Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 11th, '11

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"The Doors do not want to be seen as having approved of your establishment and also the consumption of alcohol." – Anthony Keats’ takedown notice sent to Parisian restaurant


"My hope is that nothing happens on World IPv6 Day." – Alain Durand


"I was shocked by the report that Citigroup knew that their customers' data was potentially exposed back in early May, but is only now, a full month later, informing the public about this threat to their personal information." – Rep. Jim Langevin, D-RI


"It seems now that Dan may have had an agenda all along. We don’t know yet what it is. But he never said to me, 'I’m going to get this guy.' What he said is that it was not right." – Michael Madden


"Does Homeland Security work for the US public... or for NBC Universal?" – Mike Masnick



































June 11th, 2011




'File Sharing' Solicitors Guilty of Professional Misconduct

Two to be sanctioned at a later date

The scales of justice held up

A former and existing partner with law firm Davenport Lyons have been found guilty of professional misconduct.

Last night, the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) found equity partner David Gore and former intellectual property partner Brian Miller guilty of six breaches to the Solicitors Code of Conduct.

These included acting in a way that was ‘likely to diminish the trust the public place in them or in the legal profession’.

And that they ‘used their position as solicitors to take or attempt to take unfair advantage of other persons being recipients of letters of claim either for their own benefit or for the benefit of their clients’. They were also found guilty of not acting in the best interests of their clients.

Letters to users

Between 2006 and 2009 David Gore and Brian Miller were responsible for sending out thousands of letters to internet users accusing them of allegedly illegally downloading and distributing copyright-protected material over the internet via peer-to-peer networks.

The letters then asked the recipients to pay approximately £500 in compensation in order to avoid legal proceedings.

The case was brought before the SDT by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) following a complaint about the letters by Which? who said they were ‘bullying’.

Which? also claimed the letters made incorrect assertions about the nature of copyright infringement; ignored the evidence presented in defence; and increased the level of compensation claimed over the period of correspondence.

The letters also stated, incorrectly, that failing to properly secure an internet connection was grounds for legal action.

In March last year, after investigating the matter, the SRA ruled there was a case to answer and referred the two to the SDT.

Which? says

Mark McLaren, Which? principal advocate said: ‘We’re delighted that the SDT has found all the SRA’s allegations proved, following our complaint which we made to the SRA in December 2008.

‘We hope this judgement will send a strong message to the legal profession about the way consumers should be treated.’

An SRA spokesperson added: ‘The SRA welcomes the decision of the SDT in this case brought for the protection of consumers.’

He said it would not comment further until the SDT has made its decisions on sanction and costs.’

The SRA has applied for the costs of bringing the complaint before the Tribunal to be borne by the solicitors personally, Messrs Gore and Miller.

Which? Computing understands that despite the verdict, the two are unlikely to be struck off the Solicitors Roll. Instead, they face a reprimand, a monetary fine, or suspension from practising.
http://www.which.co.uk/news/2011/06/...onduct-255730/





23,322 John Does for The Expendables Case? Not So Fast, Says Judge to US Copyright Group
Thomas Mennecke

It's nice to have a huge pile of John Does to sue. Some will fight, others will acquiesce. Those who acquiesce are a gold mine - they're so shit scared of a multi-million dollar copyright lawsuit they'll settle for a few grand to make the whole nightmare go away. It's probably extortion at some level, at least at the moral level, but it's a dirty job and someone has to do it, like WeFightPiracy.com or the US Copyright Group.

The USCG has become notorious in its fight to stem the tide BitTorrent piracy against its clients, which include an oddball mix of independent movies like "Far Cry", "Donkeyball", and "Cornered!". There's a few bigger movies too under their belt, you'll probably recall the movies "The Hurt Locker" and "The Expendables". These latter two movies are also well known because there are over 20,000 John Does per case currently pending in US District Court - or at least there was.

Both of these cases were filed in US District Court in Washington, DC. As you may know, the population of DC is just over 600,000 individuals. You may also know that the courts have been very sensitive over the issue of jurisdiction and venue - how can anyone in their right mind honestly believe that nearly 6.5% of the DC population is pirating both of these movies? The Judge presiding in The Expendable case doesn't seem to be buying it.

In a ruling made yesterday (read the order here), Judge Robert L. Wilkins was not impressed by the USCG dragging its feet in the discovery process, noting that not one Doe has been served – despite the USCG’s intense efforts for expedited discovery.

“…over two months later, Plaintiff has informed the Court that not a single subpoena has been served in this case. The Court finds this especially surprising given the fact that one of Plaintiff’s stated reasons for “good cause” for the expedited discovery was that the ISPs typically retain the information that Plaintiff seeks for only a limited period of time, and if this information is erased, Plaintiff will be unable to pursue its lawsuit.”

Judge Wilkin also scolded the USCG over jurisdictional issues – noting that it seems rather impossible that all 20,000+ individuals committed copyright infringement in DC. And he doesn’t seem particularly pleased that his time is being wasted.

“The Court finds it inappropriate and a waste of scarce judicial resources to allow and oversee discovery on claims or relating to defendants that cannot be prosecuted in this lawsuit. If venue is improper in this district, the Court must either dismiss the case or transfer it to a court in which venue is proper.”

Finally, the Judge gave the USCG the court’s order – and it’s a tough nut to crack. Basically, the USCG must show how all 23,000+ defendants are applicable to DC District Court, and how it intends to serve each of those defendants.

“The Court hereby ORDERS Plaintiff, if it intends to pursue the previously filed motion for expedited discovery, to show cause as to why venue and joinder is proper for all 23,322 putative defendants in this case. Alternatively, Plaintiff may seek leave to amend its complaint to name a certain subset of defendants and file a new motion for expedited discovery, addressing both legally and factually why venue and joinder is proper as to each defendant, and how Plaintiff intends to establish the same.”

For good measure, Judge Wilkins also vacated his previous ruling that GRANTED discovery for the Plantiffs – effectively nullifying any progress in this case.

“Because Plaintiff has taken no action on the expedited discovery that this Court granted over two months ago, and Plaintiff has not made any showing why venue is proper for all putative defendants in this case pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1400(a), the Court vacated its March 17, 2011 Order granting Plaintiff leave to take discovery prior to a Rule 26(f) conference.”

Time is not on the side of the USCG, it has until June 21 to answer the court on these issues. That coupled with 23,000+ Does to negotiate around, along with a blithering campaign that’s fighting their progress tooth and nail, the copyright trolling campaign in the United States may soon meet the same fate as that in the United Kingdom.
http://www.slyck.com/story2202_23322...opyright_Group





Kino.to Raided In Massive Police Operation, Admins Arrested
Ernesto

Europe just witnessed one of the largest piracy-related busts in history with the raid of the popular movie streaming portal Kino.to. More than a dozen people connected to the site were arrested after police officers in Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands raided several residential addresses and data centers. Kino.to hosted no illicit content itself, but indexed material stored on file-hosters and other streaming services.

Kino.to has been a thorn in the side for the movie industry for many years. The movie streaming portal is particularly popular in German-speaking countries, and with four million visitors a day it was among the 100 most-visited websites in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

This success ended abruptly a few hours ago. The site was pulled offline by a joint police operation involving officers from Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands. In Germany alone 250 officers assisted in the raids, assisted by 17 computer specialists.

Acting upon a warrant from the General Prosecutor in Dresden, police have arrested a total of 13 people thus far. A 14th person is still being hunted. The arrestees are suspected of involvement in a criminal organization with the purpose of committing professional copyright infringement.

Following the raids Kino.to has been effectively shut down and at the time of writing displays the following message:

“The domain of the site you are trying to access was closed on suspicion of forming a criminal organization to commit professional copyright infringement.”

“Several operators of KINO.TO were arrested.”

“Internet users who illegally pirated or distributed copies of films may be subjected to a criminal prosecution.”

Commenting on the raids the German Federation Against Copyright Theft (GVU) claims that Kino.to made “significant revenue” through a “parasitic business model.” GVU states that Kino.to was working closely with the sites that hosted the copyrighted films, and that they profited from commercial partnerships with these companies.

The Dresden prosecutor confirmed in a press release that Kino.to was making millions of euros in profits.

Although the site was most popular in German-speaking countries, it didn’t escape the eye of the MPAA either. A few months ago the MPAA listed Kino.to as one of the main “notorious markets” in their submission to the U.S. Government.

“This linking site specializes in illegally making available large amounts of copyrighted cinema films and TV series in German and other languages. There are currently over 300,000 infringing TV shows and over 66,000 infringing movies available,” the MPAA wrote at the time.

Last month an Austrian ISP was served with a preliminary injunction forcing it to block subscriber access to Kino.to following complaints from Verein für Anti-Piraterie der österreichischen Film und Videobranche (VAP) – the anti-piracy association of the Austrian film and video industry.
http://torrentfreak.com/kino-to-raid...rested-110608/





Disconnecting File-Sharers Divides Australian MPAA, RIAA
Jared Moya

The Australian Content Industry Group (ACIG), which represents the Australian Recording Industry Association, says that efforts to fight illegal file-sharing should “not include termination of internet accounts” while the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) says it should. Debate occurs in the wake of a UN report calling Internet disconnection a violation of human rights.

Australia’s entertainment industry is split over using Internet disconnection to fight illegal file-sharing now that a UN report has been published calling the practice a likely violation of human rights.

Last week Frank La Rue, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, submitted a report concluding that disconnecting Internet users, “regardless of the justification provided,” including on the grounds of violating intellectual property rights, to be disproportionate and thus a violation of article 19, paragraph 3, of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.”

That article specifies that everyone has the right to freedom of expression in any type of media.

Though Australia has no Internet disconnection, aka graduated response system, in place the country’s entertainment industry has been pushing for one for some time now.

It seems the country’s entertainment industry is split on the issue. On side you have the music industry (against), and on the other the movie industry (for).

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the recording industry’s music piracy branch, Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI), said there needs to be tools in place to fight illegal file-sharing, but that they should “not include termination of internet accounts.” MIPI conducts investigative, preventative and educational activities in relation to music piracy on behalf of the 125 record companies in Australia.

Sabiene Heindl, general manager of MIPI, added that the sentiment was also the official stance of the Australian Content Industry Group (ACIG) whose members include Microsoft, the Business Software Alliance, Copyright Agency Limited, and the Australian Recording Industry Association.

The split was confirmed by Peter Coroneos, chief executive of the Internet Industry Association, who said his group has noticed a divide between the two over the issue of Internet disconnection. He said the prospect of disconnecting entire households from the Internet has become a “politically toxic proposal” that some copyright holders are distancing themselves from.

The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) said the movie industry does “not agree that a graduated response scheme is a breach of human rights,” and that in fact, copyright protection is a “human right.”

I guess nobody’s told them that actually the primary purpose of copyright law, at least here in the US, is to provide an incentive for authors to create expression by giving them the exclusive right to that work for a limited period.

From the US Constitution’s so-called Copyright Clause:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Is Australia’s intent with its own copyright laws any less noble? Fines and warnings seem to be doing wonders in Germany, but I guess a group like AFACT even begins blaming ISPs for a failed business model you know consumers are near the bottom of their list of concerns.

La Rue’s report has also led to New Zealand questioning Internet disconnection to fight online infringement in that country as well.

Stay tuned.
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/tech...ong-57312.html





Memo Leak Suggests Blocking of File-Sharing Sites in Malaysia
John Lim

While the Malaysian government has ensured that there would be no censorship of the Internet in the country, an alleged leaked memo requesting Malaysian ISPs to block file-hosting sites suggests that the term “censorship” can be interpreted in many ways.

The memo in question appears to be issued by Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) on May 30, and was leaked on Facebook, Malaysia-based Lowyat.Net forum, and blogs on June 9.

The MCMC, which is the country’s industry regulator, has yet to deny or confirm the memo’s authenticity.

In the two-page document (you can see here), the MCMC requested that Malaysian ISPs block access to ten file-hosting and sharing URLs, including Megaupload, Fileserve, and The Pirate Bay. It cited Section 268 of the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998, which states that ISPs (licensees) must try their best to prevent its network from being used for activities that contravenes with Malaysian law.

It states that ISPs are obliged to help the MCMC “in preventing the commission or attempted commission of an offence under any written law of Malaysia” for “the protection of the public revenue and preservation of national security”.

When it comes to censorship, the Malaysian government has issued mixed messages. In August 2010, news portal The Malaysian Insider broke the story that the MCMC commissioned a feasibility study for an Internet filter to block “undesirable websites”, not unlike China’s Green Dam. This was quashed a few days later by the country’s Information Minister Rais Yatim, but the censorship spectre still lingers on with incidents like these, and constant reminders by the country’s Prime Minister that there would be no censorship of the Internet.

Erna Mahyuni, editor for Goreng.my and columnist for The Malaysian Insider, however cautioned the public from making the MCMC the bad guys in this matter, as they just take orders from “higher ups”.

“I suspect they had little choice in the matter. When I was with another Internet news portal, the MCMC had also visited after a ‘complaint’ that had been filed about a video involving not very nice things being done to a cow head.

“MCMC has, in fact, very few enforcement officials… It was also obvious that they didn’t want to be there but were there only because of directives sent from “higher ups.” It all smacked of political interference,” she wrote.

According to blogger Lim YH from GreyReview, this is not the first time the MCMC is making such a request, but “this is ‘probably the most comprehensive’ directive yet, according to (his) source. This is a rather disturbing trend,” he wrote.

At the time of writing, the sites listed were still accessible to the Malaysian public, but according to the blog Wirawan, which first broke the story, “It seems that Streamyx did block Megaupload, Fileserve and etc, for a short while and they unblock them after.”

Regardless of who’s to blame, this proposed move, if true, to block legitimate and commercial file-sharing and hosting sites does not sit well with the country’s drive towards a knowledge-rich economy.
http://e27.sg/2011/06/10/memo-leak-s...s-in-malaysia/





Paris Bar in Trouble for Honoring The Doors
AP

The owner of a Paris bar dedicated to Jim Morrison is worried his lifelong obsession with the late The Doors frontman could end up costing him his livelihood.

Christophe Maillet said he received a letter from a Beverly Hills, California-based attorney warning that "The Doors do not want to be seen as having approved of your establishment and also the consumption of alcohol."

The April 21 letter — signed by Anthony Keats, The Doors' intellectual property lawyer, and shown Friday to The Associated Press — urged Maillet to remove images of the group from his bar within three months.

Morrison, known for a partying lifestyle, died in 1971 of heart failure in his bathtub in Paris at the age of 27. His grave at Pere Lachaise cemetery remains a pilgrimage site for his fans.
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/201...s-Dispute.html





Russian President Proposes Creative Commons-Style Rules Baked Directly Into Copyright
Mike Masnick

Well, this is getting interesting. Last week, we noted that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, alone among the other G8 leaders, questioned today's copyright laws, suggesting that they did not fit with the times, and pointed out that these century-old laws don't seem to fit with today's internet. Glyn Moody now points us to the news that Medvedev appears to be going even further than just condemning today's copyright laws. He's now looking to adjust Russia's copyright laws in the other direction:

In a statement released on the Kremlin's website on Thursday, Medvedev instructed the country's communications ministry to draw up amendments "aimed at allowing authors to let an unlimited number of people use their content on the basis of free licensing."

The proposed copyright system is on a par with the initiative launched by Creative Commons, a San Francisco-based non-profit organization that has created copyright licenses that allow owners to share their content for free with certain restrictions.

This could be interesting. To be honest, I'm not sure why such things need to be baked into copyright law (as we've seen, it appears to work with it being built on top of existing copyright law -- though, some question the legality of certain CC licenses). However, what will be most interesting is to see how copyright industry lobbyists and US politicians react to this. I imagine that such a move will show up in the industry... er... I mean the USTR's annual Special 301 report as evidence as to why Russia doesn't "respect" copyright law enough.

But would that really be true? Does building a more flexible, more modern copyright law really mean a lack of respect for copyright? Why wouldn't it mean a healthy respect for building a system that matches better with the times -- rather than the industry's kneejerk reaction to just keep ratcheting up the punishments, enforcements and coverage of copyright?
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...opyright.shtml





Apple, Google Cloud Can Help Curb Online Piracy: U.S.
Foo Yun Chee

Services developed by Apple Inc and Google for people to store photos, music and data online may do more to combat online piracy than regulation can, a U.S. official said on Wednesday.

Victoria Espinel, the coordinator of U.S. intellectual property enforcement, said corporate innovation was often more effective than law enforcement or other rules, which are sometimes applied inappropriately.

"The U.S. government doesn't need to pick winners and losers and the last thing we should think about doing is messing up the Internet with inappropriate regulation," she told the World Copyright Summit in Brussels.

"In order for the Internet to be as productive and compelling as possible, we need to have active engagement from companies that interact with and benefit from Internet commerce," she said.

Amazon, Google and Apple have announced music and other services that are downloadable from the 'cloud' -- a form of computing where data and software are stored on servers which users can access with smartphones or PCs via the Internet.

Such innovations give those companies an advantage in developing more secure systems.

"If it is possible to construct it so that it cannot be compromised, it may have the effect of reducing piracy by giving value to consumers -- the ability to own forever and access almost anywhere -- that cannot be obtained with illegal copies," Espinel said.

"The flexibility of the cloud may help spur the development of compelling legal alternatives."

Apple on Monday unveiled remote computing services, giving it a lead over rivals Google and Amazon, which recently moved into music storage and streaming.

Espinel said she was already working closely with major corporations to develop more security for online pharmacies, and holding meetings with Google, GoDaddy, Microsoft, MasterCard, Yahoo!, American Express, eNom, PayPal, Discover and Visa.

Espinel said she would be meeting with European Commission officials to exchange views on intellectual property rights.

Last month, the European Union executive set out proposals to overhaul the legal framework for intellectual property rights in the 27-country bloc. These will need approval from the European Parliament and EU countries.

(Editing by David Cowell)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7573AW20110608





Why Copyright Holders Love iTunes Match And Pirates Hate It
Parmy Olson

Steve Jobs presented a web storage service called iCloud this week that marked cloud computing’s transition to the mainstream. But a debate is already raging about what some of iCloud’s features could mean for the future of digital music and video.

For his “one last thing” announcement at Monday’s WWDC, Jobs unveiled iTunes Match, a service that copies any music you have on your computer that wasn’t obtained through iTunes–ripped, or it appears even illegally downloaded–and puts it on your iCloud account, a replacement to MobileMe. (Apple could not be reached for comment by phone or email to explain how iTunes Match worked with pirated music, but a number of reports suggest it will.) Apple then automatically puts that music on up to 10 devices that are wirelessly connected to the same MobileMe account, bypassing the fiddly USB process. Crucially, the service costs $25 a year.

Why does that $25 matter? Because Apple is reportedly splitting that money with copyright holders, many of whom have lost out on potential revenue because so many are downloading songs from bittorrent sites like The Pirate Bay. Some say this means Apple is not only legitimizing pirated music, it’s monetizing it too. Needless to say, the folks at the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) which represents the recording industry worldwide, really like iTunes Match.

IFPI’s chief executive, Frances Moore, told me via email that iTunes Match was “good news for music consumers and for the legitimate digital music business. It is the latest example of music companies embracing new technology, licensing new services that respect copyright and responding to the new ways consumers want to access and enjoy music.”

So even if someone continues to download music illegally, matching that music to iCloud and spreading it to a bunch of Apple devices, they’re still paying $24 for the privilege. And some of that money is going to artists and labels.

But there may be a catch. Peter Sunde, co-founder of file-sharing site The Pirate Bay says iTunes Match marks a big step towards consumers losing control of their media. The problem isn’t the $25, it’s that it doesn’t make sense to pay Apple, with its closed-source system, to gain access to music you’ve downloaded. More crucial than that, he says, is what that could mean for the future of sharing music.

Sunde cites Spotify as an example. The music-streaming service does let you share music links with your friends, but they must have a Spotify account to hear them. People who use Spotify have already stopped sharing and keeping their songs, he says. “In the end if people are dependent enough on the services, there will be no more copies [on local drives].”

This sounds plausible. Cloud or no cloud, plenty of people who have a stash of illegally downloaded music might suddenly prefer to replace it entirely with higher-quality, legal copies and become a law-abiding citizen with just a few keystrokes.

But that, at least, would be your choice. Sunde’s other big worry is that some day, Apple might actively remove music tracks from your iCloud account which are deemed illegal. “They might say, you can’t do that, so you have to remove it,” Sunde says, adding that when your music is put on iCloud, Apple essentially owns that data, not you. It’s stored on their server, not yours. “So they [could] also decide which music you can’t have. That’s what you’re allowing in the future.”
http://blogs.forbes.com/parmyolson/2...rates-hate-it/





Apple Sued for Trademark Infringement by VOIP Company iCloud Communications
Klint Finley

Apple has had its share of trademark disputes in recent years, such as Cisco's trademark of the iPhone trademark and Fujitsu's ownership of "iPad." Now iCloud Communications is suing Apple over the iCloud trademark, according to The Next Web.

iCloud Communications is based in Arizona and filed the suit in the U.S. District Court there. The company was founded in 2005 offers a variety of VOIP, SIP, PBX and conferencing services.

The suit, made available on Scribd by The Next Web's Brad McCarty, includes a history of Apple's trademark suits going back to the company's beginnings, when it was sued by the Beatles' record company Apple Corp. From the suit:

As was the case of the "iPhone" and "iAd" marks, Apple discreetly applied for a foreign trademark registration for ICLOUD months prior to the launch announcement on June 6, 2011 (Apple applied initially in Australia for iPhone, Canada for iAd and Jamaica for iCloud). That foreign ICLOUD application appears to now form the basis for the various iCloud applications for which Apple filed in the United States on June 1, 2011. Apparently, Apple is attempting to use a foreign jurisdiction's laws to gain priority for its U.S. registrations while circumventing the notice and publication requirements for trademark applications filed here in the United States with respect to "intent-to-use" applications

iCloud Communications described this as "just one more example of Apple's "act first and worry about the consequences later" approach to trademark use."

The suit follows allegations that Apple swiped the concept and branding of a rejected App Store app.

Apple bought the iCloud.com domain name from a Swedish cloud-based operating system provider called Xcerion in April. Xcerion re-branded its cloud OS iCloud to CloudMe that same month. Xcerion is not mentioned in iCloud Communciations' complaint.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/20...mark-infri.php





Apple Rips Off Student's Rejected iPhone App
Dan Goodin

Apple is famous for going to absurd lengths to enforce its patents and trademarks. It recently sued Amazon for calling its app store Appstore. And it has publicly lectured competitors to “create their own original technology, not steal ours”.

But the company isn't always as fastidious about respecting the ideas of others. Consider the case of UK-based developer Greg Hughes. Last year, his app for wirelessly syncing iPhones with iTunes libraries was unceremoniously rejected from the official App Store. The software developer took the denial in stride, submitting Wi-Fi Sync to the Cydia store for jailbroken iPhones, where the app is a top seller.

Fast forward to Monday, when Apple unveiled a set of new features for the upcoming iOS 5, including the same wireless-syncing functionality. Cupertino wasn't even subtle about the appropriation, using the precise name and a near-identical logo to market the technology.

“Obviously I was fairly shocked,” said Hughes, referring to his reaction on Monday when he saw the new feature promoted on Apple's website. “I'd been selling my app with that name and icon for at least a year. Apple knew that, as I'd submitted it to them, so it was surprising to see that.”

A student at the University of Birmingham finishing his third year in the Computer Science program, Hughes said Wi-Fi Sync was rejected from the iTunes App Store in May, 2010, one month after he submitted it. He said an iPhone developer relations representative named Steve Rea personally called him prior to sending a formal rejection email to say the app was admirable, but went on to explain there were unspecified security concerns and that it did things not specified in the official iPhone software developers' kit.

“They did say that the iPhone engineering team had looked at it and were impressed,” Hughes told El Reg. “They asked for my CV as well.”

Since the official rejection, Hughes's app has become one of the most popular offered in the Cydia store, with more than 50,000 sold in the past 13 months. Throughout that time, Wi-Fi Sync has cost $9.99, not including occasional promotional discounts. Hughes declined to say how much he has grossed in sales, but it's probably fair to say the sum is considerable for a college undergrad and almost certainly would have been much higher had his app been available to people who hadn't jailbroken their iPhones.

As Apple strives to maintain the allure of its aging iDevice lineup, it's inevitable that the company will integrate features and technologies into the underlying iOS that were once considered ancillary. Microsoft learned the dark side of this success story decades ago, and it has been branded as an imitator rather than an innovator ever since.

Apple's obsession with protecting what it perceives as its intellectual property is so great, it's impossible to generate an exhaustive list. Other recent examples include app store police's rejection of an iPhone app for using Apple images meant specifically for developers and the suing of a teenager who sold White iPhone 4 conversion kits.

But the next time Steve Jobs and company chides a competitor for blatant copying, remember that in the world in which Apple – and indeed any dominant company – resides, originality is in the eye of the Goliaths. The Davids, it seems, don't stand a chance.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06..._rejected_app/





Apple Will Reject D.U.I. Checkpoints Apps
Nick Bilton

After Apple announced its latest software at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, the company also updated its guidelines for new applications that are submitted to the iTunes app store.

One of the new app guidelines, Section 22.8, says any applications submitted to the iTunes app store that promotes driving under the influence in any way will be rejected. The guideline update was discovered by the auto industry site AutoBlog.

Apple specifically wrote in its new iOS review guidelines:

Apps which contain DUI checkpoints that are not published by law enforcement agencies, or encourage and enable drunk driving, will be rejected.

The apps in question can be used to notify people when law enforcements have set up a checkpoint to catch drunk drivers. DUI Dodger, just one of these types of apps available in the iTunes app store, urges people to “fight back” against D.U.I. checkpoints.

In March, a group of United States senators sent Apple, Google and Research In Motion, the maker of BlackBerrys, a letter asking that the companies remove these applications from each company’s app store.

In a version of the letter sent specifically to Scott Forstall, Apple’s senior vice president of iPhone software, the senators said that with “10,000 Americans dying in drunk-driving crashes every year, providing access to iPhone and iPad applications that alert users to D.U.I. checkpoints is harmful to public safety.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/0...ckpoints-apps/





Android App Removals Cast Doubt on Google’s ‘Openness’
Mike Isaac

Is Google Android still open? Some Android app programmers don't think so. Photo illustration: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

Google’s pitch for the Android mobile platform rests on a single, oft-repeated word: “Open.” But to some Android developers, the search giant’s recent practices at its app store have been anything but open.

The company recently suspended the accounts of two high-profile programmers without reason or warning, removing all their published apps from the Android Market and effectively slashing a large part of their livelihoods.

“My income was cut in half,” mobile application developer ZodTTD (his web handle) told Wired.com. “But I feel that as a developer, not being able to use the Android Market or Checkout [Google’s payments system], that digs much deeper for me.”

The offending apps were emulation software for playing console games from different systems, such as PlayStation and Super Nintendo. Not coincidentally, Google pulled these apps at the same time Sony released a PlayStation phone in late May.
‘The biggest offense is that Google pulled these apps with no warning whatever.’

The removal of these apps is a sign that Google’s “open” regime is gradually crumbling, as the Android platform becomes more commercialized and entangled in corporate partnerships. Combine this episode with Google’s lockdown of source code for Android’s Honeycomb tablet operating system, and it’s no wonder why programmers and technology journalists have begun challenging Android’s claims of being open.

An ‘Open’ App Store

Android debuted in the fall of 2008 as the self-proclaimed “open” alternative to Apple’s closed iOS platform. In the name of openness, developers flocked to the platform in droves, and the Android Market ballooned in less than three years. Now host to more than 250,000 applications, Google’s app store is Apple’s only serious app-ecosystem competitor. Apple’s App Store now offers about 400,000 apps.

The word open speaks directly to the hacker ethos — open source software is made to be shared, pored over and freely distributed. Open networks were made to be entered, explored and (occasionally) exploited. Open markets, self-governed. For better or for worse, it’s pure libertarianism at its finest.

Part of the Market’s original appeal to developers came in the friction-free app-submission process. Completely antithetical to Apple’s model, the Android Market allows developers to publish their apps almost instantaneously, with no vetting or pre-approval process by Google.

“It was just so simple,” says Ralph Gootee, a mobile platform developer whose past includes coding for companies like Sony Ericsson and Pixar. “You published the app, and it was just … there. In the Market.”

That’s a stark contrast to the App Store. Apple’s team of reviewers carefully curate the App Store, with every submitted app undergoing a strict approval process. The app-review guidelines that a developer’s submitted app must adhere to are seven pages long, and the timeline for the process is ambiguous. Many apps that don’t adhere to Apple’s policies get rejected or banned.

“There’s this strange waiting period,” Gootee says of Apple’s process. “After you submit your app, you’re in limbo for anywhere from two days to two weeks, with no word from Apple whatever.”

Of course, there are lines Android app publishers aren’t allowed to cross — like uploading malware programs or apps that promote illegal activity — but the Android Market relies primarily on a system of self-policing, with patrons reporting suspect apps to Google for removal.

Apple’s lack of transparency seemed to be what irked developers most. For years, Apple refused to publish its app-submission guidelines, leaving developers playing guessing games as to whether or not their apps would be approved. Relative to Apple, Android’s instant-publishing model was more open than ever.

So when Google started pulling strings on high-profile apps from behind the scenes, developers noticed.

An Abrupt Removal

Google suspended mobile developer Yong Zhang’s Android Market developer account without warning in late May, along with all seven of his highly popular applications. A few weeks prior, Google did the same with another high-profile application developer: ZodTTD.

“I was quickly notified of my account suspension via my Twitter followers and e-mail,” ZodTTD said, though his official notice from Google didn’t come until later that day.

In a formal letter, Google offered a vague explanation, citing a “violation of Android Market policies.” The company refused our request for further comment.

It left both ZodTTD and Zhang in the lurch, with inboxes full of confused customer e-mails and no explanation to give them.

“Customers were concerned about how they would be able to reinstall the application,” says ZodTTD. Currently, Android Market users can reinstall apps they’ve already purchased on any of their devices, as long as the applications are still distributed in the Market. Those who already purchased the six-buck PSX4Droid app wouldn’t be able to install the app if they decided to switch phones or wipe the memory on their current device.

Aside from individual developer headaches, a larger dilemma seems to be at hand. Android’s open philosophy is getting more difficult to defend.

“The biggest offense is that Google pulled these apps with no warning whatever,” says Gootee, a self-proclaimed proponent of the Android platform. “It was a total Big Brother move.”

The Xperia Play smartphone's release pre-empted the removal of two prominent developers' apps. Photo courtesy Ars Technica

The Trouble With Emulators

Yong Zhang’s and ZodTTD’s apps weren’t just any random pieces of software.

Both Zhang and ZodTTD published apps called emulators, or software versions of popular console hardware, which are capable of running games (or ROMs). So if you bought and loaded ZodTTD’s PSX4Droid emulator from the Market onto your Android device, you’d essentially be able to run PlayStation games on your phone.

In other words, it’s free access to gaming content — the absolute last thing gaming industry heavyweights want.

Sony, for one, has a huge stake in mobile gaming. With the launch of the Xperia Play (also known as the “PlayStation phone”), Sony published a number of its older PlayStation titles to the Android Market. But the games are exclusive to “PlayStation-certified devices,” of which only one currently exists: the Xperia Play.

With the existence of emulators like PSX4Droid, there’s less incentive to buy Sony’s games, or to pick up Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Play hardware. So it’s no mystery why ZodTTD’s app disappeared from the Market.

Similarly, emulators like Zhang’s step on Nintendo’s territory: The company publishes a vast amount of its game catalog to its Wii and DS mobile consoles, all available to users for purchase.

Nintendo is crystal-clear on its policy toward the apps: The company doesn’t want apps that mess with its intellectual property to be in app stores. Nintendo told Wired.com it wasn’t involved in the removal of Zhang’s app, but the company admitted that it worked with Google to remove similar software recently.

“Nintendo actively monitors the unauthorized use of its intellectual property, and will continue to seek removal of any unauthorized content in these marketplaces,” a Nintendo spokesman said. “[We] worked with Google to have similar applications removed last week.”

Sony declined requests for comment on the removal of the PlayStation emulators from the Android Market. But a quick look into the company’s past shows its true colors.

In 1999, Sony sued Connectix, a software company that sold a PlayStation emulator, alleging copyright violation. Even though Sony lost the case in 2000, the onslaught of litigation fees forced Connectix to sell its company to Sony, which immediately discontinued the emulator product. Sony also bankrupted Bleem! — another emulator company — in 2005.

Under Commercial Pressure

It’s evident that large game companies had a role in pressuring Google to remove the emulators. However, to be fair, floating questions of infringement surround the takedowns.

In a recent blog post, ZodTTD said his app’s removal may have been the result of a Sony trademark infringement, and Sega reportedly complained to Google about Yong Zhang’s Genesis and Game Gear emulators.

‘It’s more open than Apple’s platform. But that’s like being a taller midget.’

But despite these claims, the timing of the removals remains suspect. ZodTTD’s and Zhang’s programs were some of the most-downloaded applications for the Android Market, and existed for months in the “Top Paid” apps category. Despite PSX4Droid being available for at least six months in a highly visible position, Google removed the app just weeks before the Xperia Play’s launch.

Some say that however drastic the measures, the takedowns make sense.

“Google is engaged in a vigorous war with Apple,” says Chris Soghoian, Ph.D. candidate in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. “For Android to see success, it’s going to need some key titles from game studios moving into the mobile space.”

That means keeping the studios happy, which may lead to concessions if the publishers ask for them.

“The content creators have a lot of leverage over Google,” Soghoian says. “It’s probably a smart business decision on Google’s behalf, even if it means pissing off these emulator communities.”

Still, can “relatively open” still be considered “open” in the truest sense of the word?

“It’s certainly more open than Apple’s platform,” Soghoian said. “But really, that’s like being a taller midget.”

And for some developers, relatively open isn’t good enough. The ordeal has left a bad taste in the mouth of at least one developer.

“I believe a change in what software I provide, and how I provide it, is definitely needed,” says ZodTTD. “This was a wake-up call.”
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/...mulators-open/





Supreme Court Takes Up Scholars' Rights

A professor's fight over Shostakovich heads to Washington
Marc Parry

When Lawrence Golan picks up his baton here at the University of Denver, the musicians in his student orchestra see a genial conductor who corrects their mistakes without raising his voice in frustration.

Yet Mr. Golan is frustrated, not with the musicians, but with a copyright law that does them harm. For 10 years, the music professor has been quietly waging a legal campaign to overturn the statute, which makes it impossibly expensive for smaller orchestras to play certain pieces of music.

Now the case is heading to the U.S. Supreme Court. The high-stakes copyright showdown affects far more than sheet music. The outcome will touch a broad swath of academe for years to come, dictating what materials scholars can use in books and courses without jumping through legal hoops. The law Mr. Golan is trying to overturn has also hobbled libraries' efforts to digitize and share books, films, and music.

The conductor's fight centers on the concept of the public domain, which scholars depend on for teaching and research. When a work enters the public domain, anyone can quote from it, copy it, share it, or republish it without seeking permission or paying royalties.

The dispute that led to Golan v. Holder dates to 1994, when Congress passed a law that moved vast amounts of material from the public domain back behind the firewall of copyright protection. For conductors like Mr. Golan, that step limited access to canonical 20th-century Russian pieces that had been freely played for years.

"It was a shocking change," Mr. Golan says over dinner at a tacos-and-margaritas dive near the University of Denver's mountain-framed campus. "You used to be able to buy Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Stravinsky. All of a sudden, on one day, you couldn't anymore."

Other works once available but now restricted include books by H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, and C.S. Lewis; films by Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, and Jean Renoir; and artwork by M.C. Escher and Pablo Picasso. The U.S. Copyright Office estimated that the works qualifying for copyright restoration "probably number in the millions."

Congress approved the recopyrighting, limited to foreign works, to align U.S. policy with an international copyright treaty. But the Golan plaintiffs—a group that includes educators, performers, and film archivists—argue that bigger principles are at stake. Does Congress have the constitutional right to remove works from the public domain? And if it does, what's stopping it from plucking out even more freely available works?

"If you can't rely on the status of something in the public domain today—that is, if you never know whether Congress is going to act again and yank it out—you're going to be a lot more cautious about doing anything with these materials," says Mr. Golan's lawyer, Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project and a lecturer in law at Stanford Law School. "You really destroy the value and the usefulness of the public domain in a profound way if the rug can be pulled out from under you at any time."

The Radicalization of Golan

Before the rug was yanked out from under him, Mr. Golan had no experience as an activist. He still doesn't seem like one. Outside the orchestra pit, the conductor could pass for an off-duty businessman: trim build, clean-cut dark hair, slacks, waist-length tan jacket. The tenured professor has taught conducting and led the 80-student Lamont Symphony Orchestra at this private university since 2001. Yet he has done little to publicize his cause on campus, at least judging from the reactions of others in the music school one recent evening as the halls buzzed with costumed nuns rehearsing Puccini's Suor Angelica.

"No!" said one professor after hearing that Mr. Golan's case was going to Washington. "Are you making it up?" asked another.

Mr. Golan keeps a low profile as a plaintiff because his life is about music, not litigation. "I would love to have my name go down in history like Arturo Toscanini, for being the greatest conductor of all time," he says.

But because his quest for that glory coincides with a broad shift in the reach of copyright law, he has a better shot at going down in history as the capitalized name atop a Supreme Court opinion studied by future generations of law students.

The son of a violinist in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Mr. Golan was just starting his own professional career when Congress passed the copyright restoration.

The change was surprising from a philosophical point of view: Under copyright law, the Constitution grants authors a limited monopoly over their works as an incentive to promote creativity. Over the years, Congress has often delayed the passage of works into the public domain by lengthening the duration of copyright terms. But removing pieces already there was different, Mr. Golan's lawyers argue, a radical change in what one scholar describes as the basic "physics" of the public domain.

That may sound abstract, but the impact on Mr. Golan was direct. When a work is in the public domain—that Puccini opera, say—an orchestra can buy the sheet music. Symphonies typically cost about $150. And the orchestra can keep those pages forever, preserving the instructions that librarians laboriously pencil into scores. But works under copyright are typically available only for rent. And the cost is significantly higher: about $600 for one performance. With the flip of a switch, the new law restored copyright to thousands of pieces.

For big-city orchestras like the New York Philharmonic, that change is like a "mosquito bite," Mr. Golan says. But Mr. Golan's university ensemble gets only about $4,000 to rent and buy music each year. That means it can perform some copyrighted works but must rely on the public domain for about 80 percent of its repertoire. And $4,000 is relatively generous. Other colleges might have only $500 to spend on music. When the Conductors Guild surveyed its 1,600 members, 70 percent of respondents said they were now priced out of performing pieces previously in the public domain.

Teaching suffers, too. Every year, for example, University of Denver students compete for the honor of playing a concerto, a piece in which the orchestra accompanies a solo instrument. But when a pianist wanted to audition with a piano concerto by Prokofiev, a Russian composer who died in 1953, Mr. Golan was forced to tell her no.

"It's one that any aspiring pianist needs to learn, and to have the experience of actually playing it with orchestra is phenomenal," Mr. Golan says. But "we just didn't have the money in the orchestra budget to pay the rental price."

The problem soon got worse. In 1998, after lobbying by entertainment groups like the Walt Disney Company, Congress passed another law, extending copyrights by 20 years. This Copyright Term Extension Act—mocked by critics as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act—meant that a work would not enter the public domain until up to 70 years after its creator's death.

That legal one-two punch made it hard for Mr. Golan to play both foreign and American works, like Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.

In response to those changes, reform-minded academics at top law schools fought back with multiple lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the statutes. The conductor's tale made him an ideal poster child for their war to protect the public domain.

Reformers suffered a defeat in 2003, when the Supreme Court rejected an online book publisher's challenge of the 20-year extension. In that case, Eldred v. Ashcroft, the court found the change acceptable in part because it had not "altered the traditional contours of copyright protection."

Think of the Golan case as "Eldred, the Sequel." Only this time the question isn't whether Congress can delay works from entering the public domain. It's whether removing works already there is a "bright line" Congress can't cross.

'Fairly Horrible'

If that bright line dims, scholars and librarians will have problems. To understand why, consider the copyright confusion faced by Elizabeth Townsend-Gard.

Ms. Townsend-Gard is an associate professor at Tulane University Law School. As a graduate student in the 1990s, she studied history at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her dissertation was a biography of Vera Brittain, a British author known for her World War I autobiography, Testament of Youth. Ms. Townsend-Gard mined letters, diaries, photos, and other texts for her research. But she worried about getting permission to publish materials she needed, because Ms. Brittain's literary executor, too, was writing a biography of the author.

In 1996 the ground shifted under Ms. Townsend-Gard's feet. At the outset of her research, almost all the works she needed had been in the public domain. When she finished, because of the restoration now under attack by Mr. Golan, almost all those works were under copyright.

She ultimately diversified her project so that it became a comparative biography of many subjects rather than just one. But she also grew fascinated with the copyright complexities surrounding the daily work of historians. Ms. Townsend-Gard ended up going to law school after finishing her Ph.D., and invented a software tool, called the Durationator, designed to tell users the copyright status of any work.

The market of scholars who might need that tool is large. The law at stake in Golan alone potentially affects anyone studying works created or published by non-U.S. authors or publishers from 1923 to 1989. Most of those materials were in the public domain before. Now they are covered by a complicated copyright statute, says Ms. Townsend-Gard.

"For people who work on the 20th century, it's fairly horrible," she says.

Now pull back from the view of an individual scholar, and imagine you are working on one of the numerous projects to make millions of digital books available online. Libraries, archives, Google: Copyright restoration has big consequences for their digitization efforts. Most of those ventures will not publish the full texts of works online unless they are clearly in the public domain in the United States.

But when it comes to a foreign book, figuring out its copyright status can require a mammoth investigation. That's because a work must have been under copyright in its home country to qualify for restoration in the United States, says Kenneth D. Crews, director of the copyright advisory office at Columbia University Libraries. So, for example, when Columbia considers digitizing a rare trove of Chinese books, including many from the 1920s and 1930s of great interest to scholars, its staff must grasp the legal nuances of a country that has gone through a revolution—and a transformation of copyright law—since the books were published. Or must try to, anyway.

And if the law is unclear, the university must decide whether digitization is worth risking a potentially expensive lawsuit should a rights-holder turn up later.

"It's deterring digitization on anything foreign," Ms. Townsend-Gard says, "because people can't figure it out."

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit took a different view. In a 2010 ruling backing the government, it stressed the argument that recopyrighting foreign works that had fallen into our public domain was crucial to protecting American authors' interests abroad. Our restoration of those copyrights could drive other countries to grant retroactive copyrights to contemporary American works that had fallen into their public domains.

And big money is at stake. The court quoted Congressional testimony from the mid-1990s in which a group representing publishers, record companies, and other copyright-based industries estimated that billions were being lost each year because foreign countries were failing to provide copyright protections to U.S.-originated works. The recording industry told lawmakers that there were "vastly more U.S. works currently unprotected in foreign markets than foreign ones here."

The government, in its Supreme Court brief, pointed out that the copyright restorations were limited in scope. They applied to foreign works whose creators weren't familiar with U.S. copyright procedures, for example. Other works restored were previously ineligible for protection.

The Supreme Court is expected to decide the case during the term that begins in October. Mr. Golan hopes to be in Washington to watch. Unless, that is, he has a concert to conduct.
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Profe...t-Over/127700/





EBooks are "Attacking Our Freedom"
Barry Collins

Free software guru Richard Stallman has called on consumers to reject eBooks until they "respect our freedom".

In an article entitled The Dangers of eBooks (PDF), the founder of the Free Software Foundation warns that "technologies that could have empowered us are used to chain us instead".

He highlights the DRM embedded in eBooks sold by Amazon as an example of such restrictions, citing the infamous case of Amazon wiping copies of George Orwell's 1984 from users' Kindles without permission.

He points to other examples of how buyers' freedoms are eroded. "Amazon requires users to identify themselves to get an eBook," Stallman claims, pointing out that printed book buyers can walk into a bookstore and make a cash purchase anonymously.

He also claims the eBook format used by Amazon is "secret", and "only proprietary user-restricting software can read it at all".

Stallman claims that eBook retailers can still support authors and retain buyers' freedoms by distributing tax funds to authors based on their popularity, or by "designing players so users can send authors anonymous voluntary payments".

"EBooks need not attack our freedom, but they will if companies get to decide," Stallman concludes. "It's up to us to stop them."
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/367894/e...ng-our-freedom





Piracy: Are We Being Conned?
Asher Moses

Is piracy really sending the entertainment industry broke or are the claimed hundreds of millions of dollars in annual losses and thousands of job cuts just a load of hogwash?

The industry is constantly warning of an impending piracy apocalypse but continues to notch up healthy revenues and record box office takings.

From bogus figures to highly exaggerated press releases, analysts and academics claim there is no limit to the hyperbole record labels and movie studios will use in their relentless lobbying campaign.

With the industry reeling after repeatedly failing to use the courts to force internet providers to penalise illegal downloaders, it is now trying to persuade the government to implement new legislation that would crack down on internet users.

But critics say the industry isn't playing fair and should refresh its business model for the digital age instead of stretching the truth in order to scare the government into implementing knee-jerk legislation.

Fudging the numbers

This month, a new lobbying group, the Australian Content Industry Group (ACIG), released new statistics to The Age, which claimed piracy was costing Australian content industries $900 million a year and 8000 jobs.

The report claims 4.7 million Australian internet users engaged in illegal downloading and this was set to increase to 8 million by 2016. By that time, the claimed losses to piracy would jump to $5.2 billion a year and 40,000 jobs.

But the report, which is just 12 pages long, is fundamentally flawed. It takes a model provided by an earlier European piracy study (which itself has been thoroughly debunked) and attempts to shoe-horn in extrapolated Australian figures that are at best highly questionable and at worst just made up.

What's more, the report attempts to provide a five-year forecast based on a single year of data and also attempts to calculate lost Commonwealth tax revenue. It suggests there is a direct correlation between internet traffic growth and lost jobs in the content industry - but includes no new research into jobs in the entertainment industry to back this up.

"The main objective is to lobby politicians with this and to scare the public into compliance," IBRS analyst Guy Cranswick said.

"The quality of data and analysis is very weak as its political objective is so clear.

"It does not use actual ABS data but data taken from Europe. It's an elemental statistical error, it's fudging with numbers to come out with a figure which is 'kinda sorta' plausible."

The report was compiled by Sphere Analysis on behalf of ACIG, which comprises the main industry bodies for the music, games, software and book industries.

The author of the Sphere report, Emilio Ferrrer, said he believed the European study was credible and thorough and stood by his estimates for Australia, which he believed were conservative. Ferrer said that, even if the numbers were not completely correct, there was no denying that piracy was a significant issue for the industry that was only expected to increase with the arrival of the National Broadband Network.

Twisting the government's arm

Despite the flaws in the data, ACIG appears to be getting through to the government, with the Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, using the report in a recent speech to highlight the threat of online piracy.

The tactic appears to be working overseas too with industry-generated reports succeeding in pushing governments in US, Britain, France and Ireland to act with onerous new laws.

ACIG's report is far from the first Australian research to be criticised. Virtually every industry-commissioned report on the effects of piracy has been ridiculed by analysts.

The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), another local anti-piracy agency, released a report in February that claimed piracy had cost the economy $1.37 billion in lost revenue and 6100 jobs from July 2009 until July 2010.

The study, based on a survey of 3500 people, has also been heavily criticised by analysts, copyright lawyers and the online users' lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA).

"The reports always headline 'jobs lost to piracy', but this has no basis in fact," EFA chairman Colin Jacobs said.

"Money not spent by downloaders on movie tickets is almost certainly spent elsewhere on other goods and services that may be more efficient at creating jobs in Australia."

Essentially, piracy is a reallocation of income, not a loss to the larger national economy. Jacobs also noted that the content industry was mostly based in the US so revenue was largely flowing offshore.

He pointed to a research report from Holland that found piracy was actually beneficial to the Dutch economy (a Canadian study has come to a similar conclusion). Other studios have found that illegal downloaders actually spent the most on music and that pirated copies served to market the legitimate versions.

'Self-serving hyperbole'

The Australian Institute of Criminology for one has been reluctant to take the industry at its word when it comes to piracy losses.

"Although these estimates provide a general indication of the scale of the problem, the validity of the data is open to some debate," the AIC wrote in its latest report on intellectual property crime in Australia.

The AIC has previously debunked claims that piracy was linked to organised crime and in a draft report leaked in 2006 said industry-provided piracy statistics were "self-serving hyperbole".

"The AIC's frustration was largely based on the fact that none of these groups will expose their reports to genuine peer review or analysis," said Kimberlee Weatherall, a senior law lecturer at the University of Queensland, who specialises in copyright law and is highly critical of the industry's piracy reports.

"When the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) looked into it at the request of US Congress, it expressed doubt about most of the industry-produced figures."

Piracy figures derived by the entertainment industry have also been heavily criticised in the US and Europe. In some instances, the industry has admitted to grossly inflating its numbers.

Australia's biggest pirate? Fat chance

In February last year, the anti-piracy arm of the music industry, Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI), put out a thunderous press release claiming it had helped police "shut down one of Australia's largest illegal music burning operations" in Melbourne.

Acting on information from MIPI, police seized "close to 100 CD burners and approximately 25,000 discs containing pirate music housed in a suburban CD store".

MIPI's general manager, Sabiene Heindl, said at the time: "This is one of the largest and most blatant illegal music burning labs that we have seen for some time."

It was only this year that the case finally ground its way through the courts and further details were released.

Of the 25,000 "pirate" CDs that MIPI claimed it seized, 14,600 were blanks, while the remaining discs were mostly of Asian artists which the store, Lucky Bubble, had a licence to reproduce.

Less than 100 of the discs were proven to be pirated copies and the charges were dropped to the lowest possible level. The manager of the store, who claims the handful of pirated discs were placed in his shop by staff, in the end was let go with a $1500 fine.

It's a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalties and years in jail that MIPI warned about in its press release.

The police have recently returned the man's burners and almost all of the seized discs.

"This whole operation from the start has just been a monumental stuff-up by MIPI," said barrister Doug Potter, who represented the defence in this matter but has 18 years' experience with Victoria Police and has previously helped MIPI with its prosecutions.

"This bloke's got a legitimate licence to be selling material and they've tried to characterise him as the greatest pirate in Australia. If their assessment is right they don't have a piracy problem, it's as simple as that."

Mr Potter said he believed that MIPI was trying to "justify their existence" by pursuing minor pirates and raiding the occasional market stall. He said most piracy was occurring on the internet and much of this MIPI was powerless to stop.

"Everyone's sitting on their computers anonymously pirating stuff and they're going after someone with just 96 discs and proclaiming a great victory - the reality is that hard copies of these things are going the way of the dinosaur," he said.

The Lucky Bubble case is reminiscent of the case of 24-year-old Queensland man James Burt, who was forced to pay $1.5 million to Nintendo in a piracy case last year for uploading a copy of a new game to the internet after he managed to buy it before the official release date.

Nintendo claimed he was a major pirate who had caused it significant losses, but Burt's father said he was simply acting under peer pressure from his friends. As for the losses, the game, New Super Mario Bros, went on to earn $20 million in revenue in just seven weeks, making it one of the fastest-selling games of all time.

Studios still raking it in

But despite the presence of internet piracy, is the local industry actually suffering? The results are mixed.

The Australian box office set its third consecutive record in 2010, reporting revenues of $1.128 billion – a 4 per cent increase on the previous result.

Figures released by the Australian Recording Industry Association show that, between 2009 and 2010, although the quantity of music sold rose almost 10 per cent, the dollar value of these sales dropped from $446 million to $384 million.

Sales of DVDs, Blu-ray discs and other packaged media are holding strong, with 2010 revenues at $1.29 billion – just 6 per cent lower than in 2009.

Mr Cranswick believes shifting the blame for lost sales on to piracy betrays a deficit of "imagination and insight" by the entertainment industry.

There were legions of other reasons that could account for changing fortunes including technology, demography, usage patterns and price models.

The music industry appears to be the worst affected by falling revenue but there are signs it will soon turn the corner thanks to new subscription-based online music services. A recent Ovum research report estimated the digital music industry would grow by 60 per cent to $US20 billion by 2015.

Mr Jacobs points out that despite its profits continuing to grow on an overall basis, the industry for a long time has made a lot of noise about the end of days. It has continuously protested against new technologies and lobbied governments to impose restrictions.

"The marketers of entertainment should ask themselves - if a quarter of Australian internet users are engaging in unauthorised downloads as they claim, is it because Australians are a bunch of immoral criminals? Or could there be another explanation?" he asked.

"Rather than treating the impending roll-out of the NBN as an apocalypse of piracy, the industry should be embracing the technology to provide a more compelling offering to their Australian customers. Sadly, it seems that innovation is harder than putting lawyers in charge."
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/tec...322-1c4cs.html





Canadian Chamber of Commerce Floats Fake $30 Billion Counterfeiting Claim
Michael Geist

This week the Canadian IP Council, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce's IP lobby arm, issued a release placing Canadian counterfeiting costs at $30 billion per year. That figure is being used to lobby the government to enact new border measure provisions that could lead to the searching of luggage as travellers enter Canada. It is tempting to dismiss the claims on the basis that the policy rationale makes no sense - if counterfeit toothpaste is indeed "coming across the border in droves" as the Chamber claims, searching traveller luggage won't address that issue. Moreover, it should be noted that even the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement features an exception for de minimis imports that an individual might carry as it recognizes that addressing counterfeiting concerns does not involve targeting individuals. Yet given the decision to resurrect the bogus $30 billion figure, it is important to again call attention to its origins and how it is simply a fabrication.

[Update: New post with the Chamber's response and more fake figures]

Several years ago I examined the source of the $30 billion claim, which has been repeated on many occasions over the years. The review started with an Access to Information request with the RCMP for the source of the $30 billion claim, which was found in a 2005 report. The RCMP responded that the figure was based on "open source documents found on the Internet." What were these documents? The RCMP provided two:

First, a March 2005 CTV news story reported unsubstantiated claims by the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, a global anti-counterfeiting lobby group made up predominantly of brand owners and law firms, that some of its members believe that 20 percent of the Canadian market is "pirate product." That 20 percent figure - raised without the support of any evidence whatsoever - appears to have been used by IACC to peg the cost of counterfeiting in Canada at $20 billion per year.

Second, a 2005 powerpoint presentation by Jayson Myers, then the Chief Economist for the Canadian Manufacturing and Exporters, included a single bullet point that "estimated direct losses in Canada between $20 billion and $30 billion annually." The source for this claim? According to Mr. Myers, it is simply 3 to 4 percent of the value of Canada's two-way trade.

In recent years, the RCMP has backed away from the $30 billion claim. In its August 2010 report on IP crime, it declined to set a figure, acknowledging that the numbers "have been subject to debate in recent years."

The use of unsubstantiated counterfeiting claims is not limited to Canada. Last year, the U.S. Government Accountability Office was asked by the U.S. Congress to try to quantify the impact of counterfeit and pirated goods (their work followed Felix Salmon's 2005 comprehensive post on the issue). While concluding that counterfeiting exists and is a problem, the GAO could not find reliable data. The report notes:

Three commonly cited estimates of U.S. industry losses due to counterfeiting have been sourced to U.S. agencies, but cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology. First, a number of industry, media, and government publications have cited an FBI estimate that U.S. businesses lose $200-$250 billion to counterfeiting on an annual basis. This estimate was contained in a 2002 FBI press release, but FBI officials told us that it has no record of source data or methodology for generating the estimate and that it cannot be corroborated.

Second, a 2002 CBP press release contained an estimate that U.S. businesses and industries lose $200 billion a year in revenue and 750,000 jobs due to counterfeits of merchandise. However, a CBP official stated that these figures are of uncertain origin, have been discredited, and are no longer used by CBP. A March 2009 CBP internal memo was circulated to inform staff not to use the figures. However, another entity within DHS continues to use them.

Third, the Motor and Equipment Manufacturers Association reported an estimate that the U.S. automotive parts industry has lost $3 billion in sales due to counterfeit goods and attributed the figure to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The OECD has also referenced this estimate in its report on counterfeiting and piracy, citing the association report that is sourced to the FTC. However, when we contacted FTC officials to substantiate the estimate, they were unable to locate any record or source of this estimate within its reports or archives, and officials could not recall the agency ever developing or using this estimate. These estimates attributed to FBI, CBP, and FTC continue to be referenced by various industry and government sources as evidence of the significance of the counterfeiting and piracy problem to the U.S. economy.

The most comprehensive review of global piracy is the Canadian-backed report, Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, which debunks many of the false claims on counterfeiting and piracy.

On the issue of counterfeiting numbers, the report notes the mounting skepticism from authorities such as the OECD and GAO and holds out hope that "the golden age of big piracy numbers is past." Apparently no one at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce has received that message as it is content to peddle discredited numbers that only serve to discredit the organization itself.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5841/125/





Reject the PROTECT IP Act

The PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) is a threatening sequel to last year's COICA Internet censorship bill that would—like its predecessor—invite Internet security risks, threaten online speech, and hamper Internet innovation. Urge your members of Congress to reject this dangerous bill!

Big media and its allies in Congress are billing the PROTECT IP Act as a new way to prevent online infringement. But innovation and free speech advocates know that PIPA is nothing more than a dangerous wish list that will compromise Internet security while doing little or nothing to encourage creative expression.

PROTECT IP = Private Rightsholders Opposed To Emerging Consumer Technologies, Innovation, and Progress

As drafted, the bill seeks to stop websites believed to be "dedicated" to "infringing activities" by granting the government the unprecedented power to attack the Internet's domain name system (DNS). The government would be able to force ISPs and search engines to redirect or dump users' attempts to reach certain websites' URLs. In response, third parties will woo average users to alternative servers that offer access to the entire Internet (not just the newly censored U.S. version), which will create new computer security vulnerabilities as the reliability and universality of the DNS evaporates.

It gets worse: the bill uses the following dangerously expansive definition of DNS server: "a server or other mechanism used to provide the Internet protocol address associated with a domain name." This loose, uncabined definition could lead to the targeting of other technologies—like operating systems, email clients, web clients, routers, and more—that are capable of providing IP addresses when given domain names like a traditional DNS server.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has placed a hold on the Senate version of the bill, taking a principled stand against a very dangerous bill. But every Senator and Representative should be opposing the PROTECT IP Act -- contact your members of Congress today to speak out!
https://secure.eff.org/site/Advocacy...rAction&id=487





Internet Piracy and How to Stop It

Online piracy is a huge business. A recent study found that Web sites offering pirated digital content or counterfeit goods, like illicit movie downloads or bootleg software, record 53 billion hits per year. That robs the industries that create and sell intellectual products of hundreds of billions of dollars.

The problem is particularly hard to crack because the villains are often in faraway countries. Bad apples can be difficult to pin down in the sea of Web sites, and pirates can evade countervailing measures as easily as tweaking the name of a Web site.

Commendably, the Senate Judiciary Committee is trying to bolster the government’s power to enforce intellectual property protections. Last month, the committee approved the Protect IP Act, which creates new tools to disrupt illegal online commerce.

The bill is not perfect. Its definition of wrongdoing is broad and could be abused by companies seeking to use the law to quickly hinder Web sites. Some proposed remedies could also unintentionally reduce the safety of the Internet. Senator Ron Wyden put a hold on the bill over these issues, which, he argued, could infringe on the right to free speech. The legislation is, therefore, in limbo, but it should be fixed, not discarded.

The bill defines infringing Web sites as those that have “no significant use other than engaging in, enabling, or facilitating” the illegal copying or distribution of copyrighted material in “substantially complete form” — entire movies or songs, not just snippets.

If the offender can’t be found to answer the accusation (a likely occurrence given that most Web sites targeted will be overseas), the government or a private party can seek an injunction from a judge to compel advertising networks and payment systems like MasterCard or PayPal to stop doing business with the site.

The government — but not private parties — can use the injunction to compel Internet service providers to redirect traffic by not translating a Web address into the numerical language that computers understand. And they could force search engines to stop linking to them.

The broadness of the definition is particularly worrisome because private companies are given a right to take action under the bill. In one notorious case, a record label demanded that YouTube take down a home video of a toddler jiggling in the kitchen to a tune by Prince, claiming it violated copyright law. Allowing firms to go after a Web site that “facilitates” intellectual property theft might encourage that kind of overreaching — and allow the government to black out a site.

Some of the remedies are problematic. A group of Internet safety experts cautioned that the procedure to redirect Internet traffic from offending Web sites would mimic what hackers do when they take over a domain. If it occurred on a large enough scale it could impair efforts to enhance the safety of the domain name system.

This kind of blocking is unlikely to be very effective. Users could reach offending Web sites simply by writing the numerical I.P. address in the navigator box, rather than the URL. The Web sites could distribute free plug-ins to translate addresses into numbers automatically.

The bill before the Senate is an important step toward making piracy less profitable. But it shouldn’t pass as is. If protecting intellectual property is important, so is protecting the Internet from overzealous enforcement.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/opinion/09thu1.html





Why Is The Federal Government Running Ads Secretly Created & Owned By NBC Universal?
Mike Masnick

We certainly suspected this when New York City first announced that it was running a series of silly and misleading videos as part of a media campaign to "Stop Piracy in NYC," but now it's been confirmed that these videos were not, in fact, New York City's, but are purely NBC Universal's. At the time, NYC had "thanked" NBC Universal (among others), but had not admitted that NBC Universal "owned" and had created the videos themselves. However, in response to one of the Freedom of Information requests that I filed with New York City, the city noted that the videos are property of NBC Universal. I had asked for any licensing info between NYC and Homeland Security/ICE because ICE was using the same videos. Since NYC had clearly suggested that those videos were the creation of the NYC government, I assumed that ICE must have licensed the videos from NYC. However, NYC responded to my request by saying that there was no such info to hand over, because it did not license the videos to Homeland Security. And the reason was that NYC did not own the videos:

The Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment has no records responsive to your request. Please note that NBC Universal owns the material, not the City of New York.

That's fascinating information. Of course, I had also filed a separate FOI request for any info on the licensing agreement between NYC and NBC Universal. As of this writing there has been no response from NYC, in violation of New York State's Freedom of Information Law, which requires a response within 5 business days (we're way beyond that).

Still, at least give NYC credit for making it clear that NBC Universal had a hand in the creation of the videos, even if it left out the rather pertinent information that it created and owned the videos. While I find it immensely troubling that a municipal government would run PSAs created by corporate interests (without making that clear), I'm extremely troubled by the news that the federal government would run those same videos with absolutely no mention of the fact that the videos were created and owned by a private corporation with a tremendous stake in the issue.

Could you imagine how the press would react if, say, the FDA ran PSAs that were created and owned by McDonald's without making that clear to the public? How about if the Treasury Department ran a PSA created and owned by Goldman Sachs? So, shouldn't we be asking serious questions about why Homeland Security and ICE are running a one-sided, misleading corporate propaganda video, created and owned by a private company, without mentioning the rather pertinent information of who made it?

Does Homeland Security work for the US public... or for NBC Universal?
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...niversal.shtml





Inside the US-Anglo-French Plan to Civilize the Internet
Nate Anderson

Get ready for international Internet regulation; top leaders from the US, UK, and France are making increasingly public statements about their plans to draft new rules that will make the 'Net more secure and will crack down on copyright infringers.

In a speech back on February 4, UK Foreign Secretary William Hague sounded a dire warning about the state of the 'Net.

The intelligence reports I see as Foreign Secretary show that just one criminal computer programme can harvest over thirty gigabytes of stolen passwords and credit card details from over a hundred countries in a matter of days, causing millions of pounds worth of fraud…

Last year the national security interests of the UK were targeted in a deliberate attack on our defence industry. A malicious file posing as a report on a nuclear Trident missile was sent to a defence contractor by someone masquerading as an employee of another defence contractor. Good protective security meant that the email was detected and blocked, but its purpose was undoubtedly to steal information relating to our most sensitive defence projects.

And last month three of my staff were sent an e-mail, apparently from a British colleague outside the FCO, working on their region. The e-mail claimed to be about a forthcoming visit to the region and looked quite innocent. In fact it was from a hostile state intelligence agency and contained computer code embedded in the attached document that would have attacked their machine. Luckily, our systems identified it and stopped it from ever reaching my staff.

The Wild West might make a romanticized setting for films, but when you're on the receiving end of chaotic violence, you start longing for some law and order pretty quick. In his speech, Hague pledged that law and order was coming in the form of an "international agreement about norms in cyberspace."

Such discussions have been ongoing for years, but in dilatory and fragmented fashion. Hague now wants to formalize and accelerate the discussions—"we need to get the ball rolling faster!"

To do that, the UK government launched a major international conference, unfortunately dubbed the "London International Cyber Conference," to gather this November.

The goal is nothing less than "to discuss norms of acceptable behaviour in cyber-space" and "bringing countries together to explore mechanisms for giving such standards real political and diplomatic weight."

The UK wants to begin the discussion with seven principles that will serve as the basis for these new international rules:

• The need for governments to act proportionately in cyberspace and in accordance with national and international law
• The need for everyone to have the ability—in terms of skills, technology, confidence and opportunity—to access cyberspace
• The need for users of cyberspace to show tolerance and respect for diversity of language, culture and ideas
• Ensuring that cyberspace remains open to innovation and the free flow of ideas, information, and expression
• The need to respect individual rights of privacy and to provide proper protection to intellectual property
• The need for us all to work collectively to tackle the threat from criminals acting online
• The promotion of a competitive environment which ensures a fair return on investment in network, services, and content

And they have already found willing partners in both France and the United States.

Library of Congress

On May 25, as President Obama wrapped up a UK visit with Prime Minister David Cameron, the two issued a joint statement on the Internet calling for "rules of the road" in cyberspace. Both singled out the London International Cyber Conference as a key event at which "consensus" would be sought on such rules.

Both sides are deadly serious about policing the Internet. In October 2010, the UK issued the most recent draft of its National Security Strategy—and "cyber attack" was the second most pressing security risk faced by the country after terrorism.

In May 2011, the US issued a cybersecurity policy document of its own which threatened even military retaliation. "When warranted, the United States will respond to hostile acts in cyberspace as we would any other threat to our country," said the document.

This is music to the ears of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who for years has called for a "civilized Internet." Sarkozy had a world platform for his ideas when he pushed the creation of the e-G8 conference last month in Paris, which took place just before a major G8 summit in the French resort of Deauville.

In his e-G8 keynote, Sarkozy made clear that law and order and control would be coming to the Internet. "The universe that you represent is not a parallel universe which is free of rules of law or ethics or of any of the fundamental principles that must govern and do govern the social lives of our democratic states," he told the techies in the audience. "[I am] calling for collective responsibility… What I am calling for is for everyone to be reasonable."

("Reasonable" in this case apparently means accepting the controversial French principle that people should have their Internet connection disrupted after three copyright violations using their account. This is not, it must be said, a universally shared view; a UN report just blasted the French approach.)

By the end of the week, the G8 countries had wrapped up their own separate event and issued a final statement concerning, in large part, the Internet.

The Internet is not some distinct sphere of action, said the statement, but just another part of the normal world of laws and regulations which demands that you wear a helmet when on a motorcycle. As such, the 'Net must be "included in a broader framework: that of respect for the rule of law, human rights and fundamental freedoms, the protection of intellectual property rights, which inspire life in every democratic society for the benefit of all citizens… Both the framework and principles must receive the same protection, with the same guarantees, on the Internet as everywhere else."

To make this happen, "action from all governments is needed through national policies, but also through the promotion of international cooperation," especially when it comes to intellectual property.

That government action, the statement concluded, would begin at events over the next six months—including at the London International Cyber Conference.

The dreaded car analogy

Because the topic at issue here involves the Internet, Anderson's (eponymous) Law applies, which holds that as the debate reaches increasing levels of public prominence, car analogies will flourish correspondingly. The fondness for such analogies goes way back to the hoary "information superhighway" trope of yore, but it pops up again every time some new Internet governance issue emerges into the public view (see: network neutrality).

When it comes to the renewed push for international 'Net norms, car analogies must therefore be expected—and the Obama/Cameron call for "rules of the road" duly delivered. But it took Francis Maude, UK Minister for the Cabinet Office and Cyber Security, to upgrade this Reliant Robin of an analogy to a hulking black Range Rover in a June 1 speech.

A century ago, the invention of the motorcar spawned an age of mass travel—of freedom to explore, investigate, widen horizons and become intimate not just with one’s immediate locality, but with a whole world beyond. It transformed everything about our society, overwhelmingly for the better. It also, of course, brought road accidents, and to reduce them, a whole panoply of new rules and regulations. The superhighways of the Internet are similarly transformative for the good, but similarly need their speed cameras and crash barriers—not so as to stop people travelling, but to allow them to do so safely…

As for the early motorists, there’s still a long, long way to go, and all we can say for sure about the journey is that we will get to places that today we can’t even imagine. For that to happen, though, the highway needs rules and policing, not so as to restrict its use, but so as to keep it safe, reliable and open for all.

And he's right. The tech community generally has a suspicion of technical law and regulation, but the near-Hobbesian nature of the current Internet cries out for more security and stability.

The challenge, of course, is to regulate and legislate sensibly, proportionally, and in full public view. The danger is that governments, the defense/attack industry that feeds off them, and major corporations will instead gather in the corner to do the important talking about road rules, only to emerge with security regulations that look too much like surveillance, Internet censorship that threatens speech, and IP laws that put the Internet in a vice.

Auto accident

The "reasonable" "rules of the road" sought by US, UK, and French governments aren't universally admired. Resistance will arise from countries which benefit from the current situation, especially when it comes to IP, where developed countries are huge exporters of content to the rest of the world.

Countries like Russia have little economic incentive to crack down hard on IP issues, unless it's from threats such as not being allowed into the World Trade Organization (a threat that convinced Russia to break up AllofMP3.com a few years back).

Though enraging to copyright holders, such resistance to IP enforcement has always been a function of net IP importers; the US allowed wholesale reproduction of copyrighted British books for more than a century, which used to outrage writers like Charles Dickens. As law professor John Tehranian notes in his recent book Infringement Nation, "many of the same industries that now lobby heavily for strong intellectual property rights established themselves precisely because of their flagrant, unauthorized exploitation of the intellectual property of others." Once such industries became established, of course, they lobbied hard for tough IP enforcement.

It's therefore no surprise to see people like Russian President Dmitry Medvedev trolling his fellow world leaders after the G8 with comments like these, reported by Hong Kong's International Business Times: "The [G8] declaration reflects an absolutely conservative position that intellectual property rights should be protected according to the existing conventions. No one questions that, but I have repeatedly stated that, unfortunately, those conventions were written 50 or almost 100 years ago, and they are unable to regulate the whole complex of relations between the copyright owner and users…. My colleagues have a more conservative opinion than is necessary at the moment. Or maybe they just don't use the Internet and have little understanding of it."

So what happens when the nations backing more Internet rules of the road find only limited international agreement? One solution is simply to forge a "coalition of the willing" and put up virtual fences around the countries willing to comply, blocking access to material that exists in the primeval chaos of, say, the Russian Internet.
Papers, please

This is the idea behind the PROTECT IP Act currently moving through the US Congress. It provides a way to block access to foreign sites that can't easily be reached by the long arm of the law, often because they exist in countries where such services are legal or simply ignored.

The EU has considered something similar, putting up a "virtual Schengen border" (Schengen borders refer to EU country border crossings that are passport-controlled; once inside such a border crossing, wide freedom of movement is possible across EU countries without further passport checks).

A May presentation to the EU on a "Single Secure European Cyberspace" (the presenter won't even identify himself out of "privacy" concerns) talks about making ISPs into the "virtual 'border crossing points' at the EU's computer technology and Internet 'borders.'" The system would allow for both mandatory and "voluntary" blocks of websites; it's explicitly targeted at child sex abuse, but such claims are often deployed by those actually intent on using such systems in other ways but lacking the courage to propose the full scope of their request outright.
A slide on Internet blocking in Europe

In this case, the end of the presentation actually admits that this is "only a first step" and that in the future, "it is possible to broaden the cooperation of the blocking process by involving other types of crimes (e.g. counterfeit medicines on the Internet)."

It's presentations like this that led Chris Marsden, a University of Essex don, to write recently, "Expect the November London conference—which has no public website, naturally, as civil society will be vetted—to produce real web filtering proposals."

Digital rights group EDRI is also worried. "With EU-level proposals and discussions on Internet blocking in the context of child abuse, gambling, copyright and now counterfeit medicines, it is far from surprising that the Council of Ministers is now discussing a harmonised 'great Firewall of Europe' for the ever-growing list of content that they wish to restrict access to," it said in a statement.

Scrutiny and public involvement are badly needed over the next year, but so is level-headed thought; the temptation to fear-monger and demagogue—both by pro-regulation cyberwarfare types and antiregulation "hands off the 'Net!" activists—can be powerful. Road rules can save lives; they just need to be crafted with wisdom, a strong appreciation for the often-fruitful chaos of the Internet, and a dose of humility.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...f-the-road.ars





FCC Report: Net has Helped Suffocate Local News
Eric Mack

Thanks to digital technologies, we have more media sources than ever to get our news from, but when it comes to covering town halls, school boards, courts, and other local news, they mostly suck.

That's the takeaway message (though definitely not in those words) in a behemoth of a report (PDF) released Thursday by the Federal Communications Commission.

The 460-plus page report, titled "The Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age," is two years in the making and was led by Beliefnet co-founder and former U.S. News and World Report National Editor Steve Waldman.

If forced to sum up the entire report in a single tweet, it would probably be "The Internet has revolutionized how we gather and consume information, but meanwhile local news has been damn near suffocated." Or, as Waldman and company put it on page 262:

There were about 13,400 fewer newspaper newsroom jobs in 2010 than there were in 2006, dropping from 55,000 positions to about 41,600. Over the years, newsmagazines, local commercial radio, and local TV have reduced their newsgathering staffs, as well. At the same time, Internet sites, cable news, and public radio have created new journalism jobs.

So, the Net picked up the slack for the shrinking old media then, right? Not so, says the report. It goes on to estimate that there are roughly 5,000 less reporters covering local "accountability" beats today than there were in 2000, and even back then there weren't nearly enough to cover everything. All told, the report estimates that the number of local beat reporters would need to be more than doubled to do the job right, at a total cost of about $1.6 billion--or $265 million if we just wanted to get back to 2000 levels.

Waldman and his report team even hint at a few ways to inject some of that cash into local news, the most compelling being shifting the government's media buys for things like those "Army of One" recruiting ads or public service announcements away from national networks, and instead directing that estimated one billion dollars to local media outlets.

It's an idea so simple you have to wonder why it hasn't already been done. Turns out those same pesky technologies that helped trample the local media could also now help direct money back to them, according to the report:

In the past, it may have been more cost effective to buy national rather than local, but technological improvements have made it possible to easily buy local media placements on TV, in print and online--so that shifting ads to local news media could prove more cost-effective for taxpayers.

The report also highlights some of the clear benefits the online world has brought to the media, such as broad access, speed, diversity of voices, etc., but doesn't leave out the many ways it has also stripped revenues away from old media that we've all heard plenty about by now.

Aside from redirecting government ads to local outlets, the report also recommends putting more public documents and proceedings online, supporting nonprofit media, and offering "residencies" for journalism students to get hands-on experience working in a local newsroom.

In the digital realm, it recommends pursuing "universal broadband" access, and, without getting too much into the tangle of the Net Neutrality debate, the report also simply calls for preserving "the openness of the system that allows for small start-ups to rise up so easily."

Much of the report is fairly vanilla, but putting a price tag, no matter how hypothetical, on how much it would cost to get local news coverage up to snuff is very useful. Turns out the cost of creating a truly healthy news media (and by extension, democracy), if we use the report's high-end $1.6 billion figure, is the same amount a developer got for rebuilding the World Trade Center (or to put it in tech terms, the same amount Google paid for YouTube).
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-200...te-local-news/





China Paper Warns Google May Pay Price for Hacking Claims
Chris Buckley

Google has become a "political tool" vilifying the Chinese government, an official Beijing newspaper said on Monday, warning that the U.S. Internet giant's statements about hacking attacks traced to China could hurt its business.

The tough warning appeared in the overseas edition of the People's Daily, the leading newspaper of China's ruling Communist Party, indicating that political tensions between the United States and China over Internet security could linger.

Last week, Google said it had broken up an effort to steal the passwords of hundreds of Google email account holders, including U.S. government officials, Chinese human rights advocates and journalists. It said the attacks appeared to come from China.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry rejected those accusations, and the party newspaper warned Google against playing a risky political game.

By saying that Chinese human rights activists were among the targets of the hacking, Google was "deliberately pandering to negative Western perceptions of China, and strongly hinting that the hacking attacks were the work of the Chinese government," the People's Daily overseas edition, a small offshoot of the main domestic paper, said in a front-page commentary.

"Google's accusations aimed at China are spurious, have ulterior motives, and bear malign intentions," said the commentary, written by an editor at the paper.

"Google should not become overly embroiled in international political struggle, playing the role of a tool for political contention," the paper added.

"For when the international winds shift direction, it may become sacrificed to politics and will be spurned by the marketplace," it said, without specifying how Google's business could be hurt.

A Google spokeswoman said the U.S. firm had no comment on the remarks.

The latest friction with Google could bring Internet policy back to the foreground of U.S.-China relations, reprising tensions last year when the Obama administration took up Google's complaints about hacking and censorship from China.

Google partly pulled out of China after that dispute. Since then, it has lost more share to rival Baidu Inc in China's Internet market, the world's largest by user numbers with more than 450 million users.

Google said last week that the hacking attacks appeared to come from Jinan, the capital of China's eastern Shandong province and home to an intelligence unit of the People's Liberation Army.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates over the weekend warned that Washington was prepared to use force against cyber-attacks it considered acts of war.

In February, overseas Chinese websites, inspired by anti-authoritarian uprisings across the Arab world, called for protests across China, raising Beijing's alarm about dissent and prompting tightened censorship of the Internet.

China already blocks major foreign social websites such as Facebook and Twitter.

(Editing by Miral Fahmy and Alex Richardson)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7550CV20110606





Security Firm Offers to Replace Tokens After Attack
Christopher Drew

RSA Security on Monday offered to replace its SecurID tokens for most of its 40 million users as it tries to regain customer confidence after prominent hacking attacks.

Arthur W. Coviello, the company’s executive chairman, made the offer in a letter posted on the company’s Web site. Most Fortune 500 companies and government agencies supply the electronic tokens to employees who need access to computer networks from customer offices, hotels or homes. The tokens generate random numbers for use in remote log-ins.

The move came three days after Lockheed Martin, the nation’s largest military contractor, confirmed that hackers had breached its network in May, partly by using data stolen from RSA in a separate hacking attack in March.

Lockheed’s was the first intrusion that was known to result from the hacking at RSA, a division of the EMC Corporation. RSA said in March that the hackers had stolen data that could compromise a company’s SecurID system in a broader attack.

Mr. Coviello said in the letter that characteristics of the attack on RSA “indicated that the perpetrator’s most likely motive” was to steal security information that could be used to obtain military secrets and intellectual property. He said RSA had worked with military companies to replace their tokens “on an accelerated timetable.”

He said RSA was expanding the offer to other companies, particularly those focused on protecting intellectual property and their corporate networks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/t...gy/07hack.html





Bank Not Responsible for Letting Hackers Steal $300K From Customer
Kim Zetter

A judge in Maine has ruled that a bank that allowed hackers to steal more than $300,000 from a customer’s online account isn’t responsible for the lost money, saying the customer should have done more to protect the account credentials.

Magistrate Judge John Rich sided with Ocean Bank in recommending that the U.S. District Court in Maine grant the bank’s motions for a summary dismissal of a complaint filed by Patco Construction Company. The ruling was reported Monday by BankInfoSecurity.

The case raises questions about how much security banks and other financial institutions may be reasonably required to provide commercial customers. It could set a precedent for liability in circumstances where customer systems are hacked and banking credentials are stolen. Small and medium-sized businesses around the United States have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years to such activity, known as fraudulent ACH (Automated Clearing House) transfers.

Patco Construction Company, a family-owned business in Sanford Maine, sued Ocean Bank, which is owned by People’s United Bank, after discovering in May 2009 that hackers were siphoning about $100,000 per day from its online bank account. The hackers had sent a malicious e-mail to employees that allowed them to surreptitiously install the Zeus password-stealing trojan on an employee computer.

After obtaining Patco’s banking credentials and waiting for its account to fill up with money, the hackers used the credentials to initiate a series of electronic money transfers. Nearly $600,000 worth of transfers were made out of the account before Patco realized it had been hacked.

Ocean Bank, after being notified of the fraud, was able to block about $240,000 in transfers. But Patco was unable to retrieve the rest.

Patco sued the bank for failing to notice the fraudulent activity and stop it. According to Patco, the out-of-character transactions triggered alarms inside the bank, but the bank didn’t notice them and let the transfers go through. Patco also accused the bank of failing to implement “best” security practices of requiring customers to use multifactor authentication.

Ocean maintained that it had done its due diligence in verifying that the ID and password used were authentic.

Judge Rich agreed that Ocean Bank could have done more to authenticate that the person initiating the transfers was indeed an authorized party.

“It is apparent, in the light of hindsight, that the Bank’s security procedures in May 2009 were not optimal,” he wrote in his ruling. “The Bank would have more effectively harnessed the power of its risk-profiling system, if it had conducted manual reviews in response to red flag information instead of merely causing the system to trigger challenge questions.”

But he nonetheless concluded that the law does not require the bank to implement the “best” security measures available, and that the bank is clear to customers when they sign up about the level of security it provides and the amount of liability it will assume if money is stolen from a customer account. The judge also noted that Ocean’s level of security was comparable to that offered by other banks. Ultimately, he determined that Patco was responsible for the loss, because it had not better secured its account credentials.

Patco is not the first company to sue its bank over fraudulent money transfers. Experi-Metal sued its bank, Comerica, in 2009 after losing more than $550,000 in fraudulent wire transfers. Other cases are wending their way through courts around the country.

The FBI announced last October that it had managed to disrupt a multinational cybertheft ring involving fraudulent ACH transfers. The thieves, using the Zeus malware, targeted small and medium-sized businesses, municipalities, churches and individuals. The scammers were able to steal more than $70 million from victims.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ank-ach-theft/





Regulators Pressure Banks after Citi Data Breach
Maria Aspan

Major U.S. banks came under growing pressure from banking regulators to improve the security of customer account information after Citigroup Inc became the latest high-profile victim of a large-scale cyber attack.

While Citigroup insisted the breach had been limited, experts called it the largest direct attack on a major U.S. financial institution, and forecast it could drive momentum for a systemic overhaul of the banking industry's data security measures.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp is developing new guidance for banks and may ask "some banks to strengthen their authentication when a customer logs onto online accounts," FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair said on Thursday.

Citigroup said late on Wednesday that computer hackers breached the bank's network and accessed the data of about 200,000 bank card holders in North America.

The third-largest U.S. bank waited more than a month before making the full extent of the breach public, drawing criticism on Thursday from lawmakers and lawyers.

Citigroup is the latest in a growing list of companies that have suffered cyber attacks, including Sony and Google Inc.

Security experts said the attack may be a watershed moment for the U.S. banking industry, which until now has suffered fewer direct hacker attacks than retailers.

"We're getting to the tipping point in terms of the number of fraud cases," said Gartner Research security analyst Avivah Litan.

As regulators weigh whether to require more spending on security, "this could be the straw that breaks the camel's back," she said.

Citigroup spokesman Sean Kevelighan said on Thursday that the bank would replace "the majority" of the credit cards affected by the data breach. The bank said its attackers viewed the names of customers, account numbers and contact information, including e-mail addresses.

Citigroup said other information such as birth dates, social security numbers, card expiration dates and card security codes (CVV) were not compromised.

Debit cards were not affected, Kevelighan said on Thursday.

The Financial Times reported on Wednesday that the bank discovered the breach in early May.

Kevelighan on Thursday told Reuters that once the bank became aware of the attack, "we immediately took steps to monitor the impacted customers accounts." But he would not further explain the bank's decision to delay making the breach public, citing security reasons.

Delayed Disclosure

Like Sony, which has declared several security breaches of its networks this year, Citi could come under fire for not telling customers sooner.

U.S. Representative Jim Langevin, who follows cyber issues closely, said that data breaches were a fact of life but that companies had to inform customers.

"I was shocked by the report that Citigroup knew that their customers' data was potentially exposed back in early May, but is only now, a full month later, informing the public about this threat to their personal information," he said in a statement.

"I expect to hear more from Citigroup as to the nature of the intrusion and the steps taken to limit exposure of the data of government and private citizens," he said.

Peter Seidman, a partner at Milberg who represents plaintiffs in hacking class actions, said the firm is mulling an investigation of the Citi breach.

"The fact that they waited more than a month before disclosing this is especially troubling," he said.

Kevelighan would not discuss how the breach had occurred.

Another Citi spokesman, James Griffiths in Hong Kong, said the breach had affected 1 percent of North American card customers, which the bank's annual report says total 21 million.

Banks can be particularly attractive targets for cyber criminals, Bair said on Thursday. "It's kind of a constant. It's one of the many risks that you have to deal with.

(Reporting by Maria Aspan; additional reporting by Ross Kerber in Boston, Diane Bartz in Washington and Dan Levine in San Francisco; editing by John Wallace and Gunna Dickson)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...edName=topNews





Sony’s Security Problems Could Take Years to Fix
Nick Bilton

It’s been a tough couple of months for Sony. The company’s PlayStation Network was breached by hackers in late April and now several other units of the company have suffered broad security breaches.

In the last week alone, half a dozen Sony Web sites and servers, including some in the United States and Brazil, have been breached. On Monday a group of hackers calling themselves LulzSec posted proprietary Sony source code on file-sharing Web sites.

Although the members of LulzSec have gone after other organizations in the past, including Fox.com and PBS.org, the attacks against Sony have been unrelenting.

“These attacks are a combination of Sony’s lax security and a number of groups being very vigilant about breaking in to show how powerful they can be,” explained Frank Kenney, vice president of global security at Ipswitch, a company used to securely transfer files online. “What Sony has to do is re-examine their entire security system including the type of code they are using and the type of servers; they have to acknowledge that their brand is at stake.”

Mr. Kenney said that no server was impervious to hackers, but a company like Sony, with millions of credit cards and users’ personal information on file, had a responsibility to ensure protection “equivalent to the Department of Homeland Security’s servers is in place.” He said that the fact that dozens of Sony Web sites and servers had been breached indicated it was clearly a companywide problem.

“Any type of environment can be breached, but Sony has to come up with a plan that not only protects their infrastructure, but also convinces their customers that their credit cards and personal information is safe,” Mr. Kenney said.

In an interview in New York last month, Howard Stringer, Sony’s chief executive, said the company was working with a number of outside security companies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to prevent further attacks. But Sony is definitely up against some untenable foes in this fight.

LulzSec doesn’t show any signs of easing its attacks on Sony, and the group is not deterred by the F.B.I., even taking up a fight with some of the organization’s affiliate groups. LulzSec also said in a Twitter message on Monday that it was receiving thousands of dollars in donations to continue its attacks on Sony.

Ron Gula, chief executive of Tenable Network Security, an enterprise security company, said the problems at Sony likely went back years when the company first built its infrastructure. “A lot of times these problems are more holistic, and that’s usually evidence by the fact that Sony has been attacked multiple times,” he said.

Mr. Gula said Sony would be unable to stop the attacks overnight and that it could take years for the company to get sufficient security in place to protect all its servers, databases and Web sites.

“Microsoft used to be the laughing stock of security and now they are now the shining example of good security,” said Mr. Gula. “It’s going to take a while for Sony to fix this, I think this will take years.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/0...-years-to-fix/





iTunes Hack Widespread, and Apple Appears to Know About It
Ed Oswald

Since Betanews' original report last Wednesday, dozens of readers have e-mailed their own reports of account issues, most dealing with Sega's Kingdom Conquest. Some of these initial reports were detailed in a followup to our original piece, but we have received more since then.

(Betanews is still actively collecting reports. If you've been hacked, whether it's Kingdom Conquest or not, we'd like to know. Send your reports to ed at edoswald dot com.)

From the reports a pattern is emerging. Nearly every victim had a gift card balance on their account, and some have reported that their credit card and/or payment information had been removed from their account. This indicates that Apple likely is aware of the attacks, and is actively trying to protect its users.

In all cases, whether they're admitting the hack is occurring or not, users are having little trouble getting their money refunded to them.

"My credit card on file info had also been either removed or something else which makes me wonder if Apple, at this point, is somehow trying to keep this ongoing issue from charging credit cards… but maybe that's just positive thinking," reader Amy Buro speculated. She might be right.

Yet, Apple has still failed to respond to requests by Betanews to confirm the issue. The fact that reports have become so numerous in the wake of our stories seems to indicate a widespread hack has indeed occurred with iTunes, yet it is still unclear as to what exactly the cause is.

"I got hacked too. Spent my graduation money on app gift cards on sale at Target and am left with nothing," reader Lauren Boyer mused. "I'm not a novice and I check regularly for virus, trojans, etc.," Enrique Zepeda wrote in. "What shall we do now? There hasn't been an official response from Apple?"

Not addressing the matter may make things worse for Apple, as users become wary of security on iTunes. "I hope this is sorted out and am now extremely wary of putting any credit at all on my iTunes account," reader Natasha Ung said. "I may have to now purchase from other companies."

The time may have come for Apple to come clean about what's going on. If it can not engender a feeling of security for its users affected by this issue, how can myself and other users ever trust to use iTunes again?
http://www.betanews.com/article/iTun...-it/1307390216





One in Four US Hackers 'is an FBI Informer'

The FBI and US secret service have used the threat of prison to create an army of informers among online criminals
Ed Pilkington

A quarter of hackers in the US have been recruited by federal authorities, according to Eric Corley, publisher of the hacker quarterly, 2600. Photograph: Getty Images

The underground world of computer hackers has been so thoroughly infiltrated in the US by the FBI and secret service that it is now riddled with paranoia and mistrust, with an estimated one in four hackers secretly informing on their peers, a Guardian investigation has established.

Cyber policing units have had such success in forcing online criminals to co-operate with their investigations through the threat of long prison sentences that they have managed to create an army of informants deep inside the hacking community.

In some cases, popular illegal forums used by cyber criminals as marketplaces for stolen identities and credit card numbers have been run by hacker turncoats acting as FBI moles. In others, undercover FBI agents posing as "carders" – hackers specialising in ID theft – have themselves taken over the management of crime forums, using the intelligence gathered to put dozens of people behind bars.

So ubiquitous has the FBI informant network become that Eric Corley, who publishes the hacker quarterly, 2600, has estimated that 25% of hackers in the US may have been recruited by the federal authorities to be their eyes and ears. "Owing to the harsh penalties involved and the relative inexperience with the law that many hackers have, they are rather susceptible to intimidation," Corley told the Guardian.

"It makes for very tense relationships," said John Young, who runs Cryptome, a website depository for secret documents along the lines of WikiLeaks. "There are dozens and dozens of hackers who have been shopped by people they thought they trusted."

The best-known example of the phenomenon is Adrian Lamo, a convicted hacker who turned informant on Bradley Manning, who is suspected of passing secret documents to WikiLeaks. Manning had entered into a prolonged instant messaging conversation with Lamo, whom he trusted and asked for advice. Lamo repaid that trust by promptly handing over the 23-year-old intelligence specialist to the military authorities. Manning has now been in custody for more than a year.

For acting as he did, Lamo has earned himself the sobriquet of Judas and the "world's most hated hacker", though he has insisted that he acted out of concern for those he believed could be harmed or even killed by the WikiLeaks publication of thousands of US diplomatic cables.

"Obviously it's been much worse for him but it's certainly been no picnic for me," Lamo has said. "He followed his conscience, and I followed mine."

The latest challenge for the FBI in terms of domestic US breaches are the anarchistic co-operatives of "hacktivists" that have launched several high-profile cyber-attacks in recent months designed to make a statement. In the most recent case a group calling itself Lulz Security launched an audacious raid on the FBI's own linked organisation InfraGard. The raid, which was a blatant two fingers up at the agency, was said to have been a response to news that the Pentagon was poised to declare foreign cyber-attacks an act of war.

Lulz Security shares qualities with the hacktivist group Anonymous that has launched attacks against companies including Visa and MasterCard as a protest against their decision to block donations to WikiLeaks. While Lulz Security is so recent a phenomenon that the FBI has yet to get a handle on it, Anonymous is already under pressure from the agency. There were raids on 40 addresses in the US and five in the UK in January, and a grand jury has been hearing evidence against the group in California at the start of a possible federal prosecution.

Kevin Poulsen, senior editor at Wired magazine, believes the collective is classically vulnerable to infiltration and disruption. "We have already begun to see Anonymous members attack each other and out each other's IP addresses. That's the first step towards being susceptible to the FBI."

Barrett Brown, who has acted as a spokesman for the otherwise secretive Anonymous, says it is fully aware of the FBI's interest. "The FBI are always there. They are always watching, always in the chatrooms. You don't know who is an informant and who isn't, and to that extent you are vulnerable."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...s-fbi-informer





Following Arrest, LulzSec Still Going Strong
Jack Phillips

The group of hackers, LulzSec, also known as Lulz Security, responded to an earlier report that one of its members was apprehended by the FBI.

In a textfile, the group claimed the breached network, #pure-elite, was only for recruiting, while its core chat rooms remain secure. They also claim the member who was arrested was not part of LulzSec. "We don't even know who he is," the group stated. They added they are “laughing heartily right now," over the incident.

LulzSec has claimed responsibility for hacking PBS’s website and posting a fake story that said slain rapper Tupac Shakur is alive and well in New Zealand. The group also admitted to hacking several Sony websites.

In a chat log during the government raid, a LulzSec user said that “military hackers are trying to hack us.” The user added that one member by the name of Robert Cavanaugh was apprehended by the FBI.

Following news of the arrest, LulzSec stated on its Twitter account Monday afternoon, "That's strange because all of us are still here. Uh-oh!”

The hacker group added that the member who leaked their chat log “has been completely hacked inside and out."

The group, which has breached the networks of both Sony and Nintendo within a week, also challenged the FBI and NATO prior to the raid and arrest. “They now treat hacking as an act of war,” LulsSec stated in a Pastebin textfile. “So, we just hacked an FBI affiliated website (Infragard, specifically the Atlanta chapter) and leaked its user base. We also took complete control over the site and defaced it.”
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/tech...ong-57312.html





LulzSec Hackers Get Personal, Dump 26,000 Porn Site Usernames And Passwords
Andy Greenberg

After high profile takedowns of PBS and Sony, the anarchic hacker group LulzSec now seems determined to maximize its exploits’ embarrassment factor.

On Friday afternoon the group announced that it had stolen and posted administrative emails and passwords for 55 porn sites, along with another 26,000 emails and passwords for users of the sex site Pron.com.

“Hi! We like porn (sometimes), so these are email/password combinations from pron.com which we plundered for the lulz,” reads a statement posted to the group’s website Lulzsecurity.com.

Those email addresses can’t be used to access users’ accounts on Pron.com without an additional username. But the posted data violates those users’ privacy on a more basic level, exposing them as visitors to the highly not-safe-for-work site. The group took special pleasure in pointing out that six of those users had signed up for the site using their government or military .gov and .mil email accounts.

LulzSec, a which has ties to the hacker collective Anonymous, has become one of the least predictable forces in the world of cybersecurity since it emerged just two weeks ago. After defacing the website of PBS and exposing many of its employees’ personal information in retaliation for a negative documentary program on WikiLeaks, it proceeded to target Sony, compromising one million passwords and leaking the source code for the Sony Computer Entertainment Developer Network.

In just the last 24 hours, LulzSec seemed to temporarily adopt more “whitehat” hacker practices, notifying the British National Health Service to password vulnerabilities on its network and taking down a Muslim extremist website. But the latest porn hack shows just how wildly the group is varying its targets. “We have no direct plans for targets today, but we’ll think of something,” LulzSec wrote on its Twitter feed just hours earlier. “Improvisation is a required Lulz Boat skill!”
http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenber...and-passwords/





I.M.F. Reports Cyberattack Led to ‘Very Major Breach’
David E. Sanger and John Markoff

The International Monetary Fund, still struggling to find a new leader after the arrest of its managing director last month in New York, was hit recently by what computer experts describe as a large and sophisticated cyberattack whose dimensions are still unknown.

The fund, which manages financial crises around the world and is the repository of highly confidential information about the fiscal condition of many nations, told its staff and its board of directors about the attack on Wednesday. But it did not make a public announcement.

Several senior officials with knowledge of the attack said it was both sophisticated and serious. “This was a very major breach,” said one official, who said that it had occurred over the last several months, even before Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French politician who ran the fund, was arrested on charges of sexually assaulting a chamber maid in a New York hotel.

Asked about the reports of the computer attack late Friday, a spokesman for the fund, David Hawley, declined to provide details or talk about the scope or nature of the intrusion. “We are investigating an incident, and the fund is fully functional,” he said.

Because the fund has been at the center of economic bailout programs for Portugal, Greece and Ireland — and possesses sensitive data on other countries that may be on the brink of crisis — its database contains potentially market-moving information. It also includes communications with national leaders as they negotiate, often behind the scenes, on the terms of international bailouts. Those agreements are, in the words of one fund official, “political dynamite in many countries.” It was unclear what information the attackers were able to access.

The concern about the attack was so significant that the World Bank, an international agency focused on economic development, whose headquarters is across the street from the I.M.F. in downtown Washington, cut the computer link that allows the two institutions to share information.

A World Bank spokesman said the step had been taken out of “an abundance of caution” until the severity and nature of the cyberattack on the I.M.F. is understood. That link enables the two institutions to share nonpublic data and conduct meetings, but users of the system say that it does not permit access to confidential financial data.

Companies and public institutions are often hesitant to describe publicly the nature or success of attacks on their computer systems, partly for fear of providing information that would be useful to the individuals or countries mounting the efforts. Even so, Google has recently been aggressive in announcing attacks and, in one recent case, of declaring that its origin was China, an accusation the Chinese government quickly denied.

But in the case of the I.M.F., officials declined to say where they believe the attack originated — a delicate subject because most nations are members of the fund.

The attacks were likely to have been made possible by a technique known as “spear phishing,” in which an individual is fooled into clicking on a malicious Web link or running a program that allows open access to the recipient’s network. It is also possible that the attack was less specific, a case in which an intruder was testing the system merely to see what was available.

The fund said that it did not believe that the intrusion into its systems was related to a sophisticated digital break-in at RSA Security that took place in March, which compromised some information that companies and governments use to control access to their most sensitive computer systems. RSA notified its clients of the loss of its data, and last month hackers attempted to use the information stolen from RSA to gain access to computers and networks at the Lockheed Martin Corporation, the nation’s largest military contractor.

After that attack, the World Bank briefly shut down external access to its most sensitive systems, for fear that the stolen information could make it a target. But it quickly resumed its normal operations and says it has seen no evidence of any attacks.

David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and John Markoff from San Francisco.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/world/12imf.html





News of the World Apologizes for Hacking Sienna Miller’s Phone
Sarah Lyall

The News of the World formally apologized to the actress Sienna Miller on Tuesday for systematically, and illegally, intercepting her cellphone messages in the mid-2000s and using the information to publish articles about her private life.

The apology comes as part of a settlement between Ms. Miller and the newspaper, which also agreed to pay her £100,000 in legal fees and damages, about $164,000. It is the latest development in a long-running drama in which the newspaper has had to contend with growing evidence that its practice of hacking into the cellphones of public figures, politicians and celebrities was widespread and pervasive.

At least four other people who say their phones were hacked into have reached out-of-court settlements with the newspaper; numerous lawsuits against it are still pending. The newspaper has offered to settle with at least seven other possible victims of its phone-hacking practices.

For several years, News of the World said that its phone hacking had been limited to a single case — that involving its former royal editor, Clive Goodman, and a private investigator hired by the paper, Glenn Mulcaire, who were both jailed in 2007 for illegally intercepting voice mail messages of members of the royal household. But that claim began to lose credibility as more evidence came to light, and this year the company admitted that it had hacked the phones of eight public figures, including Ms. Miller, in the mid-2000s.

Meanwhile, the police are conducting a criminal investigation. Two News of the World editors and a reporter have been arrested and released on bail in connection with the case.

The apology, read aloud in London’s High Court by a lawyer for News Group Newspapers, the subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News International that publishes the News of the World, was notable for how thorough, and how abject, it was.

The company, said the lawyer, Michael Silverleaf, “acknowledges that the information should never have been obtained in the manner it was” and that “the private information should never have been published.” The paper, he added, “has accepted responsibility for misuse of private information, breach of confidence and harassment.”

Ms. Miller was not in court and did not make a statement. But her lawyer, David Sherborne, said that in 2005 and 2006, the News of the World published numerous articles containing “intrusive and private information” about her, much to her puzzlement.

She did not know “whether someone close to her was leaking information or whether her mobile telephone was somehow being hacked into,” Mr. Sherborne said. “Both possibilities were extremely distressing.”

He said that she had become suspicious about the security of her cellphone when she missed a number of voice mail messages and received calls from people who hung up. She changed her phone number three times in three months, but information kept leaking out, he said.

The information was used for at least 11 articles about Ms. Miller’s private life, including details about her romantic relationships with the actors Daniel Craig and Jude Law. One of the articles drew on discussions between Mr. Law and Ms. Miller about the possibility of their having children together. The two have since split up.

News Group said that it would lay out the full extent of its phone-hacking operation to Ms. Miller privately.

Her case relied on notes seized from Mr. Mulcaire after his arrest. The notes contained details about Ms. Miller’s cellphones, including phone numbers, PINs and passwords, as well as similar details about the phone numbers of her mother, her publicist and Mr. Law.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/w.../08london.html





Police: Mac Technician Installed Spyware to Photograph Women
Robert McMillan

He was hired to fix their computers, but police say that Trevor Harwell instead installed spyware software that took candid photos of his clients in various states of undress.

Harwell had been a Macintosh specialist with a Los Angeles-area home computer repair company called Rezitech. That's how he allegedly had the opportunity to install the spy software, called Camcapture, on computers.

While working on repair assignments, the 20-year-old technician secretly set up a complex system that could notify him whenever it was ready to snap a shot using the computer's webcam, according to Sergeant Andrew Goodrich, a spokesman with the Fullerton Police Department in California. "It would let his server know that the victim's machine was on. The server would then notify his smartphone... and then the images were recorded on his home computer," he said.

Police say they've found thousands of images on Harwell's computers and have identified dozens of victims, all of them women in Los Angeles and Orange County. Harwell was arrested Wednesday by Fullerton police.

Harwell was formerly a student at Biola University, a small Christian university in southern California. Many of the victims were Biola students and Harwell may have compromised university systems as well, police said.

Harwell couldn't immediately be reached for comment. Rezitech representatives were unable to immediately comment for this story.

Police were tipped off last year after a Rezitech customer took her computer into an Apple Genius Bar for servicing. It had been popping up weird messages. One of them, designed to look like a Mac OS X system warning, said, "You should fix your internal sensor soon. If unsure what to do, try putting your laptop near hot steam for several minutes to clean the sensor."

The Genius Bar technician found the Camcapture software on this victim's computer and said, "You need to call police," Goodrich said.

She wasn't the only person to get this particular message. Some victims, tricked by the pop-up warning, did take their computers with them into the shower, Goodrich said.

Victims can find the Camcapture software by looking in their /Library/WebServer/Documents folder.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...otograph_women





Penn. School District Hit with New Mac Spying Lawsuit

After settling with another student for $175,000 last year, Lower Merion says new suit 'solely motivated by monetary interests'
Gregg Keizer

A former student at a suburban Philadelphia high school has sued his school district for allegedly spying on him and his family using a school-issued Mac laptop, according to court documents.

The Lower Merion School District of Ardmore, Pa. was first sued in February 2010 by another student using similar charges. That case, dubbed "Spygate" in some media reports, was settled last October when Lower Merion agreed to pay Blake Robbins $175,000 and cover $425,000 in court costs.

On Monday, Joshua Levin, a 2009 graduate of Herriton High, charged the district with violating his civil rights and privacy by remotely activating the notebook's built-in camera to take photographs and screenshots.

Today, Lower Merion spokesman Doug Young called Levin's lawsuit "solely motivated by monetary interests and a complete waste of the taxpayer's dollars."

Last year, Lower Merion acknowledged it had activated cameras on the school-provided MacBook system to track lost or stolen laptops, but denied it was using them to spy on students.

Levin begged to differ.

According to his lawsuit, Lower Merion used his laptop to take more than 8,000 photographs and screenshots between September 2008 and March 2009.

A report commissioned by the district uncovered more than 30,000 photographs and another 27,000 screenshots taken when the tracking and security software was activated by district IT personnel. Last June, lawyers for Lower Merion made photos and screenshots available for viewing by the 76 affected students.

"Plaintiff opted to view the recovered images, and was shocked, humiliated and severely emotionally distressed at what he saw," Levin's lawsuit stated.

Levin said he had not known about his Mac's secret spying ability until he received a letter from Lower Merion in 2010 informing him that he could view the images.

"Plaintiff kept the laptop in his bedroom, as well as throughout his mother's household and his father's household," said Levin's lawsuit. "Plaintiff's younger brother noticed that the light in the camera would go off and on at odd times, wondering if the family was being 'spied on.' Plaintiff's mother dismissed this idea as absurd, as the notion that the school district was secretly monitoring and taking pictures of students was simply incomprehensible and beyond all rational belief."

Levin's complaint did not describe the nature of the photographs he said were snapped by his MacBook.

According to Young, Lower Merion tried to resolve the dispute with Levin without going to court.

"The District has repeatedly attempted to be fair and reasonable in this matter," Young said in an email reply to a request for comment. "Regrettably, the Plaintiff has flatly refused all efforts to achieve resolution through court-supervised mediation."

Young also said that Levin's laptop was one of six that had been reported stolen in 2008, and that it was eventually recovered by local police.

The district also settled with a second student, 2010 graduate Jalil Hasan, for $10,000 last year.

Levin's lawsuit requested unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...spying_lawsuit





A Twitter Group Warned About Weiner
Jennifer Preston

Three months before Representative Anthony D. Weiner sent a photo from his Twitter account to a 21-year-old Washington State college student named Gennette Cordova, a small group of determined, self-described conservatives were warning young women on Twitter, including Ms. Cordova, to be wary of him.

Calling themselves the #bornfreecrew on Twitter, members of the group closely monitored those whom Mr. Weiner was following, taking it upon themselves to contact young women they believed to be “schoolgirls,” and urging them publicly to stay away from him, according to an analysis of posts on Twitter’s public stream.

By early May, members of the group were also speculating that Mr. Weiner would be caught in a sex scandal. The leader, a man who identified himself on Twitter as Dan Wolfe and used the handle @PatriotUSA76, is the same Twitter user who discovered the photograph that Mr. Weiner took of himself and sent to Ms. Cordova. He shared it with his followers and the conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who made it public the next day.

As Democrats and Republicans embrace Twitter and other social media tools as a way to interact with their constituents and woo voters, many have discovered a downside to online communication: cyberstalkers, who track and criticize their every move.

But even by the standards of modern politics, Dan Wolfe and other members of the #bornfreecrew watched Mr. Weiner’s account with particular ferocity, and a sharp focus on his interactions with women. In several instances the congressman dropped his online contact with women after they were identified by the crew, suggesting that Mr. Weiner might have been aware of its actions.

There were at least two female high school students among the 191 people Mr. Weiner followed. There is no evidence that he engaged in private discussions with them, and he has said that to his knowledge he has not had any online sexual communications with under-age women.

Mr. Wolfe, whose account vanished from Twitter last Friday, has been one of the more mysterious characters in the congressman’s saga, refusing to reveal his real name even to the other members of the #bornfreecrew. He joined Twitter on Jan. 6 and began posting multiple messages criticizing both Mr. Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

By March, Mr. Wolfe had more than 1,000 followers and was actively befriending fellow conservatives. Group members joined him in scrutinizing those whom Mr. Weiner was following and their Twitter profiles, and commenting if the person he followed was a young woman.

On April 14, for example, Mr. Wolfe tweeted, “Weiner’s new follow is a high school girl. LMAO! Freak!”

Michael Stack, 39, of New Jersey, who describes himself on his Twitter profile as a “Republican who believes in the principles that made this country great,” said he befriended Mr. Wolfe on Twitter (they never met in person or spoke on the phone). “Soon, Dan told me Weiner was following a bunch of girls,” Mr. Stack said. “I thought it was kind of weird.”

Mr. Stack said that Mr. Wolfe had told him in a private message that Mr. Weiner had been following a porn star who was later identified as Ginger Lee. “He tweeted about it and then the porn star was gone,” Mr. Stack said. “He was paying attention,” he said, referring to Mr. Weiner.

On May 5, Mr. Wolfe told him that he had a friend who knew Matt Drudge who had said that a scandal involving a member of Congress was coming soon. The same day that Meagan Broussard, 26, of Texas, said that she had received an e-mail from Mr. Weiner with a photo she had asked him to take, while holding up a white piece of paper that said “me.”

At 6:35 p.m., Mr. Stack, using his Twitter handle, @goatsred, posted: “Rumor ... a ‘bigtime’ Congressman caught with mistress. There are pix and a top 5 right-wing blogger has them. @RepWeiner is it you?”

Throughout May, Mr. Wolfe and other members contacted other young women Mr. Weiner was following, including a 16-year-old from California who started a campaign on Twitter to get the congressman to be her prom date.

The next day, Mr. Stack, posting on Twitter, sent her a message saying in part, “if you’re a minor and he’s following you, well, seems a little creepy if not in ny,” copying @RepWeiner on the post. The next day, on May 18, the girl posted: “Well @RepWeiner unfollowed me.”

Michael Madden, 52, a retired Philadelphia firefighter and member of the group, said he had joined Mr. Wolfe in warning young women about Mr. Weiner.

“It seems now that Dan may have had an agenda all along,” he said. “We don’t know yet what it is. But he never said to me, ‘I’m going to get this guy.’ What he said is that it was not right.”

Jack Begg, Alain Delaquérière and Barbara Gray contributed reporting
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/n...ned-women.html





Are You Also Exposing Your Private Parts to Strangers on Facebook?
Henry Copeland

Think it’s only old men in trench coats and — ahem — congressmen who like to share intimate moments with attractive strangers?

Based on my own Facebook experience, I’ve seen at least 100 influential tech, media and politics folks — men and some women — accept friend requests from attractive women they don’t know. For as long as three years, these supposedly savvy folks have been having personal conversations and sharing photos online in front of strangers that few (if any) of them know personally. And they are, inadvertently, sharing lots of their friends’ private data with these strangers.

These people are in the tech, media and political digital elite. They should know better, right? They include professors at Harvard, Columbia, NYU, CEOs and execs at Internet companies, e-consulting firms, ad networks, and PR companies. They include senior journalists and editors at places like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker. Details below.

It’s possible that one or more of the winsome Facebook profiles who these e-savants have friended are robots — bimbots? — who exist only to spy on their influential friends’ private lives.

Who is the tech and media elite eagerly friending? Let’s start with the Facebook profile of one Nicole Bally.

Does anyone out there actually know Nicole Bally? Please write me ASAP if you do. Though Facebook says she’s got 697 friends, I suspect she doesn’t exist or, at least, isn’t operating on Facebook under her real name or photo. I left a message on Nicole Bally’s wall yesterday asking where she works, but haven’t heard anything back. Hello Nicole Bally, are you out there?

Nicole Bally’s list of Facebook friends includes people like Sean Parker, Arianna Huffington, Dana Milbank, Joichi Ito, Chad Hurley, Chris Anderson, Henry Blodget, James Fallows, Jeffrey Toobin, Camille Paglia, Curtis Sliwa, Jimmy Wales, John Dickerson, Loic Le Meur, Seth Godin, Amanda Congdon, Jim Kramer, Howard Kurtz, Steve Case, Pete Cashmore, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Tim Draper, Nouriel Roubini, Jim Breyer, Sarah Lacy, Vint Cerf, Wes Clark… the list goes on and on.

You’ve almost got to worry if you’re NOT on the list of Nicole Bally’s friends.

Nicole Bally sent me a friend request a while back and I almost fell for it. Hey, 40 people who I know and trust are her friends. Apparently.

When I finally friended Nicole Bally back yesterday (to further this investigation!) I discovered that roughly 99% of the posts on her Facebook wall are simply people accepting her friend requests. Some guys muster up an eager “hey, let’s have lunch sometime!”

Do the tech and media elite actually look at Nicole Bally’s wall posts before accepting her friend request? Among her very few personal posts over the course of three years are several about mywebpost.com.

Mywebpost.com?

Nicole Bally’s photo albums feature just three generic images posted in March of 2008 shortly after she joined Facebook, one of Mark Zuckerberg and two stock-photo-like images from March 2008, one subtitled “A wonderful time with a wonderful friend” and the other “The most beautiful place in the world.”

I’ve done more hunting online, but can’t find anything solid about Nicole Bally. Surely if she works in media or advertising in NYC or San Francisco and knows so many famous-for-pixels people, she would show up on LinkedIn or someone’s Flickr photo album.
Do any of you know Nicole Bally? If not, why have so many of you friended her and why are you sharing your private lives with her?

When a colleague of mine looked around online for other instances of Nicole Bally’s profile photo, using the nifty photo identification service TinEye, he discovered that Nicole Bally’s Facebook profile photo looks like a cropped photo of Nicole Carroll, a fitness trainer.

Maybe Nicole Bally — some of her Facebook friends are weight lifters — is actually Nicole Carroll? Maybe the whole FB page is a subtle marketing ploy for a future, tech-celebrity-focused pivot for Crossfit Training, where Nicole Carroll works. Much more likely, Nicole Carroll is a hard-working, innocent person whose image has been stolen.

It would be a relief to know that Nicole Bally is a real person and not a stolen photo and a made-up name.

Except I’d still be left wondering why so many tech, politics and media people friended Nicole Bally without having ANY idea who she is or what she’s peddling.

Then there’s Celia Richards. Facebook keeps suggesting I may know Celia and should become her friend. After all, we know 24 people in common, many of them media insiders.

Again, some Googling turns up nothing solid about Celia. Given the e-fluential crowd she apparently hangs with, Celia seems like a digital playa. But she’s got no digital fingerprint outside the walls of Facebook.

Is Celia real or just a bimbot created to harvest personal info — wall posts, friendships, photos, demographic information — from her credulous yet influential friends and their friends?

I don’t know for sure. But some more sleuthing reveals that Celia’s profile pic is actually a photo of TV star Kristin Cavallari. Duh! Maybe that’s why I don’t recognize her as a friend.

Perhaps Celia really exists, but just prefers to pretend she looks like Kristin. (Contrary to Facebook’s terms, BTW.) I’ll know more if she ever accepts my friend request.

If these Facebook profiles are not bona fide, what’s the real game? Theories vary, from comic to creepy.

“Dude you guys it is the government. They lure you in with seductive women (or men if you are female) and they try to get information out of you without interrogation but with chatting.”

Or maybe we’ve just stumbled into an elaborate, long-festering online version of the famous foreover alone flashmob?

More prosaically, Harvard Kennedy School professor Steven Kelman writes:

“My guess is that somebody is setting up Facebook accounts with nonexistent (or hired) attractive women, and sending out large numbers of friend requests to guys with the hope that many will accept the request. (For all I know, similar requests, with attractive guys, are being sent to women.) Once you accept their friend request, they gain access to a lot of information about you…”

We all know that companies in the past were very eager exploiting holes in FB’s architecture to scrape personal information.

Even after Facebook tightened up its privacy settings, it seems clear that people are blithely sharing way too much of their lives with people they haven’t fully vetted. And it seems likely that our conversations are being spied on, recorded and analyzed, either by folks from China or by corporate sleuths hiding behind seductive masks to track and influence conversations about their clients, customers and competitors.

Congresstwerp Andy Weiner put way too much online.

Don’t laugh. You may be sharing way too much with strangers too.
http://blog.web.blogads.com/2011/06/...s-on-facebook/





Spain Detains 3 in PlayStation Cyberattacks
David Jolly and Raphael Minder

The Spanish police said on Friday that they had apprehended three men suspected of computer hacking in connection with recent attacks on Sony’s PlayStation Network as well as corporate and government Web sites around the world.

The National Police identified the three as the local leadership of the shadowy international network of computer hackers known as Anonymous, which has claimed responsibility for a wide variety of attacks.

Anonymous is composed of people from various countries organized into cells that share common goals, the police said, with activists operating anonymously in a coordinated fashion.

One of the three suspects, a 31-year-old Spaniard, was detained in the southern Spanish city of Almería sometime after May 18, the police said. He had a computer server in his apartment in the northern Spanish port city of Gijón, where the group is believed to have attacked the Web sites of the Sony PlayStation online gaming store.

The same computer server was also believed to have been used in coordinated attacks against two Spanish banks, BBVA and Bankia; the Italian energy company Enel; and government sites in Algeria, Chile, Colombia, Egypt, Libya, Iran, Spain and New Zealand, the police said.

The two other men, both also Spaniards in their early 30s, were picked up in Barcelona and Valencia. The police statement did not make clear the timing of those detentions, but a police spokeswoman said all had occurred recently.

The spokeswoman, who did not want to be identified in accordance with department policy, said all three were subsequently released, without bail, pending formal charges.

They were expected to be charged with forming an illegal association to attack public and corporate Web sites, a charge that carries a potential sentence of up to three years in prison.

The police opened their investigation last October, after hackers overwhelmed the Spanish Ministry of Culture’s Web site to protest legislation increasing punishments for illegal downloads.

It was not immediately clear how much of a role the group may have played in the recent attacks on Sony. About a dozen Sony Web sites and services around the world have been hacked; the biggest breaches forced the company, which is based in Tokyo, to shut down its popular PlayStation Network for a month beginning in April.

The Japanese company has acknowledged that hackers compromised the personal data of tens of millions of user accounts. Earlier this month, a separate hacker collective called Lulz Security, or LulzSec, said it had breached a Sony Pictures site and released vital source code.

Sony has estimated that the hacker attacks will cost it at least 14 billion yen ($175 million), in damages, including spending on information technology, legal costs, lower sales and free offers to lure back customers.

Mami Imada, a Sony spokeswoman in Tokyo, said she had no information on the detentions and declined to comment.

The police said that they had analyzed more than two million lines of chat logs since October, as well as Web pages used by the group to identify the leadership in Spain “with the capacity to make decisions and direct attacks.” Members of Anonymous used a computer program called L.O.I.C. to crash Web sites with denial-of-service attacks, the police said.

Among recent attacks, the hackers also brought down the site of the Spanish National Electoral Commission last month before regional and municipal elections. It was that attack, on May 18, that led to the detention of the suspect in Almería.

The movement against the antipiracy law has been closely linked to the broader youth-led political movements that have occurred in Puerta del Sol, the central square in Madrid, and in other city squares since May 15.

These protests have called for a complete overhaul of Spain’s political system and laws aimed at stopping illegal downloading.

Hiroko Tabuchi contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/11/t...gy/11hack.html





AT&T Donated Cash to Groups That Supported T-Mobile Merger
Todd Wasserman

A handful of liberal non-profits voiced support to the FCC for AT&T’s T-mobile acquisition, after receiving financial donations from AT&T, according to a report.

Politico says that the NAACP, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the National Education Association — all organizations with no direct interest in a telecom takeover — have voiced support of the deal in recent weeks. The groups deny that the support came as a result of donations from AT&T, and the company also denies using cash to influence the organizations.

In the NAACP’s case, the group received a $1 million contribution from AT&T in 2009. The NAACP wrote the FCC to support the deal. GLAAD, which got $50,000 from AT&T, also backed the deal, even though it had criticized Comcast’s merger with NBC.

The Columbia Urban League also received a $25,000 grant from the AT&T foundation in 2009. That group’s president and CEO, James McLawhorn, wrote the FCC urging it to OK the deal.

Liberal groups aren’t the only ones supporting the deal. Facebook and Oracle, among others, have also written the FCC asking it to approve the acquisition.
http://mashable.com/2011/06/10/att-c...ions-t-mobile/





Big Names in Tech Back AT&T’s T-Mobile Bid
Michael J. De La Merced

Randall Stephenson, the chief of AT&T, during a Senate panel's hearing in May, with Daniel Hesse, right, of Sprint Nextel.Alex Wong/Getty ImagesRandall Stephenson, the chief of AT&T, during a Senate panel’s hearing in May, with Daniel Hesse, right, of Sprint Nexte.

In its quest to win approval of its $39 billion takeover of T-Mobile USA, AT&T just got a lot of help from its friends.

Eight technology giants, including Facebook and Microsoft, and 10 venture capital firms, filed letters supporting the acquisition late on Monday. The letters, filed with the Federal Communications Commission, lent their support to AT&T’s argument that the T-Mobile deal will help the company extend its next-generation data network across the country, helping to meet the growing need for wireless broadband services.

“Many policy-related efforts will not be able to quickly address near-term capacity needs,” the Microsoft-led group wrote in its letter. “The F.C.C. must seriously weigh the benefits of this merger and approve it.”

The letters are the latest salvo in the fight over AT&T’s effort to become the nation’s biggest cellphone service provider.

It is a fight that has pitted AT&T against consumer groups and smaller rivals like Sprint Nextel. Sprint and other service providers have argued strenuously that the deal would revive the “Ma Bell” situation of old, leaving AT&T and Verizon Wireless in a duopoly that controls most cellphone customers. Such a combination could lead to higher prices and reduced service, they say.

Sprint, the nation’s third-biggest carrier behind Verizon Wireless and AT&T, has been the most outspoken opponent of the deal. “I am here because Sprint believes in competition, which goes hand in hand with innovation,” the company’s chief executive, Daniel Hesse, testified at a Senate hearing last month.

Both sides have been racing to enlist as many prominent supporters as possible. Sprint has found common cause with consumer groups, while AT&T has lined up support from unions, particularly the Communications Workers of America. And both sides have sought political leaders to speak out.

The outpouring of support is taking place within the confines of reviews by the F.C.C. and the Justice Department, which are aimed at determining if the deal is in the public’s interest and whether it harms competition. The process may take about a year. The deadline to file supporting comments for the deal is Friday, while the deadline to file opposing comments was last week.

The letters filed Monday provide solid support for the deal from Silicon Valley. Other companies that have signed on are Yahoo, Oracle and the BlackBerry’s maker Research in Motion. The venture capital firms include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Partners.

As smartphones and tablets proliferate, so too have apps like one by Facebook that draw in ever-rising amounts of data. Monday’s letters cite AT&T’s contention that the T-Mobile deal will allow the carrier to expand its nascent 4G network to cover 97 percent of the country and an additional 55 million Americans.

“The access aspect of this is so, so important,” Fred Humphries, Microsoft’s vice president for United States government affairs, said by telephone. “We quickly came to the conclusion that this is a good merger.”

Promod Haque, a managing partner of Norwest Venture Partners, said in a telephone interview that constraints on network capacity were harming new mobile applications and offerings.

“The lack of adequate spectrum is killing the quality of users’ experience,” he said. “Customers say, ‘I can’t even get a phone call and can’t get adequate reception. So you want me to use this new service?’ ”

Allowing AT&T to consolidate its network spectrum with T-Mobile’s is easier and more cost-effective than alternatives, Mr. Haque added.

Microsoft approached “a select few” technology companies to support the deal, mostly those whose products would obviously also benefit from wider data pipelines, and received quick and positive replies, Mr. Humphries said. The software giant also contacted several trade associations to which it belongs, letting them know of the company’s position.

While Microsoft and Research in Motion have signed the letter, other notable smartphone players whose offerings consume large amounts of data, like Apple, have not.

Some of the signers said that while they had considered Sprint’s arguments that the deal would harm both competition and innovation, they disagreed. Jon Auerbach, a general partner at Charles River Ventures, pointed to smaller competitors like Leap Wireless and “virtual network operators” like Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile USA as alternatives for consumers.

Mr. Auerbach and Mr. Haque also said that AT&T had repeatedly shown a willingness to work with its portfolio companies. They argued that those business relationships showed a willingness by AT&T to eschew existing technology in favor of new developments from unproven players.

“When a large provider is willing to take a bet on something that may not have the best balance sheet in the world or a long track record, that goes a long way,” Mr. Auerbach said. “AT&T really wants to know what’s next.”
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/06/...-for-t-mobile/





AT&T Loses at U.S. Supreme Court on Price for Sharing Lines
Greg Stohr

Established local telephone companies including AT&T Inc. must share disputed parts of their networks with competitors at cost, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled.

The unanimous ruling backs the position taken by the Federal Communications Commission in a fight stemming from the 1996 law that injected competition into the local telephone business. The law requires so-called incumbent local carriers, whose ranks also include Verizon Communications Inc and CenturyLink Inc., to share their facilities with rivals.

The ruling was a victory for Talk America Inc. in its fight with AT&T’s Michigan Bell Telephone unit. The case centered on so-called entrance facilities -- the wires or cables that connect the networks of two carriers. AT&T argued unsuccessfully that those lines aren’t covered by the 1996 law.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-0...ing-lines.html





1Gbps fiber for $70—in America? Yup.
Nate Anderson

American ISPs have convinced us that Internet access is expensive—getting speeds of 100Mbps will set most people back by more than $100 a month, assuming the service is even available. Where I live in Chicago, Comcast's 105Mbps service goes for a whopping $199.95 ("premium installation" and cable modem not included). Which is why it was so refreshing to see the scrappy California ISP Sonic.net this week roll out its new 1Gbps, fiber-to-the-home service… for $69.99 a month.

Sonic.net has been around since 1994, selling DSL service in California, but it has recently expanded into fiber; the company has even secured the contract to manage Google's own 1Gbps fiber network that will connect 800+ faculty homes at Stanford University.

Sonic.net's new approach to broadband involves stringing its own fiber lines to homes and offering bargain-basement pricing; indeed, the new 1Gbps offering is the same price as the company's earlier bonded 40Mbps DSL offering (in which two phones lines each provide 20Mbps of bandwidth to a home). The price even includes home phone service.

Is this really a sustainable model? After all, Comcast offers 1.5Mbps service for a list price of $40; Sonic.net's new offering is more than 600x faster at only twice the price.

Dane Jasper, Sonic.net's CEO, tells me that the new fiber-to-the-home deployment is a trial and will reach about 700 homes when complete. "Honestly, only as those wrap up will we have a complete picture of the economic model," he says. "But I believe that fast service for a low cost is possible."

If the pilot in Sebastopol, California goes well, Sonic.net hopes to expand the service across the region.

Jasper doesn't think like a typical US Internet exec; in an interview last year, he made clear that his company tries to avoid artificial limits as a way to make more money. "The natural model when you have a simple duopoly capturing the majority of the market is segmentation: maximize ARPU [average revenue per user] by artificially limiting service in order to drive additional monthly spending. But fundamentally this is the wrong model for a service provider like us, and we have looked to Europe for inspiration… I believe that removing the artificial limits on speed, and including home phone with the product are both very exciting."

Though the current trial is small-scale, Sonic.net's pricing reminds us just how much room there is in the US Internet market for truly disruptive pricing of the kind that Google has been promising—but on a much larger scale—with its 1Gbps fiber builds in Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...merica-yup.ars





CloudFlare: A Website Security Product Accidentally Makes Sites 60% Faster
Brad McCarty

I remember sitting in the front row of TechCrunch: Disrupt when CloudFlare was giving its pitch. At the time I commented to some other people around about how the service was answering a lot of questions, but probably wasn’t consumer-focused enough to win the competition. I was right, as Qwiki emerged as the winner but as time has moved on CloudFlare has managed to change the world of websites…and maybe even more than that.

In short, CloudFlare is a security product. Available for free to any website that wants to hop on board, there are also more in-depth packages that start at $20 per month which provide a myriad of services. When my email had an invitation to sit and talk with CEO Matthew Prince, I thought it would be interesting to see where the company has come in the 9 months since last September.

To start, we need to look at the history. CloudFlare comes from a product called Project Honey Pot that was initially launched at Paul Graham‘s MIT Spam Conference. Prince was a self-described “recovering lawyer” with a background in computer science. Project Honey Pot was launched with the goal of helping to track down all of the fraud and abuse that was happening on the Internet, spam included.

In 2007 the Department of Homeland Security reached out to Prince, essentially asking him if he had any idea what technology that he owned. Honey Pot had grown to be used by over 100,000 web administrators and millions of sites, all sending back amazing data about how spammers, hackers and fraud happened online. In short, CloudFlare wasn’t at all about speed, but rather about security. Each site that fed into Project Honey Pot only served to make it more accurate and smarter.

With a seed investment in CloudFlare, Prince was told that that the idea was great, but niche. The problem, he was told, was that going through CloudFlare’s Honey Pot would add latency. With that in mind, the team went to work trying to solve the problem. The goal was parity. The team didn’t want to make sites faster, they just wanted CloudFlare to run without interfering with page load times.

But then something unexpected happened when CloudFlare launched to the public in March of 2010.

“It was like clockwork. Three days after they’d sign up people would find that their sites were loading 30 to 40 percent faster.”

What the team had found was that, in tweaking CloudFlare’s operation at every line of code in order to get it to run at parity, they had actually found a way to make websites load faster, essentially turning CloudFlare into an accidental CDN.

“I don’t think that we’d have gone this route, if we knew what we were getting into. CloudFlare is a testament to what happens when you take the combined knowledge of huge Silicon Valley businesspeople and then provide a service that you can offer to anyone.”

But the bigger story is what CloudFlare has done since finding out about its happy accident. “We’re essentially building an operating system for the Internet,” proclaims Prince. “We can modify HTML as it’s flowing through the system, opening up a whole new set of services that we can offer.” The modification refers back to a test that was run in order to protect email addresses from spam.

“We challenged an engineer on our staff to sniff a packet of data to see if there was an email address inside of it. Then we wanted to know if we could replace it with a bit of JavaScript and bring it back so that it couldn’t be harvested.”

The end result? A virtual elimination of spam related to scraped email addresses, and it all happens with a 5-10 millisecond transfer time. From that revelation of being able to provide a whole new set of services, more innovation was born.

Prince touts CloudFlare’s ability to have 1-click integration with a number of services. Instead of having to put a line of code into every page on your site, CloudFlare can deploy things like Uservoice or Google Analytics to every page with a single button. The team went to 20 different Internet apps providers and immediately signed up 19, including services such as Apture, Pingdom, TRUSTe and typekit.

What’s more, that 30-40% increase that people used to see is now in the range of at least 50-60% as the team continues to find ways to make CloudFlare faster, while still offering security at the forefront.

What I’ve noticed about CloudFlare is a seemingly rabid commitment to its customers via interaction on Twitter. This is apparently no accident. In fact, Prince tells me that everyone on the team gets a copy of every single customer service inquiry and it’s not uncommon for members to be in the office at 4am solving a problem.

There were a couple of questions asked in the comments, and this is an appropriate place to answer those, while adding to the article overall.

In terms of stability, Prince states that CloudFlare runs its multiple datacenters over Anycast, allowing traffic to be filtered to another location if one were to go offline. It’s an answer to the single point of failure problem, as well as an increase in stability.

One TNW reader asked about government intervention and requests to pull sites offline. As another reader notes, you should be able to simply move your DNS servers back to your host’s, but Prince explains things a bit deeper:

In terms of government censorship, CloudFlare is a US-based entity and we comply with the law. We’ve never received a request from the US government, or any other government for that matter, to block any content. Our privacy policy states that if we are ever ordered to turn over data by a court, we will disclose that to the extent we can. And, most importantly, we don’t sign contracts with our users in blood. In fact, we don’t have long-term contracts at all. We like to say that it takes 5 minutes to sign up for CloudFlare, and about 2 minutes to leave if you’re ever unhappy. We have a very low churn rate today, but we recognize that could change very quickly if we ever lost the trust of our users.

When the Amazon EC2 outage in April of 2011 brought down millions of sites across the Internet, CloudFlare was able to keep static pages from its customers alive. “We’re not a hosting provider,” says Prince, “but we can make sure that at least that static content stays online.”

How many pages? At present, CloudFlare serves enough content that if it were its own website it would be the 10th largest on the Internet. Growing from 5 datacenters at launch to a current crop of 12, it generates over 2 million log lines of code every minute. To put one more figure out there, 12% of the people on the Internet have passed through CloudFlare’s servers in the 8 months that the company has been serving content.

So what’s next? Prince says that the biggest thing is CloudFlare’s new Rocketloader product. As the Internet gains more widgets, each of them requires another connection to an external site. Rocketloader is a product that allows all of those Twitter, Facebook and other widgets to be served via a single connection providing 30-40% faster response times, on top of the existing increases from CloudFlare itself.

Pre-vetted code on CloudFlare’s marketplace for the 1-click installs have taken off, as well. “That 1-click install really resonates,” notes Prince. “Performance hits are a concern for users, and most people won’t bother with things that even require a single line of code to be inserted into a page.”

So the work continues. Prince feels that in order to make security better, you need security on every site on the Internet. While this could be an explanation for CloudFlare’s free product offering, it’s also a testament to his passion. “We’re hiring like crazy. We want the kind of people who look at a problem saying ‘make the entire Internet faster’ and decide that it sounds like fun.”

We’ll be keeping an eye on CloudFlare and you should be too. The site’s blog has some great tips for new users and we’re looking forward to what we’ll see from the company moving forward.
http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/...tes-60-faster/





World IPv6 Day: Tech Industry's Most-Watched Event Since Y2K

400 websites are participating in 24-hour trial of IPv6, despite worries about timeouts and hacker attacks
Carolyn Duffy Marsan

The nation's largest telecom carriers, content providers, hardware suppliers and software vendors will be on the edge of their seats tonight for the start of World IPv6 Day, which is the most-anticipated 24 hours the tech industry has seen since fears of the Y2K bug dominated New Year's Eve in 1999.

More than 400 organizations are participating in World IPv6 Day, a large-scale experiment aimed at identifying problems associated with IPv6, an upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol known as IPv4.

Sponsored by the Internet Society, World IPv6 Day runs from 8 p.m. EST Tuesday until 7:59 p.m. EST Wednesday. The IT departments in the participating organizations have spent the last five months preparing their websites for an anticipated rise in IPv6-based traffic, more tech support calls and possible hacking attacks prompted by this largest-ever trial of IPv6.

"We're ready," says Cricket Liu, vice president of architecture at Infoblox, a World IPv6 Day participant. "We've got the IPv6 address on the Web server and the name server. ... The point of World IPv6 Day [is] to uncover issues and to prepare for a day when we do have much broader IPv6 adoption."

"We're seeing some IPv6 traffic already," says Hari Krishnan, director of product management at Nominum, a DNS vendor that is participating in the IPv6 trial. "It's still a very small percentage. But there is definitely a lot of interest in our customers in terms of rolling out IPv6-based Internet services. This is something they are planning or in the evaluation phase."

World IPv6 Day is the largest-ever experiment in the Internet's 40-year history. The goal of the event is to quantify issues such as misconfigured gear that will create broken connections for some users of IPv6.

"This is a test flight. It's been clear from the beginning that we're expecting problems," says Andy Champagne, vice president of engineering at Akamai, a content delivery network that carriers anywhere from 15% to 30% of the Internet's traffic and a World IPv6 Day participant. "I don't think I remember an event where we have had so many different companies working together to fix a problem. We have folks who are usually staunch competitors sharing information."

DETAILS: Can't reach your favorite website? IPv6 may be to blame

Many of the Internet's biggest companies are participating in World IPv6 Day, including:

-- popular websites such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Bing;

--ISPs such as Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T and Verizon;

-- network equipment vendors such as Cisco, Juniper, Blue Coat and Radware;

-- software suppliers such as Microsoft, Mozilla and Nominum.

Other participants include universities such as Rensellaer Polytechnic Institute, government agencies including the Federal Aviation Administration, and tech industry groups such as the W3C.

Preparing for World IPv6 Day required a significant amount of planning, engineering work and testing, said Alain Fiocco, who leads the IPv6 program at Cisco.

"We had to work with our DNS provider and work with our ISP to make sure we had good connectivity and a redundant path to the ISP. These are the traditional things that you would do for a good, production-quality IPv4 network," Fiocco says. "We haven't really uncovered any big technical issues, nothing that was a show-stopper. So we feel pretty good about where we are today."

Cisco set up an IPv6 war room that will monitor its website and network activity for the 24-hour trial. The company also beefed up its technical support information available online and is allowing customers to share their experiences on World IPv6 Day.

"Over the last few weeks, we've been prolific in giving people advice on what to do, how to prepare and what kind of configurations to use. For that day, we have a plan in place to support our customers," Fiocco says. "There's been a lot of prep work and a lot of education for our own people."

Router manufacturer Juniper conducted a dry run a week ago, aiming IPv6 traffic at its website for a couple of hours to prepare for World IPv6 Day.

"Everything was fine, so we are confident that we will be OK," says Alain Durand, director of software engineering at Juniper. "There were lots of T's to cross and lots of I's to dot, but nothing really that difficult to prepare."

Throughout World IPv6 Day, participants will be monitoring their networks to study IPv6 traffic volumes and patterns and to look for security threats.

"What we're going to look for is to see the locations where users are coming from, what kind of links they have, [if] there are any botnets, and could there be URLs we should blacklist," says Qing Li, chief scientist and senior technologist at Blue Coat, which is a World IPv6 Day participant. "We're going to do packet analysis to see if anyone is trying to circumvent our security policies and if any of the traffic contains actual malware."

Verizon is anticipating an increase in IPv6 traffic on the Verizon Business networks that are IPv6 enabled as well as on its LTE wireless network, which supports both IPv6 and IPv4 in what's called a dual-stack configuration. Verizon plans to reach out to its customers on social media platforms to encourage them to try IPv6 during the trial.

"Our backbone will be carrying IPv6 traffic because of our peering and transit connectivity. That's where we're interested to see the IPv6 traffic," says Jean McManus, executive director of Verizon's Corporate Technology Organization. "We're kind of curious to see how much we can drive the traffic up on World IPv6 Day."

An increase in IPv6 traffic is the only thing that World IPv6 Day participants are hoping occurs in the next 24 hours. They're keeping their fingers crossed that other threats -- from misconfigured gear to hacking attacks -- don't come to pass. This is another way in which World IPv6 Day and Y2K are similar.

"My hope is that nothing happens on World IPv6 Day," Durand says. "The goal is to make sure that nothing happens and to build confidence that it is OK to deploy IPv6 and that IPv6 is not going to break the IPv4 Internet. We have been putting in place mechanisms to minimize the potential damage. This is the real learning from World IPv6 Day."

Most sites plan to turn off their IPv6 services when World IPv6 Day ends.

"It's a one-day experiment because we need to see how pervasive the problems are," Liu says. "If it turns out that the magnitude of the problem is bigger than ... we anticipated, then there is going to be some concerted effort to stamp out that behavior."
If World IPv6 Day goes as planned, participants predict that some websites will turn IPv6 on in production mode in the coming months.

"To see the momentum continue, we need to see more consumer electronic deploying IPv6, more content and more service providers adding subscribers," says John Brzozowski, distinguished engineer and chief architect for IPv6 at Comcast, which has an ongoing IPv6 trial. "I think we could see these announcements within weeks of the [World IPv6 Day] event ... depending on what we learn about IPv6 brokenness. If it wasn't really that broken after all, content providers may be more open to the idea of turning IPv6 on and leaving it on."

ISPs and content providers are migrating to IPv6 because the Internet is running out of addresses using IPv4. The free pool of unassigned IPv4 addresses expired in February, and in April the Asia Pacific region ran out of all but a few IPv4 addresses being held in reserve for startups. The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), which doles out IP addresses to network operators in North America, says it will deplete its supply of IPv4 addresses this fall.

IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support 4.3 billion devices connected directly to the Internet, but IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses and can connect up a virtually unlimited number of devices: 2 to the 128th power. IPv6 offers the promise of faster, less-costly Internet services than the alternative, which is to extend the life of IPv4 using network address translation (NAT) devices.

One major stumbling block for IPv6 deployment is that it's not backward compatible with IPv4. That means website operators have to upgrade their network equipment and software to support IPv6 traffic.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/201...v6-expect.html





Telco Missteps, Overreach Leading to Dutch Net Neutrality Law
Nate Anderson

Big news out of the Netherlands this week, where a government minister announced plans to guarantee network neutrality by law. If Parliament approves the amendment to Dutch telecommunications law, and it expected to do so, it would become one of the first countries in the world to legislate against Internet providers who want to charge more for using particular applications or services.

What led to the change? A classic case of overreaching.

"It's not OK"

It has been an open secret in Europe for some time that mobile operators like to block or discriminate against Internet services which compete with their legacy offerings. Skype and similar voice services are the most obvious targets, but newer tools like WhatsApp (which offers text-messaging style communications over the Internet) have also been targets. Many mobile operators stand to make less money from selling pure data packages than they did when they could also charge separately for text messaging and voice minutes; some have simply decided to bill more for Internet services that compete with those offerings.

As European Commissioner Neelie Kroes—who happens to be Dutch—noted recently, "Blocking or charging extra fees for VoIP has been reported on mobile operators in Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Romania." And she made clear that she would not stand for it much longer:

Mark my words: if measures to enhance competition are not enough to bring Internet providers to offer real consumer choice, I am ready to prohibit the blocking of lawful services or applications. It's not OK for Skype and other such services to be throttled.

But even in the face of this high-level resistance to such plans, major Dutch telecommunications company KPN went ahead with new plans to charge extra for certain Internet services, notably Skype and WhatsApp. The company then admitted on an earnings call what most people suspected: it would be using deep packet inspection hardware to monitor all Internet traffic and classify it by application in order to make the new charging scheme work.

The decision kicked up huge controversy in the Netherlands, and this week Maxime Verhagen, the Minister of Economic affairs, Agriculture, and Innovation, announced in Parliament a plan to ban the practice.

"Some providers of mobile internet had announced a surcharge for specific services," said Verhagen's press release after the announcement (e-mailed to us and helpfully translated by a Dutch Ars reader). "This is because of the needed investments in the network and the decline in voice and SMS traffic. Minister Verhagen isn’t against paying for the quantity or the speed of the data traffic. The Cabinet, however, is of the opinion that a surcharge on specific services like Skype or WhatsApp goes too far."

Verhagen will draft a net neutrality proposal in the next few weeks, one that will give users confidence that "specific Internet service on their mobile will not be additionally taxed or blocked by mobile providers."

Talk about scoring an own goal.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...neutrality.ars





Dumpster Drive: A File-Sharing Trash Bin Alternative
Stephen Chapman

Talk about thinking different! A new Mac-only (for now) file-sharing application has hit the Web with a rather interesting premise. To quote:

Dumpster Drive is a file-sharing application that recycles digital files. Using dumpster diving as a model for recirculating unwanted objects, Dumpster Drive allows others to dig through files that you delete on your computer in a passive file-sharing network. Instead of simply erasing data from your computer, the software allows users to extend the lifecycle of their unwanted files and pass them on to others.

That’s right! Instead of using your trash bin, you can send files to your “Dumpster Drive” to be deleted from your hard drive, but shared with others. That’s not all, though. A promotional video on their site details a few more interesting facets of the program; one in particular being that once a file is deleted and made available to the rest of the network, it can only be downloaded by one person who then becomes the owner of that file.

That sounds like true-to-form dumpster diving to me! And if you’re perceiving this whole concept as I did when I first found out about it, you’re certainly intrigued, but mostly wary and for good reason. There are all kinds of issues this could cause, such as deleting the wrong file which could end up in the hands of someone seeking out the information contained within that file (personal information, confidential information, etc.).

Additionally, any number of typical trickery tactics could be utilized to entice someone into downloading what turns out to be a virus or some other type of malicious code. I know that’s not a primary concern for Mac users at the moment, but since the developer has made the program an open source effort, he hopes other developers will take it and make binaries available for multiple platforms.

Overall, this is a very creative idea in the world of file-sharing where the only comparable scenario I can come up with is when people inadvertently shared their entire hard drives when installing a file-sharing program (thus, including their recycle bin). I would certainly be willing to give it a try insofar as being one of the people digging through other people’s virtual trash. But for now, I’ll simply leave it up to others who are feeling a bit more adventurous.

Trash-sharing. Who knew?

















Until next week,

- js.



















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