P2P-Zone  

Go Back   P2P-Zone > Peer to Peer
FAQ Members List Calendar Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

Peer to Peer The 3rd millenium technology!

Reply
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Old 18-09-13, 07:18 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
JackSpratts's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 21st, '13

Since 2002


































"I find it difficult to believe that Comcast has found the perfect model by chance. The fact that Google Fiber in the limited places where it's deployed is offering different packages would seem to indicate that there is a competition problem is those other places." – Harold Feld


"The goal is pretty obvious, and it's certainly not to suppress so-called rumours." – Mo Shaoping






































September 21st, 2013




Spain Passes New Anti-Piracy Laws, Raises Maximum Penalty to Six Years

For years, Madrid has been under great pressure from the US to enhance IP laws.
Cyrus Farivar

Nearly six months ago, we reported that Spain was under heavy pressure from the United States to strengthen its anti-piracy laws. (That, of course, comes after Spain enacted an anti-piracy law in 2011.)

On Friday, the Spanish government approved new measures that would target those who even link to unauthorized copyrighted material for “direct or indirect profit.” The measures, which don’t take effect until early 2014, will include penalties of up to six years in prison for “aggravated cases” (Google Translate) for those who violate copyright.

The new amendment to the country’s existing penal code will not affect search engines or peer-to-peer file sharing sites, according to Reuters.

Spain is the home of RojaDirecta.com, a site that promoted unauthorized sports streams and whose domain was seized by the United States government. The domain was eventually returned last year. (The site has since switched to RojaDirecta.me, based in Montenegro.)

"This is a real balance between protecting copyright and new technologies," Spain's Justice Minister Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon told reporters at a news conference in Madrid.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...-to-six-years/





Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit Makes First Arrests

New unit PIPCU arrests two men in Birmingham and seizes suspected counterfeit DVD box sets worth £40,000

A new police unit to tackle illegal downloads and counterfeit DVDs and CDs has carried out its first raids and arrested two men. The police intellectual property crime unit (PIPCU), which launched on Friday, is being run by City of London police and has government funding of £2.56m over two years.

Detectives arrested two men in Birmingham and seized suspected counterfeit DVD box sets worth around £40,000, including titles such as Game of Thrones, CSI and Vampire Diaries.

The pair, aged 28 and 29, are suspected of importing thousands of counterfeit box sets and selling them online as genuine products.

City of London police commissioner Adrian Leppard said: "Intellectual property crime is already costing our economy hundreds of millions of pounds a year and placing thousands of jobs under threat, and left unchecked and free to feed on new technology could destroy some of our most creative and productive industries.

"Launching PIPCU we are making a statement of intent and sending out a clear warning to organised crime that the UK has just become a more hostile place for those who seek to make criminal capital on the back of others' honest endeavours."

The unit will focus particularly on online offences. City of London police said that around seven million people a month visit sites that offer illegal content in the UK, and globally it is estimated that illegally downloaded music, films and software cost the industry around $80bn (£51bn). That figure is expected to triple by 2015.

The unit is being funded by the intellectual property office, which is part of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

Lord Younger, the minister for intellectual property, said: "Criminals are continually finding new ways to exploit, produce fakes and abuse the intellectual property rights of British businesses, despite the progress made combating intellectual property crime.

"It not only damages the UK economy, but substandard goods and services can pose real threats to consumers too. Intelligent, co-ordinated and effective enforcement is key to tackling those who exploit the hard work of others."
http://www.theguardian.com/law/2013/...-first-arrests





Plastic Piracy: DRM Won't Cripple 3D Printing

Changes are coming, but don't expect a lockdown
Adi Robertson

You wouldn’t steal a car, goes the old anti-piracy warning. But would you print one from The Pirate Bay? It’s a question that’s been asked since 3D printers started entering the mainstream. It’s also one that raises an inevitable follow-up question: if 3D-printing piracy grows, will companies be tempted to wage war against it by controlling where, when, and how much you can print?

3D printing’s first copyright skirmish came in 2011, when Netherlands-based designer Ulrich Schwanitz began selling his own printed version of the "impossible" Penrose Triangle. While Schwanitz kept his process secret, fellow designer Artur Tchoukanov reverse-engineered it and posted a similar file on MakerBot’s Thingiverse catalog — leading Schwanitz to promptly file a takedown notice. MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis removed the files and quickly added DMCA-specific text to the Thingiverse terms of service — a section that remained even after Schwanitz dropped his complaint. "For better or worse, we’ve hit a milestone in the history of digital fabrication," wrote Pettis.

Since then, questions about piracy and DRM have cropped up on a regular basis. A patent by the notorious troll firm Intellectual Ventures raised the spectre of locked-down 3D printers that would scan all incoming files for potential infringement. And some companies have started issuing takedown requests for models of copyrighted objects and characters. So far, though, there’s been little connection between those two things. Even if Square Enix doesn’t want somebody selling Final Fantasy VII figurines on Shapeways, it’s not putting out its own DRM-wrapped designs or trying to get printers to recognize Sephiroth. Copy protection for 3D printing, though, is very much a reality — it’s just one that most consumers may not see any time soon.

"The whole 3D printing market in the consumer sense is probably in the same space where personal computers were when they started appearing," says Kimmo Isbjörnssund, founder of 3D copy protection company Fabulonia. "Security wasn't an issue; it was about the novelty." Despite the prevalence of Yoda and other copyrighted designs on Thingiverse, companies still often ignore them as long as they’re not a commercial product.

If more consumers buy printers (or they become more common in schools, libraries, and retail outlets) companies may start cracking down and selling their own models. But Isbjörnssund doesn’t think they’ll make a move until there’s an alternative to the current practice of sending over a file, whether copy-protected or not. Fabulonia, he says, has gotten the ball rolling with its streaming box for 3D printers. Creators can set up a network, upload files to an encrypted dashboard, and the box will authorize production on a case-by-case basis. Users get the physical object, but not access to the file itself.

Even so, he thinks this won’t be enough for retailers like Amazon or collectibles giants like Disney. "It is not realistic to assume that huge name brands would distribute their original files via any means, [with] streaming or DRM, to consumers without having embedded solutions," Isbjörnssund says. That would mean putting software or hardware straight into printers.

That direct integration is an ongoing project for Fabulonia, but it’s currently focused on industrial manufacturing instead. Though Isbjörnssund wouldn’t give names, he says his company has inked deals with national defense departments and business networks running thousands of printers. The printed products, likewise, are a mystery, but they could be anything from simple prototypes to pieces of an F-18 fighter jet. These groups aren’t selling goods on a wide-open, large-scale consumer market — which Isbjörnssund cites as one reason retailers are so worried — but they still don’t want companies knocking off their patented work.

For now, that means Fabulonia is more like an anti-counterfeiting tool than traditional DRM. With traditional manufactured goods, factory owners might sign a contract preventing them from copying or illegally distributing the items they make. If they disregard that agreement, though, it’s still possible to run a "ghost shift" pumping out counterfeit products that are virtually identical to their official counterparts. A streaming dashboard would theoretically let designers authorize only a certain number of pieces, then see whether they’d printed correctly.

Home printing is still a small market, but industrial design is another story

Andre Wegner, CEO of fellow copy protection company Authentise, agrees that it could be a while before Disney will let you print your own commemorative C-3PO. "It's a tiny market," he says of the overall printing landscape. "On the consumer side, I don't think we'll see more than a million printers in the next five years." But as that number grows, he hopes Authentise’s upcoming service SendShapes will be ready. Much like Fabulonia, SendShapes will stream encrypted data to a printer, hiding the actual file. Wegner, though, doesn’t want to rely on a box like Fabulonia does. By late next year, he says, SendShapes will start showing up directly in some 3D printers.

Besides the obvious consumer market, Wegner sees SendShapes opening up entirely new options. A company like Boeing, for example, might not just stream parts to a manufacturer. If it were confident the design would stay safe, it could sell pieces directly to remote airports, letting them perform repairs immediately instead of waiting on a slow or unreliable supply chain. Buyers, meanwhile, can be sure that their parts are coming straight from a trusted source.

Both Authentise and Fabulonia are controlling how a file is used in some form, but they’re aware that in 2013, DRM is little more than a dirty word. Wegner is quick to stop me when I use the term, saying that SendShapes won’t stop anyone from printing a file they own on their machine. "I fundamentally disagree with that," he says, describing how he spoke with both Creative Commons advocate Cory Doctorow and Defense Distributed figurehead Cody Wilson while working on SendShapes. To Wegner, SendShapes isn’t going to restrict 3D printing any more than Spotify has restricted music — perhaps less, since buyers are left with a printed object to keep.

If printers get locked down in the near future, it probably won’t be for copyright reasons. Cody Wilson’s printed Liberator pistol set off a flurry of debate over how to stop rampant gun-printing, and Danish company Create it Real thinks it’s found a solution. Earlier this year, it announced a kind of firewall for firearms, which would check each file in a 3D printer’s queue against a database of printable components. If an exact match was found, it wouldn’t print.

Copy protection creators know that in 2013, DRM is a dirty word

It’s not clear how comprehensive the system is at this point. But company founder Jeremie Gay says it’s been integrated into Create it Real’s existing printer software suite, and he’s in talks to put it directly into some consumer-level printers as well — he says to expect the first models within a few months. There’s been widespread worry that governments will crack down on 3D printers if they’re seen as dangerous, and Gay believes companies will want to head off potential lawsuits from naive buyers whose guns blow up after printing.

Create it Real’s plan is precisely the kind of thing that could keep DRM opponents up at night. It’s a tool for controlling what people can make, based on a central database run by Create It Real and built right into machines. Gay admits that, in theory, any object could be added to the no-print list. Nonetheless, he insists that Create it Real won’t usher in a new age of fettered replicators. He sees the system as a kind of parental control, suggesting that manufacturers offer their printers both with and without anti-gun software. And building an anti-piracy database isn’t in the spirit of the project, Gay says.

It’s always possible that another company will copy the system, or that rights holders will start pushing aggressive anti-piracy tactics as they move into a new market. But many people still don’t even know how consumer 3D printers will ultimately be used, much less how or if they’ll be regulated. So hold off on selling that Game of Thrones iPhone dock, but don’t worry just yet that your printer will start playing copyright cop.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/17/47...le-3d-printing





Here’s How a Law Designed to Fight the Mafia Could Stop Abusive Patent Lawsuits
Timothy B. Lee

When you're targeted by a patent troll, the rational thing to do is to capitulate. Defending a patent infringement lawsuit can cost millions of dollars, and trolls carefully calibrate their settlement demands so that it will always cost more to fight than to settle.

But the antics of one patent troll so infuriated Kevin O'Connor that he decided to fight anyway. O'Connor made his fortune as a co-founder of DoubleClick, the advertising company that was sold to Google for $3.1 billion. When his new startup, FindTheBest.com, was threatened by a troll called Lumen View Technology, he pledged $1 million of his personal fortune — significantly more than the cost of settling — to fight the lawsuit.

On Monday, O'Connor went on the offensive, filing a lawsuit under the federal Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization (RICO) statute. The statute was originally intended to fight organized crime, but O'Connor contends that Lumen View is essentially a patent extortion racket. The complaint charges that the firm has no interest in litigating the merits of its patent claims, but rather is trying to use the high cost of litigation to coerce defendants who did not infringe into paying nuisance settlements.

"Everything was about 'we're going to make your life so miserable, so painful, cost you so much money,'" O'Connor says. "I don't like bullies. So I made it personal and said 'I'm going to fund the defense of this. I'll invest a million bucks to take this on.'"

O'Connor says that when he received the original demand letter, he tried to contact Lumen View to explain that his firm didn't infringe the patent. Patent 8,069,073 claims the concept of using a computer to engage in match-making between two groups of people. FindTheBest says its site only helps users find online information, not other users. So Lumen View's patents don't apply.

O'Connor says he called one of the patent's two investors, Eileen Shapiro, to try to explain this point, with little success. Shortly after that call, O'Connor says, Lumen View attorney Damian Wasserbaur called FTB's lawyer to complain about O'Connor's call. According to FTB's complaint, Wasserbaur stated that "calling someone a 'patent troll' constituted a 'hate crime' under 'Ninth Circuit precedent.'" Wasserbaur allegedly threatened to "pursue criminal charges" if FindTheBest didn't apologize and pay up before the end of the day.

We tried to contact both Shapiro and Wasserbaur for comment on Monday but our calls have not been returned.

Congress passed the RICO Act in 1970 to help fight the Mafia, but its use has expanded over time. FindTheBest isn't the first defendant to invoke RICO against patent trolls. One academic paper found an example of RICO being used against a patent plaintiff back in 1994. In that case, the judge refused to dismiss the RICO claim, and the case settled soon afterwards. It's not clear if the RICO claim would have ultimately succeeded had the case reached the merits.

Several defendants have invoked RICO in recent years. Earlier this year, a judge threw out RICO charges against a patent troll that has threatened thousands of businesses for offering WiFi access to their customers.

But the New Jersey luggage manufacturer Tumi had more luck using a RICO suit against a patent troll. A company called ArrivalStar claims to own the concept of tracking vehicle locations electronically. Tumi responded to ArrivalStar's lawsuit by filing RICO charges against the company and its lawyers, and the tactic stopped the original lawsuit cold. ArrivalStar agreed to drop the case without Tumi paying a dime.

"This entity went around suing over 340 companies in a five-year period," says John Fallon, an attorney who represented Tumi in the case. "They base their business model on the fact that it's cheaper to pay us a small settlement fee than it is to even file a motion to dismiss."

Trolling, he argues, is "a form of extortion," exactly the problem RICO was designed to address. "When you have a commercial entity established to commit a criminal act, a RICO defense becomes available."

Of course, once ArrivalStar dropped the patent lawsuit, Tumi no longer had any reason to pursue the RICO claim. Which means we don't get to find out whether the firm's RICO claims would have stood up in court.

But O'Connor may not be so easily deterred. He doesn't just want to save his own firm from a troll, he wants to set a precedent that will help all troll victims in the future. And he may have the resources and determination to do it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...tent-lawsuits/





Angry Entrepreneur Replies to Patent Troll with Racketeering Lawsuit

Patent trolls are legal. Can one be nailed for extortion? One man is betting yes.
Joe Mullin

Most business owners sued by patent trolls don't talk about it to anyone other than their lawyer; a typical response is to cross one's fingers and hope the problem goes away. It won't, of course. Often they do the next best thing—hope it will go away for as little money as possible.

FindTheBest CEO Kevin O'Connor, who also cofounded online ad giant DoubleClick, decided several weeks ago he would talk about it—publicly, and often. O'Connor wrote to tech sites like PandoDaily telling them of his determination to "slaughter" the troll, the "scum of the earth." And in August, he pledged $1 million of his own money to fight the troll that went after his company.

Now, we're getting a vision of how FindTheBest is putting that money to use. The company has made a novel legal claim, saying that the troll that came after it is so reckless, it has engaged in outright extortion, violating racketeering laws.

The claim follows an investigation of the troll that sued the startup. The investigation started when O'Connor and FindTheBest Director of Operations Danny Seigle simply started making phone calls. "The first thing you think is, who the hell are these guys?" O'Connor ultimately called the lead inventor listed on the patent, which describes a system for "multilateral decision-making."

That set in motion a bizarre series of events. Lumen View's lawyer accused O'Connor of committing a "hate crime" by calling the inventor, Eileen Shapiro of Hillcrest Group. ("I didn't know patent trolls were a protected class," quips O'Connor.) Then the lawyer threatened criminal charges (again, for calling an inventor). From there, it got personal.

Instead of kowtowing to the troll's demand for $50,000, O'Connor decided to pledge to spend $1 million fighting. He knows it's not the rational business decision... and he doesn't care.

"From a business perspective, it makes 100 percent sense to settle," he said. "I decided to take it out of the business realm, and into the personal. There's one thing I love and that's technology, and there's one thing I hate, and that's injustice—people abusing the system."

Spending that kind of cash to fight a patent suit would be devastating to a young startup like FindTheBest, which has received $17 million in venture capital over its short life, according to a recent VentureBeat profile. O'Connor, who sold DoubleClick to Google in 2008, felt like he's in a position to use some of his personal wealth to push back.

The suit, filed late Monday, marks only the third time a major effort has been mounted to lasso a patent troll with the law known as the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) act. Cisco tried it against Innovatio, a patent troll that was threatening coffee shops and small hotel chains, but it didn't work.

It's a long shot any way you look at it. But O'Connor's tangle with Shapiro, her co-inventor, their lawyers, and any other shadowy investors that may exist, is now set to be a knock-down, drag-out fight. It's the kind of battle rarely seen in patent troll litigation, where trolls often want to settle for "nuisance" settlements that can be in the high five-figures.

Offer of a $50,000 settlement goes up, then down

Lumen View is owned, at least in part, by Eileen Shapiro, a Boston executive who works at a company called the Hillcrest Group. She has a co-inventor named Steven Mintz, who FindTheBest also believes is involved with the operation.

It's one of several shell companies connected to the two. Neither Shapiro nor Lumen View's lawyer of record, Damian Wasserbaur, returned phone calls requesting comment for this story.

Lumen View and its related patent-holding companies have been controversial ones from the start. In part, that's because the Shapiro-linked companies own patents they claim read on stunningly broad "do it on the Internet" type ideas—like one on sending out a press release online, used to sue several PR companies in 2010, including some very small ones. Shapiro wouldn't talk then either, saying only that she was "under NDA" about anything regarding the sale of her patents.

The Gooseberry patent was asserted against several online media companies back in 2011—sites like TechCrunch, Slashdot, and Reddit. That led to a kind of crowdsourced research project on Reddit, but other than names of various shells connected to the same inventors, like Kolomoki Mounds LLC, not much was discovered. Shapiro got back to me for the 2010 story, saying she was "under NDA" about anything involving the patent sale. When O'Connor spoke to Shapiro, she dodged questions about her role in Lumen View, saying simply "I'm the inventor of the patent," and refusing to talk about whether she had any economic interest in it.

Lumen View has filed 21 lawsuits in New York and Delaware. The company's initial demand to FindTheBest was $50,000; but that would explode to $85,000 if it fought back at all, filing any motion in court whatsoever. Then FindTheBest was offered a "one-day-only" settlement offer, discounted by $30,000 if they would avoid filing an answer.

At some point, it became clear that Wasserbaur just wants to collect a check without doing anything. "It was clear Damian [Wasserbaur] only wanted to talk about the settlement," said O'Connor. "He refused to tell us how we were infringing. Every sentence ended in, let's settle."

Perhaps not coincidentally, $50,000 is just about what it costs to hire a lawyer and file the initial set of paperwork to defend a patent case, noted O'Connor. The Lumen View demand letter specifically threatened to raise the settlement amount if FindTheBest chose to fight back.

"Should Company engage in early motion practice, however, we must advise that it will force us to reevaluate and likely increase Plaintiff's settlement demand," wrote a lawyer from Aeton Law Group, the firm representing Lumen View. For every motion filed by FindTheBest, Lumen View would "incorporate an escalator into its settlement demand to cover the costs of its opposition papers and argument."

Many other Lumen View defendants have settled within just a few months of a lawsuit being filed, suggesting the patent troll is accepting settlements below $50,000. The list of defendants includes Monster, as well as small job sites like SnagAJob, TheLadders.com, and JobVite. But just about any site collecting user preferences would seem to be a potential target. College search site CollegeBound Network was sued along with internship research site InternMatch and Zimride, an online ride-sharing tool.

FindTheBest's director of operations, Danny Seigle, contacted every other company defending against a Lumen View lawsuit. "We learned a lot," Seigle told Ars. "We spoke to one CEO who had already settled, and he described the process as 'complete terrorism.' He didn't want to settle, but they went after his customers and clients, and the company would have gone out of business."

"They're all really dedicated to fighting it, and then they discover the cost," said O'Connor.

O'Connor has also spoken with well-known troll-fighters like Newegg's Lee Cheng about possible solutions to the problem. "We had the same view—he's brilliant," said O'Connor. "It was really cool that Newegg took these guys on, knowing that going on the offense was the best defense."
Pointing out a “patent troll” becomes a “hate crime”

FindTheBest's RICO lawsuit uses language like "extortion" to describe Lumen View's business practices.

The suit has several tacks. First, it claims that FTB couldn't possibly infringe a patent that clearly describes two or more people entering a preference—FindTheBest's system only handles the preference of one user at a time.

In fact, Lumen didn't do "any meaningful pre-filing investigation," the suit alleges, and that's part of the problem. Lumen simply did "a broad internet search for companies that offer any type of matching service... Because the concept of matching two parties is as old as Adam and Eve, this general search reveals numerous company websites." The company's expert witness not only hadn't investigated FindTheBest's services—he'd never heard of the target company, according to O'Connor.

The threat letter is also full of barely veiled threats that Lumen will make the lawsuit as expensive as possible. In fact, the majority of the letter describes how the defendant company must take drastic steps to collect all its electronic and other documents now that it has been sued—if it doesn't, sanctions may occur, says Lumen.

FindTheBest also argues that Lumen's attorney made the claim that calling someone a "patent troll" was actually a "hate crime" under “Ninth Circuit precedent." After O'Connor contacted Shapiro, Lumen View attorney Wasserbauer threatened to file criminal charges—unless FindTheBest settled the civil case immediately, apologized, and gave financial compensation to Shapiro. The offer was "good until close of business that day," Wasserbauer allegedly said.

Finally, The letter makes technological demands that would be almost impossible to meet without shutting down one's business. In the Lumen View letter, it instructs the target company to immediately preserve "the complete contents of each user's network share and e-mail accounts," writes Lumen. That's in addition to "system sequestration," meaning that any accused "systems, media, and devices" should be "remove[d]... from service to properly sequester and protect them."

In other words, to comply with the demands of litigation, Wasserbauer actually suggested that FindTheBest had to immediately stop using its computers.

That's further demonstration of Lumen's extortionate intentions, states FTB in the RICO suit. "[Lumen] use[s] the discovery process, not to investigate and prove their patent infringement claims, but to merely harass, intimidate, injure, and annoy FTB (and their other targets)."

O'Connor hopes he'll encourage other entrepreneurs to speak out.

"There's a lot of outrageous stories, but everyone's so damn afraid of coming forward—It's like going against the Mafia," he said. But the idea that trolls may retaliate against those who speak out is overblown, he thinks. "If they want to try to teach me a lesson, go for it. This will be my retirement. I'll fight them."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...ering-lawsuit/





Why Do Patent Trolls Love East Texas and Delaware? They Win More There.
James Bessen

Earlier today, Tim Lee wrote that two federal district courts — one in Eastern Texas and one in Delaware — account for a growing share of all patent litigation. Here’s one reason why 45 percent of patent holders choose to file suit in those districts: They win more there.

A study of patent lawsuits from 1995 through 2012 by the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers finds that patent holders received damages and/or an injunction almost twice as often in Eastern Texas as elsewhere; Delaware was not far behind.

This was particularly true for "troll" plaintiffs. Non-practicing entities win fewer than a quarter of their cases nationwide. But in East Texas and Delaware, they win more than 40 percent of their cases.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...in-more-there/





Surge in File-Sharing
Dave Pell

These days, it’s pretty easy and not all that expensive to find and stream quality movies, television, and music right to your living room. So you would think that the habit of ripping off content via file-sharing networks would be on the decline. Think again. According to recent study, “the amount of bandwidth used for copyright infringement in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific has grown nearly 160% from 2010 to 2012, accounting for 24% of total Internet bandwidth.” And this isn’t just some obsessed teenager downloading a really, really big file. In January of this year, “327 million unique users illegally sought copyrighted content, generating 14 billion page views on websites focused on piracy.” It seems like some of these numbers could be a litte inflated. I’m going to see if I can steal a more accurate report.

+ Don’t feel too bad, at least when you’re stealing all that content, you’re giving companies like Netflix a lot of good data about what shows to create.

+ There will always be something irresistible about getting content for free. One of the formative periods of my adolescence took place during a week when my friends and I figured out how to descramble a cable channel. From the archives: It was the week my friend Mordy became a hero…
http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/09/17/...ws-on-the-web/





RIAA Wants Web Browsers to Block Pirate Sites, And More
Andy

Later today RIAA CEO Cary Sherman will outline his organization’s vision for increased cooperation between copyright holders and service providers. Sherman will seek agreements with user-generated content sites and promote a new understanding of the DMCA. File-hosting sites should be required to scan incoming links for piracy and search engines such as Google will be expected to do more, including fitting Chrome with systems to block infringing sites and divert users to official sources.

After more than a decade of aggressive anti-piracy actions directed through the courts, the world’s largest entertainment companies are now looking to forge less confrontational partnerships with companies in the technology sector.

In the belief that voluntary agreements can help a great deal in reducing online infringement, the RIAA and MPAA are trumpeting their efforts to make content legally available and are asking a wide range of service providers to help give those official offerings room to grow.

Later today, RIAA CEO Cary Sherman will tell a House Judiciary Subcommittee that such voluntary agreements have a vital role to play.

“In order to make this digital marketplace truly work, we must ensure that these vibrant new legitimate and authorized technologies are not undermined by those engaged in illegal activity. Voluntary initiatives with Internet intermediaries are a key component of that objective,” Sherman will tell the hearing.

Copyright Alerts System

The RIAA expresses thanks to the Administration and Congress for the support given so far to initiatives such as the fledgling Copyright Alerts System. Sherman will state that it’s too early to say whether or not it has been a full success, but the signs are good.

“The CAS is still in the initial implementation stages and proper metrics are being determined. But feedback so far has been positive and it is worth noting that P2P content protection programs in other countries have been found to have an impact on either the amount of unauthorized P2P activity or on sales,” Sherman will note.

Payments, advertising and domain issues

Another area of cooperation highlighted are agreements with payment processors including Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover and PayPal, which sees processors terminate their relationship with a website if it continually offers illegitimate content. Sherman will cite figures from the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition (IACC) that reveal the termination of more than 1,500 merchant accounts between 2011 and August 2013.

After highlighting progress in restricting advertising revenue to “rogue sites” and cautiously welcoming anti-piracy provisions relating to the rolling out of new Top Level Domains, Sherman will move on to the issue of User Generated Content.

UGC Principles

The RIAA chairman begins by referencing an initiative signed by CBS, Disney, Crackle, Daily Motion, Fox, Microsoft and Veoh among others way back in 2007. The agreement, which Sherman says was one of very first voluntary online anti-piracy initiatives, sought to boost UGC services while protecting rights holders.

The RIAA hopes that it can breathe new life into the six-year-old deal which will see parties:

- Implement fingerprinting technology to filter out unauthorized video and audio
- Provide copyright holders with “enhanced searching and identification means.”
- Work to identify “predominantly infringing” sites and block their links
- Track, identify and ban repeat infringers while “accommodating fair use”

“The UGC principles serve as a model of intermediaries and content owners working together voluntarily to assure that the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) have meaning and are adapted to new technological advancements,” Sherman will say.

“They should serve as a blueprint for new voluntary agreements between content owners and Internet intermediaries to carry out the intent of the DMCA to protect both copyright owners and intermediaries”

Search engines must do more – much more

Perhaps unsurprisingly the RIAA still has plenty of criticism for search engines such as Google, who it accuses of doing little to help with infringement. The music group says it wants engines to look at whether sites are “authorized” or not when it determines how they are placed in results.

“We believe it would be useful to see voluntary initiatives by search engines that take into account whether or not a site is authorized to provide the content at issue in determining search result rankings for searches to consume that content,” Sherman will say.

“This could take into account not only the absolute number of copyright removal requests sent about a site to trigger demotion of that site, but also whether the site is authorized to provide the content to trigger a higher search rank for that site.”

The RIAA also says that Google’s efforts to disappear links to child porn could be extended to infringing material and that tools such as Chrome could divert users away from certain sites and towards others.

“Google has tools in its Chrome browser to warn users if they are going to sites that may be malicious. Shouldn’t that technology be used to warn users of rogue sites?” Sherman will ask.

“Or better yet, can Google use similar technology to highlight or identify sites that are authorized? Imagine if links to content on legitimate sites were labeled – directly in the search result – with a certification mark indicating that the site is licensed and actually pays royalties to creators. That educational message could have a profound and positive impact on user behavior.”

The DMCA isn’t working – cooperation is needed

It’s no secret that the RIAA is disappointed with how the DMCA has panned out. The music group feels that scanning millions of websites and sending notices is an unfair burden for rightsholders and a position that needs to improve.

“As was done with the UGC Principles, there is an opportunity for intermediaries and content owners to sit down and negotiate practical solutions that will make the ‘notice and takedown’ system more meaningful and effective,” Sherman will say.

“From more stringent repeat infringer policies to takedowns that don’t automatically repopulate, many practical solutions can be adopted that would assure the intent of the DMCA is carried out. We hope the relevant parties will join together to start this process and we need Congress to encourage and facilitate such a process.”

What makes a good voluntary agreement?

In his summing up, Sherman will state that voluntary agreements mean the formation of a partnership in which both content and platform owners work to protect copyright and in which intermediaries understand that doing so is to their benefit.

“Initiatives must go beyond what is already done or expected of intermediaries under existing law,” Sherman will declare.
http://torrentfreak.com/riaa-wants-w...d-more-130918/





Record Companies Allowed to Pursue Vimeo for Copyright Infringement

A judge rules that there's a "triable issue" as to whether the popular UGC site had knowledge or awareness of copyrighted music in some of the videos being shared.
Eriq Gardner

A federal judge in New York won't allow user-generated video website Vimeo, owned by Barry Diller's IAC, to dodge a big copyright lawsuit.

Capitol Records and other big labels brought the legal action in December 2009, alleging that Vimeo copied, performed and distributed seminal sound recordings by artists including The Beatles, Daft Punk, Radiohead, Beyonce and the Beach Boys. Vimeo, which is now one of the top 130 most trafficked websites, responded by asserting that it was free of liability thanks to the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Ronnie Abrams denied that defense with respect to 55 of 199 videos in question -- ones where employees had some interaction. The ruling is another big one on the liability of Internet service providers, the second in the past month following the MPAA's win over cyberlocker Hotfile. Although Vimeo can point to some significant victories in the 56-page ruling -- it escapes liability on 144 videos, for instance -- the ruling might give some internet service providers pause. Among other things, the judge granted plaintiffs' motion on summary judgment with respect to pre-1972 recordings, an issue that has suddenly become quite hot.

In the lawsuit, there was no dispute that videos on Vimeo's network contained copyrighted music recordings. The question on summary judgment motions by each of the sides was more to whether Vimeo had sufficiently taken actions upon knowledge of infringements to escape being punished.

The record companies made several arguments why Vimeo didn't do enough.

On the less successful front, the plaintiffs argued that Vimeo didn't establish an adequate repeat infringer policy.

Judge Abrams rejects that assessment. She says that Vimeo's implementation of a system didn't go as far as the copyright owners wanted (e-mail records but not IP addresses were checked, the three-strike system had caveats), but was still "reasonably implemented." The judge's conclusion was informed by Vimeo’s "business circumstances as they evolved during the relevant period." The judge also rejects an argument that Vimeo "willfully blinded" itself to infringements, concluding that plaintiffs' examples of Vimeo executive communications on the subject were insufficient and further, "amounts to little more than their frustration that Vimeo did not use sophisticated monitoring technology in its possession to seek out and remove instances of infringing content."

More successfully, the plaintiffs scored points with the judge on the interaction that Vimeo employees had with videos. The judge looks at evidence that employees uploaded some of the videos and rejects Vimeo's defense they were stored at the direction of users.

The judge also looks at evidence that Vimeo employees entered comments on the videos, "liked" some of the videos, featured some of them on curated channels, "whitelisted" some of the videos by disabling a flagging function and more, and won't rule out the possibility that these actions could rise to "red flag knowledge" of the infringing content. The judge isn't ready to accept the plaintiffs' argument that there was awareness of facts and circumstances that would make it objectively obvious to a reasonable person that those videos were infringing. But the judge isn't dismissing the possibility either. She says it's a "triable issue."

So that will be heard at trial.

What won't be is an allegation that Vimeo induced copyright infringement. For the purposes of determining that, the judge looks at Vimeo's control over user content -- an issue that was discussed in Viacom's battle with YouTube -- and hears evidence that possible monitoring techniques could be effective, that Vimeo had the discretion to manipulate the visibility of content, and that staff communicated with users, at times suggesting that it would tolerate the uploading of copyrighted material.

But all that's not enough. For instance, on the issue of the visibility, the judge writes how "it is difficult to imagine how Vimeo’s staff of seventy-four (as of 2012) could, through its discretionary and sporadic interactions with videos on the Website, exert substantial influence on approximately 12.3 million registered users uploading 43,000 new videos each day."

There's also no triable issue over pre-'72 recordings. In the past month, as one example of why older recordings are suddenly presenting a big problem for many services, SiriusXM has been hit with one big lawsuit after another over just that issue. The topic of whether Vimeo could apply DMCA safe harbor on these works was discussed, and Judge Abrams' conclusion is that it can't. The decision to grant plaintiffs' summary judgment on this matter comes in the 55th page of a 56-page ruling, but shouldn't be overlooked.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr...e-vimeo-633272





Court Gives a Victory to Pandora Over Licensing Streaming Music
Ben Sisario

Pandora Media won a battle in its continuing war with the music industry over royalties when a federal judge ruled on Tuesday that the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, which represents thousands of members, cannot prevent Pandora from licensing all the songs in its catalog.

The ruling, by Judge Denise L. Cote of United States District Court in Manhattan, is a blow to music publishers, who have tried to get the best royalty rates for digital music by limiting the extent that performing rights societies like Ascap and Broadcast Music Incorporated represent their songs. The ruling could also hurt the societies themselves if they are perceived as preventing the publishers from getting higher rates.

Two years ago, the industry’s biggest publishers began withdrawing digital rights to their music from Ascap and BMI, forcing companies like Pandora to negotiate directly for a license to stream the music.

Sony/ATV, the world’s largest publisher, has said it received a 25 percent higher rate by licensing its songs to Pandora directly.

Pandora argued in a motion for summary judgment that allowing publishers to withdraw their digital rights violated Ascap’s longtime consent decree, which says that the organization must license its songs to any service that asks. The judge agreed, saying that Ascap must make all the songs in its catalog available to Pandora through 2015, when its current licensing terms with Internet radio provider expire. If Ascap licenses a song for some purposes, the judge ruled, it must for others – like streaming — as well.

“ 'All’ means all,” Judge Cote wrote in her decision. The ruling precedes a larger rate-setting trial between Pandora and Ascap, which will begin on Dec. 4.

In a statement, Christopher Harrison, Pandora’s assistant general counsel, said, “We hope this will put an end to the attempt by certain Ascap-member publishers to unfairly and selectively withhold their catalogs from Pandora.”

John LoFrumento, Ascap’s chief executive, said he looked forward to the trial. “The court’s decision to grant summary judgment on this matter has no impact on our fundamental position in this case that songwriters deserve fair pay for their work, an issue that the court has not yet decided.”

The larger effect of the ruling is unclear. On Wednesday, a spokesman for Sony/ATV said he expected that the terms of the deal would not change because of Judge Cote’s ruling.

BMI, which like Ascap represents a huge portion of the music available in the United States, operates under its own consent decree, and is governed by a different federal rate court. BMI sued Pandora in June over rates, a few days after Pandora said it would buy a small radio station in South Dakota to qualify for rates enjoyed by terrestrial broadcasters. Ascap has also asked the Federal Communications Commission to block that sale.

Pandora, which has more than 70 million regular users, was once the darling of the music world. But over the last year it has become one of industry’s biggest opponents as it pushes for lower royalty rates. Last year, it heavily promoted the Internet Radio Fairness Act, a failed bill in Congress that could have reduced what services like Pandora pay record companies and performing artists.

Pandora’s efforts to reduce costs and increase its advertising revenue have helped push the company’s stock higher; by Wednesday afternoon, shares were up about 2 percent.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/bu...ing-music.html





Dish Wins Again: Federal Judge in New York Refuses to Ban Hopper

Judges aren't buying the broadcasters' argument that Hopper ad-skipping tech violates their copyright
Greg Sandoval

Dish Network and the company's Hopper DVR won another important round against the top broadcasters today. Judge Laura Swain of the Southern District of New York denied a request by ABC to ban the Hopper. The Hopper, the digital video recorder introduced to the public last year, enables people to automatically skip commercials. Not long after the device made its debut, the broadcasters and Dish began exchanging lawsuits, and the networks alleged that the technology violated their copyrights and that Dish had breached its contracts with them.

"This decision is yet another victory for American consumers," Dish said a statement. "We are proud to have stood by their side in this important fight over the fundamental rights of consumer choice and control."

The networks have said that these features pose a threat to their survival

This is the third favorable federal court decision Dish has won regarding the Hopper. Unlike regular DVRs, the Hopper's AutoHop feature enables users instantly jump past commercials with the push of a single button. No need to manually fast forward. The Hopper's PrimeTime Anytime feature enables users to record network shows and store them for eight days after their initial broadcast. The networks have said that these features pose a threat to their survival. If the commercials that accompany their shows aren't watched, then the networks' ad business collapses. A representative of Disney, ABC's parent company, was not immediately available.

Dish argued in court that it pays hundreds of millions of dollars per year for the right to retransmit the broadcasters' programming. All the Hopper does is enable people to watch what they want when they want, according to Dish. Many in the tech sector say that for cable and satellite providers to compete against internet challengers, improving the viewing experience could be a key factor.

Update: The court also refused Dish's request to prevent CBS from seeking to get out of its retransmission agreement with the satellite TV company. The fight will go on.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/18/47...ing-technology





Hollywood Wants Numbers on the Digital Box Office
Michael Cieply

The movie industry is whooshing toward its digital future, but some players are worried about getting stuck in an informational void along the way.

The business has long used box-office numbers, which are publicly sliced and diced ad infinitum. Similarly, disc sales and rentals for years have been monitored by the Rentrak data company and others.

But as consumers shift to new channels like Netflix and Amazon, there are no generally available industrywide data on the digital performance of individual movies.

While the studios get some information, it isn’t widely shared with filmmakers, agencies or the public — and those who hold the data have a distinct advantage when it comes to making deals or deciding which movies to back, or what to spend on them.

By and large, public reports of digital performance are currently limited to a handful of films, or they simply report rankings without numbers. As of Aug. 27, for instance, Rentrak’s public listing showed “The Great Gatsby” to be the top performing on-demand film as reported by its participating services, but it offered no stats.

In an address at the Toronto International Film Festival last Tuesday, Liesl Copland, a digital media expert from the William Morris Endeavor Entertainment agency, told a small group of documentary filmmakers about this large, if barely visible, problem.

Movies tumble into “analytic black holes” when they are viewed on subscription services like Netflix, on-demand providers like the cable companies and iTunes, or an advertising-driven distributor like SnagFilms, she said.

“Reporting hasn’t evolved with the rapidly increasing viewership patterns,” Ms. Copland noted. “There is still no uniform reporting system that aggregates all data on, say, a film or documentary across all of its platforms.”

This wasn’t some data lover’s plea for more, more, more. A former Netflix executive who now helps to package and sell films for one of Hollywood’s largest agencies, Ms. Copland comes to her topic with an insider’s sense of both the problems and the possibilities in movie data-sharing. In her current role, she desperately wants to know more about the digital audience, whose behavior is now crucial to structuring deals and advising clients as to whether a particular project will fly.

“Richer content and more engaged audiences” she posited, might result from access to shared data — and, of course, more deal-making leverage for agents.

Digital distributors, she pointed out, may know infinitely more about their customers than studios could glean from their box-office analytics, even when bolstered by focus groups, exit polls, prerelease tracking interviews and close monitoring of social media.

It is no trick for a subscription or on-demand movie service to figure out what you like, when you like to watch it, how much you’re willing to pay and even whether you are — i.e., sneaking a peak at a film or show, though you’ve promised to watch with a mate.

In making decisions about whether to back series like “House of Cards,” Ms. Copland reminded her listeners, Netflix relied heavily on its enormous bank of largely private information.

In truth, on-demand distributors share a great deal of data with the studios from which they’ve purchased films. For the last several years, moreover, the studios, large and small, have been sharing title-by-title information about digital downloads with one another via an arrangement with Rentrak, which collects the data and circulates it among roughly 170 entertainment company clients.

The studios also receive reports with some information on the streaming of individual titles from the NPD Group, another data company. But detailed streaming data are not routinely shared with filmmakers, agencies or news organizations.

Bruce Goerlich, Rentrak’s chief research officer, noted that the wall around digital performance information was simply an extension of confidentiality strictures that have long surrounded video performance numbers.

“Measurement can equal monetization can equal a fight,” he said of the entertainment industry’s tendency to conceal data.

Mr. Goerlich, who spoke by telephone last week, seconded what Ronald J. Sanders, the president of worldwide home entertainment distribution at Warner Brothers, had to say about the public availability of box-office numbers (which are also compiled under an industry arrangement with Rentrak, then distributed to the press and others), compared with the digital numbers.

“There’s less consumer interest in it,” Mr. Sanders said of the home entertainment numbers. If the general public were more interested in on-demand performance, he said, there would probably “be a stronger push to make it available.”

But there is plenty of industry interest. According to the Digital Entertainment Group, which monitors home entertainment spending, revenue from digital delivery of films and television shows in the United States was more than $3 billion for the first six months of 2013, up 24 percent from about $2.5 billion in the first half of last year. The growth rate promises a moment when digital revenue from movies and shows will rival the relatively flat North American motion picture box-office, which was about $10.8 billion 2012.

Recently, the Motion Picture Association of America identified 95 services providing digital access to films and television shows in the United States, up from fewer than 20 in 2006.

But what is actually happening to individual films on those services? “I can still only guess,” said Ms. Copland.

Pointedly, Ms. Copland delivered her Toronto address — titled “Digital On Demand: Show Us the Numbers” — to documentary filmmakers. That is because documentarians, whose films rarely perform well at the box office but often have a vibrant digital life, might gain the most from any immediate move toward digital transparency.

Still, documentary makers, feisty but fragile, lack the muscle to realize one of Ms. Copland’s more radical proposals: the marking of every film with a bar-codelike identifier that would then be tracked through every viewing in a way that is readily transparent to interested observers like herself.

(The film industry already tags many of its films; but public availability of the resulting information is another matter.)

That kind of change might have to be forced, she theorizes, by the Hollywood guilds, which are now preparing for a round of contract negotiations in which digital issues — of a kind that brought the film industry to a halt during the hard-fought writers’ strike of 2007 — will be central.

“Transparency could have a watershed moment in those negotiations,” suggested Ms. Copland, if studios could be boxed in to demanding, and disseminating, more information from the digital platforms.

A spokesman for the Writers Guild of America, West declined to say whether digital transparency could, or should, become a bargaining point in that guild’s next round of contract talks.

Until then, digital film revenue will keep growing; but most of us will have no way to know if a tiny documentary became a digital giant, or if a big-screen blockbuster underperformed among those who click-and-view.

“For the moment, this space is equivalent to a landfill in an earthquake,” said Ms. Copland. “All the patterns go haywire.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/16/bu...ox-office.html





Google Buys Bump, Maker of Apps for Sharing Photos and Files
Claire Cain Miller

Remember 2008, when people at conferences and cocktail parties would bump their phones together to exchange digital business cards? Ever wondered what happened to that app, called Bump?

On Monday, Bump announced that it was acquired by Google.

Bump, despite raising $20 million from high-profile venture capital firms like Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, struggled to find its footing. Google paid about $40 million for it, two people who had been briefed on the sale said. The companies did not disclose the price.

It reinvented itself several times, as a tool for exchanging business cards, then a social network, then a file-sharing service. Recently, it added a photo-sharing app called Flock. It also licensed its technology to other developers, who used it for things like exchanging money or sexual compatibility information by bumping phones.

Bump’s latest versions had a characteristic Google has been chasing: simplicity of design and function, despite complex algorithms.

Bump’s app for exchanging information gathered signals from phones and sent them to its servers, where it matched them with other phones sending similar signals. Flock uses location technology and algorithms to determine that a group of friends is taking photographs at the same place and invite each friend to contribute photos to a joint album.

The acquisition occurred just after Apple announced a wireless file-sharing tool, AirDrop, as part of the new iPhone software, and Bump’s technology could interest the Android team. Its Flock photo app seems like a natural fit with Google Plus, which has been trying to distinguish itself as a more advanced photo-sharing service.

Google declined to say what it planned to do with Bump, issuing only this statement: “The Bump team has demonstrated a strong ability to quickly build and develop products that users love, and we think they’ll be a great fit at Google.”

In a blog post, David Lieb, Bump’s co-founder and chief executive, hinted that its apps might not continue to exist in their current form at Google. “Bump and Flock will continue to work as they always have for now; stay tuned for future updates,” he wrote.

The sale could have been a way for Google to buy some experienced engineers and for Bump to figure out a future for itself.

“We strive to create experiences that feel like magic, enabled behind the scene with innovations in math, data processing, and algorithms,” Mr. Lieb wrote. “So we couldn’t be more thrilled to join Google, a company that shares our belief.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/0...tos-and-files/





Never Underestimate the Bandwidth of a Station Wagon Filled with Backup Tapes
geocrasher

If you've been in IT long enough, you're bound to hear the phrase "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with backup tapes." This was especially true back in the days of dialup connections and leased lines. How does it scale today? First, we have to decide what kind of media we're going to use. Tape drives are not nearly as common as they once were and their storage density really isn't impressive. Instead, lets use the most storage dense media that mere mortals can purchase retail (at the time of this writing): The SanDisk 64GB Ultra MicroSDXC.

Now we have our storage worked out, what are we going to haul it in? These days you can't really get a good sturdy station wagon, but the modern equivalent seems like it would be the SUV. Since Chevrolet Suburbans have been around for so long, I'm going to pick that. According to Chevrolet.com the 2014 Suburban has 137 cubic feet of cargo space. So, how many MicroSD cards can you fit in there?

First we need to find out how big these little guys are, exactly. Wikipedia says that they are 0.59×0.43×0.039 inches. Now, time to do some math:

First, figure out how many cubic square inches a Suburban can hold: 137ft³ = 236736 in³

A MicroSD card is only .1 cubic inches, so if all things were equal you could stuff 100 64gb cards into a cubic inch of space! But, that does not seem realistic. In fact it doesn't even seem remotely possible. Plus, Micro SD cards are oddly shaped. Plus, nothing ever stacks just perfect and we have to put them in boxes of some sort that can support the weight of thousands of cards. So, we're going to reduce that number by 20% when we're done.

Given the dimensions of the MicroSD card and the size of a cubic foot, a little math later... 174,646 MicroSD cards per cubic foot. Now trim 20% off and you have 139716 MicroSD cards per cubic foot. Remember, we have 137 cubic feet to fill.

19 Million Micro SD Cards
19,141,092 MicroSD cards will fit in a 2014 Chevy Suburban. What does that come out to in Capacity?

1,225,029,888 GigaBytes (Yes, that's over 1.2 billion GB's!)
Or
1196318.25 TeraBytes
Or
1168.279541016 PetaBytes
Or
1.14089799 ExaBytes
Or
1/12 Google (per xkcd.com)

Or
398,772 3TB hard drives

Now let's talk about Bandwidth. We'll use the old "New York to Los Angeles" as a benchmark. According to Google, that's a 2,790 mi, 40 hour trek. Since bandwidth is generally measured per second, we'll measure the trip that way too. A 40 hour trip is 144,000 seconds. Now lets measure the bandwidth:

1,225,029,888 GB in 144,000 seconds = 68057Gbps

In comparison, ATT's OC-768 fiber optic cable transfers 38.486016 Gbps which is only a 1/1768th of the bandwidth of the Suburban full of MicroSD cards.

That's a whole lot of bandwidth! One thing we haven't considered though is actually reading and writing the data off of all those cards, and then putting it back in order. That would take far more time than the actual trip itself, but we're not counting it because the original saying "Never Underestimate the Bandwidth of a Station Wagon Filled with Backup Tapes" didn't count it either.

So, when you're trying to move lots of data, Never Underestimate the Bandwidth of a Suburban Filled with MicroSD cards!
http://tidbitsfortechs.blogspot.com/...dwidth-of.html





AT&T Threatens Persistent Pirates With Account Termination
Ernesto

Internet providers participating in the six-strikes scheme have made it clear from the start that under the program no subscriber will be permanently disconnected from the Internet. The Copyright Alerts being sent out by AT&T, however, inform accused pirates that in some cases it is company policy to terminate services to repeat infringers. Under what circumstances these disconnections take place remains a mystery for now.

After years of negotiating and planning the long-awaited U.S. “six-strikes” system finally went live in February.

The Copyright Alert System’s main goal is to educate the public. That is, informing people that their connection is being used to share copyrighted material without permission, and pointing them to legal alternatives.

While repeat infringers face so-called mitigation measures, the copyright holders and ISPs have made it very clear that no one will permanently lose their Internet access. Nevertheless, AT&T is currently using its Copyright Alert emails to warn accused pirates that account termination is an option.

TorrentFreak obtained a copy of AT&T’s Copyright Alert (posted in full below) which warns that those who share copyrighted files may lose their account. Worryingly, this threat comes before the official mitigation measures are mentioned.

“Using your Internet service to infringe copyrights is illegal and a violation of the AT&T Internet Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy, which apply to all users of your account, and could result in mitigation measures including limitation of Internet access or even suspension or termination,” AT&T writes.

The sentence above points to a footnote clarifying that a termination is AT&T policy as required by the DMCA.

“Pursuant to Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, AT&T’s policy is to terminate services to repeat infringers under appropriate circumstances,” the footnote reads.

The key part here is “appropriate circumstances,” which the Internet provider doesn’t elaborate on.

Several years ago AT&T stated that it would only disconnect repeat infringers if the company was ordered to do so by a court, unlike other service providers such as YouTube and many file-hosting services who terminate accounts on their own.

The issue is a gray area, since the termination section of the DMCA is not clear on whether service providers have to terminate accounts themselves, or if a court order is required.

TorrentFreak contacted AT&T to ask which circumstances could expose a subscriber to losing his or her Internet access but we have yet to receive a response.

If it wanted to, AT&T could certainly identify persistent pirates as the six-strikes scheme requires the company to keep a database of infringing accounts. The scheme further requires ISPs to save this information in case the MPAA, RIAA or other copyright holders decide they need to access it.

So, it is not unthinkable that account terminations could follow, although this would require the copyright holders to obtain a court order or subpoena.

While AT&T’s “alert” doesn’t cross any lines, technically speaking, for the general public the mention of possible account terminations can be rather confusing. It would have been more appropriate to explain under what circumstances subscribers may lose Internet access, while making clear that this is unrelated to the alert they received.

A redacted copy of the Copyright Alert being sent out by AT&T is detailed below.



Copyright Infringement Alert

Dear (Primary Account Holder),

We are sending you this alert as part of our participation in the Copyright Alert Program — an industry-wide initiative intended to help users understand their rights and responsibilities in the distribution of copyrighted content online.

Digital content owners routinely monitor file-sharing networks to determine if copyrighted movies and music are being distributed illegally over the Internet. Through the Copyright Alert System, we’ve recently received a notice from a movie studio, record company, television studio or other company that owns copyrighted material that your AT&T Internet account was used in connection with possible infringement of their copyright protected materials.

Your account was identified by its IP address. However, in keeping with the AT&T Privacy Policy, we have not released your name or personal information, and we will not do so except as required by a lawful request for records. But at the request of the content owner, we are sending this alert — which applies to all users of your account — so that the issue may be resolved without further action.

A copy of the original notice can be found at att.com/copyright-infringement, but summary information is available at the end of this email.

What is Copyright Infringement?

Copyright protection gives creators of original intellectual property (such as music, movies, videos, books, artwork, and images) the exclusive right to that work — including control over reproduction, distribution, adaptation, performance, or financial benefit. If you or any other user(s) of your account copy, reproduce, adapt, or distribute copyrighted material without authorization, you are infringing those rights.

Using your Internet service to infringe copyrights is illegal and a violation of the AT&T Internet Terms of Service (TOS) and Acceptable Use Policy (AUP), which apply to all users of your account, and could result in mitigation measures including limitation of Internet access or even suspension or termination.*

How Does this Affect Me?

Through the Copyright Alert Program, users are given an opportunity to understand and change behavior that may be resulting in Copyright Alerts. However, if they receive multiple Copyright Alerts, they may encounter corrective action — or mitigation measures — which may limit or inhibit Internet access.

No action will be taken at this point and we’ll let you know when mitigation measures are pending, should any be necessary. At that point, if you wish, you may request an Independent Review which provides an opportunity to challenge this or any other Copyright Alert before any mitigation measure is implemented. (Be sure to preserve any records or information that could be used to show that the activity was non-infringing.)

Other Helpful Information

It is possible that the infringement notice is the result of activity through a peer-to-peer (P2P) program that may be on your computer. These programs can pose issues, so it is important for you to understand what they are and the risks of using them.

You can find information on P2P programs and how to remove them, through the Center for Copyright Information at www.copyrightinformation.org

There are many ways to legally enjoy protected television programs, movies, and music. You can find information on these methods at http://www.copyrightinformation.org/...vies-tv-music/

What Do I Need to Do?

• Please visit att.com/copyright-infringement to learn more about copyrights, our policies, and the Copyright Alert System.
• Visit the Center for Copyright Information website at copyrightinformation.org for additional information on the industry-wide Copyright Alert Program, as well as information on Peer-to-Peer programs, and more.
• Check to make sure that the activity of all users of your account is in compliance with copyright laws, the AT&T Internet Terms of Service, and Acceptable Use Policy.

Taking the above action should help you to resolve the issue.

Sincerely,
Your AT&T Internet Service Customer Care Team

*Pursuant to Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, AT&T’s policy is to terminate services to repeat infringers under appropriate circumstances.

Important Note: This email contains links to various websites. You may copy and paste the URL(s) into your browser rather than clicking directly on the link.
Copyright Notice

–Summary–
For a copy of the original notice, please go to att.com/copyright-infringement

Notice ID: XXXXXX
Content Owner: MPAA Search and Notify
Contact: Administrator
NA
(+1) 818-XXX-XXXX
XXXXXX@mpaa.org
Content Title: EXPENDABLES 2, THE
File Name: The.Expendables.2.2012.iNTERNAL.720p.BluRay.x264-AVSHD [PublicHD]
IP Address: XXXXXX
Port: 39815
File Type: P2P
Timestamp: XXXXXX

http://torrentfreak.com/att-threaten...nation-130913/





Here’s the Case for Stricter Regulation of Broadband Incumbents
Timothy B. Lee

The American Enterprise Institute's new tech policy shop launches Monday, and over the weekend we published the first interview with the center's director, Jeffrey Eisenach. Eisenach criticized Public Knowledge's Harold Feld, who advocates stricter government regulation of incumbent broadband providers like Comcast.

I called Feld on Monday morning to get his thoughts on Eisenach's arguments. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.


Eisenach points to satellite Internet provider Viasat as evidence that the broadband market is competitive. Do you buy that?

It has really severe bandwidth caps, so you can't do things like significant streaming media. Which means that if you're trying to run a business and have video conference calls you can't do it.

The market is constantly changing. Satellite is a lot better than it used to be. The question is if you're reliant on that because you're in a rural area, does it do a good enough job for the things you care about? The ability to run a business, the ability to do educational opportunities. At least today, satellite is still fairly expensive, it still does not do a lot of the critical things that we would want a broadband connection to do in terms of my ability to participate in society using that as my sole broadband connection. So, right now it's not doing the job.

It might change. We can fight about whether LTE is good enough, for example. LTE on a smartphone doesn't seem to do what a laptop does. In two years, if it's tablets and a mix of WiFi and LTE, maybe it will improve.

Doesn't that support Eisenach's argument, though? Wouldn't he say that we don't know which broadband technologies will work in the long run, so we need to let companies experiment?

The question isn't market power or competition. The question is what are our needs and goals and are we meeting them? You have things where competition is not going to solve your problem. I can have a wildly competitive market and still worry about consumer protection. Or there might be national concerns I have with regard to overall national policy.

For example, say I want to protect myself in terms of privacy, but I have to contact my friend Fred at his ISP. Their ISP says we can snoop on everything, and Fred has chosen that ISP because it's cheaper. I have no idea Fred's ISP says they can scan everything that comes in. If I knew that I might not correspond with Fred. But there's no way I can know that. If we don't set some minimum level of privacy that applies throughout the system, there's no way I as a consumer can protect myself.

You also have issues where things are not discoverable to the consumer. There's a lot of literature now that points to the limits of competition, the limits of rational action, things like consumer fatigue, where just as a consumer it's impossible to tell what's going on. You tend to get action by Internet vigilante mob.

Net neutrality rules give me a process by which if I think a provider is discriminating against me, the provider and I talk it out, we come to a solution, the agency will investigate and adjudicate. Without that rule, whenever I think there's a problem with an ISP blocking or discriminating, I have to start raising hell. Consumers everywhere, we'll boycott this ISP. Everything becomes a vigilante justice issue. We like the administration of justice. It's the same thing economically. We like nice orderly rules.

I understand your argument that competition won't solve every problem, but do you buy Eisenach's claim that there's sufficient competition in the broadband market?

I think it's hard to say. There are clearly a lot of markets, especially in rural areas, where there just isn't a business case for multiple providers. These markets are not inconsequential. There are other issues with regard to switching costs and information asymmetry, it's not clear how much of an impact that will have.

I always say "enough competition for what?" It depends on for what purpose. Is there enough competition to have some form of impact on the market? I'd say for wireless, sure. Obviously there's some competition on that market that is having an impact. In broadband, I see a lot less dynamic change. The way providers are differentiating from each other in terms of price and service is not nearly as dynamic.

Either there's not competition there, there's sufficient lock-in issues or other issues that there isn't a lot of need to bury the packages. There's nothing like the equivalent of the Sprint Unlimited vs. T-Mobile's no-contract plans vs. Verizon's share your devices plan. One does not see that kind of differentiation in the wireline world. If it's not happening, you've got to explain why.

I find it difficult to believe that Comcast has found the perfect model by chance. The fact that Google Fiber in the limited places where it's deployed is offering different packages would seem to indicate that there is a competition problem is those other places.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...nd-incumbents/





Obama Administration Urges FCC to Require Carriers to Unlock Mobile Devices
Hayley Tsukayama

Several months after calling for legislation to unlock cellphones, the White House filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday asking that all wireless carriers be required to unlock all mobile devices so that users can easily switch between carriers.

The proposal from the administration’s tech policy arm follows up on President Obama’s response last spring to furious complaints from online activists after the Library of Congress made the practice illegal in January when an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act expired. The activists posted their complaint on the White House’s protest forum and collected over 114,000 signatures on their petition to overturn the Library of Congress decision.

In March, the Obama administration said that consumers should be allowed to own “unlocked” phones, which spurred new bill proposals and committee discussions about the issue. The FCC also said it supported cellphone unlocking.

But, while there have been small steps toward making cellphone unlocking standard, the idea had lost some momentum, and the administration appears to be trying to bring it back into the legislative arena.

Some argue that making it legal to unlock cellphones could make it too easy for consumers to take copyrighted software between carriers. But in Tuesday’s petition to the FCC, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration said that allowing unlocked devices would increase competition and consumer choice, while also putting the burden of changing networks on companies rather than consumers.

“Americans should be able to use their mobile devices on whatever networks they choose and have their devices unlocked without hassle,” said Lawrence Strickling, assistant secretary of the NTIA.

Politicians and advocacy groups were swift to commend the NTIA for its action.

“This is an issue of consumer choice and flexibility, plain and simple. We are appreciative of the support of groups like NTIA and we will all continue working to see that this issue of significant importance to most Americans is addressed,” said Reps. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), John Conyers (D-Mich.), Howard Coble (R-N.C.), Mel Watt (D-N.C.) and Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah).

George Slover, senior policy counsel for Consumers Union, said that the NTIA proposal was particularly notable because it extends unlocking privileges to tablets, as well as cellphones.

“This proposal is encouraging because it seeks to expand unlocking capabilities to more consumers and more wireless devices -- including tablets -- something Consumers Union has also called for, Slover said. “Consumers need a solution to this problem, and we hope that lawmakers and regulators can work to solve this important consumer issue.”

Public Knowledge, a D.C.-based public interest group, said that it took the White House’s action as a sign that the administration continues to support cellphone unlocking, but noted that there must be larger changes to copyright law as a whole.

“While new rules along the lines of those suggested by the petition can do a lot to alleviate the unlocking problem, we still face a copyright system that requires agencies and industries entirely unrelated to copyright to jump through hoops just to reach commonsense results. This doesn’t just suggest that FCC rules need to change; it suggest that copyright law must change as well.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...549_story.html





Verizon, Caught Red-Handed
Jeff Jarvis

Verizon has now on multiple occasions refused to connect my Google Nexus 7 LTE tablet, though the device was publicized widely as working on Verizon and though I know from other users that it will work on its network. On Twitter, its support spokesman said in response to my repeated inquiries over four days:

Verizon is thus clearly violating FCC regulations governing its acquisition of the spectrum that enables its LTE service, which require it to open to *all* devices. To quote from the regulations (my emphasis):

(b) Use of devices and applications. Licensees offering service on spectrum subject to this section shall not deny, limit, or restrict the ability of their customers to use the devices and applications of their choice on the licensee’s C Block network, except:
(1) Insofar as such use would not be compliant with published technical standards reasonably necessary for the management or protection of the licensee’s network, or
(2) As required to comply with statute or applicable government regulation.

Verizon also violates its promise not to violate that requirement. On May 7, 2008, Ars Technica quotes Verizon VP Jim Gerace saying on the company’s public policy blog:

“Verizon Wireless—and all the other participants in the recent 700 MHz spectrum auction—understood the FCC’s rules for using that spectrum in advance of the auction. Of course we’ll abide by those rules.”

I attempted to read the rest of Gerace’s blog post but Verizon has erased years of its posts there and the Wayback Machine does not have a cache from that date.

This promise came in response to a tough letter from Google at the time demanding that Verizon abide by the rule. Said Google: “The Commission must ensure that Verizon understands that this license obligation means what it says: Any Apps, Any Devices.”

And no wonder, for Google anticipated precisely this situation when it entered the spectrum auction Verizon won and insisted then on open access as an FCC condition of the sale: Google ended up marketing an unlocked device made to run on Verizon’s LTE network and now Verizon refuses to honor its promise to abide by the rules of its auction to do so.

On Twitter and Google+, many have asked why I bother, why I don’t just install the T-Mobile SIM and month’s free access that came with the Nexus 7 LTE. A few reasons: First, I am stuck with a shared-data plan on Verizon thanks to my locked (how could you, Google?!) Chromebook Pixel with LTE and my family’s Verizon iPads. Second, adding the Nexus 7 to my shared-data plan will cost me only $10 more a month, less than I’ll play if I support it solo on another carrier’s network. Third, this is a matter of principle. I will bring my Dell Hell experience to bear and fight for what is right.

Some also caution that on the Verizon network, my Nexus 7 will connect only if LTE is available; it will not be able to fail down to slower speeds as it could on other networks. True; that is how my Chromebook Pixel works and I am willing to live with the limitation for the price.

It has also been pointed out to me across social media that one can take a Verizon SIM from another LTE device, put it in the Nexus 7, and it will work. Only problems are, I don’t have such a SIM and if I did I’d need to use it in that other device. But this does prove — as others have done it — that the Nexus 7 *does* work on Verizon’s network.

So this is not a matter of anything Verizon cannot do. This is a matter of what Verizon will not do. And that is what makes this a violation of FCC regulations and Verizon’s assurances.

I have frequently asked Verizon for its help on Twitter and Google+ and in its store and via phone to Verizon Wireless via a representative in that store; you see the net of that above: a smart-assed refusal to take my money. I tried many avenues before writing this post.

I have twice asked Verizon Wireless’ director of PR for devices, Albert Aydin (@VZWalbert) for a company statement on why it refuses to connect the Nexus 7 and I have heard nothing. I do so as a journalist and also as a member of the public (I take the title “public relations” literally). I will email this post to him once more asking for the company’s statement.

I will also ask Google PR for its stand regarding Verizon’s violation of its assurances to the FCC and Google. Back in 2008, Verizon said: “As we work to put the spectrum we won to good use, if Google or anybody else has evidence that we aren’t playing by the rules, there are legitimate and expedited ways to address that.” Yes, like blogs, Twitter, Google+, Facebook, This Week in Google, Reddit, and angry customers everywhere.

: LATER: Verizon digs its hole deeper, with the @VZWSupport Twitter account sending me this:


To which I replied: “Cannot” is a lie. “Will not” is truthful — and the violation of the FCC regulations.

: LATER: Here is the *proof* that Verizon’s network *can* connect to the Nexus 7 but that Verizon *refuses* to do so, *violating* the FCC regulations. I took the SIM out of my Chromebook Pixel, put it in the Nexus 7 LTE, and it worked — note the “VERIZON WIRELESS” at the bottom of the screen and the bars at the top.


: LATER: Android Central got this from Verizon: “This is not yet a device that is Verizon 4G LTE certified. We’ll let folks know when its certified.”

Hmmm. This device was announced two months ago. They are just getting around to thinking about this now? Or they are succumbing to pressure and the requirements of the FCC’s regulations? I report, you decide.

Funny thing is, Verizon apparently responded to CNET and Android Central but not to me. All they tell me is that they won’t/can’t do it.

: THE NEXT DAY: Torod B. Neptune, VP of Corporate Communications for Verizon Wireless, just sent me this email: “I apologize for the delay in getting back to you. The Nexus 7 is not yet a Verizon 4G LTE certified device. As background, below is the link to information on our certification process, which you’ll find under the ‘Get Your Device Certified’ tab: www.opennetwork.verizonwireless.com.” [The link doesn't work; take out the www and it will]

I’m asking questions elsewhere to interpret this. The device already works on Verizon’s network. The issue is that Verizon won’t give me a sim and add it to my account. Again we come to the “can” vs. “will” conundrum. More later.
http://buzzmachine.com/2013/09/17/ve...ht-red-handed/





Belgian Telco Says it Was Hacked, While Reports Point to NSA or GCHQ as Culprit
David Meyer

Belgium’s federal prosecutor is looking into a claim by Belgacom that its systems were hacked into and infected with a virus. Reports say the complexity of the malware suggests an intelligence agency was to blame.

Here’s a curious one: Belgium’s largest telco has filed a complaint against an “unknown third party” that hacked into its internal IT systems and apparently inserted a virus. Belgacom hasn’t officially suggested who this third party might be, but De Standaard has quoted sources as saying it was the U.S. National Security Agency or one of its partners.

Belgacom said on Monday that it had found evidence of an intrusion into its systems, and the subsequent investigation revealed a virus in “a few tens” of servers and workstations. The company stressed that the virus infected only its internal IT systems, and not Belgacom’s telecoms network.

However, De Standaard‘s sources revealed a couple further details that don’t quite fit with the official statement. According to that report, the attackers hacked into at least two years of international phone traffic (I’m not sure whether that means metadata or actual voice traffic) with the intrusion being discovered in June this year. They were also apparently very interested in Belgacom International Carrier Services (BICS), the firm’s joint venture with Swisscom and South Africa’s MTN.

That and other reports say the attacker was most likely the NSA or Britain’s GCHQ, based on the complexity of the malware. They also suggest the hackers were after traffic from countries such as Syria and Yemen. On both counts, the evidence appears to be circumstantial for now.

That said, it’s probably worth pointing out that BICS is one of the outfits behind the SEA-ME-WE3 and SEA-ME-WE4 cables that run from Europe through North Africa and the Middle East to Singapore and beyond. Sueddeutsche Zeitung has previously noted that GCHQ has access to these two cables (and many others) – but then again, the cables touch the UK itself, so if they’re tapping it anywhere it’s probably there.

Anyhow, Belgium’s federal prosecutor is now on the case, so let’s see what the investigation turns up.
http://gigaom.com/2013/09/16/belgian...hq-as-culprit/





'Follow the Money': NSA Spies on International Payments

The United States' NSA intelligence agency is interested in international payments processed by companies including Visa, SPIEGEL has learned. It has even set up its own financial database to track money flows through a "tailored access operations" division.

The National Security Agency (NSA) widely monitors international payments, banking and credit card transactions, according to documents seen by SPIEGEL.

The information from the American foreign intelligence agency, acquired by former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden, show that the spying is conducted by a branch called "Follow the Money" (FTM). The collected information then flows into the NSA's own financial databank, called "Tracfin," which in 2011 contained 180 million records. Some 84 percent of the data is from credit card transactions.

Further NSA documents from 2010 show that the NSA also targets the transactions of customers of large credit card companies like VISA for surveillance. NSA analysts at an internal conference that year described in detail how they had apparently successfully searched through the US company's complex transaction network for tapping possibilities.

Their aim was to gain access to transactions by VISA customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, according to one presentation. The goal was to "collect, parse and ingest transactional data for priority credit card associations, focusing on priority geographic regions." In response to a SPIEGEL inquiry, however, a VISA spokeswoman ruled out the possibility that data could be taken from company-run networks.

The NSA's Tracfin data bank also contained data from the Brussels-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a network used by thousands of banks to send transaction information securely. SWIFT was named as a "target," according to the documents, which also show that the NSA spied on the organization on several levels, involving, among others, the agency's "tailored access operations" division. One of the ways the agency accessed the data included reading "SWIFT printer traffic from numerous banks," the documents show.

But even intelligence agency employees are somewhat concerned about spying on the world finance system, according to one document from the UK's intelligence agency GCHQ concerning the legal perspectives on "financial data" and the agency's own cooperations with the NSA in this area. The collection, storage and sharing of politically sensitive data is a deep invasion of privacy, and involved "bulk data" full of "rich personal information," much of which "is not about our targets," the document says.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-922276.html





New Snowden Leak Reveals Secret $52.6 Billion Budget for Intelligence Agencies

A new leak from Edward Snowden shows a massive budget for the military spy industrial complex that is hidden from the public
JG Vibes

The original leaks made my Edward Snowden were enough to totally change the whole collective dialogue about government spying, but those initial leaks were merely the tip of the iceberg. There are countless other pieces of damning evidence that are slowly being leaked out over time. Some of the most recent leaks are extremely interesting, showing a secret budget of almost $53 billion dollars that went to various intelligence agencies.

Here are some of the details of intelligence spending revealed in the report:

• $11.5 billion of the proposed CIA budget — which overall, was up 56 percent since 2004 — was allocated to “data collection expenses” alone.
• Of the NSA’s $10.8 billion budget, $5.2 billion were marked for “management, facilities and support.”
• Of the National Reconaissance Office’s $10.3 billion, $6 billion were allocated to data collection.
• The requested budget for the National Geospatial Intelligence Program, which supplies “imagery and map-based intelligence” was up 108 percent since 2004.
• $4.4 billion went to the General Defense Intelligence Program, which assesses foreign military activity for policymakers and U.S. military chiefs.

“The United States has made a considerable investment in the Intelligence Community since the terror attacks of 9/11, a time which includes wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction technology, and asymmetric threats in such areas as cyber-warfare,” Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. wrote in response to inquiries from The Post.

“Our budgets are classified as they could provide insight for foreign intelligence services to discern our top national priorities, capabilities and sources and methods that allow us to obtain information to counter threats,” he said.
http://intellihub.com/2013/08/30/new...ence-agencies/





Inside the Mind of NSA Chief Gen Keith Alexander

A lavish Star Trek room he had built as part of his 'Information Dominance Center' is endlessly revealing
Glenn Greenwald

It has been previously reported that the mentality of NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander is captured by his motto "Collect it All". It's a get-everything approach he pioneered first when aimed at an enemy population in the middle of a war zone in Iraq, one he has now imported onto US soil, aimed at the domestic population and everyone else.

But a perhaps even more disturbing and revealing vignette into the spy chief's mind comes from a new Foreign Policy article describing what the journal calls his "all-out, barely-legal drive to build the ultimate spy machine". The article describes how even his NSA peers see him as a "cowboy" willing to play fast and loose with legal limits in order to construct a system of ubiquitous surveillance. But the personality driving all of this - not just Alexander's but much of Washington's - is perhaps best captured by this one passage, highlighted by PBS' News Hour in a post entitled: "NSA director modeled war room after Star Trek's Enterprise". The room was christened as part of the "Information Dominance Center":

"When he was running the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, Alexander brought many of his future allies down to Fort Belvoir for a tour of his base of operations, a facility known as the Information Dominance Center. It had been designed by a Hollywood set designer to mimic the bridge of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek, complete with chrome panels, computer stations, a huge TV monitor on the forward wall, and doors that made a 'whoosh' sound when they slid open and closed. Lawmakers and other important officials took turns sitting in a leather 'captain's chair' in the center of the room and watched as Alexander, a lover of science-fiction movies, showed off his data tools on the big screen.

"'Everybody wanted to sit in the chair at least once to pretend he was Jean-Luc Picard,' says a retired officer in charge of VIP visits."

Numerous commentators remarked yesterday on the meaning of all that (note, too, how "Total Information Awareness" was a major scandal in the Bush years, but "Information Dominance Center" - along with things like "Boundless Informant" - are treated as benign or even noble programs in the age of Obama).

But now, on the website of DBI Architects, Inc. of Washington and Reston, Virginia, there are what purports to be photographs of the actual Star-Trek-like headquarters commissioned by Gen. Alexander that so impressed his Congressional overseers. It's a 10,740 square foot labyrinth in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. The brochure touts how "the prominently positioned chair provides the commanding officer an uninterrupted field of vision to a 22'-0" wide projection screen":

The glossy display further describes how "this project involved the renovation of standard office space into a highly classified, ultramodern operations center." Its "primary function is to enable 24-hour worldwide visualization, planning, and execution of coordinated information operations for the US Army and other federal agencies." It gushes: "The futuristic, yet distinctly military, setting is further reinforced by the Commander's console, which gives the illusion that one has boarded a star ship":

Other photographs of Gen. Alexander's personal Star Trek Captain fantasy come-to-life (courtesy of public funds) are here. Any casual review of human history proves how deeply irrational it is to believe that powerful factions can be trusted to exercise vast surveillance power with little accountability or transparency. But the more they proudly flaunt their warped imperial hubris, the more irrational it becomes.

Related issues

(1) Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler has an excellent Op-Ed in the Guardian arguing that the NSA is so far out-of-control that radical measures, rather than incremental legislative reform, are necessary to rein it in.

(2) The Federation of American Scientists' Steven Aftergood, usually a reform-minded transparency advocate somewhat hostile to massive leaks, examines the serious reform which Snowden's disclosures are enabling, as reluctantly acknowledged even by the FISA court and James Clapper himself.

(3) British comedian Russell Brand attended an event sponsored by GQ and Hugo Boss and gave a speech, while accepting an award, which offended almost everyone in the room (that speech is here). He then wrote a genuinely brilliant (and quite hilarious) Op-Ed in the Guardian about the role elite institutions play in reinforcing their legitimacy and how they maintain control of public discourse. It is well worth taking the time to read it.

UPDATE

Speaking of rampant, Strangelove-like megalomania in the National Security State, do read these remarkable comments from former NSA and CIA chief Gen. Michael Hayden regarding how the US views the internet.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...nder-star-trek





Snowden Disclosures Prompt Warning On Widely Used Computer Security Formula
Joseph Menn

In the latest fallout from Edward Snowden's intelligence disclosures, a major U.S. computer security company warned thousands of customers on Thursday to stop using software that relies on a weak mathematical formula developed by the National Security Agency.

RSA, the security arm of storage company EMC Corp, told current customers in an email that a toolkit for developers had a default random-number generator using the weak formula, and that customers should switch to one of several other formulas in the product.

Last week, the New York Times reported that Snowden's cache of documents from his time working for an NSA contractor showed that the agency used its public participation in the process for setting voluntary cryptography standards, run by the government's National Institute of Standards and Technology, to push for a formula that it knew it could break.

NIST, which accepted the NSA proposal in 2006 as one of four systems acceptable for government use, this week said it would reconsider that inclusion in the wake of questions about its security.

But RSA's warning underscores how the slow-moving standards process and industry practices could leave many users exposed to hacking by the NSA or others who could exploit the same flaw for years to come.

RSA had no immediate comment. It was unclear how the company could reach all the former customers of its development tools, let alone how those programmers could in turn reach all of their customers.

Developers who used RSA's "BSAFE" kit wrote code for Web browsers, other software, and hardware components to increase their security. Random numbers are a core part of much modern cryptography, and the ability to guess what they are renders those formulas vulnerable.

The NSA-promoted formula was odd enough that some experts speculated for years that it was flawed by design. A person familiar with the process told Reuters that NIST accepted it in part because many government agencies were already using it.

But after the Times report, NIST said it was inviting public comments as it re-evaluated the formula.

"If vulnerabilities are found in these or any other NIST standards, we will work with the cryptographic community to address them as quickly as possible," NIST said on September 10.

Snowden, who is wanted on U.S. espionage charges and is living in temporary asylum in Russia, disclosed secret NSA programs involving the collection of telephone and email data.

(Reporting by Joseph Menn; Editing by Eric Beech)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...98J02Z20130920





UK Cryptographers Call For Outing of Deliberately Weakened Protocols, Products
Dennis Fisher

A group of cryptographers in the UK has published a letter that calls on authorities in that country and the United States to conduct an investigation to determine which security products, protocols and standards have been deliberately weakened by the countries’ intelligence services. The letter, signed by a number of researchers from the University of Bristol and other universities, said that the NSA and British GCHQ “have been acting against the interests of the public that they are meant to serve.”

The appeal comes a couple of weeks after leaked documents from the NSA and its UK counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, showed that the two agencies have been collaborating on projects that give them the ability to subvert encryption protocols and also have been working with unnamed security vendors to insert backdoors into hardware and software products. Security experts have been debating in recent weeks which products, standards and protocols may have been deliberately weakened, but so far no information has been forthcoming.

The cryptography researchers in the UK are asking the UK and U.S. governments to reveal which ones are suspect.

“By weakening cryptographic standards, in as yet undisclosed ways, and by inserting weaknesses into products which we all rely on to secure critical infrastructure, we believe that the agencies have been acting against the interests of the public that they are meant to serve. We find it shocking that agencies of both the US and UK governments now stand accused of undermining the systems which protect us. By weakening all our security so that they can listen in to the communications of our enemies, they also weaken our security against our potential enemies,” the letter says.

Published on Monday, the letter is signed by cryptographers from the University of Bristol, University of London, University of Birmingham, University of Luxembourg, University of Southampton, University of Surrey, University of Kent, Newcastle University and University College London. In it, the researchers call on the relevant authorities to publicly name the products and standards that have been weakened in order to inform users which systems they should avoid.

“We call on the relevant parties to reveal what systems have been weakened so that they can be repaired, and to create a proper system of oversight with well-defined public rules that clearly forbid weakening the security of civilian systems and infrastructures. The statutory Intelligence and Security Committee of the House of Commons needs to investigate this issue as a matter of urgency. In the modern information age we all need to have complete trust in the basic infrastructure that we all use,” the letter says.

In the weeks since the documents detailing the NSA’s cryptographic capabilities emerged, further details about exactly which protocols the agency can attack successfully and which standards it may have influenced have been scarce. NIST, the U.S. agency that develops technical standards for cryptography, among other things, as denied accusations that the NSA was able to weaken some of the NIST standards. However, at the same time, NIST officials have issued a recommendation that people no longer use one of the encryption standards it previously published.

“NIST strongly recommends that, pending the resolution of the security concerns and the re-issuance of SP 800-90A, the Dual_EC_DRBG, as specified in the January 2012 version of SP 800-90A, no longer be used,” the NIST statement says.

The standard in question is an elliptic curve random bit generator, and cryptographers have called into question its integrity in the wake of the latest NSA revelations, mainly because its difficult to tell how the points on the elliptic curve were determined.

“This algorithm includes default elliptic curve points for three elliptic curves, the provenance of which were not described. Security researchers have highlighted the importance of generating these elliptic curve points in a trustworthy way. This issue was identified during the development process, and the concern was initially addressed by including specifications for generating different points than the default values that were provided. However, recent community commentary has called into question the trustworthiness of these default elliptic curve points,” the NIST statement says.
http://threatpost.com/uk-cryptograph...roducts/102301





Dear USA, My Data Has Left Your Building.
cpbotha

After Edward Snowden, former CIA and NSA employee, started revealing how massively, intensely and easily we are all being spied upon by the intelligence agencies of various governments, the terms above have suddenly been spending a great deal more time in the media.

It turns out that government agencies are allowed to extract, at a whim, your and my data from service providers, such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. There is no real legal process (unless you can call a secret judge in a secret court giving a secret order a real legal process), especially if you’re not a US citizen, and the providers that have been forced to give up your data in this way are not allowed to notify you about your digital self being violated. So even if they say that you shouldn’t worry, you can never be entirely sure.

Furthermore, it has also been revealed that the NSA has for years being acquiring encryption keys via legal (secretly forcing companies to give them the keys) and extra-legal (simply hacking into company servers) means. Even worse, they have for years been deliberately introducing security weaknesses into software products and encryption software in order to be able to crack open your data even more easily.

You can read more about this state of affairs in The Guardian’s NSA files. The Guardian has been doing a sterling job of analysing and bringing to light the depths to which our governments have sunk. There’s a whole lot of information, and most of it is quite upsetting.

For me the final straw was when secure email service lavabit voluntarily shut itself down, when faced with the prospect of being forced to leak user information to the US government without being allowed to tell anyone. The message on the site is quite chilling, and concludes with the following:

This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.

At this point, I was a super happy and pretty heavy user of a number of US-based services, including GMail (all my email, about 40000 conversations consisting of 60000 mails, that’s excluding my work email which I also hosted on GMail), Google+ Photos (all my photos, about 21000 of ‘em), Google Drive, Dropbox (50G of data spread out over 120000 files). In all cases, I still consider these to be best of class services. In putting my money where my mouth is, I was paying both Google and Dropbox for extra storage.

I also had no problem with Google filtering through my email to show me targeted advertising. This is the deal I had with them. I also had no problem with the possibility of someone getting my data after due legal process. However, the idea that some NSA or other government agency flunky could quite easily stick their grubby paws into my data, and that I would never know about this, was too much.

There’s probably nothing much of interest in my data. However, it has become a matter of principle; Privacy is a basic human right. Here’s an old essay by Bruce Schneier if you need to read more about why privacy is so important.

In short: It was time to extricate all of my lovely data from probably well-meaning US companies, thanks to the ridiculously powerful and secretive NSA, and thanks to all of its shadowy counterparts around the world.

Here’s how I did it:

• Considered building another low-cost Linux server, or even a Raspberry Pi. Decided against this due to time required for configuration and acquired a Synology DS213j NAS, which is at this moment standing on the desk about 1 metre to my left. My recommendation: Just get this, you won’t be sorry.

• Downloaded 60000 emails to Synology using Thunderbird mail client. Deleted everything from GMail. Google engineers assure me that after a few months, data will really be gone.

• My webhoster (WebFaction) receives mail for all my domains. My Synology retrieves mail every 5 minutes via POP (you can set this up via Roundcube on the Synology) and deletes it from WebFaction.

• Outgoing mail is relayed by the Synology via the WebFaction SMTP server. I don’t have to worry too much about blacklisting and whatnot, my hoster does this.

• I’m back to interacting with my mail using Thunderbird and IMAP SSL. The loss of GMail conversation view was initially really REALLY painful. People have forgotten the ancient art of quoting. However, I’ve configured Thunderbird to archive all mail to year-stamped archive folders, and to put my sent mail there. Poor-man’s Conversation View! (the conversations plugin is wonky. it’s shocking how much the availability of GMail, which works really well, has stunted the development of alternative email clients) Importantly, I am now able to use OpenPGP again for the strong encryption and cryptographic signing of my emails.

• On my Android telephone (whoops…) I am using the Kaiten IMAP client.

• All the data I had in Dropbox is now being synced between the Synology, two laptops and a workstation using BitTorrent Sync. This peer-to-peer syncing system is still a little rough around the edges, but falls squarely in the category of “Best Things Since Sliced Bread”, and it’s FAST. CloudStation, Synology’s dropbox-inspired solution, was just far too slow on my Synology model.

• My photos (21000 of them) have been downloaded from Google+ Photos (thank you Google Takeout) and are now being served from the Synology using PhotoStation.

• My music (5400+ tracks) is downloading from Google Music as we speak, and will be served from the Synology using AudioStation.

• I make incremental backups of everything to an encrypted external USB drive, using dirvish. I will probably add an extra external drive to the mix and try to keep that off site.

It’s been an interesting process moving my stuff out, and getting used to these alternative systems is sometimes slightly uncomfortable, but I am quite happy with the end result. I hope that more people will take this step, and I really hope that more and easier-to-use alternatives for secure email (such as mailpile) and for ubiquitous private data will become available.
http://cpbotha.net/2013/09/15/dear-u...your-building/





China Broadcasts Confession of Chinese-American Blogger
William Wan

Chinese state television on Sunday broadcast a startling video of a famous blogger in handcuffs, renouncing his Web posts and saying how dangerous the Internet would be if left uncontrolled by the government.

The 10-minute news report featuring Charles Xue — a Chinese American businessman and one of China’s most popular bloggers — was the latest step in what appears to be a systematic campaign to intimidate online opinion leaders against speaking too freely or critically of the government.

He renounced his Web posts and said the Internet is dangerous without government control.

“It gratified my vanity greatly,” Xue said of the Internet. “I got used to my influence online and the power of my personal opinions . . . and I forgot who I am.”

Chinese authorities have increasingly been broadcasting interviews after big-name arrests, forcing suspects to confess publicly to alleged crimes prior to trial or conviction. Several businessmen arrested in recent weeks have had their taped confessions aired nationally.

Some legal critics have likened the practice to a Mao-era style of justice, when guilt was never in doubt, self-confessions were routine and the goal was to make public examples of the accused.

Few online opinion leaders could serve as a better example than Xue, a venture capitalist whose liberal posts had won him 12 million followers on a weibo microblogging site, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. Xue was arrested three weeks ago on charges of hiring a prostitute. He was jailed at a time when several other online activists were arrested. Doubts about the validity of his case were so widespread online that Beijing police issued denials that he had been set up.

Authorities had earlier broadcast a report on Xue’s solicitation charges, but Sunday’s segment seemed intended to curb the huge online influence he has accumulated.

Chinese officials have condemned the postings of Xue and others as rumor-mongering, and Xue endorsed party leaders’ views with a long and detailed confession.

“At first, I was careful and I didn’t write many posts,” Xue said, in a video interview that at times seemed to attribute to microblogging the addictive and destructive qualities of illicit drugs. “But later, I posted more than 80 every day. . . . In the beginning, I verified every post. But later on, I no longer did that.”

“All of a sudden you draw so much attention,” he said. “How do you describe the feeling? Gorgeous.”

In the broadcast, CCTV reporters presented some of Xue’s offending posts. In one, he wondered whether China’s water, whose quality is always in question, contained contraceptives.

“First of all, I didn’t double-check my facts,” Xue said. “Secondly, I didn’t raise constructive suggestions to solve the problem. Instead, I just simply spread these ideas emotionally.”

Sunday’s broadcast came days after the enactment of strict laws imposing penalties for posting online rumors. Those whose posts are deemed rumors and that have been viewed by more than 5,000 Internet users or reposted more than 500 times will be subject to prosecution and face a possible three-year prison sentence.

Xue praised the new laws Sunday. “It is very necessary to release these laws and regulations today,” he said in the video. “Without regulation, there’s no punishment for spreading the rumors.”

The confession of a man whose extensive posts questioned China’s society and government appeared aimed at recasting those comments as an exercise in vanity.

Xue said that as his online following grew, so did his ego. He received invitations from universities and entrepreneurs. He felt like the “emperor of the Internet.” But, he said, in what may have been his biggest mistake, he felt that even leaders of China’s ruling Communist Party were not as powerful as he was.

“It’s not right for [popular bloggers] to behave higher than the law,” he said in a chastened tone. “If there is no moral standard or cost for slander, you can’t manage the Internet. And there are no limits. It becomes a big problem.”


Zhang Jie contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...ec8_story.html





China Crackdown on Online Rumors Seen as Ploy to Nail Critics
Megha Rajagopalan and Adam Rose

China's crackdown on online "rumor-mongering", widely seen as a tool to halt criticism of the ruling Communist Party, has chilled political discourse, with high-profile bloggers saying they have reined in sensitive posts for fear of detention.

Lawyers and activists called the crackdown a significant, if crude, expansion of powers to police the Internet and a blow to those who rely on microblogs to disseminate information that is often not monitored as strictly as traditional media.

"I am really scared now that any whistleblowing might lead to an arrest," said Zhou Ze, a rights lawyer with more than 165,000 followers on the Twitter-like microblog Sina Weibo. "We all have to talk less, and more carefully."

It is common for politically sensitive posts to be taken down by censors and for users to be blocked, but recent detentions have sparked fears of harsher punishments.

At the heart of the issue is a judicial interpretation by China's top court that says bloggers can be prosecuted for posting rumours seen by more than 5,000 people, or forwarded more than 500 times.

"If rumours can lead to detention or arrest, everyone will fear for themselves and become particularly scared about criticizing officials, which we are seeing less of on the Internet," Zhou said.

An estimate of data provided to Reuters by Weiboreach, a social media data analysis firm, shows that in a random sample of 4,500 highly influential users known as "Big Vs", those with a self-reported occupation in government or academia had a much higher rate of deletion in August than those in entertainment.

The data does not differentiate between posts that users had deleted themselves and those that were deleted by authorities.

MOVING TARGET

Analysts said the judicial interpretation specifically targeted the hundreds of Big Vs - "v" for verified - who send opinions, news and information to thousands or even millions of followers. Many are entrepreneurs, celebrities or academics.

Weibo users known for political and social commentary have been detained in recent weeks, enforcing fears that rumor-mongering is not the target of the law.

Wang Gongquan, an outspoken venture capitalist, was taken away by police on Friday on charges of disturbing public order after he helped lead a campaign for the release of another activist.

Well-known whistleblower Wu Dong, more commonly recognized by his online handle "Boss Hua", was taken into police custody in Beijing, the official Liberation Daily reported on its verified Weibo feed.

He said via Weibo on Wednesday that he had been released. His phone was off and he could not be reached for comment.

Wu, a watch lover, is one of many Weibo users who post about official corruption. He drew attention last year when he posted photos of expensive watches worn by government officials last year, helping to bring down one high-flying official.

Chinese-American venture capitalist Charles Xue was detained on charges of prostitution and appeared on state TV in handcuffs on Sunday to apologize, saying his status as a Big V had gone to his head.

"Freedom of speech cannot override the law," said Xue, who was known for outspoken comments on political and social issues online.

Spreading rumours is common on Weibo, and there is little protection against defamation.

"It's important that those who spread slander are held legally responsible," said Peng Jian, a lawyer with more than 100,000 followers on Weibo. "But if it's not implemented properly, it could suppress freedom of expression."

OPINIONS "SHOULDN'T BE SUPPRESSED"

The problem, lawyers say, is that the interpretation takes a broad view of what constitutes a rumor.

"The goal is pretty obvious, and it's certainly not to suppress so-called rumours. In some sense that's just an excuse," said rights lawyer Mo Shaoping. "Most of the things people post on the Internet are just opinions and views. Those things shouldn't be suppressed."

Mo said he had stopped using Weibo two years ago under pressure from officials.

Legal experts said that the court's interpretation amounted to a broadening of authority to police the Internet, as if Weibo were a physical public space.

"It's a significant expansion because it criminalizes postings that were not criminalized before, and not only rumours and libelous comments," said Nicholas Bequelin, of New York-based Human Rights Watch.

Tong Zhiwei, a professor at East China University of Political Science and Law who has about 95,000 Weibo followers, said he had seen a rise in the number of his posts that had been censored in recent weeks.

"It's not so much the judicial interpretation per se that is affecting my comments," said Tong, who frequently comments on social issues from a legal perspective. "It's the atmosphere it has created."

Criticizing one-party rule was in effect forbidden already, Bequelin added.

"Nine tenths of the Internet population would be in prison if you were to apply this very strictly," Bequelin said. "But that is the root of China's regulation of freedom of expression."

The latest crackdown was also significant because it targeted Internet users who didn't see themselves as dissidents, said Sarah Cook of Freedom House, a U.S.-based group promoting political freedom and human rights.

"Now you're having a criminal judicial interpretation and then actual arrests of people who don't see themselves as political," Cook said. "The group of people being targeted is much wider."

(Additional reporting by Li Hui, Beijing Newsroom and Reuters TV; Editing by Nick Macfie)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...98H07X20130918

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

September 14, September 7th, August 31st, August 24th

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
JackSpratts is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply


Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 24th, '12 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 21-11-12 09:20 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 16th, '11 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 13-07-11 06:43 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 30th, '10 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 27-01-10 07:49 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 16th, '10 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 13-01-10 09:02 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 5th, '09 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 02-12-09 08:32 AM






All times are GMT -6. The time now is 11:59 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
© www.p2p-zone.com - Napsterites - 2000 - 2024 (Contact grm1@iinet.net.au for all admin enquiries)