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Old 13-02-13, 09:14 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - February 16th, '13

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"This smackdown is going to make copyright trolling in California a rather unprofitable venture." – Tim Cushing



































February 16th, 2013




Demonoid ‘Operator’ Released From Jail, Case Stalled
Ernesto

The demise of Demonoid has been cited as one of the main victories against online piracy in 2012, but the case against those responsible for the site is reportedly stagnating. According to new information an alleged operator of Demonoid has been released from jail and criminal proceedings have been halted. The small amount of information that is available comes from U.S. copyright holders who are keeping a close eye on developments.

August last year the popular BitTorrent tracker Demonoid had its servers taken down by Ukrainian hosting company Colocall.

Local authorities explained that Interpol requested them to take action as part of a criminal investigation into the site’s alleged owners in Mexico.

Months earlier Mexican authorities conducted raids in Monterrey, the capital city of the northeastern state of Nuevo León. Their prime target was a Demonoid operator and one person connected to the BitTorrent tracker was later imprisoned.

Aside from a small notice mentioning the raids, Mexican authorities haven’t released any updates on the proceedings. According to IIPA, the umbrella organization for copyright groups including the MPAA and RIAA, there’s very little progress as the case has been stalled.

In their annual submission to the U.S. Trade Representative’s Special 301 Review the groups give a brief update on the case, which aside from Mexico and Ukraine now also involves Panama.

“IIPA and its members are closely following the progress of the criminal case in Mexico, Ukraine and Panama, and hope that a proper criminal investigation will quickly commence and proceed accordingly,” IIPA writes.

The exact nature of the Panama connection is not mentioned, but the country is a popular destination for offshore banking.

Later on, IIPA notes that the alleged operator of Demonoid has already been released from jail. It’s unclear why, but the copyright holders mention that the case has stalled which could mean that there’s not enough evidence to continue.

“As noted, BitTorrent tracker demonoid.me was taken down with the cooperation of the Mexican authorities. Unfortunately, the criminal case against the operators of the service has stalled: the main operator of the service was initially imprisoned and materials used in the service were seized, but the operator of the service was subsequently released,” IIPA writes.

For how long the alleged Demonoid operator was imprisoned is not mentioned. However, the criminal case is ongoing according to the copyright holders, who further mention that it’s now proceeding in Ukraine.

Again, the details are scarce and it’s unclear what the authorities are looking into at this point.

Demonoid, meanwhile, has moved to Hong Kong where it found a new hosting company and a new .HK domain name. Whether the BitTorrent tracker will ever return to its full glory has yet to be seen.
http://torrentfreak.com/demonoid-ope...talled-130212/





Canadian ISP Distributel Fights Back in File-Sharing Case
Nicole Bogart

Independent Canadian ISP Distributel is opposing a motion to disclose the identities of some of its subscribers who are alleged to have been involved in file sharing.

NGN Prime Productions Inc. and Riding Films Inc. allege that certain Internet Protocol (IP) addresses may have been involved in copying and sharing of three films, Recoil, Crash Site and Dawn Rider, though peer-to-peer networks.

Distributel provides service to customers in Ontario, Quebec, Albert and British Columbia.

The original statement of claimed was filed by NGN on November 14, 2012 and was later amended adding Riding Films as a plaintiff on January 10.

According to court documents, NGN and Riding Films hired Canipre Inc., a Montreal based company which provides forensic investigation services for copyright owners, to investigate the IP addresses involved in the alleged file sharing.

Canipre was also used by Voltage pictures in its case involving thousands of TekSavvy customers.

But in court documents filed Monday, Distributel is fighting back citing multiple concerns including the targeting of smaller, independent ISPs like themselves.

According to a blog post by Michael Geist, law professor and Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, Distributel did not oppose a similar request filed in November 2012, but several factors led to a “change of position” when NGN filed another request for more names.

“First, Distributel was concerned with how NGN treated its subscribers, demanding a $1500 settlement in a notice claiming that subscribers could face up to $20,000 in damages,” read the blog post by Geist.

“Distributel noted the lack of evidence for the claim made by NGN, relying on an expert analysis of BitTorrent to highlight the shortcomings.”

Court documents cite Distributel’s concerns that NGN may be involved in “copyright trolling,” when a misrepresentation of potential liabilities is handed out to customers and the settlement demanded far exceeds any potential damages to the plaintiff.

Recently enacted copyright reform Bill C-11 created a $5,000 cap on potential damages for non-commercial infringement, and some Internet law experts believe fines will be lower when it comes to actions like illegal downloading.

Distributel cites further concerns that NGN fails to demonstrate a bona fide claim, stating that “numerous errors, inconsistencies and missing links” were found in the evidence.

These concerns are included in the evidence submitted by Canipre.

Court documents cite that Canipre’s owner, Barry Logan, used a “proprietary platform that provides effective means to detect unauthorized distribution of movies.” But Distributel notes that the technology is not identified and there is no description of how it works.

Additionally, when Distributel examined the IP addresses listed by city location – provided by Canipre – they found the listed locations were wrong in all but one entry, if the date and IP address were presumably correct.

But Distributel expressed a main concern of being targeted as an independent ISP company.

“The Movie Parties’ choice to pursue independent ISP companies in unfair and adversely affects the highly-competitive market for residential Internet access service. If the public perceives their privacy rights to be diminished due to their purchase of services through a smaller company, then those customers may opt for larger companies,” read the court document.

Both recent examples of file sharing cases, including TekSavvy, have implicated smaller ISPs. However, in 2011, larger ISPs Bell and Cogeco were faced with cases involving Voltage pictures and did not oppose or challenge the cases.
http://www.globalnews.ca/canada/tech...962/story.html





IP Address Snapshots Not Sufficient Evidence To File Infringement Suit; Prenda Lawyer Faces Sanctions
Tim Cushing

It looks as if Judge Otis Wright is about done humoring Brett Gibbs and Prenda Law/AF Holdings/Ingenuity 13 LLC's continued legal asshattery. In a lengthy order that reads more like a smackdown, Wright attacks Gibb's abuse of the legal system and thoroughly dismantles his so-called "business model."

First, Wright takes on the evidence Prenda Law presents, consisting of a "snapshot" of possible infringement in progress. He points out that a time-coded screenshot hardly makes the case that actual infringement occurred.

This snapshot allegedly shows that the Defendants were downloading the copyrighted work—at least at that moment in time. But downloading a large file like a video takes time; and depending on a user’s Internet-connection speed, it may take a long time. In fact, it may take so long that the user may have terminated the download. The user may have also terminated the download for other reasons. To allege copyright infringement based on an IP snapshot is akin to alleging theft based on a single surveillance camera shot: a photo of a child reaching for candy from a display does not automatically mean he stole it. No Court would allow a lawsuit to be filed based on that amount of evidence...

And as part of its prima facie copyright claim, Plaintiff must show that Defendants copied the copyrighted work. Feist Publ’ns, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co., 499 U.S. 340, 361 (1991). If a download was not completed, Plaintiff’s lawsuit may be deemed frivolous. In this case, Plaintiff’s reliance on snapshot evidence to establish its copyright infringement claims is misplaced. A reasonable investigation should include evidence showing that Defendants downloaded the entire copyrighted work—or at least a usable portion of a copyrighted work. Plaintiff has none of this—no evidence that Defendants completed their download, and no evidence that what they downloaded is a substantially similar copy of the copyrighted work. Thus, Plaintiff’s attorney violated Rule 11(b)(3) for filing a pleading that lacks factual foundation.


TorrentLawyer summarizes Wright's opening salvo as laying down two rules via case law, ones that will adversely affect copyright trolling in California, and which could affect proceedings elsewhere:

RULE 1. IN ORDER TO SUE A DEFENDANT FOR COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT, YOU MUST PROVE THAT THE DEFENDANT DOWNLOADED THE ENTIRE COPYRIGHTED VIDEO.

RULE 2. A “SNAPSHOT OBSERVATION” OF AN IP ADDRESS ENGAGED IN DOWNLOADING AT THAT MOMENT IS INSUFFICIENT PROOF OF COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT


This sort of lawsuit has almost always relied on little more than a snapshot and an IP address as "evidence," the latter of which has been shot down by multiple courts for its inability to correctly identify alleged infringers. Now, Wright is throwing out Gibb's precious bundle of snapshots as well.

Wright tackles the IP address issue next, under a heading titled "Lack of reasonable investigation of actual infringer's identity." He points to earlier explanations by the plaintiffs as to how they arrived at the identity of the alleged infringer and picks apart their "methodology." Here's Ingenuity 13 LLC's explanation of their deductive process.

Though the subscriber, David Wagar, remained silent, Plaintiff’s investigation of his household established that Benjamin Wagar was the likely infringer of Plaintiff’s copyright. As such, Plaintiff mailed its Amended Complaint to the Court naming Benjamin Wagar as the Defendant in this action. (ECF No. 14, at 2.)...

In cases where the subscriber remains silent, Plaintiff conducts investigations to determine the likelihood that the subscriber, or someone in his or her household, was the actual infringer. . . . For example, if the subscriber is 75 years old, or the subscriber is female, it is statistically quite unlikely that the subscriber was the infringer. In such cases, Plaintiff performs an investigation into the subscriber’s household to determine if there is a likely infringer of Plaintiff’s copyright. . . . Plaintiff bases its choices regarding whom to name as the infringer on factual analysis. (ECF No. 15, at 24.)


"Factual analysis?" Really? Wright calls it for what it is.

The Court interprets this to mean: if the subscriber is 75 years old or female, then Plaintiff looks to see if there is a pubescent male in the house; and if so, he is named as the defendant. Plaintiff’s “factual analysis” cannot be characterized as anything more than a hunch.

Wright gives Ingenuity 13 LLC several suggestions on how to narrow this list of suspects down, including "wardriving" to check whether the WiFi connection in question is open, whether several downloads have occurred at the same IP address, or just a good old-fashioned stakeout.

Such an investigation may not be perfect, but it narrows down the possible infringers and is better than the Plaintiff’s current investigation, which the Court finds involves nothing more than blindly picking a male resident from a subscriber’s home.

This sentence is damning enough, but the followup is the killer:

But this type of investigation requires time and effort, something that would destroy Plaintiff’s business model.

Wright notes the difference between criminal and civil suits that rely on IP addresses for identification. In criminal proceedings, the court usually can rely on the fact that an actual investigation has taken place prior to the charges being brought. In a civil case, the court has no such guarantee, but that doesn't mean the judicial system has to entertain these claims.

[W]hen viewed with a court’s duty to serve the public interest, a plaintiff cannot be given free rein to sue anyone they wish—the plaintiff has to actually show facts supporting its allegations.

Back to TorrentLawyer with another addition to California federal court case law and another blow to trolling-as-business-model.

RULE 3. BEFORE SUING A DEFENDANT FOR COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT, YOU MUST DO A “REASONABLE INVESTIGATION” TO DETERMINE THAT IT WAS THE NAMED DEFENDANT WHO DID THE DOWNLOAD, AND NOT SOMEONE ELSE WITH ACCESS TO HIS INTERNET CONNECTION.

All in all, this smackdown is going to make copyright trolling in California a rather unprofitable venture. Expect to see some venue-shifting in the future. Unfortunately for Ingenuity 13 LLC, it's already entrenched in a losing battle, and it's going to get even worse. Wright also had some choice words for Brett Gibbs' misconduct. Two allegations stem from his failure to comply with the Court's orders to cease discovery. Gibbs first told the court the plaintiffs had not obtained any information about the subscribers in question, before later regaling the court with tales of its efforts to obtain the forbidden information when responding to Orders to Show Cause.

The third allegation is more serious, alleging fraud on the court. This circles back to the mysterious "Alan Cooper."

Upon review of papers filed by attorney Morgan E. Pietz, the Court perceives that Plaintiff may have defrauded the Court. (ECF No. 23.) At the center of this issue is the identity of a person named Alan Cooper and the validity of the underlying copyright assignments. If it is true that Alan Cooper’s identity was misappropriated and the underlying copyright assignments were improperly executed using his identity, then Plaintiff faces a few problems.

First, with an invalid assignment, Plaintiff has no standing in these cases. Second, by bringing these cases, Plaintiff’s conduct can be considered vexatious, as these cases were filed for a facially improper purpose. And third, the Court will not idle while Plaintiff defrauds this institution.


Wright then orders Gibbs to show cause why he should not be sanctioned for this misconduct, while declining to extend the sanctions to AF Holding and Ingenuity LLC -- based on Gibbs' "fiduciary interest" in the plaintiffs and the likelihood that the plaintiffs are "devoid of assets."

Wright gets in a little dig at the still-nonexistent Alan Cooper:

If Mr. Gibbs or Mr. Pietz so desire, they each may file by February 19, 2013, a brief discussing this matter. The Court will also welcome the appearance of Alan Cooper—to either confirm or refute the fraud allegations.

Things were already looking pretty grim for Brett Gibbs, but the worst may still be on the very near horizon:

Based on the evidence presented at the March 11, 2013 hearing, the Court will consider whether sanctions are appropriate, and if so, determine the proper punishment. This may include a monetary fine, incarceration, or other sanctions sufficient to deter future misconduct. Failure by Mr. Gibbs to appear will result in the automatic imposition of sanctions along with the immediate issuance of a bench warrant for contempt.

What started out for Gibbs and co. as a route to easy money has morphed into possible jail time and a complete undermining of the "business model" Prenda Law, AF Holdings and Ingenuity 13 LLC hoped would make them, if not actual millionaires, at least slightly richer. And so another chapter of the Gibbs/AF Holdings/Prenda Law saga concludes, leaving us with the sort of cliffhanger that only those whose names haven't been listed above will enjoy seeing played to its conclusion.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...80521924.shtml





Warner Bros. Defends Allegations It Abused Anti-Piracy Tool
Eriq Gardner

In court papers filed this week, the studio reveals its views on whether fair use needs to be considered when causing files to be removed from the Internet.

Very few actions cause more controversy online than when a copyright holder causes the takedown of material argued to be completely legitimate. For example, an uproar ensued last month when Lionsgate Entertainment registered a takedown notice on a remix video “Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed." The video was removed from YouTube for a short time. Before the mash-up of Twilight and Buffy the Vampire Slayer was reinstated after widespread news attention, the creator of the video cried foul since the video was cited as a quintessential example of fair use by the U.S. Copyright Office.
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Since then, there have been efforts to collect a database of false DMCA takedowns. Meanwhile, there's been a legal debate over whether copyright holders must consider fair use before sending takedown notices.

Maybe that issue seems settled. Perhaps it isn't.

Last month, in a long-running case, a federal judge paved the way for a trial over Universal Music's takedown of a video showing a toddler dancing to the 1984 Prince hit "Let's Go Crazy."

The case, brought by Stephanie Lenz, is perhaps most famous for an early decision that suggested that copyright owners must consider fair use before sending takedown notices. In describing the good and the bad of a judge's recent ruling, attorneys from the Electronic Frontier Foundation -- representing Lenz -- had this to say in a blog post:

"The ruling provided further affirmation, if it were needed, that the DMCA does not give copyright owners the right to simply take down content without first considering fair use. Of course, that was already the law. But last week’s ruling also clarified that that "consideration" means making an actual legal determination. Universal had argued that it was enough to consider some facts that might be relevant to a fair use analysis. No cigar, said the court: a content owner must make an effort "to evaluate the significance of such facts" in the context of the fair use doctrine. That’s good news for the Internet – content owners can no longer pretend that the DMCA takedown process does not require actual thought and judgment."

Oh yeah?

The movie industry is currently involved in a lawsuit against the cyber-locker Hotfile. Last year, the storage service filed a counterclaim against Warner Bros. for allegedly abusing its anti-piracy tool. Warners is alleged to have caused the deletion of thousands of files "when in fact Warner had no right to do so."

Still fighting that claim, Warners pointed to the recent Lenz ruling to support its defense.

In a notice of supplemental authority on Wednesday, the studio said that while it was true that in 2008, a federal judge in the Lenz case had ruled that a copyright owner must evaluate fair use before sending a takedown notice, the studio added this:

"The Lenz Court later clarified that it was referring only to 'extremely rare' cases and that 'the Court did not hold that every takedown notice must be preceded by a full fair use investigation."

Warners attorneys also wrote that the latest Lenz ruling in January provided more affirmation of its position:

"Following Ninth Circuit precedent, the Lenz IV decision firmly holds that a 'mere failure to consider fair use would be insufficient to give rise to liability under §512(f). It thus rejects Hotfile's reading of Lenz I, and reaffirms Plaintiffs' position that a 512(f) claim requires evidence that the defendant had actual, subjective knowledge that it was sending a takedown notice on a noninfringing file."

Here's the full brief.

In some smaller respects, there's common agreement with how Warner Bros. and the EFF are reading the recent Lenz ruling. The studio says that failure to consider fair use won't "give rise to liability," which is another way of saying there's really no penalty for not considering fair use. The EFF says in its own blog post the "the practical problem...If a trial is required to prove up a DMCA misrepresentation claim, few people victimized by unfounded takedowns will have the resources and time to obtain redress."

But there a much larger controversy here.

Warner Bros says that takedown victims have to show "actual, subjective knowledge," whereas the EFF says that takedown victims can demonstrate a copyright owner "willfully blinded itself to the potential application of the fair use doctrine."

In short, do copyright owners have to consider fair use? That's still subjective.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr...-abused-419756





Feds Urge Supreme Court to Let Stand $222K Landmark File-Sharing Verdict
David Kravets

The Obama administration on Monday urged the Supreme Court to let stand a $222,000 jury verdict levied against infamous file-sharer Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a Minnesota woman who downloaded and shared two dozen copyrighted songs on the now-defunct file-sharing service Kazaa.

Thomas-Rasset, the first person to defend herself against a Recording Industry Association of America file-sharing case, had asked the high court to set aside the damages, alleging they were unconstitutionally excessive and were not rationally related to the harm she caused to the music labels.

The administration weighed in Monday, urging the justices to turn down the petition.

“Petitioner seeks this court’s review of the question whether there is any constitutional limit to the statutory damages that can be imposed for downloading music online,” the administration said. “That question is not presented in this case.”

The RIAA also urged the court to reject the petition, saying “Thomas-Rasset’s problem” is “with Congress’ considered judgement that her infringement should be subject to significant statutory damages.”

The Supreme Court has never heard an RIAA file-sharing case and has previously declined the two other file-sharing cases brought before it.

Thomas-Rasset’s case concerns an 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision in September that upheld a jury’s award against her.

The case dates back to 2007, and has a tortuous history involving a mistrial and three separate verdicts for the same offense — $222,000, $1.92 million and $1.5 million. Under the case’s latest iteration, a jury last year awarded the RIAA the $1.5 million, which the court reduced to $54,000, ruling that the jury’s award for “stealing 24 songs for personal use is appalling.”

The convoluted decision of the appeals court in September, however, found that the original $222,000 verdict from the first case should stand, and that U.S. District Judge Michael Davis of Minnesota should not have declared a mistrial in the first trial over a flawed jury instruction.

In her appeal to the Supreme Court, Thomas-Rasset argues that the Copyright Act, which allows damages of up to $150,000 per infringement, is unconstitutionally excessive. The Obama administration, which also weighed in on the case when it was in the appellate courts, said the large damages award was allowed because it “is reasonably related to furthering the public interest in protecting original works of artistic literary, and musical expression.”

The only other individual file-sharer to challenge an RIAA lawsuit at trial was Joel Tenenbaum, a Massachusetts college student, whose case followed Thomas-Rasset’s. The Supreme Court declined, without comment, to hear his case in May, however, letting stand a Boston federal jury’s award of $675,000 against him for sharing 30 songs.

In the third RIAA file-sharing case against an individual to go before the Supreme Court’s justices, the high court declined to review a petition that would have tested the so-called “innocent infringer” defense to copyright infringement.

Generally, an innocent infringer is someone who does not know she or he is committing copyright infringement. Such downloaders get a $200 innocent-infringer fine.

Most of the thousands of RIAA file-sharing cases against individuals have settled out of court for a few thousand dollars. In 2008, the RIAA ceased a five-year campaign it had launched to sue individual file sharers and, with the Motion Picture Association of America, has since convinced internet service providers to begin taking punitive action against copyright scofflaws, including possibly terminating their service.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...-file-sharing/





Three Strikes May Decrease File Sharing, But If Sales Keep Dropping, Who Cares?
Mike Masnick

A year ago, we asked what could possibly be the "value" in "cracking down on piracy" if that didn't then lead to increased sales. It's an issue that we've dealt with time and time again. We ask people a simple question: would you rather stop piracy or make more money? Most people note that the latter is the real goal. If the former does not lead to the latter then what good does "stopping piracy" actually do? The answer is none at all. The latest data out of France shows that, despite Hadopi (the administrators of the 3 strikes program) claiming some sort of victory because stats on file sharing are down, the bigger issue is that the sale of recorded music keeps declining. Digital Music News, who normally supports the the "anti-piracy" side of things, has some slides from French labels that show that sales keep decreasing, even as Hadopi highlights a big drop in file sharing and the use of cyberlockers. But all that really matters is this one:

This is the key point that we've been making for well over a decade now. "Fighting" piracy is not the same as making more money. The focus should be on figuring out ways to make money. Even if we believe that copyright infringement is a bad thing, if efforts to stop it are both expensive and ineffective, why continue? It makes absolutely no sense. Instead, let's focus on the areas of the industry that have shown that they are expanding and where there's lots of money to be made for those who embrace them.

Oh, and for what it's worth, you have to imagine that the "declines" reported in file sharing and cyberlockers severely undercounts those things too, as using some rather basic tools can let people hide that sort of information from being collected -- and the efforts by Hadopi to "educate" the public likely educated them about how to use VPNs. It does not appear to have educated them to go back to buying at the same levels as the artificially inflated rates in the past.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...ho-cares.shtml





BitTorrent Sharpens Enterprise Focus, Launches SoShare To Send Large Files, Offering First Terabyte Free
Ingrid Lunden

BitTorrent, the once-notorious P2P file-sharing site that has turned a new leaf as a legit, distributed computing provider, is today launching SoShare, a service to send large files from one computer to another, with the first terabyte of files sent free.
Out today in beta for Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari for Mac; and Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer for Windows, the service competes with the likes of YouSendIt, as well as DropBox, Box and other cloud-storage and file-transfer services. SoShare was previously available in alpha as Share, and it complements Sync, BitTorrent’s cloud-based service that syncs your computer’s files with a cloud storage service, which itself launched in alpha in January.

The idea behind SoShare is to target creative professionals – designers, photographers, musicians, and so on – who handle large data files and need to send them to others. That makes sense, since it also targets that community for content for its consumer-facing services.

SoShare is built by BitTorrent engineers, on BitTorrent’s P2P framework (however, BitTorrent confirms that it still uses Amazon’s S3 services for caching, as it did in the alpha version), and will sit alongside Sync in Labs, BitTorrent’s “test kitchen,” where it puts work in progress for its community to try out and develop into potentially more commercial products.

“For now, we’re going into the public beta without fees,” Catherine Meek, BitTorrent’s director of product strategy, noted in an email exchange. “Leveraging the distributed BitTorrent protocol has helped keep our costs low. We’ll be looking at a few options along the way, but building something that is reliable and adds value to the user is our primary objective.”

With a number of companies like YouSendIt and SugarSync, newer players like Mega, and more established startups like Dropbox already developing names for themselves in the same space as SoShare, it will be worth seeing whether BitTorrent can entice more people to its platform by way of the very large file size threshold — one free terabyte being possibly the largest data allowance yet.

BitTorrent is taking the approach of targeting one vertical first. “We saw a gap in the current offerings, a chance to introduce something new,” says Meek. “A key learning from the alpha was that there was a need within the creative community and we had the ability to fix a problem for them.”

Meek cites figures from the Americans for the Arts that estimate 3.34 million Americans are employed in the creative industries. “They work in large file formats — photo, audio, film. And their work is dependent on being able to send and deliver these large file formats to collaborators and clients [but] right now, doing so is costly and difficult. Email places restrictions on file size and file management. Syncing services quickly transition from free to high-fee. Sending services are not designed for creative asset delivery.

“No one is designing media delivery for the media industry, basically. We saw an opportunity to build a reliable solution for this user group and added key features based on their feedback and needs.”

While BitTorrent describes this as a file-sending service, it actually keeps a copy in the cloud. It uses a plug-in, required by those both sending and accessing the file, to help manage bandwidth around that file and to download it.

“SoShare accommodates distributed file transfer while the service maintains one master copy in the cloud for reliable access,” Meek says. “The more people that have access to a file, the more the SoShare plug-in can help with the availability of bandwidth.” The plug-in also lets users pause their uploads/downloads and resume them at other times.

Rather than actually sending files to the other computer directly, it works by sending an email with a link for access and to download those files. As with services like Dropbox, you can see a thumbnail gallery of the files before downloading. It also offers a feature to let users know if and when they get delivered and viewed, and you can create both private and public links to share on sites like Facebook and Twitter. For regular users you can also create address books for frequent contacts.

Files stay on BitTorrent’s servers for 30 days, but users can also download them to keep them longer; alternatively you can erase them before the 30 days are up.

In playing with it to send myself a file, the user interface appears relatively simple to use. But perhaps a little too simple: in the sign-up process, there is no email verification whatsoever, which seems like at least one loophole for possible malicious use.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/15/bit...terabyte-free/





Dodd Frowns on Reducing Movie Violence
David McCumber

Former Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, now CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, rebuffed the idea of reducing the amount of violence in movies and television Friday, saying that "getting in the business of regulating content is a slippery slope."

At a speech before the National Press Club, he said that instead of stopping the creation of some content, the industry is committed to "providing a choice for people'' regarding the kind of content they want to watch; "giving parents the controls'' they need to effectively control what their children are exposed to; and educating people about the controls that are in place.

"Choice, control, education,'' he said, are the underpinnings of the industry's strategy.

Dodd said that as he told Vice President Joe Biden's task force on reducing gun violence, the industry "wants to be part of the conversation'' on violence-prevention methods and is open to ideas. He stressed that the movie rating system itself was voluntarily adopted half a century ago and has been modified and enhanced repeatedly to reflect national standards and expectations.

Dodd, who spent six years in the House of Representatives and 30 years as a Democratic U.S. senator from Connecticut, said that after representing Newtown the tragedy "is much more than an abstraction to me.'' He said he still has trouble talking about the massacre without losing his composure and expects to for the rest of his life.

He said that what can be done to address gun violence is a big question, but he added that he believes the biggest single thing that Congress can do is to improve the nation's ability to deal with mental-health issues.

Dodd showed himself to be an indefatigable cheerleader for the industry, giving a spirited account of "why movies matter,'' extolling both the economic power and the cultural value of "the largest, most stimulating canvas'' for creative vision.

"Movies stimulate, provoke, challenge and educate,'' he said. "The best movies elevate and enrich. They dare us to think differently, to walk uncomfortably in another person's shoes.''

China is the fastest-growing movie market in the world, he said, already the second-largest foreign market behind Japan. He added that box-office receipts were up 31 percent in China last year, and that 10 new movie screens are going online there every day.

Dodd mentioned only in passing the bruising defeat the industry suffered last year when the Stop Online Piracy Act was defeated by Internet companies and users who felt that the effort to protect intellectual property online was an attack on free speech.

"The quality of movies and TV shows is outstanding and it's getting better every day,'' Dodd said. "That's why we must protect these products. The Internet needs to work for everyone. We have to find a way to protect both free speech and intellectual property.''
http://www.newstimes.com/local/artic...ce-4283364.php





EU Data Protection: Proposed Amendments Written by US Lobbyists
Glyn Moody

It's becoming clear that the lobbying around the proposed EU directive on Data Protection is some of the most intense ever seen - some activists have said it's even worse than during ACTA, while on the US side there's mutterings about starting a "trade war" if it's passed in its present form.

Given that pressure to water down protection for our privacy, a key issue is: who is fighting our corner? The obvious answer would be the MEPs, since they are our elected representatives in the European Parliament. Their job is exactly that: to represent and defend us in just these circumstances. And some, like the Green MEP Jan Albrecht, are certainly doing their best, as I noted in a previous column. But what about the rest - what exactly are they up to?

In the past, that would have been an almost impossible question to answer. But thanks to the wonders of modern technology, and the rise of open data that sees all kinds of information made available, it is now possible to piece together a much clearer picture of what exactly our EU representatives are up to.

A new site has been created with the rather unwieldy name of LobbyPlag. Ungainly it may be, but it describes well the shocking truth: that MEPs are proposing amendments to the Data Protection proposal that are taken word for word from the lobbyists. Obviously, what's worrying here is not the plagiarism, but the fact that measures designed to protect the European public are being stripped out and/or watered down by the very people we elected to defend us.

Here, for example, is an important section on profiling. The original version reads:

Every natural person shall have the right not to be subject to a measure which produces legal effects concerning this natural person or significantly affects this natural person, and which is based solely on automated processing intended to evaluate certain personal aspects relating to this natural person or to analyse or predict in particular the natural person's performance at work, economic situation, location, health, personal preferences, reliability or behaviour.

But the American Chamber of Commerce - that well-known European organisation - didn't like that, and wanted it changed to this:

A data subject shall not be subject to a decision which is unfair or discriminatory, and which is based solely on automated processing intended to evaluate certain personal aspects relating to this data subject.

Which is rather different - it strips out an important right. So what text did the MEPs in no less than three committees propose? Why this:

A data subject shall not be subject to a decision which is unfair or discriminatory, and which is based solely on automated processing intended to evaluate certain personal aspects relating to this data subject.

Which just happens to be exactly the same as what the American Chamber of Commerce were demanding.

Here's another telling example, found in an entirely new section from the MEPs, which reads as follows:

The controller is deemed to have fulfilled the obligations set out in paragraph 1 when choosing a processor who has voluntarily self-certified or voluntarily obtained a certification, seal or mark pursuant to Articles 38 or 39 of this Regulation showing the implementation of appropriate standard technical and organizational measures in response to the requirements set out in this Regulation.

This basically makes self-certification sufficient for cloud computing services. So, where did that text come from, one wonders? Well, here's what Amazon suggested on precisely this subject:

The controller is deemed to have fulfilled the obligations set out in paragraph 1 when employing a processor who has voluntarily self-certified or voluntarily obtained a third party certification, seal or mark showing the implementation of appropriate standard technical and organizational measures in response to the requirements set out in this Regulation.

Which, by an amazing coincidence, is practically identical to what the MEPs have decided would be a really good idea.

LobbyPlag provides an interesting breakdown of what percentage of the proposed amendments with content from lobbyists. Here are the figures for UK MEPs, as calculated by the site:

Giles Chichester (giles.chichester@europarl.europa.eu): Amendments with lobby content: 10 of 44 (22.73%)

Malcolm Harbour (malcolm.harbour@europarl.europa.eu): Amendments with lobby content: 14 of 55 (25.45%)

Sajjad Karim (sajjad.karim@europarl.europa.eu): Amendments with lobby content: 13 of 55 (23.64%)

Emma McClarkin (emma.mcclarkin@europarl.europa.eu): Amendments with lobby content: 1 of 8 (12.50%)


Now, unfortunately, none of these MEPs represents me, so I wouldn't be able to contact them. But if there's one of your MEPs there, they have a duty to reply, so perhaps you might drop them an email and ask them why exactly they have proposed amendments that are taken word-for-word, or nearly so, from US companies and lobbyists, and that will harm the EU public and benefit those same US organisations.

You might ask them who exactly they think they represent: you and the other 500 million EU citizens that pay their salary, currently running at around £80,000 per year, or a bunch of extremely rich US companies that are intent on taking away our privacy so that they can get even richer? If you receive any interesting answers, please send them to me - glyn.moody@gmail.com - so that I can share them with readers. I'm sure the explanations will be fascinating.
http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/ope...ists/index.htm





Canadian Conservatives Killing Off Controversial Internet Surveillance Bill
Bruce Cheadle

The Conservative government has abandoned its controversial and much-maligned Internet surveillance bill, legislation it once claimed was crucial to stopping child pornographers.

Less than a year ago support for Bill C-30, the so-called Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act, was presented to Canadians by the government as a binary choice.

"He can either stand with us or stand with the child pornographers," Public Safety Minister Vic Toews scolded a Liberal critic in the House of Commons last February.

The comment set off a public fire storm concerning the Internet and personal privacy — a nasty fight that resulted in unsavoury details of Toews' divorce being splashed across the web by a Liberal party operative.

Toews, who introduced the legislation, did not attend Monday's news conference where Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said Bill C-30 is dead.

After announcing changes to emergency warrantless wiretap laws, Nicholson let drop that C-30 was gone, in response to a reporter's question — an inquiry the minister was clearly expecting.

"We will not be proceeding with Bill C-30 and any attempts we will have to modernize the Criminal Code will not contain the measures in C-30 — including the warrantless mandatory disclosure of basic subscriber information, or the requirement for telecommunications service providers to build intercept capabilities within their systems," Nicholson said.

"Any modernization of the Criminal Code ... will not contain those."

The legislation would have forced Internet service providers to maintain systems that allowed police to intercept and track online communications.

It also would have given police, intelligence and Competition Bureau officers warrantless access to Internet subscriber information, including name, address, telephone number, email address and Internet protocol address.

Police said they needed these powers to track child pornographers, among others.

"We have inadvertently created safe havens for those who exploit technology to traffic in weapons, drugs and people," Vancouver police Chief Jim Chu, the president of the Canadian Association of Police Chiefs, wrote in an op-ed last November.

"It is a boon to pedophile networks, money launderers, extortionists, deceitful telemarketers, fraudsters and terrorists. Cyber bullies communicate their vitriol with impunity."

Chu said police were "handcuffed by legislation introduced in 1975, the days of the rotary telephone."

Dick Fadden, the director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said he was not aware the bill was to be shelved.

"We said all along that there were some aspects of it that would be helpful to us," Fadden told reporters on Parliament Hill following a committee appearance on another matter. "It's not absolutely critical for us to do our work."

The proposed legislation infuriated a wide cross-section of opponents, including privacy and civil liberties advocates and many conservative libertarians who opposed what they called Big Brother oversight in the legislation.

"I don't think we should underestimate the significance of a majority government backing down on a piece of its legislation," Michael Geist, the chair of Internet and E-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, said in an interview.

"This is truly unprecedented within the context of this government certainly."

Nicholson had little to say Monday when asked about police concerns over child pornography, noting the government was responding to Canadians "who have been very clear on this."

The debate over modernizing surveillance of the Net has been going on for a decade, said Geist, and police have yet to clearly demonstrate the need for some of the warrantless powers they were seeking. Examples of investigations hampered or stopped by the current legislation have not been provided.

"It was bad policy, badly marketed and the government had little choice but to kill it," said Geist.

"If all you're left with is trying to market a piece of legislation using a bunch of scare tactics, I think Canadians see through that."

Charmaine Borg, the NDP critic for digital issues, called the death of the Internet surveillance law a "great victory and a way forward for politics."

She said more than half of Albertans — "the base of the Conservative party" — opposed Bill C-30.

"We saw people from across Canada speaking out," said Borg. "I think that demonstrates that if you fight hard enough and if you speak up, eventually they'll listen."

Another piece of legislation, Bill C-12, remains before Parliament. It would make it easier for Internet service providers, email hosts and social media sites to voluntarily share personal information about customers with authorities.

Nicholson also announced changes Monday that will ensure police can tap people's phones without a warrant in cases of emergency or imminent harm.

The government's proposals fall in line with recommendations from the Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously last spring that warrantless wiretaps constitute a breach of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The high court gave the government a year to come up with changes to address its concerns.

Nicholson said under the new rules, anyone whose communications have been intercepted in situations of imminent harm must be notified by police within 90 days.

There will also be an annual report compiled on the use of imminent harm wiretaps, and only police — and not other peace officers — will be able to use them.

"We are including all the safeguards that (the Supreme Court justices) required and they suggested," said Nicholson.
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/can...190742401.html





Copyright Lobby Groups Want Canada Back on Piracy Watch List
Michael Geist

The IIPA, the umbrella lobby group that represents the major movie, music, and entertainment software lobby groups, released its recommendations for the U.S. piracy watch list last week. Those that thought passing Bill C-11 - the Canadian copyright reform bill that contained some of the most restrictive digital lock rules in the world - would satisfy U.S. groups will be disappointed. The IIPA wants Canada back on the piracy watch list, one notch below the Special Watch List (where the US placed Canada last year).

Despite the praise for Bill C-11 last year, the groups are right back in criticism mode and demanding reforms. The IIPA is now unsure if the enabler provision will help stop sites that facilitate infringement (despite the fact that its members have yet to use the provision) and concerned with the prospect of new exceptions to the digital lock rules. In fact, its criticisms of the rules for Internet providers (it wants a notice-and-takedown system, tougher rules on search engines that link to infringing content, and new rules to target repeat infringers) are so strong that the organization implausibly claims possible non-compliance with the WIPO Internet treaties.

Moreover, the IIPA wants to undo many of the Bill C-11 changes. It criticizes the new non-commercial caps on statutory damages, the expansion of fair dealing, the non-commercial user generated content provision, the educational exception for publicly available materials on the Internet, and the new exception for temporary copies for technological processes. In other words, the groups are wary of virtually anything designed to provide some balance in the law. There are other targets as well including copyright term extension and more criminal copyright provisions. The Canadian government is unlikely to cave this quickly on copyright, but these demands highlight the pressure that will emerge during the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations and in bi-lateral discussions with the U.S.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6784/125/





Why the Quants Won’t Take Over Hollywood
Felix Salmon

Andrew Leonard has a very odd column about Netflix and House of Cards, under the headline “How Netflix is turning viewers into puppets”. Netflix, you see, has lots of data, and it used that data in the commissioning process for the series:

Netflix’s data indicated that the same subscribers who loved the original BBC production also gobbled down movies starring Kevin Spacey or directed by David Fincher. Therefore, concluded Netflix executives, a remake of the BBC drama with Spacey and Fincher attached was a no-brainer, to the point that the company committed $100 million for two 13-episode seasons.

It should go without saying, of course, that dropping $100 million on a 26-episode remake of a great TV show is never a no-brainer. For one thing, for all that the original series is extremely good, it was also very timely, coming as it did at the end of Margaret Thatcher’s transformation of the Prime Minister’s office into something much more powerful and Presidential than the UK had ever seen. The BBC series tapped into Britain’s fear of the possible implications of that power, as well as the fact that Richard III and Macbeth are deeply rooted in the national psyche.

More generally, remakes are inherently dangerous things: what producers think of as a “proven formula” more often turns out to have been a unique and inimitable confluence of creative electricity. And it goes without saying that the better the original was, the less likely it is that the remake will surpass it.

But Leonard doesn’t see any of those risks, he just sees science, quoting a Netflix flack waxing implausibly about how the company is “able with a high degree of confidence to understand how big a likely audience is for a given show based on people’s viewing habits”. And then Leonard takes that PR fluff and turns it into a lesson about the fearsome implications of Big Data:

The companies that figure out how to generate intelligence from that data will know more about us than we know ourselves, and will be able to craft techniques that push us toward where they want us to go, rather than where we would go by ourselves if left to our own devices. I’m guessing this will be good for Netflix’s bottom line, but at what point do we go from being happy subscribers, to mindless puppets?

We’re never left to our own devices, of course: billions of dollars’ worth of marketing, programming, and other expenses are designed precisely to make us watch this rather than that. But at the same time, we humans somehow stubbornly refuse to become mindless puppets, and our tastes tend to evolve in wonderfully unpredictable ways.

One example of this is Netflix’s own first foray into production, Lilyhammer, which turned no one into puppets mainly because no one actually saw it. But the best example isn’t Netflix at all, but rather Relativity Media. If you think that Leonard is overly credulous about the power of Netflix’s Big Data, wait until you see Chris Jones, profiling Relativity’s Ryan Kavanaugh in 2009. He opens with Ron Howard cooling his heels in Kavanaugh’s waiting room, and then explains just what it is that gives Kavanaugh the power to keep the Hollywood A-list waiting like that:

Before Relativity commits to financing a particular movie — either through its slate deals with Sony and Universal or on its own — it’s fed into an elaborate Monte Carlo simulation, a risk-assessment algorithm normally used to evaluate financial instruments based on the past performance of similar products. Enough variables are included in the Monte Carlo for Wilson and his team to have reached the limits of their Excel’s sixty-five thousand rows of data: principal actor, director, genre, budget, release date, rating, and so on. After running the movie through ten thousand combinations of variables (in marathon overnight sessions), the computers will churn out a few hundred pages that culminate in two critical numbers: the percentage of time the movie will be profitable, and the average profit for each profitable run.

In fact, of course, what gave Kavanaugh all that power is exactly the same thing that gives any other Hollywood producer power: ready cash. In Kavanaugh’s case, the money came from Elliott Associates, the New York hedge fund. Which expected to get hedge-fund-like returns from its investment in Relativity, and instead lost money.

For some reason, there seems to be a huge amount of appetite for anybody saying that Netflix is being incredibly clever here. Rebecca Greenfield’s column desperately trying to work out how spending $100 million on this series could possibly make sense has now racked up more than 100,000 views. But the base case scenario for Netflix is exactly the same as the base case scenario for any other rich outsider walking into the shark tank that is Hollywood. Stars like Kevin Spacey and David Fincher will happily take Netflix’s money for however long Netflix is willing to spend it — as will the studios charging Netflix top dollar for the rights to stream their back catalogues. It’s a lovely new revenue stream for the industry, but it doesn’t mean that Netflix knows what it’s doing.

The truth of Hollywood is no mystery: as William Goldman famously said, nobody knows anything. Sometimes, people have hot streaks, and when that happens, David Carr will write a gushing column about what might be called the anti-Netflix approach: ignore the numbers and the heuristics, and just go out there and take creative risks. And in general, the biggest rewards always accrue to the properties which came from nowhere, doing something startling and new. Conversely, formulas only work until they don’t, and the problem with the Relativity approach is that it’s pretty much guaranteed to hit that inevitable failure, if it keeps on churning out formulaic movies.

With hindsight, the biggest risk that Netflix took with House of Cards was not getting Andrew Davies to write it. Stars and directors are all well and good, but if you’re aspiring to the highbrow, as Netflix is with this series, you need great writing first and foremost. The BBC series, written by Davies, was some of the best-written television ever, at the time; it was The Wire of its day. The remake, by contrast, has cringe-inducingly bad writing, from which the best acting and directing in the world could never recover. (Not that a great writer guarantees anything: even the incomparable William Goldman had more than his fair share of flops.)

In order to realize that a script isn’t up to snuff and needs to be comprehensively rewritten, you need a producer with more than just a Monte Carlo simulation: you need someone who can not only hire talent but can fire it as well. And in order to create the kind of television which will resonate and become a cultural touchstone, you need an impossible-to-formulate cocktail of creativity, inspiration, teamwork, and luck. The House of Cards remake is perfectly good, but it’s not that good. And, in turn, that’s why we, the viewing public, will never be puppets, dangling on the end of some TV quant’s strings. TV’s quants are clever, to be sure. But clever is easy to come by in Hollywood. And it’s never been remotely sufficient for success.
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmo...ver-hollywood/





Can You Erase Yourself from the Internet?

Can you remove all trace of yourself from the internet? Joe Martin finds out

Once it’s online, it’s online for good. That’s the lesson many people learn the hard way through social media, as personal messages go public and private photos end up in places they were never intended to be. But although these extreme cases make the headlines, we still put too much of ourselves online every day – and getting that back can be a frustrating task.

We live in an increasingly connected world, where our digital identities are replicated and spread over a thousand servers and services. For the most part, that’s no bad thing; sites such as Facebook are a great way to keep up with friends, while letting Amazon remember your address is a handy time-saver.

The price paid for these conveniences is high, though: we surrender our privacy and information to companies, which can then use this data as they see fit. Most, such as Facebook and Amazon, will typically use the information to send targeted advertising – which is annoying at worst. Less scrupulous services will sell on our details, or cynically manipulate us into staying subscribed for longer.

And those are the ones we know about. Ask yourself this: in all your years online, how many sites and services have you joined... then left behind as the next big thing came along? Do you remember what you posted on that music forum in 2004? Or which services you tried for webmail before Gmail? We’re only human, so it’s natural that we forget these services as we move on to new and better ones. The problem is, they don’t forget us. And just like a drunken Friday night photo, that data can end up in places you never intended it to go.

A private eye

Whether you’re considering wiping your digital past or just want to avoid being targeted, the first step is to understand what you can demand of companies that have your data. This is pretty easy in the UK, as the 1998 Data Protection Act outlines our basic rights. These include the right to access and correct any data held about you, and the right to the support of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) should that request be denied. The law applies to any company processing personal information within the UK, regardless of where it’s based.

The Data Protection Act isn’t a totally effective weapon, however. While you have the right to access and correct your data, the act also allows a company to charge you for the privilege. There’s currently no provision for forcing a company to wipe your data either, and although EU commissioner Viviane Reding is campaigning for a “right to be forgotten”, progress may be slow as relevant bodies consider the proposal.

“Its implications for the information society need thinking through carefully – as does the challenge of making this right work in practice,” a spokesperson from the ICO told us.

“We can see the desirability of an individual being able to request the removal of information where there’s no compelling reason for its retention. However, an insufficiently qualified right to be forgotten could have serious implications for freedom of expression and for the maintenance of the historical record. An example might be where a public figure tries to use the right to remove embarrassing content from a newspaper archive.”

There is some good news for consumers, however. First, the Data Protection Act forces companies within the UK to explain how data will be used and to communicate any changes to that as they occur. This is why there’s always a hullabaloo when Facebook updates its privacy policy – the company has to tell everyone what it’s doing and deal with the reaction. It’s also how we know that Facebook keeps track of information such as which profiles and photos you’ve been looking at; it then uses this to surface relevant information intended to keep you on the site.

The Data Protection Act allows room for interpretation on what data companies are allowed to keep, decreeing that no personal data can be held for longer than is “required”. The legalese surrounding the clause is hazy at best, but if you’re quitting an online service such as Facebook or Twitter and want to leave no trace on its servers, then this is currently your best legal argument. Companies such as banks may be allowed to continue storing data for legal or operational reasons, but keeping it for profit or “just in case” isn’t a valid reason, as you may want to remind an obstructive customer services agent.

Prevention over cure

While useful in a few cases, this clause can be difficult to enforce, so prevention is easier than cure. Unless you’re dealing with a particularly benevolent company, there often isn’t a simple way to totally remove your own data – and some will go to unusual lengths to disguise that. Facebook wouldn’t let users delete their accounts until as late as 2010, for example, and even now it confuses the process by offering two options: deletion and deactivation.

The difference? A deactivated account can be tagged in photos and posts, will still receive email alerts (which have to be opted out of separately) and can be reactivated at any point. Deleting your account will overcome all of this, but it’s an option buried in a labyrinth of FAQs and privacy options. You will find the option to delete your Facebook account here, but even then the company will retain some of your personal information.

The Untouchables

Some online services, such as WordPress and Skype, don’t let you delete your accounts at all – or deactivate them. The only way you can distance yourself from them is to update them incorrectly. To do this, you’ll need to set up a new free email address under a fake name – JoeBloggs123@gmail.com, for example – then update your profile details to reflect the false identity. The company will probably still have some of your old information, but at least it won’t be able to use it very effectively.

Still, Facebook is better than some of its peers. Twitter takes a month to delete your account, for example – although it’s at least automated if you deactivate your account and stay signed out for 30 days. Note, Twitter claims no control over any of your tweets that have been cached by search engines.

WordPress won’t let you delete your account – only your blogs and comments, all of which have to be dealt with individually, assuming you have the relevant permissions. We contacted the company to find out why it was structured this way, but received no response (see box, right).

For all the deletion dodging practiced by social networks, there are a few sites that offer a comparatively simple process for clearing your information, and online stores are generally the most reliable. This is probably due to the legal scrutiny they fall under as a consequence of holding your credit card details, address details and so on.

Amazon

Take Amazon, for example. The giant of online retailers may have faced criticism earlier this year over how it handles its own finances, but when it comes to your data, it offers a robust selection of options for erasing it wholesale or piecemeal. To wipe your search history and browsing data,visit the Amazon browsing history page, where you can also tell the site not to collect this information in the future. To delete your entire account, just contact the customer services department once you’ve cancelled existing transactions, and a representative will handle your request personally. Easy.

What’s more, deleting your Amazon account at its root allows you to break links to other sites in the Amazon network, such as Javari and Kickstarter. This isn’t something that’s true of other online networks such as Google, where each sub-service will be affected differently. Deleting your overall Google account will erase your Gmail to the extent that the username can’t ever be reused, even by you, but any Google Groups you’ve joined will still be able to email you at secondary addresses, so you may need to deal with those individually.

Thankfully, there are steps you can take to ease the headache. The Google Dashboard details most of the hidden information Google collects about you, linking through to the privacy policies and FAQs for each service you use. This can act as a handy checklist to follow up on once you’ve deleted your primary Google account, which is done here.

A little help

The fact that Google Dashboard acts as a checklist highlights one of the biggest challenges in erasing all of your online tracks. Those who’ve been online for a decade or more will have lost track of all the things they’ve signed up for, leaving a trail of idling Myspace and Friends Reunited profiles.

Tracking down these unwanted services will be tricky and tedious, but companies such as Reputation.com will help – for a price. Founded in 2006, it has become one of the largest in the field at managing the online visibility of individuals and companies. Reputation.com claims it can wipe your information from more than 3,000 corporate databases and block the efforts of more than 200 companies that regularly track online behaviour. Couple that with privacy-protecting best practices, such as disabling cookies in your browser, and your online identity should be somewhat masked.

Reputation

The company claims it can also deal with more personal problems. Typically, these services are used by companies that want to combat fake reviews and bury damning articles, but they’re also available to individuals who want to change how they appear online – if they want to appear at all.

“We focus first on removing the data you want protected from sites that expose it, through a combination of partnerships and technology,” says Noah Lang, vice president of business development at Reputation.com. “Our technology then monitors for the data you’ve protected and, if it resurfaces, we remove it. We also monitor for new sites that may expose personal data online and alert our users if their data appears.”

Reputation-management companies have drawn criticism over the years for their rates and methods, but they claim their exclusive partnerships with personal data aggregators allow them to achieve a lot in a short time.

In fact, rather than large, data-collecting corporations, it’s often personal sites that pose a problem for reputation-management services. If your ex-partner has written an embarrassing blog post about you, all you can really do is send a cease-and-desist letter in the hope of scaring them into submission – and you can do that yourself. Sites such as ChillingEffects.org offer advice on online privacy, as well as templates for formatting and sending your own cease-and-desists to webmasters.

The trouble is that a cease-and-desist letter is usually used as a scare tactic – a formalised threat of legal action should the recipient continue posting objectionable content. It isn’t legally enforceable (that’s the difference between a cease-and-desist order, which is issued by a court of law, and a cease-and-desist letter, which anyone can send), and if someone calls your bluff then your only recourse is to pursue full legal action. This won’t only prove expensive, but will probably be unsuccessful too; arguing against the right to free speech is something only adulterous celebrities seem able to pull off.

Worse still, cease-and-desist letters can often serve to create the opposite effect to that intended and attract attention to the data you’re trying to hide. It’s a phenomenon popularly known as the Streisand effect, after the singer tried to have a photo of her house removed from a website, inadvertently prompting a publicity storm that proved far more intrusive than the original image. It’s the reason many reputation-management services prefer to use search-engine manipulation to bury unwanted data, rather than trying to delete it directly.

Even paying to hide your data instead of destroying it can have ironic twists. After all, you’re handing your data to one online service in the hope of combating another – a notion that plays into the cyclical, self-perpetuating nature of the internet. It’s a fact that also hints at the sad truth of any endeavour to destroy your virtual identity; your data ultimately isn’t your own, and as long as you’re even vaguely participating in society, you’ll never be able to vanish completely.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/3797...m-the-internet





Bogus Emergency Alert Message Transmitted

Someone apparently hacked into the Emergency Alert System and announced on KRTV and the CW that "dead bodies are rising from their graves" in several Montana counties.

This message did not originate from KRTV, and there is no emergency.

Our engineers are investigating to determine what happened and if it affected other media outlets.

UPDATE, 7 pm: A TV station in Michigan has experience a similar hacking incident: "The hackers posted a bizarre message that ran across the bottom of the TV screen about bodies rising from the dead."
http://www.krtv.com/news/bogus-emerg...e-transmitted/





Executive Order Aims to Facilitate Sharing of Information on Threats
Kim Zetter

President Barack Obama signed an executive order on Tuesday designed to make it easier to disseminate classified information on threats against critical infrastructure systems and to lay the groundwork for obtaining information from the private sector that would help the government protect critical infrastructures in the U.S.

The order, which runs eight pages, directs the Attorney General’s office, the office of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and the Director of National Intelligence to issue instructions to their agencies that would “ensure the timely production of unclassified reports of cyberthreats to the U.S. homeland that identify a specific targeted entity” to Congress and also develop a program for providing “classified cyber threat and technical information from the Government to eligible critical infrastructure companies or commercial service providers that offer security services to critical infrastructure,” according to the document.

To that end, the order also calls for the government to expedite security clearances to appropriate personnel employed by critical infrastructure owners and operators, so that they can receive information necessary to protect their systems.

“It is the policy of the United States Government to increase the volume, timeliness, and quality of cyber threat information shared with U.S. private sector entities so that these entities may better protect and defend themselves against cyber threats,” the order states.

The order, published in conjunction with a new Presidential Directive on cybersecurity, follows numerous failed attempts by Capitol Hill to pass controversial cybersecurity legislation that would have given private companies legal immunity to share information with the government.

The order still allows the private sector to share information with the government, but references established safeguards — such as the Fair Information Practice Principles — for protecting the privacy of customers whose information is shared and also carries some built-in limitations for the kind of information that companies will likely share. The order requires DHS’s chief privacy officer and its officer for civil rights and civil liberties to assess the privacy and civil liberties risks of the programs.

Civil liberties advocates praised the executive order in this regard, but said they will withhold judgment until they see how the information-sharing gets played out in practice.

“A lot of what this shows is that the president can do a lot without cybersecurity legislation,” said Mark Jaycox, policy analyst and legislative assistant for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who points out that the executive order satisfies the need for information sharing without the privacy problems that existed under legislative proposals where loopholes would have allowed companies to dump large amounts of data on the government in an effort to obtain legal immunities. Without those immunities, companies will by nature be more circumspect about what they provide the government, thus limiting what they hand over Jaycox said.

“An [executive order] can’t grant broad immunities to companies … so it will tighten the information that can be shared, and the government won’t be on the receiving end of tons of tons of information,” Jaycox said. “Companies will be more mindful about what they share.”

Although the order comes after a number of failed attempts by Congress last year to pass cybersecurity legislation, the White House has indicated that it doesn’t see the executive order as a substitute for legislation, and the order even indicates that further legislation is not ruled out in addressing the critical infrastructure issue.

Not everyone is happy with the order, however. Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) told the Washington Post that the president was out of line in bypassing legislation.

“It is a very dangerous road he’s going down contrary to the spirit of the Constitution,” Sen. Grassley said. “Just because Congress doesn’t act doesn’t mean the president has a right to act.”

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, which passed the House last year but failed to gain support in the Senate, was one piece of legislation that garnered a lot of criticism from civil liberties groups who were happy to see it fail. EFF and others criticized the bill for failing to provide enough safeguards to protect the digital privacy of customers when private entities such as ISPs and others shared threat information with the government.

CISPA would have allowed companies to share sensitive and personal data with the National Security Agency and other government agencies without requiring companies to make reasonable efforts to protect their customers’ privacy. The bill also failed to adequately define how the government could use the data, saying only that it would be used for “national security” purposes.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Michigan) and Ranking Member C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Maryland) plan on reintroducing CISPA this week.

Critical infrastructure sectors include chemical, communications, dams, critical manufacturing, emergency services, food and agriculture, energy, defense industrial base, healthcare and public health, government facilities, water and wastewater and transportation, among a few others.

DHS currently oversees the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center, a 24-hour watch center tied in with other federal watch centers that parses threat information that comes in to the center and monitors government civilian networks for signs of cyber threats. DHS, along with the Department of Energy, also operates the Industrial Control System – Computer Emergency Readiness Team, which helps assess industrial control systems for vulnerabilities and maintains a flyaway team to assist critical infrastructure owners in the private sector with responding to suspected attacks on their networks.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...cybersecurity/





DHS Watchdog OKs ‘Suspicionless’ Seizure of Electronic Devices Along Border
David Kravets

The Department of Homeland Security’s civil rights watchdog has concluded that travelers along the nation’s borders may have their electronics seized and the contents of those devices examined for any reason whatsoever — all in the name of national security.

The DHS, which secures the nation’s border, in 2009 announced that it would conduct a “Civil Liberties Impact Assessment” of its suspicionless search-and-seizure policy pertaining to electronic devices “within 120 days.” More than three years later, the DHS office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties published a two-page executive summary of its findings.

“We also conclude that imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefits,” the executive summary said.

The memo highlights the friction between today’s reality that electronic devices have become virtual extensions of ourselves housing everything from e-mail to instant-message chats to photos and our papers and effects — juxtaposed against the government’s stated quest for national security.

The President George W. Bush administration first announced the suspicionless, electronics search rules in 2008. The President Barack Obama administration followed up with virtually the same rules a year later. Between 2008 and 2010, 6,500 persons had their electronic devices searched along the U.S. border, according to DHS data.

According to legal precedent, the Fourth Amendment — the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures — does not apply along the border. By the way, the government contends the Fourth-Amendment-Free Zone stretches 100 miles inland from the nation’s actual border.

Civil rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union suggest that “reasonable suspicion” should be the rule, at a minimum, despite that being a lower standard than required by the Fourth Amendment.

“There should be a reasonable, articulate reason why the search of our electronic devices could lead to evidence of a crime,” Catherine Crump, an ACLU staff attorney, said in a telephone interview. “That’s a low threshold.”

The DHS watchdog’s conclusion isn’t surprising, as the DHS is taking that position in litigation in which the ACLU is challenging the suspicionless, electronic-device searches and seizures along the nation’s borders. But that conclusion nevertheless is alarming considering it came from the DHS civil rights watchdog, which maintains its mission is “promoting respect for civil rights and civil liberties.”

“This is a civil liberties watchdog office. If it is doing its job property, it is supposed to objectively evaluate. It has the power to recommend safeguards to safeguard Americans’ rights,” Crump said. “The office has not done that and the public has the right to know why.”

Toward that goal, the ACLU on Friday filed a Freedom of Information Act request demanding to see the full report that the executive summary discusses.

Meantime, a lawsuit the ACLU brought on the issue concerns a New York man whose laptop was seized along the Canadian border in 2010 and returned 11 days later after his attorney complained.

At an Amtrak inspection point, Pascal Abidor showed his U.S. passport to a federal agent. He was ordered to move to the cafe car, where they removed his laptop from his luggage and “ordered Mr. Abidor to enter his password,” according to the lawsuit.

Agents asked him about pictures they found on his laptop, which included Hamas and Hezbollah rallies. He explained that he was earning a doctoral degree at a Canadian university on the topic of the modern history of Shiites in Lebanon.

He was handcuffed and then jailed for three hours while the authorities looked through his computer while numerous agents questioned him, according to the suit, which is pending in New York federal court.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...rder-seizures/





Researchers Say AI Prescribes Better Treatment Than Doctors
Derrick Harris

Summary: Two Indiana University researchers have developed a computer model they say can identify significantly better and less-expensive treatments than can doctors acting alone. It’s just the latest evidence that big data will have a profound impact on our health care system.

A pair of Indiana University researchers has found that a pair of predictive modeling techniques can make significantly better decisions about patients’ treatments than can doctors acting alone. How much better? They claim a better than 50 percent reduction in costs and more than 40 percent better patient outcomes.

The idea behind the research, carried out by Casey Bennett and Kris Hauser, is simple and gets to the core of why so many people care so much about data in the first place: If doctors can consider what’s actually happening and likely to happen instead of relying on intuition, they should be able to make better decisions.

In order to prove out their hypothesis, the researchers worked with “clinical data, demographics and other information on over 6,700 patients who had major clinical depression diagnoses, of which about 65 to 70 percent had co-occurring chronic physical disorders like diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease.” They built a model using Markov decision processes — which predict the probabilities of future events based on those immediately preceding them — and dynamic decision networks — which extend the Markov processes by considering the specific features of those events in order to determine the probabilities. Essentially, their model considers the specifics of a patient’s current state and then determines the best action to effect the best possible outcome.

Specifically, Bennett and Hauser found via a simulation of 500 random cases that their model decreased the cost per unit of outcome change to $189 from the $497 without it, an improvement of 58.5 percent. They found their original model improved patient outcomes by nearly 35 percent, but that tweaking a few parameters could bring that number to 41.9 percent.

It’s not surprising that anyone would think computers and data analysis could be a boon for the health care system:

• IBM has been banging this drum loudly, most recently with two new commercial versions of its Watson system — one of which is designed to determine the best-possible course of treatment for lung cancer patient by analyzing their situations against a library of millions of pages of clinical evidence and medical research.

• In July, I highlighted 10 ways that health care providers and startups are using big data to improve effectiveness and decrease treatment costs.

• More recently, I explained how access to more — and better — data is critical to everything from rating doctors to, possibly, curing cancer.

Furthermore, at Structure: Data on March 20, I’ll be discussing the marriage of big data and health care with Aetna innovation head Michael Palmer.

However, no one (or very few people, at least) suggests that Watson or any computer model can or should replace physicians’ judgment. What they can do, though, is digest quantities of research and case studies that no single human being could, meaning they can take a lot more information into account when computing possible outcomes and treatments.

So, although we won’t hear “Paging Dr. Watson” at the hospital anytime soon, there’s an increasingly high chance our doctors will retire to their offices with our charts and ask a computer system of some sort what might be wrong with us and how they might best fix it.
http://gigaom.com/2013/02/11/researc...-than-doctors/





IBM's Watson Gets Its First Piece Of Business In Healthcare
Bruce Upbin

IBM’s Watson, the Jeopardy!-playing supercomputer that scored one for Team Robot Overlord two years ago, just put out its shingle as a doctor or, more specifically, as a combination lung cancer specialist and expert in the arcane branch of health insurance known as utilization management. Thanks to a business partnership among IBM, Memorial Sloan-Kettering and WellPoint, health care providers will now be able to tap Watson’s expertise in deciding how to treat patients.

Pricing was not disclosed, but hospitals and health care networks who sign up will be able to buy or rent Watson’s advice from the cloud or their own server. Over the past two years, IBM’s researchers have shrunk Watson from the size of a master bedroom to a pizza-box-sized server that can fit in any data center. And they improved its processing speed by 240%. Now what was once was a fun computer-science experiment in natural language processing is becoming a real business for IBM and Wellpoint, which is the exclusive reseller of the technology for now. Initial customers include WestMed Practice Partners and the Maine Center for Cancer Medicine & Blood Disorders.

Even before the Jeopardy! success, IBM began to hatch bigger plans for Watson and there are few areas more in need of supercharged decision-support than health care. Doctors and nurses are drowning in information with new research, genetic data, treatments and procedures popping up daily. They often don’t know what to do, and are guessing as well as they can. WellPoint’s chief medical officer Samuel Nussbaum said at the press event today that health care pros make accurate treatment decisions in lung cancer cases only 50% of the time (a shocker to me). Watson, since being trained in this medical specialty, can make accurate decisions 90% of the time. Patients, of course, need 100% accuracy, but making the leap from being right half the time to being right 9 out of ten times will be a huge boon for patient care. The best part is the potential for distributing the intelligence anywhere via the cloud, right at the point of care. This could be the most powerful tool we’ve seen to date for improving care and lowering everyone’s costs via standardization and reduced error. Chris Coburn, the Cleveland Clinic’s executive director for innovations, said at the event that he fully expects Watson to be widely deployed wherever the Clinic does business by 2020.

Watson has made huge strides in its medical prowess in two short years. In May 2011 IBM had already trained Watson to have the knowledge of a second-year medical student. In March 2012 IBM struck a deal with Memorial Sloan Kettering to ingest and analyze tens of thousands of the renowned cancer center’s patient records and histories, as well as all the publicly available clinical research it can get its hard drives on. Today Watson has analyzed 605,000 pieces of medical evidence, 2 million pages of text, 25,000 training cases and had the assist of 14,700 clinician hours fine-tuning its decision accuracy. Six “instances” of Watson have already been installed in the last 12 months.

Watson doesn’t tell a doctor what to do, it provides several options with degrees of confidence for each, along with the supporting evidence it used to arrive at the optimal treatment. Doctors can enter on an iPad a new bit of information in plain text, such as “my patient has blood in her phlegm,” and Watson within half a minute will come back with an entirely different drug regimen that suits the individual. IBM Watson’s business chief Manoj Saxena says that 90% of nurses in the field who use Watson now follow its guidance.

WellPoint will be using the system internally for its nurses and clinicians who handle utilization management, the process by which health insurers determine which treatments are fair, appropriate and efficient and, in turn, what it will cover. The company will also make the intelligence available as a Web portal to other providers as its Interactive Care Reviewer. It is targeting 1,600 providers by the end of 2013 and will split the revenue with IBM. Terms were undisclosed.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupb...in-healthcare/





Adobe Cuts Australian Prices after Inquiry Summons
David Ramli

Adobe has bowed to public pressure and cut its Australian prices

US software giant Adobe has bowed to public pressure and slashed the price of some of its products for Australian customers a day after being ordered to front a parliamentary committee hearing in Canberra.

The move will be seen as a partial victory for consumer advocates and the politicians behind the Federal IT Pricing inquiry, which has been investigating allegations that US technology companies price gouge Australian customers.

In a statement seen by The Australian Financial Review, Adobe has pledged to cut the price of its Creative Cloud suite so that local users pay the same price as US consumers. The company is known for its Photoshop image editing suite and other software. Where individual customers previously paid $62.99 per month for an annual subscription to the online version of its full software package, they will now pay $49.99 per month. Access to individual software has also been cut to $19.99 per month.

But businesses will continue to be charged inflated prices and more traditional software sold through retailers will be offered at the same rates.

“As Adobe continues to attract membership to its cloud offerings, it is evolving its product offering to provide increased value to subscribers, including new pricing for customers in Australia and New Zealand,” the company said in a statement.

“Creative Cloud membership pricing in Australia for individuals has been reduced to AU$49.99 on an annual subscription per month for new and current customers, effective immediately. Month to month pricing was $94.99 per month [and is now] $74.99 per month.”

The price change comes a day after the Federal IT Pricing inquiry summonsed Adobe, Apple and Microsoft before a public hearing in Canberra on March 22 after all three companies refused to attend voluntarily. Adobe and Microsoft had previously offered individual submissions.

The AFR can also reveal that Adobe’s global chief executive Shantanu Narayen will open a major new office in Sydney on Thursday with Communications Minister Stephen Conroy. The office will be used to manage operations throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

Senator Conroy was the minister who first requested the inquiry in May 2012.

Labor MP Ed Husic, who has been a driving force behind the inquiry, welcomed Adobe’s price cut.

“Lowering business IT costs will provide a big boost to small and medium sized enterprises – and we need to keep pushing to see this happen,” he said. “As a member of the IT Pricing Inquiry, I’m looking forward to finding out what else Adobe plans to do to reduce its prices.”
http://www.afr.com/p/technology/adob...rXRGNIrS1M2fNN





Stop Pretending Cyberspace Exists

Treating the Internet as a mythical country makes us dumber
Michael Lind

Some ideas make you dumber the moment you learn of them. One of those ideas is the concept of “cyberspace.” The term was coined by William Gibson in his novel “Neuromancer” and defined as “a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system …” As a metaphor that borrows imagery from geography, cyberspace is no different in kind from, say, John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier. But while nobody thinks that governments are invading Kennedy’s New Frontier, or commercializing Kennedy’s New Frontier, techno-anarchists on the right or left are constantly complaining that “cyberspace” is being “colonized” by government, business or both.

That’s what makes it necessary to state what ought to be obvious: There is no such place as cyberspace. It is not a parallel universe, coexisting with our world but in a different dimension. It is just a bad metaphor that has outlived its usefulness. Using the imagery of a fictitious country makes it harder to have rational arguments about government regulation or commercial exploitation of modern information and communications technologies.

Let’s start with government and cyberspace. Most Internet activity takes place in particular territories governed by states. The users of the equipment, as well as the infrastructure of servers, wireless towers, and so on, apart from satellites, are physical entities located in sovereign states. Maybe jihadists in the lawless “tribal” regions of Pakistan are effectively beyond the power of sovereign states. But individuals sitting at their PCs in, say, California are subject to the jurisdiction of the state of California and the United States of America. They may claim to be “citizens of cyberspace,” but that is a joke — the equivalent of presenting a customs officer at an international airport with a passport from the Kingdom of Oz.

So it makes no sense to say that California and the U.S. are extending their jurisdiction “into” cyberspace. Cyberspace is not the equivalent of land that has suddenly arisen off the coast and has yet to be claimed effectively by any existing nation-state. The countries of the world already have jurisdiction over all of the activity that goes on within their recognized international borders. How they exercise that authority can and should be debated. A liberal regime will pass legislative safeguards against government misuse of data and communications and will generally take a light hand, when it comes to regulation and taxation, in the interest of personal freedom and ease of commerce. But the fact that bad states may abuse the power to regulate telecommunications does not mean that benign states lack, or should lack, that power.

The idea that corporations are “invading” a mythical Oz-like kingdom called cyberspace is just as dopey. Unless you live in a country where a government monopoly builds, maintains and provides all connections to the Internet, or unless—in the alternative—you have personally built your own PC or phone or tablet and your own Internet infrastructure, at your own expense, you are dependent on a for-profit corporation for your access to the Internet. If you think that Internet service providers should be regulated in the public interest, good. So do I. But regulation would make them public utilities, like water treatment facilities or electric power plants. Nobody complains that electric utilities are “invading” the Virtual Realm of Electricity by generating and selling power, much less that governments that regulate power plants and power lines are “colonizing” that a virtual world made of electrons.

If you’re not convinced by now that the very notion of cyberspace is silly, try substituting “fax” or “telephone” or “telegraph” for “cyber” in words and sentences. The results will be comical. “Activists denounced government criminal surveillance policies for colonizing Fax Space.” “Should Telephone Space be commercialized?” Again, the point is not that telecommunications should not be structured and governed in the public interest, but rather that the debate about the public interest is not well served by the Land of Oz metaphor.

My guess is that cyber-hype is on the way out, for several reasons. For one thing, the novelty of PCs and wireless phones has worn off. They are no longer mystical portals to another dimension, but mere appliances.

At the same time, the borders between different communications modes — telephones, TVs and the Internet — are rapidly collapsing. No matter who wins the Battle of the Telcos — cable, telephone companies or something else entirely — modern IT-based communication will become a boring part of the 21st century landscape, like other utilities, including electricity and telephony and telegraphy, that seemed magical to earlier generations.

A sign that cyber-silliness may have reached its sell-by date is a new, tongue-in-cheek publication by Daniel Castro of the Information Technology and Information Foundation, a Washington, D.C., research institute (with which I have no affiliation). Released 17 years to the day after former Grateful Dead drummer and Electronic Freedom Foundation board member John Perry Barlow published his utopian “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” “A Declaration of the Interdependence of Cyberspace” restores common sense to a subject dominated too long by the gibberish of techno-utopians:

Libertarians of the Virtual World, you gray-bearded detractors of government and sovereignty, we too come from Cyberspace. On behalf of the future, we ask you of the past to leave us alone. Your declaration of independence rings false, and your stale principles are a threat to progress….

You claim to be advancing society on the Internet through a new social contract devoid of government influence, yet you have often dismissed or ignored the problems we face today. While many problems can be solved through self-governance, many others require government action. The governments of the world, not merely your virtual personas, have been at the helm of most initiatives to provide more universal access to the Internet, to foster digital literacy, and to limit digital crime…..


Like other intellectual-political fads of the late 20th century, including neoliberal economics and neoconservative foreign policy, the idea of cyberspace as a parallel reality free from government regulation and commercial corruption was confused in its conception and doomed in practice. While we can all get smarter merely by dropping the term “cyberspace,” it’s not necessary to get rid of cyberspace itself. There never was any such thing.
http://www.salon.com/2013/02/12/the_end_of_cyberspace/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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