Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 17th, '11

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"SOPA, as written, would threaten the functioning, freedom, and economic potential of the Internet." – Sherwin Siy, Public Knowledge


"What they've said is, 'We're going to criminalize the linking and structure of the Internet itself.'" – Eric Schmidt, Google


"Butchering the Internet is not a way forward for America." – Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California



































December 17th, 2011




Busted: BitTorrent Pirates at Sony, Universal and Fox
Ernesto

With increasing lobbying efforts from the entertainment industry against BitTorrent sites and users, we wondered whether these companies hold themselves to the same standards they demand of others. After some initial skimming we’ve discovered BitTorrent pirates at nearly every major entertainment industry company in the US, including Sony Pictures Entertainment, Fox Entertainment and NBC Universal. Busted.

A few days ago we wrote about a new website that exposes what people behind an IP-address have downloaded on BitTorrent. The Russian-based founders of the site developed the service so people can show their friends how public their downloading habits are, and that is exactly what we’re going to do today.

Armed with the IP-ranges of major Hollywood studios we decided to find out what they’ve been downloading. As expected, it didn’t take us long before we found BitTorrent ‘pirates’ at several leading entertainment industry companies. Yes, these are the same companies who want to disconnect people from the Internet after they’ve been caught sharing copyrighted material.

First up is Sony Pictures Entertainment. As shown below, on this single IP-address alone a wide variety of music and movies have been downloaded. And this is probably just the tip of the iceberg, as YouHaveDownloaded only tracks only a small percentage of all public BitTorrent downloads.

Another Hollywood studio where it’s not uncommon to download music, TV-shows and movies is NBC Universal. The employee(s) behind one of the IP-addresses at the Fort Lauderdale office in Florida downloaded the first season of ‘Game of Thrones,’ some trance music, a DVD of ‘Cowboys and Aliens’, and much more.

And then there are the fine upstanding people at Fox Entertainment checking out the work of a competing studio. Perhaps downloading ‘Super 8′ can be branded as “market research,” but in this instance actually paying for the DVD might be more appropriate.

After all, when Fox notices that one of their own movies has leaked online they quickly contact the FBI to get the offender jailed. Ouch.

By highlighting the above our intention is not to get anyone into trouble, and for that reason we masked out the end of the IP addresses to avoid a witch hunt. An IP address is not a person, IP addresses can be shared among many people, and anyone can be behind a keyboard at any given time.

Of course our search wasn’t limited only to these big Hollywood studios. We also checked the downloads at the BitTorrent Inc. headquarters in San Francisco. Interestingly there were no downloads recorded there. But there’s plenty of piracy at other tech companies and other institutions.

An IP registered to Google’s Corporate office in New York comes up with a long list of downloads (including a Windows 7 copy), and that’s just one of the many addresses at the search giant. Even at the Church of God the “thou shalt not steal” commandment is less important than getting the latest TV-shows.

We aren’t the only ones to come up with the idea of revealing the BitTorrent habits of copyright advocates. Yesterday, the Dutch blog Geenstijl exposed how someone at the local music royalty collecting agency Buma/Stemra downloaded a copy of the TV-show Entourage and video game Battlefield 3.

In a response Buma/Stemra issued a press release stating that their IP-addresses were spoofed. A very unlikely scenario, but one that will be welcomed by BitTorrent pirates worldwide. In fact, they’d encourage Sony, Universal and Fox to say something similar. After all, if it’s so easy to spoof an IP-address, then accused file-sharers can use this same defense against copyright holders.

Checkmate?
https://torrentfreak.com/busted-bitt...nd-fox-111213/





French President’s Residence ‘Busted’ For BitTorrent Piracy
enigmax

French President Nicholas Sarkozy is a man who has championed some of the most aggressive anti-piracy legislation in Europe. But today it’s revealed that the occupants of his very own office and home are responsible for a nice selection of pirate downloads using BitTorrent. Three strikes? Those with access to the Presidential Palace’s IP addresses have already doubled that quota.

Located near the Champs-Élysées in the French capital, Paris, the Élysée Palace is the official residence of President Sarkozy. As husband of ‘first lady’ and musician Carla Bruni, Sarkozy has helped promote and push through some of the toughest anti-filesharing legislation to be found anywhere in Europe.

Those provisions include Internet disconnections for persistent pirates, and as of October this year 60 French Internet subscribers were on their third and final strike.

This morning, however, we’re left wondering if Sarkozy, his family and French ministers will be able to answer any emails in the months to come.

As reported to TorrentFreak this morning by Nicolas Perrier of Nikopik, people using IP addresses allocated to the Élysée Palace (62.160.71.0 – 62.160.71.255) have been very naughty indeed.

According to data from YouHaveDownloaded.com, a range of downloads have been actioned from the Palace including a cam copy of Tower Heist, a telesync copy of Arthur Christmas, and music from The Beach Boys. The latter was actually a lossless FLAC rip, but as one might expect, only the best quality will do for the Palace.

In total six infringing downloads were tracked back to Sarkozy’s residence, double the country’s three-strike limit.

It’s been an embarrassing few days for some not-so-secret users of BitTorrent. The IP addresses of several entertainment companies were reported as connected to allegedly infringing activity earlier this week using the same methods.

But while the reports from YouHaveDownloaded certainly have discussion value, it is worth noting that their data collection methods are just as untested as those employed by many private anti-piracy companies and their notoriously secretive ‘proprietary software’. The difference is, however, YHD aren’t using their data for the filing of lawsuits and getting people cut off from the Internet.

BitTorrent users are increasingly aware that their activities are public – those that monitor them for the purposes of punitive responses should experience the same standard. Finally, on the subject of equality, any predictions on odds for the Palace being disconnected for piracy? Save your money folks, some bets are a lost cause.
https://torrentfreak.com/french-pres...piracy-111215/





Kazaa Creator Sues Internet Giants for Patent Infringement

A US- based entrepreneur and a creator of file -sharing application Kazaa, Kevin Bermeister has sued several Internet giants including Google and YouTube for infringing their eight patents in their cloud computing products.

Bermeister, who chairs a US-based firm, Personal Web took to combating Internet piracy after being docked in the Kazaa file sharing case in 2005.

"PersonalWeb protects its proprietary business applications and operations through a portfolio of patents that it owns, and we are actively pursuing licensing and participation in the operation of businesses that use these patents," The Sydney Morning Herald quoted Personal Web CEO Michael Weiss, as saying.

PersonalWeb alleged that defaulters including Amazon, EMC, VMWare, Dropbox, NetApps, NEC and Caringo used the company's patents in their own without paying licensing fees.

PersonalWeb has urged a jury trial and damages in a case filed at the Texas District Court.

PersonalWeb said it has used the concerned patents to develop technologies like StudyBods, an online collaboration platform for students.

The patents also form the basis of Global File Registry, a technology, which according to the company, could be instrumental in curbing online piracy and child pornography.

Queensland University of Technology senior lecturer Peter Black predicted that damages to the Internet giants could be 'substantial' if Personal Web wins the case.

A patent law specialist, Mark Summerfield estimated that the damage claims will be "at least in the hundreds of millions of dollars per defendant".

Personal Web CEO Weiss was unavailable for comment while Bermeister declined to give a statement, as he is a witness in the case.

Google and EMC refused to comment due to ongoing probe.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/t...w/11082810.cms





Megaupload to Sue Universal, Joins Fight Against SOPA
enigmax

File-hosting service Megaupload has told TorrentFreak that it will sue Universal for wrongfully taking down its content from YouTube. Universal took action Friday to remove a Megaupload-produced pop video which featured leading artists singing the cyberlocker service’s praises. The move has also prompted the company to enter the SOPA debate, with a call for like-minded people to join forces and fight for an Internet without censorship.

Last Friday, file-hosting service Megaupload surprised the Internet by launching a campaign fronted by a Printz Board-produced song featuring some of the world’s most prominent recording artists.

Needless to say, the spectacle of P Diddy, Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Macy Gray, Chris Brown, The Game and Mary J Blige all declaring their love for Megaupload was too much for the IFPI and RIAA.

As the story began to spread and the Mega Song trended on Twitter, it was suddenly blocked by YouTube, a victim of Universal Music Group (UMG) and IFPI copyright takedowns.

What followed late Friday were demands from Mega founder Kim Dotcom for YouTube to reinstate the video (full details in our earlier article), and counters from Universal to take it down again. With the weekend over, the controversy is alive again.

“Let us be clear: Nothing in our song or the video belongs to Universal Music Group. We have signed agreements with all artists endorsing Megaupload,” Megaupload CEO David Robb told TorrentFreak this morning.

“Efforts to reach out to UMG and open a dialog about this abuse of the DMCA process were answered with unfounded and baseless legal threats and demands for an apology.”

Threats against Megaupload from the mainstream entertainment industries are nothing new, yet thus far the movie and music groups have refrained from legal action. Nevertheless, the name-calling persists.

“Regrettably, we are being attacked and labeled as a ‘rogue operator’ by organizations like the RIAA and the MPAA, which represent some of the music and movie industry. They are wrong,” says Robb.

“Our record of closing accounts of repeat infringers and taking down illegal files proves we stand against piracy and care about the rights of content owners.”

But while Mega insists it always complies with legitimate takedown requests as required by law, the RIAA and their member labels want much more, as their championing of the Stop Online Piracy Act illustrates.

“UMG is currently lobbying lawmakers in Washington for legislation that would allow them to not only delete specific content from a website, but to delete entire websites from the Internet. After this demonstration of the abuse of power by UMG, we are certain that such an instrument of Internet censorship should not be put into the hands of corporations,” says Robb.

Those corporations, Robb suggests, may have already abused their existing powers to censor the Mega Song campaign on YouTube for commercial ends. Mega will shortly relaunch Megabox, a label-worrying iTunes competitor that will give artists 90% of all sales, a far bigger share than many currently enjoy.

But whatever Universal’s motivations for the takedowns were, according to Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom the label will now have to justify their actions in court. TorrentFreak can confirm that Mega’s legal team have already been instructed to sue Universal over the illegitimate copyright takedown of the Mega Song, an act which Kim says was an attempt to sabotage their viral campaign.

Furthermore, having previously been restrained on the issue of SOPA, it now appears the Mega Song takedown has prompted a change of course by Megaupload.

“We thank everyone for the massive support. Let’s join forces and fight for an Internet without censorship. Stand up and oppose new laws like SOPA and PIPA, which are being written this month in Washington,” says Mega CEO David Robb.

“Let your local representatives in Congress know what you think. Join organizations that are promoting free speech and innovation. Let’s not allow corporations to create an Internet dictatorship with the massive censorship firewall they are lobbying for in Washington.”

A TorrentFreak request for comment from an RIAA spokesperson remains unanswered.
https://torrentfreak.com/megaupload-...t-sopa-111212/





Tech News Today Blocked for Commenting on Megaupload Video
Tom Merritt

Some of you may have heard of the Megaupload video which Universal Music Group has had removed from YouTube. Megaupload claims it is entirely their property. UMG seems to believe it viokates their copyright and has twice ordered it removed from YouTube.

On Tech News Today we exercised our fair use rights to comment on the story by playing some of the video. Our episode has now been removed from YouTube at UMG's request.

Even if UMG does have a copyright issue in the Megaupload video, they do not have the right to silence commentary on their actions.

We are filing a counter-notice and will see what happens.

This is the blocked video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSCIh...8Ad-GNtxIePI4e

The uncensored episode is here: http://twit.tv/show/tech-news-today/391

Update: We counter-noticed last night, the show was restored but then it was reviewed and taken down again. We filed another counter-notice and the episode is still down.
https://plus.google.com/103207773865...ts/M2yVb5ND3Su





Judge Gives Universal Music 24 Hours to Explain Takedown Spree
Timothy B. Lee

A federal judge has given Universal Music Group until the end of the day Thursday to respond to charges that it abused the DMCA takedown process to censor a promotional music video by the locker site Megaupload.

There's been no love lost between the American recording industry and the Hong Kong-based Megaupload. The RIAA has called Megaupload a "notorious service" that "thumbs their noses at international laws, all while pocketing significant advertising revenues from trafficking in free, unlicensed copyrighted materials."

So label executives must have been furious on Friday when the locker site unveiled a new promotional video featuring some of the music industry's biggest names singing the site's praises. One of the labels, Universal Music Group, went a step further and started filing takedown notices.

The legal basis for the takedown requests isn't clear. Megaupload says that the music and artwork in the video are original, and that it has signed agreements with everyone who appeared in it. An early report suggested that Will.I.Am sent a takedown request, but this may have been the work of an over-zealous lawyer, as Megaupload CIO Kim Dotcom says that he "spoke directly with will.i.am," and confirmed that the artist "absolutely had not authorized the submission of any takedown notice on his behalf."

On Monday, Megaupload—doubtless relishing the opportunity to play copyright victim—filed a lawsuit in federal court against UMG for misuse of the DMCA takedown process. UMG, it said, is "abusing the DMCA takedown mechanism to chill free speech they do not like." It asked the court to declare that Megaupload had the right to post its video and to restrain UMG from submitting any more takedown notices.

But UMG apparently continued its takedown campaign, targeting an episode of Tech News Today that included a clip from the video in its coverage of the controversy. The host, Tom Merritt, says he filed a counter-notice under the DMCA, but as of Wednesday evening the show had not been restored. Under the DMCA, it will take 10 days for the video to go back up. "In 10 days a daily news show is worthless," he told the Verge, "so Universal was able to censor this episode of Tech News Today."

On Wednesday, Megaupload asked the court to rule quickly on the matter, arguing that UMG's takedown campaign was harming Megaupload's free speech rights. "UMG has squashed not only the video itself, but even public comment about it by others, including a 45 minute news broadcast that criticized UMG," the firm wrote. "The Court should act immediately to ensure the public that such tactics will not be tolerated."

In a brief order on Wednesday afternoon, Judge Claudia Wilken wrote that she would "defer ruling" on Megaupload's request for a restraining order until UMG has had an opportunity to respond. But she asked the label to file its response "on or before December 15"—that is, on Thursday.

Ars sought a comment from UMG, but we have not received a response.

Correction: An earlier version of the story stated that it takes up to 10 days for sites to restore content in response to a takedown request. In fact, a site must wait at least 10 days before restoring the material.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...down-spree.ars





House Panel to Move Forward on Stop Online Piracy Act

The House Judiciary Committee has scheduled a bill markup for Thursday
Grant Gross

A U.S. House of Representatives committee has scheduled a debate and vote on controversial copyright legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act, with the bill's main sponsor offering an amendment meant to address some concerns with the bill.

A House Judiciary Committee markup for Stop Online Piracy, or SOPA, is scheduled for 10 a.m. Eastern Time Thursday. Representative Lamar Smith, the committee chairman and main sponsor of the bill, will offer a wide-ranging amendment to the bill, his spokeswoman said.

Smith and the Judiciary Committee staff have been working closely with lawmakers and interested groups for the past few weeks "to strengthen the bill and address legitimate concerns from groups who are interested in working with Congress to combat foreign rogue websites," said the spokeswoman for Smith, a Texas Republican.

In a markup, lawmakers have the opportunity to debate and amend a bill. If the Judiciary Committee votes to approve SOPA, the next step would be for the full House to vote on it. Smith introduced SOPA on Oct. 26.

Monday's announcement of the markup came the same day that Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, said the antipiracy legislation would allow "censorship" of the Internet. The entertainment industry has "overreached," Schmidt said during a speech before the Economic Club of Washington, D.C. "What they've said is, 'We're going to criminalize the linking and structure of the Internet itself. If someone posts a copied video, we're going to force intermediaries to take the link down.'"

SOPA would allow U.S. Department of Justice and copyright holders to seek court orders blocking payment processors and online advertising networks from doing business with foreign sites accused of infringing copyright.

Under the current language in SOPA, the DOJ-requested court orders could also bar search engines from linking to the allegedly infringing sites, and require domain name registrars to take down the websites and Internet service providers to block subscriber access to sites accused of infringing.

SOPA would also allow copyright holders to seek court orders requiring online advertising networks and payment processors to stop supporting the alleged infringers if those businesses do not comply with requests from copyright holders. Under the current language, the court orders requested by copyright holders could target U.S. websites and services that enable or facilitate copyright, in addition to foreign websites.

Smith's proposed amendment would clarify that the bill applies only to foreign websites, not U.S. sites, accused of aiding copyright infringement. The amendment takes away language requiring Internet service providers, search engines and other services to redirect Web users who try to access a foreign site accused of infringing copyright.

In response to concerns about harm to the Internet domain name system, the amendment would prohibit courts from issuing orders that harm the DNS, and it requires a government study on the impact of the bill on the DNS.

The amendment also narrows several definitions in the bill.

Several SOPA opponents contacted for this story did not have immediate comments on the proposed amendment.
http://www.itworld.com/networking/23...ine-piracy-act





RIAA Boss Tries To Defend SOPA & PIPA To The NY Times
Mike Masnick

With the NY Times coming out against SOPA & PIPA, the RIAA apparently felt it needed to open its mouth... and stick another foot in it. RIAA boss Cary Sherman sent a letter to the NY Times defending the bills with some claims that don't hold up to much scrutiny.

we don’t agree that the proposed bills in Congress could “stymie legitimate speech.” To the contrary, the bills are specifically designed to focus on the worst of the worst sites whose model is predicated on theft.

Tell that to Dajaz1, which was censored for over a year, blocking tons of legitimate speech under similar laws. The bills are not at all focused on just "the worst of the worst." If that were the case, then the RIAA would be happy with the alternative proposal from Wyden and Issa, which actually does try to limit it to the "worst of the worst."

Moreover, there is extensive due process afforded to accused sites under the bills. They require the attorney general to extensively document why a site meets the bills’ tight standards — pulled from existing law and Supreme Court cases — and a federal judge must approve any order.

The same "due process" that Dajaz1 got? In which the domain got seized with no notice, and there was no ability to get into court to have the site owner's side of the story for over a year before the government finally admitted it was mistaken (based, I might add, on questionable claims from the RIAA itself). After all, that involved a "federal judge" too, but no adversarial hearing. The fact that this would go on for over a year is a travesty. The RIAA should be apologizing, not pushing for even greater censorship powers.

Similarly, if companies serving pirate sites choose not to take action voluntarily, copyright owners must state their case and persuade a federal judge to issue a court order before payment processors or ad networks can be compelled to stop servicing the site.

Notice the big "if" that Sherman tries to brush pass quickly here. In Section 103 of SOPA, the law says that companies "shall" take action, meaning they don't really have the option of "not" taking action. In fact, under section 103, not taking action can be seen as evidence of being dedicated to theft of US property -- so it's pretty unlikely that the won't choose to take action. And that's a pretty big concern, because all of the incentives are for companies to pre-emptively take action to censor to avoid the risk of the RIAA dragging them to court. Gee, I wonder why Sherman rushed through that point by hiding it all behind a single "if."

There may be different ways to craft a sensible bill, and we’re all for finding the best way, but one thing is clear: the status quo isn’t working. These illicit sites are among the culprits behind the music industry’s more than 50 percent decline in revenues during the last decade, resulting in 15,000 layoffs and fewer resources to invest in new bands.

Sherman should know better than to make blatantly false statements in the pages of the NY Times. The record labels may have had a 50% decline in revenues, but the wider music industry remains up over that same period. The fact that the companies he represents have been unwilling to adapt while most of the rest of the market has is no reason to rush through bad laws. Instead, it seems like a pretty good reason to suggest that the RIAA and the various labels are in desperate need of more enlightened leadership.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...medium=twitter





Wikipedia Mulls Total Blackout to Oppose SOPA
Ernesto

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales wants to blank out all pages of the online encyclopedia to oppose the pending SOPA anti-piracy bill in the US. Wales, who has asked the Wikipedia community for input on the idea, fears the bill could seriously hurt the Internet and thinks that blanking out Wikipedia will send a strong message to lawmakers.

Later this week, the Senate’s House Judiciary Committee will vote on the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA).

Supporters of the bill say it’s needed to safeguard the interests of rightsholders who claim their businesses are threatened by online piracy. Those opposing are worried that the unprecedented censorship tools it introduces will take out many websites on baseless or faulty claims of copyright infringement.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales belongs to the latter group, and behind the scenes he is mulling plans to blank out all Wikipedia pages in protest against the pending SOPA bill. On Saturday he posted a message on his user page asking the community for input on the idea.

Wales explains that the idea of a ‘self-censorship’ protest is inspired by a campaign the Italian Wikipedia community ran earlier this year.

“A few months ago, the Italian Wikipedia community made a decision to blank all of Italian Wikipedia for a short period in order to protest a law which would infringe on their editorial independence. The Italian Parliament backed down immediately,” he writes.

“As Wikipedians may or may not be aware, a much worse law going under the misleading title of ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’ is working its way through [the Senate] on a bit of a fast track.”

“I may be attending a meeting at the White House on Monday along with executives from many other top Internet firms, and I thought this would be a good time to take a quick reading of the community feeling on this issue.”

By blanking out one of the most-visited sites on the Internet, the Wikipedia founder believes the community can send a strong message to their representatives in Washington. With billions of pageviews a month, a Wikipedia protest will definitely be noticed.

“My own view is that a community strike was very powerful and successful in Italy and could be even more powerful in this case,” Wales says.

The response from Wikipedia users to Wales’ plan has been overwhelmingly supportive. However, several users also placed critical notes and wondered whether Wikipedia is the right platform for a political protest.

“I oppose the legislation, but that’s a political view. I don’t ever want Wikipedia to take a political view, no matter how much I agree with it,” Ntsimp writes for example.

Others think that blanking out entire pages might not be an ideal solution, and call for alternative forms of protest such as displaying a black background.

In an update today, Wales responds to some of the points raised in response to the idea. However, he still stands behind the blanking out protest and says that something has to be done quickly before the bill is rammed through in Washington.

“Time is not on our side here,” he says.
https://torrentfreak.com/wikipedia-m...e-sopa-111212/





Google Chairman Says Online Piracy Bill Would 'Criminalize' the Internet
Gautham Nagesh

An online piracy bill in the House would "criminalize linking and the fundamental structure of the Internet itself," according to Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt.

Schmidt said the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) would punish Web firms, including search engines, that link to foreign websites dedicated to online piracy. He said implementing the bill as written would effectively break the Internet.

"By criminalizing links, what these bills do is they force you to take content off the Internet," Schmidt said, calling it a form of censorship.

The search giant has been at the forefront of a tech industry backlash against the legislation from House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas).

"If Congress writes a bad law, we all suffer," Schmidt said.

He compared the proposal to the Web censorship practiced by repressive foreign governments like China and doubled down on that comparison when speaking with reporters after his remarks at the Economic Club of Washington.

"It's not a good thing. I understand the goal of what SOPA and PIPA are trying to do," Schmidt said of the Senate counterpart bill, the Protect IP Act. "Their goal is reasonable, their mechanism is terrible. They should not criminalize the intermediaries. They should go after the people that are violating the law."

Schmidt also criticized SOPA for targeting the Domain Name System, which experts have warned could undermine the security of the Web.

"What they're essentially doing is whacking away at the DNS system and that's a mistake. It's a bad way to go about solving the problem," Schmidt said.

The Google CEO said he's not familiar enough with an alternate piracy bill, dubbed the OPEN Act, to offer an educated opinion on its impact.

That bill, sponsored by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.),would rely on the International Trade Commission (ITC) to handle online copyright claims and stick to the "follow the money" approach Schmidt advocated, which would focus on forcing payment processors and online ad networks to cut ties with rogue websites.

Supporters of SOPA, including the movie industry and the House Judiciary Committee, have blasted the OPEN Act, arguing it goes easy on online piracy and would result in a huge cost increase for the ITC.

Smith responded on Monday: “Unfortunately, there are some critics of this legislation who are not serious about helping to protect America’s intellectual property. That’s because they’ve made large profits by promoting rogue sites to U.S. consumers."

"Google recently paid a half billion dollars to settle a criminal case because of the search-engine giant’s active promotion of rogue foreign pharmacies that sold counterfeit and illegal drugs to U.S. patients," he continued. "As a result of their actions, the health and lives of many American patients may have been endangered. Their opposition to this legislation is self-serving since they profit from doing business with rogue sites.”
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-va...nalize-linking





O.E.C.D. Calls on Members to Defend Internet Freedoms
Eric Pfanner

As a rising tide of digital dissent raises alarms in many capitals around the world, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on Tuesday called on member countries to “promote and protect the global free flow of information” online.

The O.E.C.D. , a group of 34 developed countries, urged policy makers to support investment in digital networks and to take a light touch on regulation, saying this was essential for promoting economic growth via the Internet.

“It’s really a milestone in terms of making a statement about openness,” said Karen Kornbluh, the U.S. ambassador to the O.E.C.D. “You can’t really get the innovation you need in terms of creating jobs unless we work together to protect the openness of the Internet.”

The approval of the recommendations by the O.E.C.D. council builds on a communiqué issued at a meeting in June, when the broad outlines of the policy were drawn up. The guidelines are not binding, but are intended to work through the power of persuasion . Also, the Internet recommendations will from now on be included among the criteria for assessing candidates for membership in the O.E.C.D., which is based in Paris.

While the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and other movements have shown the potential of the Internet for organizing political protest, there has also been a backlash, with a number of governments stepping up their efforts to crack down on free speech in the digital sphere.

China, which has long blocked access to Web sites deemed to be undesirable, said recently that it would step up monitoring of social media, messaging services and other forums in an effort to crack down on the publishing of “harmful information.” India has asked Internet companies and social media sites to prescreen user contributions to remove disparaging, inflammatory or defamatory content, according to Internet company executives.

In Russia there were reports of a crackdown on Web-borne dissent before and after parliamentary elections this month. Russia was one of a number of countries that blocked the adoption of a U.S.-backed declaration of online freedoms this month at a meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Russian officials, along with those of some developing countries, have made no secret of their desire to regulate the Internet at an international level, under the auspices of the International Telecommunications Union, a United Nations agency. The O.E.C.D document, by contrast, endorses the existing, dispersed model of Internet governance, under which governments, business organizations and groups representing Internet users all have a say.

The move by the O.E.C.D. on Tuesday “validates, defends and promotes an Internet model that is not government led, but led by the technical community and the private sector,” said Markus Kummer, vice president for public policy at the Internet Society , whose members include technology companies and educational institutions. “I think it is timely to remember some basic cornerstones, when there is increased pressure on governments to get involved in a more hands-on way.”

Some O.E.C.D. members’ policies have also come under scrutiny, especially measures aimed at cracking down on unauthorized sharing of digital music and other media. Campaigners for an open Internet have criticized the French approach to fighting piracy, which includes the threat of disconnecting persistent violators’ Internet connections.

In the United States, meanwhile, Internet companies like Google are campaigning against congressional proposals that could require them to block links to Web sites accused of facilitating piracy.

The music and movie industries say tougher action is needed to stop piracy. But opponents of the measures say they could be used to stifle legitimate political speech, not just copyright theft.

Among other things, the O.E.C.D. recommendation urges policy makers to “limit Internet intermediary liability” — that is, to shield Internet companies from responsibility for the content that they carry. Under existing U.S. laws, Internet companies have a so-called safe harbor if they take down copyright violations when they are informed of them.

“Congress is proposing solutions that are inconsistent with the O.E.C.D. principles,” said Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington.

President Barack Obama has not taken a position on the bills, but members of his administration have been outspoken in their defense of free speech on the Internet.

“The right to express one’s views, practice one’s faith, peacefully assemble with others to pursue political or social change — these are all rights to which all human beings are entitled, whether they choose to exercise them in a city square or an Internet chat room,” the U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, said last week at an Internet conference in the Netherlands. “And just as we have worked together since the last century to secure these rights in the material world, we must work together in this century to secure them in cyberspace.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/t...-freedoms.html





Lines Drawn on Antipiracy Bills
Edward Wyatt

Type “download movies for free” into Google, and up pops links to sites like the Pirate Bay, directing users to free copies of just about any entertainment — the latest “Twilight” installment, this week’s episode of “Whitney,” the complete recordings of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

For years, pirated movies, television shows and music have been on the Internet. And for just as long, Hollywood and the entertainment business have been trying and failing to stop it.

But with more and faster broadband networks as well as powerful and speedy computers, the playing of illegally copied music and movies is booming as are sales of counterfeit goods from auto parts to pharmaceuticals.

Because most pirate sites are abroad, beyond the reach of United States law enforcement, companies have been left with a Whac-a-Mole approach to shutting them down.

Now, however, two bills, broadly supported on both sides of the political aisle, aim to cut off the oxygen for foreign pirate sites by taking aim at American search engines like Google and Yahoo, payment processors like PayPal and ad servers that allow the pirates to function.

Naturally the howls of protest have been loud and lavishly financed, not only from Silicon Valley companies but also from public-interest groups, free-speech advocates and even venture capital investors. They argue — in TV and newspaper ads — that the bills are so broad and heavy-handed that they threaten to close Web sites and broadband service providers and stifle free speech, while setting a bad example of American censorship.

Google itself has hired at least 15 lobbying firms to fight the bills; Mozilla has included on its Firefox browser home page a link to a petition with the warning, “Congress is trying to censor the Internet.” A House committee plans to take up one of the bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act, on Thursday

On the other side, some of the biggest business lobbies like the Motion Picture Association of America and the United States Chamber of Commerce are supporting the bills. Both sides, in fact, plan to spend millions of dollars for advertisements aimed at swaying consumer sentiment.

Even newly proposed changes that the House panel will consider fail to address all the legislation’s ills, opponents say. People involved in the drafting of the latest version, however, say the bill now specifically singles out only “foreign rogue Web sites.”

“Our mistake was allowing this romantic word — piracy — to take hold,” Tom Rothman, the co-chief executive of Fox Filmed Entertainment, said in an interview last week in Washington.

“It’s really robbery — it’s theft — and that theft is being combined with consumer fraud,” he said. “Consumers are purchasing these goods, they’re sending their credit card information to these anonymous offshore companies, and they’re receiving defective goods.”

Those goods include not just movies shot surreptitiously in a theater with a jiggly hand-held video camera, the companies argue, but dangerously flawed pharmaceuticals, faulty brake pads and defective smoke alarms, to name a few categories of illegally copied goods.

Each bill has attracted dozens of co-sponsors and broad support. The Senate bill, called the Protect IP Act, was overwhelmingly approved by the Judiciary Committee; a revised House bill, intended to address some initial criticisms, is scheduled to be marked up and voted on in committee before Congress adjourns for the holidays.

Many in the Internet world, however, see ominous aspects even in the revision. “There are some provisions that have improved,” said Markham Erickson, executive director of NetCoalition, a group of technology companies that includes Facebook, LinkedIn and eBay.

“Unfortunately,” Mr. Erickson said, “the amendment also creates new problems in other places and fails to correct some of the original concerns we have raised since the start of the debate.” Among them, he said, the amendment allows anyone to seek court action to restrain a Web site’s activities, even those of sites based in the United States.

Representative Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican who is the primary sponsor of the bill and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which is working on the legislation, said the immediate rejection of the amendment by technology companies showed that they were simply protecting their financial interests — and sacrificing intellectual property rights in the process.

“That’s because they’ve made large profits by promoting rogue sites to U.S. consumers,” Mr. Smith said in a statement.

Opponents say that many of the things that the legislation aims to prevent are already covered by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Under that law, Internet sites are required to take down links to specific pirated material when asked to do so by a copyright holder. “We’ve done that more than five million times,” Katherine Oyama, a Google policy counsel, told the House committee recently.

Ms. Oyama added that Google also ejected companies from its advertising system when notified of illegal activities. Yet, as Mr. Smith and others have pointed out repeatedly, Google agreed in August to a $500 million settlement with federal and state agencies for failing to reject advertising business from pirates — specifically, online Canadian pharmacies that used Google’s AdWords program to place targeted ads promoting illegally imported prescription drugs to United States consumers.

Google officials note that it acknowledged the conduct, accepted responsibility and paid a large fine — but Google’s Web site was not shut down. Opponents of the current bills argue that under the new proposals, Google could have been shut down.

That sort of draconian measure is not where the bills are aimed, said Steve Tepp, chief intellectual property counsel for the United States Chamber of Commerce. “The targets are the rogue sites, the real bad actors,” he said, which by selling counterfeit material endanger the jobs of ordinary workers at mainstream businesses.

The jobs issue has been seized on by the bill’s supporters and has created some strange alliances: supporting the bills are both the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the Chamber of Commerce, which rarely take the same side on a business issue. On the other side, both the American Civil Liberties Union and the Tea Party Patriots oppose the legislation.

A third alternative emerged last week, as Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican, and Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has been blocking the Senate bill from getting to the floor, introduced a new proposal that would make the United States International Trade Commission the arbiter for Internet disputes over copyrighted material.

“Butchering the Internet,” Mr. Issa said, “is not a way forward for America.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/t...et-piracy.html





Tons Of Amendments Proposed For SOPA
Mike Masnick

The "markup" process for SOPA is going to begin shortly (at 10am ET/7am PT), and it's going to be quite a circus. This is when various amendments can be proposed and debated. You can watch it stream live, if they can keep the stream up (they had trouble during the SOPA hearings). On top of that, I'm planning to live tweet as much as I can via my Twitter account -- assuming Twitter doesn't tell me I've "hit the limit of tweets for the day" (as it did during the hearings as well). I also have a few meetings here and there, so I'll have to disappear from time to time depending on how long the markup goes. But I still intend to cover as much as I can.

Normally, this process doesn't take a huge amount of time... but this time around there are a huge number of amendments, and reports are that it may take two days to get through everything. I've heard anywhere from 55 to 60 amendments are being proposed, each one of which needs to be discussed and voted on. We got our hands on an "amendments roster" (embedded below) that shows 55 amendments. It's possible that more have been added. However, there are plenty of interesting amendments already here -- and it suggests, at the very least, that some unexpected members of the Judiciary Committee retain serious concerns about SOPA, even after Lamar Smith's watered down version was released.

Here are just a few of the interesting amendments:

• Zoe Lofgren has an amendment that says a DNS operator should have no obligation to block a website if doing so would impair the security or integrity of the domain name system or the operator's system or network. I'm sure opponents will say this makes the blocking toothless, but what they're really saying is they don't care if censoring websites they don't like harms the security of the internet.

• Darrell Issa tries to completely dump the DNS blocking section, as well as the requirements for search engines to block links. This would be a huge step forward... which is why Smith will never let it happen.

• Lofgren wants to make sure the anti-circumvention rule isn't able to be used to block tools used to get around foreign censorship. Considering our own State Department is funding such tools... this seems important. But it does lead to a bizarre situation where it could be legal to create circumvention tools for foreigners, but not for your own country. The whole circumvention stuff is ridiculous.

• Lofgren also wants to make sure that those defined as "foreign infringing sites" actually violate copyright law, rather than "facilitate" infringement. Defenders of SOPA insist it's just about enforcement, not about broadening copyright law itself. But when you extend enforcement to things that don't directly break the law...

• Jared Polis wants an amendment saying that the US government won't spend any money "protecting the intellectual property rights of pornography." Interesting.

• Polis also wants to dump the anti-circumvention provisions entirely. Good for him. Anti-circumvention has been a disaster under the DMCA. Expanding it here would just be crazy.

• Jim Sensenbrenner wants to do away with the private right of action entirely. Also a good idea. At least someone recognizes that this is a lawyer's dream tool. The private right of action will be massively abused. It wasn't clear where Sensenbrenner stood on the overall bill, but nice to see that he's clearly concerned with the likely abuse of section 103. He has another amendment that "replaces" the private right of action with the ability serve an order on payment providers and ad networks -- but limits the authority to enforce this to the Attorney General. I'm not sure this is that much better, but it'll be interesting to hear the details.

• Lofgren tries to narrow the definition of what's "dedicated to theft of US property." This needs to be narrowed. While it's narrower than it was in the original, it's still way too broad.

• Jason Chaffetz has an amendment that says if a company files an action based on Section 103 (trying to get ads or payment processors cut off) and the court disagrees... the company who files has to pay all fees of all the parties. Similarly, Ben Quayle, has an amendment that says anyone who knowingly misrepresents that a site is "dedicated to theft of us property," they'll be required to pay attorneys fees and court costs, and another amendment that just says that the losing party pays. Good to see more members worried about how the private right of action can be abused.

• There are a bunch of amendments clarifying that ad networks, payment processors and search engines should only get immunity in very specific cases for voluntarily cutting off sites, rather than the broad immunity currently in the bill.

• Chaffetz and Polis both have amendments concerning the "study" on the impact. Chaffetz, quite rightly, says that key parts of section 102's DNS blocking should not go into effect until after a study is done assessing the impact on internet security. Polis also wants a report on the impact of DNS blocking, as well as the impact on "employment, economic growth and the availability of capital."

• Polis wants to add in DMCA-like safe harbors to the felony streaming provisions, and also make it so first time offenses remain a misdemeanor.

• Hank Johnson includes one of my favorite clauses, and one I think should be on almost every bill: the provisions of the bill expire after five years. Why more bills don't have such provisions, I don't understand.

• Polis takes on the issue of massively expanding the diplomatic corp. with diplomats whose sole job it is to push ever more draconian copyright law on foreign nations, by saying they should be required to "consider fair use, consumers and licensees as part of their duties." What? Consider consumers? When would Congress ever do that?

• And, of course, Issa seeks to substitute his own OPEN bill. That would definitely be a big step forward towards getting rid of the problems of SOPA, but there's no way that amendment passes.

There are a bunch more, but those were just some of the interesting ones... We'll try to have a wrap up after it's all over. Chances are most of these amendments won't pass, but perhaps a few of them will at least get a reasonable hearing.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...sed-sopa.shtml





SOPA Votes Derailed by Politician's 'Offensive' Tweet
Declan McCullagh

A marathon debate today in the House of Representatives on the Stop Online Piracy Act wasn't derailed by procedural questions, even though not one hearing had been held on how the law would actually work.

It wasn't derailed by questions about SOPA's substance, even though legal scholars and technologists have said it could suppress free speech by virtually deleting Web sites accused of copyright infringement.

Instead, today's markup of SOPA in the House Judiciary committee was derailed by a snarky post on Twitter. (See CNET's FAQ on SOPA.)

The tweet in question came from Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a pro-gun, anti-abortion conservative who wrote that: "We are debating the Stop Online Piracy Act and Shiela Jackson [sic] has so bored me that I'm killing time by surfing the Internet."

That would be Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat who's a notoriously combative member of Congress and was named the "meanest" by the Washingtonian magazine. She didn't take kindly to being called boring.

Jackson Lee objected. And the hearing ground to a sudden halt.

It was her use of the O-word--"offensive"--that interrupted the steady flow of amendments that critics were offering to SOPA, which were being merrily defeated one after another by the pro-SOPA majority on the committee.

It's inappropriate "to have a member of the Judiciary committee be so offensive," Jackson Lee said.

Unfortunately for audience members who might have appreciated the relative merits of a colloquy between Jackson Lee and her Twitter-ing interlocutor, King wasn't actually in the room by the time she discovered the alarming tweet.

Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.), the committee's previous chairman and an old parliamentary hand, leaped to his Republican colleague's defense, suggesting that the clerk delete the word "offensive" from the official record. Jackson Lee refused.

Rep. Lamar Smith, a SOPA-loving Texas Republican who's the chairman of the committee, renewed that request. He had apparently concluded that unlike "boring," her use of the word "offensive" violated House rules. (See CNET's profile of Smith.)

He asked Jackson Lee to formally withdraw her remark. She refused.

Smith tried again, saying that he was trying to "avoid making an official ruling" to the effect that Jackson Lee "impugned the integrity of a member of this committee." Would she "consider having just that one word stricken from the record?"

Jackson Lee again refused. She wanted King to "give the committee an apology."

But he wasn't there. And the important question of integrity-impugning had to be resolved. The committee members waited for the stenographer to read Jackson Lee's precise remarks back from the official transcript.

House rules, as you might imagine, provide procedures for how to deal with "disorderly words" and "unparliamentary language."

One option: "In many instances, the Chair will observe that debate is becoming personal and approaching a violation of the rules, in which case he may simply request that Members proceed in order."

But when a politico is in another building, or perhaps even in another city, and commenting through Twitter, that venerable option to promote civility (dating back to 1837) doesn't exactly work.

Jackson Lee consulted with the committee's parliamentarian. Everyone else waited.

Finally, the resolution: Jackson Lee relented. She wanted to have "just that one word stricken from the record."

Instead of King's tweet being "offensive," Jackson Lee concluded, she would merely deem it "impolitic and unkind."

King, by the way, has remained impenitent, and perhaps even amused. His last tweet says: "Judging from the many responses of my critics, they've never heard of multitasking and need to, in the words of Cain, get a sense of humor."

The committee resumed debate and a series of votes, typically by a margin of around 12 to 22, siding with the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, and their allies. By the end of the day, SOPA remained entirely intact.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57...fensive-tweet/





SOPA Hits Minor Snag in House
Corbett B. Daly

A controversial measure aimed at stopping online privacy that critics contend would kill the Internet as we know it hit a minor snag on Friday, when a key backer delayed a vote on the measure until next week.

Republican Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, decided against holding a committee vote that had been expected on Friday. The panel later scheduled a vote for Wednesday, December 21.

The Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, aims to prevent Internet users from stealing content that does not belong to them but a growing chorus of opponents say the legislation is a sledgehammer that would stifle free speech.

SOPA would give the Justice Department the power to shut down so-called "rogue" offshore web sites that sell pirated materials on the Internet, including music, movies and pharmaceuticals. The major Hollywood studios and media organizations, support the legislation. If the bill makes it through the committee, it would still have to pass the full House of Representatives and the Senate before it would go to President Obama's desk.

"The impact of intellectual property theft by rogue sites is felt in countless ways and across every creative genre, from romance authors, to church and gospel music songwriters, to independent filmmakers," said Sandra Aisters, executive director of the Copyright Alliance, an industry group representing content producers. CBS Corporation, which owns CBSNews.com, is a member of the Copyright Alliance.

But most of the major players in the technology industry, including Google and Facebook, are strongly opposed to the legislation because they say they would be forced to police their websites for possibly illegal content. Google, which owns YouTube, says the language is so broad that videos of teenagers dancing would be banned because of the copyrighted music playing in the background. And that would stifle innovation, they say.

Public Knowledge, a Washington based advocacy organization pushing for an open Internet, slammed the panel's chair for pushing the legislation without understanding the bill's unintended consequences.

"SOPA, as written, would threaten the functioning, freedom, and economic potential of the Internet," said Sherwin Siy, deputy legal director of Public Knowledge, adding that scheduling a vote "when many members may well be absent demonstrates a clear desire to continue dodging the questions raised by experts, members, and the public."
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_1...snag-in-house/





Belgium Blocks The Pirate Bay
BSOD

The Belgian Anti-Piracy Federation (BAF), has been threatening ISPs into expanding their blockade of thepiratebay. Recently they have been sending threatening letters to various additional ISPs who were not involved with the original judgment to block thepiratebay. The letter "kindly requests" that all ISPs voluntarily block thepiratebay or BAF will bring legal action against them. The ISP "BASE" has succumb to these legal threats.

In other news, most of the Belgian ISPs have also blocked the dns for depiraatbaai.be . depiraatbaai.be was setup by thepiratebay as an alternative domain which directs users to the piratebay's servers to circumvent dns type censorship. Now that this domain is also being blocked we have heard unconfirmed reports that more new domains may be setup for Belgium, so that the ISPs and the courts can waste their time playing wack-a-mole.

We would like to remind everyone that alternative domains are not even necessary. If you have been blocked, there are complete fully working mirrors of thepiratebay out there like: malaysiabay.org. Of course the easiest way for an end user to avoid these blocks is to use an alternative dns server. You probably shouldn't be using the ISP provided dns server anyways. Both telecomix and OpenDNS have excellent servers that avoid this type of censorship. Also any proxy server or vpn would do the trick.

Stay tuned to nurpa.be for updates on these type of issues.
http://activepolitic.com:82/News/201...irate_Bay.html





Two-Year Jail Term for Internet File-Sharing
Vítor Quintã

Anyone who shares protected files over the Internet, even without commercial purposes, could face up to two years in jail, according to a proposal from lawmakers

People who share copyright-protected files over the Internet could be sentenced to two years in jail, if the government accepts suggestions made by lawmakers in a meeting yesterday.

The third standing committee of the Legislative Assembly (AL) is discussing the latest draft of the copyright law, which passed first reading more than a year ago, in November 2010. But lawmakers are still unhappy with the proposal.

The version prepared by the Economic Services Bureau (DSE) laid down a two-year maximum prison sentence for people who share protected files over the Internet, “with the intent of receiving an illegal benefit” and “under commercial purposes”.

Lawmakers and the AL legal advisors disagree. “They feel that if you share a protected work without the author’s consent that is already an infringement, regardless of whether there were commercial purposes,” committee president Cheang Chi Keong told journalists.

The government representatives, including DSE director Sou Tim Peng, fear that such a definition “could be too broad,” the lawmaker said. “It may look like a technical issue but in fact it’s more of a political issue,” he added.

Macau’s copyright law was enacted in 1999 but the Government has now decided to update it, extending the protection to Internet and digital technology.

“The goal is to provide more protection for authors. Should this protection be limited or as broad as possible? And should the rules against copyright infringements be softer or tougher?” Cheang asked.

Gov’t decision

Lawmakers want a maximum two-year prison sentence for anyone who shares protected files over the Internet. If that person seeks to make a profit or start an illegal business the penalty would then be increased by a third, the committee president said.

“Our legal advisors proposed this idea and they rightly did so. We think it’s the right view,” Cheang said. “If the content of a new law doesn’t fully predict future developments then it will surely cause problems in the long-term,” he stressed.

With the two sides expressing opposite views, “it is all up to the government now,” the lawmaker said. “In the past year there was a public official who said the approval of the law was in the hands of the Assembly so any questions should be raised with the Assembly.”

But the committee believes the issue is a political one and, as such, the responsibility belongs to the Administration. “The legislative initiative belongs to the government. That’s what’s written in Macau’s Basic Law,” Cheang emphasised.

Lawmakers had to wait for four months before the authorities presented a new version of the copyright law revision. “We have been discussing this law for so long. It’s high time that the government chooses its final position,” the committee president said.

In addition the MSAR is also waiting for this legislation to come into effect before ratifies two international treaties on copyright: the Copyright Treaty and the
Performances and Phonograms Treaty, both of which were signed in 1996 under the World Intellectual Property Organization.

New draft

The government representatives and the DSE director have agreed that a new draft was needed. “If there are no other major issues then I think an alternative version will quickly be written down,” Cheang said.

After yesterday’s meeting the lawmaker believes there are not many issues still in discussion.

One of these is the definition of content reproduction and related infringements, “in order to prevent the later discovery of grey areas,” he said. Both sides agreed that this particular article should be rewritten.

Last year the committee had showed concern that there was no single authority in charge of copyright law enforcement. According to the first draft this mission would be shared between the Custom Services and Intellectual Property Department at the DSE.

But yesterday Cheang said that the latest law version, which was not made available to the public, states that the DSE will be in charge of law enforcement.

After the law comes into effect, almost all local or foreign musical works publicly performed or broadcast in the territory – whether in casinos, hotels, radio or television, karaoke bars or cinemas –, would be protected by law for which payment of royalties have to be made for their use by their respective operators.
http://www.macaudailytimes.com.mo/ma...e-sharing.html





No Copyright Intended
Andy Baio

On October 26, a YouTube user named crimewriter95 posted a full-length version of Pulp Fiction, rearranged in chronological order.

A couple things struck me about this video.

First, I'm surprised that a full-length, 2.5-hour very slight remix of a popular film can survive on YouTube for over six weeks without getting removed. Now that it's on Kottke and Buzzfeed, I'm guessing it won't be around for much longer.

But I was just as amused by the video description:

"The legendary movie itself placed into chronological order. If you'd like me to put the full movie itself up, let me know and I'll be glad to oblige. Please no copyright infringement. I only put this up as a project."

These "no copyright infringement intended" messages are everywhere on YouTube, and about as effective as a drug dealer asking if you're a cop. It's like a little voodoo charm that people post on their videos to ward off evil spirits.

How pervasive is it? There are about 489,000 YouTube videos that say "no copyright intended" or some variation, and about 664,000 videos have a "copyright disclaimer" citing the fair use provision in Section 107 of the Copyright Act.

Judging by his username, I'm guessing crimewriter95 is 16 years old. I wouldn't be surprised if most of those million videos were uploaded by people under 21.

He's hardly alone. On YouTube's support forums, there's rampant confusion over what copyright is. People genuinely confused that their videos were blocked even with a disclosure, confused that audio was removed even though there was no "intentional copyright infringement." Some ask for the best wording of a disclaimer, not knowing that virtually all video is blocked without human intervention using ContentID.

YouTube's tried to combat these misconceptions with its Copyright School, but it seems futile. For most people, sharing and remixing with attribution and no commercial intent is instinctually a-okay.

Under current copyright law, nearly every cover song on YouTube is technically illegal. Every fan-made music video, every mashup album, every supercut, every fanfic story? Quite probably illegal, though largely untested in court.

No amount of lawsuits or legal threats will change the fact that this behavior is considered normal — I'd wager the vast majority of people under 25 see nothing wrong with non-commercial sharing and remixing, or think it's legal already.

Here's a thought experiment: Everyone over age 12 when YouTube launched in 2005 is now able to vote.

What happens when — and this is inevitable — a generation completely comfortable with remix culture becomes a majority of the electorate, instead of the fringe youth? What happens when they start getting elected to office? (Maybe "I downloaded but didn't share" will be the new "I smoked, but didn't inhale.")

Remix culture is the new Prohibition, with massive media companies as the lone voices calling for temperance. You can criminalize commonplace activities from law-abiding people, but eventually, something has to give.
http://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/





The Pirates of YouTube

The real villains of YouTube are the multinational companies cashing in on public domain footage they claim is their own
Cory Doctorow

When you hear about "piracy" in connection to YouTube, perhaps you think of the billion-dollar lawsuit brought by Viacom against the Google division, claiming that Google should have the duty to police all of its users' uploads to determine that they don't infringe copyright.

Google does something very close to this already, of course: the company offers a service to rights holders called "ContentID" that is meant to automatically police copyrights on their behalf. Rights holders upload copies of their copyrighted works to YouTube and identify themselves as the proprietors of those works, and YouTube scours its files for videos or audio that appear to be connected with those copyrights.

Rights holders get to decide what happens next: they can ask Google to automatically remove matching files (Google then notifies the user that her files generated a copyright match and offers them the opportunity to contest it), or they can "monetise" the video by asking Google to display ads whenever it is played back. The revenue from these ads goes to the rights holders.

ContentID does a lot more than US copyright law requires of rights holders. Under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, services like YouTube enjoy a "safe harbour", that shields them from liability for copyright infringement. In order to maintain this safe harbour, YouTube must "expeditiously" respond to notices of copyright infringement by removing the offending works. But the law does not require YouTube to proactively search for infringements and remove them. Running ContentID isn't a legal duty, it's an olive branch extended by YouTube to the audiovisual industries.

ContentID is contentious for many reasons. Viacom says it doesn't match enough of its works, and complains that it shouldn't have to tell Google which copyrights it owns – Google should just figure this out and block Viacom's works a priori.

But one titanic problem with ContentID has received little attention: the use of ContentID by those who falsely or incorrectly assert ownership over public domain works – works that have no copyright at all – and then either block access to the videos, or collect the advertising revenue from these videos.

FedFlix is a charitable project launched by Carl Malamud, a "rogue archivist" who raises funds to digitise and upload videos created at US government expense. Under US law, government creations are in the public domain and can be freely used by anyone, but the US government is remarkably lax about actually making its treasures available to the public that owns them.

Malamud's group pays the fees associated with retrieving copies from the US government – sometimes buying high-priced DVDs that the government issues, other times paying to have unreleased videos retrieved from government archives – and posts them to YouTube, the Internet Archive and other video sites, so that anyone and everyone can see, download, and use them.

Malamud's 146-page report from FedFlix to the Archivist of the United States documents claims that companies such as NBC Universal, al-Jazeera, and Discovery Communications have used ContentID to claim title to FedFlix videos on YouTube. Some music royalty collecting societies have claimed infringements in "silent movies".

These companies' claims – there are hundreds of them – have the potential to generate black marks on FedFlix's YouTube account, and these black marks could lead to automated punishment from YouTube. Accounts that generate claims can be suspended or deleted, or lose the right to mark videos as being available as Creative Commons or public domain files.

YouTube offers very little help for FedFlix. ContentID's dispute resolution mechanism allows FedFlix to contest these claims under only three circumstances: first, ContentID has generated a false match (that is, the video isn't what ContentID thinks it is); second, the uploader has the right to the file, as demonstrated by written permission from its proprietor; or third, the use is acceptable under the US doctrine of fair use, or its counterpart in other laws, fair dealing.

But FedFlix can't contest on any of these bases. ContentID isn't mistaken – the files are exactly what ContentID thinks they are. But no rights holder can send a written permission notice to YouTube about these files, because they have no rights holders – they are in the public domain. The posting of these files isn't "fair use". Fair use is a copyright infringement that is lawful because it serves some allowed purpose. FedFlix's posting of public domain files is not a copyright violation, so they can't be fair use.

Malamud's report documents these troubles in Kafkaesque detail. It's frustrating reading. The American public paid to produce these videos, and they own them, lock, stock and barrel. Multinational companies – the same ones who cry poverty and demand far-reaching laws like the Stop Online Piracy Act – have laid title to them, "homesteading the public domain", and they are abusing Google's copyright peace offering to steal from the public.

And unfortunately, there is no organised lobby for the public domain to demand the kind of stiff sanctions for Universal and co that other copyright infringers face at their behest.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...-cory-doctorow





A New YouTube, Herding the Funny Cats
Mike Hale

If you’re looking for evidence that the world just keeps moving faster, try this:

Time between the creation of Coca-Cola and hatred of New Coke: a century.

Time between the creation of YouTube and hatred of the new YouTube: six years.

The world’s largest video-sharing Web site introduced a new design this month, unleashing a wave of anger in blogs and online forums. It’s visible on YouTube itself, where a video explaining the changes has received more than three times as many dislikes as likes, and many of the attached comments couldn’t be published in a newspaper.

That negative reaction certainly has a lot to do with a general hatred of change (which is surprisingly strong on the Web, the only place that most of us visit seven days a week). People had grown accustomed to the YouTube home page’s messy, eclectic sprawl, and the new more organized and blandly tasteful look — arrived at in several stages over the last year — was bound to draw howls whether it was an improvement or not.

But beyond aesthetics lies a deeper change, one that the naysayers have perceived, explicitly or intuitively: the redesign is a muted but firm declaration that the party is over. It’s YouTube’s strongest step away from what will be seen as its short-lived early heyday as a largely unregulated repository of funny cats, anonymous guitar masters, angry Asian bus riders and countless other weird and wonderful things.

In place of that free-for-all will be a new YouTube, more commercial, more predictable and, its owners hope, more televisionlike. The underlying reason is money, of course, but the immediate issue is control. By cutting away the user-driven underbrush and shepherding viewers, especially those with YouTube accounts, toward TV-like content channels — an increasing number of them produced by corporate media partners — YouTube and its owner, Google, will gain more control by giving amateur videographers less exposure and funneling viewers toward fewer choices.

There’s nothing necessarily good or bad about these changes. Will the world be a worse place if it’s more difficult for a video of a baby biting his brother’s finger to draw 400 million views? Might the new content agreements YouTube has been signing with the Disneys and Madonnas of the world improve the overall quality of mainstream Web video, producing work that’s both more professional and more innovative? It’s too early to tell.

It’s not too early, though, to start feeling nostalgic for the loosey-goosey idiosyncratic charm of the YouTube that was. Wasting time in the office won’t be quite the same.

Refocusing choices doesn’t mean that there will be fewer of them. Hundreds of thousands of videos will still be uploaded every day, and if you’re looking for a specific video or subject, the search function is unchanged. But the new design de-emphasizes one way of using YouTube — jumping around randomly and serendipitously, with easy access to the most popular videos of the moment regardless of their provenance — in favor of a more regimented approach. The new Facebook-like vertical layout banishes formerly prominent content to the margins of the home page to make room for a dominant display of videos from the channels — collections of content from particular providers — to which a YouTube account holder has subscribed.

The top viral videos of the day used to have their own section on the home page, with thumbnail images. Finding them now requires clicking on a not very prominent tab, called “Popular,” buried in the middle of the new black navigation bar, below the tabs for your subscriptions. At the top of that bar, in the top left corner of the home page, is the symbol and engine of the new YouTube: a royal-blue, unmissable button labeled, “Add Channels.”

YouTube has always had channels — upload a video of your son brushing his teeth in the morning, and you’re the proud proprietor of your own channel. The odds are, though, that no one outside your immediate family will subscribe to it. On a continuum of millions of channels, from casual home-video makers through semi-professional content creators to celebrities and huge entertainment conglomerates, the effect of the redesign is to push the viewer toward the higher, more brand-name end.

This isn’t a hidden agenda. YouTube has been quite upfront about making itself a more televisionlike experience by bringing some order to the billions of videos in its inventory. An important distinction to remember: YouTube doesn’t want to be like a TV network; it wants to be TV.

What isn’t being said is that the new design and the emphasis on channels isn’t only, or even primarily, about what consumers want, or what would make their time on the site more pleasant or worthwhile. Note that with all the thought and money that went into the redesign, the experience of actually watching the video player appears to be virtually the same as it was before.

The more important audience lies in the advertising, media buying and television businesses, among the executives who have been watching homemade videos accrue millions of views and crying in anguish, “Nobody’s making any money off of this!” They probably don’t even mind that they’re not making money; they just wish that someone were making money.

YouTube has been making money, of course, based on the total traffic that those viral sensations help draw. When 1.5 million people click on a grainy video of an acrobatic move in a high school football game, revenue is being generated from advertising even if it isn’t specifically attached to that video. (Google does not release YouTube figures, but analysts have estimated its revenue at more than $1 billion in 2011.) And video creators or stars can make their own money downstream. Just look at Rebecca Black of “Friday” fame. (It’s preferable to listening to her sing.)

But how much more could YouTube make if it could sell advertising based on predictable viewership for specific content — in other words, if it could adapt itself to the planning and budgeting cycles of the people who have real money to spend, and allow for the kind of advance marketing that the film and television industries depend on?

So get used to channels. The only questions are what they will be and how well they will work.

I subscribe to 12 channels, but one of them, Machinima (produced by the gaming site machinima.com), offers so many videos that it routinely represents 80 percent of the 30 or so new postings displayed in chronological order on my home page, pushing others off the screen. And, as many angry commenters have pointed out, there’s no way to delete a video you’re not interested in or have already watched. In the old design, which minimized subscriptions, this wasn’t a problem; in the new design I may decide to cancel Machinima to give other channels a chance.

If you subscribe to several hundred channels — thereby approximating the size of a cable-television package — videos will be pushed from your feed even faster than posts or messages on Facebook or Twitter, and it’s unlikely that you’ll ever see them. YouTube lets you watch any video at any time, untied to a broadcast schedule. But it does not currently offer the ease and simultaneity of choice of a cable grid, in which all your options can be scanned quickly and, crucially, you recognize most of them from a two- or three-word description. As long as each viewing option on YouTube takes up a significant amount of real estate, requiring both text and image to clue you in to the content, there will be no equivalent to TV channel surfing.

Maintaining its democratic, good-Internet-citizen bona fides by continuing to let anyone and everyone maintain a YouTube channel could threaten to swamp the more profitable content the site has been busily signing up. It will be interesting to see whether the rules are changed in the future to discourage or obscure individual and amateur efforts that might draw attention from partners like Disney and CBS. It will also be interesting to see whether subscribing to YouTube channels continues to be free. Once viewers have built up loyalties, will Google start thinking about revenue streams beyond advertising?

One thing we can be fairly sure of: While Classic Coke made a triumphant comeback, the odds that we’ll be seeing the old YouTube again are slim.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/a...unny-cats.html





TorTV :: Run Tor on Your TV

TorTV is a build of the Tor Project maintained to run on TV devices and set-top boxes, so that anyone with such an household appliance can contribute to strengthen the Tor network.

Easy to deploy user downloads are provided, as well some developer documentation and mostly the code used: TorTV does not reimplements nor modifies the Tor source code in any way, it just provides binaries for embedded targets and some scripting to facilitate ease of installation.
Owning a WDTV box? The homebrew WDLXTV firmware by B-Rad is a must! it will unleash all its power and let you run Tor on your TV, how cool is that ;^)

TorTV just started to be developed and is in ALPHA stage: it consists of an ad-hoc build (app.bin) and installation instructions for the popular WD TV device series running the WDLXTV firmware (MIPS based). If this project receives enough support and attention it will eventually grow to maintain Tor builds for more MIPS and ARM based devices.

Owning a WDTV box? The homebrew WDLXTV firmware by B-Rad is a must! it will unleash all its power and let you run Tor on your TV, how cool is that ;^)
http://dyne.org/software/tortv/





I Know What You Downloaded on BitTorrent….
Ernesto

Most people know that BitTorrent is far from anonymous, but seeing all your recent downloads listed on a public website is still quite a revelation. This is exactly what Youhavedownloaded.com does. The developers of the site want to make people aware of the public nature of BitTorrent, and are currently working on a more anonymous version of the leading file-sharing technology.

So what have you downloaded lately?

If you’re not using BitTorrent through a proxy or VPN, there’s a good chance that the rest of the world can see without asking.

YouHaveDownloaded is a new Russian-based service that claims to track about 20 percent of all public BitTorrent downloads. However, they go a step further than just collecting IP-addresses and file-names by exposing all the harvested information to the public on their website.

People who visit the site immediately see their download history, as far as it’s available in the site’s database. In addition, they can also search for files or IP-addresses to find out who’s downloading what. At the time of writing the database has information on 51,274,000 users who together shared 103,200 torrents.

TorrentFreak got in touch with Suren Ter, one of the site’s founders, to find out why they decided to create this spying tool.

“We just want to remind people that the Internet is not a place to expect privacy,” he says. “Nowadays many people use it without understanding what information they leave behind. Also, even those who understand choose to ignore it quite often.”

The Russian developers created the site partly as a wake-up call. Those who don’t want this kind of information to be public should take steps to anonymize their traffic, and do that right. This message is also reflected in the site’s ‘privacy policy‘.

“Baby, this is the Internet. There is no such thing as privacy around here. You are sitting in the privacy of your own house, clicking links, reading stuff, watching movies. It may seem like you are pretty much alone, but smart nerds are watching you. They watch your every move. You are not human to them. You are a target — a consumer,” it reads.

Jokes aside, the site does indeed make people aware of the public nature of BitTorrent, something that can’t be stressed enough. Of course not everyone will be happy to see that their information is being exposed, so the developers also offer an option to de-list an IP-address.

Apart from exposing download habits the developers are also considering the creation of a more private file-sharing protocol. They already have a theoretical concept based on Bitcoin’s technology, but a workable piece of software is still very far away.

“The general idea is similar to what Bitcoin does. The key is to have an anonymous and reliable identity for each peer, and a Bitcoin-like signature chain algorithm will help,” Suren said.

The developers are currently trying to find out how viable their idea is, and then they’ll decide whether they should continue working on it or not. For now, they’ll keep on tracking dozens of millions of downloaders, for all the world to see.

Update: For those who have dynamic IP-addresses the service is obviously going to show content that someone else has downloaded.
https://torrentfreak.com/i-know-what...orrent-111210/





Why Spotify Can Never Be Profitable: The Secret Demands of Record Labels
Michael Robertson

Imagine a new hot-dog selling venture. Let’s also say there’s only one supplier to purchase hot dogs from. Instead of simply charging a fixed price for hot dogs, that supplier demands the HIGHER of the following: $1 per hot dog sold OR $2 for every customer served OR 50 percent of all revenues for anything sold in the store.In addition, the supplier requires a two-year minimum order of 300 hot dogs per day, payable all in advance. If fewer hot dogs are sold, there is no refund. If more than 300 hot dogs are sold each day, payments to the supplier are generated by calculating $2 per customer or 50 percent of total revenues, so an additional payment is due to the supplier. After the first two years, the supplier can unilaterally adjust any of the pricing terms and the shop can never switch suppliers.

Would this imaginary hot dog establishment be able to generate a profit? Never, because the economics are one-sided. The supplier will always elect the formula that captures the largest amount of money for themselves, completely disregarding the financial viability of the store. If the store miraculously managed to generate a profit, the landlord would simply raise the rates after two years.

Such economic demands may be imaginary for the hot dog business, but they are the stark reality that every digital-music subscription service such as Spotify, Rhapsody, MOG, Rdio, and others must confront. These details aren’t well-known because digital music service deals are always wrapped tightly with strict non-disclosure agreements.

For the first time, people are talking, and these previously secret demands are being made public. The specifics are even more onerous than the hot dog example cited above. Together they doom online audio companies to a life of subjugation to the labels, as you will learn below.

Here are some specific demands that digital music companies are compelled to agree to:

1. General deal structure: Pay the largest of A) Pro-rata share of minimum of $X per subscriber, B) Per-play costs at $Y per play, C) Z percent of total company revenue, regardless of other business areas. As stated previously, this means labels de facto set retail price (they also regularly negotiate floors on price, giving even less wiggle room), which limits the ability of the music service to develop ancillary revenue streams that aren’t siphoned off by the labels.

2. Labels receive equity stake. Not only do labels get to set the price on the service, they also get partial ownership of the company.

3. Up front (and/or minimum) payments. Means large amounts of cash are necessary to even get into the game. In my experience, this further stifles innovation in services and business models.

4. Detailed reporting, including monthly play counts. This seems rational enough — you would assume this information is necessary to pay artists and make other business decisions. The problem is, the labels each make additional demands, including providing additional reports unrelated to payment, including overall market share of sales in various categories. I doubt that, for example, phone manufacturers demand Best Buy provide the percentage of sales of competitors’ phones. The labels effectively offload their business analysis (and the cost of such analysis) onto the music services. I can’t think of another industry where that is standard practice.

5. Data normalization. Labels all provide their data and files in different formats. That data is constantly changing as labels make available new material and make unavailable old material. This might seem trivial. It’s not. Without standard naming conventions and canonical methods for referencing artist, tracks and albums (ISRC and UPC don’t cut it), the services are left to try and match artist, track, album names provided by one label with those of another. It’s incredibly inefficient, as each service must undergo this process separately (although there are now companies that provide a service for doing this for the retailers).

6. Publishing deals. Once you’ve signed deals with the labels, you then need to cut deals with the publishers. Determining ownership is a complete nightmare and there are huge holes in the licensable catalog. The data issues here are worse than with the labels. The long and short of it: Although you may have the rights to stream from labels, you sometime can’t get the rights to stream from the publisher, or worse, even find the publisher.

7. Most favored nation. This is a deal term demanded by every major label that ensures the best terms provided to another label are available to it as well. This greatly constricts the ability to work out unique contractual terms and further limits business models. It is a form of collusion since each label gets the best terms the other label negotiates. It’s also why it’s easy to get one label (typically EMI) because they’ll provide low-cost terms knowing that others will demand higher rates, which EMI will then garner the benefit from.

8. Non-disclosure. Every contract has strict language prohibiting the digital music company from revealing what they pay to the labels. If they speak publicly about any of the licensing terms, they jeopardize invalidating their license which would torpedo their business. Since labels license on behalf of the artists any payment to the artist comes from the labels not the digital music company. This is the main reason music services, not the labels, have been getting heat from the artist community. Music services can’t defend against accusations about low artist payments because they pay the labels who don’t disclose what they’re paying to the artists.

With most other businesses, if a supplier makes unreasonable demands, a retailer can turn to other providers. Since copyright law gives record labels and publishers a government-granted monopoly, no such option is possible with music. Digital vendors have only two options: Accept the terms or not include those songs in their offering.

The sale of EMI to other music companies means there will shortly be only three major labels. If a music service rejects terms offered by a label, then that service’s offering will have an enormous hole in their catalog of 25 percent or more of popular songs. In the business world, a monopoly leads to lopsided economics, and the subscription digital music business is a poignant illustration of that.

Final note: Online radio services such as Pandora take advantage of a government-supervised license available only to radio broadcasters thus sidestepping dealing with record labels. While the per-song fees are daunting, they bypass virtually all of the terms listed above.
http://gigaom.com/2011/12/11/why-spo...record-labels/





New Music Service Courts Tech-Averse Listeners
Kate Holton

A simple new online music service will launch across Europe and North America this week aimed at the millions who like music but struggle with the technology to find and listen to it.

Rara.com, which will be pre-loaded on some HP laptops and smartphones using Google's Android operating system, will offer 10 million tracks for a subscription from around 99 pence or cents a month at the outset.

The service, also accessible via an Internet web page, will be in 15 European countries and the United States from Tuesday, and Canada and Mexico later this week, the company said.

"I believe that almost all of the services that are available today are targeted at tech-savvy people who know quite a lot about music," Chief Executive Rob Lewis told Reuters in an interview. "That is only 20 percent of consumers, we are interested in the 80 percent."

Several new online music services have launched in recent years, seeking to tap in to the move to online music and provide an alternative to Apple's iTunes music offering.

Many struggled or eventually disappeared as they spent months negotiating terms with an often inflexible music industry

unwilling to relinquish control of its content at a time when illegal online piracy was raging.

Rara.com's subscription will rise after three months to $4.99 or 4.99 pounds for computer users and 9.99 to include smartphones or tablets.

It will also be available in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore before Christmas and launch soon on Apple's iOS operating system.

"I think there is a recognition throughout the entire industry that despite huge efforts by many parties, digital is nowhere near the penetration that the CD was just 18 months after its launch," Lewis said.

The service, which will carry no advertising, has been heavily tested on elder consumers and those put off from buying digital music because they found it too complicated.

Low initial prices were designed to attract customers unsure about signing up to new services before they knew how they worked, Lewis said.

The service will be run by Lewis, a co-founder of the successful Omnifone music technology service, which provides a white label music platform enabling other companies such as Sony Ericsson to launch their own branded music offerings. Omnifone will power the new rara.com service.

The service will offer curated channels playing different genres of music, which could in time be suitable for cars.

"We put a small team together with the task to build a music service that everyone's grandmother could use," Lewis said. "It's unbelievably easy."

(Reporting by Kate Holton; Editing by David Cowell)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7BC0U620111213





Louis CK Declares $5 Standup Special a Success, Sells 110k Copies for $200k Profit in 3 Days
Matthew Panzarino

Comedian Louis CK has announced some numbers related to his recent experiment to sell his latest comedy special, Live at the Beacon Theater, for $5 online, instead of offering it through a distributor.

In the post, he says that the special, which went on sale, Saturday, December 10th, had sold 50,000 ‘units’ and earned $250k, covering the production costs. As of today, 110k copies had been sold, for a total intake of over $500k, bringing him a profit of $200k so far.

The experiment was remarkable because it flies in the face of conventional wisdom about video distribution on the web. The offering is simple, $5 via PayPal (or credit card) and you would receive two streaming views and two downloads of the special. There was no DRM restrictions and no special preventative measures taken with regards to piracy.

Instead, he offered up a plea to those who would steal the video by downloading it from a Torrent site:

I would like to be able to post more material to the fans in this way, which makes it cheaper for the buyer and more pleasant for me. So, please help me keep this being a good idea. I can’t stop you from torrenting; all I can do is politely ask you to pay your five little dollars, enjoy the video, and let other people find it in the same way.

The plea resonated with fans and he says that very little of this kind of piracy happened, as far as he can tell.

In conclusion, Louis offers some takeaways from the experiment:

I learned that money can be a lot of things. It can be something that is hoarded, fought over, protected, stolen and withheld. Or it can be like an energy, fueled by the desire, will, creative interest, need to laugh, of large groups of people. And it can be shuffled and pushed around and pooled together to fuel a common interest, jokes about garbage, penises and parenthood.

The plan was a relatively risky one that would have seen him out of the performance fee and in the hole for the production of the video had it not worked. It was also being watched closely by other performers and celebrities—people like fellow comedian Patton Oswalt and actor/writer Wil Wheaton—who were considering tapping the model for themselves if it worked out.

The entire statement is well worth a read and may very well be the template for this kind of independent sale of a performance in the future. Oh, and the special is also very, very funny. You can buy it here for $5 bucks.
http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/12/...fit-in-3-days/





As Kindle Fire Faces Critics, Remedies Are Promised
David Streitfeld

The Kindle Fire, Amazon’s heavily promoted tablet, is less than a blazing success with many of its early users. The most disgruntled are packing the device up and firing it back to the retailer.

A few of their many complaints: there is no external volume control. The off switch is easy to hit by accident. Web pages take a long time to load. There is no privacy on the device; a spouse or child who picks it up will instantly know everything you have been doing. The touch screen is frequently hesitant and sometimes downright balky.

All the individual grievances — recorded on Amazon’s own Web site — received a measure of confirmation last week when Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert, denounced the Fire, saying it offered “a disappointingly poor” experience. For users whose fingers are not as slender as toothpicks, he warned, the screen could be particularly frustrating to manipulate.

“I feel the Fire is going to be a failure,” Mr. Nielsen, of the Nielsen Norman Group, a Silicon Valley consulting firm, said in an interview. “I can’t recommend buying it.”

All this would be enough to send some products directly to the graveyard where the Apple Newton, the Edsel, New Coke and McDonald’s Arch Deluxe languish. But as a range of retailers and tech firms could tell you, it would be foolish to underestimate Amazon.

Amazon sees the Kindle line of devices as critical for its future as a virtual store, and is willing to lose money on the sale of each one for the sake of market share. Once dominance is achieved, it plans to make money on the movies, books and music that users download directly from Amazon.

First, however, it needs to make the devices ubiquitous. Promoting them every day to its tens of millions of customers at the cheapest possible price will surely help. If Apple brought the notion of the tablet into the mainstream, Amazon is making it affordable.

The retailer says the Kindle Fire is the most successful product it has ever introduced, a measure of enthusiasm that reveals nothing; it has not specified how many Fires it has sold, nor how many Kindles it has ever sold. It also says it is building even more Fires to meet the strong demand. But, at the same time, it acknowledges that it is working on improvements.

“In less than two weeks, we’re rolling out an over-the-air update to Kindle Fire,” said Drew Herdener, a company spokesman.

There will be improvements in performance and multitouch navigation, and customers will have the option of editing the list of items that show what they have recently been doing. No more will wives wonder why their husbands were looking at a dating site when they said they were playing Angry Birds.

Amazon declines to say, but soon — probably in the spring — there will be an improved version of the device itself. One more shot is all the retailer will get, Mr. Nielsen said. “If that’s a failure, then the Fire is doomed to the dust pile of history.”

Despite Amazon’s silence on the matter, analysts have been estimating the company will sell from three to five million Fires this quarter. They are neither raising their estimates nor lowering them.

Amazon’s devotion to this product line is such that it has stripped down the original Kindle e-reader, reduced its price and begun to sell it through other retailers like Best Buy and Wal-Mart for $79, as well as prominently on its Web site. If Amazon had Apple-like margins, analysts estimate that the basic Kindle might cost $180.

According to calculations by the research firm IHS iSuppli, the $79 Kindle costs Amazon $84 to make. That sum does not include research and development, shipping or, with a third-party retailer, the wholesale discount. Add these up, and Amazon might be losing as much as $20 on every $79 Kindle sold at, for example, Best Buy.

For most hardware makers, that would be a recipe for corporate suicide. But once the device is activated in a buyer’s home, the losses stop and the consumption begins.

“What else are you going to do on this Kindle?” asked Andrew Rassweiler, senior director of teardown services at iSuppli. “Nothing. It’s a useless device unless you’re planning on putting books, a lot of books, on it.”

The Fire is trying to do much more than be an e-book reader, a function some say it does not do as well as the original Kindle. Slightly more than a third of the 4,500 reviewers of the Fire on Amazon have given it mixed to negative reviews, three stars or fewer. Of Amazon reviewers of the iPad 2, 22 percent have given three stars or fewer; for the original Kindle, that number is 11 percent. (There are a few caveats. At least some of the iPad reviewers bought not from Apple but from resellers, the real target of their ire. As for the original Kindle, after four years it has both a huge number of reviews — over 34,000 — and the advantage of being a known quantity.)

Many of the initial customers of the Fire seem to have bought it on a mixture of faith and hype. The striking thing even about some of the one-star reviewers is that they are regretful rather than angry. One review, couched as an open letter to Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, began: “I have spent thousands on your outstanding site. I own and love the original kindle. When asked about why I would buy a Fire when I had an ipad, I said that half of me wanted to just support your effort and that I believed amazon just did things right.” The reviewer is now recommending that friends skip lunch to buy an iPad.

Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, has been tracking the opinions as more reviews are posted on Amazon. Since Nov. 18, five-star reviews have fallen slightly, to 47 percent from 50 percent, he says. One-star reviews have held relatively steady at about 13 percent.

“I would have expected things to be even worse at this point,” Mr. Munster said, adding that initial buyers were usually the most critical. Pricing will save the Fire, he predicted. At $199 versus $500 for an iPad, “Amazon has a lot of air cover to have a B-level product.”

Mr. Nielsen, the consultant, disagreed.

The 7-inch Fire does a good job displaying sites optimized for smaller mobile devices, he said, but stumbles when it tries to show pages designed for 10-inch tablets. “Like squeezing a size-10 person into a size-7 suit,” Mr. Nielsen wrote in his report. “Not going to look good.” As for displaying desktop sites, forget it.

It is true that the device is only $199, but so what? “Look at your hand. Is it thin or fat?” he asked. “If it’s fat, you just know it’s going to be bad.”

The device does do one thing well, he said. Shopping on Amazon is a breeze. “If I were given to conspiracy theories, I’d say that Amazon deliberately designed a poor Web browsing user experience to keep Fire users from shopping on competing sites,” Mr. Nielsen said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/t...f-tablets.html





FLAC to MP3 Converter Available Free Till Christmas
Tim Brookes

Windows users looking for an easy way to convert their FLAC files to MP3 format are in luck this month as FLAC to MP3 drops its usual $29.95 price tag and goes free for the festive season. FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec and provides superior sound quality to “lossy” MP3 files at the expense of disk space.

The software provides users with an easy interface from which to convert their large FLAC files into compressed MP3s, with full control over bitrate and output format. The software has support for over 20 different file types (input) and can turn out MP3, WMA, WAV, AC3 and AMR files.

The software also has a batch mode whereby multiple files can be converted in one click.

The giveaway is not actually mentioned on the site but will run until December 25th 2011. You can find details and a download link below and remember to register with the giveaway serial: FLA837900198601237.

Download: FLAC to MP3 Giveaway @ FlacMP3.net
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/flac-mp...hristmas-news/





Bill Tapia, Virtuoso Ukulele Player, Dies at 103
Douglas Martin

In 2001 Bill Tapia took one of his guitars to a Southern California music shop to get it fixed. A woman was buying a ukulele, and Mr. Tapia asked to see it. He began playing it, masterfully, with a distinctive jazz inflection.

“Hey, who are you?” the store’s owner asked.

If Mr. Tapia could have seen the future, he might have answered, “Duke of Uke,” the title of an album he recorded in 2005 at the age of 97. But at the time, he knew only that he was sad that his daughter and wife had recently died in quick succession, and that playing the ukulele felt good.

Mr. Tapia, who died on Dec. 2 at the age of 103, first played the instrument as an 8-year-old street musician, then went on to become one of Hawaii’s premier young ukulele players in the 1920s and ’30s. But after World War II he switched to the guitar to get jobs playing jazz, his favorite kind of music, gave away his ukuleles and for a half-century had almost nothing to do with the instrument that had defined his youth and middle age.

Then something astonishing happened: Mr. Tapia was “discovered” as a ukulele virtuoso at a time when the instrument was having a resurgence of popularity. He became a ukulele star, twice making the Top 10 on the jazz charts, wowing concertgoers by playing the ukulele behind his head à la Jimi Hendrix, and making three albums — one of which honored his 100th birthday. He was elected to the Ukulele Hall of Fame.

“Bill Tapia has been involved with the ukulele, jazz and Hawaiian music perhaps longer than any other living person,” the Hall of Fame said when it inducted him.

His daughter, Cleo, and wife, Barbie, died in 2001. He is survived by grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.

William Tapia was born in Honolulu on New Year’s Day 1908. He fell in love with Hawaiian music listening to sugarcane workers play. He bought his first ukulele at 7 for 75 cents from one of the first men to make them commercially. His father abandoned the family the next year, and young Bill dropped out of school to collect tips as a street musician.

At 10 he came up with his own version of “Stars and Stripes Forever,” which he played for troops headed for duty in the last months of World War I. At 12 he played vaudeville. At 16 he worked on luxury liners. At 19 he performed at nightclubs and speakeasies in Hollywood and at parties at the home of Charlie Chaplin. At 21 he sat in with Louis Armstrong’s band at a Los Angeles nightclub. By this time he was playing the banjo and guitar, in addition to the ukulele, and was moving between Hawaii and the mainland.

When the Royal Hawaiian Hotel staged its grand opening in 1927, Mr. Tapia played ukulele in the orchestra. He was the only one of the original musicians to return for the hotel’s 75th anniversary — and its 80th. The second two times were better, he said: he got fed.

In 1933, the Royal Hawaiian hired him to drive one of its touring cars — a yellow-and-blue seven-passenger Packard — to ferry the wealthy and famous to scenic spots. He played the ukulele for his passengers and threw in a lesson for anyone interested. His pupils included Jimmy Durante, Shirley Temple and the stars of the Our Gang comedies.

He even claimed to have taught a lick or two to Arthur Godfrey, whose ukulele playing on television sparked the instrument’s popularity in the 1950s.

During World War II, Mr. Tapia organized entertainment for serviceman in Honolulu. After the war, he moved to the San Francisco area and devoted himself to the guitar, and to jazz. The big bands and combos with which he played had no use for ukuleles.

More than 55 years later, Alyssa Archambault was researching the background of her great-great-grandfather, a steel guitar player in Hawaii, and approached Mr. Tapia. She had been a disc jockey and promoter, and was captivated by Mr. Tapia’s music and his story. She got him in touch with professional ukulele players. They thought he had died years ago, but were awed at what they heard.

He released his first album, “Tropical Swing,” in 2004, when he was 96, and “Duke of Uke” the next year, both on the small Moon Room label. A live recording of his 100th-birthday concert at the historic Warner Grand Theater in San Pedro, Calif., was released this June.

He played concerts regularly, delighting audiences with songs like “Little Grass Shack.” The most recent was on Feb. 11 — not counting his regular gig at a local senior center, the last of which was only several weeks ago.

Mr. Tapia had a line that never failed to impress audiences: “Here’s a song I performed during World War I.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/a...es-at-103.html





More Than 100 Million EU Citizens Have Never Surfed Web
Claire Davenport

Almost a quarter of the European Union's 500 million people have never used the Internet and there is a widening division between the web-savvy north of Europe and the poorer south and east, figures released on Wednesday showed.

More than half the population of Romania and just under half of those in Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus and Portugal do not have Internet access at home, according to the figures from Eurostat, the EU's statistical agency.

As well as highlighting geographic disparities across one of the world's most-developed regions, the figures underline the lack of opportunity people in poorer communities have to take part in advances such as the Internet that have delivered lower cost goods and service to millions of people.

"For many people today it seems difficult to live without the Internet," Eurostat said.

"However, a decreasing, but still non-negligible, part of the EU population has never used it," it added, reporting that 24 percent of 16-74 year olds across the 27 countries in the European Union have never accessed the Internet.

Although overall Internet access has risen in the past five years, the range is still wide, with just 45 percent of the population connected in Bulgaria compared with 94 percent in the Netherlands.

Others in the top tier include Luxembourg, Sweden and Denmark, all with access rates of 90 percent or above.

At the bottom end of the scale, 54 percent of those in Romania have never used the Internet, whether via home access, at an Internet cafe or over a smart phone.

Those countries with the lowest usage rates also tend to be those with the least number of fixed-line broadband connections and those that make least use of e-commerce -- buying goods and services online.

Online business is most advanced in Britain, Denmark and Sweden where it contributed between 5.8 percent and 7.2 percent of total gross domestic product in 2009, according to the Boston Consulting Group.

Britain, the EU's third largest economy after Germany and France, has become the dominant force in online commerce and government services, with more than 80 percent of 16-74 year olds making Internet purchases in the past year.

The lowest rates were again recorded in Romania and Bulgaria, with just 13 percent of those surveyed.

Perhaps one of the survey's more surprising results was that Spain, a modern economy at the heart of Europe, has a relatively modest rate of Internet access and e-commerce use: just 64 percent of households are connected and only 39 percent of people shop online, the figures showed.

For full survey results, please double click here.

(Reporting By Claire Davenport; editing by Luke Baker)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7BD1BM20111214





Internet Explorer Users Have Low Risk Intelligence (RQ)
Benjamin Jakobus

A hoax report earlier this year claimed that people who used Internet Explorer had a lower IQ than those using other browsers. Inspired by this bit of fun, Projection Point decided to carry out a poll to compare the risk intelligence (RQ) of people using different browsers. We found that Internet Explorer users performed worse than everyone else; they had lower RQ scores and were grossly overconfident.

We define Risk Intelligence as the ability to estimate probabilities accurately. Our Basic RQ Test consists of fifty statements—some true, some false—and your task is to say how likely you think it is that each statement is true. It’s a simple process; if you are absolutely sure that a statement is true, you assign a probability of 100 percent to it. If you are convinced that a statement is false, you should assign it a probability of 0 percent. If you have no idea at all whether it is true or false, you should rate it as 50 percent probable. If you are fairly sure that it is true but you aren’t completely sure, you would give it 60 percent, 70 percent, 80 percent, or 90 percent, depending on how sure you are. Conversely, if you are reasonably confident that it is false but you aren’t completely sure, you would give it 40 percent, 30 percent, 20 percent, or 10 percent.

When you have estimated the likelihood of all fifty statements in the test, the website will calculate your risk intelligence quotient, or RQ, a number between 0 and 100. Although our small sample size of 351 participants does not permit strong conclusions, they do suggest an interesting possibility; users of monopoly software (that historically has been responsible for many of the most severe software vulnerabilities) are not as good at estimating probabilities as their more adventurous counterparts. Perhaps the use of Microsoft Internet Explorer should be considered an indicator of poor risk intelligence. This would be consistent with studies showing that the computers of Internet Explorer users contain more malicious software than the machines of those using other browsers, that about 7% of downloads by Internet Explorer users are malicious and that the browser is amongst the most popular means of infecting Windows machines (this holds especially true for older versions). Although Microsoft’s efforts are slowly changing vulnerability trends for the better, these findings should come as no surprise given the company’s attention to security in the past: “Many of the products we designed [...] have been less secure than they could have been because we were designing with features in mind rather than security. [...] In the past we sold new applications on the strength of new features, most of which people didn’t use.” – Chief Research and Strategy Officer at Microsoft, Craig Mundie (2002).

Right now it looks like Apple users are the best when it comes to dealing with risk, a skill that should come in quite handy considering that Mac OS X was the first system to go down during the Pwn2Own hacking contest of 2011. But only time, a larger sample size and careful scrutiny may validate our observations.

The test can be found at: http://www.projectionpoint.com/
A mobile version of the test for Android and iPhones can be found here.
http://blog.projectionpoint.com/?p=244





Study: Tablet Buyers Use Wi-Fi, Not Cellular Data
Jeff Bertolucci

Tablet owners overwhelming prefer Wi-Fi-only devices over those with cellular connections, according to a new study by Connected Intelligence, a service from market research firm The NPD Group.

Slate users are relying more and more on Wi-Fi for a number of reasons. According to Connected Intelligence vice president Eddie Hold, consumers are concerned about the high price of cellular data plans, and they're willing to rely on Wi-Fi instead.

Verizon Wireless, for example, offers three monthly plans for iPad 2 buyers: 2 GB of data for $30; 5 GB for $50; and 10 GB for $80. Tablet buyers who pay a pricey monthly cellular bill for their smartphones are reluctant to add a second data plan for their slates, deciding instead that Wi-Fi connections are good enough.

Connected Intelligence reports that in April 2011, 60 percent of tablet owners used only Wi-Fi to go online, and just 5 percent of them said they intended to buy a cellular data plan within the next 6 months. By October, the number of tablet users using only Wi-Fi dad grown to 65 percent.

Wi-Fi (Nearly) Everywhere

The number of public Wi-Fi hotspots may increase by 350 percent in the next four years, according to a recent study by market research firm Informa Telecoms and Media. Considering the steady rise of free Wi-Fi at retailers, restaurants, and coffee shops (e.g., McDonalds and Starbucks), it's easier for tablet owners to pass on a mobile broadband plan.

Newer, Wi-Fi-ready tablets with lower price points, specifically the Amazon Kindle Fire, don't even offer a cellular data option. With the rapid rise of higher-speed Wi-Fi in the home, tablet buyers are finding that they can connect to the Internet most of the time. For always-on connections, consumers are relying on their smartphones, many of which function as mobile hotspots.

According to a recent Google study, tablets tend to be homebodies. While consumers take their smartphones and laptops out of the house, they keep their tablets at home and use them mostly on the sofa, in bed, and in the kitchen.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2460...ular_data.html





U.S. Safety Board Urges Cellphone Ban for Drivers
Matt Richtel

A federal agency on Tuesday called for a ban on all cellphone use by drivers — the most far-reaching such recommendation to date — saying its decision was based on a decade of investigations into distraction-related accidents, as well as growing concerns that powerful mobile devices are giving drivers even more reasons to look away from the road.

As part of its recommendation, the National Transportation Safety Board is urging states to ban drivers from using hands-free devices, including wireless headsets. No state now outlaws such activity, but the board said that drivers faced serious risks from talking on wireless headsets, just as they do by taking a hand off the wheel to hold a phone to their ear.

And Deborah Hersman, chairwoman of the N.T.S.B., an independent federal agency responsible for promoting traffic safety and investigating accidents, said the concern was heightened by increasingly powerful phones that people can use to e-mail, watch movies and play games.

“Every year, new devices are being released,” she said. “People are tempted to update their Facebook page, they are tempted to tweet, as if sitting at a desk. But they are driving a car.”

The agency based its recommendation on evidence from its investigation of numerous crashes in which electronic distraction was a major contributing factor.

Ms. Hersman said she understood that this recommendation would be unwelcome in some circles, given the number of drivers who talk and text. But she compared distracted driving to drunken driving and even smoking, which required wholesale cultural shifts to change behavior.

“It’s going to be very unpopular with some people,” she said. “We’re not here to win a popularity contest. We’re here to do the right thing. This is a difficult recommendation, but it’s the right recommendation and it’s time.”

The agency’s recommendation is nonbinding, meaning that states are not required to adopt such a ban. And it will likely be frowned upon by state lawmakers makers who are loath to infuriate constituents who have grown accustomed to using their device behind the wheel.

But, the recommendation may also provide cover for legislators, safety advocates and others who support such a broad-based ban. Many polls show that while people continue to use their devices behind the wheel, they also widely consider such behavior to be extremely dangerous.

The ban is also noteworthy because it is the first call by a federal agency to end the practice completely, rather than the partial ban that some legislators have put in place by allowing hands-free talking.

State Senator Joe Simitian of California, who succeeded in getting a law passed in 2006 that bans drivers there from talking on a hand-held phone, called the board’s recommendation “a wake-up call about the dangers of distracted driving.”

Yet, he also said he doubted it would achieve the desired result because it was unlikely that legislators in California or elsewhere would be able to pass such a ban. Mr. Simitian noted that he spent five years trying to push a ban on hand-held devices, and faced intense opposition from the phone industry.

“It’s a political nonstarter,” he said, adding that he would not attempt to propose a total ban on drivers using their devices. “I don’t believe you’ll see such a ban in my lifetime.” For all his skepticism, though, he acknowledged that political winds could shift. “A decade ago, people didn’t think we’d have a hands-free law in California. Only time will tell.”

Nine states now ban the use of hand-held phones, and 35 states ban texting by drivers, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association, which represents state traffic agencies. The group’s executive director, Barbara Harsha, called the N.T.S.B. recommendation “courageous” and said it would prompt the group to reconsider its policy, which calls for banning drivers from texting but not talking on the phone.

“People may not be ready for that,” she said of such a ban. “But there will certainly be discussion about it.”

Many mobile phone companies dropped their opposition over the last decade to any restrictions on the use of phones in cars, and have in recent years joined calls to ban texting while driving. In a statement, CTIA, the cellular telephone industry trade group, said it deferred to states about whether to enforce such bans.

A complete ban on phone use by drivers would have enormous impact on many car makers that are offering integrated hands-free, voice-activated systems that allow drivers to talk and do other tasks, like calling up their phone directory.

The Alliance for Automobile Manufacturers, a trade group for the industry, said in a statement that it was reviewing the N.T.S.B. recommendations. But it also defended the integrated systems, saying they allow drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road while they remain connected.

“What we do know is that digital technology has created a connected culture in the United States and it’s forever changed our society: consumers always expect to have access to technology; so managing technology is the solution,” the alliance said in a statement.

Ms. Hersman, the chairwoman of the N.T.S.B., said the safety concerns were not just about keeping hands on the wheel and eyes on the road, but also about making sure people focus on the act of driving.

“It’s about cognitive distraction. It’s about not being engaged at the task at hand,” she said, adding: “Lives are being lost in the blink of an eye. You can’t take it back, you can’t have a do over, and you can’t rewind.”

The issue is gaining greater internationally, too.

Last year, Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the United Nations, called for an end to the culture of multitasking behind the wheel. Already, 30 countries have some limitations on the use of phones by drivers, including complete bans in Germany and Portugal, said Bella Dinh-Zarr, road safety director of international road safety with the FIA Foundation, a road safety advocacy group.

Because of the growing research and concern about the issue, she said, “More and more countries are going to be looking at it.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/t...r-drivers.html





FBI: Carrier IQ Files Used for "Law Enforcement Purposes"

The spook in your pocket
Michael Morisy

A recent FOIA request to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for "manuals, documents or other written guidance used to access or analyze data gathered by programs developed or deployed by Carrier IQ" was met with a telling denial. In it, the FBI stated it did have responsive documents - but they were exempt under a provision that covers materials that, if disclosed, might reasonably interfere with an ongoing investigation.

Carrier IQ came under fire after a security researcher demonstrated that the previously little-known company had software installed on a variety of phones on a variety of networks that could track user locations, keystrokes, encrypted Internet traffic and more, some of which was or could be sent back to either the cell phone owner's service provider or Carrier IQ's own servers.

What is still unclear is whether the FBI used Carrier IQ's software in its own investigations, whether it is currently investigating Carrier IQ, or whether it is some combination of both - not unlikely given the recent uproar over the practice coupled with the U.S. intelligence communities reliance on third-party vendors. The response would seem to indicate at least the former, since the request was specifically for documents related directly to accessing and analyzing Carrier IQ data.

I plan to appeal the blanket denial in hopes of answering that question.
http://www.muckrock.com/news/archive...ment-purposes/





2008 E-Mail Alerted James Murdoch to Hacking
Ravi Somaiya

An e-mail chain released Tuesday by a parliamentary panel investigating the phone hacking scandal shows that Rupert Murdoch’s son James received and responded to messages in 2008 that referred to widespread phone hacking at the News of the World tabloid, the first documentation that he had been notified of the wider problem long before he has admitted.

James Murdoch responded to the panel in a letter, saying that he had opened the e-mails on his BlackBerry and had not read their full contents at the time or since.

The e-mail chain was sent to the panel as part of an internal investigation by News International, the tabloid’s parent company. The chain contains warnings about broader hacking from lawyers that were passed on to the editor of the News of the World at the time, Colin Myler, who forwarded them to Mr. Murdoch, who replied within minutes, saying he would be available to discuss the matter. The Parliamentary committee is investigating allegations the tabloid illegally intercepted the voicemail messages of hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of people in the news between 2001 and 2009.

News International admitted widespread phone hacking earlier this year after a cascade of revelations followed by dozens of lawsuits. At least 18 former News of the World employees have been arrested, and the 168-year-old newspaper itself was shuttered this summer.

In several intense and dramatic sessions of the Parliamentary committee this year, Mr. Murdoch, the head of his father’s European and Asian businesses, and his former executives have engaged in a war of words over the crucial question of what he knew, and when. The executives have said he was informed in 2008 that the company line — that phone hacking was the work of one “rogue reporter” — was not true. They say Mr. Murdoch approved an unprecedentedly large settlement of £725,000 in a phone hacking lawsuit that year with full knowledge that others were involved. Mr. Murdoch has consistently countered that he knew nothing and that the settlement, which included a confidentiality clause, just made financial sense.

The e-mail chain, from Saturday, Jun. 7, 2008, discusses that lawsuit, brought by a British soccer union boss, Gordon Taylor. One lawyer says the case is a “nightmare scenario,” because it might uncover other voicemail interceptions and names other journalists implicated, the other notes that Mr. Taylor wants to demonstrate that hacking was “rife throughout the organization.” As he forwarded the chain to Mr. Murdoch, Mr. Myler warned that the situation was “as bad as we feared” and requests a meeting to discuss the matter further. Mr. Murdoch’s reply offering to talk came two minutes later. .

In Mr. Murdoch’s letter to the panel on Tuesday, he said he recalled no conversation with Mr. Myler that weekend and reaffirmed his position that he was “not aware of evidence that either pointed to widespread wrongdoing or indicated that further investigation was necessary.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/w...o-hacking.html





Connecticut Man Shut Down California Website, Authorities Say
Hillary Federico

A 24-year-old Manchester, Connecticut man was arrested Tuesday morning by special agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation on charges he helped shut down GeneSimmons.com, a California-based e-commerce site operated by the frontman for the rock band KISS.

Kevin George Poe, who is affiliated with the hacking group "Anonymous," allegedly sent an extremely large number of electronic requests to the website in October 2010 with the intention of overloading the server and disabling it completely, according to André Birotte Jr., the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California.

Poe was presented Tuesday morning at the federal courthouse in Hartford, where he was released after posting bail. He faces charges of conspiracy and unauthorized impairment of a protected computer. If convicted, Poe faces a maximum penalty of 15 years in federal prison.

In a press release distributed Tuesday afternoon, Birotte said Poe used a computer program called a Low Orbit Ion Cannon to conduct a distributed denial of service attack against Simmons' site. The site was overwhelmed by requests and could not respond to legitimate website traffic, the release states.

According to an indictment filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Poe participated in the attacks during a five-day period from about Oct. 17, 2010 to Oct. 22, 2010.

Around that same time, Simmons said at a conference that the music industry should protect itself by suing anyone who dares download a song illegally from the internet.

"[W]e will sue their pants off," Simmons wrote on his website, according to published reports. "We will find you. You cannot hide. Stay tuned."

Anonymous, known as a collective of computer hackers from around the world, commonly instructs its members to conduct denial-of-service attacks against specific websites or IP addresses. According to the indictment, Poe, using the screen name spyder101, would go into chat rooms affiliated with Anonymous and trade that information with others.

The attack resulted in a loss of at least $5,000 to GeneSimmons.com over a one-year period beginning on or about Oct. 18, 2010, according to the indictment.
http://www.courant.com/community/man...,6400469.story





Judge Dismisses Twitter Stalking Case
Somini Sengupta

In a case with potentially far-reaching consequences for freedom of expression on the Internet, a federal judge on Thursday dismissed a criminal case against a man accused of stalking a religious leader on Twitter, saying that the Constitution protects “uncomfortable” speech on such bulletin-boardlike sites.

The government had accused the defendant, William Lawrence Cassidy, of harassing and causing “substantial emotional distress” to a Buddhist religious leader named Alyce Zeoli. He had posted thousands of messages about her, some predicting her violent death. He lived in California, she in Maryland.

In his 27-page order, Judge Roger W. Titus wrote that “while Mr. Cassidy’s speech may have inflicted substantial emotional distress, the government’s indictment here is directed squarely at protected speech: anonymous, uncomfortable Internet speech addressing religious matters.”

The United States attorney’s office in Maryland, which filed the case, had no comment on the order Thursday, and it was unclear whether it would exercise its right to appeal the decision. Shanlon Wu, a lawyer for Ms. Zeoli, said in an e-mail that his client was “appalled and frightened by the judge’s ruling.”

Mr. Cassidy’s attorneys with the Federal Public Defender’s office said they were working on his release from jail. Mr. Cassidy’s diatribes on Twitter, posted under an ever-changing list of pseudonyms, were along these lines: “Do the world a favor and go kill yourself. P.S. Have a nice day.”

In his order, Judge Titus drew an analogy to the colonial period, when the Bill of Rights was written. A blog, he said, is like a bulletin board that a person of that time might have planted in his front yard. “If one colonist wants to see what is on another’s bulletin board, he would need to walk over to his neighbor’s yard and look at what is posted, or hire someone else to do so,” he offered.

With Twitter, he went on, news from one colonist’s bulletin board could automatically show up on another’s. The postings can be “turned on or off by the owners of the bulletin boards,” he wrote. In other words, one can disregard what is posted on a bulletin board. “This is in sharp contrast to a telephone call, letter or e-mail specifically addressed to and directed at another person,” he concluded.

Hanni Fakhoury, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, based in San Francisco, which filed a brief in support of the defendant’s motion to dismiss the case, said he was heartened by the distinction that the judge drew between speech on a public platform, versus through e-mail or telephone.

The order is among the first to address a recently expanded cyberstalking law and, as such, could have important repercussions. “This is an area where there has been very little case law,” said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It is likely to be quite influential.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/t...r-stalker.html





Twenty Something Asks Facebook For His File And Gets It - All 1,200 Pages
Brian Donohue

Be careful of what you ask for. That's a lesson that Max Schrems of Vienna, Austria, learned the hard way when he sent a formal request to Facebook citing European law and asking for a copy of every piece of personal information that the world’s largest social network had collected on him.

After a wait, the 24 year-old law student got what he was seeking: a CD with all his data stored on it - 1,222 files in all. The collection of PDF format documents was roughly the length Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace but told a more mundane story: a record of Schrems' years-long relationship with the world's largest social network.

Collected together were records of when Schrems logged in and out of the social network, the times and content of sent and received messages and an accounting of every person and thing he’s ever liked, posted, poked, friended or recorded. The archive captured friend requests, former or alternative names and email addresses, employment and relationship statuses and photos, in some cases with their GPS locations included, to name a few. To Schrems' dismay, much of the data he received from the network was information he thought he had deleted. Facebook, it seems, doesn't think much of the Delete key and continued to hold copies of the data on its servers.

The social network provides all its users with a feature for downloading their personal data. However, EU Directive 95/46/EC, which gives persons the "right of access to data relating to him" in order to verify the accuracy of that data and the lawfulness of how it is being used.

Schrems’ experience has inspired a legal project he’s working on called Europe vs. Facebook to increase transparency on Facebook, make opt-in data access the default (instead of opt-out) and to encourage data-minimization on the network.

Though EU privacy laws are generally more stiff than those in the U.S., Facebook is under pressure at home as well as abroad. The FTC proposed a settlement in late November requiring the site to take the privacy of its users more seriously by subjecting itself biennial privacy audits.

Also, the U.S. House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations and the Congressional Bipartisan Privacy Caucus recently wrote a letter to Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. The letter seeks to find out more about Facebook’s information collection and archiving practices of users and non-users, whether or not there is an opt-out option for all data collection, and why Facebook’s privacy policy has expanded from just over 1,000 words in 2005 to its present incarnation of almost 6,000 words among other things.

So how much data is Facebook collecting on you? To help laypeople understand, the Web site Taz.de has taken Schrems' data and visualized in different ways. You can find them here.You can find a list of the groups of data disclosed to Schrems by Facebook here.
https://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/t...0-pages-121311





An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the U.S. Congress

Today, a group of 83 prominent Internet inventors and engineers sent an open letter to members of the United States Congress, stating their opposition to the SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills that are under consideration in the House and Senate respectively.

We, the undersigned, have played various parts in building a network called the Internet. We wrote and debugged the software; we defined the standards and protocols that talk over that network. Many of us invented parts of it. We're just a little proud of the social and economic benefits that our project, the Internet, has brought with it.

Last year, many of us wrote to you and your colleagues to warn about the proposed "COICA" copyright and censorship legislation. Today, we are writing again to reiterate our concerns about the SOPA and PIPA derivatives of last year's bill, that are under consideration in the House and Senate. In many respects, these proposals are worse than the one we were alarmed to read last year.

If enacted, either of these bills will create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure. Regardless of recent amendments to SOPA, both bills will risk fragmenting the Internet's global domain name system (DNS) and have other capricious technical consequences. In exchange for this, such legislation would engender censorship that will simultaneously be circumvented by deliberate infringers while hampering innocent parties' right and ability to communicate and express themselves online.

All censorship schemes impact speech beyond the category they were intended to restrict, but these bills are particularly egregious in that regard because they cause entire domains to vanish from the Web, not just infringing pages or files. Worse, an incredible range of useful, law-abiding sites can be blacklisted under these proposals. In fact, it seems that this has already begun to happen under the nascent DHS/ICE seizures program.

Censorship of Internet infrastructure will inevitably cause network errors and security problems. This is true in China, Iran and other countries that censor the network today; it will be just as true of American censorship. It is also true regardless of whether censorship is implemented via the DNS, proxies, firewalls, or any other method. Types of network errors and insecurity that we wrestle with today will become more widespread, and will affect sites other than those blacklisted by the American government.

The current bills -- SOPA explicitly and PIPA implicitly -- also threaten engineers who build Internet systems or offer services that are not readily and automatically compliant with censorship actions by the U.S. government. When we designed the Internet the first time, our priorities were reliability, robustness and minimizing central points of failure or control. We are alarmed that Congress is so close to mandating censorship-compliance as a design requirement for new Internet innovations. This can only damage the security of the network, and give authoritarian governments more power over what their citizens can read and publish.

The US government has regularly claimed that it supports a free and open Internet, both domestically and abroad. We cannot have a free and open Internet unless its naming and routing systems sit above the political concerns and objectives of any one government or industry. To date, the leading role the US has played in this infrastructure has been fairly uncontroversial because America is seen as a trustworthy arbiter and a neutral bastion of free expression. If the US begins to use its central position in the network for censorship that advances its political and economic agenda, the consequences will be far-reaching and destructive.

Senators, Congressmen, we believe the Internet is too important and too valuable to be endangered in this way, and implore you to put these bills aside.

Signed,

• Vint Cerf, co-designer of TCP/IP, one of the "fathers of the Internet", signing as private citizen
• Paul Vixie, author of BIND, the most widely-used DNS server software, and President of the Internet Systems Consortium
• Tony Li, co-author of BGP (the protocol used to arrange Internet routing); chair of the IRTF's Routing Research Group; a Cisco Fellow; and architect for many of the systems that have actually been used to build the Internet
• Steven Bellovin, invented the DNS cache contamination attack; co-authored the first book on Internet security; recipient of the 2007 NIST/NSA National Computer Systems Security Award and member of the DHS Science and Technology Advisory Committee
• Jim Gettys, editor of the HTTP/1.1 protocol standards, which we use to do everything on the Web
• Dave Kristol, co-author, RFCs 2109, 2965 (Web cookies); contributor, RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1)
• Steve Deering, Ph.D., invented the IP multicast feature of the Internet; lead designer of IPv6 (version 6 of the Internet Protocol)
• David Ulevitch, David Ulevitch, CEO of OpenDNS, which offers alternative DNS services for enhanced security.
• Elizabeth Feinler, director of the Network Information Center (NIC) at SRI International, administered the Internet Name Space from 1970 until 1989 and developed the naming conventions for the internet top level domains (TLDs) of .mil, .gov, .com, .org, etc. under contracts to DoD
• Robert W. Taylor, founded and funded the beginning of the ARPAnet; founded and managed the Xerox PARC Computer Science Lab which designed and built the first networked personal computer (Alto), the Ethernet, the first internet protocol and internet, and desktop publishing
• Fred Baker, former IETF chair, has written about 50 RFCs and contributed to about 150 more, regarding widely used Internet technology
• Dan Kaminsky, Chief Scientist, DKH
• Esther Dyson, EDventure; founding chairman, ICANN; former chairman, EFF; active investor in many start-ups that support commerce, news and advertising on the Internet; director, Sunlight Foundation
• Walt Daniels, IBM’s contributor to MIME, the mechanism used to add attachments to emails
• Nathaniel Borenstein, Chief Scientist, Mimecast; one of the two authors of the MIME protocol, and has worked on many other software systems and protocols, mostly related to e-mail and payments
• Simon Higgs, designed the role of the stealth DNS server that protects a.root-servers.net; worked on all versions of Draft Postel for creating new TLDs and addressed trademark issues with a complimentary Internet Draft; ran the shared-TLD mailing list back in 1995 which defined the domain name registry/registrar relationship; was a root server operator for the Open Root Server Consortium; founded coupons.com in 1994
• John Bartas, was the technical lead on the first commercial IP/TCP software for IBM PCs in 1985-1987 at The Wollongong Group. As part of that work, developed the first tunneling RFC, rfc-1088
• Nathan Eisenberg, Atlas Networks Senior System Administrator; manager of 25K sq. ft. of data centers which provide services to Starbucks, Oracle, and local state
• Dave Crocker, author of Internet standards including email, DKIM anti-abuse, electronic data interchange and facsimile, developer of CSNet and MCI national email services, former IETF Area Director for network management, DNS and standards, recipient of IEEE Internet Award for contributions to email, and serial entrepreneur
• Craig Partridge, architect of how email is routed through the Internet; designed the world's fastest router in the mid 1990s
• Doug Moeller, Chief Technology Officer at Autonet Mobile
• John Todd, Lead Designer/Maintainer - Freenum Project (DNS-based, free telephony/chat pointer system), http://freenum.org/
• Alia Atlas, designed software in a core router (Avici) and has various RFCs around resiliency, MPLS, and ICMP
• Kelly Kane, shared web hosting network operator
• Robert Rodgers, distinguished engineer, Juniper Networks, signing as a private citizen
• Anthony Lauck, helped design and standardize routing protocols and local area network protocols and served on the Internet Architecture Board
• Ramaswamy Aditya, built various networks and web/mail content and application hosting providers including AS10368 (DNAI) which is now part of AS6079 (RCN); did network engineering and peering for that provider; did network engineering for AS25 (UC Berkeley); currently does network engineering for AS177-179 and others (UMich)
• Blake Pfankuch, Connecting Point of Greeley, Network Engineer
• Jon Loeliger, has implemented OSPF, one of the main routing protocols used to determine IP packet delivery; at other companies, has helped design and build the actual computers used to implement core routers or storage delivery systems; at another company, installed network services (T-1 lines and ISP service) into Hotels and Airports across the country
• Jim Deleskie, internetMCI Sr. Network Engineer, Teleglobe Principal Network Architect
• David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify
• Mikki Barry, VP Engineering of InterCon Systems Corp., creators of the first commercial applications software for the Macintosh platform and the first commercial Internet Service Provider in Japan
• Peter Rubenstein,helped to design and build the AOL backbone network, ATDN.
• David Farber, distinguished Professor CMU; Principal in development of CSNET, NSFNET, NREN, GIGABIT TESTBED, and the first operational distributed computer system; EFF board member
• Bradford Chatterjee, Network Engineer, helped design and operate the backbone network for a nationwide ISP serving about 450,000 users
• Gary E. Miller Network Engineer specializing in eCommerce
• Jon Callas, worked on a number of Internet security standards including OpenPGP, ZRTP, DKIM, Signed Syslog, SPKI, and others; also participated in other standards for applications and network routing
• John Kemp, Principal Software Architect, Nokia; helped build the distributed authorization protocol OAuth and its predecessors; former member of the W3C Technical Architecture Group
• Christian Huitema, worked on building the Internet in France and Europe in the 80’s, and authored many Internet standards related to IPv6, RTP, and SIP; a former member of the Internet Architecture Board
• Steve Goldstein, Program Officer for International Networking Coordination at the National Science Foundation 1989-2003, initiated several projects that spread Internet and advanced Internet capabilities globally
• David Newman, 20 years' experience in performance testing of Internet
• infrastructure; author of three RFCs on measurement techniques (two on firewall performance, one on test traffic contents)
• Justin Krejci, helped build and run the two biggest and most successful municipal wifi networks located in Minneapolis, MN and Riverside, CA; building and running a new FTTH network in Minneapolis
• Christopher Liljenstolpe, was the chief architect for AS3561 (at the time about 30% of the Internet backbone by traffic), and AS1221 (Australia's main Internet infrastructure)
• Joe Hamelin, co-founder of Seattle Internet Exchange (http://www.seattleix.net) in 1997, and former peering engineer for Amazon in 2001
• John Adams, operations engineer at Twitter, signing as a private citizen
• David M. Miller, CTO / Exec VP for DNS Made Easy (IP Anycast Managed Enterprise DNS provider)
• Seth Breidbart, helped build the Pluribus IMP/TIP for the ARPANET
• Timothy McGinnis, co-chair of the African Network Information Center Policy Development Working Group, and active in various IETF Working Groups
• Richard Kulawiec, 30 years designing/operating academic/commercial/ISP systems and networks
• Larry Stewart, built the Etherphone at Xerox, the first telephone system working over a local area network; designed early e-commerce systems for the Internet at Open Market
• John Pettitt, Internet commerce pioneer, online since 1983, CEO Free Range Content Inc.; founder/CTO CyberSource & Beyond.com; created online fraud protection software that processes over 2 billion transaction a year
• Brandon Ross, Chief Network Architect and CEO of Network Utility Force LLC
• Chris Boyd, runs a green hosting company and supports EFF-Austin as a board member
• Dr. Richard Clayton, designer of Turnpike, widely used Windows-based Internet access suite; prominent Computer Security researcher at Cambridge University
• Robert Bonomi, designed, built, and implemented, the Internet presence for a number of large corporations
• Owen DeLong, member of the ARIN Advisory Council who has spent more than a decade developing better IP addressing policies for the internet in North America and around the world
• Baudouin Schombe, blog design and content trainer
• Lyndon Nerenberg, Creator of IMAP Binary extension (RFC 3516)
• John Gilmore, co-designed BOOTP (RFC 951), which became DHCP, the way you get an IP address when you plug into an Ethernet or get on a WiFi access point; current EFF board member
• John Bond, Systems Engineer at RIPE NCC maintaining AS25152 (k.root-servers.net.) and AS197000 (f.in-addr-servers.arpa. ,f.ip6-servers.arpa.); signing as a private citizen
• Stephen Farrell, co-author on about 15 RFCs
• Samuel Moats, senior systems engineer for the Department of Defense; helps build and defend the networks that deliver data to Defense Department users
• John Vittal, created the first full email client and the email standards still in use today
• Ryan Rawdon, built out and maintains the network infrastructure for a rapidly growing company in our country's bustling advertising industry; was on the technical operations team for one of our country's largest residential ISPs
• Brian Haberman, has been involved in the design of IPv6, IGMP/MLD, and NTP within the IETF for nearly 15 years
• Eric Tykwinski, Network Engineer working for a small ISP based in the Philadelphia region; currently maintains the network as well as the DNS and server infrastructure
• Noel Chiappa, has been working on the lowest level stuff (the IP protocol level) since 1977; name on the 'Birth of the Internet' plaque at Stanford); actively helping to develop new 'plumbing' at that level
• Robert M. Hinden, worked on the gateways in the early Internet, author of many of the core IPv6 specifications, active in the IETF since the first IETF meeting, author of 37 RFCs, and current Internet Society Board of Trustee member
• Alexander McKenzie, former member of the Network Working Group and participated in the design of the first ARPAnet Host protocols; was the manager of the ARPAnet Network Operation Center that kept the network running in the early 1970s; was a charter member of the International Network Working Group that developed the ideas used in TCP and IP
• Keith Moore, was on the Internet Engineering Steering Group from 1996-2000, as one of two Area Directors for applications; wrote or co-wrote technical specification RFCs associated with email, WWW, and IPv6 transition
• Guy Almes, led the connection of universities in Texas to the NSFnet during the late 1980s; served as Chief Engineer of Internet2 in the late 1990s
• David Mercer, formerly of The River Internet, provided service to more of Arizona than any local or national ISP
• Paul Timmins, designed and runs the multi-state network of a medium sized telephone and internet company in the Midwest
• Stephen L. Casner, led the working group that designed the Real-time Transport Protocol that carries the voice signals in VoIP systems
• Tim Rutherford, DNS and network administrator at C4
• Mike Alexander, helped implement (on the Michigan Terminal System at the University of Michigan) one of the first EMail systems to be connected to the Internet (and to its predecessors such as Bitnet, Mailnet, and UUCP); helped with the basic work to connect MTS to the Internet; implemented various IP related drivers on early Macintosh systems: one allowed TCP/IP connections over ISDN lines and another made a TCP connection look like a serial port
• John Klensin, Ph.D., early and ongoing role in the design of Internet applications and coordination and administrative policies
• L. Jean Camp, former Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories, focusing on computer security; eight years at Harvard's Kennedy School; tenured Professor at Indiana Unviersity's School of Informatics with research addressing security in society.
• Louis Pouzin, designed and implemented the first computer network using datagrams (CYCLADES), from which TCP/IP was derived
• Carl Page, helped found eGroups, the biggest social network
• of its day, 14 million users at the point of sale to Yahoo for around $430,000,000, at which point it became Yahoo Groups
• Phil Lapsley, co-author of the Internet Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), RFC 977, and developer of the NNTP reference implementation
• Jack Haverty (MSEE, BSEE MIT 1970), Principal Investigator for several DARPA projects including the first Internet development and operation; Corporate Network Architect for BBN; Founding member of the IAB/ICCB; Internet Architect and Corporate Founding Member of W3C for Oracle Corporation
• Glenn Ricart, Managed the original (FIX) Internet interconnection point
• Ben Laurie, Apache Software Foundation founder, OpenSSL core team member, security researcher. Over half the secure websites on the Internet are powered by his software.
• Chris Wellens President & CEO InterWorking Labs

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/1...-sopa-and-pipa

















Until next week,

- js.



















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