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Old 10-12-14, 09:23 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 13th, '14

Since 2002


































"The past years there was no soul left in TPB. The original team handed it over to, well, less soul-ish people." – Peter Sunde


"Every story has two sides. In fact, every story has many sides. Rolling Stone decided to run with just one of them. To its everlasting regret." – Paul Farhi


"I went to jail for my cause and your TV shows. What did you do?" – Peter Sunde






































December 13th, 2014




Swedish Police Launch Raid Against Pirate Bay

Swedish police carried out a raid out at a facility which contained servers for Pirate Bay on Tuesday, it has emerged, with the file-sharing website going offline shortly afterwards.

The raid took place at a server hall in Stockholm on Tuesday after investigators became suspicious that servers there were being used by the popular site.

A Swedish prosecutor who specialises in file-sharing cases confirmed to the TT news agency that the raid was targeted towards Pirate Bay. However, he declined to state where exactly in Stockholm the authorities had carried out the probe.

"There were a number of police officers and IT forensics officers there. This lasted from the morning until the afternoon. Several servers and computers were seized but I can't say exactly how many," said Frederik Ingbland.

In the wake of the raid the Pirate Bay site with the Swedish domain name (.se) went offline. It remained unavailable for several hours before coming online again using a Costa Rican web domain (.cr).

"It's about an investigation against the Pirate Bay and the people behind the site. I took the decision to bring a search warrant to this place as we found evidence it could have been used by the Pirate Bay.

"Since the site was shut down shortly afterwards it's clear that it had something to do with it," added Ingbland.

He added that he could neither confirm or deny if a person had been detained as a result.

File sharing forums reported that a number of other websites similar to Pirate Bay also went offline following the raid.

Last week a French court ordered the country's leading internet operators to block all clients who try to access the Pirate Bay.

The Pirate Bay, which grew into an international phenomenon after it was founded in Sweden in 2003, allows users to dodge copyright fees and share music, film and other files using bit torrent technology, or peer-to-peer links offered on the site – resulting in huge profit loss for music- and movie makers.
http://www.thelocal.se/20141210/swed...nst-pirate-bay





The Pirate Bay Down, Forever?
Peter Sunde

News just reached me that The Pirate Bay has been raided, again. That happened over 8 years ago last time. That time, a lot of people went out to protest and rally in the streets. Today few seem to care. And I’m one of them.

Why, you might ask? Well. For multiple reasons. But most of all, I’ve not been a fan of what TPB has become.

TPB has become an institution that people just expected to be there. Noone willing to take the technology further. The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads was filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful they somehow ended up even worse.

The original deal with TPB was to close it down on it’s tenth birthday. Instead, on that birthday, there was a party in it’s “honour” in Stockholm. It was sponsored by some sexist company that sent young girls, dressed in almost no clothes, to hand out freebies to potential customers. There was a ticket price to get in, automatically excluding people with no money. The party had a set line-up with artists, scenes and so on, instead of just asking the people coming to bring the content. Everything went against the ideals that I worked for during my time as part of TPB.

The past years there was no soul left in TPB. The original team handed it over to, well, less soul-ish people to say the least. From the outside I felt that noone had any interest in helping the community if it didn’t eventually pay out in cash. The attention for new artists (the promo bay) felt more like something TPB had to do in order to keep it’s street cred. The street cred I personally tried to destroy when being part of TPB, multiple times, in order to make sure that people stopped idolizing TPB the way they did. Mostly it didn’t work though.

As a big fan of the KLF I once learned that it’s great to burn great things up. At least then you can quit while you’re on top. I think I left TPB just a little bit after that top, and not when it’s as shitty as it was when it was closed today. It feels good that it might have closed down forever, just a real shame the way it did that. A planned retirement would have given the community time and a way to kick off something new, something better, something faster, something more reliable and with no chance of corrupting itself. Something that had a soul and could retain it.

But from the immense void that will now fill up the fiber cables all over the world, I’m pretty sure the next thing will pan out. And hopefully it has no ads for porn or viagra. There’s already other services for that.
http://blog.brokep.com/2014/12/09/th...-down-forever/





Pirate Bay Has Been Raided and Taken Down: Here’s What We Know
Kim Zetter

The popular file-sharing service Pirate Bay was taken down today following a raid in Sweden by police who seized servers and computers.

The Pirate Bay portal went down Tuesday morning after Swedish police raided a server room in Stockholm over alleged copyright violations. In addition to its file-sharing section, Pirate Bay’s forum Suprbay.org was also down.

“There were a number of police officers and digital forensics experts there. This took place during the morning and continued until this afternoon. Several servers and computers were seized, but I cannot say exactly how many,” Swedish prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad told Radio Sweden.

Pirate Bay may not be the only target. According to TorrentFreak, other sites related to file sharing such as EZTV, Zoink, and Torrage went down today as well, though it’s not yet known if they were also raided.

Founded in 2003, Pirate Bay has been in the legal crosshairs for years, but has managed to stay afloat despite efforts by governments, anti-piracy groups and the music and film industries to close it down. Today’s raid comes after a number of recent events have occurred around the service, putting it in the spotlight once again.

The Timeline of Pirate Bay’s Recent Troubles

In October, Pirate Bay’s co-founder, the Swedish national Gottfrid Svartholm, was found guilty in Denmark and sentenced to 3.5 years in prison. Although the conviction this time was unrelated to file-sharing, it follows a previous 2009 conviction on copyright violations related to the file-sharing service. Svartholm had been convicted on the copyright charges along with his Pirate Bay co-founders, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Swedish telecommunitations owner Carl Lundstrom. While all three had been apprehended, Neij went on the lam, however.

But just last month, Neij was arrested at the Thailand-Laos border on the 2009 conviction.

And last week a French court ordered ISPs in that country to block access to Pirate Bay, as well as any of its mirror sites, from within French territory.

Then days ago Google removed and banned a number of third-party Pirate Bay file-sharing apps from the Google Play store. The apps help users circumvent blocks instated by ISPs to prevent users from accessing Pirate Bay.

Today’s raid comes after some of the movie files stolen from Sony Pictures Entertainment in its recent hack became available for download through links at Pirate Bay. It’s unknown if the raid and takedown were instigated by the distribution of those Sony files.

Despite the previous convictions, Pirate Bay has managed to forge ahead without its founders, catering to millions of daily users. Although today’s raid is not the first—Pirate Bay was also raided in 2006—in 2012 its operators bragged that they had moved their operations to the cloud to make the service virtually impervious to police raids. By hosting their operation from multiple cloud hosting providers located in a number of countries, a single police raid would not be able to disrupt their operation. Or so they thought.

It’s unclear how long authorities can keep Pirate Bay down this time before it pops up again.
http://www.wired.com/2014/12/pirate-...ed-taken-down/





The World Cracks Down on the Internet
Vauhini Vara

In September of last year, Chinese authorities announced an unorthodox standard to help them decide whether to punish people for posting online comments that are false, defamatory, or otherwise harmful: Was a message popular enough to attract five hundred reposts or five thousand views? It was a striking example of how sophisticated the Chinese government has become, in recent years, in restricting Internet communication—going well beyond crude measures like restricting access to particular Web sites or censoring online comments that use certain keywords. Madeline Earp, a research analyst at Freedom House, the Washington-based nongovernmental organization, suggested a phrase to describe the approach: “strategic, timely censorship.” She told me, “It’s about allowing a surprising amount of open discussion, as long as you’re not the kind of person who can really use that discussion to organize people.”

On Thursday, Freedom House published its fifth annual report on Internet freedom around the world. As in years past, China is again near the bottom of the rankings, which include sixty-five countries. Only Syria and Iran got worse scores, while Iceland and Estonia fared the best. (The report was funded partly by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the United States Department of State, Google, and Yahoo, but Freedom House described the report as its “sole responsibility” and said that it doesn’t necessarily represent its funders’ views.)

China’s place in the rankings won’t come as a surprise to many people. The notable part is that the report suggests that, when it comes to Internet freedom, the rest of the world is gradually becoming more like China and less like Iceland. The researchers found that Internet freedom declined in thirty-six of the sixty-five countries they studied, continuing a trajectory they have noticed since they began publishing the reports in 2010.

Earp, who wrote the China section, said that authoritarian regimes might even be explicitly looking at China as a model in policing Internet communication. (Last year, she co-authored a report on the topic for the Committee to Protect Journalists.) China isn’t alone in its influence, of course. The report’s authors even said that some countries are using the U.S. National Security Agency’s widespread surveillance, which came to light following disclosures by the whistle-blower Edward Snowden, “as an excuse to augment their own monitoring capabilities.” Often, the surveillance comes with little or no oversight, they said, and is directed at human-rights activists and political opponents.

China, the U.S., and their copycats aren’t the only offenders, of course. In fact, interestingly, the United States was the sixth-best country for Internet freedom, after Germany—though this may say as much about the poor state of Web freedom in other places as it does about protections for U.S. Internet users. Among the other countries, this was a particularly bad year for Russia and Turkey, which registered the sharpest declines in Internet freedom from the previous year. In Turkey, over the past several years, the government has increased censorship, targeted online journalists and social-media users for assault and prosecution, allowed state agencies to block content, and charged more people for expressing themselves online, the report noted—not to mention temporarily shutting down access to YouTube and Twitter. As Jenna Krajeski wrote in a post about Turkey’s Twitter ban, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan vowed in March, “We’ll eradicate Twitter. I don’t care what the international community says. They will see the power of the Turkish Republic.” A month later, Russian President Vladimir Putin, not to be outdone by Erdoğan, famously called the Internet a “C.I.A. project,” as Masha Lipman wrote in a post about Russia’s recent Internet controls. Since Putin took office again in 2012, the report found, the government has enacted laws to block online content, prosecuted people for their Internet activity, and surveilled information and communication technologies. Among changes in other countries, the report said that the governments of Uzbekistan and Nigeria had passed laws requiring cybercafés to keep logs of their customers, and that the Vietnamese government began requiring international Internet companies to keep at least one server in Vietnam.

What’s behind the decline in Internet freedom throughout the world? There could be several reasons for it, but the most obvious one is also somewhat mundane: especially in countries where people are just beginning to go online in large numbers, governments that restrict freedom offline—particularly authoritarian regimes—are only beginning to do the same online, too. What’s more, governments that had been using strategies like blocking certain Web sites to try to control the Internet are now realizing that those approaches don’t actually do much to keep their citizens from seeing content that the governments would prefer to keep hidden. So they’re turning to their legal systems, enacting new laws that restrict how people can use the Internet and other technologies.

“There is definitely a sense that the Internet offered this real alternative to traditional media—and then government started playing catch-up a little bit,” Earp told me. “If a regime has developed laws and practices over time that limit what the traditional media can do, there’s that moment of recognition: ‘How can we apply what we learned in the traditional media world online?’ ”

There were a couple of hopeful signs for Internet activists during the year. India, where authorities relaxed restric#tions that had been imposed in 2013 to help quell rioting, saw the biggest improvement in its Internet-freedom score. Brazil, too, notched a big gain after lawmakers approved a bill known as the Marco Civil da Internet, which protects net neutrality and online privacy. But, despite those developments, the report’s authors didn’t seem particularly upbeat. “There might be some cautious optimism there, but I do not want to overstate that because, since we started tracking this, it’s been a continuous decline, unfortunately,” Sanja Kelly, the project director for the report, told me. Perhaps the surprising aspect of Freedom House’s findings isn’t that the Internet is becoming less free—it’s that it has taken this long for it to happen.
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elemen...racks-internet





Project Goliath: Inside Hollywood's Secret War Against Google

SOPA was just the beginning
Russell Brandom

What is "Goliath" and why are Hollywood’s most powerful lawyers working to kill it?

In dozens of recently leaked emails from the Sony hack, lawyers from the MPAA and six major studios talk about "Goliath" as their most powerful and politically relevant adversary in the fight against online piracy. They speak of "the problems created by Goliath," and worry "what Goliath could do if it went on the attack." Together they mount a multi-year effort to "respond to / rebut Goliath’s public advocacy" and "amplify negative Goliath news." And while it’s hard to say for sure, significant evidence suggests that the studio efforts may be directed against Google.

At the beginning of this year, the MPAA and six studios — Universal, Sony, Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros., and Disney — joined together to begin a new campaign against piracy on the web. A January 25th email lays out a series of legally and technically ambitious new tools, including new measures that would block infringing sites from reaching customers of many major ISPs. Documents reviewed by The Verge detail the beginning of a new plan to attack piracy after the federal SOPA efforts failed by working with state attorneys general and major ISPs like Comcast to expand court power over the way data is served. If successful, the result would fundamentally alter the open nature of the internet.

"We start from the premise that site blocking is a means to an end," says MPAA general counsel Steven Fabrizio. "There may be other equally effective measures ISPs can take, and that they might be more willing to take voluntarily." According to the email, the group has retained its own technical experts and is working with Comcast (which owns Universal) to develop techniques for blocking or identifying illegally shared files in transit.

That strategy also involves significant political risks. "In the post-SOPA world, we need to consider the extent to which a strategy presents a risk of a public relations backlash," Fabrizio continues, "whether a strategy might invigorate and galvanize the anti-copyright forces we saw in the SOPA debates." SOPA, also known as the Stop Online Piracy Act, proposed ambitious new site-blocking measures in 2011, but was ultimately defeated by coordinated outcry from web companies and their users. The new emails suggest Hollywood hasn’t given up on the idea. "We have been exploring theories under the All Writs Acts, which, unlike DMCA 512(j), would allow us to obtain court orders requiring site blocking without first having to sue and prove the target ISPs are liable for copyright infringement," one email reads.

The only thing standing in their way? Goliath.

The MPAA’s venture is referred to over and over as "Project Goliath," an effort to take Goliath down, with each studio contributing funds towards a project that will benefit them all. One telling email — titled "Goliath data summary" — comes with an attachment titled "Search Engine Piracy Discussion (MPAA Discussion)," seeming to suggest the codename is a stand-in for Google. A number of Goliath-related emails also point to examples of copyright-infringing search results found on Google; the persistence of file-sharing links in Google search rankings has been a sore point in Hollywood for years.

The emails reveal a multi-pronged approach to defeating Goliath. One tactic is legal, convincing state prosecutors to take up the fight against Goliath. After a series of meetings at the National Association of Attorneys General in February, MPAA counsel Fabrizio writes, "Goliath has told the AGs to pound sand…they pretty clearly told the AGs that they aren’t going to do anything and essentially threatened the AGs with the possibility of attacking them as they attacked folks in DC during SOPA. The AGs did not like that." As a result, the counsels report a growing coalition of attorneys general willing to take action against Goliath, and the group budgeted $500,000 a year towards providing legal support. Much of that budget went towards retaining the prestigious law firm Jenner & Block, specifically Jenner partner and former US Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli, who has billed the group for as much as $40,000 a month.

In other emails, Google comes up as a specific target. After a dispute over Google’s most recent anti-piracy measures in October, Fabrizio suggested further action may be yet to come. "We believe Google is overreacting — and dramatically so. Their reaction seems tactical (or childish)," the email reads. "Following the issuance of the CID [civil investigative demand] by [Mississippi attorney general Jim] Hood (which may create yet another uproar by Google), we may be in a position for more serious discussions with Google." A report from the previous February suggests that the Goliath group drafted civil investigative demands (similar to a subpoena) to be issued by the attorneys general. "Some subset of AGs (3-5, but Hood alone if necessary) should move toward issuing CIDs before mid-May," the email says. (Hood issued a CID against Google in July concerning pharmaceutical counterfeiting, but he does not appear to have issued any actions against the company since Fabrizio’s letter in October.)

The fight against Goliath also has an investigative side. Other emails describe a proposed project called Keystone — budgeted at $70,000 — devoted to gathering enough evidence against Goliath to provoke further action by the state attorneys general. "There is only so far we can get with the AG’s unless we develop better evidence and intelligence against Goliath," an email reads, "and that is the budget for Keystone." The planning for the Goliath Project is laid out in dozens of emails after the initial January meeting, although the emails peter out after May for reasons that are still unclear. Still, budget projections suggest that the group was prepared for a long battle. "To take this through and have a reasonable chance of success, we probably would need to continue through year two," one email reads.

In another instance, the group seemed to look to articles on political corruption not as a cautionary tale but as an instruction manual. In one email, the MPAA's Senior VP of State Government Affairs circulated an investigative New York Times series on lobbyists wielding increasing influence over state attorneys general. The series details many tactics involved in Project Goliath, including hiring former attorneys general as counsel and targeting officials at the state level where lobbying dollars may stretch farther. The MPAA official offered only the caption "FYI, first in a series of articles." The email was sent to 62 people, including executives at Paramount, Warner Bros., Fox, Comcast, and the RIAA.

Still, the emails reveal a remarkable hostility towards Goliath, and a persistent desire to stop copyright infringing traffic as it moves across the web, a position that puts it in stark conflict with many of the guiding principles of the web. That, in turn, has created a serious conflict with many of the companies that have grown powerful on the web, a fight that, without an ambitious action like Project Goliath, the industry seems primed to lose. As one counsel noted in March, "There is much to commend an expanded Goliath strategy — the status quo has not exactly been favorable for us and, absent our doing something, it doesn’t promise to get better anytime soon."

As of press time, neither the MPAA nor Sony has responded to a request for comment. Google declined to comment.

This is the January 25th email from MPAA Global General Counsel Steven Fabrizio, laying out the group's Goliath strategy:

Site Blocking/ISP Measures - INPUT REQUESTED - PRIVILEGED

We did not get to have a full discussion of site blocking during our January meeting. However, I believe I have spoken with enough of you individually to have a good read of the room as to our authority to proceed with the necessary analysis. In this email, I outline the planned scope of analysis. Because the analysis will involve some expense for technical experts, consultants and lawyers (likely totalling in the $200-300k range), I want to make sure we are on the same page. If anyone disagrees with the plan, as described below, please let me know. Otherwise, we will proceed, with the goal of having something to present to you at our March meeting. (My goal is to use our February meeting to present and discuss a detailed US Goliath strategy.)

SCOPE We have traditionally thought of site blocking in the US as a DMCA 512(j) issue. In some ways, that is too narrow and we plan to expand our scope of inquiry on two levels. First, DMCA 512(j), by its terms, necessarily creates an adversarial relationship with the target ISP (and more generally with the ISP community). We have been exploring theories under the All Writs Acts, which, unlike DMCA 512(j), would allow us to obtain court orders requiring site blocking without first having to sue and prove the target ISPs are liable for copyright infringement. This may open up avenues for cooperative arrangements with ISPs. Second, we start from the premise that site blocking is a means to an end (the end being effective measures by ISPs to prevent infringement through notorious pirate sites). There may be other equally effective measures ISPs can take, and that they might be more willing to take voluntarily. Our intention is to work with our own retained experts and Comcast (and MPAA’s Technology group) to identify and study these other possibilities, as well as US site blocking technical issues.

ANALYSIS The analyses that remain to be done fall into three general categories:

Legal Analyses. The legal analyses that remain to be completed are the smallest part of the project. We need to finalize the All Writs Act research and confirm that developments in the law since the time of previous 512(j) analyses do not materially affect the existing analyses. In the event we recommend or present litigation options, we will also consider tactical issues, including issues related to venue and the interplay of the All Writs Act and 512(j).

Technical Analyses. Very little systematic work has been completed to understand the technical issues related to site blocking in the US and/or alternative measures IPSs might adopt. We will identify and retain a consulting technical expert to work with us to study these issues. In this context, we will explore which options might lead ISPs to cooperate with us.

Political Analyses. Here, we mean political in the broadest sense. There are important Hill issues to consider (e.g., how a strategy might impact the copyright review process). We also need to consider ISP relations issues (e.g., whether a strategy might impact the Copyright Alert program, or any progress we have been making to secure voluntary ISP assistance). Finally, in the post-SOPA world, we need to consider the extent to which a strategy presents a risk of a public relations backlash (e.g., whether a strategy might invigorate and galvanize the anti-copyright forces we saw in the SOPA debates, and what ultimate impact that might have). Each of these issues are like to have considerations that cut in many directions. To get a comprehensive assessment and weigh them in context, we will work closely with the MPAA Policy and Communications teams (and, with them, will solicit input from the appropriate studio policy and communications people).

Hopefully, at the conclusion of this set of analyses, we will be in a position to make a decision that is informed by all considerations of consequence.

If you have any questions, or want to talk through any of this, don’t hesitate to call. Best,
SBF

Additional reporting from Ross Miller and Bryan Bishop


http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/12/7...roject-goliath





Google to Shut Down News Site in Spain Over Copyright Fees
Eric Auchard

Google said it plans to close its news-linking service in Spain in response to legislation under which publishers will soon be able to force Internet sites to pay for re-publishing headlines or snippets of news.

In a statement, the search giant said the new law makes the Google News service unsustainable and that it will remove Spanish publishers from Google News sites worldwide and shut down this service in Spain on 16 December.

The move also means readers in Latin America and around the globe will no longer find links to articles from any Spanish news publishers on Google News.

The change to the copyright law, which is set to take effect in January, only applies to news aggregation sites such as Google News or domestic rival Meneame.

It does not prevent Google users in Spain or elsewhere from reading snippets of the same stories when they look up news in Google search results, where Google stands to capitalise by selling ads alongside news stories that turn up.

"The new law requires publishers to charge Google News for showing even the smallest snippets of their content -- whether they want to charge or not," the company said. Google News displays no advertising and makes no revenue from the service, it noted.

Google's action caps a decade of acrimony with news publishers who blame the search giant for revenue and readership declines. The company maintains that it sends millions of clicks that allow news sites to make money via online advertising.

The stand-off also comes amid a growing campaign by politicians, regulators and courts across Europe to rein in Google's power over the Internet search market and the impact it has on deeply ingrained social norms around personal privacy.

The European Union's recently installed digital commissioner Guenther Oettinger said in October that he was mulling a regional Internet copyright levy, taking aim at Google.

In recent years, publishers in countries from Germany and France to Spain have pushed to pass new national copyright laws that force Google and other web aggregators to pay licensing fees when they publish snippets of their news articles.

In Spain and Germany, these laws require publishers who want their content to continue to show up in Google search results to give the company explicit permission to do so.

Google has responded by requiring publishers to release it from any liability for licensing fees under such laws.

The Spanish law thwarts this by giving publishers an "inalienable" right to levy licensing fees.

However, in November, Germany's largest publisher, Axel Springer scrapped a bid to block Google after an experiment by a consortium of about 200 German publishers caused online traffic to plunge.Internet search experts say the shutdown of Google News in Spain may be greater on smaller, less-well known news publishers than on name-brand news sites who are less reliant on the site to draw in readers.

For the top five Spanish news sites, referrals from sites such as Google News are responsible for less than a quarter of traffic, ranging from 8 percent for ABC to 21 percent for La Vanguardia, according to online traffic measurement firm SimilarWeb. Social networks such as Facebook make up a smaller amount.

Google's move also does not appear to affect current agreements it has with major Spanish publishers to supply them with ad-serving technology that in effect creates a private ad marketplace to support their respective publications.

Reacting to the announcement, the Spanish ministry of education, culture and sport said the company was making a business decision to pull out of certain services but that the government remained open to negotiation about how it implemented what its statement referred to as a 'Google tax'.

(Reporting By Eric Auchard; editing by Keith Weir and Vincent Baby)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/1...0JP0QI20141211





Copyright Changes Would Allow Courts to Block Overseas File Sharing Sites

Malcolm Turnbull says illegal downloaders will receive three or four warnings before further action taken and cost of enforcement will be shared between ISPs and rights holders
Daniel Hurst

The Abbott government will amend copyright laws to allow courts to order the blocking of overseas websites used for illegal downloads and streaming.

But it is yet to resolve a dispute over who should pay for efforts to warn individual users about the consequences of infringements.

The government has given internet service providers (ISPs) and copyright holders a four-month deadline to develop a new industry code which should canvass a “fair” sharing of the cost of notifying and educating customers about infringement.

The communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, and the attorney general, George Brandis, said the government would impose “binding arrangements” if ISPs and copyright holders could not reach agreement.

“The government will also amend the Copyright Act, to enable rights holders to apply for a court order requiring ISPs to block access to a website, operated outside of Australia, which provides access to infringing content,” Turnbull and Brandis said in a statement on Wednesday.

“In a world of rapid changes in technology and human behaviour, there is no single measure that can eliminate online copyright infringement. In light of this the government will review the measures, 18 months after they are implemented, to assess their effectiveness.”

The Labor opposition said the government had failed to develop a credible policy and was passing the buck back to industry to reach agreement on a code.

“The government’s only concrete decision is to introduce legislation providing for overseas websites facilitating copyright infringement to be blocked in Australia by court order,” said the shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, and the communications spokesman, Jason Clare.

“Site blocking is unlikely to be an effective strategy for dealing with online piracy. Pirated content is likely to reappear as quickly as it can be taken down.”

The announcement follows the release of a discussion paper on the issue in July.

In a letter to industry figures on Wednesday, Turnbull and Brandis said the code’s objectives included informing customers of legitimate alternatives to copyright infringement.

The code should also include “a process for facilitated discovery to assist rights holders in taking direct copyright infringement action against a subscriber after an agreed number of notices”.

Speaking to reporters in a conference call, Turnbull said the notices to individual users were not about penalising people but were designed to be “educative”.

He said the experience in New Zealand was that most people who received a notice stopped downloading content without paying.

Turnbull said after three or four notices were issued to a user, the rights holders should have the ability “to get the details of the account holder involved and then they can take a civil action for damages in the usual way”.

The minister argued the government’s measures were reasonable and moderate.

“The critical point here is what we are not suggesting is that ISPs should be required to cut off people’s access [to the internet] or slow the speed of the connection or anything like that,” he said.

Turnbull repeated his previous calls for companies to make movies, television programs and music available to users in a timely and affordable manner, saying such a strategy reduced the incentive for people to steal content.

He said it was positive that rights owners were making more content available “on a piecemeal basis” rather than forcing people to subscribe to a whole platform.

Turnbull said he was “reasonably confident” ISPs and rights holders would come to an agreement on an industry code.

He said the rights holders were “the ones with the most to gain financially from a reduction in piracy so I think it’s reasonable to expect that the bulk of the costs will be borne by the rights holders”. But he said ISPs should also contribute part of the cost because their role in providing access to the services could not be ignored.

Turnbull said it would be wrong to characterise the proposed mechanism for content owners to seek the blocking of overseas websites as an internet filter.

“I know the temptation to engage in journalism by click-bait is very strong but this is not, I repeat, not an internet filter,” he said.

Turnbull said it “may be the case” that some users would increasingly turn to technologies such as virtual private networks to avoid detection, although he added that most people did not use such methods.

He said the aim was to “materially reduce” copyright infringement. “This is a very dynamic area and we’re playing a percentage game here; we’re never going to eliminate all piracy,” he said.
http://www.theguardian.com/australia...-sharing-sites





Chaos Computer Club On the Blocking of Our Website in UK
erdgeist

A significant portion of British citizens are currently blocked from accessing the Chaos Computer Club's (CCC) website. On top of that, Vodafone customers are blocked from accessing the ticket sale to this year's Chaos Communication Congress (31C3). [1]

Since July 2013, a government-backed so-called opt out list censors the open internet. These internet filters, authorized by Prime Minister David Cameron, are implemented by UK’s major internet service providers (ISPs). Dubbed as the "Great Firewall of Britain", the lists block adult content as well as material related to alcohol, drugs, smoking, and even opinions deemed "extremist". [2]

Users can opt-out of censorship, or bypass it by technical means, but only a minority of users know how to bypass those filters. Accessing the server directly via http://213.73.89.123/ currently appears to work quite well, thereby rendering the censorship efforts useless.

Internet filters simply do not work, but leaving technical limitation aside, the CCC's example shows that unsolicited overblocking, meaning wrongly classified websites, is a common phenomenon in large censorship infrastructures. However, it may very well be that the CCC is considered "extremist" judged by British standards of freedom of speech.

"When these filters were introduced, their abuse was imminent. Today, we are shocked to learn that they not only block access to our site, but also to our conference," says CCC-spokesperson Dirk Engling. "We see this as proof that censorship infrastructure – no matter for which reasons it was set up, and no matter which country you are in – will always be abused for political reasons."
http://ccc.de/en/updates/2014/ccc-censored-in-uk





Apple Trial Continues, Without a Plaintiff for Now
Brandon Bailey

In an unusual legal twist, a federal judge decided Monday that a billion-dollar, class-action lawsuit over Apple's iPods should continue, even though she also disqualified the last remaining plaintiff named in a case that has been on trial since last week.

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers scolded Marianna Rosen and her attorneys on Monday for not providing more complete information about the iPods Rosen had purchased. That came after Apple lawyers successfully argued that the devices purchased by Rosen were not among those affected by the lawsuit.

But the judge also rejected Apple's argument that the case should be dismissed because it's too late to name a new plaintiff. She ordered the attorneys suing Apple to identify a new person, by Tuesday, who can serve as a lead plaintiff.

Both sides estimate about 8 million people bought iPods that are potentially affected by the lawsuit, which focuses on Apple's use of restrictive software that prevented iPods from playing music purchased from competitors of Apple's iTunes store. The plaintiffs say that amounted to unfair competition and that Apple was able to sell iPods at inflated prices because the software froze makers of competing devices out of the market.

While the plaintiffs argue the overcharges amounted to $350 million, Apple could be ordered to pay triple that amount if the jury finds it violated federal antitrust rules.

While the plaintiffs' lawyers represent the entire class of 8 million, class-action rules say the suit must identify at least one person as a "named plaintiff" who suffered the losses or injuries alleged in the case. Rosen had previously said she purchased several iPods that qualified, but Apple attorneys produced evidence that those devices either had the wrong software or were purchased outside the time frame of the lawsuit. A series of pretrial rulings had narrowed the case to covering just 19 months between September 2006 and March 2009.

Late last week, Rosen and her attorneys said she had purchased two other iPods in 2008. But Apple lawyers produced records that showed they were purchased with a credit card issued to the law firm of Rosen's husband. Apple attorney William Isaacson argued that meant she was not legally the purchaser.

Judge Rogers ruled late Monday that Rosen's purchases are "inadequate" to represent the whole class. And the judge showed impatience at having to deal with the question after jurors had already heard a week of testimony.

"I am troubled," the judge said, citing Rosen's failure to adequately account for her iPod purchases and "the failure of plaintiffs' counsel themselves to investigate sufficiently." But the judge said she has an obligation to the "millions of absent class members" to let the case continue if another lead plaintiff can be identified.

Two other plaintiffs had earlier withdrawn because their iPods were not covered by the lawsuit.

Plaintiffs' attorney Bonny Sweeney said her office has heard from a number of volunteers since the issue made headlines last week. "There are plaintiffs who stand willing and ready to step in and we will have them in court tomorrow," she told the judge.

The judge curtly ordered Sweeney to give the candidates' names to Apple's lawyers Monday night, so Apple can have a chance to review whether they are eligible.

Apple lawyers insisted Monday they weren't happy about discovering the glitch. Although he argued in court briefs that the suit would have to be dismissed, Isaacson told the judge Monday, "We want to win this case on the merits." Outside court, he told reporters the issue may eventually be decided by a court of appeal.

When asked whether Apple plans to investigate the qualifications of any new plaintiff, Isaacson answered with one word: "Completely."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...12-08-20-28-28





Obama’s Net Neutrality Bid Divides Civil Rights Groups
Edward Wyatt

WHEN President Obama laid out his vision for strict regulation of Internet access last month, he was voicing views thought to be held by many at the most liberal end of the Democratic Party.

A few days later, however, the N.A.A.C.P., the National Urban League and the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition sent representatives, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, to tell Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, that they thought Mr. Obama’s call to regulate broadband Internet service as a utility would harm minority communities by stifling investment in underserved areas and entrenching already dominant Internet companies.

Their displeasure should not be read as a sign that most civil rights organizations were unhappy with Mr. Obama’s plan, however. When it comes to the details of Internet regulation, groups that otherwise have much common ground simply don’t see eye to eye.

ColorofChange.org, a black political coalition, and the National Hispanic Media Coalition, for example, support treating Internet access as an essential service like electricity or water — as Mr. Obama proposed — while the League of United Latin American Citizens opposes it.

“The civil rights community is like every sector anywhere. While from the outside it seems like a monolith, it is not,” said Cheryl A. Leanza, a policy adviser for the United Church of Christ Office of Communication. Though she was part of the 11-member group that included Mr. Jackson, she asked the chairman to embrace the president’s plan.

The debate is but one slice of a huge campaign to lobby the five F.C.C. commissioners as they weigh net neutrality, the concept that all Internet traffic should be treated equally, and whether to reclassify broadband as a more heavily regulated service.

Since 2002, broadband has been classified as a Title I information service under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, meaning that the F.C.C. lightly regulates it. Title II services include “common carriers” like telephone companies, whose rates the F.C.C. can regulate and whose business plans often require the commission’s approval.

In May, Mr. Wheeler made a proposal that would allow companies to pay Internet providers to give them a “fast lane” to consumers. Mr. Wheeler is against that practice, known as paid prioritization, and he said his proposal would discourage it. But the regulatory outline released by the F.C.C. would still allow for paid prioritization in some circumstances, a loophole that was seized on by opponents.

President Obama urged the F.C.C. to reclassify broadband as a Title II service, which would generally give the commission the authority to prohibit broadband providers from blocking or discriminating against legal online content.

In the four weeks since Mr. Obama’s move, over 100 companies, industry groups and coalitions have met with commissioners and their staffs. At least 67 of those groups have met with Mr. Wheeler himself — nearly four a day, on average. Included in those meetings have been civil rights groups with surprisingly divergent views.

The unusual alignments can also be seen in urban governments. The cities of Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco sent representatives to meet with Mr. Wheeler’s advisers to say they agreed with tight regulation, but that view is opposed by the National Organization of Blacks in Government.

“I think we’re all on board with the values embedded in what President Obama said, things like accelerating broadband deployment and adoption,” said Nicol Turner-Lee, vice president of the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council and a member of the group including Mr. Jackson that met with the F.C.C. chairman. “The question is, will we be able to solve these issues by going so far with stringent regulation?”

Some of the groups that oppose Title II designation, like the Urban League and the League of United Latin American Citizens, have received contributions from organizations affiliated with Internet service providers, like the Comcast Foundation, the charitable organization endowed by Comcast. Parts of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition’s annual symposium on civil rights were conducted last week at Comcast’s offices in Washington.

But those organizations say that the donations or sponsorships do not influence their positions. “We get support from people on all sides of the issue, including Google and Facebook,” said Brent A. Wilkes, national executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens. “We don’t let any of them influence our position.”

Several of those favoring Title II, meanwhile, have received funding from organizations affiliated with companies that support stronger regulation. The National Hispanic Media Coalition conducts events that are sponsored in part by companies like Google and Facebook. A trade organization sponsored by those and other Internet companies, the Internet Association, supports a shift to stricter regulation.

Jessica Gonzalez, executive vice president of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, said her organization also received support from Comcast for some of its programs. “There is a clear separation between our policy work and who funds us,” she said.

One of the primary disagreements among the civil rights groups is over a practice known as “zero rating,” in which an Internet service provider makes a deal with a content provider like Facebook or Spotify to allow consumers unlimited access to that service without its counting against a cap on data usage. Because zero-rating plans are most common among mobile broadband providers, those plans could particularly affect minority communities, Ms. Turner-Lee said, which are more likely to depend on mobile systems for Internet access. It is not entirely clear how Mr. Obama’s plan would affect zero-rated apps.

“The relevant question is whether there is something to be said about zero-rating plans and the ways that they can be used to further Internet adoption,” Ms. Turner-Lee said, adding that her group had not yet taken a stance.

But critics say that zero-rating programs are just a form of paid prioritization that could further entrench companies like Facebook that have the financial muscle to pay for the privilege.

According to the Mobile Trends Charging Report by Allot Communications, nearly half of mobile broadband providers worldwide offer at least one zero-rated app, and two-thirds of those offer Facebook as one.

The alignment of civil rights groups both for and against Mr. Obama’s recommendation for net-neutrality enforcement is not the only oddity in this debate.

In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that the F.C.C. acted within the law when it classified cable broadband as a lightly regulated information service. Writing a stinging dissent to that decision — that is, saying that broadband was obviously more like a utility — was an otherwise frequent nemesis of Democrats: Justice Antonin Scalia.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/08/bu...ts-groups.html





Angela Merkel Argues Against Net Neutrality, Calls for Special Access Fast Lane
Dante D'Orazio

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has laid out her vision for the future of the internet, and net neutrality proponents won't be pleased. In comments on Thursday in Berlin, Merkel argued for a two-lane internet. One lane for "special," high priority service, and another that's meant to resemble the internet as it exists today.

While supporters of net neutrality argue that it is key to the continued growth of the internet, Merkel believes just the opposite. She argues that fast lanes are necessary for the development of new, advanced uses of the internet, like telemedicine or driverless cars. According to Merkel, without guaranteed, fast-access internet connections, such innovations won't come to market.

"Can you have a fast lane and maintain net neutrality?"

It's not clear how such a two-lane system would be implemented or regulated. For instance, it's unknown if there would be limits on what sort of companies could pay for access to fast-lane internet. A report from Frankfurter Allgemeine cites sources inside the German government who say that on-demand internet video streaming services would be among the companies that would be able to pay for access for high-speed service.

The European Union currently mandates true net neutrality, though discussions have been underway for the future of internet regulation. Merkel believes that her position is a middle ground, but the idea that the general traffic lane will operate under net neutrality depends entirely on how much bandwidth it receives from internet providers. If the main traffic lane isn't fast, and any company can opt for fast-lane access, companies will likely find it necessary to pay up for direct access just to compete — the exact opposite of net neutrality.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/6/73...special-access





AT&T Sneaks Telecom Deregulation Amendment into Ohio’s Agriculture/Water Quality Bill
Phillip Dampier

AT&T’s lobbyists in Ohio have convinced state legislators to ignore a veto threat from the governor’s office and insert a deregulation amendment into an unrelated water quality and agriculture measure.

Retiring House Speaker Bill Batchelder (R-Medina) is shepherding AT&T’s latest attempt at total deregulation through the Ohio House of Representatives, claiming it will break down barriers for businesses in Ohio and give new businesses the infrastructure they need to make Ohio their home. Among Batchelder’s top donors is AT&T.

Critics contend the measure will disconnect up to 5% of rural Ohio from all telephone service because they live in “no signal bar” areas of the state.

The amendment, inserted into HB490 (at Sec. 4905.71), would end AT&T’s requirement to serve as a Provider of Last Resort, which has guaranteed that every Ohio resident seeking telephone service has had it for nearly 100 years. If the measure passes, AT&T can unilaterally disconnect service and leave unprofitable service areas, mostly in rural and poor sections of the state. Current Ohio law only permits a telephone company to end service if it can prove financial hardship and show that reasonable alternatives are available to affected residents. AT&T earned $128.75 billion in revenue in 2013 and is unlikely to meet any hardship test.

Although AT&T is unlikely to stop service in suburban and urban areas, ratepayers across the state would lose oversight protections from lengthy service outages, unreasonable billing standards and credit requirements, the ability to quickly connect or disconnect service and access to important low-income programs like Lifeline. Rural customers could be forced away from traditional landline and DSL service in favor of AT&T’s wireless network, which costs considerably more.

Current AT&T customers in Ohio can subscribe to landline service for around $20 a month in rural areas and broadband DSL for as little as $15 per month. AT&T’s wireless alternative costs $20 a month for voice service and at least $60 a month for wireless broadband (with a usage cap of 10GB per month and an overlimit fee of $10 per gigabyte). An average landline customer consuming 20GB of data would pay $35 a month for both voice and data services. The same customer using AT&T’s wireless voice and data alternative would pay $180 a month, mostly in overlimit penalties.

AT&T’s lobbying has riled Ohio’s Republican governor, John Kasich, who has threatened to veto any agriculture bill that reaches his desk with telephone deregulation attached.

“The telecommunications language will force the governor to veto this bill, as he has personally said and has also been repeated several times by other members of the administration,” Jim Zehringer, director of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources told the Ohio Senate’s Agriculture Committee during an informal hearing on the legislation. “We would be sacrificing all the great work done so far on this bill if these provisions are not removed.”

The AARP is concerned the measure will not only hurt rural Ohio, but elderly and poor residents who cannot afford wireless service.

“They will only have wireless telephone service with no price controls or guarantees for low-income Ohioans in these areas,” AARP Ohio wrote in a released statement about the proposal. “Additionally, there are areas of Ohio where wireless service is minimal, and to provide the speed needed for those receiving tele-health services in those areas will be even more expensive.”

Interested Ohio residents can share their feelings with their state legislators and the governor’s office.

• Locate your Ohio House Representative: http://www.ohiohouse.gov/ or call 1-800-282-0253 and ask to be connected to your local representative.
• Governor John Kasich’s Office Phone: (614) 466-3555

http://stopthecap.com/2014/12/02/att...-quality-bill/





Ignoring AT&T and Verizon Protests, FCC Says “Broadband” has to be 10Mbps

ISPs that accept government subsidies must offer at least 10Mbps instead of 4.
Jon Brodkin

Internet service providers that use government subsidies to build rural broadband networks must provide speeds of least 10Mbps for downloads and 1Mbps for upload, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decided today.

"That is an increase reflecting marketplace and technological changes that have occurred since the FCC set its previous requirement of 4Mbps/1Mbps speeds in 2011," the FCC said.

This action affects only broadband networks paid for by the Connect America Fund, which comes from surcharges paid by phone customers. The FCC's official definition of broadband remains at 4Mbps/1Mbps for now, but the commission is likely to change that as well.

AT&T, Verizon, and the National Cable & Telecommunications Association have all argued that the FCC should not change the broadband definition, saying 4Mbps is good enough for customers. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler disagreed, saying, "When 60 percent of the Internet’s traffic at prime time is video, and it takes 4 or 5Mbps to deliver video, a 4Mbps connection isn’t exactly what’s necessary in the 21st century." Wheeler has also said that 25Mbps "is fast becoming ‘table stakes’ in 21st century communications."

Rural Americans should not be left behind those who live in big cities, the FCC announcement today said. "According to recent data, 99 percent of Americans living in urban areas have access to fixed broadband speeds of 10/1, which can accommodate more modern applications and uses. Moreover, the vast majority of urban households are able to subscribe to even faster service," the FCC said.

The FCC plans to offer nearly $1.8 billion a year to carriers willing to expand service to 5 million rural Americans. Carriers will also receive six years of support instead of five. Commissioner Ajit Pai dissented in part, agreeing with the 10Mbps benchmark but saying that carriers should get 10 years of funding to account for the increased speed requirement.

Also today, the FCC raised the annual spending cap on its E-rate program from $2.4 billion to $3.9 billion a year to improve broadband at schools and libraries. Phone customers will pay an average of 16 cents more per month to fund this increase, which was opposed by Republican commissioners Pai and Michael O'Rielly.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2014...-to-be-10mbps/





Verizon Says Investment Will Be Unaffected by Net Neutrality Policy
Edward Wyatt

A senior executive of Verizon, which successfully challenged the Federal Communications Commission’s 2010 net neutrality rules in federal court, said Tuesday that the company’s plans for future investment in its networks would not be affected even if the F.C.C. decides to begin regulating Internet access as a utility.

Francis J. Shammo, Verizon’s chief financial officer, said at the annual UBS media and communications investment conference that the company planned to continue to invest in its FiOS fiber-optic network and its wireless systems regardless of the outcome of the broadband debate.

“I mean to be real clear, I mean this does not influence the way we invest,” Mr. Shammo said, according to a transcript of the meeting. “I mean we’re going to continue to invest in our networks and our platforms, both in wireless and wireline FiOS and where we need to. So nothing will influence that.”

Mr. Shammo said Verizon believed that the F.C.C. had enough authority already to enforce net neutrality without taking the “extreme” step of classifying broadband access as a utility under Title II of the Communications Act. And he warned that if the F.C.C. chose to classify broadband as a utility, the policy would be tied up in litigation for years.

The debate has heated up since President Obama urged the F.C.C. last month to adopt a Title II regulatory regime to guarantee that Internet service providers cannot block or discriminate against legal online content.

Opponents have said that such a move will stifle investment by companies. This week, a group of large telecommunications equipment companies, including Cisco Systems, IBM and Intel, wrote to the F.C.C. urging it not to adopt Title II classification.

“Title II would lead to a slowdown, if not a hold, in broadband build-out, because if you don’t know that you can recover on your investment, you won’t make it,” the group wrote in its letter. “The investment shortfall would then flow downstream, landing first and squarely on technology companies like ours, and then working its way through the economy over all. Just a few years removed from the worst recession in memory, that’s a risk no policy maker should accept, let alone promote.”

But there is evidence that some of those concerns might be overblown. Verizon is believed to be one of the companies bidding aggressively for new airwaves for mobile broadband that are now being auctioned by the F.C.C. Those auctions have already bid up prices for the available airwaves, or spectrum, to more than $40 billion, four times the original minimum set by the F.C.C.

Commission officials and others have said that the success of the auction disproves the assertion that even the threat of Title II regulation will stifle investment.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/1...rality-policy/





Comcast Sued for Turning Home Wi-Fi Routers Into Public Hotspots
Benny Evangelista

Two East Bay residents are suing Comcast for plugging their home’s wireless router into what they call a power-wasting, Internet-clogging, privacy threatening network of public Wi-Fi hotspots.

The class-action suit, filed last week in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on behalf of Toyer Grear and daughter Joycelyn Harris, claims Comcast is “exploiting them for profit” by using their Pittsburg home’s router as part of a nationwide network of public hotspots.

Comcast is trying to compete with major cell phone carriers by creating a public Xfinity WiFi Hotspot network in 19 of the country’s largest cities. The company is activating a second high-speed Internet channel broadcast from newer-model wireless gateway modems that residential customers lease from the company. It plans to spread to 8 million hotspots by the end of the year.

The secondary signal is supposed to be separate from the private Wi-Fi channel customers use, and it is intended for houseguests or Comcast subscribers who happen to be in range and using mobile devices.

The Philadelphia company, which owns the nation’s largest cable TV service and entertainment giant NBCUniversal, began activating the secondary channel in the Bay Area this summer. Customers who own cable modems aren’t affected.

Although Comcast has said its subscribers have the right to disable the secondary signal, the suit claims the company turns the service on without permission and places “the costs of its national Wi-Fi network onto its customers.”

“Comcast’s contract with its customers is so vague that it is unclear as to whether Comcast even addresses this practice at all, much less adequately enough to be said to have obtained its customers’ authorization of this practice,” the suit claims.

The suit quotes a test conducted by Philadelphia networking technology company Speedify that concluded the secondary Internet channel will eventually push “tens of millions of dollars per month of the electricity bills needed to run their nationwide public Wi-Fi network onto consumers.”

Tests showed that under heavy use, the secondary channel adds 30 to 40 percent more costs to a customer’s electricity bill than the modem itself, the suit said.

The suit also said “the data and information on a Comcast customer’s network is at greater risk” because the hotspot network “allows strangers to connect to the Internet through the same wireless router used by Comcast customers.”

Comcast did not have any immediate comment on the suit. But the company has previously said the modems have two antennas — separating the signals and offer a layer of privacy protection. Comcast has also said the energy costs will depend on how much guests use a resident’s Wi-Fi.

Although Comcast has said it has enough bandwidth to handle the extra traffic, the suit claims Grear and Harris have suffered from “decreased, inadequate speeds on their home Wi-Fi network.”

The suit asks for unspecified damages and an injunction preventing Comcast from using home wireless routers for its hotspot network.
http://www.sfgate.com/business/artic...to-5943750.php





Governments Shouldn't Auction More 4G Spectrum
Pablo Valerio

Last week the FCC raised more than $34 billion for six blocks of airwaves, totaling 65 megahertz of the electromagnetic spectrum. This was the first offering of licensed spectrum in six years, and the industry bid was three times the reserve price of $10.5 billion. That is also three times more than what the industry spent to establish their 3G networks in 1999.

The FCC called the auction a huge success, especially after the wireless carriers have been threatening to put a halt on new investments in infrastructure and new licenses.

Many governments, especially in Europe, have been auctioning wireless spectrum to raise money. But the industry, after paying billions a few years ago for the 3G licenses, are not willing to bid for new spectrum--and that can jeopardize the service quality. European governments collected around €130 billion during the 3G auction in 2000, according to European business association GrowthPlus.

During that time, the industry believed that 3G would be adopted by the masses for video calls and fast data services. But at the turn of the twenty-first century, most people didn't have data-capable phones; video calls were not the norm; and even Blackberrys didn't support 3G.

As a result the industry was forced to absorb the huge license fees, ultimately offering 3G data services on laptop dongles and selling heavily discounted packages to MVNOs, the mortal enemies of their lucrative contract plans.

Just three years ago, after intensive testing of LTE technology, the first commercially available 4G services started to appear. Cash-strapped governments which were feeling the effects of the global financial crisis, took the opportunity to raise a chunk of money for their empty coffers by auctioning the initial 4G frequencies

But the carriers were not willing to jump in with billions of Euros for the promise of potential big business. Also LTE works over many different channels and blocks, each with its specific range of frequencies, meaning that carriers need to obtain a license for each block and subsequently pay the "lease."

If governments insist on carrying on with frequency auctions, not only will it make it more difficult for carriers and other wireless providers to invest in infrastructure, it will also jeopardize the possibility that governments will allow more competition on those frequencies, and impose neutrality rules.

Recently, the FCC was able to stop Verizon from throttling its 4G customers because the company uses some "unlicensed frequencies" on the 900MHz band for some of its 4G networks.

But the situation has changed. While few people are interested in video calls, except for corporate virtual meetings, the explosion of smartphones and its corresponding increase in data traffic, makes 4G not just a business opportunity, but a definitive must for carriers.

Another factor luring carriers to get the low-end spectrum is the potential explosion of the number of IoT devices. If carriers get hold of the available frequencies in the 900MHz band, it is highly unlikely that services such as WiFi 802.11ah could be deployed by other companies and user groups, expanding the current monopoly the cell phone companies have in the wireless market.

The FCC is planning to offer the "digital dividend" (spectrum to be freed up by compression of TV channels in DTT) in 2016. The opportunity is for governments to allow free access to the new frequencies of the digital dividend, and ask the industry to invest in infrastructure, and provide better services.

Some European providers, such as EE and Vodafone, have already announced their plans to use the new frequencies. If governments insist in auctions of the digital dividend, it could hurt the industry and potentially destroy any possibility of negotiating universal access and net neutrality.
http://www.saasintheenterprise.com/a...&doc_id=275870





Verizon's New, Encrypted Calling App Plays Nice With the NSA
Joshua Brustein

Verizon is the latest big company to enter the post-Snowden market for secure communication, and it's doing so with an encryption standard that comes with a way for law enforcement to access ostensibly secure phone conversations.

Verizon Voice Cypher, the product introduced on Thursday with the encryption company Cellcrypt, offers business and government customers end-to-end encryption for voice calls on iOS, Android, or BlackBerry devices equipped with a special app. The encryption software provides secure communications for people speaking on devices with the app, regardless of their wireless carrier, and it can also connect to an organization's secure phone system.

Cellcrypt and Verizon both say that law enforcement agencies will be able to access communications that take place over Voice Cypher, so long as they're able to prove that there's a legitimate law enforcement reason for doing so. Seth Polansky, Cellcrypt's vice president for North America, disputes the idea that building technology to allow wiretapping is a security risk. "It's only creating a weakness for government agencies," he says. "Just because a government access option exists, it doesn't mean other companies can access it."

Phone carriers like Verizon are required by U.S. law to build networks that can be wiretapped. But the legislation known as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act requires phone carriers to decrypt communications for the government only if they have designed their technology to make it possible to do so. If Verizon and Cellcrypt had structured their encryption so that neither company had the information necessary to decrypt the calls, they would not have been breaking the law.

Other companies have designed their encryption in this way, including AT&T, which offers encrypted phone service for business customers. Apple and Android recently began protecting content stored on users's phones in a way that would keep the tech companies from being able to comply with requests from law enforcement. The move drew public criticism from FBI Director James Comey, and some security experts expect that a renewed effort to stir passage of legislation banning such encryption will accompany Silicon Valley's increased interest in developing these services.

Verizon believes major demand for its new encryption service will come from governmental agencies conveying sensitive but unclassified information over the phone, says Tim Petsky, a senior product manager for Verizon Wireless. Corporate customers who are concerned about corporate espionage are also itching for answers. "You read about breaches in security almost every week in the press," says Petsky. "Enterprise customers have been asking about ways to secure their communications and up until this point, we didn't have a solution."

There has been increased interest in encryption from individual consumers, too, largely thanks to the NSA revelations leaked by Edward Snowden. Yahoo and Google began offering end-to-end encrypted e-mail services this year. Silent Circle, a startup catering to consumer and enterprise clients, has been developing end-to-end voice encryption for phones calls. Verizon's service, with a monthly price of $45 per device, isn't targeting individual buyers and won't be offered to average consumers in the near future.

But Verizon's partner, Cellcrypt, looks upon selling to large organizations as the first step toward bringing down the price before eventually offering a consumer-level encryption service. "At the end of the day, we'd love to have this be a line item on your Verizon bill," says Polansky.

It's still not clear how big the potential market for consumer-level encryption services is. Chris Soghoian of the ACLU's speech, privacy, and technology project, believes that Verizon's approach is unlikely to have wide appeal because of Verizon's decision not to keep out law enforcement.

Many people in the security industry believe that a designed access point creates a vulnerability for criminals or spies to exploit. Last year reports surfaced that the FBI was pushing legislation that would require many forms of Internet communication to be wiretap-ready. A group of prominent security experts responded strongly: "Requiring software vendors to build intercept functionality into their products is unwise and will be ineffective, with the result being serious consequences for the economic well-being and national security of the United States," they wrote in a report issued in May.

Verizon's service might well have drawn praise from security experts in the past, Soghoian says, but the past year of revelations about government surveillance has changed the atmosphere. "Today, to roll this out with a backdoor, that's inexcusable, he says. " With encrypted phone services being developed to be inaccessible to anyone, he says, "It's tough to see how Verizon can compete here when they're designing a product that is less secure."
http://www.businessweek.com/articles...ed-for-the-nsa





Mass Surveillance Exposed by Snowden ‘Not Justified by Fight Against Terrorism’

Report by Nils Muižnieks, commissioner for human rights at the Council of Europe, says ‘secret, massive and indiscriminate’ intelligence work is contrary to rule of law
Owen Bowcott

The “secret, massive and indiscriminate” surveillance conducted by intelligence services and disclosed by the former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden cannot be justified by the fight against terrorism, the most senior human rights official in Europe has warned.

In a direct challenge to the United Kingdom and other states, Nils Muižnieks, the commissioner for human rights at the Council of Europe, calls for greater transparency and stronger democratic oversight of the way security agencies monitor the internet. He also said that so-called Five Eyes intelligence-sharing treaty between the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada should be published.

“Suspicionless mass retention of communications data is fundamentally contrary to the rule of law … and ineffective,” the Latvian official argues in a 120-page report, The Rule of Law on the Internet in the Wider Digital World. “Member states should not resort to it or impose compulsory retention of data by third parties.”

As human rights commissioner, Muižnieks has the power to intervene as a third party in cases sent to the European court of human rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg. His report is published the week after the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) found that the legal regime governing mass surveillance of the internet by the monitoring agency GCHQ is “human rights compliant”.

In his report, Muižnieks wrote: “In connection with the debate on the practices of intelligence and security services prompted by Edward Snowden’s revelations, it is becoming increasingly clear that secret, massive and indiscriminate surveillance programmes are not in conformity with European human rights law and cannot be justified by the fight against terrorism or other important threats to national security. Such interferences can only be accepted if they are strictly necessary and proportionate to a legitimate aim.”

The civil liberties organisations which brought the claim in the IPT case are planning to appeal against the ruling to the ECHR - a case in which the commissioner could participate.

Muižnieks told the Guardian: ”I’m interested in weighing in on such cases about surveillance. Surveillance has gone beyond the bounds of the rule of law and democratic oversight needs to be more robust.

“We have seen examples where there’s a clear lack of oversight of security: the first was black sites, torture and rendition; the second was the revelations about mass surveillance. I want to influence the working of the court and its thinking.

“These recommendations [in the report] are my interpretation of basic human rights principles. The court often refers to my work in their judgments. There’s no substantial case law in internet-related issues so far.

“The UK is a country we are watching closely on these issues. It has a huge influence on whether or not the rule of law will prevail in the digital environment. All of these data sharing agreements should be as transparent as possible so we can assess the extent to which they are abiding by the law. Our right to privacy has been compromised on a regular basis and on a mass scale. I find that very worrying.”

Muižnieks said he expects to visit the UK next year and examine the UK’s record on surveillance. Asked about the IPT ruling, he commented: “I would note that very few complaints to this tribunal have been upheld in the last few years which raises many questions for me.”

He supported calls for publication of the so-called Five Eyes treaty that authorises intelligence sharing between the UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand as a contribution to greater transparency. A case requesting its release has already been lodged at the ECHR.

His report contained a number of recommendations including:

• No states … European or otherwise, should access data stored in another country without the express consent of the other country or countries involved unless there is a clear, explicit and sufficiently circumscribed legal basis in international law for such access.

• Member states should ensure that their law-enforcement agencies do not obtain data from servers and infrastructure in another country under informal arrangements.

• [Countries] should stop relying on private companies that control the internet and the wider digital environment to impose restrictions that are in violation of the state’s human rights obligations.

• The activities of national security and intelligence agencies [should be brought within] an overarching legal framework. Until there is increased transparency on the rules under which these services operate their activities cannot be assumed to be in accordance with the rule of law.

• States should ensure that effective democratic oversight over national security services is in place. For effective democratic oversight, a culture of respect for human rights and the rule of law should be promoted, in particular among security service officers.

The Council of Europe, which has 47 member states including the UK, Russia and Turkey, is the body that oversees the European court of human rights in Strasbourg.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...inst-terrorism





GOP Rep Attempted Late Bid to Kill Spy Bill
Julian Hattem

One of the biggest thorns in the side of the country’s intelligence agencies attempted to mount an eleventh hour bid to kill the spy agencies' funding bill on Wednesday.

Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) wrote on Facebook that the intelligence authorization bill that easily passed through the House contained “one of the most egregious sections of law I've encountered during my time as a representative.”

“It grants the executive branch virtually unlimited access to the communications of every American,” explained Amash, who has a record of skepticism toward the National Security Agency and other agencies. Last year, he nearly succeeded in an attempt to end the NSA’s controversial phone records program.

The bill was originally set to be considered with just a simple voice vote, but Amash rushed to the House floor on Wednesday to demand a recorded vote. He also fired off a letter to his fellow lawmakers warning them not to back the bill.

Hidden in the law is “a troubling new provision that for the first time statutorily authorizes spying on U.S. citizens without legal process,” Amash told other lawmakers.

That provision allows “the acquisition, retention, and dissemination” of Americans’ communications without a court order or subpoena.

That type of collection is currently allowed under an executive order that dates back to former President Reagan, but the new stamp of approval from Congress was troubling, Amash said. Limits on the government’s ability to retain information in the provision did not satisfy the Michigan Republican.

Despite Amash’s late attempt, the bill easily passed, 325-100.

The bill passed the Senate earlier this week and is now on its way to President Obama.
http://thehill.com/policy/technology...-kill-spy-bill





The Unstoppable Rise of the Global Surveillance Profiteers
Aaron Sankin

Imagine if your government put a price tag on your privacy, acquiring shadowy surveillance technology that exploited your personal vulnerabilities.

Earlier this year, journalists at the Ethiopian Satellite Television Service (ESAT) were sent something sketchy. The Amsterdam-based TV channel holds itself up as an alternative to the country’s tightly controlled state-run media and regularly runs programming critical of Ethiopia’s ruling regime. As such, the station’s broadcasts in the country are regularly jammed by government censors, and a recent documentary aired on state-run TV urged Ethiopians not to participate in ESAT’s programming.

The first suspicious message arrived one afternoon via Skype to an ESAT employee in Belgium who was managing a company account. The message supposedly came from from Yalfalkenu Meches, a former contributor who had been out of contact for some time, and it included an attached file titled “An Article for ESAT” that raised a litany of red flags. It contained a veiled .exe file—the kind that triggers programs to start running on Windows machines and is the primary carrier of viruses—whose name included a long string of spaces designed to hide its true identity.

Suspecting that something was amiss, the employee refused to open the file, but Meches tried again—this time sending over a Microsoft Word document. Less than two hours later, Meches reached out to another ESAT employee, this one based in the company’s northern Virginia office, with a similar offer of an interesting article. Once again, Meches, or whoever had assumed his online identity, was rebuffed.

ESAT forwarded the emails to Citizen Lab, a multidisciplinary group at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs working on Internet freedom issues like censorship and surveillance, with a focus on the actions of repressive governments. Activists from around the world send files to Citizen Lab that they suspect contain viruses, and the group’s programmers will download them, rummage through the source code, and determine if there’s foul play involved.

Citizen Lab found that one of the ESAT messages exploited a bug in Microsoft Word that would make the infected system covertly download a virus from a remote server as soon as it was opened. The virus was one of the tendrils of something called Remote Control System, which was developed by a Milan, Italy-based company called Hacking Team.

Hacking Team is part of a new breed of companies that have sprouted up in the years since 9/11 sparked a global war on terror and a wired technological revolution. As the U.S. developed the online surveillance tools that, over a decade later, would eventually be revealed to the world by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, savvy businesses across the globe realized there were plenty of countries that might not be able to afford to develop such sophisticated technology in-house but still had money to burn.

Third-party surveillance tools have grown from a virtually nonexistent industry in 2001 to one raking in over $5 billion annually. It’s also enabled countries around the world to cheaply establish a crude surveillance state, one that manipulates citizens and threatens their privacy.

Citizen Lab knew that the operator of the Meches account was working for the Ethiopian government because Hacking Team only sells its products to governments. And Hacking Team wasn’t alone in giving the Ethiopian government precisely what it needed to spy on the people whose activities it didn’t like.

One year earlier, Citizen Lab came across a piece of malware circulating through the wilds of the Internet that hid itself behind pictures of Ethiopian opposition party Ginbot 7, which the government had designated a terrorist group. When researchers examined the virus, they discovered it was designed to send information to a server in Ethiopia that had been previously identified as being associated with a private surveillance software called FinFisher, made by company called Gamma International.

This map shows all of the countries where Citizen Lab has identified servers running FinFisher. (Note: The presence of a FinFisher server in a country doesn’t necessarily mean that the government of that country is using the program; some of the servers listed here are undoubtedly acting as intermediaries to disguise the intercepted data’s ultimate endpoint.)

The implication here is fascinating, noted Kenneth Page of the nonprofit Privacy International. Not only is the Ethiopian government outsourcing the construction of its surveillance technology, but it’s actively shopping around—using different programs made by different companies.

“We couldn’t tell if it was a result of two different departments in the same government working independently or if it was just the government buying two different products to determine which one worked better,” said Page, whose group is part of the Coalition Against Unlawful Surveillance Exports (CAUSE), which advocates to control the flow of this type of surveillance technology. “Even within the industry itself, there’s a healthy competition.”

There’s a major demand for electronic surveillance equipment and a thriving ecosystem of companies from Canada from to Israel willing to sell off-the-shelf surveillance solutions to any government with a few hundred thousand dollars to spare. Since the market for these goods is both opaque and truly global, for groups like CAUSE, halting the flow of this technology is an uphill battle.

The balance between safety and privacy

There are very good reasons why a government might legitimately depend on this type of surveillance software. On the most basic level, governments need to track terrorists and hardened criminals—two groups of people that, like pretty much everyone else, use the Internet to communicate.

“There are a lot of bad people in the world who are relying on these systems—telephones, mobile phones, Skype, Tor, tablets, and computers—to do what they do, and that is a threat to all of us,” insisted Hacking Team spokesman Eric Rabe. “There is a real question here about the public’s need for privacy and our need for security. If we come down 100 percent on the side of privacy, which seems to be in vogue in tech right now, we are putting ourselves at very legitimate risk. And to ignore that is foolhardy. I think, by and large, we and the other people who are protecting this software are working to keep people safe.”

Rabe insisted that Hacking Team goes to great lengths to ensure that the governments it sells to won’t use the products for ill, including an independent review process that exists outside of the company’s commissioned sales staff. Additionally, he noted, if a country were found to be using Hacking Team’s software to violate human rights, the company could stop sending over the updates necessary for its programs to bypass regularly updated commercial virus-detection software. Rabe declined to specifically state if this type of revocation has ever occurred. Even if it does happen, the programs would still be functional and effective to everyone who doesn’t has patched to the latest version of antivirus software.

Representatives from Gamma did not respond to a request for comment.

Nevertheless, for many Ethiopians, the government’s use of these surveillance technologies can be a matter of life and death. A report released by Human Rights Watch earlier this year detailed how widely electronic surveillance in the country was used to keep the government’s critics in check:

Recorded phone calls with family members and friends—particularly those with foreign phone numbers—are often played during abusive interrogations in which people who have been arbitrarily detained are accused of belonging to banned organizations. Mobile networks have been shut down during peaceful protests and protesters’ locations have been identified using information from their mobile phones.

A former opposition party member told Human Rights Watch: “One day they arrested me and they showed me everything. They showed me a list of all my phone calls and they played a conversation I had with my brother. They arrested me because we talked about politics on the phone. It was the first phone I ever owned, and I thought I could finally talk freely.”


The report noted that much of the technology used to monitor the country’s entire telecom network was provided by a Chinese firm called ZTE. But there are a litany of other options Ethiopian officials could have chosen from to meet their snooping needs.

WikiLeaks has been tracking the ecosystem of surveillance companies in a project called Spy Files since 2011. Spy Files hosts leaked documents from nearly 100 different companies in the surveillance technology business.

Since the industry is so active, and demand for the products is so enormous, the likelihood that one of these companies will sell to autocratic regimes is high. South African firm VASTech was found to have sold a system to former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi that was used to track and record every single phone call coming into and out of the country, a practice that allegedly amounted in over 30 million minutes of phone conversations every month. Not only did VASTech maintain a relationship with Libya for years, but the South African government approved hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of grants to the company, knowing full well that the funds would be going toward the production and sale of surveillance technology.

Professionally produced software isn’t the only option available to a government looking for a virus that can infect a target and report back everything that person does online. If it wanted to, a government could employ the same tools cybercriminals around the world use to steal credit card information and hack personal email accounts every day. In fact, during Syria’s civil war, government affiliates used the Blackshades Remote Access Tool (RAT), a powerful cyberweapon developed in the U.S.

However, companies like Hacking Team and Gamma International provide a complete package with their specialty products. Customers can ring technical support if something goes wrong. The programs are designed to display data in a way that’s easily readable and specifically customized to meet that government’s needs. Most importantly, the software is constantly updated to avoid firewalls and antivirus programs because what’s untraceable today may be easily defended against tomorrow.

Marietje Schaake, a member of the European Parliament who has long advocated the implementation of strict international controls on the export of surveillance technology, argues that, even outside of the context of authoritarian regimes, the proliferation of these types of Orwellian technology is problematic.

“I think people have a legitimate reason to be concerned about the spread of intrusion and mass surveillance technologies on the broadest sense,” Schaake insisted. “This is very much a discussion we must also have in our own societies—for example, when it comes to the powers of intelligence services. The many cases of abuse indicate the massive impact they have on human rights.”

Schaake has been interested in the issue since her first days in the European Parliament, when she saw how the Iranian government used surveillance technology provided by Nokia Siemens Networks to intercept the communications of and track down dissidents during widespread public demonstrations that erupted following Iran’s disputed 2009 presidential election. The willingness of a well-respected European company like Nokia Siemens Network to help a repressive government like Iran crack down on its own people really struck a nerve.

“These systems are used to intercept communications, access people’s devices, and track down dissidents,” she explained. “It demonstrates the devastating impact the unregulated trade in technologies can have on human rights.”

The Wassenaar Arrangement

Actually stopping a company from selling this technology is far tougher than it seems. For one thing, banning the sale of all surveillance software may ultimately do more harm than good.

“If you draw restrictions that are overly broad, you catch up technologies that have legitimate uses and harm the country’s business interests,” explained Danielle Kehl, a policy analyst at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, which is also part of the CAUSE coalition. “It could have a negative impact on the free flow of information and severely hinder research.”

What makes the problem even more difficult is there’s little a single country can do on its own.

The United States, for example, has a complex set of export controls that require companies selling surveillance technologies abroad to first receive specific approval from the Departments of Commerce, Defense, and State to do so.

Even with these controls in place, the system has been known to break down. In 2011, California-based surveillance tech firm Blue Coat admitted that 13 of its Internet filtering systems, which a spokesperson insisted the company had initially sold to Iraqi authorities, ended up in the hands of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who used them as censorship mechanisms in the midst of the nation’s brutal civil war.

Over the last few years, the international community has gotten together and started seriously addressing the global trade of surveillance equipment in an effort to ensure that these programs don’t fall into the wrong hands. The mechanism for doing that is called the Wassenaar Arrangement.

A few years after the end of Cold War, world leaders met in a suburb of the Hague called Wassenaar and struck a deal to control the flow of conventional military technology. The agreement wasn’t binding like an official treaty; instead, it was more like a gentleman’s agreement by which each of the 41 participating nations agreed to do their best to subsequently ratify in their individual national legislatures whatever the diplomats in Wassenaar agreed upon.

Wassenaar has been in place since 1996, but it’s only been in the past two years that surveillance technologies have been added to the list. Updates to Wassenaar occur once a year; the 2014 plenary meeting was held last week, so the process is slow. Transferring those updates to individual member states is even slower—especially in the case of the European Union, whose process for adoption is positively glacial.

Without a comprehensive, international system of controls preventing companies in virtually every country from supplying surveillance technology to bad actors, it’s relatively easy for a firm that wants to sell surveillance technology to do so—or to simply set up a subsidiary in the next country over and sell to whomever it wants. Since the Wassenaar Arrangement only covers 41 out of the world’s 196 countries, finding a nation to set up shop in that lacks any kind of surveillance tech export controls likely isn’t all that difficult.

One problem that advocates of stricter regulations like Schaake have with the way Wassenaar functions is that the controls, which give countries the ability to decide whether to grant specific export licenses, are enacted at the level of each individual government and aren’t necessarily consistent. That opens a window for companies to shop around. Just because one government denies a license, that doesn’t mean the company couldn’t just apply in another jurisdiction that’s more forgiving.

While Europe has been slow in establishing a consistent set of export controls, at least one country has elected to take strong, unilateral action. Earlier this year, German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel announced the country was placing a moratorium on the sale of all surveillance technology to a handful of nations it viewed as problematic—including Russia and Turkey—until a comprehensive solution is implemented by the E.U. as a whole.

“Supporters of Internet freedom are not supposed to deliver corresponding technology to the hands of such regimes which monitor Internet users and thus violate the most basic human rights,” Gabriel told Turkish English-language newspaper the Daily Sabah.

In addition, deciding precisely what qualifies a country as undeserving of surveillance technology is a tricky question in and of itself. It’s a simple decision not to allow an American company to sell malware to the government of North Korea, which seems to be doing pretty well on its own. The issue gets far thornier, however, when it comes to countries whose human rights records might not be stellar but aren’t quite bad enough to justify being ostracized by the international community.

Take Saudi Arabia, for example. The Saudi government has received considerable criticism for how it treats religious minorities and political dissidents; yet the country sat on the United Nations’ Human Rights Council as recently as 2012. In March, a group of 52 members of Congress wrote an open letter urging President Obama to advocate for reform during a then-upcoming meeting with Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, but the U.S. government recently sold the country $30 billion worth of F-15 fighter jets. In that context, making the argument that the U.S. should prohibit, or even significantly limit, the sale of surveillance equipment explicitly designed to catch terrorists to one of its prime strategic allies in the Middle East is a difficult one to make. As a result, privately designed surveillance software designed by former-Boeing subsidiary Narus has been identified in Saudi Arabia.

The issue of speed is also huge. Right now, Wassenaar only covers a few types of surveillance technology.

Last year, Wassenaar added two more technologies to its export control list. The first type, called “Advanced Persistent Threat Software,” is essentially malware designed to circumvent the security features on a given device and then exact information from it. The category consists of viruses that log every button typed onto a computer keyboard and ones that use a phone’s GPS to record everywhere its owner travels. The second type includes systems that monitor telecommunications networks for the purposes of mass surveillance and intercepts information like emails, Google searches, and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) calls via programs like Skype. The year before, the group started regulating tech that can be used to impersonate cell towers and allow governments to monitor communications using man-in-the-middle attacks.

These are the only technologies even theoretically controlled across participating countries in a coordinated fashion. It leaves an enormous gap for other types of systems that haven’t yet been added to the list.

Kenneth Page of human rights group Privacy International gives the example of a Dubai-based company called Advanced Middle East Systems, which sells a superhero-inspired product called Cerebro. It can be used to tap into fiber-optic cables carrying Internet traffic and intercept all of the data being passed through without the need for the cooperation of the telecom company that owns the pipe.

Advanced Middle East Systems’ marketing materials state that the export of Cerebro is subject to the United Arab Emirates licensing controls. Page argues, however, that decision is left up to authorities in the U.A.E., and there’s nothing in Wassenaar that could stop it.

The Wiretapper’s Ball

Like any major industry, the companies in the business of selling surveillance technology have conferences. Those trade shows, which are held a few times a years in locations like Mexico and Dubai are called ISS World, more commonly known as the “Wiretapper’s Ball.”

ISS World gives everyone involved in the government surveillance business, from the vendors of surveillance technology to the government intelligence agents themselves, the chance to talk shop. The list of talks the conference held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, earlier this year include:

• How to intercept wireless communications on 3G, 4G and LTE networks mobile networks
• How to carry out remote stealth surveillance on encrypted traffic networks
• How to use encryption to avoid remote stealth surveillance
• How to use facial recognition technology and gathering metadata on images posted on Facebook
• How to defend your networks against zero-day attacks—meaning, ones exploiting previously unknown holes in digital security systems

From what public accounts do exist, the events themselves seem like profoundly weird experiences.

A Bloomberg News report about an ISS World conference in Kuala Lumpur in 2011 noted that, unlike almost every other business conference in existence, there are no cocktail parties. Attendees try to avoid even being seen talking congregating with each other in public. That kind of socialization isn’t encouraged when the stated profession of nearly everyone in attendance is stealing secrets and the events are potential recruiting grounds for double agents.

At a previous iteration of the conference in Prague, one telecom regulator from an African government looked up from his tablet to see the action being displayed on his monitor also being projected on a screen at the front of the room in real time. He had logged the hotel’s wireless Internet and someone had quickly hacked his system to teach him an important lesson about what happens when one is insufficiently paranoid in a room packed with spies.

ISS World’s organizer, a Virginia-based company called TeleStrategies, is notoriously secretive. It doesn’t allow journalists into its conventions and, when contacted by the Kernel, a representative said the company has a policy of not granting interviews with the press.

However, the organization has apparently let in representatives from Sudan, Iran, and Syria—nations whose repressive governments have earned them a place on the list of countries sanctioned by the U.S. government. According to a report by independent researcher Colin Anderson, TeleStratagies requires that attendees register under the umbrella of larger, pre-screened organizations.

“In the case of Sudan, TeleStrategies has indicated knowledge of the participant’s nationality through its disclosed attendance records,” Anderson wrote. “Six of the listings are entities of the Government of Sudan, and three of which, recorded as ‘Governmental LEA,’ ‘Sudan Ministry of Interior,’ and ‘Sudan National Telecommunication Authority’, are directly cited within the State Department’s Human Rights Reports as parties in the country’s online and offline human rights abuses.”

For their part, the conference’s organizers say they do what they can to block representatives from some of the world’s most notorious governments from attending. Other than that, as TeleStratagies President Jerry Lucas charges, ethical concerns are “not our responsibility.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Hacking Team spokesman Eric Rabe. He insists that, outside of building and helping set up the technology, his company plays no part in whatever investigations its governmental customers decide to carry out. “I don’t think you want Hacking Team to be the universal arbiter of what countries are good and what countries are bad,” he noted. “That’s why we rely on blacklists; that’s why we rely on governments to help us.”

In one sense, that shirking of moral responsibility is a dodge. But in another, it’s hard logic to argue with. If governments don’t set up clear rules about the sale of these technologies, there’s going to be nothing stopping companies from selling whatever they want to the highest bidder—even if the intentions of that highest bidder are less than honorable.

“The systems we are talking about are getting smaller, faster and cheaper every day,” Schaake told the Kernel. “Technologies that are sold as law enforcement tools can easily be abused in countries where the rule of law is not upheld, and where journalists, human rights defenders, opposition politicians, and ordinary citizens are attacked by their governments through these tools.”

If government regulators and activists want to have any hope of ensuring Internet freedom for billions of people around the world, they’re going to have to act fast.
http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-...state-economy/





What If? Microsoft Appeal Ponders U.S. Reaction to Foreign Data Demand

“Imagine this scenario. Officers of the local Stadtpolizei investigating a suspected leak to the press descend on Deutsche Bank headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany. They serve a warrant to seize a bundle of private letters that a New York Times reporter is storing in a safe deposit box at a Deutsche Bank USA branch in Manhattan. The bank complies by ordering the New York branch manager to open the reporter’s box with a master key, rummage through it, and fax the private letters to the Stadtpolizei.”

— Microsoft v. United States of America,
In the Matter of a Warrant to Search a Certain E-Mail Account
Controlled and Maintained by Microsoft Corporation

So begins Microsoft’s legal brief today in New York with the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals in its ongoing case challenging a U.S. government search warrant for customer data stored in Ireland. Microsoft filed the appeal after a U.S. district court judge rejected the company’s argument that the warrant is illegal because it calls for the seizure of emails stored outside the United States.

The filing begins by imagining how the U.S. government might react if the shoe were on the other foot. For example, how would the Unites States react if a foreign government attempted to sidestep international law by demanding that a foreign company with offices in the United States produce the personal communications of an American journalist? As the brief hypothesizes, the reaction might go something like this:

The U.S. Secretary of State fumes: “We are outraged by the decision to bypass existing formal procedures that the European Union and the United States have agreed on for bilateral cooperation, and to embark instead on extraterritorial law enforcement activity on American soil in violation of international law and our own privacy laws.” Germany’s Foreign Minister responds: “We did not conduct an extraterritorial search – in fact we didn’t search anything at all. No German officer ever set foot in the United States. The Stadtpolizei merely ordered a German company to produce its own business records, which were in its own possession, custody, and control. The American reporter’s privacy interests were fully protected, because the Stadtpolizei secured a warrant from a neutral magistrate.”

As the brief states, “[N]o way would that response satisfy the U.S. Government” because the documents held by the foreign company for safekeeping are private letters, not business records. And any attempt to take possession of those letters through a warrant – even one served on the company entrusted with those letters – would constitute a seizure by a foreign government of private information located in another country.

Ultimately today’s legal brief is about more than a timely and interesting story. This case involves timeless principles and their enduring importance to a future with global technology.

As the story illustrates, this case and these principles are as important to Americans as they are to people elsewhere around the world. If the Government prevails, how can it complain if foreign agents require tech companies to download emails stored in the U.S.? This is a question the Department of Justice hasn’t yet addressed, much less answered. Yet the Golden Rule applies to international relations as well as to other human interaction.

In one important sense, the issues at stake are even bigger than this. The Government puts at risk the fundamental privacy rights Americans have valued since the founding of the postal service. This is because it argues that, unlike your letters in the mail, emails you store in the cloud cease to belong exclusively to you. Instead, according to the Government, your emails become the business records of a cloud provider. Because business records have a lower level of legal protection, the Government claims it can use a different and broader legal authority to reach emails stored anywhere in the world.

Of course, this case has also raised concerns around the world for a good reason. The DOJ in effect challenges people’s ability around the world to rely on the privacy protections of their own governments and laws.

As our brief points out, the power to embark on unilateral law enforcement incursions into another sovereign country has profound foreign policy consequences. For that reason, the European Commissioner for Justice protested the lower court’s decision, stating that “it bypasses existing formal procedures that are agreed between the EU and the U.S.” and “may be in breach of international law and may impede the attainment of the protection of individuals guaranteed in the Union.” Foreign newspapers were less diplomatic, blasting the United States with headlines such as: “U.S. Wants to Rule over All Servers Globally.”

To avoid just this sort of international discord, courts presume that federal statutes do not apply extraterritorially unless Congress expresses a clear intent for them to do so. And Congress expressed no such intention here. That fundamental point is at the heart of this case.

For this reason, the case also has important implications for the separation of powers in our own Government. The DOJ risks stepping on Congress’ authority by substituting its judgment for a decision Congress exclusively is authorized to make.

By requiring Congress to speak clearly when extending U.S. law abroad, the presumption against extraterritoriality ensures that only Congress decides when to subordinate international comity to other governmental interests. Congress did not make – and, indeed, did not even consider – any such tradeoff when it enacted the statute involved here, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). On the contrary, ECPA’s text and history show Congress believed the law would only apply domestically. If the DOJ wants the unprecedented power it claims here, it therefore should plead its case to Congress.

To be clear, we appreciate the critical role law enforcement plays and its need to obtain evidence necessary to investigate a possible crime. Microsoft and other technology companies receive thousands of demands each year from law enforcement agencies. To accommodate its duties to both its customers and law enforcement, Microsoft complies with lawful orders from U.S. authorities. However, we believe the Government should follow the processes it has established for itself for obtaining physical evidence outside the United States. And we believe in the need to strike a better balance between security and privacy. That’s why we brought this case and why we continue to call on both the Administration and Congress to introduce reforms.

Meanwhile, the warrant issued here cannot reach emails stored in Ireland, and as we argue in our brief, we believe the lower court’s judgment should be reversed.

To download and read the full text of the filing, click here.

Posted by Brad Smith
Executive Vice President & General Counsel, Microsoft
http://digitalconstitution.com/2014/...n-data-demand/





Microsoft Tells US: The World’s Servers Are Not Yours for the Taking

Redmond says the US would be aghast if a foreign government behaved as it does.
David Kravets

Microsoft's fight against the US position that it may search its overseas servers with a valid US warrant is getting nasty.

Microsoft, which is fighting a US warrant that it hand over e-mail to the US from its Ireland servers, wants the Obama administration to ponder a scenario where the "shoe is on the other foot."

"Imagine this scenario. Officers of the local Stadtpolizei investigating a suspected leak to the press descend on Deutsche Bank headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany," Microsoft said. "They serve a warrant to seize a bundle of private letters that a New York Times reporter is storing in a safe deposit box at a Deutsche Bank USA branch in Manhattan. The bank complies by ordering the New York branch manager to open the reporter's box with a master key, rummage through it, and fax the private letters to the Stadtpolizei."

In a Monday legal filing with the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals, Microsoft added that the US government would be outraged.

"This case presents a digital version of the same scenario, but the shoe is on the other foot," the Redmond, Washington-based company said in its opening brief in a closely watched appeal.

The appeal is of a July court decision demanding that Microsoft hand over e-mail stored on an overseas server as part of a US drug trafficking investigation. Microsoft, which often stores e-mail on servers closest to the account holder, said the e-mail is protected by "Irish and European privacy laws."

But a US judge didn't agree. "It is a question of control, not a question of the location of that information," US District Judge Loretta Preska ruled. The order from the New York judge was stayed pending appeal.

Other companies in the tech sector are siding with Microsoft, too. Apple, AT&T, Cisco, and Verizon all agree with Microsoft. Verizon said (PDF) that a decision favoring the US would produce "dramatic conflict with foreign data protection laws." Apple and Cisco said (PDF) that the tech sector is put "at risk" of being sanctioned by foreign governments and that the US should seek cooperation with foreign nations via treaties, a position the US said is not practical.

The Justice Department said global jurisdiction is necessary in an age when "electronic communications are used extensively by criminals of all types in the United States and abroad, from fraudsters to hackers to drug dealers, in furtherance of violations of US law."

Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, said in a blog post Monday that the company's invocation of the Stadtpolizei analogy underscores that if the US prevails, "how can it complain if foreign agents require tech companies to download e-mails stored in the US? This is a question the Department of Justice hasn’t yet addressed, much less answered."

The senior counsel for the Irish Supreme Court wrote in a lower court filing that a US-Ireland "Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty" was the "efficient" avenue for the US government to obtain the e-mail held on Microsoft's servers in Dublin, Ireland.

The appeals court on Tuesday ordered the US to respond by March 9. No hearing date has been set.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...or-the-taking/





Facebook Seeks to Block N.Y. Prosecutor’s Search Warrants
Chris Dolmetsch

Facebook Inc. (FB) is asking a New York appeals court to block the largest set of search warrants the company says it has ever received, as the tense relationship evolves between social media and law enforcement.

Lawyers for the company will appear today before a panel of five appellate judges in Manhattan to argue that the warrants, issued last year as part of a disability-fraud investigation, violate the Fourth Amendment prohibition of unreasonable search and seizure.

Courts around the country are dealing with privacy disputes involving digital communications and social-media sites such as Facebook and Twitter Inc. (TWTR) The companies are seeking to limit the information they must hand over to the government as their popularity increases.

Social media are increasingly being used by law enforcement, with agencies at all levels scouring postings for evidence of crimes, and the New York case gives the court a “dramatic” opportunity to decide what restrictions are needed to safeguard privacy, said Hanni Fakhoury, an attorney with the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.

“There is a real potential privacy problem with this very broad, very expansive search warrant that the government got in this case,” said Fakhouri, whose group works to defend civil rights in the digital world. “Hopefully, the court will understand that this is going too far and that the government can get the records they need but they should do in a more limited and narrow way.”

Vance’s Warrants

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. obtained the warrants in July 2013, directing Menlo Park, California-based Facebook, the biggest social-media company, to turn over information from 381 customer accounts. The data included messages, photographs and comments posted on pages of friends and family.

Vance sought the information in connection with a disability-fraud probe that led this year to charges against hundreds of people accused of defrauding the government of more than $400 million. Many had worked for New York City’s fire and police departments.

A total of 134 people were indicted, more than 95 of whom have agreed to plead guilty and pay more than $20 million in restitution, according to Vance’s office.

The district attorney obtained a gag order blocking Facebook from informing the users that their accounts were the subject of the warrants. Almost 80 warrants were unsealed after the subjects were indicted, allowing Facebook to notify those users. More than 300 remain sealed.

Company’s Appeal

A judge in September 2013 denied Facebook’s request to cancel the warrants and the gag order as illegal, and the company appealed. Vance unsuccessfully sought dismissal of the appeal, which is being argued today, saying no state law allows the issuance of a search warrant to be appealed and the company is trying to suppress evidence that it had already surrendered.

Prosecutors sought details of the social-media accounts to prove suspects lied about their disabilities. Postings showed defendants riding jet skis, working a cannoli stand at New York’s San Gennaro Festival and teaching and performing mixed martial arts.

The appeals court in September denied Vance’s motion and allowed companies including Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Google Inc. (GOOG) and Twitter Inc. to weigh in on the case, along with groups including the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Civil Liberties Union.

Basic Information

Facebook says on its website that it discloses account details to law enforcement agencies in connection with valid subpoenas issued in criminal investigations seeking basic information such as names and e-mail addresses.

A court order is required for the disclosure of other information such as message headers and Internet addresses, and a search warrant is needed for the contents of any account such as messages, photos and videos, Facebook said.

The warrants’ targets include high school students, electricians, schoolteachers and members of the armed forces, and “are the digital equivalent of seizing everything in someone’s home,” Facebook said court papers. “Except here, it is not a single home but an entire neighborhood of nearly 400 homes.”

The scope of the search and seizure “would be unthinkable in the physical world,” the company said.

The New York Civil Liberties Union pointed to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June saying police must get a warrant before searching the mobile phone of a person being arrested. And search warrants must be specific, the NYCLU.

Vance argued that the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply to the case because Facebook didn’t have a privacy interest in its customers’ accounts, that the warrants were specific enough and that prosecutors sought the gag order only to prevent subjects from fleeing, obstructing the investigation or destroying evidence.

The case is In re 381 Search Warrants Directed to Facebook Inc., 30207-13, New York State Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-1...-warrants.html





Supreme Court’s Privacy Streak Comes To End: Split Court Affirms Legality of Warrantless Phone Searches Incident to Arrest
Michael Geist

The Supreme Court of Canada issued its decision in R. v. Fearon today, a case involving the legality of a warrantless cellphone search by police during an arrest. Given the court’s strong endorsement of privacy in recent cases such as Spencer, Vu, and Telus, this seemed like a slam dunk. Moreover, the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2014 decision in Riley, which addressed similar issues and ruled that a warrant is needed to search a phone, further suggested that the court would continue its streak of pro-privacy decisions.

To the surprise of many, a divided court upheld the ability of police to search cellphones without a warrant incident to an arrest. The majority established some conditions, but ultimately ruled that it could navigate the privacy balance by establishing some safeguards with the practice. A strongly worded dissent disagreed, noting the privacy implications of access to cellphones and the need for judicial pre-authorization as the best method of addressing the privacy implications.

The majority, written by Justice Cromwell (joined by McLachlin, Moldaver, and Wagner), explicitly recognizes that cellphones are the functional equivalent of computers and that a search may constitute a significant intrusion of privacy. Yet the majority cautions that not every search is a significant intrusion. It ultimately concludes that there is the potential for a cellphone search to be intrusive, it does not believe that that will be the case in every instance.

Given that conclusion, it is prepared to permit cellphone searches that are incident to arrest provided that the law is modified with some additional protections against invasion of privacy. It proceeds to effectively write the law by creating four conditions: a lawful arrest, the search is incidental to the arrest with a valid law enforcement purpose, the search is tailored or limited to the purpose (ie. limited to recent information), and police take detailed notes on what they have examined and how the phone was searched.

One saving grace in the majority’s decision is that rejects the notion that password-protected phones legally enjoy greater privacy protection than non-protected ones. The majority states:

I pause here for a moment to note that some courts have suggested that the protection s. 8 affords to individuals in the context of cell phone searches varies depending on whether an individual’s phone is password-protected. I would not give this factor very much weight in assessing either an individual’s subjective expectation of privacy or whether that expectation is reasonable. An individual’s decision not to password protect his or her cell phone does not indicate any sort of abandonment of the significant privacy interests one generally will have in the contents of the phone. Cell phones – locked or unlocked – engage significant privacy interests.

The dissent – written by Karakatsanis and joined by LeBel and Abella – unsurprisingly agrees on the issue of password protection but also offers a much stronger defence of privacy. It explicitly recognizes the connection between digital devices and privacy:

the cell phone acts like a key or portal which can allow the user to access the full treasure trove of records and files that the owner has generated or used on any number of devices. It is not just the device itself and the information it has generated, but the gamut of (often intensely) personal data accessible via the device that gives rise to the significant and unique privacy interests in digital devices. The fact that a suspect may be carrying their house key at the time they are arrested does not justify the police using that key to enter the suspect’s home. In the same way, seizing the key to the user’s digital life should not justify a wholesale intrusion into that realm. Indeed, personal digital devices are becoming as ubiquitous as the house key. Increasingly large numbers of people carry such devices with them everywhere they go (be they cell phones, mobile computers, smart watches, smart glasses, or tablets).

The dissent proceeds to adopt the position that complicated conditions are no substitute for effective privacy. It therefore concludes that warrants provide the right balance:

The intensely personal and uniquely pervasive sphere of privacy in our personal computers requires protection that is clear, practical and effective. An overly complicated template, such as the one proposed by the majority, does not ensure sufficient protection. Only judicial pre-authorization can provide the effective and impartial balancing of the state’s law enforcement objectives with the privacy interests in our personal computers. Thus, I conclude that the police must obtain a warrant before they can search an arrested person’s phone or other personal digital communications device. Our common law already provides flexibility where there are exigent circumstances – when the safety of the officer or the public is at stake, or when a search is necessary to prevent the destruction of evidence.

While the case does provide some helpful language on the importance of privacy, the recognition that cellphones and computers are now functionally equivalent, and that password protection should not be a pre-requisite for privacy protection, the decision is a setback for privacy in Canada. With the court having just concluded in Spencer that a warrant is needed to access subscriber information, it should have maintained that approach by similarly requiring one for cellphone searches during an arrest. In trying to establish the legality of some warrantless cellphone searches, it has replaced the important safeguard of a judicial authorization with conditions that do little to protect privacy while complicating the obligations of law enforcement.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2014/12/s...cident-arrest/





Treasury Dept: Tor a Big Source of Bank Fraud
Brian Krebs

A new report from the U.S. Treasury Department found that a majority of bank account takeovers by cyberthieves over the past decade might have been thwarted had affected institutions known to look for and block transactions coming through Tor, a global communications network that helps users maintain anonymity by obfuscating their true location online.

The findings come in a non-public report obtained by KrebsOnSecurity that was produced by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a Treasury Department bureau responsible for collecting and analyzing data about financial transactions to combat domestic and international money laundering, terrorist financing and other financial crimes.

In the report, released on Dec. 2, 2014, FinCEN said it examined some 6,048 suspicious activity reports (SARs) filed by banks between August 2001 and July 2014, searching the reports for those involving one of more than 6,000 known Tor network nodes. Investigators found 975 hits corresponding to reports totaling nearly $24 million in likely fraudulent activity.

“Analysis of these documents found that few filers were aware of the connection to Tor, that the bulk of these filings were related to cybercrime, and that Tor related filings were rapidly rising,” the report concluded. “Our BSA [Bank Secrecy Act] analysis of 6,048 IP addresses associated with the Tor darknet [link added] found that in the majority of the SAR filings, the underlying suspicious activity — most frequently account takeovers — might have been prevented if the filing institution had been aware that their network was being accessed via Tor IP addresses.”

FinCEN said it was clear from the SAR filings that most financial institutions were unaware that the IP address where the suspected fraudulent activity occurred was in fact a Tor node.

“Our analysis of the type of suspicious activity indicates that a majority of the SARs were filed for account takeover or identity theft,” the report noted. “In addition, analysis of the SARs filed with the designation ‘Other revealed that most were filed for ‘Account Takeover,’ and at least five additional SARs were filed incorrectly and should have been ‘Account Takeover.'”

The government also notes that there has been a fairly recent and rapid rise in the number of SAR filings over the last year involving bank fraud tied to Tor nodes.

“From October 2007 to March 2013, filings increased by 50 percent,” the report observed. “During the most recent period — March 1, 2013 to July 11, 2014 — filings rose 100 percent.”

While banks may be able to detect and block more fraudulent transactions by paying closer attention to or outright barring traffic from Tor nodes, such an approach is unlikely to have a lasting impact on fraud, said Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and at the University of California, Berkeley.

“I’m not surprised by this: Tor is easy for bad actors to use to isolate their identity,” Weaver said “Yet blocking all Tor will do little good, because there are many other easy ways for attackers to hide their source address.”

Earlier this summer, the folks who maintain the Tor Project identified this problem — that many sites and even ISPs are increasingly blocking Tor traffic because of its abuse by fraudsters — as an existential threat to the anonymity network. The organization used this trend as a rallying cry for Tor users to consider lending their brainpower to help the network thrive in spite of these threats.

“A growing number of websites treat users from anonymity services differently Slashdot doesn’t let you post comments over Tor, Wikipedia won’t let you edit over Tor, and Google sometimes gives you a captcha when you try to search (depending on what other activity they’ve seen from that exit relay lately),” wrote Tor Project Leader Roger Dingledine. “Some sites like Yelp go further and refuse to even serve pages to Tor users.”

Dingledine continued:

“The result is that the Internet as we know it is siloing. Each website operator works by itself to figure out how to handle anonymous users, and generally neither side is happy with the solution. The problem isn’t limited to just Tor users, since these websites face basically the same issue with users from open proxies, users from AOL, users from Africa, etc.

Weaver said the problem of high volumes of fraudulent activity coming through the Tor Network presents something of a no-win situation for any website dealing with Tor users.

“If you treat Tor as hostile, you cause collateral damage to real users, while the scum use many easy workarounds. If you treat Tor as benign, the scum come flowing through,” Weaver said. “For some sites, such as Wikipedia, there is perhaps a middle ground. But for banks? That’s another story.”
http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/12/t...of-bank-fraud/





Forgetting the Lesson of Cypherpunk History: Cryptography Is Underhanded
Bill Blunden

2014.12.7.Encryption.main"To put all of your eggs in the encryption basket is to chase after an illusion conjured artfully by propagandists," says Bill Blunden. (Image via Shutterstock)Those who extol the virtues of commercial technology as a means of remediation to government and other cyber-surveillance - suggesting that companies like Google and Apple, conspicuously deploying encryption to protect user data, will gradually foster near universal internet privacy - forget cypherpunk history.

There's a general theme that recurs as the Snowden affair unfolds. Specifically, several high profile figures have openly extolled the virtues of commercial technology as a means of remediation, with the basic narrative that companies like Google and Apple, having conspicuously deployed encryption to protect user data, will encourage other vendors to do the same and gradually foster near universal internet privacy.

Proponents of this narrative direct our attention to the recent outcry by officials like FBI director James Comey or GCHQ director Robert Hannigan. They presume that the uproar is evidence that encryption is a potent defense against government spying. But are high-level apparatchiks like Comey and Hannigan sincere in their protest or are they simply lending credibility to the high-tech industry's marketing campaign to reassure users that their data is safe? After all, if the FBI or the GCHQ, Britain's intelligence agency, makes a fuss then it must mean that Google's encryption is solid, right?

In an article that appeared recently in The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald extended his vote of confidence to both Google and Apple in this regard:

It is well-established that, prior to the Snowden reporting, Silicon Valley companies were secret, eager and vital participants in the growing Surveillance State. Once their role was revealed, and they perceived those disclosures threatening to their future profit-making, they instantly adopted a PR tactic of presenting themselves as Guardians of Privacy. Much of that is simply self-serving re-branding, but some of it, as I described last week, are genuine improvements in the technological means of protecting user privacy, such as the encryption products now being offered by Apple and Google, motivated by the belief that, post-Snowden, parading around as privacy protectors is necessary to stay competitive.

While he acknowledges the existence of propaganda at work in the above excerpt please note the caveat at the end. That a journalist like Greenwald would accept guarantees of genuine protection from Google or Apple is an ominous sign. Because when it comes to acquiring market share, vendors are well aware that they don't necessarily have to offer genuine security so much as merely the impression of genuine security.

High-Tech's Magic Act

Let's just say there are good reasons why foreign security services are returning to typewriters. As far as security is concerned, high-tech products rarely deliver what they promise. The history of Silicon Valley is littered with bold initiatives that assured cyber security and then resulted in an endless trail of critical flaws (accidental or otherwise) rendering users vulnerable to cyber spies and crooks. The NSA itself admits as much:

Current security efforts suffer from the flawed assumption that adequate security can be provided in applications with the existing security mechanisms of mainstream operating systems.

Industry players like Crypto AG, RSA and Microsoft stand out as prime examples. Likewise the Tor anonymity network was widely hailed as the guarantor of internet privacy only to witness alleged promises of confidence grotesquely pulled apart by a parade of federal investigators, academic researchers and state-sponsored spies. Don't even get me started about the serial failures of HTTPS. The Heartbleed bug was aptly named as it drove a stake through the notion that encryption is a cure-all and revealed it instead as a clever sleight of hand. It would be naïve to assume that a flaw like Heartbleed is an isolated incident.

Cypherpunk History

History demonstrates that Greenwald's encryption-laden narrative is the stuff of pleasant fiction and that the outward acts of bold defiance tend to indicate concealed acts of collaboration. Once more the most widely used products are also the most likely to be subverted. What better way to intercept sensitive information than to convince users to mistakenly put their faith in technology that they magically believe will keep their secrets safe?

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, a group of encryption mavens known as cypherpunks sought to protect individual privacy by making "strong" encryption available to everyone. To this end they successfully spread their tools far and wide such that there were those in the cypherpunk crowd who declared victory. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we know how this story actually turned out. The NSA embarked on a clandestine, industry-spanning, program of mass subversion that weakened protocols and inserted covert backdoors into a myriad of products. Technology promoted as "secure" quietly and intentionally failed on behalf of national security.

The depth of this betrayal is hard to overstate.

One lesson that can be derived from cypherpunk lore is that it's extremely hazardous to put blind faith in technology. The public record shows that prominent high-tech companies actively assisted the surveillance state in relationships that have existed for decades. Corporate spokespeople brazenly lied about doing so when confronted with accusations of complicity. Are we to assume that they've turned over a new leaf?

High-Tech as a Serial Adulterer

Greenwald believes that leaked documents will induce Silicon Valley to clean up its act. But given the systemic forces at work, Silicon Valley will likely continue to consort with spies. In light of wage cartels, slave labor and wanton tax avoidance, it should be clear that high-tech companies have absolutely no shame at all. Like a textbook psychopath, most corporate entities really care about one thing only: profit. Caught in bed with the intelligence services, they'll simply keep on selling more lies.

Why should they clean up their act when it's cheaper and more profitable to sell snake oil to rubes? In the C-suites of Silicon Valley managing bad publicity is largely a matter of cleverly devised public relations. Having beguiled their users with a newly minted "encryption everywhere" sales pitch they will return to their old ways. High-tech executives, you see, want to have their cake and eat it too. People raking in billions are used to getting what they want: patronize the unwashed masses with talk of improved security and simultaneously maintain their links to their brethren in the intelligence services.

Shared Class Interest

The reality is that companies tend to collaborate with spies as a matter of shared class interests. There are subtle affinities that link corporate officers and intelligence officers beneath the surface of the body politic, an interface that has been referred to as the Deep State. Leaked documents show how spymasters and CEOs communicate via e-mail on a casual first-name basis. Indeed, writers like Julian Assange and Yasha Levine have described in detail the far-reaching links between high-tech companies, the Pentagon and the US State Department - the sort of relationships that President Eisenhower warned against in his 1961 farewell speech.

As former CIA officer John Stockwell observed both large corporations and intelligence services are "vigorously committed to supporting the system." Another former CIA officer, Philip Agee, explained this dynamic more bluntly, stating that the intelligence services are the "logical, necessary manifestations of a ruling class's determination to retain power and privilege." These assertions have been rigorously documented by activists like William Blum and filmmakers like Scott Noble.

In a nutshell, US intelligence pursues the interests of private capital. Snowden indicated as much in an open letter to Brazil. He warned, in no uncertain terms, that the surveillance state has little to do with preventing terrorism and that instead it was focused on "economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation." There's no doubt whom this sort of activity actually benefits.

There Is No Refuge From Politics

Can the public rely on an app to safeguard its civil liberties? Universal encryption as a panacea is an appealing canard because it offers the chimera of a quick fix, an escape from more onerous and labor-intensive solutions - not to mention the opportunity for entrepreneurs to sell us things. "Genuine security? Wow, let me break out my check book!"

The surveillance state is motivated by the desire for power, the power to subvert technology and raise up an Eye of Providence behind a shroud of official secrecy. Power is rooted in politics. To put all of your eggs in the encryption basket is to chase after an illusion conjured artfully by propagandists. To save our civil liberties, we must recall our constitutional duty as citizens in a republic born out of revolution. Small as the windows of opportunity may seem we still have a system that admits the possibility of change. We must rise to seize this possibility, to recapture our government and remake the rules by which it operates. People in the past have mobilized to implement fundamental changes and we must do so again.
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/ite...erpunk-history





North Korea Denies Hacking Sony but Calls Attack a ‘Righteous Deed’
Choe Sang-Hun

North Korea on Sunday denied responsibility for hacking the computers of Sony Pictures but appeared to relish the cyberattack that crippled the computer systems of the Hollywood company, which is set to release a comedy involving an assassination attempt of its leader, Kim Jong-un.

Sony Pictures is producing “a film abetting a terrorist act while hurting the dignity of the supreme leadership,” a spokesman of the National Defense Commission, Mr. Kim’s top governing agency in Pyongyang, was quoted as saying by the North’s Korean Central News Agency.

The spokesman said North Korea did not know why Sony was targeted, but he speculated that the attack “might be a righteous deed of the supporters and sympathizers with” North Korea in its struggle to “put an end to U.S. imperialism.”

A hacking attack last month shut down the computer systems of Sony Pictures and exposed a trove of internal data, including salary figures. North Korea has since emerged as a possible suspect because it has been criticizing Sony Pictures for producing “The Interview,” a comedy starring Seth Rogen and James Franco that involves a plot to assassinate Mr. Kim.

North Korea saw no humor there. It has called the movie “an act of war” sponsored by Washington’s “hostile policy.”

Mr. Kim’s family has been ruling North Korea since the late 1940s with a totalitarian grip that has rested upon a personality cult. The regime in Pyongyang lashes out at any attempt from the outside to criticize Mr. Kim, calling it a challenge to the “supreme dignity” of the entire country. It has been especially sensitive about such criticism in recent weeks because there was an American-supported attempt at the United Nations to ask the Security Council to refer Mr. Kim to an international criminal court for human rights abuses.

No direct evidence has emerged yet that links North Korea to the hacking attack at Sony Pictures, and cybersecurity analysts have been divided over the likelihood of its involvement.

On Sunday, North Korea said there were “a great number of supporters and sympathizers” with North Korea “all over the world,” including “champions of peace” who might launch more “righteous reaction” against the United States’ “evildoings.”

South Korean and American officials have been increasingly concerned about North Korea’s capability to carry out offensive attacks on computers, especially following huge disruptions of bank, government, media and military websites in South Korea in recent years that South Korea blamed on hacking attacks sponsored by the North. North Korea has denied involvement and instead blamed South Korea for disrupting its websites in recent years.

North Korea itself is cut off from the Internet, except for a handful of state-sanctioned websites linked to the World Wide Web. But South Korean officials and defectors from North Korea said that North Korea has been training specialists in computer attacks for decades to collect technological data through the Internet, spread the country’s propaganda online and initiate hacking attacks.

In a report to Congress last year, the United States Department of Defense said that given its bleak economic outlook, North Korea may see hacking attacks as “a cost-effective way to develop asymmetric, deniable military options.”

In October, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service told lawmakers that North Korean-sponsored hackers had spread game apps containing malicious viruses between May and September, affecting an estimated 20,000 South Korean smartphone users. It did not reveal how it determined that such attacks were sponsored by North Korea.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/08/bu...eous-deed.html





Don't Believe the Hype: Sony Hack Not 'Unprecedented,' Experts Say
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai

The cyberattack on Sony Pictures was "unprecedented," "undetectable" and "unparalleled," according to the security firm hired to investigate it — but other experts aren't so sure.

That description of the attack was included in an internal memo from Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton to all employees, which was leaked to some news organizations on Sunday.

The memo featured a letter by Kevin Mandia, who is the head of cybersecurity firm Mandiant, the company hired by Sony to probe the massive and embarrassing film studio hacking. So far, the cyberattack has resulted in gigabytes of internal data leaked and the destruction of some of its computer systems, and North Korea remains a prime suspect contrary to analysis from various security experts.

"This attack is unprecedented in nature. The malware was undetectable by industry-standard antivirus software and was damaging and unique enough to cause the FBI to release a flash alert to warn other organizations of this critical threat," Mandia wrote in the letter, which was posted in full by Re/code.

"The bottom line is that this was an unparalleled and well planned crime, carried out by an organized group, for which neither [Sony Pictures Entertainment] nor other companies could have been fully prepared," he added.

Two weeks after the attack, few details have emerged from the investigation. Sony and Mandiant, which is part of cybersecurity firm FireEye, have have released almost no public comments.

In the memo, Lynton says he wanted to share Mandiant's letter after some employees asked "about the strength of our information security systems and how this attack could have happened," and to understand "the nature of what we are dealing with."

In other words, Sony wanted its employees and the world to know they were hacked by a mighty adversary — never mind Sony's own glaring security shortcomings, such as its password policies (employees kept plaintext passwords in Microsoft Word documents) or the fact that its executive director of information security once said it was a "valid business decision to accept the risk" of a security breach.

@thegrugq @lorenzoFB The only thing I've seen that's maybe unprecedented is the volume of data released. Otherwise, meh.

— Adam Caudill (@adamcaudill) December 8, 2014

Adam Caudill, an independent security researcher, has doubts about the description of the attack as "unprecedented" and "unparallaed" that came from Mandia and Sony.

"At this point their goal is to save face, to their investors, to their employees, to their partners," Caudill told Mashable. "To protect their image, they need this to be an unpreventable, incredibly sophisticated attack."

Caudill explained that making undetectable malware is not particularly hard. Hackers likely had access to Sony Pictures network for weeks, when they were siphoning huge amounts of data, which should have been noticed.

"Even if they couldn't detect the malware, they should have detected the unusual activity. You don't steal such a large amount of data without raising some red flags — the question is, was anyone watching," Caudill added. "This wasn't a smash-and-grab-type attack that was pulled off quickly, to have penetrated the network so completely, the attackers had clearly been at it for some time."

His view was shared by Adrian Sanabria, a cybersecurity analyst at 451 Research, who criticized Sony's security practices.

"You should definitely be able to detect somebody copying 40GB of data systematically," he told Mashable.

A well-known security expert who goes by the nickname "The Grugq" was snarky about Mandiant's description of the attack on Twitter, calling it "bullshit."

TIL Mandiant sells indulgences. http://t.co/e5WYFi3ccv

— the grugq (@thegrugq) December 8, 2014

"I saw it and just thought 'they've been absolved of sin, this is an indulgence!'" he later tweeted.

While it's true that the attack was destructive, it is hardly unprecedented.

In 2012, hackers wiped 30,000 computers belonging to the oil giant Saudi Aramco using similar malware. Last year, some South Korean banks and TV companies were hit by a very similar attack involving a "wiper" malware that erased data on multiple victim's computers.

According to some cybersecurity experts, the hackers responsible for these two attacks may be the same ones behind the Sony hack.

Meanwhile, North Korean authorities have repeatedly denied involvement in the attack, and no definitive evidence shows that the country is at fault. Yet rumors and speculation still abound, mainly based on the fact that North Korean authorities have been extremely vocal about their anger toward Sony's upcoming comedy The Interview, which focuses on a plot to assassinate Kim Jong-un.

A spokesman for North Korea's National Defense Commission said he didn't know the reason for the attack on Sony, but called it "a righteous deed" carried out by North Korean "supporters and sympathizers."
http://mashable.com/2014/12/08/sony-...-undetectable/





Sony Pictures Hack Traced to Bangkok Hotel
Natasha Kracynski

Hackers who broke into Sony Pictures Entertainment’s servers last week were working from a posh hotel in Bangkok. The revelation come shortly after North Korea denied responsibility for the attack, which many believe was a retaliation for Seth Rogan and James Franco’s The Interview, which lampoons the dictator.

The hacks were traced to the St. Regis Bangkok, a 4.5 star resort where basic rooms cost over $400 per night. It remains unclear whether the hacks were done from a room or a public area, but investigations into the breach have traced the attack to the hotel on December 2nd at 12:25 am, local time.

Recent speculation has arisen that the hack was co-ordinated by North Korean operatives or the government itself. Cybersecurity experts said the group DarkSeoul, a hacking group that also attacked South Korean banks in 2013, was probably responsible for the attack. In a recent statement, North Korea said the hack was a “righteous deed” but denied responsibility.

North Korea has relatively positive diplomatic relations with Thailand, and a North Korean embassy operates in the Thai capitol. However, Bangkok is also a favored destination for North Korean defectors and refugees, who enter the southeast Asian country via China and Laos.

St. Regis Bangkok owners Starwood Hotels & Resorts has not commented on the revelation, although it is common practice to encrypt all Wifi networks in Thailand and to document the identity of all guests who use them.

The hacked information included private details of 47,000 Sony employees and Hollywood celebrities, and occurred shortly after North Korea called
http://expatnewswire.com/news/2014/1...bangkok-hotel/





Cyber Attack Could Cost Sony Studio as Much as $100 Million
Lisa Richwine

Sony Corp's (6758.T) movie studio could face tens of millions of dollars in costs from the massive computer hack that hobbled its operations and exposed sensitive data, according to cybersecurity experts who have studied past breaches.

The tab will be less than the $171 million Sony estimated for the breach of its Playstation Network in 2011 because it does not appear to involve customer data, the experts said.

Major costs for the attack by unidentified hackers include the investigation into what happened, computer repair or replacement, and steps to prevent a future attack. Lost productivity while operations were disrupted will add to the price tag.

The attack, believed to be the worst of its type on a company on U.S. soil, also hits Sony's reputation for a perceived failure to safeguard information, said Jim Lewis, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"Usually, people get over it, but it does have a short-term effect," said Lewis, who estimated costs for Sony could stretch to $100 million.

It typically takes at least six months after a breach to determine the full financial impact, Lewis said.

Sony has declined to estimate costs, saying it was still assessing the impact.

The company has insurance to cover data breaches, a person familiar with the matter said. Cybersecurity insurance typically reimburses only a portion of costs from hacking incidents, experts said.

People claiming responsibility for the attack posted yet-to-be-released Sony films online, including holiday musical "Annie." Macquarie Research analysts projected Sony would likely take an impairment charge of 10 billion yen ($83 million) related to the incident.

Mark Rasch, a former federal cyber crimes prosecutor, estimated costs could run up to $70 million.

Losses in that range would not mean a big financial setback to Sony Pictures Entertainment, which reported operating profit of $501 million for the fiscal year through March.

But other effects, such as the loss of trade secrets, will be difficult to measure, Rasch said. Hackers have released a trove of documents that include contracts and marketing plans that could influence competitors' strategies.

Costs could mount if Hollywood stars, producers or financiers decide to take projects to Sony's competitors.

"Will they be able to attract high-name stars if those stars believe their personal information will not be protected?" he said. "How do you know what business opportunities are lost? It's hard to put a dollar figure on it."

(Editing by Mary Milliken and Jonathan Oatis)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/1...0JN2L220141209





Sony Pictures Tries to Disrupt Downloads of Its Stolen Files
Dawn Chmielewski

Sony Pictures Entertainment is fighting back.

The studio behind the “Spider-Man” franchise and “The Social Network” has taken technological countermeasures to disrupt downloads of its most sensitive information, which was exposed when a hacking attack crippled its systems in late November.

The company is using hundreds of computers in Asia to execute what’s known as a denial of service attack on sites where its pilfered data is available, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.

Sony is using Amazon Web Services, the Internet retailer’s cloud computing unit, which operates data centers in Tokyo and Singapore, to carry out the counterattack, one of the sources said. The tactic was once commonly employed by media companies to combat Internet movie and music piracy.

In one of the most devastating cyber security breaches in recent memory, a hacking group calling itself Guardians of Peace claimed to have stolen just under 100 terabytes of Sony Pictures’ financial information, budgets, payroll data, internal emails and feature films and has slowly leaked portions of it to public file-sharing sites such as PasteBin.

The breach has caused havoc within Hollywood’s inner circles as private correspondence between powerful producers and executives have exposed internal politics and petty gripes. More importantly, the data also appeared to include spreadsheets outlining financial deals Sony had with third parties, which could hurt its standing with its partners. These details also expose how much these third parties have paid Sony for rights to certain TV shows and films.

These files have not been verified by Sony Pictures, which also declined to comment for this story.

“The activity being reported is not currently happening on AWS (Amazon Web Service),” Amazon said in an emailed statement to Re/code on Thursday. Amazon declined to comment further on whether the activity happened prior to Thursday.

“AWS employs a number of automated detection and mitigation techniques to prevent the misuse of our services,” according to Amazon’s statement. “In cases where the misuse is not detected and stopped by the automated measures, we take manual action as soon as we become aware of any misuse.”

With the fifth such illicit data dump, made available earlier this week, individuals who attempted to access the torrent file encountered bogus “seeds” — or computers — that sapped the resources of their software, the sources said.

This variant on the hacker’s favorite tool, the denial of service attack, slowed download speeds to a crawl. The latest document leak, offered Wednesday, had a different type of file name which apparently fooled Sony’s interdiction efforts.

North Korea, or its sympathizers, are being investigated as suspects in the attack, and while the reclusive state denied any involvement, it praised the perpetrators for their “righteous deed.”

Sony’s technique is similar to one it employed in the early days of file sharing, when it worked with an anti-piracy firm called MediaDefender. The firm populated file-sharing networks with decoy files labeled with the names of such popular movies as “Spider-Man,” to entice users to spend hours downloading an empty file.

The goal was to frustrate users and prod them to turn to legitimate movie sites. It was a temporary fix that worked until file-sharing sites grew more sophisticated and provided information that allowed users to easily identify these so-called spoof files.
http://recode.net/2014/12/10/sony-pi...-stolen-files/





Sony Hack Reveals Email Crossfire Over Angelina Jolie and Steve Jobs Movie
Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes

Salaries of its top executives. Unpublished scripts. Sensitive contracts. Aliases that stars use to check into hotels.

Those are just some of the disclosures from a devastating hacking attack on Sony’s movie studio last month. But among all of the information that has spilled forth, perhaps nothing has riveted Hollywood more — and laid bare the machinations at the highest levels of the film industry — than a humiliating email exchange between Amy Pascal, Sony’s co-chairwoman, and the producer Scott Rudin over Angelina Jolie and a planned Steve Jobs biopic.

On Wednesday, Sony was scrambling to cope with the fallout from the incendiary emails posted by Gawker, the tabloid news site, that revealed an ugly internal battle over “Jobs,” an Aaron Sorkin-scripted biopic of the Apple co-founder. Mr. Rudin, who is widely known for his razor-toothed missives and temper, was upset that his favored director for the picture, David Fincher, was being pulled by Ms. Jolie toward a competing Sony movie, a remake of “Cleopatra” with Ms. Jolie in the title role.

Mr. Rudin referred to Ms. Jolie as “a minimally talented spoiled brat” and pressured Ms. Pascal to shelve “Cleopatra.”

Ms. Pascal at times tried to calm Mr. Rudin, whose company is supported financially under a deal with Sony, writing, “This doesn’t need to get crazy.”

By the end, however, “Jobs” had moved to Universal, and Mr. Rudin, according to the emails, told Ms. Pascal that she had “behaved abominably, and it will be a very, very long time before I forget what you did.”

Ms. Pascal then wrote a lieutenant to “get rid of him,” an apparent reference to Mr. Rudin’s deal.

Ms. Pascal declined a request to discuss the exchange. A spokesman for Ms. Jolie said she had no comment.

“This is not about salacious emails being batted around by Gawker and Defamer,” Mr. Rudin said on Wednesday. “It’s about a criminal act, and the people behind it should be treated as nothing more nor less than criminals.”

For Michael Lynton, the chief executive of a music, television and movies unit called Sony Entertainment, the hacking scandal has ensnared him and his company at a time when he was supposed to be on a victory lap. Some in the film industry have speculated that he soon planned to climb the corporate ladder into a job that would add to his responsibilities, perhaps to coincide with a planned move of his home base from Los Angeles to New York.

Mr. Lynton declined through a spokesman to address that talk on Wednesday, but one person briefed on his plans said no change in his corporate responsibilities was in the works.

Recently, Mr. Lynton had won a battle with the activist investor Daniel S. Loeb, who sought improved profitability. The studio announced layoffs, cut its budget, recruited fresh executive talent, and secured much-needed outside movie financing. In early November, Sony confidently projected that revenue would rise by a third over the next three years.

But now Mr. Lynton is instead scrambling to advise both his superiors at the Sony Corporation in Japan and his employees on the studio’s Culver City, Calif., lot as to the extent of the damage and of steps he and they must take to contain it over the coming weeks and perhaps years.

Some computer systems remain down for fear of reinfecting them, and the studio could be two to three months away from restoring all of them.

The studio is insured against at least some of its losses. The final tab is likely to be much less than the $100 million-plus estimates that have been floated by outsiders, one person briefed on the studio’s situation said.

People briefed on Mr. Lynton’s movements said he returned at midweek from a long-planned trip to Japan, where he discussed business strategy and the breach. On Friday, he is expected to address a rare mass gathering of employees.

A veteran of the publishing industry, Mr. Lynton was named chairman of Sony Pictures, a post he still holds, in 2003. In April 2013, the studio said it had renewed his employment contract, but did not disclose its terms.

Executives at Sony say Mr. Lynton has been methodically but quietly engaged since the beginning of the attack — a posture that matches his notably cerebral approach to studio management. At his studio, marching orders are for a rapid return to business as usual.

In that spirit, the studio has rejected any notion that it should scrap “The Interview,” a planned comedy, starring Seth Rogen and James Franco, about the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, though hackers who identified themselves as the Guardians of Peace appear to cite the film as a reason for the attack.

On Wednesday, senior movie executives at Sony insisted that “The Interview” would be released as planned on Christmas, but acknowledged that additional security had been ordered for a premiere on Thursday in downtown Los Angeles.

Security experts and law enforcement continue to search for the attackers, who may never be found.

“Attribution is very difficult until there has been a full analysis and even then, it can be impossible,” said Liam O’Murchu, a senior security research manager at Symantec, the security company.

Speaking at a cybersecurity conference on Tuesday, Joseph Demarest, the assistant director with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s cyber division, said only, “There is no attribution to North Korea at this point.”

The attacks on Sony were orchestrated by command and control centers across the world, including computers at a convention center in Singapore and one at Thammasat University in Thailand, as well as others in Cyprus, Poland, Italy, the United States and Bolivia.

Mr. Lynton and other senior Sony executives have so far not spoken publicly, but memos to employees have been leaked to the media. On Sunday — perhaps in an effort to counter reports that Sony had been lax with its computer security — Mr. Lynton sent a companywide bulletin quoting Kevin Mandia, the chief executive of Mandiant, an online security firm hired to help Sony recover.

“The scope of this attack differs from any we have responded to in the past,” Mr. Mandia wrote. “The bottom line is that this was an unparalleled and well-planned crime, carried out by an organized group, for which neither SPE” — Sony Pictures Entertainment — “nor other companies could have been fully prepared.”

Representatives from the F.B.I., which has been leading the investigation into the culprits, were on Sony’s Culver City lot on Wednesday to brief employees about online security. Some Sony employees have watched in recent days as their identities have been stolen; the leaked information has been used to open false mortgage accounts and even buy women’s handbags at Beverly Hills boutiques.

The crisis recalled an episode 20 years ago when about 200 pages of the studio’s financial documents were leaked to the trade publication Variety. Alan J. Levine, then Sony’s chief operating officer, threatened legal action if the numbers were printed; with that, and some backdoor bargaining, the problem was nipped.

“I couldn’t even dream of how big a nightmare this might be,” Mr. Levine said on Wednesday. “This could actually just be the tip of the iceberg.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/11/bu...y-laundry.html





Leaked Emails Reveal Maureen Dowd Promised To Show Sony Exec’s Husband Column Before Publication

The end result: kudos at the studio and an email to Dowd after it published saying, “you’re amazing.”
Matthew Zeitlin

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd promised to show Sony Pictures co-chair Amy Pascal’s husband, Bernard Weinraub, — a former Times reporter — a version of a column featuring Pascal before publication.

The end result was a column that painted Pascal in such a good light that she engaged in a round of mutual adulation with Dowd over email after its publication. It also scored Pascal points back at the studio, with Sony’s then-communications-chief calling the column “impressive.”

The exchanges were uncovered in a trove of Pascal’s emails released as part of a massive hack on Sony carried out by the group known as “Guardians of Peace.”

The column, published after the Academy Awards earlier this year, lamented how “Oscar voters and industry top brass are still overwhelmingly white, male and middle-aged.”

Dowd quoted Pascal as saying women received “paltry” salaries compared to men in Hollywood. Pascal, according to leaked salary data from the hack, is tied for the highest earning executive at Sony Pictures with Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton. Pascal also told Dowd that women directors face an “unconscious mountain” of rejection.

It highlighted Pascal’s role in greenlighting movies by female directors Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers, but also other Sony movies like The Social Network and American Hustle that had “impressed the guys in the boardroom,” Dowd wrote.

Pascal told Dowd there had been “a gigantic change” in 2013 thanks to female-fronted films such as Gravity, Hunger Games, Frozen, and The Heat earning a combined $4 billion. Pascal also said that the problems between men and women in Hollywood are “completly unconscious” and that “Women have to help each other more. It’s our duty.”

Dowd, Pascal, and Weinraub are friendly, the emails show — Dowd would send Pascal links to New York Times stories and bought birthday presents for Pascal and Weinraub’s teenage son.

It turns out that the way Pascal’s viewpoint was presented was exactly how she and her husband, Weinraub, wanted it.

Dowd did not respond to requests for comment from BuzzFeed News. In an email Thursday, Weinraub said: “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

But the leaked documents show that when Dowd emailed Pascal on March 3 for the column — which would run online the next night and in print on March 5 — Dowd told Pascal “i would make sure you look great and we’d check it all and do it properly.”

Before Pascal actually interviewed with Dowd for the column, she talked to Weinraub.

“I said the rap that you jus like to make womens films is unfair amnd sexist,” Weinraub said in an email to Pascal on March 4. “You made all these “women’s movies ===league of their own, 28 days,,,the nora Ephron films…zero dark…. but you also do spifderman… denzel….Jonah hill…..bad teacher etc etc.”

Pascal responded, “IM NOT TALKING TO HER IF SHE IS GONNA SLAM ME. PLEASE FIND OUT.”

Weinraub assured her, “you cant tell single person that I’m seeing the column before its printed…its not done…no p.r. people or Lynton or anyone should know.”

After the column was published later that night, Pascal emailed Dowd, saying “I THOUGHT THE STORY WAS GREAT I HOPE YOUR HAPPY ”

Dowd responded: “I hope you’re happy! Thanks for helping. Let’s do another.” Pascal replied, “Your my favorite person so yes” and Dowd finished the conversation with “you’re mine! you’re amazing”

About 10 minutes later, Sony’s then-communications-head Charles Sipkins forwarded the column to Pascal and Lynton, saying “this is impressive.”

This isn’t the first time one of Dowd’s columns has been leaked — in 2012, Times intelligence reporter Mark Mazetti fowarded an advance copy of a column Dowd wrote about Zero Dark Thirty to then-Central Intelligence Agency spokeswoman Marie Harf. Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy described it as “a mistake that is not consistent with New York Times standards.”
http://www.buzzfeed.com/matthewzeitl...sony-execs-hus





The Rise of AdBlock Reveals A Serious Problem in the Advertising Ecosystem
Frédéric Filloux

Seeing a threat to their ecosystem, French publishers follow their German colleagues and prepare to sue startup Eyeo GmbH, the creator of anti-advertising software AdBlock Plus. But they cannot ignore that, by using ABP, millions of users actively protest against the worst forms of advertising.

On grounds that it represents a major economic threat to their business, two groups of French publishers are considering a lawsuit against AdBlockPlus creator Eyeo GmbH. (Les Echos, broke the news in this story, in French).
Plaintiffs are said to be the GESTE and the French Internet Advertising Bureau. The first is known for its aggressive stance against Google via its contribution to the Open Internet Project. (To be clear, GESTE said they were at a “legal consulting stage”, no formal complaint has been filed yet.) By his actions, the second plaintiff, the French branch of the Internet Advertising Bureau is in fact acknowledging its failure to tame the excesses of the digital advertising market.

Regardless of its validity, the legal action misses a critical point. By downloading the plug-in AdBlock Plus (ABP) on a massive scale, users do vote with their mice against the growing invasiveness of digital advertising. Therefore, suing Eyeo, the company that maintains ABP, is like using Aspirin to fight cancer. A different approach is required but very few seem ready to face that fact.

I use AdBlock Plus on a daily basis. I’m not especially proud of this, nor do I support anti-advertising activism, I use the ad-blocker for practical, not ideological, reasons. On too many sites, the invasion of pop-up windows and heavily animated ad “creations” has became an annoyance. A visual and a technical one. When a page loads, the HTML code “calls” all sorts of modules, sometimes 10 or 15. Each sends a request to an ad server and sometimes, for the richest content, the ad elements trigger the activation of a third-party plug-in like Adobe’s Shockwave which will work hard to render the animated ads. Most of the time, these ads are poorly optimized because creative agencies don’t waste their precious time on such trivial task as providing clean, efficient code to their clients. As a consequence, the computer’s CPU is heavily taxed, it overheats, making fans buzz loudly. Suddenly, you feel like your MacBook Pro is about to take off. That’s why, with a couple of clicks, I installed AdBlock Plus. My ABP has spared me several thousands of ad exposures. My surfing is now faster, crash-free, and web pages looks better.

I asked around and I couldn’t find a friend or a colleague not using the magic plug-in. Everyone seems to enjoy ad-free surfing. If this spreads, it could threaten the very existence of a vast majority of websites that rely on advertising.

First, a reality check. How big and dangerous is the phenomenon? PageFair, a startup-based in Dublin, Ireland, comes up with some facts. Here are key elements drawn from a 17-pages PDF document available here.

Put another way, if your site, or your apps, are saturated with pop-up windows, screaming videos impossible to mute or skip, you are encouraging the adoption of AdBlock Plus — and once it’s installed on a browser, do not expect any turning back. As an example of an unwitting APB advocate:

Eyeo’s AdBlock Plus takes the advertising rejection in its own hands — but these are greedy and dirty ones. Far from being the work of a selfless white knight, Eyeo’s business model borders on racketeering. In its Acceptable Ads Manifesto, Eyeo states the virtues of what the company feels are tolerable formats:

1. Acceptable Ads are not annoying.
2. Acceptable Ads do not disrupt or distort the page content we’re trying to read.
3. Acceptable Ads are transparent with us about being an ad.
4. Acceptable Ads are effective without shouting at us.
5. Acceptable Ads are appropriate to the site that we are on.

Who could disagree? But such blandishments go with a ruthless business model that attests to the merits of straight talk:

We are being paid by some larger properties that serve non-intrusive advertisements that want to participate in the Acceptable Ads initiative.
Whitelisting is free for all small and medium-sized websites and blogs. However, managing this list requires significant effort on our side and this task cannot be completely taken over by volunteers as it happens with common filter lists.
Note that we will never whitelist any ads that don’t meet these criteria. There is no way to buy a spot in the whitelist. Also note that whitelisting is free for small- and medium-sized websites.
In addition, we received startup capital from our investors, like Tim Schumacher, who believe in Acceptable Ads and want to see the concept succeed.


Of course, there is no public rate card. Eyeo doesn’t provide any measure of what defines “small and medium size websites” either. A 5 million monthly uniques site can be small in the English speaking market but huge in Finland. And the number of “larger properties” and the amount they had to pay to be whitelisted remains a closely guarded secret. According to some German websites, Eyeo is said to have snatched $30m from big internet players; not bad for a less than 30 people operation (depending of the recurrence of this “compliance fee” — for lack of a better term.)

There are several issues here.

One, a single private entity cannot decide what is acceptable or not for an entire sector. Especially in such an opaque fashion.

Two, we must admit that Eyeo GmbH is filling a vacuum created by the incompetence and sloppiness of the advertising community’s, namely creative agencies, media buyers and organizations that are supposed to coordinate the whole ecosystem (such as the Internet Advertising Bureau.)

Three, the rise of ad blockers is the offspring of two major trends: a continual deflation of digital ads economics, and the growing reliance on ad exchanges and Real Time Bidding, both pushing prices further down.

Even Google begins to realize that the explosion of questionable advertising formats has become a problem. Proof is its recent Contributor program that proposes ad-free navigation in exchange for a fee ranging from $1 to $3 per month (read this story on NiemanLab, and more in a future Monday Note).

The growing rejection of advertising AdBlock Plus is built upon is indeed a threat to the ecosystem and it needs to be addressed decisively. For example, by bringing at the same table publishers and advertisers to meet and design ways to clean up the ad mess. But the entity and leaders who can do the job have yet to be found.
http://www.mondaynote.com/2014/12/08...ing-ecosystem/





French Publishers Willing to Prosecute Ad Blockers
Nicolas Rauline (Google Translate)

A complaint should be filed soon against France Adblock Plus or "ad blockers" in general. The editors believe that this is a matter of survival.

The joust verbally to the court battle. The relationship increasingly strained between publishers and "ad blockers" may well settle in court. A complaint should be filed in the coming days by French publishers and advertisers against such software that can hide the Internet advertising, or against Adblock Plus , the market leader. The gesture, an organization that brings together the French publishers, and IAB France, which enacts the standards of online advertising, currently studying the terms of this lawsuit and have already moved closer to their German counterparts, who started the same action in Germany against Adblock Plus.

These software are increasingly popular: in the world, they would be 144 million to use one, a figure that increased by 69% in one year, according to a report PageFair and Adobe. In France, five million people have already equipped their Adblock Plus software computer. The phenomenon inevitably worries the world of advertising and all sites that live (Gesture estimated that the audience exposed to advertising down 20% to 40%), especially as the methods of the companies that publish this software strongly challenged.

Some ad blockers, such as German EYEO, which publishes Adblock Plus, have indeed developed a particular business model. To monetize their service, they have turned to publishers by offering them ... not to block their advertisements for remuneration. The only condition to respect a program of "acceptable advertising" that is to say, non-intrusive judged by Adblock Plus. Several criteria must be met as well: advertisements must be identified as such, be static and therefore not contain animation, no sound, and should not interfere with the content. A position that some media have likened to extortion. This is also the reason that has been selected to the complaint filed in Germany. "We are one of the few blockers to offer a practical solution for publishers, argues Ben Williams, spokesman Adblock Plus. C 'is a compromise that deserves to exist and we are always open to dialogue. Do you even lift

Technological race

Pending eventual court decisions, publishers are trying to organize. Some broadcast a message to users who install an ad blocker, exposing their economic dangers in the event of loss of advertising. Companies also are working on technologies to block ad blockers.

A true technological chase that complicates the situation. AdBlock Plus is for example to announce that it is now bent on "native advertising", these ad formats integrated with content, taking the modern form of "infomercials". Previously undetectable by such software, they would now be in their viewfinder and no longer escape the blockade.

Last week, it is Google that went into the battle, presenting Contributor . This system, tested with several partners publishers, as Mashable, The Onion or Science Daily, functions as an ad blocker charge: users agree to pay a rather low amount (1-3 dollars per month). These amounts are paid to partners publishers in exchange stop post advertisements to users who have paid. But this system can not be effective with a number of partners, while they are now only six ...
https://translate.google.com/transla...php&edit-text=





AdNaseum: Clicking Ads So You Don't Have To.

As online advertising is becoming more automatic, universal and unsanctioned, AdNauseam works to complete the cycle by automating all ad-clicks universally and blindly on behalf of the target audience. Working in coordination with Ad Block Plus, AdNauseam quietly clicks every blocked ad, registering a visit on the ad networks databases. As the data gathered shows an omnivorous click-stream, user profiling, targeting and surveillance becomes futile.

AdNauseam is a browser extension designed to obfuscate browsing data and protect users from surveillance and tracking by advertising networks. Simultaneously, AdNauseam serves as a means of amplifying users' discontent with advertising networks that disregard privacy and facilitate bulk surveillance agendas.

AdNauseam joins a broader class of software systems that serve ethical, political, and expressive ends. In light of the industry's failure to achieve consensus on a Do Not Track standard, or to otherwise address the excesses of network tracking, AdNauseam allows individual users to take matters into their own hands, fighting back against excessive unilateral surveillance. Taken in this light, the software follows an approach similar to that of TrackMeNot, employing the obfuscation tactic in an attempt to shift the balance of power between the trackers and the tracked. For further information on this approach, please see this paper.
https://dhowe.github.io/AdNauseam/





How DuckDuckGo Are Redefining Search Security
Natalie Halimi

We live in an age where increasingly advanced technology means that we never know just how secure our online activities are. In order to give people a bit more security, and stop them anxiously looking over their digital shoulder every five minutes, DuckDuckGo have designed a search engine which protects its users’ privacy. DuckDuckGo is beginning to make headway in the search engine market, and since the site was redesigned in May 2014, it’s been added to Safari and Firefox browsers as an alternative search option.

I used SimilarWeb to see how DuckDuckGo has performed since it’s redesign and the effect this has had on its rivals.

DuckDuckGo Takes Flight

It’s natural for people to fear change as it challenges our comfort zone, so it was always a risk for DuckDuckGo to redesign their platform. Especially when (as you can see with SimilarWeb PRO) in April 2014, DuckDuckGo received a respectable 24.5 million desktop visits.

What would happen when DuckDuckGo’s redesign was launched a month later?

According to our stats DuckDuckGo almost doubled their traffic with 42.8 million visits! July 2014 saw a peak of 60.8 million visits before activity levelled out to around 54.3 million visits in October 2014.

The internet embraced DuckDuckGo’s new look and gave it two thumbs up!

Taking on Its Data Obsessed Rivals

Of course, DuckDuckGo isn’t necessarily the first choice of search engine in the world. Google and Bing receive a heck of a lot more traffic as SimilarWeb PRO shows.

But if you take a closer look at the figures you’ll notice that DuckDuckGo has bucked the trend for the past 6 months. Where Google’s monthly visits have dropped by 2% and Bing’s by 21% , DuckDuckGo’s monthly visits have risen by nearly 27%.

This indicates that the public are really buying into DuckDuckGo’s privacy policy rather than the data hungry approach of Google and Bing.

How on Earth Are DuckDuckGo Going to Make Money?!

Seeing as DuckDuckGo doesn’t track its users you might be wondering how they monetize their site. After all, Google and Bing bring in huge revenues from advertising, but this involves tracking.

DuckDuckGo are first and foremost a business and not just a bunch of helpful folks willing to solve all your search needs with a friendly point in the right direction. They believe in advertising.

But there’s no demographic scanning or cookie mining going on here.

Instead, contextual ads are served up according to your current search. If you search for ‘designer jeans’ you’ll get ads for designer jeans. You won’t, however, get an ad related to something you searched for last week. Nothing is stored.

This isn’t as lucrative as data-tracked advertising, but if DuckDuckGo continue to see their visits skyrocket, then profits will increase regardless.

A New, Secure Future of Search?

With the paranoia of government intrusion into our online privacy it’s no surprise that the public is seeking an alternative to data-crunching browsers. DuckDuckGo has seen its privacy philosophy solidified by substantial growth while Bing and Google have struggled to grow in recent months.

It’s a shot across the bows for Google and Bing, and it’s time they took a leaf out of DuckDuckGo’s book and respected their user’s privacy. In terms of traffic, the reward could be very significant.
http://blog.similarweb.com/how-duckd...arch-security/





The New Republic Will Not Publish Next Issue Thanks to Staff Exodus

About a dozen editorial staffers have quit since Thursday
Michael Sebastian

The New Republic magazine will not publish its next issue, which had been scheduled to appear Dec. 15, after about a dozen full-time editorial staffers and many more contributors resigned in the wake of a management shakeup this week.

The magazine has lost at least 55 people from its masthead -- a mix of fulltime employees and contributing editors -- since Thursday, according to tweets from Ryan Lizza, a contributing editor.

"Given the departure this week of several editors and writers, The New Republic decided to cancel the issue rather than risk producing a magazine not in keeping with the traditionally high standards of the institution," a spokesman said in an email.

Any advertisers affected by the cancellation will receive make goods, the spokesman said.

Advertising is not a significant part of the magazine, though it has sought to attract more ad dollars in the last year. Companies such as BP, Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse advertise in The New Republic.

The next issue will instead appear Feb. 2, according to the spokesman. It will be the first of 10 issues scheduled for 2015, including two double issues. Those issues will be edited by the magazine's new editor in chief Gabriel Snyder.

The editorial exodus this week was sparked by changes brought to the 100-year-old magazine by its owner and publisher, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.

In a memo to staff on Thursday, The New Republic CEO Guy Vidra, a former Yahoo exec, said the magazine was replacing its editor, moving its headquarters to New York from Washington D.C. and cutting the number of issues in half to 10 starting in 2015.

Mr. Snyder, former editor in chief of Gawker and The Atlantic Wire, was hired to help usher in a new era at The New Republic, according to Mr. Vidra's memo.

"As we move forward under Gabriel's leadership, we are re-imagining The New Republic as a vertically integrated digital media company," Mr. Vidra said in his memo Thursday.

Mr. Gabriel succeeds Franklin Foer as editor in chief, who said in a memo to staff this week that he was leaving over a disagreement about the future of the magazine.

In a statement issued Friday, Mr. Hughes, who through a spokesman declined Ad Age's interview request, said he was "saddened by the loss of such great talent."

"It has been a privilege to work with them, and I wish them only the best," he said. "This is a time of transition, but I am excited to work with our team -- both new and old alike -- as we pave a new way forward."

Mr. Hughes, who also helped develop the digital strategy for the 2008 Obama campaign, bought The New Republic in 2012.
http://adage.com/article/media/repub...-issue/296125/





How Rolling Stone Failed in its Story of Alleged Rape at the University of Virginia
Paul Farhi

Journalists are paid to be skeptical and to distinguish facts from assertions: Don’t get too close to your sources and check what they tell you.

Rolling Stone magazine, it appears, ignored both principles in its explosive story, “A Rape on Campus.”

The 9,000-word article about Jackie, a University of Virginia freshman who alleged a frat-house gang rape, was apparently fraught from the beginning with gaps in basic reporting. The story’s writer, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, as well as a phalanx of editors, fact-checkers and lawyers who massaged the piece before publication, accepted Jackie’s account without locking down key details that would have confirmed, or at least plausibly substantiated, her harrowing tale.

Instead, Erdely’s story, published Nov. 19 to a thunderous and mostly positive reaction, appears to have been fatally defective. Major details, including the name of the fraternity in question, are in dispute or have been exposed as false. Jackie’s allies have distanced themselves from her and from Rolling Stone’s story.

And so, too, has Rolling Stone. The magazine backed away from the story Friday and placed the onus for its defects on Jackie. “In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced,” wrote managing editor Will Dana in “A Note to Our Readers” posted on the magazine’s Web site. (The magazine did not return calls for further comment.)

He also wrote, ”Because of the sensitive nature of Jackie’s story, we decided to honor her request not to contact the man she claimed orchestrated the attack on her nor any of the men she claimed participated in the attack for fear of retaliation against her.”

Which, like the story itself, is not entirely accurate.

In interviews with The Washington Post and Slate, Erdely never asserted that she had agreed not to speak to the men in question — only that she wouldn’t name them in her story or talk about them afterward. Jackie “asked me not to name the individuals because she’s so fearful of them,” she told The Post. “That was something we agreed to. She was nervous to name the fraternity, too. I told her, ‘If we’re trying to shine light on this, we have to name the fraternity.’ ”

In fact, Erdely and her editor, Sean Woods, later acknowledged that the magazine had tried to find the men but failed to do so. “We did not talk to them,” Woods said. “We could not reach them.”

That should have been a red flag. In essence, neither writer nor editor could warrant that the men alleged to have committed a terrible crime actually existed.

That’s not to say that Rolling Stone should have abandoned the story altogether. But it does suggest the need for more reporting before going to press. The failure to ascertain the whereabouts of key actors in such a revolting drama left Rolling Stone not with she said/he said ambiguity — a feature of every alleged crime or scandal — but with half a story, told from a single viewpoint. Except for two vague, inconclusive quasi-denials by the president of the local Phi Kappa Psi chapter and the executive director of the fraternity, no aspect of Jackie’s story was rebutted.

Indeed, wrote Dana, “In the months Erdely spent reporting the story, Jackie neither said nor did anything that made Erdely, or Rolling Stone’s editors and fact-checkers, question Jackie’s credibility. Her friends and rape activists on campus strongly supported Jackie’s account.” But “friends” and “activists” have little incentive to be skeptical; that’s the reporter’s job.

To be sure, Rolling Stone was under no obligation to prove that Jackie’s account was true. That is a standard that eludes even the most rigorous trials, with eyewitness testimony and expert witnesses. News organizations, however, are responsible for independently verifying details, ascertaining facts, rooting out discrepancies and determining whether the discrepancies it finds are substantial enough to discredit a story.

How, for example, could Jackie recognize some of the men she said assaulted her in a room Erdely described as “pitch black”? How could she have exited the fraternity house via an entrance that, upon inspection, would have been shown not to exist? Did a party really take place at the fraternity on Sept. 28, 2012? (The fraternity maintains it did not.) If so, what did some of the partygoers, if not the alleged rapists, remember about that night? No such recollections were cited, leaving readers to wonder whether anyone was asked in the first place.

Erdely also adopted the “voice” of her protagonist as she described the alleged events. The style is common in magazine writing; newspapers are wary of it, lest it give too much credence to one perspective rather than multiple viewpoints. “You can have voice if the underlying facts check out,” said Emily Bell, professor of professional practice at Columbia University’s School of Journalism. “But you have to have the facts. [This] was a factual failing, not a presentational one.Voice is a secondary issue.”

Erdely herself deflected questions about her reporting by engaging in a bit of misdirection. When asked repeatedly by The Post last week about her contacts with “Drew” — the purported ringleader of the gang rape — she demurred, citing her non-disclosure agreement with Jackie. Her answer left the impression that she had indeed had such contact with Drew, but was bound not to talk about it.

The magazine could also have disclosed to its readers what it did not know and what its reporting could not show. The story didn’t disclose, for example, that Erdely couldn’t find Drew, nor a second fraternity member who Jackie identified.

Such caveats may weaken the overall narrative, but they help readers understand how strong the narrative is in the first place.

There’s another basic principle in journalism: Every story has two sides. In fact, every story has many sides. Rolling Stone decided to run with just one of them. To its everlasting regret.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifest...bdc_story.html





U.S. Utilities Face Up to $48B Revenue Loss from Solar, Efficiency

Energy demand could drop by more than 15% due to new energy technologies by 2025
Lucas Mearian

Energy utilities face losing between $18 billion and $48 billion a year in the U.S and up to €61 billion a year in Europe by 2025 as solar power and energy conservation initiatives grow, according to Accenture.

The Accenture analysis, based on extensive modeling and a survey of global utilities executives, estimates that energy demand could be reduced by more than 15% due to new energy technologies by 2025.

For example, researchers at the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics at the University of New South Wales announced that they've achieved 40.4% efficiency in converting sunlight to electricity by using commercially available solar cells combined with a mirror and filters that reduce wasted energy.

The average conversion ratio for solar cells is around 16% to 18%, according to Amit Ronen, director of George Washington University's Solar Institute in Washington. The best solar cells are able to convert as much as 20% of the sunlight they absorb into electricity, he added.

Accenture's "Digitally Enabled Grid" study found that utility executives are "notably more concerned" about the impact of renewable energy on their revenue streams than in the past.

This year, 61% of utility executives surveyed by Accenture indicated they expect significant or moderate revenue reductions as a result of distributed electricity generation, such as solar photovoltaic (PVs), compared to 43% last year.
screen shot 2014 12 09 at 2.08.41 pm Accenture

Companies are increasingly recognizing the benefits to renewable energy based on a distributed grid, where solar is on their own rooftop or microgrid, where renewable energy is generated and stored on site in batteries, autonomous of the conventional power grid.

Accenture conducted telephone interviews with 85 utility executives from 20 countries between July and October.

PVs, electricity storage such as lithium-ion batteries, electrification of heating and transport, energy efficiency, energy conservation and demand response, are all poised to reduce utility revenue, Accenture stated.

The cost of rooftop solar-powered electricity will be on par with prices for common coal or oil-powered generation in two years, and the technology to produce it will only get cheaper, according to a recent report from Deutsche Bank's solar industry analyst, Vishal Shah.

One of the factors spurring growth is the expiration of the federal government's solar investment tax credit (ITC). That measure, passed in 2008, offered a 30% tax credit for residential and business installations for solar energy. When it expires in 2016, the tax credit will drop to a more permanent 10%.

"Consequently, we expect to see a big rush of new installations ahead of the 2016 ITC expiration," Shah stated in his research document.

Even adoption of energy efficiency and distributed generation "will become possible without subsidies, which will lead to greater market penetration as a result of shifting consumer sentiment, falling technology costs and a moderate rise in electricity prices, especially across Europe," said Valentine de Miguel, global managing director of Accenture Smart Grid Services, in a statement.

Accenture largely agreed with Deutsche Bank that Solar PV is already at grid parity - equal to or less than the cost of power purchased from the grid - in many states.

Utility companies are under increasing internal and external pressure to address the complexity, cost implications and opportunities of the future grid.

Accenture's analysis suggests that by next year, rooftop solar will be at grid parity across Australia and most EU member states, except less sunny ones like Sweden and Poland, and in Spain, where there are regulatory barriers to solar PV deployment. Japan will reach parity in the next few years, followed by the rest of North America, with the exception of Canada and some U.S. states with the lowest electricity prices.

The sharp decline in solar energy costs is the result of increased economies of scale leading to cheaper photovoltaic panels, new leasing models and declining installation costs, according to Shah.

Distributed has a long way to go before it beats grid

As part of its research, Accenture conducted its second annual survey of global utilities executives and found that despite popular reports of a looming utilities "death spiral," in which consumers migrate off the grid or use it only as backup, such a scenario us s unlikely and uneconomical for a large number of consumers due to natural limitations on viability and cost constraints.

The vast majority (79%) of utility executives said that it won't be cost-effective for consumers to go off-grid without subsidies until 2030 or beyond. In addition, by 2035, just 12% of customers in North America are expected to become energy self-sufficient, compared to 11% in Europe.

"While the 'death spiral,' as commonly defined, is a myth, the demand disruption caused by the growing adoption of energy demand-disrupting technologies is a real threat to utilities' business models," de Miguel said. "And in addition to the financial pressure, this will cause significant operational challenges for utilities, increase technical stress on the grid and open the market to new competition for energy products and services."

Nearly two-thirds (61%) of utility executives expect grid faults, or interruptions, to increase by 2020 as a result of low-voltage connected distributed renewable generation, up from 41% last year. More than half (53%) also expect an increase in grid faults from deployments of large-scale renewables, also up from last year (33%).

A significant majority of utility executives expect continued competition from new entrants in data-related services (92%), distributed generation (87%) and beyond-the-meter energy efficiency and demand response solutions (90%), as well as in a number of new areas, such as plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) and associated charging infrastructure (81%).

"In order to navigate through this demand disruption, utilities will need to fundamentally transform their business models, including the creation of distribution system operations services to manage a more complex and distributed grid," de Miguel said. "As part of this transformation, they should focus on engaging with regulators to secure the long-term viability of the distribution business. This includes the adoption of new tariff structures, opening up new markets and aligning subsidies; investing in grid optimization, such as automation, sensing devices and real-time analytics; and developing new customer products and services."
http://www.computerworld.com/article...fficiency.html





Discarded Laptop Batteries Keep the Lights On

Millions of batteries discarded with computers have more than enough life to power home lighting for one year, researchers in India say.
David Talbot

Many of the estimated 50 million lithium-ion laptop batteries discarded every year could provide electricity storage sufficient to light homes in poor countries, researchers at IBM say.

In work being aired this week at a conference in San Jose, researchers at IBM Research India in Bangalore found that at least 70 percent of all discarded batteries have enough life left to power an LED light at least four hours a day for a year.

While it’s possible to combine LED lights with solar panels and rechargeable batteries (see “Innovators Under 35: Evans Wadongo”), using discarded batteries could make the approach far cheaper.

“The most costly component in these systems is often the battery,” says Vikas Chandan, a research scientist at the lab’s Smarter Energy Group, who led the project. “In this case, the most expensive part of your storage solution is coming from trash.”

The IBM group, working with a hardware R&D firm called RadioStudio, tore open discarded laptop battery packaging and extracted individual storage units called cells, tested those individually to pick out the good ones, and recombined them to form refurbished battery packs. Then, after adding charging dongles as well as circuitry to prevent overheating, they gave them to five users in Bangalore who lived in slums or operated sidewalk carts.

Three months later, the users said the battery packs had worked well; the main request was for rat-resistant wires and brighter bulbs, says Mohit Jain, a research engineer with the group. A revised setup is now being tested.

Around 50 million laptop and desktop computers are discarded in the United States every year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Meanwhile, in India alone, about 400 million people lack grid-connected electricity.

IBM is not considering this as a business but says the technology could be offered free to poor countries.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news...the-lights-on/





Seagate’s First Shingled Hard Drives Now Shipping: 8TB for Just $260
Sebastian Anthony

Seagate, using its new shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology to cram more data into fewer platters, is preparing to launch an 8TB hard drive priced at just $260. For that low-low price (just over 3 cents per gig!) you get a three-year warranty and very low power consumption — but certainly not performance. This 8TB drive is all about long-term storage and backups — pair it with a new SSD like the Samsung 850 Pro or 850 Evo and you’d have a very flexible, cost-effective storage setup.

First, the speeds and feeds. This is a new range of hard drives that Seagate refers to as Archive HDD, where performance is eschewed in favor of reliability and power efficiency. There will be 8TB, 6TB, and 5TB models, and they’ll all come in Standard and Secure flavors (the Secure drives have a hardware encryption chip). The drives all spin at 5,900 RPM and have a 128MB cache, with an average read/write throughput of 150MB/sec (190MB/sec max). There’s a three-year warranty, and a fairly high MTBF (mean time between failures) of 800,000 hours.

The cheap and cheerful 8TB Archive HDD — model number ST8000AS0002, in case you were wondering — is only possible because of Seagate’s use of shingled magnetic recording. While all three of the big players (Western Digital, HGST, Seagate) have been sampling SMR in small quantities, I think the Archive HDD range will be the first commercial use of the technology. SMR is a technique that increases areal density, but reduces performance (compared to “conventional” perpendicular magnetic recording, anyway). For more on how SMR works, watch the video above or read our detailed explainer.

Ultimately, SMR allows Seagate to cram 1.33 terabytes onto a single platter — up from a pre-SMR areal density limit of around 1TB per platter. This means that Seagate can hit 8TB with just six platters, as opposed to seven or eight — which in turn reduces production costs, energy consumption, noise, vibration, temperature… you get the idea. The only issue is that you lose performance — but considering hard drives haven’t been about performance for a while now, that’s not really a big issue. The other option, which was pursued by Hitachi (now Western Digital-HGST), is to fill drives with helium, which achieves most of the same goals by reducing wind resistance around the platters — but so far, WD/HGST hasn’t managed to get its helium-filled drives down to a price that consumers can afford.

As you’ve probably surmised, an 8TB drive for $260 is pretty impressive in terms of cost-per-gigabyte — 3.25 cents per gig, to be exact. As it stands, the cheapest 6TB drives on Amazon or Newegg are around $280 — or about 4.5 cents per gig. And to think, I was worried that SSD/NAND flash density was going to overtake good ol’ hard drives!

As of the time of publishing, it seems Seagate’s Archive HDDs are currently being shipped to retailers. Amazon has some drives coming in stock on January 7, 2015 — and in fact, it will sell you a 20-pack of the drives for $5,336 ($267 each), if you wish. There are European retailers that will soon have stock in, priced at around €250. It looks like Seagate is targeting an official launch in January.
http://www.extremetech.com/computing...b-for-just-260





Grappling With the ‘Culture of Free’ in Napster’s Aftermath

In 1999, a file-sharing program created in a Boston dorm room sent shock waves across the music industry and served notice that a major cultural shift was underway.
Clyde Haberman

Once upon a time, a new technology happened along. It was called radio. Soon enough, some people began plucking wireless transmissions out of the air for their own purposes. One clever young man in Washington figured out how to intercept messages that Navy units sent to one another. “He has represented himself to be at distant naval stations or at sea on warships equipped with wireless apparatus,” a magazine called Electrical World reported in 1907. Back then, this fellow’s actions were not unlawful. They amounted nonetheless to a form of piracy.

As radio grew more sophisticated, so did those intent on beating the system. In 1960s Britain, radio pirates flourished on unlicensed stations that broadcast from ships anchored beyond territorial limits. They found eager audiences in young people who tuned in for the latest from the Rolling Stones, the Kinks and the Who. (Talkin’ ′bout my generation.) Then the world went digital. Naturally, pirates tagged along. One of them, the online sharing service Napster, forms the core of this Retro Report offering, the final installment in the current series of video documentaries examining the consequences of major news stories from the past.

Napster did not last long, two years. But for a while at the dawn of this century it claimed to have 70 million registered users. It spawned a host of Internet music-swapping providers, more than a few of them falling on the dubious side of the law. Most important, it irrevocably altered not only the way in which Americans absorbed music but also their belief system in what they should pay. The conviction theologically held by many boiled down to a single word: nothing. “You have a generation of people now who expect their music for free,” Greg Hammer, managing director of Red Bull Records, a branch of the energy-drink company, told Retro Report. “It’s very difficult to change.”

The music industry is not alone in coming to terms with altered realities. As every sentient soul surely knows by now, the “culture of free” — words borrowed from the title of this week’s video — has turned the print world upside down, pushing newspapers, magazines and book publishers into a frantic search for financial safe harbors. With the advent of broad Internet use in the 1990s came a notion that information should be free. Never mind that the gathering and transmission of information can be a costly proposition and that (dirty word alert) money is needed if the survival of, say, a newspaper is to be ensured. As with music in Mr. Hammer’s observation, a generation now believes that the written word, whether on processed wood or in pixels, should come without charge.

Napster burst forth in June 1999, the brainchild of an entrepreneurial, 18-year-old computer wiz, Shawn Fanning. His creation enabled anyone with a modicum of tech savvy to share audio files in MP3 format — peer to peer, as it was called. Music lovers could download thousands upon thousands of songs, then pass them on to friends or create albums of their own on compact discs. No one paid royalties. To music companies and some individual artists, this was high-tech piracy and a threat to their fiscal well-being. (It might be noted that the commercial introduction of CDs in the early 1980s delivered its own near-mortal blow to an earlier technology, long-playing vinyl records.) The Recording Industry Association of America sued Napster for copyright infringement. So did a few musicians, like the rapper Dr. Dre and the heavy metal band Metallica.

Not every performer thought of Napster as the enemy. Some who might otherwise have been doomed to oblivion regarded the service as a platform from which they might find listeners and build a fan base. Nor were all economists convinced that one free download equaled one less sale of a high-priced CD; quite possibly, some of them said, people were plugging into music that they would never have paid for.

Napster, however, did not have the courts on its side. Ordered by federal judges to stop allowing copyrighted material to be traded on its system, it shut down in July 2001. But from its ashes other file-sharing services arose, some bearing curious names like Grokster, Kazaa and Gnutella. Mr. Fanning tried his hand at new digital media endeavors, including Snocap and Napster 2.0. Few of those companies were unqualified successes. One thing was certain, though: The culture of free was not going away.

A decade ago, Apple established a new order in the commercial music universe by introducing the iTunes store. From its vast digital warehouse, customers could buy any song they wished, typically for 99 cents. The arrangement was perhaps not ideal for the recording companies and for many performers. Among other things, music albums — fixtures since the ’60s and, in many instances, creative masterpieces — were becoming relics; single-song listening ruled, whether through an iTunes purchase or snatched from the ether via file-swapping networks. Still, for the industry, some money was better than none, and so an iTunes reality beat a Napster world.

Now the music business is in transition once more, reshaped by streaming services like YouTube, Spotify and Pandora. Instead of owning songs, a listener can in effect borrow them from millions of titles made available by these operations. A cultural shift seems well underway, with more and more consumers sensing they no longer need to possess certain physical items, like CDs or books. A reliable Internet connection will do.

Unlike Napster and the like, the streaming services are not engaged in piracy. They are legally licensed, having paid music companies some money. They themselves cash in by selling advertising or, increasingly, by offering subscriptions to customers interested in a commercial-free experience.

The results have been stark. Data from Nielsen SoundScan, a sales-tracking system, show that consumers in this country listened to 70 billion songs via streaming services in the first half of 2014, an increase of 42 percent from the same period a year earlier. Sales of albums, whether on CDs or through digital downloads, declined by 15 percent. Downloads of individual tracks were down by 13 percent.

Embrace the change, Silicon Valley types say. But even if one does, it comes at a cost. As CDs fade from the scene, so do stores like Tower Records. Thousands of jobs are lost: workers who make the discs, wholesale buyers, salespeople, stockroom clerks, accountants and others. Substitute work for them is not assured in the digital cosmos. And, thus far, the people who create the music on which others build their fortunes often receive mere rivulets of reward. Not everyone is a Beyoncé or a Taylor Swift (who has removed her entire oeuvre from Spotify to keep it behind a pay wall). Many more musicians are like Zoe Keating, a cellist from Northern California who described her situation in detail last year. Over a six-month period, Ms. Keating’s songs had been played on Pandora more than 1.5 million times; that earned her all of $1,652.74. She had 131,000 plays on Spotify in 2012. She took home $547.71, or less than half a penny per play.

Some industry executives insist that, over time, things will sort themselves out, including how to steer more money to performers. Last month, for instance, YouTube announced plans to generate revenue by giving its users an opportunity to pay a few dollars a month in return for extra features that are not available to those who click on songs at no charge. Royalties to artists, in theory anyway, would thus rise.

In the meantime, some oldsters (talkin’ ′bout my generation again) may derive a measure of comfort from learning that vinyl albums still have life. Nielsen SoundScan reported four million sales of vinyl LPs in the first half of this year, a 40 percent increase from the same period in 2013. Go figure. Hey, maybe you can get a copy of “Revolution 9” from the Beatles’ White Album, and check out for yourself if, when played backward on a turntable, it really does tell you that Paul is dead.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/08/te...aftermath.html





You Can Take Down Pirate Bay, But You Can’t Kill the Internet it Created
Caitlin Dewey

In the late hours of Tuesday night, the Pirate Bay abruptly disappeared from the Internet, the result of a surprise raid on the site’s servers by Swedish police in Stockholm.

But forget the big-picture questions of Internet freedom or intellectual property. The real problem, for millions of Internet-users, is how am I going to watch TV?

See, the Pirate Bay is as much an idea and an orientation to entertainment media as it is/was a torrent-tracking site. Sure, the Pirate Bay technically indexed torrents, a peer-to-peer file format popular for sharing movies, music and other oversized files. But since its launch in 2003, the world’s “most notorious file-sharing site” has done something a bit more significant, and a bit more permanent, too: It’s made digital piracy a casual, inarguable part of the mainstream.

During just one month in 2013, more than 340 million people tried to download illegal content, an industry report claimed. In North America, Europe and Asia — the regions where most infringement comes from — that averages out to one in four Internet users.

“The free and simple availability of copyrighted content through piracy ecosystems continues to drive the popularity of hundreds of websites,” the report goes on to say. “Users of piracy ecosystems, the number of Internet users who regularly obtain infringing content, and the amount of bandwidth consumed by infringing uses of content all increased significantly between 2010 and 2013.”
bittorrent growth chart

It wasn’t always this way, of course. Before the birth of the torrent protocol in the early aughts, sharing big files, like TV shows or movies was virtually impossible. But in the early aughts, an American guy named Bram Cohen invented, essentially, a new way for computers to communicate data and named it BitTorrent. Less than two years later, in November 2003, just as BitTorrent was starting to gain steam, a little-known group of Swedish activists launched a site to help people find and access these shared BitTorrent files.

Pirate Bay wasn’t the first torrenting site, by any means — but it quickly became the largest, and the one that stuck around. (It’s no coincidence that the popularity of the phrase “torrent download” grew, in lockstep, with the profile of Pirate Bay.) It helped, probably, that Pirate Bay was initially operated by Piratbyran, a sort of pro-piracy think tank, which lobbied extensively against intellectual property law and wanted to popularize torrenting for “moral and political” reasons. In other words, they had the courage of conviction on their side.

Even when TPB split off from Pitatbyran shortly after its founding, administrators for the site remained involved with the group, circulating petitions, hosting rallies and publishing on “the practical, moral and philosophical issues of file sharing.” And even when law enforcement and industry groups began going after the Pirate Bay — the site was first raided in 2006, and its founders arrested and charged with aiding copyright infringement three years later — the site stayed online, moving frequently to new domains and changing to a more secure, cloud-based infrastructure in 2012.

And yet, despite all these (substantial!) threats, torrenting — on Pirate Bay, the largest torrenting portal, and off it — has only become more popular and more entrenched. Between 2011 and 2013, for instance, unique users on torrenting sites jumped 23.6 percent. There are now tens of millions of people accustomed to getting their “Game of Thrones” and “Breaking Bad” and “Walking Dead” illegally, online. In fact, more people watch “Game of Thrones” by torrent than watch it on HBO — a figure that, more than any other, should hammer in how well-entrenched this whole digital-piracy thing is.

Pirate Bay could very well come back online soon; there’s certainly no evidence, at this juncture, to suggest that it won’t, and the site has bounced back from several such hurdles before. But even if TPB doesn’t return, the politics and the conventions it advanced — that content should be free, and if you torrent, they can be! — will be very difficult to eradicate.

You may be able to shut down Pirate Bay, but good luck raiding the Internet that Pirate Bay created.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/t...et-it-created/





Peter Sunde: 'I Went to Jail for My Cause. What Did You Do?'
Peter Sunde

There's a few big moments in life where you feel that something moves you deeply. Graduating school. Getting your first kiss. Writing that first book, publishing that first scientific document. A loved one dies. Getting your first customer in your café. Some of them might seem small and trivial to others but to you they are huge and life altering.

Today I got a similar feeling. A feeling that we reached a certain critical mass. A critical mass that are upset with the current state of the internet, nay, the current state of policing the internet and what it promises the world. A critical mass that finally understands that we're on the way to a broadcast democracy with little peer involvement. The Pirate Bay was shut down. It tilted people's brains into knowing that tomorrow, their favorite TV show must be downloaded somewhere else. They thought about it a bit more and decided this is the beginning of a slippery slope. They understand that maybe this means that alternative content might be hard to ever reach, if at all. That the langoleers are catching up faster than we assumed. That this thing, that we're centralising the internet, having just a handful of centralised services, mostly owned by companies in one single country, a country that doesn't care about borders when it comes to their own gauntlets, is not a great idea. A movement is forming. A movement away from this. And tomorrow, when you wake up, it will climax into a whole bunch, maybe even a whole million of people, that will see the group "Stop destroying the internet" or "Give us our pirate bay back" on Facebook. And they will click Like and feel proud. They finally did it. They stopped the internet from being destroyed.

Honestly, my feeling of climax is really there. It's a feeling that close to 100 percent of the internet community is thinking "it's not my problem, someone else will fix it". But it wasn't just the current event with The Pirate Bay that got me to this insight. It's been a long time coming. Only a few activists left are actually doing things. We're way underfunded, we're getting older and we're getting lazy. We're trying to work smart while still having a family life, managing our lives with boy- and/or girlfriends, thinking about careers. Many of the best activists end up working full time on the projects in organisations such as the EFF, that can offer funding. The community funds the organisations and hence the community gets a feeling that if they do, these great people will fix the issues.

We stopped ACTA. We stopped SOPA, PIPA. We're working on stopping TTIP. We have people in parlament. Because that's the way we work now. The internet has become mainstream. We can't just run around as wild activists doing whatever we want. We need to do it in an orderly fashion. We need to listen to other people. There's no wild west anymore. So we stand in line. We discuss. Meanwhile, the opponents are growing bigger and stronger. They already paid their old politicians so the runway was short to get up and fly. We're playing at their home turf. And we really want food on our table, and we've done much more than anyone else.

At the same time, there's been multiple ACTA/SOPA/PIPA/TTIP agreements that we never got to know about. When we stop one, three pass unnoticed. We're still fighting data retention even though we won in the European supreme court. It's a never ending story.

We have our own celebrities. We had Wikileaks. We had Snowden. We had Manning. We had Aaron Swartz. Some are dead, some are in jail forever. Some are in hiding -- scared for their actual lives. What people reveal, what people fight for, are major causes. Freedom of information. Liberty. Democracy. Governmental transparency and due process. Things we take for granted, that are the basis for a modern safe society. We talk about it a lot. We are upset. We cry, we scream. We sometimes protest. We have our T-shirts. We have our symbols. We have our masks, our conferences. Our debates. We get some attention. People in general like us. Our opponents are old fat bastard whore sell-outs. They're mostly rich men from the United States of America. They're corrupt. They're easy to hate. It's all like a good old Hollywood movie. The type of movies these men make to make money to fight us.

But the movies taught us that the good guys win in the end. And we know who the good guys are. We know we have our rights. We know we're protected by law. We also understand that the law can't really protect us if the bad guys come after us. But we didn't do anything wrong, so we're not worried.

Journalists contact me daily. Most of them are intelligent, well educated and highly skilled professionals. They're protected because they're from the press. They can protect their sources by law, in most countries. They've all read the documents from Manning. They've read what Snowden leaked. They know about the NSA surveillance. But in the back of their minds, they're also the good guys. And this PGP thing is just such a hassle. And Gmail is just so easy to use, and works everywhere. And they never had an issue with anything before. And they don't want to end up as Glenn Greenwald, all paranoid.

I never get invited to parties anymore. It's not that I'm boring -- au contraire -- I'm usually an entertaining party guest with crazy stories, I'm the weird monkey clown that tells you insane real life events I've been through. I've met the president of Brazil, I've been to jail with killers and dope smugglers. But it's just such a hassle that I'm not on Facebook, so when someone arranges a party, they assume someone will invite me. And everyone assumes that someone else did. They think I'm so paranoid for not being on Facebook.

I'm always upset with some of my co-workers. They're so hard to reach. Most of them don't have cellphones. We have to decide a time and place to meet over encrypted chat, because they don't want to be tracked. If they're delayed I won't know. A few times I've waited 6-7 hours because trains/boats/cars had issues. Who do they think they are, trying to be that anonymous? I don't want to end up like them, they're so fucking paranoid. I assume that my phone is not wire-tapped, I'm not interesting. Just because I know a lot of people that might be interesting to some governments doesn't mean they get a warrant to tap me.

The past day I've read lots of comments on the oh-so-many threads regarding the fact that I've stated I wish The Pirate Bay is closed for good, so that something new can emerge. Something new and fresh. So many of the comments are insanely insightful. About how lazy I am for not doing anything instead of just ranting on how crappy TPB became. That I should open a new site instead of allowing TPB to go down. That they want their package they sent me, when I was in jail for my activism, returned. Since I suck for not getting TPB back up. I'm assuming these well-spleling guys (yes, they're all guys) are other activists that are doing their part for the open and libre community. If so, I must be wrong that we're just a few -- there are apparently tens of thousands of people actually doing important work that I should appreciate.

My feeling of some life-altering insight might be nothing but rants on the spoiled, lazy and naive parts of our internet community. And maybe I'm using those terms just to piss people off a little bit more. But hey. I went to jail for my cause and your TV shows. What did you do? You want that copy of Orwell's 1984 returned? I'll take one of the 25 copies I got sent to me in jail and send it back to you. Maybe you'll read it instead of just sending it to someone else to take care of.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/...11/peter-sunde





Ye Olde Pirate Baye

It’s Baaack: the IsoHunt team is hosting the old Pirate Bay database – Jack.
http://oldpiratebay.org/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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Old 11-12-14, 12:18 AM   #2
multi
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Join Date: Jan 2002
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What The?

so it begins..




http://rt.com/news/213387-pirate-bay-party-chairman/
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