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Old 14-01-15, 08:04 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 17th, '15

Since 2002


































"No, there is no way to detect the attack unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on which side of the table you’re sitting)." – Samy Kamkar


"We reject this Kafka-esque criminalization of social movements, and the ludicrous and extremely alarming implication that protecting one’s internet privacy is tantamount to terrorism." – Riseup






































January 17th, 2015




Commercial Court Hearing File-Sharing Challenge

Sharing files over the Internet is not illegal unless the material is copyrighted by a third party Sharing files over the Internet is not illegal unless the material is copyrighted by a third party

The Commercial Court has begun hearing a challenge by a number of record companies aimed at forcing telecoms company UPC to disconnect customers responsible for illegally sharing and downloading copyrighted music.

Sony Music, Universal Music and Warner Music are seeking a "graduated response" mechanism which may lead to disconnection, similar to that operated by Eircom.

Sharing files over the Internet is not illegal unless the material is copyrighted by a third party.

Record companies claim they are losing millions each year as a result of people here illegally downloading and sharing copyrighted music through file-sharing websites.

Since it struck a settlement with record companies in 2009, Eircom has been operating a so called "graduated response" or "three strikes and you are out" policy.

It sees it warn offenders that what they are doing is against the law, provide them with information about the alternative ways to get their music and finally disconnect them if the first two warnings aren't heeded.

Music labels then took UPC to court in 2010 to force it to block access to illegal download websites. However, it lost that case.

The Government subsequently amended the law in 2012 to enable record companies to seek court orders forcing telecom companies to block websites which facilitate illegal downloading of copyrighted material.

Since then record companies have successfully sought orders forcing a number of record companies to block specific websites.

But Sony Music, Universal Music and Warner Music are now seeking to force UPC to implement a graduated response system similar to that of Eircom.

Opening their case, Senior Counsel Michael McDowell said the graduated response system is a reasonable, achievable, practicable and affordable step for UPC to take in response to a situation which all accept is causing grave damage to copyright holders.

He said such a system had already been agreed with Eircom, and the record companies are contractually bound by that agreement to seek to implement similar agreements with other internet service providers here.

He added that the evidence is that the system works.

However, he also left open the possibility that another system could be put in place if it was acceptable to the court and the music labels.

He said the record companies are seeking a particular formulation which is reasonable and practicable, but the law doesn't say it's the only injunction available.

The court heard that there is a dispute between the two sides about the costs involved in implementing a graduated response system.

Mr McDowell said the record companies consider UPC's estimation of the costs involved as excessive.

However he said it's agreed by both sides that UPC has 28.5% of the fixed line broadband market and that a substantial number of its customers or their children are using the service to illegally share music.

He claimed that blocking of individual websites, like Pirate Bay, doesn't address the issue, because of the nature of peer to peer technology.

The case, before Mr Justice Brian Cregan, is expected to last eight days.
http://www.rte.ie/news/2015/0113/672265-file-sharing/





Stop Threats to Canada's Online Pirates, Rights Holders Told

Media companies must back off from threatening Canadians who illegally download movies, music and books with penalties that do not exist in Canadian law, the government said on Friday.

"These notices are misleading and companies cannot use them to demand money from Canadians," said Jake Enright, a spokesman for Industry Minister James Moore.

Officials will be contacting Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and rights holders within days to put an end to the practice, he said.

The issue surfaced on Thursday, when University of Ottawa law professor and respected industry blogger Michael Geist posted a letter from a rights holder that threatened civil liabilities of up to $150,000 per infringment.

Canadian law caps liability for non-commercial infringements by individuals at $5,000.

Recent legal amendments require ISPs to pass on to their customers copyright infringement notices from media companies.

The opposition New Democratic Party earlier on Friday urged the Conservative government to close what they called a loophole.

"The Conservatives are letting these companies send false legal information to Canadians in order to scare them into paying settlements for movies or music no one has even proved they've actually downloaded," NDP Industry Critic Peggy Nash said.

Geist said ISPs should reassure customers that their personal information has not been disclosed and point out Canadian law on the issue.

He urged the government to penalize companies that send false information or make "misleading settlement demands."

The letter posted by Geist, sent by Rightscorp Inc on behalf of music rights manager BMG Rights Management to an unidentified Canadian ISP, also offered a legal release from the copyright owner for $20 per infringement.

It is not clear how many of these letters have been sent out in Canada, or how many people have opted to settle.

The Canadian lawyer retained by Rightscorp, Susan Abramovitch, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Canada's biggest telecom company, BCE Inc, said it adds its own message to the notices it is legally obliged to pass on, pointing out that it played no part in identifying the possible unauthorized use of content.

(Reporting by Alastair Sharp; Editing by Richard Chang)
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/n...s-holders-told





Canada’s Copyright Notice Fiasco: Why Industry Minister James Moore Bears Some Responsibility
Michael Geist

Last week I posted on how Rightscorp, a U.S.-based anti-piracy company, was using Canada’s new copyright notice-and-notice system to require Internet providers to send threats and misstatements of Canadian law in an effort to extract payments based on unproven infringement allegations. Many Canadians may be frightened into a settlement payment since they will be unaware that some of the legal information in the notice is inaccurate and that Rightscorp and BMG do not know who they are.

The revelations attracted considerable attention (I covered the issue in my weekly technology law column – Toronto Star version, homepage version), with NDP Industry Critic Peggy Nash calling on the government to close the loophole that permits false threats. Nash noted that “Canadians are receiving notices threatening them with fines thirty times higher than the law allows for allegedly downloading copyrighted material. The Conservatives are letting these companies send false legal information to Canadians in order to scare them into paying settlements for movies or music no one has even proved they’ve actually downloaded.”

With the notices escalating as a political issue, Jake Enright, Industry Minister James Moore’s spokesman, said on Friday the government would take action. Enright said that “these notices are misleading and companies cannot use them to demand money from Canadians”, adding that government officials would be contacting ISPs and rights holders to stop the practice.

While that is encouraging, the reality is that this is a mess of the government’s own making. In fact, according to documents obtained under Access to Information, the government previously dismissed calls for changes to the system from Internet providers. Moreover, Industry Canada officials conducted consultations that were designed to create reforms that might have stopped these practices. Moore decided to forge ahead with the notice-and-notice system without any additional regulations, however, a decision that lies at the heart of the current problem.

According to the internal documents, Industry Canada officials prepared a list of issues with the notice-and-notice system as early as July 2012. It raised the possibility of establishing a strict template for use in notices. Had the government implemented a template in the regulations, the threatening notices from Rightscorp would be invalid. Moreover, by the fall of 2012, the government prepared a letter to stakeholders and a backgrounder that invoked the regulatory powers to prescribe the form or content of the notice and to decrease the statutory damages for failing to meet the notice-and-notice obligations. Moore announced in June 2014 that the system would be implemented without regulations.

This was not the first time Moore decided against reforms to the notice-and-notice system. Further government documents reveal that Bell Canada recommended reforms in January 2012 (before the bill was passed) that included a removal of a minimum statutory damage for failure to to forward a notice. Had the reform been accepted, the government would now be in a position to recommend that Internet providers not forward the misleading Rightscorp notices without fear of liability.

Not only does Moore bear some responsibility for establishing the notice-and-notice rules without regulations, but there is now no quick fix. The Minister may promise to talk to the ISPs and rights holders, but what is going to say? His own rules require ISPs to forward notifications to subscribers under threat of a minimum of $5000 in statutory damages for failing to do so. His own rules do not include a specific form that could have been used to exclude the misleading assertions on Canadian law and the efforts to scare individuals into paying settlement fees. ISPs have little choice but to forward the notifications and there seems little likelihood that a company like Rightscorp, which is being sued in the U.S. for its practices, will care what a Canadian government minister has to say.

Merely stating that the government disapproves of the misleading practices is not enough. To address the issue, the government should ask the Competition Bureau to conduct an investigation into the misleading conduct. Moreover, Moore should move quickly to implement the very regulations he previously dismissed, which could be used to prohibit the inclusion of settlement demands within the notices and create penalties for those companies that send notices with false or misleading information.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2015/01/c...esponsibility/





Radio, Not YouTube, is Still King of Music Discovery
Tim Ingham

We might live in an age of YouTube and Spotify being the go-to music players of teenagers, but radio was still the top method of music discovery in the US last year.

That’s according to new Nielsen data that shows 51% of music consumers in the US still use radio to discover new music – more so than any type of digital service.

Nielsen said that radio’s ‘local nature makes it an integral part of the daily lives of hundreds of millions of consumers in markets large and small’.

The company’s research concluded:

• 59% of music listeners use a combination of over-the-air AM/FM radio and online radio streams to hear music;
• 243 million U.S. consumers (aged 12 and over) tune in each week to radio – 91.3% of the national population tuning in across more than 250 local markets;
• Across the 48 Nielsen portable people meter (PPM) markets, Pop Contemporary Hit Radio (CHR) and Country were the leading music formats amongst all listeners in 2014, followed by Adult Contemporary (AC), Hot AC and Classic Hits;
• Country radio grew significantly with 18-to-34-year-old audiences through the first half of the year, peaking in June with its all-time best audience share, before ending the year on a downtrend. For the year, Country ranked second across the Nielsen PPM markets;
• ‘Hot AC’ radio increased its share of audience, moving from fifth to third in 2014 among audiences aged 18 to 34. It was the best year ever for the format.

It’s interesting to note, however, that the wording in Nielsen’s annual report has changed: in 2013, it concluded that 48% of music fans used radio as their primary music discovery medium; this time round, it simply says that 51% of people use radio to discover new music - indicating that they’re also using digital platforms, potentially as their primary music discovery source.

The chart below breaks down national listening for the top 10 most popular radio formats of 2014 in the US amongst the 18-34 audience
http://www.musicbusinessworldwide.co...sic-discovery/





Actually, Album Sales are Doing Fine in America… so Long as You’re Not iTunes, Walmart or Target
Tim Ingham

One of MBW’s most popular articles this week has regarded the ‘Sad collapse of the album in America’.

If you’re an LP fan – and considering they’re still the industry’s most lucrative product, you probably are – the stats make for depressing reading: according to Nielsen Soundscan data, full-year LP sales in the US across all formats dropped by a shocking 61.5% between 2004 and 2014 – from 667m all the way down to 257m.

But now Nielsen has released its in-depth report about 2014 in the States. And it appears the album might not be completely doomed after all – so long as it’s not being sold in a massive retailer like Wal-Mart.

Independent stores and ‘non-traditional’ retailers? They’re doing just fine.

Total album sales in the States dropped by 11.2% to 257m in 2014. Digital album downloads – a market which is dominated by iTunes – dropped 9.4% to 106.5m.

But it’s in the physical world where things get interesting. Vinyl LP sales had a stormer, but to no great effect on the wider market – up 51.8% to 9.2m.

And on paper, CD sales had a howler, falling 15% from 165.4m to 140.8m; the biggest format hurting by the biggest amount.

But to really get an accurate picture of physical album sales, it’s important to understand where CD’s decline is taking place – because it ain’t Rough Trade New York.

According to Nielsen, physical album sales in chain stores across America were slashed by a fifth in 2014 – plummeting by a massive 20.6%, from 39.1m to 31m.

Meanwhile, ‘mass merchant‘ stores – like Walmart and Target – suffered a similar fall, with album sales crashing 19.3% from 77.9m to 62.9m.

Between them, these two types of retailer alone saw 23.1m album sales wiped off their bottom line in 2014 – making their tills almost entirely culpable for America’s annual decline in CD sales.

As for independent US music stores, their year in album sales was flat – down just 0.5% in unit terms to 18.2 million.

But the positive story of the year in US physical music retail was the ‘non-traditional’ outlets – including direct-to-fan sales, CD purchases at gigs and internet retailers such as Amazon.

Their sales of physical albums increased by 5.2% to 38.5m units – meaning they are now a bigger category for overall music purchases than the chain stores.Music Business Worldwide
http://www.musicbusinessworldwide.co...almart-target/





Wavelength Lets You Legally Share Movies With Friends for Free
Tori Reid

Web: Sharing photos, YouTube videos, and other web content is easy, but an easy way to share movies has been uncharted territory until now. Wavelength is a movie library in the cloud that links to your friends' libraries so you can watch theirs, and share with them, too.

Wavelength is free and powered by Ultraviolet. You just log in through Facebook and connect to your Ultraviolet library (or create one) to get started. Claim your two free movies, then upload your own collection through Ultraviolet. Click the "Friends" tab to select specific friends and watch their movies, or click the "Find Movies" tab to browse through all the movies you have access to and purchase others. Your friends can do the same.

Wavelength is in public beta, which means the developers aren't done working out the kinks, but it's available for everyone to try. It's gotten a lot of attention the past couple of days, so be patient if you experience some errors. I had to refresh a couple of pages, but overall it's good enough to try it out if you've got a little patience. Hit the link below to check it out.
http://lifehacker.com/wavelength-let...s-f-1679703924





'Silk Road Reloaded' Just Launched on a Network More Secret than Tor
Joseph Cox

A new anonymous online drug market has emerged, but instead of using the now infamous Tor network, it uses the little known "I2P" alternative.

"Silk Road Reloaded" launched today, and is only accessible by downloading the special I2P software, or by configuring your computer in a certain way to connect to I2P web pages, called 'eepsites', and which end in the suffix .i2p.

It's not just the switch to I2P that marks a change. Whereas the original Silk Road and its successor Silk Road 2 exclusively accepted Bitcoin, Silk Road Reloaded will process transactions in other cryptocurrencies by converting them into Bitcoin through the site's built in wallet. They include Anoncoin, which, as the name suggests, is the more anonymity focused cousin of Bitcoin. Darkcoin is also listed, which last November became an acceptable form of currency on Nucleas, a Tor marketplace. You can also use Dogecoin, the meme-inspired altcoin, as well as the more established Litecoin. In all, eight different altcoins are accepted, with others slated to join soon. The administrators say on the site that they are open to suggestions on other coins to use, and will consider it if you contact them.

The administrators of online markets have typically made their money by taking a small slice of the profits from those selling drugs on their site. Silk Road Reloaded does the same, but it will also take a 1 percent conversion fee whenever an altcoin is converted into Bitcoin on the site.

“All functions are completely enabled and fully functional,” says a message on the site, posted today. “Sample data is being removed. Current vendor(s) your products will show shortly. Thank you all for making the site launch a success!”

At the time of writing, it appears that the listings are placeholders, with no concrete details on what it actually being sold. These have been listed by 'SysAdmin', and judging by the announcement on the site, this will change shortly, being replaced by real products.

The catalog lists many of the things we've come to expect from an online marketplace, including drugs, counterfeit money and IDs, hacking tools, and fake clothing. Notably absent are weapons and stolen credit card details, something which some Tor sites, such as Evolution, now sell in abundance.

This lack of weapons and stolen data may be due to the site owner's apparent political beliefs: it appears that the site owners subscribe to the same libertarian motivations that inspired the original Silk Road. “Who are we? Ones who care about true freedom, self-ownership and self-possesion. Yes believe it or not you own yourself,” the site reads.

“What exactly does this mean? Many things but, first and foremost that we nor anyone else has the right/privilege to tell you what to do with your person, on any level except/unless you cause harm to someone's property/person.”

“We created this to allow the most basic of human activities to occur unimpeded, that being trade. It's not only a major disruption of progress but, it is an interference to control someone to the degree that their free will is compromised. We may not be able to stop this but, we certainly won't contribute to it.

“Enjoy the site.”

Naturally, Silk Road Reloaded has its own forum as well. At the moment, there isn't a single posting, but it seems to function normally.

I contacted the owners of the site using the inbuilt messaging system, but haven't yet received a reply. I wanted to ask why they had made the switch to I2P from Tor. To speculate, the recent tide in security worries about Tor may have contributed to this move; even if those worries were ultimately unjustified and Tor remains robust.

Although both Tor and I2P are anonymity networks, there are some key differences. One of those differences is the greater degree of decentralisation that I2P offers.

“Tor takes the directory-based approach - providing a centralized point to manage the overall 'view' of the network, as well as gather and report statistics, as opposed to I2P's distributed network database and peer selection,” according to the I2P website. Whereas Tor relies on a set of relays run by volunteers, and then people use their computer to connect to the network, I2P takes a peer-to-peer approach, and makes every user's computer a node in the network itself. “Essentially all peers participate in routing for others,” the I2P site reads.

Other differences pointed out on the I2P site include that Tor is much more well funded, originating as a project by the US Naval Research Laboratory and continues to receive the bulk of its support from the US government. Tor is large enough to have adapted to denial-of-service attempts—cyberattacks that attempt to overwhelm it with simulated traffic—and generally has a much larger user-base and lively community. While Tor’s developers are open about their involvement in the project, and use their real names, I2P developers are known only by pseudonyms.

The “about” section of the I2P website reads very similarly to that of the Tor Project's. “I2P is used by many people who care about their privacy,” the site reads, “activists, oppressed people, journalists and whistelblowers, as well as the average person.”

Silk Road Reloaded is an important development in the world of online drug trading. Even if it doesn't take off quite just yet, or even falls apart completely, it shows that people are willing to explore alternatives to the established formula of Tor and Bitcoin. In what must be worrying for law enforcement agencies, who recently boasted about taking down hundreds of deep web sites, Silk Road Reloaded shows that drug markets are far from dead. Instead, they are becoming more plentiful, and more diverse.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/silk-road-reloaded-i2p





F.B.I. Is Broadening Surveillance Role, Report Shows
Charlie Savage

Although the government’s warrantless surveillance program is associated with the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has gradually become a significant player in administering it, a newly declassified report shows.

In 2008, according to the report, the F.B.I. assumed the power to review email accounts the N.S.A. wanted to collect through the “Prism” system, which collects emails of foreigners from providers like Yahoo and Google. The bureau’s top lawyer, Valerie E. Caproni, who is now a Federal District Court judge, developed procedures to make sure no such accounts belonged to Americans.

Then, in October 2009, the F.B.I. started retaining copies of unprocessed communications gathered without a warrant to analyze for its own purposes. And in April 2012, the bureau began nominating new email accounts and phone numbers belonging to foreigners for collection, including through the N.S.A.’s “upstream” system, which collects communications transiting network switches.

That information is in a 231-page study by the Justice Department’s inspector general about the F.B.I.’s activities under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which authorized the surveillance program. The report was entirely classified when completed in September 2012. But the government has now made a semi-redacted version of the report public in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by The New York Times.

The Times filed the lawsuit after a wave of declassifications about government surveillance activities in response to leaks by the former intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden.

The report was delivered late Friday to The Times. In it, the inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, concluded that the F.B.I. was doing a good job in making sure that the email accounts targeted for warrantless collection belonged to noncitizens abroad.
But parts of the report remained heavily redacted. For example, there was only one uncensored reference to the Prism system. It was not clear why the Justice Department had redacted all the other references to Prism in the report; the name of that program and many details about it have been declassified and were discussed in a July 2014 report by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.

David McCraw, a Times lawyer, said the newspaper may challenge the redactions at a later stage in the Freedom of Information Act litigation.

The report also filled in a gap about the evolving legality of the warrantless wiretapping program, which traces back to a decision by President George W. Bush in October 2001 to direct the N.S.A. to collect Americans’ international phone calls and emails, from network locations on domestic soil, without the individual warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. The Times revealed that program in December 2005.

After the article appeared, telecommunications providers that had voluntarily participated in the program were sued, and a Federal District Court judge in Detroit ruled that the program was illegal, although that decision was later vacated. The Bush administration sought to put the program on more solid legal footing by gaining orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approving it.

In January 2007, the Bush administration persuaded the court’s Judge Malcolm Howard to issue an order to telephone and network companies requiring them to let the security agency target foreigners’ accounts for collection without individual warrants. But in April 2007, when the order came up for renewal before Judge Roger Vinson, he said that it was illegal.

Judge Vinson’s resistance led Congress to enact, in August 2007, the Protect America Act, a temporary law permitting warrantless surveillance of foreigners from domestic network locations. The next year, Congress replaced that law with the FISA Amendments Act.

Last month, as a result of separate Freedom of Information Act lawsuits by The Times and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the government declassified the identities of the judges who disagreed in early 2007 and several court filings from that episode. But it remained unclear what the N.S.A. had done in June and July of 2007.

The newly declassified report said Judge Vinson issued an order on May 31, 2007, that allowed existing surveillance to continue by approving collection on a long list of specific foreign phone numbers and email addresses. But after that, when the agency wanted to start wiretapping an additional person, it had to ask the court for permission.

The report said that “the rigorous nature of the FISA Court’s probable cause review of new selectors submitted to the various FISA Court judges following Judge Vinson’s May 31, 2007, order caused the N.S.A. to place fewer foreign selectors under coverage than it wanted to.” That and other factors “combined to accelerate the government’s efforts” to persuade Congress to enact the Protect America Act.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/12/us...ort-shows.html





FBI Access to Surveillance Program Expands in Recent Years
Grant Gross

U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation access to overseas surveillance collected by sister organization the National Security Agency has expanded in recent years, with the law enforcement agency gaining access to collected but unprocessed data in 2009, according to a report released by the government.

The FBI’s access to email and other data collected from overseas targets in the NSA’s Prism program has been growing since 2008, according to a 2012 U.S. Department of Justice inspector general’s report declassified last Friday by the DOJ. The agency made the highly redacted inspector general’s report public in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the New York Times.

In 2008, the FBI began reviewing email accounts targeted by the NSA through the Prism program, according to the report and a New York Times story.

Then, in October 2009, the FBI requested that information collected under the Prism program be “dual routed” to both the NSA and the FBI so that the FBI “could retain this data for analysis and dissemination in intelligence reports,” according to the IG’s report.

And in April 2012, the FBI began nominating email addresses and phone numbers that the NSA should target in it surveillance program, according to the document.

The IG’s report, however, concluded that the FBI took a responsible approach toward the surveillance program. The FBI’s Prism team “implemented its targeting procedures with commendable deliberation, thoroughness and professionalism,” the report said.

The NSA’s Prism program targets email messages and other digital communications by people outside the U.S. in an effort to deter terrorism. The NSA reportedly accessed the networks of Google, Yahoo, Apple and other Internet companies to gain access to users’ communications, although some companies have insisted that they were not willing partners in the surveillance programs, as original leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden suggested.

The Prism program isn’t supposed to target U.S. communications, but some domestic communications are inadvertently collected, according to oversight reports.
http://www.itworld.com/article/28678...ent-years.html





Obama Turns Focus to Internet Security, Privacy
Doina Chiacu

President Barack Obama will highlight plans next week to protect American consumers and businesses from cyber threats, a month after the most high-profile hacking attack on a U.S. company.

Internet security became a national focus after a cyberattack on Sony Pictures that Washington blamed on North Korea. The attack and subsequent threats of violence against theatres prompted Sony to scale back its release of "The Interview", a comedy film that depicts the fictional assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

A White House official said on Saturday Obama would announce legislative proposals and executive actions that will be part of his Jan. 20 State of the Union address and will tackle identity theft and privacy issues, cybersecurity and broadband access.

On Monday, Obama will present plans "to improve confidence in technology by tackling identity theft and improving consumer and student privacy" in a visit to the Federal Trade Commission, the official said, on condition of anonymity.

Obama will host members of Congress from both parties on Tuesday to discuss common goals for the economy and national security, the official said, as the Democratic president prepares a speech that will be his first to the U.S. Congress since Republicans won the Senate in November elections.

Later he will visit the Department of Homeland Security's cybersecurity nerve centre to promote voluntary information sharing between government and private sector and industry to fight cyber threats "while protecting privacy and civil liberties", the official said.

The National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center monitors threats to the country's critical infrastructure, including energy and chemical plans, emergency and financial services and government facilities.

In Iowa on Wednesday, Obama will propose new steps to increase access to affordable, high-speed broadband across the country, the White House said.

Last week, the president highlighted economic issues and plans to help Americans, including a proposal to make two years of free community college tuition to students. That plan, and its $60 billion price tag over 10 years, immediately faced scepticism from Republican lawmakers on Friday.

Obama floated the education idea on the third and final day of a tour to promote agenda items being prepared for his State of the Union address.

(Editing by Gareth Jones)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/0...0KJ0K320150110





Obama's War on Hackers
Robert Graham

Ha ha. New York Times accidentally posted their employee database to their website: SSN, passwords, and salaries: https://t.co/1dLdUXG2tT
— Rob Graham (@ErrataRob) January 14, 2015

In next week's State of the Union address, President Obama will propose new laws against hacking that could make either retweeting or clicking on the above link illegal. The new laws make it a felony to intentionally access unauthorized information even if it's been posted to a public website. The new laws make it a felony to traffic in information like passwords, where "trafficking" includes posting a link.

You might assume that things would never become that bad, but it’s already happening even with the current laws. Prosecutors went after Andrew “weev” Auernheimer for downloading a customer list AT&T negligently made public. They prosecuted Barrett Brown for copying a URL to the Stratfor hack from one chatroom to another. A single click is all it takes. Prosecutors went after the PayPal-14 for clicking on a single link they knew would flood PayPal’s site with traffic. The proposed changes make such prosecutions much easier.

Even if you don’t do any of this, you can still be guilty if you hang around with people who do. Obama proposes upgrading hacking to a “racketeering” offense, means you can be guilty of being a hacker by simply acting like a hacker (without otherwise committing a specific crime). Hanging out in an IRC chat room giving advice to people now makes you a member of a “criminal enterprise”, allowing the FBI to sweep in and confiscate all your assets without charging you with a crime. If you innocently clicked on the link above, and think you can defend yourself in court, prosecutors can still use the 20-year sentence of a racketeering charge in order to force you to plea bargain down to a 1-year sentence for hacking. (Civil libertarians hate the police-state nature of racketeering laws).

Obama’s proposals come from a feeling in Washington D.C. that more needs to be done about hacking in response to massive data breaches of the last couple years. But they are blunt political solutions which reflect no technical understanding of the problem.

Most hacking is international and anonymous. They can’t catch the perpetrators no matter how much they criminalize the activities. This War on Hackers is likely to be no more effective than the War on Drugs, where after three decades the prison population has sky rocketed from 0.1% of the population to a staggering 1%. With 5% the world’s population, we have 25% of the world’s prisoners – and this has done nothing to stop drugs. Likewise, while Obama’s new laws will dramatically increase hacking prosecutions, they’ll be of largely innocent people rather than the real hackers that matter.

Internet innovation happens by trying things first then asking for permission later. Obama’s law will change that. For example, a search engine like Google downloads a copy of every website in order to create a search “index”. This sort of thing is grandfathered in, but if “copying the entire website” were a new idea, it would be something made illegal by the new laws. Such copies knowingly get information that website owners don’t intend to make public. Similarly, had hacking laws been around in the 1980s, the founders of Apple might’ve still been in jail today, serving out long sentences for trafficking in illegal access devices.

The most important innovators this law would affect are the cybersecurity professionals that protect the Internet. If you cared about things such as "national security" and "cyberterrorism", then this should be your biggest fear. Because of our knowledge, we do innocent things that look to outsiders like "hacking". Protecting computers often means attacking them. The more you crack down on hackers, the more of a chilling effect you create in our profession. This creates an open-door for nation-state hackers and the real cybercriminals.

Along with its Hacking Prohibition law, Obama is also proposing a massive Internet Surveillance law. Companies currently monitor their networks, using cybersecurity products like firewalls, IPSs, and anti-virus. Obama wants to strong-arm companies into sharing that information with the government, creating a virtualized or “cloud” surveillance system.

In short, President Obama’s War on Hackers is a bad thing, creating a Cyber Police State. The current laws already overcriminalize innocent actions and allow surveillance of innocent people. We need to roll those laws back, not extend them.
http://blog.erratasec.com/2015/01/ob...n-hackers.html





'Cyber Attack War Games' to be Staged by UK and US

The UK and US are to carry out "war game" cyber attacks on each other as part of a new joint defence against online criminals.

The first exercise, a staged attack on the financial sector, will take place later this year, Downing Street said.

The "unprecedented" arrangement between the two countries was announced by Prime Minister David Cameron ahead of talks with US President Barack Obama.

The leaders will also discuss privacy issues around encrypted messages.

Mr Cameron has previously said in relation to cyber attacks that there should be no "means of communication" which "we cannot read".

He is expected to talk to the US president about getting companies such as Google and Facebook to allow governments to view encrypted messages.
'Modern threat'

In terms of the planned cyber war games Downing Street said they will aim to improve the flow of information between the US and UK about threats.

No 10 said agents will co-operate in "cyber cells", involving MI5 and the FBI, and they will be the first the UK has established with another country.

Speaking to BBC political editor Nick Robinson after arriving in Washington on Thursday night for a two-day visit, Mr Cameron said cyber attacks were "one of the big modern threats that we face".

The first war game will involve the Bank of England and commercial banks, targeting the City of London and Wall Street, and will be followed by "further exercises to test critical national infrastructure", Downing Street said.

Money will also be made available to train "the next generation" of cyber agents.

The tensions and confusions over what cyber security means are all too apparent this week.

Is it about defending corporate networks against hostile attackers of the type who targeted Sony? That's the focus of today's announcements about war-gaming and threat cells.

Or is it about getting hold of data and communications about terrorists? That seemed to be the focus earlier in the week, with briefings that the visit would focus on getting US companies to be more helpful in providing data to British authorities.

The two are different in focus and it is not yet clear how much progress on the latter the prime minister will make with a president whose relations with the tech sector are already difficult post-Snowden.

There is also some tricky overlap between the two fields, for instance on how far information should be encrypted so it cannot be read or stolen.

Encryption may foil foreign cyber spies but also stymie law enforcement.

The measures come in the wake of the recent hacking of Sony Pictures' computers and the US military's Central Command's Twitter feed, where comments were posted promoting Islamic State (IS) militants.

The cyber attack on Sony Pictures led to data being leaked from its computers exposing emails and personal details about staff and stars.

The hackers, who called themselves #GOP or Guardians of Peace, also threatened cinema chains planning to screen Sony's satirical North Korea comedy, The Interview, the plot of which involves a bid to assassinate the country's leader Kim Jong-un.

Sony initially cancelled the film's release after leading US cinema groups said they would not screen it, a move which Mr Obama later described as "a mistake".

PM: "Cyber attacks are one of the biggest modern threats we face"

Mr Obama has said cyber threats were an "urgent and growing danger" and unveiled domestic proposals to strengthen the law.

The UK's National Audit Office warned in 2013 that a lack of skilled workers was hampering the fight against cyber crime.

Mr Cameron said the UK was already prepared for a cyber attack, saying GCHQ had "massive expertise", but added more needed to be done.

He said: "We need to be able in extremis to interrupt the contact between terrorists.

"It's also about protecting people's data, people's finances - these attacks can have real consequences to people's prosperity."

'Beef up filters'

The BBC's technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones said there had been a lot of concern over Mr Cameron's inference that governments should be able to view encrypted data.

He said not only were civil rights groups worried, but major players in the technology industry said banning encrypted messages could harm British trade if UK companies were seen to be not private.

Our correspondent also told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that smaller social networking sites were just as well used by potential hackers as the well-known ones.

He said he had found an example of an exchange on the site Ask.fm which appeared to be from an IS fighter asking another user which country he should go to for weapons training.

In relation to the site being used for this type of communication Doug Leeds, the chief executive of Ask.com, which owns Ask.fm, said: "We have taken some action, and we're looking to take more, what we have done so far is beef up our filters to try and look for patterns that would suggest that this is going on."

Howard Schmidt, a former eBay and Microsoft executive, told the BBC attitudes around privacy and the right to encrypt personal data were still hotly debated in the US in light of the revelations disclosed by fugitive US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden.
Among other things, Snowden's leaks detailed the National Security Agency's practice of harvesting data on millions of telephone calls made in the US and around the world, and revealed the CIA intelligence agency had snooped on foreign leaders.

A recent report by GCHQ, the UK government's communications security agency, on the issue of cyber attacks said that more than 80% of large UK companies experienced some form of security breach in 2014, and attacks were on the rise.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-30842669





David Cameron Seeks Cooperation of US President Over Encryption Crackdown

PM to ask Barack Obama to put pressure on US internet companies to work more closely with UK intelligence agencies
Nicholas Watt and Patrick Wintour

David Cameron is to urge Barack Obama to pressure internet firms such as Twitter and Facebook to do more to cooperate with Britain’s intelligence agencies as they seek to track the online activities of Islamist extremists.

As he becomes the first European leader to meet the president after the multiple shootings in Paris last week, the prime minister will seek to win Obama’s support for his plans to secure a new legal framework to deny terrorists a “safe space”.

The prime minister arrives after he proposed earlier this week that British intelligence agencies have the power to break the encrypted communications of suspected terrorists and insisting that the likes of Twitter and Facebook do more to cooperate with Britain’s GCHQ eavesdropping centre.

Cameron will demand that US internet companies store – and then be prepared to hand over – data and content needed by the intelligence agencies “to keep us safe” when he meets the president for talks in the Oval Office on Friday morning.

A government source said: “The prime minister’s objective here is to get the US companies to cooperate with us more, to make sure that our intelligence agencies get the information they need to keep us safe. That will be his approach in the discussion with President Obama – how can we work together to get them to cooperate more, what is the best approach to encourage them to do more.”

Obama, who recently accused North Korea of orchestrating the cyber attack on the film studio Sony Pictures, is due to address data security in his penultimate state of the union address next week.

The sought-after summit meeting is Cameron’s last bilateral visit overseas before the general election. The prime minister arrives on Thursday, and is due to first meet the president for dinner at the White House.

The two-day visit, designed originally by Downing Street to provide helpful general election pictures to burnish Cameron’s status a world statesman, will take on a more sober note than planned in the aftermath of the attacks in Paris. The White House believes it erred in failing to send a high-level representative to the Unity rally in Paris on Sunday attended by Cameron and other EU leaders.

In a sign that Obama is prepared to go out of his way to help the prime minister on the eve of the general election, the two men have penned a joint article in which the two leaders declare that transatlantic freedoms are “rooted in economic strength”.

Echoing one of the Tories’ central themes of the general election – that progressive goals, such as defending the NHS, cannot be achieved without a sound economy – Cameron and Obama write in the Times on Thursday: “As we meet today at the White House, we reaffirm our belief that our ability to defend our freedoms is rooted in our economic strength, and the values that we cherish – freedom of expression, the rule of law, and strong democratic institutions.”

The intervention by Obama, who also endorses Cameron’s plans to expand the number of apprenticeships and to increase the minimum wage, will come as a blow to Ed Miliband, the leader of the Democrats’ sister party in the UK. But the Labour leader, who met Obama in the White House last summer in a more low key setting, has been told that the president was unamused by his decision not to support Cameron in the House of Commons vote on military action in Syria in August 2013.

While in Washington, the prime minister will:

• Press the president to allow Shaker Aamer, the last British resident held at Guantánamo Bay, to be released and sent to Britain. Officials fear that Aamer, a British resident who was born in Saudi Arabia and who has been held at the US base since 2002, will not be safe if the US carries out a plan to deport him to Saudi Arabia.

• Announce business deals worth more than £1.1bn including an injection of £600m in equity capital by the Carlyle Group into the North Sea oil and gas industry.

British government officials say that the prime minister’s plan to provide a fresh legal framework for the collection of communications data – such as billing information – and the interception of the contents of communications can only work with the co-operation of internet giants that are largely based in the US.

Sir Nigel Sheinwald, the former British ambassador to Washington who has been appointed as a special envoy to the internet companies, is due to report by the end of March.

But a government source indicated that the prime minister believes that the internet giants need to do more now – a process that could be encouraged by Obama.

Obama has faced intense pressure from the internet giants over the intrusive surveillance of the US National Security Agency exposed by the files leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, wrote on his Facebook page last year that he was “confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behaviour of the US government”.

The president announced a series of initiatives on Monday, before his state of the union address, to improve the data security of US citizens. A new student digital privacy act is designed to stop companies from selling student data to third parties.

Theresa May, the home secretary, told MPs that there must be no safe spaces for terrorist communications was likely that the counter-terrorist investigation in Paris following the massacre at Charlie Hebdo involved the use of communications data to locate the suspects. The home secretary mounted another fierce attack on her coalition colleagues for blocking the communications data bill – the so called ‘snoopers charter’ – in 2012, saying: “With every day that passes without the capabilities in the proposed bill, the powers of the security services diminish.” She said this meant “crimes will go unpunished and innocent lives put at risk”.

She said it was necessary to allow the police and the security services, under a tightly controlled regime, to find out “the who, where, when and how of a communication, but not its content”.

The prime minister will use the White House talks to press the case for the release to Britain of Shaker Aamer who has not been charged with any offence despite being incarcerated in Guantánamo Bay since 2002 after being picked up in Afghanistan in 2001 where he said he was working for a charity.

Cameron, who raised the case of Shaker Aamer at the G8 summit in Lough Erne in 2013, is keen to secure the release of the detainee to avoid him being sent to Saudi Arabia. Officials point out that the UK has taken 14 Guantánamo detainees compared with 11 across the rest of the EU.

“This is an important case for the prime minister and he would like to see progress on it as quickly as possible,” the government source said. “The opportunity that this presents, in terms of Shaker Aamer’s case, is for the prime minister to sit down face to face with President Obama and talk to him about it and talk to him about it and understand where the US is at.”

However, the prime minister does not expect a breakthrough on Aamer during this trip. He appreciates he needs to make the case with care because the US Congress has to be given 30 days’ notice of any release from Guantánamo.

Congress could also disrupt Obama’s plans to close the Guantánamo Bay detention centre by the end of his second term if a release plays badly in the US.

It is understood that Britain has been unable to provide the US authorities with assurances that it would have a legal basis for monitoring Aamer on his return to the UK.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2...remists-online





Cameron Pledges New Internet Security Laws to Tighten Intelligence Web

British Prime Minister David Cameron pledged on Monday to give security and intelligence services new powers to monitor Internet communications, as Britain set out its response to last week's deadly attacks by Islamist militants in Paris.

Facing a tight election in four months' time, Cameron promised that if he was re-elected he would bring in new laws to make sure that Internet firms were covered by rules that allow security services to monitor communications and, in some cases, access their content.

"Are we going to allow a means of communication where it simply isn't possible to do that? My answer to that question is 'No we must not,'" Cameron said after a campaign speech in central England, stressing that the attacks in Paris had highlighted the need for new laws.

He added: "If I'm Prime Minister I will make sure it is a comprehensive piece of legislation that makes sure we do not allow terrorists safe space to communicate with each other."

Previous attempts to give security services greater access to data on communications and their content have been blocked by the government's junior coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, but Cameron said he believed such powers were "absolutely right" for a modern liberal democracy.

The head of Britain's eavesdropping agency last year called on technology firms Twitter Inc. (TWTR.N) and Facebook Inc (FB.O) to allow security services greater access to their networks, citing their huge importance to militant groups.

(Reporting by William James; Editing by Stephen Addison)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/0...0KL18F20150112





What David Cameron Just Proposed Would Endanger Every Briton and Destroy the IT Industry

David Cameron says there should be no "means of communication" which "we cannot read" -- and no doubt many in his party will agree with him, politically. But if they understood the technology, they would be shocked to their boots.
Cory Doctorow

What David Cameron thinks he's saying is, "We will command all the software creators we can reach to introduce back-doors into their tools for us." There are enormous problems with this: there's no back door that only lets good guys go through it. If your Whatsapp or Google Hangouts has a deliberately introduced flaw in it, then foreign spies, criminals, crooked police (like those who fed sensitive information to the tabloids who were implicated in the hacking scandal -- and like the high-level police who secretly worked for organised crime for years), and criminals will eventually discover this vulnerability. They -- and not just the security services -- will be able to use it to intercept all of our communications. That includes things like the pictures of your kids in your bath that you send to your parents to the trade secrets you send to your co-workers.

But this is just for starters. David Cameron doesn't understand technology very well, so he doesn't actually know what he's asking for.

For David Cameron's proposal to work, he will need to stop Britons from installing software that comes from software creators who are out of his jurisdiction. The very best in secure communications are already free/open source projects, maintained by thousands of independent programmers around the world. They are widely available, and thanks to things like cryptographic signing, it is possible to download these packages from any server in the world (not just big ones like Github) and verify, with a very high degree of confidence, that the software you've downloaded hasn't been tampered with.

Cameron is not alone here. The regime he proposes is already in place in countries like Syria, Russia, and Iran (for the record, none of these countries have had much luck with it). There are two means by which authoritarian governments have attempted to restrict the use of secure technology: by network filtering and by technology mandates.

David Cameron has already shown that he believes he can order the nation's ISPs to block access to certain websites (again, for the record, this hasn't worked very well). The next step is to order Chinese-style filtering using deep packet inspection, to try and distinguish traffic and block forbidden programs. This is a formidable technical challenge. Intrinsic to core Internet protocols like IPv4/6, TCP and UDP is the potential to "tunnel" one protocol inside another. This makes the project of figuring out whether a given packet is on the white-list or the black-list transcendentally hard, especially if you want to minimise the number of "good" sessions you accidentally blackhole.

More ambitious is a mandate over which code operating systems in the UK are allowed to execute. This is very hard indeed. We do have, in Apple's Ios platform and various games consoles, a regime where a single company uses countermeasures to ensure that only software it has blessed can run on the devices it sells to us. These companies could, indeed, be compelled (by an act of Parliament) to block secure software. Even there, you'd have to contend with the fact that other EU states and countries like the USA are unlikely to follow suit, and that means that anyone who bought her Iphone in Paris or New York could come to the UK with all their secure software intact and send messages "we cannot read."

But there is the problem of more open platforms, like GNU/Linux variants, BSD and other unixes, Mac OS X, and all the non-mobile versions of Windows. All of these operating systems are already designed to allow users to execute any code they want to run. The commercial operators -- Apple and Microsoft -- might conceivably be compelled by Parliament to change their operating systems to block secure software in the future, but that doesn't do anything to stop people from using all the PCs now in existence to run code that the PM wants to ban.

More difficult is the world of free/open operating systems like GNU/Linux and BSD. These operating systems are the gold standard for servers, and widely used on desktop computers (especially by the engineers and administrators who run the nation's IT). There is no legal or technical mechanism by which code that is designed to be modified by its users can co-exist with a rule that says that code must treat its users as adversaries and seek to prevent them from running prohibited code.

This, then, is what David Cameron is proposing:

* All Britons' communications must be easy for criminals, voyeurs and foreign spies to intercept

* Any firms within reach of the UK government must be banned from producing secure software

* All major code repositories, such as Github and Sourceforge, must be blocked

* Search engines must not answer queries about web-pages that carry secure software

* Virtually all academic security work in the UK must cease -- security research must only take place in proprietary research environments where there is no onus to publish one's findings, such as industry R&D and the security services

* All packets in and out of the country, and within the country, must be subject to Chinese-style deep-packet inspection and any packets that appear to originate from secure software must be dropped

* Existing walled gardens (like Ios and games consoles) must be ordered to ban their users from installing secure software

* Anyone visiting the country from abroad must have their smartphones held at the border until they leave

* Proprietary operating system vendors (Microsoft and Apple) must be ordered to redesign their operating systems as walled gardens that only allow users to run software from an app store, which will not sell or give secure software to Britons

* Free/open source operating systems -- that power the energy, banking, ecommerce, and infrastructure sectors -- must be banned outright

David Cameron will say that he doesn't want to do any of this. He'll say that he can implement weaker versions of it -- say, only blocking some "notorious" sites that carry secure software. But anything less than the programme above will have no material effect on the ability of criminals to carry on perfectly secret conversations that "we cannot read". If any commodity PC or jailbroken phone can run any of the world's most popular communications applications, then "bad guys" will just use them. Jailbreaking an OS isn't hard. Downloading an app isn't hard. Stopping people from running code they want to run is -- and what's more, it puts the whole nation -- individuals and industry -- in terrible jeopardy.
http://boingboing.net/2015/01/13/wha...st-propos.html





EU Response to Free Speech Killings? More Internet Censorship
David Meyer

In the wake of this week’s terrorist attacks in Paris, which began with the killing of 12 people at the offices of satirical publication Charlie Hebdo, the interior ministers of 12 EU countries have called for a limited increase in internet censorship.

The interior ministers of France, Germany, Latvia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden and the U.K. said in a statement that, while the internet must remain “in scrupulous observance of fundamental freedoms, a forum for free expression, in full respect of the law,” ISPs need to help “create the conditions of a swift reporting of material that aims to incite hatred and terror and the condition of its removing, where appropriate/possible.”

This sounds similar to recent agreements in the U.K. whereby ISPs use filters to stop citizens seeing “extremist” online content, though it’s hard to tell without more details. There seems to be no coordinated push for more internet surveillance just yet, although there is a drive for better intelligence sharing between EU countries.

It seems, to say the least, an awkward reaction to what was in part a free-speech-related attack — the left-wing Charlie Hebdo has itself frequently been accused of hate speech for its portrayal of Muslims and others. On that front, a German newspaper that reprinted blasphemous Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Mohammed in the wake of the attack was firebombed in the early hours of Sunday morning, with no injuries. Others that did the same remain under police guard.

At the Paris meeting, the ministers also agreed on a more positive way to counter terrorist propaganda: more speech. They said they had resolved “to develop positive, targeted and easily accessible messages, able to counter this propaganda, aimed at a young audience that is particularly vulnerable to indoctrination.”

The ministers also agreed on various other measures to do with keeping an eye on people travelling, including urgently moving towards a new European Passenger Name Record framework. As legal advice released this week indicates, any such agreement will need to take account of last year’s striking-down of the Data Retention Directive, by embedding significant privacy safeguards.

The meeting came as ministers and heads of state from around the world marched in Paris in solidarity against the attacks and in favor of the free expression for which Charlie Hebdo was targeted. These included representatives of countries such as Egypt, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria and Russia, all of which are notable for cracking down on free expression at home — their presence drew condemnation from Reporters Without Borders, which said it was “appalled”.

“We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends,” Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Bernard “Willem” Holtrop said of some who had expressed condolences and solidarity with the publication, such as Vladimir Putin, far-right French politician Marine Le Pen, Queen Elizabeth and Pope Francis. In the Saturday interview with a Dutch newspaper, he added: “I never come to the editorial meetings because I don’t like them. I guess that saved my life.”
https://gigaom.com/2015/01/11/eu-res...et-censorship/





After Paris Attacks, Wrong Responses to Charlie Hebdo
The Editorial Board

Leaders in Europe are justifiably trying to figure out what they should be doing to prevent terrorist attacks like the recent massacre at the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Regrettably, some politicians are proposing the kind of Internet censorship and surveillance that would do little to protect their citizens but do a lot to infringe on civil liberties.

In Paris, a dozen interior ministers from European Union countries including France, Britain and Germany issued a statement earlier this week calling on Internet service providers to identify and take down online content “that aims to incite hatred and terror.” The ministers also want the European Union to start monitoring and storing information about the itineraries of air travelers. And in Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron suggested the country should ban Internet services that did not give the government the ability to monitor all encrypted chats and calls.

Even before the Charlie Hebdo attack, European leaders were proposing or enacting harsh measures. For example, the French Parliament passed a law in September that allows the authorities to temporarily seize the passports and identity cards of citizens who they believed intended to join foreign terrorist organizations. And this week, French officials said they had arrested 54 people for hate speech, including a controversial comic.

Appealing as these measures may sound in the aftermath of a tragedy, they are deeply flawed. Countries like France and Germany have long had stricter controls on speech than the United States. For example, their governments have in the past forced Internet firms like Yahoo and Twitter to take down Nazi propaganda. But those decisions are generally made by government officials or judges, not technology companies.

Internet service providers do not have the staff or the skill to determine what content is likely to lead to terrorist attacks. That is why a blanket mandate to censor terrorism-related information could force these businesses to err on the side of caution and take down information that might be offensive but would not lead to an imminent attack. In fact, an Internet service provider might well have taken down satirical cartoons of the kind Charlie Hebdo published.

Besides, even if Internet companies blocked videos and other propaganda produced by terrorist groups from their networks, that action would not necessarily prevent Europeans from finding that information. Terrorist sympathizers could access the banned content relatively easily by using virtual private networks or proxy servers that allow users in one country to pretend they are in a different country, like the United States, where free speech laws are much stronger. Some Europeans are already using such tools to access American services, like Netflix, that are not yet available in their countries.

Mr. Cameron’s proposal raises another set of problems. In a speech earlier this week, he said he wanted companies like WhatsApp and Snapchat to create back doors in their services that would allow intelligence services to monitor conversations between users. If the companies refused to comply, he said, they should not be allowed to operate in Britain. Such an approach might seem reasonable to some — after all, the police can wiretap a landline phone, so why not a messaging service?

But technology and privacy advocates say it is dangerous to require technology companies to build such surveillance mechanisms into communications services because hackers and criminals will inevitably find ways to use those back doors to steal information from individuals, corporations and governments.

Mr. Cameron’s proposal would make the Internet less secure without necessarily hampering terrorists. People who are determined to communicate with each other in secret can download encryption software from the Internet and send messages through systems like Tor that obscure their identities and location.

Of course, governments can and should take steps to identify threats and prevent terrorist attacks through targeted intelligence gathering. But there is good reason to believe that widespread censorship and intrusive surveillance will only undermine personal freedoms and could even make us less secure.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/16/op...lie-hebdo.html





Report Finds No Substitute for Mass Data Collection
David E. Sanger

A federal study released on Thursday concluded that there was no effective alternative to the government’s “bulk collection” of basic information about every telephone call made in the United States, a practice that civil rights advocates call overly intrusive.

Last year, after the former intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden revealed details of the government’s vast data-collection enterprise, President Obama asked intelligence agencies to assess whether there was a way to get at the communications of terrorism suspects without sweeping up records of all calls made and received inside the United States, including their length and other identifying information.

On Thursday, the National Academy of Sciences, in a detailed report that brought together communications and cybersecurity experts and former senior intelligence officials, said that “no software-based technique can fully replace the bulk collection of signals intelligence.” But it also concluded that there were ways to “control the usage of collected data” and to make sure that once it is in the government’s hands, there are stronger privacy protections.

The findings came a year after Mr. Obama announced modest reforms to practices of the National Security Agency that had been revealed by Mr. Snowden, including doing away with a huge government-run database of phone records and instead relying on separate databases managed by phone companies.

Eventually, those records will be held only by providers like AT&T and Verizon. But the change has not happened yet, as officials try to figure out how they would search, with court orders, information they do not have on their own computer systems. Government officials have been clear that the transition will take considerable time.

Mr. Obama’s hope was that technology would solve the problem — that new search technologies would make it possible to “target” the collection of the phone data, which does not include the conversations themselves. But the researchers could not find a way.
“From a technological standpoint, curtailing bulk data collection means analysts will be deprived of some information,” said Robert F. Sproull, the chairman of the committee that examined the problem and a former director of Oracle’s Sun Labs. But, he said, that “does not necessarily mean that current bulk collection must continue.”

Since the uproar over Mr. Snowden’s revelations and the program’s effect on Americans’ privacy, the politics of mass data collection have shifted. Terrorist attacks like the ones that killed 17 people in Paris last week, along with the rise of the Islamic State, have led to calls for more vigilance by intelligence agencies, swinging the pendulum back.

Britain is now talking about expanding surveillance, and both its government and Mr. Obama’s law enforcement agencies have protested moves by Apple, Microsoft and other technology companies to prevent snooping by routinely encrypting many types of mobile and computer communications. David Cameron, the British prime minister, was expected to raise those issues in detail in a visit with Mr. Obama on Thursday and Friday.

The American Civil Liberties Union, a strong critic of the N.S.A. program, said in a statement from Neema Singh Guliani, the group’s legislative counsel, that “it would be a mistake to read the National Academy’s report as supporting a policy of continued bulk collection.”

She added that the report did not contradict findings of groups that have concluded that “the domestic bulk call record program has not helped stop an act of terrorism.” But she noted that the report “does importantly acknowledge that there are additional steps that the intelligence community can take to increase transparency, improve oversight, and limit the use of information collected.”

The report examined ways intelligence agencies could narrow searches to foreign research institutes, companies or government facilities, using generic situations that were clearly thin covers for events now unfolding in places like Libya and Syria. But it found all the approaches ultimately unsatisfactory. “The ‘needle in the haystack’ metaphor is relevant here,” it concluded. “If the needle is not in the smaller haystack, no amount of smarter searching will help.”

“There is no doubt that bulk collection of signals intelligence leaves many uncomfortable,” the report said. “Various courts have indeed questioned whether such collection is constitutional.” But in the end, the committee concluded, the United States should focus on putting limits on how the data is viewed and used — and by whom — rather than limiting how much of it is collected.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/16/us...hone-data.html





Exclusive: A Sneak Peek At CISPA 2015
Rachael Tackett

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is the bill in the US Congress that just refuses to die. Like a zombie, it keeps rising from the dead to harass cyber activists and civil liberties advocates. In a slight reprieve, Representative Mike Rogers, CISPA’s previous co-sponsor, has announced that he will not run for re-election. Never one to waste an opportunity for a crisis, a House Democrat, Representative Dutch Ruppersberger, has decided to re-introduce CISPA after the Sony hacks, which the US government blames on North Korea.

The full text of the reintroduced CISPA bill can be found here RUPPER_001_xml-1

Even though CISPA 2015 was introduced last Thursday, for some reason, the text of the bill has not appeared on Congress.gov. Earlier today, I called Representative Ruppersberger’s office to get a copy of the bill.

Under CISPA 2015 (HR 234), the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Attorney General, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Secretary of Defense would create the cyber threat information sharing program and also provide oversight for the program’s civil liberties protections. This is akin to allowing the foxes to guard the hen house. CISPA 2015 also mandates privacy and civil liberties reports, but allows government agencies to classify the annexes to the reports. In other words, CISPA 2015 does not intend to have any real oversight for civil liberties and privacy. Cyber threat information shared with the government would also be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act and would be a serious blow to transparency in government. Perhaps the worst thing about the CISPA 2015 bill is that it would give immunity from criminal prosecution and lawsuits to anyone sharing cyber threat information with the government. CISPA 2015 would provide for an even cozier relationship between Silicon Valley and the US government at the detriment of civil liberties and privacy for everyone else.

CISPA 2015 has now been referred to the House Committees on the Judiciary, Armed Services, Homeland Security, and Intelligence.
http://piratetimes.net/exclusive-a-s...at-cispa-2015/





The New CISPA Bill Is Literally Exactly the Same as the Last One
Kate Knibbs

The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over expecting different results. That's a cliche, but politicians often follow the hoariest routes to power, and attempting to enact change by doing the same thing repeatedly is one of them. When word broke last week that the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, the twice-defeated bill known as CISPA, was being re-revived by Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), it wasn't clear if the zombie legislation would be updated to address the myriad concerns with previous versions. We combed through the full text of the bill and, nope, it's exactly the same, word for word for overly broad data-scooping power-granting word.

The reintroduced CISPA (HR 234) is identical to HR 624, the CISPA bill that passed the House in 2013 and stalled out in the Senate. Nevermind that the Senate already refused to vote on an identical bill. Perhaps there is some unspoken Beetlejuice rule among Congressmen where Ruppersberger is hoping to invoke to a vote by saying the same damn thing three times.

Like the Patriot Act, which conferred massively broad powers in response to security threats, CISPA employs vague language to grant the government an enormous amount of wiggle room when it comes to justifying privacy violations.

To recap it for you, under CISPA, no warrants or subpoenas are required for collecting and sharing personal data, as long as the action falls under the so-broad-as-to-be-essentially-meaningless umbrella of "to protect the national security of the United States." The data siphoned and disseminated by the government would be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

CISPA's information-sharing goal is not inherently malicious or anti-privacy. Of course the government wants whatever powers necessary to prevent, assess, and shut down cybersecurity threats. But the bill as it is written is an unambiguous threat to privacy.

The bill only grants powers to share data when a cyber threat is imminent. It defines a cyber threat as either "efforts to degrade, disrupt, or destroy such system or network" or "theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information." This definition would make any instance of cybercrime an opportunity to collect and disseminate data. And if the NSA's track record is any indication (which, come on, it is) this would make anyone even remotely connected to an instance of cybercrime vulnerable to government and corporate data-siphoning.

One troubling aspect comes from the lack of limitations on how corporations can use the data they receive. CISPA encourages companies to share data with personal identifying information with government agencies, and with other companies if it relates to a threat.

The bill gives companies that are sharing information immunity, as long as they act "in good faith":

No civil or criminal cause of action shall lie or be maintained in Federal or State court against a protected entity, self-protected entity, cybersecurity provider, or an officer, employee, or agent of a protected entity, self-protected entity, or cybersecurity provider, acting in good faith

What is "good faith" exactly? The bill defines it by its opposite, "a lack of good faith" which includes "any act or omission taken with intent to injure, defraud, or otherwise endanger any individual, government entity, private entity, or utility." This sort of language lacks the specificity required to go after companies that abuse their newly-bloomed access to data.

Once that information is shared, federal government agencies are limited in the ways the can use the data (with very vague language). However, the companies on the receiving end are not explicitly barred from repurposing this data.

As the ACLU pointed out, this could be fixed by amending the bill to circumscribe repurposing. That no such amendment was added before the bill hit the floor for the third time is a disturbing indication that this sort of personal information protection is not a priority.

President Obama promised to veto HR 624. That doesn't mean he is opposed to new cybersecurity laws. In the wake of the Sony hack, the White House is keen to introduce legislation to make it easier for private entities and companies to share information about cyber threats with government agencies. That's why Obama announced a legislative proposal about cybersecurity this week that covers much of the same ground as CISPA. There are key differences: The White House proposal insists that companies remove personal identification information from data before they share it with government agencies, a move designed to protect the privacy of the people whose data is part of the perceived threat.
Sony Hack - Everything you need to know about the Sony hack in one place

That's a good thing, but it's also likely to become a point of contention with CISPA supporters, who could argue that eliminating personal identifiers would be too difficult to do while racing the clock against a security threat. It's probably not a coincidence that the president announced his proposals on the heels of the new CISPA legislation; it could be a way to divert support from the more-contentious CISPA.
http://gizmodo.com/the-new-cispa-bil...the-1679496808





Pirate Activist Shows Politicians What Digital Surveillance Looks Like
Zeljka Zorz

How to make politicians really understand the dangers of mass digital surveillance and the importance of information security?

Gustav Nipe, the 26-year old president of the Swedish Pirate Party's youth wing, tried to do it by setting up an open Wi-Fi network at the Society and Defence National Conference held in Sälen, Sweden, late last and earlier this week, and collecting and analyzing the metadata of conference attendees who connected to it.

This conference is an annual summit organized by the Swedish Society and Defence NGO, during which defense and national security issues in Sweden are debated by the speakers and other participants, usually Riksdag (Swedish parliament) members, representatives of political parties, trade unions, the government, and journalists.

Nipe set up an open wireless Internet access point named "Open Guest" on the premises of the hotel where the conference was held, and over 100 delegates used this particular unsecured Wi-Fi network to go online.

The collected metadata showed that, among other sites, they visited those of daily Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, Swedish private ads website Blocket, eBay, and tourism sites. "This was during the day when I suppose they were being paid to be at the conference working," Nipe noted for The Local.

But the collected metadata also showed a far more serious thing: on several occasions, users connected to e-mail servers belonging to the likes of the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) and other government organizations.

"The [MSB] is tasked to develop the community's ability to prevent and handle emergencies and crises. That their staff is apparently not adequately trained in information security is problematic," Nipe pointed out in a press release (via Google Translate), adding that their use of an open unencrypted network to read official emails is astonishing.

"The scary part is that with unsecure networks like these you can end up getting access even to secure servers because people so often use the same passwords for different sites. So we could have got into the government's server or used other information to track people in their everyday lives," he noted.

The fact that they managed to identify authority figures, journalists and politicians through their use of a wireless network and their less thoughtful use of online services demonstrates the tremendous power available to anyone controlling the internet, they pointed out.

"It also shows the risk involved for public figures and private individuals to work and live their lives on a network whose safety is compromised," they said, and called for the authorities and the security establishment to work towards the creation of a safer Internet on which all non-suspect privacy is protected.

This action has been criticized by many, and the question of whether a stunt like this is legal according to the Sweden's Personal Data Act has been raised. Nipe promised to encrypt all the collected information and to destroy it after it's thoroughly analyzed.

He also pointed out that it was the delegates who used their network without permission, and added that using an unprotected network for logging into their official email accounts must be against official operational rules at the agencies for which they work.
http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=17828





To Avoid Detection, Terrorists Purposely Sent Emails with Spammy Subject Lines
Alice Truong

By now, it’s common knowledge the National Security Agency collects plenty of data on suspected terrorists as well as ordinary citizens. But the agency also has algorithms in place to filter out information that doesn’t need to be collected or stored for further analysis, such as spam emails—a fact terrorists used to their advantage.

Much of the debate around the NSA’s overreach has focused on selectors, the terms it uses to describe its requests for information collected. According to a transparency report it published last summer, the agency was approved to use 423 selectors in 2013 under its telephone metadata program. However, filters, which specify data the agency does not want, also play an important role in reducing noise.

In a paper published by the American Mathematical Society, the agency’s former research director, Michael Wertheimer, recalled an instance when the US seized laptops left by Taliban members soon after the 9/11 attacks. The only email written in English found on the computers contained a purposely spammy subject line: “CONSOLIDATE YOUR DEBT.” According to Wertheimer, the email was sent to and from nondescript addresses that were later confirmed to belong to combatants.

“It is surely the case that the sender and receiver attempted to avoid allied collection of this operational message by triggering presumed ‘spam’ filters,” he said, noting the agency is constantly refining its algorithms to discover new threats.
http://qz.com/326927/to-avoid-detect...subject-lines/





Judge Cites Use of Secure Email Riseup as a Potential Terrorist Indicator
Ms. Smith

Is it possible that using secure email services can be construed as an indicator of being a terrorist? Although it’s a ridiculous notion that using secure email implies criminal activities, a judge cited that reason to partially justify arrests in Spain.

In December, as part of “an anti-terrorist initiative” Operation Pandora, over 400 cops raided 14 houses and social centers in Spain. They seized computers, books, and leaflets and arrested 11 people. Four were released under surveillance, but seven were “accused of undefined terrorism” and held in a Madrid prison. This led to “tens of thousands” participating in protests. As terrorism is alleged “without specifying concrete criminal acts,” the attorney for those seven “anarchists” denounced the lack of transparency.

The case grabbed my attention thanks to this EFF tweet. It is unacceptable for privacy and security measures to get people flagged as potential terrorists.

The EFF points toward a quote from a Riseup blog post titled “Security is not a crime.” Reasons given by the judge to hold seven people in jail “include the possession of certain books, ‘the production of publications and forms of communication’, and the fact that the defendants ‘used emails with extreme security measures, such as the RISE UP server’.

“We reject this Kafka-esque criminalization of social movements, and the ludicrous and extremely alarming implication that protecting one’s internet privacy is tantamount to terrorism,” wrote Riseup.

In case you don’t know, Riseup provides secure email services and online communication tools popular among activists and people opposed to "full pipe monitoring" in the U.S. “Riseup like any other email provider, has an obligation to protect the privacy of its users,” the blog post states.

Many of the “extreme security measures” used by Riseup are common best practices for online security and are also used by providers such as hotmail, GMail or Facebook. However, unlike these providers, Riseup is not willing to allow illegal backdoors or sell our users’ data to third parties.

In the same way that visiting the Tor Project’s (The Onion Router) website, viewing the TAILs (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) website or documentation, or even surfing to the Linux Journal can mean the NSA has “fingerprinted” your IP to track and watch you, it’s an exceedingly dangerous precedent to cite the use of secure email as a potential indicator of involvement in terrorist activities.

But using secure email is not the only reason the judge mentioned for holding the seven in a Spanish prison. Just as possession of the FBI-hated (pdf) Anarchist Cookbook (pdf) has been cited in terrorism cases, reading the book Against Democracy (Contra la democràcia [pdf]) was also cited as partial justification for the arrests.

As explained on Rabble:

According to the prosecutor, the evidence against them includes finding numerous copies of a book called “Against Democracy”, written by the “Grupos Anarquistas Coordinados” (“Coordinated Anarchist Groups”, GAC), in the raided buildings. The GAC is an anarchist organization, active since 2012, which the Spanish state is trying to paint as a “terrorist” network.

325 provides more about Against Democracy, while anarchist news reprinted a Spanish flyer that states:

The coordination between the police force and the media during Operation Pandora was immediately apparent. Together, they created panic and justified the repressive operation in terms of “criminal groups”, “terrorists” and “violent ones”. These police raids happened one day after the enactment of the “Ley Mordaza”, a very restrictive law that criminalizes disobedience and protest.

There may be other reasons and possibly other evidence instead of unproven accusations, such as destroying ATMs with homemade bombs during 2012 and 2013, but Judge Javier Gómez Bermúdez cited a book and the use of secure email as “evidence” to apply the anti-terrorism law. The judge, according to Directa, said he is not investigating the possible attacks, but is investigating the organization based on possible danger it might pose in the future. Put another way, “not judging what one has done but what you could do in the future.”

This is not the first time Riseup services have been targeted by law enforcement; in 2012, the FBI seized a Riseup server in a facility it shared with May First/People Link. The EFF got involved because the FBI’s investigation led them to an anonymous remailer program called MixMaster, which “should have been the end of the story.” Eventually, the seized server was returned.

Regarding Riseup email services being cited in the Spanish terrorism case, as if protecting online privacy is a crime, Riseup wrote:

The European Parliament’s report on the US NSA surveillance program states that “privacy is not a luxury right, but the foundation stone of a free and democratic society.” Recent revelations about the extent to which States violate everyone’s right to privacy show that everything that can be spied upon will be spied upon. Furthermore, we know that criminalizing people for using privacy tools also has a chilling effect on everybody, and human-rights defenders, journalists, and activists, in particular. Giving up your basic right to privacy for fear of being flagged as a terrorist is unacceptable.

More will surely come out about the case, but it’s not looking good right now as it seems to ridiculously indicate that maintaining online security and privacy is a bad criminal-like thing.
http://www.networkworld.com/article/...indicator.html





Washington DC's Public Library Will Teach People How to Avoid the NSA
Jason Koebler

Later this month, the Washington DC Public Library will teach residents how to use the internet anonymization tool Tor as part of a 10 day series designed to shed light on government surveillance, transparency, and personal privacy.

A series called "Orwellian America," held by a publicly funded entity mere minutes from a Congress and administration that allowed the NSA’s surveillance programs to spin wildly out of control certainly seems subversive. But the library says it wasn't really intended that way.

"We realize it can be a controversial topic, but we tried to make the program as balanced as possible," Catherine Gees, a library associate who helped put together the program, told me. "We reached out to NSA and other federal agencies, and with a lot of them, we didn't get response."

The series will open with a screening of The Internet's Own Boy, a documentary about Aaron Swartz, the brains behind RSS, Creative Commons, and an influential partner at Reddit who committed suicide while under a widely criticized indictment for federal data theft.

There will also be marathon readings of George Orwell’s 1984, a lesson in how to use the anonymity service Tor to protect your privacy online, a lecture about how to access government data online, a lecture about how to track campaign finances, internet safety classes for teens, and screenings of the Frontline documentary United States of Secrets, about the Edward Snowden leaks.

Another lecture will teach people basic online security (such as two-step authentication) and will include live hacking demonstrations. A closing event at the Spy Museum will discuss the ongoing tension between transparency and national security.

The series has been in the planning stages for roughly a year by Gees and her colleagues, Emily Menchal and Myra Remigio-Leonard, but it wasn't until the library secured a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services that it was able to put the full program together.

"We wanted to take a look at 1984 because it's very relevant, and recently, people keep comparing everything to it, sometimes not in the most accurate way," Gees said. "We wanted a way to get people to come to the library, and it seems as though they're concerned about personal privacy and security online. People were asking questions like 'What is Wikileaks?' 'Who is Edward Snowden?' and 'How does wiretapping work?'"

Gees added that maybe it’s not so ironic for a library to be teaching people this stuff.

“Libraries have always been concerned about privacy rights. It seems like a natural place for this,” she said. “I just wish we were able to bring in more voices from the other side of the conversation.”
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/was...-avoid-the-nsa





How a $10 USB Charger Can Record Your Keystrokes Over the Air
Dennis Fisher

Hardware hacker and security researcher Samy Kamkar has released a slick new device that masquerades as a typical USB wall charger but in fact houses a keylogger capable of recording keystrokes from nearby wireless keyboards.

The device is known as KeySweeper and Kamkar has released the source code and instructions for building one of your own. The components are inexpensive and easily available, and include an Arduino microcontroller, the charger itself and a handful of other bits. When it’s plugged into a wall socket, the KeySweeper will connect to a nearby Microsoft wireless keyboard and passively sniff, decrypt and record all of the keystrokes and send them back to the operator over the Web.

“KeySweeper has the capability to send SMS alerts upon certain keystrokes being typed, e.g. “www.bank.com”. If KeySweeper is removed from AC power, it appears to shut off, however it continues to operate covertly using an internal battery that is automatically recharged upon reconnecting to AC power,” Kamkar said in a post explaining the new device.

Wireless keyboards have become a popular option for users wanting to connect to a laptop. Kamkar said he picked Microsoft’s keyboards after going into Best Buy and seeing which models seemed to be the most prevalent. The effective range of the KeySweeper device is likely about the typical range of a Bluetooth device, he said, but that could be extended using a low-noise amplifier. The KeySweeper project builds on previous work from Travis Goodspeed and Thorsten Schröder and Max Moser.

Kamkar spells out the process for determining the kind of chip that the keyboard is using and the frequency and protocol it’s using to communicate with the USB dongle. With that done, he then set about figuring out how to decrypt the keystrokes, which are encrypted as they move from the keyboard to the dongle.

“Thorsten and Max discovered the keystrokes are simply encrypted (xor’d) with the MAC address in ECB mode, which we are able to sniff after using Travis’ method of abusing the nRF24L01+ to both sniff and reveal MAC addresses. This “encryption” is the equivalent of taking a deck of cards, cutting it once, and calling it shuffled,” Kamkar said.

“After further investigation, I found that since we now know all Microsoft keyboards begin with 0xCD as the MAC address, the actual keystroke (in orange below) happens to be aligned with the first byte of the MAC address (0xCD). This means even if we do not know the MAC address, we can decrypt the keystroke, as the alignment will never change, and 0xCD is always the first byte of the MAC.”

The hardware portion of KeySweeper is designed to be as inconspicuous as possible, and Kamkar said it can be built with or without the GSM motherboard. He warns that the device can be dangerous because it doesn’t necessarily meet normal electrical standards and users without a good electrical background shouldn’t try to build one.

“KeySweeper uses extremely low-power and low profile hardware to remain as covert as possible. KeySweeper can be operated from a battery, or from ~3-20V DC power. Because we wish to keep KeySweeper powered at all times, we stealthily install it inside of an innocent wall USB charger which we expect to be always plugged in,” he said.

“In the case that the USB charger is unplugged, KeySweeper stealthily continues its operation using its (optional) internal battery. The moment KeySweeper is plugged back in, it switches back over to using AC power, and simultaneously recharges the battery.”

Kamkar, who has released a number of other hardware-based attack tools such as SkyJack and USBdriveby, said via email that there’s not a practical way to detect the KeySweeper attack.

“No, there is no way to detect the attack unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on which side of the table you’re sitting),” he said.
http://threatpost.com/how-a-10-usb-c...the-air/110367





Need Some Espionage Done? Hackers Are for Hire Online
Matthew Goldstein

A man in Sweden says he will pay up to $2,000 to anyone who can break into his landlord’s website. A woman in California says she will pay $500 for someone to hack into her boyfriend’s Facebook and Gmail accounts to see if he is cheating on her.

The business of hacking is no longer just the domain of intelligence agencies, international criminal gangs, shadowy political operatives and disgruntled “hacktivists” taking aim at big targets. Rather, it is an increasingly personal enterprise.

At a time when huge stealth attacks on companies like Sony Pictures, JPMorgan Chase and Home Depot attract attention, less noticed is a growing cottage industry of ordinary people hiring hackers for much smaller acts of espionage.

A new website, called Hacker’s List, seeks to match hackers with people looking to gain access to email accounts, take down unflattering photos from a website or gain access to a company’s database. In less than three months of operation, over 500 hacking jobs have been put out to bid on the site, with hackers vying for the right to do the dirty work.

It is done anonymously, with the website’s operator collecting a fee on each completed assignment. The site offers to hold a customer’s payment in escrow until the task is completed.

In just the last few days, offers to hire hackers at prices ranging from $100 to $5,000 have come in from around the globe on Hacker’s List, which opened for business in early November.

For instance, a bidder who claimed to be living in Australia would be willing to pay up to $2,000 to get a list of clients from a competitor’s database, according to a recent post by the bidder.

“I want the client lists from a competitors database. I want to know who their customers are, and how much they are charging them,” the bidder wrote.

Others posting job offers on the website were looking for hackers to scrub the Internet of embarrassing photos and stories, retrieve a lost password or change a school grade.

The rather matter-of-fact nature of the job postings on Hacker’s List shows just how commonplace low-profile hacking has become and the challenge such activity presents for law enforcement at a time when federal and state authorities are concerned about data security.

Hacking into individual email or social media accounts occurs on a fairly regular basis, according to computer security experts and law enforcement officials. In September, the Internet was abuzz when hackers posted nude photos of female celebrities online.

It is not clear just how successful Hacker’s List will prove to be. A review of job postings found many that had yet to receive a bid from a hacker. Roughly 40 hackers have registered with the website, and there are 844 registered job posters. From the postings, it is hard to tell how many of the job offers are legitimate.

The site did get a favorable review recently on hackerforhirereview.com, which specializes in assessing the legitimacy of such services. The reviewer and owner of that site, who would identify himself only as “Eric” in emails, said he gave his top rating to Hacker’s List because it’s a “really cool concept” that limits the ability of customers and hackers to take advantage of one another.

In light of the novelty of the site, it’s hard to say whether it violates any laws.

Arguably some of the jobs being sought on Hacker’s List — breaking into another person’s email account — are not legal.

The founders of Hacker’s List, however, contend that they are insulated from any legal liability because they neither endorse nor condone illegal activities.

The website includes a 10-page terms and conditions section to which all users must agree. It specifically forbids using “the service for any illegal purposes.”

Some experts say it is not clear whether Hacker’s List is doing anything wrong in serving as a meeting ground for hackers and those seeking to employ them.

Yalkin Demirkaya, president of the private investigation company Cyber Diligence, and a former commanding officer of the New York Police Department’s computer crimes group, said a crackdown would depend on whether law enforcement officials saw it as a priority. He said Hacker’s List may skate by because many of the “people posting the ads are probably overseas.”

But Thomas G. A. Brown, a senior managing director with FTI Consulting and former chief of the computer and intellectual property crime unit of the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, said hacker-for-hire websites posed problems.

“Hackers for hire can permit nontechnical individuals to launch cyberattacks with a degree of deniability, lowering the barriers to entry for online crime,” Mr. Brown said.

The website, which is registered in New Zealand, is modeled after several online businesses in which companies seeking freelancers can put projects out to bid. Some have compared the service to a hacker’s version of the classified advertising website Craigslist. Hacker’s List even has a Twitter account (@hackerslist), where it announces the posting of new hacking assignments.

Still, the three founders of Hacker’s List are not willing to go public with their own identities — at least not yet.

After registering with the website and beginning an email conversation, a reporter contacted one of the founders. Over a period of weeks, the founder, who identified himself only as “Jack,” said in a series of emails that he and two friends had founded Hacker’s List and that it was based in Colorado. Jack described himself as a longtime hacker and said that his partners included a person with master’s degree in business administration and a lawyer.

He said that the three were advised by legal counsel on how to structure the website to avoid liability for any wrongdoing by people either seeking to hire a hacker, or by hackers agreeing to do a job. The company, he said, tries to do a small background check on the hackers bidding on jobs to make sure they are legitimate, and not swindlers.

“We all have been friends for a while,” Jack said in an email, adding that Hacker’s List “was kind of a fluke occurrence over drinks one night.”

“We talked about a niche and I built it right there,” he said. “It kind of exploded on us, which was never expected.”

Hacker’s List began its website several months after federal prosecutors and F.B.I. agents in Los Angeles completed a two-year crackdown on the hacker-for-hire industry. The investigation, called Operation Firehacker by the F.B.I., led to the filing of criminal charges against more than a dozen people across the country involved in either breaking into a person’s email account or soliciting a hacker for the job.

In New York, information uncovered during the investigation in Los Angeles led to the arrest in 2013 of Edwin Vargas, a New York Police Department detective at the time, who was charged with paying $4,000 for the hacking of the email accounts of 43 people, including current and former New York police officers. Mr. Vargas, who pleaded guilty in November 2013 and was sentenced to four months in prison, said he had been motivated by jealousy and wanted to see whether any of his colleagues were dating an ex-girlfriend who is the mother of his son.

The F.B.I. investigation also involved the cooperation of the authorities in China, India and Romania, because a number of the websites where the hackers advertised their expertise were based overseas.

Still, the market for hackers, many of whom comply with the law and act more like online investigators, shows no signs of slowing. Many companies are hiring so-called ethical hackers to look for weaknesses in their networks.

David Larwson, a director of operations with NeighborhoodHacker.com, which is incorporated in Colorado, said he had seen increased demand from companies looking to make sure their employees are not obtaining sensitive information through hacking. He said in an email that companies were increasingly focused on an “insider threat” leading to a breach or unauthorized release of information.

On its website, NeighborhoodHacker describes itself as a company of “certified ethical hackers” that works with customers to “secure your data, passwords and children’s safety.”
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2015/01/...r-hire-online/





China Shuts 50 Websites and Social Media Accounts

China has closed 50 websites and social media accounts for violations ranging from pornography to "publishing political news without a permit", Beijing's cyberspace watchdog said on Tuesday.

The government is pursuing a crackdown on unwanted material online. Critics say the increasing restrictions further limit free speech in the one-party Communist state.

Authorities shut 17 public pages on the mobile social messaging app Weixin, also known as WeChat in English, as well as 24 websites and 9 channels or columns on websites, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said in a statement on its website (www.cac.gov.cn).

The Weixin accounts were shut down during the past two months, the state-run news agency Xinhua said.

Some of the other offences listed by CAC include publishing fake information under the guise of the government or media, and publishing information related to gambling or fraud.

Jiang Jun, a spokesman for the cyberspace watchdog, said the CAC would regularly publish a "black list" of violators, according to the statement.

Last fall, Xinhua said the cyberspace watchdog had closed nearly 1.8 million accounts on social networking and instant messaging services since launching an anti-pornography campaign earlier in the year.

In 2014, authorities received almost 11 million reports of what was described as harmful information online, Xinhua reported separately on Tuesday.

In November, Chinese officials called for controls on the Internet to preserve stability.

With a population of 1.4 billion and 632 million people online, China is a market no one wants to miss out on. But it also has the world's most sophisticated online censorship system, known outside the country as the Great Firewall.

It blocks many social media services, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and Google, along with many rights groups sites and some foreign media agencies.

(Reporting by Adam Rose; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/0...0KM1FB20150113





China Expands Internet Backbone to Improve Speeds, Reliability
Michael Kan

Even as China cuts access to some foreign online services, it is laying more fiber optic cables to improve its connection to global Internet networks.

China recently added seven new access points to the world’s Internet backbone, adding to the three points that connect through Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced on Monday.

To expand its Internet backbone networks, China laid over 3,000 kilometers worth of fiber optic cable, and invested 2.9 billion yuan (US$477 million) in its construction. Driving the project were the country’s three state-owned telecom operators, which provide most of China’s Internet broadband.

The additional Internet infrastructure will help accelerate access speeds across the country, and ensure China’s Internet stays functional, the ministry added.

Before, “a failure at one access point could easily cause a large-scale paralysis,” the ministry said. This happened in late 2006 when an earthquake damaged undersea cables, and temporarily cut some of China’s access to international websites.

“Now by having 10 different backbone access points, the traffic going through Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou will lessen, and the Internet flow overall will be more balanced,” the ministry said.

The additional access points were built in seven separate cities, most of which are more inland, such as Chengdu, Xi’an and Zhengzhou.

Tests of the new Internet infrastructure showed website loading times cut by half or more, according to the ministry.

The country has the world’s largest online population, at over 600 million users, and domestic Internet companies such as Alibaba Group, Baidu and Tencent are all expanding their services outside China.

But last year, China’s Internet censorship rose to new levels, with the blocking of more foreign Internet services. In late December, the country cut all access to Google’s Gmail service, after blocking Facebook’s Instagram app, and the phone messaging app Line.
http://www.itworld.com/article/28682...liability.html





Obama Calls for End to 19 State Laws that Harm Community Broadband

President joins FCC in tackling laws that protect ISPs from competition.
Jon Brodkin

President Obama today called for an end to state laws that restrict the rights of cities and towns to build their own broadband networks.

In a report titled, "Community-based broadband solutions: The benefits of competition and choice for community development and highspeed Internet access," the White House said it wants to "end laws that harm broadband service competition."

"Laws in 19 states—some specifically written by special interests trying to stifle new competitors—have held back broadband access and, with it, economic opportunity," the report said. "Today President Obama is announcing a new effort to support local choice in broadband, formally opposing measures that limit the range of options to available to communities to spur expanded local broadband infrastructure, including ownership of networks. As a first step, the Administration is filing a letter with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) urging it to join this effort by addressing barriers inhibiting local communities from responding to the broadband needs of their citizens."

The FCC is already examining these state laws, and considering whether it can invalidate them by using its authority to promote competition in local telecommunications markets by removing barriers that impede infrastructure investment. Community broadband providers in Tennessee and North Carolina recently petitioned the FCC to preempt state laws that prevent them from expanding.

There are also limits on municipal broadband in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin. A similar law in Missouri has an exception for "Internet-type" services, but a state legislator is trying to impose new restrictions on municipal broadband there too.

This is the second time in recent months in which Obama has taken stances on major issues at the FCC. In November, he called on the FCC to reclassify broadband as a common carrier service in order to impose net neutrality rules. After initial resistance, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler now appears ready to do just that.

Beyond those 19 state laws, there may be more restrictions on broadband that should be removed, the White House said. "The President is calling for the Federal Government to remove all unnecessary regulatory and policy barriers to broadband build-out and competition, and is establishing a new Broadband Opportunity Council of over a dozen government agencies with the singular goal of speeding up broadband deployment and promoting adoptions for our citizens," the report said. "The Council will also solicit public comment on unnecessary regulatory barriers and opportunities to promote greater coordination with the aim of addressing those within its scope."

Obama is scheduled to speak about broadband at a community Internet service provider in Iowa tomorrow. The White House report said the US Internet market is seeing a "declining level of competition at higher speeds."

"At speeds of 4 Mbps or less, 75 percent of consumers have a choice between two or more fixed providers, and 15 percent can select among three or more ISPs. However, in the market for Internet service that can deliver 25 Mbps downstream—the speed increasingly recognized as a baseline to get the full benefits of Internet access—three out of four Americans do not have a choice between providers," the report said.

Wheeler last week proposed changing the official definition of broadband from 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream to 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up.

Obama argues that community-based broadband can boost competition and help Internet users.

"In markets where private competition is anemic, whether because of regulatory barriers to entry or the high fixed costs of infrastructure investment, town and cities can build their own middle-mile networks and offer competitive access to the private sector, as Scott County, MN has done," the report said. "Or municipalities can provide service directly to consumers, like in Chattanooga, TN. In either case, municipalities are creating more choices for consumers, fostering competition and creating opportunities for economic growth. Municipal broadband is often a logical choice for towns and cities that are already served by a municipal electric utility, since infrastructure costs can be shared across those two services, just as private cable companies leveraged their networks to provide Internet service. Hundreds of towns and cities around the country have experimented with these networks and created tremendous benefits for consumers and businesses."

The White House wants to help individual communities build better broadband networks, by publishing guides and offering online and in-person technical assistance to communities looking to "address problems in address problems in broadband infrastructure planning, financing, construction, and operations across many types of business models."

Additionally, the Department of Agriculture plans a "revamped" broadband loan program for rural carriers to bring high-speed Internet to unserved and underserved areas.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015...ity-broadband/





FCC Urged to Investigate Verizon’s “Two-Faced” Statements on Utility Rules

Verizon built fiber network with higher phone bills and other Title II perks.
Jon Brodkin

Verizon has repeatedly claimed that utility rules would harm investment in broadband networks, urging the Federal Communications Commission to avoid imposing new regulations. Yet Verizon’s statements to the FCC have avoided mentioning that its own utility-style common carrier status helped the company charge landline phone customers higher prices to fund construction of the fiber network over which it provides FiOS Internet and TV.

That’s the crux of a complaint by telecom analyst Bruce Kushnick of New Networks Institute and audit director Tom Allibone of telecom customer advocacy group Teletruth. They are petitioning the FCC to investigate Verizon for perjury; the petition is available online and will be filed with the FCC tomorrow, Kushnick says.

“Bottom line—We caught the culprit red-handed,” Kushnick and Allibone wrote. “It is an open and shut case. Verizon either did or did not tell the FCC that their entire current investment in fiber optics is based entirely on using the Title II [common carrier] classification. Or that the Verizon companies have made phone customers ‘de facto’ investors by using Title II... We allege that Verizon did deceive the FCC. These material misrepresentations taint every FCC decision and policy affecting Verizon’s regulatory status, but most importantly now the Open Internet [net neutrality] Proceeding.”

The complaint calls Verizon "the 'Janus' of telecom," referring to a two-faced god of Roman mythology. "Verizon has claimed and continues to claim that Title II would harm the companies’ [Verizon and Verizon Wireless] investments," they wrote. "However, this is in direct contradiction to Verizon’s own filings, statements, SEC and state-based filings, the companies’ cable franchise agreement—every fiber optic wire appears to be Title II." That includes fiber lines used to deliver home Internet service and the fiber lines that feed into Verizon Wireless' cell towers, Kushnick and Allibone wrote. Kushnick pointed to a 2012 statement by Verizon CFO Fran Shammo that wireline capital dollars were paying for wireless expansion.

We contacted Verizon this morning to ask for a response or a phone interview but haven’t heard back yet. The FCC also did not provide a response to Ars.

“The FCC can start criminal proceedings against Verizon for perjury,” Kushnick told Ars. “In every document we went through there is no mention whatsoever that Title II is the foundation of their investment in fiber optics.” Verizon claims that “Title II harms investment,” Kushnick noted. “Well, no, Title II is the basis of their investment.”

It seems unlikely that the FCC would go after Verizon for perjury, but the complaint contains details that might help FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler bolster his case that Title II won’t harm broadband providers.

Title II helped Verizon raise rates on phone customers

Verizon is a “common carrier” regulated by Title II of the Communications Act because of the utility phone service it offers over the Public Switched Telephone Network. Verizon’s wireline phone network mostly consists of old copper lines, but the company has upgraded the copper to fiber in areas where demographics justify the investment.

Verizon provides Title II-regulated phone service over both copper and fiber, but the fiber network also supports FiOS Internet, TV, and the largely unregulated Digital Voice service. Despite its claims about Title II harming broadband providers, Verizon used its common carrier status to gain perks that helped build the fiber network.

Kushnick described how Verizon plays both sides of the utility debate in a report that we covered in May 2014. (Verizon did not provide a response to that report, either.) His latest complaint to the FCC fleshes out his argument and adds some new details.
Kushnick and Allibone pointed to a 2009 decision by the New York Public Service Commission (NYPSC) that raised phone rates to fund fiber expansion.

“We are always concerned about the impacts on ratepayers of any rate increase, especially in times of economic stress,” Commission Chairman Garry Brown said at the time. “Nevertheless, there are certain increases in Verizon’s costs that have to be recognized. This is especially important given the magnitude of the company's capital investment program, including its massive deployment of fiber optics in New York. We encourage Verizon to make appropriate investments in New York, and these minor rate increases will allow those investments to continue.”

Verizon’s 2014 cable franchise agreement with New York says that “Verizon New York Inc. (‘Verizon’), as a common carrier under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 (the ‘Act’), constructed its Fiber To The Premises (FTTP) network as an upgrade to its existing telecommunications network,” the Kushnick/Allibone petition said.

The statement “is similar, if not identical to every other Verizon state-based fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) deployment,” the petition states.

Kushnick and Allibone contrasted that with Verizon’s statement to the FCC in July opposing net neutrality rules based on Title II. “Imposing a Title II common carriage regime on broadband providers would be a radical change in course that would only chill, not spur innovation,” Verizon said in that case. “Title II is a regulatory dinosaur, crafted eighty years ago—and based on 19th-Century laws regulating railroads—to address the one-wire world of rotary telephones. Imposing a Title II common carriage regime on broadband providers would be a radical change in course that would only chill, not spur innovation.”

Consumer advocates and customers have accused Verizon of letting its copper lines rot in order to push customers onto fiber. Some customers prefer to keep copper-based phone service because it can keep working during power outages; others can’t upgrade to fiber even if they want to, because Verizon has stopped major expansion of the fiber network. In both scenarios, customers have paid higher rates to fund fiber networks they don't want or can't use, while Verizon allegedly drags its feet fixing longstanding problems in the copper lines.

As we’ve also reported, phone companies are lobbying the FCC to let them stop maintaining the traditional Public Switched Telephone Network and strip utility rules from phone service, leaving the fate of copper-based customers unsettled. The FCC has pledged to investigate complaints that phone companies such as AT&T and Verizon are failing to maintain copper networks.

Kushnick: Open the network to competition

The FCC may reclassify fixed and mobile broadband as Title II next month, using the statute to impose net neutrality restrictions on blocking, throttling, or prioritizing Internet content in exchange for payment. The FCC is expected to avoid imposing stricter Title II rules like rate regulation.

"As far as net neutrality is concerned, we believe this pretty much solves the issue of whether the FCC has the jurisdiction to do Title II," Kushnick said. "It is Title II, it’s redundant to do it again at least for Verizon and all its fiber optic services."

Since Verizon built fiber lines by invoking its utility status, Kushnick argues that the company should be forced to open the network—letting other ISPs offer Internet service directly to consumers by leasing access to Verizon’s lines.

That’s also unlikely, even if the FCC reclassifies broadband as Title II. The FCC got rid of the “unbundling” requirements that opened DSL networks to competition a decade ago, and Wheeler is likely to forbear from imposing the strictest Title II requirements on Internet service.

“Most people don’t understand that net neutrality doesn’t open the networks, it doesn’t bring back competition,” Kushnick told Ars. “It leaves the situation as it is, and you, the company, have to play nice, and the FCC will monitor you.”

It’s not illegal for Verizon to provide non-Title II services such as Internet access over infrastructure built using the benefits of Title II. But Kushnick and Allibone want the FCC to follow the money, especially where phone customers paid for improvements they might not necessarily benefit from. They wrote:

Verizon uses Title II to fund the infrastructure as “Title II”, which means it is part of the state-based utilities as a telecommunications network. This allows utility customers to get charged for ‘massive deployment of fiber optics’. Verizon also gets the rights-of-way from the state-based utility as Title II.

There are those who will argue that the networks can have multiple classifications of service over the same wire. While true, the issue of investment is about the flows of money. In at least New York State, Verizon’s Title VI cable networks were built as part of the existing telecommunications network and therefore the cable division paid little or no construction costs for the FTTP networks it uses to deliver its cable programming. Similarly, it appears that the fiber optic wires to the cell towers and the wires used for Internet service, were all installed as Title II facilities—i.e., the affiliate companies are getting a free ride on the backs of local phone customers who were charged multiple rate increases in New York for “massive deployment of fiber optics”.


In a 2005 New York proceeding, Verizon asserted that it did not have to obtain cable franchises before building fiber networks, arguing that it did not need to be classified as a cable company until it started offering TV service over its fiber lines. Until that point, Verizon argued "that it has the requisite authority to conduct this upgrade under its existing state telephone rights," an NYPSC document said. Despite objections from officials in some towns, the NYPSC concluded that Verizon was correct because of Verizon's common carrier status.

As for the perjury claim, Kushnick and Allibone pointed to a portion of US telecommunications law that says written statements to the FCC may not “intentionally omit material information that is necessary to prevent any material factual statement that is made from being incorrect or misleading," and another section that says statements made to the FCC are done so under penalty of perjury.

“I think it is important not to let companies get away with making statements that are contradicted by their own actions,” Senior VP Harold Feld of advocacy group Public Knowledge told Ars. “Based on Commission precedent, I don't have a lot of hope of them granting Bruce's request, but I am glad someone is shining a spotlight on this instance and similar instances when companies say one thing to regulators and do something else in reality.”

Shammo contradicted the company line at an investor conference last month when he said that Title II “does not influence the way we invest.”

He revised those comments in a subsequent blog post, writing that Verizon’s “short term view on investment” won’t change “based on rumors of what might or might not happen.” But he added that “experience in other countries shows that over-regulation decreases network investment. If the US ends up with permanent regulations inflicting Title II's 1930s-era rules on broadband Internet access, the same thing will happen in the US and investment in broadband networks will go down.”

Wheeler doesn't seem convinced. When making the case for Title II last week, he pointed out that cellular voice is a Title II service just as traditional landline phone service is. Verizon is thus a common carrier for both wireline and wireless voice service, though not for fixed and mobile broadband.

"Under [Title II] for the last 20 years, the wireless industry has been monumentally successful," Wheeler said. "Hundreds of millions—billions of dollars of investment as Title II regulated companies."
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015...utility-rules/





In Surprise FCC Filing, Sprint Endorses Net Neutrality
Jeff John Roberts

Supporters of net neutrality got a boost from an unlikely source on Friday as telecom giant Sprint stated in a letter to the FCC that it would support so-called “Title II” regulation, which is the only legal tool that the agency can use to ensure internet providers can’t favor some websites over others.

The filing is significant because, until now, the telecom industry has been largely opposed to the use of Title II. Here is the key passage from the letter (my emphasis):

So long as the FCC continues to allow wireless carriers to manage our networks and differentiate our products, Sprint will continue to invest in data networks regardless of whether they are regulated by Title II, Section 706, or some other light touch regulatory regime.

This position stands in stark contrast to what other carriers, including Verizon and AT&T, have espoused. In particular, the carriers have warned that Title II would provide a major disincentive to invest in upgrades to their internet offerings.

Sprint’s letter, which can be read in full below, comes before an important FCC meeting on February 26 at which the agency is expected to vote on new rules for the internet. The process became necessary after a major court decision one year ago that struck down a prior version of the FCC’s net neutrality rules.

While wireless data providers like Sprint were not covered by the earlier net neutrality rules, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has hinted strongly that they will be included in whatever new regime the agency imposes.

The letter from Sprint also represents an ongoing shift in momentum in favor of Title II, which appeared to be a long shot at the outset of the process.

Last spring, FCC Chairman floated a plan that would have allowed internet providers to offer special “fast lanes” to preferred websites, but soon reversed course. Meanwhile, companies like Netflix and comedian John Oliver also helped to increase consumers’ support for net neutrality.
https://gigaom.com/2015/01/16/in-sur...et-neutrality/





“Bipartisan” Bill Would Save Internet Providers from Utility Rules

FCC would be stripped of power to apply Title II common carrier rules to ISPs.
Jon Brodkin

US Rep. Bob Latta (R-Ohio) yesterday filed what his press release called "bipartisan legislation to keep [the] Internet open [and] accessible." What the bill actually would do is prevent the Federal Communications Commission from applying common carrier rules to Internet service providers, a step the FCC appears likely to take next month.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler may propose reclassifying broadband providers as common carriers to be regulated by Title II of the Communications Act. The move would let the FCC impose net neutrality rules that restrict ISPs' ability to block, throttle, or prioritize Internet content in exchange for payment, but industry groups argue it will expose telecoms to stricter rules and impose new fees and taxes on consumers.

“The FCC’s plans to reclassify broadband under Title II are misguided,” Latta said in his announcement. “Imposing monopoly-era telephone rules on a 21st Century industry that has thrived under the current light-touch regulatory framework will undoubtedly impede the economic growth and innovation that have resulted in the broadband marketplace absent government interference. These businesses thrive on dynamism and the ability to evolve quickly to shifting market and consumer forces. Subjecting them to bureaucratic red tape won’t promote innovation, consumer welfare, or the economy. My legislation provides the certainty needed for continued investment in broadband networks and services that have been fundamental for job creation, productivity, and consumer choice.”

Latta first proposed the bill last year along with co-sponsors Charles Rangel (D-NY) and Randy Weber (R-Texas). He reintroduced it this week with Republicans now controlling both houses of Congress. Latta is vice chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Communications and Technology Subcommittee.

The bill would amend the Communications Act to define broadband Internet access as an "information service" and prevent the FCC from reclassifying information services as common carriers. Though Latta's bill has a Democratic supporter, congressional Democrats and President Obama have generally pushed a different agenda on net neutrality.

ISPs and telecom industry groups have been among Latta's top donors. In the 2013-14 election cycle, he received $15,000 from the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, $13,000 from AT&T, $10,000 from the American Cable Association, $10,000 from Time Warner Cable, $8,500 from Comcast, $8,000 from Verizon, $8,000 from NCTA - The Rural Broadband Association, and $7,500 from CenturyLink, according to OpenSecrets.org. In the case of the ISPs, donations came not directly from the companies themselves, but from their political action committees, employees, or owners in order to comply with campaign contribution rules.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015...utility-rules/





British Regulator Says BT Must Not Squeeze Rivals in Broadband

British regulator Ofcom has said it would set up a safeguard to make sure BT maintains a sufficient margin between its wholesale and retail superfast broadband charges to allow rival providers to profitably match its prices.

BT has turned around its business in recent years by building a fibre network that has driven the uptake of broadband services, both by consumers and by rivals who take the lines on a wholesale basis to offer them to customers.

Smaller broadband provider TalkTalk had complained however that BT, the country's biggest fixed-line provider, was abusing its dominant position in the way it priced the wholesale offering.

It complained there was not enough of a gap between wholesale price and the rate at which BT sold the product to retail customers, squeezing margins for competitors.

Ofcom said under the new proposal BT would be allowed to set its wholesale fibre prices, but they must do it in such a way that others can compete profitably for superfast broadband customers.

"Ofcom's indicative assessment is that BT is maintaining a sufficient margin under the new draft rules," Ofcom said. "Therefore, the condition is a safeguard which limits BT's ability to reduce retail margins in future, and ensures that any increases in BT's costs must be reflected in its prices."

(Reporting by Kate Holton; editing by Sarah Young)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/0...0KO0JZ20150115





Marriott Abandons Quest to Block Personal Wi-Fi Hot Spots

After an unsuccessful legal and PR battle, the hotel chain says it will not seek to be allowed to block personal hot spots in its conference and convention areas.
Kimberly Weisul

If you're like most travelers, you probably never suspected that your hotel was blocking your personal hot spot. But in October, after Marriott was fined $600,000 by the FCC for blocking Wi-Fi access at its Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center, the issue suddenly popped up on road warriors' agendas. (You can see our best-and-worst of hotel Wi-Fi here.)

On Wednesday, after a legal and public relations battle, Marriott issued a statement to Inc. saying, in effect, that it had given up its quest to be allowed to block guests' personal hot spots. "Marriott International listens to its customers, and we will not block guests from using their personal Wi-Fi devices at any of our managed hotels," a spokesman said in an email.

On December 30, Marriott said it did not intend to block personal hot spots in guests' rooms, but was asking the FCC to be able to do so in conference facilities. In today's statement, Marriott says it is no longer seeking to block guests' personal hot spots anywhere on its properties, but is still looking at potential security issues and looking at ways to resolve them without resorting to blocking guests' devices.

The reference to listening to customers could refer in part to the multiple letters the FCC has received on this issue. After Marriott was fined, it joined with the American Hotel and Lodging Association to request that the FCC change the rules and allow it to block personal hot spots. Marriott said it was concerned about rogue access devices and fraud, although some industry analysts said the issue had more to do with the potentially lucrative income stream to be had by selling Wi-Fi services to convention-goers and exhibitors.

The FCC received 39 comment letters on the issue, of which 38 were negative and one was either neutral or off-topic. Google and Microsoft were among those registering their opposition.

In its statement on Wednesday, Marriott says it "remains committed to protecting the security of Wi-Fi access in meeting and conference areas at our hotels." It said it would continue to work with the FCC and to find "appropriate market solutions that do not involve the blocking of Wi-Fi devices."
http://www.inc.com/kimberly-weisul/m...l-hotspot.html





Don't Buy What Neil Young Is Selling
Mario Aguilar

Neil Young's "high resolution" PonoPlayer goes on sale for $400 today. You shouldn't buy it. The recalcitrant rocker isn't wrong for wanting to reclaim audio quality in the digital age, but in the service of that goal he's peddling junk science, and supporting expensive gear and music files you don't need.

For the last few years, Neil Young has been been the most visible proponent of what's called both "high resolution" and "high definition" audio. These huge audio files theoretically sound much better than any other digital files that have ever existed before. To put that sound in the hands—and ears—of the people, he created the PonoPlayer, a triangular portable music player that promises only the highest of fidelities. He's not alone. Last week at CES, Sony announced a whole battery of new high-resolution audio products, led by an absurdly expensive $1200 Walkman, loaded with hardware that's supposed to optimize the reproduction of the music loaded on it.

At the most basic level, the push for high resolution audio is rooted in reality. By adopting digital formats like the MP3, and the lossy encoding of the music streamed by subscription services like Spotify, we've sacrificed audio quality for convenience. A music lover should care about improving their audio quality by using better files.

That's fair! But from there, the arguments for high-resolution audio fall apart.

The science doesn't make any sense

Though the term is used loosely, high resolution audio is generally meant to refer to music that has been digitally encoded at very high sampling rate and bit-depth. Specifically, it means music encoded at much higher rates than even the CD-quality digital standard that was adopted decades ago.

Here's a chart from Pono describing various levels of audio quality. At the very bottom, you've got the lowest quality streaming files, in the middle you've got 44.1 kHz/16-bit CD quality standard, and at the top, you've got absurdly high-resolution files that are encoded at 192 kHz/24-bit.

The rationale behind high-resolution audio is that by maximizing the sampling rate and bit depth, you also maximize audible detail and dynamic range in the music you're listening to. This sounds great on paper, but in practice it's an absolute fantasy.

The CD-quality standard—which Young and HRA proponents say isn't sufficient—wasn't adopted randomly. It's not a number plucked out of thin air. It's based on sampling theory and the actual limits of human hearing. To the human ear, audio sampled above 44.1 kHz/16-bit is inaudibly different.

Still, this demonstrated mathematical truth does not stop people from claiming that they can hear the difference on higher quality audio. The evidence for Pono's greatness begins with a video testimonials that were posted on the Pono Kickstarter page. Young used his industry connections to put the PonoPlayer loaded with high definition audio tracks in the hands of famous musicians, who all freak out and say Pono is the best thing they have ever heard.

This proves nothing. I'm not calling Norah Jones and Dave Grohl liars, but I'm saying that they're succumbing to confirmation bias, that natural impulse to hear or see what it is you want to hear or see. If Neil Young thrusts a gadget in your hands and says, "Listen dude, you are not going to believe this shit," you are probably going to hear exactly what Neil Young wants you to hear.

Of course, there's a scientific way to overcome confirmation bias, called double-blind testing, whereby you are presented two alternatives randomly in such a way that you have no idea which is which. There are some problems with double-blind testing, but it's generally accepted as best practices, especially when it comes to evaluating something as elusive as audio quality.

Though Young and Pono have failed to produce double-blind studies on the benefits of high-rate audio or their music player, inquiring minds have taken the time to do it. In a 2007 paper published in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, Brad Meyer and David Moran outline the results of a study in which they presented a large sample of "serious" listeners with a double blind test comparing 44.1 kHz audio from "the best high resolution discs we could find." The goal was not to show which was better, but simply to find out if people could even tell the difference.

"None of these variables have shown any correlation with the results, or any difference between the answers and coin-flip results," they write in their conclusion. Later they note, "Further claims that careful 16/44.1 encoding audibly degrades high-resolution signals must be supported by properly controlled double-blind tests."

This is how you do science. It's incredible to me the lengths that educated and intelligent people will go to say that they're somehow endowed with impossible hearing powers that necessitate a level of audio encoding that's demonstrably unnecessary.

The hardware is unnecessary

Let's set the bitrates aside for a moment. We can all agree that better audio quality is a good thing for everyone, so who cares if the rates are way higher than what we need? It will be better! This might technically be true, but the push for high-resolution audio that defies science creates an irrational obsession with hardware we don't need.

First of all, high-resolution audio files take up enormous amounts storage space. A "high resolution" 96 kHz/24-bit file is roughly three times larger than a CD-quality 44.1 kHz/16-bit file. And if you aren't currently using CD-quality files, it's about 24-times larger than what's considered a decent quality MP3. If you have a large music collection, storing any significant amount of high-resolution audio requires a huge amount of storage space, for which companies like Sony want to sell you $1000+ hi-res music players that are basically network attached flash storage.

Moreover, the push for high resolution audio leads people to think they need more expensive hardware than they do, from high-resolution players like the PonoPlayer and Sony's rebooted Walkman, to outrageously priced headphones, speakers, amplifiers and other gadgets.

I'm guilty of this as much as anybody else. Back when Sony announced its (relatively) cheaper $300 high-resolution Walkman last fall, I marveled at it, and thought to myself, "I kind of like the idea of a cute standalone music player that's designed just for my music files." And from a gear lover's point of view, I still feel that way.

On a more rational level, though, I'm actually sensitive to claims that the Pono Player's circuitry is superior to the circuitry of your average music player, which in the case of most people is our smartphones. In audio the quality of the gear you use does often improve the sound. That's why people pay big bucks to record in fancy recording studios that have completely analog circuits. From the Pono's product description:

This portable audio player uses circuitry taken straight from Ayre's own top-of-the-line products, costing tens of thousands of dollars, for unparalleled sound quality and unrivaled listening pleasure.

The question then becomes if the better circuitry on these players is really worth $400, or the inconvenience of carrying around an entire device dedicated only to music playback.

I think for a moment it's worth addressing my own headphone use. The cans I use on a daily basis cost $300. Do I think a good set of headphones sound better than a bad set? Definitely. But I also know that you can get good quality sound from a set of $80 Grados, and that the reason I spend more money on headphones as actually for build quality, comfort, and aesthetics. Much of it doesn't have anything to do with sound at all.

The point is that you don't need fancy hardware to make music sound good, and that no amount of hardware will make your ears hear better than the limits of biology and physics.

Neil Young's heart might be in the right place. Unfortunately, he's put his considerable connections and resources behind a tone-deaf movement.
http://gizmodo.com/dont-buy-what-nei...ing-1678446860





Why Do All Records Sound the Same?

Desperate to get their music on the radio at all costs, record labels are employing powerful software to artificially sweeten it, polish it, make it louder— squeezing out the last drops of its individuality
Tom Whitwell

There was once a little-watched video on Maroon 5's YouTube channel (now deleted, but visible here and here) which documents the tortuous, tedious process of crafting an instantly-forgettable mainstream radio hit.

It’s fourteen minutes of elegantly dishevelled chaps sitting in leather sofas, playing $15,000 vintage guitars next to $200,000 studio consoles, staring at notepads and endlessly discussing how little they like the track (called “Makes Me Wonder”), and how it doesn’t have a chorus. Even edited down, the tedium is mind-boggling as they play the same lame riff over and over and over again. At one point, singer Adam Levine says: “I’m sick of trying to engineer songs to be hits.” But that’s exactly he proceeds to do.

Note: This article originally appeared in the March, 2008 edition of Word Magazine. That was a long time ago—before YouTube started to usurp radio as the place where people discovered music, before music streaming services, before the vinyl revival and before audiophile digital music players like Neil Young’s Pono.

The final version of “Makes Me Wonder” came in three versions: Album, Clean (with the word ‘fuck’ removed from the chorus) and Super Clean (with ‘fuck’ removed more thoroughly, and ‘God’ removed from the second verse). It was a spectacular hit, number one in Panama, Croatia, Cyprus, South Korea and Hungary and many larger countries. Why? Because it was played on the radio over and over and over again.

When you turn on the radio, you might think music all sounds the same these days, then wonder if you’re just getting old. But you’re right, it does all sound the same. Every element of the recording process, from the first takes to the final tweaks, has been evolved with one simple aim: control. And that control often lies in the hands of a record company desperate to get their song on the radio. So they’ll encourage a controlled recording environment (slow, high-tech and using malleable digital effects).

Every finished track is then coated in a thick layer of audio polish before being market-tested and dispatched to a radio station, where further layers of polish are applied until the original recording is barely visible. That’s how you make a mainstream radio hit, and that’s what record labels want.

To be precise, “Makes Me Wonder” was particularly popular on U.S. radio stations playing the ‘Hot Adult Contemporary’ format, which is succinctly described within the radio industry as: “A station which plays commercial popular and rock music released during the past fifteen or twenty years which is more lively than the music played on the average Adult Contemporary station, but is still designed to appeal to general listeners rather than listeners interested in hearing current releases.”

Playlists of Hot Adult Contemporary stations are determined by a computer, most likely running Google-owned Scott SS32 radio automation suite, which shuffles the playlist of 400 to 500 tracks, inserts ads and idents and tells the DJ when to talk. The playlist is compiled after extensive research. Two or three times a year, a company like L.A.-based Music Research Consultants Inc arrive in town, hire a hotel ballroom or lecture theatre and recruit 50 to 100 people, carefully screened for demographic relevance (they might all be white suburban housewives aged 26–40). They’re each given $65 and a perception analyzer—a little black box with one red knob and an LED display. Then, they’re played 700 seven-second clips of songs. If they turn the knob up, the song gets played. If they turn it down, it doesn’t.

If a station needs more up-to-date information (bearing in mind that they’re “designed to appeal to general listeners rather than listeners interested in hearing current releases”) they can run a ‘call-out test,’ where people from the right demographic are cold-called and interrogated about 30 seven-second clips played over the phone.

So Maroon Five’s job is clear. Just as a modern politician’s job is to deliver seven second soundbites, their job is to deliver seven second audio clips which will encourage young-ish people with a high disposable income to turn a little red knob at least 180 degrees clockwise. No wonder they look so stressed.

Fortunately, there are armies of producers, engineers, software programmers and statisticians lining up to help our heroes to craft the perfect innocuous but shiny-sounding research-ready pop hit. “It’s like digital photography,” says the prolific producer John Leckie, who has worked Radiohead’s The Bends, the first Stone Roses album and A Storm In Heaven by The Verve. “Twenty years ago, if I showed you a picture of me standing next to the Pope, you’d believe it, and think I’d met the Pope. Today, you’d assume it was Photoshop.”

John’s career started as a tape operator at Abbey Road, where he witnessed Phil Spector recording All Things Must Pass with George Harrison. Phil wanted a big sound, so he filled the studio with musicians. The album was recorded pretty much live in one room with three drummers, two bassists, two pianists, two organists, six guitarists and horns, playing together onto six tracks of an eight track recorder. Vocals took up the last two tracks.

For many people, this was a golden age. Recording a group of musicians playing together in an acoustically pleasant space is a tremendously difficult business. It’s all about where you place the microphones to capture the instrument sounds, but also the room sounds. Recording engineers at Abbey Road wore white coats and spent years as apprentices before they knew enough to do the job properly. When you listen to a record made the old way—like the Buena Vista Social Club album—you’re hearing a recording of a room. Which happens to have some musicians playing in it.

In the early 70s, recording started to change. Four tracks turned into eight, then 16, then 24, then 48. Engineers looked for ways to get more control over the sound. They started to create dead rooms, with very dry acoustics. Microphones were moved much closer to instruments, which were recorded one by one. With a clean, pure sound on tape, they could add artificial room sounds afterward using echo chambers. There was an explosion in audio creativity, as people were able to experiment endlessly. Records like Tubular Bells or Queen albums would never have been possible in the 60s. The white-coated engineers were replaced with experimental producers like Trevor Horn.

The music sounded exciting and different and strange. If you stick your head really close to an acoustic guitar, or someone singing, or a piano, you’ll hear strange, unexpected things. The aggressive click of plectrum on metal. The ambient resonance of piano strings. The new studios could capture all this.

Compare an acoustic track from Neil Young’s Harvest (1972) with one from Johnny Cash’s American IV (2002):

Rick Rubin’s recordings of Cash are extraordinarily intimate and affecting. But they don’t sound anything like Johnny Cash sitting in your living room playing some songs. They sound like you’re perched on Johnny Cash’s lap with one ear in his mouth and a stethoscope on his guitar.

When people talk about a shortage of ‘warm’ or ‘natural’ recording, they often blame digital technology. It’s a red herring, because copying a great recording onto CD or into an iPod doesn’t stop it sounding good. Even self-consciously old fashioned recordings like Arif Mardin’s work with Norah Jones was recorded on two inch tape, then copied into a computer for editing, then mixed through an analogue console back into the computer for mastering. It’s now rare to hear recently-produced audio which has never been through any analogue-digital conversion—although a vinyl White Stripes album might qualify.

Until surprisingly recently—maybe 2002—the majority of records were made the same way they’d been made since the early 70s: through vast, multi-channel recording consoles onto 24 or 48-track tape. At huge expense, you’d rent purpose-built rooms containing perhaps a million pounds’ worth of equipment, employing a producer, engineer and tape operator. Digital recording into a computer had been possible since the mid 90s, but major producers were often sceptical.

By 2000, Pro Tools, the industry-standard studio software, was mature and stable and sounded good. With a laptop and a small rack of gear costing maybe £25,000 you could record most of a major label album. So the business shifted from the console—the huge knob-covered desk in front of a pair of wardrobe-sized monitor speakers—to the computer screen. You weren’t looking at the band or listening to the music, you were staring at 128 channels of wiggling coloured lines.

“There’s no big equipment any more,” says John Leckie. “No racks of gear with flashing lights and big knobs. The reason I got into studio engineering was that it was the closest thing I could find to getting into a space ship. Now, it isn’t. It’s like going to an accountant. It changes the creative dynamic in the room when it’s just one guy sitting staring at a computer screen.”

“Before, you had a knob that said ‘Bass.’ You turned it up, said ‘Ah, that’s better’ and moved on. Now, you have to choose what frequency, and the slope, and how many dBs, and it all makes a difference. There’s a constant temptation to tamper.”

What makes working with Pro Tools really different from tape is that editing is absurdly easy. Most bands record to a click track, so the tempo is locked. If a guitarist plays a riff fifty times, it’s a trivial job to pick the best one and loop it for the duration of the verse.

“Musicians are inherently lazy,” says John. “If there’s an easier way of doing something than actually playing, they’ll do that.” A band might jam together for a bit, then spend hours or days choosing the best bits and pasting a track together. All music is adopting the methods of dance music, of arranging repetitive loops on a grid. With the structure of the song mapped out in coloured boxes on screen, there’s a huge temptation to fill in the gaps, add bits and generally clutter up the sound.

This is also why you no longer hear mistakes on records. Al Kooper’s shambolic Hammond organ playing on “Like A Rolling Stone” could never happen today because a diligent producer would discreetly shunt his chords back into step. Then there’s tuning. Until electronic guitar tuners appeared around 1980, the band would tune by ear to the studio piano. Everyone was slightly off, but everyone was listening to the pitch of their instrument, so they were musically off.

Today, the process of recording performances, then editing them together into what the band and producer consider a finished track, is just the start. Record companies need to ensure they’ll get that perfect seven-second snippet for the radio testing session, so they’ve added yet more polishing processes.

Once the band and producer are finished, their multitrack—usually a hard disk containing Pro Tools files for maybe 128 channels of audio—is passed onto a mix engineer. L.A.-based JJ Puig has mixed records for Black Eyed Peas, U2, Snow Patrol, Green Day and Mary J Blige. His work is taken so seriously that he’s often paid royalties rather than a fixed fee. He works from Studio A at Ocean Way Studios on the Sunset Strip. The control room looks like a dimly-lit library. Instead of books, the floor-to-ceiling racks are filled with vintage audio gear. This is the room where Frank Sinatra recorded “It Was A Very Good Year” and Michael Jackson recorded “Beat It.”

And now, it belongs to JJ Puig. Record companies pay him to essentially re-produce the track, but without the artist and producer breathing down his neck. He told Sound On Sound magazine: “When I mixed The Rolling Stones’ A Bigger Bang album, I reckoned that one of the songs needed a tambourine and a shaker, so I put it on. If Glyn Johns [who produced Sticky Fingers] had done that many years ago, he’d have been shot in the head. Mick Jagger was kind of blown away by what I’d done, no-one had ever done it before on a Stones record, but he couldn’t deny that it was great and fixed the record.”

When a multitrack arrives, JJs assistant tidies it up, re-naming the tracks, putting them in the order he’s used to and colouring the vocal tracks pink. Then JJ goes through tweaking and polishing and trimming every sound that will appear on the record. Numerous companies produce plugins for Pro Tools which are digital emulations of the vintage rack gear that still fills Studio One. If he wants to run Fergie’s vocal through a 1973 Roland Space Echo and a 1968 Marshall stack, it takes a couple of clicks.

Some of these plugins have become notorious. Auto Tune, developed by former seismologist Andy Hildebrand, was released as a Pro Tools plugin in 1997. It automatically corrects out of tune vocals by locking them to the nearest note in a given key. The L1 Ultramaximizer, released in 1994 by the Israeli company Waves, launched the latest round of the loudness war. It’s a very simple looking plugin which neatly and relentlessly makes music sound a lot louder (a subject we’ll return to in a little while).

When JJ has tweaked and polished and trimmed and edited, his stereo mix is passed on to a mastering engineer, who prepares it for release. What happens to that stereo mix is an extraordinary marriage of art, science and commerce. The tools available are superficially simple—you can really only change the EQ or the volume. But the difference between a mastered and unmastered track is immediately obvious. Mastered recordings sound like real records. That is to say, they all sound a little bit alike.

In a typical week, 30% of the U.S. Top 40 has been mastered at Sterling Sound in New York, which has seven studios working round the clock. There aren’t many mastering engineers in the world. The Strokes recorded Is This It on an old Apple Mac in Gordon Raphael’s basement studio. But it was mastered by Greg Calbi, who also did Born To Run and Graceland.

The business of mastering is infinitely complicated. Mastering engineer Bob Katz has written a 400 page book on mastering techniques, which ends with a poem about the art of mastering:

“I see:/a world which recognizes craft and training/
in audio itself which is not disdaining…”

The mastering engineer’s principle tool is compression. (Audio compression is completely unrelated to data compression, which is what turns a CD into a MP3 file.) It’s a simple-but-complicated audio technique. The loudest parts of a track are made quieter, which means you can turn the overall level up, without getting distortion, so it sounds louder. Why are TV ads so much louder than TV programs? Because their soundtracks are heavily compressed. Why are commercial radio stations much louder? Because they’re heavily compressed.

Bands, producers and record labels have always wanted to make loud records, for radio play and jukeboxes. At Motown, they realized that tambourines can cut through almost anything else. If you’ve got someone shaking a tambourine somewhere on a track, everyone in the pub can hear it when it comes on the jukebox.

With vinyl, there were clear physical restrictions about how wide the grooves could be, and how many grooves you could fit on a 7-inch single. Mastering engineer Bob Ludwig created ultra-loud master of Led Zeppelin II, but his version was pulled when it skipped on a record player owned by Atlantic boss Ahmet Ertegün’s daughter (if your copy has “RL” scratched in the run-out groove, it’s his master, and worth a bit on eBay.)

Radio testing makes loudness more important than ever before. Your seven-second sample has to cut through when played down the phone to a mum with a screaming kid in the background. Software like Waves L1 (which has now evolved to L3) takes a track and slams every millisecond to the maximum level. With multiband compressors, the track is split into three frequency bands. The bass, mid and treble are all independently made as loud as possible. That’s why you can still hear all the words on a Girls Aloud single playing on a transistor radio half a mile away.

Loudness is hugely controversial. In interviews, mastering engineers are always clear that they’d never push a track too far, that it’s all Some Guy’s fault. But 1,275 people have signed an online petition to get Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ Californication remastered because: “The music should not be mastered simply to make all of the songs sound as loud as possible when broadcast on radio.”

Excessive loudness doesn’t hurt sales. (What’s the Story) Morning Glory was one of the loudest CDs ever released until Iggy Pop broke the record with his unlistenably distorted 1997 remastering of The Stooges’ Raw Power.

So the track has been recorded, edited, mixed and mastered. It’s burned on CD and in the shops. Does the polishing stop? Not quite. Just as labels compete to get their music on the radio, so radio stations compete to sound loudest and brightest. Radio stations have always used compressors to help their programming sound clearer and cut through interference.

Now that radio stations are entirely digital, they can go much further. Commercial stations now routinely edit songs themselves, trimming intros, chopping out boring bits, editing in station idents and—I’m not making this up—speeding up songs which they think are too slow or boring for their demographic. Some stations routinely play every track at +3%.

Of course, not everyone does it like this, although most commercial releases will have at least the final layer of mastering polish. There are plenty of people who reject the polishing process, but they’re not getting much U.S. mainstream radio play: Aberfeldy recorded their debut album Young Forever in mono, using a single microphone to record the five piece band playing through battery-powered amplifiers. The White Stripes famously recorded Elephant on 8-track tape at Toe Rag studios, and the album was mastered by veteran vinyl cutter Noel Summerville (who mastered the Clash’s Combat Rock).

When old school producers and engineers talk about modern music, they’re convinced that better recorded music would save the music industry from itself. Producer Joe Boyd wrote of the Buena Vista Social Club album (4m copies worldwide): “Its success is usually ascribed to the film or the brilliant marketing. But I am convinced that the sound of the record was equally if not more important.” Beautifully recorded records by Norah Jones, Bob Dylan and others have certainly shifted units. But the Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ brutally mastered Californication has sold 15m copies worldwide.

Why does most music sound the same these days? Because record companies are scared, they don’t want to take risks, and they’re doing the best they can to generate mainstream radio hits. That is their job, after all. And as the skies continue to darken over the poor benighted business of selling music, labels are going to cling to what they know more fiercely than ever.

So is that it? Have we arrived? Will records continue to increase in loudness and homogeneity until literally everything sounds like Californication? Optimistic engineers dream of a day when the world’s music listeners spontaneously rebel against over-processed music. The Loudness War will end and people will stop buying Black Eyed Peas records. A new era of high-fidelity recording will be born, and men in white coats will once again stride confidently through acoustically-lively studios placing their vintage microphones with care.

Pessimistic engineers can see an endless war against fidelity, as ever-more sophisticated technology makes pop music louder and shiner than ever. As hi-fi systems are abandoned for earbuds and mobile phones, there will be no reason to make nice-sounding records. Worse still, the technology behind systems like Waves Ultramaximizer could easily be built into an iPod, automatically remastering all those dull old Neil Young records into BIG LOUD IN-YOUR-FACE BANGERS.

In reality, technology might save the recording process. At the moment, Pro Tools operates at twice (or four times) the resolution of a CD. A great deal of quality is lost as those huge files are squished to the CD format, before being further squished into MP3s on your iPod. In a very few years, we’ll have 1 terabyte iPods, easily capable of handling thousands of recordings in their original high-definition form. At the same time, every part of the signal chain—from earbuds to digital/audio converters—is improving and getting cheaper. Studio software is also constantly developing, so perhaps mastering and compression can become more subtle and less abrasive. It’s quite possible that we’ll look back at the first years of this century as a crude interval of low-fidelity sound. And maybe the record industry will even persuade us to re-buy all those old records yet again.
https://medium.com/cuepoint/why-do-a...me-830ba863203





The Fine Art of Bullshit

Killed by Google
Greg Gueldner

Thursday Night in New Orleans
April 1994

The lazy ceiling fan spun in the humid Louisiana night. It was weighted poorly, letting out a loud squeak every fifth revolution. Annoying, but fixing it would have been more annoying.

I pushed myself up from the pleather sofa, navigated around a coffee table overrun with beer bottles, and shuffled to the entertainment center we had found on the street corner. With one hand I hit eject on the laser disc player and plucked out “Star Wars,” with the other slipped “Dazed and Confused” from its cardboard sleeve.

As it was probably the most prized possession in the apartment, I laid it into the player’s drawer like a newborn. Hit the button, grabbed another beer from the cooler, and threw myself back onto the couch between the dudes.

Our stomachs all tingled as those sensations we’d lived through a million times before once again kicked in: The black screen broken by the Gramercy Pictures logo, then the snake-charmer opening tones of Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion.”

“Dude, fuckin’ Aerosmith,” came the call from under a pulled-down baseball cap.

“You know it.” The clinking of two bottles.

“Hey, you know…” A pause while Rick searched for the words. “You know, fuckin’… Steven Tyler and Mary Tyler Moore are brother and sister.”

The song played uninterrupted while those words hovered in the air. Five seconds, six seconds, seven seconds. Then four dudes erupted.

“Bull fucking shit.”

“You’re…what…what the hell are you talking about.”

“What a load of crap. And is someone going to pack this?”

“No way! No wait. I think I’ve heard that before.”

The movie took a backseat to controversy.

“Absolutely.” Rick stood up, a bit unsteady, but ready to defend his declaration to the death. He stood between the couches and the TV, which meant Business.

“First off, I’ve heard that before somewhere. My buddy told me I think.” Like a politician, he pumped his uplifted thumb with every point. “Second, same name. Thirdly, they look exactly alike.”

“I’ve never been more impressed with how wrong someone can be,” said Tony, a beer cap snapping off his fingers, narrowly missing Rick’s head.

“It’s the truth.” Rick pointed back at us. “And it’s the 100% truth, so believe that.”

“Fuck you,” from Chris.

“Well,” came tentatively from Matt. “That sounds kinda familiar.”

“Alright. Phone. Settling.” I leaned forward and dug the cordless out from the empties. From memory I punched in the number of the local record store, and it started ringing.

“You know who might know,” pondered Chris. “Those girls downstairs.”

I pointed at him. “Excellent idea. Go get them.”

He jumped up and ran out the door.

The other end of the phone picked up. “mushroomrecordsthisismikecanihelpyou.”

“Hey man!” I yelled. It was loud in the apartment now. The movie had been paused, an Aerosmith CD retrieved, and “Sweet Emotion” put on repeat. “Hey, are Steven Tyler and Mary Tyler Moore brother and sister?”

“What?!”

“Are Steven Tyler and Mary Tyler Moore brother and sister?”

“Wow man. I don’t know…Hold on.” I heard the phone hit the counter. “Tim! Are Steven Tyler and Mary Tyler Moore brother and sister?”

From the background I heard Tim yell, “I don’t fucking care!”

Record store Mike came back on the phone. “We don’t know. But we have a bunch of like, TV trivia books and shit. Maybe it says it in there.”

“Ok, cool. Thanks man.” I hung up the phone just as the girls walked in and were handed beers.

“Welcome ladies,” said Matt. “Before you can drink those beers, one quick question: Are Steven Tyler and Mary Tyler Moore brother and sister?”

“Who and who?” replied the blonde one.

A collective “Aaaah shit!” from the dudes, as Rick moved in to explain and teach, gesturing at the TV and the stereo.

Chris grabbed the phone. “My buddy J.D. is DJ tonight at the radio station. Total music nerd. He’d know.”

“We’re going to need some more beer,” said Tony with a slight panic.

“Yep,” I said. “We gotta get this answered.” By now everyone was standing up, pacing the room, tossing out ideas.

“Are any libraries open?”

“Let’s call information in Boston and try to get Steven Tyler’s number.”

“We have to get our hands on a Mary Tyler Moore show VHS and do a side-by-side facial comparison.”

Chris put the phone down. “J.D. gave a definitive ‘maybe.’ And they have every Aerosmith record at the station.”

“Awesome!” High-fives all around.

“Uhm, can I just take this moment to point out how much I hate Aerosmith?” interjected Matt. He was promptly instructed to shut up, and that no one cared what he thought. This was bigger than that.

“Alright. The plan.” I pounded my fist into my open palm for emphasis. “We split up. Half of us go to the record store and try to find that book. The others go to the radio station and…do something. We meet up at The Boot after and compare notes. This shit gets settled now!”

“Hey, can we pick up our friends on the way?” asked one of the girls.

Matt pointed at her. “Great fucking idea.”

Whoosh. The apartment emptied out, the front door left wide open. Details get hazy, but highlights include:

• The record store didn’t have the book, but had sunglasses for $3. A round were purchased.

• The radio station had nothing about Mary Tyler Moore, but our group got to intro “Sweet Emotion” live on air and played it twice in a row. People called in and complained.

• We mistimed the rendezvous at the first bar, but luckily all ran in to each other at the second bar, where Rebirth Brass Band was playing. We danced.

• We asked every single person we met that night if they knew whether Steven Tyler and Mary Tyler Moore were brother and sister. No one knew, and the split was 50–50ish.

And we never, ever found out the right answer.
_________________


Thursday Night in San Francisco
April 2014

I used my Roku app to start streaming Dazed and Confused on the flat-screen.

Our stomachs all tingled as those sensations we’d lived through two million times before once again kicked in: The black screen broken by the Gramercy Pictures logo, then the snake-charmer opening tones of Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion.”

A bottle of IPA dropped from Rick’s lips as he made the declaration:

“You know, fuckin’…Steven Tyler and Mary Tyler Moore are brother and sist-”

Four phones lit up.

“No they’re not.”

“No they’re not.”

“No they’re not.”

“No they’re fucking not.”

The End.

https://medium.com/funny-stuff/the-f...t-c09f7bbb391e

















Until next week,

- js.



















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