Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 7th, '10

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August 7th, 2010




'Free' Movies, Songs no More as Colleges Bust File-Sharing
Dexter R. Mullins

College students who download music and movies from peer-to-peer file-sharing programs such as LimeWire and KaZaA will find themselves cut off when they return to campus this fall.

Every college across the country must either have installed software to block illegal file-sharing or have created some other procedure for preventing it. The requirement is part of the 2008 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which took effect July 1.

Some schools have been working to comply with the provisions for several years.

Under the law, student violators face fines from $750 to $30,000 for each song or movie downloaded. If a court determines the infringement was "willful," that fine can be as much as $250,000, although some judges have reduced higher fines, saying they're unreasonable. Schools' liability is limited if they cooperate with law enforcement.

Campus punishments vary. The University of North Carolina website lists expulsion as a possible consequence. Vassar College requires first-time offenders to perform 20 hours of "sanctioned service" and pay a $25 fine. Second-time offenders face double the service requirements, double the fines and loss of Internet access, says spokesman Jeff Kosmacher.

Most schools use commercial software on their networks to restrict downloads, says Gregory Jackson, vice president for policy analysis and advocacy at Educause, a non-profit that focuses on higher education and technology. Companies such as Red Lambda, based in Longwood, Fla., and Audible Magic in Los Gatos, Calif., automate a large portion of the process.

These products look for file-sharing programs and block them. They shut down a user's Web access for a period of time, and the user must remove the file-sharing program and any files that were downloaded before access is restored.

But some schools, such as UCLA, have opted to find other ways of monitoring downloads. Using commercial software would violate the University of California's privacy policy, say Steve Montiel, UC system spokesman, and Kent Wada, UCLA director of strategic information technology and privacy policy. Every school in UC's system uses the same guidelines to address file-sharing, and Wada says it's working.

When a UCLA student is caught illegally sharing files on the school's network, Internet access is locked and the student gets a letter from the dean of students. Software and songs or movies must be removed from the computer, and students must attend a session explaining why sharing copyrighted material is wrong. Repeat offenders lose Internet privileges for the year.

"The entertainment industry wants immediate action, and who can blame them? But the higher-education community wants to have a 'teachable moment' approach, where we are trying to teach our students about what the law is," Wada says.

Despite all the risk associated with file-sharing, students will keep downloading, says Christopher Palmer, 22, a senior at LaSalle University in Philadelphia, who was caught using file-sharing programs this past school year. "People will always find a way around things," he says.

Palmer says he has. He has moved off-campus and away from the school's security system.

But Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, says that even students who live off-campus aren't immune. The financial loss to artists is unquantifiable, he says, adding that the industry's best customers have become its worst offenders.

"If a student is file-sharing at home, then we are dealing with that person by sending notices to their (Internet provider) just like we send notices to universities," Sherman says.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/educati...ing04_ST_N.htm





$200 Textbook vs. Free. You Do the Math.
Ashlee Vance

INFURIATING Scott G. McNealy has never been easier. Just bring up math textbooks.

Mr. McNealy, the fiery co-founder and former chief executive of Sun Microsystems, shuns basic math textbooks as bloated monstrosities: their price keeps rising while the core information inside of them stays the same.

“Ten plus 10 has been 20 for a long time,” Mr. McNealy says.

Early this year, Oracle, the database software maker, acquired Sun for $7.4 billion, leaving Mr. McNealy without a job. He has since decided to aim his energy and some money at Curriki, an online hub for free textbooks and other course material that he spearheaded six years ago.

“We are spending $8 billion to $15 billion per year on textbooks” in the United States, Mr. McNealy says. “It seems to me we could put that all online for free.”

The nonprofit Curriki fits into an ever-expanding list of organizations that seek to bring the blunt force of Internet economics to bear on the education market. Even the traditional textbook publishers agree that the days of tweaking a few pages in a book just to sell a new edition are coming to an end.

“Today, we are engaged in a very different dialogue with our customers,” says Wendy Colby, a senior vice president of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. “Our customers are asking us to look at different ways to experiment and to look at different value-based pricing models.”

Mr. McNealy had his own encounter with value-based pricing models while running Sun. The company had thrived as a result of its specialized, pricey technology. And then, in what seemed liked a flash, Sun’s business came undone as a wave of cheaper computers and free, open-source software proved good enough to handle many tasks once done by Sun computers.

At first, Sun fought the open-source set, and then it joined the party by making the source code to its most valuable software available to anyone.

Too little, too late. Sun’s sales continued to decline, making it vulnerable to a takeover.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and other top textbook publishers now face their, forgive me, moment in the sun.

Over the last few years, groups nationwide have adopted the open-source mantra of the software world and started financing open-source books. Experts — often retired teachers or groups of teachers — write these books and allow anyone to distribute them in digital, printed or audio formats. Schools can rearrange the contents of the books to suit their needs and requirements.

But progress with these open-source texts has been slow.

California and Texas dominate the market for textbooks used in kindergarten through high school, and publishers do all they can to meet these states’ requirements and lock in their millions of students for years.

Both states have only recently established procedures that will let open-source textbooks begin making their way through the arduous approval process. Last year, Texas passed a law promoting the use of open, digital texts and is reviewing material that might be used in schools.

In California, a state board is studying whether open texts meet state requirements. The CK-12 Foundation, a nonprofit financed by another Sun co-founder, Vinod Khosla, has created several texts that have met the board’s criteria.

“In three and a half years, we have developed nine of the core textbooks for high school,” says Neeru Khosla, Mr. Khosla’s wife and the head of CK-12. “If you don’t try this, nothing will change.”

Aneesh Chopra, the federal chief technology officer, promoted an open physics textbook from CK-12 in his previous role as the secretary of technology for Virginia, which included more up-to-date materials than the state’s printed textbooks.

“We still had quotes that said the main component of a television was a cathode ray tube,” Mr. Chopra says. “We had to address the contemporary nature of physics topics.”

Eric Frank, the co-founder of Flat World Knowledge, argues that there is a huge financial opportunity in outflanking the traditional textbook makers. His company homes in on colleges and gives away a free online version of some textbooks. Students can then pay $30 for a black-and-white version to be printed on demand or $60 for a color version, or they can buy an audio copy.

About 55 percent of students buy a book, Mr. Frank said, adding that the leading calculus book from a traditional publisher costs more than $200.

Publishers have started de-emphasizing the textbook in favor of selling a package of supporting materials like teaching aids and training. And companies like Houghton Mifflin have created internal start-ups to embrace technology and capture for themselves some of the emerging online business.

They are responding in much the same way traditional software makers did when open-source arrived, by trying to bundle subscription services around a core product that has been undercut.

Ms. Colby of Houghton Mifflin puts the state of affairs politely: “I think the open-source movement is opening a whole new conversation, and that is what is exciting to us.”

Mr. McNealy wants to make sure there is a free, innovative option available for schools as this shift occurs.

Curriki has made only modest strides, but Mr. McNealy has pledged to inject new life. He wants to borrow from Sun’s software development systems to create an organized framework for collecting educational information.

In addition, he wants the organization to help build systems that can evaluate educational material and monitor student performance. “I want to assess everything,” he says.

MR. McNEALY, however, has found that raising money for Curriki is tougher than he imagined, even though so many people want to lower the cost of education.

“We are growing nicely,” he says, “but there is a whole bunch of stuff on simmer.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/te...gy/01ping.html





Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age
Trip Gabriel

At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.

At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.

Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.

Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

“Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.”

Professors who have studied plagiarism do not try to excuse it — many are champions of academic honesty on their campuses — but rather try to understand why it is so widespread.

In surveys from 2006 to 2010 by Donald L. McCabe, a co-founder of the Center for Academic Integrity and a business professor at Rutgers University, about 40 percent of 14,000 undergraduates admitted to copying a few sentences in written assignments.

Perhaps more significant, the number who believed that copying from the Web constitutes “serious cheating” is declining — to 29 percent on average in recent surveys from 34 percent earlier in the decade.

Sarah Brookover, a senior at the Rutgers campus in Camden, N.J., said many of her classmates blithely cut and paste without attribution.

“This generation has always existed in a world where media and intellectual property don’t have the same gravity,” said Ms. Brookover, who at 31 is older than most undergraduates. “When you’re sitting at your computer, it’s the same machine you’ve downloaded music with, possibly illegally, the same machine you streamed videos for free that showed on HBO last night.”

Ms. Brookover, who works at the campus library, has pondered the differences between researching in the stacks and online. “Because you’re not walking into a library, you’re not physically holding the article, which takes you closer to ‘this doesn’t belong to me,’ ” she said. Online, “everything can belong to you really easily.”

A University of Notre Dame anthropologist, Susan D. Blum, disturbed by the high rates of reported plagiarism, set out to understand how students view authorship and the written word, or “texts” in Ms. Blum’s academic language.

She conducted her ethnographic research among 234 Notre Dame undergraduates. “Today’s students stand at the crossroads of a new way of conceiving texts and the people who create them and who quote them,” she wrote last year in the book “My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture,” published by Cornell University Press.

Ms. Blum argued that student writing exhibits some of the same qualities of pastiche that drive other creative endeavors today — TV shows that constantly reference other shows or rap music that samples from earlier songs.

In an interview, she said the idea of an author whose singular effort creates an original work is rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the individual. It is buttressed by the Western concept of intellectual property rights as secured by copyright law. But both traditions are being challenged.

“Our notion of authorship and originality was born, it flourished, and it may be waning,” Ms. Blum said.

She contends that undergraduates are less interested in cultivating a unique and authentic identity — as their 1960s counterparts were — than in trying on many different personas, which the Web enables with social networking.

“If you are not so worried about presenting yourself as absolutely unique, then it’s O.K. if you say other people’s words, it’s O.K. if you say things you don’t believe, it’s O.K. if you write papers you couldn’t care less about because they accomplish the task, which is turning something in and getting a grade,” Ms. Blum said, voicing student attitudes. “And it’s O.K. if you put words out there without getting any credit.”

The notion that there might be a new model young person, who freely borrows from the vortex of information to mash up a new creative work, fueled a brief brouhaha earlier this year with Helene Hegemann, a German teenager whose best-selling novel about Berlin club life turned out to include passages lifted from others.

Instead of offering an abject apology, Ms. Hegemann insisted, “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.” A few critics rose to her defense, and the book remained a finalist for a fiction prize (but did not win).

That theory does not wash with Sarah Wilensky, a senior at Indiana University, who said that relaxing plagiarism standards “does not foster creativity, it fosters laziness.”

“You’re not coming up with new ideas if you’re grabbing and mixing and matching,” said Ms. Wilensky, who took aim at Ms. Hegemann in a column in her student newspaper headlined “Generation Plagiarism.”

“It may be increasingly accepted, but there are still plenty of creative people — authors and artists and scholars — who are doing original work,” Ms. Wilensky said in an interview. “It’s kind of an insult that that ideal is gone, and now we’re left only to make collages of the work of previous generations.”

In the view of Ms. Wilensky, whose writing skills earned her the role of informal editor of other students’ papers in her freshman dorm, plagiarism has nothing to do with trendy academic theories.

The main reason it occurs, she said, is because students leave high school unprepared for the intellectual rigors of college writing.

“If you’re taught how to closely read sources and synthesize them into your own original argument in middle and high school, you’re not going to be tempted to plagiarize in college, and you certainly won’t do so unknowingly,” she said.

At the University of California, Davis, of the 196 plagiarism cases referred to the disciplinary office last year, a majority did not involve students ignorant of the need to credit the writing of others.

Many times, said Donald J. Dudley, who oversees the discipline office on the campus of 32,000, it was students who intentionally copied — knowing it was wrong — who were “unwilling to engage the writing process.”

“Writing is difficult, and doing it well takes time and practice,” he said.

And then there was a case that had nothing to do with a younger generation’s evolving view of authorship. A student accused of plagiarism came to Mr. Dudley’s office with her parents, and the father admitted that he was the one responsible for the plagiarism. The wife assured Mr. Dudley that it would not happen again.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/ed...n/02cheat.html





Hey NY Times: Can You Back Up The Claim Of $200 Billion Lost To Counterfeiting?
from the and-you-want-people-to-pay-you? dept

It's getting really frustrating watching the supposedly professional press repeat stats that have been thoroughly debunked as if they're factual, so I think it's about time that people started calling out the publications and reporters who make these mistakes directly. So, Stephanie Clifford, reporter for the NY Times, can you give any evidence whatsoever to support the claim that you made in your article this past weekend that counterfeiting "costs American businesses an estimated $200 billion a year?" I don't think that Clifford can, because that number has been thoroughly debunked time and time again.

Back in 2007 we wrote about a study by the well-respected GAO which noted that industry claims on counterfeiting were massively overblown. The GAO looked at the actual data and found that, contrary to claims from the industry that 5 to 7% of world trade involves counterfeit materials, the research they've seen shows it happening in less than 1% of trade and the value of those goods was significantly lower. Of course, obviously, those trying to pass counterfeit goods across the border will do their best to hide it, the evidence of the supposed 5 to 7% is totally lacking.

Soon after that, we wrote about a similar OECD report that tried to look at how big an issue counterfeiting really was. After it was announced (before the actual report came out) that the OECD numbers were going to show that the $200 billion number was totally bogus, there was lots of talk of "pressure" being put on the OECD to still support the $200 billion number. Eventually, the actual report came out, and the OECD hedged its bets by claiming that, even though the data didn't support it, counterfeiting could be a problem that cost up to $200 billion. Lots of weasel words. But since the data was actually there, some enterprising reporters, like Felix Salmon, actually looked at the details and found the real number appeared to be more like $5 billion. Still an issue, but hardly $200 billion. That link amusingly goes through the report to figure out how it came up with the "up to $200 billion" claim, and finds that the OECD, repeatedly basically says "well, this part seemed low, so we doubled it." And then they get to the next number and say "well, this seemed low, so we doubled it again." They end up doing that a bunch of times -- compounding the wild ass guess even further just to make the industry happy.

But where did that actual $200 billion number come from? Well, back in 2008, Julian Sanchez famously went to hunt down the origins of the claim, and found that it was always totally made up. Sanchez tries to track down where the number first came from, and finds it all dates back to a claim made in a 1993 Forbes article. That article claims counterfeiting is a $200 billion problem, but gives no citation or explanation, but that's the original citation if you trace back everyone else who's claiming $200 billion. It's just made up. From 20 years ago. And the NY Times is still relying on it despite all of the research debunking it?

And, of course, all of these numbers tend to come from the industry itself, who has every reason to make the numbers sound bigger than they really are. In fact, all of this ignores more recent studies that have shown the claim of "losses" from counterfeits almost certainly massively overstates the problem, because a significant number of the people who are buying counterfeit goods (1) know they're buying counterfeit goods and (2) at a later date, when they can afford it, often upgrade to the real version. In other words, the counterfeit isn't a "loss" at all, but a market entry point for those who never would have bought otherwise.

So, considering that we have two respected organizations (the GAO and the OECD) showing that the $200 billion number is massively exaggerated, followed by good reporters like Felix Salmon and Julian Sanchez pointing out the real number is much lower, and the basis for the $200 billion number is more or less made up... why is a respected publication like the NY Times still citing it as if it were factual? Of course, I don't mean to just pick on Stephanie Clifford or the NY Times, because plenty of reporters seem to repeat this number without thinking, but it's about time that people started calling them on it, and asking them to back it up with evidence or stop using it.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...31810439.shtml





RIAA ‘Protects’ Radiohead’s In Rainbows
Ernesto

In 2007 Radiohead sent a shockwave through the music industry by allowing fans to download their new ‘self-released’ album ‘In Rainbows’ for whatever price they wanted to pay, including nothing. Fast-forward three years and the RIAA and IFPI are sending takedown notices to people who share that album online. What happened?

After sitting out their contact with EMI, Radiohead self-released their latest album ‘In Rainbows’ and gave fans the option to download it for the price they felt comfortable paying. Not only was this one of the best promotional campaigns of the last decade, it also brought in serious money.

Radiohead said that the scheme made more money online than all of their other albums combined. The band was obviously proud that they had bypassed the major labels successfully. In the years that followed the band members lobbied for more rights for artists, and less power for the labels.

Last year, Radiohead and several other well known artists formed a lobby group with the aim of ending the extortion-like practices of record labels and allowing artists to gain more control over their own work. The artists were unhappy with the fact that the labels, represented by lobby groups such as the RIAA and IFPI, push their anti-piracy agenda without consulting the artists they claim to represent.

Going after fans is not the solution to the problems the industry is facing, they argued.

Considering the above, it came as a surprise to us when we found out that the RIAA and IFPI are still taking anti-piracy measures on behalf of Radiohead. Both the RIAA and IFPI have been sending out takedown notices to Google (RIAA, IFPI), urging it to disable blogger accounts and filter search results where Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ is offered for free. What went wrong here?

Although some people think that the ‘In Rainbows’ album is still available for free, the free offer really only lasted a few months. After that, the revolutionary ‘pay-what-you-want’ model was traded in for traditional licensing schemes with major labels.
The download versions of the album are still self-released, but for the physical copies Radiohead teamed up with record labels such as Warner and Sony. Because of these deals, major record labels now have the ‘rights’ to a piece of ‘In Rainbows’ and they are using this power to take down copies that are distributed online without their authorization.

It is of course ironic that an album that was once seen as the next step towards a new business model in the music industry, is now heavily protected by industry anti-piracy bodies. On the other hand, it is doubtful if the takedown requests are actually legitimate because the labels have the rights to physical distribution, not digital.

TorrentFreak contacted a Radiohead representative to discuss RIAA and IFPI practices but they declined to comment. Still, with all the sensible comments the band’s members have made about sharing in the past, we assume that they don’t approve of the tactics employed by the RIAA and IFPI. Or do they?
http://torrentfreak.com/riaa-protect...inbows-100801/





Why World War I Recordings Won't Enter The Public Domain Until 2049
from the that-doesn't-seem-right dept

In the past, we've pointed to the excellent (and useful) public domain tracker from Cornell, which helps you determine whether or not a work is in the public domain. In the past, I've generally focused on the top part of the chart, and forgot the ridiculous situation with sound recordings, which gets very little attention when it comes to copyright discussions. Basically, due to a quirk in the way US copyright law was constructed, sound recordings made prior to 1972 are treated quite differently than other works. I was reminded of this, thanks to Glyn Moody, pointing me to a discussion on an archivists' mailing list about the trouble of using World War I music. As copyright law stands today, works (in the non-sound recording division) published prior to 1923 are in the public domain. But that's not true for sound recordings:

The bad news is that no sound recording made before 1972 has federal copyright protection. They are instead protected by state common law copyrights, and will not enter the public domain until in most cases 1 January 2049, regardless of when they were recorded. .... Note that state protection is afforded even to European recordings, most of which enter the public domain in their home country after 50 years.

Understanding why this is really does highlight just how screwed up copyright law has become in this country, and how far it's come from its origins. That same discussion points people to Peter Jaszi's (a true expert on copyright and fair use) recent paper on pre-1972 sound recordings, where he details the history of all of this. In part, it's due to the fact that Congress did not include sound recordings in the 1909 Copyright Act. It's actually quite important to understand why they did not do so:

Although Congress subjected federal copyright protection to an overhaul by enacting the 1909 Copyright Act, it still failed to grant statutory copyright protection to sound recordings. Despite efforts by some members of Congress to raise the issue of sound recordings, the final bill declined to extend protection. Indeed, the report released with the Copyright Act expressly stated that Congress did not intend to protect sound recordings: "It is not the intention of the committee to extend the right of copyright to the mechanical reproductions themselves, but only to give the composer or copyright proprietor the control, in accordance with the provisions of the bill, of the manufacture and use of such devices." According to one commentator, Congress had two principal concerns about sound recordings, leading it to decline to protect them. First, Congress wondered about the constitutional validity of such protection. The Constitution allows Congress to protect "writings," and Congress was uncertain as to whether a sound recording could constitute a writing. Second, Congress worried that allowing producers to exclusively control both the musical notation and the sound recording could lead to the creation of a music monopoly.

That seems like an important paragraph to show to folks who insist that copyright on sound recordings must obviously be covered by copyright and/or that it's a "natural right" to include sound recordings under copyright. Clearly, even Congress felt it was likely to be unconstitutional for quite some time.

Congress (under tremendous pressure from exactly who you would imagine) finally added protection to sound recordings in 1972, but in the meantime, some states had passed local laws to deal with unauthorized copying and distribution of sound recordings. While Federal Copyright law in the 70s was designed to totally pre-empt state copyright laws, a court ruling in Goldstein v. California (over bootlegging) found otherwise -- and said that state laws did apply to sound recordings published prior to 1972. The different state laws vary quite a bit, and apparently a bunch of them do exempt personal use from those laws.

But, either way, because of this little quirk of history, where Congress mostly believed that sound recordings could not be subject to copyright on a Constitutional basis, many such works are effectively locked up for much, much long than they would be if under federal copyright law.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...05510490.shtml





Senate Votes to Clean up Federal Copyright Laws
Gautham Nagesh

The Senate unanimously approved legislation Monday night to clarify federal copyright laws.

The Copyright Cleanup, Clarification and Corrections Act, introduced Monday by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and ranking member Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), implements several recommendations from the Copyright Office to make the agency's operations more efficient. The bill also clarifies aspects of copyright law that are either ambiguous or have been made unclear by recent court decisions.

"Today’s legislation makes common-sense improvements to the copyright system that will make it more efficient," Leahy said. "Congress should work in a bipartisan fashion to find inefficiencies and correct them. We are doing that today.”

The bill includes rule changes that will make it easier for the Copyright Office to transition to digital recordkeeping and allow filers to submit documents electronically. It also asserts that dramatic or literary works were not "published" when included on a record album, allowing their original owners to retain their rights. Other changes clarify aspects of the law or correct technicalities that hamper the agency's effectiveness.

“Creators of intellectual work need assurances about their artistic rights, and it’s important that our laws take into account modern technology," Sessions said. "Among other things, this bill will assist the U.S. Copyright Office’s transition to digital recordkeeping. It also clarifies important principles of copyright ownership that have become clouded by recent court rulings and creates a clear mechanism for judicial review of rulemakings by copyright royalty judges."

Both lawmakers expressed their hope that the House would take up the issue quickly.
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-va...copyright-laws





Sued by the US Copyright Group? The EFF Launches New Resource to Help
Thomas Mennecke

Back in the mid 2000s, the major concern of Internet users was the RIAA. But those days are long gone. The only thing that remains is the massive file-sharing community and the patchwork of networks that supports it. Within this realm, and perhaps even outside of it, are those who are being targeted by the US Copyright Group - a group of lawyers representing several independent film makers targeting alleged P2P butt pirates.

No one knows for sure how many people out of the 5,000+ individuals currently being sued are actually liable for copyright infringement or not. All too often we hear cases of people with open WIFI connections being accused of sharing works that would be totally out of character for the alleged infringer (for example, senior citizens accused of sharing gangsta rap or death metal - not that it doesn't happen).

In any event, the fact remains that generally well-intentioned individuals whose goal in life is not massive copyright infringement are often times caught up in the legal process. The laws that protect copyright, and the penalties associated, were never designed to prosecute the small time citizen. But that doesn't mean the end user can't be sued and threatened for $150,000 by the US Copyright Group. It's that type of intimidation the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) is looking to confront.

The EFF has been intimately involved in the ongoing BitTorrent lawsuits. In particular, the EFF filed an Amici brief (friend of the court) on the issue of joinder (combining thousands of lawsuits into one). Although the effort to disperse these lawsuits into separate cases was denied, their efforts have bore fruit, as the judge overseeing the cases ordered all sides to work together and draft suitable letter that will inform the accused of their rights.

Today, the EFF is providing an updated and very comprehensive USCG vs The People guide for those accused of copyright infringement.

"The people targeted in these mass lawsuits need good information about this situation and their options," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry. "USCG vs. the People provides answers to the many of the questions faced by anyone who learns their identity is being sought in connection with USCG's campaign or receives an intimidating letter from USCG. It also includes a list of attorneys who are interested in assisting."

Be sure to check out the EFF's expanded resource, whether for your own edification or if you're a recipient of the USCG's monetary demand.
http://www.slyck.com/story2015_Sued_...source_to_Help





Kazaa is Resurrected, But Why?
Jon Healey

How appropriate: The day that Rdio goes live, Kazaa comes back from the dead.

Rdio is the new music streaming service from Janus Friis with Niklas Zennström, the entrepreneurs who brought the Kazaa file-sharing software to market as the music industry was suing the original Napster out of existence. Kazaa eventually ran into the same legal buzzsaw, ultimately settling the lawsuit brought by the major labels and studios for more than $115 million. (Friis and Zennström had already exited by then.) The current owners of the Kazaa brand -- Brilliant Digital Entertainment -- announced the launch of the beta version of the new, non-file-sharing Kazaa service Tuesday, about the same time that Rdio made its offering available to the public.

I haven't had much time to explore Kazaa, but my first impression is that the Web-based service is miles behind the competition. It's as if the company locked its technologists in a room four years ago and they've just now emerged, having missed the growth of social networks, the explosion in smartphone usage and the death of music DRM. The service costs $15 a month -- 50% more than Rdio, MOG or Rhapsody -- and doesn't have a mobile app. Instead, it offers unlimited streams and tethered downloads (that is, songs wrapped in electronic locks to deter copying) that can be played only by Kazaa's proprietary plugin for Windows Media Player.

It also has only rudimentary social-media features, most notably the ability to play other users' playlists and to watch a continuously updated list of what other users are playing. And although there are a handful of "editor's picks," there's no preference engine to recommend tracks based on a user's tastes -- a major handicap when it comes to discovering music. Essentially, users are left to search for tracks or artists they already know, or take unguided tours through the library's eight genres.

There are some nice touches, such as the ability to find songs by searching through a database of lyrics. I also liked the ability to find user playlists containing particular songs or artists, which could be a useful form of crowd curation. On the whole, though, the service struck me as being very much a work in progress, with a much smaller library of tracks (1.8 million vs. 8 million on MOG).

The press release from Kazaa put the best possible spin on the offering, saying "Kazaa’s beta offering of our cloud based download music application and everything that comes with it signals our commitment to continue developing new product offerings and services at full speed." Judging by the beta, Kazaa needs to go even faster.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/tech...d-but-why.html





Hadopi's Secret Internet Spying Spec Leaked
from the now-doesn't-that-make-you-feel-good dept

As a part of France's three strikes law, the organization in charge of implementing the program, Hadopi (which, we should remind you, was caught infringing itself in using a font it did not license for its logo), has been tasked with figuring out a way to actually block people from the internet, or to stop them from using certain file sharing programs. While there were public consultations on how to do this, the actual technical spec was supposed to have been kept secret. Not surprisingly, that didn't last very long. Glyn Moody points us to the news that the tool's spec has leaked (French).

Basically, it's your everyday snooping software, that will monitor all internet traffic, including searching through files on your computer, and checking the router configuration. It will also act as a creepy form of Big Brother, with an alert system which, if it notices you using a file sharing program, says things like: "You are about to download a file using a P2P protocol - do you want to continue?" One hopes that it would include a button that says "Yes, Dammit, I'm Downloading Linux" or something of the sort, but that seems unlikely.

The link above also notes that this appears to violate EU law, which prohibits a "general obligation to monitor."
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...05910492.shtml





Google and Verizon in Talks on Selling Internet Priority
Edward Wyatt

Google and Verizon, two leading players in Internet service and content, are nearing an agreement that could allow Verizon to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if the content’s creators are willing to pay for the privilege.

The charges could be paid by companies, like YouTube, owned by Google, for example, to Verizon, one of the nation’s leading Internet service providers, to ensure that its content received priority as it made its way to consumers. The agreement could eventually lead to higher charges for Internet users.

Such an agreement could overthrow a once-sacred tenet of Internet policy known as net neutrality, in which no form of content is favored over another. In its place, consumers could soon see a new, tiered system, which, like cable television, imposes higher costs for premium levels of service.

Any agreement between Verizon and Google could also upend the efforts of the Federal Communications Commission to assert its authority over broadband service, which was severely restricted by a federal appeals court decision in April.

People close to the negotiations who were not authorized to speak publicly about them said an agreement could be reached as soon as next week. If completed, Google, whose Android operating system powers many Verizon wireless phones, would agree not to challenge Verizon’s ability to manage its broadband Internet network as it pleased.

Since the court decision, involving Comcast, in April, the F.C.C. has been trying to find a way to regulate broadband delivery, and that effort has been the subject of a series of private meetings at the agency’s headquarters in recent weeks. At the meetings, officials from the nation’s biggest Internet service and content providers, including Google and Verizon, have tried to reach a consensus on how broadband Internet service should be regulated in light of the decision. Those meetings continued this week, apart from the talks between Google and Verizon.

The court decision said the F.C.C. lacked the authority to require that an Internet service provider refrain from blocking or slowing down some content or applications, or giving favor to others. The F.C.C. has since sought another way in which to enforce the concept of net neutrality. But its proposals have been greeted with much objection in Congress and among Internet service providers, cable companies and some Internet content producers.

A spokesman for Verizon said that the company was still engaged in the larger talks to reach a consensus at the F.C.C. and declined to comment on other negotiations. A spokeswoman for Google also declined to comment. While a deal between Google and Verizon would affect only those two companies, it could sway the opinions of lawmakers, many of whom have questioned the wisdom of the F.C.C.’s plans to oversee broadband service.

At issue for consumers is how the companies that provide the pipeline to the Internet will ultimately direct traffic on their system, and how quickly consumers are able to gain access to certain Web content. Consumers could also see continually rising bills for Internet service, much as they have for cable television.

The prospect of a Google-Verizon agreement infuriates many consumer advocates, who feel that it would concentrate in a few corporations control of what to date has been a free and open Internet system in which consumers decide which companies are successful.

“The point of a network neutrality rule is to prevent big companies from dividing the Internet between them,” said Gigi B. Sohn, president and a founder of Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy group. “The fate of the Internet is too large a matter to be decided by negotiations involving two companies, even companies as big as Verizon and Google.”

It is not clear that the Google-Verizon talks will result in a deal, or that any agreement would extend beyond those companies. David M. Fish, a spokesman for Verizon, acknowledged the talks, saying, “We’ve been working with Google for 10 months to reach an agreement on broadband policy.”

But, Mr. Fish added, “We are currently engaged in and committed to the negotiation process led by the F.C.C. We are optimistic this process will reach a consensus that can maintain an open Internet, and the investment and innovation required to sustain it.”

The F.C.C. process he referred to is what is jokingly called at the agency headquarters “the secret meeting.” At least nine times in the last seven weeks — including Wednesday, with another meeting scheduled for Thursday — a group that includes Google, Verizon, AT&T, Skype, cable system operators and a group called the Open Internet Coalition has met with top F.C.C. officials to discuss net neutrality and the agency’s legal basis for regulating Internet service.

Cable and telephone companies want free rein to sell specialized services like “paid prioritization,” which would speed some content to users more quickly for a fee. Wireless companies, meanwhile, want no restrictions on wireless broadband, which they see as a different technology than Internet service over wires.

Many content providers — like Amazon, eBay and Skype — prefer no favoritism on the Internet or they want to be sure that if a pay system exists, all content providers have the opportunity to pay for faster service.

The F.C.C., meanwhile, favors a level playing field, but it cannot impose one as long as its authority over broadband is in legal doubt. It has proposed a solution that would reclassify broadband Internet service under the Communications Act from its current designation as an “information service,” a lightly regulated designation, to a “telecommunications service,” a category that, like telephone service, is subject to stricter regulation.

The F.C.C. has said that it does not want to impose strict regulation on Internet service and rates, but seeks only the authority to enforce broadband privacy and guarantee equal access. It also wants to use federal money to subsidize broadband service for rural areas.

While the F.C.C. is gathering public comment on its reclassification proposal, it has convened the private talks, which are overseen by Edward Lazarus, the chief of staff to Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C.’s chairman.

The talks have produced some common ground among the participants on smaller matters. But one participant, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the group members agreed not to discuss their deliberations publicly, said there had been little movement “on the few big issues that are the most important.”

Frustrated with that lack of progress in the last two months, direct talks between Google and Verizon have accelerated, according to people close to the discussions who were not authorized to comment publicly.

Google and Verizon have their own interests at stake in negotiating separately. The Android operating system from Google is used on many Verizon phones, including the Droid, a competitor to the iPhone from Apple.

Consumer groups have objected to the private meetings, saying that too many stakeholders are being left out of discussions over the future of the Internet.

Mr. Lazarus said the meetings “are part of our efforts to identify the best way forward in the wake of the Comcast case to preserve the openness and vibrancy of the Internet.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/te.../05secret.html





Google, Verizon Said to Strike Deal on Web Traffic Rules
Todd Shields

Bloomberg's Todd Shields discusses efforts by the Federal Communications Commission and technology company executives to resolve a dispute over U.S. Internet regulation. Executives from Google Inc., AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. met with FCC officials over the weekend in an attempt to reach a compromise on net-neutrality rules. Shields talks with Scarlet Fu on Bloomberg Television's "In the Loop." (Source: Bloomberg)

Verizon Communications Inc. and Google Inc. have struck their own accord on handling Internet traffic, as both participate in talks by U.S. officials on Web policy, two people briefed by the companies said.

The compromise as described would restrict Verizon from selectively slowing Internet content that travels over its wires, but wouldn’t apply such limits to Internet use on mobile phones, according to the people, who spoke yesterday and asked not to be identified before an announcement.

Verizon and Google have been adversaries over the issue, known as net neutrality. Verizon was among cable and phone companies saying they need leeway over the delivery of Web content to protect performance of their networks. Google led content providers and advocacy groups that say restrictions are needed so communications companies don’t favor their own online offerings or those of partners.

The Federal Communications Commission is negotiating behind closed doors with Verizon, Google, AT&T Inc. and other companies on rules proposed by Chairman Julius Genachowski to regulate how phone and cable companies handle Web traffic such as Google’s YouTube videos. Regulations or legislation that result would bind Google and Verizon as well.

“We’ve been working with Google for 10 months to reach an agreement on broadband policy,” said Verizon spokesman David Fish. “We are currently engaged in and committed to the negotiation process led by the FCC.”

‘Nothing to Announce’

Google has “nothing to announce at this point,” said Mistique Cano, a Washington-based spokeswoman, in an e-mail.

The two companies have become business allies through Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S. wireless carrier, which is co-owned by Verizon. Mobile phones that use software from Google, owner of the largest Internet search engine, helped Verizon’s profit this year.

New York-based Verizon’s earnings beat estimates last month after its wireless unit introduced phones running on Google’s Android software, including Droids from Motorola Inc. and HTC Corp., to compete against AT&T’s iPhone from Apple Inc.

Verizon and Mountain View, California-based Google proposed in a January filing at the FCC areas of compromise for regulating Internet service providers. The companies said preserving an “open Internet” calls for “minimal interference from the government” for applications, content and services, such as Google and Twitter.

‘Not Necessarily Good’

“What is good for Google and Verizon is not necessarily good for innovation and competition on the Internet,” said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, senior vice president of the Washington- based Media Access Project, a public-interest law firm, in an e- mailed statement.

The FCC must “stay the course” and enact rules “that benefit everyone, not just the largest companies,” Schwartzman said.

“AT&T is not a party to the purported agreement between Google and Verizon,” Jim Cicconi, AT&T senior executive vice president, said in an e-mailed statement. “We remain committed to trying to reach a consensus on this issue through the FCC process.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-0...b-traffic.html





Hacker Shows How He Can Intercept Cell Phone Calls with $1,500 Device
Dean Takahashi

A security researcher showed in a live demo today how he can intercept cell phone calls on 80 percent of the world’s phones with just about $1,500 worth of equipment.

Chris Paget, who also showed yesterday how he can hack into radio frequency identification tags (RFID) from a distance, created a fake cell phone tower, or Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) base station. GSM is the protocol for 80 percent of the world’s phones and is used by T-Mobile and AT&T in the U.S. The demo was not, Paget said, a malicious attack in any way.

Military and intelligence agencies can intercept cell phone calls with their wiretapping technology. But Paget simply wanted to show how vulnerable the cell phone network is and how hackers could intercept calls for a small amount of money. He used a couple of large antennae and a laptop with some other equipment.

“There’s a good chance you won’t even know about it when it happens,” Paget said during a talk at the Defcon security conference in Las Vegas.

Paget’s system disables the encryption in the system, and the GSM network complies and never sends a warning message. Paget’s talk got some attention in advance because Federal Communications Commission authorities contacted him about his planned demonstration. They asked whether he would be violating wiretapping laws.

Paget consulted his legal help from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and decided to go forward with the live demo of cell phone call interception. He posted notices at the event saying he would be intercepting calls on the GSM network in the area during the talk. That gave him some legal protection.

In the demo, he turned on his interceptor and immediately had 15 people on his network. The interceptor he created could intercept phones in a small area covered by one cell site. Dozens more phones were intercepted in the course of the talk. He inserted a warning message saying that he was intercepting calls, and some phones displayed that they were on the Defcon 18 cell phone network during the interception. He could take over a give area by broadcasting a stronger signal that was available from AT&T or T-Mobile in that given area.

“It’s not particularly difficult to do,” he said.

Paget said that he could easily create a noise generator that could disrupt all calls in a given area. He chose not to do that demo, as it would have knocked out all cell phone coverage for most of Las Vegas, he said.

“I am not turning this on,” he said. “The thing about band jamming is there is no way to defend against it.”
http://mobile.venturebeat.com/2010/0...alls-for-1500/





Researcher Detained at U.S. Border, Questioned about Wikileaks
Elinor Mills

A security researcher involved with the Wikileaks Web site was detained by U.S. agents at the border for three hours and questioned about the controversial whistleblower project as he entered the country on Thursday to attend a hacker conference, sources said on Saturday.

He was also approached by two FBI agents at the Defcon conference after his presentation on Saturday afternoon about the Tor Project.

Jacob Appelbaum, a Seattle-based programmer for the online privacy protection project called Tor, arrived at the Newark, New Jersey, airport from Holland flight Thursday morning when he was pulled aside by customs and border protection agents who told him he was randomly selected for a security search, according to the sources familiar with the matter who asked to remain anonymous.

Appelbaum, a U.S. citizen, was taken into a room, frisked and his bag was searched. Receipts from his bag were photocopied and his laptop was inspected but it's not clear in what manner, the sources said. Officials from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Army then told him he was not under arrest but was being detained, the sources said. They asked questions about Wikileaks, asked for his opinions about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and asked where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is, but he declined to comment without a lawyer present, according to the sources. He was not permitted to make a phone call, they said.

After about three hours, Appelbaum was given his laptop back but the agents kept his three mobile phones, sources said.

Asked for comment, Appelbaum declined to talk to CNET. However, he made reference to his phone getting seized to Defcon attendees. Following a question-and-answer session after his talk on the Tor Project Appelbaum was asked by an attendee for his phone number. He replied "that phone was seized."

Shortly thereafter two casually dressed men identified themselves as FBI agents and asked to talk to him.

"We'd like to chat for a few minutes," one of the men said, adding "we thought you might not want to." Appelbaum asked them if they were aware of "what happened to me?" and one of them replied "Yes, that's why we're here."

"I don't have anything to say," Appelbaum told them. One of the agents said they were interested in hearing if "human rights" being "trampled" and said "sometimes it's nice to have a conversation to flesh things out."

Marcia Hofmann, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was in the room and asked if the agents were at the event in an official capacity or for personal reasons. "A little of both," one of the said.

Appelbaum asked when his equipment would be returned and one of them said "We aren't involved in that; we have no idea," and walked away when Appelbaum declined to talk further.

The agents declined to identify themselves to CNET. They said they were attending the conference and declined to talk further.

Appelbaum is a hacker and security researcher who co-founded the Noisebridge hacker space in San Francisco's Mission district. He's also worked to bypass the security of "smart" parking meters, unearth flaws in Web security certificates, and discover a novel way to bypass hard drive encryption.

At the Next HOPE hacker conference in New York in mid-July, Appelbaum filled in for Julian Assange, the controversial figure who's become the public face of Wikileaks. Assange skipped his appearance at Next HOPE on the expectation that Homeland Security agents would be looking for him. After his own presentation, Appelbaum beat a hasty exit and hopped on a flight to Europe.

While he was on stage at Next HOPE, Appelbaum urged the largely sympathetic audience to support Wikileaks by volunteering or by donating money, to address recent criticisms of the document-publishing Web site, and to boast that Wikileaks remains uncensorable. "You can try to take us down... but you can't stop us," he said. He also challenged modern U.S. foreign policy and called for civil disobedience by way of exposing heavily guarded secrets.

Appelbaum told the Next HOPE audience that although he's significantly involved in Wikileaks, he has no access to classified U.S. data that may have been sent to the site.

(CNET's Declan McCullagh contributed to this report.)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20012253-245.html





A Renegade Site, Now Working With the News Media
Noam Cohen

THE four stages of a political movement, as Gandhi told it, were: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

For the whistle-blower Web site WikiLeaks, the release last week of secret field reports on the war in Afghanistan that it obtained from American military sources certainly looked like a victory. Not only did The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel devote hundreds of hours of reporters’ and editors’ time to analyzing and confirming the information in the documents, the three agreed to coordinate publication for last Monday, ensuring there would be blanket news media coverage on at least two continents.

This success followed long periods of obscurity, mocking and, at times, hostility toward WikiLeaks and its hard-to-miss leader, Julian Assange, since the site began in late 2006.

“In the beginning, everyone was skeptical of whether it would work out,” said Daniel Schmitt, a WikiLeaks spokesman based in Germany.

Traditional news media may have finally taken WikiLeaks seriously, but the episode also reflected a change within the organization itself. By handing over the documents to professionals, with no strings attached, and before the site itself could offer its own interpretation, WikiLeaks was retreating to the job of information procurer rather than information explainer.

That’s a shift in strategy since the last time WikiLeaks had an important leak — the release in April of a video of United States soldiers in an Apache helicopter killing civilians in Baghdad, including two Reuters journalists. Then, WikiLeaks itself tried to supply its own context and analysis.

In addition to an unedited 39-minute version of the video, the site published an edited version, under the title “Collateral Murder,” which was criticized in the media for lacking context and for its provocative title, notably in a testy interview of Mr. Assange by Stephen Colbert.

Lisa Lynch, an assistant professor of journalism at Concordia University in Montreal who has written academic papers on WikiLeaks, called the “Collateral Murder” video “an audacious attempt to assert themselves into the conversation.”

“In a way, the ‘Collateral Murder’ video moved away from the model,” she said, looking back on earlier leaks that were processed without WikiLeaks’ becoming the focal point of the coverage. She added that after the critical reception, “there must have been a realization this was a better way to present the material.”

Mr. Assange certainly seems to have dialed down his language after the experience of “Collateral Murder.” At a news conference last week, he was asked if the Afghan logs showed war crimes by NATO forces.

“It is up to a court to decide really if something in the end is a crime,” he said patiently, though he couldn’t resist adding that “there does appear to be evidence of war crimes.”

Mr. Schmitt confirmed the shift in an interview. “We certainly learned our share from the whole ‘Collateral Murder’ episode,” he said. “We just need to make sure that the line is more distinct than it was with the ‘Collateral Murder’ release.”

In Ms. Lynch’s paper published this year on WikiLeaks and the future of investigative reporting, she said that before the site went live, organizers tried, and largely failed, to get media attention for the site’s first major leak — a 2005 memo on civil war policy by the Somali Islamic court system. The vision was that the memo would be commented on, analyzed and distributed, wiki-style, in the words of one WikiLeak organizer whose e-mail is quoted by Ms. Lynch, by “one hundred thousand enraged Somali refugees, blade and keyboard in hand, cutting apart its pages until all is dancing confetti and the truth.”

In fact, the authenticity of that leak was questioned. Ms. Lynch wrote, “Members expressed frustration that their analysis was granted little authority by the press, with one member acknowledging that until the site was certified by someone with ‘a gold plated reputation,’ it might be hard for them to gain media credibility.”

Even at that time, Mr. Assange was recommending a path that worked closely with traditional media outlets: “We are in a romance with journalists’ hearts; if our voices sweet are not easily reachable on the phone when their desire and deadlines peak, others’ voices, less honeyed but always, always available will replace them,” he wrote in an e-mail in 2007, according to Ms. Lynch.

In the years that followed, WikiLeaks frequently served journalism (particularly in Britain, with its tough libel laws) by hosting material obtained by reporters, but kept secret by court order. In cases involving accusations of tax avoidance, membership in a racist political party and dumping of toxic waste, WikiLeaks published material that The Guardian, among others, was prevented from publishing itself. The Guardian has returned the favor by writing an editorial in praise of WikiLeaks.

The shift in tactics with “Collateral Murder” was debated within WikiLeaks, Mr. Schmitt said in an interview. “There always is debate within WikiLeaks,” he said. “Whether that debate is over the strategy of working with the media or of choosing that title — there is no common opinion about that.”

While WikiLeaks was inching toward traditional media, newsrooms began making their way to WikiLeaks. It was The Guardian that reached out to Mr. Assange to get a look at the WikiLeaks material on Afghanistan, according to a detailed report in the Columbia Journalism Review, not the other way around.

Mr. Assange was eager to comply, and, according to the journalism review, asked that The Times and Der Spiegel be included. He had learned the hard way, Ms. Lynch said, that without enlisting news media coverage, the site’s scoops “were received with a thud.”

The Obama administration sought to undercut the leak in an e-mail to reporters by saying that WikiLeaks was opposed to the war in Afghanistan: “It’s worth noting that WikiLeaks is not an objective news outlet but rather an organization that opposes U.S. policy in Afghanistan” was the advice to reporters. But Mr. Assange, in a more neutral tone, responded that WikiLeaks did not “have a view about whether the war should continue or stop.” But he added: “We do have a view that it should be prosecuted as humanely as possible.”

By the end of the week, President Obama had addressed WikiLeaks, and his defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, had castigated the organization, accusing it of endangering the lives of Afghans by publishing documents that had not been vetted to remove the names of military sources. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the same news conference that WikiLeaks “might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.”

In response on Friday, Mr. Assange was returning to a more combative tone.

“The grounds of Iraq and Afghanistan are covered with real blood,” he told CNN, adding, “Secretary Gates has overseen the killings of thousands of children and adults in these two countries.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/bu...ia/02link.html





After Afghan War Leaks, Revisions in a Shield Bill
Charlie Savage

Democratic senators who have been working on legislation providing greater protections to reporters who refuse to identify confidential sources are backpedaling from WikiLeaks, the Web site that recently disclosed more than 75,000 classified documents related to the Afghanistan war.

Senators Charles E. Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, Democrats of New York and California, are drafting an amendment to make clear that the bill’s protections extend only to traditional news-gathering activities and not to Web sites that serve as a conduit for the mass dissemination of secret documents. The so-called “media shield” bill is awaiting a vote on the Senate floor.

“WikiLeaks should not be spared in any way from the fullest prosecution possible under the law,” Mr. Schumer said in a statement. “Our bill already includes safeguards when a leak impacts national security, and it would never grant protection to a Web site like this one, but we will take this extra step to remove even a scintilla of doubt.”

The bill would allow reporters, when faced with subpoenas seeking to compel them to testify about their confidential sources, to ask a federal judge to quash the demand rather than fining or jailing them for contempt of court if they refuse to comply. About three dozen states have such a law for state courts.

Under the bill, federal judges would evaluate requests to quash a subpoena by balancing the public interest against the need to identify a source, providing different levels of protection depending on the nature of the case.

The information seeker would also have to exhaust all other means of obtaining the names before seeking a journalist’s testimony, though matters involving threats to national security would be exempted from some protections.

It is not clear whether WikiLeaks — a confederation of open-government advocates who solicit secret documents for publication — could be subject to a federal subpoena. Federal courts most likely do not have jurisdiction over it or a means to serve it with such a subpoena.

Moreover, WikiLeaks says that its Web site uses technology that makes it impossible to trace the source of documents that are submitted to it, so even if the organization were compelled to disclose a source, it is not clear that it would be able to do so.
Still, in case WikiLeaks or a similar organization sought to invoke a shield law, proponents of the legislation are trying to create legislative history that would show judges that Congress did not intend for the law to cover such organizations. The idea, aides said, would be to add language bolstering a section defining who would be covered by the law as a journalist — an area that can be tricky in an era of blogging and proliferation of online-only news media outlets.

Paul J. Boyle, senior vice president for public policy at the Newspaper Association of America — which supports the bill — said Senate aides had asked his group to consult on the proposed changes.

Mr. Boyle argued that the WikiLeaks case could, paradoxically, help supporters of the bill. He contended that the increasing use of subpoenas to pressure reporters to identify sources created incentive for would-be leakers to send material to a group like WikiLeaks rather than to a traditional news organization subject to American law and having editorial controls and experience in news judgment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/us/04shield.html





Most Consumers Support Government Cyber-Spying

Sixty-three percent of people believe that it is acceptable for their government to spy on another country's computer systems
Sophie Curtis

Nearly two thirds of computer users globally believe that it is acceptable for their country to spy on other nations by hacking or installing malware, according to Sophos’s mid-year 2010 Security Threat Report, with 23 percent claiming to support this action even during peace time.

One in 14 respondents to the survey claimed to believe that crippling denial of service (DDoS) attacks against another country’s communication or financial websites – like the one used to target Russian banks earlier this year – are acceptable during peace time. Nearly half said such an attack was only acceptable when two countries were at war, and 44 percent said it was never acceptable.

“I think there might be an attitude of all’s fair in love and war,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, speaking to eWEEK Europe. “There’s always been one rule for your country and another rule for your citizens.

“But it goes one stage further when you begin to ask, is it all right to launch attacks against communication systems and financial systems?” he added. “You can image the chaos that would ensue if there were organised denial of service attacks on a regular basis, purely to give your country an economic advantage.”

All’s fair in love and war

Cluley believes the attitudes of respondents are largely down to an ingrained cynicism about the role of governments in war. Governments have always spied on each other, and “used every dirty trick in the book” to do so, said Cluley. “Why wouldn’t they use the Internet to do this as well? If it’s your country’s interests at heart, and if they’re protecting your country, then you might think, ‘I don’t really care what they do’.”

Perhaps more surprisingly, 32 percent of respondents to Sophos’s survey said that countries should also be allowed to plant malware and hack into private foreign companies in order to spy for economic advantage.

“It’s kind of curious, because these are the people that have got no time for hackers and the bad guys at all, but seem to think it’s all right for countries to do this,” said Cluley. “I think they need to remember that, one day, it might be a country attacking your company’s network, and trying to infiltrate it, and how are you going to feel about it then?”

Malware-hosting websites

The Security Threat Report also found that the US is still has the majority (42.29 percent) of malware-hosting websites. These are websites that have been set up with the intention of infecting visitors, or legitimate websites that have been compromised by hackers. The UK was sixth on the list, with 2.41 percent hosted in this country.

According to Cluley, many of these websites are legitimate ones that have been targeted by hackers. “Businesses could end up infecting their customers, leaving them open to fraud,” he warned. Some hackers also use aggressive search engine optimisation techniques to push infected websites to the top of search results.

This news could be of particular concern, in light of the fact that the UK government recently axed plans for an increase in funding to the Metropolitan Police’s cyber crime unit. With online fraud and other electronic crimes becoming increasingly commonplace, the Police Central e-crime Unit had been hoping for extra funding from the Home Office for training and equipment purposes. However the extra funding was cut as part of the coalition government’s £6 billion deficit reduction plans.

“There is concern that at the moment the cyber crime authorities are pretty pitifully funded for the level of crime that is going on,” said Cluley. “I think the one thing we can be sure of is that the cyber criminals aren’t cutting their investment in this kind of crime. We are seeing more attacks than ever before. We see 60,000 pieces of new malware every single day, which is simply staggering, but that’s the level of crime that we’re seeing. So companies need to keep on top of this problem.”
http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/mo...er-spying-8741





Secretive Group Seeks Recruits, Finds Skepticism

Many attendees at the Defcon hacker conference have never heard of Project Vigilant
Robert McMillan

A secretive volunteer group that tries to track terrorists and criminals on the Internet went to the Defcon hacker conference this past week in hopes of recruiting information security experts, but it will first have to overcome some skepticism.

That's because most information security professionals have never heard of the group, called Project Vigilant. The group's director, Chet Uber, came forward Sunday at a press conference run by Defcon organizers to try to recruit volunteers from among the show's attendees. "We need more people," he said. "By increasing the numbers, we increase the likelihood that we will get the work done."

Run by former military, law enforcement and intelligence volunteers, Project Vigilant is able to monitor more than 250,000 IP (Internet protocol) addresses each day and create profiles for bad actors, their online identities and even the IP addresses they use. The group has access to data provided by 12 regional Internet service providers and also gathers intelligence from its growing network of volunteers, Uber said.

It is sponsored by a Fort Pierce, Florida, company called BBHC Global and receives funding from U.S. government research projects. It can often react more quickly than federal agencies to emerging threats, and feeds the data it collects back to the government, he said. The group was founded in 1996 and is comprised of more than 600 volunteers.

To date, Project Vigilant has recruited members by word of mouth, and Uber has kept off most information security lists.

That raised question marks for some. "If you've been around for 14 years and you say your whole goal is to safeguard the U.S. against cyberthreats ... why hasn't he participated in any security communities?" said Andre DiMino, a co-founder of the Shadowserver Foundation, which tracks online threats such as the Conficker worm.

Jart Armin, the pseudonymous researcher behind the Host Exploit cybercrime research website, was dismissive of the project. "A group that does not provide any public record or reports of its activities, while stressing how it does good, would appear as a PR stunt," he said via instant message.

That kind of skepticism isn't surprising, given that the group has kept such a low profile for so long, said Kevin Manson, a former prosecutor and instructor with the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center who has worked with Project Vigilant.

"Their work has been going on for at least a decade, and some of the people who are working on this, quite frankly, don't want to have their names in the media," Manson said.

"It's probably one of the most interesting projects I've personally been involved with in the past 10 years," he added.

On Sunday, Uber said he was the first person to call the federal government about the sensitive cache of documents allegedly leaked by U.S. Army Intelligence Analyst Bradley Manning, and which was ultimately published on Wikileaks. Manning leaked the documents to Adrian Lamo, who does "adversary characterization" for the group, Uber said.

According to Uber, Project Vigilant also played a role in Iran's Green Uprising last year, operating five Internet proxy servers that helped dissidents circumvent government spying and move information out of Iran and into the hands of dissident groups.

The project obtained election results from many polling stations within Iran and was able to analyze them for fraud, he said. They found, for example, that in some villages where voting was expected to be split 50-50, the votes were going 100 percent for Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

With Project Vigilant's focus on national security, it's not surprising if the group has had little contact with white-hat hackers and researchers such as DiMino and Armin, said Steve Santorelli, director of global outreach with Team Cymru, a not-for-profit security research firm.

"It doesn't make them irrelevant or bogus or charlatans," he said. "It just means that the world that they inhabit hasn't intersected with the security community."

Santorelli said he too had not heard of the group before Sunday.

Manson had this piece of advice for skeptics: "I would invite them to submit their résumés and see if they can be helpful to us on our mission."
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/articl...ds_skepticism/





UCLA Professor Warns of Hardware Hackers
Jesse Emspak

It's a given that hackers will target software, and that's enough for many people to worry about. But now there's the possibility that hackers would hide malicious code in the hardware itself.

John Villasenor, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, studies the way information moves and the way chips are built. He says the problem is that protecting hardware is neither that expensive nor difficult, but many companies don't give it the attention it deserves.

A hardware hack could be an annoyance, by stopping a mobile phone from functioning. Or it could be more dangerous, if it damages the way a critical system operates.

"The vulnerability is in the design process," he said. "The trouble can only be caused by someone with access to that." Traditionally, hardware hacking was almost impossible. Chip manufacturers did all the design in-house, and any problems would be quickly traced.

But in the last several years, hundreds of companies have become involved in hardware design as bigger manufacturers have started outsourcing parts of the design process.

Chips are divided into "blocks," each of which has a different function or set of functions. A chip maker will outsource some blocks if it doesn't have the expertise in certain fields. "A chip might need to do 15 different things," Villasenor said. "So the company outsourcing might say, 'I need a block that adds six and four.'"

A malicious designer could then build a block that functions innocently and well enough until a very specific function is called for. When that happens a certain program is initiated, which could be anything from simply freezing the machine by monopolizing the input and output of data and paralyzing the rest of the system, to transmitting private data to someone else. Such a problem wouldn't be caught in the fabrication process, since by that time the factory is just following instructions.

"The system assumed that everybody was going to be nice," Villasenor said.

Villasenor says there are several types of attacks. Broadly they would fall into two categories: one is when a block stops a chip from functioning, while the other involves shipping data out.

In the first case, a block might execute a piece of code that makes it monopolize the transmission of data between the chip it is on and the rest of the system. That would simply stop the chips from functioning, possibly freezing a computer or cell phone. In the second, a block might be programmed to gather data and send it elsewhere.

Most of the defenses involve adding a kind of "policing" function to the chip's architecture. For example, one could design a block that would monitor the behavior of other blocks and make sure they fit certain patterns. If another block misbehaves, it would be "quarantined" and the monitoring hardware would take over the now-missing functions.

Intel Spokesman George Alfs said the company makes every effort to protect s platform and takes these issues seriously, but said the company was not going to speak about the problem directly. Other chip makers declined to comment.

While the additional hardware would cost, it's the very nature of hardware attacks that limits how much that cost can go up, Villasenor says. Chip sizes would also rise a little -- on the order of a few percent -- but the added protection would be well worth it. He added that the Department of Defense takes the problem seriously enough that it has a program of only buying chips from reliable companies, who in turn only outsource to other vendors vetted by the government. This minimizes the number of companies involved in any particular design.
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/4079...ware-hacks.htm





Large Zeus Botnet Used for Financial Fraud

Trusteer announced that it has uncovered a large Zeus version 2 botnet being used to conduct financial fraud in the UK which is operated and controlled from Eastern Europe.

The botnet appears to be controlling more than 100,000 infected computers, 98% of which are UK Internet users. The criminals have been harvesting all manner of potentially lucrative and revenue-producing credentials - including online account IDs plus login information to banks, credit and debit card numbers, account types plus balances, bank statements, browser cookies, client side certificates, login information for email accounts and social networks and even FTP passwords.

Trusteer discovered the extent of the botnet after they gained access to the botnet's drop servers and command and control center which contained the stolen information including hundreds of thousands of stolen credentials. Trusteer are sharing the information with UK law enforcement agencies.

“This is just one out of many Zeus 2 botnets operating all over the world,” says Amit Klein, Trusteer's CTO. “What is especially worrying is that this botnet doesn't just stop at user IDs and passwords. By harvesting client side certificates and cookies, the cybercriminals can extract a lot of extra information on the user that can be used to augment their illegal access to those users' online accounts.”

“Coupled with the ability to remotely control users' machines, download data and run any file on them, this means that the fraudsters can insert partial or complete Internet pages into a live Web session, enabling to inject transactions at will or extract even more data from the hapless victims,” he added.

This is another example of the growing trend of regional malware where the cybercriminals operate targeted and segmented attacks on users, harvesting revenue from one bank's users one day, and, as that bank's security systems ramp up, move on to another regional bank another day, in this case the UK has been targeted.

In addition to gaining access to the botnet’s servers Trusteer has also been able to access the interface used by the fraudsters to manage the botnet. The interface allows three main functionalities. The first is the ability to monitor the growth and footprint of the botnet with very accurate statistics and graphs showing the total number of bots, their distribution, newly added bots, count of active bots, etc.

The second is a search function on all traffic generated by the bots. The botnet captures all HTTP and HTTPS traffic from infected computers and stores it in a central MySQL database. A search tool allows the fraudsters to easily extract any type of information from the database. For example if the fraudsters are looking for credentials for a specific institution they can just type a part of the institution’s URL into the search box and will immediately receive all HTTP/S requests that contain this pattern. From there they can extract the relevant login information.

The third functionality allows criminals to push updates and other executables to specific bots or to the entire botnet. For example, they can push other pieces of malware or they can push a remote access program that then allows them to remotely access the infected machine and control it.
http://www.net-security.org/malware_news.php?id=1418





Computer Criminal Blows Probation
Kyodo News

Tokyo police said Wednesday they have arrested a 27-year-old man in Osaka on suspicion of using a computer virus to destroy stored data.

Masato Nakatsuji is believed to have destroyed computer property by using an "ika-tako" (squid-octopus) virus to change icons for data files in infected computers into humorous octopus illustrations.

Nakatsuji is the first person in Japan to be charged with destroying property by tampering with data through a computer virus, the police said.

"I wanted to see if my programming skills had improved or not. I (also) wanted to punish users of file-sharing software," Nakatsuji was quoted as saying by police. Fire-sharing software is often used to illegally copy copyrighted music and video titles over the Internet.

Nakatsuji, who owned up to the data destruction, created the virus in July 2009 and distributed it through file-sharing software the following month, affecting about 50,000 people, they said.

Nakatsuji had been on probation after being given a suspended two-year prison term in 2008 for copyright infringement through computer virus production.

The infections spread when people used file-sharing software to acquire movies or music files that had been tainted with the virus, which was designed to transform stored data into pictures of octopus or squid, the police said.
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-b...0100805a4.html





On the Web's Cutting Edge, Anonymity in Name Only
Emily Steel and Julia Angwin

You may not know a company called [x+1] Inc., but it may well know a lot about you.

From a single click on a web site, [x+1] correctly identified Carrie Isaac as a young Colorado Springs parent who lives on about $50,000 a year, shops at Wal-Mart and rents kids' videos. The company deduced that Paul Boulifard, a Nashville architect, is childless, likes to travel and buys used cars. And [x+1] determined that Thomas Burney, a Colorado building contractor, is a skier with a college degree and looks like he has good credit.

The company didn't get every detail correct. But its ability to make snap assessments of individuals is accurate enough that Capital One Financial Corp. uses [x+1]'s calculations to instantly decide which credit cards to show first-time visitors to its website.

In short: Websites are gaining the ability to decide whether or not you'd be a good customer, before you tell them a single thing about yourself.

The technology reaches beyond the personalization familiar on sites like Amazon.com, which uses its own in-house data on its customers to show them new items they might like.

By contrast, firms like [x+1] tap into vast databases of people's online behavior—mainly gathered surreptitiously by tracking technologies that have become ubiquitous on websites across the Internet. They don't have people's names, but cross-reference that data with records of home ownership, family income, marital status and favorite restaurants, among other things. Then, using statistical analysis, they start to make assumptions about the proclivities of individual Web surfers.

"We never don't know anything about someone," says John Nardone, [x+1]'s chief executive.

Capital One says it doesn't use the full array of [x+1]'s targeting technology, and it doesn't prevent people from applying for any card they want. "While we suggest products that we believe will be of interest to our visitors, we do not limit their ability to easily explore all products available," spokeswoman Pam Girardo says.

A Wall Street Journal investigation into online privacy has found that the analytical skill of data handlers like [x+1] is transforming the Internet into a place where people are becoming anonymous in name only. The findings offer an early glimpse of a new, personalized Internet where sites have the ability to adjust many things—look, content, prices—based on the kind of person they think you are.

New York-based Demdex Inc., for instance, helps websites build "behavioral data banks" that tap sources including online-browsing records, retail purchases and a database predicting a person's spot in a corporate hierarchy. It crunches the data to help retailers customize their sites to target the person they think is visiting.

"If we've identified a visitor as a midlife-crisis male," says Demdex CEO Randy Nicolau, a client, such as an auto retailer, can "give him a different experience than a young mother with a new family." The guy sees a red convertible, the mom a minivan.

The technology raises the prospect that different visitors to a website could see different prices as well. Price discrimination is generally legal, so long as it's not based on race, gender or geography, which can be deemed "redlining."

In financial services, fair-lending laws prohibit discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, gender, receipt of public assistance or marital status. The laws also require that borrowers have access to any data used to evaluate their creditworthiness.

But the law doesn't specifically bar using web-browsing history to make lending decisions. That means, in theory, a bank could deny a loan based on knowledge of the applicant's visits to, say, gambling sites. In such a case, however, the bank would be required to let the applicant see the browsing data and correct it if inaccurate.

Capital One says it doesn't use [x+1] or browsing history in lending decisions. Rather, it uses [x+1] to suggest products to individuals.

The regulators who monitor fair lending at the Federal Trade Commission say suggesting offers isn't illegal. But it could violate the law if the suggestions result in protected groups such as minorities being steered into paying higher credit-card rates despite having solid credit.

"Steering can be a law violation depending on how they do it," says Alice Hrdy, an assistant director at the FTC. "Credit decisions have to be based on the customer's creditworthiness."

Capital One spokeswoman Ms. Girardo says, "Our practices are fully compliant with banking regulations and privacy laws."

[x+1] says none of its credit-card services use gender, ethnicity or age data. It adds that the company doesn't have the names of the individuals it analyzes.

The idea of using data about website visitors' offline lives was controversial in 1999 when [x+1] first started a website-personalization business. The FTC was investigating the privacy implications of online-advertising network DoubleClick Inc.'s acquisition of Abacus Direct, which tracked people's "offline" purchases at traditional retailers.

After a flood of negative publicity, DoubleClick agreed not to combine its online data with Abacus's offline data. For years, DoubleClick's experience deterred other companies from merging online and offline data.

[x+1] struggled to stay afloat. It cycled through six CEOs and three names, including Poindexter Systems (after a nerd scientist in "Felix the Cat" cartoons).

In 2008, Mr. Nardone took the helm just as things changed. Online ad spending rebounded and marketplaces for online data sprang up, letting companies like his tap data about people's Web browsing. Traditional data brokers (mostly serving direct-mail and catalog companies) began making data available online, too, but with names stripped out to address privacy worries.

Mr. Nardone saw opportunity. He revived the company's decade-old data-crunching patent for a "predictive optimization engine," now turbocharged with newly available data. "I discovered very quickly that we were going back to the original roots of the company," he says.

He found a receptive audience for site customization in the credit-card business, nabbing Capital One. [x+1] says clients pay $30,000 to $200,000 a month for its technology.

In Capital One's case, [x+1] says it helps the bank estimate a potential customer's "lifetime value," or how much revenue the person might generate over time.

"You don't get information on everybody, but there are ways of doing analysis that you can fill out the gaps" says Ted Shergalis, [x+1]'s co-founder and chief strategy officer. "That is the whole science of this."

Its technology works like this: A visitor lands on Capital One's credit-card page, and [x+1] instantly scans the information passed between the person's computer and the web page, which can be thousands of lines of code containing details on the user's computer. [x+1] also uses a new service from Digital Envoy Inc. that can determine the ZIP code where that computer is physically located. For some clients (but not Capital One), [x+1] also taps additional databases of web-browsing history.

Armed with its data, [x+1] taps consumer researcher Nielsen Co. to assign the visitor to one of 66 demographic groups.

In a fifth of a second, [x+1] says it can access and analyze thousands of pieces of information about a single user. It quickly scans for similar types of Capital One customers to make an educated guess about which credit cards to show the visitor.

To gauge the system's accuracy, the Journal asked eight people to visit the credit-card page of Capital One's site and note the credit cards they were shown. The Journal also analyzed the computer code that zipped back and forth between the testers' computers and Capital One.

Separately, the Journal asked its testers to click on a custom website that [x+1] built to demonstrate its technology. After the testers clicked on that site, [x+1] described to the Journal what it knew about each person.

Throughout both of these processes, the testers didn't reveal any personal information.

[x+1]'s assessments of the testers were generally accurate, though some specific details missed the mark. For instance, [x+1] correctly placed Ms. Isaac, the Colorado Springs mom, in a Nielsen demographic segment called "White Picket Fences." People in this group live in small cities, have a median household income of $53,901, are 25 to 44 years old with kids, work in white-collar or service jobs, generally own their own home, and have some college education.

All of those points were correct for Ms. Isaac—to her surprise. "They pinpointed my income more accurately than I remembered it," she says.

But the "White Picket Fence" category wasn't 100% accurate. It suggested Ms. Isaac might read People en Espanol, watch Toon Disney and drive a Nissan Frontier truck. In fact, she doesn't speak Spanish, doesn't subscribe to cable TV and doesn't drive a truck.

Nielsen says its segments are intended to provide a broad framework to help marketers understand their customers, rather than an exact template.

[x+1] says its analysis isn't meant to be pinpoint accurate, either. "It is just saying, 'Do I have better than 50-50 odds of guessing what this anonymous user is going to want?'" says Mr. Shergalis, the company co-founder.

The Journal also captured and analyzed 5,219 lines of code that passed between Ms. Isaac's computer and Capital One. That code contained some of the results of [x+1]'s analysis, which was generally accurate, putting her in "Colorado Springs" with a "midscale" income and saying she was either a college grad or had "some college."

As a result of the analysis, Capital One showed her some of its least generous cards, which it describes as being for people with "average" credit. The bank defines "average" as people who might not currently have a card, or whose credit limits are below $5,000 or who "may have been late" on a loan or card in the past six months.

Ms. Isaac says that category fits. She and her husband use only debit cards after using credit cards in the past.

Capital One's Ms. Girardo says: "Like every marketer, online and offline, we're making an educated guess about what we think consumers will like and they are free to choose another product of their liking."

[x+1] zeroed in on Mr. Boulifard's love of travel. The Nashville architect was shown only one card on the Capital One website: a "VentureOne Rewards" card, shown floating above a beach scene, with a headline: "Still searching? Get double miles with Venture."

It's rarely a coincidence when you see Web ads for products that match your interests. WSJ's Christina Tsuei explains how advertisers use cookies to track your online habits.

Mr. Boulifard is a member of several frequent-flier clubs and is saving up for a Europe trip. He routinely shops for hotels online and uses his American Express card to rack up travel points. However, Capital One's suggestion didn't tempt him to switch. "I have 90,000 points on my American Express, so I'm going to Europe on that," he says.

With Teresa Britton, [x+1]'s algorithms bumped into the limits of their ability to capture some of the complexities of modern America. The company correctly pegged her as a Greensboro, N.C., resident and assigned her to the "Young Influentials" Nielsen segment, a group that lives in suburbs and earns about $50,000 a year.

That underestimates her income, Ms. Britton says. But she really bristled at Nielsen's suggestions that she might buy rap music or read Vibe, the hip-hop magazine. Ms. Britton is white, and her husband is black.

"I don't know if they somehow got me and my husband mixed," she says. That said, her husband doesn't read Vibe or buy much rap music. "That is so stereotypical," she says. [x+1] says its Nielsen data are from broad segments and "don't apply at the individual level."

The technology was better at sizing up Mr. Burney, the Colorado contractor who builds ski-vacation homes. He saw only one credit card, the Capital One Prestige Platinum, under a headline: "Our best rewards at a glance." The pitch included an initial 0% interest rate and no annual fee.

That card made sense, Mr. Burney says. Not only does he tend to charge a lot of expenses for his construction business, but "I have a wallet full of platinum credit cards," he says. "My credit is sparkling."

Based on Mr. Burney's visit to [x+1]'s test site, the company pegged him as a member of a Nielsen segment called "God's Country." People in that group live in small towns or rural areas, have median household income of $86,724, are 35 to 54 years old with no kids, work in management, mostly own their homes and are college graduates.

Mr. Burney is, in fact, a homeowner, a college grad and a manager, and has no kids. At 28, he's younger than predicted, and his income is less than predicted.

When he saw the 3,748 lines of code that passed in an instant between his computer and Capital One's website, Mr. Burney said: "There's a shocking amount of information there." Buried in the code were references to his income level ("uppermid"), education ("college%252b graduate") and his town ("avon").

In fact, [x+1]'s assessment of Mr. Burney's location and Nielsen demographic segment are specific enough that it comes extremely close to identifying him as an individual—that is, "de- anonymizing" him—according to Peter Eckersley, staff scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy-advocacy group.

Mr. Eckersley does research in the field of de-anonymization, the mathematics of identifying individuals based on a few specific details from their life. In the jargon of the field, Mr. Eckersley says, all that's needed to uniquely identify one person is a total of 33 "bits" of information about him or her.

Calculating "bits" gets complex, as some facts about a person are more valuable—and thus have more "bits"—than others. ZIP codes and birthdates, for instance, are extremely valuable when zeroing in on individuals.

Bottom line: Mr. Eckersley determined Mr. Burney's location (the small town of Avon, Colo.) and his Nielsen demographic segment ("God's Country") together offered about 26.5 bits of information that could be used to identify Mr. Burney individually.

That's enough to narrow him down to one of just 64 or so people world-wide.

With one more piece of information about him, such as his age, Mr. Eckersley says, it's likely that Mr. Burney could be de- anonymized. "You're starting to look very close to identified."

Mr. Nardone of [x+1] acknowledges the possibility of de-anonymization, but says it isn't worth the effort: The company already has enough information to sell. "It would be a massive undertaking," he says, "and it is hard enough to make money."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...EFTTopStories#





No Anonymity on Future Web Says Google CEO

Privacy is so last century
James Nixon

The CEO of search giant Google has told users they can look forward to an Internet that offers them no place to hide.

"True transparency and no anonymity", he says, is the way forward - and there's nothing we can do to prevent it.

According to a report on tech blog ReadWriteWeb, Eric Schmidt revealed the size of the Internet information boom yesterday at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe.

"There was five exabytes [five billion gigabytes] of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003," he said. "But that much information is now created every two days, and the pace is increasing... People aren't ready for the technology revolution that's going to happen to them.

"In our lifetimes," Schmidt said, "we'll go from a small number of people having access to information, to five billion people having all the world's knowledge in their native language."

The bulk of that information, Schmidt explained, comes in the form of user-generated data. Every digital interaction throws up information, he said. And that information can be used to minutely analyse and predict human behaviour.

"If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use artificial intelligence, we can predict where you are going to go," Schmidt said, adding unnervingly.

"Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don't have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You've got Facebook photos!"

Schmidt told delegates at the conference that the availability of information increased convenience, and enabled society to more effectively combat anti-social and criminal behaviour - but his talk raised some unsettling issues.

He said that addressing issues such as identity theft, for instance, required "true transparency and no anonymity".

"In a world of asynchronous threats," said Schmidt, "it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a [verified] name service for people. Governments will demand it."

Schmidt's comments come just days after hacker Samy Kamkar demonstrated a technique that used Google's Street View Wi-fi data to identify an individual's location remotely down to as little as nine metres.

Literally, as well as metaphorically, it seems, there's no place left to hide.
http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/8/5/no-a...ys-google-ceo/





Apple Security Breach Gives Complete Access to Your iPhone

Right now, if you visit a web page and load a simple PDF file, you may give total control of your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad to a hacker. The security bug affects all devices running iOS 3.1.2 and higher.

Update: Initially we thought that this exploit only effected iOS4 devices, but it turns out all iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads running 3.1.2 and higher are susceptible.

The vulnerability is easily exploitable. In fact, the latest one-click, no-computer-required Jailbreak solution for iOS 4 devices uses this same method to break Apple's own security (although in a completely benign way for the user).

How it works

It just requires the user to visit a web address using Safari. The web site can automatically load a simple PDF document, which contains a font that hides a special program. When your iOS device tries to display the PDF file, that font causes something called stack overflow, a technical condition that allows the secret ninja code inside the font to gain complete control of your device.

The result is that, without any user intervention whatsoever, that program can do whatever it wants inside your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad. Anything you can imagine: Delete files, transmit files, install programs running on the background that can monitor your actions... anything can be done.

This is not the first time that something similar has happened. At the beginning of the iPhone's life there was a problem with TIFF files that also caused the same security breach. Apple patched the bug after a while, but back then there were very few iPhones compared to the current installed base. Apple says that there are 100 million iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads in the world. Obviously, malicious hackers are racing to get a slice of that market.

How can you avoid it?

Right now, the easiest way to avoid this problem is by not going to any PDF links directly and not loading any PDF from any non-trusted source.

You can also jailbreak your iPhone and install a program that will ask for authorization every time your browser encounters a PDF (just look for "PDF loading warner" in Cydia).

Apple Security Breach Gives Complete Access to Your iPhone

While this doesn't solve the security problem at all, at least it will remind you every single time.

Apple hasn't commented on the situation yet. [Macstories and Digdog]
http://gizmodo.com/5603319/





Hackers Release Browser-Based 'Jailbreak' for iPhone 4
Sam Oliver

Hackers on Sunday released the first "jailbreak" for the iPhone 4, a browser-based exploit that allows users to run unauthorized code. However, some reported that the modification results in broken MMS and FaceTime functionality.

A hacker who uses the handle "comex," a member of the iPhone Dev Team, released the hack through a website, jailbreakme.com. Users can visit the site in their iPhone browser to begin the jailbreaking process.

The software modification is the first release for Apple's latest handset hardware, the iPhone 4. Some users reported that the jailbreak managed to break FaceTime and MMS functionality on the device.

Comex, via twitter, said that he was able to reproduce the issues, and is working on a fix. The latest jailbreak does not work with iPads running iOS 3.2.1.

Unlike previous jailbreaks, which required users to run software on their Mac or PC and tether their iPhone to their computer, the latest hack is done entirely within the Safari browser. Users simply visit the URL to begin the process, which modifies the iOS mobile operating system found on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

The iPhone 4 jailbreak comes less than a week after the U.S. Library of Congress officially made it legal for users to jailbreak their iPhone to run unauthorized software. The government approved the measure as an exemption to a federal law which prevents the circumvention of technical measures that keep users from accessing and modifying copyrighted works.

The warranty-voiding jailbreak process allows users to run software not approved by Apple, which has no plans to allow users to install third-party applications downloaded from outside its sanctioned App Store. Hackers have created their own custom applications -- many free, and some for purchase from an alternative storefront known as Cydia.

Jailbreaking can also be used to unlock a phone, allowing it to be used on carriers that do not have access to the iPhone.

Apple has been criticized for its strict control over the iPhone App Store, requiring that all applications be approved before they are made available for download. The company has defended this practice, stating that it keeps faulty and potentially dangerous software from being made available, as well as banning unsavory content such as pornography.

In addition to allowing access to legitimate third-party software, both free and paid, through services like Cydia, jailbreaking can also be used to pirate App Store software, one major reason why Apple has fought the practice.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles..._iphone_4.html





iPad Shift May Wreak Havoc on Parts of Tech Sector

Apple sold 3.3 million iPads last quarter. That’s one of the best starts ever for a consumer electronic device. The company led by Steve Jobs could sell 25 million of the electronic tablets next year, based on the trajectory of past consumer hits. While Apple and its suppliers are celebrating, many other companies will suffer. Of course, the game’s not sewn up — nearly every large electronics firm has announced or is rumored to be working on rival devices. But the iPad’s lead and momentum means it has a big advantage. In tech, one winner usually takes most of the spoils. With that in mind, Breakingviews has compiled a list of the potential losers — from the obvious to the indirect.

PC makers and sellers: It stands to reason that if companies and consumers buy iPads, they will cut back on competing electronic items due to limited budgets. This effect probably hasn’t fully kicked in. Early adopters are more willing to splurge on a new gadget. Yet Barclays Capital points out there are already signs of cannibalization. The number of lower-priced netbooks fell 19 percent in June compared to last year according to NPD. HP, Dell and Acer earn little money on selling these devices. But if the iPad starts to cannibalize higher-margin items, selling PCs could become a recipe for losses. Dell, for example, eked out less than a 3 percent net margin last year.

Microsoft: It doesn’t take the IQ of Bill Gates to figure out that reduced sales of computers running Windows would hurt Microsoft. True, the company’s most recent quarterly figures were robust, as users upgraded to Windows 7. But if PC cannibalization occurs, it won’t be pretty. The company’s Windows division has astonishingly high margins — it accounts for roughly a quarter of sales but half of operating profit. A small revenue decline would disproportionately hit earnings.

Intel and AMD: Likewise, a shift from PCs to the iPad would hurt the two big semiconductor makers. Instead of using a chip whose roots lie in desktop computing where Intel has its stronghold, Apple used one from the cellphone world. Intel may catch up in designing low-power chips, but it could lose its quasi-monopoly style margins if it doesn’t. AMD, which chases after Intel yet never catches up, would take a harsher hit.

Software security companies: Apple’s devices are generally perceived as having fewer security holes than Windows. While most PC users install antiviral programs, many Apple users don’t bother. So an iPad shift would hit software sales at security companies such as McAfee and Symantec. True, the more popular Apple’s systems become the more effort hackers will make to crack them. But overall, antiviral vendors look like potential losers.

Hard disk drive makers: Apple was one of the first computer makers to eschew floppy disk drives. Likewise, the iPad could lead the charge away from hard disk drives. The device employs NAND flash memory, which is smaller and uses less power than the hard drives commonly used in laptops and desktops. If the iPad cannibalizes these markets, companies like Western Digital and Seagate would suffer. Moreover, Apple is believed to use a third of the world’s supply of this memory. If it demands more, companies like Samsung would be encouraged to ramp up production. That could be recipe for an eventual price crash and consequent use of NAND in more consumer devices.

Cellphone producers: Apple says about half of Fortune 100 companies are testing the device. AT&T says business demand for the device is robust. Since the iPad and the iPhone essentially use the same operating system, the tablet could act as a Trojan Horse for the handset. Let employees use one and you might as well let them use the other. And since applications developed for the iPad often work equally well on the iPhone, the platform is more attractive for developers. Nokia and Research in Motion appear in danger of losing the app battle — if their phones are regarded as undifferentiated commodities, their profit margins could vaporize.

Bookstores: Other forms of collateral damage may seem surprising. Take bookstores. It seems clear that most texts will eventually be sold and consumed electronically. Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Borders sell devices specialized for reading. Yet the iPad’s launch set off a vicious price war in e-readers — Amazon’s Kindles now sell for as low as $139. That suggests consumers prefer gadgets like the iPad that can read email, play games and download apps that perform other tasks. True, book retailers have iPad apps that allow for easy purchase of electronic books. But consumers can download several and easily compare prices. Increased competition means margins are likely to fall.
http://blogs.reuters.com/columns/201...f-tech-sector/





BlackBerry Users in UAE and Saudi May Have Services Cut
Tamara Walid and Souhail Karam

More than a million BlackBerry users may have key services in Saudi Arabia and the UAE cut off after authorities stepped up demands on smartphone maker Research In Motion for access to encrypted messages sent over the device.

BlackBerry's Messenger application has spread rapidly in the Gulf Arab region but because the data is encrypted and sent to offshore servers, it cannot be tracked locally.

"Certain BlackBerry services allow users to act without any legal accountability, causing judicial, social and national security concerns," the United Arab Emirates' Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) said in a statement.

The UAE said it would suspend BlackBerry Messenger, email and Web browser services from October 11 until a fix was found, while industry sources said Saudi Arabia had ordered local telecom companies to freeze Messenger this month.

Sunday's moves cap wrangling with regulators over the issue, which first surfaced in 2007.

India raised similar security concerns last week, and Bahrain in April warned against using BlackBerry Messenger to distribute local news. As far back as 2007, France cautioned officials about using the services.

Indian security officials were concerned that BlackBerry's encrypted data could be used to coordinate acts against the state. They have clamped down on mobile phone operators in the wake of 2008 attacks that killed 166 people in Mumbai.

The UAE, home to Gulf financial hub Dubai, said it would halt BlackBerry services until an "acceptable solution" was developed and applied.

Users of the device said that could mean disruptions for companies and individuals who rely on the services, including almost 700,000 in Saudi Arabia and some 500,000 in the UAE.

"It's a final decision but we are continuing discussions with them," Mohammed Al Ghanem, director general of the UAE's TRA, told Reuters.

"Censorship has got nothing to do with this," he said, calling it instead a suspension due to RIM's lack of compliance with UAE regulations.

Authorities noted there is no such problem with services on smartphones from Nokia or Apple's iPhone.

"This is an issue for RIM since all email traffic goes through its Network Operating Centers," said James Cordwell, an analyst at Atlantic Equities. "Nokia and Apple do not route traffic in this way."

RIM officials were not immediately available to comment.

The Canadian company has more than 41 million BlackBerry subscribers, meaning the Gulf bans could affect fewer than 3 percent of its users.

"The UAE market in and of itself is not significant to RIM. A bigger concern would be if it runs into similar issues in a large market such as China, which has similar security concerns, as Google is well aware of," Cordwell said.

User Uproar

In Saudi Arabia, BlackBerry handsets have become the must-have gizmo for Saudi youth, enabling them to connect with members of the opposite sex in a deeply conservative society.

"About 80 percent of Saudi-based BlackBerry users are individual users and 20 percent are enterprises, while these ratios are basically reversed in developing nations," said one industry source.

"This problem would not have emerged if the bulk of BlackBerry users were enterprises."

The governor of Saudi Arabia's telecom regulator declined to comment. An Interior Ministry spokesman could not immediately be reached to comment.

In the UAE, which is slowly emerging from an economic slowdown brought about by the global financial crisis and Dubai's property crash, some worried the move was aimed at curbing free speech.

"If you want to eavesdrop on your people, then you ban whatever they're using," said Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer at BT. "The basic problem is there's encryption between the BlackBerries and the servers. We find this issue all around about encryption."

Wrangling over the issue included an incident last year in which a state-controlled local service provider, Emirates Telecommunications (Etisalat), introduced what it called a software upgrade. RIM said it was an unauthorized "telecommunications surveillance application.

"I think there will be such an uproar, it probably won't happen and a solution will be found," Irfan Ellam, Al Mal Capital telecoms analyst said, referring to the mooted BlackBerry services ban.

"BlackBerry is seen as essential by many companies, so if you want to attract business to your country, it doesn't make much sense to ban these BlackBerry services," said Ellam.

He said RIM had been asked to set up a proxy server in India to allow the government there to monitor traffic from a security perspective and the same approach might resolve the issue in the UAE and elsewhere.

"The UAE is asking them to have a server here and they are offering solutions other than that," a UAE source familiar with the matter told Reuters.

"BlackBerry appears to be compliant in similar regulatory environments of other countries, which makes noncompliance in the UAE both disappointing and of great concern," UAE's regulator said.

RIM shares rose last week on speculation that it might unveil a new touchscreen BlackBerry this week to compete more effectively with the iPhone and models.

(Additional reporting by Matt Smith, Mahmoud Habboush in Dubai; Frederik Richter in Manama; Alastair Sharp in Cairo; Reed Stevenson in Amsterdam; Frank McGurty in Toronto; Writing by Amran Abocar; Editing by Jason Neely and Maureen Bavdek)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6700C920100802





For E-Data, Tug Grows Over Privacy vs. Security
Miguel Helft

The threat by the United Arab Emirates to shut down mobile services on BlackBerrys like e-mail and text messaging underscores a growing tension between communications companies and governments over how to balance privacy with national security.

While communications companies want to be able to ensure that their customers’ messages are shielded from prying eyes, governments increasingly insist on gaining access to electronic messages to track down criminals or uncover terrorist plots.

On Monday, Research In Motion, or R.I.M., the Canadian company that makes the BlackBerry line of smartphones, sought to reassure its customers that its services remained secure a day after the U.A.E. said it would ban many BlackBerry services because of national security concerns.

Internet security experts say the demands by the United Arab Emirates for certain access to communications flowing across the BlackBerry network echo requests of other governments around the world. Many countries have laws and regulations requiring telecommunications providers to grant government agencies access to their systems for court-sanctioned intercepts.

The demands also come as other governments, including India, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain, are reportedly considering new requirements on services like BlackBerry to ensure they can monitor electronic messages.

“These requirements for access to communications exist on a significant scale worldwide,” said Anthony M. Rutkowski, chief executive of Netmagic Associates, a consulting company specializing in technical and regulatory issues related to online security.

At the same time, electronic communications providers are increasingly offering security measures like encryption. For instance, after a cyberattack that originated in China and that targeted Google’s servers and Gmail, the company began encrypting by default all e-mail messages while in transit.

As a growing volume of communications content is encrypted, governments are demanding other information like whom customers communicate with and when, said Mr. Rutkowski. Such information can be useful to help gather intelligence.

Security experts say that BlackBerry’s service, which uses its own network to transmit e-mail and instant messages, may make access to such data more difficult, especially for countries in which the company has no servers controlling that network. The experts also say that is why Research In Motion has had frequent confrontations with governments. Other services, like Skype, have also raised concerns in some countries.

Research In Motion issued a statement on Monday that did not directly address the company’s conflict with the United Arab Emirates or its relationship with other countries, citing the “confidential nature” of its discussions with certain governments. The company said it balanced competing demands. “R.I.M. respects both the regulatory requirements of government and the security and privacy needs of corporations and consumers,” the company said in statement. In an open letter to customers, Research In Motion, which operates in more than 175 countries, also said that its security system was designed to ensure that no one, not even the company, could gain unauthorized access to customers’ data.

Security experts said that it was not clear what kind of access requirements the United Arab Emirates had requested from Research In Motion and whether those requirements were more onerous than those mandated by other governments.

“There is a lot going on that we are not seeing,” said Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer for BT, the giant telecommunications provider based in Britain. “We don’t know what R.I.M. does for other countries.”

Experts also say that the United Arab Emirates, a major business center in the Middle East, may be focusing on BlackBerry’s service, rather than Gmail or other encrypted services, because it is being offered by local telecommunications carriers and has grown increasingly popular there.

The BlackBerry service is a frequent target because of “its convenience, its widespread use and the fact that it runs on its own network,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy advocacy group based in Washington. “The United Arab Emirates is not in much of a position to tell Google not to encrypt e-mail.”

Many analysts agreed that the Emirati government appeared more interested in getting some concessions from Research In Motion than in actually shutting off access to BlackBerry data services. The government said the telephone service would not be affected.

“Saying that the restrictions will not kick in until October is a form of saber-rattling,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at the Harvard Law School and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “The government is saying that as a way to get negotiations going with R.I.M., not to ease the pain of executives who fear they may have their service cut off.”

Still, some businesspeople in Dubai seemed to be digesting the news, and waiting to see whether an agreement could be worked out between R.I.M. and the Emirati government before the October deadline. “People are taking a wait-and-see attitude,” said Blair Look, the managing director of asset management at al Mal Capital in Dubai.

Ian Austen and Robert F. Worth contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/te...lackberry.html





BlackBerry May Make Concessions in Government Talks: Reports
Devidutta Tripathy and Tamara Walid

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion may be considering concessions to governments who have voiced concerns about the tight security that makes its devices so popular, newspapers said on Tuesday.

India's Economic Times newspaper reported that RIM had agreed to allow security authorities in the country to monitor BlackBerry services after pressure from governments worried about national security.

Separately Kuwaiti daily al-Jarida, quoting a source it did not identify by name, said RIM had given "initial approval" to block 3,000 porn sites at the request of Kuwait's communications ministry. It said security was also a concern.

The two reports follow the announcement on Sunday that the United Arab Emirates would suspend BlackBerry Messenger, email and Web browser services from October 11 unless it could access encrypted messages.

RIM has declined to comment on the newspaper reports or on the reports of a UAE ban, but said on Monday in a statement it would respect both customers and governments.

"RIM does not disclose confidential regulatory discussions that take place with any government," it said, without elaborating.

The Ontario-based company says is keen to clear the air before Tuesday's expected launch of a new BlackBerry dubbed its "iPhone killer."

Unlike rivals Nokia and iPhone maker Apple, RIM controls its own networks which handle encrypted messages through centers in Canada and the UK.

That has made the BlackBerry popular as a secure way to communicate, but has worried governments.

RIM's Nasdaq-listed shares fell as much as 2.7 percent before closing down 0.96 percent at $56.98 on Monday. Its Toronto-listed shares resume trading on Tuesday following a public holiday.

Negotiations In Train

The Economic Times, citing internal government documents, said RIM has offered to share with Indian security agencies its technical codes for corporate email services, open up access to all consumer emails within 15 days and also develop tools in six to eight months to allow monitoring of chats.

An Indian government source could not confirm or deny the details in the newspaper but told Reuters the company and security agencies were discussing several options and a deal would be reached soon.

"We hope to find a solution by this month end," the official said on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak to media.

Kuwait's al-Jarida said Kuwait's government was working with RIM and telecom companies on "legal controls that would guarantee national security on the one hand, and the rights of citizens ... to use the device's services on the other."

Saudi Arabia has also asked service providers to cut off Messenger, industry sources told Reuters.

Bahrain in April warned against using Messenger to distribute news.

Freedom Of Information

The United States weighed in on the matter on Monday and said the UAE was setting a dangerous precedent in limiting freedom of information.

But the UAE says it wants nothing more than what other nations have negotiated and notes it only announced plans for a ban after three years of attempts to work out a compromise.

Under U.S. law, for example, authorities can use a subpoena to gain access to telecommunications data and Britain has similar rules. RIM has refused to discuss the details of its pacts with individual governments.

"It is troublesome to think that RIM is already complying with U.S. and UK regulatory requirements which are virtually the same as those in the UAE," said a UAE source familiar with the matter. "So it begs the question why treat the UAE differently?"

Theodore Karasik, a security analyst at Dubai-based firm INEGMA, said there were real security concerns at stake.

"Some in the Dubai/UAE bashing crowd will say this is a freedom of speech issue ... but some would say the UAE brought this up at the height of threat awareness here. There are several security issues here -- Iran, Yemen, al Qaeda -- that they could be worried about," he told Reuters.

"Everyone wants to get their security access. The UAE is acting as a bellwether for other countries on this," he said.

In addition to security threats, the UAE has tracked several money laundering incidents, including a plot to defraud the central bank of 7.2 billion euros ($10.17 billion).

The UAE, Saudi Arabia and India represent more than 2 million BlackBerry users, or about 5 percent of the 41 million devices in service worldwide.

BlackBerry users in the UAE on Tuesday were offered iPhones and other handsets by service providers keen to hold on to some 500,000 customers in the Gulf Arab nation. Top provider Emirates Telecommunications Corp (Etisalat) offered free devices to customers affected by the ban.

(Additional reporting by Diana Elias in Kuwait; Erika Solomon and Amena Bakr in Dubai; Writing by Jason Neely; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...67151F20100803





BlackBerry Maker Resists Governments’ Pressure
Jenna Wortham

A top executive of Research In Motion, the Canadian company that makes BlackBerry smartphones, said on Tuesday that his company would not give in to pressure from foreign governments to provide access to its customers’ messages.

That pressure increased on Tuesday as Saudi Arabia ordered local cellphone providers to halt BlackBerry service, saying it failed to meet the country’s regulatory requirements.

Mike Lazaridis, founder and co-chief executive of R.I.M, said in an interview that allowing governments to monitor messages shuttling across the BlackBerry network could endanger the company’s relationships with its customers, which include major companies and law enforcement agencies.

“We’re not going to compromise that,” Mr. Lazaridis said. “That’s what’s made BlackBerry the No. 1 solution worldwide.”

Similarly, the United Arab Emirates announced on Sunday that it would block BlackBerry e-mail and text-messaging services beginning in October.

Several governments have cited national security concerns in demanding that R.I.M. open up its system. Like the Emirates, Saudi Arabia has expressed concern about BlackBerry’s highly encrypted data service, which makes it difficult to monitor communications.

The suspension in Saudi Arabia is to take effect this month, according to the state-owned Saudi Press Agency.

Mr. Lazaridis denied reports that the company had already granted special concessions to the governments of countries like India and China, which have large numbers of BlackBerry owners.

“That’s absolutely ridiculous and patently false,” he said.

Mr. Lazaridis said the encryption that was causing alarm among foreign governments was used for many other purposes, including e-commerce transactions, teleconferencing and electronic money transfers.

“If you were to ban strong encryption, you would shut down corporations, business, commerce, banking and the Internet,” he said. “Effectively, you’d shut it all down. That’s not likely going to happen.”

Mr. Lazaridis expressed sympathy for the concerns of the Persian Gulf nations. “I am very empathetic to their concerns and what they go through,” Mr. Lazaridis said. “But every country goes through these things. We have to be prepared for the ramifications of the decisions we make.”

R.I.M. issued a statement Tuesday that was intended to reassure customers, saying that “customers of the BlackBerry enterprise solution can maintain confidence in the integrity of the security architecture without fear of compromise.”

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said the statement appeared to address only the products that the company sold to corporate customers, not those it sells directly to consumers.

Corporate customers tend to be of less concern to governments, he said, because criminals or terrorists are less likely to engage in illegal activities from corporate e-mail systems, and because governments can go directly to those corporations to obtain employees’ information.

“This doesn’t put the main question to rest,” Professor Zittrain said. “It doesn’t explain under what circumstances would the average BlackBerry user have his communications exposed.”

A spokeswoman for R.I.M. said the company would not elaborate on its statement.

Mr. Lazaridis spoke after a press conference in Manhattan at which executives from AT&T and R.I.M. introduced the BlackBerry Torch 9800, the company’s first phone with both a touch screen and a slide-out keyboard.

The Torch, which costs $199 with a two-year data plan, will be sold exclusively for AT&T’s network beginning Aug. 12. It has a 5-megapixel camera with a flash and runs a new version of R.I.M.’s mobile operating system called BlackBerry 6.

Don Lindsay, vice president for user experience at R.I.M., pointed out the phone’s new software features, which include a redesigned home screen, improved support for multimedia and applications and a better Web browser.

“It’s not about bringing something new to BlackBerry but improving what we do best,” he said.

Research In Motion has a lot riding on the release of the Torch. The company has been losing market share and mindshare to Apple and Google as more users clamor for the iPhone and smartphones powered by Android, Google’s mobile operating system. For R.I.M., this competition has increased the importance of markets in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

A report released on Monday by Nielsen said sales of R.I.M. devices to new subscribers in the United States were slowing, and that 29 percent of BlackBerry users had considered switching to the iPhone.

Another report from the research firm Canalys said that in the second quarter, Android sales were up nearly 900 percent from a year ago, claiming 34 percent of the market in the United States. By comparison, Research In Motion had 32 percent, and Apple staked out 21.7 percent of the market. A year ago, R.I.M.’s share was 45 percent.

Robert F. Worth and Miguel Helft contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/technology/04rim.html





U.S. Authorities Able to Tap BlackBerry Messaging

The BlackBerry -- renown for the security of its messaging -- doesn't offer 100 percent protection from eavesdropping. At least not in the United States.

U.S. law enforcement officials said they can tap into emails and other conversations made using the device, made by Research in Motion, as long as they have proper court orders.

RIM's willingness to grant authorities access to the messages of its clients is a hot-button issue. The United Arab Emirates claims it does not have the same kind of surveillance rights to BlackBerry messages as officials in the United States. It has threatened to clamp down on some services unless they get more access.

The exact details of the dispute remain unclear, but security experts say that many governments around the world enjoy the ability to monitor BlackBerry conversations as they do communications involving most types of mobile devices.

"The ability to tap communications is a part of surveillance and intelligence and law enforcement all over the world," said Mark Rasch, former head of the computer crimes unit at the U.S. Department of Justice.

RIM is in an unusual position of having to deal with government requests to monitor its clients because it is the only smartphone maker who manages the traffic of messages sent using its equipment. Other smartphone makers -- including Apple Inc, Nokia, HTC and Motorola Corp -- leave the work of managing data to the wireless carrier or the customer.

RIM's encrypted, or scrambled, traffic is delivered through secure servers at its own data centers, based mostly in its home base of Canada. Some corporate clients choose to host BlackBerry servers at other locations.

Rasch said that RIM may feel uncomfortable granting such access to officials in UAE. There may be concern authorities could abuse that access, he said.

"You reach a point where a company feels uncomfortable from the client perspective with what a government is asking them," Rasch said. "It may be a function of what they are being asked to do, or it may be a function of which government is asking."

U.S. rules that govern wire-tapping are designed to avoid abuse of power.

"It's a very complex process going to go about getting a wire tap. It's not something that is made easy for us to do," said Connecticut State Police Sergeant Shawn Corey.

(Reporting by Jim Finkle in Boston. Additional reporting by Alastair Sharp in Cairo and Jeremy Pelofsky in Washington; Editing by Frank McGurty)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67246V20100803





From Samizdat to Twitter: How Technology Is Making Censorship Irrelevant
Peter Kirwan

To understand what the web has done for free speech, it’s necessary to think about how Natalya Gorbanevskaya and her fellow dissidents produced 65 issues of the samizdat publication Chronicle Of Current Events in the Soviet Union between 1968 and 1983.
Censoring the web poses a significant challenge to authoritarian rulers everywhere, and often involves fine-grained judgment calls.

The Soviet state controlled access to printing presses and photocopiers. So when it was time to publish, Gorbanebskaya would tap out six identical copies of Chronicle on a controband typewriter. Next, she distributed these editions to six friends, who would, in turn, type out further copies before distributing them to additional readers.

Distribution was slow and extremely risky. Like dozens of others involved in the production of Chronicle, Gorbanevskaya was arrested by the 9th Division of the Fifth Chief Directorate of the KGB, which was specifically charged with rooting out samizdat. In 1969, she was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and confined to a mental hospital for three years.

Today, there are only two countries in the world where censorship-induced paralysis exists on anything like a comparable scale: Burma and North Korea. Everywhere else, the terms of trade between free speech and censorship have improved since the Cold War.
Technology has been responsible for most, perhaps all, of this improvement. Behaving like water, information on the web always seeks the largest possible audience. In doing so, it continues to exert pressure on the adamantine surface of oppression.

The experience of Iran suggests that the results can be significant. The Berkmann Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University suggests that 35,000 regularly-updated blogs are written in Arabic worldwide. Yet a separate Berkmann study suggests that as many as 70,0000 active blogs are written in Farsi.

According to Technorati, the lingua franca of the Islamic Republic of Iran — spoken by an estimated 75m people worldwide — ranks among the web’s top 10 most popular blogging languages.

“If you look around the Arab world,” one member of Dubai’s digerati told me during a visit to the emirate last week, “you’ll see that blogging and social media is taking off fastest where repression is most severe.”
You won’t hear such criticism of Dubai’s ruling class on the airwaves or in print. Yet technology enables their expression around the fringes of public life.

It’s also true that censoring the web poses a significant challenge to authoritarian rulers everywhere. Unlike the Soviet drive to wipe out samizdat publishers, it often involves fine-grained judgment calls.

The Chinese government, for example, recognizes that the web can keep its citizens entertained (and therefore quiescent). It also recognizes that web access — and the accompanying access to ideas and inspiration — is an indispensable driver of economic growth. Under these circumstances, deciding what to censor can become difficult and expensive.

In many cases, the playing field is more level than it was for Natalya Gorbanevskaya. Measures call forth counter-measures. In Beijing, on 15 June, for example, 2.3m soldiers in the People’s Liberation Army were banned from blogging. Yet in Paris, ten days later, the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders set up a virtual private network designed for journalists, bloggers and dissidents who wish to evade eavesdropping.

In addition, it’s nice to imagine — as Clay Shirky did last week at the Guardian’s Activate conference — that dissidents hold a trump card: the absence of hubris. Power tends to make rulers “certain of what will happen next”, said Shirky. As a result, rulers “try fewer things” than dissidents, who excel in terms of creativity. Meanwhile, as Shirky argues, “the wiring of the population” is “complete to the first degree”. Even North Korea has a mobile phone network.

But what happens when information, like water, does its work? What happens when barriers to free expression come crashing down?

Westerners typically envisage free expression being accompanied by profound political consequences. From the English Civil War to the French Revolution, the model for this kind of transition feels deeply familiar.

But is this model applicable everywhere? What, for example, will happen when the voices on the other side of content-filtering walls become too loud in a place like Dubai?

A US-friendly emirate in a strategic location, Dubai’s social and cultural norms are rooted in the past. Everything else about the city, including its rampant consumerism, is predicated upon fast-forwarding to the century’s end.

Like governments everywhere, Dubai’s government operates in the present tense. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it’s described by the OpenNet Initiative as an “extensive” censor of the web. The authorities block any web site deemed to be “inconsistent” with the government’s “religious, cultural, political and moral values”.

In practice, this means difficulties for sites that specialize in nudity, sex, dating, gambling, religion, alcohol, drugs, anonymizer tools and VoIP applications. For its part, traditional media censors itself, wary of selective enforcement of draconian laws.

The society on which bloggers and journalists pass comment rests on a series of significant fault lines. In a city of 1.7 million , for example, four out of five inhabitants are migrant workers, many of whom live in conditions described by Human Rights Watch as “less than human”.

At street-level, Dubai is a city of Pakistanis, Indians, Chinese and Iranians. Only in comfortable air-conditioned offices and hotels does the emirate suddenly become Arabic. When wealthy local women go shopping, indentured servants trail behind them, carrying their bags. The glittering shopping malls they patronize are studded with prayer rooms for spiritual contemplation.

To western eyes, the contradictory feudalism of Dubai is disorienting. Last week, a taxi driver from Peshawar who drove me around the city hinted at the tensions that exist beneath the surface. “The locals are good for only three things,” he told me dismissively. “They eat, they sleep and have sex.”

You won’t hear such criticism of Dubai’s ruling class on the airwaves or in print. Yet technology enables their expression around the fringes of public life. James Piecowye, an expat Canadian who hosts a radio talk show in Dubai, tells a story that captures the fragility of censorship in a society that isn’t accustomed to speaking its mind.

Recently, Piecowye was talking live, on air, about “something that couldn’t be said” because of the emirate’s media laws. At this point, he received a text message from a listener that read as follows: “We know what you’re trying to say, so why don’t you just SAY it!!”

Dubai isn’t a failed state, or a famine-wracked totalitarian basket case. Among those born in the emirate, life expectancy is 78 years. Slightly less than 90 percent of the local population can read and write. Yet the natives of Dubai live their long and literate lives in a society where public debate is frequently non-existent.

In places like this, much the web’s leveling work remains to be done, with consequences that remain unpredictable.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/...ip-irrelevant/





Indonesia Finds Banning Pornography Is Difficult
Aubrey Belford

As one of the heads of the Indonesian Internet Service Provider Association, Valens Riyadi knows he has his work cut out for him.

Last month, the country’s information minister, Tifatul Sembiring, said that local service providers would have to start blocking online pornography by the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, which starts Aug. 11. That deadline is fast approaching, and Mr. Riyadi says he still has no idea how he is going to put a filter in place.

“It’s really a hard thing to do in technical terms,” he said. “For me, it’s almost an impossible task.”

Mr. Sembiring has won plaudits for pledging to curb online pornography in this Muslim-majority democracy of 240 million people, and for following regional peers like China, Thailand and Singapore into the fraught world of Internet screening. But the problem, Mr. Riyadi says, is that the minister’s plan is really no plan at all.

No official decree has been issued, no list of banned sites has been published and no details have surfaced on who will pay for monitoring and screening of Web sites. The minister has, however, threatened the roughly 230 Internet service providers in Indonesia with closure if they fail to block pornographic sites for the country’s 40 million Internet users.

Mr. Riyadi, laughing with exasperation, said service providers might be able to scrape together a block of “famous pornographic Web sites” in the coming weeks — roughly 10 percent of such content. Service providers might be able to block 50 percent of online pornography in the months ahead, he said, if they were lucky.

The debate over Internet screening here has been intense. Early this year, Mr. Sembiring proposed a decree that would impose screening of sites with illegal content, including pornography, gambling and blasphemy. He based his proposal in part on two laws concerning information technology and pornography that were passed in 2008, but the announcement led to howls of opposition from secularists and free-speech advocates.

The uproar from civil society groups and in the rambunctious Indonesian media, one of the freest in Asia, prompted Indonesia’s president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, to rebuff the plan.

But in June, a series of videos emerged online that allegedly showed the popular rock singer Nazril Irham, known as Ariel, having sex with two female celebrities.

Amid the wild popularity of the videos and blanket media coverage of the scandal, in which the celebrities and a number of other people were declared suspects accused of breaking laws on criminal pornography and indecency, Mr. Sembiring revived the screening plan — this time with backing from the president.

Mr. Sembiring says the plan will work, and in time for the fasting month. During an interview, he said that service providers would adopt a government keyword filtering system known as Trust Positif, which is already in use in many of the government’s computer networks.

“Not all of the sites, all of the pornographic content, will be gone from the Internet,” said Mr. Sembiring, a politician from the Prosperous Justice Party, a conservative Islamic group that is a member of the president’s governing coalition. “But step by step, we’re trying to filter pornographic content.”

The filter would begin with pornography and would later be expanded to other undesirable sites. Since the keyword list has already been in use for government departments, he said, “I think after one month, our frequency of updating will be low.”

But for Mr. Riyadi, of the I.S.P. association, the plan is simply unworkable. Blocking sites by keywords might be feasible for small networks, but it is a tricky task for larger ones, he said.

Service providers would have to collectively spend as much as 500 billion rupiah, or $56 million, to install proxy, or intermediate, servers to house the filters, he said.

Mr. Riyadi added that the proxy servers might not even work, and that if they did, it could slow the access to overseas Web sites by 20 percent to 30 percent, he said.

Mr. Riyadi said the way forward would be for the government to put together a list of blocked addresses, a laborious process that would involve tens of millions of restricted pages.

But such a list has not been made public, despite requests. “I guess he’s gotten the wrong technical data from his staff,” he said.

For Hasan Yahya, a business consultant and blogger, the screening plan threatens both free speech and Indonesia’s Internet industry.

Although there are hundreds of service providers in the country, the majority of people are clients of Telkom, the state-linked giant, and a handful of other, private operators.

Making service providers assume the burden of screening will squeeze smaller operators hard, Mr. Yahya said.

Mr. Sembiring “is a Taliban copying what he thinks he knows from China,” Mr. Yahya said. “It’s hardly the example that we want to copy for this young and fragile democracy.”

Besides, Mr. Yahya said, the plan is so vague and technically unfeasible that it will probably not even work. Unlike China or Singapore, Indonesia, with its roughly 17,000 islands, has no centralized Web infrastructure and has several links to networks overseas.

“I’d bet you my little finger nobody could make it happen,” Mr. Yahya said. “Not in the next few months, not in the time frame the minister wants, before Ramadan.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/te...ndoporn02.html





Most Internet Time Now Spent with Social Networks, Games
Matthew Lasar

Just in case you needed further confirmation that blogs, social networks, and games are overtaking everything else on the 'Net, Nielsen has released its latest statistics. They show that Americans now spend almost a quarter of their PC/laptop days and nights on social networking sites and blogs. That's a 43 percent jump from a year ago.

Social networking now has a 22.7 percent share of the PC pie, while online games get a 10.2 percent share (up 10 percent from last year).

Meanwhile, the jury is still out on e-mail—which now commands a paltry 8.3 percent of consumer time, a drop of 28 percent from June 2009.

But the media survey company notes that at the same time computer e-mail use is in decline, mobile users are ramping up the activity—e-mailing now consumes 41.6 percent of all US mobile Internet time.

"Despite the almost unlimited nature of what you can do on the Web, 40 percent of US online time is spent on just three activities—social networking, playing games and emailing," noted Nielsen research analyst Dave Martin, "leaving a whole lot of other sectors fighting for a declining share of the online pie."

Those "other sectors" include Portals (4.4 percent), Instant Messaging (4 percent), and search (3.5 percent).
http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2010...-uncertain.ars





Norwegian Newspaper Taps Into Web’s Efficiencies
Eric Pfanner

Last summer, as the crisis in the newspaper business worsened, executives at Edda, a publisher in Norway, met to discuss the Internet. As managers fiddled with their iPhones, someone suggested a novel approach: If the company was serious about securing a place in the digital future, why not devote half its resources to the Web and other new media?

“In the beginning it seemed like just a wild thought, but after I thought about it for a while, I decided it would be interesting to try it,” said Erling Omvik, the editor of Fredrikstad Blad, one of Edda’s newspapers, in the southern city of Fredrikstad.
Previously, he said, employees were spending about 90 percent of their time working on the printed newspaper and 10 percent on the online version. Like other small-town newspapers with limited resources, Fredrikstad Blad had found it hard to grow on the Web.

Since that meeting, the paper has transformed its operations, demanding that reporters, advertising representatives and the rest of its 64 employees devote equal time to the print edition, which has a circulation of 21,000, and the Web. Journalists had to reapply for new, hybrid jobs. Ad reps were required to sell across both media.

The Web site was enhanced with faster, more thorough coverage of local events. A social networking area of the site was developed, and the paper solicits articles from its members — about their clubs, church groups and other Fredrikstad institutions, for example.

Some of the material on the site veers beyond traditional newspaper content. Local moviemakers, for example, have provided short fictional films that are included in a video section.

“Online newspapers have to be something very different from print,” said David Montgomery, chief executive of Mecom, the London company that acquired Edda four years ago. “The online proposition is infinite in terms of content.”

Since Fredrikstad Blad reallocated its resources, the Web site has shown significant growth. The number of daily visitors has risen 27 percent, to 26,000, according to Mecom. Advertising revenue in the first half of this year more than doubled from a year earlier, to €812,000.

Should other small-town newspapers, many of which are struggling for survival, pay attention to what is being done in Fredrikstad?

Norway is certainly not a representative newspaper market. Readers remain more loyal to their local papers than in other countries, yet they are also early adopters of technology.

The changes at Fredrikstad have also come at a cost. More time spent on the Web means less time for the print edition. Even before the 50-50 split was initiated, the staff had been reduced nearly 20 percent as Mr. Montgomery imposed companywide cuts.

Mr. Montgomery insists that the contents of Mecom’s newspapers have not suffered, because employees work more efficiently. Reporters, for example, generally write the headlines, format their articles for the newspaper and post them to the Web — jobs that at most newspapers are done by a copy desk. As a result, Mecom has largely eliminated copy editors.

“As an industry, we need to cast off this mistrust of individual journalists and let them live up to the training and education they’ve been given,” he said.

Mr. Montgomery’s tough-guy approach has not made him popular in newsrooms, but it seems to be helping the bottom line. Last week, Mecom reported a 48 percent increase in earnings for the first half of this year, after two difficult years.

Mr. Omvik, who has been the editor of Fredrikstad Blad for 12 years, acknowledged that it had sometimes been “difficult to be a leader” since Mecom acquired Edda.

But now, with the paper making a serious commitment to its digital business, he added: “I think the last year has maybe been my most exciting year as an editor. There are no more certainties, but there are so many possibilities. It would be tragic if newspaper people were the last to realize that the old way of giving out information is shrinking.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/bu...t-cache02.html





Technology Races to Meet Tide of Data
Kevin J. O'Brien

As smartphones and video streaming double the crunch of data carried over mobile networks each year, big advances in optical transport, data filtering and networking are keeping the Internet from collapsing under its own weight.

The gains, often unheralded, have allowed mobile network operators to continue selling unlimited broadband packages to customers who, despite their often voracious data habits, have been spared from sharing the cost of the strains being put on the system.
Take for example the quick fix made in northern Spain in June 2008, when a 915-kilometer, or 570-mile, stretch of high-speed cable from Madrid to Marseille began to overload, threatening service to hundreds of thousands of Europeans.

The shutdown was averted in part by a 30-year-old Spanish line technician, Jesús Bergaz, who, with conventional tools and four optical line cards roughly the size of a pizza box, expanded the network’s capacity tenfold in just 27 hours.

The repair job was the digital equivalent of converting a two-lane country road into a superhighway in a few hours. And Mr. Bergaz’s remedy is one of several advances taking place every day that are keeping operators and the Internet ahead of the crush, experts said.

“The doomsayers assume technology doesn’t advance, but it does,” said Jimmy Yu, an optical transport equipment analyst at Dell’Oro, a research company in Redwood City, California. “If you look at history, when something is threatening, technology moves in to compensate.”

The volume of data on the world’s mobile networks is doubling each year, according to Cisco Systems, the U.S. maker of routers and networking equipment. By 2014, it estimates, the monthly data flow will increase about sixteenfold, to 3.6 billion gigabytes from 220.1 million.

So far, progress in many aspects of network technology, from wringing more out of long-distance fiber optic transport to reducing the bottlenecks that can occur at the critical links between base stations and main networks, along with eliminating some of the digital clutter produced by cellphones, are staving off a meltdown.

“There might be a lapse between consumer demand and an operator’s ability to meet it,” said Hans Vestberg, the chief executive of Ericsson, the largest maker of telecom networking equipment, which is spending €3 billion, or $3.9 billion, this year on research and development. “But we believe the technology coming onto the market now will go a long way toward addressing this issue. Technological development will be crucial.”

This year, 22 operators, including TeliaSonera in Scandinavia, Verizon Wireless in the United States, and NTT DoCoMo in Japan, are expected to start using networks with Long Term Evolution technology, which can transmit at up to 40 megabits a second, compared with 3 to 6 megabits for conventional networks.

But amid the economic downturn, operators’ spending on L.T.E. networks has been slow, and the mounting data traffic has required equipment makers to come up with quicker fixes.

In Spain, the technology installed by Mr. Bergaz, who works for Interoute, a long-distance operator based in London, was a tiny, complex optical transport system made by Infinera, a company in Sunnyvale, California, that is a pioneer in optical miniaturization.

Infinera’s technology compresses 50 optical components like lasers, modulators and diodes onto a so-called photonic integrated circuit, or PIC, chip the size of an infant’s fingernail. The chips are the heart of a system that can push 10 times as much data through a fiber optic cable at speeds of up to 100 gigabits a second.

Mr. Bergaz inserted four Infinera line cards along the route of an Interoute customer, an operator the company declined to identify, between Barcelona and Madrid. A second technician in France added four cards in Marseilles. The installation turned a fiber optic cable the thickness of a human hair into a high-speed digital fire hose.

Dave Welch, Infinera’s chief strategy officer, said new generations of Infinera’s technology would deliver further quantum leaps in transmission speed. In 2012, it plans to start selling circuitry that would compress more than 200 optical components onto a single chip capable of delivering data at speeds up to 500 gigabits a second.

“As Internet bandwidth grows, it is essential that technology drive down the cost-per-bit,” Mr. Welch said. “We see the capacity of our chips doubling every three years.”

Typically, however, the skyrocketing levels of Internet data are causing bottlenecks not along long-haul cables but in dense urban areas, overloading the ubiquitous router switches that sort and send voice, data and Internet traffic to its destination.

Many older networks were built when voice calls were the only forms of data being sent and are still based on a technology called time division multiplexing, or T.D.M., which divides the available bandwidth into 64-kilobit slices, with one slice for each voice call. But in an age of data-heavy activities like video conferencing, giving that amount of space to a phone call, which typically uses just 8 kilobits of data, results in a significant portion of unused capacity.

So operators are progressively converting their grids to computer-based Internet Protocol networks, enabling them to send data in digital packets that can transmit real-time conversations while still filling the microseconds of “dead air” with e-mail messages, video or other data.

A refined example of this approach came from Alcatel-Lucent, the French equipment maker, which in 2009 developed a router the size of two pizza boxes that could slice and dice voice, data and Internet traffic, sending it on its most efficient path at up to 40 gigabits a second.

Sales of the company’s I.P. service routers rose 30 percent in the second quarter of this year.

Many operators with large numbers of smartphone users, like AT&T Wireless, the exclusive U.S. seller of Apple’s bandwidth-hungry iPhone, choose Alcatel-Lucent’s service routers to improve the critical link between cell base-stations and its core network.

“If we didn’t have this technology, we would be constrained,” said Michael Howard, a co-founder and principal analyst at Infonetics Research in Campbell, California. “There would be no YouTube, etc. The carriers would all have to limit traffic.”

But the solution is not only a matter of smarter lines and switches.

Huawei, the fast-growing Chinese network equipment maker, has developed software that lets operators screen out 75 percent of the digital pulses, or “heartbeats,” that are continually sent by smartphones to maintain a contact with a base station. The developers found that even when the frequency of the pulses was reduced, the phone would remain in meaningful contact with the network, while allowing operators to carry more calls and data.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/te...NETPIPE02.html





1962 Glass Could be Corning's Next Bonanza Seller
Ben Dobbin

An ultra-strong glass that has been looking for a purpose since its invention in 1962 is poised to become a multibillion-dollar bonanza for Corning Inc.

The 159-year-old glass pioneer is ramping up production of what it calls Gorilla glass, expecting it to be the hot new face of touch-screen tablets and high-end TVs.

Gorilla showed early promise in the '60s, but failed to find a commercial use, so it's been biding its time in a hilltop research lab for almost a half-century. It picked up its first customer in 2008 and has quickly become a $170 million a year business as a protective layer over the screens of 40 million-plus cell phones and other mobile devices.

Now, the latest trend in TVs could catapult it to a billion-dollar business: Frameless flat-screens that could be mistaken for chic glass artwork on a living-room wall.

Because Gorilla is very hard to break, dent or scratch, Corning is betting it will be the glass of choice as TV-set manufacturers dispense with protective rims or bezels for their sets, in search of an elegant look.

Gorilla is two to three times stronger than chemically strengthened versions of ordinary soda-lime glass, even when just half as thick, company scientists say. Its strength also means Gorilla can be thinner than a dime, saving on weight and shipping costs.

Corning is in talks with Asian manufacturers to bring Gorilla to the TV market in early 2011 and expects to land its first deal this fall. With production going full-tilt in Harrodsburg, Ky., it is converting part of a second factory in Shizuoka, Japan, to fill a potential burst of orders by year-end.

"That'll tell you something about our confidence in this," said Corning President Peter Volanakis.

Investors are taking notice. In June, Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York raised Corning's projected share price, predicting Gorilla would be its second biggest business by 2015.

"There's a wide range of views on how successful this product will be," said Deutsche Bank analyst Carter Shoop. "But I think it's safe to say that, in aggregate, people are becoming much more bullish. It's a tremendous opportunity. We'll have to see how consumers react."

DisplaySearch market analyst Paul Gagnon said alternatives "obviously scratch easier, they're thicker and heavier, but they're also cheaper." He estimates that a sheet of Gorilla would add $30 to $60 to the cost of a set.

It remains to be seen "whether this becomes a hit trend that propagates to other models and sizes or remains in the confines of a premium step-up series of products," Gagnon said.

"This is a fashion trend, not a functional trend, and that's what makes (the growth rate) very hard to predict," said Volanakis. "But because the market is so large in terms of number of TVs — and the amount of glass per TV is so large — that's what can move the needle pretty quickly."

Based in western New York, Corning is the world's largest maker of glass for liquid-crystal-display computers and TVs. High-margin LCD glass generated the bulk of Corning's $5.4 billion in 2009 sales.

By ramping up volume production quickly in a budding market, Corning is pursuing a well-worn strategy designed to keep rivals from gaining ground. Its patience is also well practiced. Executives know too well the gulf between inspiration and application is sometimes decades-wide.

Corning set out in the late 1950s to find a glass as strong as steel. Dubbed Project Muscle, the effort combined heating and layering experiments and produced a robust yet bendable material called Chemcor.

Then in 1964, Corning devised an ingenious method called "fusion draw" to make super-thin, unvaryingly flat glass. It pumped hot glass into a suspended trough and allowed it to overflow and run down either side. The glass flows then meet under the trough and fuse seamlessly into a smooth, hanging sheet of glass.

To make Chemcor, Corning ran the sheets through a "tempering" process that set up internal stresses in the material. The same principle is behind the toughness of Pyrex glass, but Chemcor was tempered in a chemical bath, not by heat treatment.

Corning thought Chemcor sheets created this way would be the material of choice in car windshields, but British rival Pilkington Bros. intervened with a far cheaper mass-production approach. And another Chemcor adaptation in photochromic sunglasses also fizzled in the retail market.

Fusion draw finally proved its commercial value when Japanese electronics companies, looking for slim sheets free of alkalis that contaminate liquid crystals, turned to Corning's soda-lime LCD glass in the 1980s. Corning rapidly turned into the world's biggest supplier of LCD glass for laptops and that business blossomed around 2003 when LCD technology migrated to TVs.

In 2006, when demand surfaced for a cell phone cover glass, Corning dug out Chemcor from its database, tweaked it for manufacturing in LCD tanks, and renamed it Gorilla. "Initially, we were telling ourselves a $10 million business," said researcher Ron Stewart.

With relatively low startup costs, Gorilla should generate its first profit this year. And now that production is back on, designers are again exploring using it in unexpected places, like refrigerator doors, car sunroofs and touch-screen hotel advertising.

Among the 100-plus devices with Gorilla are Motorola Inc.'s Droid smart phone and LG Electronics' X300 notebook. Whether Apple Inc. uses the glass in its iPod is a much-discussed mystery since "not all our customers allow us to say," said Jim Steiner, general manager of Corning's specialty materials division.

Since the Civil War, Corning has turned out a glittering array of innovations from railroad signals to Pyrex and auto-pollution filters to optical fiber. Allotting 10 percent of revenue to research keeps promising projects brewing at its Sullivan Park research hub on Corning's hilly outskirts.

Optical fiber is another example of an invention that took a long time to come into its own. In 1934, chemist Frank Hyde came up with a practical method of making fused silica — an exceptionally pure glass — in bulk, yet it wasn't put to use as optical fiber until the 1970s. Once there, it helped create the Internet revolution.

In his office lobby, Steiner showed off a 400-foot-long spool of flexible, 16-inch-wide glass that's as thin as a sheet of paper.

"Kind of like Chemcor was back in the '60s," he said. "We're not sure what we're going to do with it, but it's cool, isn't it?"
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/...gpfJQD9HARJ3G0





Gorilla Glass Invented in US. But Will Jobs Head to Asia?

Gorilla glass, Corning's superstrong glass, is already a hit in smartphones. Now, Gorilla glass could make inroads with Asian TV makers.
Laurent Belsie

Two to three times stronger than other glass and resistant to dents and scratches, it's beginning to find its way onto screens for smartphones, tablet computers, and soon flat-screen high-definition TVs. Sales are expected to nearly quadruple from last year. Its inventor, New York-based Corning, expects sales to quadruple again next year into a $1 billion business as the flat-screen TV business takes off.

But don't expect a huge surge of American jobs as a result. Although production will be expanding in the United States, the big market potential lies with TVs, which are all made in Asia. That's why Corning is planning to locate there to remain price competitive.

At the moment, all Gorilla glass is produced in Corning's Harrodsburg, Ky., plant. On Tuesday, Corning is expected to announce a $200 million expansion in the facility that will add about 80 workers over time to the 300-odd work force already there. Although many of the smartphones and other portable devices using it are made in Asia, the size of the screens and the amounts needed are small enough that it's possible to export from the United States.

In July, however, Corning announced it had an agreement with an Asian manufacturer to supply Gorilla glass for flat-screen TVs that should appear in the marketplace early next year. So it is retrofitting a liquid-crystal display (LCD) plant in Shizuoka, Japan, to start manufacturing the special glass later this quarter.

The company is spending several hundred million dollars in the Japanese plant, which will employ several hundred workers. It's a signal that the company expects to ink similar deals with other TV manufacturers.

That's what happens when a country or region dominates an industry. Suppliers, even the most innovative ones, tend to locate near the manufacturers. Although it played a big role in creating the first LCDs, Corning never did any large-scale US manufacturing because the manufacturers in the 1980s were located in Japan. Over the decades, the company has followed the manufacturers to South Korea, Taiwan, and now China.

"If we hadn't been in Japan, we wouldn't be in the business," says company spokesman Dan Collins.

The TV manufacturers are interested in using the properties of the strong glass to create new styles of flat-screen sets.

"You will begin to see it around you these borderless design TVs and other devices that I'm not at liberty to talk about at this time," Wendell Weeks, Corning's chairman and chief executive officer.

If consumers flock to the new designs, the market for Gorilla glass could take off, even though it's more expensive than other glass.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Money/new-e...s-head-to-Asia





AT&T and Verizon Plan Mobile Payment System: Report

AT&T Inc and Verizon Wireless are planning a partnership to displace credit and debit cards by letting consumers pay with the contactless wave of a smartphone, Bloomberg News reported, citing three people with direct knowledge of the plan.

The new venture may pose a competitive threat to payment networks such as Visa Inc and MasterCard Inc, the report said.

The partnership, which also includes T-Mobile USA, may work with Discover Financial Services and Barclays Plc to test a system at stores in Atlanta and three other U.S. cities, the people told the agency.

AT&T and Verizon Wireless declined comment to Bloomberg. They could not be immediately reached for comment by Reuters outside regular U.S. business hours.

The carriers have been searching for a chief executive officer, according to Bloomberg News.

The planned service is similar to those already available in Japan, Turkey and the U.K., and would use contactless technology to pay for purchases in stores, the report said.

(Reporting by Sakthi Prasad in Bangalore; Editing by Anshuman Daga)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6710IH20100802





F.B.I., Challenging Use of Seal, Gets Back a Primer on the Law
John Schwartz

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has taken on everyone from Al Capone to John Dillinger to the Unabomber. Its latest adversary: Wikipedia.

The bureau wrote a letter in July to the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization of Wikipedia, demanding that it take down an image of the F.B.I. seal accompanying an article on the bureau, and threatened litigation: “Failure to comply may result in further legal action. We appreciate your timely attention to this matter.”

The problem, those at Wikipedia say, is that the law cited in the F.B.I.’s letter is largely about keeping people from flashing fake badges or profiting from the use of the seal, and not about posting images on noncommercial Web sites. Many sites, including the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, display the seal.

Other organizations might simply back down. But Wikipedia sent back a politely feisty response, stating that the bureau’s lawyers had misquoted the law. “While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version” that the F.B.I. had provided.

Michael Godwin, the general counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote, “we are prepared to argue our view in court.” He signed off, “with all appropriate respect.”

An F.B.I. spokesman, William Carter, said that such letters go out “from time to time” from the office of general counsel.

“You can’t use the F.B.I. seal, by law, unless you have the permission of the F.B.I. director,” he said.

Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the dust-up both “silly” and “troubling”; Wikipedia has a First Amendment right to display the seal, she said.

“Really,” she added, “I have to believe the F.B.I. has better things to do than this.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/us/03fbi.html





Resistance Forms Against Hollywood’s 3-D Push
Michael Cieply

A joke making the rounds online involves a pair of red and green glasses and some blurry letters that say, “If you can’t make it good, make it 3-D.”

The fans of flat film have a motto. But do they have a movement?

While Hollywood rushes dozens of 3-D movies to the screen — nearly 60 are planned in the next two years, including “Saw VII” and “Mars Needs Moms!” — a rebellion among some filmmakers and viewers has been complicating the industry’s jump into the third dimension.

It’s hard to measure the audience resistance — online complaints don’t mean much when crowds are paying the premium 3-D prices. But filmmakers are another matter, and their attitudes may tell whether Hollywood’s 3-D leap is about to hit a wall.

Several influential directors took surprisingly public potshots at the 3-D boom during the recent Comic-Con International pop culture convention in San Diego.

“When you put the glasses on, everything gets dim,” said J. J. Abrams, whose two-dimensional “Star Trek” earned $385 million at the worldwide box office for Paramount Pictures last year.

Joss Whedon, who was onstage with Mr. Abrams, said that as a viewer, “I’m totally into it. I love it.” But Mr. Whedon then said he flatly opposed a plan by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to convert “The Cabin in the Woods,” a horror film he produced but that has not yet been released, into 3-D. “What we’re hoping to do,” Mr. Whedon said, “is to be the only horror movie coming out that is not in 3-D.”

A spokesman for MGM declined to discuss “The Cabin in the Woods.” But one person who was briefed on the situation — and spoke on the condition of anonymity because the studio was in the middle of a difficult financial restructuring — said conversion remained an option.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for Marvel Entertainment said that studio had not decided on two or three dimensions for “Avengers,” a superhero film Mr. Whedon is directing.

With the enormous 3-D success of “Avatar,” directed by James Cameron, followed in short order by “Alice in Wonderland,” by Tim Burton, film marketing and distribution executives have been clamoring for more digitally equipped theaters to keep 3-D movies from crowding one another off the screen.

By year’s end, there will be more than 5,000 digital screens in the United States, or 12.5 percent of the roughly 40,000 total, easing a traffic jam that has caused 3-D hits like “Clash of the Titans,” from Warner Brothers, to bump into “How to Train Your Dragon,” from DreamWorks Animation, to the disadvantage of both.

Tickets for 3-D films carry a $3 to $5 premium, and industry executives roughly estimate that 3-D pictures average an extra 20 percent at the box office. Home sales for 3-D hits like “Avatar” and “Monsters vs. Aliens” have been strong, showing they can more than hold their own when not in 3-D.

A 3-D movie can be somewhat more costly than a 2-D equivalent because it may require more elaborate cameras and shooting techniques or an additional process in the already lengthy postproduction period for effects-heavy films. But the added costs are a blip when weighed against higher ticket sales.

Behind the scenes, however, filmmakers have begun to resist production executives eager for 3-D sales. For reasons both aesthetic and practical, some directors often do not want to convert a film to 3-D or go to the trouble and expense of shooting with 3-D cameras, which are still relatively untested on big movies with complex stunts and locations.

Filmmakers like Mr. Whedon and Mr. Abrams argue that 3-D technology does little to enhance a cinematic story, while adding a lot of bother. “It hasn’t changed anything, except it’s going to make it harder to shoot,” Mr. Whedon said at Comic-Con.

In much the same spirit, Christopher Nolan recently warded off suggestions that his film “Inception,” from Warner — still No. 1 at the box office — might be converted to 3-D.

On the other hand, Michael Bay, who is shooting “Transformers 3,” appears to have agreed that his film will be at least partly in 3-D after insisting for months that the technology was not quite ready for his brand of action.

“We’ve always said it’s all about balance,” said Greg Foster, the president and chairman of Imax Filmed Entertainment, which has long counseled that some films are better in 2-D, even on giant Imax screens. “The world is catching up to that approach.”

A willingness to shoot in 3-D could persuade studio committees to approve an expensive film. But the disdain of some filmmakers for 3-D — at least in connection with their current projects — was on full display in San Diego.

Jon Favreau, speaking at Comic-Con about his coming “Cowboys & Aliens” for DreamWorks and Universal, said the idea of doing the movie in 3-D had come up, but he was not interested. Contemporary 3-D requires a digital camera, and “Westerns should only be shot on film,” Mr. Favreau said. He added: “Use the money you save to see it twice.”

Stacey Snider, the DreamWorks chief executive, said Mr. Favreau and the studios involved had mutually agreed that 3-D was not right for the film. But, she added, a discussion about 3-D was inevitable.

“It’s naïve to think we wouldn’t be having it on any movie that has effects, action or scale,” Ms. Snider said.

Earlier at Comic-Con, Edgar Wright, the director of “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” an action-filled comic-book extravaganza from Universal, similarly said that his film would arrive in two dimensions, at regular prices.

(People briefed on Universal’s approach to the film said 3-D had been considered very briefly. It was rejected, however, partly to avoid straining what promises to be a young audience with high ticket prices, partly because the already busy look of the movie might have become overwhelming in 3-D.)

The crowds cheered, as they had in an earlier Comic-Con briefing by Chris Pirrotta and other staff members of the fan site TheOneRing.net, who assured 300 listeners that a pair of planned “Hobbit” films will not be in 3-D, based on the site’s extensive reporting.

“Out of 450 people surveyed, 450 don’t want 3D for ‘The Hobbit,’ ” a later post on the Web site said.

But in Hollywood, an executive briefed on the matter — who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicate negotiations surrounding a plan to have Peter Jackson direct the “Hobbit” films — said the dimensional status of the movie remained unresolved.

Asked by phone recently whether die-hard fans would tolerate a 3-D Middle Earth, Mr. Pirrotta said, “I do believe so, as long as there was the standard version as well.”

In his own family, he said, the funny glasses can be a deal-breaker.

“My wife can’t stand 3-D.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/bu...dia/03-3d.html





On-Demand Options for Hard-to-Find Films
Mike Hale

The Hong Kong director Johnnie To, one of the great virtuosos of the gangster film, makes movies worth rushing out to see.

But where? Most of his movies aren’t released in the United States; those that are play for a few weeks in New York and perhaps Los Angeles.

The true To aficionado has had to track down films in Chinatown video stores or at far-flung festivals. The 2008 film “Sparrow,” about a gang of pickpockets, made brief appearances in Chicago; Cleveland; Madison, Wis.; and Mill Valley, Calif.

But now a new conduit is opening for Mr. To and other foreign and independent directors who struggle to have their work seen in the United States. His newest film, “Vengeance,” from 2009, is receiving a nationwide release from IFC Films beginning on Wednesday, not in theaters or on DVD, but on pay television, as an on-demand selection ($5.99 on Time Warner Cable in New York).

Serious moviegoers may still see on-demand channels as a dumping ground for films that were in theaters six months ago or weren’t good enough to be in theaters at all. But as more and more “small,” serious films fight for screen time, a few distributors are starting to see on-demand television as a first option — which means that the quality of on-demand offerings is beginning to rise.

The challenge for the viewer is to find what you’re looking for or, more likely, what you don’t yet know you’re looking for. Newspapers (like this one) and other traditional sources of television listings aren’t in the habit of calling attention to on-demand releases, which can pop on and off of cable systems with seemingly no warning.

Cable providers themselves don’t make things any easier, even though on-demand programming is universally described as an increasingly important source of revenue. Each system has its own way of organizing and labeling the movies it carries (making any kind of nationwide listings impossible).

Those labels can be head scratchers. On Time Warner in New York City, the primary channel for on-demand movies, 1000, is currently divided into 14 categories. Some are reasonably self-explanatory, like “All New!” Others leave you wondering: just what will you find under “DVD Releases” or “Early Screening” or “Date Night”?

IFC Films, which has moved particularly aggressively into on-demand distribution, has created its own branded labels, but even those don’t completely prevent confusion. Some cable systems go along with IFC’s wishes and provide separate homes for its “IFC Midnight,” “Festival Direct” and “Sundance Selects” labels; Time Warner, on the other hand, lumps all IFC films together under “IFC in Theaters.”

Within that category are many films that are not exclusive to on-demand; they may have been released in theaters simultaneously (as was the case with art-house hits like “Gomorrah” and “Summer Hours”), or they may have received limited releases.

But if you click down the list of films and read the descriptions, you’ll find the exclusive content. Recent IFC offerings (which may still be available, depending on your cable provider) have included “Cell 211,” a tense prison riot drama with political overtones that won eight Goya awards (the Spanish Oscar) this year, including those for best film, director (Daniel Monzón) and actor (Luis Tosar); and “Don’t Look Back,” a French psychological thriller that’s part “Vertigo,” part “Alice in Wonderland,” in which Sophie Marceau morphs into Monica Bellucci over the course of the film.

Also on Wednesday, IFC’s “Sundance Selects” platform will begin carrying “Colin Fitz Lives!,” a low-budget black comedy about two security guards sent to watch the grave of a rock star. It was nominated for the grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1997 but never got a wide release.

Other distributors are experimenting with on-demand distribution in their own ways. Magnolia Pictures made “Centurion,” starring Dominic West and Olga Kurylenko, available on demand on July 23, more than a month before it was to open in theaters; the company plans to repeat the strategy this fall with “Freakonomics.” SnagFilms hopes to create on-demand channels as one of many platforms for its large library of documentaries.

“Vengeance,” meanwhile, will appear nowhere but on pay television, at least for now. It walks the same fine line between romantic high style and sentimentality that all of Mr. To’s films do, stepping mostly on the side of romance (blood-soaked, of course). The To themes of honor, loyalty and noblesse oblige are central to a story of opposing hit men that echoes his sprawling 2006 film, “Exiled.”

The gunmen and gangsters are played by members of Mr. To’s repertory company, like Anthony Wong, Simon Yam and Suet Lam, but the star is the French singer and actor Johnny Hallyday, playing a French restaurant owner whose daughter’s family is wiped out by a three-man killing crew.

The role primarily requires world-weary style and a thousand-mile stare, and these are in Mr. Hallyday’s wheelhouse — he’s a perfect match for Mr. To. His facility with English also helps; it’s the language he speaks with the Chinese hit men he hires to carry out his revenge. Some of the Chinese actors, including Mr. Lam, are dubbed in those scenes, to the film’s detriment.

“Vengeance” is not top-flight Johnnie To. The action sequences don’t have the complexity and gasp-inducing jolts that set apart his best work, and a plot device involving the Frenchman’s failing memory is labored. But the To poetry keeps breaking through: a gun battle in a city park stops and starts as clouds pass before the moon; in the climactic showdown, the hit-men heroes form a moving O.K. Corral by rolling huge bales of recyclables.

And, as always, the killers take time out to cook and eat, noodles being nearly as important a feature of a To movie as guns are. Since the only way to see “Vengeance” is from your couch, you can fire up the wok and join them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/mo...vengeance.html





Sisterhood? Still Powerful, if a Bit Stressed
Jon Caramanica

“I don’t believe in anything but myself” were the first words sung on the main stage of the Lilith Fair revival tour, which arrived at the Comcast Theater here on Sunday. They came from “Soldier,” by Ingrid Michaelson, the soundtrack-friendly folkie from Staten Island, and they encapsulated the Lilith worldview established during the tour’s initial run from 1997 to 1999: direct, empowered, emotive, a little sullen.

A couple of minutes later, though, Ms. Michaelson sneaked in a familiar and unexpected refrain: “Can’t read my/ Can’t read my/No he can’t read my.” It was “Poker Face,” by Lady Gaga, the hyperperformative, hyperstylized pop cyborg who would seem to embody all the things Lilith fights against. Et tu, Ingrid?

Not really. That was about as much dissonance as this year’s Lilith Fair allowed. The slate on the main stage — there were two side stages operating earlier in the day — was as close to the platonic ideal of vintage Lilith as possible. (The tour, which ends on Tuesday night outside Washington, featured varying lineups in each city.)

There was the mildly cheeky piano pop of Ms. Michaelson and Sara Bareilles; firebrand roots-rock from the Indigo Girls; and moments of brilliant spite mixed with tepid spirituality by Sarah McLachlan, the durable Canadian melodramatist who is the tour’s organizer and figurehead.

The outlier was Chan Marshall, who performs as Cat Power, though performing is, in her case, a loaded word: she is legendarily challenged onstage, and here was no different. “That’s all,” she said after 30 minutes of indolent, hazy country and furtive conversations with the sound guy. “Sorry about the bad performance. Hope you have a great time.”

At least Ms. Marshall demonstrated that not all female performers are alike in temperament, a valuable lesson in diversity that was sometimes lost during this show. (Speculating on whether Ms. Marshall would return for the customary end-of-show all-artist jam became a fun parlor game; of course she did not.)

Elsewhere, even the rage was optimistic. The Indigo Girls were precise and devastating, their sound overwhelming, even though they had the most bare-bones setup of the day — just Amy Ray and Emily Saliers on various guitars, and Julie Wolf, playing keyboards and accordion. By now, songs like “Galileo” and “Shame on You” have become smooth from use, each rendition effortless.

Ms. McLachlan, the headliner, appeared as if in a sea of bliss, whether singing drowsy takes on comforting anthems like “I Will Remember You,” frantic older hits like “Possession” or darker songs from her most recent album, “Laws of Illusion” (Nettwerk/Arista). Talking about the Lilith Fair vision, she exulted, “For a brief moment, we all get to be a part of something bigger than ourselves.” (Unless you are Ms. Marshall, that is.)

That moment may be brief indeed: all summer long, Lilith Fair has been hit with setbacks, casting doubts about whether this revival can continue beyond this year. About a dozen shows were canceled because of soft ticket sales — here, the theater appeared to be a little more than half full at its peak — and several big names who would have diversified the tour either saw their dates axed or withdrew. That meant no Kelly Clarkson or Rihanna and, in Hartford, no Carly Simon or Selena Gomez, who each cited health reasons for not performing.

What Lilith Fair needs to sustain itself is a new generation of performers who hew closely to its ideals. That was where Ms. Michaelson and Ms. Bareilles came in. While more urbane than their older tour mates — their prominent placement in television commercials helped cement their fame — they were still game for the tour’s communal spirit.

Ms. Bareilles, in particular, was promising, with a strong voice that emerged in unlikely places during her own set, though not on her cover of Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” which was less fun than Ms. Michaelson’s cover of Britney Spears’s “Toxic.” Still, she shone on two guest appearances: during the show’s finale, performing Patti Smith’s “Because the Night,” and during the closer of the Indigo Girls’ set, “Closer to Fine.” Singing the verse about the futilities of higher education, Ms. Bareilles was grinning widely: a little excited, a little embarrassed, embracing it anyway.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/ar.../03lilith.html





Study: AC Listeners Change Tastes At Age 40
FMQB

As Alan Burns and Associates continues to roll out more data from the largest-ever study of female radio listeners, CEO Alan Burns suggests that AC listeners under and over the age of 40 have significantly different music preferences.

"The over/under line in AC is now Age 40," says Burns. "That’s the dividing line between listeners who prefer heritage AC artists and those who are into the newer artists. For AC women, the top artist with 30 to 39-year-olds is P!nk; with 40-49s it's The Eagles. Lady Gaga makes the top five list for Hot AC fans, but with Mainstream P1s the most contemporary artist in the top five is Carrie Underwood."

Burns notes that there are similar differences in music style preference and in new media behavior between the older and younger AC listeners. As reported yesterday, AC's audience contains fewer early adopters to technology, thus the format has so far been less impacted by iPods, streaming music and song downloading.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1895136





Massive Censorship Of Digg Uncovered
oleoleolson

A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives. An undercover investigation has exposed this effort, which has been in action for more than one year.

“The more liberal stories that were buried the better chance conservative stories have to get to the front page. I’ll continue to bury their submissions until they change their ways and become conservatives.”
-phoenixtx (aka vrayz)

Digg.com is the powerhouse of social media websites. It is ranked 50th among US websites by Alexa (117th in the world), by far the most influential social media site. It reached one million users in 2007 and likely has more than tripled that by this point. Digg generates around 25 million page views per month, over one third of the page views of the NY Times. Front page stories regularly overwhelm and temporarily shut down websites in a process called the “Digg Effect.”

The concept behind the site is simple. Submitted webpages (news, videos, or images) can be voted up (digging) or down (burying) by each user, sort of a democracy in the internet model. If an article gets enough diggs, it leaves the upcoming section and reaches the front page where most users spend their time, and can generate thousands of page views.

This model also made it very susceptible to external gaming whereby users from certain groups attempt to push their viewpoint or articles to the front page to give them traction. This was evident with the daily spamming of the upcoming Political section with white supremacist material from the British National Party (articles which rarely reached the front page). The inverse of this effect is more devastating however. Bury brigades could effectively remove stories from the upcoming sections by collectively burying them.

One bury brigade in particular is a conservative group that has become so organized and influential that they are able to bury over 90% of the articles by certain users and websites submitted within 1-3 hours, regardless of subject material. Literally thousands of stories have already been artificially removed from Digg due to this group. When a story is buried, it is removed from the upcoming section (where it is usually at for ~24 hours) and cannot reach the front page, so by doing this, this one group is removing the ability of the community as a whole to judge the merits or interest of these stories on their own (in essence: censoring content). This group is known as the Digg “Patriots”.

Conservatives & Libertarians3

DIGG PATRIOTS

A group of nearly one hundred conservatives have banded together on a Yahoo Group called Digg Patriots (DP), and a companion site at coRanks to issue bury orders and discuss strategies to censor Digg and other social media websites. DP was founded on 21 May 2009. Since then, over 40,000 posts have been logged at a steady rate of around 3000-4000 per month. The “Patriots” Network on coRank is a tool to submit Diggs to a group list as opposed to sending an e-mail every time. It also has some tools that make submitting to the list as easy as clicking on a bookmark. The DP membership includes the following Digg users (among others):

4verageJo3
alanocu
allisonrose870
asami21
atomheartmother
BalancingAct
Benthedog (ties with diggforwhatever, formerly LeConcierge)
bettverboten (formerly banned as Lizbett, sleeper accounts loquaciouslola, MsBoop)
bossm4n (BP site admin)
CaptCarrot (goes by therjcarter on other websites)
cajungal
ChronicColonic (Wrote ‘Tools to Be Excellent at Burying’ guide)
clickfire
ClydePRM2
conservativepie
DCconservative
dgpj
emersonbiggins (formerly EdHurl, rjwusa, MightRighty, BurtToast, GangusGreen, esornivek)
EMFK (Social Blade Digger of the Year 2010, 65% popular ratio, DP site admin)
frofisrael (jenalp on Twitter)
Gandalff
gbudavid
heythere1857
howdoyouknow
jackalgunner (DP site admin, not active on Digg)
Janinco (DP site admin)
JasonQPublic (formerly scarlett0hara)
JeremiahLaments (formerly RightWingAttila, a DP site admin)
jjvors
johnny2k
KCLorelei39
Kraviwannabe
LandThatILove
le0pardess (1badk1tty)
libertyalways (formerly KurtHofmann, 45superman)
lilamae (Fillifan)
LoneStarLizard
LouisCipher777
maggiesnotebook
MattRoss1968
mikeinto
minarchian (duplicate accounts as Phreedom, CongressCritter, formerly Brewskie)
novaculus
PatriotRoom (billdupray)
pharoah247
phoenixtx (formerly vrayz, DP site founder and owner)
pookydirt
pray4sneaux (formerly energizersnobabe, a profile active elsewhere)
punx
quirkopatra
raggsat98 (MassRon, DP site admin)
Ramfire98
Raycheetah (formerly Browncoat)
robertsdig
SadLisa (formerly mollydog12, GrantPeace, FoolsGoldParty, UrdhvaMukha)
schwartzloenard (formerly NewsGuy2005, NewsGuy2009, ClydePRM)
SethStuck (ConservativeBrawler elsewhere, runs DiggsAndBuries site)
spiegelscott
spindig
starcmc
Striker101
sultanknish
tasine
Temlakos
texasknight
ThePartyStar (formerly LibertyCheeks, MyCarteBlanche)
thoughtsonthis
Welshman007
whatbubbaknows
zacharytelschow

The ring leader of the group is Bettverboten, who issues multiple digg and bury orders everyday. She is a Digg power user who has dugg 70,000 articles and has 1500 submits of her own (18% have gone popular) in one short year on the site. She was previously known as Lizbett before her lifetime ban for offensive and inappropriate comments, and has two sleeper accounts waiting if she gets banned again at loquaciouslola and MsBoop. She is also on Twitter, although her primary focus is Digg, where she has acquired a huge following of power users who are likely unaware that she is gaming the system, and even calling to bury some of her mutuals.

The other primary members responsible for cheating are CaptCarrot, ChronicColonic, emmersonbiggins (rjwusa), SadLisa (mollydog), Janinco, allisonrose870, asami21, Benthedog, JeremiahLaments (RightWingAttila), libertyalways, phoenixtx, pray4sneaux, quirkopatra, raggsat98, Ramfire98, and ThePartystar. Digg and bury orders are issued multiple times everyday, with most of the members blindly following without question.

The list above is truncated from the larger membership, some of which are inactive. Not every member listed has admitted to violating the Digg Terms of Service in public either, although most are guilty of some abuse or another. This group is the heart of a complicated web on various networks, including Twitter, Propeller, StumbleUpon, YouTube, and Facebook, all dedicated to ramming an extreme right wing viewpoint down the throats of those communities and censoring opposing viewpoints. This includes such means as cyber stalking, bullying, and terror, as exposed on YouTube yesterday (something not one of the DP group condemned). Not surprisingly, there is also a heavy contingent active on the ultraconservative FreeRepublic.

There are a few differences of opinion within DP, although for the most part, they are extremely similar in perspective. They hate Obama. They hate progressives. They hate the UN, diplomacy, and peace/disarmament efforts. They hate reforms of health care, Wall St., and immigration. They hate science, in fact many are creationists, and some even blog about it. They hate the secular nature of our nation. They hate environmental protection, requiring polluters to be responsible for their own cleanup, and especially hate climate efforts. They hate unions and any attempt to level the playing field to give all Americans economic opportunities. They hate the government, except the military-industrial complex. They hate abortion rights. They hate public schools and really hate higher education. They hate anyone in the media except far right personalities like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Michelle Malkin. They hate anyone who doesn’t think Obama is a secret islamist and/or marxist who was born in Kenya. They just love to hate.

Although this is a fringe group of Teabagging wingnuts, many well established figures in the Digg community are also present, such as BalancingAct, EMFK, Janinco, mikeinto, and spindig. 10 members have been part of Digg since 2005-2006, with 43 having their current account there for over 2 years. 19 are in the top 500 all time users as ranked by Social Blade, including 3 in the top 100. They have submitted over 30,000 articles, and dugg over 1,000,000 submits collectively. They regularly front page material, yet have some paranoid delusion that the Digg admins are part of some conspiracy to censor them, not once recognizing the blatant hypocrisy of their organized censorship doing that very thing.

FP success of DP

CENSORSHIP
The primary function of the Digg Patriots is to censor politically progressive content from the upcoming Political, Political Opinion, World News, and Business sections, so that conservative stories have a better chance to get more traction. To do this, they constantly monitor these sections, progressive submitters, and news websites.

Whether I agree with Bjornski, Anamaly100, PhilPerspective, Novenator, JanineWallace, UncaJoe, & a couple others I can’t think of right now, I bury `em anyway. *ACTUALLY* each of them has been “dead-on, balls-accurate” (an industry term) at least once in the past week or so, and it sort-of pains me to be dishonest by burying them anyway, but then I remember . . . I’m not up for re-election!
-BentheDog

asami21 mass bury call

Although many hundreds of users are victims of this political censorship, the targets of choice of the Digg “Patriots” were typically the following: novenator, Anomaly100, Amprather, FreedomJoe, noupsell, PhilPerspective, bjornski, BePeace, Michael9636, MercyPolitics, GonzoMuckraker, LiamFox, BIGOTHER1, capj71, tcbishop12, SolidUncertain, SarahLee, GeorgeClymer, uncajoe, Mizzy, MiddleAmericaMS, rearlgrant, VegetableLamb, MrBabyMan, jrod4040, whiteblackninja, EasyPeasy08, dagnabbit, danholt7, Matt43, penolan, Jaime2000, and mklopez. They even went as far as to bury the submissions of these user’s friends on Digg. Digg power user Bossm4n gave a list to the group of the top 13 power users that are left-leaning that they should target, stating that he has been deliberately trying to ban the last one (nahsrocket) for years:

1. MrBabyman
2. Noupsell
3. Badwithcomputer
4. MSaleem
5. VTbarerra
6. Jaybol
7. irfanmp
8. Bukowsky
9. 1KrazyKorean
10. d2002
11. kplo
12. bixby1
13. nahsrocketeer75

If any of the usual suspects subbed a story claiming “sky blue/water wet,” I’d BURY IT without question. I’ve been on digg for almost 4 years…
-JeremiahLaments (account says Joined Digg on 21Aug2009)

bettverboten landthatilove bury

I personally vote for a complete blackout on lib subs: Bury every comment (including the conservatives “helping” to pop the story). No up-votes (no matter how much you agree).
-asami21

This censorship is not restricted to political articles either. Articles about education, homophobia, racism, science, the environment, economics, wealth disparity, world events, the media, green energy, and anything even slightly critical of the GOP/Tea Party/FoxNews/corporations are targets. In fact, any articles submitted by the users they hate the most are on their kill lists, including such benign things as SETI Opens All Data To The Public, Celtics Take Lead in N.B.A. Finals, Man Donates Phone He Used to Record Rape of 3-Year-Old Girl, 40,000 BP Australian Rock Art May Depict Giant Extinct Bird, Sarah Ferguson: I Was Drinking At The Time Of Video Sting, Top 10 Real Life Mutants, What is being Taught in a Bible Belt Science Classroom, and Totally Cute Puppy Pictures (buried in less than 30 minutes).

The following a transcript of a DP conversation:
Bettverboten (Lizbett): Check back here you late nighters to see when and who subs this [article just published on targeted website]. I am sure it is coming our way.
Phoenixtx: Good recon Liz! Thanks! Let’s keep our eyes open.
LibertyAlways: It’s up—bury! [link]
JeremiahLaments: Think we can bury it in record time? I think we CAN!
[10 minutes later] We did it! Buried it with only 5 diggs–might be a record!

The DP group searches Digg for any articles from websites they want to drown out, sites such as Salon, News Junkie Post, Talking Points Memo, FreakOutNation, Five Thirty Eight, ThePublicRecord, Rawstory, The Nation, Media Matters for America, PoliticusUSA, Alternet, Fire Dog Lake, Political Carnival, TruthOut, DailyKos, The Joshua Blog, The Brad Blog, Huffington Post, Science Blogs, Smirking Chimp, Down With Tyranny, Crooks and Liars, MarioPiperni, Buzzflash, Bob Cesca’s REALLY AWESOME Blog, and The New York Times.

[use the] search site feature, I bury all the subs less than 2 days [old] in matter of seconds. I think we’d be even more effective if we all did this to some degree with consistency or at least with certain sources/sites. From there it’s like shooting ducks…
-allisonrose870

Further, this is not merely a case of not knowing they are breaking the rules, this is deliberate.
I am concerned that if Skype is directly connected to digg like twitter is …than bury rules probably apply like they do with twitter. If there are monitors in the chat rooms and someone reports we are linking buries and asking for buries on digg with links, it may be reported to digg.
-bettverboten

Chronic bury

DUPLICATE AND FORMERLY BANNED ACCOUNTS

Beyond censorship, the Digg “Patriots” group regularly discusses strategy on how to either come back after being banned for life from Digg for violating the rules, set up sleeper profiles, and how to utilize multiple accounts at once without getting caught. Digg only functions as a democratic environment when each person is limited to one account. Discussing the time in late 2009 when zacharytelschow was temporarily banned for homophobic hate speech:

Ron AKA Chronic: You can create another account. Worse comes to worse, you can just lay low for a bit and then come back.

JasonQPublic: Zach, if they won’t reinstate your account, you really don’t have to leave digg unless you just want to. Just follow the steps below.
1. Go to whatismyip.com/ and write down the IP address that is displayed at the top of the page.
2. Turn off your cable or DSL modem for approx. 5 minutes then turn it back on.
3. When you are connected to the internet again, make sure that the IP address displayed at the top of the page is different from the one that you wrote down in step 1. If it is not different, go back to step 2 and leave modem off for longer period of time.
4. Create a new email address at your favorite email site.
5. Go to Digg and create a new account using the new email address.

Account gaming by Minarchian

During the undercover investigation, dozens of duplicate or previously banned Digg profiles were uncovered, some with many of each. This is likely the tip of the iceberg as many were reluctant to discuss their past, perhaps recognizing that a leak could be devastating to their censorship ring. Due to the rampant nature of this conduct, it is likely that dozens more previously banned profiles have not been discovered, and many more still exist as sleeper accounts.

I can give a crap if digg bans me again. I’m sick of little Kevin Rose and his bunch of Frisco malcontents
-emersonbiggins (formerly EdHurl, rjwusa, MightRighty, BurtToast, GangusGreen, esornivek, and many more)

Edhurl's former IDs

I’ve been permanently banned 4 or 5 times. You gotta make sure you got a month or so between [accounts]. …The libs make a big deal out of start dates on profiles after one of us returns from getting permanently banned. Maybe we should have 10 or 15 identities created so the next time one of us gets a permanent ban we could come back with an identity that was created weeks or months before. Kind of like Jeff came back as Benthedog and they had no clue.
-Phoenixtx

When I created a new account, Phreeedom, I changed my IP but they still banned me for having two account. It got me thinking…how’d they know? If you look when a page is loading it also goes to facebook.com I think they are in with FP to compare Ips. So, next time I get banned I’ll also log off FP and twitter first, with the original IP and then create new accounts there with a new IP, then create a new account at digg. Of course you’ll also have to delete all cookies and web bugs from the three sites too.
-Minarchian

Google up: How to change your MAC address on -insert your operating system-. This will give you a new IP as many times and as often as you like. Make sure you turn off your modem while doing so. Also, Most sites keep track of you by flash cookies. They don’t delete like regular ones…again Google for your browser.
-Asami21

Another example of abusing the rules against multiple accounts by the DP group was discussed in the confusion behind who exactly was the digg user in their ranks named Benthedog:

Jim used to be Benthedog until he committed Digg suicide and got banned for life. He then became diggforwhatever because his Benthedog profile was banned. A few months later I noticed that Benthedog was back in my friends list again (I think someone at Digg accientally unbanned it.). I emailed Jim and asked him if they let him back. He said that he didn’t know Benthedog was back on Digg but since he was already diggforwhatever he gave me his password in case someone else needed down the line. When Jeff was banned and didn’t plan on creating another profile until he moved to Ohio I gave him the name and password so he could use it until then. Does that help?
-Vern (PhoenixTX)

I propose that I create a blogger account. [Purpose being to] take a news story and to spin it in such a fashion that we editorialize the submission title and the byline (Description)… to get around the digg Terms of Usage agreement. Editorializing a submission is considered the ‘hijacking’ of a submission by digg. Doing so can (and has gotten me) get you banned.
-emersonbiggins.

Note Dp created this blog called the Rattington Post.

So, next time I get banned I’ll also log off [FaceBook] and twitter first, with the original IP and then create new accounts there with a new IP, then create a new account at digg. Of course you’ll also have to delete all cookies and web bugs from the three sites too.
-Minarchian

ATTEMPTS AT BANNING OTHERS

Bury and report this comment
-Bossm4n

Another regular tactic of the DP group is to attempt ban opponents. One method is to deliberately anger other Digg users in an attempt to get them to say something that violates the TOS. There are thousands of examples of this on the Digg discussion pages (there is a comment area for each article).

Can we get [digg user] for a digg TOU violation?: The use of Teabaggers and NAMBLA should come under one or more of these definitions listed below from the digg Terms of Use: libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, abusive, offensive, profane. We need to make it a goal to get the dolt banned. We need to mine his stuff. I think if we look hard enough, we can get him banned. We should form a team to mine his submission and another to mine his comments for incriminating material.

One of the many DP members that write for the Examiner, blogger Kurt Hoffman who is currently Libertyalways discussed this during his first account as 45superman: “[i] Just noticed that nicegeek got banned, too. I’ll take a 3 hour ban, in exchange for a ban (however short) of itofts and nicegeek.” Another example was when Bossm4n provoked and got an unnamed atheist banned for stating that the country is ready for battle when the christian nationalists try to take over.

In another incident, rjwusa directed other DP members to report and try to ban someone: I reported DDRSkata. I also told a fib and I stated I was African-American. Report to Digg: “As a conservative African-American, I get deeply offended when someone refers to one of my conservative sisters and other conservative African-Americans as, ‘Beulahs and Uncle Toms’. Had I been white, and had used the terms, ‘Fag or Nigger’, I could expect to be banned from digg in a very swift fashion. I trust you will do right by the people of color who use digg.”

THE NEW DIGG

Digg Patriots is the first large scale and protected site that the conservatives use to rig Digg, but it is far from the first place where they have done this. SethStruck runs DiggsAndBuries, an open website devoted to gaming Digg. The Diggcons group was active for a while on Twitter and Facebook, and reported on at a Digg submission. Punx and Sharon (formerly WeAreSparta) run a website called the liberalheretic, where they openly admitted how they cheat on digg (article has since been scrubbed clean to remove any evidence), with one admitting “I’ve probably been through 400-500 Digg ID’s,” as reported by another buried story on Digg. They also ran an unlocked shout-replacement system with very open calls for diggs and buries which is still available for now. Even the FreeRepublic has been attempting to rally it’s brigades to take over Digg for a while now. Out of all of these, DP has been the most insidious and pervasive in manipulating the king of all social media websites.

Digg v4.0 should be released soon, and preliminary analysis suggests that the ability of groups like the Digg “Patriots” will be greatly diminished. The Bury button has been removed, and there is only a Report button, which will at least stop the content censorship caused by the Digg “Patriots”.

Wow–just noticed: 988 Facebook “shares,” and only 29 diggs. When digg changes to the new format, which will supposedly be heavily integrated with Facebook, Anomaly might become much more formidable. Not a happy thought.
-Libertyalways

In an entertaining twist, this shift to version 4.0 is already being interpreted by many of the DP members as “another” conspiracy to silence them. They latched onto the latest paranoid rumor floating around that all stories that reach the front page are manually selected, and that since they are being “oppressed”, that somehow justifies their cheating.

I chalk it up to the AMA. The AMA stands for Algorithm My Ass – it can work in your favor, but mostly it works against conservative stories. Lately the AMA has been good to us.
-ChronicColonic

There’s no ‘algorithm’ at digg. The ‘algorithm’ most likely consists of a bunch of liberal, bi-sexual, emo-types, who drink mimosas all day, and engage in a circle-jerk by night. When they’re not doing that, they pull a few levers to get a banana payoff from a machine, which they call the digg ‘algorithm’.
-rjwusa (currently emersonbiggins)

On another thread, many in the DP group were whining that the Digg admins had just “removed” a conservative story until someone finally realized the link they provided was misspelled and the submitted story was still there. What they fail to understand is that there was never a conspiracy to censor their content, it was the greater Digg community that did that because their articles are usually unprofessional, fact-challenged fantasies that nobody wants to read. World Net Daily, Fox “News”, Michelle Malkin, newsmax, townhall, newsbusters, redstate, and the various conservative Examiner authors on DP have very little to offer in a rational discussion, and read like what they are: propaganda.

The Digg Patriots have censored hundreds of users, dozens of websites, and thousands of stories from the largest social media website in the world, but as of publishing time, no action has been taken by the Digg.com administrators. Regardless of what action is taken, there is a clear and systematic pattern of censorship, duplicate accounts, dodging lifetime bans, and trying to ban other users by the Digg Patriots Group.

To all of our new group members: We are really happy you have joined us at DiggPatriots! Please remember this is a group that we are trying to keep below the radar. Please do not disclose this group’s existence to anyone outside the group on Digg or elsewhere. The longer we can keep this group on the down low, the better. I know you probably aready knew that, but I wanted to make sure we are all on the same page as far as the keeping this group from being exposed to the public.
-Ron AKA ChronicColonic
http://blogs.alternet.org/oleoleolso...igg-uncovered/





No, The Fifth Amendment Does Not Complicate Net Neutrality
from the oh-please dept

I've said it plenty of times before: I don't think that the government should mandate net neutrality, but I'm getting pretty sick of ridiculously tortured explanations for why doing so is somehow illegal. There are plenty of legitimate reasons not to support network neutrality legislation, and I'm amazed that those against it keep trying to make really far out claims. The latest comes to us via Slashdot, which points us to an article claiming that the Fifth Amendment's eminent domain concept in the "takings clause," net neutrality would consist of an unconstitutional "taking." Sorry, I don't buy it. Not even close. You can read the full paper this is based on, written by Daniel Lyons from Boston College, but it the logic is just not there to support the claim.

The key problem is defining the internet as a a private broadband network, when in nearly every case, the broadband infrastructure involved includes tremendous use of government granted rights of ways and other government subsidies. If the telcos actually had built their network entirely on their own and negotiated privately with land owners for rights of way, they might have a point on this one. But they didn't and they don't.

However, the paper pretends that the internet is a purely private network:

The purpose of the "open internet" initiative is to prevent broadband providers from controlling which third-party content and application providers can use their networks to deliver information to end-user consumers. In essence, these third parties receive an unlimited, continuous right of access to broadband providers' private property. This access allows them to physically invade broadband networks with their electronic signals and permanently occupy portions of network capacity, all without having to pay the network provider for access. The effect is to appropriate the use of these private networks for the public's benefit, in the form of unfettered and nondiscriminatory access to the content and applications of the consumer's choosing.

Almost none of that accurately represents the situation. Content and service providers are not "invading" (especially not physically) anyone's private network at all. Nothing can be further from the truth. They have, instead, put themselves out on the open internet, and these service providers chose to connect to the open internet allowing their users to request such content. The content and service providers are doing nothing proactive, especially nothing that deserves the grossly misleading "invading" moniker.

Lyons then tries to twist this into a claim that it's like an easement on physical property. Again, this is simply untrue. The third parties are not proactively going onto anyone's network. They have set themselves up and connected directly to the open internet (via their own ISPs to which they pay handsomely for bandwidth) and the only times their content crosses those other networks is when the end users (i.e., the customers of these ISPs) reach out and request that the content be sent to their computer. That's how the open internet works. If the ISPs don't like it, they shouldn't have offered an internet service. To twist this and claim that the internet is somehow a "private network" of these ISPs and service providers who connect to the open internet are somehow "invading" that private network is the height of sophistry.

Effectively, you could take Lyons' twisted reasoning and apply it to nearly any government regulation. Taxes? Clearly an unjustified "taking" of someone's private property. Highway speed limits? An unjustified "taking" of the private owners' use of their own automobile. It's not hard. Try it with some other laws. Lyons tries to get around this by suggesting the key is the "right to exclude." But this is also wrong. It assumes that the ISP controls the wider internet, rather than its own network. Yes, a telco has every right to not connect to the internet. But once it does, it's expected to abide by the overall rules of the internet. If it wants to "exclude," then it doesn't need to hook up to the internet.

There are some other factual problems with the paper, such as suggesting that the telcos developed DSL in response to the success of cable modem services. That's not quite accurate. While DSL did lag cable slightly in implementation, cable was not widely deployed when DSL came on the market. The two were more or less developed in parallel.

I have no doubt that this argument will likely come into play in the upcoming fight over the FCC's attempt to reclassify broadband access, but it seems like an excessively weak claim that I hope no court would seriously consider. There are much more serious issues to focus on, including whether or not the sort of change is actually within the FCC's mandate.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...44210457.shtml





FCC Taps Yang to Lead Broadband Team
Eliza Krigman

Phoebe Yang will serve as a senior advisor on broadband to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski the commission announced on Monday.

Yang will lead the high-profile work of managing the agency's broadband priorities as established by the ten-year plan, released last March, to bring high-speed internet into every American home. In her new role, Yang will serve as the commission's representative to the Executive Branch inter-agency working group tasked with implementation of the broadband plan.

Previously, Yang served as General Counsel of the Omnibus Broadband Initiative at the FCC. In that capacity, she chaired the Broadband Steering Committee.

"Phoebe has played an absolutely critical role in creating the National Broadband Plan," Genachowski said. The chairman is "delighted" that she is staying with the FCC to help him with this work.
http://techdailydose.nationaljournal...d-broadban.php





F.C.C. Chief Opposes Fees for Internet Priority
Edward Wyatt

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said Thursday that he believed it was “unacceptable” for Internet service providers to offer faster Internet transmission to content providers willing to pay higher fees.

“Any outcome, any deal that doesn’t preserve the freedom and openness of the Internet for consumers and entrepreneurs will be unacceptable,” Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman, told reporters on Thursday.

His remarks came in response to press reports that Google and Verizon were nearing an agreement about broadband management that could clear the way for Verizon to consider offering such a service. The two companies declined to comment on any potential deal.

Many Internet purists believe that a system that includes a sort of toll lane for faster routing of some content to Internet users violates the long-held tenet of net neutrality, which holds that no form of content is favored over another. But a federal appeals court said in April that the F.C.C. did not have the authority to regulate how Internet service providers manage their systems.

The F.C.C. in recent weeks has been trying to negotiate its own agreement in a series of private meetings with a group of big Internet service and content companies, including Google and Verizon, to ensure net neutrality. But the agency canceled a session scheduled for Thursday after the reports of the Google-Verizon talks.

Edward Lazarus, Mr. Genachowski’s chief of staff, who convened the meetings, said in a statement that the effort “has been productive on several fronts, but has not generated a robust framework to preserve the openness and freedom of the Internet, one that drives innovation, investment, free speech and consumer choice.”

The F.C.C. is studying the possibility of reclassifying broadband service under the Communications Act. The proposed new designation would allow the agency to apply stricter regulation to broadband service and to further its efforts to expand broadband access to rural areas, particularly where it is not profitable for Internet service providers to offer connections.

“All options remain on the table as we continue to seek broad input on this vital issue,” Mr. Lazarus said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/te...net/06fcc.html





Net Neutrality is Foremost Free Speech Issue of Our Time
Al Franken

If we learned that the government was planning to limit our First Amendment rights, we'd be outraged. After all, our right to be heard is fundamental to our democracy.

Well, our free speech rights are under assault -- not from the government but from corporations seeking to control the flow of information in America.

If that scares you as much as it scares me, then you need to care about net neutrality.

"Net neutrality" sounds arcane, but it's fundamental to free speech. The internet today is an open marketplace. If you have a product, you can sell it. If you have an opinion, you can blog about it. If you have an idea, you can share it with the world.

And no matter who you are -- a corporation selling a new widget, a senator making a political argument or just a Minnesotan sharing a funny cat video -- you have equal access to that marketplace.

An e-mail from your mom comes in just as fast as a bill notification from your bank. You're reading this op-ed online; it'll load just as fast as a blog post criticizing it. That's what we mean by net neutrality.

But telecommunications companies want to be able to set up a special high-speed lane just for the corporations that can pay for it. You won't know why the internet retail behemoth loads faster than the mom-and-pop shop, but after a while you may get frustrated and do all of your shopping at the faster site. Maybe the gatekeepers will discriminate based on who pays them more. Maybe they will discriminate based on whose political point of view conforms to their bottom line.

We don't have to speculate. We can look to the history of the media gatekeepers for examples.
We'll end up with a few mega-corporations in control of the flow of information, not just on TV, but online as well.

Back in the 1990s, Congress rescinded rules that prevented television networks from owning their own programming. Network executives swore in congressional hearings that they wouldn't give their own programming preferred access to the airwaves. They vowed access to the airwaves would be determined only by the quality of the shows.

I was working at NBC back then, and I didn't buy that line one bit. Sure enough, within a couple of years, NBC was the largest supplier of its own prime-time programming. To take advantage of this new paradigm, Disney bought ABC, Viacom (the parent company of Paramount) bought CBS and NBC merged with Universal.

And since these conglomerates owned both the pipes through which Americans received information (in this case, TV networks) and the information itself (in this case, TV shows), they developed a monopoly over what you could watch.

Today, if you're an independent producer, it's nearly impossible to get a show on the air unless the network owns at least a piece of it.

Now Comcast, the nation's largest cable provider, and NBC/Universal want to merge. This new behemoth would be able to charge other cable carriers more for NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo and the 35 other cable networks it will own in whole or in part. This means that other carriers won't be able to afford as many choices -- and it means that your cable bill will go up.

Comcast is also the nation's largest home internet service provider. And as more and more of our television is provided through the internet, other internet giants such as Verizon and AT&T will have to look toward merging with CBS/Viacom or ABC/Disney.

We'll end up with a few megacorporations in control of the flow of information -- not just on TV, but now online as well.

From my seat on the Judiciary Committee, I plan to do everything I can to stop these mergers or at least put rigorous restrictions on them. But if this trend toward media consolidation continues, the free and open internet will be a thing of the past unless we write the principle of net neutrality into law right now.

This isn't a liberal or conservative issue. Everyone has a stake in protecting the First Amendment.

And it isn't even strictly a political issue. The internet's freedom and openness has made it a hotbed for innovations that change our lives. It's been an incredible engine of job creation.

The internet was developed at taxpayer expense to benefit the public interest. If we let corporations prioritize some content over others, we'll lose what makes it so valuable to our economy, our democracy and our daily lives.

Net neutrality may sound like a technical issue, but it's the key to preserving the internet as we know it -- and it's the most important First Amendment issue of our time.
http://us.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/08/05...ity/index.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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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