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Old 27-07-11, 06:58 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 30th, '11

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"For Hadopi it's now all about this strategy of intimidation - they're sending out warnings to make people believe that file-sharing is bad, but that's as much as they can do." – Jeremie Zimmermann


"This is like Black Hat’s greatest hits. And it flies." – Mike Tassey


"Hulu has suspended our use of KISSmetrics’ services pending further investigation." – Company Spokeswoman



































July 30th, 2011




Former EMI Exec Says File-Sharers Are Good Customers
Glenn Peoples

-- Former EMI executive Douglas Merrill has reiterated what many studies and surveys over the years have showed: file-sharers are also good music customers. Merrill reportedly made the comments at a conference in Australia.

After profiling users of the popular file-sharing service LimeWire and comparing them to iTunes customers, he saw that the biggest iTunes buyers were the same as the highest-sharing LimeWire users. "That's not theft, that's try-before-you-buy marketing and we weren't even paying for it… so it makes sense to sue them," he said sarcastically.

It may be novel to hear this from a former music executive - albeit one with a short-lived career - but there has long been surveys and studies that told the same story. A 2009 Jupiter Research survey of commissioned by a variety of music industry trade groups found that music sharers in five Western Europe countries were more likely to buy digital music files than average Internet users. A different 2009 study of UK consumers found that file-sharers spent 75% more each year on music than people who had not engaged in file-sharing. A 2005 study by Speakerbox that was carried out by The Leading Question found that file sharers were spending four-and-a-half times more on legitimate downloads than average fans and were eager to try legitimate music services in the future.

Much has changed s ince Merrill openly criticized the RIAA's strategy of suing consumers back in 2008 ("What we need to do is understand when is it good, when it is not good...Suing fans doesn't feel like a winning strategy," he told CNET). The RIAA has clearly moved beyond consumer lawsuits. U.S. entertainment companies and ISPs recently agreed to a new framework for fighting piracy on broadband networks. And labels licensed their catalogs to Spotify, a streaming service with a free version that offers the best legal alternative to piracy this side of YouTube.

Nevertheless, today's anti-piracy efforts do spur concerns. Given the findings of these and other studies, it seems more than rational to think that graduated response programs will end up targeting broadband users who purchase music. The end result of some programs - not all of them - will be suspended service. So, in effect, music fans with suspended service are less likely to purchase music, buy tickets online, respond to email marketing and engage with the bands they love. If there is a bright side here, however, it is that numbers coming out of France and South Korea show very few broadband customers are ending up with suspended service.
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/indus...05293592.story





French Downloaders Face Government Grilling
BBC

The body responsible for administering France's "three strikes" anti-piracy law has summoned a group of web users to explain their file sharing habits.

Hadopi takes its name from the 2009 legislation which permits authorities to fine copyright infringers, or to cut off their internet connection.

The move is the most significant enforcement action since French politicians passed the law.

However, the 10 individuals named in the action are not obliged to appear.

France's "three strikes and out" legislation empowers Hadopi to identify suspected illegal file sharers and write to them, demanding they stop.

Those who do not comply after several letters can be disconnected from their internet service provider and blacklisted from obtaining services from another ISP.

In the UK, the Digital Economy Act makes some similar provisions, although the exact nature of possible sanctions has yet to be fully explained.

The blanket term "technical measures" is used to cover a range of potential consequences ranging from enforced slowdown of internet connections to disconnection.

Legal action

Hadopi said that in the last nine months it has been tracking 18 million French IP addresses.

It has sent a total of 470,000 first warnings by email, with 20,000 users receiving a second warning through the mail.

About 10 people who appeared to ignore the two warnings were asked to come and explain their actions to the agency.

After the meeting, Hadopi will decide whether to pursue legal action.

It will then be up to a judge to rule if a user has broken the law.

"The judge may impose a fine of a maximum of 1,500 euros (£1,326) and also disconnect the user from the internet for a maximum of one month," said a Hadopi spokesperson.

"Alternatively, he may decide to fine the user without the disconnection penalty - or simply let the user go."

But Jeremie Zimmermann from French citizen advocacy group La Quadrature du Net (Squaring the Net) thinks that it is unlikely that anyone will ever be charged.

"Hadopi is hoping that people will come and confess, that they will say that they have indeed downloaded copyrighted material," he told BBC News.

If the person does not confess or does not even show up, the only evidence the agency can present before the judge is a series of numbers - a particular computer's IP address, he said.

This poses several problems, believes Mr Zimmermann.

Firstly, hackers can easily break into a user's wireless hotspot and stream illegal content to a particular IP address using a different computer.

"We have no idea how this data has been acquired," said Jeremie Zimmermann. He expects that securing a conviction difficult, if not impossible.

Hadopi disagrees. "It's not only about the IP address," said its spokesperson.

"What we have to show is that the person has been warned that there's something wrong going on with his internet usage - that there's been illegal file-sharing - and that he has not done anything to protect himself from it after the first warning.

"So the evidence is the second warning received by the person."

Connection 'hacked'

The first person to respond to Hadopi's "invitation" has already declared his innocence.

Robert Tollot, a 54-year-old high school teacher from the region of Loire, will present himself to the Hadopi officials in Paris in September.

He told the French media that he had never downloaded any copyrighted material and that his wi-fi connection was hacked.

"He's absolutely furious, and it can turn out really badly for Hadopi as others will hear about his case and will prepare accordingly," said Mr Zimmermann.

"This law is absolutely useless," he added.

"For Hadopi it's now all about this strategy of intimidation - they're sending out warnings to make people believe that file-sharing is bad, but that's as much as they can do."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14294517





Judge Orders BT to Block Filesharing Web Site Newzbin2

Major victory for the Motion Picture Association
Dean Wilson

A UK JUDGE has ordered BT to block access to filesharing web site Newzbin2 in a landmark decision that could affect thousands of users.

Justice Arnold of the High Court of Justice in London said, "In my judgment it follows that BT has actual knowledge of other persons using its service to infringe copyright: it knows that the users and operators of Newzbin 2 infringe copyright on a large scale, and in particular infringe the copyrights of the studios in large numbers of their films and television programmes."

He ruled that BT, which claimed it had no responsibility for how people use its service, must now block access to Newzbin2. He said his decision was "proportionate ... necessary and appropriate".

The judge rejected all seven of BT's arguments against blocking the service, including its assertion that blocking would effectively mean it was required to monitor users. It also asked for the decision to be deferred to Europe, but this was also rejected.

This is a major victory for the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and a huge loss for the filesharing community, particularly those who share legitimate files.

"This ruling from Justice Arnold is a victory for millions of people working in the UK creative industries and demonstrates that the law of the land must apply online," said Chris Marcich, president and managing director for the EMEA region at the MPA. "This court action was never an attack on ISPs but we do need their cooperation to deal with the Newzbin site which continually tries to evade the law and judicial sanction."

The INQUIRER spoke with Loz Kaye, leader of the UK Pirate Party, who was critical of the ruling. "This is a terrible day for ordinary British Internet users. The judgement sets a worrying precedent for internet censorship. This is the thin end of a very large wedge. It also leaves the coalition's internet policy in disarray. It appears that our digital rights are to be determined by Hollywood, not parliament."

The threat of internet censorship is serious, as this ruling will likely set a precedent in law where other web sites can be blocked, both by BT and by smaller ISPs. The potential for this to be abused is significant, so it's no surprise that the MPA's win has met with vocal criticism from internet freedom advocates.

The original Newzbin was closed after a High Court ruling, but it reappeared under a new name and new management, moving its servers overseas to avoid prosecution. This led to the latest case, which no longer seeks to close Newzbin2, but simply block it at all the major ISPs around the world.

It is not known at time of writing whether BT will seek to appeal this decision.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...-site-newzbin2





Anti-Piracy Lawyers Find Cheaper Way To Identify BitTorrent Users
Ernesto

Since 2010 close to 200,000 people in the U.S. have been sued for sharing movies via BitTorrent. For the copyright holders and lawyers these cases are already highly profitable. However, some are testing a new and potentially more effective tactic to pursue alleged copyright infringers which could signal the beginning of a new avalanche of settlements.

Every first year law student knows that copyright related court cases are exclusively a matter of federal law. You can’t bring a copyright suit in state court, period.

However, during the past months more and more BitTorrent-related cases were filed at state courts. And as a complete surprise to us, the judges in question granted the copyright holders the right to subpoena the Internet providers of subscribers they accuse of copyright infringement.

Once the copyright holders obtain the personal details they use this to send out their infamous pay-up-or-else letters, asking the alleged file-sharers to send them a few thousands dollars. On the surface this seems to be identical to what the copyright holders are doing in the federal court cases, aside from the fact that it’s easier and less expensive.

But how can this be? Are these cases being handled properly, have judges forgotten that copyright cases don’t belong in a state court?

In order to find out more about this shortcut we contacted anti-piracy lawyer Marc Randazza whose law firm has filed federal lawsuits against hundreds of BitTorrent users. Randazza told us that the cases filed at state courts are not lawsuits against the alleged sharers, but merely a request to allow the copyright holders to demand that ISPs hand over customer information.

“What is going on here is a complaint for pure discovery — in other words, all the lawyer is asking the court for is for the court to give him the right to figure out who the defendants are. This seems to me to be a proper way to do things,” Randazza told TorrentFreak, admitting that he also has also filed a few cases in state court.

“In effect, it seems like a good thing for the defendants, the plaintiffs, and the courts. Look at it this way: If you do it the federal way, you need to file a case with the proper parties joined. So, separate cases for each hash file and possibly separate cases in separate states — depending on how the local court looks at jurisdiction.”

Although we’re not sure whether simplifying and cheapening the discovery process is a good thing, as it may lead to even more alleged sharers being targeted, Randazza argues that it will lead to cheaper settlement offers.

“If you do it this way, you can at least engage the potential defendants early on. If you do that, your costs are lower and thus your settlement figures can be lower.”

“In my torrent cases, my defendants have to pay pretty high figures to get out of the case — because we put a lot of money and effort into the case. If there were an easier way to get in contact with the torrenters, then they would likely all get off much lighter. Food for thought for potential defendants,” Randazza told us.

But are people really looking for lower settlement offers?

As pointed out earlier, the major problem with the settlement scheme is that people get wrongfully accused, and lower payoffs don’t change that. On the contrary, handling these cases the state court way will only increase the number of potential settlements without a proper review of the ‘evidence’.

In addition, hiring legal representation will make even less sense with lower settlements fees, as that will be more expensive than settling the case outright. It will leave most alleged illicit BitTorrent users with no other option than to settle, even if they are wrongfully accused.

Despite Randazza’s comments, we have the feeling that lawyers who take their cases to state court are not doing this with the interests of their targets in mind. But that shouldn’t surprise anyone of course.
http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-...-users-110722/





Aurora Critics Can Remain Anonymous, Judge Rules

In a decision with broader implications for online privacy, a judge has ruled not to force the identification of anonymous bloggers who wrote critical web posts about former Aurora mayor Phyllis Morris.

The Ontario Superior Court ruling, which Ms. Morris intends to appeal, is a major blow to her $6-million defamation action, which targets three individuals who authored anonymous posts on the Aurora Citizen website, along with the site's moderators.

In her decision, Judge Carole Brown weighed Ms. Morris's allegations against the fundamental right to freedom of speech and found the former mayor's case wanting.

"The public interest favouring disclosure [of the bloggers' names] clearly does not outweigh the legitimate interests in freedom of expression and the right to privacy of the persons sought to be identified," Judge Brown wrote, noting the three anonymous defendants, who chose to make comments on the site using pseudonyms, had "a reasonable expectation of anonymity."

In addition, the judge noted, Ms. Morris failed to set forth the specific words alleged to be defamatory, including only snippets and titles in her statement of claim.

"It is not the role of the court to parse the impugned articles and blogs before it to attempts to determine, by divination or divine inspiration, which statements it should assess in determining whether a prima facie case has been established," Judge Brown wrote in her decision, handed down last week.

Ms. Morris says she has reviewed the written decision with her legal team and will launch an appeal, effectively placing the case on hold in the interim.

"While we respect the decision of the court, we also respectfully disagree with the finding that we failed to make out a prima facie case of defamation," Ms. Morris said, noting the anonymous comments "went far beyond acceptable political commentary."

Along with the three anonymous bloggers, Ms. Morris's lawsuit names Aurora Citizen moderators William Hogg and Elizabeth Bishenden, frequent contributor Richard Johnson and web host wordpress.com. Mr. Hogg, Ms. Bishenden and Mr. Johnson are not the authors of the blog comments in question.

Ms. Morris, who lost the mayoralty to Geoff Dawe in a landslide vote last year, argues critical comments on the site made her the subject of "ridicule, hatred and contempt."

The defendants, meanwhile, have dismissed the lawsuit as an attempt to quash their political participation in matters of public importance, and hailed the judge's latest ruling as a vindication.

"We remain confident that irrespective of any potential appeal, this ruling will be ultimately allowed to stand," Mr. Johnson said Monday.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, which intervened in Ms. Morris's motion by arguing the anonymous bloggers' identities should be protected, also lauded the outcome.

"This is political speech... the kind of speech that we think should be given broad protection in society," said Cara Zwibel, director of the CCLA's fundamental freedoms program. Judge Brown's ruling, she said, "sets what we think is an appropriately high bar for plaintiffs in defamation actions before they can get this kind of information."
http://www.canada.com/mobile/iphone/story.html





Man's Call for Obama Assassination is Free Speech, Not Crime, Court Rules

A La Mesa man who posted racial epithets and a call to "shoot" Barack Obama on an Internet chat site was engaging in constitutionally protected free speech, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday in overturning his criminal conviction.

Walter Bagdasarian was found guilty two years ago of making threats against a major presidential candidate in comments he posted on a Yahoo.com financial website after 1 a.m. on Oct. 22, 2008, as Obama's impending victory in the race for the White House was becoming apparent. Bagdasarian told investigators he was drunk at the time.

A divided panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that conviction Tuesday, saying Bagdasarian's comments were "particularly repugnant" because they endorsed violence but that a reasonable person wouldn't have taken them as a genuine threat.

The observation that Obama "will have a 50 cal in the head soon" and a call to "shoot the [racist slur]" weren't violations of the law under which Bagdasarian was convicted because the statute doesn't criminalize "predictions or exhortations to others to injure or kill the president," said the majority opinion written by Judge Stephen Reinhardt.

"When our law punishes words, we must examine the surrounding circumstances to discern the significance of those words’ utterance, but must not distort or embellish their plain meaning so that the law may reach them," said the 2-1 ruling in which Chief Judge Alex Kozinski joined but Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw dissented.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lano...urt-rules.html





DOJ Takes Swipe at EFF Over Encryption Passphrases
Declan McCullagh

The U.S. Department of Justice took a thinly veiled swipe at an online civil liberties group that's arguing a Colorado woman can't be forced to decrypt her laptop for police inspection.

In a legal brief filed yesterday in what is likely to be a precedent-setting case, the Justice Department claimed that the Electronic Frontier Foundation had previously agreed that being forced to type in your passphrase was legal and did not violate Americans' rights to self-incrimination.

Prosecutors are hoping to convince a federal judge to order Ramona Fricosu, accused of running a mortgage scam, to decrypt an encrypted laptop that police found in her bedroom during a raid of her home. Fricosu has been charged with bank fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering as part of an alleged attempt to use falsified court documents to illegally gain title to homes near Colorado Springs.

EFF's Know Your Rights guide, prosecutors said, warns the public that "a grand jury or judge may still order you to disclose your data in an unencrypted format under certain circumstances."

The upshot, they said, is that "EFF's 'Know Your Rights' publication correctly states that a judge may properly order the production of unencrypted data consistent with the Fifth Amendment." (The Fifth Amendment broadly protects Americans' right to remain silent--see CNET's Q&A with defense attorney Phil Dubois.)

EFF staff attorney Hanni Fakhoury, a former public defender in San Diego, wrote the guide. Fakhoury told CNET today that the Justice Department isn't exactly describing his work fairly:

Quote:
This (the guide) is simply stating the obvious: whether the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination applies is fact-dependent. EFF believes that under the facts presented in the Fricosu case, the privilege applies and prevents the government's attempt to force Ms. Fricosu to decrypt the laptop. Under a different set of facts, the outcome might be different; something that's true in most areas of the law.

This is obviously a situation in which the government is trying to do something it has rarely tried to do before, so the courts are just starting to consider it. That is why EFF got involved in the first place, to assist the court by providing it with what we think the law should be. I'm flattered the government believes the guide I wrote is legal precedent, and I look forward to the day when that's actually the case.
The Justice Department also argues that Fricosu's Fifth Amendment rights are effectively nullified because the government obtained the laptop through a search warrant, not a grand jury subpoena.

"Evidence obtained through search warrants does not implicate the self-incrimination clause because search warrants do not compel individuals to make statements..." prosecutors said. "The applied-for order would use as the source of evidence only material seized with a warrant; it would not make use of any compelled statements."

Prosecutors have stressed that they don't actually require the passphrase itself, meaning Fricosu would be permitted to type it in and unlock the files without anyone looking over her shoulder. They say they're not demanding "the password to the drive, either orally or in written form," and that they know the laptop is hers because of a legally intercepted phone call she made to someone in prison.

Competing legal analogies: What's a PGP passphrase like?

The question of whether criminal defendants can be legally compelled to cough up their encryption passphrase remains an unsettled one, with law review articles for at least the last 15 years arguing the merits of either side of the issue. A U.S. Justice Department attorney wrote an article in 1996, for instance, titled "Compelled Production of Plaintext and Keys."

Much of the debate has been over which of two analogies comes closest to the truth. Prosecutors tend to view PGP passphrases as akin to someone possessing a key to a safe filled with incriminating documents. That person can, in general, be legally compelled to hand over the key. Other examples include the U.S. Supreme Court saying that defendants can be forced to provide fingerprints, blood samples, or voice recordings.

On the other side are civil libertarians citing other Supreme Court cases that conclude Americans can't be forced to give "compelled testimonial communications" and extending the legal shield of the Fifth Amendment to encryption passphrases. Courts already have ruled that such protection extends to the contents of a defendant's minds, so why shouldn't a passphrase be shielded as well?

While the U.S. Supreme Court has not confronted the topic, a handful of lower courts have.

In March 2010, a federal judge in Michigan ruled that Thomas Kirschner, facing charges of receiving child pornography, would not have to give up his password. That's "protecting his invocation of his Fifth Amendment privilege against compelled self-incrimination," the court ruled.

A year earlier, a Vermont federal judge concluded that Sebastien Boucher, who a border guard claims had child porn on his Alienware laptop, did not have a Fifth Amendment right to keep the files encrypted.

Update 3:15 p.m. PT: I've heard back from Phil Dubois, Fricosu's criminal defense attorney. Dubois' position remains, he said in an e-mail message:

Quote:
That to force my client (assuming that she has the ability) to decrypt the hard drive would be an unreasonable and therefore unconstitutional search and so a Fourth Amendment violation; and

That to force her to decrypt the drive would not be the same as compelling her to surrender the key to a safe, the new technology making that analogy inapposite, but would instead be compelling her to use the content of her mind to perform an affirmative act to assist the government to prosecute her, which raises the Fifth Amendment problem.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20...n-passphrases/





As China Steps Up Web Monitoring, Many Wi-Fi Users Stay Away
Andrew Jacobs

New regulations that require bars, restaurants, hotels and bookstores to install costly Web monitoring software are prompting many businesses to cut Internet access and sending a chill through the capital’s game-playing, Web-grazing literati who have come to expect free Wi-Fi with their lattes and green tea.

The software, which costs businesses about $3,100, provides public security officials the identities of those logging on to the wireless service of a restaurant, cafe or private school and monitors their Web activity. Those who ignore the regulation and provide unfettered access face a $2,300 fine and the possible revocation of their business license.

“From the point of view of the common people, this policy is unfair,” said Wang Bo, the owner of L’Infusion, a cafe that features crepes, waffles and the companionship of several dozing cats. “It’s just an effort to control the flow of information.”

It is unclear whether the new measures will be strictly enforced or applied beyond the area of central Beijing where they are already in effect. But they suggest that public security officials, unnerved by turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa partly enabled by the Internet, are undaunted in their efforts to increase controls.

China already has some of the world’s most far-reaching online restrictions. Last year, the government blocked more than a million Web sites, many of them pornographic, but also Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Evite. Recent regulations make it difficult for individuals unaffiliated with a company to create personal Web sites.

When it comes to search engines and microblogging, dictates from the central Propaganda Department filter out topics and words that the Communist Party deems a threat to national stability or its reputation. At public cybercafes, where much of China’s working class gains access to the Internet, customers must hand over state-issued identification before getting on a computer.

The new measures, it would appear, are designed to eliminate a loophole in “Internet management” as it is called, one that has allowed laptop- and iPad-owning college students and expatriates, as well as the hip and the underemployed, to while away their days at cafes and lounges surfing the Web in relative anonymity. It is this demographic that has been at the forefront of the microblogging juggernaut, one that has revolutionized how Chinese exchange information in ways that occasionally frighten officials.

“To be honest, I can get Internet at home or at work, but it’s nice to just sit in a comfortable place and surf the Web,” said Wang Fang, 28, an advertising sales agent who often conducts work from the leather wing chairs at Kubrick, a high-ceilinged, smartly designed cafe that unplugged its router earlier this month rather than pay for the software. “If there’s no Internet, there’s no reason to come here.” The manager said the loss of Wi-Fi had already led to a 30 percent drop in business.

The Dongcheng Public Security Bureau did not respond to requests for comment on Monday, but according to its publicly issued circular, the measure is designed to thwart criminals who use the Internet to “conduct blackmail, traffic goods, gamble, propagate damaging information and spread computer viruses.” Such nefarious activity, the notice says, “not only hurts the interests of the country and the masses, but has also caused some businesses to suffer economic losses.”

The maker of the program, Shanghai Rain-Soft Software, declined to discuss how the product operates, but a company employee said it had already been delivered to public security officials in Beijing. Shanghai Rain-Soft was paid about $310,000 to design the program, according to a government Web site that announced its winning bid.

One bookstore owner said she had already disconnected the shop’s free Wi-Fi, and not for monetary reasons. “I refuse to be part of an Orwellian surveillance system that forces my customers to disclose their identity to a government that wants to monitor how they use the Internet,” said the woman, who feared that disclosing her name or that of her shop would bring unwanted attention from the authorities.

During a survey of more than a dozen businesses on Monday, none said they were prepared to purchase the software, which is designed to handle 100 users at one time. For many, it was a matter of economics. “It might make sense for places like Starbucks or McDonald’s, but we only have a couple of users at a time,” said Ray Heng, the owner of Sand Pebbles Lounge, a Mexican restaurant.

Like several other business owners, he said he hoped official fervor for new regulations would soon die down. In fact, he said, he had no immediate plans to stop offering his customers free Wi-Fi. “We have no problem allowing our customers to surf the Internet; it’s the government that does,” he said. “If they want us to install the software, they should foot the bill.”

Adam Century contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/w...a/26china.html





Firefox and Chrome Tools Block Murdoch-Owned Websites
Mike Flacy

Hacking attacks aren't the only headaches for the digital side of Rupert Murdoch's empire. New Firefox and Chrome additions allow people to avoid Murdoch properties on the Web.

It’s safe to say Rupert Murdoch is having a bad month. A couple developers have created free tools to help consumers stay away from websites owned by the Murdoch media empire. A Firefox add-on called MurdochAlert creates a warning when users are loading one of 100+ sites. For instance, if a user lands on Fox News, an alert bar appears to warn the user of the “potential computer security risks of accessing Murdoch-controlled sites”. The add-on comes with a Greasemonkey script for any user that wants to alter the design.

A Chrome extension takes a more stringent approach and completely halts the user from loading a Murdoch property. Called Murdoch Block, the extension displays a warning before allowing the user to choose to load the site. Popular blocked properties include Hulu (31 percent owned by Fox), Fox News, MySpace, Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. However, News Corp-owned IGN and American Idol sites didn’t get the same treatment from the developer.

Collectively, the add-on and extension have nearly 5,000 users since being added to the corresponding databases earlier this week. These tools have been developed in response to the current phone hacking scandal that caused Murdoch-owned News of the World to shut down last week. The developer of the Firefox add-on is concerned that hacking and abuse of user data may also extend into the sites controlled by Murdoch, either from internal employees or groups like LulzSec. Earlier this week, LulzSec hacked the UK’s The Sun to by adding a page that claimed Rupert Murdoch had been found dead

Rupert Murdoch and son James Murdoch have been under fire by British politicians this week regarding questioning about the phone hacking scandal as well as the questionable relationships between News Corp. newspapers and the police department. They also face the possibility that a hacker affiliated with Anonymous has access to 4GB of potentially incriminating email communication as claimed on his Twitter account.
http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/fir...wned-websites/





Fox to Limit Next-Day Streaming on Hulu to Paying Cable Customers
Brian Stelter

For a few years, fans have been able to log on to Hulu.com or Fox.com to watch what they missed on television the previous night. For most viewers, doing so is about to get a lot more difficult.

Starting Aug. 15, the Fox network will limit next-day streaming of its shows to paying customers of approved cable and satellite distributors. Those customers will be able to log in and watch episodes of “Bones,” “The Simpsons” and other shows the day after they appear on TV; all others will have to wait eight days.

The limitations, announced on Tuesday and bemoaned by fans of Hulu, are a significant change to the online television system. At least one of Hulu’s other network partners, ABC, is contemplating setting a similar limit, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

For Fox, a unit of the News Corporation, the new limitations are driven by a desire to protect lucrative deals with cable and satellite distributors. Increasingly, distributors are paying monthly fees for Fox programs through retransmission agreements, and they dislike the fact that many of the programs are free online.

By putting an eight-day delay in place, Fox is appeasing the distributors and supporting what is known in the TV industry as an authentication model for online streams of shows. Cable channels like ESPN and CNN are implementing a similar model, which requires an individual to authenticate that they are a cable or satellite customer before streaming a show or a channel. Through authentication, traditional distributors hope to keep customers paying for monthly TV service while making it possible to access a wealth of content online.

Fox’s announcement marks the first instance of authentication by a broadcast network. To make authentication work, programmers and distributors have to work together and in some cases sign new contracts; that’s why Fox announced only one distribution partner on Tuesday, Dish Network, which has a subscriber-only Web site for streaming TV, DishOnline.com.

All other cable and satellite customers will be affected by the eight-day delay until Fox lines up other participating distributors. Network executives declined interview requests on Tuesday, but they acknowledged privately that many viewers would be disadvantaged, at least temporarily, by the strategic shift.

Mike Hopkins, the president for affiliate sales and marketing for Fox Networks, said in a statement that the change was about providing a product to “enhance the value of pay television to subscribers.”

While the four-year-old Hulu, a joint venture of the parents of Fox, ABC, NBC and the investment firm Providence Equity Partners, is profitable, retransmission agreements with big distributors are much more profitable for the networks. With the eight-day delay, Hulu, which is known to be for sale, is effectively being placed second in line behind the traditional distributors.

News Corporation executives had signaled previously that they were considering placing limitations on the free episodes that Fox supplies to Hulu. This summer, Fox signed a contract to continue supplying Hulu; the terms were not disclosed, but analysts believed the contract allowed for further delays of episodes and heavier ad loads.

Hulu declined to comment on Fox’s announcement on Tuesday. The Web site has both a free service and a paid service, Hulu Plus, that includes full seasons of many series. Hulu Plus, which costs $8 a month, has almost one million subscribers.

A Fox spokeswoman said Hulu Plus would not be subject to the eight-day delay. But the company’s news release notably did not mention Hulu Plus, as if trying to discourage that option for next-day viewing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/27/b...g-on-hulu.html





The Oddball U.S. Privacy Law That’s Keeping Netflix Away From Facebook

Under U.S. law, most information exchanges aren’t regulated at all by the federal government. There are a few big exceptions, like health information, which is regulated by HIPAA. And there’s another, more unusual, exception—video-rental history, which is regulated by the Video Privacy Protection Act, or VPPA.

In today’s letter to shareholders, Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) said that it’s making “great progress” on an application that would integrate it with Facebook. It plans to launch the new feature before the next earnings report—but only in Canada and Latin America. In the U.S., Netflix says it’s hampered by the VPPA.

The VPPA has an unusual history. It was passed by Congress in 1988 after the U.S. Senate debated Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court. (Bork’s quest to join the high court was unsuccessful, making him the first person to ever get Borked.)

During the debate over Bork’s nomination, the alt-weekly Washington City Paper obtained his (utterly, utterly unremarkable) video-rental history from a local store and decided to publish it. It wasn’t quite the phone-hacking scandal of its day, but the tactic was deemed invasive and was denounced by liberals and conservatives alike.

It made Congress angry, and Congress passed the VPPA. So today, anyone who publishes a consumer’s video rental history can get in serious trouble; the law makes a rental service liable for up to $2,500 in penalties per offense.

The trouble Netflix is having is that the VPPA is written in such a way that it isn’t clear how you would go about publishing a consumer’s video-watching habits even with permission. The text of the VPPA states that the history can be disclosed “to any person with the informed, written consent of the consumer given at the time the disclosure is sought.” (emphasis mine)

That line clearly envisions a one-time publication of results. Netflix wouldn’t be allowed to just ask a customer once, “Is it OK if we publish the movies you watch on your Facebook page?” Because permission must be given at the time of disclosure. That language puts continuous, internet publication of the data in a kind of legal limbo.

Imagine telling lawmakers in 1988 that in the future, consumers would want to publish—constantly publish—their own video rental history. It might have been laughed at. But today it’s an obvious feature for Netflix to add, and it’s hampered by a pre-internet era privacy law.

In any case, Netflix has said it’s hoping the problem gets solved soon. A bipartisan group of legislators is pushing a fix to this in the form of HR2471, a bill introduced in the House earlier this month. But this strange law does mean that the U.S. is likely to be in the unusual situation of getting the latest online-video innovations after its northern and southern neighbors.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-t...from-facebook/





As DVD Sales Decline, Walmart.Com Adds Vudu Streaming
Ryan Lawler

Online video rental store Vudu has seen massive growth lately, driven mostly by getting embedded on an ever-growing number of connected TVs and other devices. But the streaming-video-on-demand service is about to get a big boost, as it’s being integrated with the website of parent company Walmart, potentially introducing millions of shoppers to the joy of online video.

It’s been about 18 months since Walmart bought Vudu, but as demand for physical media declines, the big box retailer is finally marrying the online video service with its website. By doing so, it’s hoping to introduce its customers to a new way of watching movies and getting them to spend money on digital copies instead of buying the DVD.

Steve Nave, SVP and general manager of Walmart.com, said the decision to buy Vudu was made as the retailer realized that there was a rapid shift in consumer behavior from purchasing physical media to streaming content online. The acquisition was made to help better position Walmart and its web property as this shift occurred.

The result of that purchase can now be seen at Walmart.com. Users shopping online for DVDs and Blu-ray discs on the site will now also have the option of buying or renting digital copies of titles that are available as part of the Vudu streaming library. Once purchased, those movies can then be accessed either through the Walmart website, Vudu.com or on any of the 300-plus connected devices that the Vudu streaming service is available on.

The move to add the service to Walmart.com comes just a few months after Vudu introduced its own browser-based streaming option. But it’s not just the Vudu service on a Walmart URL: The integration keeps the same look and feel of the retailer’s website, while introducing a wide new range of streaming content. Existing Walmart.com customers will be able to link their accounts with the Vudu service and seamlessly purchase movie titles without having to switch logins or change sites.

Now for the bad news: For those that want to stream videos in HD, they’ll have to watch the movie on one of Vudu’s supported devices. The Walmart.com site, along with Vudu.com, only stream videos in standard definition. While many purists will only want the highest quality video, for many Walmart shoppers new to streaming movies online, that might not be a big deal.

Adding the Vudu service to its website also comes as the retailer is experimenting with new ways to get its users to try out the service. That includes the introduction of new digital movie cards that users can purchase from Walmart stores and use to redeem streaming movies later. The company has also been working with Hollywood studios to enable customers to buy a physical copy of a DVD and be able to stream it from Vudu on supported devices.
http://gigaom.com/video/vudu-walmart-website/





In Deal With NBC, Amazon Seeks to Widen Its Video Streaming Service
Brian Stelter

Amazon, the online retailing giant, announced a deal with NBCUniversal for access to part of Universal Pictures’ film library on Thursday, its second such pact in the streaming video space in as many weeks.

The attention around its content acquisitions suggests a budding rivalry with Netflix and a strategy of stocking up on films and TV shows for the tablet computer that the company is developing. Much like Apple, Amazon wants to have an assortment of content available for owners of the forthcoming device.

The NBC deal gives Amazon nonexclusive access to films like “Elizabeth,” “Babe” and “Billy Elliott.”

Last week, Amazon and CBS announced a similar deal that lets Amazon stream about 2,000 episodes of older TV shows like “The Tudors” and “Medium.”

In both cases the content is available through Amazon Prime, a $79-a-year membership service that gives buyers free two-day shipping. The five-month-old streaming service is available at no additional cost for members.

Amazon is just one of the Internet companies that is seeking to compete more directly with Netflix, which has about 25 million subscribers, many of whom stream films and TV shows, but which may look vulnerable this summer and fall as it imposes a price increase for some subscribers.

Netflix acknowledged in its earnings letter to shareholders this week that both Amazon and Hulu Plus, the subscription arm of Hulu, are in the marketplace, but noted that it has “vastly more streaming content” than Amazon and has many more customers than either service.

“So far, we haven’t detected an impact on our business from Amazon Prime,” the letter from Netflix stated.

For media companies, the suitors are welcome. At the time of the Amazon-CBS deal, Anthony DiClemente of Barclays Capital said that he believed CBS was in talks with other online distributors for similar deals, citing Microsoft, Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube, as potential partners.

Given that multiple online distributors are bidding for such content, “we remain of the belief that digital media distribution is an incremental boon to core film/TV studio economics, as media content owners like CBS continue to benefit from the simple laws of supply and demand,” Mr. DiClemente wrote in an analyst note.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/b...g-service.html





Wave Goodbye to Free Internet TV
Greg Sandoval

Fox's decision to make anybody but cable, satellite, or Hulu Plus subscribers wait an extra week to access hit shows--such as Bones--is just the latest reduction of free Web TV.

They said Hulu was going to save the film studios and television networks from repeating the mistakes of the music industry.

They said the video portal would help turn the Internet into a new means of distributing the most popular TV shows and movies for less money than cable and offer viewers much more control over where and when they watch.

But the latest news out of Hollywood seems to indicate that enthusiasm was misplaced, premature, or both. The most recent and most dramatic sign of this came yesterday, when the Fox Network, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., announced the network would begin limiting Web access of its TV shows to viewers who subscribed to participating cable and satellite TV providers (Dish Network is the only one so far to have signed on) or subscribers to Hulu Plus, the portal's paid-subscription service. If you don't pay for any one of those three then you'll have to wait eight days to watch the latest episodes of such Fox shows as "Bones" and "Glee."

Fox's move may not seem the sort of thing worthy of breathless "the free content dream is gone" coverage, but it's the most dramatic example of a yearlong trend. The studios and TV networks are giving up on Web distribution on an ad-supported basis. They want to quash the perception that the Internet is some magic gateway to cut-rate content. Instead, content creators are effectively turning the Web into an extension of the cash-rich cable industry.

Look at what's going on all across the Web: subscription prices are rising at Netflix; Hulu began charging last year and pushing more content behind the pay wall and now the media companies behind the service are trying to sell the portal; HBO Go dropped a bomb by building a slick streaming service and iPad app that offers all the best parts of Internet delivery--provided you are a cable customer and subscribe to HBO. That's television, but it isn't much different in Hollywood. Last year, Netflix agreed to hold off renting newly released DVDs for 28 days for such studios as Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, and NBC Universal. The deal was designed to help boost disc sales.

According to Dan Rayburn, principal analyst at research firm Frost & Sullivan, some studios intend to try and extend those 28-day sales-only windows when they renegotiate their Netflix deals. Apparently, the windows do increase sales.

And the studios and TV networks aren't done yet. ABC and other broadcasters could follow Fox's move by walling off some of its content in the same way, according to The New York Times. Need more evidence? Major League Baseball and HBO content has never been available free online (legally) and that's unlikely to change anytime soon as their content is behind a pay wall and is doing just fine.

The Web as a means to obtain free or less-expensive content was, unfortunately for consumers, a pipe dream, Rayburn argues.

"Somehow the idea got out there that consumers will have access to any type of content they want on any device," Rayburn said. "That's not going to be the reality...This stuff costs money. So, I'm not at all surprised by the Fox move and I expect we'll see a lot more of that down the road. Some will argue that that's not the right approach. You can debate that but the bottom line is they are obviously concerned about their core business and they want to do everything possible to protect that."

Judging by the hostile reaction Netflix has received to a planned rate increase, Fox is likely to take a lot of heat for the decision. Watchdog groups have already criticized the move as a step backward. "This development is very unfortunate for consumers and ultimately will be self-destructive for the TV industry," said Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a public-interest group that focuses on digital issues.

What Sohn is referring to when she says "self destructive" is of course the piracy threat. Hulu first made its debut in 2007 to much fanfare. The site was easy to use, offered access to scores of popular TV shows from the major networks and was free--supported by advertising sales. Eric Garland, CEO of Big Champagne, which tracks consumption of digital media online, has stated that Hulu was the first service to snatch users away from illegal file-sharing sites.

Hulu was the great Web experiment for the TV networks. Built as a defense to YouTube, which at the time was a favorite place for people to post unauthorized clips of TV shows and films, Hulu was an immediate hit. The service quickly accumulated a large audience, providing evidence there was large demand for full-length premium shows delivered over the Web, even one that required users to watch commercials.

Then Hulu fell back to Earth. The company couldn't generate the kinds of returns that the networks were used to and worse, the cable and satellite companies that distributed the TV content and paid dearly for it became threatened.

"The networks have gotten so used to the subscription fees from the cable providers," said Aram Sinnreich, managing partner of Radar Research, a media and tech consultancy, "there's no way for them to staunch the blood flow when consumers are using the Web as a replacement for cable instead of as an auxiliary to cable."

A pull-back was inevitable says Rayburn. He advises consumers to get used to the idea that the best and newest content is going to come with a charge.

"This is the future," Rayburn said. "Like it or not as a consumer, content owners are the ones who are putting restrictions on who can see what, the quality that they can get it in, and the device they can play it on."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20...e-internet-tv/





The Difference Engine: Beyond HDTV
N.V.

A YEAR ago, your correspondent noted that, every generation or so, 3D entertainment becomes all the rage, only to fizzle as the technology’s shortcomings make themselves felt (see “The best seat in the house”, May 7th 2010). The entertainment industry’s enthusiasm for 3D hit fever pitch when James Cameron’s blockbuster movie “Avatar” was released in late 2009 and went on to gross $2.8 billion worldwide in 2010.

Since then, the fad has faded even faster than your correspondent expected. While cinema owners welcomed 3D movies (they allowed them to increase ticket prices), movie-goers wearied of the clumsily used effects, the headaches and nausea that frequently ensued, and the sheer nuisance of having to wear special glasses.

Much the same goes for 3D television. A year ago, set-makers saw it as a nifty way of boosting flagging sales for a few dollars of additional electronics. Then there were the hundreds of dollars more they could charge for all the spectacles (at $150 a pair) needed to view the three-dimensional effects. But with 3D content limited and uninspired, and the spectacles remaining a pain in the neck, the novelty has quickly worn off.

The problem is that 3D television requires people to change their viewing habits. Normally, viewers watching even their favourite shows tend to be in reasonably lit rooms doing several things at once—scanning newspapers and magazines, using the phone, even browsing the web and answering e-mail. Taking 3D glasses off and on to do such things quickly becomes a chore. No surprise that even ardent early fans of 3D television have largely gone back to watching traditional fare.

It is not as though 3D television is about to go the way of the video-cassette player. It has simply become yet another feature built into television sets (like LED backlighting, 240-hertz refresh rate, local dimming and WiFi connection to the internet) that consumers are happy to have, provided they are not expected to pay a premium, and the special glasses are thrown in free. Lately, Fry’s Electronics, a big retail chain on the West Coast, has been offering 47-inch 3D television sets with glasses and all the usual bells and whistles for under $800. A few months ago, such sets sold for $1,700.

One of the few benefits to emerge from the latest 3D fad is the way it has spurred set-makers to produce televisions with higher resolution. The special glasses that switched the left and right lenses alternatively on and off in sync with the 3D television set’s screen—as it displayed the stereoscopic image first for one eye, and then, from a slightly different perspective, for the other—meant that the glasses were effectively off for half the time. So, instead of seeing eye-popping pictures, people were left with, quite literally, a dim view of things. Also, by not seeing the whole picture all the time, the eyes perceived a far fuzzier image.

To compensate, set-makers are looking to increase the number of picture elements (“pixels”) on the screen. Today’s high-definition television (HDTV) sets display 1,920 vertical scan lines and 1,080 horizontal lines using so-called “progressive” scanning (ie, cycled continuously from top to bottom). The result is a grid of 2,073,600 pixels (ie, 2.1 megapixels). Doubling the number of vertical and horizontal scan lines across and down the screen to 3,840 by 2,160 results in a display containing 8,294,400 pixels (ie, 8.3 megapixels). In other words, going from “1080p” to “2160p” display technology yields a fourfold increase in the amount of information that can be displayed on the screen.

So far, only prototypes of the new “Quad HD” format have been seen at trade shows. Samsung has grabbed the most attention with a 2160p prototype boasting an 82-inch screen. But it is not the first of the new generation by far. Westinghouse has been selling 2160p displays in screen sizes up to 56 inches since 2007, though it has never offered them to the public. With prices of $40,000 and up, such professional-grade displays are used as monitors for imaging machines in hospitals, laboratories and industry.

A decade ago, no monitor could display more than five megapixels of information. Then came IBM with a 22-inch display packing 9.2 megapixels. Being relatively small, the screen had a resolution of a then-unheard-of 200 pixels per inch (ppi). For comparison purposes, a 1080p HDTV set with a 60-inch screen has a resolution of a little over 36ppi. A 2160p Quad HD television of similar size has a resolution of 73ppi.

The resolution race does not end there. NHK, the Japanese public broadcasting service which pioneered HDTV with its Hi-Vision broadcasts in the early 1990s, has been steadily developing a Super Hi-Vision version capable of displaying 7,680 by 4,320 pixels (ie, 33 megapixels). Recently, Sharp unveiled the first fruit of its collaboration with NHK—a 4320p prototype with a humongous 85-inch screen and a resolution of 103ppi. If all 33m pixels that the Super Hi-Vision format (known as Ultra HD elsewhere) offers were crammed onto a 22-inch screen, the picture resolution would be an astonishing 400ppi.

Last September, NHK joined forces with the BBC in Britain to record a live performance by “The Charlatans” in Ultra HD format, which was then broadcast over the internet to Japan. NHK expects to launch its Super Hi-Vision service sometime between 2016 and 2020.

But when most people cannot distinguish the difference between photographs printed at 300 dots per inch (dpi) and 150dpi when held at normal viewing distances, you have to wonder whether 4320p Ultra HD television is overkill. It will certainly be the kiss of death for traditional over-the-air broadcasters, who struggle to find enough bandwidth to beam today’s 1080p signals—and will have serious trouble transmitting the forthcoming 2160p format.

With Blu-ray discs having set the gold standard for picture quality, the cable and satellite TV companies have scrambled to embrace the streaming technologies pioneered by online video services like Vudu, Hulu, YouTube and Netflix. Vudu's new streaming technology is said to give even Blu-ray a run for its money. The migration from today’s HDTV format to Quad HD in a year or so (and possibly to Ultra HD five or six years thereafter) will only accelerate the trend from broadcasting television over the airwaves to streaming it over the internet.

Meanwhile, the film studios have been pushing in the same direction. It is no coincidence that the new Quad HD format is almost identical to the “4K” digital cinema standard (3,996 by 2160 pixels) that the studios have started using to shoot digital movies. While conventional cinema screens have an aspect ratio of 1.85-to-one, the slightly wider 4K movie format can be shoe-horned into television’s 1.77-to-one picture frame without too much difficulty.

With DVD dead and Blu-ray never having fully taken its place, the studios have been anxious to find a replacement for their lost revenue. Many believe their best hope is to stream feature films direct to Quad HD television sets in living rooms. Were that to happen, Quad HD would take off even faster than HDTV did a decade before.

Congress could yet spoil everything, however. Draft legislation that would increase penalties for public websites which allowed users to stream copyrighted video-games, television shows and music is being fast-tracked through the Senate. In particular, the Commercial Felony Streaming Act targets websites like YouTube that broadcasters believe are threatening their livelihoods. The bill would make unauthorised streaming of copyrighted material for profit a felony (instead of the misdemeanor it is today), with a penalty of up to five years in prison. It defines illegal streaming as streaming ten or more times within a 180-day period, and earning a total of more than $2,500 in the process.

If the legislation is enacted, it is impossible to say who the enforcement agencies would single out first—the online streaming services themselves, the individuals who post offending content, or the members of the public who use such services. Whoever it is, the bill (if passed) could have a chilling effect on the creation and distribution of online video. In turn, that could seriously hamper innovation, if developers, investors and users fled in fear of running afoul of the vagaries of America's copyright law.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babba...-definition-tv





Cable Companies to Give Clues on Internet Impact
AP

Are people really cancelling cable to watch TV and movies from the Internet instead?

It's a question that has dogged the pay-TV industry for a year, and a spate of quarterly reports over the next few weeks, starting with Time Warner Cable Inc. on Thursday, could provide important clues.

Much lies in the balance. If online video really is taking TV service subscribers from cable, satellite and phone providers, it's not just bad news for those companies. Analysts also see it leading to more restrictions and higher prices for online video and broadband access, a trend that has already started.

This month, Netflix Inc.'s streaming video service went from being a freebie thrown in with its DVD-by-mail service to something the company charges for separately.

On Tuesday, News Corp.'s Fox broadcasting company said that only paying subscribers of Hulu.com or satellite-TV company Dish Network Corp. will be able to watch new episodes of its shows, which include "Glee" and "Family Guy," online the day after they air. Non-paying viewers can catch them online eight days later.

Hollywood studios and other content producers have so far seen online video as an addition to the revenue they get from cable and satellite companies, and they've charged less for it. Consumer surveys showed that people didn't watch less TV just because they went to Hulu.com or Youtube.com sometimes.

But in June, The Nielsen Co. said it found that Americans who watch the most video online tend to watch less TV. The ratings agency said it started noticing last fall that a segment of consumers were starting to make a trade-off between online video and regular TV. The activity was more pronounced among people ages 18-34, a slice of the population advertisers are particularly eager to target.

That doesn't necessarily mean that people are starting to think they can get by without conventional pay-TV. While sitcoms and movies are easy to get through online services, sports aren't. But if studios and TV networks start seeing online video as something that's siphoning off their flow of cash, then it's in their interest to further restrict online viewing, like Fox did, or start charging for it.

"It appears that Fox isn't waiting for second quarter Pay TV subscriber numbers to disappoint," wrote Sanford Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett.

Cable companies have their own way of replacing lost revenue: charging more for broadband Internet access, which is essential to online video. Internet service providers are starting to charge extra when subscribers go above a certain monthly traffic allotment. These charges that will hit households that guzzle online video before they hit people who use mainly the Web and email.

The pay-TV industry first lost paying subscribers in last year's second quarter. The industry and most analysts concluded that the "cord cutting" was due to the poor economy, which forced people to cut back on spending and combine households. The second quarter is also the year's weakest quarter, because college students often cancel their service at the end of the semester.

The third quarter also showed a loss of subscribers. But then the seasonally strong fourth and first quarters showed growth, and fears subsided. Now, analysts believe the second quarter will show another decline. Cable companies lose subscribers every quarter, so the real question is whether satellite companies Dish and DirecTV Group Inc. and phone companies AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. will make up for those losses. Thomas Eagan at Collins Stewart expects the industry as whole to show a loss of 31,000 subscribers, compared to an estimated of loss of 173,000 last year.

Time Warner Cable might give an early read on the trend Thursday. Analysts expect a loss of only slightly more than the 111,000 it lost in the same period last year.

Most analysts still think the economy and ever-increasing monthly programming fees are to blame for last year's subscriber losses. A survey this spring by Leichtman Research Group Inc. found that of the 13 percent of U.S. households that don't subscribe to some form of pay-TV service, about 60 percent have broadband. But very few of them cite online video as the reason for not subscribing to pay-TV. The households were much more likely to say the cable was just too expensive or that they just don't watch much TV. These households tend to watch online video about as much as households that do pay for TV, and they tend to earn less, Leichtman reported.

"It is erroneous to think of this group as making decisions driven by online video," said Bruce Leichtman, president of the research firm. "These decisions tend to be more based on economics."

The firm called 1,500 households for the survey, which had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percent.

Research firm SNL Kagan is on the other side of the debate, estimating that 2.5 million households had already given up their pay-TV subscriptions in favor of online video at the start of this year. It thinks 2 million more will do so this year. By 2015, it sees 10 percent of households as online-only. That would be a big enough number to force big changes in the pay-TV industry.
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/201...ing-Cable.html





Bandwidth Caps are Rate Hikes
Robert Cringely

Internet Service Providers in the USA are trying to apply bandwidth caps to their users, with those caps being 2, 4, or 5 gigabytes-per-month for wireless users at various price levels and generally 250 gigabytes-per-month for home users. Most of the press coverage of this issue comes down on the side of consumers but lately the ISP publicity machine has been revved-up and we’re being told that bandwidth caps are necessary, even inevitable. This is, as my 87 year-old Mom would say, BS.

Provisioning is what ISPs call the amount of Internet backbone capacity they buy per subscriber. This number is always less than the amount of bandwidth we think we are buying because most of the time Internet connections aren’t used at all and ISPs count on this to keep costs under control. If you are buying an 8 megabit-per-second connection from your ISP, he in turn provisions you with around 50 kilobits-per-second of backbone. This data arbitrage is part of what makes being a broadband ISP so profitable.

The reason this is an issue, we’re told, is because ISPs fear we are changing our consumption patterns. If we all switch to getting our television and movies over the Internet then there’s no way 50 kilobits will be enough.

So they’ve taken to publishing charts like the one above, which came from a blog here. It shows the massive increase in data consumption at an arbitrary ISP. Arcing into the heavens it looks like ISP costs are exploding and will shortly become infinite unless data caps are applied. If the ISPs can’t make money, we’re told, then we’ll all lose our Internet service.

They’ve become “too big to fail. ”

Remember that one?

Fortunately, at the same time bandwidth consumption is going up, backbone costs are going down and have been doing so for many years. The basic unit of ISP backbone expenditures is called IP Transit. Here’s a chart I found showing IP Transit prices per megabit in several cities over a period of years.

There are a couple interesting points I can make about this chart. You’ll notice for example that backbone costs in Tokyo, where broadband connections typically run at 100 megabits-per-second, are about four times higher than they are in New York or London. Yet broadband connections in Tokyo cost half what they do in New York, and that’s for a connection at least four times a fast!

So Softbank BB in Tokyo pays four times as much per megabit for backbone capacity and offers four times the speed for half the price of Verizon in New York. Yet Softbank BB is profitable.

No matter what your ISP says, their backbone costs are inconsequential and to argue otherwise is probably a lie.

Now let’s try an apples-to-apples comparison of these two charts by adjusting them to cover the same time period like this:

Consumption went up and prices went down. In terms of backbone cost per subscriber, ISP costs have been flat for years.

That 250 gigabytes-per-month works out to about one megabit-per-second, which costs $8 in New York. So your American ISP, who has been spending $0.40 per month to buy the bandwidth they’ve been selling to you for $30, wants to cap their maximum backbone cost per-subscriber at $8.

That doesn’t sound unreasonable on the face of it. Capping consumption at 20-times the provisioning level doesn’t sound so bad, but I think it sets a dangerous precedent.

These data caps are actually a trap being set for us by the ISPs.

Data caps that may make logical sense today make no sense tomorrow, yet once they are in place they’ll tend to stay in place.

IP Transit costs will continue to drop. That $8 price will most likely continue to fall at the historical annual rate of 22 percent. So what’s presented as an ISP insurance policy is really a guaranteed profit increase of 22 percent that will be compounded over time because consumption will continue to rise and customers will be for the first time charged for that increased consumption.

This isn’t about capping ISP losses, but are about increasing ISP profits. The caps are a built-in revenue bump that will kick-in 2-3 years from now, circumventing any existing regulatory structure for setting rates. The regulators just haven’t realized it yet. By the time they do it may be too late.

Most U. S. broadband customers don’t get anywhere near that 250 gigabyte cap. The few who do hit those limits are big gamers or file downloaders for the most part. Maybe they do take unfair advantage of the system, but the question is whether this is the proper way to control their consumption? I don’t think it is.

In time we will all bump into these caps and our Internet bills will suddenly double as a result, circumventing competition and ending a 15 year downward broadband price trend.

ISPs win, we lose.
http://www.cringely.com/2011/07/band...re-rate-hikes/






http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/j1yl0/its_funny/




Reid's Debt Plan Could Speed Wireless Auctions

Efforts to give U.S. regulators the authority to auction off some television airwaves for mobile broadband use are getting a boost in a debt ceiling plan proposed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

The auctions have the potential to raise $15 billion in revenue, according to Reid's plan, with some of the proceeds going to broadcasters as compensation.

The Federal Communications Commission has been pushing for the authority to hold such auctions as a part of its broader National Broadband Plan. The FCC wants to repurpose 120 megahertz of spectrum currently used by TV broadcasters to free up more airwaves for rapidly growing wireless services.

The final shape of a plan to cut government spending in an effort to gain Republican support for raising the nation's $14.3 trillion borrowing limit is very uncertain.

Lawmakers are still far apart over competing plans in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate to raise the debt ceiling before August 2, when the U.S. Treasury says the government will start to run out of money to pay its bills.

The debt package proposed by House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican, does not include spectrum auctions, multiple industry sources said.

But the inclusion by Reid, a Democrat, of the auction revenues could speed a spectrum reshuffle if it were to become part of the final plan.

Some 25 million Americans already watch video on smartphones and tablet computers like Apple Inc's iPad, putting 120 times more demand on spectrum than older mobile phones.

"This deficit-reducing proposal reflects insight from members of the FCC, leading economists and wireless technology experts, all of whom have cautioned a spectrum crunch is looming," said Jonathan Spalter, chairman of Mobile Future, a coalition whose membership includes technology and communications companies.

But broadcasters have expressed concerns over the unintended consequences repurposing their spectrum could have on their TV signals and the 46 million viewers that still rely on over-the-air TV.

Broadcasters worry that the FCC's plan would affect not only those who voluntarily part with their spectrum, but the entire industry. The FCC would "repack," or move TV stations, to make large swaths of spectrum considered more suited for mobile broadband use available.

A study released by the National Association of Broadcasters on Monday found that 40 percent of U.S. full power local television stations could have to vacate their current TV channel assignment.

"NAB is deeply concerned about provisions currently in Senate Majority Leader Reid's legislation that would threaten the future of a great American institution -- free and local television. We will work with him as the process moves forward in hopes that our issues can be addressed," said Dennis Wharton, NAB's executive vice president of communications.

(Reporting by Jasmin Melvin; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2011...-spectrum.html





House Dems Want Cost Estimate for ‘Dig Once’ Broadband
Gautham Nagesh

Several House Democrats have written to the Government Accountability Office asking for a cost-benefit analysis of a "dig once" policy that would require the installation of fiber optic cables for broadband during highway construction.

Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) introduced the Broadband Conduit Deployment Act in May, which would require the inclusion of broadband conduit — plastic pipes housing the fiber optic cables — during the construction of federal highways.

The bill was originally co-sponsored by Democratic Reps. Edward Markey (Mass.), Henry Waxman (Calif.) and Doris Matsui (Calif.) and has gained 18 other co-sponsors since.

According to the letter from Eshoo and the original co-sponsors, the Federal Communications Commission claims that the largest cost of deploying fiber-based broadband networks is not the fiber but the cost of placement, including burying it in the ground.
The FCC estimates running fiber through an existing conduit is three to four times cheaper than constructing a new aerial build.

"Given the scale of the federal government's funding of highway construction, we believe the installation of conduit in these projects could greatly facilitate the deployment of broadband networks," the letter states.

In fiscal 2009, the Federal Highway Administration reported the federal government helped states with 5,000 miles of new construction. The lawmakers asked the GAO to examine the effect of a national "dig once" policy, specifically asking for the cost and benefits along with the extent to which the policy would divert funds from highway construction.

The letter also asks which states and local governments have adopted "dig once" policies and what locations would benefit most from such a policy.
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-va...along-highways





Colleges Join Plan for Faster Computer Networks
John Markoff

A coalition of 29 American universities is throwing its weight behind a plan to build ultra-high-speed computer networks — with Internet service several hundred times faster than what is now commercially available — in the communities surrounding the participating colleges.

The project, which is named Gig.U and will be announced on Wednesday, is meant to draw high-tech startups in fields like health care, energy and telecommunications to the areas near the universities, many of which are in the Midwest or outside of major cities. These zones would ideally function as hubs for building a new generation of faster computer networks, which could make the United States more competitive internationally.

For now the plan is a work in progress, with the universities reaching out to telecommunications companies for suggestions and to corporations and nonprofits for business ideas. The institutions involved include Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University, Howard University, Duke University, the University of Michigan, the University of Washington, the University of Chicago and George Mason University.

”We’re not asking for government money,” said Blair Levin, a fellow at the Aspen Institute who is heading the project. “We believe the right approach is to have the private sector fund the networks.”

By offering one-gigabit network connections — fast enough to download high-definition movies in less than a minute — not just to scientific researchers and engineers but to the homes and businesses that surround universities, the group aims to create a digital ecosystem that will attract new companies, ideas and educational models.

“It’s a sandbox for the research community and the residents, too,” said Lev Gonick, chief information officer at Case Western in Cleveland.

Last year, Case Western set up a pilot program in a several-block area near campus, he said. The Case Connection Zone offers one-gigabit fiber-optic networking to 104 homes adjacent to the university. Within three months of its birth, Mr. Gonick said, three startups moved to the neighborhood.

“We believe a small amount of investment can yield big returns for the American economy and our society,” he said.

The Gig.U members come mainly from the heartland — states like Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana and West Virginia — where they can potentially have a big impact on midsize communities across the country. The biggest universities already have access to higher-speed networks.

The colleges are preparing to talk to big telecommunications companies about ways to attract new ventures to their neighborhoods through super-fast computing. Then, they will seek out business proposals for building the networks, “not decades hence, but in the next several years,” the group said in a statement.

Although the United States pioneered computer networks from the 1960s through the ’90s, in recent years it has fallen behind other nations in deploying and improving network technology. A recent study by the World Economic Forum found that while the United States ranked fifth in overall network “readiness” — a broad index comparing countries in the digital era — it came in 30th in network bandwidth available to the population.

In 2010, before joining the Aspen Institute, a policy research group, Mr. Levin was the staff director of the Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Plan, which aims to make high-speed Internet service available throughout the United States. After leaving the agency and talking to researchers at universities around the country, he came to believe that the United States needed to find a strategy for continuously improving the quality of its Internet technology.

“It’s the difference between seeing it as a race-to-a-tape versus creating a constantly evolving ecosystem that is improving our networks,” Mr. Levin said.

The research community must still counter skepticism about what some technologists call a “build it and they will come” mentality. Some technologists say that once faster networks are deployed, new uses will emerge that cannot be foreseen today. Others argue that high-resolution video is the only current general application for the highest speed network technology.

“The concept is laudable, but the real question is for what purpose?” said Michael Kleeman, a computer network designer and telecommunications policy strategist at the University of California, San Diego.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/27/science/27gig.html





Steve Perlman Unveils White Paper Explaining “Impossible” Wireless Data Rates
Dean Takahashi

People have called Steve Perlman’s new wireless technology impossible.

Today, he’s releasing a white paper that aims to show how it can really work.

Perlman’s “distributed input distributed output” technology, or DIDO, allows each wireless user on a network to use the full data capacity of shared spectrum simultaneously with a bunch of other users. It does so by eliminating interference between users sharing the same spectrum. That’s a phenomenal invention that appears to violate the laws of physics, and Perlman calls it a “cloud wireless system.”

The technology gets around Shannon’s Law — a physics law that figures the upper limit for data that can go through a wireless channel. The new technology can transmit data at speeds that are about 10 times the limits determined by Shannon’s Law, and Perlman thinks that could hit 1,000 times the limit eventually.

Perlman is a legendary entrepreneur and inventor who helped create Apple’s video encoding and playback technology, Quicktime, before founding WebTV and then selling it to Microsoft for half a billion dollars in 1997. A glowing BusinessWeek profile of Perlman calls him the “Edison of Silicon Valley.”

To date, Perlman has described DIDO only in vague terms. But this white paper, co-authored with Antonio Forenza, a principal scientist at Perlman’s Rearden Companies in Palo Alto, Calif., is aimed at disclosing more of the technical details of the technology.

“If everyone here decided to watch HD video on a tablet, that would overwhelm any network,” Perlman said at our GamesBeat 2011 event. “But with this technology, each of you would have the full bandwidth of being in that wireless cell; you would not interfere with each other at all.”

With conventional wireless technologies, the data rate for each user drops as more users share the same spectrum. Claude Shannon, who created Shannon’s law, showed that was a necessary tradeoff: The more people using a spectrum, the more redundancy needs to be built into each individual’s transmissions in order to avoid interference. But with DIDO, the date rate per user remains steady as more users are added. As a result, DIDO “profoundly increases the data capacity of the wireless spectrum, while increasing reliability and reducing the cost and complexity of wireless devices.”

The paper also says deploying DIDO is far less expensive than conventional commercial wireless deployment. Yet it also has higher capacity and performance and is able to tap existing consumer internet infrastructure and indoor wireless access points.

This means that DIDO could have a virtually unlimited number of users, all of them streaming high-definition video, using the same spectrum that a single user would use with conventional wireless technology. There would be no dead zones, no interference, no reduction in data rate and a range of up to several miles in urban and suburban settings with sub-millisecond latency. In rural areas, DIDO works at distances up to 250 miles.

If these claims bear out, DIDO would revolutionize the wireless industry in almost every aspect.

Understanding interference

Whenever there is more than one wireless transmission within range of another, there is potential for interference between them, like when you listen to AM or FM radio while driving. As you drive out of the range of one station, you start to hear another station that you are approaching. The two stations duel for a time, but at some point you only hear the new station. That’s why radio stations are carefully located far apart with limited transmission power. The stations are spaced out to eliminate interference.

With cell phones, the problem of interference gets more complex. With lots of users sending and receiving communications at the same time, each region has to be subdivided into cells, a mile or less in diameter, with cell towers that have different frequencies from adjacent cells so as not to interfere. As a mobile phone user moves from one cell’s range to another’s, it switches frequencies and hands off to a new cell tower. A user stays connected as long as they are within range of at least one cell tower.

As mobile usage has grown, it’s become a lot more complicated, with tricks used such as dividing cells into pie sectors and using more advanced transmission techniques. But each cell still has a limited data rate capacity which is shared by all users in that cell. Once the data capacity is reached, people can no longer get the data rates they expect, and in some cases they can’t even maintain a connection. That results in dropped calls and slow internet connections.

Demand for data has outstripped the carriers’ ability to add more spectrum and their willingness to put up more cell towers.

Wi-Fi wireless networks are restricted to even shorter ranges because of interference. But Wi-Fi is now so pervasive that inference is the norm: Your neighbor’s network overlaps with your own. As a result, you can’t get the speeds you want with Wi-Fi either. Approaches such as MIMO, used in 802.11n wireless networks and LTE cell data networks, can increase the limit by a factor of three or four, but Shannon’s Law eventually gets in the way.

A new approach

DIDO takes a new approach, in which the shared capacity is not subject to Shannon’s Law. As more users in a given area share the same wireless spectrum, the quality of user data access doesn’t go down.

So far, Rearden says it hasn’t come close to the limit of users in the same area. It has demonstrated wireless capacity that is more than 10 times the Shannon’s Law limit today. In the future, Rearden expects to hit 100 times and possibly even 1,000 times.

“We have observed wireless phenomenon that we do not believe have been seen before that will take time to understand and document,” the paper says.

DIDO works in a way that can be compared to Wi-Fi. When a user connects a computer to a single Wi-Fi access point, and there are no other users of the spectrum, the connection process is simple and reliable. The user gets 100 percent of the spectrum available, as pictured in the first image to the right. When a user watches a web video, the web site sends video data to the access point, which modulates the data, or creates a wave signal that contains the data. The radio transmits that signal through the air and the user’s computer receives it, demodulates the data and plays back the video.

If the user stays within range of the access point and nothing else happens, then the video plays uninterrupted. But as soon as other devices compete for the same spectrum, the data rate becomes tougher to maintain. If a neighbor next door also has Wi-Fi, and the users are on the same frequency, then the users will see interference if they try to access video at the same time. They wind up sharing the same wireless channel, halving the data rate for each user. With more users, the problem gets worse.

If you use a DIDO access point instead of a Wi-Fi access point, it’s different. When a user clicks on a web video, that video is sent not directly to the user’s access point, but rather to a DIDO data center. The data center processes the data, modulates it into a radio signal waveform, and sends the waveform to the access point, which sends the waveform to its antenna and transmits it as a radio signal. The user’s computer receives the radio signal, demodulates it, and plays the video.

If you add a second user into the picture, both users click on a web video. The data are combined and processed in the DIDO data center, which produces two radio signal waveforms. Each is dispatched to the correct user’s computer. Both access points transmit the radio signal waveforms to the user’s computer simultaneously. Because both are transmitting at once, the two radio signals collide at the first user’s computer and the second user’s computer.

Normally, when two radio signals collide, the result is the stronger one overpowers the other, or indecipherable noise results. But not with DIDO. Instead, the sum of the radio signals at each computer’s location results in a clean modulated waveform carrying the data intended for that particular computer. Each computer then demodulates the signal waveform and plays the video. What each user receives is what they would have received if they both had the channel all to themselves. If you add more users, the same thing occurs. There is no interference.

The full explanation for why this happens is very long and involves immensely complex mathematics, carefully designed software and hardware, and new data communications and modulation techniques. Simply put, DIDO is a cloud wireless system.

Today, DIDO can handle 10 users with 10 DIDO access points working and they are working “extremely well,” the paper says. DIDO is just as efficient in sending data upstream from the user to the internet.

DIDO also uses advanced math, not switching, to enable users to move between adjacent DIDO networks, without requiring handoffs.

The company says that the signal quality and reliability are much higher than that of Wi-Fi or cellular radios. For the same range, less wireless power is needed. And the DIDO radios are simpler.

Central intelligence

All of the “smarts” in the system reside in the data center, which communicates to all of the users at once through all of the access points at once. The DIDO access points are like a vast array of antennae extending from the DIDO data center for miles, connected to the center over the internet.

DIDO communication begins with the access points exchanging brief test signals with DIDO user devices, such as laptops with DIDO radios in them. DIDO analyzes these test signals as they move through the wireless links. The DIDO data center determines precisely what will happen when it transmits data signals from each access points to each users, and how the signals will add up together when received at the user devices.

The DIDO data center then uses this analysis to create precise waveforms for all of the access points that, when transmitted at once, will add up together at each user device to create a clear signal, or a clean independent wave form carrying the data requested by that user.

While it’s currently only working in limited tests, the paper says DIDO was designed to become a mass market product over the course of a decade. As a result, the system was designed to be built practically and inexpensively, scaled to any size. Much of the work has focused on making sure the DIDO data centers can be scaled up linearly, not exponentially, or without huge costs as users are added.

The reason users don’t have to share the same spectrum at once is that Shannon’s Law is not about spectrum data rate limits, but channel data rate limits. But spectrum and channels are not the same thing. In conventional Wi-Fi, users do share the same spectrum and the same channel. MIMO allows more channels to be created. DIDO creates an independent channel for each user. The reason why these channels are independent is that the signals are crafted in a unique way.

The DIDO access points are distributed in a way that achieves “diversity,” which in turn makes the signals distinct from each other in the path they take to an antenna. The DIDO data center distinguishes each access point signal from those of the many access points that reach a given user. So the data center can figure out precisely what waveforms it needs to generate for a clean waveform to arrive at each user. Each clean waveform is an independent channel. As more users share a space, more independent channels are created.

DIDO operates at frequencies ranging from 1 megahertz to 1 gigahertz, and it works fine at all frequencies, the paper says. Higher frequencies are likely as well. DIDO systems are more reliable because the antennae are scattered about; if some antennae are obstructed, it is likely other antennae will reach the user.

DIDO access points can transmit far longer distances than Wi-Fi access points or cell towers because they can transmit at a higher power, if needed, without the concerns of interference. So indoor DIDO access points can safely transmit a mile or more, and outdoor access points can transmit much farther. One rural configuration can transmit 250 miles in radius. That’s because the signal at the 3 megahertz to 7 megahertz range can bounce off the ionosphere in the sky (as pictured) and overcome limits of the curvature of the earth.

Rearden has built a test system with several access points in Pflugerville, Lake Austin, and Austin — all cities in Texas.

DIDO has very low latency of less than 1 millisecond, compared to a few milliseconds for Wi-Fi and 150 milliseconds for 3G wireless.

As such, it is ideally suited for Perlman’s other business, the cloud gaming service known as OnLive, which delivers high-end games to low-end computers via the cloud. The advantage is that OnLive and DIDO can share the same data centers. The systems will be able to deliver outstanding quality video and imagery to users, even if those users don’t have expensive computers. The quality level is as high as one of Perlman’s other companies, Mova, which can create lifelike human faces for special effects.

“The unveiling of DIDO is the latest piece in the puzzle,” the paper says. “There are more coming….We believe DIDO wireless will completely transform the world.”
http://venturebeat.com/2011/07/28/st...ss-data-rates/





Lucas Loses UK Battle Over Stormtrooper Helmets
Jill Lawless

The Empire has struck out.

Britain's Supreme Court on Wednesday defeated a bid by George Lucas' company to stop a prop designer making and selling replicas of the iconic stormtrooper helmets from the "Star Wars" films. The court did, however, prevent him from selling them in the United States.

Andrew Ainsworth sculpted the white helmets worn by the sinister galactic warriors in the original "Star Wars" film in 1977, and now sells replica costumes, made from the original molds, over the Internet. Lucasfilm Ltd. has been trying for years to stop him, in a battle that has climbed through the British courts.

Lucasfilm's lawyers argued that the stormtrooper suits are sculptures and therefore works of art covered by British copyright law. Two lower courts ruled in 2008 and 2009 that the costumes were props, not artworks, and so covered by a much shorter copyright period that has now expired.

The country's highest court on Wednesday upheld those decisions. The panel of five judges said "it was the 'Star Wars' film that was the work of art that Mr. Lucas and his companies created. The helmet was utilitarian in the sense that it was an element in the process of production of the film."

But the judges agreed with Lucasfilm's lawyers — and a lower court — that Ainsworth had violated Lucas's copyright in the United States by selling costumes there.

Ainsworth's attorney, Seamus Andrew, said that means the designer may have to pay damages to Lucasfilm for the U.S. sales, but they are likely to be minor because he did not sell much merchandise there. The judges said Ainsworth had sold between $8,000 and $30,000 worth of goods in the U.S.

Andrew said that on the broader issue, "our client won, without a doubt."

He said the Supreme Court had been asked: "Could our client continue to manufacture and sell replica helmets and suits of armor without any form of license from George Lucas? And he can."

Ainsworth, 62, said he was delighted.

"I am proud to report that in the English legal system David can prevail against Goliath if his cause is right," he said. "If there is a Force, then it has been with me these past five years."

Lucasfilm said that "unfortunately" the court had upheld an "anomaly of British copyright law under which the creative and highly artistic works made for use in films — which are protected by the copyright laws of virtually every other country in the world — may not be entitled to copyright protection in the U.K."

The eminent Supreme Court judges may be experts in law, but their ruling revealed gaps in their knowledge of science fiction. The judgment said the "Star Wars" movies are set "in an imaginary, science-fiction world of the future."

Film fans know that they take place "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away."
http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...ts-1610151.php





Brands Frown On Fair Use

Parody police question user-generated content
Andrew Wallenstein

A Tumblr blog gets thousands of followers by juxtaposing classic "Peanuts" cartoons with unrelated tweets. But "Peanutweeter" was shut down in June, several months after launching, due to a takedown notice from Iconix Brand Group, which jointly holds the copyright with the heirs of creator Charles Schulz.

Meanwhile, kiddie show "My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic" has somehow attracted an adult-male cult following, called "bronies" (bro + ponies), who take footage from the show and combine it with everything from foul-mouthed Wu-Tang Clan songs to R-rated movies like "Inglourious Basterds" (a practice known as "trackjacking"). Copyright holder Hasbro Studios has not only allowed most of the content to remain online, but it released a promotional video paying tribute to its unlikely fans.

Welcome to the confusing world of online parodies, where intellectual property gets manipulated in the name of comedy. And that is forcing content companies to make tough calls as to whether to embrace it all as free marketing or crack down, claiming copyright infringement.

Some, like Hasbro, recognize that the Internet has enabled the tools and distribution to "remix" the shows and movies they love or hate. What was always a passive experience for fans has given way to a participatory culture.

And yet there is still a conservatism that leaves many within the media business wary of those whose parodies could easily be confused with or tarnish their own output. Even worse: the prospect that they could even profit from their appropriation. Lucas Films is often held up as the Darth Vader of content restrictions for repeated clashes with rabid fans of its "Star Wars" franchise.

"You have a lot of people in marketing who think that's not how the branding should be portrayed, so they should be quashing it," says Ben Huh, CEO of Cheezburger Networks, a suite of comedy websites that houses many user-generated parodies.

What makes this tricky territory to navigate is the murky legal notion of "fair use," under which parody is considered one of the key exceptions to copyright restrictions. As a legal concept, parody is like pornography -- not easily defined -- which explains why many of those who put parody to work have little understanding of its boundaries.

That's where the platforms that exhibit and/or promote some of this controversial content come in. YouTube, Twitter and Tumblr have all tried to strike a balance between preserving the free expression of their user base while staying sensitive to the content companies that are sources of revenue from advertising and licensing.

YouTube in particular has tried to enlighten its users to the nuances of fair use. The Google-owned site introduced a tutorial on the subject in April, as well as a "copyright school" -- a video series that educates users who have been flagged for copyright violations, followed by a quiz they're required to pass in order to be reinstated.

Regardless of the effort, media companies will likely issue takedown notices to any content they find offensive, and offenders will be intimidated enough to comply rather than question.

Jonathan McIntosh, a self-proclaimed "pop culture hacker" who operates out of website Rebellious Pixels, braces for backlash every time he releases a clever mash-up like his most recent work, "Right Wing Radio Duck," which mixed footage of Donald Duck with audio from Glenn Beck.

"It makes me happy that it's going viral (but) at the same time I have this feeling of apprehension that the wrong person is going to see it and try to censor it," he says, adding that while Beck bashed him on the air, he did not order any takedown.

But even qualified tolerance may seem short-sighted when there's an opportunity to actively encourage and participate in a parody. Consider what Bear Grylls, star of "Man vs. Wild," did in May in response to months of fans creating comic illustrations that mocked the wilderness expert's propensity to drink his own urine when deprived by the elements of more suitable liquids. Grylls tweeted a picture of himself sipping a cup of tea with the message, "Am on vacation in LA. Looks like I'll have to drink my own pee!"

"Really it all comes down to a question of control for big media companies," McIntosh says. "They can either attempt to clamp down on remixers and fan communities or they can embrace the new creative digital world and see transformative works as a positive thing for their franchises."
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118040411?refCatId=19





Google Plus Deleting Accounts En Masse: No Clear Answers

A number of Google+ accounts have been deleted in the last 24 hours as the new social network struggles with real name policy.
Violet Blue

A striking number of Google+ accounts have been deleted in the last 24 hours as the new social network struggles with its community standards policy around real names - alienating and frightening the people it aims to serve.

Removed but restored through influence is Limor Fried - AKA Lady Ada / Adafruit Industries: She was recently featured on the cover of WIRED Magazine.

Google suspended Limor Fried “Ladyada” Google+ profile, no show-and-tell tonight… http://adafru.it/b16793

Her account has just now been mysteriously restored, though only after a groundswell of complaints. Suffice it to say, the rest of the deleted accounts will not have such well-placed advantages.

Many have now been purged and not restored.

The message I received this morning from the source in my previous Google+ article summarized it,

Google+ suspended my acct “After reviewing your profile, we determined the name you provided violates our Community Standards.”

After the next few messages repeating the same thing, it was clear that the dam had burst and Google+ is on an account suspension rampage.

Just Like Facebook’s Real Name Hypocrisy

Ex-Google employee Kirrily “Skud” Robert. Irony? The former Google employee that originally applauded Google Plus’ statements about real names had their account suspended. Kirrily “Skud” Robert writes in I’ve Been Suspended From Google+:

So today, I got off a plane this afternoon to find a pile of tweets, emails, and blog comments asking whether it was true that my Google+ account had been suspended. When I managed to get some wifi and check, it turned out that it had been.

They are asking the ex-employee for ID verification. Kirrily “Skud” Robert continues,

It then asks me for my name (uh, don’t you know that already?), email (ditto), link to my profile (ditto), and asks me to provide documentation. I can either give them a scan of my photo ID (obscuring “personal information”, whatever that means), or links to places on the web that demonstrate that this is my name.

They suggest using Facebook (the site that allows Google founder Sergey Brin to go under a pseudonym, and whose own founder has a page for his dog) as evidence. I have something better, though, because I expected this to happen and I had already collated my evidence. I linked to that page and submitted the form.

It raised a chilling spectre in the background about what happens, exactly, when Google suspends your account.

Bill Noble writes,

To be clear, the stories we’re hearing so far are of people being suddenly frozen out of EVERYTHING, all their data and resources, not just one or a few Google functions. Given who we early adopters are, even a few more days of this unreasonable behavior could abort the whole G+ effort.

Others are indicating uneven application of punitive measures:

When my account was suspended it was only my profile. I could still get to Documents, Calendar and Gmail. My G+ Stream was still updating, I just couldn’t post to it.

Madge Weinstein just tweeted,

Just happened to me- but they not only suspended gplus, but rather all google services incl gmail! The notice just said i violated TOS- nothing specific.

Multiple Account Sign-In Breakdown?

It is not a simple matter of using a “real name” - as much of a problematic grey area as that is. Another person cited in my Google+ article has now had their account deleted for the simple reason that they were using Gmail and Google+ with multiple account sign-in:

This is tremendously disappointing for a variety of reasons, not least that the multiple linked login functionality made G+ just about perfect for what I need. I was a big proponent of and encouraged many friends to come over here.

Oh, and for clarity: there was nothing like objectionable content in the suspended account. I simply have details of my life that I would like to put in my PROFILE that I do not care to share with all my contacts. Details that extend beyond Google’s privacy controls for Profiles.

Meanwhile, this chilling post is making the rounds on tech messageboards today:

Dear Google, I would like to bring to your attention a few things before I disconnect permanently from all of your services.

On July 15 2011 you turned off my entire Google account. You had absolutely no reason to do this, despite your automated message telling me your system “perceived a violation.” I did not violate any Terms of Service, either Google’s or account specific ToS, and your refusal to provide me with any proof otherwise makes me absolutely certain of this. And I would like to bring to your attention how much damage your carelessness has done.

My Google account was tied to nearly every product Google has developed, meaning that I lost everything in those accounts as well. I was also in the process of consolidating everything into my one Google account. (…)

To say that this issue is deeply concerning is an understatement to anyone and everyone that has their businesses and personal lives tied to Google services and have an interest in participating in Google+ - even Limor Fried was participating as herself.

A.V. Flox, occasional contributor to the LA Weekly, LA Times’ BrandX, Village Voice Media and section editor at BlogHer has just had her account suspended as well.

Well known nerdcore rapper Doctor Popular lost his account today - like Lady Ada, he’s also a personality in tech circles, and a Laughing Squid contributor. He tweeted,

It appears my Google+ profile has been suspended because it lists my name as Doctor Popular instead of Brian Roberts. Totally lamehole.

Would they do the same to Lady Gaga? Currently there are multiple Lady Gaga accounts.

Personally, I doubt it.

Kirrily “Skud” Robert is currently compiling a database of those who have had their accounts deleted over alleged name violations. If you have had your account deleted you can contribute information at the Suspended Google+ Accounts page.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue...ar-answers/567





Google+ Misses an Opportunity - Privacy is an Important Part of Openness
Chester Wisniewski

Google's new "Plus" social networking service attracted more than 10 million users within a week of its public beta. That is a remarkable number of people signing up for an unfinished social network when the field of options is already quite crowded.

Why would so many people flock to Google+? The one thing almost everyone that I know references is privacy and control, or at least the hope that it might achieve that end.

Twitter users are happy with the openness of Twitter... You know what it does: It broadcasts your messages to the world in bite-size chunks. No hidden agenda, no surprises... It's public.

LinkedIn logoLinkedIn is great for professional networking, again mostly public. I don't use it to share links of cats playing keyboards or cool movie quizzes. For many of us, aside from finding employment, it is a way to stay in touch with people we've worked with in the past.

Facebook logoFacebook? Well, it started out as something exclusive and private, then became open and not so private. Nearly everyone who cares about being social is on there, so it continues to march along 500 million users strong.

Why do we need an alternative to Facebook? Much of it started with comments Mark Zuckerberg made in January of 2010. He stated:

"A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change - doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."

Many are uncomfortable with Facebook's privacy controls, the wishy-washy attitude toward changes and the attitude their CEO has towards privacy in general.

This is where Google had a golden opportunity to provide something that could scale to the same heights and remedy the grievances many have with Facebook.

When you first logged in, you could see how it was intended to be a blend of public and private, and enjoy the ease with which you were invited to privately share things, just within your Circles.

Pseudonymous circle with zero membersLast week Google began suspending accounts of people who used pseudonyms, which they considered a breach of the Google+ common name policy.

What they seemed to have missed is that the very foundation of privacy is identity. Simply knowing my postal code or birth date is meaningless without a name to associate it with.

By requiring people to only use their real names, unless they just happen to be a celebrity, they have eliminated the ability for people to be private in any meaningful way.

It's important to remember that it's a social network. Google will not be issuing passports like the nation of Facebook.

Google suggests your pseudonyms could go in the optional Nicknames field, which you can choose to make searchable and public.

This solves Google's problem, but erodes privacy even further by associating your "real" name with your pseudonym. I believe this is actually destructive to privacy, not helpful.

I hope Google reconsiders their current policy, as this makes them just another also-ran in the social networking game. You don't need to bully people into disclosing personal information to stop spammers and impersonators.

My advice to Google? Get your lawyers and your programming gurus together and see if you can create a place that is safe for all of us to share in ways we are comfortable with. If you can do that, you have a good chance at being a leader rather than a Facebook wannabe.
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011...t-of-openness/





Did Apple Eject Google Books from the App Store for Violating Terms?
Jake Smith

For reasons yet undefined, Google Books has been removed from the iTunes App Store. We noticed the App was gone earlier this week but thought it might have been just a blip. Now it has been awhile.

Google Books was just updated in April with new 3D page turning, landscape mode and search so it is unlikely that Google decided to orphan it. Google launched its Books initiative in December of this year as a competitor to Amazon and Apple’s eBookstores.

So why is it gone now? The timing with Apple’s new, controversial Terms of Service would seem like the most obvious explanation.

Was Google in violation of Apple’s new in-app purchase terms of service? Or, is this because Harry Potter is coming out on Google Books?

We’ve reached out to Google and Apple for answers.
http://9to5mac.com/2011/07/23/did-ap...olating-terms/





Where Do Dwarf-Eating Carp Come From?
Jonah Weiner

Tarn Adams was in the carpeted spare bedroom that serves as his work space, trying to avert an apocalyptic outbreak of vampire dwarves. “If they just run wild biting people, half the dwarves in the colony will be infected in no time,” he said, shaking his head. “That would be no fun.” He was silent for a moment. “Maybe they have to bite you three times before you’re infected?”

Seated nearby was Tarn’s older brother, Zach, squinting thoughtfully and jotting ideas into a notepad. It was a chilly afternoon in Silverdale, Wash., a town about 20 miles west of Seattle, and Tarn was wearing one of his favorite sweatshirts, a beige hoodie decorated with rows of strutting cats. The brothers — both heavyset, with close-cropped brown hair and sweetly sheepish demeanors — were conversing, as they do every day, about Dwarf Fortress, the computer game they began devising in 2002.

Dwarf Fortress is barely a blip on the mainstream radar, but it’s an object of intense cult adoration. Its various versions have been downloaded in the neighborhood of a million times, although the number of players who have persisted past an initial attempt is doubtless much smaller. As with popular simulation games like the Sims series, in which players control households, or the Facebook fad FarmVille, where they tend crops, players in Dwarf Fortress are responsible for the cultivation and management of a virtual ecosystem — in this case, a colony of dwarves trying to build a thriving fortress in a randomly generated world. Unlike those games, though, Dwarf Fortress unfolds as a series of staggeringly elaborate challenges and devastating setbacks that lead, no matter how well one plays, to eventual ruin. The goal, in the game’s main mode, is to build as much and as imaginatively as possible before some calamity — stampeding elephants, famine, vampire dwarves — wipes you out for good.

Though its medieval milieu of besieged castles and mutant enemies may be familiar, Dwarf Fortress appeals mainly to a substratum of hard-core gamers. The game’s unofficial slogan, recited on message boards, is “Losing is fun!” Dwarf Fortress’s unique difficulty begins with its most striking feature: The way it looks. In an industry obsessed with pushing the frontiers of visual awe, Dwarf Fortress is a defiant throwback, its interface a dense tapestry of letters, numbers and crude glyphs you might have seen in a computer game around 1980. A normal person looks at ♠§dg and sees gibberish, but the Dwarf Fortress initiate sees a tense tableau: a dog leashed to a tree, about to be mauled by a goblin.

This bare-bones aesthetic allows Tarn to focus resources not on graphics but on mechanics, which he values much more. Many simulation games offer players a bag of building blocks, but few dangle a bag as deep, or blocks as small and intricately interlocking, as Dwarf Fortress. Beneath the game’s rudimentary facade is a dizzying array of moving parts, algorithms that model everything from dwarves’ personalities (some are depressive; many appreciate art) to the climate and economic patterns of the simulated world. The story of a fortress’s rise and fall isn’t scripted beforehand — in most games narratives progress along an essentially set path — but, rather, generated on the fly by a multitude of variables. The brothers themselves are often startled by what their game spits out. “We didn’t know that carp were going to eat dwarves,” Zach says. “But we’d written them as carnivorous and roughly the same size as dwarves, so that just happened, and it was great.”

Dwarf Fortress may not look real, but once you’re hooked, it feels vast, enveloping, alive. To control your world, you toggle between multiple menus of text commands; seemingly simple acts like planting crops and forging weapons require involved choices about soil and season and smelting and ores. A micromanager’s dream, the game gleefully blurs the distinction between painstaking labor and creative thrill.

“Playing Dwarf Fortress is like taking the controls of a plane right as it’s taking off,” says Chris Dahlen, editor in chief of the gaming magazine Kill Screen. And, he added, “flying a jet is a lot more interesting than just riding in a jet.”

Dwarf Fortress is too willfully noncommercial to have any discernible influence on gaming at large, but it is widely admired by game designers. Programmers behind The Sims 3 reportedly played Dwarf Fortress when they were making their game, and several homages to Dwarf Fortress appear in the blockbuster fantasy game World of Warcraft. Richard Garfield, who created the hit card game Magic: The Gathering, once attended a Dwarf Fortress fan meet in Seattle to introduce himself to Tarn. “I told him there’s nothing out there quite like it,” Garfield recalled. He suggested ways of broadening the game’s appeal, but “that stuff didn’t matter to Tarn. The charm of it is that he’s making exactly the game he wants to make.”

After nine years of development, Dwarf Fortress is, from the perspective of game play, perhaps the most complex video game ever made. And yet it is still only in “alpha” — the most recent release is version 0.31. By version 1.0, Tarn says, the game will include military campaigns and magic, along with scores of other additions. He showed me a four-inch stack of index cards, color-coded and arranged into umbrella categories, to keep track of his goals. “I like being able to hold the game in my hands,” he says.

I asked Tarn when he thought he and Zach would reach version 1.0. “Twenty years from now,” he replied. “That’s the number we talk about.” He chuckled at the prospect, adding that even when that milestone arrived, Dwarf Fortress would keep growing. “This is going to be my life’s work.”

Tarn, 33, lives in an apartment complex abutting one of the many shopping plazas that make up Silverdale, a town he calls “a strip mall.” His place has two bedrooms, the larger of which he uses for programming and which is nearly empty except for his computer desk, a framed picture of his part Manx, part Maine Coon cat, Scamps, and a fuzzy cat tree. In the living room are two gray folding tables for playing board games like Arkham Horror and Descent, and a box of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games. Tarn said he seldom touches these because “most of them suck.” The only furniture in the small dining room is Scamps’s litter box.

If much of Tarn’s apartment suggests a tenant who never fully moved in, his bedroom suggests a tenant who never sets a sock outdoors. When I peeked inside, rumpled underwear, discarded boxes and books lay scattered across the carpet. A sheet of plywood, edged with black foam rubber, was wedged into the window frame and affixed there by metal clamps. Tarn wakes up around 3 p.m. every day, codes through the night and goes to bed around 6 a.m. The plywood keeps slumber-disturbing daylight out of the room, making it a chamber fit for a vampire dwarf — or at least for a computer programmer.

Tarn and Zach’s parents live on several wooded acres in nearby Bremerton, and Zach, who is 35 and between jobs, has lived with them since 2002. Zach brought over a drinking glass from the house in case I got thirsty, because Tarn owns only a couple of dishes. In the fridge were three sodas and a jug of water and nothing else. Tarn said I was welcome to anything, although the jug technically belonged to Scamps — the tap water has something in it that makes the cat refuse to drink it. Tarn consumed “maybe one glass” of water in the last three months, hydrating with soft drinks instead. “Water’s not doing it for me these days,” he said. “I know it’s bad, but the sugar goes right into programming the game. If I don’t drink soda now, I get a headache and can’t do any work.”

Near midnight one evening, after a chat with Zach about incorporating sewers into the game, Tarn settled into his coding routine, opening his C++ software and firing up a Pandora playlist of upbeat soul. (Zach, less adept at programming, contributes to the game by brainstorming ideas.) Tarn surveyed the code, arrayed before him in tiny type, and began rocking in his swivel chair so vigorously that its joints squawked. The rocking had nothing to do with the music. “It’s a tic,” he explained later. “Sometimes I don’t even notice I’m doing it. During tests at college, people would yell at me to knock it off.”

As Tarn got into the zone, his muttered profanities and grumbles about “x distances” took on a mantralike quality. Conjuring sewers, he would type out lines of code, let the software effect his changes, frown at the results, then tweak. Initially, the sewers appeared as an illogical tangle of blue gashes, but line by line, Tarn worked them into coherence.

At about 1:30 a.m., a family of hippos, represented by light gray H’s, swam into the tunnels from a nearby river. Their arrival was an unintended development born entirely of the game’s internal logic. Tarn was pleased. “The hippos like the sewers!” he said. He took a celebratory swig of Dr. Pepper and rocked back and forth.

Despite the modesty of Tarn’s setup, he has a lot riding on Dwarf Fortress. For much of his adult life, he was headed in a very different direction. He’d enrolled at the University of Washington, where he became a star math student. He wasn’t much interested in the social atmosphere of dorms and spent his freshman year splitting a Seattle apartment with Zach, who was a senior majoring in ancient history at the university. When Zach graduated, Tarn moved into a string of “dingy one-bedrooms” with “bad moisture problems” — in one, he discovered a shelf fungus growing behind his couch. Tarn didn’t take notes in class, such was his facility with the material, and he still “4.0’d almost everything.” In his final year, the faculty named him best math major.

Tarn applied to 17 Ph.D. programs, got into 15 and, wavering briefly between M.I.T. and Stanford, chose the latter. He earned his doctorate in 2005 with a dissertation called “Flat Chains in Banach Spaces,” a rumination on concepts in advanced geometry that he describes as “not that interesting to that many people, but a nice little paper.” He published a version of it in The Journal of Geometric Analysis and, landing a postdoc at Texas A&M, seemed destined for the academic career he envisioned since his undergraduate days.

But Tarn wasn’t entirely happy. He’d had doubts about pursuing a career in math since the “pressure cooker” of his first year at Stanford, when he failed his qualifying exams (students get two chances; he passed the second time). Faced with the school’s highly competitive and professionalized environment, he came to regard himself as a “second-rate mathematician.” The issue wasn’t aptitude so much as passion. He wanted to do math but also to make video games, a juggling act he managed as an undergraduate. This had become impossible. “They wanted 60 hours a week from you, giving you problems that would take 20 hours to solve,” he said. He grew depressed and, in his only encounter with drugs, snorted meth.

For Tarn, making games “scratches all the same itches” as math: “At the end of a math problem, you have a paper and maybe you publish it, and the paper can be a building block for the edifice of mathematics, but to me that’s not so important. But working on a problem and having a game when you’re done? That’s pretty damn cool.”

In the summer of 2006, after a year at Texas A&M, Tarn went to his department head and, breaking into tears, quit. “It wasn’t easy,” Tarn recalls. “Being a mathematician was part of what I’d been doing for years. But it was easy in another sense, because I was so sick of it.” His plan, if it counts as one, was to move home and devote himself fully to Dwarf Fortress, which he’d been developing as a hobby. He figured he’d burn through his $15,000 savings and sort things out from there. To Tarn’s relief, Texas A&M offered to keep him on another year, paying him a $50,000 salary. “I woke up the morning after I gave notice, like, I can actually make this work.”

Tarn has been programming computers for as long as he can remember. “My earliest real memory is when my dad taught me how to use a ‘FOR loop’ in BASIC when I was 6, to make something go across the screen,” he says. His father, Dan, worked in wastewater treatment, writing software to crunch data and run sewage plants, and he furnished the house with the latest computers. Tarn coded little animations and, in fifth grade, wrote his first fantasy game with Zach.

Tarn’s grandmother, Elinor Ringland, who lives a short drive from Silverdale, says he was a restlessly curious child. “I remember Tarn taking my hair dryer and burning a hole into a chair cushion,” she told me. “It wasn’t mischievous; he was just inquisitive. We had to make sure he wouldn’t go into the medicine cabinet and start mixing potions.” (The brothers’ parents declined to be interviewed; “Calling them private is an understatement,” Zach explained.)

Despite Tarn’s adventurousness at home, he was withdrawn at school. “Occasionally I’d have a friend, and we’d talk or joke around or whatever, but I didn’t play sports or talk to people or have that experience,” he says. “I was a get-home-from-school, get-on-the-computer kind of kid.” In high school he made one close friend, Alan Ames, who still corresponds sporadically with Tarn. “We’d spend weekends making video games, or these silly ‘Star Trek’ parodies with his dad’s video camera,” Ames, who is now an aerospace engineer, recalled. “He never cared about socializing.” He had to be pushed to join the math club.

Growing up, Tarn was enamored of Dungeons & Dragons and J.R.R. Tolkien, but he has never been a lockstep member of the geek culture so much as a wanderer on the fringes. He didn’t read superhero comics as a kid, and later, he never became obsessed with the “Game of Thrones” books, say, or with “Lost.” He graduated from D&D to the more obscure pen-and-paper game Cyberpunk 2020, and he and Zach would download indie computer games from early bulletin boards. They adored 1985’s Hack 1.0.3, which, with its randomly generated levels, elaborate mechanics and primitive graphics, helped to popularize a microgenre of fantasy games known as roguelikes, which in turn influenced Dwarf Fortress. “We liked that you could choke to death on your food or fall down a stairway and fall on something poisonous you were carrying and poison yourself,” Tarn said.

Tarn calls Zach his best friend. The brothers’ closeness is largely a function of frequent moves the family made for Dan Adams’s work: by the time Tarn was 18, the family had been uprooted from Washington to California to New Hampshire and back to Washington. The brothers were the only constants in each other’s lives besides their parents. “There’s been a couple times when I’ve gone off and done my own thing,” Zach says, “but I always come back to Tarn.”

In 2007, when Tarn left Texas and moved back to Washington, he lived at home before moving to Silverdale. “I wanted to be close to Zach,” he says, to collaborate more easily on the game and because Zach, who worked after graduation in an Amazon.com warehouse and as a stevedore, was “going through some stuff.” Zach, who alluded to past problems with alcohol (he no longer drinks), told me his marriage of two years had collapsed; neither brother wished to comment further. Zach’s background in ancient history often helps in devising the imagery that gives Dwarf Fortress its atmosphere. For example, goblins hang the skin of conquered foes from towers, a gnarly detail the brothers got from a book on the Assyrians that Zach recommended.

When the weather permits, the brothers take walks along a trail that wends over marshland past plastic picnic tables near State Route 3. They watch crime procedurals at their parents’ house and follow a one-meal-a-day rule (most local restaurants are open for just a few hours after Tarn wakes up), which can mean Quiznos, a turkey sandwich from the supermarket or root-beer popsicles and handfuls of dry Crispix (Tarn is lactose intolerant).

Tarn has been single since graduate school, when he dated a Cisco systems administrator for a short time. I asked him whether he wanted children. “I don’t mind the idea of never having kids,” he said. “I want to stay focused on the game, and if I had kids, I’d wind up paying attention to them instead.”

He expressed similar ambivalence about finding a romantic partner. “If I were in the supermarket one day and someone came on really strong and it was a mutual thing, I’d probably get pushed along, but it’s not something I’m anticipating,” he said. His interest has dwindled. “It’s easier not to care about that stuff when you’re in your 30s.”

Dwarf Fortress began life as “a simple mining game, like Dig Dug,” Tarn says. The brothers worked for about four years on an adventure title, rendered in 3-D graphics, called Slaves to Armok: God of Blood. Between battles, “you could zoom in on your character, and it’d tell you how curly his leg hairs were, and the melting and flash points of various materials,” Tarn said. “It was insane.”

The brothers started a company called Bay 12, nicknaming themselves Toady One (Tarn) and ThreeToe (Zach), posting games that could be downloaded free and building a fan base of about 300 people. Tarn found 3-D graphics agonizingly time-consuming to program, and Dwarf Fortress was conceived as an undemanding side project: its full title is Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress. Soon enough, Armok was scrapped and Dwarf Fortress took over, inheriting its predecessor’s fetish for complexity but none of its looks. It’s like a jalopy with a V-12 under the hood. “The processing power that Dwarf Fortress uses is on the same scale as modern engineering software for designing aerospace hardware,” says Ames, the engineer. “You have more complicated simulations in Dwarf Fortress than when you model the aerodynamics of a wing.”

Though it may seem ungainly at first, the game’s interface — rendered in what are known as extended ASCII characters — has a sparse elegance. As seasons change, trees, represented by various symbols, shift from green to yellow. Goblins’ eyes appear as red quotation marks; if you shoot out an eye with an arrow, the symbol becomes an apostrophe. On a message board, one fan likened the ASCII experience in Dwarf Fortress to the immersive pleasures of reading a book: “You can let your imagination fill in the gaps.”

The community that has arisen around Dwarf Fortress is remarkable. Fans maintain an extensive wiki, which remains the game’s best (and, effectively, only) instruction manual, and which even Tarn and Zach admit to consulting. There are fan-organized podcasts, and meet-ups where players converge on bars in homemade Dwarf Fortress shirts. On the Bay 12 forums, fans make suggestions for the game, and Tarn has implemented some of these. Last spring, a player calling himself Jong89 logged on with brain-bending news. Using “672 pumps, 2,000 logs, 8,500 mechanisms and thousands of other assorted bits and knobs like doors and rock blocks,” he’d built a crude but functioning computer within Dwarf Fortress.

Perhaps most fascinating are the stories that fans share online, recounting their dwarven travails in detailed and sometimes illustrated narratives. In a 2006 saga, called Boatmurdered, fans passed around a single fortress — one player would save a game, send the file to another player and so on, relay-race style — while documenting its colorful descent into oblivion. (After a vicious elephant attack: “A single untrained marksdwarf stands ready to defend the crossing, but I doubt he’ll be enough.”) Boatmurdered spread across gaming sites and made the front page of MetaFilter, a popular blog. “That did a lot to make people aware we existed,” Tarn says.

Shared projects like Boatmurdered mark the extent to which Tarn accommodates multiplayer participation. Massive multiplayer online games have been a lucrative industry trend for years, but Tarn disdains M.M.O.’s. To him, they replace the deep pleasures of imaginative game design with the novelty of community and are invariably oriented toward mass, lowest-common-denominator appeal. “Half the people I met were 12-year-olds yelling homophobic slurs,” he says.

At bottom, Dwarf Fortress mounts an argument about play. Many video games mimic the look and structure of films: there’s a story line, more or less fixed, that progresses# only when you complete required tasks. This can make for gripping fun, but also the constrictive sense that you are a mouse in a tricked-out maze, chasing chunks of cheese. Tarn envisions Dwarf Fortress, by contrast, as an open-ended “story generator.” He and Zach grew up playing computer games with notebooks in hand, drawing their own renditions of the randomly generated creatures they encountered and logging their journeys in detail. Dwarf Fortress, which never unfolds the same way twice, takes that spirit of supple, fully engaged play to the extreme.

Tarn sees his work in stridently ethical terms. He calls games like Angry Birds or Bejeweled, which ensnare players in addictive loops of frustration and gratification under the pretense that skill is required to win, “abusive” — a common diagnosis among those who get hooked on the games, but a surprising one from a game designer, ostensibly charged with doing the hooking. “Many popular games tap into something in a person that is compulsive, like hoarding,” he said, “the need to make progress with points or collect things. You sit there saying yeah-yeah-yeah and then you wake up and say, What the hell was I doing? You can call that kind of game fun, but only if you call compulsive gambling fun.” He added: “I used to value the ability to turn the user into your slave. I don’t anymore.”

Tarn’s scruples have certainly cost him fans, but he says he’s doing fine. He has no plans to charge for the game; he subsists entirely on PayPal donations from players. “I like that it’s free, and if you care about it, you pay,” he says. In 2010, he earned $50,000. (He calls that year, in which he released a major update after a long delay, anomalous, and expects to make $30,000 in 2011.) His expenses are low — $860 a month in rent, $750 a month to Zach for his help and a few hundred dollars for utilities and food — and as long as Dwarf Fortress is self-sustaining, he’s happy. He has refused a programming job at a major developer (he asked that I keep its name off the record) and turned down a $300,000 offer from another company to license the Dwarf Fortress name, fearing that the proposed sum wouldn’t sufficiently offset the long-term donations drop that would likely result.

But the game’s profile is slowly growing on Tarn’s own terms. This week, the Museum of Modern Art will include Dwarf Fortress in a major design exhibition called “Talk to Me,” which Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA, describes as being about the “communication between people and objects.” Antonelli selected several simulation games for display in the show but was struck by the combination of “beautiful aesthetics” and “mind-boggling” complexity in Dwarf Fortress. “When you are playing Dwarf Fortress, you are God, and the world is talking back to you,” Antonelli said. Then she added, with a laugh, “And you are a very anal god.”

Meanwhile, the smash success of the world-building game Minecraft, which is in many ways a more user-friendly version of Dwarf Fortress (and which has earned its Dwarf Fortress-loving creator millions of dollars), has only been good for Tarn, driving curious new players his way. Still, in the only moment I heard him speak with anything like bitterness, Tarn called Minecraft a “depressing distillation of our own stuff.” He paused, adding more magnanimously that the game “has its own things going for it.” The problem, he concluded, “isn’t with Minecraft so much as it’s with society.”

On a bright spring day in Silverdale, Tarn and Zach spread heavy-stock paper across Tarn’s living-room tables and opened a box of crayons. When players donate to Dwarf Fortress, they’re offered a story written by Zach or a piece of crayon art drawn by Zach and colored by Tarn. These gifts contribute to an appealing sense of the game as handcrafted and personal. The brothers usually make the drawings at their grandmother’s house, a monthly ritual in which she plays appraiser, deciding what a $5 donor will get and what a $100 donor will get.

They had 14 pending crayon requests, which ranged from carte blanche to comically precise. “One guy wants a picture of seven dwarves being chased by four zombie badger boars,” Tarn said, grinning. Hunched over the table with his tongue out, Zach would make a pencil outline, then Tarn would add color. “Is this the goblin’s shears or his armor?” Tarn asked at one point.

Tarn and Zach reached the last drawing: two dwarves standing beside a massive tower under a starry sky. The scene had been rendered and colored, and all that was left to do was for Tarn to write a caption, conceived by the donor, along the bottom. “Time for my chicken-scratch,” Tarn said. Using a black Uni-Ball, he carefully lettered the caption, which read, “We shall build a tower so tall, we can mine the very stars themselves!”

Tarn offered the pen to Zach. “Do you want to sign it?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/m...-fortress.html





ALDI Sells Hard Drives with Malware Inside
Michael Lee

ALDI has confirmed that one of the products it has stocked in its stores contains malware.

The device infected with the Conficker worm. (Screenshot by Michael Lee/ZDNet Australia)

The Australian Computer Emergency Response Team (AusCERT) released an alert yesterday on the Federal Government's Stay Smart Online alert service, alleging that the Fission External 4-in-1 Hard Drive, DVD, USB and Card Reader product offered by ALDI contains the components of the "Conficker" worm.

ALDI told ZDNet Australia that the worm was limited to a small number of the devices and said that it has removed the product from all of its stores and has issued a voluntary public recall of products already purchased.

AusCERT advised customers who have already purchased the device to format the hard drive and scan their computer for infection using up-to-date antivirus software. In a separate advisory, AusCERT said that as the worm was extremely old, emerging in August 2008, most systems should be able to detect it if they have antivirus software installed.

ALDI confirmed that a full reformat of the device's hard drive would remove the worm. At the time of writing, the device still appeared on ALDI's online listing of products available.

The worm, also known as Downup, Downadup and Kido, had a high profile during its peak, infecting ANZ Bank and RailCorp in 2009.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/aldi-sells-h...-339319481.htm





For Suspected Hackers, a Sense of Social Protest
Somini Sengupta

The F.B.I.’s arrests of 14 people last week were the most ambitious crackdown yet on a loose-knit group of hackers called Anonymous that has attacked a string of government agencies and private companies over the last eight months.

But at least some of the suspects are not your typical hard-core hackers, judging from interviews with two of them and the online traces of others. Some did not bother to cover their digital tracks as they participated in what they saw as an online protest. And some say they were unaware that their feverish clicks on a home computer may have been against the law.

The suspects, mostly in their 20s and living unremarkable lives in small towns and suburbs across the country, now face up to 15 years in prison. Among them are a college student, an ex-Marine, a couple of self-taught computer programmers, even a young man whose only celebrity before last week’s arrest was that he dressed up as Harry Potter for a movie premiere.

While federal law enforcement officials are clearly keen to quash the notion that online attacks are a form of social protest, the arrests highlight a far bigger challenge facing the authorities as they try to stop digital raids carried out by a large and ideologically motivated group of people scattered across the globe.

The Justice Department has accused the suspects of being part of a criminal conspiracy to damage the Web site of PayPal, the online payment company owned by eBay, which announced last December that it would stop processing donations for WikiLeaks after it exposed classified government information.

Anonymous encouraged retaliation against PayPal, rallying supporters on Twitter. Untold numbers of people — probably hundreds — jumped into the Anonymous-affiliated chat rooms. Some of them began lobbing large packets of data aimed at overwhelming PayPal’s system, using a program called Low Orbit Ion Cannon. The site was hampered for several hours.

Drew Phillips, a wry, serious 26-year-old programmer with a paunch that testifies to hours spent hunched over a computer, admits to joining one of those chat rooms when the attack was being discussed, and to tinkering with the program used in the attack. He said he could have obscured his Internet Protocol address, which can be used to identify a computer, had he thought that anyone was interested in what he was doing.

“I didn’t have anything to hide. I didn’t feel I had to mask my I.P. address,” he said over a caffe mocha at a coffee shop not far from Santa Rosa, his placid middle-class hometown north of San Francisco. “What would anyone want with me?”

Mr. Phillips admits he was sympathetic to the strike against PayPal, but he maintains he did not actually participate.

It took federal officials only a few weeks to catch up with Mr. Phillips. Police and federal agents with a search warrant, arrived at his home early one morning in January.

“What, did I download one too many movies?” he remembers asking facetiously. Federal agents were interested in what he was doing with the Low Orbit Ion Cannon software. Mr. Phillips, who works for a solar energy company, said he used it to test the endurance of his employer’s computer systems. They left with all his equipment: a server he had built himself, a desktop, two laptops and several flash drives. Federal agents returned last week to arrest him, charging him with causing damage to a protected computer and a related conspiracy charge. He says wryly that he suspects the government needed to make an example out of him.

Eugene H. Spafford, a computer security professor at Purdue University, was not convinced that the arrests last week would serve as a deterrent. Rather, he said, it could prompt others to be more careful in the future and even prompt retaliatory strikes.

“A whole bunch of people were angry, they didn’t really think about whether it was legal or not. It never entered their minds,” Professor Spafford said. “This was kind of the equivalent of a spontaneous street protest, where they may have been throwing rocks through windows but never thought that was against the law or hurting anybody.”

A federal law enforcement official, who would not be named because he was not authorized to speak about an active case, argued that denial-of-service attacks like the one against PayPal were costly and illegal: “These things are costing companies millions of dollars.”

The official acknowledged that some of those arrested “used unsophisticated techniques.” But when asked if the authorities were overreacting, he said, “No, it’s never heavy-handed to address violations of law, particularly in this arena of cybersecurity, where the threat is so pervasive.”

Anonymous does make some effort to warn its supporters of the potential hazards of joining the movement; its handbook for new recruits has several pages of instructions on how to mask one’s online identity.

Two days after the arrests in the United States last week, in an open letter to the F.B.I. and international law enforcement authorities, Anonymous and its offshoot, Lulz Security, pledged to continue to attack government and private Web sites. “Your threats to arrest us are meaningless to us as you cannot arrest an idea,” the statement read.

While there are clearly some core members of both Anonymous and Lulz Security, it is not clear whether the authorities have arrested any of them, though media reports have said that a 16-year-old arrested in London last week was an important member of the latter group.

In Jacksonville, Fla., another self-taught programmer named Keith Downey was also angered last December by PayPal’s stance toward WikiLeaks. And in general, he was dismayed at what he saw as increasing government control over the Internet. He logged on from home, also without bothering to use tools that would help shield his identity.

In an Anonymous chat room he was inspired to join the bombardment of PayPal. He likened it to “the college sit-ins of the ’70s” and even to Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement against British rule. No one in the chat rooms apparently bothered to explain that Gandhi spent a lot of time in jail, as did antiwar protesters in the 1970s. Mr. Downing wasn’t prepared to be arrested last week. Nor is he financially prepared to travel across the country for his court appearance in San Jose, Calif., in September.

Mr. Downey, who had a small business installing and maintaining computer hardware for local music studios, lost his computer equipment during an F.B.I. raid in January. He lives with his widowed mother, who was laid off from her job earlier this year. Mr. Downey says he is patching together construction work to make ends meet. He has been represented so far by court-appointed counsel. “I need to set up a donation Web site for my legal expenses,” said Mr. Downey. “I definitely will not use PayPal.”

Lisa Bruno contributed reporting from Jacksonville, Fla.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/t...l-protest.html





British Police Say They Arrested Hacker Group Member
Somini Sengupta

British police on Wednesday announced the arrest of a 19-year-old man who they said was the spokesman of the cyber-vigilante group Lulz Security, which has claimed credit for a string of attacks on the Web sites of government agencies and private corporations.

In a statement, the police said the man used the online alias Topiary and was picked up during a raid on a residence in the Shetland Islands, the rugged archipelago off the northeastern coast of Scotland. Police said they were also questioning a 17-year-old, but have not arrested him, and were conducting a search at another address in Lincolnshire, while a search continued at the Shetland Islands address.

On Twitter, Topiary described himself as a “simple prankster turned swank garden hedge.” His moniker and missives were frequently facetious and occasionally provocative, suggesting the handiwork of someone who relished playful language.

The most recent post on Topiary’s Twitter feed is dated July 21, two days after law-enforcement authorities announced the arrests of more than a dozen people in the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands, who were accused of participating in online attacks at the instigation of the hacker group, Anonymous and its offshoot, Lulz Security. “You cannot arrest an idea,” Topiary wrote.

In the United States, 14 men and women, mostly in their 20s, were charged in connection with an online attack last December against PayPal, after the online payment company stopped taking donations for WikiLeaks.

On Wednesday, in response to those arrests, Anonymous called on supporters to cancel their PayPal accounts. Shares in PayPal’s parent company, eBay, dropped and then recovered somewhat. In afternoon trading they were down 2 percent, in line with other technology stocks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/28/t...up-member.html





Exclusive: British Police Duped by LulzSec Into Arresting the Wrong Guy

Chat logs, video evidence indicate that the arrest was the result of misdirection
Jason Mick

Earlier today the blogosphere lit up with news that "Topiary" a key hacker from Anonymous and LulzSec was arrested. Topiary, along with "Sabu", was viewed as a LulzSec "chief", instrumental in orchestrating the group's many sophisticated attacks [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. But all may not be as it seems.

I. The Arrest

If the arrested man was indeed LulzSec's Topiary, he couldn't have picked a much more perfect lair. Much like a James Bond villain, the alleged hacker was arrested on a remote island -- one of the Shetland Islands, off the north coast of Britain's mainland.

Police transported the 19-year-old suspect to central-London, for interrogation. Police say they're also searching for a 17-year-old related to the case in Lincolnshire, a eastern province of the mainland.

Police characterized the arrest as a "pre-planned, intelligence-led operation".

Topiary's Twitter account fell silent about a week ago, and many posts were deleted from it. The sole remaining post, dating to July 21, played Medger Ever's iconic quote "You can not kill an idea", stating, "You cannot arrest an idea."

To add to the picture, LulzSecurity's website has been down on and off for the last few weeks, being on life-support thanks to a CloudFlare cached copy.

Given these details and the UK government's insistence they had nabbed their man, the media jumped into a fervor. And the public gobbled it up, as they had long expected LulzSec's brass to be apprehended and redirected towards a local penitentiary.

II. Details Conflict

But this open and shut case might not be so open and shut. Last month the blog site LulzSecurityExposed supposedly "doxed" (published the real world identity of) Topiary. They claim he's changed names more times than Prince and their accounting puts him nowhere near Scotland.

They write:

Topiary aka Warpstonelord aka Hombre de Mundo aka Tomtenisse

Daniel Ackerman Sandberg
Birthday 13 August 1988
Location Uppsala, Sweden
Interests Zelda :D, Warhammer, Writing, Being with friends, more...
Twitter -
http://twitter.com/atopiary" rel="nofollow
Facebook -
http://www.facebook.com/ManofWorld" rel="nofollow
Youtube -
http://www.youtube.com/user/
warpstonelord
Skype - x-tomtenisse-x , Doxiary
Digg - http://digg.com/warpstonelord

Forums
http://www.cubed3.com/
journal/Hombre%20de%20Mundo

http://z12.invisionfree.com/
WHFBhelp/index.php?showuser=2

http://www.zeldauniverse.net/forums
/members/9225
-hombre-de-mundo-page110.html


So which is the true Topiary? The arrest 19 year old Scotland native? Or the at-large 23 year old Swede? There's more to come.

III. Chat Logs Indicate UK Police Are Being Duped

London's police force are desperate for some good press. Amid the resignation of London's police chief and allegations of bribery, the arrest could be a huge victory for the department. In recent years the police have been battered by a long string of embarrassments, including an invasive camera scheme, which failed to reduce crime rates.

A series of chat logs published by anti-LulzSec American "hacktivist", th3j35t3r ("The Jester") indicate, however, that the department may be enmeshed in another debacle.

The logs are as follows:
[removed]: S'up Daniel
Topiary: s'appening [removed]
[removed]: You OK?
Topiary: could be better, you seen the pdf table thing with all the names I take it?
[removed]: Saw that, but you seen the thing today?
Topiary: bro I've been playing it off since fakegregg said something about Zelda
[removed]: ah, well, you should keep low man
Topiary: I can't at this point, I need to just straight up deny it 100% and flaunt it everywhere
Topiary: but I trust you, you know how it is
Topiary: if I go hide then people will assume the dox are right
Topiary: so I'll just act like they failed hard
[removed]: True that - so you need to make a big show of disproving them
Topiary: yeah well, this is my plan:
Topiary: (as you know I stole this nickname from a troll last December, didn't work out so well)
Topiary: I'll just keep denying it until they try to go after the troll
Topiary: then they'll think that's me and harass him
[removed]: then he harasses back?
Topiary: yeah but if I deny my real dox enough, people will go looking for other dox
Topiary: then nobody will believe I'm me
Topiary: and all you bastards told me my Brit voice was good, damnit
Topiary: did they get voice recognition?
[removed]: well when you talk the Swedish accent comes out a bit
[removed]: but not for a couple of minutes
Topiary: these faggots aren't hitting the UK ni$%*r Topiary
Topiary: why aren't they?
Topiary: I'm hoping someone will go after him and think it's me, then I'll act all scared etc
[removed]: then boom - you drop all the heat on him
Topiary: ANYTHING to divert attention from that fuckign nameshub
Topiary: I'm assuming they put that to Feds
Topiary: so I might be raided soon
Topiary: fucking shit
Topiary: goddamnit
[removed]: that "nameshub" thing exposed a few peopl
[removed]: have the feds any jurisdiction in Sweden?
[removed]: ohwait
[removed]: shit :/
Topiary: don't know but I'm shitting bricks
Topiary: so I don't know what to do
Topiary: so I'm just playing it off
Topiary: "Who the fuck is Daniel Sandberg?", the whole story
[removed]: well, hopefully someone will go after the troll you stole the name off
Topiary: they should have already
Topiary: hoping so dude
Topiary: because I don't want this shit
Topiary: but yeah I deleted everything recently
[removed]: rm -rf
[removed]: fuck, I hope you DBAN-ed
Topiary: I'd like to make it to the end of the month, how long do they take to raid?
Topiary: better not hit me on April fool's day
Topiary: but yeah maybe they'll just think backtrace is a joke and not go after me
[removed]: Well shit, how long before they raided no that time?
Topiary: not very long
Topiary: bro why haven't you done what I did?
Topiary: find some network and steal someone's nick
Topiary: like someone you don't like
Topiary: then do illegal shit
Topiary: and they hit them instead
Topiary: you're using a real name
[removed]: never thought to do it...
[removed]: I'd advise taking a hammer to your drives though
Topiary: wouldn't that look suspicious if they come?
Topiary: maybe things just have to be normal
[removed]: hmmmm. use a guttmann pass - you know, like DBAN on crack?
[removed]: then reload windows or something
Topiary: yeah
Topiary: just hoping that they'll take the bait
Topiary: the fucker has been using Topiary for like a year
Topiary: trolling everyone
Topiary: for no reason
Topiary: so now we troll him, hope he's getting raided
Topiary: well whatever, we both discussed this like last year
Topiary: so...
Topiary: then I'll stop my twitter and everything
Topiary: but it isn't FUCKING WORKING
[removed]: make it look like they got the right guy
Topiary: yup
[removed]: it is also
Topiary: fucking tired of people adding me on Facebook
Topiary: to be honest I'm just gonna continue the Zelda casts as normal
Topiary: it would look REALLY weird if they stopped
[removed]: it shouldnt fsck with your normal life
Topiary: yeah, right, right
Topiary: agreed
Topiary: so that's what I'll do
Topiary: just keep it cool and carry on with it
[removed]: frame up this damn trollfaggot, and "carry on"
Topiary: hope it blows over and they start doxing Ireland fag or Scotland fag or wherever the fuck UK part he's from
Topiary: anyway I trust you so yeah
Topiary: we can keep this between us
[removed]: Wont say a word bro
[removed]: just take care
Topiary: okay gotta go
Topiary: thanks for advic
[removed]: bye!

If the above commentary is to be believed it sounds like the UK police has fallen hook line and sinker for LulzSec and Topiary's ploy. And so did the mass media [1][2].

IV. Not the First Time the Police and Media Were Duped

Back on June 6, the internet lit up with reports of a LulzSec "arrest". Only, it turns out the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations appears to have been duped into arresting Robert Cavenaugh ("XYZ"), a ex-Anonymous youth who the group had doxed after he published private server logs from the group.

Anonymous had it out for Mr. Cavenaugh, and thus he made the perfect fall guy for them. And best of all he had nothing to do with LulzSec, ostensibly.

Not long after the arrest of "Chippy1337" (real name: Ryan Cleary), yet another supposed LulzSec "official" was reported. Mr. Cleary was also former Anonymous and had helped "XYZ" publish the server logs -- and like Mr. Cavenaugh, was doxed. Now, Mr. Cleary remained close to some in Anonymous and was indeed serving as a spokesperson for LulzSec. But reportedly he had nothing to do with the actual operations.

How convenient, it seems. The U.S. law enforcement is hungry to catch a LulzSec hacker and a low-ranking spokesperson who ran afoul of LulzSec's parent group (Anonymous) gets handed into their lap.

In the end it appears Scotland's "Topiary" met a similar fate as "Chippy1337" and "XYZ" -- arrested by authorities who were led down the wrong trail by the clever members of Anonymous and LulzSec.

Supporting evidence of this conclusion can be found in several videos [1][2][3] in which Topiary speaks in Swedish or with a Swedish accent (while a member of Anonymous). Given this and the chat logs, it appears that police have the wrong guy.

Of course, the possibility remains that the chat log comments were just misdirection. But there's too many clues pointing in the direction of Sweden to ignore that possibility, at this point.
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=22280





British Judge Outlines Hacking Investigation
Sarah Lyall

The judge leading the inquiry into the phone hacking scandal engulfing Britain’s tabloids, political elite and police said Thursday that his panel plans to hold its first public hearings in September and will be able to compel witnesses to testify.

The inquiry will be in the two parts. The first will focus on press regulation and the relationship between the press and the public, said the judge, Lord Justice Leveson. The second, which will begin after the police investigation is finished, will focus on specific allegations of phone hacking and other journalistic malfeasance in the wake of the scandal over the now-defunct News of the World tabloid, part of Rupert Murdoch’s shaken media empire.

Justice Leveson was appointed by Prime Minister David Cameron after it became clear that hacking at the News of the World extended not just to public figures like celebrities and politicians, but also to a young murder victim and the families of those killed in terrorist attacks. Mr. Cameron, a Conservative, initially resisted setting up an immediate inquiry, but changed his mind in response to widespread public disgust and growing political pressure from the opposition Labour Party.

Speaking at a news conference in central London, Justice Leveson set out how the inquiry would proceed.

“The focus of the inquiry is the culture, practices and ethics of the press in the context of the latter’s relationship with the public, the police and politicians,” he said.

His goal, he added, would be to “consider what lessons, if any, may be learned from past events” and to make recommendations about how the press might be regulated in the future.

One of the issues the judge will consider is the coziness of the ties between politicians and the news media — particularly the relationship between lawmakers and editors and executives at News International, the British newspaper arm of Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation.

In another sign of how far News International’s influence extends — or has extended, until now — in British public life, it emerged last week that Justice Leveson himself had gone to two parties last year at the home of Elisabeth Murdoch, a daughter of Mr. Murdoch, and her husband, Matthew Freud, a powerful public-relations executive.

Justice Leveson said that since he and the rest of the inquiry panel — which includes former journalists and a former high-ranking police officer, among others — had been chosen “for our experience,” it was “inevitable” that “there are such contacts or links, and there should be no apology for this.”

He added: “Had I had the slightest doubt about my own position, I would not have accepted the appointment, and I also make it clear that I am satisfied that what the panelists have said creates no conflict of interest for them or me.”

Justice Leveson also said that the panel would convene a series of seminars examining media ethics, the law and investigative journalism. He said that he hoped to make the inquiry as broad as possible and encompass broadcast journalists as well as those from the print media.

A spokesman for the panel said that witnesses would testify under oath.

“It may be tempting for a number of people to close ranks and suggest that the problem is or was local to a group of journalists then operating at the News of the World,” Justice Leveson said. “But I would encourage all to take a wider view of the public good and help me grapple with the width and depth of the problem.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/w...29hacking.html





2007 Letter Clearing Tabloid Is Under Scrutiny
Jo Becker and Don Van Natta Jr.

When a Parliamentary committee first confronted The News of the World with charges of phone hacking in 2007, the paper’s owners produced a reassuring, one-paragraph letter from a prominent London law firm named Harbottle and Lewis.

The firm had been hired to review e-mails of the tabloid’s royal reporter, who had pleaded guilty to hacking the mobile phone messages of royal household staff. The letter said senior editors were not aware of the reporter’s “illegal actions,” which helped convince lawmakers that hacking was not endemic at the tabloid.

That letter has taken on new significance since it emerged in recent weeks that those e-mails, while not pointing to wider knowledge of hacking, did contain indications of payoffs to the police by journalists in exchange for information. The circumstances behind the writing of that single paragraph are being examined as part of criminal and Parliamentary inquires into whether the tabloid’s parent company, News International, the British subsidiary of News Corporation, engineered a four-year cover-up of information suggesting criminal wrongdoing.

In interviews, two people familiar with both the contents of the e-mails and discussions between the executives and the law firm provided new details about the possible payoffs. The two people also indicated that both News International and the firm were aware of the information when the reassuring letter was written, yet defined their task as only addressing the hacking issue.

In one e-mail, from 2003, the paper’s royal reporter, Clive Goodman, complained to the top editor, Andy Coulson, about a management push to cut back on cash payments to sources, saying he needed to pay his contacts in the royal protection unit. In another e-mail, the interviews show, Mr. Goodman said that he did not want to go into detail about cash payments because everyone involved could “go to prison for this.”

Mr. Goodman requested permission from Mr. Coulson to pay £1,000 for a classified “Green Book” directory, which had been stolen by a police officer in the protection unit, it has been previously reported. The book contains the private phone numbers of the Queen of England, the Royal Family and their closest friends and associates — a potentially useful tool for hacking.

In the years since the letter was written, various revelations have confirmed that phone hacking was endemic at the tabloid. Evidence disclosed in the last several weeks of widespread payoffs to the police have given rise to a second, and potentially more potent, front in the scandal.

Both Harbottle & Lewis and News International took notice of the e-mails to and from Mr. Goodman containing those initial indications of payoffs in 2007, according to the two people knowledgeable about the events. News International’s chief lawyer set them aside for a second look and they were among the e-mails retained in the files of the law firm. Yet they were not turned over to the police until last month, and no hint of their existence made its way into the firm’s single-paragraph letter four years ago.

The two people familiar with internal discussions between News International and the firm, who spoke on condition of anonymity given the criminal investigations, said company executives urged Harbottle & Lewis to write a letter giving News International a clean bill of health in the strongest possible terms.

The firm had been hired to defend the paper after Mr. Goodman sued, claiming his dismissal over hacking was unfair because it was widely done and widely known. The firm was asked to examine 2,500 e-mails involving Mr. Goodman to defend against his claim that superiors knew about his hacking.

The correspondence between the company and the firm over framing the letter does not make reference to the e-mails on police payments, a source familiar with the exchanges said, but it does reflect “huge anxiety” about the wording.

The final version of the letter, dated May 29, 2007, sent by the firm’s managing partner to Jon Chapman, who was head of the legal department for News International, read: “I can confirm that we did not find anything in those e-mails which appeared to us to be reasonable evidence that Clive Goodman’s illegal actions were known about and supported by both or either of Andy Coulson, the editor, and Neil Wallis, the deputy editor, and/or that Ian Edmondson, the news editor, and others were carrying out similar procedures.”

The company rejected earlier drafts by Harbottle & Lewis that were not as broad, according to the two people with access to the correspondence. One of them said that lawyers on both sides seemed to struggle to find language that said the review had found no evidence of wrongdoing.

“They wanted to bury those e-mails, and they wanted Harbottle & Lewis to give them a letter to indicate there was nothing incriminating in the file,” said one of the people who reviewed the exchanges. “They knew exactly what they were doing.”

But a former News International official familiar with the matter said Mr. Chapman was expected to testify to a Parliamentary committee that the discussion over the letter had nothing to do with the e-mails suggesting police payoffs and only with finding a way for the firm to say it had looked into Mr. Goodman’s allegations about hacking and had found no evidence.

The former official noted that neither Mr. Chapman nor the firm’s lawyer who reviewed the e-mails are criminal attorneys. Mr. Chapman is expected to testify that while he noticed the e-mails in question, he did not realize that paying the police was a criminal offense, the former official. He is expected to testify that Mr. Goodman’s e-mail mentioning prison seemed to him to be in jest.

Like Mr. Chapman, Harbottle & Lewis has been asked to give its account to a select committee of Parliament, and it has said it will cooperate as long as the police say it will not harm the criminal investigation. News International recently released the firm from its client confidentiality obligations so it can talk to the authorities. While it is unclear what the firm’s opinion on the e-mails was in 2007, client confidentiality would have prevented it from unilaterally reporting them to authorities.

Mr. Goodman, who was rearrested this month on suspicion of paying police officers for information, did not return a call requesting comment. Lawyers for Mr. Coulson, who was arrested this month on suspicion of conspiring to hack phones and bribe the police for information, have said that they have told him not to answer questions in the midst of a criminal investigation.

News International discovered the e-mails indicating police payoffs as it was responding to lawsuits filed by phone hacking victims and inquires from the police. As the company assembled its defense team, a law firm it hired retained Lord Ken Macdonald to advise the News Corporation board on whether the e-mails were evidence of a crime and needed to be turned over to the police.

Mr. Macdonald had overseen the office that prosecuted Mr. Goodman in 2006. But back then, he had not seen the trove of e-mails reviewed by Harbottle & Lewis, since they were never reported to the authorities.

Once Mr. Macdonald saw them in May, it took him between “about three minutes, maybe five minutes” to conclude that it was “blindingly obvious” that they were evidence of criminal wrongdoing, he told a select committee of Parliament.

Mr. Macdonald advised the News Corporation board to immediately turn them over to the police, a move that sparked the current investigation into paying off the police by News of the World reporters and journalists.

The company then trawled through other documents, including its cash authorization records, and found £130,000 worth of payments to a group of officers over several years, according to officials with knowledge of the inquiry. Included within those records was documentation of a £1,000 cash withdrawal around the date of Mr. Goodman’s e-mail concerning his purchase of the Green Book from a police officer, according to one person with knowledge of the investigation.

Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/30/w.../30letter.html





New Hacking Case Outrages Britain
Ravi Somaiya

Britain was awash in a new surge of outrage over the phone hacking scandal on Thursday as news emerged that Scotland Yard had added to the list of probable victims a woman whose 8-year-old daughter was murdered by a repeat sex offender in 2000.

The tabloid at the center of the scandal, The News of the World, aggressively championed the campaign of the grieving mother, Sara Payne, for a law warning parents if child sex offenders lived nearby. Mrs. Payne had written warmly of the paper in its final issue, calling it “an old friend.”

A statement released on behalf of Mrs. Payne by the Phoenix Foundation, a children’s charity she founded, described her as devastated and disappointed.

“Today is a very sad dark day for us,” the charity added in a posting on Facebook. “Our faith in good people has taken a real battering.” Other postings noted that she was struggling in light of the July 1 anniversary of her daughter’s abduction and from the effects of a stroke she suffered 19 months ago, which paralyzed her left side.

The Guardian was the first to report Scotland Yard’s alert to Mrs. Payne, but the e-mail newsletter Popbitch suggested earlier this month that Mrs. Payne’s voice mail had been hacked and that the phone in question might have been provided to her by Rebekah Brooks, then the editor of The News of the World.

In a statement, Ms. Brooks confirmed that The News of the World had provided Mrs. Payne with a cellphone “for the last 11 years” as part of the campaign for the law, but said that “it was not a personal gift.” She said that she found the allegations that Mrs. Payne’s voice mail had been hacked “abhorrent and particularly upsetting, as Sara Payne is a dear friend.” In recent testimony on the scandal in Parliament, Ms. Brooks cited the measure named after Mrs. Payne’s daughter, Sarah’s Law, as evidence of the good she had done in her years at the tabloid’s helm.

Ms. Brooks was The News of the World’s editor during periods when hacking appeared to have been widespread, but has maintained she knew nothing of it. She stepped down July 15 from her executive role at News International, the British arm of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and the owner of The News of the World, and was later arrested on suspicion of phone hacking and payments to the police.

The company issued a brief statement on Thursday that said: “News International takes this matter very seriously and is deeply concerned like everyone. As the facts are established, the Company and the independent Management and Standards Committee will take all appropriate actions, including cooperating fully with any potential criminal enquiries or civil proceedings which may arise.”

Scotland Yard officers told Mrs. Payne that details about her were among the papers held by the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, according to the Phoenix Foundation statement. Mr. Mulcaire, who had an exclusive contract with the tabloid, had a list of about 4,000 potential targets and was convicted on hacking charges related to the paper five years ago.

The hacking scandal had been smoldering for years, but ignited in recent weeks after assertions that hacking on behalf of The News of the World had interfered with the investigation into the 2002 murder of a 13-year-old girl, Milly Dowler. The man eventually convicted of her killing committed two more murders before he was caught.

More revelations appear imminent. Members of Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee said Thursday that they would gather this week to discuss whether to call further witnesses in their inquiries into the scandal and an alleged cover-up by News International. On Aug. 8, previously unseen documents relating to hacking from News International as well as a portion of Mr. Mulcaire’s documents held by the police will be released to those who have filed lawsuits.

On Aug. 10, the News Corporation — which has been bolstering its stock price with buybacks — will announce its quarterly results.

In central London on Thursday, the British judge leading the inquiry into the scandal held a news conference, saying that the panel planned to hold its first public hearings in September and that it would have the power to compel witnesses to testify.

An initial phase will focus on press regulation and the relationship between the press and the public, said the judge, Lord Justice Leveson. A second, which will begin after the current police investigation is finished, will focus on specific allegations of phone hacking and other journalistic malfeasance.

Justice Leveson was appointed by Prime Minister David Cameron after it became clear that hacking at The News of the World extended not only to public figures like celebrities and politicians, but also to Milly Dowler and possibly to the families of those killed in terrorist attacks. Mr. Cameron, a Conservative, initially resisted setting up an immediate inquiry, but changed his mind in response to widespread public disgust and growing political pressure from the opposition Labour Party.

One of the issues the judge will consider is the coziness of the ties between politicians and the news media — particularly the relationship between lawmakers and editors and executives at News International.

In another sign of how far in British public life News International’s influence extends — or has extended, until now — it emerged last week that Justice Leveson himself attended two parties last year at the home of Elisabeth Murdoch, a daughter of Mr. Murdoch’s, and her husband, Matthew Freud, a powerful public relations executive.

Justice Leveson said that because he and the rest of the inquiry panel — which includes former journalists and a former high-ranking police officer, among others — had been chosen for their experience, it was inevitable that “there are such contacts or links, and there should be no apology for this.”

He added: “Had I had the slightest doubt about my own position, I would not have accepted the appointment, and I also make it clear that I am satisfied that what the panelists have said creates no conflict of interest for them or me.”

In another development that might spell trouble for News International, Tim Godwin, the temporary chief of Scotland Yard, told a committee of lawmakers at City Hall that a new inquiry would most likely be opened into the 1987 ax murder of a private investigator.

The case has become newly relevant in light of revelations that Scotland Yard told Ms. Brooks in 2003 that it had evidence that one of her editors at The News of the World had hired people to conduct surveillance of the lead investigating police officer in the case. She was told that there was evidence that the surveillance was ordered as a favor to the chief suspects, Jonathan Rees and Sidney Fillary, investigators who had worked for the tabloid. Efforts to bring them to trial have fallen apart repeatedly.

Sarah Lyall contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/w...29hacking.html





UK Police Add Computer Probe to Phone-Hack Inquiry

London police probing phone hacking at Rupert Murdoch's defunct News of the World tabloid are broadening their investigation to allegations of computer hacking, they said on Saturday.

A new investigative team will be set up to tackle the new allegations, reporting to Sue Akers, the officer in charge of the phone hacking probe, the Metropolitan Police Service said in a statement.

"Operation Tuleta is currently considering a number of allegations regarding breach of privacy, received by the MPS since January 2011, which fall outside the remit of (phone-hacking) Operation Weeting, including computer hacking," the statement by the London police force said.

"Some aspects of this operation will move forward to a formal investigation."

London police reopened their investigation into phone hacking in January, shortly after the prime minister's communications chief, Andy Coulson, resigned because of allegations of phone hacking at the News of the World while he was the paper's editor.

The paper's royal reporter Clive Goodman and private detective Glenn Mulcaire were jailed in 2007 for intercepting the voicemail messages of royal aides.

On Friday Mulcaire issued a statement through his lawyer saying he was not acting on his own initiative when he intercepted phone messages while in the pay of the newspaper.

Allegations of hacking at News Corp's British newspapers, in particular reports that journalists accessed the voicemails of murder victims, have triggered a judicial inquiry and calls by some politicians to cap News Corp's media ownership.

The scandal has led to News Corp dropping its $12 billion bid for the 61 percent of pay-TV broadcaster BSkyB it does not own.

(Reporting by Olesya Dmitracova; editing by Tim Pearce)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...76T0R920110730





Republican Tea Party Leader Arrested for Computer Piracy
Mike Luttrell

A heavyweight for the political Tea Party movement in the south has most likely just crippled his potential political future.

61-year-old Anthony Trinca was arrested for allegedly selling pirated versions of high-end computer software. Microsoft Office, Windows, Adobe Photoshop, and Rosetta Stone language programs were all listed as software that he sold illegally.

Trinca is the president of the Grand Strand Tea Party, based in South Carolina, which strives to spread messages about how big government is evil and that America needs to return to its conservative roots.

His software piracy scheme came to an end after one of his customers purchased four copies of Rosetta Stone software, and then tried to resell the software himself. The person he sold it to found out it was an illegal copy.

So when he tried to go back to Trinca for a refund, Trinca refused. That's when the police got involved.

Local news station WMBF reports that Trinca kept all sorts of software packages around his home. His sony Michael, 23, was also arrested for the same charge.

Specifically, both face charges of "unauthorized use or trafficking in counterfeit trademarks" are were released on $5,000 bond.

It is another blow to the already crumbling Tea Party, which didn't have as strong a presence in the last midterm election as expected, and is losing favor as the noted leaders of the movement fail to deliver on their promises.
http://www.tgdaily.com/business-and-...omputer-piracy





New Court Filing Reveals How the 2004 Ohio Presidential Election Was Hacked
Bob Fritakis

A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush.

The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio's vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a suspicious small plane crash.

Additionally, the filing contains the contract signed between then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and Connell's company, GovTech Solutions. Also included that contract a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State's election night server layout system.

Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney in the King Lincoln case, exchanged emails with IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore. Arnebeck asked Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the capability to "input data" and thus alter the results of Ohio's 2004 election. Spoonamore responded: "Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not."

Spoonamore explained that "they [SmarTech] have full access and could change things when and if they want."

Arnebeck specifically asked "Could this be done using whatever bypass techniques Connell developed for the web hosting function." Spoonamore replied "Yes."

Spoonamore concluded from the architectural maps of the Ohio 2004 election reporting system that, "SmarTech was a man in the middle. In my opinion they were not designed as a mirror, they were designed specifically to be a man in the middle."

A "man in the middle" is a deliberate computer hacking setup, which allows a third party to sit in between computer transmissions and illegally alter the data. A mirror site, by contrast, is designed as a backup site in case the main computer configuration fails.

Spoonamore claims that he confronted then-Secretary of State Blackwell at a secretary of state IT conference in Boston where he was giving a seminar in data security. "Blackwell freaked and refused to speak to me when I confronted him about it long before I met you," he wrote to Arnebeck.

Read the email correspondence here [pdf].

On December 14, 2007, then-Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, who replaced Blackwell, released her evaluation and validation of election-related equipment, standards and testing (Everest study) which found that touchscreen voting machines were vulnerable to hacking with relative ease.

Until now, the architectural maps and contracts from the Ohio 2004 election were never made public, which may indicate that the entire system was designed for fraud. In a previous sworn affidavit to the court, Spoonamore declared: "The SmarTech system was set up precisely as a King Pin computer used in criminal acts against banking or credit card processes and had the needed level of access to both county tabulators and Secretary of State computers to allow whoever was running SmarTech computers to decide the output of the county tabulators under its control."

Spoonamore also swore that "...the architecture further confirms how this election was stolen. The computer system and SmarTech had the correct placement, connectivity, and computer experts necessary to change the election in any manner desired by the controllers of the SmarTech computers."

Project Censored named the outsourcing of Ohio's 2004 election votes to SmarTech in Chattanooga, Tennessee to a company owned by Republican partisans as one of the most censored stories in the world.

In the Connell deposition, plaintiffs' attorneys questioned Connell regarding gwb43, a website that was live on election night operating out of the White House and tied directly into SmarTech's server stacks in Chattanooga, Tennessee which contained Ohio's 2004 presidential election results.

The transfer of the vote count to SmarTech in Chattanooga, Tennessee remains a mystery. This would have only happened if there was a complete failure of the Ohio computer election system. Connell swore under oath that, "To the best of my knowledge, it was not a fail-over case scenario – or it was not a failover situation."

Bob Magnan, a state IT specialist for the secretary of state during the 2004 election, agreed that there was no failover scenario. Magnan said he was unexpectedly sent home at 9 p.m. on election night and private contractors ran the system for Blackwell.

The architectural maps, contracts, and Spoonamore emails, along with the history of Connell's partisan activities, shed new light on how easy it was to hack the 2004 Ohio presidential election.

Download the Plaintiffs' Brief here [zip].

--
Bob Fitrakis is co-counsel in the King Lincoln case.
http://www.truth-out.org/new-court-f...ked/1311603015





Document: FBI Surveillance Geeks Fear, Love New Gadgets
Kim Zetter

Can’t wait for 4G to become the ubiquitous standard for mobile communication? On the edge of your seat for the unveiling of Microsoft’s secret Menlo Project and Greenfield application?

You’re not the only one watching the growth of these and other new technologies with rapt attention. According to an internal FBI document, the law enforcement agency has a keen interest in evaluating each new technology for its surveillance possibilities and challenges.

The FBI fears, for example, that 4G will require agencies to “deal with significantly higher data rates than in current wireless network intercepts,” according to the document. “Managing this ‘fire hose’ of data is complicated by the lack of buffering or reliable delivery requirements. … These higher data rates could place a greater emphasis on the filtering of data to identify specific content.”

To intercept VoIP, or voice-over IP traffic, in this environment, “voice packets will need to be extracted from the packet stream in near real-time,” the document states.

The information appears in the Emerging Technologies Research Bulletin, an internal newsletter produced by the FBI’s Operational Technology Division. The 84-page issue titled Wireless Technologies is dated March 2011 and is labeled the first issue of volume 8 in what appears to be a quarterly publication.

The document was obtained by the Federation of American Scientists through a FOIA request. The unclassified document is a handy primer on all of the latest wireless technologies, presumably to help FBI engineers devise strategies for circumventing any surveillance obstacles the technologies might pose. Each technology section includes a discussion of the potential challenges to surveillance, but most of these discussions were redacted by the FBI before releasing the document. The document covers net neutrality, 4G, public Wi-Fi, anonymity services like Tor, and cloud storage and file-sharing services such as Dropbox, SpiderOak and SugarSync.

One problem with VoIP communication on a 4G network, the FBI notes, arises from the tunnels that are used within networks during the “handoff” of IP traffic as it’s transmitted. “Tunnels within a network increase the complexity of lawful intercept (LI) solutions,” reads the newsletter. The challenges presented by tunnels include “difficulty in identifying the traffic of a particular user (e.g., deep packet inspection may be needed), accessing the content of a tunnel at its end-points, and the use of encryption within tunnels.”

Other ways 4G could impact interception are still unclear, the document states, because standards are still in development and vendor plans for deploying the technology are “not known in detail.”

On the other hand, the FBI appears to be excited about the new opportunities for surveillance and evidence-gathering that Microsoft’s new Greenfield application might provide. Greenfield is reportedly an “activity-based navigation” system from Microsoft Research that will be able to track a phone user’s movements through a suite of sensors on the mobile phone, allowing a trail to be gathered indoors, where GPS tracking doesn’t reach.

The sensors include an accelerometer, a compass, and a barometric pressure sensor to measure altitude. Using data collected from these, Greenfield will evidently be able to track a user’s footsteps and even count the floors the user traveled by stairs or elevator. The app will store the data so the user can retrace his footsteps to find a misplaced auto in a car park or transmit it to someone else to help an injured wilderness hiker, for example, lead rescuers to his precise location.

The information could also, however, be subpoenaed by law enforcement agents to track the movements of a suspect. “This kind of data is terrific for convicting people and terrific at exonerating people,” according to a news story the FBI document quotes.

There’s also a fascinating description of a device called Slurp (see below) that was developed by a former MIT Media Lab student. The device resembles a large eye dropper, and uses infrared ports to allow a user to easily slurp up (extract) and squirt out (inject) data from one device to another. The user touches the dropper to a file icon on a computer screen to slurp up the file, and then points it at a second display while squeezing the dropper to squirt the file back out.

Because of the device’s small and inconspicuous design, the document notes, the “act of capturing or transferring data may go undetected.”

The document also discusses “human area network” technologies that use the human body as a network transmitter, which could prove a useful replacement for the old-school “brush pass” method of passing intelligence between spies.

“In the future, conventional voice-to-voice calling and data transfer methods may no longer be required to pass information to a person or a device,” the FBI document notes. “Devices that are based on HAN technology allow people to communicate and initiate tasks with a simple handshake, tap on the arm, or by placing a hand over a sensor.”

In a show of irony, the document holds an uncharitable view of another cutting edge technology: an Apple patent for a “killswitch” that uses voice and facial recognition to shutdown an iPhone or its data if the device detects that the person using it is not the rightful owner. The FBI calls Apple’s concept “Big Brother-ish”.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/fbi-gadgets/





House Panel Approves Broadened ISP Snooping Bill
Declan McCullagh

Internet providers would be forced to keep logs of their customers' activities for one year--in case police want to review them in the future--under legislation that a U.S. House of Representatives committee approved today.

The 19 to 10 vote represents a victory for conservative Republicans, who made data retention their first major technology initiative after last fall's elections, and the Justice Department officials who have quietly lobbied for the sweeping new requirements, a development first reported by CNET.

A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers' names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses, some committee members suggested. By a 7-16 vote, the panel rejected an amendment that would have clarified that only IP addresses must be stored.

It represents "a data bank of every digital act by every American" that would "let us find out where every single American visited Web sites," said Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, who led Democratic opposition to the bill.

Lofgren said the data retention requirements are easily avoided because they only apply to "commercial" providers. Criminals would simply go to libraries or Starbucks coffeehouses and use the Web anonymously, she said, while law-abiding Americans would have their activities recorded.

To make it politically difficult to oppose, proponents of the data retention requirements dubbed the bill the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, even though the mandatory logs would be accessible to police investigating any crime and perhaps attorneys litigating civil disputes in divorce, insurance fraud, and other cases as well.

"The bill is mislabeled," said Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the panel. "This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It's creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes."

ISP snooping time line

In events that were first reported by CNET, Justice Department officials have been lobbying to require Internet providers to track of what Americans are doing online. Here's the time line:

June 2005: Justice Department officials quietly propose data retention rules.

December 2005: European Parliament votes for data retention of up to two years.

April 2006: Data retention proposals surface in Colorado and the U.S. Congress.

April 2006: Attorney General Gonzales says data retention "must be addressed."

April 2006: Rep. DeGette proposes data retention amendment.

May 2006: Rep. Sensenbrenner drafts data retention legislation--but backs away from it two days later.

May 2006: Gonzales and FBI Director Mueller meet with Internet and telecommunications companies.

February 2009: Two data retention bills target ISPs, hotels, coffee shops

February 2009: Copyright holders would benefit from data retention

January 2011: Justice Department calls for mandatory data retention

February 2011: White House undecided on data retention

May 2011: Wireless providers exempted from Rep. Smith's bill

July 2011: National Sheriffs' Association endorses data retention

Supporters of the measure characterized it as something that would aid law enforcement in investigating Internet crimes. Not enacting it "would keep our law enforcement officials in the dark ages," said its primary sponsor, House Judiciary chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas).

"Both Democratic and Republican administrations have called for data retention for over a decade," said Smith, who noted that groups including the National Sheriffs' Association, the Major County Sheriffs' Association, and the Fraternal Order of Police have endorsed the concept.

For a while, it seemed like opposition from a handful of conservative members of Congress, coupled with Democrats concerned about civil liberties, would derail the bill.

Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican and previous chairman of the House Judiciary committee, had criticized it at a hearing earlier this month, and again in the voting session that began yesterday and continued through this morning.

"I oppose this bill," said Sensenbrenner. "It can be amended, but I don't think it can be fixed... It poses numerous risks that well outweigh any benefits, and I'm not convinced it will contribute in a significant way to protecting children."

So did Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), who has made privacy a signature issue and introduced a geolocation bill last month after trying to curb the use of airport body-scanners two years ago.

The original version of the bill, introduced in May, required Internet providers to "retain for a period of at least 18 months the temporarily assigned network addresses the service assigns to each account, unless that address is transmitted by radio communication." The wireless exemption appeared to be the result of lobbying from major carriers, but drew the ire of the Justice Department, which says it didn't go far enough, and was removed in a revised draft.

The mobile exemption represents a new twist in the debate over data retention requirements, which has been simmering since the Justice Department pushed the topic in 2005, a development that was first reported by CNET. Proposals publicly surfaced in the U.S. Congress the following year, and President Bush's attorney general, Alberto Gonzales said it's an issue that "must be addressed." So, eventually, did FBI director Robert Mueller.

In January 2011, CNET was the first to report that the Obama Justice Department was following suit. Jason Weinstein, the deputy assistant attorney general for the criminal division, warned that wireless providers must be included because "when this information is not stored, it may be impossible for law enforcement to collect essential evidence."

Smith introduced a broadly similar bill in 2007, without the wireless exemption, calling it a necessary anti-cybercrime measure. "The legislation introduced today will give law enforcement the tools it needs to find and prosecute criminals," he said in a statement at the time.

"Retention" vs. "preservation"

At the moment, Internet service providers typically discard any log file that's no longer required for business reasons such as network monitoring, fraud prevention, or billing disputes. Companies do, however, alter that general rule when contacted by police performing an investigation--a practice called data preservation.

A 1996 federal law called the Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act regulates data preservation. It requires Internet providers to retain any "record" in their possession for 90 days "upon the request of a governmental entity."

Because Internet addresses remain a relatively scarce commodity, ISPs tend to allocate them to customers from a pool based on whether a computer is in use at the time. (Two standard techniques used are the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol and Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet.)

In addition, an existing law called the Protect Our Children Act of 2008 requires any Internet provider who "obtains actual knowledge" of possible child pornography transmissions to "make a report of such facts or circumstances." Companies that knowingly fail to comply can be fined up to $150,000 for the first offense and up to $300,000 for each subsequent offense.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20...snooping-bill/





House Committee Approves Bill Mandating That Internet Companies Spy on Their Users
Rainey Reitman

Despite serious privacy concerns being voiced by both Democratic and Republican leaders and by thousands of digital rights activists using EFF's Action Center, this afternoon the House Judiciary Committee voted 19 to 10 to recommend passage of H.R. 1981. That bill contains a mandatory data retention provision that would require your Internet service providers to retain 12 months' worth of personal information that could be used to identify what web sites you visit and what content you post online. EFF had previously joined with 29 other civil liberties and consumer privacy groups in signing a letter to the Committee members that condemned the bill as a "direct assault on the privacy of Internet users."

EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston had this to say about today's vote:

The data retention mandate in this bill would treat every Internet user like a criminal and threaten the online privacy and free speech rights of every American, as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have recognized. Requiring Internet companies to redesign and reconfigure their systems to facilitate government surveillance of Americans' expressive activities is simply un-American. Such a scheme would be as objectionable to our Founders as the requiring of licenses for printing presses or the banning of anonymous pamphlets. Today's vote is therefore very disappointing, but we are especially thankful to GOP Representatives Sensenbrenner, Issa and Chaffetz, who chose principle over party-line in opposing this dangerous tech mandate. We hope that bipartisan opposition will grow as the bill makes its way to the House floor and more lawmakers are educated about this anti-privacy, anti-free speech, anti-innovation proposal.

Please help us defeat this legislation before it is made law by contacting your Representative today.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/0...ating-internet





What You Need to Know About the Internet Snooping Bill (and How You Can Protect Yourself)
Adam Dachis

On Thursday, the US House of Representatives approved an internet snooping bill that requires internet service providers (ISPs) to keep records of customer activity for a year so police can review them as needed. Here's what this bill means for you and what you can do about it.

What Is This Internet Snooping Bill, Exactly, and Why Is It Bad?

The lovingly titled Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 (PCFIPA of 2011) requires ISPs to retain customer names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and dynamic IP addresses. It's a record of your personal information plus the web sites you visit. It's like handing over a year's worth of browser history plus the contents of your wallet to the police. The thing is, you're not really handing it over so much as your ISP is—without your consent.

You might be wondering what this has to do with child pornography and protecting children, as the bill claims to exist for those reasons. The idea is that child pornographers will be easier to catch if these records are available, and that, in turn, will protect children. According to the Denver Post, child pornography cases have been on the rise and there have been over 10,000 arrests since 1996. While the police should be prosecuting child pornographers and consumers, the problem isn't so out of control that these extreme measures are necessary.

Internet World Stats reports that there are currently 272.1 million Americans connected to the internet. The 10,000 known child pornography consumers make up a tiny fraction of a percent of Americans online. Even if the number of child pornography consumers were as much as 1,000,000, it still wouldn't make up a single percent. That's not to say that we wouldn't want to prosecute them and get them to stop, or that even 10,000 is a small number when it comes to a crime like this, but making a year's worth of records doesn't solve the problem.

Consider the browser history of a single person over the course of a year, and then multiply that by 272,100,000. Then try to find 10,000 people in that data that have, at some point during that year, downloaded at least a single piece of child pornography. Finding a needle in a haystack is hard, but it gets to be pretty close to impossible when that haystack is the size of a country. There are too many people not downloading child porn to easily locate an offender and too few policemen to thoroughly look through the information. Like we've seen when the RIAA prosecuted music downloaders with little success, you get nowhere going after the consumers. Instead, you have to go after the providers. It's why police are much more interested in drug dealers than the people who buy from them. You need to cut off the source. But this bill isn't targeting the source at all. Furthermore, there are already provisions in place (like the Protect Our Children Act of 2008) that give the police a means of collecting information on a potential child pornography consumer.

Essentially, this bill does nothing more than make the browsing histories of approximately 272.1 million Americans readily available to the police. And that information comes with credit card numbers, addresses, and more. It not only encroaches upon personal privacy but is a complete waste of resources.
How You Can Block Snooping ISPs and Protect Your Privacy

It could be worse. One nice feature of the PCFIPA of 2011 bill is that it doesn't include cellular data, so if you've thought about switching to 4G wireless data at home you'll soon have another reason. That's not an option for many people, however, but that doesn't mean you're out of luck.

Your best bet is to find yourself a good VPN provider and hook it up to a good VPN tool to encrypt and route all your internet traffic through a third-party that isn't your ISP. Virtual Private Networks creates secure, encrypted connections between your computer and a server on the internet, then routes all your internet activity through that server. Your ISP would only really be logging the IP address of your VPN server, which doesn't give them much of your private info.

Tor is one of the easiest ways to browse anonymously online (even if it isn't perfect). If you're a Chrome user, you can even create a simple Tor toggle button to use it only when you really need it. By anonymizing your browsing, your ISPs won't have a record of what you've been doing. They'll know you were online, but the details won't be available to them or the police. Of course, there's no assurance that any anonymous browsing tool will provide full protection but it's definitely better than nothing at all. If setting up Tor seems a little daunting, Vidalia can help simplify the process. You'll also want to read our guide on protecting your privacy when downloading for more suggestions.
http://lifehacker.com/5825746/what-y...an-do-about-it





Flying Drone Can Crack Wi-Fi Networks, Snoop On Cell Phones
Andy Greenberg

How do one ex-Air Force official and one former airplane hobby shop owner, both of whom happen to have decades of experience as network security contractors for the military, spend their weekends? Building a flying, unmanned, automated password-cracking, Wi-Fi-sniffing, cell-phone eavesdropping spy drone, of course.

At the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences in Las Vegas next week, Mike Tassey and Richard Perkins plan to show the crowd of hackers a year’s worth of progress on their Wireless Aerial Surveillace Platform, or WASP, the second year Tassey and Perkins have displayed the 14-pound, six-foot long, six-foot wingspan unmanned aerial vehicle. The WASP, built from a retired Army target drone converted from a gasoline engine to electric batteries, is equipped with an HD camera, a cigarette-pack sized on-board Linux computer packed with network-hacking tools including the BackTrack testing toolset and a custom-built 340 million word dictionary for brute-force guessing of passwords, and eleven antennae.

“This is like Black Hat’s greatest hits,” Tassey says. “And it flies.”

On top of cracking wifi networks, the upgraded WASP now also performs a new trick: impersonating the GSM cell phone towers used by AT&T and T-Mobile to trick phones into connecting to the plane’s antenna rather than their carrier, allowing the drone to record conversations and text messages on a 32 gigs of storage. A 4G T-mobile card routes the communications through voice-over-Internet or traditional phone connections to avoid dropping the call. “Ideally, the target won’t even know he’s being spied on,” says Tassey.

That GSM hack is based on a demonstration that security researcher Chris Paget performed at Defcon last year, showing that with a powerful enough antenna placed close enough to target phones, the victims’ handsets can be tricked into connecting to Paget’s setup instead of the carrier’s tower. Perkins and Tassey have implemented the same tools in their airborne hacking machine, and like Paget, used a portion of the radio frequency band set aside for Ham radios to avoid violating FCC regulations. They don’t plan to demonstrate the phone-hacking trick at the conference, and tested it only in isolated conditions to ensure their flying contraption wasn’t illegally eavesdropping on random strangers’ phones. “We want to make sure we’re not stepping on any cell providers’ toes,” says Tassey.

And why build a digital spy drone? Perkins, an Air Force contractor focused on cybersecurity who once owned a airplane hobby shop, and Tassey, an ex-Air Force consultant with Engineering Systems Solutions, say they wanted to demonstrate the vulnerability of government and corporate facilities to a nimble eavesdropping machine that can cover large distances and circle above a target. Though it requires remote control to take off and land, WASP can be set to fly a pre-programmed course once airborne and loiter around any chosen area. “We wanted to bring to light how far the consumer industry has progressed, to the point where public has access to technologies that put companies, and even governments at risk from this new threat vector that they’re not aware of,” says Perkins.

See a test flight of the WASP in the video below.

A military base like Area 51, Tassey points out, is surrounded by more than 25 miles of empty land to obscure it from outside snoops. “With WASP, we can cover that distance in about 20 minutes,” he says. “With radar designed specifically not to see birds, it’s very difficult to protect yourself from an object coming out of the sky and flying low.”

WASP’s design, complete with two eyes and a black-and-yellow striped paint job, isn’t not exactly designed for stealth. But aside from showing real-world security risks, Tassey and Perkins also shared a goal just as appealing to Black Hat and Defcon’s crowd: pulling off a fantastically elaborate hack. “The number one reason we did this was because we were told it wouldn’t be possible,” says Perkins. “Neither of us like hearing that.”
http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenber...n-cell-phones/





Microsoft's Web Map Exposes Phone, PC Locations
Declan McCullagh

Microsoft has collected the locations of millions of laptops, cell phones, and other Wi-Fi devices around the world and makes them available on the Web without taking the privacy precautions that competitors have, CNET has learned.

The vast database available through Live.com publishes the precise geographical location, which can point to a street address and sometimes even a corner of a building, of Android phones, Apple devices, and other Wi-Fi enabled gadgets.

Unlike Google and Skyhook Wireless, which have compiled similar lists of these unique Wi-Fi addresses, Microsoft has not taken any measures to curb access to its database. Google tightened controls last month in response to a June 15 CNET article, and Skyhook uses a limited form of geolocation to protect privacy.

Microsoft assembled the database through crowdsourced data gathering from Windows Phone 7 devices and through what it calls "managed driving" by Street View-like vehicles that record Wi-Fi signals accessible from public roads. Its Web interface is, the company says, intended to provide "search results, weather, movie times, maps and directions based on a device's current location."
Stanford researcher Elie Bursztein says Microsoft should adopt the same location-privacy protections that Google implemented last month.

Stanford researcher Elie Bursztein says Microsoft should adopt the same location-privacy protections that Google implemented last month.

CNET has confirmed how Live.com's interface works independently and also with Elie Bursztein, a postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford Security Laboratory who recently analyzed Microsoft's application programming interface, or API. He plans to summarize his findings in a related talk with two other researchers at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas next week.

Bursztein recommended that Microsoft adopt some of the same limits that its competitors already have. "I think what Google does is the smart thing to do," he said. "It's a pretty good solution."

Reid Kuhn, a program manger with Microsoft's Windows Phone Engineering Team, sent CNET this statement: "To provide location-based services, Microsoft collects publicly broadcast cell tower IDs and MAC addresses of Wi-Fi access points via both user devices and managed driving. If a user chooses to use their smartphone or mobile device as a Wi-Fi access point, their MAC address may also be included as a part of our service. However, since mobile devices typically move from one place to another they are not helpful in providing location. Once we determine that a device is not in a fixed location, we remove it from our list of active MAC addresses."

Microsoft did not, however, respond to questions whether its database includes only Wi-Fi devices acting as access points, or whether client devices using the networks have been swept in as well--something that Google did with its Street View cars. A May blog post touts "Transparency About Microsoft's Practices," but doesn't provide details.

If Microsoft collects and publishes only the Wi-Fi addresses of access points, the privacy concerns are lessened. But millions of phones and computers are used as access points--tethering is one example, and the feature is built into Apple's OS X operating system--meaning that their locations could be monitored.

It's true that Wi-Fi addresses, also called MAC addresses, aren't typically transmitted over the Internet. But anyone within Wi-Fi range can record yours, and it's easy to narrow down which addresses correspond to which manufacturer.

Someone, such as a suspicious spouse, who can navigate to the About screen on an iPhone or a laptop's configuration menu can obtain it in a few seconds as well. And hobbyist hacker Samy Kamkar created a proof-of-concept code last year that uses what's known as a cross-site scripting attack to grab the location of Wi-Fi routers that can be seen from an unsuspecting visitor's computer.

Geolocation privacy time line

Here's how the debate over privacy and geolocation, which allows wireless devices to speed up location fixes, has evolved:

April 2011: Apple iPhones and Android devices not only transmit location data, but also store it

April 2011: Windows Phone 7 devices also collect records of users' physical locations of customers and transmit them to Microsoft

April 2011: Apple says it will fix iPhone tracking "bug"

June 2011: CNET reports that Google publishes the estimated location of millions of phones, laptops, and other Wi-Fi devices

June 2011: Google curbs Web service that exposed the locations of phones, laptops, and other Wi-Fi devices

July 2011: Confirmation that Google's Street View cars collected the locations of not only Wi-Fi routers, but also devices using those wireless networks

A Microsoft representative pointed CNET to a list of Web pages, including one describing how geolocation works in Internet Explorer 9 and another discusses Windows Phone 7 and geolocation. Microsoft does not appear to provide an opt-out mechanism that would allow someone to remove his or her Wi-Fi address from the Live.com database.

Microsoft's database extends beyond U.S. locations. A CNET test of a range of Wi-Fi addresses used by HTC devices showed that Live.com returned locations linked to street addresses in Leon, Spain; Westminster, London; a suburb of Tokyo, Japan; and Cologne, Germany.

Some Wi-Fi addresses appeared to change positions, meaning the Live.com database--located at http://inference.location.live.com--could be used to track the movements of a handheld device. In addition, some Wi-Fi addresses were added or deleted to the database over the period of a few days.

Google has taken multiple privacy steps that Microsoft has not, including using geolocation to filter requests (to find out where a wireless device is, you already have to know it's approximate location to about one city block). Another is that the search company's database does not appear to include the Wi-Fi addresses of Android devices acting as wireless hotspots.

Here's how it works: iPhone and Android devices automatically change their Wi-Fi MAC address when acting as an access point. Android devices appear to choose a MAC address beginning with 02:1A.

Google's database doesn't include the MAC address 02:1A:11:F2:12:FF. But Microsoft's does, and reports that it is located in the Embassy of Montenegro on New Hampshire Avenue in Washington, D.C.

Disclosure: McCullagh is married to a Google employee not involved in this issue.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20...-pc-locations/





Stanford Researcher Exposes Microsoft's Wi-Fi Database
Declan McCullagh

A Stanford University researcher has created a Web page allowing people to query Microsoft's massive database for the locations of their--or someone else's--laptops, cell phones, and other Wi-Fi devices.

The Web page, created this morning by Elie Bursztein, a postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford Security Laboratory, lets people type in the unique 12-character Wi-Fi address of any wireless device. If there's a match, the site displays a map of where Windows Phone 7 devices and Microsoft's fleet of Wi-Fi recording vehicles saw the wireless device last.

A CNET article last night provided details about Microsoft's extensive database at Live.com, which is not protected by the same privacy safeguards that competitors Google and Skyhook Wireless have adopted.

Bursztein says he created the Web page querying Live.com's application programming interface, or API, to highlight how it works and to nudge Microsoft in a more privacy-protective direction. He plans to summarize his findings in a related talk with two other researchers at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas next week.

You can typically find your device's unique Wi-Fi address by going to the About screen on an iPhone or a laptop's configuration menu. Anyone within Wi-Fi range--typically a maximum of a few hundred feet--can learn it as well. The potential privacy concerns, of course, arise when you want to look up someone else's address: an ex-spouse, a politician, a celebrity, and so on.

On Bursztein's Web site, typing in the Wi-Fi address "02:1A:11:F2:12:FF," which is used by an Android phone acting as a Wi-Fi hotspot, brings up a latitude of 38.91192 and a longitude of -77.04171. Those coordinates in Washington, D.C., show that nearby buildings include residential apartments and the embassy of Montenegro.

It's not clear if Microsoft has collected the locations of only Wi-Fi devices acting as access points, or whether client devices using the networks have been swept in as well--something Google did using Street View. Microsoft has repeatedly declined to answer that question, which CNET first posed in June.

Reid Kuhn, a program manager in Microsoft's Windows Phone Engineering Team, did confirm that the company uses Windows devices and Street View-like "managed driving" to collect the unique addresses of devices that are acting "as a Wi-Fi access point." That includes mobile devices using tethering to share a wireless link.

Google and Skyhook have taken some privacy steps that Microsoft has not, including using geolocation to filter requests (in Google's case, to find out where a wireless device is, you already have to know its approximate location to about one city block). Another is that Google's database does not appear to include the Wi-Fi addresses of Android devices acting as wireless hotspots.

Until a June 15 CNET article appeared, sparked by the work of security researcher Ashkan Soltani, Google took the same open approach as Microsoft. About a week later, Google curbed access and blocked a similar Web page created by hobbyist hacker Samy Kamkar.

Microsoft's database extends beyond U.S. locations. A CNET test of a range of Wi-Fi addresses used by HTC devices showed that Live.com returned locations linked to street addresses in Leon, Spain; Westminster, London; a suburb of Tokyo; and Cologne, Germany.

Some Wi-Fi addresses appeared to change positions, meaning the Live.com database--located at http://inference.location.live.com--could be used to track the movements of a handheld device. In addition, some Wi-Fi addresses were added to or deleted from the database over the period of a few days.

Here's a list of ways to find your computer's Wi-Fi MAC address.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20...i-fi-database/





Researchers Expose Cunning Online Tracking Service That Can’t Be Dodged
Ryan Singel

Researchers at U.C. Berkeley have discovered that some of the net’s most popular sites are using a tracking service that can’t be evaded — even when users block cookies, turn off storage in Flash, or use browsers’ “incognito” functions.

The service, called KISSmetrics, is used by sites to track the number of visitors, what the visitors do on the site, and where they come to the site from — and the company says it does a more comprehensive job than its competitors such as Google Analytics.

But the researchers say the site is using sneaky techniques to prevent users from opting out of being tracked on popular sites, including the TV streaming site Hulu.com.

The discovery of KISSmetrics tracking techniques comes as federal regulators, browser makers, privacy activists and ad tracking companies are trying to define what tracking actually is. The FTC called on browser makers to add a “Do Not Track” setting that essentially lets users tell websites not to leave them alone — though it doesn’t block tracking on its own. It’s more like a “privacy, please” sign on a hotel door. One of the big questions surrounding Do Not Track is about web analytics software, which sites use to determine what’s popular on their site, how many unique visitors a site has a month, where users are coming from, and what pages they leave from.

In response to inquiries from Wired.com, Hulu cut ties with KISSmetrics on Friday.

UPDATE 5:00 PM Friday: Spotify, another KISSmetrics customer named in the report, said that it was concerned by the story:

“We take the privacy of our users incredibly seriously and are concerned by this report,” a spokeswoman said by e-mail. “As a result, we have taken immediate action in suspending our use of KISSmetrics whilst the situation is investigated.” /UPDATE

“Hulu has suspended our use of KISSmetrics’ services pending further investigation,” a spokeswoman told Wired.com. “Hulu takes our users’ privacy very seriously. We have no further comment at this time.”

KISSmetrics is a 17-person start-up founded in 2008 and based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Founder Hitten Shah confirmed that the research was correct, but told Wired.com Friday morning that there was nothing illegal about the techniques it was using.

“We don’t do it for malicious reasons. We don’t do it for tracking people across the web,” Shah said. “I would be having lawyers talk to you if we were doing anything malicious.”

Shah says KISSmetrics is used by thousands of sites to track incoming users, and it does not sell or buy data about those visitors, according to Shah. After this story was published, the company tweeted a link that explains how its tracking works.

So if a user came to Hulu.com from an ad on Facebook, and then later, using a different browser on the same computer, visited Hulu.com from Google, and then at some point signed up for the premium service, KISSmetrics would be able to tell Hulu all about that user’s path to purchase (without knowing who that person was). That tracking trail would remain in place even if a user deleted her cookies, due to code that stores the unique ID in places other than in a traditional cookie.

The research was published Friday by a team UC Berkeley privacy researchers that includes veteran privacy lawyer Chris Hoofnagle and noted privacy researcher Ashkan Soltani.

“The stuff works even if you have all cookies blocked and private-browsing mode enabled,” Soltani said. “The code itself is pretty damning.”

The researchers were reprising a study from 2009 which discovered that some of the net’s biggest sites were using technology from online ad tracking firms Clearspring and Quantcast to re-create users’ cookies after users deleted them. The technique involved using a little known property of Flash to hold onto unique ID numbers. Then, if a user deleted her cookies, the companies would check in the secondary stash for the user ID, and use it to resurrect the traditional HTML cookies.

That finding led to inquiries from regulators and a class action lawsuit alleging that websites and the tracking companies were unfairly monitoring users. That suit was settled for $2.4 million in cash and a promise by Clearspring and Quantcast not to use that method again.

One of the sites named in that suit was Hulu, but its part of the settlement only required that the company tell users if it was using Flash to store cookies and provide a link in the policy that would show users how to turn off Flash data storage. However with KISSmetrics running, even knowing how to do that wouldn’t have saved a user from persistent tracking.

This go-round the researchers’ report found only two sites that were recreating cookies after users deleted them — and Hulu.com was the only one doing so for tracking users across the entire site.

The researchers dug into Hulu.com’s tracking code and discovered the KISSmetrics code. Using it, Hulu was able to track users regardless of which browser they used or whether they deleted their cookies. KISSmetrics used a number of methods to recreate cookies, and the persistent tracking can only be avoided by erasing the browser cache between visits.

They also say that Shah’s defense that the system is not used to track people around the web doesn’t hold up.

“Both the Hulu and KISSmetrics code is pretty enlightening,” Soltani told Wired.com in an e-mail. “These services are using practically every known method to circumvent user attempts to protect their privacy (Cookies, Flash Cookies, HTML5, CSS, Cache Cookies/Etags…) creating a perpetual game of privacy ‘whack-a-mole’.”

“This is yet another example of the continued arms-race that consumers are engaged in when trying to protect their privacy online since advertisers are incentivized to come up with more pervasive tracking mechanisms unless there’s policy restrictions to prevent it.”

They point to their research that found that when a user visited Hulu.com, they would get a “third-party” cookie set by KISSmetrics with a tracking ID number. KISSmetrics would pass that number to Hulu, allowing Hulu to use it for its own cookie. Then if a user visited another site that was using KISSmetrics, that site’s cookie would get the exact same number as well.

In this screenshot provided by U.C. Berkeley's Chris Hoofnagle, the IDs numbers for all three cookies are exactly the same.

So that makes it possible, the researchers say, for any two sites using KISSmetrics to compare their databases, and ask things like “Hey, what do you know about user 345627?” and the other site could say “his name is John Smith and his email address is this@somefakedomainname.com and he likes these kinds of things.”

Shah did not respond to a follow-up e-mail seeking clarification on his first answers.

KISSmetrics is used by a number of prominent websites, which Wired.com is not naming until we have time to contact them.

Berkeley researcher Soltani, who consulted for the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on privacy, notes that the code includes function names like “cram cookie.”

One of the techniques used involves using something called ETags in the browser cache, a once-theoretical technique that’s never before been seen in the wild on a major site, according to the researchers.

The research also found that many top websites have adopted new ways to track users using HTML5 and that Google tracking cookies are present on 97 of the top sites, including government sites such as IRS.gov.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/...etable-cookie/





PRs Lose Court Appeal On Online Story Copying
Robert Andrews

PRs have failed to overturn a court ruling that they should pay ongoing license fees for receiving links to and summaries of newspapers’ online articles.

The UK Court of Appeal today rejected an appeal by the Public Relations Consultants Association against November’s ruling, which said the Newspaper Licensing Agency is allowed to require online licenses of commercial news monitors and their customers.

The court rejected their argument that both pay-for news crawlers like Meltwater and their PR customers - who receive headlines, summaries and links to full articles - are creating only “temporary copies” of stories.

Applying the same rule to web users generally would have massive ramifications, the appellants say: “Anyone who clicks on a link and reads a news article on a public website in a commercial setting will infringe copyright unless licensed by the publisher. This judgment could prove very costly for UK businesses. Millions of professionals will unwittingly infringe copyright legislation on a daily basis by simply browsing the web.”

Indeed, simply in order to read a web page, a “copy” is transferred to a user’s computer, where it is stored. This ruling applies only to commercial users, however. One PR, Speed Communications MD Stephen Waddington, says: “This sets us back by 25 years. Anyone involved in the supply chain of web content is now going to have to pay a license fee.”

The PRCA and Meltwater will appeal this part of the rejection to the Supreme Court. They claimed a partial concession because the appeal judge noted how no cases in case law had demonstrated headlines to be copyrighted literary works. In fact, the appeal judge endorsed the trial judge’s view that headlines can be literary works - it just happens that no-one’s found a breach yet.

Background

The Newspaper Licensing Agency was founded in 1996 by the eight national newspaper publishers to collect fees from cuttings services who photocopied print clippings for clients.

The agency last year introduced controversial new online licenses that also compel commercial digital monitors like Moreover and Meltwater to pay for crawling members’ websites, as well as their clients for receiving the ensuing “copies” of news excerpts.

The PR industry’s PRCA umbrella and the Meltwater digital news monitor took the NLA to London’s High Court but lost in November. Their appeal began in June.

Meanwhile, a case at the Copyright Tribunal, a quasi-legislative body that rules on intellectual property levies, is also set between the sides for this coming September, giving the pair a second opportunity to knock back the licenses.

Free aggregators like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) are exempt from the licenses, which the NLA requires only from commercial monitoring services.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-p...es-concession/





Report: More Than Half of Americans Go Online Daily For News
Jon Mitchell

According to Ongo, a curated news service, more than half of Americans go online for news once or twice per day, and nearly one-third check for news three or more times. As we've reported, online news consumption reached a major milestone this year, surpassing newspapers as a preferred news source for the first time.

Fifty six percent of the 726 respondents go online for news once or twice per day, 26% visit three sites, and 24% visit four or more sites. The survey also found that men were more likely than women to visit multiple sites.

The most important news topics for the respondents were national news (77%), world news (75%), and local news (73%), followed by health (50%) and politics (49%).

Ongo reports that 37% spend between 15 and 30 minutes daily reading news online, 26% spend between 31 minutes and one hour, and 21% spend 15 minutes or less.

The survey needs some clarification, and we've reached out to Ongo for comment. How do they define "sites?" Did they ask about native apps as well as websites? What was the full list of news topics presented to participants? Were the reading times self-reported, or were they measured? We'll update this post as we learn more about the survey.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...line_for_n.php





Community-Driven Record Label Makes Music a Democratic Business
Brenna Ehrlich

Name: Public Records

Quick Pitch: Public Records is an online community for indie music that seeks to replace the traditional record label structure, calling upon its members to help bands with all aspects of the business.

Genius Idea: A commune for music.

It’s becoming a well-worn song: As the Internet makes it easier for musicians to get their music out there, it also makes it harder for anyone to get any kind of tangible recognition — there’s just too much competition, and we’re all too ADD-addled to make it through an entire album nowadays.

“In the music industry, we have seen a dramatic shift in the way people acquire and listen to new music over the past decade,” says Ashleigh Schafer, director of communications for Public Records. “Yet, the businesses that have traditionally profited from selling us physical media still cling to the status quo business model that artists and listeners are increasingly starting to shun.”

Public Records seeks to harness the spidering power of the web that propels musicians into the limelight, replacing the traditional mores of the music industry with a more democratic flavor.

We have yet to lay eyes on the site — as it will be launched in beta in August — but Schafer describes it as a community that will be packed with casual users (music fans), bands and businesses (industry professionals). The site will cater to both members — who will pay an annual fee — and non-members. Members will participate in governing the site, and will pay extra for premium features such as media uploading, downloading, streaming and sale (if you’re in a band).

Much like pre-existing social networks such as Facebook, members can follow bands and keep up to date about their musical progress and events via a newsfeed. Bands and companies can publish updates to their feeds, and share those updates to networks like Facebook as well.

Still, the site isn’t just about keeping up with new bands, it’s also designed to be a kind of democratic community for advancing their careers. The whole site is governed by its members, who elect community directors who set goals and strategies for the assemblage. The site then metes out help to the artists deemed worthy in the form of production assistance, grants, distribution, promotion, help landing tours and more.

Grants are raised internally — through advertising, membership dues and other fees. The company itself is a nonprofit, so all money goes back into the community to advance artists’ careers.

At beta launch, the site will not be as built-out as the final version, slated to roll out in January. It will allow bands to upload music and list events, and fans to create playlists of songs they like and earn virtual currency (“Notes”) for referrals. One can use Notes for on-site purchases (music, merch, tickets).

However, those Notes will gain a lot more clout when the full version of the site rolls out, complete with e-commerce. It will also feature a virtual promoter (provides bands, promoters and venues with an automated system to book shows and communicate via the network), social advertising (users can buy ad space along side of pages or become featured song/artist) and charts.

As the music industry continues to change, crowdsourced record labels like this continue to pop up — we’ve covered a bevy in the past. Still, the question with such service: Will it be able to draw enough users into its fold that it will truly make a difference in a musician’s career?
http://mashable.com/2011/07/28/public-records/





A Bad Girl With a Touch of Genius
Guy Trebay

“IT’S hard to look that cheap and pull it off,” John Waters said admiringly of Amy Winehouse, some days after the English singer was found dead in her London bed.

He was right. It takes a kind of genius.

And genius was something Amy Winehouse possessed in abundance; the ill-starred singer, some suggested, had more gifts than she knew how to use.

There were the vocals, of course, lauded for being simultaneously bluesy, jazz-inflected and somehow punk. There was the phrasing so singular that Ms. Winehouse could stretch a note until it threatened to snap and then cap it with a sly vibrato quaver. There was the songwriting, too, child-simple three-note tunes that lodged in your head, and lyrics handily capable of mauling one’s heart while slicing surgically through gender conventions.

Is there another straight woman who could pull off a love song to a girl (“Valerie”) or make a hit from a tune in which she refers to her boyfriend as her “lady-boy”?

Like much else about her, the visual persona Ms. Winehouse concocted over her brief career fused instinct with cunning. She was a 5-foot-3 almanac of visual reference, most famously to Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes, but also to the white British soul singer Mari Wilson, less famous for her sound than her beehive; to the punk god Johnny Thunders (for a full survey of this legendary rocker/addict/style-god’s tonsorial history, check out the Facebook page devoted to his hair); to the fierce council-house chicks that have provided an endless source of inspiration to fashion (see: Dior and Chanel runways, 2007 and 2008); to the rat-combed biker molls photographed by the Swiss photographer Karlheinz Weinberger in the 1960s; to a lineage of bad girls extending from Cleopatra to Louise Brooks’s Lulu to Salt-n-Pepa, irresistible man-traps who always seem to come to the same unfortunate end.

“Rock ‘n’ roll is about bad girls,” Mr. Waters said. Or at least it used to be.

Ms. Winehouse, the director said, was the kind of girl he hung out with in high school, a “hair-hopper.” Yet she was not a born hair-hopper, a natural outlaw or hoodlum, as photos from her early career make clear.

At the start, when she released her first album, “Frank,” Ms. Winehouse appeared to be a pretty type shyly unconvinced of her appeal (“I’m ugly,” she said repeatedly in interviews), a woman whose conservative taste in clothes gave no hint of the transformation she would effect by the time she released her second and final album, “Back to Black.”

By then, the performer whose neutral wardrobe seemed suitable for a wedding singer had undergone a radical style transformation. “She took vintage looks and combined them with punk into brand-new looks that gave even bad girls pause,” Mr. Waters said.

The lush mane was ratted and backcombed into a frowsy beehive, the kind in which hoodlums of legend used to conceal their razor blades. Her basic eyeliner became an ornate volute, a swath of clown makeup, a cat mask. Her demure and kittenish dresses gave way to tart frocks that accentuated a cleavage impressive on a woman of any size, let alone one barely larger than a doll.

Her array of 13 tattoos, which she began to collect in her teenage years with a Betty Boop inked on her backside, eventually included markings reminiscent of cheap flash: hearts, anchors, pin-ups, horseshoes, a pocket above her left breast lettered with her lover’s name.

“In the film about Winehouse, you see her look begin to change, but it’s frustrating because you don’t know why,” Karen Durbin, the film critic of Elle, said in an interview, referring to “The Girl Done Good,” a 2008 documentary about Ms. Winehouse. “You see the moment when the pretty girl becomes something fiercer and weirder, a bad girl, and when the ordinary pretty-girl makeup turns into war paint.”

Of the many connections commentators strained to make after Ms. Winehouse’s death to other members of the so-called 27 Club, rock legends like Janis Joplin who never made it past that birthday, victimization was a dominant theme.

“Janis, like Amy, is always projected as a victim,” said Ann Powers, a critic for NPR Music. Yet that analysis, largely based on their shared drug addiction, is simplistic, Ms. Powers said. For one thing, it fails to account for the joyous and powerful images Ms. Winehouse and Ms. Joplin projected; for the raucous brio of Ms. Joplin’s high-hippie floozy style; for Ms. Winehouse’s own wholehearted embodiment of a look that lent her the air of a slatternly rocker from Camden Town, the tough immigrant neighborhood in north London. It is probably worth noting that both wore their biker- or gang-girl-style tattoos, traditional markers of renegade status, as badges of honor and pride.

“Self-victimization as outsiderness, self-sacrifice as a form of rebellion is a classic bad-girl stance,” Ms. Powers said.

What’s odd, she added, is how little room the victim narrative that attached to Ms. Winehouse the moment she died leaves for the possibility that, though sadly in thrall to drugs, she was probably nobody’s patsy. Yes, her music producer Mark Ronson may have helped shape her award winning neo-retro sound.

True, her stylish husband Blake Fielder-Civil may have influenced her look.

It was Ms. Winehouse alone, though, who could pull off feats of vocal and sartorial brilliance without sounding like a karaoke singer or looking like she was in drag.

“When I interviewed her once in a tiny window of time when she and Blake had broken up, she didn’t seem like such a wreck,” Ms. Powers said. “She seemed really smart and engaged and aware of what she was doing. It’s strange how we can look at somebody whose performance was so clearly thought out and studied and say it’s completely instinctive and natural.”

How come we cannot take the leap and see the thought that went into the creation of Amy Winehouse, Ms. Powers wondered. Why can’t we see that little about her presentation was haphazard, an accident?

“Look at the difference between the first and second album,” said Joe Levy, chief content officer at Maxim and a former editor in chief at Rolling Stone, which once put Ms. Winehouse on its cover. “The way she looked before she made herself into the Amy Winehouse we know, who became an icon, who beat Lady Gaga to the Cleopatra eye makeup and the beehive hairdo, is a demure young lady out on the town.”

“The woman on the cover of ‘Back to Black’ is clearly wearing her clothing and makeup as armor,” Mr. Levy said. “She is someone who is outside the conventional world, beautiful but fierce, and who is making music that means to take possession of that world.”

Just as her best music drew on sampling — assembling sonic licks and stylistic fragments borrowed from Motown, Stax, punk and early hip-hop — her personal style was also a knowing collage, he added. “There was a certain moment in the ’90s when, if you were headed downtown and turned left, every girl looked like Bettie Page,” Mr. Levy said. “But they did not do what Winehouse did, mixing Bettie Page with Brigitte Bardot and adding that little bit of Ronnie Spector.”

According to Mr. Waters, anybody else trying to pull off Ms. Winehouse’s look was doomed to failure. “It all looked like it came very naturally to her,” he said. “She didn’t look like Halloween, but you could go as her on Halloween, and there’s the difference.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/28/f...of-genius.html
















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