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23-02-11, 08:22 AM
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
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Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - February 26th, '11
Since 2002
  "When it comes to the best of the best Speedtest results (ping times, download speeds, and upload speeds), the AT&T iPhone won. AT&T also won the best of the best app download times (the best time was 43 seconds) and the best of the best YouTube loading times (2 minutes and 1 second). Basically, AT&T won everything when it came to its best results compared against the Verizon iPhone's best results." – Jacqui Cheng "Lawmakers should be wary of industry propaganda dressed as studies that purposefully conflate issues and make completely fraudulent conclusions about the economic impacts of file sharing. We believe that instead of shifting to an even more draconian enforcement of copyright, stigmatising and repressing Australians who share knowledge, culture and information, the Australian Government must begin to accept the legitimacy of sharing, and the benefits it accrues to both creators and consumers, and those in between." – Rodney Serkowski "As a musician I have a duty to promote music. That’s the basic philosophy behind it." – Edward W. Guo "They recognize that a total Internet kill switch is totally unacceptable. A smaller Internet kill switch, or a series of kill switches, is also unacceptable...How does this make cybersecurity better? They have no answer." – Jim Harper February 26th, 2011  10-Year Time Capsule: When Napster Changed the Music Industry We revisit the online service's glory days, when revolution was dawning and Justin Timberlake was just a pop star Drew Grant The first song I ever downloaded off Napster was "What You Own," one of the lesser-known duets from the rock opera "Rent" that I spent my formative middle- and high-school years obsessed with. Although it didn't have the staying power of, say, "Seasons of Love" or even "Take Me or Leave Me" (featured in last week's episode of "Glee"), I loved the harmony of Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal as Mark and Roger. But the song was oddly nostalgic, too, because listening to it in 2000, when Napster first came on my suburban radar, was a staunch reminder of how proudly pre-aughts "Rent" was. Lyrics from "What You Own": "You're living in America At the end of the millennium You're living in America Where it's like the twilight zone And when you're living in America At the end of the millennium You're what you own." (At the time, I was unaware that these lyrics also summed up the business model of Napster.) I was one of the last of my friends to get into the music download trend, mainly because my musical tastes were so abhorrent that I was literally too embarrassed to download anything. Napster had been around since 1999, when Shawn Fanning and his uncle sunk some money into a music-distribution business and let a kid named Sean Parker hop onboard as a business partner. The peer-to-peer file-sharing was the first of its kind, and landed Shawn on the cover of Time magazine by 2000. I don't need to go into the logistics of how Napster changed the music industry, but from a personal standpoint, I remember being dumbstruck by the ability to download and listen to rare bootlegs of Laurie Anderson concerts in under 15 minutes. My friends and I stopped buying CDs and started burning them, making mix tapes for our friends of Elliott Smith and Rufus Wainwright. It didn't cost us a cent. It was better than Snood. And the music industry freaked the hell out. February 2001 was the peak moment of Napster's history, though that wouldn't be discovered until the whole thing crashed and burned later in July, when Napster shut down its entire network to comply with the injunction served by the courts. Later, they settled $26 million to several artists, went bankrupt, and Fanning started Napster LLC. But back in February, Napster had the highest number of users it was ever going to get -- 26.4 million unique users spending a collective 6.3 billion minutes on the service that month -- before the RIAA started sending its threats (courtesy of Madonna, U2 and Metallica), and other file-sharing services started picking up Napster's slack. It wasn't our fault we didn't line up to protest behind our Web heroes! We just had heard too many stories about the grandmothers who were carted off to jail by the secret music police because their grandsons downloaded an illegal copy of Dr. Dre on her computer! What is left of Napster today? Well, it still exists, though you have to pay for it, so what's the point? It's legacy is what's important: Shawn Fanning's name may not be memorable, but funny enough, Sean Parker's is, thanks to his recent portrayal by Justin Timberlake in "The Social Network." Peer-to-peer music sharing is still a thriving business, although sites like Pirate's Bay are constantly in threat of being shut down. And it's actually YouTube that carries the torch of what I consider Napster's original sentiment. Ben Karris of The State Press unwittingly provided my point with his look back on how Napster "ruined" the music industry by diluting any original talent: "The proportion of illegally downloaded tracks rises to 61 percent among 14 to 17-year-olds. In addition, 14 percent of CDs (one in seven) in a young person’s collection are copied," Sabbagh writes. We want our music and we want it now! Although, I suppose if we're not really paying for it, can we even demand quality? Kids like Justin Bieber and The Jonas Brothers get coached from infancy on how they'll dress, act, sing and do whatever it takes to be marketable. The whole passion thing #-- that's just a side note. Besides the nonsensical argument made here (Justin Bieber and the Jonas Brothers suck because people download their music for free?), Karris unwittingly proves the exact opposite of his point. If it weren't for user-uploading services like YouTube, kids like Justin Bieber wouldn't even exist. (He was just a boy playing guitar on the Internet before Scooter Braun discovered him, after all.) It's because of these sharing networks that the music conglomerate doesn't get to decide 100 percent of what we listen to anymore, and for every illegal download of the Black Eyed Peas (who, by the way, are not hurting for money, so let's just give up that ghost already, shall we?), there is an upload of some kid covering the song, turning it into a mashup, or otherwise making his or her creative musical stamp on the churned-out Pop 20 hits we hear on the radio every day. Ten years ago, on Feb. 21, Napster offered $1 billion to try to make peace with labels like Sony, Warner and Universal, in an attempt to keep the industry from suing Shawn for copyright infringement. Said a Forbes piece at the time, "Of course, the $1 billion in revenue this settlement would require is roughly $1 billion more than Napster takes in now." Suddenly, a billion dollars didn't seem so cool anymore. Only a decade after the fact can Napster find a sort of ironic redemption, as co-founder Sean Parker's alter ego in "The Social Network" -- as portrayed by a former member of N'Sync, whose label BMG was suing Shawn and Sean in 2001 -- leans back, smirks at the camera and says, "Napster wasn't a failure. I changed the music industry for better and for always." It may have been a line of fictional dialogue, but it's pretty damn close to the truth. http://www.salon.com/entertainment/m...ing/index.html  Another File-Sharing Case Dropped Before Trial Nicole Kobie Crown prosecutors have dropped a file-sharing case rather than take the evidence before a judge. George Cartledge, the administrator of online forum Filesoup, was accused of distributing or authorising distribution of copyright material and arrested in July 2009, according to David Cook from Cartledge's solicitors Burrows Bussin. After prosecutors dropped the case in Bristol Crown Court today, a spokesperson for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said: “The CPS reviewed the file in accordance with the code for Crown Prosecutors, and no longer considered there was a realistic prospect of conviction. Accordingly, we offered no evidence in court.” The news echoes a previous case, also defended by Burrows Bussin. Last year, the CPS dropped a case against a 17-year-old accused of sharing music via the OiNK forum, saying it wasn't in the public interest to continue. It also brings to mind ACS Law, which tried to drop a set of file-sharing cases before the Patents County Court in London last month. Cook counts the discontinuance as a win for his firm's client. “It’s the kind of thing that people don’t fully appreciate," he said. "If they discontinue before the trial, it means that they haven’t got the stamina to put it before a jury. This is better than him being found not guilty – this is the CPS believing that he won’t be found guilty.” Cook said his firm had six applications before the court, regarding "defects" in Cartledge's case. "We believe there are a lot of things wrong with this case," Cook told PC Pro, saying the prosecution hadn't initially been sure if Cartledge should be charged as a business or which charges should be laid. "It’s a surprise to me that they’ve continued for as long as they have." “It’s right that copyright holders should be afforded the protection of the court, they’ve just been going about it in entirely the wrong way," Cook added. FACT involvement Many of the cases flaws, Cook said, stem from the involvement in the investigation of FACT - the Federation Against Copyright Theft, which is funded by the US and UK film industry. "By and large, FACT goes into markets and picks up a load of dodgy DVDs with the police, point out which ones are dodgy to the police, and the police seize them. It’s all above board," explained Cook. However, problems crop up when the investigations move online, where evidence collection is more complicated. "In this case, the police seized these computers, they didn't ever take the computers into the police station, they merely gave them to FACT," Cook said. "FACT then took the computers and did a forensic report on them, and gave the police the reports – the police didn’t ever independently check what they were saying," Cook said. Cook believes that once FACT alerts authorities to a copyright infringement, it should no longer be involved in the investigation. “It’s a public function of the police to investigate these things on their own, the police are under a duty to investigate," he said. FACT's head of communications Eddy Levitan wouldn't directly comment on the Cartledge case, but said there have indeed been successful prosecutions of illegal file-sharers based on his group's evidence. Ongoing investigations The current process leaves prosecutors unable to secure a win against illegal file-sharing, Cook claimed. “In terms of a successful prosecution for file-sharing, there haven’t been any.” Despite today's discontinuance, Cook says his firm expects more such cases to arise; Levitan said FACT has other investigations ongoing. http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/365500/a...d-before-trial Over 40,000 Does Dismissed In Copyright Troll Cases Eva Galperin These have been some eventful weeks in the world of copyright trolling. Thousands of unnamed “John Does” in P2P file sharing lawsuits filed in California, Washington DC, Texas, and West Virginia have been severed, effectively dismissing over 40,000 defendants. The plaintiffs in these cases must now re-file against almost all of the Does individually rather than suing them en mass. These rulings may have a significant impact on the copyright trolls’ business model, which relies on being able to sue thousands of Does at once with a minimum of administrative expense. The cost of filing suit against each Doe may prove prohibitively expensive to plaintiffs’ attorneys who are primarily interested in extracting quick, low-hassle settlements. However, EFF has received reports that some Does are still receiving notices from their ISP’s informing them that their identities are being sought in relation to these cases. If you receive a notice from your ISP informing you that it has received a subpoena requesting your subscriber information in connection with one of the cases in the spreadsheet, please contact EFF immediately by emailing info@eff.org. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/0...ht-troll-cases Swedish Court Fines File Sharer About $300 For Sharing 44 Songs Mike Masnick While US courts have been awarding tens of thousands of dollars per song for the few people found guilty of unauthorized file sharing, many people have noted how utterly ridiculous those awards are, in comparison to any actual harm. It appears that a court over in Sweden appears to agree. A man who was charged with sharing 44 songs has been fined a much smaller amount, specifically, 2,000 kronor, or about $300. It actually comes out to just about $7 per song. It will be interesting to see how the industry reacts to this one. After all, they've been going around praising the IPRED anti-piracy law in Sweden for the last two years now. Will we suddenly start hearing about how Sweden "doesn't take piracy seriously" and then there will be a new push for even stricter laws? http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...44-songs.shtml Piracy: Everybody Does It; Everything Should Be Free Janko Roettgers Pirates are in it for the free stuff, and there are plenty of them: That’s the gist of a new PricewaterhouseCoopers study of consumer attitudes toward piracy. The study asked some 202 self-described pirates about their behavior and the reasons for it. At the top of the list was the fact that pirated content doesn’t actually cost anything. Respondents signaled some willingness to pay, but not much — and the vast majority said that they’re going to continue to hunt for free loot. However, people don’t seem to mind ads, so the Hulu model might actually working to curb piracy. Streaming clearly dominates video piracy, with 82 percent of respondents saying that they get their TV fare as streams, and 69 percent streaming pirated movies online, while 62 percent admitted to downloading TV show episodes, and 52 percent do so with movie titles. So what makes them pirate? For 69 percent, the content being free was a deciding factor; 68 percent said DVDs are too expensive; and 58 percent believe that digital downloads are also too pricey. And if that wasn’t bad enough news for Hollywood, consider this: 54 percent “felt that everyone was doing it,” and 57 percent actually had a friend or family member recommend unlicensed content. Of course, this isn’t statistical proof that everyone actually is pirating content, but this kind of perception may well become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If everyone believes that everyone is doing it, then everyone may as well be doing it themselves. And there’s little that could get people to abandon piracy: 81 percent said that they’re likely going to continue to get their video fix for free. People signaled some willingness to pay for movies if they had access to it right after it came out in the theaters, but even then, 45 percent said they’d pay less than a dollar to stream a movie. That’s not exactly what Hollywood has in mind with its new premium VOD plans. The only thing that seems to be working to get people back to legitimate offerings is pricing them at zero; 58 percent responded that they’d frequent free, ad-supported websites. Thirty-four percent were open to subscription-based offerings like Netflix, but only nine percent want to pay iTunes or Amazon for each and every movie or TV show episode. You’d probably be hard-pressed to find many people in Hollywood happy with these kinds of findings, but the PwC survey comes as a validation to Hulu’s approach, which has been questioned lately. Offering ad-supported content seems to be working as a piracy deterrent, and adding a subscription-based offering to the fold may actually have helped Hulu to tap into that one-third willing to open their wallets. http://gigaom.com/video/piracy-consumer-attitudes/ How Pirates Can Save the Home Movie Industry (And Why Netflix is its Future) Navneet Alang Unlike other ‘old media’ establishments like newspapers or the music industry, the movie business has been hit less dramatically by the rise of the web – despite the fact that piracy is rampant. Even though revenues from DVD sales have continued to decline, box office receipts have, at the very least, kept up with inflation. Unlike the catastrophic losses at places like Universal Music, people who make films are still doing relatively okay. But that’s not to say there isn’t trouble ahead. In fact, as Paidcontent reports a recent study put out by PriceWaterhouseCooper suggests the movie biz might be in some serious trouble. Pirates, it tells us, are willing to pay no more than $3 for a downloadable movie and no more than a buck for a TV show. So much for those plans to charge $20-25 a pop to watch a movie on VOD a month or so it comes out in the cinema. But despite the doom and gloom of the Paidcontent article, there’s a silver lining here: the movie industry can learn from how pirates think. And in doing so, they just might be able to save – if not entirely preserve – their massive, lucrative business. Why the Biz Went 'Wrong' (And How Pirates Got it Right) Movies – particularly their pricing – have always been based on the perceived value of an experience. A movie was worth 5 bucks to see at the cinema – then 10 bucks, now (in some places like New York) even as high as fifteen. People were happy to spend that money not just because it was the only way to do it, but because the experience of a big screen, a communal atmosphere and fancy surround sound made it worth it. It was a night out with friends. One cannot make the argument that watching movies at home changed this, because box office revenues went up with the advent of the DVD. But what has gone wrong is that piracy reshaped the value of a film. Now, while a lot of movie execs will claim that this is about entitlement, or a devaluing of ‘art’, piracy did something else: when you can download 50 movies in a month, essentially for ‘free’ – if not, ya’ know, legally – you are also struck by the fact that most of them… suck. This is to say: the more you are exposed to the products of the film industry, the more your realize that only, oh, 1 in 10 films is worth paying full price for and maybe 1 or 2 more are worth paying 5 or 6 bucks to rent. The rest are generally things you might watch on TV – or, if you’re bored, catch on Netflix. By doing away with scarcity, the value of the experience has gone down, in large part because most films, despite their huge budgets and flood of buzz, are throwaway entertainment. It’s not that piracy ‘devalued’ film. Hollywood already did that for us. All piracy did was to allow large numbers of people to, through comparison, witness that most films aren’t really worth your time – or your money. Yet, another lesson loomed, that didn’t quite have to do with the value of content. It was about how to sort and watch all of that content once the web so drastically opened us to. A New Definition of Value But at the same time, a second parallel, and much more hopeful thing was occurring. That thing was called Netflix. See, as people became more and more accustomed to way in which the web can produce a glut of content, consumers – even pirates – realized that were also willing to pay for certain things. In fact that PWC study suggests that pirates also use legit streaming sites in addition to pirating. That’s significant because it means the flow of all kind of content just merges into one large stream online. And really, it’s only the very top stuff that stands out. But ‘good stuff’ isn’t the driving factor when it comes to payment. It was about an experience. Convenience was a big one, and cloud access another. Interoperability on various sorts of hardware was a big plus and it meant, instead of transcoding a film to play on your mobile device or game console, you just clicked play and you were off. Put quite simply, the content created by the movie and TV industry dropped in value, while the frame and context it was presented in rose in value. Suddenly, the thing that made money was not a rental on some 10 year old movie – it was a service that packaged thousands of older movies and made them super easy to watch. Let’s say this another way: piracy reshaped how we think of content and taught us to value the delivery rather than the content itself. This was not due to the way in which ‘the web destroys culture’ or ‘devalues art’ but, rather, because the expansion of content choice through, yes, piracy, showed us what is important to us is the ease and convenience of legitimate services and the algorithms with which they recommend things. Pirates didn’t destory the movie industry, they laid bare its weaknesses – yet at the same time, showed a new strength: legit is just easier. The Future of Movies at Home The movie industry is convinced of one simple proposition: people must pay a set price for one piece of content. $30 for a Blu-Ray, $20 for a DVD, $6 for an HD rental and so on. But their secret has been laid bare by pirates: most movies aren’t worth paying much, if anything for, because they are of the ‘watch-and-forget’ sort. Now, people still like watching those. We all like to just veg out on the sofa and watch something mindless. But piracy has taught us we are not willing to pay each time we want to be distracted. Instead, it is the subscription model of Netflix that makes sense: give us 8 bucks a month, and you can distract yourself as much as you want. By turning Hollywood’s business model against it, piracy has shown the weakness of producing content lacking in substance. But at the same time, by placing value elsewhere in the content chain – on convenience, delivery and (weirdly) quantity – piracy has also shown how the movie industry can save itself. http://www.techi.com/2011/02/how-pir...is-its-future/ Industry Welcomes iiNet Appeal Win Darren Pauli The telco industry has applauded the Federal Court dismissing an appeal for the landmark copyright case brought against iiNet by copyright action group the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT). The federation commenced legal action against iiNet in the Federal Court in November 2008, hoping to prove the internet provider liable for copyright infringement conducted by its subscribers. It claimed the internet service provider (ISP) had not taken reasonable steps to prevent customers pirating copyright video over its network. Today the full bench of the Federal Court dismissed AFACT's appeal. iiNet managing director Michael Malone said outside court that the case has not stopped one instance of piracy. "All this legal action hasn't stopped one person downloading anywhere in Australia." "There needs to be a lot more clarity as to what is expected of telcos, so ultimately this will only be resolved by governments stepping in," Malone said. AFACT executive director Neil Gane said iiNet must take responsibility for copyright infringement on its network. "This is a case where the ISP had admitted to tens of thousands of copyright infringements on its network, and it does not have to lift a finger to prevent them," Gane said. "It cannot be right that in effect the ISP, who has the power to prevent copyright infringement online and has admitted they are taking place, does not share the responsibility to stop it." Gane said it is too early to comment on the next move AFACT will take, or whether it will appeal the decision. It has 28 days to decide. Internode regulatory chief John Lindsay welcomed the decision favouring friend and rival iiNet. "Internode hopes this decision settles the matter and we will continue to work with rights holders to promote legal content," Lindsay said. Peter Coroneos, the outgoing head of the Internet Industry Association which assisted iiNet in its initial case, said he hopes AFACT will not appeal. "The IIA has consistently maintained it is not the role of internet providers as intermediary to enforce third-party rights, but we hope now that the decision will enable the rights holders to work with the industry to develop a model so that end users can be provided compelling lawful content in Australia." He said he will maintain a close relationship with iiNet in the event of an AFACT appeal. "I hope an appeal won't be necessary. I think it's time we moved along on this issue and begin to address the market failures in innovation," said Coroneos. Exetel head John Linton said he thought the result was "never in doubt". "The case was appallingly run by AFACT and the result was never, if you can use such a word in legal matters, in doubt. "I remain very happy that Exetel didn't have to go through this experience — we have/had neither the money nor the time." Pirate Party president Rodney Serkowski welcomed the iiNet win. "An imposition of such a regulatory burden would unjustifiably increase costs for ISPs and, invariably, consumers. It would also necessitate incursions into consumers' privacy, something the Telecommunications Act presently forbids," Serkowski said in a statement. "Lawmakers should be wary of industry propaganda dressed as studies that purposefully conflate issues and make completely fraudulent conclusions about the economic impacts of file sharing. "We believe that instead of shifting to an even more draconian enforcement of copyright, stigmatising and repressing Australians who share knowledge, culture and information, the Australian Government must begin to accept the legitimacy of sharing, and the benefits it accrues to both creators and consumers, and those in between." Serkowski said that file sharing is positive "both culturally and economically", dubbing AFACT a "relic" which is forced to pursue a strategy of "fear, uncertainty and doubt" because of the current legal frameworks. "For these organisations to change, law makers must change the legal framework within which they operate, making substantive changes that respect the freedom of expression and privacy. It requires changes that recognise the legitimacy of sharing and that encourage it." Telstra said it will review particular rulings of the case which may be a source of concern. Optus said it was pleased and would be looking at the judgement in more detail. "Under Australian law there are remedies available to copyright holders, including taking action directly against those alleged to be infringing rights," it said in a statement. http://www.zdnet.com.au/industry-wel...-339310227.htm But wait, there’s more iiTrial: A Green Light to Disconnect Pirates Film industry granted path to cut infringer's net access. Brett Winterford Today’s judgment by the Full Bench of the Federal Court could clear the way for internet service providers to disconnect subscribers accused of copyright infringement. The majority ruling in the split judgment handed down today gives internet service providers no absolute protection over the actions of their subscribers. The judgment also determined that, should the film industry improve the way it delivers infringement notices and pay for ISPs to vet them, it would be a “reasonable step” for ISPs to disconnect customers accused of infringement in these notices. The complex judgment – under which Justice Emmett and Justice Nicholas chose to dismiss the appeal and Justice Jagot chose to endorse it – provided the film industry with a great deal of ammunition for when it inevitably appeals to the High Court of Australia. “Assuming AFACT seek leave to the High Court, they will no doubt extract what they can from the dissenting judgment [of Justice Jagot],” said Timothy Webb, a senior associate at Clayton Utz. Should the High Court reject AFACT's submission, interpretation of the law would fall back onto those areas in today’s split decision in which the majority of the three judges agreed. All judges in today’s decision agreed on a new definition of the “means of infringement” which gives “no absolute defence” to ISPs for the actions of their subscribers. “It was found that ISPs have the power to prevent infringements by terminating users or via some sort of graduated response system,” said John Fairbairn, partner at Clayton Utz. Justice Emmett's judgment said that cutting net access would be reasonable under certain conditions – including if rights holders were prepared to reimburse ISP’s for the costs of verifying copyright notices and were prepared to provide the ISP indemnity for wrongfully disconnecting customers. “iiNet says that termination of an account was not a reasonable exercise of a power to prevent because it would involve disconnection of the customer from the internet. However, it is difficult to see why that consequence is unreasonable, if the customer, having been warned that the service being provided to the customer by iiNet was being used to engage in infringing acts, that to do so was a breach of contract and that continuing to do so may result in termination, nevertheless chooses to continue to permit the iiNet service to be used to engage in infringing acts,” Justice Emmett said in his judgment. In some respects, iiNet was spared from losing the appeal case because both Justice Emmett and Justice Nicholas found AFACT’s infringement notices to be inadequate. “Mere assertion by an entity such as AFACT… would not, of itself, constitute unequivocal and cogent evidence of the doing of acts of infringement,” Justice Emmett said. But Justice Jagot, by contrast, found that the AFACT notices were reasonable means to disconnect customers. Jagot argued that the notices were personally addressed, delivered by hand to iiNet CEO Michael Malone and signed by AFACT’s Neil Gane, written in a standard, easy-to-understand format in plain English, and sent from an address in Australia. (The “robot notices” iiNet used in its defence, by contrast, were automated, made no mention of iiNet’s customer relationship agreement and came from an address in the United States.) Fairbairn warns that should AFACT improve the quality of its infringement notices as per Justice Emmett’s set of conditions – “an ISP would risk being found to have infringed copyright” had it not taken action against a customer on account of those notices. “That much is clear,” Fairbairn said, “and Justice Nicholas agrees there would be a liability. “This provides an opportunity for the film industry to improve their position by improving their notices. The issue is – will they put up the cost of the regime ISPs will need to implement?” More reasons for the High Court Fairbairn suspects that for this reason, it won’t just be AFACT looking to appeal to the High Court. The ISP – iiNet – “may need to strengthen its position on authorisation. “If the High Court agreed with the first instance judge (Justice Cowdroy), that would be a much cleaner outcome for iiNet.” In any case, if AFACT is granted leave to have an appeal heard by the High Court, “all issues are wide open again.” http://www.itnews.com.au/News/249230...t-pirates.aspx New Mortal Kombat Banned in Australia Australia’s content classification regulator has banned the highly anticipate remake of the classic Mortal Kombat video game series from being sold in Australia, deeming the game’s violence outside the boundaries of the highest MA15+ rating which video games can fall under. The full text of the Australian Classification Board’s decision is available in PDF format here. It goes into detail about the decision, stating that the game contains violence which “goes beyond strong in impact” is therefore unsuitable for those under the age of 18 to play — particularly noting Mortal Kombat’s famously gruesome ‘fatality’ finishing moves. Confirming the board’s decision, a spokesperson for the local branch of Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment said the group was “extremely disappointed” that Mortal Kombat — “one of the world’s oldest and most successful video games franchises” wouldn’t be available to adult gamers in Australia. The lack of an R18+ classification system for video games in Australia, which Mortal Kombat would likely fall under, has resulted in various popular video games — such as Left 4 Dead 2 — being censored for the Australia market or refused classification so that they are unable to be sold locally. Some game publishers have been forced to modify their games prior to release in Australia, meaning some local releases have been delayed. The Warner Bros spokesperson said the organisation would not market mature content where it was not appropriate for the targeted audience — and backed persistent industry calls for an R18+ rating to be introduced into the Australian jurisdiction to cover games like Mortal Kombat. “We understand that not all content is for every audience, but there is an audience for mature gaming content and it would make more sense to have the R18+ classification in Australia. As a member of the Interactive Games and Entertainment Association, WBIE is reviewing all options available at this time,” they said. The iGEA represents a number of video game manufactuers and distirbutors in Australia, including heavyweights such as Microsoft, Nintendo, Activision, Sony Computer Entertainment and more. The organisation has for several years been pushing for the introduction of an R18+ rating locally. In December, Australia’s Federal and State Attorneys-General — who are required to reach unanimous agreement on the need for an R18+ rating for it to be introduced — further postponed reaching a decision on the matter. The NSW election is expected to postpone any agreement further. iGEA chief executive Ron Curry said the fact that another game “clearly designed and targeted at adults” had been refused classification again highlighted the shortcomings of the current classification scheme. “As with many other forms of media, there is a demand and place for an adult themed narrative. We trust adults with this material in other media forms, yet deny them similar access simply because it’s a ‘game’. We would not accept the argument that because it’s “unsuitable for a minor to see or play” that it should therefore be banned in any other media form, so why video games?” he said. Furthermore, Curry said when a highly anticipated game was refused classification, two things could happen — interest in the game would actually increase, and people would still get the game via importation or piracy. “Ironically, the game is then widely available in Australia without any identifiable classification markings. How is this informing parents and protecting children?” he asked. “It is the industry position that an adult classification sends a clear message to the public that the content is not suitable for minors and is the most effective means of guiding access to mature content. Refusing classification of titles that meet adult rating criteria in every other Western country in our digital age is ineffective and naïve.” http://delimiter.com.au/2011/02/25/n...-in-australia/ Internet TV Service ivi Chief Vows to Appeal Judge’s ‘Wrong’ Ruling Sam Gustin A federal judge in New York has issued a preliminary injunction against internet TV service ivi, in closely-watched case pitting an upstart web video service against some of the most powerful entertainment companies in the world. In a phone interview with Wired.com after the ruling Tuesday, ivi founder and CEO Todd Weaver vowed to appeal the order. “The judge has it wrong,” Weaver said flatly. The injunction is victory for the major TV networks and a setback for the nascent crop of online video distributors aiming to offer an alternative to the major cable and satellite companies. The case highlights the disharmony between copyright law and FCC regulatory policy at a time of rapid evolution and innovation in the online video space. “Plaintiffs have demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits of their copyright claim,” U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald wrote in her decision. “They also have demonstrated irreparable harm, that the balance of hardships tip in their favor, and that the public interest will not be disserved by an injunction.” “ivi streams signals to a nationwide audience, without copyright owners’ consent or compliance with the rules and regulations of the FCC,” the judge added. Launched by Weaver, a Seattle-based entrepreneur, in September 2010, ivi (pronounced “ivy”) immediately drew the legal wrath of several major entertainment companies, including Disney, NBC Universal, Fox Television, and Major League Baseball. That’s not altogether surprising, considering that the company’s business involves pulling down over-the-air TV signals from 55 stations in New York, Los Angleles and Chicago, and rebroadcasting them over the internet to its users, for $5 per month. Needless to say, ivi does not have the originating stations’ permission to rebroadcast the programming. In its defense, ivi argued that it fits within the statutory definition of a “cable system” under Section 111 of the 1976 Copyright Act, and thus is entitled “to perform plaintiffs’ programming” as long as it makes payments to the Copyright Office. In her decision, Judge Buchwald concluded that ivi is not, in fact, a cable system. “To place defendants’ argument in a real world context,” Judge Buchwald wrote, “they assert that for the payment of approximately $100 a year to the Copyright Office (the payment for a Section 111 compulsory license) and without compliance with the strictures of the Communications Act or plaintiffs’ consent, that they are entitled to use and profit from the plaintiffs’ copyrighted works.” “ivi’s architecture bears no resemblance to the cable systems of the 1970s,” the judge added. “Its service retransmits broadcast signals nationwide, rather than to specific local areas.” The internet video startup argued that it is not bound by FCC retransmission rules — and thus not required to obtain retransmission consent — because the FCC does not regulate the internet. But Judge Buchwald wasn’t buying that argument either. “No company or technology, which refuses to abide by the rules of the FCC has ever been deemed a cable system for purposes of the Copyright Act,” the judge wrote. For its part, ivi disputed that, arguing that it “has met with all the commissioner’s offices of the FCC repeatedly and has received assurances that we are in full and complete compliance.” Therein lies a taste of the disconnect between copyright law and FCC regulatory policy. To Weaver, ivi’s founder, this battle represents yet another attempt by the legacy entertainment giants to stifle competitive threats based on new technology. “We are a new form of distribution,” Weaver told Wired.com. “And every new form of distribution has been challenged in the past. Be that cable, when they were sued, or satellite, when they were sued. And here we are, as the third.” “The judge has it wrong,” Weaver added. “She is supposed to rule on copyright. And she is granting a preliminary injunction in a copyright case to make communications policy, which is something that the FCC needs to do.” Public Knowledge, a D.C.-based advocacy group that supports ivi, issued a statement expressing disappointment with the court’s ruling and urging the FCC and Copyright Office to provide clarity, given the rapidly evolving nature of video on the internet. “If competition to traditional cable service is to develop in the online distribution sector, then the FCC and Copyright Office are going to have to move quickly to update their rules to conform to the realities of new technology and consumer choice,” said John Bergmayer, staff attorney for Public Knowledge. In a defiant statement, Weaver said ivi will appeal. “The oppressive big media networks must open their doors to innovators or they will inevitably fall,” he said. “People want responsible choice, not the one-size-fits-all television offerings imposed by powerful media interests.” http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/02/ivi-injunction/ A 'Plan B' is Needed to Address Site Blocking Litigation Concerns of the DEA John Hunt A 'plan B' is needed to avoid potential litigation caused by blocking of websites which have been accused of unlawful file sharing, according to a working group made up of the government, ISPs and the music industry. This follows the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt's referral of part of the Digital Economy Act (section 17) which deals with blocking of websites, to Ofcom to see how workable it will be in practice. Section 17 can be found here and, in brief, reads: Quote:
The working group intends to look at what can be done to make the system more acceptable, and easier to implement for ISPs who could face repercussions from being forced to block parts of the Internet. One concern is that service providers could get sued by websites who have been blocked. The system could have wider affects of blocking innocent parties if a service provider's implementation of this does not have finely grained control. Quote:
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/4...onomy-act.html Amazon Rolls Out Instant Streaming for 'Prime' Members Erik Berte Amazon.com on Tuesday announced its highly-rumored video-streaming service for customers subscribing to its Amazon Prime service. Subscribers can now access 5,000 TV shows and movies instantly and commercial-free, according to Amazon. Boasting titles including, "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," "March of the Penguins," and "Syriana," Amazon said users can view TV shows and movies on their PCs, Macs, as well as several models of Blu-ray players and set-top boxes. Amazon Prime gives customers unlimited two-day shipping on items from the retail site for a flat rate of $79 per year. Tech site Gizmodo pointed out that the selection of video content is on the low side at the moment, but there are "interesting" movies available. It also said it's difficult to navigate through titles on the site. Netflix Vice President of Corporate Communications Steve Swasey told FOX Business Netflix doesn't disclose the number of titles it offers for streaming, but said, "it's thousands and thousands, more than you can watch in a lifetime." However, what sets Amazon apart from competitors like Hulu Plus and Netflix is how it's bundled with its Prime service, which works out to cost roughly $6.58 per month, cheaper than the offerings of those and other competitors. This might also help Amazon on the retail side, as it could prove to be more convenient for customers having this included free two-day shipping than paying extra on competitor retail sites. http://www.foxbusiness.com/technolog...prime-members/ 3D Helps Drive Global Box Office to $31.8 Billion The global box office hit a record $31.8 billion in 2010, growing 8 percent from the year before on the strength of 3D ticket sales and a hot Asia-Pacific market, a Hollywood industry group said on Wednesday. But U.S. and Canadian movie ticket revenues were flat at $10.6 billion, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, which represents major U.S. film studios in government and business affairs. The Asia-Pacific region saw the most growth in ticket sales with a 21 percent hike, and China accounted for a sizable chunk of that increase, the MPAA said. "Despite a weak economy, shifting business models and the ongoing impact of digital theft, we had another record year at the global box office driven by growth outside the U.S. and Canada," Bob Pisano, president and interim CEO of the MPAA, said in a statement. While the U.S. and Canada was flat, that market also benefited from consumers' taste for 3D films, as one in three people saw a 3D film in 2010, the MPAA said. Movies in 3D made up 21 percent of U.S. and Canada ticket sales, accounting for a total of $2.2 billion. In a negative sign for the industry, the total number of tickets sold in the U.S. and Canada declined 5 percent to 1.34 billion, the MPAA said. In an ironic twist, the total number of moviegoers was actually up slightly, but those people going to movies saw fewer films. The average ticket price for the U.S. and Canada climbed to $7.89 from $7.50 the year before, which made for flat box office revenues despite the decline in attendance. (Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis: Editing by Bob Tourtellotte and Tim Dobbyn) http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...71M72T20110223 Graying Audience Returns to Movies Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply Hollywood and older Americans have never had much use for each other. The 50-plus crowd doesn’t go to opening weekends or buy popcorn; a youth-obsessed Hollywood has happily ignored them. But in the last few months an older audience has made a startling reassertion of its multiplex power. “True Grit,” “The King’s Speech,” “The Fighter,” “Black Swan” — all movies in contention for a clutch of Oscars on Sunday — have all been surprise hits at the box office. And they have all been powered by people for whom 3-D means wearing glasses over glasses, and “Twilight” sounds vaguely threatening. Hollywood, slower than almost any other industry to market to baby boomers, may be getting a glimpse of its graying future. While the percentage of moviegoers in the older population remains relatively small, the actual number of older moviegoers is growing explosively — up 67 percent since 1995, according to GfK MRI, a media research firm. And the first of the 78 million baby boomers are hitting retirement age with some leisure hours to fill and a long-dormant love affair with movies. “There is an older audience that is growing, and it’s an underserved audience, which makes for an obvious and important opportunity,” said Nancy Utley, co-president of Fox Searchlight, whose “Black Swan” has sold over $100 million at the North American box office. If the core audience for a particular film is over 50, she noted, “that’s now a gigantic core.” There are glimmers of a shift. Aging action stars; theaters with adult fare, like better food; reserved seating; and, most important, movies like “The Social Network” and “The King’s Speech” that have become hits based on wit and storytelling, not special effects. Theaters have long favored younger consumers in part because older moviegoers tend to skip the concession counter, where theaters make most of their money. The imbalance between young and old grew more pronounced over the last decade as theater chains, suffering the after-effects of overbuilding, cut back on maintenance. Sticky floors and popcorn-strewn aisles have kept even more older people at home. That, and all those texting teenagers, “which is something that adult audiences really find irritating,” said Patrick Corcoran, director of media and research for the National Association of Theater Owners. The very young still go to the movies more than anyone else — especially on those all-important opening weekends — but distribution executives say they are getting harder to lure in huge numbers. Social networking has sped up word of mouth, turning teenagers and young adults into more discerning moviegoers — a phenomenon pushed along by rising prices. People age 18 to 24 bought an average of seven tickets per person in 2010, down from eight in 2009. And the industry is battling a generational quirk. When you can legally stream movies on laptops or order them from video-on-demand services soon after their release — or easily pirate them with high-speed Internet connections, often while they are still in theaters — it makes you less likely to buy a ticket. Fewer teenagers, then, present an opening. Baby boomers are not their Depression-era parents, who grew up on radio and were very conscious of the price of a ticket. Baby boomers were weaned on movies. “Our generation really had a love affair with the movies in a profound way,” said Nicholas Kazan, a screenwriter whose credits include “Reversal of Fortune,” which was nominated for an Oscar in 1991. “It was not a fling, not a casual relationship, but a real love affair.” For many baby boomers, the relationship blossomed in 1969, as the movies belatedly caught up with the counterculture in a wave of films that included “Easy Rider,” “Medium Cool” and “Midnight Cowboy.” College film societies and an art-house circuit made generational heroes of foreign directors like Ingmar Bergman, whose “Cries and Whispers” had its New York debut in 1972. The “Godfather” series, from Francis Ford Coppola, forged the lexicon for a generation. But then a younger, more fantasy-oriented generation asserted itself with “Star Wars” in 1977. Hollywood adjusted its output accordingly. “For me, the ’80s is a dead zone,” said Peter Biskind, a film historian who sees the baby boomers as having been “betrayed and abandoned” by Hollywood in the era of “E.T.,” “Sixteen Candles” and “Top Gun.” The baby boomers were taking their children to the movies, however, helping to make megahits of films like the “Home Alone” series. Mr. Biskind, himself a baby boomer, said he believed that as the generation’s love affair with movies ended, television stepped in. “ ‘The Sopranos’ really nailed the boomer generation,” he said. It offered 50-ish viewers all the moody action of a Coppola film without the bother of a trip to the theater. Slowly, the movie industry is trying to get baby boomers back in seats. You can see it in the bets studios are taking on scripts. Last year, there were two movies, “RED” and “The Expendables,” that featured older actors in action roles. Helen Mirren, who is 65, was a machine gun-toting assassin in “RED,” which stands for “retired and extremely dangerous.” Sylvester Stallone, who is 64, was a mercenary in “The Expendables.” Both movies were hits. Just last weekend, “Unknown,” with a 58-year-old Liam Neeson as its action star, was No. 1 at the box office, beating a heavily promoted teenage science fiction movie. More than half of the audience was over 50. Almost every studio has a movie aimed at an older audience on its current schedule or in development, whether it’s “Dirty Old Men” at Warner Brothers or “Larry Crowne” at Universal Pictures. Fox Searchlight has high hopes for “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” about a group a British retirees who go to India. It stars Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, who are both 76. Movie theaters have begun to do their part. At ArcLight Cinemas you can now have a grilled ahi tuna sandwich or red pepper Gorgonzola dip. At AMC Entertainment, the second-largest theater chain in North America after Regal Cinemas, older moviegoers are becoming “an increasingly important part of our plan,” said Stephen A. Colanero, chief marketing officer. He points to efforts to improve adult offerings even if Hollywood doesn’t provide them — Metropolitan Opera simulcasts, for instance. AMC is also experimenting with seat-side food and cocktail service. The company now operates seven AMC Dine-In Theaters, including three new ones in New Jersey. More are planned. Studios will continue to tailor the bulk of their releases to younger audiences, and for good reason. In 2010, North Americans ages 12 to 24 made up only 18 percent of the population, but bought 32 percent of the 1.34 billion tickets sold, according to the annual industry snapshot by the Motion Picture Association of America, released on Wednesday. By contrast, people over 50 made up 32 percent of the population, but bought only 21 percent of the tickets. That is a slight uptick from 2009, when the over-50 audience bought 19 percent of the total tickets sold. But the actual number of older moviegoers has grown enormously since 1995, the year before boomers started hitting the midcentury mark. Then about 26.8 million people over the age of 50 went to the movies, according to GfK MRI. That number grew to 44.9 million in 2010. Studios used to deride older viewers as “the once-a-year audience.” They came out once a year, on Christmas Day, to see a movie. Columbia Pictures gave them “Prince of Tides” on Christmas Day in 1991. It is an attitude, and a reality, that is shifting. “One of the most urgent issues we face as an industry is to figure out how to lure the boomers back to the movie theaters,” said Bob Pisano, president and interim chief executive of the M.P.A.A. Nancy Perry Graham, editor of AARP The Magazine, says it’s about time. “There is a huge demand that needs to be satisfied, and we’ve been trying to make that point to Hollywood for years,” she said. “I truly believe that Hollywood is finally listening.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/bu...oviegoers.html Google Weighs In on isoHunt File-Sharing Search Index Case Mark Hefflinger Mountain View, Calif. - Google has weighed in on an ongoing lawsuit against file-sharing search engine isoHunt, agreeing with the court's finding that the service violates copyrights, but voicing concerns on how the court arrived upon its decision, TorrentFreak reported. A court last May handed down a permanent injunction against isoHunt, which was sued by the Motion Picture Association of America. The file-sharing search index had argued its service is no different from Google's search engine, which returns many of the same results for media files available online. "While in agreement with the result reached in this case, Google is concerned that some of the reasoning offered by the district court goes too far and would upset the careful balance between copyright protection and technological innovation struck by the Supreme Court and Congress. Particularly because this case is not a hard one, it should be decided narrowly," Google states in its brief. "The court complicated a straightforward [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] case by wading into an unnecessary discussion of the relationship between the statutory safe harbor and judge-made principles of secondary liability, including inducement." In addition to the U.S. court decision at hand, which isoHunt is appealing, the company was also by the major record labels for copyright infringement in its home country of Canada earlier this month. http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2011/02...rch-index-case Hotfile has Decided to Adopt a More Aggressive Policy Against Accounts that Host Content Violating Intellectual Property Rights The Hotfile file sharing service is clear in their conditions of use. In the same way that they don’t allow the uploading of software containing computer viruses for example, they also reserve the right to veto all content that breaches intellectual property rights. In reality, the hosting of these kinds of files contributed in boosting Hotfile’s popularity when compared to other services of the same genre. But Hotfile has visibly decided to now be a lot stricter when enforcing their policy. According to Hotfile, through the publication of this warning, users "persist in attempting to use Hotfile.com to share materials to which they do not have the necessary rights". "Therefore, we have implemented a more aggressive policy of terminating the accounts of users who are the subject of repeated complaints of infringement". This sudden "aggressiveness" has obviously come about following a complaint filed by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) who accuses Hotfile of "facilitating the theft of films and TV series" under copyright, and benefitting from this. Besides the Premium service, Hotfile also offered a rewards program which paid these users depending on the number of files downloaded (and the size of the files) generated directly from their content. The MPAA has obviously made the link with illegal downloading: "in less than two years, Hotfile has become one of the top 100 sites in the world in terms of traffic. This is a direct result of massive digital theft which Hotfile promoted". Whether they are a file hosting service or something else, the MPAA’s threats have obviously rubbed them up the wrong way. Accounts are being closed if they don’t have summaries, with the related files being removed from the Premium users and related networks. What will happen to these users’ hypothetical payments though? According to TorrentFreak, the amounts in question can at times be up to 1 000 dollars, but more often range between 15 and 400 dollars. For the moment, Hotfile hasn’t announced the end of their rewards program. It shouldn’t be forgotten that RapidShare ended their RapidPoints program last summer. Each time a user downloaded files put online by an account, this paid the account holder points. These RapidPoints could be used to extend a Premium accounts lifespan, or could be used to create a new account. RapidShare justified their stopping of the service as they suspected it was being routed, while payments for the spreading of content put online by others than those that held the copyrights being unjustified. It is this kind of content that is most likely to generate downloads. http://us.generation-nt.com/hotfile-...s-2755801.html Twitter File-Sharing App Goes Viral After 2 Weeks A new Twitter application that allows users to share files with ease has taken off a mere two weeks following launch. The free service, dubbed TwileShare, uploads a file with user-generated tweet text and adds a unique short URL that is tracked and links to the uploaded file. In addition to being mentioned hundreds of times on Twitter, TwileShare had over 20,000 visits, rave reviews and 24,000 search results on Google – all in an incredibly short space of time. TwileShare founder Danny Bull said, "The response has been phenomenal. File-sharing has always been a topical subject and by combining it with the popularity of Twitter users can harness social media to share files in a new and interesting way." The service is still in beta but prospective users can request access via the TwileShare web site. Integration with other file storage services and an iPhone application are being planned. Editors Notes Journalists, bloggers and interested parties can access a beta preview of the site using their Twitter account to sign in. http://www.sourcewire.com/releases/r...hp?relid=62871 MP3.com Founder Launches DAR.fm, a DVR for the Radio Anthony Ha Michael Robertson, who already participated in one reinvention of the music business by founding MP3.com, is launching a new way to listen to talk radio and music. His startup is called DAR.fm (DAR stands for “digital audio recorder”) and he demonstrated on-stage at the Launch conference in San Francisco. Robertson compared the new service to what DVR does for television. Just as DVR allows users to record many TV shows at any time, he said DAR.fm will allow you to record the radio shows that you care about. The service browses radio stations that already broadcast their content online, and allows users to search that content by station or by show. Then you just select the shows that you want to hear, hit “record”, and at the appointed time DAR.fm makes the recording for you. DAR.fm allows you to listen to the recording when you want, either in your Web browser or on applications for iPhone, Android, and other phones. It isn’t just a single, undigested recording either — Robertson showed that if you recorded a music station, DAR.fm would allow you to navigate between each song. In other words, it’s Internet radio with control that you won’t find in an application like Pandora. (Pandora, by the way, may be adding talk radio features in the future.) But aren’t there legal issues with these recordings? Robertson said that there’s legal precedent in the cable industry, with court cases protecting the right to make these recordings as long as viewers hit the record button, even if it’s a virtual record button hosted on a company’s servers. Still, Robertson did close his presentation with a little speech about how the music industry hasn’t changed. Or at least the legal departments haven’t — they still want to sue everyone. (MP3.com was one of the first companies sued by the record industry.) Robertson said he’s hopeful that there will finally be some changes as CD sales “crater”. “I swore to myself I’m not going to do another digital music thing, and here I am,” he said, turning to conference organizer Jason Calacanis and adding, “Thanks Jason.” http://venturebeat.com/2011/02/23/da...ael-robertson/ New Music Service Takes Up the Spotify Gauntlet Peter Vinthagen Simpson Scandinavian mobile technology firm Aspiro has announced the impending launch in Sweden of WiMP, a new music streaming service hoping to imitate the success of pioneering Swedish site Spotify. The new service, which has been named WiMP, opens to Swedish users on March 3rd and is already available to customers of mobile telecoms firm Telenor. "WiMP offers an editorial profile, guiding users to millions of songs. Our country editors will select material relevant for each market to help users to cope with the amount of music that a music streaming service can offer," said Kristin Castillo Eldnes at Aspiro to The Local on Thursday. "We think it is more important to take about the relevance, than how many millions of songs are in the catalogue," Eldnes added. It is this strong editorial profile which WiMP hopes will enable it to compete with the likes of Spotify, the pioneering Swedish music service which is soon to add the US to its growing list of markets. WiMP will be priced at 99 kronor ($15) per month, the same as Spotify but without the free advertising funded option. "By being a pure payment service, WiMP contributes financially to artists, record labels and rights holders and helps to create a sustainable music industry. This ensures that WiMP’s music catalogue will always be extensive and deep," the firm wrote in a statement. WiMP was launched in Norway, Denmark and Portugal during 2010, and the firm plans to expand the service beyond Sweden during the remainder of 2011. "We have said that we will definitely open in more countries during 2011, but we don't know which yet," Kristin Castillo Eldnes said. http://www.thelocal.se/32246/20110224/ Music Execs Stressed Over Free Streaming Joab Jackson Free streaming services are replacing piracy as the chief culprit of music industry revenue loss in the minds of fiscally frustrated executives, if a number of panel discussions at a New York digital music conference are any indication. People are listening to more music than ever before, but they are paying less for it, noted Russ Crupnick, a president at the analyst firm NPD Group, speaking at the Digital Music Forum East conference, held Thursday in New York. Crupnick noted that the average consumer listened to music 19.7 hours a week in 2010, up from 18.5 hours per week in 2009. But at the same time, consumers have been buying less music. In 2010, only 50 percent of consumers purchased music, by either buying a CD or paying for a downloadable music track, down from 70 percent in 2006. "We have lost 20 million buyers in just five years," Crupnick said. Moreover, only about 14 percent of buyers account for 56 percent of revenue for the recording industry. "Consumers have flipped us the bird," Crupnick concluded, adding that the lost sales has thus far not been made up yet by other forms of revenue, such as concerts or merchandise sales. The music industry has long expected that sales of music CDs would decline, as consumers move their libraries to computers and portable listening devices. Digital sales, however, have not made up for the shortfall on CD sales over the past decade. Last year, digital sales accounted for about 23 percent of all music sales, which is up only modestly from 14 percent in 2006, Crupnick said. "We never really made the digital transformation," he said. The reasons behind this sales decline have been routinely debated at this conference over the past decade, the panelists noted. In years past, music executives put the blame on digital music piracy -- the easy and free sharing of music with Internet software like BitTorrent -- for eroding sales of recorded music. At this year's conference, however, concern centered on the growing influence of free streaming Internet services, such as Pandora, MySpace, Spotify and even YouTube. Music listeners deploy YouTube as a streaming service, picking the songs they want to hear and minimizing the browser window, noted Eric Garland, who is the CEO and founder of BigChampagne, a media tracking company. "We've given consumers an awful lot of options for free music, which they've certainly taken advantage of," Crupnick said. While recording companies do get some revenue from free streaming services, it is a fraction of what they get from selling a digital track. Garland estimated that a record company gets only US$.0001 for each time a user plays one of its songs, which is far less than the average of $1.00 a track that is collected when a digital copy of a song is sold. And while users seem to have gravitated towards free streaming services, such as the online streams offered by their local radio stations, they aren't willing to pay $10.00 or $15.00 a month for a paid streaming service, such as Rhapsody's ad-free paid subscription. In the U.S. only about 2 million users pay for streaming music services, said Ted Cohen, who is a managing partner for digital entertainment consulting firm Tag Strategic. And the number of paid subscriptions has largely been flat over the past few years, with about 5 percent of the Internet users worldwide paying for a streaming service, Crupnick added. Microsoft offers a streaming music service for its xBox users priced at $14.99 a month, including 10 free MP3 tracks a month. Customer interest, however, "hasn't been what we hoped for," said Christina Calio, who is a director of music relationships at Microsoft. "I think we need to demand more from consumers," Crupnick said. "Why are we being so liberal? Why aren't we talking about asking for more money for the product?" The music industry could take a lesson from Hollywood, Crupnick suggested. He noted how the Hollywood studios have deliberately withheld their products in certain formats to spur revenue. He held up a DVD package of the 2010 movie "Inception," explaining that consumers could either purchase a deluxe Blu-ray packaged edition of the movie for $75, purchase a DVD for around $14.99, or watch it as a pay-per-view or rent it from a video store for about $4. Consumers, however, could not watch it for free on an existing Netflix streaming service. He encouraged the music industry to create a similar form of "artificial scarcity." The practices of the movie industry may be harder to adopt for music industry though, argued Gerrit Meier, chief operating officer of digital operations for Clear Channel Radio. People are already more used to renting movies, or paying to see them, whereas the idea of paying to stream doesn't seem worth the cost. "I'm not sure subscription in itself is the right model. I think there are still a lot of other models that the business hasn't explored," said Julie Lee, executive vice president for business development and business affairs for the Vevo Web video service. http://www.itworld.com/%5Bprimary-te...free-streaming Free Trove of Music Scores on Web Hits Sensitive Copyright Note Daniel J. Wakin Humanity’s musical treasures — Beethoven piano sonatas, Schubert songs, Mozart symphonies and the like — come to life in performance. But they truly survive as black marks on a page, otherwise known as scores. Now a Web site founded five years ago by a conservatory student, then 19 years old, has made a vast expanse of this repertory available, free. The site, the International Music Score Library Project, has trod in the footsteps of Google Books and Project Gutenberg and grown to be one of the largest sources of scores anywhere. It claims to have 85,000 scores, or parts for nearly 35,000 works, with several thousand being added every month. That is a worrisome pace for traditional music publishers, whose bread and butter comes from renting and selling scores in expensive editions backed by the latest scholarship. More than a business threat, the site has raised messy copyright issues and drawn the ire of established publishers. The site (imslp.org) is an open-source repository that uses the Wikipedia template and philosophy, “a visual analogue of a normal library,” in the words of its founder, Edward W. Guo, the former conservatory student. Volunteers scan in scores or import them from other sources, like Beethoven House, the museum and research institute in Bonn, Germany. Other users oversee copyright issues and perform maintenance. Quality control — like catching missed pages — is also left to the public. “It’s completely crowd sourced,” Mr. Guo said. The site has recently begun adding recordings. And through a partnership with a freelance musician in Indiana who runs a publishing business, it offers low-cost, on-demand printing of the music, often at a tiny fraction of the cost of standard editions. The prices of major publishing houses range widely depending on the number of instruments in the work or its length. A set of parts for a mainstream string quartet, for example, can run from $30 to $50. The score library project has turned classical music into the latest wrestling mat for conventional information purveyors — newspapers, book publishers, record companies — and the new digital forces, like Apple, e-book sellers, music-sharing sites and Mr. Guo, now a 24-year-old Harvard law student. While a boon to garret-living, financially struggling young musicians, the library has caught the attention of music publishers. “I don’t know if I would call it a threat, but I do believe it hurts sales,” said Ed Matthew, a senior promotion manager at G. Schirmer in New York. “It is that profit that helps us to continue to bring out more composers’ work.” Universal Edition, a music publisher based in Europe, where copyright laws tend to be stricter, threatened a cease-and-desist order against the site for copyright violations in October 2007. Mr. Guo said he did not have the time or money to remove all the offending scores, so he took the site down completely and posted an emotional farewell. That, he said, galvanized followers to appeal to Universal. Then he took action. Mr. Guo said volunteers checked every score — 15,000 at the time — for copyright violations. He set up a company, Project Petrucci, to take ownership of the site to remove personal liability. (Ottaviano Petrucci was an Italian Renaissance printer who produced some of the first impressions of music with movable type.) A disclaimer was made to appear before any score opens, saying that the project provides no guarantee that the work is in the public domain and demanding that users obey copyright law. The site operates from servers in Canada, where copyright law is generally looser. “We cannot know the copyright laws of 200 countries around the world,” Mr. Guo said. “It is up to the downloader.” In July 2008 the project came back online. Downloads have surged. Some complaints still arise, especially from Europe, Mr. Guo said. “We say we are not bound by E.U. law,” he added, referring to the European Union. “Publishers usually go away.” Mr. Guo said no formal legal challenges were pending. He shows publishers little sympathy. “In many cases these publishers are basically getting the revenue off of composers who are dead for a very long time,” Mr. Guo said. “The Internet has become the dominant form of communication. Copyright law needs to change with it. We want people to have access to this material to foster creativity. Personally I don’t feel pity for these publishers.” Those who “cling to their old business model,” he added, will simply fade away. But publishers point out that users of the site can miss the benefit of some modern editions that may be entitled to copyright protection — and thus not part of the public domain — because of significant changes to the music, such as corrections and editing marks based on years of scholarship about the composer’s intention. “You’re paying for something that’s worth more than the paper you’re receiving,” said Jonathan Irons, Universal Edition’s promotion manager in Vienna. “Everybody expects somebody else to pay for it.” Music publishers also suggest that the site’s warnings to avoid copyright violations amount to little more than a wink. Mr. Irons said Universal was unfairly maligned by its critics for doing what music publishers typically do: use revenue from the sale of old pieces to finance publishing of contemporary composers. “They think we’re sitting on our bums raking in cash, eating cake,” he said. But he made an effort to sound conciliatory about Mr. Guo’s project, saying several times in an interview that “there’s room for both of us.” At the same time, Mr. Irons said, it is important to separate “this very valiant and completely kosher and clean repository of public material, which we perfectly endorse, and this kind of firebrand ‘We want to show the publishers they’re wrong’ kind of attitude.” One blogger on music and technology, Gregory Beaver, who is also the cellist of the Chiara String Quartet, said in an e-mail that the site “has the potential to democratize printed classical music much as open source has democratized the programming world.” But it could stand “a great deal of technical improvement in both its organization of the data and the look and feel.” Many important composers — including Stravinsky, Bartok and Messiaen — are barely represented or absent because the copyright has not expired for their works. But a number of contemporary composers have agreed to allow their works to be scanned under a Creative Commons license, which permits free online sharing as long as the originator is properly credited. At least one professional group uses the site prominently. The Borromeo String Quartet plays from laptops with downloaded scores instead of sheet music. The digital music library is one of its major sources. Mr. Guo said his drive to create a grand repository of music stemmed from his childhood in China, where his parents, both engineers, sent him to study violin at the elementary school of the Shanghai Conservatory. Browsing through a bookstore one day, he said, he was frustrated by how few orchestral scores were available. His father took him to Vancouver, British Columbia, for high school when he was 13. Mr. Guo graduated a year early and entered the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston to study composition. There a world of scores, at the library and in music shops, lay open to him. But the memory of musical deprivation remained strong, and the idea of a bank of digital scores took flight. “It was sort of the winter, and there wasn’t much going on,” Mr. Guo said. “I just thought this would be something that was a nice fit for my skill set. I’m a bit of a computer geek and a music geek and a law geek. That’s how I got started.” And so, over a month during the New England winter, he built an early version of the Internet Music Score Library Project. “It was pretty ugly,” he said. He uploaded the first score: Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 1. “It was sort of a symbolic thing,” he said. The scan is there, dated Feb. 16, 2006. The uploader is listed as Feldmahler, Mr. Guo’s online handle, a name based on wordplay involving the composers Morton Feldman and Gustav Mahler. The copyright questions stoked Mr. Guo’s interest in the law. Thus Harvard Law School. But that was not the only reason he enrolled. “Composing is very good until you have to pay your bills,” he said. With the reports of billion-dollar valuations floating around other interactive Web sites, has Mr. Guo ever thought of trying to profit from his site? “That’s really not my M.O.,” he said. “As a musician I have a duty to promote music. That’s the basic philosophy behind it.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/ar...sic-imslp.html Britney Spears May Be Sued By The Bellamy Brothers Tierney Bricker The Bellamy Brothers think Britney Spears plagiarized one of their songs and they are going to hold it against her. Sorry, that was too easy. The Bellamy Brothers released a song in 1979 called "If I Said You Had A Beautiful Body," which included the lyric: "If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?" In Brit Brit's new song, "Hold It Against Me," she sings "If I said I want your body now, would you hold it against me?" Because of that one line, the Brother are planning to file a multimillion dollar lawsuit against Spears for plagiarism. (Crazy thought, but shouldn't they file it against the songwriter?) David Bellamy, 60, explains, "Howard and I have no personal beef with Britney. She's a talented gal. But professionally we feel completely ripped off." While we don't see any resemblance between the two songs whatsoever, we are horrified by his use of the word "beef." http://blog.zap2it.com/pop2it/2011/0...-brothers.html JRR Tolkien Estate Threatens Lawsuit Over Book Featuring Tolkien As Character (Exclusive) Eriq Gardner A Texas author is at odds with the J.R.R. Tolkien estate over plans to publish a fictional book that features Tolkien as a character and includes a critical analysis of Tolkien's books. Stephen Hilliard is going to court in an attempt to release "Mirkwood, A Novel About J.R.R. Tolkien," to be published by Cruel Rune. The 450-page book is described as taking place from 1970 through near-present day in the United States and features six characters -- five fictional and Tolkien himself. "Mirkwood" is portrayed as both a piece of fiction as well as an exercise in "literary criticism." Hilliard hints that the book will take issue with the lack of female characters in Tolkien's works, including "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" series. But on the verge of releasing the book, Hilliard says he was sent a cease-and-desist letter from the Tolkien estate, which alleged that it had a property right to commercially exploit the name and likeness of J.R.R. Tolkien. The estate also alleged that the cover art and typefaces in "Mirkwood" were similar to Tolkien's work to a degree that it would provoke unfair competition. The demand letter threatened Hilliard with a lawsuit if he didn't cease publishing the novel and destroy all copies. Hilliard isn't waiting around to find out whether the Tolkien is serious about its legal threat. Yesterday, he filed a lawsuit in Texas District Court seeking a declaration that the Tolkien estate's claims were precluded by the First Amendment and by fair use. In some ways, this saga is a worthy successor to the intrigue that surrounded the controversy over "60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye," an unauthorized sequel by a Swedish author to J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye." That book featured J.D. Salinger himself in a fictional setting too, which caused legal alarms for Salinger before he died. Salinger successfully got a New York federal judge to enjoin the publication of the book. The matter was then settled, with the author agreeing to only publish the book outside the U.S. and agreeing not to market the book as a sequel. There may be differences in the two cases, however. "60 Years Later" was said to include some of J.D. Salinger's characters, including Holden Caulfield, whereas "Mirkwood" doesn't seem to be represented as a sequel in any way. In Hilliard's complaint, he cites other fictional books that have used real celebrities as characters, including "Blonde," featuring Marilyn Monroe, "The Hours," featuring Virginia Woolf, "Libra," featuring Lee Harvey Oswald, and "Underworld," featuring Jackie Gleason, J Edgar Hoover, and Frank Sinatra. The latest dispute is another example of how publicity rights and freedom of speech are crossing swords with each other, a topic that's been on the docket this week in disputes. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/blo...lawsuit-101528 Tolkien Estate In Legal Spat With Author Of Historical Fiction; Will Publicity Rights Kill Off Historical Fiction? Mike Masnick And here we go with another really dumb publicity rights case, that may result in yet another book burning in the US. This one involves the notoriously overprotective estate of JRR Tolkien, the famed Lord of the Rings author. An author by the name of Stephen Hilliard has written a bit of historical fiction, that includes a bunch of historical characters and a fictionalized version of Tolkien. The book is supposed to be a historical novel and a form of literary criticism of Tolkien -- though I would imagine it's partly called that in order to aid with any potential "fair use" claims. The Tolkien estate, of course, objects to the entire concept of the book, and sent a cease-and-desist letter to Hilliard, claiming that the book violated JRR Tolkien's publicity rights and "alleged that the cover art and typefaces in "Mirkwood" were similar to Tolkien's work to a degree that it would provoke unfair competition." That may be one of the more ridiculous assertions we've seen in a long time. "Unfair competition" to whom or what? Is anyone going to buy this novel and then say "well, that satisfies my need for Tolkien's work?" It seems like a pretty extreme argument, putting in the cease-and-desist just to pad out the threats part. Hilliard decided to act first and filed for a declaratory judgment (full filing below), to preempt any lawsuit from the Tolkien estate. Hilliard claims that the threats from the Tolkien estate are against the First Amendment, and any copyright issues are protected fair use. It's worth pointing out, by the way, that the state of Texas, where Hilliard lives and where the lawsuit was filed, does have a publicity rights law, and it's one of a few states that allows those publicity rights to continue after death. That said, I'm not sure Texas' law would apply to Tolkien, seeing as Tolkien lived in the UK for most of his life (he was born in South Africa, apparently). Either way, this seems like yet another ridiculous attempt by an author's estate to ban a book in the US. This follows on the (eventually failed, after initial) attempt to ban The Wind Done Gone -- an alternative take on Gone with the Wind -- and the (successful) attempt to ban Coming Through the Rye -- an unauthorized sequel to Catcher in the Rye. I'm still immensely troubled by the banning of the latter book, as it seems to go against basic First Amendment principles on almost every account. So, this case should certainly be worth watching as well. It seems like Hilliard has an even stronger case than with the Coming through the Rye book, since there doesn't seem to be any assertion of Hilliard using any of Tolkien's copyrighted characters -- which was what the judge got hung up on in the earlier case. But a bigger point is that this is, once again, highlighting one of the serious problems with publicity rights -- especially when it comes to publicity rights on deceased authors. Historical fiction is a very popular genre, but a ruling against this book could suggest that historical fiction is not allowed without approval from the estates of every real person mentioned in the book! That kind of result would be patently ridiculous. Hopefully, the court will quickly strike down the Tolkien estate's attempt to ban a book in the US. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...-fiction.shtml Books Without Borders: A Victory For Amazon, But Also For Independent Book Stores Paul Carr It’s amazing, isn’t it, the Borders bankruptcy? Not amazing in a fun way – although the idea of a typically perky Borders employee being handed their pink slip does lend itself to mean-spirited satire: “oh, pink slip, great choice, I’ve been meaning to read that one myself – did you find everything you need today? Fantastic! Do you have a Borders reward card?” No, it’s amazing in a “woah, how the hell did that happen?” way. It seems like only yesterday that we were cursing Borders for driving local independent bookstores out of business. And yet, this time next month, America’s streets will still be littered with thousands of independent bookstores. Borders stores? Not so much. Explaining the global fall of Borders – their UK arm collapsed last year – isn’t quite as simple as blaming Amazon and the rise of ebooks. But it mostly is. The company took a big gamble a decade or so ago in focusing on the notion of bricks-and-mortar book shopping as an “experience”. Stores were built with coffee shops and comfy chairs and warm little nooks in which people could hang out all day and read all the book and magazines they wanted. Unfortunately, after finishing their coffee and their free reading time, many of those people subsequently went home and took advantage of Amazon’s significant discounts to actually buy books. Only those few customers who demanded instant gratification needed to actually pay full price in store. Then, with the arrival of the Kindle, even those impatient shoppers had no need to visit Borders. So, with Borders gone, Barnes and Noble struggling and independent stores still closing in their dozens, is this the beginning of the end for real world bookstores? Actually, I think probably not. In fact I suspect the death of Borders might actually cause something no-one in the book trade ever thought they’d see: a resurgence in independent book stores. For a while, Borders – and the bigger (and for now more solvent) Barnes and Noble – represented a kind of mushy middle for bookselling. On one end of the spectrum sits Amazon – colossal of inventory, quick of delivery, soulless of personality. If you know exactly what book you want, Amazon is the place to buy it. At the other end of the spectrum sit the independents – mom and pop stores and dusty used bookshops, staffed by knowledgeable bookworms eager to recommend something quirky (and possibly second hand) that they themselves have read, and think you might like. Borders plunked itself awkwardly in the middle, trying to out-stock the former (and failing) and to out-personality the latter (and failing). Even if Borders couldn’t replace the independent bookstore experience, the existence of a giant competitor in the their midst certainly hit mom and pop’s bottom line. No-one did well from the fight except for Amazon. Now, with Borders out of the way, leaving absolutely no major chain book store in some markets (including San Francisco, which had three Borders but no Barnes and Noble), the independents have a real opportunity to push back. There are, after all, some experiences which Amazon will never be able to replicate: attending book readings by visiting authors, drinking coffee while flipping through magazines, making eye contact with sexy hipsters over the Charles Bukowski shelves… The biggest opportunity for independents to thrive, though, is in the used book market. Used books represent a huge inventory headache for e-tailers but are wonderfully suited to casual in-person browsing, and not just because they smell so freaking good. By combining a regular flow of quirky new titles, a decent stock of used books, a ton of genuine expertise and enthusiasm, and a drop or two of decent coffee, America’s independent book stores once again have a chance to thrive. And for everything else, Amazon has earned its spoils. As a lover of books, and of bookstores, I have to say that bright future excites the hell out of me — perhaps enough to stop me mourning the bazillion Borders reward points I’ve racked up over the years and which are no barely worth the plastic they were stored on. … A quick tangential update: In other The Internet vs The Book Industry news, attentive readers might remember a column I wrote last month, bitching about how my forthcoming book still didn’t have a US publisher, and proposing ways in which the Internet might disrupt international rights sales. Sadly, my call for an entrepreneur to build an eBay for international rights remains unheeded — however, the column did have one amusing and ironic side effect. It turns out that Gary Baddeley, President of one of my favourite independent publishing houses – The Disinformation Company in New York – is an avid TechCrunch reader (not least because Disinfo sublets part of their office to TC’s NYC bureau). On reading the column Gary took pity on my whining and emailed me to ask for an advance copy of the book. Long story short, thanks to the power of TechCrunch (and, of course, Gary’s exquisite literary taste) The Upgrade finally has a US publisher and will be available in all good American bookstores (except Borders, obviously) early next year. http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/23/boo...t-book-stores/ Free Kindle This November In October 2009 John Walkenbach noticed that the price of the Kindle was falling at a consistent rate, lowering almost on a schedule. By June 2010, the rate was so unwavering that he could easily forecast the date at which the Kindle would be free: November 2011. Since then I've mentioned this forecast to all kinds of folks. In August, 2010 I had the chance to point it out to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. He merely smiled and said, "Oh, you noticed that!" And then smiled again. When I brought it to the attention of publishing veterans they would often laugh nervously. How outrageous! they would say. It must cost something to make? The trick was figuring out how Amazon could bundle the free Kindle and still make money. My thought was the cell phone model: a free Kindle if you buy X number of e-books. But last week Michael Arrignton at TechCruch reported on a rumor which hints at a more clever plan: a free Kindle for every Prime customer of Amazon. Prime customers pay $79 per year for free 2-day shipping, and as of last week, free unlimited streaming movies (a la Netflix). Arrington writes: In January Amazon offered select customers a free Kindle of sorts – they had to pay for it, but if they didn’t like it they could get a full refund and keep the device. It turns out that was just a test run for a much more ambitious program. A reliable source tells us Amazon wants to give a free Kindle to every Amazon Prime subscriber. I don't know if this is Amazon's plan, but it should be. It brilliantly feeds into Bezo's long-term strategy of nurturing extreme customer satisfaction. What could be more satisfying that a free Kindle, free movies, and free 2-day shipping for $80 a year? If the past is any indication of future events, expect an as-if-free Kindle this fall in time for the holidays. Brilliant indeed! http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archiv...kindle_thi.php Internet Archive Partners With 150 Libraries to Launch an E-Book Lending Program Audrey Watters The Internet Archive, in conjunction with 150 libraries, has rolled out a new 80,000 e-book lending collection today on OpenLibrary.org. This means that library patrons with an OpenLibrary account can check out any of these e-books. The hope is that this effort will help libraries make the move to digital book lending. "As readers go digital, so are our libraries," says Brewster Kahle, founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive. This new digital lending system will allow library patrons to borrow up to 5 e-books at a time for up to 2 weeks. People can choose to borrow either an in-browser version (that can be read via the Internet Archives' e-reader that we covered here last December) or a PDF or ePUB version. The latter will allow readers to access the borrowed books from a number of devices, including iPads, laptops, and libraries' own computers. Lending e-books has proven to be quite complicated, for both individual book owners but certainly for libraries. As we have written here before, some publishers have been fearful of the move to digital books, let alone the move to e-book sharing, refusing to allow their books to be made available for lending or only allowing loans with certain on-site restrictions. The publishers participating in this OpenLibrary project, including Cursor and OR Books, have a very different take on the future of libraries, publishing, and lending. "Libraries are our allies in creating the best range of discovery mechanisms for writers and readers - enabling open and browser-based lending through the Internet Archive means more books for more readers, and we're thrilled to do our part in achieving that," says Richard Nash, founder of Cursor. As a number of startups spring up to take advantage of the lending options available on Kindles and Nook readers, it's good to see public libraries also moving to embrace e-book lending. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...ries_to_la.php Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins Dirk Johnson Locked in a climate-controlled vault at the Newberry Library here, a volume titled “The Pen and the Book” can be studied only under the watch of security cameras. The book, about making a profit in publishing, scarcely qualifies as a literary masterpiece. It is highly valuable, instead, because a reader has scribbled in the margins of its pages. The scribbler was Mark Twain, who had penciled, among other observations, a one-way argument with the author, Walter Besant, that “nothing could be stupider” than using advertising to sell books as if they were “essential goods” like “salt” or “tobacco.” On another page, Twain made some snide remarks about the big sums being paid to another author of his era, Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. Like many readers, Twain was engaging in marginalia, writing comments alongside passages and sometimes giving an author a piece of his mind. It is a rich literary pastime, sometimes regarded as a tool of literary archaeology, but it has an uncertain fate in a digitalized world. “People will always find a way to annotate electronically,” said G. Thomas Tanselle, a former vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and an adjunct professor of English at Columbia University. “But there is the question of how it is going to be preserved. And that is a problem now facing collections libraries.” These are the sorts of matters pondered by the Caxton Club, a literary group founded in 1895 by 15 Chicago bibliophiles. With the Newberry, it is sponsoring a symposium in March titled “Other People’s Books: Association Copies and the Stories They Tell.” The symposium will feature a new volume of 52 essays about association copies — books once owned or annotated by the authors — and ruminations about how they enhance the reading experience. The essays touch on works that connect President Lincoln and Alexander Pope; Jane Austen and William Cooper; Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau. Marginalia was more common in the 1800s. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a prolific margin writer, as were William Blake and Charles Darwin. In the 20th century it mostly came to be regarded like graffiti: something polite and respectful people did not do. Paul F. Gehl, a curator at the Newberry, blamed generations of librarians and teachers for “inflicting us with the idea” that writing in books makes them “spoiled or damaged.” But marginalia never vanished. When Nelson Mandela was imprisoned in South Africa in 1977, a copy of Shakespeare was circulated among the inmates. Mandela wrote his name next to the passage from “Julius Caesar” that reads, “Cowards die many times before their deaths.” Studs Terkel, the oral historian, was known to admonish friends who would read his books but leave them free of markings. He told them that reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation. Books with markings are increasingly seen these days as more valuable, not just for a celebrity connection but also for what they reveal about the community of people associated with a work, according to Heather Jackson, a professor of English at the University of Toronto. Professor Jackson, who will speak at the symposium, said examining marginalia reveals a pattern of emotional reactions among everyday readers that might otherwise be missed, even by literary professionals. “It might be a shepherd writing in the margins about what a book means to him as he’s out tending his flock,” Professor Jackson said. “It might be a schoolgirl telling us how she feels. Or maybe it’s lovers who are exchanging their thoughts about what a book means to them.” Just about anyone who has paged through a used college textbook has seen marginalia, and often added comments of their own. Not everyone values marginalia, said Paul Ruxin, a member of the Caxton Club. “If you think about the traditional view that the book is only about the text,” he said, “then this is kind of foolish, I suppose.” David Spadafora, president of the Newberry, said marginalia enriched a book, as readers infer other meanings, and lends it historical context. “The digital revolution is a good thing for the physical object,” he said. As more people see historical artifacts in electronic form, “the more they’re going to want to encounter the real object.” The collection at the Newberry includes a bound copy of “The Federalist” once owned by Thomas Jefferson. Besides penciling his initials in the book, Jefferson wrote those of the founding fathers alongside their essays, which had originally been published anonymously. “It’s pretty interesting to hold a book that Jefferson held,” Mr. Spadafora said. “Besides that, if we know what books were in his library in the years leading to the writing of the Declaration of Independence, it tells us something about what might have inspired his intellect.” In her markings, Rose Caylor gave us a sense of her husband, the playwright Ben Hecht. In her copy of “A Child of the Century,” which Mr. Hecht wrote, she had drawn an arrow pointing to burns on a page. “Strikes matches on books,” she noted about her husband, who was a smoker. Some lovers of literature even conjure dreamy notions about those who have left marginalia for them to find. In his poem “Marginalia,” Billy Collins, the former American poet laureate, wrote about how a previous reader had stirred the passions of a boy just beginning high school and reading “The Catcher in the Rye.” As the poem describes it, he noticed “a few greasy smears in the margin” and a message that was written “in soft pencil — by a beautiful girl, I could tell.” It read, “Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/books/21margin.html No More Crippled iBooks? Jailbreaking Tool's Update Claims to Fix Issues Sarah Perez Last week, Apple updated its e-reader app iBooks with several minor new features and one very unwelcome tweak that affected users of jailbroken phones. Jailbreakers who downloaded the update were no longer able to use iBooks on their mobile phone. "Apple deliberately crippled my device," wrote an angry blogger on Social Apples after realizing what had occurred. Today, an update to the jailbreaking tool Sn0wbreeze may have addressed this issue, according to reports from mobile bloggers and Twitter. According to the Twitter account @iH8sn0w, which is behind the Sn0wbreeze jailbreaking tool, a new update (version 2.2.1) has been released which supposedly fixes the iBooks issue "100%." It also addresses issues affecting Verizon iPhone jailbreakers on iOS 4.2.6, issues for users of the Windows Classic theme and it adds a drag-and-drop feature for moving IPSW files (the iPhone firmware files used during the jailbreak process). DRM Breaks iBooks on Jailbroken Phones The problem with iBooks, in case you missed the news, has to do with e-books protected by FairPlayDRM (digital rights management). When Apple updated iBooks last week, it also introduced code which allowed it to detect jailbroken devices. When a jailbreak is detected, a dialog box appears, reading: "There is a problem with the configuration of your iPhone. Please restore with iTunes and reinstall iBooks." Apple introduced this feature (err...bug?) to protect books whose content was locked down using DRM technology. Not all e-books have DRM, so the problem isn't necessarily affecting all jailbreakers at this point - only those whose library includes DRM-protected titles. iBooks Fixed? The update to Sn0wbreeze reportedly fixes the problem, although we cannot verify this here on our end. (Please comment if you've tried it!) However, according to some forum postings, there is mixed success in using the new software. One person wrote "all is good," while another shouted "it doesn't work!!!!" In other words, proceed with caution, folks. Sn0wbreeze is a different variation of jailbreaking tool that the others we typically cover (greenpois0n, redsn0w, etc.) as it allows you to create custom, jailbroken firmware files in advance of the hacking attempt and then update your device using that new firmware. For those who also unlock their phones (unlocking, or "SIM unlocking," lets you use your phone on other carriers' networks), sn0wbreeze is often the preferred method because it won't affect the iPhone's baseband. Regardless of whether or not Sn0wbreeze is the tool that fixes the issue with iBooks, it's only a matter of time before the jailbreak community as a whole addresses the problem. Of course, we have a simpler solution ourselves: just don't use iBooks. Amazon Kindle and a host of others provide reasonable alternatives to Apple's iBooks e-bookstore and reader app. You can live without it. Update: A clarification on this. @iH8Sn0w implemented the fix within the app Sn0wbreeze. The fix itself was created by @comex. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...eading_app.php Rip ‘n’ Read How I Indexed The Daily Andy Baio For the last three weeks, I've indexed The Daily. Now that my free trial's up, I've had an intimate look at what they have to offer and, sad to say, I don't plan on subscribing. As a result, I'm ending The Daily: Indexed, my unofficial table of contents for every article they published publicly. I'm surprised and grateful that The Daily executive and legal team never tried to shut it down. On the contrary, when asked directly about it, publisher Greg Clayman said, "If people like our content enough to put it together in a blog and share it with folks, that's great! It drives people back to us." They seem like a nice bunch of folks, and I hope they succeed with their big publishing experiment. But now that I'm ending it, I can finally address the most common question — how did I do it? The Daily: Indexed is just a list of article headlines, bylines, and links to each article on The Daily's official website. Anyone can grab the links from the Daily iPad app by clicking each article's "Share by Email" button, but that would've taken me far too long. So, how to automate the process? When you first start The Daily application, it connects to their central server to check for a new edition, and then downloads a 1.5MB JSON file with the complete metadata for that issue. It includes everything — the complete text of the issue, layout metadata, and the public URLs. But how can you get access to that file? My first attempt was to proxy all of the iPad's traffic through my laptop and use Wireshark to inspect it. As it turns out, The Daily encrypts all traffic between your iPad and their servers. I was able to see connections being made to various servers, but couldn't see what was being sent. Enter Charles, a brilliantly-designed web debugging proxy for Mac, Windows, and Linux. By default, Charles will listen to all of your HTTP network traffic and show you simple, but powerful, views of all your web requests. But it can also act as an SSL proxy, sitting in the middle of previously-secure transactions between your browser and an SSL server. After grabbing the JSON, I was able to write a simple Python script to extract the metadata I needed and spit out the HTML for use on the Tumblr page. Here's how to do it. Configuring Charles 1. Download and install Charles on your desktop machine. On your iPad, navigate to http://charlesproxy.com/charles.crt to trust Charles' SSL certificate. 2. For Mac users, start Network Utility to get your desktop's local IP address. Start your iPad, make sure it's on the same wireless network as your desktop, and go into Settings>Network>Wi-Fi. Select the wireless network, and click the right arrow next to it to configure advanced settings. Under "HTTP Proxy," select "Manual." Enter the IP address of your desktop for "Server" and enter in "8888" for the port. 3. Now, start Charles on your desktop and, on the iPad, try loading any website. You should see assets from that website appear in Charles. If so, you're ready to sniff The Daily's iPad app. Indexing the Daily 1. Start the Daily app on the iPad. Wait for it to download today's issue. In Charles, drill down to https://app.thedaily.com/ipad/v1/issue/current, and select "JSON Text." 2. Copy and paste the raw JSON into a text file. 3. This Python script takes the JSON file as input, and spits out a snippet of HTML suitable for blogging. I simply pasted the output from that script into Tumblr, made a thumbnail of the cover, and published. The End So, that's it! Hope that was helpful. If any fan of The Daily out there wants to take over publishing duties, I'll happily pass the Tumblr blog on to you. http://waxy.org/2011/02/how_i_indexed_the_daily/ Police Raid Graf_Chokolo's House - In Response Graf Releases "Hypervisor Bible" grandy Graf_chokolo, who has contributed countless things to the PS3 scene, had his private home raided by police this morning. They confiscated all of his "accounts" and anything related to PS3 hacking. Some of you may remember that graf_chokolo promised if he was pushed, that he would release all of his PS3 hypervisor knowledge to the world. He kept good on this promise releasing what is being dubbed as the Hypervisor Bible. "The uploaded files contains his database which is a series of tools for the PS3′s Hypervisor and Hypervisor processes. It will help other devs to reverse engineer the hypervisor of PS3 further." Download: coolstuff.rar or coolstuff.rar I don’t know how to say this but graf_chokolo, the man who contributed a lot to the scene has recently been caught off by Sony and the Police. They went to his house to grab all his accounts and stuff, yeah could be anything related to his findings on the PS3 security. Guys, SONY was today at my home with police and got all my stuff and accounts. So be careful from now on. He keep his promised though by releasing all his knowledge on the HV reversing. The uploaded files contains his database which is a series of tools for the PS3′s Hypervisor and Hypervisor processes. It will help other devs to reverse engineer the hypervisor of PS3 further. You can find the following (Based on the folders in the archive): * Dump LV2 Reversing * HV Dump of 3.15 Reversing * HV Dump of 3.41 Reversing * HV Dump of 3.55 Reversing * Payloads Guys, i don’t joke, it’s serious. And to prove it, i kept my word and uploaded all my HV reversing stuff. Upload it everywhere so SONY couldn’t remove it easily. Grab it guys, it contains lots of knowledge about HV and HV procs. http://psgroove.com/content.php?801-...ervisor-Bible& GeoHot Asks for Donations to Fight Sony’s PS3 Hacking Lawsuit Emil Protalinski PlayStation 3 jailbreaker George Hotz, also known as GeoHot, is asking for donations to help pay for legal defense fees in his fight against Sony. He specifically calls the electronic giant a bully and then outlines why he needs financial help: Media, I need your help. This is the first time I have ever asked. Please, if you support this cause, help me out and spread the word. I want, by the time this goes to trial, to have Sony facing some of the hardest hitting lawyers in the business. Together, we can help fix the system Donations here are for legal defense ONLY I checked with my lawyers before setting this up If you have another substantial way to donate aside from money, let me know GeoHot says he would hate to lose this case due to resource starvation and so he needs the support of the masses to set a precedent for consoles and all closed systems to come. He insists that Sony sued the wrong guy since he is an advocate against mass piracy and does not distribute anyone's copyrighted work but his own. His goal for the PS3 is to provide users a legitimate path to homebrew, which should be legal according to previous non-console court cases. He also notes that his rap video in which he attacks Sony was just an attempt at humor and he really does take the whole legal matter very seriously. Although GeoHot doesn't specify how much you should donate, he does indicate that Sony has five lawyers while he has two, and that he already has racked up over $10,000 in legal bills. He also notes that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has provided some legal help and so leftover donations will go to them. If Sony were to settle, "I want the settlement terms to include OtherOS on all PS3s and an apology on the PlayStation blog for ever removing it," he notes. "It'd be good PR for Sony too, lord knows they could use it. I'm also willing to accept a trade, a legit path to homebrew for knowledge of how to stop new firmwares from being decrypted." Sony's legal attacks against the hackers that released the PS3 root key and custom firmware began last month. The group known as fail0verflow is accused of posting a rudimentary hack in December 2010 after finding security codes for the PS3. It was refined by GeoHot weeks later when he independently found and published the PS3 root key. The resulting hacks allow homebrew apps and pirated software to run on unmodified consoles. Sony is still threatening to sue anybody posting or distributing PS3 jailbreak code, despite the fact that the company accidentally tweeted the PlayStation 3 security key. Sony's official stance is if you crack your PS3, you'll get banned. http://www.techspot.com/news/42495-g...g-lawsuit.html PS3 Hacker Raised All the Legal Funds Needed to Beat Sony in a Weekend Greg Tito Famed rapper and PS3 hacker Geohot asked for donations on Friday to fund his defense against Sony and got all he needed by Monday. Geohot, aka George Hotz, firmly believes that he has done nothing wrong. When he and the hacker group known as fail0verflow posted the PS3 rootkey online, allowing saavy consumers to install any operating system on the game console, he was not breaking any laws because he paid for Sony's hardware and doesn't have to follow their EULA. On his website Geohot claims that Sony is trying to use his case as a warning and has a team of five lawyers ready to rake him in court to send a message to other hackers. He also points out that other hackers have lost court battle not because they were wrong but because they lacked the money to mount a defense. When pressed with legal fees beyond his means, but a large amount of internet celebrity, Hotz's only recourse was to ask the masses to donate to his cause. Geohot may have underestimated the number of people who support his fight against Sony, as he received enough money for the first phase of defense in about 18 hours. He didn't specify exactly how much he raised, but he did say that he would donate any money left over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Sony doesn't care if what you did was legal, if they don't like it, they sue. Sony tried to sue a guy for getting his AIBO to do non Sony approved tricks, making it apparent that they don't really care about piracy, they care about control," wrote Geohot on his website. "I would hate to lose this case due to resource starvation, and with the support of the masses, I won't. Lets turn the bully back on itself." For his part, Geohot reiterated that he is against piracy and distributing copyrighted work, but he believes that it is his right to hack any consumer product once it is in his legal possession. "Sony does not even try to allege piracy or copyright infringement in this case, they allege I did things like play "Super Mario World, an unauthorized game" on my PS3. And access my PS3 in an unauthorized way. Who are they to authorize what I do with my taxed and paid for property?" he asked rhetorically. "For example, I believe Apple has every right to lock down their iPhone in the factory as much as they want, but once it's paid for and mine, I have the right to unlock it, smash it, jailbreak it, look at it, and hack on it." Geohot is, of course, referring to his previous exploits in jailbreaking the iPhone. It seems that more than a few parties support Geohot's fight against Sony. The Electronic Frontier Foundation offered legal help, and he closed donations early this morning stating that he raised enough to fund the first stages of defense. "Thank you so so much for all of your help, things are looking up money wise. Expect to see a few more lawyers on my responses!" he wrote. I believe that Geohot has a strong case, and if he actually defeats Sony it will have repercussions that will be felt throughout the industry. Console manufacturers have long tried to control the actions that consumers can perform with their hardware, but Geohot's case may demolish any such controls. For my part, like all of the hacks derived from the Kinect, I think that open systems foster development of new ideas and Sony's attempts to curtail such creativity is averse to the 21st century idea of innovation. So yeah, go Geohot! And for the record, Geohot firmly denies that he has anything to do with cheaters on Modern Warfare. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news...y-in-a-Weekend Sony’s War on Makers, Hackers, and Innovators Phillip Terrone Two weeks ago I proclaimed a winner in the microcontroller dev board arena with “Why the Arduino Won, and Why It’s Here to Stay.” There’s still lots of great debate going on, and conversations that still haven’t ended. Is my prediction right? We’ll see what happens in the upcoming months and years. This week I’m going to switch gears a little and declare an enemy for all makers, hackers, and innovators — it’s in a very different space: the consumer electronics industry. And who is this slayer of progress? Sony. If you’re over the age of 25 you likely have a long history with Sony. They were the company we all had something from. If you only had $20, Sony had the best $20 headphones. If you have $500, again, Sony usually had the best. From their world-changing Walkman to a Sony Trinitron monitor, Sony has been part of our lives in one way or another for decades. In this article, we’ll explore Sony’s long history of going after legitimate innovation, hobbyists, and competition. Sony, we’ve been keeping score. We’re tired of you picking on people who want to program their robot dogs to dance. We’re tired of you suing people who want to run their own software on something they bought. Sony has made so many mistakes with technology choices (Memory Stick, Magic Gate, UMD!), perhaps they’ll end themselves soon enough, but we’d like to think there’s at least someone there would wants to avoid Sony spending its last days sending DMCAs to anyone who tweets “46DCEAD317FE45D80923EB97E4956410D4CDB2C2″. I couldn’t find one location that documented Sony’s all-out war on makers, hackers, and innovators, so I started my own (and it isn’t pretty). The talented artists, designers, and engineers who work at Sony deserve better, and their customers deserve better. Don’t worry, I’m not just going to spank Sony. I’m going to give Sony some ideas to right this ship and also let them know it’s time to reconsider suing George “geohot” Hotz, the Playstation 3 hacker Sony is dragging to court for unlocking his PS3 to run his own software on it. There are likely a few other examples, but I’ve boiled it down to a top 7 list — these are in mostly chronological order. We’ll explore each one and why it’s been bad for makers as well as Sony. * Sony DMCA delayed disclosure of Sony BMG rootkit vulnerability * Sony threatens Aibo hobbyists for creating software that enables Sony’s Aibo robot dog to dance * Sony sues Connectix and Bleem to block software that allows gamers to play their PlayStation games on PCs * Sony attacks PlayStation “Mod Chips” and enforces a system of “region coding” * Sony sued Gamemasters, distributor of the Game Enhancer peripheral device, which allowed owners of a U.S. PlayStation console to play games purchased in Japan and other countries * Sony removes OtherOS option, removes Linux support * Sony is suing makers, hackers, and tinkers for jailbreaking of the PS3 to play homebrew games Sony DMCA delayed disclosure of Sony BMG rootkit vulnerability The problem seems to have started when Sony became a content company. They bought music and movie companies, and stopped caring about what they were good at: making awesome, tiny electronics that people love. J. Alex Halderman, a graduate student at Princeton University, discovered the existence of several security vulnerabilities in the CD copy-protection software on dozens of Sony-BMG titles. He delayed publishing his discovery for several weeks while consulting with lawyers in order to avoid DMCA pitfalls. This left millions of music fans at risk longer than necessary. The security flaws inherent in Sony-BMG’s “rootkit” copy-protection software were subsequently publicized by another researcher who was apparently unaware of the legal risks created by the DMCA. Security researchers had sought a DMCA exemption in 2003 in order to facilitate research on dangerous DRM systems like the Sony-BMG rootkit, but their request was denied by the U.S. Copyright Office. Source: EFF. This was classic — people who actually bought a CD back in 2005 were treated to “Extended Copy Protection (XCP) and MediaMax CD-3 software” on their music CDs. This was malware, and if you used it your computer was hosed. Sony later recalled the CDs, was class-action sued, and even homeland security and the DOJ got involved. But that’s not all… Additionally, further investigation revealed that Sony had created its copyright protection software, in part, using LAME code written by Jon Lech Johansen, violating the GNU Lesser General Public License. Source: Wikipedia. To recap: Sony delays disclosing the vulnerability and then it turns out they also violated the GPL. Harmful to researchers, harmful to people who do OSS and harmful to Sony’s customers. It was estimated that over 500,000 computers/networks were infected with this Sony malware. At least Sony didn’t kick puppies. Oh wait, that’s the next one… Sony threatens Aibo hobbyist for creating software that enables Sony’s Aibo robot dog to dance Another classic Sony war-on-makers. Here’s one from 2005, again… …the Aibo robotic pet has gained popularity not only in people’s homes but also in the eyes of DMCA-case watchers. Perhaps Sony’s engineers couldn’t keep up with owners’ demands that their robotic dogs do more than bark, sit, and fetch pink-colored objects. In walked the hacker known only as AiboPet, who cracked the encrypted Aibo code and created programs that taught the dogs to dance and speak, and enabled owners to view the world through their pets eyes. “If it had not been for AiboPet’s information, his invaluable knowledge and his generosity in sharing it with the Aibo community, I would not have purchased an Aibo,” one Aibo owner said. Sony sued AiboPet for violating the DMCA. Aibo-lovers boycotted Sony. Sony conceded to its customers, apologized to AiboPet by rescinding the lawsuit, and the AiboPet-hacked code is back, available for downloading. Source: GrepLaw. The EFF also has a good overview of this incident: Sony has also invoked the DMCA against a hobbyist who developed custom “dance moves” for his Aibo robotic “pet” dog. Developing these new routines for the Sony Aibo required reverse engineering the encryption surrounding the software that manipulates the robot. The hobbyist revealed neither the decrypted Sony software nor the code he used to defeat the encryption, but he freely distributed his new custom programs. Sony claimed that the act of circumventing the encryption surrounding the software in the Aibo violated the DMCA and demanded that the hobbyist remove his programs from his website. Responding to public outcry, Sony ultimately permitted the hobbyist to repost some of his programs (on the understanding that Sony retained the right to commercially exploit the hobbyist’s work). The incident illustrated Sony’s willingness to invoke the DMCA in situations with no relationship to “piracy.” That was about six years ago, and what has happened since? Sony discontinued the Aibo. No one is using their platform, millions of dollars are wasted, and the IP is locked up, unused. Talented roboticists steered clear of Sony, and customers eventually moved on too. One of the best robots in the world to get kids interested in robotics is completely ruined by the company that created it. Pictured above, me with my Aibo running my custom Aibo programs — telepresence through a robot dog! Sony sues Connectix and Bleem to block software that allows gamers to play their PlayStation games on PCs Let’s say you want to start a company that emulates old consoles to play old videos — sounds like a cool company — or maybe you just have a ton of old games and want to play them on your PC. In Sony’s world, this isn’t permitted and (you guessed it) you get sued. In the maker world, it’s completely normal to build your own arcade enclosure or retro-looking system and use a PC to power. We jam PCs into old Ataris, or whatever else we can get our hands on. But when a company made it possible to play old PlayStation games, they got shut down. Another roundup from the EFF: Sony has used DMCA to sue competitors who created emulation software that permits gamers to play PlayStation console games on PCs. In 1999, Sony sued Connectix, the maker of the Virtual Game Station, a PlayStation emulator for Macintosh computers. Sony also sued Bleem, the leading vendor of PlayStation emulator software for Windows PCs. Neither Connectix nor Bleem were able to bear the high costs of litigation against Sony and pulled their products off the market. No similar emulation products have been introduced, effectively forcing gamers to use Sony console hardware if they want to play the PlayStation games they have purchased. We don’t think Sony would win this one then or now, and in July 2010 the DMCA added some new exemptions. Not exactly a get-out-of-Sony-suit-free card, but at least it’s being considered… (4) Video games accessible on personal computers and protected by technological protection measures that control access to lawfully obtained works, when circumvention is accomplished solely for the purpose of good faith testing for, investigating, or correcting security flaws or vulnerabilities, if: (i) The information derived from the security testing is used primarily to promote the security of the owner or operator of a computer, computer system, or computer network; and (ii) The information derived from the security testing is used or maintained in a manner that does not facilitate copyright infringement or a violation of applicable law. (5) Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete. A dongle shall be considered obsolete if it is no longer manufactured or if a replacement or repair is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace; The problem is that Sony is good at making lawsuits and not much else lately. Connectix and Bleem couldn’t fight them so Sony never learned their lesson. Sony attacks PlayStation “mod chips” and enforces a system of “region coding” The next two are pretty similar. Again, overviews from the EFF: Sony has sued a number of manufacturers and distributors of “mod chips” for alleged circumvention under the DMCA. In doing so, Sony has been able to enforce a system of “region coding” that raises significant anti-competitive issues. “Mod chips” are after-market accessories that modify Sony PlayStation game consoles to permit games legitimately purchased in one part of the world to be played on a games console from another geographical region. Sony complains that mod chips can also be used to play pirated copies of games. As noted above, it is hard to see why an independent vendor of a product with legitimate uses should have to solve Sony’s piracy problems before entering the market. Sony sued Gamemasters, distributor of the Game Enhancer peripheral device, which allowed owners of a U.S. PlayStation console to play games purchased in Japan and other countries. Although there was no infringement of Sony’s copyright, the court granted an injunction under the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions, effectively leaving gamers at the mercy of Sony’s region coding system. Sony removes OtherOS option, and removes Linux support Sony’s public blog has become a collection of unhappy customers. When Sony removed a feature they once used to market their console, they received 7,440 comments. It’s the most commented post of every Sony’s blog post that I could find (combined!). Sony once used “OtherOS” as a marketing bullet point, and thousands of customers specifically bought PS3s for the OtherOS option. So many customers were upset, they filed a class-action suit that is still pending. Here’s an overview from Engadget: Sony forced PS3 owners into a tough decision with the mandatory 3.21 firmware update: either lose online play or forgo Linux support. On Tuesday, Anthony Ventura chose door number three — and filed a lawsuit in California, asking the judge for class-action status. The complaint quotes Sony executives on numerous occasions saying how vital and important the “Install Other OS” feature was to the game console (it’s a computer, remember?) and claims breach of contract, false advertising, and several other causes of action against the entertainment giant. Sure, a lawsuit was bound to happen, given the number of angry PS3 owners out there, but here’s the thing: there’s no telling whether the court will grant a class-action certification here, and even if the case gets that far it’s pretty unlikely to force Sony to turn the feature back on — instead, customers will probably receive a token amount in damages while the lawyers get their full fees. For example, a rare, successful class-action suit against Palm — filed in 2004 — got Treo 600 owners only $27.50 in store credit, five years later. Meanwhile, we hear European PS3 owners just have to ask for their money back — which, we promise you, is the fastest way to put an end to your Linux-based PS3 nightmares. Full Complaint (PDF). Part of being a maker, hacker, and innovator usually means you’re fond of installing Linux on something — it goes hand-in-hand with tinkering. Here’s the install page on Sony’s site, which is now pretty much useless. Why did they remove this feature in a shipping product (with a forced update)? The old “security” excuse. …the “Install Other OS” feature that was available on the PS3 systems prior to the current slimmer models, launched in September 2009. This feature enabled users to install an operating system, but due to security concerns, Sony Computer Entertainment will remove the functionality through the 3.21 system software update. One of the worst things a company can do is upset people whose hobby is installing Linux on things. Sony’s removal of this feature brought dozens of teams around the world together, and we were all re-introduced to “GeoHot” (George Hotz). GeoHot was best known for jailbreaking the iPhone, allowing owners to use different carriers as well as put their own software on their own devices. Jailbreaking of phones is perfectly legal in the U.S. now, and we’re guessing it will eventually be fine for other devices too. GeoHot got to work: In the end of 2009, Hotz announced his efforts to hack the Sony PlayStation 3, a console widely regarded as being the only fully locked and secure system of the seventh generation era. Hotz opened a blog to document his progress, and five weeks later, on January 22, 2010, he announced that he had successfully hacked the machine by enabling himself read and write access to the machine’s system memory and having hypervisor level access to the machine’s processor. Hotz also detailed the many things his work could allow, such as homebrew and PlayStation 2 emulation (a feature removed by Sony in newer revisions of the console to tackle production costs). On January 26, 2010, Hotz released the exploit to the public. It requires the OtherOS function of the machine, and consists of a Linux kernel module and gaining control of the machine’s hypervisor via bus glitching. Hotz wrote that “Sony may have difficulty patching the exploit.” On March 28, 2010, Sony has responded by announcing to release a PlayStation 3 firmware update that removes the OtherOS feature, a feature that was already absent on the newer slim revisions of the machine. Hotz had then announced plans of a custom firmware, similar to the custom firmware for the PlayStation Portable, to enable Linux and OtherOS support, while still retaining the features of newer firmwares. Source: Wikipedia. What did Sony eventually do? Lawsuit, and that brings us up to the present, final example. Sony is suing makers, hackers, and tinkers for jailbreaking of the PS3 to play homebrew games GeoHot made it possible to run your own software on your own device. Since then, Sony and GeoHot have been busy. Mostly Sony suing GeoHot. * On January 12, 2011, Sony sued Hotz and others on 8 claims, including violation of the DMCA, computer fraud, and copyright infringement. In response, Carnegie Mellon University professor David S. Touretzky mirrored Hotz’s writings and issued a statement supporting that Hotz’s publication is within his right to free speech. * On January 27, 2011, Sony’s request for a temporary restraining order (TRO) is granted by the US District Court for the Northern District of California. This forbids him from distributing the jailbreak, helping or encouraging others to jailbreak, and distributing information they’ve learned during the creation of the jailbreak. It also orders him to turn over computers and storage media used in the creation of the jailbreak to Sony’s lawyers. Professor Touretzky’s mirror was voluntarily censored following issue of the TRO, but Hotz’s writings and software have been mirrored elsewhere. * On February 12, 2011, Hotz posted a rap video on his official YouTube page explaining his Sony lawsuit. * On February 19, 2011, Hotz started a blog about the Sony lawsuit. And here we are, almost a decade-long journey of Sony punishing their customers, fans, and innovators. George Hotz (GeoHot) isn’t just a random kid, he’s our future. He should be celebrated and considered a role model for anyone interested in science and technology. Sony should take a page from Microsoft’s playbook and develop a PlayStation SDK for innovators with Hotz. Microsoft saw all the amazing projects and hacks with the Xbox Kinect, and they embraced it. Here’s a Microsoft employee celebrating jailbreaking and encouraging Hotz to hack their product! Brandon Watson is Director for Windows Phone 7. Sony should not be suing GeoHot, they should be making a job offer. GeoHot isn’t going away, he has a bright future ahead — just look at what he’s done already, and he’s only 21! He was a finalist at the 2005 ISEF competition in Portland OR with his project “The Mapping Robot”. Recognition included interviews on the Today Show and Larry King. Hotz was a finalist at the 2005 ISEF competition, with his project “The Googler”. Continuing with robots, Hotz competed in his school’s highly successful Titanium Knights battlebots team. George also worked on his project, “Neuropilot,” in which he was able to read EEG signals off his head with hardware from the OpenEEG project. Hotz competed in the 2007 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, a science competition for high school students, where his project, entitled “I want a Holodeck”, received awards and prizes in several categories. Hotz has received considerable attention in mainstream media, including interviews on the Today Show, Fox, CNN, NBC, CBS, G4, ABC CNBC, and articles in several magazines, newspapers, and websites, including Forbes, and BBC. The Forbes article said Hotz hopes to go into Neuroscience: “hacking the brain,” he called it. In March 2008, PC World magazine listed George as one of the top 10 Overachievers under 21. He entered the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2007, quickly after gaining notoriety for hacking the iPhone, but withdrew from the school after 1 quarter. In December 2007, Hotz travelled to Sweden to attend the Stockholm International Youth Science Seminar and talk about his 3D imaging invention (called Project Holodeck) that netted him a $20,000 Intel scholarship earlier that year. Source: Wikipedia. Hotz has a long battle ahead in court. He’s received donations, and he’s “lawyering up” as they say in the biz. We think Sony is going to lose this one. While we’d love Sony to drop this and work with Hotz (as they eventually did with the Aibo community), we’re selfishly hoping Sony sticks to being Sony, goes to court, and loses. The biggest irony of all is that Sony was once fought for fair use and non-commercial use for their customers. In the 1970s, Sony developed Betamax, a video tape recording format (VHS would later overtake Betamax). Universal Studios and the Walt Disney Company were among the film industry members who were wary of this development, but were also aware that the U.S. Congress was in the final stages of a major revision of U.S. copyright law, and would likely be hesitant to undertake any new protections for the film industry. The companies therefore opted to sue Sony and its distributors in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in 1976, alleging that because Sony was manufacturing a device that could potentially be used for copyright infringement, they were thus liable for any infringement that was committed by its purchasers. The complaint additionally included an unfair competition claim under the Lanham Act, but this was dismissed early in the course of the lawsuit. Two years later, the District Court ruled for Sony, on the basis that noncommercial home use recording was considered fair use, that access to free public information is a First Amendment public interest served by this use. This is the Sony before they got into the content business, when they were an underdog that made hardware. Sony was a champion of public interest, fair use, and the First Amendment. It’s time for Sony to get back to its roots. What else? Sony is also missing out on innovation, specifically from their users. From a recent NYTimes article… Mr. von Hippel, who has been researching innovation for 30 years, estimates that when it comes to scientific instruments 77 percent of the innovations come from users. Fields like medicine can be particularly fertile for creative tinkering. A classic example of user innovation is the heart-lung machine. In the late 1930s Dr. John Heysham Gibbon approached manufacturers about building one, but they did not know how to do it or whether there was a market for it. So Dr. Gibbon spent years developing one himself before this essential device was manufactured commercially. Imagine going back in time and convincing Sony to work with, not against, their users. Where would they be now? Sony had decades of innovation and created an industry. What happens next is up to Sony but it’s also up to us. The Aibo community was able to get Sony to reconsider their actions, perhaps the maker world can as well. Here is the press contact page for all of Sony. Please consider sending a polite email asking them to drop the lawsuit against GeoHot and the community of makers, hackers, and innovators. I’ll also be sending a physical copy of this article to the CEO of Sony. This collection of Sony’s missteps is also a handy reminder before your next purchase — where will I spend my next $20 when I need a decent set of headphones? Or a flat screen TV, or something else? Will anyone even bother to hack their stuff anymore, Apple already won the “Walkman” from them – where will Sony innovate, and when? The worst thing you can be in consumer electronics is irrelevant, and that’s where Sony is heading. Besides — if none of this works — it’s back to tweeting “46DCEAD317FE45D80923EB97E4956410D4CDB2C2″. Just like Sony did… http://blog.makezine.com/archive/201...nnovators.html U.S. Sets 21st-Century Goal: Building a Better Patent Office Edward Wyatt President Obama, who emphasizes American innovation, says modernizing the federal Patent and Trademark Office is crucial to “winning the future.” So at a time when a quarter of patent applications come from California, and many of those from Silicon Valley, the patent office is opening its first satellite office — in Detroit. That is only one of the signs that have many critics saying that the office has its head firmly in the 20th century, if not the 19th. Only in the last three years has the office begun to accept a majority of its applications in digital form. Mr. Obama astonished a group of technology executives last year when he described how the office has to print some applications filed by computer and scan them into another, incompatible computer system. “There is no company I know of that would have permitted its information technology to get into the state we’re in,” David J. Kappos, who 18 months ago became director of the Patent and Trademark Office and undersecretary of commerce for intellectual property, said in a recent interview. “If it had, the C.E.O. would have been fired, the board would have been thrown out, and you would have had shareholder lawsuits.” Once patent applications are in the system, they sit — for years. The patent office’s pipeline is so clogged it takes two years for an inventor to get an initial ruling, and an additional year or more before a patent is finally issued. The delays and inefficiencies are more than a nuisance for inventors. Patentable ideas are the basis for many start-up companies and small businesses. Venture capitalists often require start-ups to have a patent before offering financing. That means that patent delays cost jobs, slow the economy and threaten the ability of American companies to compete with foreign businesses. Much of the patent office’s decline has occurred in the last 13 years, as the Internet age created a surge in applications. In 1997, 2.25 patents were pending for every one issued. By 2008, that rate had nearly tripled, to 6.6 patents pending for every one issued. The figure fell below six last year. Though the office’s ranks of patent examiners and its budget have increased by about 25 percent in the last five years, that has not been enough to keep up with a flood of applications — which grew to more than 2,000 a day last year, for a total of 509,000, from 950 a day in 1997. The office, like a few other corners of the government, has long paid its way, thanks to application and maintenance fees. That income — $2.1 billion last year — has made it an inviting target for Congress, which over the last 20 years has diverted a total of $800 million to other uses, rather than letting the office invest the money in its operations. Applications have also become far more complex, said Douglas K. Norman, president of the Intellectual Property Owners Association, a trade group mainly of large technology and manufacturing companies. “When I was a young patent lawyer, a patent application would be 20 to 25 pages and have 10 to 15 claims,” Mr. Norman said. A claim is the part of the patent that defines what is protected. “Now they run hundreds of pages, with hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of claims.” Lost in the scrutiny of the office’s logjam, however, was the fact that the number of patents issued reached a record last year — more than 209,000, or 29 percent more than the average of 162,000 a year over the previous four years. Rejections also hit a high of 258,000 — not a measure of quality, Mr. Kappos said, but a sign of greater efficiency. Between the backlog of 700,000 patents awaiting their first action by an examiner and the 500,000 patents that are in process, a total of 1.2 million applications are pending. Sitting in his suburban Virginia office, not far from a model of the light bulb Edison presented for patent in November 1879 (which was approved two and a half months later), Mr. Kappos proudly ticked off figures that he said proved the agency was heading in the right direction. The backlog has actually declined about 10 percent from a peak of 770,000 at the end of 2008. “We were able to work a 13-month year last year,” he said, referring to the productivity increase in 2010 over the 2009. “We are processing a far larger workload with the same number of examiners.” Still, Mr. Kappos wants to add more than 1,000 examiners in each of the next two years, a 30 percent increase. Mr. Obama’s 2012 budget calls for a 28 percent increase in spending, to $2.7 billion, over 2010. In two consecutive sessions, Congress has defeated a bill that would allow the patent office to keep all of the fees it collects. While another similar effort is under way, a big staffing increase will not be easy in a climate of cuts. Mr. Kappos, a former electrical engineer and lawyer who joined the patent office in 2009 after 27 years at I.B.M., has improved relations with the union representing patent examiners. He and the union agreed on performance evaluation measures last year, the first time in 50 years that the yardsticks had been revised. “I give David Kappos a good deal of credit for seeing where the problems have been and being willing to address them,” said Robert D. Budens, president of the union, the Patent Office Professional Association. “I think it’s a little early to see the full extent of the changes. But we have seen an increase in morale and a decrease in attrition, which is now almost the lowest it’s been since I came here” in 1990. Patent applications come from all over the United States, and the office has forgone satellite offices — until now. Last year, the office announced it would put about 100 examiners in Detroit. Some prominent lawmakers from Michigan have worked on patent issues, including Representative John Conyers Jr., a Detroit Democrat who, when the decision was made, was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which oversees patents. Mr. Kappos said he chose Detroit because it had a large communities of patent lawyers and agents, nearby universities and transportation centers, and relatively low costs of living and real estate. “Detroit has long been an innovation center,” he said. “It’s undervalued, and that is where we want to invest.” He said it would also attract a work force with more varied skills. Mr. Kappos is also pushing an initiative that would charge patent applicants a higher fee to guarantee that their applications will receive a ruling within a year. But that initiative and others are not enough, said Paul R. Michel, who recently retired as chief judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, the main forum for patent appeals. “The office can’t be made efficient in 18 months without a vast increase in finances,” said Mr. Michel, who has made evangelizing for an overhaul of the office a pet cause. “Small efficiency improvements will only make a small difference in the problem.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/bu.../21patent.html TV Industry Taps Social Media to Keep Viewers’ Attention Brian Stelter By the time the first ballot is opened at the Academy Awards next Sunday, millions of people will be chatting about the awards show on the Internet. And ABC will be ready. Trying to exploit viewers’ two-screen behavior, the television network has built a companion Web site with behind-the-scenes video streams, so Oscar winners will be seen accepting an award on the TV set, then seen celebrating backstage on the stream. Experiments like this one are a sudden priority in television land. As more and more people chat in real time about their favorite shows — on Facebook, Twitter and a phalanx of smaller sites — television networks are trying to figure out how to capitalize. It’s as if people are gathered around the online water cooler — and the television executives are nervously hovering nearby, hoping viewers keep talking and, by extension, watching their shows. Experts like Ian Schafer, the chief executive of the digital agency Deep Focus, say that Twitter and Facebook messages about shows may well be “the most efficient way to drive tune-in.” Though it is hard to prove the link, Mr. Schafer sees it firsthand when a news segment catches his attention or a basketball game is in overtime. “I’ll say on Twitter or Facebook, ‘You have got to tune into ‘Nightline’ or ‘60 Minutes’ right now,’ and then I’ll get people saying, ‘Oh, thanks for alerting me,’ ” he said. The water-cooler effect makes big shows even bigger — the Grammy Awards had its highest rating in a decade on Feb. 13 — and gives small shows a new way to stand out. On the same day as the Grammys, Howard Stern demonstrated the latter with his stream Twitter posts during a re-airing of his movie “Private Parts.” Suddenly, some people flipped over to HBO2 to follow along, and Twitter executives were thrilled. Adam Bain, one such executive, wrote, “This is what fiction TV producers should do every week.” Acts like Mr. Stern’s make television viewing more social, even if the viewers are in separate rooms (or states). “In a sense, you are in the living room, watching together,” said Jeff Probst, the host of “Survivor,” who used Twitter to talk with fans during the show’s season premiere last Wednesday while flying from New York to Los Angeles. Mr. Probst plans to make such viewing a weekly habit this season. Television executives say the chats deepen viewers’ interest in a show, making them more likely to watch next time. BET stunned its competitors last month when “The Game,” a sitcom about football players’ relationships with women, drew more than seven million viewers, thanks in part to fevered online chatter. Debra Lee, the chief executive of BET, said “we can now tell when something’s a hit almost immediately — by seeing how many of the trending topics on Twitter belong to us.” Twitter generally lists 10 such trending words at a time, and in the evenings, television shows are well-represented. Television networks as well as some technology companies, Twitter chief among them, see benefits to their business from this behavior. Dick Costolo, the chief executive of Twitter, said last week at a mobile conference in Barcelona that online conversations about TV shows turn the programs into events, “meaning people watch them as they happen,” blunting the impact of digital video recording. He may have overstated the impact of Twitter — digital recording remains prevalent — but it is clear that many people feel they have to watch some shows as they premiere in order to keep up with conversations online. “We know people are multitasking while they’re watching TV,” said Albert Cheng, the executive vice president for digital media for the Disney/ABC Television Group, which oversees ABC. “The question is, how do we tap into that and create a whole different consumer experience?” “We don’t have all the answers,” he added, “but we are definitely trying different things and seeing how people are reacting.” In this television season, ABC introduced iPad apps for two shows, the since-canceled “My Generation” and the medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy,” that sync up polls and trivia to the premieres of new episodes. Those apps, for Mr. Cheng, double as research labs. Much of the experimentation around the online water cooler is happening on cable before it trickles up to the broadcast networks. Lisa Hsia, the executive vice president of Bravo’s digital media arm, said that its online viewing parties for “Real Housewives” reunions gave a 10 percent ratings lift to the telecasts. “The key discovery is that we’re not just driving digital growth, we’re driving analog growth,” she said. The experiments are gaining the attention of TV advertisers looking to leverage the online communication about their brands. For the Super Bowl last year, Nielsen created a blended media score for clients that looked at the impact of both paid media and earned media. The highest-scoring clients had what Randall Beard, the global head of advertising solutions for the Nielsen Company, described as “pass-along currency” in their social media campaigns, like a coupon. “The best form of advertising is a recommendation from a friend and a family member,” something that social media encourages, Mr. Beard said. During this year’s Super Bowl on Feb. 6, Twitter users set a new record by sending 4,064 messages each second, the highest number of messages per second recorded during any sporting event. A recent study by Deloitte of 2,000 American consumers ages 14 to 75 found that 42 percent sometimes surfed the Web while watching TV, and 26 percent sometimes sent instant messages or texts. Analysts say such behavior will become more common as tablets and smartphones become more prevalent. Programs like “The Rachel Maddow Show,” on MSNBC promote iPad apps, and ABC’s Oscar Web site will come in the form of an app. It’s not just television networks like ABC that are eager to wedge themselves into the two-screen experience. A wide range of Web sites, including People.com and NYTimes.com, are creating Web pages and apps meant to be viewed during the Oscars next Sunday. Mark Golin, the editor of People Digital, said the People.com site would feature real-time trivia with a $10,000 grand prize. “We do a lot of run-up content in the days and weeks before” the Oscars, he said. “We always have a big day after. So why not during the show?” Jennifer Preston contributed reporting. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/bu...atercooler.htm Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter Verne G. Kopytoff Like any aspiring filmmaker, Michael McDonald, a high school senior, used a blog to show off his videos. But discouraged by how few people bothered to visit, he instead started posting his clips on Facebook, where his friends were sure to see and comment on his editing skills. “I don’t use my blog anymore,” said Mr. McDonald, who lives in San Francisco. “All the people I’m trying to reach are on Facebook.” Blogs were once the outlet of choice for people who wanted to express themselves online. But with the rise of sites like Facebook and Twitter, they are losing their allure for many people — particularly the younger generation. The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half; now 14 percent of children those ages who use the Internet have blogs. Among 18-to-33-year-olds, the project said in a report last year, blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier. Former bloggers said they were too busy to write lengthy posts and were uninspired by a lack of readers. Others said they had no interest in creating a blog because social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family. Blogging started its rapid ascension about 10 years ago as services like Blogger and LiveJournal became popular. So many people began blogging — to share dieting stories, rant about politics and celebrate their love of cats — that Merriam-Webster declared “blog” the word of the year in 2004. Defining a blog is difficult, but most people think it is a Web site on which people publish periodic entries in reverse chronological order and allow readers to leave comments. Yet for many Internet users, blogging is defined more by a personal and opinionated writing style. A number of news and commentary sites started as blogs before growing into mini-media empires, like The Huffington Post or Silicon Alley Insider, that are virtually indistinguishable from more traditional news sources. Blogs went largely unchallenged until Facebook reshaped consumer behavior with its all-purpose hub for posting everything social. Twitter, which allows messages of no longer than 140 characters, also contributed to the upheaval. No longer did Internet users need a blog to connect with the world. They could instead post quick updates to complain about the weather, link to articles that infuriated them, comment on news events, share photos or promote some cause — all the things a blog was intended to do. Indeed, small talk shifted in large part to social networking, said Elisa Camahort Page, co-founder of BlogHer, a women’s blog network. Still, blogs remain a home of more meaty discussions, she said. “If you’re looking for substantive conversation, you turn to blogs,” Ms. Camahort Page said. “You aren’t going to find it on Facebook, and you aren’t going to find it in 140 characters on Twitter.” Lee Rainie, director of the Internet and American Life Project, says that blogging is not so much dying as shifting with the times. Entrepreneurs have taken some of the features popularized by blogging and weaved them into other kinds of services. “The act of telling your story and sharing part of your life with somebody is alive and well — even more so than at the dawn of blogging,” Mr. Rainie said. “It’s just morphing onto other platforms.” The blurring of lines is readily apparent among users of Tumblr. Although Tumblr calls itself a blogging service, many of its users are unaware of the description and do not consider themselves bloggers — raising the possibility that the decline in blogging by the younger generation is merely a semantic issue. Kim Hou, a high school senior in San Francisco, said she quit blogging months ago, but acknowledged that she continued to post fashion photos on Tumblr. “It’s different from blogging because it’s easier to use,” she said. “With blogging you have to write, and this is just images. Some people write some phrases or some quotes, but that’s it.” The effect is seen on the companies providing the blogging platforms. Blogger, owned by Google, had fewer unique visitors in the United States in December than it had a year earlier — a 2 percent decline, to 58.6 million — although globally, Blogger’s unique visitors rose 9 percent, to 323 million. LiveJournal, another blogging service, has decided to emphasize communities. Connecting people who share an interest in celebrity gossip, for instance, provides the social interaction that “classic” blogging lacks, said Sue Rosenstock, a spokeswoman for LiveJournal, which is owned by SUP, a Russian online media company. “Blogging can be a very lonely occupation; you write out into the abyss,” she said. But some blogging services like Tumblr and WordPress seem to have avoided any decline. Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic, the company that commercializes the WordPress blogging software, explains that WordPress is mostly for serious bloggers, not the younger novices who are defecting to social networking. In any case, he said bloggers often use Facebook and Twitter to promote their blog posts to a wider audience. Rather than being competitors, he said, they are complementary. “There is a lot of fragmentation,” Mr. Schneider said. “But at this point, anyone who is taking blogging seriously — they’re using several mediums to get a large amount of their traffic.” While the younger generation is losing interest in blogging, people approaching middle age and older are sticking with it. Among 34-to-45-year-olds who use the Internet, the percentage who blog increased six points, to 16 percent, in 2010 from two years earlier, the Pew survey found. Blogging by 46-to-55-year-olds increased five percentage points, to 11 percent, while blogging among 65-to-73-year-olds rose two percentage points, to 8 percent. Russ Steele, 72, a retired Air Force officer and aerospace worker from Nevada City, Calif., says he spends up to three hours a day seeking interesting topics and writing about them for his blog, NC Media Watch, which covers local issues in Nevada County, northeast of Sacramento. All he wants is to have a voice in the community for his conservative views. Although he signed up for Facebook this month, Mr. Steele said he did not foresee using it much and said that he remained committed to blogging. “I’d rather spend my time writing up a blog analysis than a whole bunch of short paragraphs and then send them to people,” he said. “I don’t need to tell people I’m going to the grocery store.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/te...et/21blog.html Engadget Loses its Second Editor in Two Days: Ross Miller Resigns Engadget will be saying farewell to its second editor in the space of a week after its Associate Editor Ross Miller announced he was to leave the popular technology website after five years of service with Weblogs, Inc. Detailing his reasons in a Tumblr blog post, Miller stated that “the AOL way” wasn’t the only reason behind his departure but mentions it certainly added to the list of concerns he had about Engadget’s future direction. Miller seems to worry about how Engadget’s brand is affected by AOL’s new content strategy and how much control its staff will have over the site if it does indeed go down the “content farm” route. Miller writes: Quote:
Ross Miller’s announcement follows the resignation of Paul Miller, who made the decision to leave Engadget, posting his own blog entry on Friday. Voicing his displeasure at AOL’s reluctance to assist Engadget’s evolution, Ross Miller believes that AOL has “its heart in the wrong place with content” and that it sees “content as a commodity it can sell ads against” which “doesn’t promote good journalism”. At the moment, it looks like “AOL’s way” is proving to be the “highway” as some of the most important individuals behind one of the world’s hardest working and most authoritative technology websites are leaving the company, questioning AOL’s ethics and long term vision. Ross Miller says “Hey, I’m not leaving the industry. We’ll be in touch.” – we wish him the best of luck in whatever he does in the future. http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/02/...iller-resigns/ Fox News Chief, Roger Ailes, Urged Employee to Lie, Records Show Russ Buettner It was an incendiary allegation — and a mystery of great intrigue in the media world: After the publishing powerhouse Judith Regan was fired by HarperCollins in 2006, she claimed that a senior executive at its parent company, News Corporation, had encouraged her to lie two years earlier to federal investigators who were vetting Bernard B. Kerik for the job of homeland security secretary. Ms. Regan had once been involved in an affair with Mr. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner whose mentor and supporter, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, was in the nascent stages of a presidential campaign. The News Corporation executive, whom she did not name, wanted to protect Mr. Giuliani and conceal the affair, she said. Now, court documents filed in a lawsuit make clear whom Ms. Regan was accusing of urging her to lie: Roger E. Ailes, the powerful chairman of Fox News and a longtime friend of Mr. Giuliani. What is more, the documents say that Ms. Regan taped the telephone call from Mr. Ailes in which Mr. Ailes discussed her relationship with Mr. Kerik. It is unclear whether the existence of the tape played a role in News Corporation’s decision to move quickly to settle a wrongful termination suit filed by Ms. Regan, paying her $10.75 million in a confidential settlement reached two months after she filed it in 2007. Depending on the specifics, the taped conversation could possibly rise to the level of conspiring to lie to federal officials, a federal crime, but prosecutors rarely pursue such cases, said Daniel C. Richman, a Columbia University law professor and a former federal prosecutor. Of course, if it were to be released, the tape could be highly embarrassing to Mr. Ailes, a onetime adviser to Richard M. Nixon whom critics deride as a partisan who engineers Fox News coverage to advance Republicans and damage Democrats, something Fox has long denied. Mr. Ailes also had close ties with Mr. Giuliani, whom he advised in his first mayoral race. Mr. Giuliani officiated at Mr. Ailes’s wedding and intervened on his behalf when Fox News Channel was blocked from securing a cable station in the city. In a statement released on Wednesday, a News Corporation spokeswoman did not deny that Mr. Ailes was the executive on the recording. But the spokeswoman, Teri Everett, said News Corporation had a letter from Ms. Regan “stating that Mr. Ailes did not intend to influence her with respect to a government investigation.” Ms. Everett added, “The matter is closed.” Ms. Everett declined to release the letter, and Ms. Regan’s lawyer, Robert E. Brown, said the News Corporation’s description of the letter did not represent Ms. Regan’s complete statement. The new documents emerged as part of a lawsuit filed in 2008 in which Ms. Regan’s former lawyers in the News Corporation case accused her of firing them on the eve of the settlement to avoid paying them a 25 percent contingency fee. The parties in that case signed an agreement to keep the records confidential, but it does not appear that an order sealing them was ever sent to the clerk at State Supreme Court in Manhattan, and the records were placed in the public case file. Discussion of the recorded conversation with Mr. Ailes emerges in affidavits from Ms. Regan’s former lawyers who are seeking to document the work they did on her case and for which they argue they deserve the contingency fee. They describe consulting with a forensic audio expert about the tape. No transcript of the conversation is in the court records. But Brian C. Kerr, one of Ms. Regan’s former lawyers, describes in an affidavit the physical evidence he reviewed as “including a tape recording of a conversation between her and Roger Ailes, which is alluded to throughout the complaint” that Mr. Kerr and another lawyer, Seth Redniss, drafted for Ms. Regan. That complaint said News Corporation executives “were well aware that Regan had a personal relationship with Kerik.” “In fact,” the complaint said, “a senior executive in the News Corporation organization told Regan that he believed she had information about Kerik that, if disclosed, would harm Giuliani’s presidential campaign. This executive advised Regan to lie to, and to withhold information from, investigators concerning Kerik.” Mr. Redniss, in his affidavit, referred to “a recorded telephone call between Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News (a News Corp. company) and Regan, in which Mr. Ailes discussed with Regan her responses to questions regarding her personal relationship with Bernard Kerik.” “The ‘Ailes’ matter became a focal point of our work,” Mr. Redniss continued. The dispute involves a cast of well-known and outsize personalities; it also includes some New Yorkers who have had spectacular career meltdowns. Mr. Kerik was sent to prison last year after pleading guilty to federal charges including tax fraud and lying to White House officials. The law firm Ms. Regan hired to draft her complaint against News Corporation was headed by Marc S. Dreier, whose firm was cast into bankruptcy in 2008 when he was charged with a $100 million fraud scheme. The firm’s suit seeking the contingency fee from Ms. Regan is being led by the bankruptcy trustee handling the dissolution of the firm. Mr. Redniss was a co-counsel to the Dreier firm. Ms. Regan’s own crash was remarkable in itself. While often controversial for her book choices, which ranged from literary novels to sex advice from a pornography star, her imprint at HarperCollins had become one of the more financially successful in the business. The end came quickly in late 2006. Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chairman, was quoted saying it had been “ill advised” for her to pursue “If I Did It,” a hypothetical murder confession by O. J. Simpson. A novel that included imagined drunken escapades by Mickey Mantle drew another round of outrage. Then News Corporation said Ms. Regan had been fired because she made an anti-Semitic remark to a Jewish HarperCollins lawyer, Mark H. Jackson, in describing the internal campaign to fire her as a “Jewish cabal.” In her 2007 suit, Ms. Regan said the book controversies had been trumped up and the anti-Semitic remark invented to discredit her, should she ever speak out about Mr. Kerik in ways that would harm Mr. Giuliani’s image. The new court documents expand upon that charge and link it to Mr. Ailes. Mr. Redniss wrote in an affidavit that Ms. Regan told him that Mr. Ailes sought to brand her as promiscuous and crazy. “Regan believed that Ailes and News Corp. subsidiary Fox News had an interest in protecting Giuliani’s bid for the U.S. presidency,” he wrote. In addition to serving as chairman of Fox News, Mr. Ailes has taken a broader role at News Corporation, including oversight of Fox’s local television stations and Fox Business Network. As part of the settlement in January 2008, News Corporation publicly retracted the allegation that Ms. Regan had made an anti-Semitic remark to Mr. Jackson. The court records examined by The New York Times this week, which have subsequently been taken out of the public case file, also reveal another interesting footnote. After Ms. Regan fired her lawyers, a seemingly unlikely figure came forward to help settle the case: Susan Estrich, a law professor and a regular Fox commentator whose book Ms. Regan had published, according to Ms. Regan’s affidavit. William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/ny...s.html?_r=1&hp Internet Tool Shows French Web Surfers 'Jewish-Curious' Roland Lloyd Parry An Internet tool that flags up popular search words has spontaneously revealed a deeper trend: French web surfers' exceeding curiosity about whether their politicians are Jewish. Observers say the phenomenon betrays an obsession in a country with a sensitive history of anti-Semitism. The device, known as "Autocomplete" on the most popular search engine Google, is designed to save web surfers time by offering, for example, to search for "car parts" or "car rental" to a user typing in "car". But try entering the name of a politician such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn -- the International Monetary Fund head who could challenge for the French presidency next year -- in the French version, Google.fr. As you type, a list of suggestions appears below the search field, revealing what words other web surfers commonly associate with the name. Along with terms such as "IMF" and "2012" -- for those interested in his global finance work or prospects in next year's French presidential election -- the fourth commonest search offered in French is "dominique strauss kahn juif" (Jewish). The "Jewish" term is also offered for searches about France's President Nicolas Sarkozy, his Prime Minister Francois Fillon, and several other members of his three-month old cabinet. The newspaper Le Monde said that a comparison of searches on various language versions of Google revealed that Autocomplete linked Jewishness to politicians far more commonly in France than in other countries. The same effect occurs on the French version of another major search engine, Yahoo! "The auto-completion technology used by Google could in theory reveal the mentality of the country where these propositions originate," said Olivier Ertzscheid, an Internet specialist at Nantes University. "It is not by chance if the word 'Jewish' appears linked to more search queries in France than elsewhere. It goes back to something in the history of the country in question," he told AFP. French Jews' painful history dates to before the Nazi occupation of the 1940s. The so-called Dreyfus affair in the late 19th century became a by-word for anti-Semitism -- a scandal over Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish military officer exiled for treason and later pardoned, which sparked political upheaval. The issue still raises its head in contemporary politics. Allies of Strauss-Kahn, who is Jewish, saw implicit anti-Semitism in a recent claim by an opponent that the IMF chief did not embody "the image of rural France". Autocomplete on the English language Google.com appears not to flag up "Jew" or "Jewish" regularly for prominent US or British political figures, though such words do appear for some foreign leaders. But Google.fr reveals Francophone curiosity about Britain's prime minister, offering "David Cameron juif." Google says that if Autocomplete turns out words judged downright offensive, it removes these on a case-by-case basis -- but merely associating a person and a religion does not necessarily qualify. "The search queries that you see as part of Autocomplete are a reflection of the search activity of all web users," Google France spokeswoman Anne-Gabrielle Dauba-Pantanacce explained in an email to AFP. "While we always strive to neutrally and objectively reflect the diversity of content on the web -- some good, some objectionable -- we also apply a narrow set of removal policies for pornography, violence, and hate speech," she wrote. In Ertzscheid's view, "what complicates things is that we know that Google corrects certain results, but we do not know which ones. "It is possible that on Google.com there is more cleaning-up done to delete offensive keywords" than on the other language versions, he suggested. The Le Monde report's author Stephane Foucart wrote that his findings reflected "a subtle and latent form of anti-Semitism, which seems only to manifest itself when face to face with a computer." Jean-Yves Camus, a Jewish political scientist specialising in anti-Semitism, interpreted the Autcomplete effect differently, seeing it as a natural "phenomenon of curiosity" in a country with by far the biggest Jewish community in Europe. "It is totally normal that the phenomenon is more widespread in France, because there are more Jews, and because there are more Jewish personalities in political life" than most European countries, he told AFP. "The problem is that what you find on the Internet is often rumour and exaggeration." http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp...DtHK0fIENJs3NA Modding for moolah A Patrol for the Web’s Playgrounds Christine Larson THE dinosaurs didn’t know it, but their world might have narrowly averted upheaval this month. For two years, all the denizens of Webosaurs, an online virtual world for children 5 to 12, could customize their dinosaur avatars with leather armor and other whimsical outfits. Recently, though, the Webosaurs founder, Jacques Panis, decided that leather armor should be available only to premium members, who pay about $6 a month. Players with free membership would be denied that attire. Then the Metaverse Mod Squad stepped in. The company employs moderators around the country who monitor the Webosaurs site to keep its users safe and happy. In this instance, it told Webosaurs that if the change were made, the free users might abandon the Webosaurs world or turn on one another. In the end, the dinosaurs kept their armor, and Webosaurs avoided the possibility of alienating some of its 1.5 million registered users. “I’m running a business, but Metaverse Mod Squad, as the moderators and community managers, is the voice of the kids,” Mr. Panis says. Since starting Metaverse in 2007, Amy Pritchard, its chief executive, has emerged as an industry expert in creating safe, engaging online communities for both children and grown-ups. Metaverse has a client list that includes the Cartoon Network, the National Football League, Nickelodeon and the State Department. It employs an army of workers — often stay-at-home moms — to monitor and moderate Web sites where children create their own characters, or avatars, and can interact with thousands of other users. Metaverse’s employees frequently create their own avatars to help maintain the peace. Ms. Pritchard says the stakes are higher in online worlds intended for children, like Webosaurs. In more adult-oriented sites like Second Life, users must be at least 16 and are presumably more equipped to deal with the threats of online interaction. She has found that keeping children safe has a lot to do with keeping them entertained. “If you just release kids into these online playgrounds with no one to monitor them and no rules, it’s ‘Lord of the Flies,’ ” she says. “But if you can balance safety with fun and engage the kids, I guarantee you’ll have a site with a great group of kids and no cyberbullying.” In three and a half years, Metaverse has grown from a whimsical idea hatched in a Second Life virtual bar into an agency that has been profitable since 2009 and had revenue “in the millions” last year, she says, declining to be more specific. The company is private. WITH her sensible bob and librarian glasses, Ms. Pritchard, 42, looks like a typical suburban mom, until you see her shoes. Her chunky Mary Janes, with oversized stitching, give away her less conventional side. So do the skateboard stickers slapped on the back of her PowerBook. One sticker is from a surf shop, another is from a punk band and two are from “Sesame Street,” added by her 5-year-old daughter, Mary, who in some ways is responsible for the existence of her mother’s company. A lawyer by training, Ms. Pritchard expected to continue as a commercial litigator when she became a mother. But “having Mary changed everything,” she says. She stumbled onto a business idea while exploring the virtual world of Second Life with her husband, Ron, who had taken a job at Linden Lab, Second Life’s creator. Ms. Pritchard was taken with the breathtaking landscapes, elaborate buildings and whimsical avatars — from long-legged blond bombshells to blue giraffes — that users created for themselves. But she says she noticed that few users visited some of the elaborate environments created by major corporations because the companies offered nothing to do there. “Companies had no idea how to create relationships in 3-D,” she says. Ms. Pritchard, however, knew exactly how to make friends online. As a side job, she had moderated message boards for the WB television network and had struck up close friendships with several other moderators. After introducing them to Second Life, she persuaded five of her moderator friends to create avatars and join her regularly at a Second Life virtual sports bar called the Thirsty Tiger. There, Ms. Pritchard struck up a friendship with the bar’s creator, Mike Pinkerton, a real-life lawyer in New Orleans. One night in July 2007, she ran this idea past him: What about a virtual company, providing remote moderators to staff Second Life sites for corporations, and to moderate Web forums? Mr. Pinkerton signed on as chief operating officer of the fledgling business. By the end of the summer, the company had a name, a pool of on-call moderators drawn from Ms. Pritchard’s network, and a client: Newt Gingrich. Ms. Pritchard had learned that Mr. Gingrich, the former House speaker, was planning to create an avatar and to give a speech in Second Life in an area designed to look like the United States Capitol, created by an interactive marketing firm as a space for public debate. Knowing that Second Life events like this were sometimes plagued by “griefers”— troublemakers who might appear in outlandish or offensive attire, create protest signs that could fill the entire screen, or otherwise disrupt activities — Ms. Pritchard called Mr. Gingrich’s office. She offered her company’s virtual security services to a confused aide. “No one had ever heard of avatar bodyguards before,” Ms. Pritchard says. When Mr. Gingrich’s avatar delivered his speech in September 2007, a bevy of Metaverse bodyguards, clad in go-go boots and 1960s-style mini-trench coats, surrounded him. They peacefully resolved the only security breach, asking one guest to cover her bikini-clad avatar in more seemly attire. The potent combination of surveillance and fun turned out to work in all kinds of online spaces. When the CW network started a Second Life site for its series “Gossip Girl,” Metaverse staffed the site, a re-creation of the Upper East Side of Manhattan, with greeters and party planners who ran daily events and contests to engage visitors. “We were like social directors,” Ms. Pritchard said. “We found if we greeted people, told them what they could do, gave them an event card and introduced them to other people, they had more fun.” Ms. Pritchard soon had a chance to test the method against a far more demanding audience: children. While Second Life thrives on a free-wheeling, anything-goes culture, a different breed of virtual world began to proliferate soon after Ms. Pritchard started her company. The sudden growth of Club Penguin, acquired by the Walt Disney Company in late 2007, spawned a galaxy of virtual worlds for children. Suddenly Barbie, Build-a-Bear, Webkinz and countless other toys, games and entertainment properties had their own mini-universes, where children could create avatars, play with one another, care for virtual pets and furnish virtual dream homes. The rise of social media, meanwhile, produced another explosion in social games like Zynga’s Farmville, where players create characters and play cooperatively. Putting children into these social environments raises risks of predators, privacy breaches, inappropriate conversations and bullying. “Anybody can buy a profanity filter, but kids have all kinds of work-arounds,” says Anne Collier, co-director of connectsafely.org, which promotes the well-being of children. “There really is no substitute for human moderation.” But not all companies can afford, or have the expertise, to hire an in-house moderation team, and they prefer to outsource to Metaverse or a handful of similar firms, including LiveWorld and I.C.U.C. Ms. Pritchard’s approach to child safety is more camp counselor than cop. When children misbehave, Metaverse moderators send a private message to the miscreant, with a warning. Repeat offenders may receive a five-minute muted timeout or can be ejected from a site. “Our policy is firm forgiveness,” Ms. Pritchard says. “Sometimes kids, and adults, too, come into a new environment and feel nervous or scared, and get attention by saying something inappropriate. By giving a warning or turning it into a joke and saying, ‘Come join us,’ you’ve given them a second chance to be part of the community.” MANY companies have found Metaverse’s combination of surveillance and social direction appealing, both from a safety and brand-management perspective. In the N.F.L. Rush Zone, the league’s virtual world, Metaverse avatars in striped referee shirts greet children with high-fives and hand out pigskins, the game’s virtual currency. “For many of the kids, that conversation between their avatar and the referee is their first connection with the N.F.L.,” says Peter O’Reilly, the league’s vice president for fan strategy and marketing. “We needed a safe space that promoted the values of the N.F.L. and moderators who were passionate about the teams.” Recently, when a live chat with Drew Brees, the quarterback of the New Orleans Saints, was delayed by 45 minutes, Metaverse referees pacified some 10,000 restless children with trivia contests and games, then rewarded them with pigskins for waiting patiently. Still, outsourcing moderation does not work well for every company. Melissa Parrish, an analyst at Forrester Research specializing in interactive marketing, said a possible drawback of outsourced moderating was that “you have someone who’s not embedded in your company talking as if they are.” To avoid losing touch with their users, some clients, like Webosaurs, insist on having a Metaverse manager working in the clients’ own offices, rather than managing the moderation remotely. “The manager sits right here, and is involved in our ongoing development efforts,” said Mr. Panis of Webosaurs, which is based in Dallas and owned by Reel FX. Employing an entire team of its own in-house moderators, he says, would not be cost-effective. To staff a project, Metaverse assigns a manager, one of the company’s 115 regular employees, to oversee it. Managers then draw on a pool of 500 prescreened moderators around the country, many of whom are stay-at-home parents, students and others with flexible schedules. The pool gives Metaverse quick access to moderators with expertise in a wide array of subjects, from the N.F.L. to Harry Potter. For one project, the company had to find people to judge user-submitted rap videos for a contest sponsored by a major record label. “We needed people who knew specifically about East Coast and West Coast rap, and would recognize gang signs” so they would not be shown, Ms. Pritchard says. BECAUSE she started Metaverse as a way to spend more time with her daughter, the company endorses a family-friendly culture, and does not require specific hours, even for its regular employees. Until a year ago, the company didn’t even have an office. Instead, the staff met regularly in its swanky virtual headquarters in Second Life London. Now, 35 employees work out of Metaverse’s brick-walled studio in Sacramento or from a small office in Brooklyn. The rest work from home. While moderators are often paid by the post — Ms. Pritchard herself was paid 3 cents a post for moderating a WB chat board — Metaverse typically pays contractors $8 to $25 an hour, with no benefits. “For the service level most of our clients want,” she says, “we need to make sure that there’s a dedicated person moderating, even if there’s nothing to do.” While some companies might have doubts about using contractors working from home, Ms. Pritchard is proud of her company’s model. What she pays may not be a lot to a professional in California, but it’s a decent salary for a stay-at-home mom in Wisconsin, she says. In the last year, Ms. Pritchard has found that Metaverse’s approach to dealing with children also works for customer service, which companies increasingly provide via corporate Facebook pages, Twitter feeds or other social media forums. Companies including Kabam, the social game developer, and Horizon DataSys, the data recovery firm, have hired Metaverse to provide online customer service. For social media support, interactions between moderators and customers occur in text, via instant messages, Facebook or e-mail. That makes these exchanges easy to monitor, says Charlene Li, founder of Altimeter, the technology research firm, and author of “Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead.” “With a call center, you can only monitor about 5 percent of your calls,” she says. “Here you can monitor every single one, and if the tone isn’t quite right, you can correct it immediately.” While customer service and children’s virtual play may seem worlds apart, both ultimately come down to respectful communication in a social environment. “They hire us,” Ms. Pritchard says, “because we know how to have conversations when millions of people may be listening.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/business/27meta.html Home Internet May Get Even Faster in South Korea Mark McDonald South Korea already claims the world’s fastest Internet connections — the fastest globally by far — but that is hardly good enough for the government here. By the end of 2012, South Korea intends to connect every home in the country to the Internet at one gigabit per second. That would be a tenfold increase from the already blazing national standard and more than 200 times as fast as the average household setup in the United States. A pilot gigabit project initiated by the government is under way, with 5,000 households in five South Korean cities wired. Each customer pays about 30,000 won a month, or less than $27. “South Korean homes now have greater Internet access than we do,” President Obama said in his State of the Union address last month. Last week, Mr. Obama unveiled an $18.7 billion broadband spending program. While Americans are clip-clopping along, trailing the Latvians and the Romanians in terms of Internet speed, the South Koreans are at a full gallop. Their average Internet connections are far faster than even No. 2 Hong Kong and No. 3 Japan, according to the Internet analyst Akamai Technologies. Overseeing South Korea’s audacious expansion plan is Choi Gwang-gi, 28, a soft-spoken engineer. He hardly looks the part of a visionary or a revolutionary as he pads around his government-gray office in vinyl slippers. But Mr. Choi has glimpsed the future — the way the Internet needs to behave for the next decade or so — and he is trying to help Korea get there. During an interview at his busy office in central Seoul, Mr. Choi sketched out — in pencil — a tidy little schematic of the government’s ambitious project. “A lot of Koreans are early adopters,” Mr. Choi said, “and we thought we needed to be prepared for things like 3-D TV, Internet protocol TV, high-definition multimedia, gaming and videoconferencing, ultra-high-definition TV, cloud computing.” Never mind that some of these devices and applications are still under development by engineers in Seoul, Tokyo and San Jose, Calif. For Mr. Choi, nothing seems outlandish, unthinkable or improbable anymore. And the government here intends to be ready with plenty of network speed when all the new ideas, games and gizmos come pouring out of the pipeline. “The gigabit Internet is essential for the future, absolutely essential, and all the technologists will tell you this,” said Don Norman, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, a leading technology consultancy in Fremont, Calif. “We’re all going to be doing cloud computing, for example, and that won’t work if you’re not always connected. Games. Videoconferencing. Video on demand. All this will require huge bandwidth, huge speed.” The South Korean project is also meant to increase wireless broadband services tenfold. Even as South Korea aims for greater, faster connectivity, Internet addiction is already a worrisome social issue here. Deprogramming camps have sprung up to help Net-addicted youngsters. One South Korean couple, arrested last year, became so immersed in a role-playing game at an Internet cafe that their 3-month-old daughter starved to death — even as they fed and nurtured a virtual, online daughter named Anima. But industry executives are plowing ahead. “The name of the game is how fast you can get the content,” said Kiyung Nam, a spokesman for the Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung Electronics. “People want to download and enjoy their content on the go. But right now it’s not seamless. It’s not perfect.” The idea of the gigabit Internet is not a new one, said Mr. Norman, the American consultant. But large-scale adoptions have not yet taken hold, especially outside Asia. Hong Kong and Japan offer gigabit service. Australia has a plan in the works for 2018. Google is drafting pilot programs for part of the Stanford campus and other locales in the United States. And Chattanooga, Tenn., has started a citywide gigabit service, reportedly at a staggering $350 a month. Any technical hurdles in upgrading the existing South Korean infrastructure are minimal, according to engineers and network managers. DSL lines — high-speed conventional telephone wires — will have to be replaced. But fiber-optic lines already widely in use are suitable for one-gigabit speeds. South Korea, once poorer than Communist North Korea, now has the world’s 13th-largest economy. It recovered from the ravages of the Korean War by yoking its economy to heavy industries like cars, steel, shipbuilding and construction. But when labor costs began to rise, competing globally in those sectors got tougher, so “knowledge-based industries were the way forward,” Mr. Choi said. South Koreans pay an average of $38 a month for connections of 100 megabits a second, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Americans pay an average of $46 for service that is molasses by comparison. Mr. Choi declined to guess what private South Korean service providers might charge for the one-gigabit service. But he said it would be nowhere near the $70 a month charged for gigabit rates in Japan. “I can’t imagine anyone in Korea paying that much,” he said. “No, no, that’s unthinkable.” Mr. Choi’s gigabit program is just one of several Internet-related projects being coordinated by the government here over the next four years. Their overall cost is projected to be $24.6 billion, with the government expected to put up about $1 billion of that amount, according to the Korea Communications Commission. Private South Korean firms, notably KT (the former Korea Telecom), SK Telecom and the cable provider CJ Hellovision, are the principal participants in the gigabit project. The government’s financial contribution in 2010, Mr. Choi said, would be just $4.5 million. For now, most Korean consumers use their blessings of bandwidth largely for lightning Internet access and entertainment — multiplayer gaming, streaming Internet TV, fast video downloads and the like. Corporations are doing more high-definition videoconferencing, especially simultaneous sessions with multiple overseas clients, and technologists are eager to see what new businesses will be created or how existing businesses will be enhanced through the new gigabit capability. One of the customers already connected to Mr. Choi’s pilot program is Moon Ki-soo, 42, an Internet consultant. He got a gigabit hookup about a year ago through CJ Hellovision, although because of the internal wiring of his apartment building his actual connection speed clocks in at 278 megabits a second. But even that speed — about a quarter-gigabit — has him dazzled. “It is so much more convenient to watch movies and drama shows now,” he said. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/te...oadband22.html iPhone Versus iPhone: Ars Puts Verizon and AT&T to the Test Jacqui Cheng The Verizon version of the iPhone 4 doesn't need a full review—partially because you've read a bunch already, and partially because there's not a lot to differentiate it from the AT&T iPhone 4. Yes, iFixit found a number of subtle differences between the two devices on the inside, but from the user end, there are really only two major differentiators: choice of network and the personal hotspot feature. We decided to focus our testing energy on these two differentiators, plus the Verizon iPhone's battery performance, with a special focus on Chicago. (Chicago is where the largest concentration of the Ars staff is based, and Chicago rarely gets any love in tech circles.) But this city has seen its fair share of frustrations when it comes to cell network coverage, and what better time than the present to pit AT&T against Verizon than when you have two near-identical devices on different networks? Network tests The Verizon iPhone will load data slower than the AT&T iPhone in most major areas—by now, you have surely heard this so many times that it doesn't mean a whole lot to you. You probably want to know how much slower and in what circumstances. Will it actually affect your iPhone use in any meaningful way? We wondered the same thing and set out to find the answer. First, it's important to remember that AT&T uses High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) on its GSM network, which offers a theoretical maximum of 14Mbps for downloads. Verizon's CDMA network uses EVDO Rev. A, which offers a theoretical maximum of 3Mbps for downloads. Even though real-world use almost never reaches the theoretical maximums, it's good to know the general limitations before going in. We performed three different tests (and also made phone calls) on both iPhones at eight different locations around Chicago. The first was a standard speed test using the Speedtest iOS app, the second was a timed download of a 15.1MB app from the App Store (Angry Birds Free), and the third was loading a full 4 minute and 35 second video from YouTube. (The video we used was taken in Egypt during the protests last week and has now apparently been removed from YouTube, so unfortunately you won't be able to use it for your own tests.) We wanted to hit up some of the most popular neighborhoods in Chicago and included areas that were residential, commercial, business-y, academic, and some that were a mixture of all of the above. First we'll discuss the broad conclusions, and then get into some of the more nuanced details. When it comes to the best of the best Speedtest results (ping times, download speeds, and upload speeds), the AT&T iPhone won. AT&T also won the best of the best app download times (the best time was 43 seconds) and the best of the best YouTube loading times (2 minutes and 1 second). Basically, AT&T won everything when it came to its best results compared against the Verizon iPhone's best results. The AT&T iPhone also won the best of the averages for all of the tests except for YouTube load times. The Verizon iPhone had the best average YouTube time compared to AT&T, but otherwise AT&T still came out on top when it came to averages (2 minutes and 13 seconds, compared to AT&T's 2 minutes and 17 seconds). And when it comes to the worst of the worst, the Verizon iPhone won (or is that lost?) all of the awards there except for worst YouTube time (the AT&T iPhone got the best and worst YouTube times). The worst Verizon app download time was 5 minutes and 22 seconds. Ouch. On to the nuance. As you can see from the tables above, the Speedtest results may say one thing, but they don't always translate to real-world network performance. Even in the cases where the Verizon iPhone got a faster download speed than the AT&T iPhone, the AT&T app download took noticeably less time than the same app download on Verizon—in one case, where AT&T was measured via Speedtest as slower (UIC test), the download time on AT&T was almost half that of Verizon. Comparatively, the two networks performed very similarly when it came to loading the YouTube video. Verizon's best time (2:09) isn't far off from AT&T's best time (2:01)—the averages are within five seconds of each other, and even the worst times are not too far apart (2:44 for AT&T, 2:24 for Verizon). How is it possible for the Verizon iPhone to lose so badly when it comes to downloading large files—in this case, a 15.1MB app—but get such good times when loading YouTube videos? The answer probably lies in Verizon's recent decision to start optimizing video content that is being delivered to its mobile devices. In this case, the results are clear: even though Verizon's network is noticeably slower when downloading a large hunk of a file that cannot be optimized—an app, podcast, song purchase, etc.—the carrier is able to transcode and buffer YouTube videos so that they flow more efficiently through the network. This results in the video sometimes even being delivered faster than the iPhone loading the same video on AT&T. So, which phone is better for data warriors? It really depends on what kind of data warrior-ing you're doing. Loading relatively small chunks of data at a time (e-mail, tweets, anything text-based) will feel pretty much the same on both devices. Even loading up video and music streams isn't likely to feel much different for the reasons we discussed in this section—Verizon has apparently done a decent job at optimizing that kind of content before it gets to your phone so that, at the very least, it loads in roughly the same amount of time as (or slightly faster than) it would on a faster network like AT&T's. The place where AT&T's network really shines is in loading large chunks of data that can't be "optimized" in any way. That applies to app downloads, music/video downloads (the kind that you plan to store on your phone), podcasts, big webpage or image loads in Safari, chunky PDFs, and the like. If your data usage patterns lean in this direction, it may be wiser to stick with AT&T. All of the usual caveats apply (to both devices) when it comes to cell signal and quality, though: where you live and work and how the network is in your area trumps anything you'll read in any review. Luckily, both AT&T and Verizon allow you to return a device within a certain period of time if you're not satisfied with the performance or coverage, so if you're not sure, it could be worth conducting your own tests. Phone calls The obvious appeal of the Verizon iPhone (versus its AT&T equivalent) is the network. Many users say that Verizon's coverage tends to hit more of their critical areas than AT&T's does, and that the calls manage to stay connected better. There are certain cities that tend to run into this problem with AT&T more than others (anecdotally, we've rarely managed to complete a phone call on AT&T while in San Francisco), and it can vary a lot even on an individual basis. Here in Chicago, AT&T's coverage was not particularly impressive when the iPhone first launched in 2007—there were plenty of pockets in heavily populated areas of the city with little or no coverage at all—but that has changed significantly over the years. Still, Verizon fans often extol the virtues of the network, so we placed a number of calls using both devices to see if we could tell a difference in call quality or coverage. First, we'll say that we had a hard time finding those pockets of no-AT&T-but-still-Verizon coverage that we used to find years ago. There were places, however, where we would get fewer bars of signal on the AT&T iPhone than on the Verizon iPhone. Regardless of bars, though, we felt that the AT&T iPhone sounded more "tinny" than the Verizon iPhone when we made calls from the same locations. The Verizon iPhone was slightly less tinny in all cases, so that was a plus, but it was also noticeably more quiet (despite us making sure that both phones were on the same volume level). On the receiving side, the person taking our calls said that we were "quite a bit louder" when we were using the AT&T iPhone, but other than volume, we reportedly sounded the same on both devices. We were unable to get a call to drop on either device, though we know from experience that call drops only seem to happen when you're on the most important call of your life. We've had enough AT&T call drops in the past to believe our trusted friends when they say the Verizon iPhone doesn't drop as many, but we were unable to trigger this phenomenon ourselves over a period of several days. It's worth noting that not all phone-call-related behaviors are the same between the AT&T and Verizon iPhones thanks to the limitations of CDMA. Apple has posted a support document to outline the differences when dealing with things like call waiting, caller ID, conference calls, and putting a call on hold. ("CDMA networks do not offer the ability to place a call on hold," Apple writes. So, hope you weren't planning on doing that on your Verizon iPhone anytime soon.) Hotspot feature The Verizon iPhone—for the time being, anyway—is the only iPhone that allows users to set up a personal WiFi hotspot without any kind of jailbreaking shenanigans. With it, users can share their Verizon 3G connections with several devices at once over WiFi for $20 extra per month, but it can also connect via Bluetooth or USB to a computer for tethering (which the AT&T iPhone also does). The great part about the personal hotspot feature is that it's so easy to use. You can access it by going into the iPhone's settings and then tapping on Personal Hotspot, located near the top. When you turn it on, the phone immediately starts broadcasting the device's name as the WiFi SSID and assigns a default WPA password, which you can change. There's no way to run the hotspot feature over WiFi and not offer some kind of password protection, and you don't get to choose between WPA and WPA2. If you choose to assign a different password than the one it chooses, it must be at least 8 characters long. The hotspot settings are easy to use, and the phone will always show you at the top of the screen how many devices are currently connected. When you connect a device to your Verizon iPhone's hotspot, the phone begins displaying a blue bar across the top of the screen to indicate that users are connected. Helpfully, it even shows how many users are connected so that you always know whether someone is using the connection or not. This is helpful because, as you likely know, the Verizon iPhone cannot do data and voice at once thanks to the limitations that come with CDMA. While this may not affect your life while you're walking around town with your phone, it may affect you when you're sharing the device's 3G connection with others. When we tested the hotspot feature and then took a call, all devices that were previously connected to the network remained connected. All network activity stops until the call is over, but the connection to the WiFi network itself remains on. When the call ends, network activity resumes without you having to do anything extra (except perhaps refresh the page you were trying to load), so that's the upside. This is the main area where we can see the lack of simultaneous data and voice being an annoyance, though, so if you plan to use the hotspot feature regularly, be sensitive to the fact that your calls will cut everyone off from the Internet. As for data speeds when sharing the 3G connection over WiFi, keep in mind that you'll never get speeds that are faster than the phone itself can get, so refer to our network testing section if you want harder data on what to expect. Subjectively, we found the speeds to be tolerable when connected via laptop. Loading webpages and doing general work was fine and felt only marginally slower (if anything) than using a "normal" connection. Video and audio streams (such as those from YouTube or Pandora) ran fine without hiccups, though downloading a 2.5MB PDF took a little longer than we would have liked under normal circumstances. Obviously you wouldn't want to be torrenting massive files or conducting a huge Dropbox sync, though—this is the kind of connection you want to share with your laptop when you're trying to get some work done or checking in online while out and about, not amassing the world's largest porn collection. Save that for when you get home. Battery life with hotspots and beyond As an iPhone, the Verizon iPhone's battery life is largely the same as the AT&T iPhone, which is to say it's significantly better than the iPhone 3G or 3GS, but not quite as good as the original iPhone. With regular "casual" use (the occasional phone call, some Web browsing, posts to Twitter, listening to music), we could get the device to last a couple days before the needed to refuel. Your milage may vary depending on your own usage patterns. What we really wanted to see was how the battery would fare when using the device as a WiFi hotspot. We tested it several times with between one and three simultaneous connections—there was always at least one device using the connection, while the others were phones that occasionally hopped off the WiFi as they went to sleep and back on as they were unlocked. We were able to consistently get about three hours' worth of hotspot usage on 50 percent of the iPhone's battery, indicating that it could very well offer hotspot services to other devices for between five and six hours on a full charge. Compared to a standalone hotspot device like the Novatel MiFi or Sierra Wireless Overdrive (the latter of which we have lots of experience with), this is pretty phenomenal. The Overdrive rarely lasts us much more than two hours, and that's on a full charge. The same applied to the MiFi on Verizon the last time we tested it. So, if you find yourself in need of a hotspot and don't mind sharing your maybe-not-so-fast-but-generally-tolerable Verizon 3G connection, we really recommend using the Verizon iPhone. The battery life and ease of use is great, not to mention that you're likely to always have your phone on you (unlike a standalone hotspot device). Just be careful not to bump up against Verizon's 2GB data limitation for tethering/hotspot use—if you find yourself needing more, then you might want to investigate some of Sprint or Clear's (currently unlimited) 4G offerings instead, or tether an AT&T iPhone the old fashioned way to get 4GB of data. Conclusion At least in Chicago (and, according to anecdotal evidence from our readers, mostly everywhere else too), AT&T's network performance on the iPhone is consistently faster than that of Verizon when it comes to bigger downloads. (This is the case even when the Speedtest numbers put Verizon first, showing that Speedtest alone isn't the best real-world example.) When it comes to moderately sized or even small downloads, the two aren't going to seem much different to the naked eye without a stopwatch. The hotspot feature of the Verizon iPhone is definitely a plus, especially for those who regularly need a 3G connection on their laptops or tablets while on the go. The battery life when using the iPhone as a hotspot is amazing—much better than most standalone hotspots we have used—but the lack of simultaneous voice and data on Verizon could hamper your experience. The AT&T version of the iPhone is expected to gain hotspot capabilities in the near future, though, so this may not be a differentiating feature for very long. What it really comes down to is your own network experiences where you live, work, and play. Verizon is known for its superior call quality and reduced possibility of dropped calls, though, so if this is an important element for you, it will likely weigh heavily in Verizon's favor. As for me, I mostly use my iPhone for data (though not usually a ton of it at once), so I'll be sticking with my AT&T iPhone for the time being—at least until my contract runs out or a 4G version becomes available on one of the US networks. http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews...o-the-test.ars Verizon Asked to Probe ‘Alarming’ Dropped 911 Calls Todd Shields U.S. regulators said Verizon Communications Inc.’s networks may have dropped a “truly alarming” number of wireless emergency calls during a snow storm last month, and asked the carrier to investigate. Reports indicate Verizon’s network failed to connect 10,000 calls to 911 numbers in Washington’s suburbs during the Jan. 26 storm, the Federal Communications Commission said in a letter to the carrier today that was released by e-mail. “We are particularly concerned that this problem may be widespread across Verizon’s footprint,” Jamie Barnett, chief of the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, said in the letter. The agency wants Verizon to investigate the extent of the problem across its network, he said. “We have been addressing this issue directly with the counties involved, and will work cooperatively to address the FCC’s questions, as well,” Harry Mitchell, a Verizon spokesman, said in an e-mail. The outage, which affected Montgomery and Prince George’s counties in Maryland, was triggered by a “mass call event,” Mitchell said. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-0...snowstorm.html Everything That Can Go Wrong With Windows Phone 7 Update Does Peter Bright It's amazing. Given the importance that Microsoft's smartphone platform should have—not to mention the uphill struggle it faces against the iPhone and Android juggernauts—one would have thought that the company would make sure that delivery of the first patch was rock solid and reliable. After all, robust, universal patching is one of the big advantages of Microsoft's platform over Google's Android. Microsoft's locked down hardware requirements, in conjunction with its centralized patch distribution and offical (albeit carefully-worded) statements to say that all devices would be "eligible" for updates, should have given Microsoft an almost Apple-like patch process: uniform availability, regardless of carrier, regardless of OEM, regardless of model. And because every phone is running the same software, well, it should all just work, shouldn't it? Alas not. Monday, Microsoft started rolling out the first update to Windows Phone 7. The company was non-specific about the purpose of the update; it's not the copy-and-paste update that will be shipped next month, but rather an update to somehow improve the update process. Presumably to ensure that the company can keep on top of any issues that arise, the patch's roll-out has been staggered; none of the handsets I have in hand have shown the update to be available, but many others have installed it already. Sounds simple. Except it doesn't actually work. The two Samsung handsets on the market—the Omnia 7 and possibly the Focus (which are, or were, my pick of the Windows Phone 7 crop, thanks to the way their AMOLED screens make the operating system look so delightful)—are both experiencing "difficulties" with installing the update. The updates are failing to install in two ways. For lucky individuals, the process merely hangs on step seven (out of ten); rebooting the phone resurrects it, albeit without the upgrade. For a minority of unlucky users, the process fails at step six, and corrupts the phone's firmware. What's worse is that for some of them it appears to be bricking the phone completely, rendering it useless. Those unfortunates with apparent firmware corruption can try forcing the phone into download mode (turn off the handset, then turn it on while holding the camera button and the volume down button, and keep all three buttons pressed for 10-15 seconds; then choose the "format" option). If this is successful, it should allow the handset to recover its original firmware and resume operation. But not everyone can get this to work, indicating that the devices are truly bricked, with the only option being to return them to the network operator and have them replaced under warranty. Investigation of the issue shows that Samsung has a range of different firmware versions in-use. Devices with older firmwares—JI9, JID (which my Omnia 7 is using) and JJ4—are often failing to update. The newer JK1 firmware updates properly (at least most of the time). Figuring out which firmware version you have is a somewhat awkward procedure. From the phone's dialer, type ##634#, then press the call button. This will start up Samsung's Diagnosis application (it will also create an icon for it in the phone's programs list, so that you can go back to it in future without using the dialer). In the Diagnosis application, type *#1234#. This will show a screen of detailed version information. It's the first three version numbers (for "PDA", "Phone", and "CSC") that are relevant here. If the firmware versions are older (JIx, JJx) then the update probably won't work; if they're newer (JKx) it probably will. But there are no guarantees. We've asked Microsoft for its position on the situation, but as of yet have received not so much as a "no comment". Microsoft's official comment is: “We are investigating reports related to the Windows Phone update process and will provide additional information and guidance as it becomes available.” Carrier gripes Unrelated to this update failure issue, evidence that carriers are indeed exercising their right to block updates is growing. Though Microsoft still hasn't named names or provided any explicit confirmation that carriers have blocked the update, responses on its official support forums strongly suggest that it is taking place. A Windows Phone 7 user asked when he would receive the initial update; the response from a company support representative said that the reason may be that his carrier has blocked the update. Though circumstantial, this does suggest that carrier blocks are a real concern, and not merely a hypothetical capability. And if carriers are willing to block a minor update with no user-visible changes, what hope is there for updates that actually extend the functionality (and hence lifetime) of handsets? On the upside, the same support thread reaffirmed that OEMs have no facility at all to block updates; carrier tyranny can be avoided through buying unbranded full-price handsets. It wasn't meant to be like this This is a monumental cock-up. Failing to install properly is bad. Corrupting firmware and needing recovery is terrible. Bricking handsets altogether is inexecusable. Who on earth wants to schlep into a store to get a new handset just because Microsoft and Samsung screwed something up? In spite of the handsets being available for four months now, in spite of having a month or more to test the update, it doesn't actually work. I don't know how many different firmware variants Samsung has—probably one per telco branding or more—but it's not going to be thousands. Testing all the different variants was certainly something Microsoft could have done, but apparently has not. I'm sure that Samsung has some blame here too—the problems thus far appear to be limited to its handsets—but if Samsung has screwed something up, Microsoft should have noticed this and forced them to fix it before shipping the phones to end users. As someone who uses and likes Windows Phone 7, I can only hope that this is mere teething trouble, and that future updates will be perfect. But I'm fearful that it's actually a sign of things to come. Even with the minimal variation between makes and models that Windows Phone 7 has at the moment, it looks like it's already too much for the update process to cope with. I can't help but be disappointed. Part of the promise of Windows Phone 7 is that in spite of the range of manufacturers, the software is consistent across different devices. This screw-up makes it look like that consistency is only skin-deep—under the covers, there's ample scope for things to get screwed up. And this was just a minor update—what's it going to be like when we see major updates like the multitasking upgrade that'll come in the second half of this year? I do understand that, as they say, stuff happens. I've had iPod touch flashes go bad (forcing me to put the device into recovery mode), and there have been bad interactions between iPhone flashes and jailbreaks in the past. Samsung Galaxy S users on Bell Canada had a firmware update released just before Christmas 2010 that caused widespread bricking. It's not an unprecedented event. But to screw up the very first update of a brand new, high profile platform, on stock standard hardware? Such that the only solution for some people is to get a whole new phone? That is a truly horrendous experience. The Android update situation, with its haphazard roll-outs and inconsistent availability, is bad enough. But Microsoft, with this update, has one-upped Google. Not only do we have a haphazard roll-out and inconsistent availability—we have ruined phones, too. What should have been a great strength of the platform is now a vulnerability. Microsoft says that it hopes to produce an update that resolves the Samsung incompatibility within three days or so. In the meantime, owners of Samsung handsets are advised not to install the update, just in case it gives them grief. Small consolation anyone who's had to return their broken phones. http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/new...pdate-does.ars Cellphone Use Tied to Changes in Brain Activity Tara Parker-Pope Researchers from the National Institutes of Health have found that less than an hour of cellphone use can speed up brain activity in the area closest to the phone antenna, raising new questions about the health effects of low levels of radiation emitted from cellphones. The researchers, led by Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, urged caution in interpreting the findings because it is not known whether the changes, which were seen in brain scans, have any meaningful effect on a person’s overall health. But the study, published Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is among the first and largest to document that the weak radio-frequency signals from cellphones have the potential to alter brain activity. “The study is important because it documents that the human brain is sensitive to the electromagnetic radiation that is emitted by cellphones,” Dr. Volkow said. “It also highlights the importance of doing studies to address the question of whether there are — or are not — long-lasting consequences of repeated stimulation, of getting exposed over five, 10 or 15 years.” Although preliminary, the findings are certain to reignite a debate about the safety of cellphones. A few observational studies have suggested a link between heavy cellphone use and rare brain tumors, but the bulk of the available scientific evidence shows no added risk. Major medical groups have said that cellphones are safe, but some top doctors, including the former director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Center and prominent neurosurgeons, have urged the use of headsets as a precaution. Dr. Volkow said that the latest research is preliminary and does not address questions about cancer or other heath issues, but it does raise new questions about potential areas of research to better understand the health implications of increased brain activity resulting from cellphone use. “Unfortunately this particular study does not enlighten us in terms of whether this is detrimental or if it could even be beneficial,” Dr. Volkow said. “It just tells us that even though these are weak signals, the human brain is activated by them.” Most major medical groups, including the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute and the Food and Drug Administration, have said the existing data on cellphones and health has been reassuring, particularly a major European study released last year by the World Health Organization that found no increased risk of rare brain tumors among cellphone users. When asked to comment on the latest study, the leading industry trade group, CTIA – The Wireless Association, released a statement emphasizing recent studies that have shown no elevated cancer risk associated with cellphone use. “The peer-reviewed scientific evidence has overwhelmingly indicated that wireless devices, within the limits established by the F.C.C., do not pose a public health risk or cause any adverse health effects,” said John Walls, vice president of public affairs for the trade group, adding that leading global health groups “all have concurred that wireless devices are not a public health risk.” But the new research differed from the large observational studies that have been conducted to study cellphone use. In Dr. Volkow’s study, the researchers used brain scans to directly measure how the electromagnetic radiation emitted from cellphones affected brain activity.. The randomized study, conducted in 2009, asked 47 participants to undergo positron emission tomography — or PET — scans, which measure brain glucose metabolism, a marker of brain activity. Each study subject was fitted with a cellphone on each ear and then underwent two 50-minute scans. During one scan, the cellphones were turned off, but during the other scan, the phone on the right ear was activated to receive a call from a recorded message, although the sound was turned off to avoid auditory stimulation. Whether the phone was on or off did not affect the overall metabolism of the brain, but the scans did show a 7 percent increase in activity in the part of the brain closest to the antenna. The finding was highly statistically significant, the researchers said. They said the activity was unlikely to be associated with heat from the phone because it occurred near the antenna rather than where the phone touched the head. In the past, any concerns about the health effects of cellphones have been largely dismissed because the radiofrequency waves emitted from the devices are believed to be benign. Cellphones emit nonionizing radiation, waves of energy that are too weak to break chemical bonds or to set off the DNA damage known to cause cancers. Scientists have said repeatedly that there is no known biological mechanism to explain how nonionizing radiation might lead to cancer or other health problems. But the new study opens up an entirely new potential area of research. Although an increase in brain glucose metabolism happens during normal brain function, the question is whether repeated artificial stimulation as a result of exposure to electromagnetic radiation might have a detrimental effect. Although speculative, one theory about how an artificial increase in brain glucose metabolism could be harmful is that it could potentially lead to the creation of molecules called free radicals, which in excess can damage healthy cells. Or it may be that repeated stimulation by electromagnetic radiation could set off an inflammatory response, which studies suggest is associated with a number of heath problems, including cancer. Among cancer researchers and others interested in the health effects of cellphones, the study, listed in the medical journal under the heading “Preliminary Communications,” was met with enthusiasm because of the credibility of the researchers behind it and the careful methods used. “It’s a high-quality team, well regarded, and if nothing else they’re showing that radiation is doing something in the brain,” said Louis Slesin, editor of Microwave News, a newsletter on the health effects of electromagnetic radiation. “The dogma in the cellphone community says that it doesn’t do anything. What she’s shown is that it does do something, and the next thing to find out is what it’s doing and whether it’s causing harm.” Dr. Ronald B. Herberman, former director of the Pittsburgh Cancer Institute and now chief medical officer for the Intrexon Corporation, a biotechnology company in Germantown, Md., said, “I think it’s a very well-designed study, and they have clearly shown that there is biologic activity being induced in the nerve cells in the region where the antenna is the closest.” Dr. Herberman said skeptics about the risks of cellphones have focused on the fact that the type of radiation they emit is too weak to break chemical bonds and cannot plausibly be implicated in cancer. However, the new research suggests a potentially different pathway for cancer and other health problems to develop. “I think it’s an important new direction to go in for biologists to start delving deeper into sorting out what might be going on,” Dr. Herberman said. In an editorial accompanying the Journal article, Henry C. Lai, a University of Washington professor of bioengineering who has long raised concerns about cellphone safety, said he hoped the data would broaden the focus of cellphone research and health. “The bottom line is that it adds to the concern that cellphone use could be a health hazard,” said Dr. Lai. “Everybody is worried about brain cancer, and the jury is still out on that question. There are actually quite a lot of studies showing cellphone radiation associated with other events, like sleep disturbances. But people have not been paying a lot of attention to these other types of studies.” Dr. Volkow said future research may even show that the electromagnetic waves emitted from cellphones could be used to stimulate the brain for therapeutic reasons. She said the research should not set off alarms about cellphone use because simple precautions like using a headset or earpiece can alleviate any concern. “It does not in any way preclude or decrease my cellphone utilization,” she said. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/0...rain-activity/ Skype Hits New Record: Approaching 30 Million Concurrent Users Marshall Kirkpatrick A record 29,527,474 people were logged into Skype all at the same time today, around noon PST. The new high is up 4.3% from the previous high mark set last month, according to the watch-dog blog Skype Journal. Skype Journal Editor Phil Wolff says his "rambunctious" December 2010 prediction for 2011 to be the year Skype passed 30 million concurrent users logged-in now seems conservative. Wolff predicted the company would "credit growth in the workplace and mobile devices with video-chat-ready cameras." Skype's rapid growth comes just months after the service experienced its worst down-time in years right before Christmas, 2010. Never the less, Skype saw growth in the number of international calling minutes made last year that was more than double what every other phone company on earth combined saw. Perhaps because it's free between Skype users. Not everyone is a Skype user, however. Skype Journal now estimates there are about 177 million active Skype users around the world. That's a mere one third as many people as use Facebook, for example. Skype isn't the only Voice Over IP option when calling outside the network at all. Experienced international caller and CEO of telephony startup MrNumber Jason Devitt, for example, recently discussed the pros and cons of a wide variety of alternatives in a discussion on Quora. Devitt advises that people who need to call one international number regularly should use Jajah or Rebtel because they are the cheapest. Numerous other competitors, including Google Voice, offer roughly similar services as well. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...lion_concu.php Android, Video Games Dominate Mobile Confab John Gaudiosi The 2011 instellment of Mobile World Congress, which gathered 60,000 professionals from 200 countries, served as the official coming-out party for the next generation of Google Android smartphones and tablets. Android had a massive, two-floor booth packed with all the new smartphones and tablets shipping in the coming months running off the various Android platforms, including Sony Ericsson's Xperia Play phone, which operates on Gingerbread, and LG's Optimus Pad tablet, which is powered by Honeycomb. The Android booth featured a huge arcade section where developers from around the world showcased the next generation of mobile games. While graphics and gameplay have improved in the mobile space over the years, the new wave of smartphones and tablets will push the capabilities of these devices to the level of PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 -- and beyond even the best iPhone 4 and iPad games that are currently on the market. "Video games drive the mobile business because they're the best showcase of what these new devices can really do," said Gonzague de Vallois, senior vice president of publishing at Gameloft, one of the largest mobile game companies in the world. "Our experience in the console market is helping us deliver quality titles to these new devices for the mobile market." Gameloft, which previously supported Apple's launch of iPhone and iPad with games, had franchises like Asphalt 6, Let's Golf and NOVA running in autostereoscopic (glasses free) 3D at LG's booth on the new Optimus 3D phone. The company also will support the March launch of Xperia Play with 10 titles, including Star Battalion. And the publisher has recently started developing new games to run on NVIDIA's Tegra 2 dual-core technology. Tegra 2 brings PC gaming graphics and speed from just a few years ago to the mobile space on new Android smartphones and tablets, which will run 10x faster than the processors in today's smartphones like iPhone 4. The Tegra 2's dedicated graphics processor also delivers 1080p HDTV playback of movies, TV shows and games. On battery life, Tegra's ultra low-power design delivers over 16 hours of HD video or 140 hours of music on a single charge. "This technology will impact the games we release because it will absolutely increase the available market," said Mike Breslin, vice president of marketing, Glu Mobile. "There will be a lot more people with access to these new smartphones and tablets thanks to the marketing push from Google, NVIDIA and all of the consumer electronics companies, carriers and headset makers." Last fall, Android overtook Symbian to become the top smartphone platform in the world. According to research firm Canalys, global sales of Android phones in the fourth quarter of 2010 was 33.3 million, compared to 31 million Symbian phones, 16.2 million Apple phones, 14.6 million RIM devices and 3.1 million Microsoft phones. Overall, the global smartphone market grew 89% compared to the fourth quarter of 2009, exceeding 100 million units for the first time. And 2011 is poised to be an even bigger breakthrough year for Android. Another new trend showcased at Mobile World Congress was cross-platform gaming on Android and Tegra devices, which will allow players to team up in games like Trendy Entertainment's Dungeon Defenders: First Strike to play across PlayStation 3, PC and mobile platforms. "This is a really profound change in the way mobile games are designed," said Jeremy Stieglitz, development director at Trendy Entertainment. "There will be a huge influx of quality content very quickly on these new Tegra-based platforms, where you basically can have the same game running on a mobile device as you have on a PC or console." NVIDIA showcased brand new Tegra 3 technology at the show, code-named Kal-El after Superman. New phones will ship with this quad-core chip beginning this August and tablets will follow in late fall. NVIDIA demonstrated a game, Great Battles Medieval, that ran at 720p HD and featured 650 enemy soldiers on the field at once. According to Michael Rayfield, general manager of NVIDIA's mobile business unit, over the next three years projects codenamed Wayne, Logan, and Stark will further push the gaming potential of mobile devices. By 2014, when Stark becomes a reality, the technology will feature a 75x improvement over the performance of today's Tegra 2. "Our customers and partners have already indicated that they're confident they can use everything we give them," said Rayfield. HTC introduced a new tablet, Flyer, which will introduce streaming subscription video game service OnLive to the mobile space. Gamers will be able to play games like Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, NBA 2K11 and LEGO Harry Potter on the new tablet, or connect the tablet to any HDTV, without needing to buy any new hardware or software. There is a negative side to the increased capabilities of mobile gaming. And that's for portable gaming companies like Sony, which will launch its Next Generation PlayStation (NGP) system this fall. "IHS believes that the market opportunity for a specialist device such as the NGP is shrinking rather than growing, and that short- and medium-term market conditions are less supportive of the release of a high-end handheld console," said Piers Harding-Rolls, video game analyst at HIS Screen Digest. Harding-Rolls said by the end of the fourth year after its release, the NGP is expected to accrue a total installed base of 22.8 million units. In comparison, the PSP achieved a base of 30.7 million, 34.8% higher, during the same length of time. "The competitive landscape for handheld and on-the-move gaming has been highly disrupted in recent times, with disruption occurring on the device, content and distribution levels," added Harding-Rolls. Moving forward, more consumers will use one device for everything, including gaming, multimedia, entertainment and Web browsing. And Android is perfectly positioned to take advantage of this shift. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...71K02T20110221 Apple in Talks to Improve Sound Quality of Music Downloads Mark Milian Apple and other digital music retailers are in discussions with record labels to improve the quality of the song files they sell, executives involved in the talks say. As a result, online music stores could eventually offer songs that sound truer to their original recordings, perhaps at a premium price. Professional music producers generally capture studio recordings in a 24-bit, high-fidelity audio format. Before the originals, or "masters" in industry parlance, are pressed onto CDs or distributed to digital sellers like Apple's iTunes, they're downgraded to 16-bit files. From there, the audio can be compressed further in order to minimize the time the music will take to download or to allow it to be streamed on-the-fly over the internet. Why don't record labels at least give retailers the option of working from higher-grade recordings? "Why?" Jimmy Iovine, a longtime music executive, asked rhetorically. "I don't know. It's not because they're geniuses." 'Changing the pipes' Iovine, in addition to being the chairman of Universal Music Group's Interscope-Geffen-A&M record label, has a venture with hip hop artist Dr. Dre called Beats Audio. The company designs high-end headphones and other audio equipment. Work from Beats Audio will be included in the upcoming TouchPad tablet computer from Hewlett-Packard. HP has sold 1 million laptops with Beats Audio technology. Iovine briefly discussed the topic of improving the caliber of music offered by download services onstage during a two-hour HP news conference unveiling the TouchPad and other products. "We've gone back now at Universal, and we're changing our pipes to 24 bit. And Apple has been great," Iovine said. "We're working with them and other digital services -- download services -- to change to 24 bit. And some of their electronic devices are going to be changed as well. So we have a long road ahead of us." A new high-end smartphone, called the Pre 3, was also announced at HP's event. But the device only has mono speakers, according to technical specifications provided by HP. Many models of Mac computers can play 24-bit sound, and the iTunes program is capable of handling such files. But most portable electronics, and many computers, don't support 24-bit audio. To make the jump to higher-quality music attractive for Apple, the Cupertino, California, company would have to retool future versions of iPods and iPhones so they can play higher-quality files. "Paul McCartney can master The Beatles albums all he wants, (but) when you play them through a Dell computer, it sounds like you're playing them through a portable television," Iovine said. Apple secured rights to begin selling The Beatles catalog in November as the exclusive digital retailer. Apple has upgraded the quality of its music catalog once before. In January 2009, the iTunes Store began offering most tracks in a bit-rate twice as high as its previous standard and free of copy-protection. Apple had piloted the program two years prior with music giant EMI. ITunes controls about 66% of the paid digital-download market. Amazon MP3 trails with 13%, according to research from the NPD Group. Apple and Amazon declined to comment for this story. Representatives for the big four record companies didn't respond to requests for comment. eMusic, a smaller digital retailer, is investigating whether customers would be willing to pay for higher-quality downloads, Adam Klein, the company's CEO, said in a statement. The eMusic website recently began selling albums from major labels, including the Universal Music Group, which Iovine is negotiating on behalf of. Universal and eMusic executives have met regularly "to discuss future initiatives," Klein said. The advent of streaming Sony Network Entertainment launched its subscription music-streaming service, called Music Unlimited Powered by Qriocity, in the United States and other countries on Thursday. The new company is owned by Sony, which also owns major label Sony Music Entertainment. Shawn Layden, Sony Network's chief operating officer, said most people don't care, or even notice, if their music is flawed. That is a common sentiment among industry watchers. "The challenges of music right now -- I don't think the primary one is a quality issue," he said. "Music lovers worldwide are mostly keen right now on the convenience of access -- make it easier for me to have." The Qriocity service streams music at 48 kilobits per second, Layden said. Current downloads from iTunes are more than five times higher in bit-rate quality. But Qriocity uses the latest methods of compression so the music still sounds good, he said. Regardless, offering premium-quality downloads could help a la carte retailers like iTunes hold on to valuable high-volume music fanatics. Otherwise, those customers could gravitate to the growing number of services -- like Sony's, Napster and others -- that offer millions of streaming tracks for the monthly price of a single album. The initiative could also serve as a sparkplug for digital music sales in general. Worldwide revenue from paid downloads is flattening, as sales of physical CDs -- another 16-bit format -- continue to sink, according to a report by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Support from musicians Some notable music acts have broken from labels to handle their own distribution and have found a sound business in selling primo music files, usually to their most diehard fans. Renowned rock band Radiohead began selling digital versions of its new album on its website Friday. For $9, fans can download MP3 files in a higher bit-rate than what iTunes would offer, and for $14, they can get the uncompressed audio. A Radiohead representative didn't respond to a question about preliminary sales. Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor released figures in 2008 for a record he produced by rapper Saul Williams. Back then, about 87% chose either the highest quality MP3 or the uncompressed format, the data shows. Reznor's bands now usually offer high-fidelity versions of their own songs. For musicians who pore over every aural detail, the digital age can be frustrating. "Most of you aren't hearing it the way it's supposed to sound," Dr. Dre said in a Beats Audio promotional video. "And you should -- hear it the way I do." At the HP event, Iovine summed up his mission and the purpose of this industry initiative. "What we're trying to do here is fix the degradation of music that the digital revolution has caused," he said. "It's one thing to have music stolen through the ease of digital processing. But it's another thing to destroy the quality of it. And that's what's happening on a massive scale." http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/02/22/24.bit.music/ No More Desktop Linux Systems in the German Foreign Office In response to a question (PDF German language) on "the use of open source software in the Foreign Office and other Government departments" submitted in parliament by the SPD (Social Democrats, the main German opposition party), the German government has confirmed (PDF German language) that the German Foreign Office is to switch back to Windows desktop systems. The Foreign Office started migrating its servers to Linux in 2001 and since 2005 has also used open source software such as Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice on its desktop systems. Mobile systems use a Debian GNU/Linux based Linux and office PCs are configured with a dual Windows / Linux boot. Back in 2007, the Foreign Office's IT department regarded the use of open source software on servers and desktop systems as a success story. IT costs per workspace were reported to be lower than in any other government department, despite the demands imposed by running a high security, globally distributed IT infrastructure. The use of Linux desktop systems in the Foreign Office also acted as a beacon for the use of open source software in other government departments. Now the Foreign Office is back-pedalling. The government's response to the SPD's question states that, although open source has demonstrated its worth, particularly on servers, the cost of adapting and extending it, for example in writing printer and scanner drivers, and of training, have proved greater than anticipated. The extent to which the potential savings trumpeted in 2007 have proved realisable has, according to the government, been limited – though it declines to give any actual figures. Users have, it claims, also complained of missing functionality, a lack of usability and poor interoperability. The Foreign Office launched a modernisation process in 2010, one component of which was the pursuit of a new IT strategy moving away from open source software and towards "standardised proprietary client solutions" as used in other ministries. Specifically, this means a return to Windows XP, to be upgraded at some point to Windows 7, Office 2010 and Outlook. According to the government, this will not give rise to any immediate costs, indeed, they expect introduction of these "standardised software products" to produce "efficiency gains". Open source software will continue to be used on servers. Henning Tillmann, a colleague of Oliver Kaczmarek, the SPD MP who raised the question, and a member of the SPD executive committee's web policy discussion group, told our associates at heise Open that the government's response was not satisfactory. "The reasons given for the return to Windows are implausible," says Tillmann, "We need the figures." The costs of licensing Windows and MS Office throughout the department would cover the costs of programming a hell of a lot of drivers, notes Tillmann. Oliver Kaczmarek has already announced his intention to take the matter further and demand a clear statement from the government. http://www.h-online.com/open/news/it...e-1191122.html Hackers can’t wait King Conservation District to Try Online Election Keith Ervin Eager to reverse a history of low voter turnout, the little-known King Conservation District is holding the largest online election ever conducted by a public agency in the United States. One million voters are eligible to cast ballots over the Internet from their home computers in the supervisor election that started last week and ends March 15. Registered voters in all of King County are eligible to participate, except for those in Federal Way, Enumclaw and three smaller cities. To some observers, it's a bold leap into a future that younger voters are yearning for. To others, it's a misguided and dangerous outsourcing of vote-counting. "For a small district that's trying to conduct an election without having the existing election facilities like ballot-tabulation equipment, I think this is a smart way to go," said Katie Blinn, who supervises local elections — but not conservation-district balloting — as co-director of elections for the Secretary of State. But without a paper record to back up every vote, Douglas W. Jones, associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa, claims Internet voting is vulnerable to manipulation — and, he said, "Outsourcing a democracy is not a good idea." District officials, who experimented with electronic balloting at voting centers two years ago, say an online election is the best way they've found to encourage voter participation at a price they can afford. Recent elections conducted at a handful of polling places have drawn 196 to 4,389 voters, turnouts of less than one-half of 1 percent. If the conservation district paid King County Elections to conduct a vote-by-mail election, it could cost $1 million, money now used to stabilize bluffs, keep manure out of creeks and restore salmon habitat. That led the district to online voting, which a private contractor is managing for $50,000. "Over the years we've had our critics," said district board Chairman Bill Knutsen. "This is the best way we have to answer their concerns, to provide an opportunity for all members of the conservation district to vote." Different rules The King Conservation District, created after the Dust Bowl of the 1930s to help rural landowners protect their soil, conducts elections under a different set of rules than other public agencies. The state Conservation Commission changed the rules last year to allow online voting. The district — which Executive Director Sara Hemphill calls "a fairly modest, humble operation" — has struggled to boost voter participation in its low-profile elections without breaking its $6 million budget. So the conservation district hired Bellevue-based Election Trust to conduct this election using remote-voting technology from Barcelona firm Scytl Secure Electronic Voting. Internet voting has been used mostly in party primaries, labor-union and corporate elections, and pilot projects to make voting easier for armed-forces members and other Americans overseas. The largest previous online public election — with a fraction of the conservation-district's voters — was a 2009 election of neighborhood board commissioners on Oahu, Hawaii. Voters there were given passcodes to vote by computer or telephone. With some exceptions for overseas voters, online voting isn't allowed in regular elections in Washington or any other state. Wider use of Internet voting may be years off, state elections co-director Blinn said, but she believes it will come and will be done without compromising election integrity. "It is the expectation for the younger generation," Blinn said. "That's usually one of the first questions we receive when we talk to groups that are mainly 35 and under: Why aren't we voting on the Internet? Why are we voting on paper?" Others disagree. When Washington, D.C., tested an open-source electronic voting system intended for armed-forces members last year, a team of University of Michigan computer scientists hacked in and altered votes. Each time a vote was cast, the hackers left a "calling card" on the screen, played the Michigan fight song and secretly changed the latest vote — until election officials shut down the site after two days. "This obviously doesn't go a long way in building public confidence," Election Trust Managing Partner John Bodin said of the incident. But that shouldn't tarnish a "trusted" industry leader like Scytl, he said. Scytl's Richmond, Va.-based managing director, Hugh Gallagher, said his company is a world leader in cryptography and, like the military, uses "layers of defense" to fend off would-be intruders. When a minister in the Philippines suggested hackers try to break into a pilot Internet election there, Gallagher said, Scytl detected 4,000 attempts — all unsuccessful — to hack into the system. Scytl's software received a mixed review from an expert panel commissioned by the Florida Department of State before its use by armed-forces members overseas in the 2008 election. The reviewers said the system was as well defended against Internet-based attacks "as can reasonably be expected," but was vulnerable to secret manipulation by insiders. To safeguard against fraud, the reviewers recommended tallying paper records of each vote. No paper The conservation district will have no paper record of votes cast from homes, offices or libraries — and critics of Internet voting say that's a dangerous risk. "I believe the Internet is extraordinarily insecure regardless whose system you are using," said the University of Iowa's Jones. "The way to make a secure computer in today's world is to have it not connected to the Internet." For the King Conservation District, "The big issue was how can we be absolutely certain we're not going to have a bunch of bogus votes," Hemphill said. So Election Trust came up with a two-step process that requires voters to submit their signatures by mail, e-mail or fax before voting. After the company verifies a signature matches the one on file with King County Elections, the voter is given a personal identification number for online voting. As for any concerns about possible manipulation of votes, Hemphill said, conservation-district officials relied largely on assurances from Election Trust that Scytl's system is tried and true. "We're not an expert in this," Hemphill said. "We chose Election Trust. This is the fourth year of working with them. We've been very impressed with Election Trust's thoroughness and attention to detail and their readiness to correct." Board Chairman Knutsen said he has no fear someone could tamper with election results. And after years of low-turnout elections that some people "liked to bash," Knutsen said, he's delighted to offer a more convenient way for people to vote. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...etvote21m.html Stars and Sewers Maureen Dowd Rarely have we seen such epic clashes between the forces of light and darkness. We watch in awe as revolutions somersault through the Middle East. We see instantaneous digital communication as a weapon against oppression and, in the hands of tyrants who tap into its power, as a weapon for oppression. While the cloud spurs some people to reach for the stars, delighting in freedom of expression, it seduces others to sprawl in the gutter, abusing freedom of expression. When CBS’s Lara Logan was dragged off, beaten and sexually assaulted by a mob of Egyptian men in Tahrir Square the giddy night that Hosni Mubarak stepped down, most of us were aghast. But some vile bodies online began beating up on the brave war correspondent. Nir Rosen, a journalist published in The Nation, The New Yorker and The Atlantic who had a fellowship at New York University’s Center on Law and Security, likes to be a provocateur. He has urged America to “get over” 9/11, called Israel an “abomination” to be eliminated, and sympathized with Hezbollah, Hamas and the Taliban. Invited to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2008 about the Iraq surge, he told Joe Biden, the committee chairman then, that he was uncomfortable “advising an imperialist power about how to be a more efficient imperialist power.” Rosen must now wish Twitter had a 10-second delay. On Tuesday, he merrily tweeted about the sexual assault of Logan: “Jesus Christ, at a moment when she is going to become a martyr and glorified we should at least remember her role as a major war monger.” He suggested she was trying to “outdo Anderson” Cooper (roughed up in Cairo earlier), adding that “it would have been funny if it happened to Anderson too.” Rosen lost his fellowship. He apologized in a whiny way, explaining that he “resented” Logan because she “defended American imperial adventures,” and that she got so much attention for the assault because she’s white and famous. He explained in Salon that “Twitter is no place for nuance,” as though there’s any nuance in his suggestion that Logan wanted to be sexually assaulted for ratings. He professed to be baffled by the fact that he had 1,000 new Twitter followers, noting: “It’s a bizarre, voyeuristic Internet culture and everybody in the mob is looking to get in on the next fight.” It’s been Lord of the Flies for a while now, dude, and you’re part of it. The conservative blogger Debbie Schlussel smacked Logan from the right: “Lara Logan was among the chief cheerleaders of this ‘revolution’ by animals. Now she knows what the Islamic revolution is really all about.” On her LA Weekly blog, Simone Wilson dredged up Logan’s romantic exploits and quoted a Feb. 3 snipe from the conservative blog Mofo Politics, after Logan was detained by the Egyptian police: “OMG if I were her captors and there were no sanctions for doing so, I would totally rape her.” Online anonymity has created what the computer scientist Jaron Lanier calls a “culture of sadism.” Some Yahoo comments were disgusting. “She got what she deserved,” one said. “This is what happens when dumb sexy female reporters want to make it about them.” Hillbilly Nation chimed in: “Should have been Katie.” The “60 Minutes” story about Senator Scott Brown’s revelation that a camp counselor sexually abused him as a child drew harsh comments on the show’s Web site, many politically motivated. Acupuncturegirl advised: “Scott, shut the hell up. You are gross.” Dutra1 noted: “OK, Scott, you get your free pity pills. Now examine the image you see in the mirror; is it a man?” Evgeny Morozov, author of “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom,” told me Twitter creates a false intimacy and can “bring out the worst in people. You’re straining after eyeballs, not big thoughts. So you go for the shallow, funny, contrarian or cynical.” Nicholas Carr, author of “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” says technology amplifies everything, good instincts and base. While technology is amoral, he said, our brains may be rewired in disturbing ways. “Researchers say that we need to be quiet and attentive if we want to tap into our deeper emotions,” he said. “If we’re constantly interrupted and distracted, we kind of short-circuit our empathy. If you dampen empathy and you encourage the immediate expression of whatever is in your mind, you get a lot of nastiness that wouldn’t have occurred before.” Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, recalled that when he started his online book review he forbade comments, wary of high-tech sociopaths. “I’m not interested in having the sewer appear on my site,” he said. “Why would I engage with people digitally whom I would never engage with actually? Why does the technology exonerate the kind of foul expression that you would not tolerate anywhere else?” Why indeed? http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/opinion/20dowd.html Black Ops: How HBGary Wrote Backdoors for the Government Nate Anderson On November 16, 2009, Greg Hoglund, a cofounder of computer security firm HBGary, sent an e-mail to two colleagues. The message came with an attachment, a Microsoft Word file called AL_QAEDA.doc, which had been further compressed and password protected for safety. Its contents were dangerous. "I got this word doc linked off a dangler site for Al Qaeda peeps," wrote Hoglund. "I think it has a US govvy payload buried inside. Would be neat to [analyze] it and see what it's about. DONT open it unless in a [virtual machine] obviously… DONT let it FONE HOME unless you want black suits landing on your front acre. :-)" The attached document, which is in English, begins: "LESSON SIXTEEN: ASSASSINATIONS USING POISONS AND COLD STEEL (UK/BM-154 TRANSLATION)." It purports to be an Al-Qaeda document on dispatching one's enemies with knives (try "the area directly above the genitals"), with ropes ("Choking… there is no other area besides the neck"), with blunt objects ("Top of the stomach, with the end of the stick."), and with hands ("Poking the fingers into one or both eyes and gouging them."). But the poison recipes, for ricin and other assorted horrific bioweapons, are the main draw. One, purposefully made from a specific combination of spoiled food, requires "about two spoonfuls of fresh excrement." The document praises the effectiveness of the resulting poison: "During the time of the destroyer, Jamal Abdul Nasser, someone who was being severely tortured in prison (he had no connection with Islam), ate some feces after losing sanity from the severity of the torture. A few hours after he ate the feces, he was found dead." The purported Al-Qaeda document According to Hoglund, the recipes came with a side dish, a specially crafted piece of malware meant to infect Al-Qaeda computers. Is the US government in the position of deploying the hacker's darkest tools—rootkits, computer viruses, trojan horses, and the like? Of course it is, and Hoglund was well-positioned to know just how common the practice had become. Indeed, he and his company helped to develop these electronic weapons. Thanks to a cache of HBGary e-mails leaked by the hacker collective Anonymous, we have at least a small glimpse through a dirty window into the process by which tax dollars enter the military-industrial complex and emerge as malware. Task B In 2009, HBGary had partnered with the Advanced Information Systems group of defense contractor General Dynamics to work on a project euphemistically known as "Task B." The team had a simple mission: slip a piece of stealth software onto a target laptop without the owner's knowledge. HBGary white paper on exploiting software They focused on ports—a laptop's interfaces to the world around it—including the familiar USB port, the less-common PCMCIA Type II card slot, the smaller ExpressCard slot, WiFi, and Firewire. No laptop would have all of these, but most recent machines would have at least two. The HBGary engineering team broke this list down into three categories. First came the "direct access" ports that provided "uninhibited electronic direct memory access." PCMCIA, ExpressCard, and Firewire all allowed external devices—say a custom piece of hardware delivered by a field operative—to interact directly with the laptop with a minimum amount of fuss. The direct memory access provided by the controllers for these ports mean that devices in them can write directly to the computer's memory without intervention from the main CPU and with little restriction from the operating system. If you want to overwrite key parts of the operating system to sneak in a bit of your own code, this is the easiest way to go. The second and third categories, ports that needed "trust relationships" or relied on "buffer overflows," included USB and wireless networking. These required more work to access, especially if one wanted to do so without alerting a user; Windows in particular is notorious for the number of prompts it throws when USB devices are inserted or removed. A cheerful note about "Searching for device driver for NSA_keylogger_rootkit_tango" had to be avoided. So HBGary wanted to go the direct access route, characterizing it as the "low hanging fruit" with the lowest risk. General Dynamics wanted HBGary to investigate the USB route as well (the ports are more common, but an attack has to trick the operating system into doing its bidding somehow, commonly through a buffer overflow). The team had two spy movie scenarios in which its work might be used, scenarios drafted to help the team think through its approach: 1) Man leaves laptop locked while quickly going to the bathroom. A device can then be inserted and then removed without touching the laptop itself except at the target port. (i.e. one can't touch the mouse, keyboard, insert a CD, etc.) 2) Woman shuts down her laptop and goes home. One then can insert a device into the target port and assume she will not see it when she returns the next day. One can then remove the device at a later time after she boots up the machine. Why would the unnamed client for Task B—which a later e-mail makes clear was for a government agency—want such a tool? Imagine you want access to the computer network used in a foreign government ministry, or in a nuclear lab. Such a facility can be tough to crack over the Internet; indeed, the most secure facilities would have no such external access. And getting an agent inside the facility to work mischief is very risky—if it's even possible at all. But say a scientist from the facility uses a memory stick to carry data home at night, and that he plugs the memory stick into his laptop on occasion. You can now get a piece of custom spyware into the facility by putting a copy on the memory stick—if you can first get access to the laptop. So you tail the scientist and follow him from his home one day to a local coffee shop. He steps away to order another drink, to go to the bathroom, or to talk on his cell phone, and the tail walks past his table and sticks an all-but-undetectable bit of hardware in his laptop's ExpressCard slot. Suddenly, you have a vector that points all the way from a local coffee shop to the interior of a secure government facility. The software exploit code actually delivered onto the laptop was not HBGary's concern; it needed only to provide a route through the computer's front door. But it had some constraints. First, the laptop owner should still be able to use the port so as not to draw attention to the inserted hardware. This is quite obviously tricky, but one could imagine a tiny ExpressCard device that slid down into the slot but could in turn accept another ExpressCard device on its exterior-facing side. This sort of parallel plugging might well go unnoticed by a user with no reason to suspect it. HBGary's computer infiltration code then had to avoid the computer's own electronic defenses. The code should "not be detectable" by virus scanners or operating system port scans, and it should clean up after itself to eliminate all traces of entry. Greg Hoglund was confident that he could deliver at least two laptop-access techniques in less than a kilobyte of memory each. As the author of books like Exploiting Software: How to Break Code, Rootkits: Subverting the Windows Kernel, and Exploiting Online Games: Cheating Massively Distributed Systems, he knew his way around the deepest recesses of Windows in particular. Hoglund's special interest was in all-but-undetectable computer "rootkits," programs that provide privileged access to a computer's innermost workings while cloaking themselves even from standard operating system functions. A good rootkit can be almost impossible to remove from a running machine—if you could even find it in the first place. Just a demo Some of this work was clearly for demonstration purposes, and much of it was probably never deployed in the field. For instance, HBGary began $50,000 of work for General Dynamics on "Task C" in June 2009, creating a piece of malware that infiltrated Windows machines running Microsoft Outlook. The target user would preview a specially crafted e-mail message in Outlook that took advantage of an Outlook preview pane vulnerability to execute a bit of code in the background. This code would install a kernel driver, one operating at the lowest and most trusted level of the operating system, that could send traffic over the computer's serial port. (The point of this exercise was never spelled out, though the use of serial ports rather than network ports suggest that cutting-edge desktop PCs were not the target.) Once installed, the malware could execute external commands, such as sending specific files over the serial port, deleting files on the machine, or causing the infamous Windows "blue screen of death." In addition, the code should be able to pop open the computer's CD tray and blink the lights on its attached keyboards—another reminder that Task C was, at this stage, merely for a demo. General Dynamics would presumably try to interest customers in the product, but it's not clear from the e-mails at HBGary whether this was ever successful. Even with unique access to the innermost workings of a security firm, much remains opaque; the real conversations took place face-to-face or on secure phone lines, not through e-mail, so the glimpses we have here are fragmentary at best. This care taken to avoid sending sensitive information via unencrypted e-mail stands in stark contrast with the careless approach to security that enabled the hacks in the first place. But that doesn't mean specific information is hard to come by—such as the fact that rootkits can be purchased for $60,000. Step right up! Other tools were in use and were sought out by government agencies. An internal HBGary e-mail from early 2010 asks, "What are the license costs for HBGary rk [rootkit] platform if they want to use it on guardian for afisr [Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance]?" The reply indicates that HBGary has several tools on offer. "Are you asking about the rootkit for XP (kernel driver that hides in plain sight and is a keylogger that exfiltrates data) or are you asking about 12 Monkeys? We've sold licenses of the 1st one for $60k. We haven't set a price on 12 Monkeys, but can." The company had been developing rootkits for years. Indeed, it had even developed a private Microsoft Word document outlining its basic rootkit features, features which customers could have (confirming the e-mail listed above) for $60,000. Description of the basic rootkit platform That money bought you the rootkit source code, which was undetectable by most rootkit scanners or firewall products when it was tested against them in 2008. Only one product from Trend Micro noticed the rootkit installation, and even that alert was probably not enough to warn a user. As the HBGary rootkit document notes, "This was a low level alert. TrendMicro assaults the user with so many of these alerts in every day use, therefore most users will quickly learn to ignore or even turn off such alerts." When installed in a target machine, the rootkit could record every keystroke that a user typed, linking it up to a Web browser history. This made it easy to see usernames, passwords, and other data being entered into websites; all of this information could be silently "exfiltrated" right through even the pickiest personal firewall. But if a target watched its outgoing traffic and noted repeated contacts with, say, a US Air Force server, suspicions might be aroused. The rootkit could therefore connect instead to a "dead drop"—a totally anonymous server with no apparent connection to the agency using the rootkit—where the target's keyboard activity could be retrieved at a later time. But by 2009, the existing generic HBGary rootkit package was a bit long in the tooth. Hoglund, the rootkit expert, apparently had much bigger plans for a next-gen product called "12 monkeys." The 12 Monkeys rootkit was also a contract paid out by General Dynamics; as one HBGary e-mail noted, the development work could interfere with Task B, but "if we succeed, we stand to make a great deal of profit on this." On April 14, 2009, Hoglund outlined his plans for the new super-rootkit for Windows XP, which was "unique in that the rootkit is not associated with any identifiable or enumerable object. This rootkit has no file, named data structure, device driver, process, thread, or module associated with it." How could Hoglund make such a claim? Security tools generally work by scanning a computer for particular objects—pieces of data that the operating system uses to keep track of processes, threads, network connections, and so on. 12 Monkeys simply had nothing to find. "Since no object is associated with the objectless rootkit, detection will be very difficult for a security scanner," he wrote. In addition, the rootkit would encrypt itself to cloak itself further, and hop around in the computer's memory to make it even harder to find. As for getting the data off a target machine and back to the rootkit's buyer, Hoglund had a clever idea: he disguised the outgoing traffic by sending it only when other outbound Web traffic was being sent. Whenever a user sat down at a compromised machine and started surfing the Web, their machine would slip in some extra outgoing data "disguised as ad-clicks" that would contain a log of all their keystrokes. While the basic rootkit went for $60,000, HBGary hoped to sell 12 Monkeys for much more: "around $240k." 0-day The goal of this sort of work is always to create something undetectable, and there's no better way to be undetectable than by taking advantage of a security hole that no one else has ever found. Once vulnerabilities are disclosed, vendors like Microsoft race to patch them, and they increasingly push those patches to customers via the Internet. Among hackers, then, the most prized exploits are "0-day" exploits—exploits for holes for which no patch yet exists. HBGary kept a stockpile of 0-day exploits. A slide from one of the company's internal presentations showed that the company had 0-day exploits for which no patch yet existed—but these 0-day exploits had not yet even been published. No one knew about them. The company had exploits "on the shelf" for Windows 2000, Flash, Java, and more; because they were 0-day attacks, any computer around the world running these pieces of software could be infiltrated. One of the unpublished Windows 2000 exploits, for instance, can deliver a "payload" of any size onto the target machine using a heap exploit. "The payload has virtually no restrictions" on what it can do, a document notes, because the exploit secures SYSTEM level access to the operating system, "the highest user-mode operating system defined level" available. These exploits were sold to customers. One email, with the subject "Juicy Fruit," contains the following list of software: VMware ESX and ESXi * Win2K3 Terminal Services Win2K3 MSRPC Solaris 10 RPC Adobe Flash * Sun Java * Win2k Professional & Server XRK Rootkit and Keylogger * Rootkit 2009 * The e-mail talks only about "tools," not about 0-day exploits, though that appears to be what was at issue; the list of software here matches HBGary's own list of its 0-day exploits. And the asterisk beside some of the names "means the tool has been sold to another customer on a non-exclusive basis and can be sold again." References to Juicy Fruit abound in the leaked e-mails. My colleague Peter Bright and I have spent days poring through the tens of thousands of messages; we believe that "Juicy Fruit" is a generic name for a usable 0-day exploit, and that interest in this Juicy Fruit was high. "[Name] is interested in the Juicy Fruit you told him about yesterday," one e-mail reads. "Next step is I need to give [name] a write up describing it." That writeup includes the target software, the level of access gained, the max payload size, and "what does the victim see or experience." Aaron Barr, who in late 2009 was brought on board to launch the separate company HBGary Federal (and who provoked this entire incident by trying to unmask Anonymous), wrote in one e-mail, "We need to provide info on 12 monkeys and related JF [Juicy Fruit] asap," apparently in reference to exploits that could be used to infect a system with 12 Monkeys. HBGary also provided some Juicy Fruit to Xetron, a unit of the massive defense contractor Northrop Grumman that specialized in, among other things, "computer assault." Barr wanted to "provide Xetron with some JF code to be used for demonstrations to their end customers," one e-mail noted. "Those demonstrations could lead to JF sales or ongoing services work. There is significant revenue potential doing testing of JF code acquired elsewhere or adding features for mission specific uses." As the deal was being worked out, HBGary worked up an agreement to "provide object code and source code for this specific Juicy Fruit" to Xetron, though they could not sell the code without paying HBGary. The code included with this agreement was a "Adobe Macromedia Flash Player Remote Access Tool," the "HBGary Rootkit Keylogger Platform," and a "Software Integration Toolkit Module." The question of who might be interested in these tools largely remains an unknown—though Barr did request information on HBGary's Juicy Fruit just after asking for contacts at SOCOM, the US Special Operations Command. But HBGary Federal had ideas that went far beyond government rootkits and encompassed all facets of information warfare. Including, naturally, cartoons. And Second Life. Psyops In mid-2010, HBGary Federal put together a PSYOP (psychological operations) proposal for SOCOM, which had issued a general call for new tools and techniques. In the document, the new HBGary Federal team talked up their past experience as creators of "multiple products briefed to POTUS [President of the United States], the NSC [National Security Council], and Congressional Intelligence committees, as well as senior intelligence and military leaders." The document focused on cartoons and the Second Life virtual world. "HBGary personnel have experience creating political cartoons that leverage current events to seize the target audience's attention and propagate the desired messages and themes," said the document, noting that security-cleared cartoonists and 3D modelers had already been lined up to do the work if the government wanted some help. Cartoon example of Ahmadinejad with a puppet ayatollah The cartooning process "starts with gathering customer requirements such as the target audience, high level messages and themes, intended publication mediums… Through brainstorming sessions, we develop concept ideas. Approved concepts are rough sketched in pencil. Approved sketches are developed into a detailed, color end product that is suitable for publishing in a variety of mediums." A sample cartoon, of Iranian President Ahmadinejad manipulating a puppet Ayatollah, was helpfully included. The document then went on to explain how the US government could use a virtual world such as Second Life to propagate specific messages. HBGary could localize the Second Life client, translating its menu options and keyboard shortcuts into local dialects, and this localized client could report "valuable usage metrics, enabling detailed measures of effects." If you want to know whether your message is getting out, just look at the statistics of how many people play the game and for how long. As for the messages themselves, those would appear within the Second Life world. "HBGary can develop an in-world advertising company, securing small plots of virtual land in attractive locations, which can be used to promote themes using billboards, autonomous virtual robots, audio, video, and 3D presentations," said the document. They could even make a little money while they're at it, by creating "original marketable products to generate self-sustaining revenue within the virtual space as well as promote targeted messaging." We found no evidence that SOCOM adopted the proposal. But HBGary Federal's real interest had become social media like Facebook and Twitter—and how they could be used to explore and then penetrate secretive networks. And that was exactly what the Air Force wanted to do. Fake Facebook friends In June 2010, the government was expressing real interest in social networks. The Air Force issued a public request for "persona management software," which might sound boring until you realize that the government essentially wanted the ability to have one agent run multiple social media accounts at once. It wanted 50 software licenses, each of which could support 10 personas, "replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent." The software would allow these 50 cyberwarriors to peer at their monitors all day and manipulate these 10 accounts easily, all "without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries." The personas would appear to come from all over the world, the better to infiltrate jihadist websites and social networks, or perhaps to show up on Facebook groups and influence public opinion in pro-US directions. As the cyberwarriors worked away controlling their 10 personas, their computers would helpfully provide "real-time local information" so that they could play their roles convincingly. In addition the Air Force wanted a secure virtual private network that could mask the IP addresses behind all of this persona traffic. Every day, each user would get a random IP address to help hide "the existence of the operation." The network would further mask this persona work by "traffic mixing, blending the user's traffic with traffic from multitudes of users from outside the organization. This traffic blending provides excellent cover and powerful deniability." This sort of work most interested HBGary Federal's Aaron Barr, who was carving out a niche for himself as a social media expert. Throughout late 2010 and early 2011, he spent large chunks of his time attempting to use Facebook, Twitter, and Internet chat to map the network of Exelon nuclear plant workers in the US and to research the members of Anonymous. As money for his company dried up and government contracts proved hard to come by, Barr turned his social media ideas on pro-union forces, getting involved in a now-controversial project with two other security firms. But e-mails make clear that he mostly wanted to sell this sort of capability to the government. "We have other customers, mostly on offense, that are interested in Social Media for other things," he wrote in August 2010. "The social media stuff seems like low hanging fruit." How does one use social media and fake "personas" to do anything of value? An e-mail from Barr on August 22 makes his thinking clear. Barr ponders "the best way to go about establishing a persona to reach an objective (in this case ft. belvoir/INSCOM/1st IO)." The Army's Fort Belvoir, like any secretive institution, might be more easily penetrated by pretending to be an old friend of a current employee. "Make your profile swim in a large sea," Barr wrote. "Pick a big city, big high school, big company. Work your way up and in. Recreate your history. Start by friending high school people. In my case I am in the army so after you have amassed enough friends from high school, then start friending military folks outside of your location, something that matches the area your in, bootcamp, etc. Lastly start to friend people from the base, but start low and work your way up. So far so good." Once the persona had this network of friends, "I will start doing things tricky. Try to manipulate conversations, insert communication streams, etc," said Barr. This sort of social media targeting could also be used to send your new "friend" documents or files (such as the Al-Qaeda poison document discussed above) [that] come complete with malware, or by directing them to specially-crafted websites designed to elicit some specific piece of information: directed attacks known as "spear phishing." But concerns arose about obtaining and using social media data, in part because sites like Facebook restricted the "scraping" of its user data. An employee from the link analysis firm Palantir wrote Barr at the end of August, asking, "Is the idea that we'd want to ingest all of Facebook's data, or just a targeted subset for a few users of interest?" The more data that was grabbed from Facebook, the more chance a problem could arise. The Palantir employee noted that a researcher had used similar tools to violate Facebook's acceptable use policy on data scraping, "resulting in a lawsuit when he crawled most of Facebook's social graph to build some statistics. I'd be worried about doing the same. (I'd ask him for his Facebook data—he's a fan of Palantir—but he's already deleted it.)" Still, the potential usefulness of sites like Facebook was just too powerful to ignore, acceptable use policy or not. Feeling twitchy While Barr fell increasingly in love with his social media sleuthing, Hoglund still liked researching his rootkits. In September, the two teamed up for a proposal to DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that had been instrumental in creating the Internet back in the 1960s. DARPA didn't want incrementalism. It wanted breakthroughs (one of its most recent projects is the "100-Year Starship Study"), and Barr and Hoglund teamed up for a proposal to help the agency on its Cyber Insider Threat (CINDER) program. CINDER was an expensive effort to find new ways to watch employees with access to sensitive information and root out double agents or disgruntled workers who might leak classified information. So Barr and Hoglund drafted a plan to create something like a lie detector, except that it would look for signs of "paranoia" instead. "Like a lie detector detects physical changes in the body based on sensitivities to specific questions, we believe there are physical changes in the body that are represented in observable behavioral changes when committing actions someone knows is wrong," said the proposal. "Our solution is to develop a paranoia-meter to measure these observables." The idea was to take an HBGary rootkit like 12 Monkeys and install it on user machines in such a way that users could not remove it and might not even be aware of its presence. The rootkit would log user keystrokes, of course, but it would also take "as many behavioral measurements as possible" in order to look for suspicious activity that might indicate wrongdoing. What sort of measurements? The rootkit would monitor "keystrokes, mouse movements, and visual cues through the system camera. We believe that during particularly risky activities we will see more erratic mouse movements and keystrokes as well as physical observations such as surveying surroundings, shifting more frequently, etc." The rootkit would also keep an eye on what files were being accessed, what e-mails were being written, and what instant messages were being sent. If necessary, the software could record a video of the user's computer screen activity and send all this information to a central monitoring office. There, software would try to pick out employees exhibiting signs of paranoia, who could then be scrutinized more closely. Huge and obvious challenges presented themselves. As the proposal noted: Quote:
Grey areas The ideas got ever more grandiose. Analyzing malware, HBGary's main focus, wasn't enough to keep up with the hackers; Hoglund had a plan to get a leg up on the competition by getting even closer to malware authors. He floated an idea to sniff Russian GSM cell phone signals in order to eavesdrop on hackers' voice calls and text messages. "GSM is easily sniffed," he wrote to Barr. "There is a SHIELD system for this that not only intercepts GSM 5.1 but can also track the exact physical location of a phone. Just to see what's on the market, check [redacted]… these have to be purchased overseas obviously." The note concluded: "Home alone on Sunday, so I just sit here and sharpen the knife." Barr, always enthusiastic for these kinds of ideas, loved this one. He wanted to map out everything that would be required for such an operation, including "personas, sink holes, honey nets, soft and hard assets… We would want at least one burn persona. We would want to sketch out a script to meet specific objectives. And, he noted, "We will likely ride in some grey areas." Back to basics In January 2011, Barr had moved on to his research into Anonymous—research that would eventually do his company in. Over at HBGary, Hoglund continued his pursuit of next-gen rootkits. He had hit on a new approach that he called "Magenta." This would be a "new breed of Windows-based rootkit," said a Magenta planning document, one that HBGary called a "multi-context rootkit." The Magenta software would be written in low-level assembly language, one step up from the ones and zeroes of the binary code with which computers do their calculating. It would inject itself into the Windows kernel, and then inject itself further into an active process; only from there would the main body of the rootkit execute. Magenta would also inject itself routinely into different processes, jumping around inside the computer's memory to avoid detection. Its command-and-control instructions, telling the rootkit exactly what to do and where to send the information, wouldn't come from some remote Internet server but from the host computer's own memory—where the control instructions had been separately injected. "This is ideal because it’s trivial to remotely seed C&C messages into any networked Windows host," noted Hoglund, "even if the host in question has full Windows firewalling enabled." Nothing like Magenta existed (not publicly, at least), and Hoglund was sure that he could squeeze the rootkit code into less than 4KB of memory and make it "almost impossible to remove from a live running system." Once running, all of the Magenta files on disk could be deleted. Even the best anti-rootkit tools, those that monitored physical memory for signs of such activity, "would only be of limited use since by the time the responder tried to verify his results Magenta will have already moved to a new location & context." Hoglund wanted to build Magenta in two parts: first, a prototype for Windows XP with Service Pack 3—an old operating system but still widely installed. Second, if the prototype generated interest, HBGary could port the rootkit "to all current flavors of Microsoft Windows." Shortly thereafter, Anonymous broke into HBGary Federal's website, cracked Barr's hashed password using rainbow tables, and found themselves in a curious position; Barr was also the administrator for the entire e-mail system, so they were able to grab e-mail from multiple accounts, including Hoglund's. A world awash in rootkits The leaked e-mails provide a tantalizing glimpse of life behind the security curtain. HBGary and HBGary Federal were small players in this space; indeed, HBGary appears to have made much of its cash with more traditional projects, like selling anti-malware defense tools to corporations and scanning their networks for signs of infection. If rootkits, paranoia monitors, cartoons, and fake Facebook personas were being proposed and developed here, one can only imagine the sorts of classified projects underway throughout the entire defense and security industry. Whether these programs are good or bad depends upon how they are used. Just as Hoglund's rootkit expertise meant that he could both detect them and author them, 0-day exploits and rootkits in government hands can be turned to many uses. The FBI has had malware like CIPAV (the Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier) for several years, and it's clear from the HBGary e-mail leak that the military is in wide possession of rootkits and other malware of its own. The Stuxnet virus widely believed to have at least damaged Iranian nuclear centrifuge operations is thought to have originated in the US or Israeli governments, for instance. But the e-mails also remind us how much of this work is carried out privately and beyond the control of government agencies. We found no evidence that HBGary sold malware to nongovernment entities intent on hacking, though the company did have plans to repurpose its DARPA rootkit idea for corporate surveillance work. ("HBGary plans to transition technology into commercial products," it told DARPA.) And another document, listing HBGary's work over the last few years, included this entry: "HBGary had multiple contracts with a consumer software company to add stealth capability to their host agent." The actions of HBGary Federal's Aaron Barr also serve as a good reminder that, when they're searching for work, private security companies are more than happy to switch from military to corporate clients—and they bring some of the same tools to bear. When asked to investigate pro-union websites and WikiLeaks, Barr turned immediately to his social media toolkit and was ready to deploy personas, Facebook scraping, link analysis, and fake websites; he also suggested computer attacks on WikiLeaks infrastructure and pressure be brought upon journalists like Glenn Greenwald. His compatriots at Palantir and Berico showed, in their many e-mails, few if any qualms about turning their national security techniques upon private dissenting voices. Barr's ideas showed up in Palantir-branded PowerPoints and Berico-branded "scope of work" documents. "Reconnaissance cells" were proposed, network attacks were acceptable, "target dossiers" on "adversaries" would be compiled, and "complex information campaigns" involving fake personas were on the table. Critics like Glenn Greenwald contend that this nexus of private and public security power is a dangerous mix. "The real issue highlighted by this episode is just how lawless and unrestrained is the unified axis of government and corporate power," he wrote last week. Quote:
While hackers get most of the attention for their rootkits and botnets and malware, state actors use the same tools to play a different game—the Great Game—and it could be coming soon to a computer near you. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...government.ars UK Court Agrees Assange Extradition to Sweden Michael Holden A British court has agreed to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to Sweden where he is accused of sex crimes, dismissing claims such a move would breach his human rights. Swedish prosecutors want to question Assange about allegations of sexual misconduct, which he denies, made by two WikiLeaks volunteers during his time in Sweden last August. One alleges Assange, who has angered the U.S. government by releasing thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables on his website, sexually molested her by ignoring her request for him to use a condom during sex. The second woman has said Assange had sex with her while she was asleep and that he was not wearing a condom. Prosecutors say the second allegation falls into the least severe of three categories of rape in Sweden, carrying a maximum of four years in jail. During three days of legal argument earlier this month, lawyers for Assange argued he would not get a fair trial in Sweden and said Swedish prosecutors had mishandled the case against the 39-year-old Australian computer expert. They argued that he might wind up being sent to the United States where he could face execution. Assange's lawyers also accused Sweden's Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt of creating a "toxic atmosphere" in Sweden and damaging his chances of a fair trial by portraying him as "public enemy number one." However, Judge Howard Riddle dismissed the arguments and ordered Assange be extradited although his lawyer said they would appeal against the decision. The Swedish prosecution authority had no immediate comment but would post a statement on its website shortly, a spokeswoman for the office said. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...71M7PH20110224 DOJ Gets Reporter's Phone, Credit Card Records in Leak Probe Trying to show ex-CIA officer leaked agency secrets, feds target newspaperman Michael Isikoff A court filing in the case of a former CIA officer accused of spilling secrets about Iran’s nuclear program provides new details about the extraordinary measures Justice Department prosecutors are using to identify government leakers. The former CIA officer, Jeffrey Sterling, was indicted in December on charges that he disclosed “national defense information” to New York Times reporter James Risen. In a court filing this week, Sterling’s lawyers revealed that, as part of the investigation, prosecutors obtained Risen’s telephone, credit and bank records. They also obtained credit reports on Risen conducted by three credit agencies — Equifax, TransUnion and Experian — as well as records of his airline travel, the filing states. Those records, as well as other material, have been turned over to Sterling’s lawyers as part of pre-trial discovery in the case, the lawyers said. “I find this very disturbing,” said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “This tells us the Obama administration will do almost anything to figure out who is leaking government information.” Matt Miller, a spokesman for the Justice Department, declined to comment on the court filing or say whether department subpoenas for Risen’s bank and credit reports occurred under President Barack Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, or earlier, during the Bush administration, when the investigation into Sterling began. A lawyer for Risen also declined comment. Although there have been other public controversies over subpoenas — real and threatened — to reporters in recent years, there have been few, if any, cases in which it has been documented that federal prosecutors obtained the bank records and credit reports of journalists. But a former Justice Department prosecutor, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said subpoenas for such records — often without the journalists’ knowledge — are not a surprising tactic, given the unusually aggressive Justice Department efforts to prosecute leakers in recent years. In fact, the former prosecutor noted, that because subpoenas for financial records are standard practice in criminal investigations, there is no reason for the Justice Department not to use them to obtain records from journalists in leak probes. The data from credit and bank records would allow prosecutors to home in on where journalists have traveled, lunches or dinners they might have paid for, and other information that could help identify their sources for a story, the former prosecutor said. Reporters Urged to Take Precautions Dalglish said she now repeatedly urges journalists to use old school methods when communicating with their sources to avoid creating any paper trail. “What I tell them is ‘buy disposable phones, purchase manila envelopes and identify park benches’” to meet their sources, she said. The government’s efforts to identify Risen’s source was unusually aggressive by any measure, lasting more than six years. It stems from what was deemed to be damaging disclosures in Risen’s 2006 book “State of War,” which included a chapter about a CIA program called “Operation Merlin.” Risen described it as a botched attempt under the Clinton administration to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program by feeding the Iranians deliberately flawed design blueprints for key nuclear components. But according to Risen’s book, the Iranians uncovered the scheme and the effort ended up accelerating Iran’s nuclear program. The government’s investigation led the FBI to Sterling, who had worked on the Iranian desk at the CIA and, according to his indictment, had raised concerns about the program to the Senate Intelligence Committee. He had also filed a lawsuit against the CIA alleging that he had been discriminated against — and was turned down on his request to work on sensitive Iranian cases — because he was African-American. As part of the investigation, prosecutors twice subpoenaed Risen to testify —once during the Bush administration and more recently under President Obama. In both cases, the subpoenas were quashed by a federal judge. But the indictment of Sterling — for allegedly violating a World War One era law known as the Espionage Act — could now lead to yet another court battle over whether the reporter will be forced to testify at Sterling’s trail. Sterling has pleaded not guilty to the charges. The larger concern, according to Dalglish, is the growing number of leak investigations under President Obama’s Justice Department — a development considered especially ironic since the White House had publicly endorsed a so-called “shield” law to provide limited protection for journalists’ sources. In fact, the efforts to enact a shield law have all but died. Instead, the administration has engaged in highly public efforts to stanch government leakers, the current probe into WikiLeaks being the best-known example. In fact, said Dalglish, “They don’t like leaks of any sort.” Until recently, such prosecutions were exceedingly rare, largely because leakers were notoriously difficult to identify. But in the past year, in addition to Sterling, Justice Department prosecutors have indicted a former National Security Agency official for allegedly leaking to a Baltimore Sun reporter and a former State Department contractor for allegedly leaking to Fox News. In addition, military prosecutors have charged Army Pvt. Bradley Manning for allegedly leaking to WikiLeaks. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41787944...news-security/ Thuraya Satellite Telecom Says Jammed by Libya Still has 70 percent coverage in Libya Thuraya Satellite Telecommunications Co's services are being jammed by Libya, the UAE-based firm's chief executive said on Thursday, as a revolt continued against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. "Unfortunately there is deliberate jamming by Libya ... which is illegal," CEO Samer Halawi told Al Arabiya television. "Jamming started on Feb. 17 and it continues today. Our equipment is reducing the effects of the jamming so that we have coverage in 70 percent of Libya," Halawi said. Based in the United Arab Emirates capital Abu Dhabi, Thuraya provides satellite telephone and other services across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Emirates Telecommunications Corp (Etisalat) is a main shareholder of the company. Forces loyal to Gaddafi launched a fierce counter-attack on Thursday, fighting gun battles with rebels who have threatened the Libyan leader by seizing important towns close to the capital. On Monday, Al Jazeera television said Libya's intelligence agency was behind the powerful jamming that has disrupted the widely watched Arab satellite broadcaster's signal across much of the Middle East and North Africa. On Saturday, Arbor Networks, a U.S. company that monitors Internet traffic said Internet service had been cut off in Libya for a second consecutive day. http://af.reuters.com/article/libyaN...71N2CU20110224 Internet 'Kill Switch' Bill Gets a Makeover Declan McCullagh A Senate proposal that has become known as the Internet "kill switch" bill was reintroduced this week, with a tweak its backers say eliminates the possibility of an Egypt-style disconnection happening in the United States. As CNET reported last month, the 221-page bill hands Homeland Security the power to issue decrees to certain privately owned computer systems after the president declares a "national cyberemergency." A section in the new bill notes that does not include "the authority to shut down the Internet," and the name of the bill has been changed to include the phrase "Internet freedom." "The emergency measures in our bill apply in a precise and targeted way only to our most critical infrastructure," Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said yesterday about the legislation she is sponsoring with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn). "We cannot afford to wait for a cyber 9/11 before our government finally realizes the importance of protecting our digital resources." But the revised wording continues to alarm civil liberties groups and other critics of the bill, who say the language would allow the government to shut down portions of the Internet or restrict access to certain Web sites or types of content. Even former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak didn't actually "shut down" the Internet: at least at first, a trickle of connections continued. "It still gives the president incredible authority to interfere with Internet communications," ACLU legislative counsel Michelle Richardson said today. If the Department of Homeland Security wants to pull the plug on Web sites or networks, she said, "the government needs to go to court and get a court order." That concern was punctuated by a report yesterday that Homeland Security erroneously seized 84,000 Web domains and took them offline. Former congressman Bob Barr, now an NRA board member and newspaper columnist, wrote that the mistake shows that "no government--no matter how benign or well-meaning--should be empowered to control the Internet." The Electronic Frontier Foundation said today that it continues to have concerns about the Lieberman-Collins bill. "The president would have essentially unchecked power to determine what services can be connected to the Internet or even what content can pass over the Internet in a cybersecurity emergency," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "Our concerns have not changed." Some of the companies and industry groups listed as supporting last June's version of the bill, before the protests in Egypt, the FBI's push on Internet wiretapping, and the Justice Department's campaign for Internet data retention, stopped short of endorsing the revised version. Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, pointed to his letter to the Senate committee last year saying the legislation "is in need of additional refinement." Clinton said in an e-mail today that "much more needed to be done before we could support enactment." Microsoft said it did not have a position on the legislation. "The bill language just came out, and so we really need to review it before we can provide further comment," a representative said today. From "Protecting Cyberspace" to "Internet Freedom" Many portions of the revised bill, also sponsored by Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), are generally uncontroversial, dealing with topics such as boosting the federal government's information security, recruiting federal "cybersecurity personnel," and funding research into secure versions of Internet protocols. (The bill previously was called the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act; as part of its makeover it's been renamed the "Cybersecurity and Internet Freedom Act.") But all of the recent attention has been focused on the sections handing the president emergency powers. The new version follows the same process as the old one: President Obama would be given the power to "issue a declaration of a national cyberemergency." Once that happens, Homeland Security would receive sweeping new authorities, including the power to require that so-called critical companies "shall immediately comply with any emergency measure or action" decreed. No "notice" needs to be given "before mandating any emergency measure or actions." That means a company could be added to the "critical" infrastructure list one moment, and ordered by Homeland Security to "immediately comply" with its directives the next. The U.S. Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which Lieberman chairs, appears to believe that it's not necessary to include explicit judicial review of the president's emergency authority once exercised, believing it's implicit. Any such lawsuit filed by a targeted company would likely focus on language saying the emergency decrees should be "the least disruptive means feasible." The president may declare a "cyberemergency" for 30 days, and extend it for one 30-day period, unless Congress votes to approve further extensions. Homeland Security will "establish and maintain a list of systems or assets that constitute covered critical infrastructure" and that will be subject to those emergency decrees. Homeland Security is only supposed to place a computer system (which could include a server, Web site, router, and so on) on the list if certain requirements are met. First, the disruption of the system could cause "severe economic consequences" or worse. Second, the system is "a component of the national information infrastructure," such as the Internet, or relies on that infrastructure. Third, it can't be placed on the list "based solely" on any First Amendment-protected activities. A committee report from December says that senators hope that Homeland Security will interpret that language to include a "combination" of factors, including mass casualties or evacuations, over $25 billion in damages, or "severe degradation" of national security. The suggestion, however, appears to be nonbinding and doesn't actually appear in the legislation. One big change: Earlier versions of the bill barred companies from filing a lawsuit objecting to being placed on that list. The revised version explicitly permits judicial review as long as the lawsuit is filed in the District of Columbia. "A state of public peril" A 1934 law creating the Federal Communications Commission says that in wartime, or if a "state of public peril or disaster or other national emergency" exists, the president may "authorize the use or control of any...station or device." That could sweep in the Internet, but it's not entirely clear it does. (The revised bill says that existing authority may not be used to "shut down the Internet," but does not otherwise limit it.) In congressional testimony last year, the Obama administration stopped short of endorsing the Lieberman-Collins bill. The 1934 law already addresses "presidential emergency authorities, and Congress and the administration should work together to identify any needed adjustments to the act," DHS Deputy Undersecretary Philip Reitinger said, "as opposed to developing overlapping legislation." A draft Senate proposal that CNET obtained in August 2009 authorized the White House to "declare a cybersecurity emergency," and another from Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) would have explicitly given the government the power to "order the disconnection" of certain networks or Web sites. House Democrats have taken a similar approach. In a statement, Lieberman said there's no "kill switch" in this bill. "It is impossible to turn off the Internet in this country," he said. "This legislation applies to the most critical infrastructures that Americans rely on in their daily lives--energy transmission, water supply, financial services, for example--to ensure that those assets are protected in case of a potentially crippling cyberattack." The ACLU's Richardson believes the problem was never a "kill switch." She said: "The question is bigger than that. It's generally, can the government interfere with communications...The question is: Are there significant protections in there?" Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the free-market Cato Institute and a member of a Homeland Security advisory panel, says that supporters of the bill have yet to make the argument that such governmental emergency powers will do more good than harm. "They recognize that a total Internet kill switch is totally unacceptable," Harper said today. "A smaller Internet kill switch, or a series of kill switches, is also unacceptable...How does this make cybersecurity better? They have no answer." http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20033717-281.html Wisconsin Capitol Blocks Pro-Union Website David Edwards The Democratic Party of Wisconsin spoke out forcefully Tuesday after it was discovered that the state Capitol had blocked a website that was attempting to organize those protesting Republican Gov. Scott Walker's plan to strip unions of their rights. Anyone trying to use the state Capitol's Wi-Fi connection to access www.defendwisconsin.org Monday and early Tuesday received an error message. University of Wisconsin-Madison Teacher Assistants created the website to share information with protesters and let them know where volunteers were needed. Democratic party officials claimed that it was available at the Capitol until at least last Friday. "In a direct assault on the First Amendment, Scott Walker's administration is blocking access in the Wisconsin Capitol to opposition websites," Wisconsin Democratic Party press secretary Graeme Zielinski told CNN. "It seems that we are entering a nightmare period in Wisconsin history in which Scott Walker is drawing all power unto himself, to the point that he feels comfortable blocking the First Amendment rights of protesters at the exact time they are exercising their First Amendment rights," Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Michael Tate said in recorded audio message. "This is undemocratic and it is un-American," he added. "We have seen so many things without precedence from Scott Walker in recent weeks, including blowing up almost seven decades of labor peace." "We call on Walker to specifically renounce the practice of suppressing opposition websites. We call on him to explain fully how and why this is being done and we call on him to apologize for his administration's attack on our fundamental principles." In a statement Tuesday, Walker's spokesman, Cullen Werwie, called the claim a "lie." "The Department of Administration blocks all new websites shortly after they are created, until they go through a software approval program that unblocks them. Within 30 minutes of being notified this website was blocked, DOA circumvented the software and immediately made the website accessible," the statement said. "Well, that doesn't explain why the website was fully accessible for the entire time it was up, up until they started blocking it on Friday," Tate countered. Former Capitol tech worker Sachen Chheda examined a screen image of the error said that the that blockage appeared to be intentional. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/2...union-website/ Until next week, - js. Current Week In Review  Recent WiRs - February 19th, February 12th, February 5th, January 29th Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved. "The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black |
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24-02-11, 02:07 AM
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Thanks for being with arse
Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: The other side of the world
Posts: 10,343
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The telco industry has applauded the Federal Court dismissing an appeal for the landmark copyright case brought against iiNet by copyright action group the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT).
The federation commenced legal action against iiNet in the Federal Court in November 2008, hoping to prove the internet provider liable for copyright infringement conducted by its subscribers. It claimed the internet service provider (ISP) had not taken reasonable steps to prevent customers pirating copyright video over its network. Today the full bench of the Federal Court dismissed AFACT's appeal. iiNet managing director Michael Malone said outside court that the case has not stopped one instance of piracy. "All this legal action hasn't stopped one person downloading anywhere in Australia." "There needs to be a lot more clarity as to what is expected of telcos, so ultimately this will only be resolved by governments stepping in," Malone said. AFACT executive director Neil Gane said iiNet must take responsibility for copyright infringement on its network. "This is a case where the ISP had admitted to tens of thousands of copyright infringements on its network, and it does not have to lift a finger to prevent them," Gane said. "It cannot be right that in effect the ISP, who has the power to prevent copyright infringement online and has admitted they are taking place, does not share the responsibility to stop it." Gane said it is too early to comment on the next move AFACT will take, or whether it will appeal the decision. It has 28 days to decide. Internode regulatory chief John Lindsay welcomed the decision favouring friend and rival iiNet. ...more I had a quick look... I don't think it was there this just happened today  |
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24-02-11, 08:00 AM
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,016
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Thanks Multi. The industry had already lost the first round. I believe there may be one more appeal. If that goes against them they'll need parliament's help, which they're pursuing.
- js. |
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