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 08-01-14, 09:34 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 - January 11th, '14

Since 2002


































"The goal is to create a browser-like client to circumvent censorship, including domain blocking, domain confiscation, IP-blocking." – The Pirate Bay






































January 11th, 2014




Germany's Highest Court Rules Parents Not Liable for Adult Children's File Sharing
Loek Essers

In a case that has gone on for years, Germany’s highest court further reduced the legal responsibilities of Internet connection owners when it ruled Wednesday that parents are in principle not liable if their adult children use the family Internet connection for file sharing.

The decision follows a November 2012 verdict in which the same court, the Federal Court of Justice, ruled that parents are not liable for their minor’s file sharing, as long as they warned their child that unauthorized downloading and sharing of copyrighted material online is illegal and they were unaware their child violated this prohibition.

However, when children are adults, parents don’t have to warn them in order to avoid liability, the Federal Court of Justice ruled Wednesday. In Germany, the age of majority is 18.

In the case before the Federal Court of Justice, four German record producers sued the owner of an Internet connection that was used in 2006 to make 3,749 copyright protected music recordings available for download on the Internet via a file sharing network, the court said.

The songs were shared by the then 20-year-old stepson of the man who owned the Internet connection, the court said in a news release. The record companies however tried to recover €3,454 (about US$4,700) in damages from the stepfather who owned the connection, rather than from the stepson. While the stepfather signed an agreement that his Internet connection would not be used for that purpose again, he refused to pay, saying that he was not liable for his stepson’s deeds, the court said.

Even so, the Regional Court of Cologne in 2010, and subsequently the Higher Regional Court of Cologne in 2011, ruled that the stepfather was liable for the copyright infringement. He was ordered to pay €2,841 to the record companies by the Higher Regional Court.

By making the Internet available to his stepson, the stepfather created the opportunity for him to take part in illegal online file sharing, the Higher Regional Court reasoned. Because this risk was there, it would have been reasonable to expect that the stepfather would have educated his stepson on the illegality of online sharing of copyright protected material and prohibited him to use file-sharing programs, even without having concrete evidence his stepson was doing this or interested in doing this, the Higher Regional Court said at the time.

Because the stepfather had violated this obligation he was liable, the Higher Regional Court ruled.

But the German Federal Court of Justice disagreed.

Adults are responsible for their own actions, the court said. Moreover, the owner of the Internet connection should be able to let his adult family members use the Internet without having to teach them first or monitor their behavior, it added.

Only if the owner of the Internet connection has a specific reason to suspect that family members are using the connection for rights violations, should he take the necessary measures to prevent infringements, the court said.

Since there is no evidence the stepfather had such suspicions, he is not liable for his stepson’s infringements, the court ruled. He would also not have been liable if he did not, or did not sufficiently, inform his stepson of the illegality of participating in file-sharing networks, the court added.

The stepfather could be liable only if the stepson used the Internet connection for copyright violations, his stepfather knew about it and did nothing to prevent it, said Karin Milger, a judge and spokeswoman for the Federal Court of Justice who was not part of the judges panel in the case.

The ruling doesn’t mean that the stepson now has to pay the compensation demanded by the record companies, she said. They could however decide to sue the stepson because he did violate the rights of the copyright holders, she added.

As is customary in Germany, the names of those involved in the case were not divulged for privacy reasons.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/20862...e-sharing.html





How The Pirate Bay Plans to Beat Censorship For Good
Ernesto

The Pirate Bay’s PirateBrowser just hit 2.5 million downloads but the notorious torrent site has much bigger plans in store for the new year. The team behind the site is developing a new tool that doesn’t rely on domain names or server farms. Instead, users will serve as the P2P hosts of the sites, with the system running its own alternative DNS. Today, the Pirate Bay team shares some more details on the technology.

Over the past few years The Pirate Bay has had to deal with its fair share of censorship, mostly through court-ordered blockades.

In response to these efforts the site launched the PirateBrowser last summer, and not without success. The tool, which allows users to circumvent ISP blockades, clocked its 2.5 millionth download a week ago.

However, there’s a much bigger project in the pipeline, one that will make The Pirate Bay and other sites more resilient than ever before. Instead of bypassing external censors, the new tool will create its own P2P network through which sites can be accessed without restrictions.

“The goal is to create a browser-like client to circumvent censorship, including domain blocking, domain confiscation, IP-blocking. This will be accomplished by sharing all of a site’s indexed data as P2P downloadable packages, that are then browsed/rendered locally,” a Pirate Bay insider explains.

In other words, when users load The Pirate Bay or any other site that joins the new platform, the site’s data will be shared among users and stored locally. The website doesn’t require a public facing portal and only needs minimal resources to “seed” the site’s files to the rest of the world.

“It’s basically a browser-like app that uses webkit to render pages, BitTorrent to download the content while storing everything locally,” the Pirate Bay insider says.

All further site updates are incremental, so people don’t end up downloading the entire site day after day. The disk space users need for the locally stored sites ranges from a few dozen megabytes for a small site, to several gigabytes for a larger torrent index.

The new software will be released as a standalone application as well as Firefox and Chrome plugins.

Since the site data comes from other peers, there is no central IP-address that can be blocked by Internet providers. Site owners will still offer webseeds to speed up loading, but sites are fully accessible when these are blocked.

Another important change is that the new software will not use standard domain names. Instead, it will use its own fake DNS system that will link the site’s name to a unique and verified public key. For example, within the application bt://mysite.p2p/ will load 929548249111abadfjab29347282374.p2p.

“Site owners will be able to register their own names, which will serve as an alias for the curve25519 pub-key that will identify the site,” the Pirate Bay insider notes.

“The “domain” registrations will be Bitcoin authenticated, on a first come first served basis. After a year the name will expire unless it’s re-verified.”

The entire project will be open source and built using existing code such as Libtorrent, Webkit, SQLite v3 and node-js. The Pirate Bay team is still looking for coders to assist, mainly on the Windows side, but thus far the development has been going steady.

It may take a few months before the first version is released in public, but it already promises to be a game changer in the ongoing censorship Whack-a-Mole.
http://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pira...r-good-140105/





Twister - a P2P Microblogging Platform
Miguel Freitas

This paper proposes a new microblogging architecture based on peer-to-peer networks overlays. The proposed platform is comprised of three mostly independent overlay networks. The first provides distributed user registration and authentication and is based on the Bitcoin protocol. The second one is a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) overlay network providing key/value storage for user resources and tracker location for the third network. The last network is a collection of possibly disjoint "swarms" of followers, based on the Bittorrent protocol, which can be used for efficient near-instant notification delivery to many users. By leveraging from existing and proven technologies, twister provides a new microblogging platform offering security, scalability and privacy features. A mechanism provides incentive for entities that contribute processing time to run the user registration network, rewarding such entities with the privilege of sending a single unsolicited ("promoted") message to the entire network. The number of unsolicited messages per day is defined in order to not upset users.

Subjects: Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)
Cite as: http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.7152 [cs.NI]
(or http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.7152v1 [cs.NI] for this version)
http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.7152





Tor Website Needs Your Help!
lunar

Tor started more than eleven years ago. The project website has gone through three major revisions in that time. It looks like it’s again time for important changes.

Tor has shifted in the recent years from being a project prominently used by researchers, developers, and security experts to the wider audience of anyone concerned about their privacy. Tor’s user base continues to grow. While this is a very good news for the anonymity of every Tor user, we need to make information that matters more accessible and better structured. The support team already receive close to 30 new requests every day, and it would be a better experience for newcomers, users, and journalists to directly find their answers.

Creating the ideal website for Tor is not an easy task. We have very diverse audiences with very diverse expectations. We need to gather information from different sources. Some pages should be multi-lingual. As outdated information could endanger our users, it should be easy to keep up-to-date. Our users deserve beautiful, clear, and comprehensive graphics to allow everyone to quickly understand Tor better. We’ve had some starting discussions, but we’re very much in need of your help.

Up to the challenge? Do you want to help improving a website visited everyday by millions of people looking for protection against surveillance? Then feel free to join the website team mailing list. We need usability experts, technical writers, designers, code wizards of the modern web, static website generator experts, documentalists… Join us and help!
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor...eeds-your-help





Digital Music Sales Decrease For First Time in 2013
Ed Christman

For the first time since the iTunes store opened its doors, the U.S. music industry finished the year with a decrease in digital music sales.

While the digital track sales decline had been expected due to weaker sales in the first three quarters, the digital album downturn comes as more of a surprise as the album bundle had started out the year with a strong first quarter.

Overall for the full year 2013, digital track sales fell 5.7% from 1.34 billion units to 1.26 billion units while digital album sales fell 0.1% to 117.6 million units from the previous year’s total of 117.7 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

While industry executives initially refused to attribute the early signs this year of digital sales weakness to the consumer's growing appetite for streaming, in the second half of the year many were conceding that ad-supported and paid subscription services were indeed cannibalizing digital sales.

While SoundScan has not yet released its annual streaming numbers numbers, so far industry executives have been reporting that the growth in streaming revenue has been offsetting the decline in digital sales revenue.

Overall, album sales suffered an 8.4% decline, dipping to 289.4 million units from nearly 316 million units in 2012. The CD declined 14.5% to 165.4 million units, down from 193.4 million in the prior year, while vinyl continued its ascension rising to 6 million units from the 4.55 million the format tallied in 2012. That means vinyl is now 2% of album sales in the U.S; digital albums comprise 40.6% and the CD is 57.2% and cassettes and DVDs 0.2%.

Meanwhile, album plus track equivalent albums fell to 415.3 million units, down from 449.5 million units in 2012, which represents a 7.6% drop.

Despite the decline in album sales, million sellers increased in 2013 to 13 titles versus the 10 that passed that milestone the prior year when Adele’s “21” led the way with 4.4 million units followed by Taylor’s Swift;s “Red,” which scanned 3.1 million units. In 2013, only one album sold more than one million units, Justin Timberlake’s 20/20 Experience, with 2.4 million units.

The top selling track in 2013 was Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” featuring T.I. & Pharrell, which scanned nearly 6.5 million units, followed by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ “Thrift Shop,” featuring Wanz with 6.1 million units and Imagine Dragon’s “Radioactive" with 5.5 million units. Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used To Know” featuring Kimbra was the top selling digital song with 6.8 million units the prior year.

In 2013, 106 songs hit million units mark, versus 108 titles that achieved that feat in 2012.

Moving over to market share, the Universal Music Group came in first with 38.9% in albums plus TEA, thanks to its acquisition of the Capitol Music Group, while Sony Music Entertainment finished with 29.5%, and the Warner Music Group tallied 18.7%. While these market share totals are by distribution ownership, where indie labels collectively are calculated as having a 12.3% share, next week’s Billboard will also show market share by label ownership where the indies are expected to have nearly 35% market share.

Moving over to genres, R&B which includes rap was the only genre to post an increase in 2013, with album sales growing 1.2% to 50.7 million from 50.1 million units in 2012, which all things considered is pretty impressive in a year where album sales declined 8.4%. The only other genres to outperform the U.S. album market were EDM, which declined 0.3% to 8.8 million units; and rock, down 5.9% for the year to 100.8 million units.

Despite the decline in digital album sales, download stores like iTunes gained market share growing to 40.6% of U.S album sales, while mass merchants like Target and Walmart saw sales drop 16.3% to about 78 million units and now comprise nearly 27% market share; with chain stores like Best Buy and Trans World seeing sales decline by nearly 20% to 39 million album units to comprise 13.5% market share.

Meanwhile non-traditional CD merchants like Amazon, Starbucks and concert venues saw album sales increase by 2.4% to 36.5 million units; and indie merchants dropped by nearly 12% to 18.3 million units. Respectively, the former comprises 12.6% of album sales while the latter accounts for 6.3%.
http://www.billboard.com/biz/article...t-time-in-2013





Sales of Digital Movies Surge

Delaying Availability of DVDs, Rentals Nudged Consumers
Ben Fritz connect

After years of trying to convince consumers to buy movies online, Hollywood found a solution in 2013: Make it the only option.

Digital movie purchases surged 47% last year to $1.19 billion, according to data released by Digital Entertainment Group, an industry trade group. It was the fastest-growing category as total home-entertainment revenue inched up 0.7% to $18.22 billion.

Digital growth just barely made up for ongoing declines in sales and rentals of physical discs. The total U.S. home-entertainment market remains well below its peak of more than $22 billion 2004, a drop that has squeezed the profits of every studio and led to widespread cost cutting.

Still, strides in digital-movie sales are encouraging to studios. And a primary reason for the accelerating growth in online sales is the widespread adoption of a new release window marketed as "Digital HD." For one to four weeks before a movie becomes available on DVD or to rent online, studios make new movies available to purchase from digital stores like Apple Inc. AAPL +0.63% 's iTunes Store and Amazon.com Inc. AMZN +0.98% in high definition.

"That's a significant portion of the growth we've seen," said Jim Underwood, an executive vice president of home entertainment at Sony Corp.'s 6758.TO +3.78% Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Although some people are now buying movies online who might otherwise have bought a DVD or Blu-ray disc, studio executives said the biggest change is people who would have rented a movie but now, unwilling to wait, are buying it instead.

"We've seen a fundamental shift in consumer behavior based on that early digital availability," said Ron Sanders, home entertainment president for Time Warner Inc. TWX -1.10% 's Warner Bros.

Online movie sales are studios' highest-profit-margin transaction, along with Blu-ray discs, which is why they have aggressively pushed the format.

On most new releases, digital purchases now make up between 10% and 15% of home entertainment revenue, said Mike Dunn, home entertainment president for 21st Century Fox's FOX -1.66% Twentieth Century Fox. Only a few years ago, the business was virtually non-existent.

(21st Century Fox and News Corp, NWSA -0.63% owner of The Wall Street Journal, were until late June part of the same company.)

"Despicable Me 2," which was available to buy online for two weeks before its DVD release, was the best-selling title online of 2013. Universal Pictures, the Comcast Corp. CMCSA -0.15% studio that released the animated sequel, declined to share exact sales figures, but Craig Kornblau, the studio's home-entertainment president, said sales were more than double those of his studio's "Ted," the No. 1 online seller in 2012.

Sony was the first company to offer a movie for sale online before the DVD, with the comedy "Bad Teacher" in 2011. But the experimental practice became widely accepted only last year, as studios also all adopted the "Digital HD" branding first pushed by Fox.

Despite widespread speculation that studios would do away with so-called release windows, and instead release movies in multiple formats simultaneously, they have been doing just the opposite. In addition to the early digital window, several studios have pushed back on buck-a-night DVD rentals from kiosks, making them wait four weeks after a DVD is released. That form of DVD rental, a business dominated by Redbox, a unit of Outerwall Inc., OUTR -0.14% formerly called Coinstar Inc., slipped in 2013. After growing 16% in 2012 and 31% in 2011, the kiosk-rental category fell 1% last year to $1.92 billion.

A Redbox spokeswoman didn't respond to a request for comment.

Also helping digital sales, executives said, have been price cuts that mean most releases are now offered for $15 to $20. Studios typically charge retailers a wholesale price that's $1 to $2 cheaper than the retail price.

Several companies also started selling movies online for the first time in 2013, including Comcast's cable business and Target Corp. TGT -0.35%

Meanwhile, physical media sales—a category that includes both DVDs and high-definition Blu-ray discs—dropped 8% to $7.78 billion.

DVD rental subscriptions, the category that Netflix Inc. NFLX +0.44% pioneered, dropped 19% to $1.02 billion, while rentals at stores fell 14% to $1.04 billion.

Subscriptions for movie streaming, a category dominated by Netflix, remained increasingly popular, though, with revenue up 32% to $3.16 billion.
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_e...MDAwNzEwNDcyWj





Run Run Shaw, Movie Mogul Seen as Creator of Kung Fu Genre, Dies at 106
Jonathan Kandell

Run Run Shaw, the colorful Hong Kong media mogul whose name was synonymous with low-budget Chinese action and horror films — and especially with the wildly successful kung fu genre, which he is largely credited with inventing — died on Tuesday at his home in Hong Kong. He was 106.

His company, Television Broadcasts Limited, announced his death in a statement.

Born in China, Mr. Shaw and his older brother, Run Me, were movie pioneers in Asia, producing and sometimes directing films and owning lucrative cinema chains. His companies are believed to have released more than 800 films worldwide.

After his brother’s death in 1985, Mr. Shaw expanded his interest in television and became a publishing and real estate magnate as well. For his philanthropy, much of it going to educational and medical causes, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and showered with public expressions of gratitude by the Communist authorities in Beijing.

Mr. Shaw enjoyed the zany glamour of the Asian media world he helped create. He presided over his companies from a garish Art Deco palace in Hong Kong, a cross between a Hollywood mansion and a Hans Christian Andersen cookie castle. Well into his 90s he attended social gatherings with a movie actress on each arm. And he liked to be photographed in a tai chi exercise pose, wearing the black gown of a traditional mandarin.

Asked what his favorite films were, Mr. Shaw, a billionaire, once replied, “I particularly like movies that make money.”

Run Run Shaw was born Shao Yifu in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, in 1907. As a child, he moved to Shanghai, where his father ran a profitable textile business. According to some Hong Kong news media accounts, Run Run and Run Me were English-sounding nicknames the father gave his sons as part of a family joke that played on the similarity of the family name to the word rickshaw.

Evincing little interest in the family business, Run Run and Run Me turned instead to entertainment. The first play they produced was called “Man From Shensi,” on a stage, as it turned out, of rotten planks. As the brothers often told the story, on opening night the lead actor plunged through the planks, and the audience laughed. The Shaws took note and rewrote the script to include the incident as a stunt. They had a hit, and in 1924 they turned it into their first film.

After producing several more movies, the brothers decided that their homeland, torn by fighting between Nationalists and Communists, was too unstable. In 1927 they moved to Singapore, which was then part of British colonial Malaya.

Besides producing their own films in Singapore, the brothers imported foreign movies and built up a string of theaters. Their business boomed until the Japanese invaded the Malay Peninsula in 1941 and stripped their theaters and confiscated their film equipment. But according to Run Run Shaw, he and his brother buried more than $4 million in gold, jewelry and currency in their backyard, which they dug up after World War II and used to resume their careers.

With the rise of Hong Kong as the primary market for Chinese films, Run Run Shaw moved there in 1959, while his brother stayed behind looking after their Singapore business.

In Hong Kong, Run Run Shaw created Shaw Movietown, a complex of studios and residential towers where his actors worked and lived. Until then, the local industry had turned out 60-minute films with budgets that rarely exceeded a few thousand dollars. Shaw productions ran up to two hours and cost as much as $50,000 — a lavish sum by Asian standards at the time.

Mr. Shaw went on to plumb the so-called dragon-lady genre with great commercial success. Movies like “Madame White Snake” (1963) and “The Lady General” (1965) offered sexy, combative, sometimes villainous heroines, loosely based on historical characters. And by the end of the 1960s, he had discovered that martial-arts films in modern settings could make even more money.

His “Five Fingers of Death” (1973), considered a kung fu classic, was followed by “Man of Iron” (1973), “Shaolin Avenger” (1976) and many others. Critics dismissed the films as artless and one-dimensional, but spectators crowded into the theaters to cheer, laugh or mockingly hiss at the action scenes. To ensure that his films were amply distributed, Mr. Shaw’s chain of cinemas grew to more than 200 houses in Asia and the United States. “We were like the Hollywood of the 1930s,” he said. “We controlled everything: the talent, the production, the distribution and the exhibition.”

Other Hong Kong producers, directors and actors called Mr. Shaw’s methods iron-fisted. In 1970, Raymond Chow, a producer with Mr. Shaw’s company, Shaw Brothers, left to form his own company, Golden Harvest, which gave more creative and financial independence to top directors and stars.

Mr. Chow’s biggest success, and Mr. Shaw’s most notable loss, was his decision to bankroll Bruce Lee. Mr. Lee initially approached Shaw Brothers, which turned down his demand for a long-term contract of $10,000 per film. Golden Harvest then offered Mr. Lee creative control and profit-sharing.

“The Big Boss,” better known as “Fists of Fury” (1971), was Mr. Lee’s first film with Golden Harvest, and it broke all Hong Kong box-office records. Other big-name actors and directors flocked to Golden Harvest, breaking Shaw Brothers’ virtual monopoly.

But Run Run Shaw had already expanded beyond the film industry. His investments in the new phenomenon of Asian television were to prove even more lucrative than his movie productions. In 1972 he began Television Broadcasts (TVB), and he soon gained control of 80 percent of the Hong Kong market. TVB churned out 12 hours of its own programming a day, much of it soap operas and costume dramas that riveted Chinese television viewers on the mainland and throughout Southeast Asia.

As his fortune grew, Mr. Shaw donated generously to hospitals, orphanages and colleges in Hong Kong, for which he was awarded the Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1974 and a knighthood in 1977. In 1990 he donated 10 million pounds to help establish the Run Run Shaw Institute of Chinese Affairs at Oxford University, where his four children had studied. In 2004 he established the Shaw Prize, an international award for research in astronomy, mathematics and medicine. As Hong Kong’s days as a British colony dwindled, Mr. Shaw stepped up his philanthropy in China. He contributed more than $100 million to scores of universities on the mainland and raised money in support of Chinese victims of floods and other natural disasters. Chinese leaders toasted him for his generosity at banquets in Beijing.

Mr. Shaw’s philanthropy did not extend to the United States, but he was once viewed as a white knight in New York. In 1991, when Macy’s was on the verge of bankruptcy, he bought 10 percent of its preferred shares for $50 million, becoming one of the largest shareholders in R. H. Macy & Company.

The investment had a personal aspect. Ten years earlier, Mitchell Finkelstein, the son of Macy’s chief executive, Edward S. Finkelstein, had married Hui Ling, a Shaw protégée who appeared in many of his movies. Mr. Shaw met the older Finkelstein at the wedding, and they became friends.

In later years, the aging mogul himself seemed in need of help to keep his media empire intact. Concerned with the rise of cable and satellite television, he sold a 22 percent stake in TVB to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in 1993.

Mr. Shaw had intended to maintain control over his media business by balancing his one-third share in TVB against Mr. Murdoch’s 22 percent and the 24 percent held by Robert Kuok, one of Hong Kong’s richest entrepreneurs. But the balance of power shifted when Mr. Murdoch sold his equity to Mr. Kuok shortly afterward. Then, in 1996, in Hong Kong’s first case of a hostile takeover, Mr. Kuok forced Mr. Shaw to sell him his shares in TVE, the lucrative publishing, music and real estate subsidiary of TVB. The deal reduced Mr. Shaw’s TVB stake to 23 percent.

Mr. Shaw’s business situation was also hindered by his inability to groom credible successors. His sons, Vee Meng and Harold, were at one time heavily involved in the family enterprises, but their relationship with him had become strained.

Even after turning 90, Mr. Shaw maintained a powerful presence in the Hong Kong film world through his control of Shaw Studios. But a newer generation of independent producers came to dominate the Hong Kong market with their own violent brand of police and gangster films.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/mo...es-at-106.html





Analysis: Apps for Mobile Viewing Challenge Cable Operators, TV Networks
Liana B. Baker

U.S. cable and satellite television operators, already locking horns with programmers over subscriber fees, are now squaring off over the mobile apps that viewers are increasingly using to watch TV.

Internet-based services such as Netflix Inc have gotten millions of viewers accustomed to catching shows on tablets and phones. And as the incumbents are getting in on the act with apps of their own, that has become a sticking point dragging out major programming negotiations, as in the case of Dish Network Corp and Walt Disney Co, which are trying to reach a new rights agreement.

These disputes increase the dangers of further blackouts and may mean delays in the development of apps that combine the content, technology and marketing muscle of both sides of the industry.

Missteps by cable and satellite operators also raise the danger that some consumers will rely more on Netflix, and other such services, and cancel their pay-TV subscriptions, causing a major drop in industry revenue. Meanwhile, both sides are scrambling to draw consumers to their apps and get the most appealing and profitable deals in place for the future.

Attendees at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week will sample apps across a range of mobile and connected TVs. Dish will show off a new version of its "Dish Anywhere" app, which enables live viewing and lets users transfer shows from their DVR to mobile devices and watch them offline, a feature that has upset media companies.

And it is not just Dish: Time Warner Cable Inc, Comcast Corp, DirecTV and Verizon FiOs have all created apps in recent years, while the largest content companies, including Disney, Viacom Inc and Time Warner Inc's HBO and Turner Broadcasting System, have countered with their own.

"Both sides are paranoid. The operators think that if the programmers can create a one-to-one relationship with the consumer, some day they peel off and become their own HBO," said an executive at a media company involved in content negotiations who was not authorized to talk to the media.

Among the areas being fought over are advertising revenue and user data. Ad sales on the platforms are still small and hard to estimate, but revenue is expected to grow as more viewing moves to mobile devices, said Jeff Minsky, director of emerging media at media agency OMD. Both sides are trying to figure out the best way to split that revenue.

Media companies also want to gather and crunch all the data about viewing habits they can to sell to advertisers. The companies receive less high quality data when people watch network programming through an app from Dish Network or DirecTV instead of using their own apps.

"The fight is in the details. Who is controlling the user experience, who is controlling the data and where is the experience taking place?" said another person involved in programming negotiations.

'FIND IT ELSEWHERE'

Executives worry that not adapting to changing habits could send viewers away from cable altogether. Needham research analyst Laura Martin, citing PWC figures, estimates that in 2012 consumers paid $75 billion to U.S. pay-TV providers, $45 billion of which was reaped by content companies while $30 billion was kept by cable, satellite and telecommunications companies offering the TV services.

"There's no question more and more people will continue to consume whatever content they are looking for on a variety of devices, not just the television set. If we are not evolving and providing our content in the way people want to consume it, then people will find it elsewhere," said ESPN's senior vice president of digital distribution, Matt Murphy, who oversees the business side of Disney's viewing apps.

Apps from cable operators and programmers have the same goal in mind - to demonstrate the value of a cable or satellite subscription.

But in the quest to show that cable subscriptions are worth the money, both sides end up competing to lure the consumer to different apps that feature the same content. Sports fans, for example, need to choose between the WatchESPN app or Comcast's Xfinity TV GO app to watch the same programs.

There's also fear from operators that if programming providers build up large audiences through their own apps, they could one day go "over the top" or dispense with cable. One of the most closely watched issues in pay TV is when popular streaming service HBO Go will go direct to consumer.

Deals on programming last several years, so negotiations have to address how people might watch TV five or 10 years from now. One large media company was pushing for clauses to protect its apps in case a cable company one day adopted usage-based Internet pricing, according to people familiar with the matter.

If cable companies one day make customers pay for how much broadband Internet they use at home, they could offer use of their own TV viewing apps free to customers, which would give them an edge over the apps made by media companies.

Some are trying to bridge the gap. The third-largest U.S. cable company, Cox Communications Inc, offers "Contour," a well-reviewed iPad app that integrates 30 apps within it, the only offering on the market so far to keep all the apps under one roof.

APP OVERLOAD

When TV viewers want to use an app to watch a show, they are likely to turn to channels and networks they know, such as WatchESPN, WATCH ABC or HBO Go, said David Wolf, managing director of Accenture's digital service practice in North America, whose firm has been gathering research on viewing from a global consumer survey of 12,000 consumers.

To be sure, usage of these apps is still small compared with how many people watch TV the traditional way. But it is growing quickly. The "Watch ESPN" app is available in 55 million U.S. homes and has been downloaded 24 million times, ESPN said, and minutes viewed on the app on mobile devices is up more than 6.5 times from two years ago.

The next place viewers turn to are apps that do not require a cable subscription, such as Netflix or Hulu, Wolf said. Only then, in third place, will viewers turn to apps made by their cable or satellite company, he said.

One hurdle facing the world of media apps is that users often need to figure out their cable account information to log in. But it's getting easier. Some operators are letting customers use Facebook credentials or a phone number to sign in while cable operators are working on technology for automatic authentication so a viewer does not have to sign in at all.

Simonette Lowy, a 26-year-old fashion designer in Los Angeles who uses DirecTV's app to set her DVR recordings, said with so much choice out there, it is hard to know which apps have best streaming quality or carry which shows.

"Why are there so many? It's too much. People just want everything in one place," Lowy said.

(Reporting by Liana B. Baker; Editing by Ron Grover, Christian Plumb, Martin Howell, Edwin Chan and Steve Orlofsky)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...A0506H20140106





‘Smart TVs’ Are Next Bet for Makers as Sales Languish
Brian X. Chen and Nick Wingfield

Big, bright, sharp and sophisticated, television sets have never looked better. But that’s a problem. The TV industry has innovated itself into a corner.

Crisp, high-definition TVs as big as 50 diagonal inches can be had for a few hundred dollars. Why bother upgrading or paying more for a fancy new one? Many people don’t. And if you spend much of your time watching streaming video on a tablet or phone, paying for a better TV seems even more pointless. So for several years now, TV sales have been lackluster.

Electronics manufacturers, though, are not losing hope. And at the 47th International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, scheduled to open on Monday, they will show how they intend to attract more customers. In many cases, it will be by offering so-called smart TVs that can connect to the Internet and run apps.

“Consumers are telling us they’re more interested in connected” televisions, said Benjamin Arnold, an analyst at the NPD Group, the research firm.

For example, at the show, Roku, the manufacturer known for making set-top boxes that include Netflix streaming, will announce designs for integrating its streaming media service directly into television sets. Two Chinese manufacturers, Hisense and TCL, will make the first products based on the designs. Roku, which is based in Saratoga, Calif., will show six television set models at the show with its service built in, said Anthony Wood, the company’s chief executive.

Mr. Wood says Roku is in a position to make a smarter television than others in the industry. He said most TV set makers do not have the resources to make smart televisions with a broad selection of content, partly because many media companies do not want to create versions of their apps for all the different smart TVs on the market. By contrast, there are already more than 1,200 apps available for Roku, including HBO Go, Netflix, Vudu and others, he said.

“Our strategy is to be the dominant platform on the big screen,” Mr. Wood said in an interview.

Samsung, the No. 1 TV manufacturer in the world, is also bullish about Internet-connected TVs. This year more than 75 percent of Samsung TVs will be smart TVs, said Joe Stinziano, an executive vice president for home entertainment at Samsung Electronics America.

But Samsung, like other television makers, is covering its bases by also trying to grab consumers’ attention with flashy new features for the old-fashioned set. The manufacturers have been introducing these kinds of features for a while now to little avail; last year’s crop of sets offered the ability to watch content in 3-D and included screens with quadruple the pixels. Yet shipments of sets last year were down, and with little content to watch, 3-D TVs are a failure so far.

In the United States, sales of Ultra HD TVs in the 12 months that ended in November accounted for less than 1 percent of overall sales of televisions 40 inches or larger. Nonetheless, this year, Samsung is emphasizing curved high-definition TVs, including a high-end 105-inch Ultra HD TV with a curved display.

The slightly concave screen cuts down on reflections from ambient lighting, like the ceiling lights in a living room, for example. It also allows people who are sitting off to the sides, away from the central sweet spot, to get a better viewing experience, Mr. Stinziano said.

“Your eye is curved and this TV is also curved,” he said. “It’s a much more natural feeling.”

Other TV makers like LG, Panasonic, Sharp, Toshiba and Sony will also showcase their big-screen Ultra HD TVs at the electronics show this week.

Out of all the TV makers’ tricks, smart TVs appear to be gaining some traction. In the year that ended in November, 22 percent of televisions sold in the United States were Internet-connected TVs, compared with 11 percent in the previous year, according to NPD.

And an NPD survey found that 38 percent of people who bought smart TVs found the Internet connectivity and apps to be important; two years ago, 33 percent of respondents said the feature was important.

To James L. McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, the wide interest in streaming demonstrates that manufacturers of ultrahigh-resolution TVs seem to have misread the market when they fiddled with sets to create even better, more immersive pictures.

“A lot of these TV manufacturers grew up thinking they understand why people watch TV,” Mr. McQuivey said. “They came to the wrong conclusion. All of these TV makers were trying to outdo each other with this thing called quality.”

Mr. McQuivey pointed to the huge growth in mobile video consumption and video services like YouTube to show how consumers are gravitating to services with lower-quality pictures than conventional television.

“They were wrong,” he said. “Turns out the reason people watch video is much more emotional and psychological.”

Over all, in the year that ended in November, TV makers sold $15.5 billion worth of sets in the United States in 2013, down about 4 percent from the same period in 2012, according to NPD. Worldwide, manufacturers shipped 155.4 million television sets in the first three quarters of 2013, down about 3.6 percent from the same period in 2012, according to NPD DisplaySearch.

“The TV industry is in a doldrum because many people have more sources for their content, and many people have upgraded and they’re not ready to upgrade again,” said Raymond M. Soneira, president of DisplayMate Technologies, a consulting firm that studies displays.

The TV industry’s dark horse has, for years, been Apple, the pioneer of the smaller, connected screens that are wildly popular: smartphones and tablets.

Apple has long been rumored to be working on a connected television. But other than saying that television “continues to be an area of great interest for us,” Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has offered no clues about whether the company plans to make a television.

Apple, the No. 1 seller of tablets and the second-largest smartphone maker in the world, already has an audience. Video consumption on tablets and smartphones has been one of the most popular reasons to buy the devices. Nearly a third of tablet users in the United States are watching full-length television programming on the devices at least once a week, according to Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors, a unit of the media consulting firm Frank N. Magid Associates.

“The tablet is a bloody TV,” Mr. Vorhaus said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/06/te...-languish.html





The Not So Subtle Distinction Between UHD and 4K
Seegs108

There is a growing problem within the CE industry today. The problem is a collaborative one that was created out of ambiguity and laziness between enthusiasts and within the CE industry itself. I am, of course, talking about the widely used "4K" moniker when talking about UHD. The two formats are obviously not the same, otherwise we'd only be calling it one or the other. Part of the problem has been a lengthy wait time, wild speculation on the formats' specifics, and a problem with manufacturers themselves making the two names synonymous with each other.

Like 2K, 4K is a professional format used on the commercial side of video production most often seen by everyday consumers at commercial movie theaters equipped with the latest digital projectors. Unlike UHD, 4K has a different native aspect ratio. A true 4K image (4096x2160) has an aspect ratio of 1.9:1, while a true UHD image (3840x2160) is 1.78:1. We can see here that a 4K panel is actually wider by 256 pixels. This is a trivial number and doesn't do much in terms of overall resolution or clarity of the image. I'm fairly certain that this minimal difference in resolution is what's fueling many of us to call UHD "4K."

This 256 horizontal pixel difference causes at least one major issue when dealing with consumer content. The problem is that almost all television content is presented in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio. If we were to view this content on a true 4K display, we would see black bars on the left and right side of the display to keep that original aspect ratio intact. While enthusiasts understand the reasoning behind this, most everyday viewers would find their TV content annoyingly masked with black bars, very similar to how they find black bars on their 1080p televisions annoying while viewing 'scope films. This is one of the main reasons for choosing 3840x2160 as the next-gen consumer resolution. It makes sense to keep that 1.78:1 aspect ratio as most content made for broadcast TV is presented this way.

True 4K is the resolution specified by the DCI (Digital Cinema Initiative) commercial standard. This is another area where UHD and 4K differ. Much like Blu-ray is the 1080p standard for encoding and presentation, 4K has its own set of standards that the DCI dictates. These standards are high end, resulting in exemplary image quality. While it isn't totally clear yet what kind of video encoding standards the new UHD video format will use, all rumors point to sub-par encoding. DCI 4K uses JPEG2000 video compression, up to 250Mbps video bitrate, 12-bit 4:4:4 video, and a much wider color gamut. HDMI 2.0 will most likely dictate the standards for UHD Blu-ray (or whatever they decide to call it). Unfortunately, HDMI has very little left to give as an interconnect standard. As a result, there is no way to transport the amount of information needed to exceed or even match the 4K DCI standard. Those in the know are under NDA (non-disclosure agreements), which means we won't know the specifics for at least another month or two. Rumors point to 10-bit 4:2:2 video for UHD video content at 24 frames per second and a doubling of the throughput to support higher bitrates.

As we can see, the term "4K" encompasses more than just resolution. I’m going to give everyone who's called UHD "4K" the benefit of the doubt and assume that everyone knows the differences. Heck, I'll admit it, I was one of you. So, if this is the case, why does everyone still call UHD "4K"?

The issue stems from a time where no one knew what the new format was going to be. We've only known for a fairly short time that the new resolution was going to be 3840x2160. This resolution was not the 4096x2160 that enthusiasts wanted. The A/V enthusiast community, including us here at AVSForum, are partly to blame for this naming error. We had way too much time on our hands to gossip, speculate, and more importantly, assume we were going to get a format that would derive from the DCI 4K standard regarding not only resolution, but video compression, bitrates, bit depth, chroma subsampling, color space, etc. This infatuation with wanting the best of the best turned anything next-generation digital video into "4K," even if that isn't what we got. What we now have is an entire industry afraid to let go of that 4K moniker because of how much the name has stuck, even though what we're getting isn't 4K in both resolution and video-encoding quality.

I've noticed many UHD products being described as "4K-UHD." Even the Wikipedia page for UHD now refers to UHD as "4K-UHD." If you go to Newegg or Amazon, many HDTVs and computer monitors have both 4K and UHD in the title. To those who don't know the difference, it can be confusing. If I was shopping for a 1080p HDTV and saw 2K and 1080p in the title, I'd be very confused. If I was shopping for a computer monitor and saw it listed as both 1920x1200 and 1920x1080, I'd be even more confused. Which one is it?!? I’m sorry folks, but UHD and 4K are not the same. It boggles my mind that at least one major manufacturer hasn't called BS on this.

I blame the CE industry for letting this issue continue. UHD is still one of those esoteric topics where all the CE manufacturers need to do is simply change their branding scheme to fix the issue. If you were to stop 100 regular folks on the street to see if they knew what 4K or UHD is, I'd wager that less than 10 percent could give you a correct answer. Sony has flat out said it will not drop the "4K" naming scheme even if its products aren't really 4K. It seems 4K is a much more marketable name than UHD to early adopters.

In Scott Wilkinson's recent interview with video guru Joe Kane, he speaks about the same issue. Kane seems just as upset as I am. But he offers a solution, and it's a fairly simple one. He thinks it could be as easy as getting people to start referring to UHD as "2160p." Kane's reasoning has to do with why we call our Full HD displays "1080p." Kane explains that we have always referenced consumer displays by their vertical resolution and commercial displays by their horizontal resolution. So 2160p could be a great alternative to UHD, just like 1080p, 720p, and 480p were before it. I, for one, agree. It seems like the logical solution here even if it doesn't roll off the tongue as easily as 4K does.

To get the change that’s needed, someone big needs to take a stand and completely drop the 4K naming scheme for home-theater products. I find this issue particularly troublesome because even enthusiasts seem completely content with making the mistake. I guess a good way to sum it up would be to say that the term "4K" already has a meaning—it refers to a resolution and a strict set of rules for presentation. We aren't getting the same resolution or the same set of rules with UHD, so why call it something it isn't? I think we here at AVSForum have an obligation to fix this. We're a large enough community to make a difference. This site alone gets over 2 million unique visitors per month. With enough word of mouth, or more specifically, forum posting, we can turn this thing around. Who's with me?
http://www.avsforum.com/a/the-not-so...een-uhd-and-4k





Sony Announces Internet TV Service, Plans to Start Testing it Later This Year
Janko Roettgers

Sony wants to launch its own online TV service with a cloud DVR and live TV feeds. The service will scheduled to go into testing in the U.S. later this year.

Not discouraged by Intel’s failure to launch its OnCue TV service, Sony just announced at CES that it wants to become a pay TV provider of is own and offer customers in the U.S. a cloud-based TV service with live TV and cloud DVR functionality.

Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Andrew House officially announced the service on stage during Sony’s CES keynote in Las Vegas Tuesday, saying that the company intends to start testing the service in the U.S. later this year. House said that the service will stream live and recorded programming to TVs, game consoles and mobile devices without the need for any additional set-top boxes, and that subscribers will be able to search across live and on-demand content.


Sony is uniquely qualified to launch such a service, Hall said, because it already has more than 70 million internet-enabled devices in the market, and he added that the PS3 is already the most popular device to stream Netflix content.

Hall didn’t provide additional details on the launch date or pricing, but said that more information would be revealed soon. Sony President and CEO Kaz Hirai added that the TV service is part of a plan to become “a single source of entertainment.”

Reports that Sony was looking to launch its own pay TV service first surfaced last year, and the company reportedly even inked a deal with Viacom in August. However, this is the first time Sony has actually confirmed these plans.

Intel had announced its own plans to launch an online TV service called OnCue early last year, originally with the goal to have it up and running by the end of 2013. However, the company has since abandoned these plans and is now looking to sell parts or all of OnCue to Verizon.
http://gigaom.com/2014/01/07/sony-cloud-tv-service/





Texas Library Offers Glimpse of Bookless Future
Paul J. Weber

Texas has seen the future of the public library, and it looks a lot like an Apple Store: Rows of glossy iMacs beckon. iPads mounted on a tangerine-colored bar invite readers. And hundreds of other tablets stand ready for checkout to anyone with a borrowing card.

Even the librarians imitate Apple’s dress code, wearing matching shirts and that standard-bearer of geek-chic, the hoodie. But this $2.3 million library might be most notable for what it does not have — any actual books.

That makes Bexar County’s BiblioTech the nation’s only bookless public library, a distinction that has attracted scores of digital bookworms, plus emissaries from as far away as Hong Kong who want to learn about the idea and possibly take it home.

“I told our people that you need to take a look at this. This is the future,” said Mary Graham, vice president of South Carolina’s Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce. “If you’re going to be building new library facilities, this is what you need to be doing.”

All-digital libraries have been on college campuses for years. But the county, which runs no other libraries, made history when it decided to open BiblioTech. It is the first bookless public library system in the country, according to information gathered by the American Library Association.

Similar proposals in other communities have been met with doubts. In California, the city of Newport Beach floated the concept of a bookless branch in 2011 until a backlash put stacks back in the plan. Nearly a decade earlier in Arizona, the Tucson-Pima library system opened an all-digital branch, but residents who said they wanted books ultimately got their way.

Graham toured BiblioTech in the fall and is pushing Charleston leaders for a bond measure in 2014 to fund a similar concept, right down to the same hip aesthetic reminiscent of Apple.

Except Apple Stores aren’t usually found in parts of town like this. BiblioTech is on the city’s economically depressed South Side and shares an old strip mall with a Bexar County government building. On a recent afternoon, one confused couple walked into the library looking for the justice of the peace.

San Antonio is the nation’s seventh-largest city but ranks 60th in literacy, according to census figures. Back in the early 2000s, community leaders in Bibliotech’s neighborhood of low-income apartments and thrift stores railed about not even having a nearby bookstore, said Laura Cole, BiblioTech’s project coordinator. A decade later, Cole said, most families in the area still don’t have wi-fi.

“How do you advance literacy with so few resources available?” she said.

Residents are taking advantage now. The library is on pace to surpass 100,000 visitors in its first year. Finding an open iMac among the four dozen at BiblioTech is often difficult after the nearby high school lets out, and about half of the facility’s e-readers are checked out at any given time, each loaded with up to five books. One of BiblioTech’s regulars is a man teaching himself Mandarin.

Head librarian Ashley Elkholf came from a traditional Wisconsin high school library and recalled the scourges of her old job: misshelved items hopelessly lost in the stacks, pages thoughtlessly ripped out of books and items that went unreturned by patrons who were unfazed by measly fines and lax enforcement.

But in the nearly four months since BiblioTech opened, Elkholf has yet to lend out one of her pricey tablets and never see it again. The space is also more economical than traditional libraries despite the technology: BiblioTech purchases its 10,000-title digital collection for the same price as physical copies, but the county saved millions on architecture because the building’s design didn’t need to accommodate printed books.

“If you have bookshelves, you have to structure the building so it can hold all of that weight,” Elkholf said. “Books are heavy, if you’ve ever had one fall on your foot.”

Up the road in Austin, for example, the city is building a downtown library to open in 2016 at a cost of $120 million. Even a smaller traditional public library that recently opened in nearby suburban Kyle cost that city about $1 million more than BiblioTech.

On her first visit, 19-year-old Abigail Reyes was only looking for a quiet space to study for an algebra exam. But she got a quick tutorial from a librarian on how to search for digital books and check out tablets before plopping down on a row of sleek couches.

“I kind of miss the books,” Reyes said. “I don’t like being on the tablets and stuff like that. It hurts my eyes.”

Across the room, Rosemary Caballeo tried shopping for health insurance on a set of computers reserved for enrollment in the Affordable Care Act. Her restless 2-year-old ran around and pawed at a row of keyboards. The little girl shrieked loudly, shattering the main room’s quiet. She was soon whisked outside by her father.

After all, it’s still a library.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...715_story.html





AT&T Allows Advertisers to Sponsor Mobile Data
Brian X. Chen

Say you want to watch a trailer for “The Wolf of Wall Street” on your smartphone. Why should you pay for the data required to display it when you are essentially viewing an advertisement?

That’s the idea behind a program that AT&T calls Sponsored Data. Businesses working with AT&T can pay for the data that is used to consume their content or services so that it does not show up on a customer’s phone bill.

AT&T on Monday announced three initial partners working with its Sponsored Data program, including Aquto, an ad platform that provides marketers tools to use sponsored data; Kony Solutions, a company that helps businesses develop apps; and UnitedHealth Group, the health care company, which plans to use the program to stream educational videos to people’s mobile devices.

AT&T said that when sponsored content shows up on customers’ phones, a Sponsored Data icon will be displayed to show that the content costs them nothing to watch.
C.E.S. 2014

The data sponsorship program is an example of maturation of the mobile ad space. Media companies and advertisers have struggled to find the ideal solution for serving advertisements on mobile products, partly because their smaller screens can make ads too intrusive and annoying. Sponsored mobile data could entice customers to watch ads they might otherwise have avoided because they would have incurred charges on their phone bill.

AT&T, the No. 2 American wireless carrier after Verizon Wireless, is still hugely lucrative. But the growth of new customer subscriptions has significantly slowed as the smartphone market has become saturated. That is why it has been trying different avenues to make money, like Digital Life, a connected home security system, and partnerships with automakers to sell mobile data plans for cars.

It’s unlikely AT&T will be the only American carrier offering a data sponsorship program. Verizon has been experimenting with a similar program, according to a person briefed on the company’s plans, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the project.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/0...r-mobile-data/





Did AT&T Just Create a Pay-for-Play Mobile Internet?
Brian Fung

AT&T just made surfing the mobile Web a little easier on your wallet — but in doing so, it risks threatening the long-term openness of the Internet.

With a new product unveiled Monday called Sponsored Data, AT&T subscribers will be able to take advantage of certain Internet services without that usage counting against their data caps. Instead of paying for that data out of their monthly allotment, customers' consumption will be paid for by the third-party companies offering the services used. Everyone who has a smartphone, tablet or mobile broadband subscription will be covered under the offering, and it seems like a great move by AT&T to help you save on your wireless bill.

AT&T has already sealed deals with three sponsors: United Health Group, which plans to use Sponsored Data to promote its visual, interactive customer service offering; Aquto, a mobile advertising platform that'll use its Sponsored Data to cover "long-format product infomercials" and other ads; and Kony Solutions, a company that provides mobile application platforms to other businesses. Each deal was negotiated separately and charges sponsors different prices, according to AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson foreshadowed the rise of subsidized data last year, telling investors in May that the industry would soon find ways to keep data charges from spiraling out of control.

On the one hand, Sponsored Data promises to relieve a bit of the pressure on you to keep a close eye on your data cap. On the other hand, critics say the setup establishes just the kind of pay-for-play Internet that consumer advocates have long warned might affect the wired Web if a federal court quashes regulations mandating that all traffic be treated equally. In this version of the future, Internet providers that charge businesses to reach people effectively steer consumers toward fee-paying services at the expense of others, limiting the power of Americans to make their own choices.

"The company that connects you to the Internet should not be in a position to control what you do on the Internet," said Michael Weinberg, acting co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge.

What AT&T is doing is a little different. It's not degrading or blocking "normal" Internet traffic, just shifting the cost onto a different player. Federal regulations that ban outright traffic discrimination also apply only to wired ISPs and not cellular carriers, so AT&T isn't likely to run afoul of those rules. But it's also why observers say the wireless industry is a kind of bellwether for the broader Internet when it comes to network neutrality.

It's still questionable whether Sponsored Data will save you money in the end. Companies that pay AT&T to provide their content for free might pass those costs onto consumers in other ways, whether those consumers are AT&T subscribers or not.

Critics also argue that Sponsored Data could make it harder for new businesses to grow if they can't afford to participate in the program. That said, if the companies that can afford it do pay up, that leaves more room in a customer's monthly data budget for those smaller businesses, so that might prove a wash.

Of course, data caps themselves are the subject of intense debate. They were initially justified as a method for managing congestion, but some network operators outside the wireless industry have grown increasingly frank about their real benefits as a revenue generator.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...bile-internet/





Will Digital Networks Ruin Us?
Joe Nocera

The most important book I read in 2013 was Jaron Lanier’s “Who Owns the Future?” Though it was published in May, I came to it late in the year. But this turned out to be fortuitous timing. With unemployment seemingly stalled out at around 7 percent in the aftermath of the Great Recession, with the leak of thousands of National Security Agency documents making news almost daily, with the continuing stories about the erosion of privacy in the digital economy, “Who Owns the Future?” puts forth a kind of universal theory that ties all these things together. It also puts forth some provocative, unconventional ideas for ensuring that the inevitable dominance of software in every corner of society will be healthy instead of harmful.

Lanier has an unusual authority to criticize the digital economy: He was there, more or less, at the creation. Among (many) other things, he founded the first company to sell virtual reality products. Another of his start-ups was sold to Google. As a consultant, he has had assignments with “Wal-Mart, Fannie Mae, major banks and hedge funds,” as he notes in “Who Owns the Future?” But unlike most of his fellow technologists, he eventually came to feel that the rise of digital networks was no panacea.

On the contrary: “What I came away with from having access to these varied worlds was a realization that they were all remarkably similar,” he writes. “The big players often gained benefits from digital networks to an amazing degree, but they were also constrained, even imprisoned, by the same dynamics.”

Over time, the same network efficiencies that had given them their great advantages would become the instrument of their failures. In the financial services industry, it led to the financial crisis. In the case of Wal-Mart, its adoption of technology to manage its supply chain at first reaped great benefits, but over time it cost competitors and suppliers hundreds of thousands of jobs, thus “gradually impoverishing its own customer base,” as Lanier put it to me.

The N.S.A.? It developed computer technology that could monitor the entire world — and, in the process, lost control of the contractors it employed. As for Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon et al., well, in Lanier’s view, it’s only a matter of time before their advantages, too, disintegrate.

There are two additional components to Lanier’s thesis. The first is that the digital economy has done as much as any single thing to hollow out the middle class. (When I asked him about the effect of globalization, he said that globalization was “just one form of network efficiency.” See what I mean about a universal theory?) His great example here is Kodak and Instagram. At its height, writes Lanier “Kodak employed more than 140,000 people.” Yes, Kodak made plenty of mistakes, but look at what is replacing it: “When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people.”

Which leads nicely to Lanier’s final big point: that the value of these new companies comes from us. “Instagram isn’t worth a billion dollars just because those 13 employees are extraordinary,” he writes. “Instead, its value comes from the millions of users who contribute to the network without being paid for it.” He adds, “Networks need a great number of people to participate in them to generate significant value. But when they have them, only a small number of people get paid. This has the net effect of centralizing wealth and limiting overall economic growth.” Thus, in Lanier’s view, is income inequality also partly a consequence of the digital economy.

It is Lanier’s radical idea that people should get paid whenever their information is used. He envisions a different kind of digital economy, in which creators of content — whether a blog post or a Facebook photograph — would receive micropayments whenever that content was used. A digital economy that appears to give things away for free — in return for being able to invade the privacy of its customers for commercial gain — isn’t free at all, he argues.

Lanier’s ideas raise as many questions as they answer, and he makes no pretense to having it all figured out. “I know some of this will turn out to be wrong,” he told me. “But I just don’t know which part.”

Still his ideas about reformulating the economy — creating what he calls a “humanistic economy” — offer much food for thought. Lanier wants to create a dynamic where digital networks expand the pie rather than shrink it, and rebuild the middle class instead of destroying it.

“If Google and Facebook were smart,” he said, “they would want to enrich their own customers.” So far, he adds, Silicon Valley has made “the stupid choice” — to grow their businesses at the expense of their own customers.

Lanier’s message is that it can’t last. And it won’t.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/op...s-ruin-us.html





Burglars Who Took On F.B.I. Abandon Shadows
Mark Mazzetti

The perfect crime is far easier to pull off when nobody is watching.

So on a night nearly 43 years ago, while Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier bludgeoned each other over 15 rounds in a televised title bout viewed by millions around the world, burglars took a lock pick and a crowbar and broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation office in a suburb of Philadelphia, making off with nearly every document inside.

They were never caught, and the stolen documents that they mailed anonymously to newspaper reporters were the first trickle of what would become a flood of revelations about extensive spying and dirty-tricks operations by the F.B.I. against dissident groups.

The burglary in Media, Pa., on March 8, 1971, is a historical echo today, as disclosures by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden have cast another unflattering light on government spying and opened a national debate about the proper limits of government surveillance. The burglars had, until now, maintained a vow of silence about their roles in the operation. They were content in knowing that their actions had dealt the first significant blow to an institution that had amassed enormous power and prestige during J. Edgar Hoover’s lengthy tenure as director.

“When you talked to people outside the movement about what the F.B.I. was doing, nobody wanted to believe it,” said one of the burglars, Keith Forsyth, who is finally going public about his involvement. “There was only one way to convince people that it was true, and that was to get it in their handwriting.”

Mr. Forsyth, now 63, and other members of the group can no longer be prosecuted for what happened that night, and they agreed to be interviewed before the release this week of a book written by one of the first journalists to receive the stolen documents. The author, Betty Medsger, a former reporter for The Washington Post, spent years sifting through the F.B.I.’s voluminous case file on the episode and persuaded five of the eight men and women who participated in the break-in to end their silence.

Unlike Mr. Snowden, who downloaded hundreds of thousands of digital N.S.A. files onto computer hard drives, the Media burglars did their work the 20th-century way: they cased the F.B.I. office for months, wore gloves as they packed the papers into suitcases, and loaded the suitcases into getaway cars. When the operation was over, they dispersed. Some remained committed to antiwar causes, while others, like John and Bonnie Raines, decided that the risky burglary would be their final act of protest against the Vietnam War and other government actions before they moved on with their lives.

“We didn’t need attention, because we had done what needed to be done,” said Mr. Raines, 80, who had, with his wife, arranged for family members to raise the couple’s three children if they were sent to prison. “The ’60s were over. We didn’t have to hold on to what we did back then.”

A Meticulous Plan

The burglary was the idea of William C. Davidon, a professor of physics at Haverford College and a fixture of antiwar protests in Philadelphia, a city that by the early 1970s had become a white-hot center of the peace movement. Mr. Davidon was frustrated that years of organized demonstrations seemed to have had little impact.

In the summer of 1970, months after President Richard M. Nixon announced the United States’ invasion of Cambodia, Mr. Davidon began assembling a team from a group of activists whose commitment and discretion he had come to trust.

The group — originally nine, before one member dropped out — concluded that it would be too risky to try to break into the F.B.I. office in downtown Philadelphia, where security was tight. They soon settled on the bureau’s satellite office in Media, in an apartment building across the street from the county courthouse.

That decision carried its own risks: Nobody could be certain whether the satellite office would have any documents about the F.B.I.’s surveillance of war protesters, or whether a security alarm would trip as soon as the burglars opened the door.

The group spent months casing the building, driving past it at all times of the night and memorizing the routines of its residents.

“We knew when people came home from work, when their lights went out, when they went to bed, when they woke up in the morning,” said Mr. Raines, who was a professor of religion at Temple University at the time. “We were quite certain that we understood the nightly activities in and around that building.”

But it wasn’t until Ms. Raines got inside the office that the group grew confident that it did not have a security system. Weeks before the burglary, she visited the office posing as a Swarthmore College student researching job opportunities for women at the F.B.I.

The burglary itself went off largely without a hitch, except for when Mr. Forsyth, the designated lock-picker, had to break into a different entrance than planned when he discovered that the F.B.I. had installed a lock on the main door that he could not pick. He used a crowbar to break the second lock, a deadbolt above the doorknob.

After packing the documents into suitcases, the burglars piled into getaway cars and rendezvoused at a farmhouse to sort through what they had stolen. To their relief, they soon discovered that the bulk of it was hard evidence of the F.B.I.’s spying on political groups. Identifying themselves as the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the F.B.I., the burglars sent select documents to several newspaper reporters. Two weeks after the burglary, Ms. Medsger wrote the first article based on the files, after the Nixon administration tried unsuccessfully to get The Post to return the documents.

Other news organizations that had received the documents, including The New York Times, followed with their own reports.

Ms. Medsger’s article cited what was perhaps the most damning document from the cache, a 1970 memorandum that offered a glimpse into Hoover’s obsession with snuffing out dissent. The document urged agents to step up their interviews of antiwar activists and members of dissident student groups.

“It will enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across there is an F.B.I. agent behind every mailbox,” the message from F.B.I. headquarters said. Another document, signed by Hoover himself, revealed widespread F.B.I. surveillance of black student groups on college campuses.

But the document that would have the biggest impact on reining in the F.B.I.’s domestic spying activities was an internal routing slip, dated 1968, bearing a mysterious word: Cointelpro.

Neither the Media burglars nor the reporters who received the documents understood the meaning of the term, and it was not until several years later, when the NBC News reporter Carl Stern obtained more files from the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act, that the contours of Cointelpro — shorthand for Counterintelligence Program — were revealed.

Since 1956, the F.B.I. had carried out an expansive campaign to spy on civil rights leaders, political organizers and suspected Communists, and had tried to sow distrust among protest groups. Among the grim litany of revelations was a blackmail letter F.B.I. agents had sent anonymously to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., threatening to expose his extramarital affairs if he did not commit suicide.

“It wasn’t just spying on Americans,” said Loch K. Johnson, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Georgia who was an aide to Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho. “The intent of Cointelpro was to destroy lives and ruin reputations.”

Senator Church’s investigation in the mid-1970s revealed still more about the extent of decades of F.B.I. abuses, and led to greater congressional oversight of the F.B.I. and other American intelligence agencies. The Church Committee’s final report about the domestic surveillance was blunt. “Too many people have been spied upon by too many government agencies, and too much information has been collected,” it read.

By the time the committee released its report, Hoover was dead and the empire he had built at the F.B.I. was being steadily dismantled. The roughly 200 agents he had assigned to investigate the Media burglary came back empty-handed, and the F.B.I. closed the case on March 11, 1976 — three days after the statute of limitations for burglary charges had expired.

Michael P. Kortan, a spokesman for the F.B.I., said that “a number of events during that era, including the Media burglary, contributed to changes to how the F.B.I. identified and addressed domestic security threats, leading to reform of the F.B.I.’s intelligence policies and practices and the creation of investigative guidelines by the Department of Justice.”

According to Ms. Medsger’s book, “The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret F.B.I.,” only one of the burglars was on the F.B.I.’s final list of possible suspects before the case was closed.

A Retreat Into Silence

The eight burglars rarely spoke to one another while the F.B.I. investigation was proceeding and never again met as a group.

Mr. Davidon died late last year from complications of Parkinson’s disease. He had planned to speak publicly about his role in the break-in, but three of the burglars have chosen to remain anonymous.

Among those who have come forward — Mr. Forsyth, the Raineses and a man named Bob Williamson — there is some wariness of how their decision will be viewed.

The passage of years has worn some of the edges off the once radical political views of John and Bonnie Raines. But they said they felt a kinship toward Mr. Snowden, whose revelations about N.S.A. spying they see as a bookend to their own disclosures so long ago.

They know some people will criticize them for having taken part in something that, if they had been caught and convicted, might have separated them from their children for years. But they insist they would never have joined the team of burglars had they not been convinced they would get away with it.

“It looks like we’re terribly reckless people,” Mr. Raines said. “But there was absolutely no one in Washington — senators, congressmen, even the president — who dared hold J. Edgar Hoover to accountability.”

“It became pretty obvious to us,” he said, “that if we don’t do it, nobody will.”

The Retro Report video with this article is the 24th in a documentary series presented by The New York Times. The video project was started with a grant from Christopher Buck. Retro Report has a staff of 13 journalists and 10 contributors led by Kyra Darnton, a former “60 Minutes” producer. It is a nonprofit video news organization that aims to provide a thoughtful counterweight to today’s 24/7 news cycle.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/us...n-shadows.html





How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet
Steven Levy

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and the other tech titans have had to fight for their lives against their own government. An exclusive look inside their year from hell—and why the Internet will never be the same.

On June 6, 2013, Washington Post reporters called the communications departments of Apple, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and other Internet companies. The day before, a report in the British newspaper The Guardian had shocked Americans with evidence that the telecommunications giant Verizon had voluntarily handed a database of every call made on its network to the National Security Agency. The piece was by reporter Glenn Greenwald, and the information came from Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old IT consultant who had left the US with hundreds of thousands of documents detailing the NSA’s secret procedures.

Greenwald was the first but not the only journalist that Snowden reached out to. The Post’s Barton Gellman had also connected with him. Now, collaborating with documentary filmmaker and Snowden confidante Laura Poitras, he was going to extend the story to Silicon Valley. Gellman wanted to be the first to expose a top-secret NSA program called Prism. Snowden’s files indicated that some of the biggest companies on the web had granted the NSA and FBI direct access to their servers, giving the agencies the ability to grab a person’s audio, video, photos, emails, and documents. The government urged Gellman not to identify the firms involved, but Gellman thought it was important. “Naming those companies is what would make it real to Americans,” he says. Now a team of Post reporters was reaching out to those companies for comment.

It would be the start of a chain reaction that threatened the foundations of the industry. The subject would dominate headlines for months and become the prime topic of conversation in tech circles. For years, the tech companies’ key policy issue had been negotiating the delicate balance between maintaining customers’ privacy and providing them benefits based on their personal data. It was new and contro#versial territory, sometimes eclipsing the substance of current law, but over time the companies had achieved a rough equilibrium that allowed them to push forward. The instant those phone calls from reporters came in, that balance was destabilized, as the tech world found itself ensnared in a fight far bigger than the ones involving oversharing on Facebook or ads on Gmail. Over the coming months, they would find themselves at war with their own government, in a fight for the very future of the Internet.

It wasn’t just revenue at stake. So were the very ideals that had sustained the tech world since the birth of the Internet.

But first they had to figure out what to tell the Post. “We had 90 minutes to respond,” says Facebook’s head of security, Joe Sullivan. No one at the company had ever heard of a program called Prism. And the most damning implication—that Facebook and the other companies granted the NSA direct access to their servers in order to suck up vast quantities of information—seemed outright wrong. CEO Mark Zuckerberg was taken aback by the charge and asked his executives whether it was true. Their answer: no.

Similar panicked conversations were taking place at Google, Apple, and Microsoft. “We asked around: Are there any surreptitious ways of getting information?” says Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel. “No.”

Nevertheless, the Post published its report that day describing the Prism program. (The Guardian ran a similar story about an hour later.) The piece included several images leaked from a 41-slide NSA PowerPoint, including one that listed the tech companies that participated in the program and the dates they ostensibly began fully cooperating. Microsoft came first, in September 2007, followed the next year by Yahoo. Google and Facebook were added in 2009. Most recent was Apple, in October 2012. The slide used each company’s corporate logo. It was like a sales force boasting a series of trophy contracts. Just a day earlier, the public had learned that Verizon and probably other telephone companies had turned over all their call records to the government. Now, it seemed, the same thing was happen#ing with email, search history, even Instagram pictures.

The tech companies quickly issued denials that they had granted the US govern#ment direct access to their customers’ data. But that stance was complicated by the fact that they did participate—often unwillingly—in a government program that required them to share data when a secret court ordered them to do so. Google and its counterparts couldn’t talk about all the details, in part because they were legally barred from full disclosure and in part because they didn’t know all the details about how the program actually worked. And so their responses were seen less as full-throated denials than mealy-mouthed contrivances.

They hardly had the time to figure out how to frame their responses to Gellman’s account before President Obama weighed in. While implicitly confirming the program (and condemning the leak), he said, “With respect to the Internet and emails, this does not apply to US citizens and does not apply to people living in the United States.” This may have soothed some members of the public, but it was no help to the tech industry. The majority of Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo customers are not citizens of the US. Now those customers, as well as foreign regulatory agencies like those in the European Union, were being led to believe that using US-based services meant giving their data directly to the NSA.

The hard-earned trust that the tech giants had spent years building was in danger of evaporating—and they seemed powerless to do anything about it. Legally gagged, they weren’t free to provide the full context of their cooperation or resistance. Even the most emphatic denial—a blog post by Google CEO Larry Page and chief legal officer David Drummond headlined, “What the …”—did not quell suspicions. How could it, when an NSA slide indicated that anyone’s personal information was just one click away? When Drummond took questions on the Guardian website later in the month, his interlocutors were hostile:

“Isn’t this whole show not just a face-saving exercise … after you have been found to be in cahoots with the NSA?”

“How can we tell if Google is lying to us?”

“We lost a decade-long trust in you, Google.”

“I will cease using Google mail.”

The others under siege took note. “Every time we spoke it seemed to make matters worse,” an executive at one company says. “We just were not believed.”

“The fact is, the government can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” says Face#book’s global communications head, Michael Buckley. “We can put out any statement or statistics, but in the wake of what feels like weekly disclosures of other government activity, the question is, will anyone believe us?”

At an appearance at a tech conference last September, Facebook’s Zuckerberg expressed his disgust. “The government blew it,” he said. But the consequences of the government’s actions—and the spectacular leak that informed the world about it—was now plopped into the problem set of Zuckerberg, Page, Tim Cook, Marissa Mayer, Steve Ballmer, and anyone else who worked for or invested in a company that held customer data on its servers.

Not just revenue was at stake. So were ideals that have sustained the tech world since the Internet exploded from a Department of Defense project into an interconnected global web that spurred promises of a new era of comity. The Snowden leaks called into question the Internet’s role as a symbol of free speech and empowerment. If the net were seen as a means of widespread surveillance, the resulting paranoia might affect the way people used it. Nations outraged at US intelligence-gathering practices used the disclosures to justify a push to require data generated in their countries to remain there, where it could not easily be hoovered by American spies. Implementing such a scheme could balkanize the web, destroying its open essence and dramatically raising the cost of doing business.

Silicon Valley was reeling, collateral damage in the war on terror. And it was only going to get worse.

While tech companies didn’t know the name Prism before June, they came to under#stand that it refers to a program several years old, in which they turn over speci#fied data to the government, often without formal warrants, for national security purposes. The program’s legal justification derives from a series of laws, renewals, and extensions. The Foreign Intelligence Security Act of 1978, widely referred to as FISA, created a secret court that blesses information requests. The FISA Amend#ments Act of 2008 carved out a new section of the law, 702, which gave legal cover to the warrantless surveillance programs operated in total secrecy under President Bush; queries are often called 702s. The NSA cites the FISA Amendments Act as the specific legal basis for Prism. More covert surveillance practices (outside of Prism) are justified under Reagan-era Executive Order 12333, which authorized the NSA to collect pretty much any data from outside the US that concerns foreign persons.

In a sense, Prism is a child of the Patriot Act, which set a post-9/11 tone for the sacrifice of some civil liberties in service of national security. “It was passed in the middle of a huge, understandable fear,” says US senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), who voted for it and is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “I felt it had a time stamp on it. Nobody reading it would be inclined to think of bulk collection of data on millions and millions of Americans.”

Some companies seemed perfectly comfortable turning over information about their customer bases to the NSA. Verizon has never denied passing along its key billing information, including the number and duration of every call made by each of its millions of customers. In a way, this isn’t surprising. Telephone companies don’t sell themselves on trust, and customers have few expectations of their relationship with those quasi-monopolistic behemoths. Instead of catering to consumers, telcos seem to prioritize winning favor with the government that regulates them.

The prospect of multiple “splinternets” worries many in the tech industry. “The US needs to help fix this problem,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says.

Technology companies are another matter. It’s almost a cliché when tech CEOs claim that without the trust of their users, they would have no business. They depend on customers’ willingness to share information. In exchange, those customers receive more and better services, and expect that the companies will keep their personal data private and secure and will be transparent about any exceptions. Users had no reason to think their information would be handed over to the government without a warrant.

At least one company challenged those requests as unconstitutional. Yahoo waged a secret battle in the FISA court to resist turning over user data. But it was for naught. An August 22, 2008, order determined that the government’s interest in national security, along with safeguards in the program, outweighed privacy concerns in a manner consistent with the law. A subsequent appeal went nowhere. Yahoo’s unsuccessful challenge set a marker for those who might resist in the future: The FISA request program was legal, and any company that failed to cooperate would risk the contempt charges specified in the law.

The requests might have offended some of the large tech companies but weren’t logistically challenging. None say they were forced to make significant infrastruc#ture changes as a result. Generally they would divert requested data to special equipment owned by the government. In some cases they even hosted the equip#ment on company property.

But compliance wasn’t always as easy for smaller companies. For example, the government demanded that Lavabit—a secure email startup that allowed users, including Snowden, to encrypt messages—hand over the keys to Snowden’s communications. Lavabit could not do so without exposing the information on all its customers and ultimately folded rather than comply.

There appear to be smaller ways to resist, though. “The government can request the information, but they can’t compel how the information is given,” says Twitter’s general counsel, Vijaya Gadde. “You can make it easy or you can make it hard.” Google also says it pushes back when a request is “overly broad.” Pocket#book issues present a subtler means of resistance. FISA requires the government to reimburse companies for the cost of retrieving information. Google says it doesn’t bother to charge the government. But one company says it uses that clause, hoping to limit the extent of the requests. “At first, we thought we shouldn’t charge for it,” says an executive of that company. “Then we realized, it’s good—it forces them to stop and think.”

In the end, though, there is a greater financial motive to cooperate. “Large com#panies do a lot of business with the government,” one top technology executive points out. “It’s hard to look at the government officers and say, “‘We’re fighting you on this—oh, and can I have that $400 million contract?’”

Tech companies also grew more vocal in their requests to publicize the number of FISA requests they received. They were only allowed to release reports that tally all government requests, including those from civil court and law enforcement. (The raw numbers, often in the low thousands, don’t seem scary, but they lack context.) Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Microsoft petitioned the FISA court to loosen the gags, and a long list of technology firms, including Apple and LinkedIn, submitted amicus briefs in support. But the government filed passionately opposing briefs and prevailed.

The clash illustrates a seemingly irresolvable conflict. While Silicon Valley must be transparent in many regards, spy agencies operate under a cloak of obfuscation. There is certainly a reason for the secrecy; evildoers who use an Internet service presumably would be less likely to keep using it if they were aware that the pro#vider was sharing communications with the NSA. But one of the disturbing conse#quences of secret programs is the destructive shroud of doubt they cast over every#thing they touch. Months after Snowden’s leak, basic facts about Prism remain elusive. How much information is actually collected by the program? Exactly what kind of cooperation did the companies offer after those dates specified on that NSA PowerPoint slide? The companies contend that in addition to what they can’t say, there’s plenty they don’t know.

“We’re still guessing,” says Richard Salgado, Google’s director of information security and law enforcement. “We’re not the author of those slides. We have no idea where they got some of that information.”

“The question goes to issues of a highly classified nature,” says Tekedra Mawa#kana, Yahoo’s head of global public policy.

All summer, the tech companies tried to deal with the fallout from Prism, while the NSA tried to figure out how to respond to the Snowden leaks. And then things got uglier for both sides.

In October, a Snowden leak exposed a program in which the NSA, without the knowledge or cooperation of the companies involved, managed to collect the address-book data of millions of people. The Washington Post reported that over the course of a single day, the NSA had collected “444,743 email address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail, and 22,881 from unspecified other providers.” The practice was categorized internally at the NSA as an upstream method to collect data as it flows through the Internet, as opposed to downstream methods, like Prism, in which information was provided directly from the source. (In an earlier story about Prism, the Post printed a slide detailing the two approaches, which instructed analysts: “You should use both.”)

Then Gellman and his Post team revealed documents detailing how the NSA, working with its British counterpart, GCHQ, had hacked into the traffic that moved exclusively on the private fiber connections linking the respective data centers of Google and Yahoo. The codename for this upstream program was Muscular.

In one sense, the news cleared up a mystery that had been baffling the companies. “It provided us a key to finally understanding what was going on,” says Microsoft’s general counsel, Brad Smith. “We had been reading about the NSA reportedly having a massive amount of data. We felt that we and the others in the industry had been providing a small amount of data. It was hard to reconcile, and this was a very logical explanation.”

Still, news of the government raid on data-center traffic hit the industry with the visceral shock of having one’s home robbed. The betrayal was most strikingly illustrated in a PowerPoint slide that showed how the NSA had bypassed Google’s encryption, inserting a probe as data moved from its servers across the open Internet. Between two big clouds—one representing the public Internet, the other labeled “Google Cloud”—there was a little hand-drawn smiley face, a blithe emoji gotcha never meant to be seen by its victim. Google’s Drummond wrote an indig#nant statement to the Post, describing the company as “outraged.” Yahoo’s direc#tor of security, Ramses Martinez, endorses the sentiment. “It was news to us,” he says of Muscular. “We put a lot of work into securing our data.”

It’s one thing to object to a legal process that one believes is unconstitutional. It’s quite another to be working for an American company, charged with protecting the privacy of customers, and find that the eyes staring across from you on the virtual Maginot Line of cyberdefense are those of the United States of America.

“At first we were in an arms race with sophisticated criminals,” says Eric Grosse, Google’s head of security. “Then we found ourselves in an arms race with certain nation-state actors [with a reputation for cyberattacks]. And now we’re in an arms race with the best nation-state actors.” Primarily, the US government.

But perhaps the most authentic expression of betrayal came from a relatively unknown Google security engineer named Brandon Downey in a post on his personal Google+ account. He prefaced his message by stating that he was speaking only for himself—but he might as well have been channeling his colleagues across the industry:

Fuck these guys. I’ve spent the last ten years of my life trying to keep Google’s users safe and secure from the many diverse threats Google faces. I’ve seen armies of machines DOS-ing Google. I’ve seen worms DOS’ing Google to find vulnerabilities in other people’s software. I’ve seen criminal gangs figure out malware. I’ve seen spyware masquerading as toolbars so thick it breaks computers because it interferes with the other spyware. I’ve even seen oppressive governments use state-sponsored hacking to target dissidents … But after spending all that time helping in my tiny way to protect Google—one of the greatest things to arise from the internet—seeing this, well, it’s just a little like coming home from War with Sauron, destroying the One Ring, only to discover the NSA is on the front porch of the Shire chopping down the Party Tree and outsourcing all the hobbit farmers with half-orcs and whips.

Since the revelations, many companies have been beefing up their security. Google’s Grosse had long pushed to implement encryption on data both as it moved across public networks and within the company’s data centers—a tactic the company had begun to pursue. “We were partway through deploying when we learned how far the NSA had gotten,” Grosse says. “The hypothetical thing we were worried about was finally happening.”

Yahoo, which has lagged in adopting additional encryption, vows to strengthen it, including on traffic between its data centers, by the end of March. “There is nothing more important to us than protecting our users’ privacy,” CEO Marissa Mayer said in a statement. Facebook and Microsoft plan to phase in a technique called Perfect Forward Secrecy, which drastically limits the information an intelligence agency might be able to access by using many more secret keys to encode data. (Google and Twitter already use it.) Previously, cracking a single cryptographic key would open a treasure trove of information, but with forward secrecy, even sophisticated cryptoanalysis gets you only a small portion of the loot. The point of such measures, wrote Microsoft’s Smith in a blog post, was to ensure that government access to data is “decided by courts rather than dictated by technological might.”

But even strong encryption won’t necessarily keep out the NSA. Another Snowden-generated scoop, this one a collaboration between ProPublica and The New York Times, detailed the agency’s spectacular recent success in cracking popular forms of cryptography. The tactics include using purloined or company-supplied keys to decode all the messages of a major Internet service and exploiting unreported vulnerabilities in software systems. Some documents raised the possibility—already suspected by some in the crypto community—that the NSA helped promote weak encryption standards that it knows how to crack. It is a well-known principle of cybersecurity that any flaw will eventually be discovered and exploited. If in fact the NSA was not reporting known security holes, then it risked exposing domestic information and secrets to evildoers. It may even have allowed foreign governments to snatch high-value corporate secrets.

“The NSA is willing to compromise the security of everything to get what they want,” security expert Bruce Schneier says.

“Think about the damage this does to America,” says US Representative Rush Holt (D-New Jersey), who is the rare member of Congress with a PhD in physics—and one of a number of legislators pursuing measures that would curtail the NSA’s activities. “The NSA is saying, ‘We’ve got to make sure the encryption has flaws so we can decrypt.’ Isn’t that the pinnacle of arrogance? No one else knows how to do it or is as smart as we are. They won’t realize we’ve degraded our product. But the truth always comes out. And America is worse off because of it.”

Certainly the tech companies felt worse off. In November, the German newsweekly Der Spiegel—another recipient of Snowden leaks—described an NSA/GCHQ exploit that seemed tailor-made to erode trust. In an attempt to gain access to the Brussels-based telecommunications firm Belgacom, the agencies set up bogus versions of sites like Slashdot and LinkedIn. When employees tried to access the sites from corporate computers, their requests were diverted to the phony replicas, which the spies used to inject malware into their machines.

Using considerable understatement, LinkedIn’s general counsel, Erika Rottenberg, says, “We are not happy that our intellectual property is being used in that way.” It is not hard to see why. If foreign customers can’t know whether they are using a legitimate social network or a spy-created fake, they are liable to log off altogether.

For years, companies from espionage-happy countries like China have been spurned by overseas buyers who didn’t trust their products. Now it’s America’s turn. And that is already having an impact on young companies looking to grow internationally. “Right now, our ad business is 95 percent US-based,” says David Karp, founder of Tumblr. “As we start to take this business overseas, we’re running up against stricter EU laws, particularly on privacy, as part of their reaction to US practices on the Internet.”

“The other day I saw my first pitch that exploited the situation,” says Brad Burnham, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures. “It was a Dropbox clone that told us, ‘We’re in Europe and we have a government that doesn’t snoop!’” Though the major companies have not yet reported losing large amounts of business, they do acknowledge that their overseas customers are worried. Forrester Research estimates that as much as $180 billion could be lost due in large part to overseas companies choosing not to patronize the American-based cloud. “American companies are feeling shellacked by overeager surveillance,” says US senator Wyden. “It reduces our competitiveness in a tough global economy.”

Even so, a decline in trust, or even business, is not the tech companies’ biggest worry in the post-Snowden era. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes that the inherent value of the Internet will keep his users coming to the big online services. But he is among those who fear that the NSA revelations have unleashed a potential backlash from other nations that could hurt not only those companies but the net itself. “Part of the reason the US blew it is that governments around the world are now threatening the security of the Internet by passing their own laws that permit intrusions on Internet users,” he says.

Zuckerberg is referring to a movement to balkanize the Internet—a long-standing effort that would potentially destroy the web itself. The basic notion is that the personal data of a nation’s citizens should be stored on servers within its borders. For some proponents of the idea it’s a form of protectionism, a prod for nationals to use local IT services. For others it’s a way to make it easier for a country to snoop on its own citizens. The idea never posed much of a threat, until the NSA leaks—and the fears of foreign surveillance they sparked—caused some countries to seriously pursue it. After learning that the NSA had bugged her, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff began pushing a law requiring that the personal data of Brazilians be stored inside the country. Malaysia recently enacted a similar law, and India is also pursuing data protectionism.

For years, companies from espionage-happy countries like China have been spurned by overseas buyers who didn’t trust their products. Now it’s America’s turn.

To most people familiar with Internet protocols, this sounds crazy. Google’s Drummond refers to the result—dozens of independent Internets that don’t com#municate with one another—as “splinternets.” “It’s not realistic and very short#sighted,” LinkedIn’s Rottenberg says. “How is that even implemented? If I’m a Brazilian resident and I’m traveling, I can’t get my data?”

It’s not just developing economies that are considering this route. In Germany, where the NSA bugged the phone of chancellor Angela Merkel, there is talk of a similar scheme, called Schengen routing. Renè Obermann, chief executive of Teutonic giant Deutsche Telecom, seemed to endorse the principle at a European cybersecurity conference. In the pre-Snowden world, such a proposal would have been hooted down. But now Obermann was speaking to an audience that was all but armed with pitchforks, ready to storm the listening posts of American spooks.

“The Internet was built without reference to international borders, and that has allowed for huge innovation,” Yahoo’s Mawakana says. “But how does it function when countries try to pin the cloud to the ground? What if Indonesia pins, Brussels pins, and Brazil pins? Will companies invest equally across the world?”

One of the worst effects could be to dampen the prospects of startup companies. Would Facebook or YouTube ever have gotten off the ground if they had to figure out how to store their data in dozens of different countries? “More and more markets, like Brazil, are working on passing laws that would basically say, ‘You can’t do business here unless you physically house user data in our country,’” Karp says. “That’s an incredibly expensive proposition for Tumblr, but it’s impossible for the aspiring young company that wants to build something for everyone to use over the entire world.”

“The US needs to help fix this problem,” Zuckerberg says. But the Obama admini#stration worries that any US government attempts to do so will only fortify the resolve of other nations to balkanize—to prove that they will not be bullied. So it’s up to the industry to make the case.

Previously, companies could argue that balkanization would give the citizens of those artificially isolated countries less choice and more censorship and snooping. But that’s a hard sell now that Snowden has revealed that the US—through its tech companies—is the one snooping on the rest of the world.

“This isn’t the companies’ fault. They were compelled to do it. As a nation, we have a responsibility to stand up for the companies, both domestically and internation#ally. That is our nation’s best interest. We don’t want our companies to lose their economic capability and advantage. It’s for the future of our country.”

Those words could have come from a policy spokesperson for Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or Yahoo. Or one of the legislators criticizing the NSA’s tactics. Or even a civil liberties group opposing the NSA. But the source is US Army general Keith Alexander, director of the NSA. Still, even as he acknowledges that tech companies have been forced into a tough position, he insists that his programs are legal, necessary, and respectful of privacy.

The NSA is legendarily tight-lipped, so much so that for decades it refused to publicly acknowledge its own existence. But, in one of the less heralded consequences of the Snowden revelations, it has apparently realized that it must defend itself to the press. And so, on a crisp day in early November, I am invited to visit its imposing glass-walled headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. After submitting my personal data—including the serial number of my tape recorder—I pass through three security checkpoints and park my car in a specified space. Eventually I take a seat in a conference room bedecked with patriotic posters that trumpet national security and privacy. I am introduced to general counsel Rajesh De; Anne Neuberger, the NSA’s point person for partnerships with the private sector; and Rick Ledgett, a deputy director who heads the agency’s Media Leaks Task Force, a position created last summer for Snowden damage control.

And then the top man enters, a surprise participant who wants to set the tone for the interview, staying for the first 20 minutes of a session that will last more than two hours. Trim in physique and efficient in expression, Alexander has a charismatic confidence that clearly has aided him in ascending to a key role in national security.

“That program, by itself, is the hornet’s nest,” Alexander says in reference to Prism. “It is the hornet’s nest that [enables] the NSA to see threats from Pakistan and Afghanistan and around the world, share those insights with the FBI—who can look inside the United States, based on their authorities—and find out, is there something bad going to happen here?” Alexander cites the case of Najibullah Zazi, the radical Islamist who planned to bomb the New York City subways in 2009, implying that information collected under the Prism program led to his capture.

“My concern is that, without knowing the facts, people will say, ‘Let’s put that hornet’s nest away.’ We sure would like to get rid of that hornet’s nest. We would like to give it to somebody else, anybody else. But we recognize that if we do that, our nation now is at greater risk for a terrorist attack. So we’re going to do the right thing; we’re going to hold on to it, let people look at the options. If there is a better option, put it on the table.”

Oddly, at heart, the NSA’s complaints sound remarkably similar to those of the tech companies: People don’t understand us. “No one knows how the NSA works,” Ledgett says. “It’s always been a black box, Enemy of the State movies, stuff like that. People don’t understand the NSA’s checks and balances.”

That’s one of the key points these officials want to make: While the NSA might collect a lot of data, rules and oversight limit the extent to which privacy is compromised. In an earlier speech, Alexander said, “You need the haystack to find the needle.” Simply gathering the haystack is benign, the officials claim, because ample protections exist to constrain any searches of that information. De refers to the comprehensive collection of voice call metadata as “one of the most highly regulated programs in the entire federal government.” He describes in detail the multiple times it has been reauthorized in Congress and the courts, the limited number of people who have access to it, and the oversight employed to make sure that they use it as directed. (In December, two federal judges weighed in on the constitutionality of the government’s collection of phone metadata. US District Court judge Richard Leon ruled that the program likely violates the Fourth Amendment but stayed his order pending appeal. In a separate case 11 days later, however, Judge William H. Pauley III declared the dragnet lawful, writing that “the question of whether that program should be conducted is for the other two … branches of government to decide.”)

Similar controls exist for Prism, which the NSA views as its most important tool. “Gmail is the most popular terrorist mail service in the world,” one official says. “Second place is Yahoo. It’s not because Google and Yahoo are evil, it’s because they offer a great service.”

Exactly how much information the NSA ultimately collects with Prism it won’t say. According to the Snowden leaks, on April 5, 2013, there were 117,675 “records” in the Prism database. If these targets have contact with people inside or associated with the United States, Prism can wind up collecting tons of information about Americans. Between Prism and upstream collection procedures like Muscular, the NSA winds up with plenty.

Ledgett identifies several steps by which the NSA winnows data to exclude Americans’ email, search queries, and selfies. “We are responsible for minimizing the collection of US personal information,” he says. However, this process so far has been largely self-regulated, and recent declassified FISA court documents indicate that the NSA has fallen short on multiple occasions; the court has criticized the NSA for overcollecting or failing to properly filter its content.

The officials paint a picture, though, of a system that fundamentally works. They describe a rigorous training process. They tell me that respect for boundaries is drilled into the psyche of NSA employees from the day they are hired. (As for one embarrassing incident, in which employees tracked their romantic partners, the officials emphasize its rarity—and point out that the abuses were caught by the NSA’s own system of frequent polygraph tests.) Ledgett provides an example of what happens when someone’s information is mistakenly analyzed. The agency, he says, had tracked a high-value target in South Asia for over a decade before learn#ing that he had once applied for a green card—making him, under NSA rules, a “US person.” “As soon we discovered that,” Ledgett says, “we dropped collection on him under our Executive Order 12333 authority and canceled 14 years of reports.”

Critics charge that while there is not yet any evidence of massive abuse of the NSA’s collected data, there is also no guarantee that a future regime won’t ignore these touted protections. These officials discounted that possibility, saying that the majority of NSA employees wouldn’t stand for such a policy. “If that happened, there would be lines at the Inspector General’s office here, and at Congress as well—longer than a Disneyland line,” Ledgett says. (The fates of several NSA employees-turned-whistleblowers indicate that anyone in that hypothetical queue would be in for a ride far wilder than anything in Anaheim.)

The NSA acknowledges that news of its activities has put US technology companies in a bind. But the solutions are elusive, even for a seemingly easy problem like letting companies share more detail about the national security requests they receive. “We have a shared interest in transparency,” says general counsel De, who adds that the NSA is preparing its own report to disclose the total number of requests and user accounts from all companies combined. Yet the NSA continues to oppose efforts to break down the numbers: It might provide a road map for enemies to use the least scrutinized services.

The officials profess not to worry about companies using stronger cryptography to protect users from intruders—including those in Fort Meade. “We applaud the use of encryption,” Neuberger says. “We support better security.” But they imply that if the techniques make the NSA’s job more difficult, the agency might miss vital clues.

And the NSA insists that, despite the implications of those Snowden-leaked documents, it does not engage in weakening encryption standards. “The same standards we recommend are the standards we use,” Ledgett says. “We would not use standards we thought were vulnerable. That would be insane.” The officials won’t deny the NSA’s use of software vulnerabilities but portray their general behavior as protective.

“We are heavily biased toward defense,” Ledgett adds, citing one case in which the NSA discovered a serious vulnerability in one company’s software that could have impacted users all over the world. “We talked about it for a few days internally and decided it was so critical to the entirety of the US government and most of America that we disclosed [the vulnerability to that company]. We could have made hay on that forever on a huge range of targets.”

During the conversation, the officials could barely contain the frustration they feel about how the world—and their fellow Americans—views them post-Snowden. They have read Brandon Downey’s heartbroken lament about his own government breaking into his beloved data center. They understand that journalism conferences routinely host sessions on protecting information from government snoops, as if we were living in some Soviet society. And they are aware that multiple security specialists in the nation’s top tech corporations now consider the US government their prime adversary.

But they do not see any of those points as a reason to stop gathering data. They chalk all of that negativity up to monumental misunderstandings triggered by a lone leaker and a hostile press. NSA employees see themselves as dealing with genuine deadly threats to the nation, and it makes them crazy when people assume that spooks at Fort Meade are intent on stealing their privacy.

“It’s almost delusional,” Ledgett says. “I wish I could get to the high mountaintop to scream, ‘You’re not a target!’”

The problem, of course, is not merely one of misunderstanding. It is largely a consequence of the inexorable rise of digital technology. In a sense, the tech companies are more like the NSA than they would like to think. Both have seized on the progress in computing, communications, and storage to advance their respective missions. (When you think of it, Google’s original mission statement—“to collect and organize the world’s information”—might also apply to the activity at Fort Meade.) Both have sought to fulfill those missions by amassing huge troves of personal information—and both offer trade-offs that seemingly justify the practice. Google, Facebook, and others argue that they can use that information to improve the lives of their customers far in excess of any discomfort that may come from sharing that data. The NSA believes that it’s necessary to draw on that information to prevent a replay of 9/11 or worse. Both have established elaborate self-policing procedures to minimize abuse and claim to strictly follow the external constraints that limit their activities. When either makes a mistake, it invariably vows to do better—at least when its overreaches become public. Of course, the comparison goes only so far. If the NSA doesn’t connect the dots, the door is open to catastrophe.

Throughout the fall, legislators introduced a number of bills that would demand more transparency and oversight, or even outlaw the collection of bulk information altogether. The tech companies have been lobbying Congress to get at least some of those provisions into law. In December they specified their preferences—including no bulk data collection of Internet communications—in an open letter, then forcefully stated their case in a meeting with President Obama. The next day, the White House released a 300-page report from the advisory panel he had appointed to review NSA practices. “Free nations must protect themselves,” the report stated, “and nations that protect themselves must remain free.” Its 46 recommendations call for tempering the breadth of NSA activities to accommodate privacy concerns, revealing more NSA operations to outside scrutiny, engaging in bulk data collection only when justified by concrete national security concerns, and refraining from some of the dark-side hacker practices that erode confidence in private tech.

But civil liberties groups were disappointed that the panel did not make a stand against bulk data collection. At least one suggestion—that bulk personal data be retained by companies instead of the government—might present a headache for the tech industry. Would Google, Facebook, and similar firms be seen as archivists for spies?

The president has indicated that early this year he would identify which recom#mendations he would endorse. (Some would require legislation.) While the programs in question may have begun under the previous administration, Obama has made it clear that he is not giving up his 702s. “As the president has said, FISA is an important tool in our effort to disrupt terrorist plots,” Caitlin Hayden, a National Security Council spokesperson, wrote in a statement to WIRED. “He believes that there are steps we can take to give the American people additional confidence that there are added safeguards against abuse, including putting in place greater oversight, greater transparency, and further constraints on the use of this authority.”

Nicole Wong, the nation’s deputy chief technology officer (and former chief privacy lawyer for Google), emphasizes the government’s good intention: “We’re trying to prevent another Boston bombing,” she says. “In a world where we have those threats, what can we live with? Is it more transparency, is it less collection?”

There are others who argue that we may regret even modest constraints on the NSA. Former Microsoft research head Nathan Myhrvold recently wrote a hair-raising treatise arguing that, considering the threat of terrorists with biology degrees who could wipe out a good portion of humanity, tough surveillance measures might not be so bad. Myhrvold calls out the tech companies for hypoc#risy. They argue that the NSA should stop exploiting information in the name of national security, he says, but they are more than happy to do the same thing in pursuit of their bottom lines. “The cost is going to be lower efficiency in finding terrorist plots—and that cost means blood,” he says.

That’s the way the government sees it too. In a white paper last summer, the Obama administration argued that collecting the details of everyone’s phone behavior is justified, because the program is about “forward-looking prevention of the loss of life, including potentially on a catastrophic scale.”

But even if the spy programs are viewed as justified, and whether they are tempered or not, we’re still left with the most sickening aspect of the Snowden revelations: The vast troves of information gathered from our digital activities will forever be seen as potential fodder for government intelligence agencies. A lot of people became inured to worries about Little Brother—private companies—knowing what we bought, where we were, what we were saying, and what we were searching for. Now it turns out that Big Brother can access that data too. It could not have been otherwise. The wealth of data we share on our computers, phones, and tablets is irresistible to a government determined to prevent the next disaster, even if the effort stretches laws beyond the comprehension of those who voted for them. And even if it turns the US into the number one adversary of American tech companies and their privacy-seeking customers.

“I was naive,” says Ray Ozzie, who as the inventor of Lotus Notes was an early industry advocate of strong encryption. “I always felt that the US was a little more pure. Our processes of getting information were upfront. There were requests, and they were narrow. But then came the awakening,” he says. “We’re just like everybody else.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...-internet/all/





What It's Like When The FBI Asks You To Backdoor Your Software
Max Eddy

At a recent RSA Security Conference, Nico Sell was on stage announcing that her company—Wickr—was making drastic changes to ensure its users' security. She said that the company would switch from RSA encryption to elliptic curve encryption, and that the service wouldn't have a backdoor for anyone.

As she left the stage, before she'd even had a chance to take her microphone off, a man approached her and introduced himself as an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He then proceeded to "casually" ask if she'd be willing to install a backdoor into Wickr that would allow the FBI to retrieve information.

A Common Practice

This encounter, and the agent's casual demeanor, is apparently business as usual as intelligence and law enforcement agencies seek to gain greater access into protected communication systems. Since her encounter with the agent at RSA, Sell says it's a story she's heard again and again. "It sounds like that's how they do it now," she told SecurityWatch. "Always casual, testing, because most people would say yes."

The FBI's goal is to see into encrypted, secure systems like Wickr and others. Under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) legislation, law enforcement can tap any phone in the US but they can't read encrypted communications. We've also seen how law enforcement have followed the lead of the NSA, and gathered data en-masse from cellphone towers. With the NSA reportedly installing backdoors onto hardware sitting in UPS facilities and allegedly working to undermine cryptographic standards, it's not surprising that the FBI would be operating along similar lines.

The Difference

It was clear that the FBI agent didn't know who he was dealing with, because Sell did not back down. Instead, she lectured him on topics ranging from the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution, to George Washington's creation of a Post Office in the US. "My ancestor was a drummer boy under Washington," Sell explained. "Washington thought it was very important to have freedom of information and private correspondence without government surveillance."

Her lecture concluded, she proceeded to grill the agent. "I asked if he had official paperwork for me, if this was an official request, who his boss was," said Sell. "He backed down very quickly."

Though she didn't budge for the agent, Sell makes it clear that surveillance and security is a complicated issue. "Ten years ago, I'd have said yes," said Sell. "Because if law enforcement asks you to catch bad guys, who wouldn't want to help?"

The difference now, she explained, was her experiences at BlackHat. Among those, Sell pointed to a BlackHat event where Thomas Cross demonstrated how to break into lawful intercept machines—or wiretaps. "It was very clear that a backdoor for the good guys is always a backdoor for the bad guys."

How To Be A Good Guy

"I'm not against helping law enforcement, but the most important thing to me is protecting my friends and family the best way I know how," said Sell. She suggested that the NSA and other agencies go back to a model where individuals are targeted, instead of monitoring all communications and sorting it out later. "There are plenty of ways to track people without trampling human rights," she said.

As an example of how to do security right, Sell unsurprisingly pointed to Wickr. She said that her company does not hold the encryption keys to decrypt users' messages, or see their identities. That way, should Wickr be compelled to hand over data from a court order, investigators will only find junk. And in addition to employing who Sell calls the "best crypto people," Sell said that individual messages are bound to their intended device. "Even in 20 years or 100 years, if the NSA miraculously breaks these [encryption] equations, they still wouldn't be able to read these messages."

It's clear that for Sell, this is about more than good security. "I'm doing the right thing here, and it's the right thing for them, too," she said. "I'm not afraid of them."
http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/secur...-your-software





High-End CNC Machines Can't Be Moved Without Manufacturers' Permission
Cory Doctorow

On Practical Machinst, there's a fascinating thread about the manufacturer's lockdown on a high-priced, high-end Mori Seiki NV5000 A/40 CNC mill. The person who started the thread owns the machine outright, but has discovered that if he moves it at all, a GPS and gyro sensor package in the machine automatically shuts it down and will not allow it to restart until they receive a manufacturer's unlock code.

Effectively, this means that machinists' shops can't rearrange their very expensive, very large tools to improve their workflow from job to job without getting permission from the manufacturer (which can take a month!), even if their own the gear.

According to posts in the thread, many manufacturers have introduced this lockdown feature because their goods have found their way into Iran, violating the embargo. So now these machines can't be moved at all without the manufacturer's knowledge and consent, a situation that the manufacturers have turned into a business-opportunity by using the technology to assist in repossessing machines from delinquent lease-payers -- and requiring permission for privilege of deciding where to place their key capital assets.

I'm interested in the security implications of this. Malware like Stuxnet attacked embedded systems on computerized machines, causing them to malfunction in subtle ways. A subtly weakened or defective part from a big mill like the NV5000 might find its way into a vehicle or a high-speed machine, with disastrous consequences.

And since the mills are designed to be opaque to their owners, and to actively prevent their owners from reverse-engineering them (lest they disable the gyro/GPS), an infection would be nearly impossible to detect. Criminals and saboteurs are a lot less worried about voiding the warranty on your $100K business-asset than you are, and that asymmetry, combined with the mandate for opacity in the operations, presents a serious risk to machine shops and their customers (and their customers' users -- that is, everyone).
http://boingboing.net/2014/01/06/hig...es-cant-b.html





Homer Seeks Refuge with File-Sharing Swedes

An attempt at reviving the movie-going experience lands novice file-sharer Homer Simpson in court, but not before he pays a visit to the embassy of "piracy loving" Sweden.

In the Steal This Episode gander on the show The Simpsons, Homer ends up downloading and sharing a film after growing increasingly annoyed at moviegoers' anti-social behaviour, including talking and texting on mobile phones.

Conscience-of-the-family Marge, however, tries to pay for her viewing pleasure by sending a check to Hollywood, which sets off not only alarm bells but a full-blown emergency response involving the authorities.

An op-ed on the TorrentFreak website, which argued that the episode was "an absolute goldmine for anyone interested in the file-sharing phenomenon," said the scene at the FBI was telling of the government's attitude toward copyright infringement.

"The size of the movie piracy department next to the drug enforcement office is a clear nod to the resources being expended on piracy-related issues," mused the writer, who argued that the episode allowed viewers to take in both sides of the arguments concerning copyright theft.

As the manhunt proceeds in the episode, the Simpson family seeks refuge at the Swedish embassy, with daughter Lisa explaining that "the Swedish people think film should be shared for free."

The TorrentFreak op-ed argued that the plot of the episode touched upon many issues at play in regards to Sweden's The Pirate Bay.

"Many times in the past The Pirate Bay has made it clear that its mission is to offer ‘culture’ to all," the writer noted. "In the show Homer does something similar by opening his own free mini theater for the people of Springfield."

Despite attempts at reviving the movie-going experience in its family-friendly role, Homer eventually ends up in court.

"(The episode) makes clear that big budget content needs to have a funding mechanism, but even more apparent is the overblown response to the issue encouraged by Hollywood and executed by law enforcement," TorrentFreak noted.
http://www.thelocal.se/20140107/simp...sharing-swedes
















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

January 4th, December 28th, December 21st, December 14th

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 - July 16th, '11 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 13-07-11 06:43 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 9th, '11 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 06-07-11 05:36 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 01:29 PM.


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)