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Old 23-10-13, 07:34 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 26th, '13

Since 2002


































"Imagine instead of driving down the street scanning license tags, driving down the street checking the faces of individuals walking down the street. We have to remind ourselves - just because we can do something doesn't mean we should do it." – Philadelphia Police Chief Charles Ramsey






































October 26th, 2013










Megaupload Raid ‘Destroyed’ (Way) More Than 10,000,000 Legal Files
Ernesto

New research from Boston’s Northeastern University shows that with the shutdown of Megaupload, the U.S. Government took down at least 10.75 million legitimate files. The researchers examined the percentage of legal and copyright-infringing content on six file-hosting services. While infringing content outnumbers legitimate files on all sites, the volume of non-infringing content casts doubt on the drastic seizure that took place early last year.

When the U.S. Government took down Megaupload it branded the company as a pirate site with seemingly few legitimate uses. Up until now, however, there has been no research to back up this claim.

In an attempt to fill this gap researchers from Boston’s Northeastern University, together with colleagues from France and Australia, examined millions of files that were uploaded to five cyberlockers (FileFactory, Easy-share, Filesonic, Wupload and Megaupload) and the reupload service Undeadlink.

To find out whether the files were legitimate or not, the researchers extracted metadata from the site’s uploads using a link checker. The researchers controlled for several factors including split archives, and then manually determined the legitimacy of the files based on random samples of 1,000 uploads per site.

The results just published in the article titled “Holiday Pictures or Blockbuster Movies? Insights into Copyright Infringement in User Uploads to One-Click File Hosters” provide a unique insight into the proportion of infringing content on these services.

The main results displayed in the figure below reveal that the percentage of infringing files varies heavily between the six services. In addition, it also shows that for the majority of the files the researchers couldn’t conclusively determine whether a file was infringing or not.

For Megaupload (MU) the researchers found that 31% of all uploads were infringing, while 4.3% of uploads were clearly legitimate. This means that with an estimated 250 million uploads, 10.75 million uploads were non-infringing. For the remaining 65% the copyrighted status was either unknown, or the raters couldn’t reach consensus.

Using the most conservative estimate the findings show that the Megaupload raid took down at least 10.75 million legitimate files. In addition, the researchers found that FileFactory had a highest percentage of non-infringing uploads (14%).

With 0.1% Wupload and Undeadlink had the fewest uploads that were clearly legitimate, while 79% of all files added to these services were without a doubt infringing.

The research confirms that “one click” file-hosting services appear to be predominantly used to upload pirated content. However, there’s clearly also plenty of non-infringing uses, something the U.S. Government may have overlooked when it took Megaupload offline.

TorrentFreak spoke with Tobias Lauinger, one of the authors of the paper, who told us that the high volume of legitimate files is one of the most interesting aspects of the study.

“What I find most interesting about our results is that they support what many people were already suspecting before: That Megaupload was partially being used for “illegal” file sharing, but that there were also millions of perfectly legitimate files stored on Megaupload.”

One of the main drawbacks of the findings is that the researchers couldn’t determine the infringing status of the majority of the files. For two-third of all uploads to Megaupload this remains uncertain.

While unlikely, this means that in the most optimistic scenario 69.3% of the files uploaded to Megaupload could be perfectly legal. This means that the Megaupload raid could in theory have destroyed 172,500,000 million non-infringing files.

TorrentFreak talked to Megaupload’s Kim Dotcom who says that both the number of files as well as the non-infringing use was much higher in reality.

The researchers, however, found that based on the number of possible file IDs and the hit rate they got by randomly guessing these IDs there were an estimated 250 million files available at the time of the experiment.

Of course, the many users who lost access to their personal files are not helped by this statistics. But perhaps it may serve as a reminder for the District Court to finally make a decision on whether or not to allow former users to retrieve their files. It’s been almost two years after all.
http://torrentfreak.com/megaupload-r...-files-131018/





Pirate Bay Cofounder Appeals Hacking Case, Argues to Halt His Extradition

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg may be sent to Denmark to face new charges.
Cyrus Farivar

It has been a rough year for Pirate Bay cofounder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg.

In September 2012, the famed hacker was deported from his adopted home of Cambodia on a visa violation. After arriving in Sweden, Svartholm Warg was immediately arrested on hacking charges. By June 2013, he had been found guilty of "invading" the mainframe of Nordea (a major bank), as well as aggravated fraud and attempted aggravated fraud. He was then sentenced (Swedish) to two years in prison, which last month was reduced to one year on appeal.

Svartholm Warg is now facing extradition to neighboring Denmark to face related charges. He and another unnamed co-defendant are accused of illegally accessing the country’s driver’s license database, social security database, the shared IT system across the Schengen zone, and the e-mail accounts and passwords of 10,000 police officers and tax officials. Apparently, all of that data was managed by CSC, a major American IT contractor. If convicted (Danish), the two men could face up to six years in prison.

On Tuesday, Svartholm Warg formally appealed his case (Google Translate) to the Swedish Supreme Court. In addition, in a new open letter published on Sunday to local authorities, Svartholm Warg argued that there are several unresolved issues with his case. He sent the letter from prison to three government officials, “Swedish and international media,” and the two Swedish Pirate Party members of the European Parliament.

Since his sentence was reduced in Sweden (and accusations of hacking the Nordea bank were annulled), “it must be investigated whether this act should be considered ‘the same offense’ or not,” Svartholm Warg said.

Svartholm Warg's detention in Sweden since late 2012 counts toward his sentence (he still owes his share of the fines) for the infamous Pirate Bay copyright case. In 2010, a Swedish appellate court reduced sentences for the other codefendants (not including Svartholm Warg) to between four and 10 months each while increasing their collective fine to 46 million Swedish kronor ($6.8 million). In February 2012, the Supreme Court of Sweden declined to hear the case, and the European Court of Human rights rejected the appeal of two other Pirate Bay defendants in a unanimous decision this past March, finding that their conviction did not violate their human rights.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...s-extradition/





Filesharing Site Revealed to be Anti-Piracy ‘Honeypot’

Operator of UploaderTalk boasts of ‘biggest swerve ever’ as he sells user data to anti-piracy company
Samuel Gibbs

A high-profile file-sharing site has been revealed to be a year-long pirate "honeypot", collecting data on users, file hosters and websites.

The revelation, which had users of the forum up in arms, accompanied the purchase of the UploaderTalk (UT) site by US-based anti-piracy company Nuke Piracy.

A honeypot is a facility, in this case a site, run under false pretences that encourages criminal behaviour in an effort to collect incriminating data.

“That's right – the biggest swerve ever,” the operator of UT, known only as WDF, said in a statement about the purchase of the site. “I, WDF, work for the anti-piracy people!”

Set up to collect data

WDF, having previously been a senior member of another high-profile filesharing site called WJunction, started UT a year ago – a site designed to attract people who upload copyrighted files to file-hosting sites for profit, as well as representatives of file-hosters touting affiliate and incentive schemes.

“UT was set up for a number of reasons. But mostly to be a sounding board, proof of concept ... and to collect data,” said WDF.

“I collected info on file hosts, web hosts, websites. I suckered shitloads of you,” WDF bragged.

Proprietary and unconventional methods

It is unclear what WDF or Nuke Piracy, a private anti-piracy firm, intends to do with the data collected. Nuke Piracy, based in Arkansas, USA, clearly states on its website that it uses “proprietary and unconventional methods we do not discuss or disclose our methodologies, processes, and procedures publicly.”

It is likely that Nuke Piracy will use the data as part of its anti-piracy actions, collected from UT and possibly WJunction as well, given that WDF had access to sensitive data on the site as a senior management including user accounts.

“I work for Nuke Piracy now, this is very bad for anyone profiting from piracy,” proclaimed WDF.

Nuke Piracy, which launched its own site and “IP theft and copyright infringement detection, mitigation, and prevention” services in February 2013, has reportedly made several moves to acquire active piracy sites, set up honeypots, as well as an anti-piracy news site called CashWhore.net.
http://www.theguardian.com/technolog...talk-user-data





Open Codec Pioneer Leaves Red Hat, Joins Mozilla to Work on Next-Generation Video Codec
Janko Roettgers

Summary: Monty Montgomery, the mastermind behind Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora, has joined up with Mozilla to finish the development of an open next-generation video codec.

Xiph.org founder Monty Montgomery is leaving Red Hat to join Mozilla next week. Montgomery announced the change on Google+ Tuesday, writing: “This is not a reflection on Red Hat, but rather jumping at an opportunity offered by Mozilla.”

Montgomery is currently working on Daala, a next-generation video codec that aims to provide better results than H.265, also known as HEVC, without requiring any kind of commercial license agreements. Much of the work on Daala has already been done by people working for Mozilla, which acts as the primary sponsor for the project.

Montgomery has been active in the development of open codecs for years. His Xiph.org foundation first introduced the open audio codec Ogg Vorbis in 2000, and followed up with the open video codec Ogg Theora in 2008. Ogg Theora has since largely been replaced by Google’s open VP8 video codec, but Ogg Vorbis is still in use in many applications, and for example powers parts of Spotify’s music streaming service.

Next-generation codecs like H.265 and its competitors are set to play a big role as video providers are starting to embrace 4K video. Google has been working on its own VP9 video codec to compete with H.265, and recently added playback support for VP9 to its Chrome browser. However, Daala is trying to take things one step further. From a recent introduction to Daala:

“The next-generation VP9 and HEVC codecs are the latest incremental refinements of a basic codec design that dates back 25 years to h.261. This conservative, linear development strategy evolving a proven design has yielded reliable improvement with relatively low risk, but the law of diminishing returns is setting in. Recent performance increases are coming at exponentially increasing computational cost. Daala tries for a larger leap forward— by first leaping sideways— to a new codec design and numerous novel coding techniques.”

Montgomery told me that the advantage of using completely novel research also is that there are fewer suspicions that an open codec violates someone else’s intellectual property. He added that the progress on Daala is solid, and that the current time line is to have the codec at a state where it could be used in commercial products by the end of 2015.
http://gigaom.com/2013/10/15/monty-m...lla-for-daala/





YouTube MP3 Converter Loses Court Battle But The Music Plays On
Andy

One of the world’s largest sites dedicated to converting YouTube videos to downloadable MP3s has lost a court battle with representatives from the music industry. YouTube-MP3, a site that was also threatened by Google in 2012, agreed to cease and desist from its current mode of operation after it was revealed it was not only ripping music from YouTube, but also archiving the MP3s for future download. Despite the loss, the site remains online – legally.

In addition to obtaining music from file-sharing networks, those looking for free tracks often get them from so-called tube-rippers, sites and services that transform YouTube videos into downloadable MP3s.

These tools are available in several formats including desktop packages, apps for mobile devices, and more commonly browser-based tools. In mid-2012 YouTube owners Google, believed to be under pressure from the music industry, started to make life more difficult for web-based YouTube converters and some cases issued threats to sue.

While some sites decided to shut down, many others continued business as usual, including the German site YouTube-MP3, one of the largest YouTube ripping services around with around 30 million visits per month. The site has long insisted that it has a right to provide ripping services but having fought off Google it recently found itself up against fresh adversaries.

Three music companies under the umbrella of industry group BVMI challenged YouTube-MP3′s assertion that it operates legally and sued it in the Hamburg District Court. The companies said that while YouTube-MP3 claimed to be offering only a rip-and-download service, there were serious technical issues behind the scenes that rendered the site in breach of copyright law.

YouTube-MP3 claimed that users of its service could enter the URL of a YouTube video and have the site convert and churn out an MP3 for download. Apparently, however, that wasn’t always the way it worked. Once a video had been converted to MP3, that audio was stored on YouTube-MP3′s servers. If another user subsequently entered the same YouTube URL, no conversion or ripping was carried out. They were simply handed a copy of the previously stored MP3 for download.

In a statement sent to TorrentFreak, BVMI said that this was a clear breach of copyright law.

“Contrary to the common assumption that YouTubeMP3 is a streamripper that allows users to record songs from the Internet (much as cassette recorders were used to record music from the radio back in the day), in fact the online converter often simply made the pieces available for download without a license,” BVMI said.

BVMI said that by the time the case had arrived in court last month the owner of YouTube-MP3 had already signed cease and desist declarations and agreed to refrain from reproducing and distributing copyright content.

“The current case provides deep insights into the workings of so-called ‘recording services’and exposes a trick that not only hoodwinks the rights owners but also misleads the users of these services,” said BVMI Managing Director Dr Florian Drücke.

“Under the guise of private copying [YouTube-MP3] deceives people into thinking that everything is above-board, even though the user – unwittingly – avails himself of an illegal download platform. We have for some time pointed out that the vague definition of ‘private copies’ encourages cat-and-mouse games in matters of streamripping, so a clarification at the political level is needed here.”

With the signing of the declarations the Hamburg District Court considered the case closed but ordered YouTube-MP3 to pay everyone’s costs.

TorrentFreak contacted the site’s owner for a comment but as yet we’ve received no response. Presumably life at YouTube-MP3 will continue, but without storing converted MP3s for subsequent download. The end result, of course, is that users of the site will still get ripped MP3s just as they did before, a point not lost on BVMI.

“One thing is clear: this platform, as well as most other streamripper sites, generate considerable advertising income that is not shared with the artists or their partners. This has nothing to do with fairness, nor does it fit with our current digital age, when many music sites – some of them free – can be used perfectly legally on the Internet,” BVMI conclude.
http://torrentfreak.com/youtube-mp3-...ays-on-131023/





Wikipedia Editors, Locked in Battle with PR Firm, Delete 250 Accounts

Investigation follows reports that Wiki-PR scored Viacom, Priceline as clients.
Joe Mullin

Wikipedia editors have disabled hundreds of paid Wikipedia editing accounts in recent weeks as part of a campaign against so-called "sockpuppetry."

The efforts were described in a statement published this morning by the Wikimedia Foundation, in which director Sue Gardner acknowledged that "as many as several hundred" accounts belong to editors who are being paid to promote products or services on the site. That's a violation of Wikipedia policies and terms of use, Gardner noted. "As a result, Wikipedians aiming to protect the projects against non-neutral editing have blocked or banned more than 250 user accounts," continued Gardner. "The Wikimedia Foundation takes this issue seriously and has been following it closely."

The statement follows reports earlier this month in the The Daily Dot and last week in Vice. The stories describe the increasing amounts of money flowing toward paid editing of English-language Wikipedia pages. According to both articles, Wikipedia editors attribute the growth in paid edits to a company called Wiki-PR.

The Daily Dot interviewed four Wiki-PR clients who said they paid between $500 and $1,000 to have articles written and then $50 a month for ongoing "page management" services. For its article, Vice spoke to a college dean who paid $1,500 for a profile to be written—and then was asked to pay another $800 for 30 days of "media relations efforts" when the page kept getting deleted.

Unfortunately for Wikipedia editors, Wiki-PR recently had success in attracting larger corporate clients. In a tweet captured by Wikipedians in September, Wiki-PR's head of sales boasted of snagging Viacom and Priceline as clients.

"I don't give two shits if they write articles about websites that sell erectile dysfunction pills," said longtime Wikipedia editor Kevin Gorman in an interview with Vice. "They're immediately obvious to the casual user as lame spam. I'm much more worried about what happens when an unethical outfit manages to start getting major clients and start controlling articles that our average reader assumes are not written by corporate flaks."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...-250-accounts/





Authors Accept Censors’ Rules to Sell in China
Andrew Jacobs

Chinese readers of Ezra F. Vogel’s sprawling biography of China’s reformist leader Deng Xiaoping may have missed a few details that appeared in the original English edition.

The Chinese version did not mention that Chinese newspapers had been ordered to ignore the Communist implosion across Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. Nor that General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, purged during the Tiananmen Square crackdown, wept when he was placed under house arrest. Gone was the tense state dinner with the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev when Deng, preoccupied by the throngs of students then occupying the square, let a dumpling tumble from his chopsticks.

Mr. Vogel, a professor emeritus at Harvard, said the decision to allow Chinese censors to tinker with his work was an unpleasant but necessary bargain, one that allowed the book to reach the kind of enormous readership many Western authors can only dream of. His book, “Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China,” sold 30,000 copies in the United States and 650,000 in China.

“To me the choice was easy,” he said during a book tour of China that drew appreciative throngs in nearly a dozen cities. “I thought it was better to have 90 percent of the book available here than zero.”

Such compromises, almost unheard of just five years ago, are becoming increasingly common as American authors and their publishers are drawn to the Chinese market. With a highly literate population hungry for the works of foreign writers, China is an increasing source of revenue for American publishing houses; last year e-book earnings for American publishers from China grew by 56 percent, according to the Association of American Publishers. Chinese publishing companies bought more than 16,000 titles from abroad in 2012, up from 1,664 in 1995.

This month, Chinese book agents and publishers flocked to the Frankfurt book fair, aggressively bidding on the works of Western writers and offering handsome advances, especially for titles by best-selling authors. China can also be a gold mine for royalties. Last year J.K. Rowling took in $2.4 million here, and Walter Isaacson, the author of the biography “Steve Jobs,” earned $804,000, according to the Huaxi Metropolitan Daily in Chengdu, which publishes an annual list.

But while best-selling mysteries like “The Da Vinci Code,” by Dan Brown, or classics like Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” are often faithfully translated, the authors of sexually explicit works or those that touch on Chinese politics and history can find themselves in an Orwellian embrace with a censorship apparatus that has little patience for the niceties of literary or academic integrity.

Some books, like “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the erotic blockbuster by E.L. James that has been published in more than three dozen countries, may be beyond salvaging. A Chinese publisher who reportedly paid handsomely for the rights last year has so far been thwarted from bringing it to press, according to industry executives.

Qiu Xiaolong has refused to allow his fourth novel, “A Case of Two Cities,” to be printed in China.

Foreign writers who agree to submit their books to China’s fickle censorship regime say the experience can be frustrating. Qiu Xiaolong, a St. Louis-based novelist whose mystery thrillers are set in Shanghai, said Chinese publishers who bought the first three books in his Inspector Chen series altered the identity of pivotal characters and rewrote plot lines they deemed unflattering to the Communist Party. Most egregiously, he said, publishers insisted on removing any references to Shanghai, replacing it with an imaginary Chinese metropolis called H city because they thought an association with violent crime, albeit fictional, might tarnish the city’s image.

Mr. Qiu, who writes in English but was born and raised in China, said that he had reluctantly agreed to some of the alterations, and only after heated discussion, but that others had been made after he approved what he thought were final translations. “Some of the changes are so ridiculous they made the book incoherent,” he said in a phone interview. Having been burned three times, he said he has refused to allow his fourth novel, “A Case of Two Cities,” to be printed in China.

The title of "When Red is Black" was changed to "A Farewell Song to Shikumen" in China. According to the author, Qiu Xiaolong, the words "red" and "black" were considered too politically sensitive.

Other authors have resisted, too. In 2003, Hillary Rodham Clinton ordered her memoir “Living History” pulled from Chinese shelves after she discovered that large sections of the book had been excised without permission. More recently, a Chinese version of Alan Greenspan’s “Age of Turbulence” was shelved after he refused to approve significant changes to the book.

James Kynge, a columnist for The Financial Times and the author of “China Shakes the World: A Titan’s Rise and Troubled Future — and the Challenge for America,” walked away from a potentially lucrative deal last year after one publisher demanded that an entire chapter be cut. “As a journalist committed to accuracy,” he said, “I felt it would be terrifically hypocritical to waive that principle just to gain access to the Chinese marketplace.”

But such stands, it seems, are becoming increasingly rare. Many writers say they are torn by their desire to protect their work and the need to make a living in an era of shrinking advances. For others, it is simply about cultivating an audience in the world’s most populous country, a rising superpower that cannot be summarily ignored.

“As an academic who doesn’t write for a large publication, I’m always happy to have a readership that extends beyond the three people in my family,” said Rebecca Karl, a professor of modern Chinese history at New York University whose book “Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History” was recently purchased by a Chinese publishing house. She said most of the cuts demanded by her publisher, Hunan People’s Publishing, were relatively painless, although she fought back on every one of them. “It’s about what I expected,” she said.

What she did not expect was that the book would be withheld from publication. The book was rushed to publication for the coming 120th anniversary of Mao’s birth, but when Ms. Karl came to China for the launch in June, it had been canceled. “It could end up never being published,” she said.

Jo Lusby, managing director at Penguin Books China, which has published 250 foreign titles in the past eight years, said she often finds herself trying to ease communications between indignant Western writers and the Chinese editors whose job it is to iron out passages they deem unacceptable. In most instances, she said, the Chinese side refuses to bend.

Even if the process remains opaque and unpredictable, publishing executives say the broad outlines of China’s censorship regime have changed little in recent years. Topics that deal with ethnic tensions, Taiwan and Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement, are off limits, and books that contain even a passing reference to the Cultural Revolution or contemporary Chinese leaders can expect fine-toothed scrutiny.

Gone are the days of the 1990s when Chinese publishers would buy boundary-pushing titles from abroad and hope to sneak them past the censors. The country’s 560 publishing houses are required to employ in-house censors, most of them faithful party members. Then there is the General Administration of Press and Publications, whose anonymous apparatchiks can order the removal of chapters or kill an entire book. (The administrative agency did not respond to requests for comment.)

But it is the editors at Chinese publishing houses themselves who often turn out to have the heaviest hands. “Self-censorship has become the most effective weapon,” said the editor in chief of a prominent publishing house in Beijing that publishes more than 300 foreign titles a year, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “If you let something slip through that catches the attention of a higher-up, it can be a career killer.”

For Western writers, the process can be time-consuming and confounding. Mr. Vogel, whose Chinese publisher, Sanlian, is one of China’s most respectable publishing houses, said it took a year to settle on a final translation, which was adapted from the unexpurgated version published in Hong Kong. Friends of Mr. Vogel told him the book was considered so sensitive that even the children of long-deceased party luminaries mentioned in the book were given a chance to comment on the galleys.

Many deletions involved passages that detailed squabbles between top leaders or specific adjectives, like those describing Mao Zedong as “paranoid” and “vindictive.” Edited out, too, was the phrase suggesting that Deng, then in his 80s, was aloof from the yearnings and complaints of ordinary Chinese.

“The impressive thing is how much actually got through,” Mr. Vogel said.

Michael Meyer, whose 2008 book, “The Last Days of Old Beijing,” laments the destruction of the city’s historic fabric, had a similar reaction after seeing the final galleys of the Chinese edition last year. “I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop,” he said.

In the end, editors made a few predictable deletions — including a reference to the Tiananmen Square crackdown and a passage in which the artist Ai Weiwei criticizes the city’s leaders — and a title change that sought to cast the book as a nostalgic love letter (“See You Again, Old Beijing”).

For Mr. Meyer, the most amusing changes involved two text messages sent to him by a New York architect who was attending a municipal planning session in a large coastal city.

The first described the presence of a young woman, who was hanging on the arm of a middle-aged man with a comb-over and loudly sucking on a lollipop. The second message announced that the man was the mayor and the woman was his mistress.

The passages were removed.

Patrick Zuo and Amy Qin contributed research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/20/wo...-in-china.html





Japan Secrecy Act Stirs Fears About Press Freedom, Right to Know
Linda Sieg and Kiyoshi Takenaka

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's government is planning a state secrets act that critics say could curtail public access to information on a wide range of issues, including tensions with China and the Fukushima nuclear crisis.

The new law would dramatically expand the definition of official secrets and journalists convicted under it could be jailed for up to five years.

Japan's harsh state secrecy regime before and during World War Two has long made such legislation taboo, but the new law looks certain to be enacted since Abe's Liberal Democratic Party-led bloc has a comfortable majority in both houses of parliament and the opposition has been in disarray since he came to power last December.

Critics see parallels between the new law and Abe's drive to revise Japan's U.S.-drafted, post-war constitution to stress citizen's duties over civil rights, part of a conservative agenda that includes a stronger military and recasting Japan's wartime history with a less apologetic tone.

"There is a demand by the established political forces for greater control over the people," said Lawrence Repeta, a law professor at Meiji University. "This fits with the notion that the state should have broad authority to act in secret."

Abe says the new law, a draft of which was approved by his cabinet on Friday and should be passed by parliament in the current session, is vital to his plan to set up a U.S.-style National Security Council to oversee security policies and coordinate among ministries.

Outside Abe's official residence, several dozen protesters gathered in the rain in a last-minute appeal against the move.

"We are resolutely against this bill. You could be subject to punishments just by revealing what needs to be revealed to the public," one of the protesters said.

Legal and media experts say the law, which would impose harsh penalties on those who leak secrets or try to obtain them, is too broad and vague, making it impossible to predict what would come under its umbrella. The lack of an independent review process leaves wide latitude for abuse, they say.

"Basically, this bill raises the possibility that the kind of information about which the public should be informed is kept secret eternally," Tadaaki Muto, a lawyer and member of a task force on the bill at the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, told Reuters.

"Under the bill, the administrative branch can set the range of information that is kept secret at its own discretion."

Media watchdogs fear the law would seriously hobble journalists' ability to investigate official misdeeds and blunders, including the collusion between regulators and utilities that led to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.

A probe by an independent parliamentary panel found that collusion between regulators and the nuclear power industry was a key factor in the failure to prevent the meltdowns at Tokyo Electric Power Co's (Tepco) tsunami-hit Fukushima plant in March 2011, and the government and the utility remain the focus of criticism for their handling of the on-going crisis.

Tepco has often been accused of concealing information about the crisis and many details have first emerged in the press. In July, Tepco finally admitted to massive leaks of radiation-contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean after months of media reports and denials by the utility.

CHILLING IMPACT

"This may very well be Abe's true intention - cover-up of mistaken state actions regarding the Fukushima disaster and/or the necessity of nuclear power," said Sophia University political science professor Koichi Nakano.

Legal experts fear a broad impact on the media's ability to act as a watchdog. "It seems very clear that the law would have a chilling effect on journalism in Japan," said Meiji University's Repeta.

Critics have dismissed as political window dressing the addition of references to freedom of the press and the right to know, which were added to the bill at the insistence of the LDP's junior coalition partner, the New Komeito party.

The LDP has sought unsuccessfully previously to enact such a state secrets law but impetus was renewed after a Japanese Coast Guard official posted video online in 2010 showing a collision between a Chinese fishing boat and a Japanese patrol vessel near disputed isles in the East China Sea. The government, then led by the now-opposition Democratic Party, wanted to keep the video under wraps for fear of inflaming tense Sino-Japanese relations.

The Coast Guard official was suspended for one year, but resigned his post. He was not indicted for any crime.

The new legislation would create four categories of "special secrets" that should be kept classified - defense, diplomacy, counter-terrorism and counter-espionage.

Top officials in all ministries - rather than only defense officials as currently - will be able to designate state secrets for five years, renewable in five-year increments and potentially indefinitely, although cabinet approval would be required after 30 years.

"As things stand, the state gets a more or less free hand in deciding what constitutes a state secret and it can potentially keep things secret forever," Nakano said.

Currently, only defense secrets are subject to such classification. Security experts say that makes defense officials reluctant to share classified data with other ministries, a pre-requisite for the functioning of the planned National Security Council.

Under the new law, public servants and others cleared for access to such information could get up to 10 years in prison for leaks. At present, they face one year imprisonment except for defense officials, who are subject to up to five years in prison or 10 years if the data came from the U.S. military.

Journalists and others in the private sector who encourage such leaks could get up to five years in jail if they used "grossly inappropriate" means to encourage leaks.

(Writing by Linda Sieg; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...99N1EC20131025





Online Retailers Are Cruising Tor to Hunt for Fraudsters
Meghan Neal

That time of year is nigh: the holiday season, and all the commercial excess it begets. With Black Friday a month away, retailers of both the brick-and-mortar and online variety are bracing for the buying frenzy that keeps some businesses afloat for the rest of year. For e-commerce sites, this means pouring effort into preventing the growing problem of online fraud, and one strategy they’re using to thwart these fraudsters is to identify orders coming from encrypted networks like Tor.

This week, the verification company Service Objects announced a new tool to help websites detect "suspicious" visitors using Tor and other anonymous proxies. Its updated DOTS IP Address Validation product identifies discrepancies between the user's home location and the location of the IP address the order’s coming from. It joins a handful of other tools on the market promising Tor-detection for retailers.

It’s a logical strategy: If you're trying to buy something with stolen credit card, you're obviously going to want to block your real identity and location while doing it. But it also raises the question of whether targeting anonymity services to hunt out fraudsters could have chilling effects for harmless Tor users trying to protect their privacy online—particularly this year in light of the NSA-spying scandal.

What’s worrisome is when the sole fact that someone’s using an anonymity service is enough to presume they’re guilty of something criminal. This fear was fueled after documents leaked by Edward Snowden at the beginning of this month revealed the NSA has repeatedly tried (without much success) to crack Tor's encrypted network, believing it's used to enable terrorism and other criminal activities. The irony is that one of the most relied upon services to evade the invasive government cyber-spies is also being specifically targeted by them. And that in turn could inadvertently implicate people using secure browsing for legitimate reasons.

In the case of online retail, whether cruising Tor has an unintended ripple effect depends a lot on what the companies do after they’ve detected an anonymized IP address. Do you automatically ban it? Flag it for further verification? How likely is it that a user visiting an e-commerce site through Tor is committing fraud?

Pretty likely, according to a September study by another verification company, Iovation. The company analyzed 240 million transactions throughout the month of August and found that 30 percent of those using Tor were fraudulent, compared with one percent of non-Tor transactions.

Now, Iovation also sells a Tor-detecting service for preventing fraud, ReputationManager 360, so the study was hardly coming from a place of objectivity. But statistics like that and the increasing prevalence of fraudulent transactions has online retailers nervous. If a business fulfills an illegal transaction it can cost them a lot of time and money from chargebacks: Last year illegitimate purchases cost retailers a total $3.9 billion in lost revenue.

So while there’s nothing wrong with trying to spot would-be fraudsters using encryption to fly under the radar, identifying anonymized IPs should only be step one. From there, there's a range of tools and tips to verify if a user is legitimate or not, for instance checking the credit card number the person provides for the purchase against databases listing stolen account numbers.

For its part, the Tor Project tries to stay ahead of the problem—it offers its own tool to help websites sniff out bad seeds in the onion network. You can type in your server’s IP address and it will generate a list of Tor exit points that would be used to access your website. "Giving you the whole list means you can query the list privately, rather than telling us your users' IP addresses," Tor explains. Retailers can then peruse and flag orders coming in from Tor nodes for additional verification to see if it's a legitimate order, instead of resorting to a sweeping ban.
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/onl...for-fraudsters





Anonymity Network Tor Needs a Tune-up to Protect Users from Surveillance

Fixes are planned for Internet anonymity tool Tor after researchers showed that national intelligence agencies could plausibly unmask users.
Tom Simonite

Why It Matters

Tor provides crucial online anonymity to activists, NGOs, and government workers around the world.

When reports published earlier this month revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency could reverse the protections of Internet anonymity tool Tor, many activists and others who rely on the tool had little reason to panic. Despite the alarmist tone of some headlines, the techniques revealed relied on attacking software such as Web browsers rather than Tor itself. After reviewing the leaked NSA documents, the Tor Project declared “there’s no indication they can break the Tor protocol.”

All the same, the Tor Project is trying to develop critical adjustments to how its tool works to strengthen it against potential compromise. Researchers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory have discovered that Tor’s design is more vulnerable than previously realized to a kind of attack the NSA or government agencies in other countries might mount to deanonymize people using Tor.

Tor prevents people using the Internet from leaving many of the usual traces that can allow a government or ISP to know which websites or other services they are connecting to. Users of the tool range from people trying to evade corporate firewalls to activists, dissidents, criminals, and U.S. government workers with more sophisticated adversaries to avoid.

When people install the Tor client software, their outgoing and incoming traffic takes an indirect route around the Internet, hopping through a network of “relay” computers run by volunteers around the world. Packets of data hopping through that network are encrypted so that relays know only their previous and next destination (see “Dissent Made Safer”). This means that even if a relay is compromised, the identity of users, and details of their browsing, should not be revealed.

However, new research shows how a government agency could work out the true source and destination of Tor traffic with relative ease. Aaron Johnson of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and colleagues found that the network is vulnerable to a type of attack known as traffic analysis.

This type of attack involves observing Internet traffic data going into and out of the Tor network and looking for patterns that reveal the Internet services that a specific Internet connection, and presumably its owner, is using Tor to access. Johnson and colleagues showed that the method could be very effective for an organization that both contributed relays to the Tor network and could monitor some Internet traffic via ISPs.

“Our analysis shows that 80 percent of all types of users may be deanonymized by a relatively moderate Tor-relay adversary within six months,” the researchers write in a paper on their findings. “These results are somewhat gloomy for the current security of the Tor network.” The work of Johnson and his colleagues will be presented at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Berlin next month.

Johnson told MIT Technology Review that people using the Tor network to protect against low-powered adversaries such as corporate firewalls aren’t likely to be affected by the problem. But he thinks people using Tor to evade the attention of national agencies have reason to be concerned. “There are many plausible cases in which someone would be in a position to control an ISP,” says Johnson.

Johnson says that the workings of Tor need to be adjusted to mitigate the problem his research has uncovered. That sentiment is shared by Roger Dingledine, one of Tor’s original developers and the project’s current director (see “TR35: Roger Dingledine”).

“It’s clear from this paper that there *do* exist realistic scenarios where Tor users are at high risk from an adversary watching the nearby Internet infrastructure,” Dingledine wrote in a blog post last week. He notes that someone using Tor to visit a service hosted in the same country—he gives the example of Syria—would be particularly at risk. In that situation traffic correlation would be easy, because authorities could monitor the Internet infrastructure serving both the Tor user and the service he or she is connecting to.

Dingledine is considering changes to the Tor protocol that might help. In the current design, the Tor client selects three entry points into the Tor network and uses them for 30 days before choosing a new set. But each time new “guards” are selected the client runs the risk of choosing one an attacker using traffic analysis can monitor or control. Setting the Tor client to select fewer guards and to change them less often would make traffic correlation attacks less effective. But more research is needed before such a change can be made to Tor’s design.

Whether the NSA or any other country’s national security agency is actively trying to use traffic analysis against Tor is unclear. This month’s reports, based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden, didn’t say whether the NSA was doing so. But a 2012 presentation marked as based on material from 2007, released by the Guardian, and a 2006 NSA research report on Tor, released by the Washington Post did mention such techniques.

Stevens Le Blond, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Kaiserslautern, Germany, guesses that by now the NSA and equivalent agencies likely could use traffic correlation should they want to. “Since 2006, the academic community has done much work on traffic analysis and has developed attacks that are much more sophisticated than the ones described in this report.” Le Blond calls the potential for attacks like those detailed by Johnson “a big issue.”

Le Blond is working on the design of an alternative anonymity network called Aqua, designed to protect against traffic correlation. Traffic entering and exiting an Aqua network is made to be indistinguishable through a mixture of careful timing, and blending in some fake traffic. However, Aqua’s design is yet to be implemented in usable software and can so far only protect file sharing rather than all types of Internet usage.

In fact, despite its shortcomings, Tor remains essentially the only practical tool available to people that need or want to anonymize their Internet traffic, says David Choffnes, an assistant professor at Northeastern University who helped design Aqua. “The landscape right now for privacy systems is poor because it’s incredibly hard to put out a system that works, and there’s an order of magnitude more work that looks at how to attack these systems than to build new ones.”
http://www.technologyreview.com/news...-surveillance/





Seeking Online Refuge From Spying Eyes
Jenna Wortham

Consider this scene in “The Circle,” Dave Eggers’s new novel that imagines a dystopian future dominated by an omnipotent social networking company: Mae, the young protagonist, tries to unplug from her hypernetworked life to go on a covert, solitary kayaking trip. But when she returns to shore, she is greeted by police officers who have been alerted to her excursion by several hidden cameras. She quickly realizes that very little in her life isn’t recorded, tracked and analyzed.

It’s a troubling image, one that some fear might not be limited to works of fiction. In fact, some elements of Mae’s scenario have emerged recently in the news. There was the report that the National Security Agency can create sophisticated maps of some people’s personal information and social connections. There were the recent changes to Facebook’s privacy settings that will no longer allow users to hide their profiles from public searches. In addition, Google recently revealed that it was considering using anonymous identifiers to track browsing habits online, raising hackles among privacy advocates who have described it as “the new way they will identify you 24/7.”

And, at the same time, drones are becoming commonplace — used by the government in counterterrorism efforts and by hobbyists — prompting discussions about the long-term impact on privacy.

These developments, among others, have spurred the creation of a handful of applications and services intended to give people respite and refuge from surveillance, both online and off. They have a simple and common goal: to create ways for people to use the Internet and to communicate online without surveillance.

Nadim Kobeissi, a security adviser in Montreal who works on an encrypted-message service called Cryptocat, said the security and hacker circles of which he is a part have long suspected that the government is listening in on online conversations and exchanges but “have never been able to prove it.” He added: “It’s been a worst-case-scenario prediction that all turned out to be true, to a worrying extent.”

If nothing else, the N.S.A. leaks and disclosures have brought these issues front and center for many people, myself included, who are troubled by how much of our daily and online interaction is concentrated in and around a handful of companies that have funneled data to the N.S.A.

“It’s sad that this is the proverbial kick in the butt that needs to bring awareness to this concept,” said Harlo Holmes, who works for the Guardian Project, a group that is building several anti-surveillance and privacy applications.

Ms. Holmes says interest has been surging in the Guardian Project’s services, which include tools that let people make phone calls over the Internet which the organization says cannot be recorded. More than a million people have downloaded an app called Orbot that allows users to send e-mails anonymously through mobile devices.

She said it was common to assume that people who want to avoid detection online are doing illicit things, like trying to buy drugs or look up illegal content — and that may happen. But it is certainly not the intent.

She says the Guardian Project and its peers are built for people who live under governments that don’t allow access to the Web or to certain apps, as well as for people who simply don’t like the idea of their online activity being tracked and monitored. Ms. Holmes says that most of the tools are used by people in totalitarian states. “We get a lot of feedback from people who use it to get access to blogs and sites they can’t access because of a firewall,” she said, referring, for example, to a government blocking access to Twitter.

Most of these services are still relatively small. For example, Cryptocat, the encrypted-message service, typically sees peaks of around 20,000 simultaneous users. In recent months, that number has grown to 27,000. But it’s a far cry from the hundreds of thousands, or even millions, that mainstream social networking tools and services can claim.

“As good as all of our intentions are, whatever looks good and is user-friendly gets critical mass,” she said. “That is what is going to take off.”

But those who work on these services say they don’t have to compete directly with the Facebooks, Twitters and Googles of the world. They just have to offer an alternative, independent space where people can interact if and when they need to.

Dan Phiffer works on a project called Occupy.here that gives people access to a private messaging forum by creating small, localized pockets of Internet access. People who are nearby and whose laptops or mobile devices detect the network are directed to a discussion board where they can interact. Inspired by the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, the idea was to allow activists and organizers to interact in a way that would be hard for police officers to track.

His project is naturally resistant to Internet surveillance, “but its original purpose was not for countersurveillance,” he said. “What I am trying to do is build alternative online spaces for supporting activists and those who might be sympathetic to their cause.”

Mr. Phiffer also thinks that the project can have much larger implications and motivate “broader political engagement by offering a tool for people who are tired of the disregard of their civil liberties by their government.”

Of course, there is no guarantee that the Guardian Project, Mr. Kobeissi’s project, or any others like it are safe from being broken into by a government or a hacker or another entity. But Mr. Kobeissi said that there was an upside to all of the disturbing security disclosures: at least now, he said, the security world can deal with the information disclosed in leaks “on a per-revelation basis” to make its own offerings stronger and more secure.

The truth, he said, is that “we are developing software in an unknown environment, even though we know so much about the threats being posed.”

“The specifics are always changing,” he added.

Tools like Cryptocat, he said, are just the impetus for a larger discussion. “It’s not an answer by itself,” he said. “It is a combination of privacy and technology, democratic movement and political discussion that it is not acceptable to use the Internet as a surveillance medium.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/1...m-spying-eyes/





Google Announces uProxy: Internet Censorship Avoidance in a Browser Extension
Mariella Moon

At its Ideas Summit in New York, Google revealed Uproxy: a service that aims to change the way people around the globe use the internet. A browser extension for Chrome and Firefox, uProxy can bypass restrictive firewalls that hinder users from accessing vital (and trivial) information online by creating peer-to-peer connections. If someone from a country with limited internet access installs uProxy, they can get a friend from the US to authorize them to surf the open web using their connection. The service has yet to launch, but its creators -- the University of Washington and Brave New Software -- have opened a restricted beta for select, technically adept users to make it as "secure, private, and robust" as possible. If you know anyone who could benefit from uProxy, especially in times of need, direct them to the source link below for the sign-up page.
http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/21/google-ideas-uproxy/





Ten Steps You Can Take Right Now Against Internet Surveillance
Danny O'Brien

One of the trends we've seen is how, as the word of the NSA's spying has spread, more and more ordinary people want to know how (or if) they can defend themselves from surveillance online. But where to start?

The bad news is: if you're being personally targeted by a powerful intelligence agency like the NSA, it's very, very difficult to defend yourself. The good news, if you can call it that, is that much of what the NSA is doing is mass surveillance on everybody. With a few small steps, you can make that kind of surveillance a lot more difficult and expensive, both against you individually, and more generally against everyone.

Here's ten steps you can take to make your own devices secure. This isn't a complete list, and it won't make you completely safe from spying. But every step you take will make you a little bit safer than average. And it will make your attackers, whether they're the NSA or a local criminal, have to work that much harder.

• Use end-to-end encryption. We know the NSA has been working to undermine encryption, but experts like Bruce Schneier who have seen the NSA documents feel that encryption is still "your friend". And your best friends remain open source systems that don't share your secret key with others, are open to examination by security experts, and encrypt data all the way from one end of a conversation to the other: from your device to the person you're chatting with. The easiest tool that achieves this end-to-end encryption is off-the-record (OTR) messaging, which gives instant messaging clients end-to-end encryption capabilities (and you can use it over existing services, such as Google Hangout and Facebook chat). Install it on your own computers, and get your friends to install it too. When you've done that, look into PGP–it's tricky to use, but used well it'll stop your email from being an open book to snoopers.
• Encrypt as much communications as you can. Even if you can't do end-to-end, you can still encrypt a lot of your Internet traffic. If you use EFF's HTTPS Everywhere browser addon for Chrome or Firefox, you can maximise the amount of web data you protect by forcing websites to encrypt webpages whenever possible. Use a virtual private network (VPN) when you're on a network you don't trust, like a cybercafe.
• Encrypt your hard drive. The latest version of Windows, Macs, iOS and Android all have ways to encrypt your local storage. Turn it on. Without it, anyone with a few minutes physical access to your computer, tablet or smartphone can copy its contents, even if they don't have your password.
• Strong passwords, kept safe. Passwords these days have to be ridiculously long to be safe against crackers. That includes the password to email accounts, and passwords to unlock devices, and passwords to web services. If it's bad to re-use passwords, and bad to use short passwords, how can you remember them all? Use a password manager. Even write down your passwords and keeping them in your wallet is safer than re-using the same short memorable password -- at least you'll know when your wallet is stolen. You can create a memorable strong master password using a random word system like that described at diceware.com.
• Use Tor. "Tor Stinks", this slide leaked from GCHQ says. That shows much the intelligence services are worried about it. Tor is an the open source program that protects your anonymity online by shuffling your data through a global network of volunteer servers. If you install and use Tor, you can hide your origins from corporate and mass surveillance. You'll also be showing that Tor is used by everyone, not just the "terrorists" that GCHQ claims.
• Turn on two-factor (or two-step) authentication. Google and Gmail has it; Twitter has it; Dropbox has it. Two factor authentication, where you type a password and a regularly changed confirmation number, helps protect you from attacks on web and cloud services. When available, turn it on for the services you use. If it's not available, tell the company you want it.
• Don't click on attachments. The easiest ways to get intrusive malware onto your computer is through your email, or through compromised websites. Browsers are getting better at protecting you from the worst of the web, but files sent by email or downloaded from the Net can still take complete control of your computer. Get your friends to send you information in text; when they send you a file, double-check it's really from them.
• Keep software updated, and use anti-virus software. The NSA may be attempting to compromise Internet companies (and we're still waiting to see whether anti-virus companies deliberately ignore government malware), but on the balance, it's still better to have the companies trying to fix your software than have attackers be able to exploit old bugs.
• Keep extra secret information extra secure. Think about the data you have, and take extra steps to encrypt and conceal your most private data. You can use TrueCrypt to separately encrypt a USB flash drive. You might even want to keep your most private data on a cheap netbook, kept offline and only used for the purposes of reading or editing documents.
• Be an ally. If you understand and care enough to have read this far, we need your help. To really challenge the surveillance state, you need to teach others what you've learned, and explain to them why it's important. Install OTR, Tor and other software for worried colleagues, and teach your friends how to use them. Explain to them the impact of the NSA revelations. Ask them to sign up to Stop Watching Us and other campaigns against bulk spying. Run a Tor node, or hold a cryptoparty. They need to stop watching us; and we need to start making it much harder for them to get away with it.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/1...t-surveillance





CryptoSeal VPN Shuts Down Rather than Risk NSA Demands for Crypto Keys

Complying with US law while protecting user privacy a tough task, company says.
Jon Brodkin

A consumer VPN service called CryptoSeal Privacy has shut down rather than risk government intrusions that could cost the company money in legal fees and threaten user privacy.

CryptoSeal will continue offering its business-focused VPN, but the consumer service is done, the company announced:

With immediate effect as of this notice, CryptoSeal Privacy, our consumer VPN service, is terminated. All cryptographic keys used in the operation of the service have been zerofilled, and while no logs were produced (by design) during operation of the service, all records created incidental to the operation of the service have been deleted to the best of our ability.

Essentially, the service was created and operated under a certain understanding of current US law, and that understanding may not currently be valid. As we are a US company and comply fully with US law, but wish to protect the privacy of our users, it is impossible for us to continue offering the CryptoSeal Privacy consumer VPN product.

VPN services let consumers gain extra privacy and security while using the Internet. A user establishes an encrypted connection with a VPN service, routing all Internet traffic to the VPN before sending it on to the rest of the Internet.

Some VPN services promise only protection from common hackers, which is useful for people seeking extra security while surfing the Web on public Wi-Fi networks. To hide one's traffic from Internet service providers or governments, people look to VPNs that promise not to keep any logs that might reveal what they use the Internet for.

CryptoSeal's description of its business VPN service says it's not designed to hide information from the government. "CryptoSeal Connect is not designed as a BitTorrent or other file-sharing VPN and is not designed to give you anonymity against the legal system," the company said. "We fully comply with all warrants and subpoenas and are located in the United States. We suggest using systems such as the Tor Project for anonymity requirements."

The possibility of handing cryptographic keys over to the government is a troubling one, though. "For anyone operating a VPN, mail, or other communications provider in the US, we believe it would be prudent to evaluate whether a pen register order could be used to compel you to divulge SSL keys protecting message contents, and if so, to take appropriate action," CryptoSeal wrote.
Lavabit case raises troubling legal possibilities

The company referred to the case of Lavabit, an e-mail service that shut down rather than comply with government orders to monitor user communications. A legal filing in that case raises a possibility that is troubling for CryptoSeal. Specifically, it describes "a Government theory that if a pen register order is made on a provider, and the provider's systems do not readily facilitate full monitoring of pen register information and delivery to the Government in realtime, the Government can compel production of cryptographic keys via a warrant to support a government-provided pen trap device," CryptoSeal wrote.

"Our system does not support recording any of the information commonly requested in a pen register order, and it would be technically infeasible for us to add this in a prompt manner," CryptoSeal continued. "The consequence, being forced to turn over cryptographic keys to our entire system on the strength of a pen register order, is unreasonable in our opinion and likely unconstitutional. But until this matter is settled, we are unable to proceed with our service."

CryptoSeal is investigating "alternative technical ways" to comply with US law without sacrificing user privacy, but in the meantime it is offering customers refunds as well as "one year subscriptions to a non-US VPN service of mutual selection" and "free service for one year if/when we relaunch a consumer privacy VPN service." CryptoSeal also encouraged people to donate to a Lavabit legal fund.

We've contacted CryptoSeal to ask why it's able to keep its business service open but haven't heard back yet. Selling to enterprises is more lucrative than selling to consumers, of course, providing one possible reason CryptoSeal chose this route. Another factor is that businesses seeking a VPN service may be more concerned about security from hackers than about hiding Internet activity from governments and Internet service providers.

A comment on Hacker News apparently posted by CryptoSeal founder and CEO Ryan Lackey points to the cost of legal services being one of the main factors.

"The financial issue was the potentially huge liability due to a legal action or battle, not the (small) costs of operating the service," Hacker News user "RDL" wrote. The service "was covering operating costs and some profit," but the risk of defending against a government order would have wiped that out.

"If we were the legally best VPN option, I would probably have pushed to keep it going anyway and just shut down when/if that happened, but as it is, non-US providers run by non-US people (there are several good ones) are an objectively better option, so in good conscience there's no reason to continue running a US privacy VPN service without technical controls to prevent being compelled to screw over a user," RDL wrote.
http://arstechnica.com/information-t...r-crypto-keys/





France Summons U.S. Ambassador Over Spying Report

France summoned the U.S. ambassador on Monday to protest allegations in Le Monde newspaper about large-scale spying on French citizens by the U.S. National Security Agency.

The allegations that the agency was collecting tens of thousands of French telephone records risked turning into a diplomatic row just as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Paris for the start of a European tour over Syria.

"I have immediately summoned the U.S. ambassador and he will be received this morning at the Quai d'Orsay (the French Foreign Ministry)," French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told reporters on the sidelines of an EU meeting in Luxembourg.

Earlier, France's interior minister, Manuel Valls, said Le Monde's revelations that 70.3 million pieces of French telephone data were recorded by the NSA between Dec 10, 2012 and Jan 8, 2013 were "shocking."

"If an allied country spies on France or spies on other European countries, that's totally unacceptable," Valls told Europe 1 radio.

U.S. Ambassador to France Charles Rivkin declined immediate comment on reports that he had been called in by the French foreign ministry but stressed that U.S.-French ties were close.

"This relationship on a military, intelligence, special forces ... level is the best it's been in a generation," Rivkin told Reuters as Kerry arrived in Paris.

In July, Paris prosecutors opened a preliminary inquiries into the NSA's program, known as Prism, after Germany's Der Spiegel and Britain's The Guardian revealed wide-scale spying by the agency leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

"We were warned in June (about the program) and we reacted strongly but obviously we need to go further," Fabius said. "We must quickly assure that these practices aren't repeated."

The NSA's targets appeared to be individuals suspected of links to terrorism, as well as those tied to French business or politics, Le Monde wrote.

(Reporting By Adrian Croft and Arshad Mohammed. Writing by Alexandria Sage; editing by Mark John)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...99K04920131021





Berlin Complains: Did US Tap Chancellor Merkel's Mobile Phone?
Jacob Appelbaum, Holger Stark, Marcel Rosenbach and Jörg Schindler

Berlin is taking seriously indications that Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone might have been tapped by US intelligence, according to SPIEGEL information. Merkel spoke with President Barack Obama on Wednesday about her concerns.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel phoned United States President Barack Obama on Wednesday to discuss suspicions that she may have been targeted by US intelligence agencies for years, SPIEGEL has learned.

The chancellor asked for a thorough explanation of serious indications that US intelligence agencies had declared her private mobile phone to be a target in their operations.

Merkel made it clear that, should these indications turn out to be true, she "unequivocally disapproves" of such methods and finds them "totally unacceptable," her spokesman Steffen Seibert said. "This would be a grave breach of trust," he added. "Such practices must immediately be put to a stop."

The unusually strong reaction from the Chancellery was prompted by SPIEGEL research. After the information was examined by the country's foreign intelligence agency, the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), and the Federal Office for Information Security, Berlin seems to have found their suspicions plausible enough to confront the US government.

During her conversation with Obama, Merkel expressed her expectation that "US authorities would provide an explanation about the possible extent of such surveillance practices, and thus answer questions that the German government already posed months ago," Seibert said.

"As a close ally of the United States of America, the German government expects a clear contractual agreement on the activities of the agencies and their cooperation," he added.

In response to the allegations, a spokeswoman for the US National Security Council told SPIEGEL: "The President assured the Chancellor that the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of Chancellor Merkel."

The spokeswoman did not wish to specify whether this statement applied to the past.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-929642.html





Leaked Memos Reveal GCHQ Efforts to Keep Mass Surveillance Secret

Exclusive: Edward Snowden papers show UK spy agency fears legal challenge if scale of surveillance is made public
James Ball

The UK intelligence agency GCHQ has repeatedly warned it fears a "damaging public debate" on the scale of its activities because it could lead to legal challenges against its mass-surveillance programmes, classified internal documents reveal.

Memos contained in the cache disclosed by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden detail the agency's long fight against making intercept evidence admissible as evidence in criminal trials – a policy supported by all three major political parties, but ultimately defeated by the UK's intelligence community.

Foremost among the reasons was a desire to minimise the potential for challenges against the agency's large-scale interception programmes, rather than any intrinsic threat to security, the documents show.

The papers also reveal that:

• GCHQ lobbied furiously to keep secret the fact that telecoms firms had gone "well beyond" what they were legally required to do to help intelligence agencies' mass interception of communications, both in the UK and overseas.

• GCHQ feared a legal challenge under the right to privacy in the Human Rights Act if evidence of its surveillance methods became admissible in court.

• GCHQ assisted the Home Office in lining up sympathetic people to help with "press handling", including the Liberal Democrat peer and former intelligence services commissioner Lord Carlile, who this week criticised the Guardian for its coverage of mass surveillance by GCHQ and America's National Security Agency.

The most recent attempt to make intelligence gathered from intercepts admissible in court, proposed by the last Labour government, was finally stymied by GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 in 2009.

A briefing memo prepared for the board of GCHQ shortly before the decision was made public revealed that one reason the agency was keen to quash the proposals was the fear that even passing references to its wide-reaching surveillance powers could start a "damaging" public debate.

Referring to the decision to publish the report on intercept as evidence without classification, it noted: "Our main concern is that references to agency practices (ie the scale of interception and deletion) could lead to damaging public debate which might lead to legal challenges against the current regime." A later update, from May 2012, set out further perceived "risks" of making intercepts admissible, including "the damage to partner relationships if sensitive information were accidentally released in open court". It also noted that the "scale of interception and retention required would be fairly likely to be challenged on Article 8 (Right to Privacy) grounds".

The GCHQ briefings showed the agency provided the Home Office with support in winning the PR battle on the proposed reforms by lining up people to talk to the media – including Lord Carlile, who on Wednesday gave a public lecture condemning the Guardian's decision to publish stories based on the leaked material from Snowden.

Referring to the public debate on intercept evidence, the document notes: "Sir Ken McDonald [sic] (former DPP [director of public prosecutions]), Lord Goldsmith (former AG [attorney general]) and David Davis (former Shadow HSec [home secretary) [have been] reiterating their previous calls for IaE [intercept as evidence].

"We are working closely with HO [Home Office] on their plans for press handling when the final report is published, e.g. lining up talking heads (such as Lord Carlisle [sic], Lord Stevens, Sir Stephen Lander, Sir Swinton Thomas)."

Carlile was the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation in 2001-11, and was awarded a CBE in 2012 for his services to national security.

Another top GCHQ priority in resisting the admission of intercepts as evidence was keeping secret the extent of the agency's co-operative relationships with telephone companies – including being granted access to communications networks overseas.

In June, the Guardian disclosed the existence of GCHQ's Tempora internet surveillance programme. It uses intercepts on the fibre-optic cables that make up the backbone of the internet to gain access to vast swaths of internet users' personal data. The intercepts are placed in the UK and overseas, with the knowledge of companies owning either the cables or landing stations.

The revelations of voluntary co-operation with some telecoms companies appear to contrast markedly with statements made by large telecoms firms in the wake of the first Tempora stories. They stressed that they were simply complying with the law of the countries in which they operated.

In reality, numerous telecoms companies were doing much more than that, as disclosed in a secret document prepared in 2009 by a joint working group of GCHQ, MI5 and MI6.

Their report contended that allowing intercepts as evidence could damage relationships with "Communications Service Providers" (CSPs).

In an extended excerpt of "the classified version" of a review prepared for the Privy Council, a formal body of advisers made up of current and former cabinet ministers, the document sets out the real nature of the relationship between telecoms firms and the UK government.

"Under RIPA [the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000], CSPs in the UK may be required to provide, at public expense, an adequate interception capability on their networks," it states. "In practice all significant providers do provide such a capability. But in many cases their assistance – while in conformity with the law – goes well beyond what it requires."

GCHQ's internet surveillance programme is the subject of a challenge in the European court of human rights, mounted by three privacy advocacy groups. The Open Rights Group, English PEN and Big Brother Watch argue the "unchecked surveillance" of Tempora is a challenge to the right to privacy, as set out in the European convention on human rights.

That the Tempora programme appears to rely at least in part on voluntary co-operation of telecoms firms could become a major factor in that ongoing case. The revelation could also reignite the long-running debate over allowing intercept evidence in court.

GCHQ's submission goes on to set out why its relationships with telecoms companies go further than what can be legally compelled under current law. It says that in the internet era, companies wishing to avoid being legally mandated to assist UK intelligence agencies would often be able to do so "at little cost or risk to their operations" by moving "some or all" of their communications services overseas.

As a result, "it has been necessary to enter into agreements with both UK-based and offshore providers for them to afford the UK agencies access, with appropriate legal authorisation, to the communications they carry outside the UK".

The submission to ministers does not set out which overseas firms have entered into voluntary relationships with the UK, or even in which countries they operate, though documents detailing the Tempora programme made it clear the UK's interception capabilities relied on taps located both on UK soil and overseas.

There is no indication as to whether the governments of the countries in which deals with companies have been struck would be aware of the GCHQ cable taps.

Evidence that telecoms firms and GCHQ are engaging in mass interception overseas could stoke an ongoing diplomatic row over surveillance ignited this week after the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, accused the NSA of monitoring her phone calls, and the subsequent revelation that the agency monitored communications of at least 35 other world leaders.

On Friday, Merkel and the French president, François Hollande, agreed to spearhead efforts to make the NSA sign a new code of conduct on how it carried out intelligence operations within the European Union, after EU leaders warned that the international fight against terrorism was being jeopardised by the perception that mass US surveillance was out of control.

Fear of diplomatic repercussions were one of the prime reasons given for GCHQ's insistence that its relationships with telecoms firms must be kept private.

Telecoms companies "feared damage to their brands internationally, if the extent of their co-operation with HMG [Her Majesty's government] became apparent", the GCHQ document warned. It added that if intercepts became admissible as evidence in UK courts "many CSPs asserted that they would withdraw their voluntary support".

The report stressed that while companies are going beyond what they are required to do under UK law, they are not being asked to violate it.

Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty and Anthony Romero Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union issued a joint statement stating:

"The Guardian's publication of information from Edward Snowden has uncovered a breach of trust by the US and UK Governments on the grandest scale. The newspaper's principled and selective revelations demonstrate our rulers' contempt for personal rights, freedoms and the rule of law.

"Across the globe, these disclosures continue to raise fundamental questions about the lack of effective legal protection against the interception of all our communications.

"Yet in Britain, that conversation is in danger of being lost beneath self-serving spin and scaremongering, with journalists who dare to question the secret state accused of aiding the enemy.

"A balance must of course be struck between security and transparency, but that cannot be achieved whilst the intelligence services and their political masters seek to avoid any scrutiny of, or debate about, their actions.

"The Guardian's decision to expose the extent to which our privacy is being violated should be applauded and not condemned."
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2...secret-snowden





U.S. Surveillance Leaks Threaten Police Use of New Technologies: Official

Public disclosures about U.S. government surveillance threaten the ability of police to use powerful new technologies such as drones and mobile license plate readers, a top law enforcement official said on Sunday.

The leak of highly classified documents by National Security Agency Edward Snowden prompted tighter restrictions on key technology advances, said Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Vernon Keenan, speaking at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference.

The disclosures, including about monitoring of U.S. phone records, threaten to erode existing authority to use high-tech equipment, he said.

"The scrutiny that the NSA has come under filters down to us," Keenan said at the annual gathering that draws top law enforcement from the United States and elsewhere with workshops, product exhibits and conferences.

He said guidelines for collecting data varied widely from state to state. License plate data is retained for 48 hours to five years, for example, depending on local law, he said.

For many new technologies, there is no clear legal standard to govern their use, he said.

"If we are not very careful, law enforcement is going to lose the use of technology," he said.

New technology including advanced facial recognition software, mobile license plate readers and unmanned aircraft are reshaping U.S. law enforcement, officials said.

Such advances will be "both the benefactor and the curse of policing" and demand that law enforcement be thoughtful about their deployment, Philadelphia Police Chief Charles Ramsey said on Saturday at the start of the weeklong conference.

"Imagine instead of driving down the street scanning license tags, driving down the street checking the faces of individuals walking down the street," Ramsey said.

"We have to remind ourselves - just because we can do something doesn't mean we should do it."

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation are scheduled to address the roughly 13,500 conference attendees on Monday.

(Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst and Bernard Orr)
http://www.courant.com/news/nation-w...,2061509.story





Keith Alexander Says The US Gov't Needs To Figure Out A Way To Stop Journalists From Reporting On Snowden Leaks
Mike Masnick

Apparently not satisfied with just setting fire to the 4th Amendment, NSA boss Keith Alexander's next target is the 1st Amendment. In an interview with the Defense Department's "Armed With Science" blog, it appears that Alexander felt he'd have a friendly audience, so he let loose with some insane claims, including suggesting that the government needs to find a way to "stop" journalists from reporting on the Snowden leaks.

As noted by Politco, General Alexander isn't a fan of journalists doing anything about these documents:

"I think it’s wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000—whatever they have and are selling them and giving them out as if these—you know it just doesn’t make sense," Alexander said in an interview with the Defense Department's "Armed With Science" blog.

"We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don’t know how to do that. That’s more of the courts and the policymakers but, from my perspective, it’s wrong to allow this to go on," the NSA director declared.


It's not the policymakers and the courts. It's the Constitution, and it says there's freedom of the press.

Other parts of the interview continue to show Alexander spewing things that have already been debunked:

“When you look at the 9/11 commission, it faulted the intelligence community for not connecting the dots. We didn’t have the tools. These [programs we have now] are tools that help us connect the dots. We have learned that lesson once. We all vowed this would never happen again. We should commit to that course of action.”

That's not true. The 9/11 commission argued, indeed, that the intelligence service failed to connect the dots, but it wasn't because they lacked the information. It's just that it wasn't properly shared. The way to fix that is not to collect more information and make it even harder to connect the dots. And yet that's been General Alexander's strategy all along.

Elsewhere in the interview, Alexander laughably tries to pretend that US Cyber Command, which he also controls, is focused on protecting "intellectual property." But that's also not true. As has been clearly stated and confirmed, it's focused on offensive attacks, which it does more than any other country (even as the US government tries to scold countries like China and Iran for their online attacks).

And then, I guess he figures that if he's going to lie about, well, everything, why not go all in, and just claim that these programs aren't "spying."

“They aren’t spying programs,” he says directly. “One is called the Business Records FISA Program, or Section 215, and the other is called the FISA Amendment Act 702 or PRISM.”

The business records program, or Section 215, is probably the most misunderstood of the two programs. The metadata program takes information and puts it in a data repository. Metadata is the phone number, the date, time, group, and duration of the call.

“That’s all we have,” Gen. Alexander explains. “We don’t have any names or any content.”


Except that having that metadata is incredibly revealing and absolutely is a form of spying. If it's not, why won't General Alexander release his phone numbers, date, time, group and duration of all of his calls from the past year? Why not? Because he thinks that's private information. Because it is. And because General Alexander is a hypocrite.

“The oversight and compliance on these programs is greater than any other program in our government.”

Hahahahah. No. This is also a lie. It's been shown that the courts and Congress have admitted they're limited by what the NSA tells them -- and the NSA goes out of its way to avoid telling Congress very much.

Alexander also mocks the recent claims about spying on French phone calls, using the exact same dodge as his boss, James Clapper. Both pretend that the news reports said that 70 million calls were recorded. Alexander mocks this by pointing out it would be impossible to have so many calls listened to, and to find enough translators to understand them. But the reports were about mostly metadata, and just some recordings. Pretending that the press said something that it didn't doesn't make Alexander look trustworthy. It makes it look like he's lying.

Not surprisingly, though hilariously, the blogger for the Defense Department's "Armed With Science," Jessica Tozer doesn't appear to challenge any of Alexander's claims. Instead, she repeats all the statements and mocks anyone who might challenge them:

Some people would rather believe a dramatic, convenient lie than a real, uncomplicated truth. Don’t be that person.

I'd argue that right back at Tozer and Alexander, because Alexander is flat out lying in the interview, based on confirmed facts.

Don’t give credence to speculation, rumor, or hyperbole. Simply put, don’t give into the hype. When it comes down it, a nation without the NSA would be a nation left undefended.

And that, dear readers, is no lie.


Um. It's absolutely a challengeable statement, but the Defense Department, obviously, isn't here for reasoned discussion on this issues.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...en-leaks.shtml





Techies Concerned Over NSA Surveillance Will March in D.C., Proclaiming ‘Stop Watching Us’
Amy Argetsinger

Matthew Meola launched into his talking points haltingly.

“We’re concerned about this, um, bulk collection,” he said, rehearsing the message he planned to deliver to congressional offices. “We’re concerned it violates the Constitution.”

But the words became more fluid as he channeled his concern Friday about NSA surveillance, in preparation for a lobbying trip to Capitol Hill demanding closer scrutiny of the secretive agency. If the spiel didn’t come easily at first, well, he’s not a lobbyist. Like so many of the protesters turning out for this weekend’s Stop Watching Us march, he’s a tech guy: a computer scientist from Cambridge, Mass.

Oh, did you expect anti-tech folks — the tinfoil hat crowd, the off-the-gridders? Instead, it’s the super-techie community that has been agitated about the government’s power to collect and analyze our personal data — “people who care” about the issue “because they understand it,” said Chris Lewis, vice president of Public Knowledge, one of the event’s nonprofit-group organizers.

“This is probably the defining issue of a young generation of technologists,” said Matt Simons of ThoughtWorks, a software developer that is one of the weekend’s corporate sponsors. “If you’re not coming out on the right side of history, you’re in the wrong industry.”

Organizers hope to draw a couple of thousand protesters to the rally and march, set to kick off at 11:30 a.m. Saturday in front of Union Station before moving to the Reflecting Pool at the Capitol. Speakers will include Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), former congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake and former Army Lt. Dan Choi, who is a gay-rights activist.

Hosted by a hodgepodge coalition that includes the American Civil Liberties Union and the Council on American-Islamic Relations as well as libertarian-leaning groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and FreedomWorks, the Stop Watching Us organizers hope for a diverse crowd that includes the Internet-weary. No need to RSVP by name: Just show up! Don’t worry about those addresses they’re collecting from you — it’s just to let lawmakers know that an actual constituent has shown up; no other use for the data planned.

But it’s the Internet-savvy who represent the beating heart of the movement. At a training session Friday morning on the Hill, a few gray-haired activists and policy wonks stood out in a crowd dominated by the postgrad vibe — beards, glasses, shaggy hair — of techies on their day off from the cubicle farm.

“I have been personally disappointed I haven’t been able to rally my less-geeky friends,” said Vince Kane, 36, a shaved-head computer engineer for the Navy who lives in Northern Virginia.

Polls show a sharp increase in the number of Americans who are concerned about the government’s collection of Internet and phone data, ever since the June disclosures by NSA defector Edward Snowden — yes, another tech guy. Yet among his non-tech friends, Kane still senses complacency. “We have a culture of, ‘Oh, your information is out there already.’ ”

But the IT guys you call every time that weird prompt freezes your screen? They get the big picture. “We’re much more aware of it,” said Joseph Slade, 27, a lanky government contractor in glasses. “Twenty years ago, if they collected this information, they couldn’t do much with it.”

At the training session, policy veterans offered the geeks some tips for navigating their Hill meetings: Stay on schedule. Be succinct. Don’t be nervous.

Greg Nojeim of the Center for Democracy and Technology tried to put the fear of God in them. Even a simple gathering such as the one they were in, he said, could fall under the NSA’s scope. “This meeting shows a relationship between the people here, and our locations can be tracked by the phone we carry. It’s a really critical moment.”

He was preaching to the converted. Meola, 29, said that while he once feared that the government would use its power to target individuals based on religion or ethnicity, he realized later that it was much bigger. “What they’re doing is saying, we’re going to take all the data we can possibly accrue, and they look at whatever they want to look at.”

Most chilling, he said, is what the government can do these days with “metadata.” Which is . . . ? Stephanie Cleary, 27, made a try: It’s all the data about your data — where and when your Facebook photos were taken, and the information from your phone that’s still stuck on them somehow.

“I deleted all my photos,” said the Boise State postgrad, who got her communications masters’ with a thesis on privacy policies. “I don’t do updates. I don’t have a photo of myself. It’s the little things.”

Thought about signing off altogether? “I’m torn!” she said. “I love the Internet for its accessibility to so many things in the world. You do the Internet in the right way, it’s so great.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifest...c3e_story.html





You Don’t Want Cable Data Caps—But a Former FCC Chairman Does

It's not too late for caps, according to the cable industry's top lobbyist.
Jon Brodkin

Michael Powell, a former Federal Communications Commission chairman who is now the cable industry's top lobbyist, said yesterday that cable companies "should be moving with some urgency and purpose" toward implementing data caps.

After serving as chairman of the FCC under President George W. Bush, Powell is now president and CEO of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association. At the Cable-Tec Expo in Atlanta, he was asked about data caps, or "usage-based billing." Multichannel News has the details:

Powell was also asked about usage-based broadband policies, which are permissible by the FCC. He disagreed with arguments that the window for usage-based broadband is closing or that it’s too late for MSOs [multiple-system operators] to implement usage-based policies when consumers have grown accustomed to unlimited access.

Cable, he said, “should be moving with some urgency and purpose” with respect to usage-based billing. Powell said operators have sound economic reasons to pursue a new model but acknowledged that the industry faces perceptions that usage-based billing is viewed as an anti-competitive move designed to disadvantage over-the-top video providers.

“I don’t think it’s too late,” Powell said, noting later that the wireless industry has been acclimating consumers on the concept of usage-based Internet access. “But it’s not something you can wait for forever.”

There was no transcript of Powell's remarks, the NCTA told Ars, but the organization pointed us to a page on its website that makes the case that usage-based billing can be good for consumers.

"Since Americans are accustomed to paying for what they use, some broadband providers are developing usage plans that promote fairness by asking high capacity Internet users to shoulder a greater proportionate share of network costs," the NCTA argues. "But instead of applauding increased consumer choice and common sense pricing, some critics want to force average users to pay a flat fee akin to a 'universal' service, no matter if they are an occasional visitor or frequent 'super user.'"

Pricing based on monthly allotments protects customers "from subsidizing the heaviest users," the NCTA further says. If such pricing schemes resulted in substantial savings for people who don't use many data-heavy services, it would be hard to argue against the potential benefits for some users. But the positives aren't necessarily going to be huge. As DSLReports notes, "Time Warner Cable and Comcast are both trialing... plans that offer a measly $5 discount if users accept a 5GB cap with $1 per GB overages."

As streaming video becomes increasingly prevalent, data caps are going to have to be pretty high to keep consumers from paying overage charges.

Powell also discussed cable's competitive situation compared to Google Fiber. "I don’t get too flustered about 1Gig or Google Fiber," he said, according to Light Reading. "With DOCSIS 3.1 capable of supporting downstream speeds as high as 10Gbps and upstream speeds as high as 2Gbps, we're there and beyond."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...chairman-does/





Google’s Fibre Optic Boss Unravels Demand ‘Myth’
James Hutchinson

The executive leading search giant Google’s fibre optic roll out in three US cities says it is a myth that internet users do not want or cannot use faster broadband speeds than are now available.

Kevin Lo, who led Google’s foray into building its own fibre network in Kansas City in 2010, said entrepreneurs would “rise to the occasion” to build applications capable of taking advantage of broadband speeds up to a gigabit, 200 times the average download speeds available in Australia today.

“There’s huge consumer demand out there for fast internet and we believe that faster internet speeds will lead to what we refer to as the next chapter of the internet,” Mr Lo said at the Broadband World Forum conference in Amsterdam on Tuesday.

“Just like the last step function improvements in speed going from dial-up to broadband brought about all the current applications we use today – from streaming video, photo sharing, video conferencing online – we’re confident that the next 100x improvement in speeds will lead to innovation.”

The utility of fast broadband has been one of contentious debate in Australia and globally.

The Coalition government has based its policy to slim down the national broadband network roll out partly on the notion that Australians do not need to access speeds of 100 megabits per second or a gigabit in the short-term.

Internet services company Akamai says Australian users now have an average broadband speed of 4.8 megabits per second and just 5 per cent of the country has double that speed despite the NBN roll out.

‘We’ve been surprised with the impact’

Steve Unger, the chief technology officer of UK communications watchdog Ofcom, said on Tuesday that increasing customers’ broadband speeds beyond 10 megabits per second did not automatically change the number or type of online applications they used.

But Mr Lo said businesses were likely to offer new applications “that we can’t even imagine at this point in time” in markets where broadband speeds and adoption were high.

He said Google decided to build its own fibre network in 2010 to explore how users would take advantage of faster internet speeds, through Google and other services.

The venture, which Google says will be profitable, is now operational in two US cities, providing 1 gigabit upload and download speeds – 10 times faster than those available on the NBN today – and a free service providing 5 megabits per second for eligible customers.

Mr Lo pointed to the success of Google Fiber’s first installation in Kansas City, Missouri, which had increased attention from technology start-ups, investors and not-for-profit groups since activating services.

The play has caused dominant cable television and broadband providers in the towns receiving Google Fiber to reduce their prices in competition. Mr Lo said access to increases in broadband speeds had also prompted ratings agency Fitch to upgrade Kansas City’s rating to neutral this year.

“We’ve been surprised with the impact that fibre connectivity and fast internet can really have on a community,” he said.
http://www.afr.com/p/technology/goog...2tT3WyVjWwZneJ





Million-Year Data Storage Disk Unveiled

Magnetic hard discs can store data for little more than a decade. But nanotechnologists have now designed and built a disk that can store data for a million years or more

Back in 1956, IBM introduced the world’s first commercial computer capable of storing data on a magnetic disk drive. The IBM 305 RAMAC used fifty 24-inch discs to store up to 5 MB, an impressive feat in those days. Today, however, it’s not difficult to find hard drives that can store 1 TB of data on a single 3.5-inch disk.

But despite this huge increase in storage density and a similarly impressive improvement in power efficiency, one thing hasn’t changed. The lifetime over which data can be stored on magnetic discs is still about a decade.

That raises an interesting problem. How are we to preserve information about our civilisation on a timescale that outlasts it? In other words, what technology can reliably store information for 1 million years or more?

Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Jeroen de Vries at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and a few pals. These guys have designed and built a disk capable of storing data over this timescale. And they’ve performed accelerated ageing tests which show it should be able to store data for 1 million years and possibly longer.

These guys start with some theory about ageing. Clearly, it’s impractical to conduct an ageing experiment in real time, particularly when the periods involved are measured in millions of years. But there is a way to accelerate the process of ageing.

This is based on the idea that data must be stored in an energy minimum that is separated from other minima by an energy barrier. So to corrupt data by converting a 0 to a 1, for example, requires enough energy to overcome this barrier.

The probability that the system will jump in this way is governed by an idea known as Arrhenius law. This relates the probability of jumping the barrier to factors such as its temperature, the Boltzmann constant and how often a jump can be attempted, which is related to the level of atomic vibrations.

Some straightforward calculations reveal that to last a million years, the required energy barrier is 63 KBT or 70 KBT to last a billion years. “These values are well within the range of today’s technology,” say de Vries and co.

And to prove the point, they go ahead and build a disk capable of storing information for this period of time. The disk is simple in conception. The data is stored in the pattern of lines etched into a thin metal disc and then covered with a protective layer.

The metal in question is tungsten, which they chose because of its high melting temperature (3,422 degrees C) and low thermal expansion coefficient. The protective layer is silicon nitride (Si3N4) chosen because of its high resistance to fracture and its low thermal expansion coefficient.

These guys made their disc using standard patterning techniques and stored data in the form of QR codes with lines 100nm wide. They then heated the disks at various temperatures to see how the data fared.

The results are impressive. According to Arrhenius law, a disk capable of surviving a million years would have to survive 1 hour at 445 Kelvin, a test that the new disks passed with ease. Indeed, they survived temperatures up to 848 Kelvin, albeit with significant amounts of information loss.

That compares well with the Rosetta Project, a proposal by the Long Now Foundation to create archival materials capable of storing information for periods in excess of 10,000 years.

The new work suggests we ought to be able to preserve a significant amount of information for future civilisations, perhaps even alien ones.

There are caveats, of course. The theory behind accelerated aging only applies in very specific circumstances and says nothing about survivability in other cases. It’s hard to imagine the new disk surviving a meteor strike, for example. Indeed, it would be unlikely to survive the temperatures that can occur in an ordinary house fire.

But de Vries and co are confident that they can make even more robust data storage systems. Their work is an interesting step towards preserving our data for future civilisations.
http://www.technologyreview.com/view...disk-unveiled/
















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