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Old 07-01-15, 09:28 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 10th, '15

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"FCC rules must ensure 'there are no tolls, gatekeepers, or a two-tiered Internet system in this country.'" – U.S. Rep Doris Matsui, D-CA






































January 10th, 2015




Republicans Lay Plans to Fight FCC’s Net-Neutrality Rules

Utility-like regulation would go too far, GOP lawmakers say
Gautham Nagesh

Newly fortified Republicans in Congress are considering a number of ways to stymie the Obama administration’s planned regulations on broadband Internet providers in 2015, making Capitol Hill a new front in the fight over “net neutrality.”

Concern about the rules is playing into Republican efforts to rein in what they say is regulatory overreach by the Federal Communications Commission.

Dissension over the Internet rules is so rancorous that it could end up impeding progress on technology policy areas where there is potential for agreement, such as cybersecurity and the allocation of wireless spectrum, according to telecom lobbyists and congressional aides.

The FCC spent most of 2014 drafting the new rules for how broadband Internet providers manage their networks, and it plans to vote on a final rule in February. Shortly after the midterm elections, President Barack Obama called on the FCC to impose the strongest possible rules on providers by classifying broadband as a utility, which would make it subject to much greater regulation. The rules are designed to protect net neutrality—the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally.

Many conservatives and the broadband industry say utility-like regulation is a step too far, arguing it will stifle innovation in the industry. That view is held by some pivotal players in the new Congress, such as John Thune (R., S.D.), the incoming chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.

“The regulatory tools at the FCC’s disposal are outdated and its previous efforts to create rules to regulate the Internet were struck down by the courts,” Sen. Thune said in a statement. “It’s hard to imagine that its new attempt will escape legal challenges and avoid the kind of regulatory uncertainty that harms Internet innovation and investment.”

In the House, a Republican staffer for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees the FCC, said lawmakers won’t know what steps they will take until they see the agency’s final plan. But all options are on the table, he said, including legislation to block reclassification and cutting the agency’s budget. The FCC is already straining to complete the many outstanding items on its docket with its current resources. Lawmakers also could try to implement a seldom-used law, the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to void major rules issued by federal agencies.

Another option is legislation to preserve net neutrality without resorting to utility regulation. However, such legislation would be anathema to many Republicans who oppose any regulation of Internet access.

Moreover, any legislation to override or undo the Internet rules would be a heavy lift in Congress. It would have to pass both the House and Senate, then override a likely veto from Mr. Obama, which would require a two-thirds vote in both chambers. Moreover, the most effective challenge to the rule may come not from Congress but from the industry; within the FCC, officials take it as a given that whatever the commission produces will be challenged in court.

“There are many paths that opponents of strong net neutrality rules can follow in the Congress,” said Gene Kimmelman, president of the group Public Knowledge, which supports strong net neutrality rules, in an interview. “However if the White House remains firmly in favor of strong net neutrality rules, all legislation is likely to fail.”

As a result, the most likely venue for taking on the agency will be the hearing room, where GOP-led committees can be expected to grill FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler on the policy while making it clear that they oppose expanded regulation of broadband providers. A date hasn’t yet been set for a net-neutrality hearing.

The net neutrality issue could overshadow a debate over the best way to allocate government spectrum, specifically airwaves that wireless carriers can use to transmit data for smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. The federal government still holds the most spectrum, which is typically shared between various agencies for a multitude of purposes.

Demand for spectrum has increased significantly in recent years as mobile devices have become the primary Internet connection for millions of consumers. That demand produced a spike in the prices paid for spectrum by the carriers in the FCC auction that ran from November into December. Both parties would like to see more of that spectrum freed up for public use, though there is some debate over the best way to do so. Republicans have traditionally favor selling the airwaves to wireless carriers for their exclusive use, while Democrats would also like to see more spectrum sharing, and more unlicensed spectrum that is free for any device maker to use.

Similarly, the net-neutrality fight could exacerbate the divide over cybersecurity legislation, which has become a higher priority thanks to the continuing run of high-profile cyberattacks against Sony Corp. and other companies. Both parties agree with industry on the need to update the law, but there is debate on whether industry should face security regulations or be liable in the event of an attack. The fight over net neutrality could make it tougher for individual members to cross party lines to end the long-standing logjam on even modest changes to the cybersecurity laws.

A sense of the Republicans’ eagerness to challenge the administration’s tech agenda came at the end of 2014 when they included in the fiscal 2015 spending bill language prohibiting the Commerce Department from using funds to terminate the U.S. government’s oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Icann manages the Internet Domain Name System, which serves as a set of central signposts that help computers locate the correct servers and websites. Conservatives argue that without U.S. involvement, oversight of the Internet could fall into the hands of repressive governments.

Commerce officials said they are still evaluating the language to determine whether it would impede their plan to transfer oversight of Icann to an international group of nonprofits, academics, and engineers.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/repub...210700099.html





Glass Houses and Throwing Stones: Why a Canadian Anti-Piracy Firm May Need to Send Itself Copyright Infringement Notices
Michael Geist

Canipre, a Montreal-based intellectual property enforcement firm, yesterday issued a press release announcing an infringement monitoring program designed to take advantage of the new copyright notice-and-notice system. The release notes that the service detects online infringement and sends notifications alleging infringement to Canadian Internet providers, who must forward the notifications to their subscribers. The company has been involved in the Voltage Pictures – TekSavvy lawsuit and it cites that case as evidence of the effectiveness of its services.

Yet what Canipre does not say is that a blog associated with the company may have been engaged in copyright infringement for many months. The blog – copyrightenforcement.ca – is run by Barry Logan, the company’s Managing Director, Operations (I received an email from Mr. Logan last year that listed the site as his blog address). In addition to posting releases from Canipre and information about the TekSavvy case, the site has posted dozens of full-text articles from media organizations around the world.

For example, last week it posted the full text of a 1200 word article on TV piracy from the Wire Report, an Ottawa-based telecom publication. The article resides behind a paywall limited to subscribers and is listed as “exclusive content.” In fact, reposting full-text articles from other sources is a regular occurrence on the site. Posts in December feature articles from the Huffington Post Canada, Business Insider, and CNET. Earlier posts include full-text articles from the Hollywood Reporter, StreamDaily, Reuters, the Canadian Press, Global News, Vancouver Sun, and the National Post. Some of the posts include articles that strip out reference to the author (Chronicle Herald, CBC) and others include no attribution whatsoever. The site also uses photos from the articles, often without attribution.

While the use of clips of articles will often qualify as fair dealing and even full text of articles can be fair dealing in some circumstances, posting full text articles without attribution or including subscription-only information that is not otherwise available, is much more likely to be viewed as infringement if posted without authorization. Canipre would likely offer its services to the media companies whose work is affected, yet it might want to take a closer look at its internal conduct before throwing stones in the form of thousands of notices alleging infringement.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2015/01/g...ement-notices/





Google Piracy Hits Record High

Google allegedly awash with pirate links
Dave Parrack

Piracy percentages really just tell you there’s a small number of people who rip off everyone. Absolute revenue is more interesting.

— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) January 5, 2015


Google was asked to remove 345 million links to copyrighted material in 2014. This represents an increase of 75 percent over the previous year, suggesting that either there are more piracy links on Google than ever before or that copyright holders are ramping up their efforts.

TorrentFreak did the necessary math, adding up the weekly totals to arrive at the 345 million takedown requests figure for the year. Not all of these requests are acted upon, but Google honors the majority of them. Either way, it’s processing around 1 million requests every day.

Copyright holders would rather Google deal with the problem directly, and the search giant has taken steps to push piracy sites down the rankings. However, Google insists there is a much more obvious solution, as revealed in the How Google Fights Piracy PDF:

Piracy often arises when consumer demand goes unmet by legitimate supply. As services ranging from Netflix to Spotify to iTunes have demonstrated, the best way to combat piracy is with better and more convenient legitimate services. The right combination of price, convenience, and inventory will do far more to reduce piracy than enforcement can.

In other words, the affected industries should spend less time fighting a neverending battle with pirates and more time forging legitimate alternatives that would prevent piracy from propagating in the first place. Which seems rather sensible advice to me personally.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/google-...h-news-digest/





Pirate Bay Hints at Reincarnation, Posts Countdown Timer Set to 1 February
Anirban Roy

The notorious file sharing torrent website Pirate Bay is down since the Sweden Police raid at the Pirate Bay office on 9 December, 2014. Following this, several other torrent sites, including EZTV, Zoink, Torrage and Istole Tracker too went down.
Pirate Bay could be coming back on 1st FebruaryPirate Bay Website

ISOHunt took the responsibility of bringing back the Pirate bay and launched a whole new torrent website oldpiratebay.org. On 12 December, 2014 ISOHunt team confirmed the launch of oldpiratebay by mentioning the original Pirate Bay site as "the symbol for a whole generation of Internet users".

Waving their trademark Pirate flag the original Pirate bay site posted a countdown timer counting the downtime of the site since its raid. Following a few changes, the original site also posted a handful of cryptic message and a torrent link of the Sony's Pictures movie "The Interview".

Suddenly today, the site posted a new countdown timer with an animated "we are TPB" flag behind it. The countdown clock is set to 1 February, 2015. However, there was no official Pirate Bay update on the timer at the time of filing this report. We will keep updating this report once we receive any further detail on this.

Founded in 2003, Pirate Bay was a major torrent-based site, allowing users to share audio and video files, of which most were copyrighted to somebody else.

In 2009, all three founders of the site were found guilty in Sweden for assisting in making copyright content available. In a few countries the ISP's had been ordered to block the website.

Swedish prosecutors filed charges against Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Peter Sunde in 2008. They also charged Carl Lundstrom, a Swedish businessman with an allegation of promoting the site through his business activities.

They were sued for 34 cases out of which 21 were related to music files, nine to films and four to games. The trial started on 16 February, 2009 and ended on 3 March, 2009 with a verdict of one-year imprisonment and a fine of 30 million Swedish Krona.

The entire Pirate Bay episode of file sharing activities has become so popular that The League of Noble Peers produced a documentary series on them. The documentary series, "Steal This Film", achieved huge success after its release in 2006.
http://www.ibtimes.co.in/pirate-bay-...ebruary-619106





Could Cryptocurrency Improve P2P File Sharing?
Danny Bradbury

The Pirate Bay may never make it to its teenage years. The popular file sharing site, launched in 2003, was recently taken offline following a raid by Swedish police.

It’s a sad event for a site that is supposed to be all about unassailable file sharing and, although resurrected versions of The Pirate Bay may already be back up online, the latest interruption to its service raises a number of questions.

What does this raid mean for decentralised P2P filesharing? And can the same technologies that underpin cryptocurrencies help sustain or even enhance decentralised P2P filesharing networks like The Pirate Bay?

A way around ISPs

P2P filesharing networks work by enabling lots of computers on the Internet to share files with each other. Most of the P2P networks today use the BitTorrent protocol.

BitTorrent has some superficial similarities to cryptocurrencies like bitcoin: namely, it is a protocol offering decentralised communications among autonomous nodes in a network.

There are several potential problems for people wanting to use BitTorrent networks. The first is that visitors to sites like The Pirate Bay may be blocked by their own ISPs, possibly at the behest of governments or industry lobby groups.

“I don’t think a decentralised service offers a way around ISPs,” said Nick Lambert, COO at MaidSafe, which focuses on distributed secure file storage. “When the SAFE Network launches – which is the most decentralised service I have heard of, as it doesn’t have a blockchain – it is still not immune from ISPs.”

Theoretically, users could do away with ISPs altogether with a decentralised mesh network using bitcoin as an incentive to participate. Lambert points to Libernet, a bitcoin-funded mesh networking concept, as a way to dodge ISPs altogether. This is more of a theoretical solution than a practical one at present, though.

“The quest to find a replacement for ISPs is something that many people would like to see, but unfortunately I think a really viable solution is a wee bit off,” he concluded.

The other potential problem for filesharing users is that even if their ISPs let them visit sites like The Pirate Bay, local law enforcement may take those sites down at the source, as happened with The Pirate Bay.

However, this may be less of an issue than expected, because The Pirate Bay wasn’t actually sharing the files itself. Instead, it was simply an index, maintaining a database of those files.

“Despite the warning message, most of these users will still download their file successfully, since BitTorrent trackers have already been made mostly redundant by a global P2P network, which can be referred to as ‘the BitTorrent DHT’,” said Andrew Miller, a computer science PhD student at the University of Maryland.

Miller is a key contributor to permacoin, a project designed to use blockchain technology to archive data across thousands of computers.

How BitTorrent file sharing works

To understand this concept, we must delve into how BitTorrent works.

In a BitTorrent network, files are made available for others to download in a process called 'seeding'. Files are seeded by computers called 'peers', and anyone’s computer can be made into a peer simply by downloading an appropriate software client and connecting it to the Internet.

Computers on the network that download files from seeders are called 'leeches', and it’s common for a peer to be both a seeder and a leech at the same time.

Seeded files are carved up into many individually downloadable segments. This has three advantages:

First, if one peer containing a file becomes unavailable during a download, other seeders will still be available to deliver the segments that a leech is missing. Second, multiple segments can be downloaded from different seeders at once, making it easier to retrieve files quickly. Finally, leeches can quickly become seeders themselves, by seeding the files that they have already downloaded. This contributes to the overall health of the network and the availability of files.

In the early days of BitTorrent, peers on the network found each other using tracker files, which contained a constantly-updated list of which peers held which file segments.

The Pirate Bay used to be a centralised tracker service for BitTorrent files. For each downloadable file, it would host a downloadable tracker file with a .torrent extension.

Trackerless torrents

In 2009, The Pirate Bay switched off its centralised tracking service. Instead, it switched to trackerless torrents. These use a variety of mechanisms to enable people to find their files. The most common is the distributed hash table (DHT) technology that Miller describes. It enables peers in the network to hold partial lists of other peers that are hosting particular file segments. Another mechanism, Peer Exchange, enables BitTorrent clients to ask other peers in the network directly which peers they are connected to.

Consequently, The Pirate Bay moved from being a source of downloadable trackers, to a directory of magnet links. Unlike trackers, magnet links didn’t tell a peer where to find a file. Instead, it contained cryptographically hashed information about the content of a particular downloadable file, effectively telling a client what to look for. A BitTorrent client referencing a magnet link connects to its peers using distributed hash tables and asks them who is seeding that file.

When sites like The Pirate Bay stopped sharing files, they stopped being necessary for the continued operation of the file sharing network. Instead, the real heavy lifting has long since moved to the client, and the distributed hash tables. Nevertheless, those sites did provide a useful way to easily find shared files online.

One way to sustain that ease of use, rather than relying on people manually sharing links, may be to decentralise the publishing of file information itself. This is something that distributed hash tables are useful for. OpenBazaar, which is a decentralised marketplace allowing people to list their own goods and services, uses DHTs to get that information out. Projects like OpenBazaar suggest that it’s possible for autonomous nodes in a global network to publish information of their own for everything from trading to P2P lending.

Other projects, like Triblr, have already implemented distributing searching for file sharing.

Using cryptocurrency to improve performance

So, cryptocurrency’s underlying technologies may not be needed to save file sharing, or the indexing of information about currently-available files. Nevertheless, there may be room for cryptocurrency to improve the performance of these filesharing networks.

“One of the innovative things in bitcoin is its use of built-in virtual currency for incentives in its network,” said Miller.

BitTorrent also has a built-in incentive mechanism, Miller points out. Those peers that seed files are rewarded with faster downloads, while peers that seed fewer or no files will find that the frequency of file segments they can download from another peer are artificially limited, or ‘choked off’.

This incentive mechanism leaves new peers with a problem: they have nothing to seed, so their downloads may be slower. The BitTorrent protocol uses ‘optimistic unchoking’, in which a random peer is selected for unthrottled downloads, on the assumption that it may pay off.

“Overall, the BitTorrent network consists of volunteers. Perhaps BitTorrent would work even better if you could offer to pay your peers for their service,” said Miller. In such a scheme, a leeching peer without file segments to trade could potentially pay a seeding peer to unchoke it, increasing its download performance, and using the blockchain to track it all.

A fluffier long tail

There’s a nuance here. Popular files such as the latest viral video or Hollywood blockbuster would probably do quite well without a paid quality of service download, as there would be enough seeders to satisfy even a new leecher.

“I think this approach would have the most potential for the ‘long tail’ of files such as personal backups (that only concern one person) or niche files (which, currently, are less likely to have active seeders),” Miller said.

The long tail is a distribution in which a small number of items outrank the rest in popularity.

A term highlighted by Wired editor Chris Anderson’s popular book of the same name, it applies to content in the Internet age. A small number of popular mainstream items will be downloaded the most, while other, more obscure content will be viewed by far fewer people. However, there are far more of these less popular items, creating the ‘long tail’.

BitTorrent networks have their own version of the long tail, giving rise to something known as the seeder promotion problem. Seeders often discontinue their file seeding after they have downloaded their own content. While there will always be enough seeders for a popular file, there may be only one or two seeds for that obscure public domain Norwegian documentary on the cultural history of lutefisk that you’ve been dying to watch. If you start leeching from the handful of seeders for that item and they become unavailable, you’ll be stuck without the full file download.

Using a cryptocurrency as an incentive could be a way to ‘fluff out’ the long tail, by encouraging more people to share less popular items. It could reward peers with a form of stored value. They could use in the future to purchase their own priority download status for segments of a different file, or, if the cryptocurrency was traded on exchanges, they could cash out.

Tackling fraudulent peer attacks

There’s another potential use for cryptocurrency technologies in file sharing networks, Miller said: as a form of protection from attack.

Media companies have hired firms to disrupt filesharing networks using a variety of methods, including using fake seeders. These seeders may transmit incomplete blocks, or upload poor-quality or broken files.

“The rating system used by Pirate Bay and other sites is important for combatting this, but it's potentially fragile,” Miller said. “It's possible that if such attacks become much more advanced in the future, then blockchain technology may lead to more robust defenses.”

The blockchain might become a way to store downloads and information about the quality of particular files or peers, for example. An internal cryptocurrency could even be used as a form of reputation system to reward genuine sharers and punish fraudulent ones.

For now, such ideas remain theoretical, and BitTorrent continues along its current successful path without any of these blockchain enhancements. But technology disrupts wherever it can. If the need arises, the technology is certainly there.
http://www.coindesk.com/could-crypto...-file-sharing/





Thom Yorke Made as Much as $20M from His BitTorrent Experiment
Mathew Ingram

As part of its mission to convince the music industry that it isn’t just for copyright infringers, BitTorrent launched a new product in 2013 called “Bundles,” which allow musicians and other artists to combine free downloads with paid products. One of the most high-profile figures to experiment with this feature last year was Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, who used it for his new album — and not only did he become the most legally-downloaded BitTorrent artist in 2014, but he may have made as much as $20 million.

What makes those kinds of numbers even more impressive is that Yorke didn’t launch his album bundle, called Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, until the end of September. By October — according to a comment on Twitter from an editor with Billboard magazine — the bundle had already been downloaded over 4 million times, and a year-end retrospective from BitTorrent says that the total number of downloads was 4.4 million.

When he released the album, Yorke said in a statement that he hoped the bundle would become an alternative to traditional music releases for more artists, saying it could prove to be “an effective way of handing some control of internet commerce back to people who are creating the work [and] bypassing the self elected gate-keepers.”

The paid portion of the bundle, which included seven songs, cost $6 to download — meaning the total amount of revenue generated by the project could be as high as $26 million. Since BitTorrent gives 90 percent of the income from its bundles to the artist, that means Yorke could have made almost $24 million from the album. That’s far more than he likely would have made releasing it using almost any other traditional method.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple, as a number of music-industry watchers have pointed out: the $26-million revenue figure assumes that everyone who downloaded the bundle paid for it. But bundles also include free downloads — in Yorke’s case, a song and a video. And BitTorrent allows the artist to decide whether to release the exact breakdown of free vs. paid, something that Yorke has chosen not to do, according to BitTorrent’s head of content strategy Straith Schreder.

Whatever the actual breakdown of paid vs. free is, however, more than 4 million downloads is still a big number, and if even half of those who downloaded it paid $6 for the bundle then Yorke still made a substantial amount of revenue with very little overhead. It certainly makes BitTorrent’s bundle program look pretty good compared with other distribution methods such as iTunes, which takes a 30-percent cut of the proceeds.

Update: Glenn Peoples of Billboard magazine estimates that Yorke probably made between $1 million and $6 million on his album, based on the likely number of people who paid for it rather than just getting the free track. The low number is based on the proportion of users who pay for Pandora.
https://gigaom.com/2015/01/05/thom-y...nt-experiment/





How ‘1989’ Edged Out ‘Frozen’ as the No. 1 Album of 2014, and Vice Versa
Ben Sisario

What was the most popular album of 2014? With technology rapidly changing how people listen to music, the answer depends on which numbers you count.

Based on the traditional sales model, Taylor Swift’s “1989,” which sold 3.66 million copies in the United States in formats like CDs and album downloads, narrowly beat Disney’s “Frozen” soundtrack, which moved 3.53 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

But incorporating streaming services like Spotify and YouTube changes the picture. Looked at that way, “Frozen” moved 4.47 million “album equivalent units,” a measurement introduced late last year by SoundScan and Billboard magazine that, in addition to album sales, factors in streams and downloads of individual songs. By this method, “1989” — which was largely unavailable through streaming — came in at 4.40 million.

As streaming grows in popularity, it still faces serious doubts over its viability as a financial model, and competing album sales metrics that yielded two different No. 1 albums illustrate the music industry at a crossroads.

Last year was the second in a row that sales of music downloads dropped in the United States. Some 106.5 million digital albums were sold, down 9.4 percent from 2013, while song sales fell 12.5 percent for the year, to just over 1.1 billion.

Over all, including downloads, CDs and the growing niche of vinyl LPs, some 257 million albums were sold in 2014, down 11.2 percent from the previous year.

Meanwhile, streaming through services like Spotify and Rhapsody increased 54.5 percent in 2014, to nearly 164 billion song streams. The pattern is much the same around the world. In Britain, for example, downloads fell for the first time last year but streaming doubled, according to the British Phonographic Industry, a trade group.

“There is definitely a consumer shift, as the digital consumer seems to moving away from downloads and toward streaming in massive amounts,” said David Bakula, an analyst at Nielsen.

Competition among streaming companies grew more intense in 2014. YouTube introduced a paid subscription plan for music, and Apple paid $3 billion for Beats, the headphone company that includes a fledgling subscription music outlet. That deal is expected to play a big part in the future of Apple’s iTunes store, which transformed the digital music market when it was introduced in 2003 but lately has seen a stark drop in consumer interest, music executives say.

Yet streaming is at the center of an intense industry debate about the value of music. In perhaps the year’s most influential decision in the music business, Ms. Swift removed her catalog from Spotify, which has both free and paid versions — a model known as “freemium” — apparently because the company was unwilling to make her music available only to its paying subscribers.

Ms. Swift’s stance made her a hero to many musicians who have fretted over the low royalty rates generated through streaming. It also brought to the fore a long-simmering concern among record executives that services like Spotify and YouTube make so much free music available that consumers have little incentive to buy any.

That concern is driving the big record companies as they renegotiate licensing contracts this year with streaming services. Like Ms. Swift, many artists and labels want more control to introduce staggered release “windows” — withholding albums for a time from streaming’s free tiers, for example, to spur sales. In Ms. Swift’s case, that strategy seemed to work: “1989” had nearly 1.3 million sales in its first week, the fastest any record has sold since 2002.

Analysts worry, however, that placing too many restrictions on such services as they grow will turn away potential customers.

“The biggest near-term challenge will be fixing freemium,” said Mark Mulligan of the firm Midia Research. “There is a risk that freemium will get thrown out with the windowing dishwater, that the major labels will bow to pressure from their boards and from big artists to seriously scale back free streaming.”

Spotify, which is available in 58 markets around the world, is used by 50 million people, 12.5 million of whom pay, according to the company.

In another of the most-talked-about moves by musicians in 2014, U2 teamed up with Apple to give away digital copies of its latest album, “Songs of Innocence.” The plan, which made the album automatically available on users’ iTunes accounts, was criticized by some as an invasion of privacy, and led to an apology from the band.

But Bono, the group’s lead singer, defended it as an experiment in publicizing new music, which remains a concern, even for a superstar act like U2. In a long and candid New Year’s post on the band’s website, Bono also wrote about the need for sorting out the economics of streaming from services like Spotify, which he praised for working to get people to pay for music.

“These payments don’t add up to replacement for income from physical or digital sales at the moment,” he wrote. “But I think they can if everyone sits down — record companies, artists and digital services — to figure out a fairer way of doing business.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/05/bu...ice-versa.html





Why Rosyna Can't Take A Movie Screenshot
adc

If you're on an Intel machine that you've purchased in the past 2-3 years, that computer almost certainly has an Intel Management Engine. You might not know what that is, and that's okay. You may also be unaware that the operating system on your computer could be leveraging features in the Intel Management Engine when consuming DRM Media.

What is the Intel Management Engine?

It's a coprocessor sitting on the same die as your CPU(s). "The computer next to your computer" from Igor Skochinsky's [1] presentation is a really fitting description. It's the hardware component that runs Intel's Accessibility Management Technology firmware. The device evolved out of a conglomeration of technologies that were targeted towards enterprises -- for feature upgrades, anti-theft, and remote machine management. It can run specialized java code, a web-server, work with the Wi-Fi and ethernet cards, run off the power-rail when the main CPU is off, and much, much more. Any project manager reading this is already breaking into a cold-sweat thinking about all the bugs in this feature-packed technology. It almost sounds like I'm making this up, as this is seriously a lot of stuff for an embedded technology.

What does it have to do with DRM?

One of the features of Intel's Accessibility Management Technology is an implementation of an Intel technology known as "Protected Audio/Video Path" (PAVP). The goal of the technology is to deliver media content in a manner which prevents piracy, even in realtime. That is, an attacker trying to rip content is unable to employ simple screen-recording software to grab those pixels.

How does this even work?

Without diving into the details or reverse engineering much of this, this is roughly how PAVP via the Intel ME works on Mac OS X. Applications such as iTunes and Safari are able to communicate directly to an IOKit service in the Intel Graphics drivers via an IOUserClient. They can negotiate and send in encrypted DRM blobs with keys to the Intel Graphics drivers. In turn, the graphics drivers are able to arbitrate communication with the PAVP application in the Intel Management Engine over the PCI bus, and deliver those encrypted keys and DRM content blob addresses. The Intel Management Engine then has some magic sauce (re: secret keys) that allows it to decrypt DRM keys and then decrypt the DRM blobs. Next, the Intel Management Engine writes directly to protected video memory to allow the Intel Graphics hardware to display to a computer monitor.

So why can't Rosyna take a screenshot of a movie?

Because the pixels aren't there. They're in a protected region of memory that the host CPU can't access without a security bypass. Sorry, Rosyna [2]. And there you have it.

Obligatory Security Rant

Before I leave you with some links for further research, I'd like to share some personal thoughts about the Intel ME.

Given that the ME sits in a position where it can configure the chipset and operate on the PCI bus, there are some serious security implications here I wish I could mitigate. Among them is the ability of the ME to run arbitrary code on the host CPU via option ROMs or presenting a disk-drive to boot from. Also among those abilities is the possibility to perform DMA to access host CPU memory. And another one is the ability to configure and use PCI devices present in the system (such as the ethernet card).

As a consumer, I didn't ask for these features. It'd be great to turn them all off. A hardware switch even. And BIOS settings do have a way to "Disable" the ME. But is it truly disabled? It will still run some code at startup I assume. And given that the Intel ME's security model requires that the host CPU is less privileged than the Intel ME, how can the host CPU really turn it off? One example of how the ME is more privileged is the ability to walk around VT-d configuration when performing memory access, which is possibly something required to make PAVP secure.

What it comes down to is that I like to think I own my computer since I bought the hardware. But in reality, I can't own all of it since there's much more privileged firmware running than any of my code, and I can't truly turn it off as far as I know, and I can't really look at it, without an exploit...
http://www.alexrad.me/discourse/why-...creenshot.html





Writers Say They Feel Censored by Surveillance
Jennifer Schuessler

A survey of writers around the world by the PEN American Center has found that a significant majority said they were deeply concerned with government surveillance, with many reporting that they have avoided, or have considered avoiding, controversial topics in their work or in personal communications as a result.

The findings show that writers consider freedom of expression to be under significant threat around the world in democratic and nondemocratic countries. Some 75 percent of respondents in countries classified as “free,” 84 percent in “partly free” countries, and 80 percent in countries that were “not free” said that they were “very” or “somewhat” worried about government surveillance in their countries.

The survey, which will be released Monday, was conducted anonymously online in fall 2014 and yielded 772 responses from fiction and nonfiction writers and related professionals, including translators and editors, in 50 countries.

Smaller numbers said they avoided or considered avoiding writing or speaking on certain subjects, with 34 percent in countries classified as free, 44 percent in partly free countries and 61 percent in not free countries reporting self-censorship. Respondents in similar percentages reported curtailing social media activity, or said they were considering it, because of surveillance.

The survey included only writers affiliated with PEN, the writers’ group emphasizing freedom of expression, and others the group was able to contact, and did not necessarily reflect the views of all writers. But the executive director of the PEN American Center, Suzanne Nossel, said that the findings, taken together with those of a 2013 PEN survey of writers in the United States, indicate that mass surveillance is significantly damaging free expression and the free flow of information around the world.

“Writers are the ones who experience encroachments on freedom of expression most acutely, or first,” Ms. Nossel said. “The idea that we are seeing some similar patterns in free countries to those we’ve traditionally associated with unfree countries is pretty distressing.”

The results of the survey, which was conducted by the nonpartisan research firm FDR Group, arrive amid continuing debate over the data collection programs of the National Security Agency, as well as increased broader concern about the erosion of privacy in the wake of various leaks and hacks, including the recent cyberattack on Sony.

The British novelist Hari Kunzru, a member of English PEN currently living in New York, said fears of government surveillance were a significant concern, even if the information being gathered was not necessarily being put to improper use by officials.

“The feeling that the Internet is looking over your shoulder is now universal,” he said. “But it’s the government that has the techniques and tools to look in at will.”

He added, “We are really putting into place a system that might be used by more tyrannically inclined governments in the future.”

The survey found that mass surveillance by the United States government had damaged its reputation as a defender of free expression, with some 36 percent in other “free” countries and 32 percent in “less free” countries saying freedom of expression had less protection in the United States than in their nations.

The 2013 PEN survey of American writers provoked some comment that writers’ fears were overblown, and there was little evidence that the American government took particular interest in the communications of writers.

But Ms. Nossel said that subjective perceptions of surveillance matter, particularly among those who rely on freedom of expression as “their lifeblood.”

“Just the fact that so many writers say they are deeply concerned and are actually changing their behavior is significant,” she said. “Whether we consider it justified or not, it isn’t something that should be ignored.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/05/ar...veillance.html





Malibu Media Dealt With Setback in File-Sharing Case
Drew Wilson

Malibu Media was dealt with a setback in a file-sharing lawsuit against an alleged file-sharer. It was an interesting case where the defendant said that the hard drive failed and it had to be replaced. Malibu Media claimed that this act alone constituted destruction of evidence. The court disagreed with the assessment and denied their motion.

There was an interesting development in one of the many file-sharing lawsuits filed by Malibu Media, a pornography company. In the MALIBU MEDIA, LLC v. Harrison case (Reference: Dist. Court, SD Indiana 2014. No. 1:12-cv-01117-WTL-MJD.), magistrate judge Mark J. Dinsmore recommended that Malibu’s “Motion for Sanctions Against Defendant for the Intentional Destruction of Material Evidence” be denied.

Court documents obtained by Freezenet details the very interesting set of circumstances that led to this. Malibu media accused a number of alleged file-sharers of copyright infringement over the work “Pretty Back Door Baby” on the BitTorrent protocol back in 2012.

The plaintiffs demanded the storage devices in the defendants possession for the purpose of collecting evidence:

Plaintiff’s Request for Production No. 1 asked for a “complete copy of the hard drive for each of the Computer Devices in [Defendant’s] house, apartment or dwelling.” […] Defendant responded that Plaintiff “was provided a complete copy of the hard drive for each of [his] computer devices on July 25, 2013.” […] At his deposition, Defendant testified about the drive that he had provided from his gaming computer. He stated that the hard drives in his computers “get used pretty hard and die pretty quickly,” such that he “replaced hard drives a lot in all of [his] computers.” […] In January 2013, for instance, the hard drive in Defendant’s gaming computer “had begun crashing,” and “it needed to be replaced.” […] Thus, Defendant replaced the drive shortly thereafter.

Apparently, the replacement drive was paid for by someone else. The defendant said that this other individual owed him money for car parts and that the hard drive would be sufficient. The plaintiffs wanted to know what happened to the old drive and the defendant explained that the drive was taken to recycling where it would be melted down. These events led up to the motion by the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs motion was “Sanctions Against Defendant for the Intentional Destruction of Material Evidence”.

Court documents continue, “Plaintiff contends that Defendant received notice of this lawsuit in October 2012 through the letter from Comcast […], and that the hard drive that Defendant replaced in early 2013 could have “contained evidence of Plaintiff’s copyrighted works.” […] Thus, Plaintiff argues that Defendant’s recycling of the hard drive violated Plaintiff’s duty to preserve evidence relevant to this litigation. […] Plaintiff also contends that Defendant tried to conceal his alleged wrongdoing: Plaintiff notes that its Requests for Production instructed Defendant to disclose the existence of and circumstances surrounding the destruction of any hard drives that Defendant had used but that Defendant no longer had in his possession. […] Defendant, however, allegedly did not reveal the existence of the hard drive he replaced in early 2013 until his August 2014 deposition, several months after he responded to Plaintiff’s requests for production.”

The court took the motion under advisement and conducted a hearing. That was where Malibu’s case began to fall apart:

Plaintiff in this case seeks imposition of sanctions for spoliation of evidence resulting from the destruction of Defendant’s hard drive. […] The Seventh Circuit notes that “courts have found a spoliation sanction to be proper only where a party has a duty to preserve evidence because it knew, or should have known, that litigation was imminent.” […] (observing that plaintiff “fail[ed] every element of the test for the spoliation inference” where evidence was destroyed “before [defendant] knew or should have known that litigation was imminent”).

Furthermore, a showing of “bad faith” is “a prerequisite to imposing sanctions for the destruction of evidence.” […] “`[b]ad faith’ means destruction for the purpose of hiding adverse information.” […] (“A party destroys a document in bad faith when it does so for the purpose of hiding adverse information.”). Sanctions for spoliation therefore may not be imposed simply because evidence was destroyed; instead, such sanctions are appropriate only if the evidence was destroyed for the purpose of hiding adverse information. […] (“[T]he crucial element is not that evidence was destroyed but rather the reason for the destruction.”). The movant bears the burden to make this showing.


Later on, a critical blow to the plaintiffs motion:

[i\Defendant received notice of this lawsuit at the beginning of October 2012. […] Defendant, however, did not destroy the hard drive until “late February 2013.” […] Thus, almost five months passed between the time that Defendant learned of the lawsuit and Defendant’s destruction of the hard drive. Had Defendant truly wished to hide adverse information, the Court finds it unlikely that Defendant would have waited nearly five months to destroy such information. Instead, Defendant’s continued use of the hard drive for the months after he learned of the litigation suggests that the hard drive contained no information to hide at all, or that Defendant did not intend to hide any such information.

The timing of Plaintiff’s amendment and the service of its complaint also detract from an inference of bad faith. Plaintiff amended its complaint to add Harrison as a Defendant on November 9, 2012. […] Plaintiff, however, did not serve the amended complaint on Harrison until April 2013, […], after Defendant had arranged to order the replacement hard drive, […], and after the recycling of Defendant’s hard drive. […] Furthermore, Defendant testified that the service of the complaint was the first time that he became aware that he was personally being sued for copyright infringement. […] Thus, at the time of the destruction in February 2013, Defendant was not even certain he had been sued, making it much less likely that he destroyed the hard drive to hide information that could prove damaging in this litigation.

Next, the circumstances of Defendant’s purchase of the replacement hard drive are not as suspicious as Plaintiff contends. Plaintiff notes that Defendant had a third party purchase the new hard drive for him and implies that Defendant did so to hide the existence of his original hard drive. […] As noted above, however, Defendant explained the circumstances of the third party’s purchase and gave a legitimate reason—repayment of the loan—for Harlan’s purchase of the hard drive. Furthermore, Mr. Harlan testified that he did in fact purchase the hard drive because he owed Defendant money, and agreed that the original loan had been for parts for Harlan’s car. […] Harlan’s testimony thus corroborates Defendant’s explanation for Harlan’s purchase of the drive, making it less likely that the purchase was part of a plan to hide adverse information.

Moreover, Plaintiff’s First Request for Production of Documents asked Defendant to produce “[a]ll documents referring, relating to or comprising records associated with the purchase of a Computer Drive.” […] Defendant responded by attaching a copy of the receipt showing the purchase of the hard drive by John Harlan. […] The Court finds unlikely that Defendant would have produced the receipt showing the purchase of the hard drive had Defendant wished to hide the purchase of the replacement hard drive. Defendant’s disclosure of this receipt thus further erodes the strength of any inference that Defendant was attempting to hide adverse information.[/i]

After analyzing a large number of facts of the case, the court struck the blow to Malibu’s motion:

For these reasons, then, the Court concludes that Defendant did not destroy the hard drive in bad faith. No direct testimony establishes that Defendant did so, and the circumstances of the destruction as outlined above do no warrant an inference that Defendant destroyed the hard drive for the purpose of hiding adverse information. As such, Plaintiff has not carried its burden to prove bad faith destruction of evidence, and Plaintiff’s motion for sanctions is DENIED.

A number of other elements the plaintiff filed was also shot down in court as well.

In short, there was no evidence to suggest that the destroyed drive was even involved in the alleged acts of copyright infringement. The court also found that there was no conspiracy to destroy evidence. The hard drive simply failed and needed replacing. The defendant had no real way of knowing that particular hard drive was to be preserved in court. The court also sided with the defendant that the drive wasn’t even used for the purposes of using BitTorrent in the first place. So, it just sounds like the plaintiff was simply barking up the wrong tree on this one as far as the court was concerned.

It’s hard to see this as anything other then a self-inflicted setback for Malibu. It’s hard to say where this case goes from here. We’ll be happy to report on any developments if we find anything.
http://www.freezenet.ca/malibu-media...-sharing-case/





Seagate Outs a Fleet of Cloud, Wireless and Super-Thin Hard Drives
Billy Steele

If getting your digital life better organized is tops on your list of New Year's resolutions, Seagate has a trio of options that cover all the bases. First, the company is offering its ultra-thin 7mm drive in portable form with the appropriately named Seagate Seven. As you might expect, the company boasts that this is "the world's slimmest" device for on-the-go storage, wielding 500GB of space and connecting to your gadgets via USB 3.0 inside a steel enclosure. The Seven certainly won't take up much space in your pocket or backpack, and it's set to arrive later this month for $100.

Prefer a wireless option for wrangling files? No worries: There's something for you, too. Seagate Wireless is another 500GB portable drive, but as the moniker indicates, this one cuts the tether to play nice with mobile devices. Aiming to cure the limited-space woes on phones and tablets, this multihued model creates its own network, so there's no need to worry about finding WiFi along the highway. Files are managed via Seagate's Media app for iOS, Android, Kindle and Windows 8, and what's more, stored media can be beamed to a big screen with Airplay, Chromecast or with the company's app for smart TVs and Roku players. Expect five color schemes when the $130 Wireless hits shelves in February.

What's that? You need a more comprehensive storage solution for all of the family's digital clutter? Seagate is ready to sort that too, and its Personal Cloud setup makes sure that stuff is accessible both at home and on the go. Keeping downloaded media in one place to watch on tablets, TVs and media streamers? Check. Serving as a central backup for laptops and other essential gadgets? It does that as well. Heck, it can even stream your content to DLNA-based wares like a PlayStation or Xbox console. Personal Cloud also handles backups of Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon and other cloud repositories, and there's a two-bay model that's configured to copy all data to the second drive for folks looking to be extra careful. And yes, you can turn it into one big storage space if you prefer. There's no word on pricing just yet, but Seagate Personal Cloud will wrangle 3TB, 4TB and 5TB capacities while the two-bay version will handle 4TB, 6TB and 8TB, with both scheduled to ship before the month's end.
http://www.engadget.com/2015/01/04/s...d-hard-drives/





Advertisers to Get a Glimpse of Apple Watch Promise, Challenge
Malathi Nayak

Apple’s forthcoming smartwatch poses a conundrum for advertisers: How to tap the enticing possibilities of the tiny gadget without overwhelming consumers with messages.

At this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, mobile-marketing firm TapSense plans to release an Apple Watch ad-buying service. The service will provide a first glimpse of how businesses can serve up ads on the watch, even though the gadget will not be available until later this year.

At issue: the same qualities that render the watch exciting to Madison Avenue, such as the ability to detect customers approaching a store and to zap an ad directly to their wrists, also risk alienating those customers.

Apple declined to comment on the use of its watch by advertisers, and will not attend CES officially. But many companies that make devices and services based around Apple products will be there, including several that are working with WatchKit, a software-development tool Apple released in November that allows developers to build watch-tailored applications.

Using that tool, developers are devising Apple Watch ad formats including interactive wallpapers on the watch dial with brand logos and personalized clock faces, said TapSense's chief executive Ash Kumar. His product helps developers insert ads, bought and sold instantaneously, in those apps.

The watch’s main screen allows the display of several tiny icons, including for email, weather, time, and potentially a few favourite service and retail apps.

Businesses could use those apps to notify customers of special deals, but only within already-opened apps, Kumar said. Otherwise, the vendor risks annoying consumers by introducing an ad that is out of sync with whatever they are doing.

If a consumer is using a transit app on the watch to monitor delays, for example, an advertiser could insert a marketing offer that would light up on the watch face for a ride-sharing service or a deal at a coffee shop nearby, Kumar said.

SMARTWATCH SPAM BOX?

But moderation is key. Push notifications and banner ads on smartphones can be turn-offs. Some marketers advise avoiding showing ads to users who typically click out of them or delivering the same ad too many times to any one user.

"If it feels like your smartwatch is turning into a spam box, you will take it off," said Padden Guy Murphy, who heads business development and public policy at car-sharing service Getaround.

The startup is exploring using Apple Watch's location-based features to target new customers. Apple has not added global positioning on the Apple Watch, but apps can track location as the device is tethered to a smartphone.

If a consumer shows interest in an ad, such as raising the wrist for a better look, WatchKit allows for notifications that expand and take up more room on the screen. Conversely, a disinterested consumer could tap an "X" mark to exit the ad, TapSense's Kumar said.

Communicating through buzzing or vibrations is currently only available on Apple's own apps on its wearable device.

FORCE PUSH

Whether Apple scores a hit with its upcoming Apple Watch and creates a new mass-market category remains unclear. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson caused a stir last week by predicting the watch “will not be the home run product that iPod, iPhone, and iPad have been.”

But advertisers see potential. They particularly like a watch feature that Apple calls "Force Push" that activates when a user taps the screen with extra pressure, opening up a menu with up to four actions. They envision coupons that when tapped can show directions to a store, for example.

Ad executives hope that the watch can overcome challenges that have prevented location-based ads from succeeding on mobile phones. Unlike on phones, says Jeff Malmad, North American mobile director at media agency Mindshare, users will not need to dig into a bag or pocket to see the ad. They will be right on a user’s wrist, in sight at all times.

But to keep them effective, he says, consumers will need to opt for them, much as many consumers opt to receive email messages from various retailers.

(Additional reporting by Christina Farr; Editing by Sarah McBride and Tomasz Janowski)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/0...0KE0BP20150105





WiFiPhisher

Wifiphisher is a security tool that mounts fast automated phishing attacks against WPA networks in order to obtain the secret passphrase. It is a social engineering attack that unlike other methods it does not include any brute forcing. It is an easy way for obtaining WPA credentials.

Wifiphisher works on Kali Linux and is licensed under the MIT license.

From the victim's perspective, the attack makes use in three phases:

1. Victim is being deauthenticated from her access point. Wifiphisher continuously jams all of the target access point's wifi devices within range by sending deauth packets to the client from the access point, to the access point from the client, and to the broadcast address as well.
2. Victim joins a rogue access point. Wifiphisher sniffs the area and copies the target access point's settings. It then creates a rogue wireless access point that is modeled on the target. It also sets up a NAT/DHCP server and forwards the right ports. Consequently, because of the jamming, clients will start connecting to the rogue access point. After this phase, the victim is MiTMed.
3. Victim is being served a realistic router config-looking page. wifiphisher employs a minimal web server that responds to HTTP & HTTPS requests. As soon as the victim requests a page from the Internet, wifiphisher will respond with a realistic fake page that asks for WPA password confirmation due to a router firmware upgrade.

https://github.com/sophron/wifiphisher





White House Nudges Congress to Revisit Controversial 'CISPA-Style' Laws After Sony Attack

Summary:President Obama's remarks about wanting Congress to work on "stronger cybersecurity laws" are reminiscent of one controversial bill that angered privacy groups.
Zack Whittaker

President Obama has sent the strongest signal yet for the upcoming Congress to take up new controversial cybersecurity information sharing legislation next year.

It comes days after the FBI said North Korea was "responsible" for the attack that crippled Sony's networks in a cyberattack launched in November.

President Obama said at his end-of-year press conference on Friday that he had a "cyber agency team look at everything we could do at the government level to prevent these kinds of attacks."

"We have been correlating with the private sector but a lot more needs to be done," Obama said.

He said he hoped Congress will in the new year work on "stronger cybersecurity laws that allow for information sharing across private sector platforms as well as the public sector."

This would help to prevent cyberattacks from happening "in the first place," he added.

The Obama administration and the soon-to-be-retiring Congress have failed to see eye-to-eye in the past two years on proposed cybersecurity legislation. The problem has been exacerbated by a series of high-profile attacks against U.S. businesses from state-sponsored hackers and lone-wolf hacker groups.

After the White House threatened to veto one controversial bill, dubbed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), new legislation made it through the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this year.

Critics called the new bill, the similarly named Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), an "even more toxic bill than the original CISPA bill." It will be debated and voted on by the full Senate in the new year.

Congress nudged by NSA nominee to revive CISPA as intelligence reforms take shape

The NSA chief-in-waiting's testimony to Congress may be enough to inspire lawmakers to revive old cybersecurity legislation, which would indemnify Silicon Valley technology giants from sharing their users' data with the government.

CISA is designed to encourage ways of sharing information between government agencies and the private sector, including technology companies. It contains similar language to CISPA, its fallen predecessor. Critics warn the law, if passed, will allow private sector firms to search personal and sensitive user data of ordinary U.S. residents to identify "threat information," which can then be shared with other opt-in firms and the federal government -- without the need for a court-ordered warrant.

White House Economic Council Director Jeff Zients said at a Politico breakfast on Friday that there would be more executive action by the president in order to protect federal government assets.

"But in order to take this to the next level we need legislation," he said,

The White House has not yet publicly indicated whether or not the president would veto CISA, however.

The Sony hack, however, was severe enough for the Obama administration to consider it a "serious national security issue" on Thursday.

It's not clear if the severity of the Sony hack will indicate a change in stance on cybersecurity policy. Questions were left with the White House but were not returned at the time of writing.

With just shy of two weeks before sessions begin, all eyes are on the upcoming Congress to see if the new CISA bill gains traction among the new lawmakers.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/white-h...r-sony-attack/





Hey Everyone, CISPA Is Back... Because Of The Sony Hack, Which It Wouldn't Have Prevented
Mike Masnick

This isn't a huge surprise, but Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, the NSA's personal Rep in Congress (NSA HQ is in his district), has announced that he's bringing back CISPA, the cybersecurity bill designed to make it easier for the NSA to access data from tech companies (that's not how the bill's supporters frame it, but that's the core issue in the bill). In the past, Ruppersberger had a teammate in this effort, Rep. Mike Rogers, but Rogers has moved onto his new career as a radio and TV pundit (CNN just proudly announced hiring him), so Ruppersberger is going it alone this time around.

Not surprisingly, he's using the Sony Hack as a reason for why this bill is needed:

“The reason I’m putting bill in now is I want to keep the momentum going on what’s happening out there in the world,” Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger... told The Hill in an interview, referring to the recent Sony hack, which the FBI blamed on North Korea.

Fair enough, then perhaps Ruppersberger could explain how CISPA would have prevented the Sony Hack? Of course, he can't, because it wouldn't have helped. CISPA is focused on getting companies to share more information with the government (including the NSA and DHS), but there's no indication that Sony would have actually opened up its network for the NSA to snoop through and find these hackers (wherever they might have come from). Even if Sony had opened up its system to the government, it seems unlikely that the NSA would have magically spotted this hack and done anything about it.

Instead, using the Sony Hack as a hook is a cynical political ploy for a losing idea that is designed to harm the public and take away their privacy.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...-is-back.shtml





FBI Says Search Warrants Not Needed to Use “Stingrays” in Public Places

Feds' position on decoy cell-site towers continues anti-privacy theme.
David Kravets

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is taking the position that court warrants are not required when deploying cell-site simulators in public places. Nicknamed "stingrays," the devices are decoy cell towers that capture locations and identities of mobile phone users and can intercept calls and texts.

The FBI made its position known during private briefings with staff members of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). In response, the two lawmakers wrote Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson, maintaining they were "concerned about whether the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have adequately considered the privacy interests" of Americans.

According to the letter, which was released last week:

For example, we understand that the FBI’s new policy requires FBI agents to obtain a search warrant whenever a cell-site simulator is used as part of a FBI investigation or operation, unless one of several exceptions apply, including (among others): (1) cases that pose an imminent danger to public safety, (2) cases that involve a fugitive, or (3) cases in which the technology is used in public places or other locations at which the FBI deems there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.

The letter was prompted in part by a Wall Street Journal report in November that said the Justice Department was deploying small airplanes equipped with cell-site simulators that enabled "investigators to scoop data from tens of thousands of cellphones in a single flight, collecting their identifying information and general location."

The bureau's position on Americans' privacy isn't surprising. The Obama Administration has repeatedly maintained that the public has no privacy in public places. It began making that argument as early as 2010, when it told a federal appeals court that the authorities should be allowed to affix GPS devices on vehicles and track a suspect's every move without court authorization. The Supreme Court, however, eventually ruled that warrants are required. What's more, the administration has argued that placing a webcam with pan-and-zoom capabilities on a utility pole to spy on a suspect at his or her residence was no different from a police officer's observation from the public right-of-way. A federal judge last month disagreed with the government's position, tossing evidence gathered by the webcam that was operated from afar.

In their letter, Leahy and Grassley complained that little is known about how stingrays, also known as ISMI catchers, are used by law enforcement agencies. The Harris Corp., a maker of the devices from Florida, includes non-disclosure clauses with buyers. Baltimore authorities cited a non-disclosure agreement to a judge in November as their grounds for refusing to say how they tracked a suspect's mobile phone. They eventually dropped charges rather than disclose their techniques. Further, sometimes the authorities simply lie to judges about their use or undertake other underhanded methods to prevent the public from knowing that the cell-site simulators are being used.

"The Judiciary Committee needs a broader understanding of the full range of law enforcement agencies that use this technology, the policies in place to protect the privacy interests of those whose information might be collected using these devices, and the legal process that DOJ and DHS entities seek prior to using them," Leahy and Grassley wrote in their letter to Holder and Johnson.

Hanni Fakhoury, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said some states and judges are pushing back against stingrays.

"In Tacoma, judges now require police (to) specifically note they plan to use an IMSI catcher and promise not to store data collected from people who are not investigation targets," he said. "The Florida and Massachusetts state supreme courts ruled warrants were necessary for real-time cell phone tracking. Nine states—Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin—passed laws specifically requiring police to use a warrant to track a cell phone in real time."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...public-places/





Android TV Takes Over The Television Ecosystem

Chances are it will power your 2015 TV.
Lauren Orsini

Sony, Sharp and Philips will start shipping televisions powered by Android TV this spring, Android’s parent company, Google, announced Tuesday.

With Android functionalities baked into these companies’ latest TV models, consumers won’t need additional peripherals to access Google Play and Android TV. The features include Voice Control so users can search for content audibly, and Google Cast which allows TV owners to stream content on their tablets and phones to the television screen.

Google said that every major television and TV device chip maker is participating in Android’s effort to expand to TV in a big way: ARM, Broadcom, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Marvell, MediaTek, MStar, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and STMicroelectronics.

“When we launched Android with a single phone in 2008, we never imagined that we could connect over a billion people,” a spokesperson said. “And now, we're working closely with an entire ecosystem of TV partners—hardware manufacturers, service providers, and chip makers—to reimagine the living room.”

As Sony, Sharp, and Philips embrace Android TV, the odd one out is Samsung, which will use its own Tizen software in an attempt to differ from Google.
http://readwrite.com/2015/01/06/andr...ystem-takeover





This is Dish's Sling TV: an Internet TV Service that Lets You Stream ESPN for $20

The perfect complement to your Netflix subscription is coming this month
Chris Welch

Internet TV is here. Sony kicked us off in earnest with the launch of PlayStation Vue (which currently remains in limited beta), but Dish is about to make a full-on push into a new TV experience aimed at cord cutters and millennials who've dropped or never even had a cable or satellite subscription. If you're someone who pays for Netflix (and maybe Hulu Plus) and borrows someone else's password to watch HBO Go, you're probably the type of person Dish is trying to sell this on. At a recent media event, CEO Joe Clayton recently said his company is aiming for the 18-35 demographic. "I believe it's the launch of a whole new industry," he said.

Dish's grand experiment is called Sling TV, and before going on, we need to point out that it has very little to do with the Sling brand you may already be familiar with. There's no direct partnership with Slingbox or Sling Media, though both it and Dish are beneath a single parent company, EchoStar. So right off the bat, it's a somewhat confusing name that Dish maybe could've done better with. Another thing: though this is a service designed by and coming from Dish, you wouldn't know it without being told. The satellite provider's own logo is nowhere to be seen on branding and marketing materials — a decision meant to underline that Sling TV isn't meant to compete with or cannibalize Dish's primary satellite business. It's a new product meant for consumers that Dish has never been able to sign on. "It is a complementary service, not a supplementary service," said Clayton at a recent media gathering.

This isn't the cable experience you're used to

But what is Sling TV? For $20 a month — yes, twenty dollars — you get access to a lineup of cable networks that includes TNT, TBS, CNN, Food Network, HGTV, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, the Disney Channel, ESPN, and ESPN2. ESPN is obviously a huge get for Dish and could earn Sling TV plenty of customers all on its own. ESPN just ended another year as TV's leading cable network, and now you won't need a traditional cable package to watch it. For sports fanatics, that could prove enticing. But Dish has hinted that there may be limits on watching ESPN on mobile thanks to red tape from existing deals between the network and Verizon. We'll need to wait for the specifics on that.

There are no contracts involved with Sling TV. No commitments. You can buy it for a month and cancel the next if you're not sold on the idea. And since it's a true, over-the-top internet TV service, you can watch and take it anywhere. This really is TV everywhere; watch it on a Roku box in your living room, and then carry live TV with you outside the house on Android and iOS devices. You can also stream it on your PC or Mac with a web browser. Here's the initial list of exactly where you can tune into Sling TV:

• Amazon Fire TV
• Amazon Fire TV Stick
• Google Nexus Player
• LG Smart TVs
• Mac / OS X
• Roku set-top boxes
• Roku Streaming Stick
• Roku TV
• Windows PC
• Xbox One

All of that newfound freedom gives you an idea of why Dish has rounded up a fairly small list of supporters right now. This is new territory that both it and Sony are entering, and popular networks are perfectly cozy with the current system that calls for a cable subscription if you want to watch full episodes and complete seasons of their shows. (Beyond what's on Hulu.com, of course.) There's no AMC here, nor FX and Comedy Central. And none of the big four networks want anything to do with Sling TV at this stage. But instead of negotiating for months and years on end, Dish is choosing to make a go of it now. Give them points for determination, if nothing else. "Our strategy was never to replicate traditional pay TV over the internet," said Roger Lynch, the newly named CEO of Sling TV. Doing so would've resulted in $60 or $70 bundles, according to Lynch. "We don't think that's the right approach.

No a la carte channels, but you can add on "genre" packages

"Dish calls a la carte an "impossibility.""

Sling TV is something new, but that doesn't mean Dish plans on delivering the "dream" of a la carte programming. That approach would never work out on the business end of things, according to the company's top brass. "The economics for it don't really work out for programs," said Lynch. And Dish insist it would wind up a bigger hassle than consumers expect. Instead, beyond the $20 base offering, you can pay extra for "genre packages" that add more content. "You can construct a package that meets your needs rather than the traditional pay TV bundle of big, bigger, biggest," Lynch said. Today, Dish is announcing two of those premium packs: Kids and News. Each will tack $5 more onto the monthly $20 price — and did we mention you'll still be dealing with commercials? Apparently that's one aspect of traditional pay TV that Dish isn't comfortable ditching yet.

There's a lot we still don't know about the specifics of Sling TV. You'll be able to pause and rewind live shows, and some will be available to replay for up to three days after they originally air. But others won't, and Dish isn't yet getting specific about names. Exactly where and when will you be able to watch ESPN? Also, Dish says it's got a huge catalog of video-on-demand programming to complement live TV. That includes some internet content producers like Maker Studios. Dish says Sling TV will launch later this month, so it won't be long before you get to try out its take on internet TV. The big question is whether it'll prove worth paying for in addition to Netflix and, eventually, HBO. Just don't count on sharing it with anyone: there's a single-stream limit at all times.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/5/749...unced-ces-2015





Google Wants to Make Wireless Networks that Will Free You from AT&T and Verizon’s Data Caps
Brad Reed

You aren’t the only one who hates the prospect of getting hit with overage fees if you exceed your monthly wireless data cap. Google hates it too but for different reasons: If you’re too scared to watch a YouTube video on your phone because you’re worried about going over your cap, that means Google gets less ad revenue. However, a new report in The Wall Street Journal makes it clear that Google has a pretty detailed plan to help free your mobile phone from data caps using cap-free wireless networks.

Essentially, Google has been heavily lobbying the Federal Communications Commission to open up around 150MHz of unused spectrum on the 3.5GHz band for unlicensed use “while still leaving some of it available for companies to use exclusively.”

The 3.5GHz band is intriguing because while it could deliver very fast speeds, it doesn’t have strong propagation, which means that its signals won’t carry very far. Wireless carriers typically covet spectrum on the lower bands such as the 600MHz and 700MHz bands that will let them build huge networks that are also able to easily penetrate buildings.

So if the 3.5GHz spectrum won’t be good for building out a large nationwide network, what would it be good for? According to the Journal, the spectrum is “useful for delivering heavy loads of data in cities, which could make them viable for a lot of typical wireless needs — the way Wi-Fi is now, but potentially broader and more available.”

The Journal also says that Google thinks the current spectrum auctions give big wireless carriers the power to create artificial scarcity by hoarding spectrum and imposing data caps on their users. If more spectrum were freed up, it would sap some of carriers’ earning power and could drive down the cost of wireless access.

There are still a lot of hurdles to overcome with this plan and it certainly wouldn’t be a cure-all for everyone in the U.S., particularly people who live in rural areas. That said, any plan that promises to let more people use their phones without fear of getting slammed with overage fees seems like a step in the right direction.
http://bgr.com/2015/01/06/google-vs-...-att-wireless/





Democrats' Bill Would Ban Paid Prioritization by ISPs
Grant Gross

Democrats in the U.S. Congress have wasted no time in resurrecting a debate over net neutrality rules, with lawmakers introducing a bill that would ban paid traffic priority agreements between broadband providers and Web content producers.

A day after new members of Congress were seated, Democrats on Wednesday introduced a bill in both the House of Representatives and the Senate that would require the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to ban paid prioritization agreements. The FCC is preparing to vote on new net neutrality rules in late February, after an appeals court threw out a large portion of the agency’s old rules a year ago.

The reintroduced Online Competition and Consumer Choice Act, which failed to pass after Democrats introduced it last year, is designed to prevent broadband providers from creating Internet fast lanes and slow lanes, based on the ability of Web content providers and services to pay for faster speeds, sponsors said.

The primary sponsors of the bill are Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, and Representative Doris Matsui, a California Democrat. Other co-sponsors include six Democratic representatives, three Democratic senators, and independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

“The Internet must be a platform for free expression and innovation, and a place where the best ideas and services can reach consumers based on merit rather than based on a financial relationship with a broadband provider,” Leahy said in a statement. “The Online Competition and Consumer Choice Act would protect consumers and sets out important policy positions that the FCC should adopt.”

FCC rules must ensure “there are no tolls, gatekeepers, or a two-tiered Internet system in this country,” Matsui added in a statement.

Republicans now hold the majority in both the House and the Senate, and many have voiced opposition to strong net neutrality regulations. While the Democrats’ bill is unlikely to pass, it puts political pressure on the FCC to ban paid prioritization. An early proposal by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler would have allowed broadband providers to engage in “commercially reasonable” traffic management and, in limited cases, sign traffic prioritization deals.

The bill would require the FCC to prohibit paid prioritization agreements on the last-mile Internet connection, the connection between the ISP and the consumer. It would also prohibit broadband providers from prioritizing its own last-mile Internet traffic over the traffic of other companies.
http://www.itworld.com/article/28665...n-by-isps.html

















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