Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 27th, '10

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"The public should not stand for deals 'that exchange Internet freedom for bloated profits.'" – Michael Copps, FCC


"I think the film is rather nice, actually. No one is drunk; there is no alcohol, no drugs. It’s just a bunch of naked kids having fun." – Peter Gustavsson
































Well Done

Why didn’t anyone think of this before? Hell, why didn't I?

Oh yeah, I don't know how to program.

Well I'm glad somebody finally did: really simple drag and drop image hosting.













Enjoy,

Jack


















November 27th, 2010





Court Affirms Jail Time for Pirate Bay Founders

Three of the men behind the Pirate Bay filesharing site have had their convictions upheld by a Swedish court of appeal.

All three of the men have been sentenced to prison, although their prison terms have been reduced from the sentences handed down by the lower court.

Fredrik Neij was sentenced to ten months in prison, Peter Sunde to eight months, while Carl Lundström received a sentence of four months.

In addition, the court of appeal increased the compensation the defendants are required to pay up to 46 million kronor ($6.5 million). Lawyers for the entertainment industry had requested damages of 120 million kronor.

“This is wrong, this is just really wrong. Now it’s time for the Swedish legal system to shape up a little bit about what they think and believe about the world. This is just reprehensible, totally and utterly reprehensible”, Sunde told the TT news agency.

Ludvig Werner, chair of the Swedish arm of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), called the verdict "an extremely clear signal".

In April 2009, the Stockholm District Court convicted Sunde, Neij, Lundström, as well as fellow Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg of facilitating copyright violations.

Each man was sentenced to one year in prison. They were also ordered to pay a total of 30 million kronor in damages.

The appeals court didn’t review the case against Svartholm Warg because he was sick in a hospital in Cambodia during the trial. He is set to receive a new trial at a later date.

The court of appeal ruled that evidence showed that the three men charged in the case had been involved in facilitating illegal filesharing.

But the court disagreed with the district court’s reasoning in making the compensation claim a collective matter for all of the defendants, which meant that they all carried responsibility for everything done within the framework of the Pirate Bay.

Instead, the appeals court ordered an individualised assessment, where each one is held accountable for the actions they themselves carried out.

“This is positive news, naturally, because the appeal and the district court result are so similar,” said Werner.

He pointed to other sites that carry out similar activities and hopes they will also consider what the ruling entails.

Werner was also pleased that the damages claim was increased by more than 50 percent.

Monique Wadsted, an attorney representing American record companies, was pleased with the ruling.

“It’s a relief that the court of appeal finally affirmed that if you carry out this type of activity, you’ll go to prison,” she told TT.

“In two years, this type of piracy will be over. After a ruling like this and all the pioneers start to get older and have children and families, piracy won’t occur to this extent.”

While Christian Engström, a member of the European Parliament representing the Pirate Party, called the ruling “depressing”, he disputed whether the ruling would affect file sharing.

“The judgement has no meaning for file sharing. It has continued to increase from year to year and the technical capabilities continue to develop,” he told TT.
http://www.thelocal.se/30454/20101126/





Dutch Artist Unions Call Government to Legalize File-Sharing
Ernesto

A strong coalition of two Dutch artists unions and the local consumer watchdog have submitted a proposal to permanently legalize file-sharing of music and movies. In exchange, the parties call for a levy on MP3-players and other devices that can play and record movies and music. In the future, this has to be changed to a general levy on Internet subscriptions.

For years, downloading movies and music for personal use has been allowed under Dutch law, but the current Government has plans to change this.

This is a bad idea, according to the consumer watchdog artists unions. Instead, they have issued a counterproposal that would eventually legalize both the uploading and downloading of movies and music entirely.

“The parties find it essential to protect the freedom of consumers on the Internet and to ensure that the rights of artists are respected. A necessary condition for the adoption of the proposal is that the technologies used will not infringe on the rights of consumers,” the press statement reads.

Legalizing ‘illicit’ file-sharing would happen in two stages. The existing levy on blank media such as CDs and DVDs will be replaced by a levy on devices that can play an record movies and music. This includes, but is not limited to mobile phones, MP3-players and TVs.

The average levy would be around 5 euros per device, and the money collected should be fairly divided among artists and other rightsholders. The proposal does not apply to other digital files such as games, software and books.

In the future, when file-sharing is even more dominant than it is now, this levy should be changed into a general Internet levy which will completely legalize the uploading and downloading of movies and music for personal use. Commercial copyright infringement will remain illegal according to the proposal.

The proposal is an interesting one, especially coming from the artists themselves, but it also raises many questions. The proposal is quite vague about how the collected money should be divided. Also, it avoids the important issue that people who are not downloading at all will end up paying more for their mobile phones and TVs.

The proposal will undoubtedly meet some resistance from music retailers such as Apple, who will lose millions in revenue if it was adopted. That said, it’s good to see that the unions and the consumer watchdog are at least thinking about alternative solutions.
http://torrentfreak.com/dutch-artist...haring-101124/





Judge Asks Righthaven To Explain Why Reposting Isn't Fair Use... Even When Defendant Didn't Claim Fair Use
Mike Masnick

In yet another sign that things may not be looking so good for copyright lawsuit machine Righthaven, a judge has asked Righthaven to explain why a non-profit organization reposting an article isn't fair use. There are two reasons why this is interesting. First, to date, most of the "fair use" claims in Righthaven cases have involved sites posting snippets of articles, rather than the full articles (Righthaven has recently said it will only sue for full articles going forward). However, this is a full article, and the judge is still considering whether or not it's fair use. As we've noted in the past, there are certainly cases where using the entirety of a work still constitutes fair use, and this may be one of them.

The other reason why this is interesting is that the defendant in this case didn't even raise the fair use issue. It was the judge who brought it up. At the very least, this suggests that the various Nevada judges being inundated with hundreds of Righthaven cases are at least aware of the other cases, what defenses are being offered, and what the other judges are saying -- since one Righthaven case has already been found to be fair use.

Of course, if the court finds that there are situations in which posting the entire article can be seen as fair use, it may be game over for Righthaven (and some others as well). Considering how many of the sites sued were small, non-profit sites where the use was clearly not intended to compete or to take money away from Righthaven, if those conditions satisfy a fair use ruling, Righthaven may watch a bunch of these cases fall like dominoes. Of course, that would be quite fitting, in that in bringing nearly 200 lawsuits against various sites, the end result could be that various sites receive clearer guidelines stating that they actually can copy entire articles onto their websites, given certain other conditions.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...fair-use.shtml





EU Parliament Approves Once-Secret ACTA Copyright Treaty

The vote is 331-294, with 11 abstentions, on the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
Jennifer Baker

After 11 rounds of international negotiations, the final text of the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has overcome its biggest hurdle yet when it was welcomed as a step in the right direction by the European Parliament, which voted 331-294, with 11 members abstaining, to approve the measure.

Although the Parliament has called for some reassurances from the European Commission, the vote means that in principle the final legal text can now be agreed to by the Commission at a meeting in Sydney from Nov. 30 to Dec. 3. Under the Lisbon Treaty, Members of the European Parliament were required to give their consent to the measure and there were fears right up until the vote that they might halt the deal altogether.

The relatively high vote against represents the MEPs who were angry at being kept in the dark for much of the negotiating period. However, many MEPs were appeased when transparency improved following their complaints.

But Parliament nonetheless called on the European Commission to confirm that it will have no impact on basic freedoms and existing European Union legislation, particularly as "E.U. law is already considerably more advanced than the current international standards."

The ACTA agreement has been mired in controversy from the beginning due to secrecy imposed by the U.S. and to worries that it may not uphold E.U. data privacy rules. The deal seeks to enforce intellectual property rights and combat online piracy and illegal software.

The most controversial paragraph in the final text leaves the door open for countries to introduce the so-called three-strikes rule. This would cut Internet users off if they download copyright material as national authorities would be able to order ISPs to disclose personal information about customers.

The text has been somewhat watered down from the original wording, which said that parties "shall" provide laws to demand information from ISPs. But sources close to the negotiations said that ACTA can be seen as suggesting "what is considered best practice," which may be interpreted as encouraging countries to introduce draconian measures such as the so-called three-strikes rule.

The proposed agreement would also place sanctions against any device or software that is marketed as a means of circumventing access controls such as encryption or scrambling that are designed to prevent copying. It also requires legal measures against knowingly using such technology.

Concerned MEPs had warned they would not give the agreement their approval if they didn't have enough time to read the text. The final text of the ACTA agreement was only published by the U.S. State Department on Nov. 15.

The agreement as it stands would not require any change in E.U. legislation, but could have an impact on other parties whose laws on intellectual property are less well defined.

The countries involved in the negotiations are Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, Mexico, the U.S. and the E.U. Critics question the effectiveness of an agreement that does not include China, the source of almost 65 percent of all cases of counterfeit goods seized by E.U. customs in 2009.
http://www.itworld.com/legal/128754/...pyright-treaty





Police to Get Major New Powers to Seize Domains
James Nixon

Police could soon have the power to seize any domain associated with criminal activity, under new proposals published today by UK domain registrar Nominet.

At present, Nominet has no clear legal obligation to ensure that .uk domains are not used for criminal activities. That situation may soon change, if proposals from the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) are accepted.

SOCA wants Nominet to change its registration terms and conditions, giving the registrar the power to suspend domains if it has "reasonable grounds to believe they are being used to commit a crime".

And Nominet gives us an example of what those "reasonable grounds" might consist of - "a request from an identified UK Law Enforcement Agency".

Such a move would mark a massive extension of the authorities' powers to clamp down on illegal web sites - and possibly just those that the powers that be deem to be a thorn in their side.

Two weeks ago, Fitwatch, a site dedicated to campaigning against what it sees as heavy-handed practices by police surveillance units, was taken down by its UK-based web hosting company, JustHost, after a formal request by the Metropolitan Police.

The site was accused of publishing guidance to students involved in the recent violent Millbank protests to escape detection by the police.

But in a matter of days Fitwatch was back up and laughing in the face of the law, with a heap of extra publicity under its belt. The site is now hosted in the United States, where its hosting company is beyond the jurisdiction of UK police.

With no specific powers to seize the site's domain name - the memorable address ending in .co.uk that is used by servers on the internet to point browsers in the direction of a specific server's numeric IP address, Fitwatch could simply set up on the other side of the Atlantic and point the same domain name towards their new servers instead.

SOCA's new proposals, if accepted, would put an end to that, giving Nominet the power to grab back a name at the police's request - and effectively increasing the powers of censorship wielded by the UK's law enforcement agencies.

With its domain name suspended, the only way for visitors to find a rogue site would be to type in its lengthy (and decidedly less memorable) numeric IP address.

Unsurprisingly, the issue is a hot potato - but it won't be the first time Nominet has involved itself in controversial name-grabbing. In December 2009, Nominet suspended over 1,200 domain names at the request of the Police Central eCrime Unit.

Back then, Nominet used the legal fig leaf that these sites had provided the registrar with false information in their registrations. If the new proposals are passed, they won't have to.

If you're concerned about the move, and want to express your opinion, email policy@nominet.org.uk, and include the title, "Dealing with domain names used in connection with criminal activity" in the subject line of your message.
http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/11/25/po...seize-domains/





U.S. Government Seizes BitTorrent Search Engine Domain and More
enigmax

Following on the heels of this week’s domain seizure of a large hiphop file-sharing links forum, it’s clear today that the U.S. Government has been very busy. Without any need for COICA, ICE has just seized the domain of a BitTorrent meta-search engine along with those belonging to other music linking sites and several others which appear to be connected to physical counterfeit goods.

While complex, it’s still possible for U.S. authorities and copyright groups to point at a fully-fledged BitTorrent site with a tracker and say “that’s an infringing site.” When one looks at a site which hosts torrents but operates no tracker, the finger pointing becomes quite a bit more difficult.

When a site has no tracker, carries no torrents, lists no copyright works unless someone searches for them and responds just like Google, accusing it of infringement becomes somewhat of a minefield – unless you’re ICE Homeland Security Investigations that is.

This morning, visitors to the Torrent-Finder.com site are greeted with an ominous graphic which indicates that ICE have seized the site’s domain.

“My domain has been seized without any previous complaint or notice from any court!” the exasperated owner of Torrent-Finder told TorrentFreak this morning.

“I firstly had DNS downtime. While I was contacting GoDaddy I noticed the DNS had changed. Godaddy had no idea what was going on and until now they do not understand the situation and they say it was totally from ICANN,” he explained.

Aside from the fact that domains are being seized seemingly at will, there is a very serious problem with the action against Torrent-Finder. Not only does the site not host or even link to any torrents whatsoever, it actually only returns searches through embedded iframes which display other sites that are not under the control of the Torrent-Finder owner.

Torrent-Finder remains operational through another URL, Torrent-Finder.info, so feel free to check it out for yourself. The layouts of the sites it searches are clearly visible in the results shown.

Yesterday we reported that the domain of hiphop site RapGodFathers had been seized and today we can reveal that they are not on their own. Two other music sites in the same field – OnSmash.com and DaJaz1.com – have fallen to the same fate. But ICE activities don’t end there.

Several other domains also appear to have been seized including 2009jerseys.com, nfljerseysupply.com, throwbackguy.com, cartoon77.com, lifetimereplicas.com, handbag9.com, handbagcom.com and dvdprostore.com.

Domain seizures coming under the much debated ‘censorship bill’ COICA? Who needs it?
http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-governme...d-more-101126/





Threatened by a Copyright Lawyer?

Cheaper to let them take you to court
Nick Farrell

IF YOU GET A FILESHARING WRIT in the mail, it might be cheaper to ignore it.

So far the US Copyright Group (USCG) has sued more than 16,000 people this year for sharing movies online. It has sued them anonymously based on their IP addresses, but has not managed to get most of their names and addresses yet.

However as Ars Technica points out, it has yet to take anyone to court.

Apparently when an ISP looks up the subscriber name associated with an IP address, USCG doesn't immediately add their name to a lawsuit. Instead, like other law firms trying the same trick, it sends out a settlement letter, asking the person to pay a few thousand dollars in order not to be sued.

However so far no one has been sued.

Now Federal Judge Rosemary Collyer, who oversees several of these cases in the Washington, DC US District Court, is annoyed and wants to see someone in court.

In March 2010, USCG brought cases for the films Far Cry and The Steam Experiment, and Collyer set an initial deadline to name defendants in July, later extended to 18 November.

Now the USCG asked the judge to extend that deadline again... for nearly five years.

It said that is because the ISP Time Warner moaned that it was taking too long to do all these look-ups and was told that it only had to do 28 USCG lookups a month. Those are split between the two separate cases. This means that USCG will only learn the identities of 14 people each month. With almost 800 IP addresses to look up in the Far Cry case alone, this could take 58 months to resolve.

Collyer said that was unfair and prejudicial to all John Does who have been identified by an ISP.

So she has said that USCG has until 6 December to name those defendants it wants to sue.

The order only applies to the IP addresses for which ISPs have provided a name. If USCG has the names, it has to sue someone.

Obviously it does not want to do this as it can get cash out of them without an expensive court case. It might also find that if any of the suspected file sharers contest the case they might win on the grounds of being out of jurisdiction or other legal technicalities.

The situation is similar in Blighty where there have been no filesharing cases that have got to court because people pay up.

Of course if you are the one case where the lawyers decide to make an example of you and take you to court it could be very expensive.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...pyright-lawyer





Time Warner Balks At Subpoenas In Mass Copyright Suits

The biggest headache when suing 10,000 people for copyright infringement? Finding out who they are.

Lawyers from Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC) have intervened in a few mass-copyright lawsuits recently, saying they’ve been overwhelmed by the tactics of one Washington, D.C., area law firm, Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver. Since January, lawyers from that firm have sued more than 10,000 “John Does” in nine separate lawsuits, alleging that those users have broken copyright law by sharing movies over BitTorrent sites. The firm has requested names and contact info for all 10,000, a task that falls to ISPs like Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) to carry out.

Time Warner says it’s not set up to deal with tracking down the details on thousands of alleged file-sharers. The internet provider’s subpoena compliance division mainly caters to law-enforcement personnel who need to identify particular internet users in all types of cases, from threats on public officials to money laundering. Time Warner argued that Dunlap lawyers could be delaying the IP lookups cops need to respond to more pressing cases, like suicide threats, child-abduction cases and even terrorist activity. “Any time spent working on Dunlap subpoenas will cause a corresponding delay in responding to law enforcement subpoenas,” the company’s lawyers wrote.

To catch alleged file sharers, law firms hires private investigators who log on to the file-sharing networks to track which IP addresses transfer copyrighted files. Through that process they gather the IP addresses and dates and times of the alleged violators. That information is then turned over to the ISP, which has to convert each IP address into a name, address and phone number.

After Time Warner complained to the court about the Dunlap’s request, the judge overseeing the case limited the lookups to 28 IP addresses per month, which increases the broadband provider’s workload by about 5 percent, since it currently handles an average of 567 lookups per month. This week, Dunlap partner Tom Dunlap asked for an extension to serve all the defendants, saying that at the slow rate Time Warner was producing the names it needed, it would take almost two and a half years to serve all the defendants. In an email to paidContent, Dunlap said “Time Warner has made a great run at obtaining publicity,” adding “I do think they can produce more than they are saying.”

A lawyer who represents several of the John Does, Carey Lening, has objected to Dunlap’s request, saying a long wait to be served with legal papers will unfairly place defendants in legal limbo.

With mass copyright lawsuits one of the litigation trends of 2010, the tension between ISPs and lawyers representing rightsholders could continue to grow. According to the process described by Time Warner in court papers, IP lookups involve efforts at the corporate office as well as work at the local operations center where a particular subscriber is located. TWC did an internal study that it says calculated the cost of each IP lookup at about $45. (Dunlap lawyers are paying $32 per lookup, pursuant to an earlier agreement with TWC.)

In some of Dunlap’s earlier cases, which have smaller data requests, the ISPs have already handed over identifying information for the IP addresses requested. Dunlap said some of those defendants have settled with his client, while others will be named in a separate lawsuit to be filed after Thanksgiving.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-t...pyright-suits/





Anti-Piracy Lawyers 'Knowingly Targeted The Innocent', Says Law Body

Watchdog howls at 'revenue-generating scheme'
Chris Williams

A major law firm knew it sometimes had no reliable evidence of unlawful filesharing when it demanded hundreds of pounds damages from internet users, according to the solicitors' watchdog.

London-based Davenport Lyons threatened thousands of people with legal action for alleged copyright infringement between 2006 and 2009. They were told that by quickly paying around £500 damages, plus costs, they could avoid court.

Following complaints to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), Davenport Lyons now stands accused of deliberately ignoring concerns over the standard of its evidence. It matched IP addresses captured from movie and videogame BitTorrent swarms with customer records obtained from ISPs by court order.

David Gore and Brian Miller, two Davenport Lyons partners, will face disciplinary proceedings in March.

In a submission to the Tribunal, the SRA says: "Each of the respondents knew that in conducting generic campaigns against those identified as IP holders whose IP numeric had been used for downloading or uploading of material that they might in such generic campaigns be targeting people innocent of any copyright breach."

"An IP address does not however necessarily lead to a conclusion that the ISP account holder has infringed copyright or authorised another person to infringe copyright. There were other factual possibilities known to [Gore and Miller] such as unauthorised access or a change in IP address after a 24-hour gap following modem switch off follow or other such occurence."

The submission highlights customers' use of poorly-secured Wi-Fi routers and ISPs' deployment of DHCP as problems with the evidence that were allegedly known to Davenport Lyons.

The pair are also accused of acting in the interests of Davenport Lyons, rather than those of their copyright-holding clients. They sent 6,113 demands for money and were "regarding the scheme which they were operating as a revenue-generating scheme", according to the SRA.

Gore and Miller also disregarded the harm the campaign of legal threats might do to Davenport Lyons' reputation, regulators claim, in breach of the Solicitors Code of Conduct.

Davenport Lyons declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigation.

Amid public controversy, Davenport Lyons passed the business to another legal firm, ACS:Law, in 2009. ACS:Law's founder, Andrew Crossley, also faces SRA disciplinary action over the demands next year.

He recently hit headlines when a DDoS attack by 4Chan users led to the leak of company records online.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11...ort_lyons_sra/





Witcher 2 Torrents Could Net You a Fine
Wesley Yin-Poole

Gamers who download upcoming PC exclusive The Witcher 2 illegally could receive a letter demanding they pay a fine or face legal action.

If gamers refuse to pay the fine, which will be more than the cost of the game, they could end up in court, developer CD Projekt told Eurogamer.

"Of course we're not happy when people are pirating our games, so we are signing with legal firms and torrent sneaking companies," CD Projekt co-founder Marcin Iwiński said.

"In quite a few big countries, when people are downloading it illegally they can expect a letter from a legal firm saying, 'Hey, you downloaded it illegally and right now you have to pay a fine.'

"We are totally fair, but if you decide you will not buy it legally there is a chance you'll get a letter.

"We are talking about it right now."

The music and film industries have been aggressive in their pursuit of illegal downloaders in recent years, but the videogame industry has so far acted with caution.

While CD Projekt hopes The Witcher 2 will sell 1.3 million copies within a year of its May 2011 release, it considers the game ripe for pirating - as a single-player only RPG it lacks an online component.

Normally, law firms specialising in cracking down on illegal downloaders approach torrent sites and ask for the names of Internet Service Providers used by people who download cracked games.

They then write to the ISPs threatening legal action if they refuse to spill the account details of users.

From that, real names are drilled down, and letters are sent out.

The process has come under scrutiny in recent months for a perceived lack of efficiency and questions around security.

Responsibility lies with the person paying the ISP bill, but the person who downloaded the game illegally could have been someone else. Thousands of people reckon they've been wrongly accused of illegally downloading and sharing copyright protected material via the internet, according to Which?.

Indeed UK consumers "cannot be held legally responsible for any illicit online file sharing activity which occurs without their knowledge, or consent, on their unsecured wireless networks". At least that's the opinion of Roger Wyand QC, a barrister specialising in intellectual property law and joint head of Hogarth Chambers.

But for Iwiński and CD Projekt it's a worthy pursuit. "There are more and more firms interested in it, because piracy is huge," he added.

"I'm sure you've heard about stories in the US when recording companies were chasing people. We don't want to be so harsh, but there is a chance that this might happen to some people if they download illegally. There will be an initiative."

According to Jas Purewal, a games lawyer at Olswang and writer of Gamer/Law, CD Projekt's effort with The Witcher 2 marks the beginning of a crackdown that's set to become more intense.

"Piracy is a serious legal and financial issue for the games industry, which is responding with a range of measures from DRM to legal action against illegal downloaders," he said.

"Historically, this kind of anti-piracy action has been more associated with the film or music industries, but in the future we may well see more of this from the games industry, particularly with the streamlined 'three strikes' process being introduced in the UK by the Digital Economy Act.

"That said, it is important that games companies use robust evidence gathering and legal processes to avoid encountering some of the bad PR which has resulted from litigation against innocent consumers elsewhere."

He added: "From a gamer's perspective, the whole point of these measures is that they should have a nil effect on legitimate games purchases but a strong negative effect on illegal downloads."

Interestingly, The Witcher 2 will be released digital rights management free – but only through the CD Projekt-owned digital download shop GOG.com.

That means owners will be able to install it as many times as they like on any number of computers – and it will not requite an internet connection to run.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...net-you-a-fine





Man Fined For Publishing Links To Legal Sports Broadcast
enigmax

A man who linked to two hockey games streamed live by broadcaster Canal Plus has been found guilty of copyright infringement. The 32 year-old found unprotected direct URL links to the games on the channel’s official website which would ordinarily cost money to view. A District Court decided that publishing those links on his forum amounted to an infringement of copyright.

In 2007, a man from the coastal town of Söderhamn in east-central Sweden drew the attention of TV channel Canal Plus. The 32 year-old ran a forum where fans could participate in chats about live hockey games, games ordinarily broadcast for a fee by Canal Plus.

However, due to the way the Canal Plus service was structured, it proved trivial for anyone to watch the games free of charge if they knew the direct URL. The problem here is that Canal Plus simply handed over the URLs to people who paid for the matches but since they were completed unprotected, people passed them onto friends. Making matters worse, at the time Canal Plus used the same URL time and again for all its hockey streams.

So, on two occasions in October and November 2007, at times when it was confirmed that approximately 25 people were using the fan site’s live chat facility, the man posted the URLs of the streams to his forum. Canal Plus were not amused.

In the summons against the man, Canal Plus called his actions “an assault on the entire operations of pay TV services on the Internet” and that by publishing links to the streams broadcast openly from the Canal Plus website he had illegally made them available to the public.

Yesterday, and despite Canal Plus being completely unable to show that anyone at all had clicked the links or viewed the streams, the Hudiksvall District Court found the man who posted the links guilty of copyright infringement. He was fined 3,500 kronor ($520) and ordered to pay 11,780 kronor ($1,747) in compensation to Canal Plus.

Although the fines may be almost laughably small by United States standards, this decision by the District Court has the potential to send shivers down the spine of anyone running a website who links to a media source, even when provided by an official outlet but not in accordance with their wishes.
http://torrentfreak.com/man-fined-fo...adcast-101111/





RIAA Misfires, Grazes PCMag.com
Lance Ulanoff

How did we end up being the music industry's scapegoat, and what do we think about it.

The music industry has gone off the deep end. Now they want to lay the blame for music piracy on PCMag.com's doorstep. Seriously, over a dozen music industry execs signed a letter stating, "PC Magazine is encouraging" people to steal music. Allow me to explain.

Some weeks ago PCMag.com covered the legal imbroglio surrounding popular P2P site Limewire. The service had been sued multiple times by the music industry for "massive" copyright infringement. This ultimately led to the service shutting down, then being resurrected (though by people who may or may not be part of the original LimeWire team). However, in the brief time Limewire was offline, PCMag.com wrote a service story on Limewire alternatives—other services you could use to download and manage P2P-bourne content. This act, apparently, did not please the music industry.

Recently, our CEO Vivek Shah received a letter from music industry execs (I was CC'ed), which was subsequently posted on Billboard.com. The signees, which included the RIAA, American Society of Composers and the Gospel Music Association, expressed "deep disappointment" with the publication of this story: LimeWire is Dead: What Are the Alternatives? Our article includes this line: "PCMag does not condone the download of copyrighted or illegal material" which the execs contend "rings hollow." In reality, PCMag did not have to include that line. We did it as a courtesy and to make sure that readers do not assume the article constituted some sort of piracy approval. The music industry execs insist the article is encouraging people to steal music.

That's nonsense.

We wanted to send a direct response to the letter writers, but they failed to include a return address. We chose one of the signees and e-mailed them our thoughts, some of which are summarized below.

The story isn't encouraging or discouraging anything. That's not our role. PCMag's job is to cover all aspects of technology, which includes the products, services and activities that some groups and individuals might deem objectionable. We covered these Limewire alternatives because we knew they would be of interest to our readers. We understand that some might use them to illegally download content. We cannot encourage that action, but also cannot stop it. Reporting on the existence of these services does neither.

We have, obviously, written about many online and offline services, including some that these groups might consider legitimate or "legal." However, the fact is that some users store and manage illegally gained content in music applications like iTunes. We would not stop covering these utilities simply because some users place illegal or even inappropriate content in them.

The execs also call out coverage, found elsewhere online, of Limewire's resurrection and think the act of linking to any P2P service is damning in and of itself. Linking is part of reporting online and it worries me that the music industry thinks the answer to their troubles is any editorial entity employing self-censorship.

Let me be clear, the music industry's charges remain groundless. PCMag.com is not a mouthpiece for music pirates or the music industry and we hold no stake in either side winning the copyrighted content war.

The letter goes on to suggest PCMag.com retract the article (we won't).

It worries me that the music industry took this action, because it reeks of desperation. The RIAA and other music industry organizations have spent the better part of the decade fighting the digital transition, with only a shrinking business to show for it. In recent years, though, the fist of anger has turned into at least one open hand as the music industry embraces the once shunned digital music industry. Unfortunately, that warm embrace, and the change that comes with it, are not happening fast enough. Clearly the music industry is still losing money to music piracy and even the recalibrated profit margins brought on by legal music sharing services.

It's time for these music execs to pull their collective heads out of the sand and fully acknowledge and accept all the ways their industry has changed. They also have to understand that nothing will stop technology's inexorable march forward. Things will continue to change. Music downloads and sharing will never go away. These execs have to find a way to use all that technology allows and make a business that rivals the good old days of vinyl, cassette tape and even CDs.

We will continue to cover it all—as we must.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2373273,00.asp





Lars Ulrich: Underestimated File Sharing.. But Proud We Sued
Mike Masnick

Jari Winberg points us to a big Billboard story about Metallica that has some quotes by the band about this whole internet thing. You recall, of course, that Metallica became the poster-child for anti-internet activity, when it became the first to sue Napster, back in 2000. Since then, the band has often tried to rehabilitate its online image, and has even done a few creative online things -- but still has trouble shaking the anti-fan image it put forth with the lawsuits.

In the interview with Billboard, Lars Ulrich, who was the band member who led the charge against Napster, first talks about "The awesomeness of the Internet" in that you've got "the whole world at your fingertips" and how great it would have been for him as a child (until the older version of himself would have sued him for listening to music... but I digress). That leads to the obvious question from Billboard about Napster, where Ulrich notes that he fully expects his obituary to mention Napster in the opening paragraph and then says the following:

"That's something I have to accept, and I accept it," he says. "But it's not something that plays a big part in my life in 2010. I'm proud of the fact that we stood up for what we believed in and took a stance. Were we caught off-guard? Absolutely. Were there some gross underestimation of what this thing was? Yeah. But it came from the same impulsive spirit that drives everything else this band does."

I keep trying to parse that, but I'm not sure what it's actually saying. He's proud that they sued... but it was an underestimation? An underestimation of what? That they'd be able to sue file sharing out of existence? If that's the case, then why be proud of suing and hurting the band's reputation?

Earlier this year, we pointed out that Metallica is a band that makes the vast majority of its money from touring -- over $20 million, versus about $1.5 million from album sales -- and suggested that the band's attack on Napster seems really short-sighted when you consider that. They were fighting over the scraps -- when embracing the fans likely would have resulted in much greater live and merchandise sales. In fact, the band's manager is asked how the band is dealing with lower album sales, and he notes that it's no big deal because of all the other revenue sources:

"It won't change anything else we do," he says. "I'm trying not to be cocky about it, but for Metallica, at their level, the kinds of things you might think about to replace income are minor compared to what you make playing tours and selling merch. We're just finishing 225 shows worldwide [in support of "Death Magnetic"], and these are massive shows. We can play anywhere. What else do we need to do, really? If we sell fewer records, so be it. Of course I'd rather sell more, but I can't do anything about the size of the market, and neither can they."

Yeah, well, if you hadn't pissed off all those fans, you could have actually increased the size of the market willing to attend concerts and buy stuff... but... whatever.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...-we-sued.shtml





Beatles Sales On iTunes Top 450K

The initial Beatles sales figures are in: More than 450,000 albums and 2 million individual songs were sold on iTunes worldwide, according to Apple, since the Beatles catalog was made available Tuesday (Nov. 16). In U.S. the best-selling album was "Abbey Road" and best-selling song was "Here Comes the Sun."

Of that tally, U.S. album sales totaled 119,000 units, which included 13,000 digital box sets, while individual digital track sales reached 1.4 million, according to industry sources. Each digital box set included 13 studio albums, the two-volume “Past Masters” compilation and the “Live at the Washington Coliseum, 1964” concert film. Sources say the U.S. album sales tally of 119,000 counts each box set as one unit, while Apple’s worldwide album sales tally counts each box set as multiple sales units, although it wasn’t immediately clear how many units each box set accounted for.

The Fab Four’s debut-week sales on iTunes compare favorably with the first-week sales of previous iTunes holdouts. When Led Zeppelin’s catalog made its digital debut in November 2007, the band generated total U.S. digital album sales of 47,000 units, which included sales of 33,000 units of the two-volume hits compilation “Mothership,” which was released the same week, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Led Zeppelin’s first-week individual track sales totaled 300,000, according to SoundScan.

But these numbers also show that digital music consumers aren't necessarily holding their breath to pounce on buying music when holdouts finally join the fray. Led Zeppelin's entire catalog may have generated digital track sales of 300,000, but Eminem’s digital track “Not Afraid” alone sold 379,000 units in the its debut week ended May 9, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

First-week digital track sales for superstar acts this year typically ranged from 100,000 to 300,000 per title, while digital album sales ranged anywhere from 40,000 to 278,000 for Taylor Swift’s blockbuster third album “Speak Now.”

Weekly U.S. digital track sales have averaged 21.7 million units so far in 2010, according to SoundScan. That means the Beatles’ first-week track sales equaled about 6.4% of all U.S. track sales for an average week. That’s more than Island Def Jam Group, Warner Bros. Records or Capitol Records each sold in the week ended Nov. 14, when their respective market shares were 5.6%, 5.3% and 4.5% and track sales totaled 21.3 million units, according to SoundScan.

The Beatles’ debut on iTunes was accompanied by an extensive marketing campaign, including prominent homepage placement on iTunes and TV spots that aired during Sunday’s American Music Awards broadcast on ABC, Sunday Night Football on NBC and other prime-time programming.

The iTunes marketing efforts likely helped boost overall sales of Beatles albums. During the week ended Nov. 14 (i.e. the week before the Nov. 16 debut of the Fabs’ iTunes debut), U.S. sales of Beatles albums totaled 20,000, while year-to-date, sales have averaged 23,000 a week, according to SoundScan.

Also helping boost sales of Beatles titles was Amazon’s aggressive discounting of all Beatles albums during the same week as their exclusive digital debut on iTunes. Amazon priced single-CD albums at $7.99, the double-disc album known as the “White Album” at $11.99 and EMI’s stereo and mono box sets at $130 each. By contrast, iTunes is selling individual Beatles albums for $12.99 each, the “White Album” for $19.99 and the digital box set for $150.

Sources say the Beatles/iTunes media campaign is expected to kick into high gear this for Black Friday, with expanded TV advertising in the U.S. and full-page ads in the “Wall Street Journal” and the “New York Times.”
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...815b9fb843970c





How Did The Beatles Sell 2 Million Songs On iTunes? Mostly Facebook (Not Search)
Matt McGee

Although at least one recent study says search beats social media when it comes to product discovery, those rules don’t apply to The Beatles. When you’re known worldwide and have set the standard for commercial and critical musical success, social media is where it’s at in 2010.

Billboard magazine reports that The Beatles sold more than two million individual songs worldwide and in excess of 450,000 albums in its first week on Apple’s iTunes Music Store. (The Beatles’ catalog was added to iTunes on November 16th.)

According to Experian Hitwise, it was social media — not search — that drove a lot of the online interest and, more importantly, the online traffic surrounding The Beatles addition to iTunes. Consider this stat: On November 16, the first day Beatles songs were available on iTunes, 26% of UK traffic to Apple.com came from social media, about double the amount that came from search.

And Hitwise says Apple received a “huge spike” in UK traffic coming specifically from Facebook. The week prior to The Beatles launch on iTunes, Apple was the 86th most popular outbound destination from Facebook; after the launch, it jumped up to the 20th most popular. Hitwise says that one in every 200 web site visits that left Facebook went straight to Apple’s web site.

What About US Traffic?

We asked Hitwise to run similar data for the US market. The numbers show a marked increase in social media traffic to Apple.com and a drop in search traffic on November 16th, but not enough for the former to surpass the latter.

And just as in the UK, Facebook was a primary source of US traffic to Apple.com. Hitwise says there was an 18% jump in Facebook-to-Apple.com visits after the Beatles’ iTunes premiere.

Even though Facebook can take the credit for driving a lot of traffic to Apple’s web site, it wasn’t all bad news for search. In the UK, Hitwise says searches on Beatles-related terms “increased 30-fold” during the week of the launch. And in the US, Hitwise says there was a 19% increase in searches for the exact word “beatles” on November 16 vs. the day before.
http://searchengineland.com/beatles-...t-search-56901





Comcast, NBC Argue Against Sharing with Internet TV
Cecilia Kang

Comcast and NBC Universal executives met with senior officials at the Federal Communications Commission this week, urging the agency against conditions to their proposed merger that would require the new company to provide shows and movies to Internet video distributors.

The Monday meeting comes after sources indicated to Post Tech that federal regulators would impose such conditions on their merger. The merger, proposed one year ago, is close to gaining approval if Comcast agrees to voluntary conditions on video program access to Internet companies like Apple TV and Google TV, sources said.

Comcast executive vice president of content acquisition, Matt Bond, and Kathy Zachem, vice president of regulatory affairs, joined NBC general counsel Rick Cotton to argue against conditions. They met, according to an ex parte filing, with the FCC’s senior counsel on the merger, John Flynn, and Chairman Julius Genachowski’s chief counsel, Rick Kaplan.

“The program access rules were designed to regulate traditional linear delivery of video programming, a market with an established business model,” Comcast and NBC wrote in their filing. “In the nascent, rapidly-evolving online video market where there is no established business model, it would be difficult as a practical matter to compare distributors for purposes of determining whether a programmer had unreasonably discriminated against a distributor.”

The companies said the FCC needs to more clearly define what an online video distributor is if it were to establish program-access rules for the Internet.

The issue comes as networks block their Web-based shows from Google TV and live online streaming site iviTV. FilmOn was hit with a temporary restraining order from a federal judge on Monday for allegedly retransmitting broadcaster’s signals without permission. IviTV, a similar site, says its practice differs from that of FilmOn because it pays copyright fees as a cable service provider.

Comcast has indicated it believes the merger will close before the end of the year. Stifel Nicolaus analyst Rebecca Arbogast said in a research note Tuesday that the FCC will likely push its review into January as it focuses next month on a net neutrality proposal.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/pos...inst_cond.html





FCC Member Condemns Google and Verizon Over Net Neutrality Plans
John Lister

A Federal Communications Commissioner has condemned the Verizon-Google take on net neutrality. Michael Copps said the public should not stand for deals “that exchange Internet freedom for bloated profits.”

Copps was speaking at a public hearing in Albuquerque titled “The Future Of The Intenet.” Among the topics he addressed was a proposal by Google and Verizon to settle the ongoing debate about net neutrality. The two companies argued that although the principle of all traffic being treated equally be enforced, but only for wired communications, with wireless internet not regulated in such a manner.

They also called for an exemption for “additional, differentiated online services, in addition to the Internet access and video services”, such that services that were “distinguishable from traditional broadband Internet access services” were not covered by net neutrality.

At the time Copps criticized the idea, but in this week’s speech he took a much firmer line:

The world envisioned by the Verizon-Google Gaggle was one built of private Internets that would vastly diminish the centrality of the Internet that you and I know. They want a tiered Internet. “Managed services” is what they call this. “Gated communities for the Affluent” is what I call them.

Despite the criticism, Copps said the responsibility to deal with the issue was for the commission: ” I suppose you can’t blame companies for seeking to protect their own interests. But you can blame policy-makers if we let them get away with it.”

Copps also took a swipe at the FCC’s own previous actions in agreeing to reclassify broadband internet as an information rather than communications service, thus heavily reducing its own regulatory powers on the issue.

While Copps was on the offensive, FCC chairman Julius Genachowski was a little more restrained. He told the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco that “I would have preferred if [Verizon and Google] didn’t do exactly what they did when they did it. It had the effect of slowing down some processes.”
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20...trality-plans/





The Rich Get Richer: Verizon Ups FiOS to 150 Mbps
Stacey Higginbotham

Verizon Communications today announced an even faster tier of fiber-to-the-home service: 150 Mbps down and 35 Mbps up. For folks like myself still stuck on first generation DOCSIS cable or plain old DSL, the digital divide grew by a couple of feet. But for the lucky 12.5 million people living in an area where Verizon’s FiOS service is available, by the end of this year, they will have the fastest broadband in the nation for an eye-popping $194.99 per month (to get that price you need to sign up for Verizon voice service as well as commit to a one-year contract). Small businesses can purchase the service as well. Verizon will continue to offer its other FiOS service tiers that go all the way down to a 15 Mbps down/5 Mbps up offering.

For those wondering what 150 Mbps is good for (other than bragging rights), Verizon says:

“With a downstream speed of 150 Mbps, consumers can download a two-hour, standard-definition movie (1.5 gigabytes) in less than 80 seconds, and a two-hour HD movie (5 GB) in less than four and a half minutes. Downloading 20 high-resolution photographs (100 megabytes) would take less than five and a half seconds using the 150/35 Mbps service. With the 35 Mbps upstream speed, consumers can upload those same 20 high-resolution photos in less than 23 seconds.”

Verizon said the faster service is all part of plans to bring services like remote backup, 3-D television and real-time video conferencing to the home. It also said it will eventually pass 18 million homes with its service. However, in a nation with about 115 million households, according to U.S. Census estimates, there are plenty who won’t get FiOS speeds. Sure, cable providers have pledged to bring out faster DOCSIS 3.0 technology by 2013 for much of the nation, which is currently delivering speeds of about 100 or 50 Mbps down and 15 Mbps up. And there’s Google’s small fiber-to-the-home efforts, as well as municipal fiber to the home, but the race for better wireline broadband doesn’t feel like a priority. At the federal level, we have a goal of delivering 100 Mbps down to 100 million households by 2020, but that’s a goal in the same way managing to brush my teeth every morning is goal. It’s going to happen— and it’s not going to take a lot of effort or thought.

By letting companies such as Verizon set the pace of our broadband speed, the country lets ISPs set the pace of innovation in many ways. In areas where Verizon and cable aren’t battling for the title of the fastest provider, the speed of broadband connections isn’t rising as quickly and the costs aren’t going down. Sure, mobile Internet is the future, but wireline broadband is the platform on which mobile has to rest, for both offloading data and for the backhaul. Plus, for truly immersive virtual experiences, the home, schoolroom or work is still going to be the place one settles down for an intensive online session. So while Verizon’s speed boost announced today is a huge win for the 12.5 million customers who could get it, for the killer applications to develop and the end prices of such fast service to drop, the rest of the country has to see similar offerings as well. I hope it’s soon, because my 7 Mbps down and 480 kbps up have me realizing I’m on the wrong side of the divide.
http://gigaom.com/2010/11/21/the-ric...s-to-150-mbps/





The Better-Off Online
Jim Jansen

People in higher-income households are different from other Americans in their tech ownership and use.

Analysis of several recent surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Projects finds key differences between those who live in households making $75,000 or more relative to those in lower-income households.

Some 95% of Americans who live in households earning $75,000 or more a year use the internet at least occasionally, compared with 70% of those living in households earning less than $75,000. Even among those who use the internet, the well-off are more likely than those with less income to use technology. Of those 95% of higher-income internet users:

• 99% use the internet at home, compared with 93% of the internet users in lower brackets.

• 93% of higher-income home internet users have some type of broadband connection versus 85% of the internet users who live in households earning less than $75,000 per year. That translates into 87% of all those in live in those better-off households having broadband at home.

• 95% of higher-income households own some type of cell phone compared with 83% in households with less income.

Differences among income cohorts apply to other technology as well

The relatively well-to-do are also more likely than those in lesser-income households to own a variety of information and communications gear.

• 79% of those living in households earning $75,000 or more own desktop computers, compared with 55% of those living in less well-off homes;

• 79% of those living in higher-income households own laptops, compared with 47% of those living in less well-off homes.

• 70% of those living in higher-income households own iPods or other MP3 players, compared with 42% of those living in less well-off homes.

• 54% of those living in higher-income households own game consoles, compared with 41% of those living in less well-off homes.

• 12% of those living in higher-income households own e-book readers such as Kindles, compared with 3% of those living in less well-off homes.

• 9% of those living in higher-income households own tablet computers such as iPads, compared with 3% of those living in less well-off homes.

The findings in this report come from three surveys by the Pew Internet Project conducted in late 2009 and 2010. These surveys show that internet users in higher-income households are the most active participants in a range of online activities, when compared with those who have less income:

• 93% of higher-income users use email;
• 80% access news online;
• 71% pay bills online;
• 48% have used their cell to send or receive email;
• 88% conduct online product research;
• 37% have donated to charities online.

Internet users in higher-income households are more likely than others to go online multiple times a day, both at home and at work. Some 86% of internet users in higher-income households go online daily, compared with 54% in the lowest income bracket.

In many cases, the most noticeable difference in online engagement between various income groups relates to their intensity of use. On any given day, internet users in the higher-income bracket are more likely than those in lower-income brackets to be carrying out various online activities. Compared with internet users in other income cohorts, higher-income internet users go online more often compared with other groups: For instance, 55% are on the internet or are using email several times a day from home. Moreover, on any given day the more well-to-do internet users, are more likely get online news, conduct online research for a product or service, and go online to search for maps or directions.
Where better-off Americans get their news

Those who fall in the top earnings category are also the biggest consumers of online news sources, with 80% of higher-income internet users (74% of the general population) seeking news on the internet.

However, the higher-income households have not abandoned traditional media altogether; they also turn to print and television, especially for local news. Asked about various platforms where they might get the news on a typical day, 76% o those from higher-income households watch local and national news shows on television, 51% of this higher-income group said they get local news from a print version of a newspaper, and 22% read a print version of a newspaper for national news.Still, the online news consumption patterns of this more well-off group stand in stark contrast to those living in the lowest income households.

• 80% of online Americans in the higher income bracket get news on the internet, compared with 60% of the internet users earning less than $30,000 per year.
• 79% of the internet users in the higher earning bracket have visited a government website at the local, state or federal level versus 56% of those who fall into the lowest-income group.
• 61% in the higher bracket seek political news online, compared with 35% from the lowest-income bracket.

Engagement with online commerce by the higher-income households

Significantly more higher-income Americans are conducting e-commerce activities than members of other income groups.

Solid majorities of higher-income internet users research products (88%), make travel reservations online (83%), purchase products or services online (81%), perform online banking (74%), use the internet to pay bills (71%), and use online classified sites such as Craigslist (60%.

There are other e-commerce activities for which less than a majority of higher-income Americans on the internet engage, but they still conduct these activities at significantly higher percentages than other income groups, including paying for online content, reviewing products, rating products, and participating on online auctions.

Read the full report including an analysis of online usage by various demographic groups and by the most affluent households as well as more information on survey methodology at pewinternet.org.
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1809/int...come-americans





Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction
Matt Richtel

On the eve of a pivotal academic year in Vishal Singh’s life, he faces a stark choice on his bedroom desk: book or computer?

By all rights, Vishal, a bright 17-year-old, should already have finished the book, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle,” his summer reading assignment. But he has managed 43 pages in two months.

He typically favors Facebook, YouTube and making digital videos. That is the case this August afternoon. Bypassing Vonnegut, he clicks over to YouTube, meaning that tomorrow he will enter his senior year of high school hoping to see an improvement in his grades, but without having completed his only summer homework.

On YouTube, “you can get a whole story in six minutes,” he explains. “A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification.”

Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.

Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.

“Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,” said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. And the effects could linger: “The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”

But even as some parents and educators express unease about students’ digital diets, they are intensifying efforts to use technology in the classroom, seeing it as a way to connect with students and give them essential skills. Across the country, schools are equipping themselves with computers, Internet access and mobile devices so they can teach on the students’ technological territory.

It is a tension on vivid display at Vishal’s school, Woodside High School, on a sprawling campus set against the forested hills of Silicon Valley. Here, as elsewhere, it is not uncommon for students to send hundreds of text messages a day or spend hours playing video games, and virtually everyone is on Facebook.

The principal, David Reilly, 37, a former musician who says he sympathizes when young people feel disenfranchised, is determined to engage these 21st-century students. He has asked teachers to build Web sites to communicate with students, introduced popular classes on using digital tools to record music, secured funding for iPads to teach Mandarin and obtained $3 million in grants for a multimedia center.

He pushed first period back an hour, to 9 a.m., because students were showing up bleary-eyed, at least in part because they were up late on their computers. Unchecked use of digital devices, he says, can create a culture in which students are addicted to the virtual world and lost in it.

“I am trying to take back their attention from their BlackBerrys and video games,” he says. “To a degree, I’m using technology to do it.”

The same tension surfaces in Vishal, whose ability to be distracted by computers is rivaled by his proficiency with them. At the beginning of his junior year, he discovered a passion for filmmaking and made a name for himself among friends and teachers with his storytelling in videos made with digital cameras and editing software.

He acts as his family’s tech-support expert, helping his father, Satendra, a lab manager, retrieve lost documents on the computer, and his mother, Indra, a security manager at the San Francisco airport, build her own Web site.

But he also plays video games 10 hours a week. He regularly sends Facebook status updates at 2 a.m., even on school nights, and has such a reputation for distributing links to videos that his best friend calls him a “YouTube bully.”

Several teachers call Vishal one of their brightest students, and they wonder why things are not adding up. Last semester, his grade point average was 2.3 after a D-plus in English and an F in Algebra II. He got an A in film critique.

“He’s a kid caught between two worlds,” said Mr. Reilly — one that is virtual and one with real-life demands.

Vishal, like his mother, says he lacks the self-control to favor schoolwork over the computer. She sat him down a few weeks before school started and told him that, while she respected his passion for film and his technical skills, he had to use them productively.

“This is the year,” she says she told him. “This is your senior year and you can’t afford not to focus.”

It was not always this way. As a child, Vishal had a tendency to procrastinate, but nothing like this. Something changed him.

Growing Up With Gadgets

When he was 3, Vishal moved with his parents and older brother to their current home, a three-bedroom house in the working-class section of Redwood City, a suburb in Silicon Valley that is more diverse than some of its elite neighbors.

Thin and quiet with a shy smile, Vishal passed the admissions test for a prestigious public elementary and middle school. Until sixth grade, he focused on homework, regularly going to the house of a good friend to study with him.

But Vishal and his family say two things changed around the seventh grade: his mother went back to work, and he got a computer. He became increasingly engrossed in games and surfing the Internet, finding an easy outlet for what he describes as an inclination to procrastinate.

“I realized there were choices,” Vishal recalls. “Homework wasn’t the only option.”

Several recent studies show that young people tend to use home computers for entertainment, not learning, and that this can hurt school performance, particularly in low-income families. Jacob L. Vigdor, an economics professor at Duke University who led some of the research, said that when adults were not supervising computer use, children “are left to their own devices, and the impetus isn’t to do homework but play around.”

Research also shows that students often juggle homework and entertainment. The Kaiser Family Foundation found earlier this year that half of students from 8 to 18 are using the Internet, watching TV or using some other form of media either “most” (31 percent) or “some” (25 percent) of the time that they are doing homework.

At Woodside, as elsewhere, students’ use of technology is not uniform. Mr. Reilly, the principal, says their choices tend to reflect their personalities. Social butterflies tend to be heavy texters and Facebook users. Students who are less social might escape into games, while drifters or those prone to procrastination, like Vishal, might surf the Web or watch videos.

The technology has created on campuses a new set of social types — not the thespian and the jock but the texter and gamer, Facebook addict and YouTube potato.

“The technology amplifies whoever you are,” Mr. Reilly says.

For some, the amplification is intense. Allison Miller, 14, sends and receives 27,000 texts in a month, her fingers clicking at a blistering pace as she carries on as many as seven text conversations at a time. She texts between classes, at the moment soccer practice ends, while being driven to and from school and, often, while studying.

Most of the exchanges are little more than quick greetings, but they can get more in-depth, like “if someone tells you about a drama going on with someone,” Allison said. “I can text one person while talking on the phone to someone else.”

But this proficiency comes at a cost: she blames multitasking for the three B’s on her recent progress report.

“I’ll be reading a book for homework and I’ll get a text message and pause my reading and put down the book, pick up the phone to reply to the text message, and then 20 minutes later realize, ‘Oh, I forgot to do my homework.’ ”

Some shyer students do not socialize through technology — they recede into it. Ramon Ochoa-Lopez, 14, an introvert, plays six hours of video games on weekdays and more on weekends, leaving homework to be done in the bathroom before school.

Escaping into games can also salve teenagers’ age-old desire for some control in their chaotic lives. “It’s a way for me to separate myself,” Ramon says. “If there’s an argument between my mom and one of my brothers, I’ll just go to my room and start playing video games and escape.”

With powerful new cellphones, the interactive experience can go everywhere. Between classes at Woodside or at lunch, when use of personal devices is permitted, students gather in clusters, sometimes chatting face to face, sometimes half-involved in a conversation while texting someone across the teeming quad. Others sit alone, watching a video, listening to music or updating Facebook.

Students say that their parents, worried about the distractions, try to police computer time, but that monitoring the use of cellphones is difficult. Parents may also want to be able to call their children at any time, so taking the phone away is not always an option.

Other parents wholly embrace computer use, even when it has no obvious educational benefit.

“If you’re not on top of technology, you’re not going to be on top of the world,” said John McMullen, 56, a retired criminal investigator whose son, Sean, is one of five friends in the group Vishal joins for lunch each day.

Sean’s favorite medium is video games; he plays for four hours after school and twice that on weekends. He was playing more but found his habit pulling his grade point average below 3.2, the point at which he felt comfortable. He says he sometimes wishes that his parents would force him to quit playing and study, because he finds it hard to quit when given the choice. Still, he says, video games are not responsible for his lack of focus, asserting that in another era he would have been distracted by TV or something else.

“Video games don’t make the hole; they fill it,” says Sean, sitting at a picnic table in the quad, where he is surrounded by a multimillion-dollar view: on the nearby hills are the evergreens that tower above the affluent neighborhoods populated by Internet tycoons. Sean, a senior, concedes that video games take a physical toll: “I haven’t done exercise since my sophomore year. But that doesn’t seem like a big deal. I still look the same.”

Sam Crocker, Vishal’s closest friend, who has straight A’s but lower SAT scores than he would like, blames the Internet’s distractions for his inability to finish either of his two summer reading books.

“I know I can read a book, but then I’m up and checking Facebook,” he says, adding: “Facebook is amazing because it feels like you’re doing something and you’re not doing anything. It’s the absence of doing something, but you feel gratified anyway.”

He concludes: “My attention span is getting worse.”

The Lure of Distraction

Some neuroscientists have been studying people like Sam and Vishal. They have begun to understand what happens to the brains of young people who are constantly online and in touch.

In an experiment at the German Sport University in Cologne in 2007, boys from 12 to 14 spent an hour each night playing video games after they finished homework.

On alternate nights, the boys spent an hour watching an exciting movie, like “Harry Potter” or “Star Trek,” rather than playing video games. That allowed the researchers to compare the effect of video games and TV.

The researchers looked at how the use of these media affected the boys’ brainwave patterns while sleeping and their ability to remember their homework in the subsequent days. They found that playing video games led to markedly lower sleep quality than watching TV, and also led to a “significant decline” in the boys’ ability to remember vocabulary words. The findings were published in the journal Pediatrics.

Markus Dworak, a researcher who led the study and is now a neuroscientist at Harvard, said it was not clear whether the boys’ learning suffered because sleep was disrupted or, as he speculates, also because the intensity of the game experience overrode the brain’s recording of the vocabulary.

“When you look at vocabulary and look at huge stimulus after that, your brain has to decide which information to store,” he said. “Your brain might favor the emotionally stimulating information over the vocabulary.”

At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory.

In that vein, recent imaging studies of people have found that major cross sections of the brain become surprisingly active during downtime. These brain studies suggest to researchers that periods of rest are critical in allowing the brain to synthesize information, make connections between ideas and even develop the sense of self.

Researchers say these studies have particular implications for young people, whose brains have more trouble focusing and setting priorities.

“Downtime is to the brain what sleep is to the body,” said Dr. Rich of Harvard Medical School. “But kids are in a constant mode of stimulation.”

“The headline is: bring back boredom,” added Dr. Rich, who last month gave a speech to the American Academy of Pediatrics entitled, “Finding Huck Finn: Reclaiming Childhood from the River of Electronic Screens.”

Dr. Rich said in an interview that he was not suggesting young people should toss out their devices, but rather that they embrace a more balanced approach to what he said were powerful tools necessary to compete and succeed in modern life.

The heavy use of devices also worries Daniel Anderson, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who is known for research showing that children are not as harmed by TV viewing as some researchers have suggested.

Multitasking using ubiquitous, interactive and highly stimulating computers and phones, Professor Anderson says, appears to have a more powerful effect than TV.

Like Dr. Rich, he says he believes that young, developing brains are becoming habituated to distraction and to switching tasks, not to focus.

“If you’ve grown up processing multiple media, that’s exactly the mode you’re going to fall into when put in that environment — you develop a need for that stimulation,” he said.

Vishal can attest to that.

“I’m doing Facebook, YouTube, having a conversation or two with a friend, listening to music at the same time. I’m doing a million things at once, like a lot of people my age,” he says. “Sometimes I’ll say: I need to stop this and do my schoolwork, but I can’t.”

“If it weren’t for the Internet, I’d focus more on school and be doing better academically,” he says. But thanks to the Internet, he says, he has discovered and pursued his passion: filmmaking. Without the Internet, “I also wouldn’t know what I want to do with my life.”

Clicking Toward a Future

The woman sits in a cemetery at dusk, sobbing. Behind her, silhouetted and translucent, a man kneels, then fades away, a ghost.

This captivating image appears on Vishal’s computer screen. On this Thursday afternoon in late September, he is engrossed in scenes he shot the previous weekend for a music video he is making with his cousin.

The video is based on a song performed by the band Guns N’ Roses about a woman whose boyfriend dies. He wants it to be part of the package of work he submits to colleges that emphasize film study, along with a documentary he is making about home-schooled students.

Now comes the editing. Vishal taught himself to use sophisticated editing software in part by watching tutorials on YouTube. He does not leave his chair for more than two hours, sipping Pepsi, his face often inches from the screen, as he perfects the clip from the cemetery. The image of the crying woman was shot separately from the image of the kneeling man, and he is trying to fuse them.

“I’m spending two hours to get a few seconds just right,” he says.

He occasionally sends a text message or checks Facebook, but he is focused in a way he rarely is when doing homework. He says the chief difference is that filmmaking feels applicable to his chosen future, and he hopes colleges, like the University of Southern California or the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, will be so impressed by his portfolio that they will overlook his school performance.

“This is going to compensate for the grades,” he says. On this day, his homework includes a worksheet for Latin, some reading for English class and an economics essay, but they can wait.

For Vishal, there’s another clear difference between filmmaking and homework: interactivity. As he edits, the windows on the screen come alive; every few seconds, he clicks the mouse to make tiny changes to the lighting and flow of the images, and the software gives him constant feedback.

“I click and something happens,” he says, explaining that, by comparison, reading a book or doing homework is less exciting. “I guess it goes back to the immediate gratification thing.”

The $2,000 computer Vishal is using is state of the art and only a week old. It represents a concession by his parents. They allowed him to buy it, despite their continuing concerns about his technology habits, because they wanted to support his filmmaking dream. “If we put roadblocks in his way, he’s just going to get depressed,” his mother says. Besides, she adds, “he’s been making an effort to do his homework.”

At this point in the semester, it seems she is right. The first schoolwide progress reports come out in late September, and Vishal has mostly A’s and B’s. He says he has been able to make headway by applying himself, but also by cutting back his workload. Unlike last year, he is not taking advanced placement classes, and he has chosen to retake Algebra II not in the classroom but in an online class that lets him work at his own pace.

His shift to easier classes might not please college admissions officers, according to Woodside’s college adviser, Zorina Matavulj. She says they want seniors to intensify their efforts. As it is, she says, even if Vishal improves his performance significantly, someone with his grades faces long odds in applying to the kinds of colleges he aspires to.

Still, Vishal’s passion for film reinforces for Mr. Reilly, the principal, that the way to reach these students is on their own terms.

Hands-On Technology

Big Macintosh monitors sit on every desk, and a man with hip glasses and an easygoing style stands at the front of the class. He is Geoff Diesel, 40, a favorite teacher here at Woodside who has taught English and film. Now he teaches one of Mr. Reilly’s new classes, audio production. He has a rapt audience of more than 20 students as he shows a video of the band Nirvana mixing their music, then holds up a music keyboard.

“Who knows how to use Pro Tools? We’ve got it. It’s the program used by the best music studios in the world,” he says.

In the back of the room, Mr. Reilly watches, thrilled. He introduced the audio course last year and enough students signed up to fill four classes. (He could barely pull together one class when he introduced Mandarin, even though he had secured iPads to help teach the language.)

“Some of these students are our most at-risk kids,” he says. He means that they are more likely to tune out school, skip class or not do their homework, and that they may not get healthful meals at home. They may also do their most enthusiastic writing not for class but in text messages and on Facebook. “They’re here, they’re in class, they’re listening.”

Despite Woodside High’s affluent setting, about 40 percent of its 1,800 students come from low-income families and receive a reduced-cost or free lunch. The school is 56 percent Latino, 38 percent white and 5 percent African-American, and it sends 93 percent of its students to four-year or community colleges.

Mr. Reilly says that the audio class provides solid vocational training and can get students interested in other subjects.

“Today mixing music, tomorrow sound waves and physics,” he says. And he thinks the key is that they love not just the music but getting their hands on the technology. “We’re meeting them on their turf.”

It does not mean he sees technology as a panacea. “I’ll always take one great teacher in a cave over a dozen Smart Boards,” he says, referring to the high-tech teaching displays used in many schools.

Teachers at Woodside commonly blame technology for students’ struggles to concentrate, but they are divided over whether embracing computers is the right solution.

“It’s a catastrophe,” said Alan Eaton, a charismatic Latin teacher. He says that technology has led to a “balkanization of their focus and duration of stamina,” and that schools make the problem worse when they adopt the technology.

“When rock ’n’ roll came about, we didn’t start using it in classrooms like we’re doing with technology,” he says. He personally feels the sting, since his advanced classes have one-third as many students as they had a decade ago.

Vishal remains a Latin student, one whom Mr. Eaton describes as particularly bright. But the teacher wonders if technology might be the reason Vishal seems to lose interest in academics the minute he leaves class.

Mr. Diesel, by contrast, does not think technology is behind the problems of Vishal and his schoolmates — in fact, he thinks it is the key to connecting with them, and an essential tool. “It’s in their DNA to look at screens,” he asserts. And he offers another analogy to explain his approach: “Frankenstein is in the room and I don’t want him to tear me apart. If I’m not using technology, I lose them completely.”

Mr. Diesel had Vishal as a student in cinema class and describes him as a “breath of fresh air” with a gift for filmmaking. Mr. Diesel says he wonders if Vishal is a bit like Woody Allen, talented but not interested in being part of the system.

But Mr. Diesel adds: “If Vishal’s going to be an independent filmmaker, he’s got to read Vonnegut. If you’re going to write scripts, you’ve got to read.”

Back to Reading Aloud

Vishal sits near the back of English IV. Marcia Blondel, a veteran teacher, asks the students to open the book they are studying, “The Things They Carried,” which is about the Vietnam War.

“Who wants to read starting in the middle of Page 137?” she asks. One student begins to read aloud, and the rest follow along.

To Ms. Blondel, the exercise in group reading represents a regression in American education and an indictment of technology. The reason she has to do it, she says, is that students now lack the attention span to read the assignments on their own.

“How can you have a discussion in class?” she complains, arguing that she has seen a considerable change in recent years. In some classes she can count on little more than one-third of the students to read a 30-page homework assignment.

She adds: “You can’t become a good writer by watching YouTube, texting and e-mailing a bunch of abbreviations.”

As the group-reading effort winds down, she says gently: “I hope this will motivate you to read on your own.”

It is a reminder of the choices that have followed the students through the semester: computer or homework? Immediate gratification or investing in the future?

Mr. Reilly hopes that the two can meet — that computers can be combined with education to better engage students and can give them technical skills without compromising deep analytical thought.

But in Vishal’s case, computers and schoolwork seem more and more to be mutually exclusive. Ms. Blondel says that Vishal, after a decent start to the school year, has fallen into bad habits. In October, he turned in weeks late, for example, a short essay based on the first few chapters of “The Things They Carried.” His grade at that point, she says, tracks around a D.

For his part, Vishal says he is investing himself more in his filmmaking, accelerating work with his cousin on their music video project. But he is also using Facebook late at night and surfing for videos on YouTube. The evidence of the shift comes in a string of Facebook updates.

Saturday, 11:55 p.m.: “Editing, editing, editing”

Sunday, 3:55 p.m.: “8+ hours of shooting, 8+ hours of editing. All for just a three-minute scene. Mind = Dead.”

Sunday, 11:00 p.m.: “Fun day, finally got to spend a day relaxing... now about that homework...”

Malia Wollan contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/te...y/21brain.html





Mobile Web Usage Surged in October: Opera
Tarmo Virki

Global mobile data traffic surged in October at the fastest rate in seven months, raising the prospect of new orders for the makers of telecoms equipment.

The largest mobile Internet browser firm Opera Software ASA said on Wednesday that global data traffic through its browser rose 15 percent in October from September, and surged 134 percent from a year ago.

The mobile Internet market has boomed since the introduction of Apple Inc's iPhone in 2007.

Wireless operators are keen on raising revenue from Internet browsing and the social networking boom as revenue from traditional voice calls declines, but they are facing increasingly congested networks.

The rising pressure on networks is helping browsers such as Opera, which packages up to 90 percent of the data to save network bandwidth.

Telecoms gear makers Nokia Siemens, Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent, which have struggled in recent years in the face of aggressive pricing by Asian rivals, expect rising data traffic to lead to new orders.

Fearful of losing customers, only a few operators have publicly admitted to the problem of keeping pace with data traffic, but 63 percent are experiencing difficulties, a global survey showed earlier this month.

Opera has increased its lead over rival browsers -- from Blackberry maker RIM, and from Apple and Nokia -- in the last few months and controlled 24.5 percent of the market in October, according to Web analytics firm StatCounter.

The Blackberry, iPhone and Nokia browsers all have 16 to 18 percent market shares.

Opera has 76.3 million users for its Opera Mini browser, who all access the Internet through Opera's servers -- giving the firm usage data -- and who generated 616 million megabytes of data traffic for operators worldwide last month.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6AN14S20101124





Long Live the Web

The Web is critical not merely to the digital revolution but to our continued prosperity—and even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending
Tim Berners-Lee

The world wide web went live, on my physical desktop in Geneva, Switzerland, in December 1990. It consisted of one Web site and one browser, which happened to be on the same computer. The simple setup demonstrated a profound concept: that any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere. In this spirit, the Web spread quickly from the grassroots up. Today, at its 20th anniversary, the Web is thoroughly integrated into our daily lives. We take it for granted, expecting it to “be there” at any instant, like electricity.

The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of the World Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles.

The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments—totalitarian and democratic alike—are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights.

If we, the Web’s users, allow these and other trends to proceed unchecked, the Web could be broken into fragmented islands. We could lose the freedom to connect with whichever Web sites we want. The ill effects could extend to smartphones and pads, which are also portals to the extensive information that the Web provides.

Why should you care? Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend. The Web is also vital to democracy, a communications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation. The Web is now more critical to free speech than any other medium. It brings principles established in the U.S. Constitution, the British Magna Carta and other important documents into the network age: freedom from being snooped on, filtered, censored and disconnected.

Yet people seem to think the Web is some sort of piece of nature, and if it starts to wither, well, that’s just one of those unfortunate things we can’t help. Not so. We create the Web, by designing computer protocols and software; this process is completely under our control. We choose what properties we want it to have and not have. It is by no means finished (and it’s certainly not dead). If we want to track what government is doing, see what companies are doing, understand the true state of the planet, find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, not to mention easily share our photos with our friends, we the public, the scientific community and the press must make sure the Web’s principles remain intact—not just to preserve what we have gained but to benefit from the great advances that are still to come.

Universality Is the Foundation

Several principles are key to assuring that the Web becomes ever more valuable. The primary design principle underlying the Web’s usefulness and growth is universality. When you make a link, you can link to anything. That means people must be able to put anything on the Web, no matter what computer they have, software they use or human language they speak and regardless of whether they have a wired or wireless Internet connection. The Web should be usable by people with disabilities. It must work with any form of information, be it a document or a point of data, and information of any quality—from a silly tweet to a scholarly paper. And it should be accessible from any kind of hardware that can connect to the Internet: stationary or mobile, small screen or large.

These characteristics can seem obvious, self-maintaining or just unimportant, but they are why the next blockbuster Web site or the new homepage for your kid’s local soccer team will just appear on the Web without any difficulty. Universality is a big demand, for any system.

Decentralization is another important design feature. You do not have to get approval from any central authority to add a page or make a link. All you have to do is use three simple, standard protocols: write a page in the HTML (hypertext markup language) format, name it with the URI naming convention, and serve it up on the Internet using HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol). Decentralization has made widespread innovation possible and will continue to do so in the future.

The URI is the key to universality. (I originally called the naming scheme URI, for universal resource identifier; it has come to be known as URL, for uniform resource locator.) The URI allows you to follow any link, regardless of the content it leads to or who publishes that content. Links turn the Web’s content into something of greater value: an interconnected information space.

Several threats to the Web’s universality have arisen recently. Cable television companies that sell Internet connectivity are considering whether to limit their Internet users to downloading only the company’s mix of entertainment. Social-networking sites present a different kind of problem. Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster and others typically provide value by capturing information as you enter it: your birthday, your e-mail address, your likes, and links indicating who is friends with whom and who is in which photograph. The sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the information to provide value-added service—but only within their sites. Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site. Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site’s pages are on the Web, but your data are not. You can access a Web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site.

The isolation occurs because each piece of information does not have a URI. Connections among data exist only within a site. So the more you enter, the more you become locked in. Your social-networking site becomes a central platform—a closed silo of content, and one that does not give you full control over your information in it. The more this kind of architecture gains widespread use, the more the Web becomes fragmented, and the less we enjoy a single, universal information space.

A related danger is that one social-networking site—or one search engine or one browser—gets so big that it becomes a monopoly, which tends to limit innovation. As has been the case since the Web began, continued grassroots innovation may be the best check and balance against any one company or government that tries to undermine universality. GnuSocial and Diaspora are projects on the Web that allow anyone to create their own social network from their own server, connecting to anyone on any other site. The Status.net project, which runs sites such as identi.ca, allows you to operate your own Twitter-like network without the Twitter-like centralization.

Open Standards Drive Innovation

Allowing any site to link to any other site is necessary but not sufficient for a robust Web. The basic Web technologies that individuals and companies need to develop powerful services must be available for free, with no royalties. Amazon.com, for example, grew into a huge online bookstore, then music store, then store for all kinds of goods because it had open, free access to the technical standards on which the Web operates. Amazon, like any other Web user, could use HTML, URI and HTTP without asking anyone’s permission and without having to pay. It could also use improvements to those standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, allowing customers to fill out a virtual order form, pay online, rate the goods they had purchased, and so on.

By “open standards” I mean standards that can have any committed expert involved in the design, that have been widely reviewed as acceptable, that are available for free on the Web, and that are royalty-free (no need to pay) for developers and users. Open, royalty-free standards that are easy to use create the diverse richness of Web sites, from the big names such as Amazon, Craigslist and Wikipedia to obscure blogs written by adult hobbyists and to homegrown videos posted by teenagers.

Openness also means you can build your own Web site or company without anyone’s approval. When the Web began, I did not have to obtain permission or pay royalties to use the Internet’s own open standards, such as the well-known transmission control protocol (TCP) and Internet protocol (IP). Similarly, the Web Consortium’s royalty-free patent policy says that the companies, universities and individuals who contribute to the development of a standard must agree they will not charge royalties to anyone who may use the standard.

Open, royalty-free standards do not mean that a company or individual cannot devise a blog or photo-sharing program and charge you to use it. They can. And you might want to pay for it if you think it is “better” than others. The point is that open standards allow for many options, free and not.

Indeed, many companies spend money to develop extraordinary applications precisely because they are confident the applications will work for anyone, regardless of the computer hardware, operating system or Internet service provider (ISP) they are using—all made possible by the Web’s open standards. The same confidence encourages scientists to spend thousands of hours devising incredible databases that can share information about proteins, say, in hopes of curing disease. The confidence encourages governments such as those of the U.S. and the U.K. to put more and more data online so citizens can inspect them, making government increasingly transparent. Open standards also foster serendipitous creation: someone may use them in ways no one imagined. We discover that on the Web every day.

In contrast, not using open standards creates closed worlds. Apple’s iTunes system, for example, identifies songs and videos using URIs that are open. But instead of “http:” the addresses begin with “itunes:,” which is proprietary. You can access an “itunes:” link only using Apple’s proprietary iTunes program. You can’t make a link to any information in the iTunes world—a song or information about a band. You can’t send that link to someone else to see. You are no longer on the Web. The iTunes world is centralized and walled off. You are trapped in a single store, rather than being on the open marketplace. For all the store’s wonderful features, its evolution is limited to what one company thinks up.

Other companies are also creating closed worlds. The tendency for magazines, for example, to produce smartphone “apps” rather than Web apps is disturbing, because that material is off the Web. You can’t bookmark it or e-mail a link to a page within it. You can’t tweet it. It is better to build a Web app that will also run on smartphone browsers, and the techniques for doing so are getting better all the time.

Some people may think that closed worlds are just fine. The worlds are easy to use and may seem to give those people what they want. But as we saw in the 1990s with the America Online dial-up information system that gave you a restricted subset of the Web, these closed, “walled gardens,” no matter how pleasing, can never compete in diversity, richness and innovation with the mad, throbbing Web market outside their gates. If a walled garden has too tight a hold on a market, however, it can delay that outside growth.

Keep the Web separate from the Internet

Keeping the web universal and keeping its standards open help people invent new services. But a third principle—the separation of layers—partitions the design of the Web from that of the Internet.

This separation is fundamental. The Web is an application that runs on the Internet, which is an electronic network that transmits packets of information among millions of computers according to a few open protocols. An analogy is that the Web is like a household appliance that runs on the electricity network. A refrigerator or printer can function as long as it uses a few standard protocols—in the U.S., things like operating at 120 volts and 60 hertz. Similarly, any application—among them the Web, e-mail or instant messaging—can run on the Internet as long as it uses a few standard Internet protocols, such as TCP and IP.

Manufacturers can improve refrigerators and printers without altering how electricity functions, and utility companies can improve the electrical network without altering how appliances function. The two layers of technology work together but can advance independently. The same is true for the Web and the Internet. The separation of layers is crucial for innovation. In 1990 the Web rolled out over the Internet without any changes to the Internet itself, as have all improvements since. And in that time, Internet connections have sped up from 300 bits per second to 300 million bits per second (Mbps) without the Web having to be redesigned to take advantage of the upgrades.

Electronic Human Rights

Although internet and web designs are separate, a Web user is also an Internet user and therefore relies on an Internet that is free from interference. In the early Web days it was too technically difficult for a company or country to manipulate the Internet to interfere with an individual Web user. Technology for interference has become more powerful, however. In 2007 BitTorrent, a company whose “peer-to-peer” network protocol allows people to share music, video and other files directly over the Internet, complained to the Federal Communications Commission that the ISP giant Comcast was blocking or slowing traffic to subscribers who were using the BitTorrent application. The FCC told Comcast to stop the practice, but in April 2010 a federal court ruled the FCC could not require Comcast to do so. A good ISP will often manage traffic so that when bandwidth is short, less crucial traffic is dropped, in a transparent way, so users are aware of it. An important line exists between that action and using the same power to discriminate.

This distinction highlights the principle of net neutrality. Net neutrality maintains that if I have paid for an Internet connection at a certain quality, say, 300 Mbps, and you have paid for that quality, then our communications should take place at that quality. Protecting this concept would prevent a big ISP from sending you video from a media company it may own at 300 Mbps but sending video from a competing media company at a slower rate. That amounts to commercial discrimination. Other complications could arise. What if your ISP made it easier for you to connect to a particular online shoe store and harder to reach others? That would be powerful control. What if the ISP made it difficult for you to go to Web sites about certain political parties, or religions, or sites about evolution?

Unfortunately, in August, Google and Verizon for some reason suggested that net neutrality should not apply to mobile phone–based connections. Many people in rural areas from Utah to Uganda have access to the Internet only via mobile phones; exempting wireless from net neutrality would leave these users open to discrimination of service. It is also bizarre to imagine that my fundamental right to access the information source of my choice should apply when I am on my WiFi-connected computer at home but not when I use my cell phone.

A neutral communications medium is the basis of a fair, competitive market economy, of democracy, and of science. Debate has risen again in the past year about whether government legislation is needed to protect net neutrality. It is. Although the Internet and Web generally thrive on lack of regulation, some basic values have to be legally preserved.

No Snooping

Other threats to the web result from meddling with the Internet, including snooping. In 2008 one company, Phorm, devised a way for an ISP to peek inside the packets of information it was sending. The ISP could determine every URI that any customer was browsing. The ISP could then create a profile of the sites the user went to in order to produce targeted advertising.

Accessing the information within an Internet packet is equivalent to wiretapping a phone or opening postal mail. The URIs that people use reveal a good deal about them. A company that bought URI profiles of job applicants could use them to discriminate in hiring people with certain political views, for example. Life insurance companies could discriminate against people who have looked up cardiac symptoms on the Web. Predators could use the profiles to stalk individuals. We would all use the Web very differently if we knew that our clicks can be monitored and the data shared with third parties.

Free speech should be protected, too. The Web should be like a white sheet of paper: ready to be written on, with no control over what is written. Earlier this year Google accused the Chinese government of hacking into its databases to retrieve the e-mails of dissidents. The alleged break-ins occurred after Google resisted the government’s demand that the company censor certain documents on its Chinese-language search engine.

Totalitarian governments aren’t the only ones violating the network rights of their citizens. In France a law created in 2009, named Hadopi, allowed a new agency by the same name to disconnect a household from the Internet for a year if someone in the household was alleged by a media company to have ripped off music or video. After much opposition, in October the Constitutional Council of France required a judge to review a case before access was revoked, but if approved, the household could be disconnected without due process. In the U.K., the Digital Economy Act, hastily passed in April, allows the government to order an ISP to terminate the Internet connection of anyone who appears on a list of individuals suspected of copyright infringement. In September the U.S. Senate introduced the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, which would allow the government to create a blacklist of Web sites—hosted on or off U.S. soil—that are accused of infringement and to pressure or require all ISPs to block access to those sites.

In these cases, no due process of law protects people before they are disconnected or their sites are blocked. Given the many ways the Web is crucial to our lives and our work, disconnection is a form of deprivation of liberty. Looking back to the Magna Carta, we should perhaps now affirm: “No person or organization shall be deprived of the ability to connect to others without due process of law and the presumption of innocence.”

When your network rights are violated, public outcry is crucial. Citizens worldwide objected to China’s demands on Google, so much so that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the U.S. government supported Google’s defiance and that Internet freedom—and with it, Web freedom—should become a formal plank in American foreign policy. In October, Finland made broadband access, at 1 Mbps, a legal right for all its citizens.

Linking to the Future

As long as the web’s basic principles are upheld, its ongoing evolution is not in the hands of any one person or organization—neither mine nor anyone else’s. If we can preserve the principles, the Web promises some fantastic future capabilities.

For example, the latest version of HTML, called HTML5, is not just a markup language but a computing platform that will make Web apps even more powerful than they are now. The proliferation of smartphones will make the Web even more central to our lives. Wireless access will be a particular boon to developing countries, where many people do not have connectivity by wire or cable but do have it wirelessly. Much more needs to be done, of course, including accessibility for people with disabilities and devising pages that work well on all screens, from huge 3-D displays that cover a wall to wristwatch-size windows.

A great example of future promise, which leverages the strengths of all the principles, is linked data. Today’s Web is quite effective at helping people publish and discover documents, but our computer programs cannot read or manipulate the actual data within those documents. As this problem is solved, the Web will become much more useful, because data about nearly every aspect of our lives are being created at an astonishing rate. Locked within all these data is knowledge about how to cure diseases, foster business value and govern our world more effectively.

Scientists are actually at the forefront of some of the largest efforts to put linked data on the Web. Researchers, for example, are realizing that in many cases no single lab or online data repository is sufficient to discover new drugs. The information necessary to understand the complex interactions between diseases, biological processes in the human body, and the vast array of chemical agents is spread across the world in a myriad of databases, spreadsheets and documents.

One success relates to drug discovery to combat Alzheimer’s disease. A number of corporate and government research labs dropped their usual refusal to open their data and created the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. They posted a massive amount of patient information and brain scans as linked data, which they have dipped into many times to advance their research. In a demonstration I witnessed, a scientist asked the question, “What proteins are involved in signal transduction and are related to pyramidal neurons?” When put into Google, the question got 233,000 hits—and not one single answer. Put into the linked databases world, however, it returned a small number of specific proteins that have those properties.

The investment and finance sectors can benefit from linked data, too. Profit is generated, in large part, from finding patterns in an increasingly diverse set of information sources. Data are all over our personal lives as well. When you go onto your social-networking site and indicate that a newcomer is your friend, that establishes a relationship. And that relationship is data.

Linked data raise certain issues that we will have to confront. For example, new data-integration capabilities could pose privacy challenges that are hardly addressed by today’s privacy laws. We should examine legal, cultural and technical options that will preserve privacy without stifling beneficial data-sharing capabilities.

Now is an exciting time. Web developers, companies, governments and citizens should work together openly and cooperatively, as we have done thus far, to preserve the Web’s fundamental principles, as well as those of the Internet, ensuring that the technological protocols and social conventions we set up respect basic human values. The goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...g-live-the-web





MP Calls for Pornography 'Opt-In' to Protect Children

Claire Perry says web firms need to be brought in line with TV stations and newsagents
BBC

Internet providers should create an "opt-in" system to prevent children gaining access to pornography, a Conservative MP has said.

Claire Perry wants age-checks to be attached to all such material to reduce exposure to it.

The mother-of-three, who has prompted a Commons debate on the issue, said internet firms should "share the responsibility" of protecting children.

A study suggests one in three under-10s has seen pornography on the web.

Four in every five children aged 14 to 16 admitted regularly accessing explicit photographs and footage on their home computers, according to Psychologies magazine.

MPs will discuss whether to bring in measures to increase protection for those under the age of 18.

Ms Perry, who represents Devizes, in Wiltshire, said: "As a mother with three children I know how difficult it is to keep children from seeing inappropriate material on the internet.

"We already successfully regulate British TV channels, cinema screens, High Street hoardings and newsagent shelves to stop children seeing inappropriate images and mobile phone companies are able to restrict access to adult material so why should the internet be any different?"

Ms Perry added: "British internet service providers should share the responsibility to keep our children safe so I am calling for ISPs to offer an 'opt-in' system that uses age verification to access pornographic material."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11822874





For Google, the Browser Does It All
Claire Cain Miller

When a Google engineer gave top executives computers running the company’s new Chrome operating system, Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, tried to hold on to his computer running an older version.

“I reached to take the old one, and he reaches to grab it,” recalled Linus Upson, the vice president for engineering in charge of Chrome. “Then he realizes, ‘I don’t need it.’ ”

That is because Chrome stores everything that people have on their computers — like documents, photos and e-mail — online, or in tech parlance, in the cloud. In Google’s vision of a world where all computers run on its Chrome OS, anyone can walk up to any computer with an Internet connection and gain access to all their information.

If Mr. Brin was momentarily confused, it is no wonder that Google users and analysts are struggling to wrap their heads around what Google is trying to do with Chrome.

It is all the more confusing because Google already has a Web browser named Chrome. And Google already has an operating system, called Android.

Google says it will become clearer by the end of the year, when the company will introduce to the public a lightweight netbook computer that runs Chrome. Though Google declined to give details of the device, it is expected to be manufactured by another company and branded by Google, similar to the way Google released its Nexus phone, which runs on Android.

Google has high hopes for Chrome, and as the company weathers criticism for relying too much on search advertising for revenue, its executives have been describing Chrome as one of Google’s new businesses with huge potential.

With Chrome OS, Google is stepping once again into the territory of its archrivals, Microsoft and Apple, both of which make operating systems as well as widely used desktop software like Microsoft Office and Apple iPhoto and iTunes.

That software would not work on Chrome computers. Instead, Chrome users would use Google’s Web-based products, like Docs, Gmail and Picasa for word processing, e-mail and photos, or software from other companies, like Microsoft’s cloud-based Office 365. Google also plans to open a Chrome app store for software developers to dream up other Chrome tools.

The Chrome browser, which is installed on 8 percent of all PCs, shares a name because the operating system is, essentially, the same thing as the browser. “When people look at Chrome OS, they’re going to be like, ‘It’s just a browser, there’s nothing exciting here,’ ” Mr. Upson said. “Exactly. It’s just a browser, there’s nothing exciting here — that’s the point.”

Computers running Chrome OS will start in seconds, not minutes, and then users will see a browser through which applications and data can be used.

Yet while Google imagines a Web-based future, analysts wonder whether Chrome’s time has passed — before Google netbooks even hit the market.

When Google first talked about Chrome last year, netbooks — small, low-cost laptops with keyboards — were all the rage. But since then, smartphones and tablets — slate PCs with touch screens, like the iPad — have crushed that market.

“When Google made their decision early on with the Chrome OS project, Android was in its infancy and the tablet market didn’t really exist,” said Ray Valdes, a research vice president at Gartner who studies Internet platforms. “Now things have changed, and I think Google is likely recalibrating its strategy and product mix to take that into account.”

Google’s hugely successful Android operating system for mobile phones and tablets adds a level to the confusion. Chrome and Android are built by separate Google teams and the company says there is no conflict between the two. But its executives acknowledge they are not entirely sure how the two will coexist.

“We don’t want to call the question and say this one does one thing, this one does another,” said Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive. “So far the model seems to be the Android solution is particularly optimized for things that involve touch in some form and Chrome OS appears to be for keyboard-based solutions.”

But Mr. Upson said that Chrome OS would be a computing platform stretching to hand-held devices, tablets and TVs. “We are starting with laptops and we will expand in both directions,” he said.

“Google hasn’t told a great story about how Chrome and Android live relative to each other,” said Michael Gartenberg, a Gartner research director studying consumer applications. “It’s incumbent upon Google to start telling a story that makes sense. It gets to the point of confusion that you have a lot of folks saying, ‘What’s Steve Jobs’s phone number again?’ ”

Yet another source of puzzlement: even though Google has been promoting both Chrome and Android as new big businesses, they are free and open-source, meaning that hardware manufacturers don’t have to pay Google to use them on devices, and software developers don’t have to pay to use them to build their own operating systems or browsers.

That actually makes perfect sense, said Sundar Pichai, vice president for product management with Chrome, because Google makes almost all its revenue from things people do on browsers.

“These are enablers — platforms on which people use Google services,” Mr. Pichai said. “Both offer benefits in terms of how people can use services easily and increase usage, and that gives them a better experience and over all generates more revenue for us.”

Though some people might worry about storing their private information on Google’s servers instead of their own computers, Google says Chrome is safer because security updates happen automatically and if people lose their computers, their data is inaccessible once they reset their passwords.

Mr. Upson says that 60 percent of businesses could immediately replace their Windows machines with computers running Chrome OS. He also says he hopes it will put corporate systems administrators out of work because software updates will be made automatically over the Web. But the vast majority of businesses still use desktop Microsoft Office products and cannot imagine moving entirely to Web-based software or storing sensitive documents online — at least not yet.

Even if Google missed the netbook craze, it may in fact be ahead of its time in imagining a Web-based future, Mr. Gartenberg said. “Android, where everything is very application-dependent, is a response to the things that are here today,” he said. “Chrome is preparing for a future when everything can be delivered through the Web.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/25/te.../25chrome.html





The Cold War: Then and Now

An NSA director compares cyber war to US-Soviet Cold War
Robert Mullins

When Dickie George of the National Security Agency says, "This is life and death and about our freedom and our way of life," he’s not talking about the Soviet Union firing nuclear missiles at the U.S. or infiltrating our government with spies bent on subversion. He’s talking about cyber criminals hacking into personal, business or government computers, stealing information, intellectual property and/or money.

George is the Information Assurance Technical Director at the NSA and compared the threats of the current cyber cold war to the Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet Union in a webcast Wednesday hosted by RSA Conference, the network security industry convention held twice annually in the U.S. and Europe, which I cover for news about Microsoft. I found the parallels interesting and provocative.

George says fighting today’s cyber cold war depends on building the best security into computer technology, continuous monitoring of networks for threats, and the adoption of security that is transparent to the end user. "When we do this we can make the nation a much harder target," he said.

The "threat adversary model" between today’s cyber war and the Cold War that raged from the end of World War II until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 share six common characteristics, George said: Capabilties; resources; intent; motivation; access; and risk aversion.

Capabilities and resources of the Cold War included the armies of each country, their nuclear stockpiles and spy networks. The intent and motivation concern each country’s efforts to beat each other to the moon or to gather intelligence on the other. Access refers to the ability to obtain the technology to build spaceships or nuclear weapons, or the opportunity to plant spies. And risk aversion refers to each country’s reluctance to actually wage a nuclear war based on the concept of mutually-assured destruction.

In the cyber cold war, the capabilities and resources of our adversaries refers to the ability of hackers to control thousands of computers to launch attacks or share code that allows them to infiltrate systems. Intent and motivation cover efforts to steal intellectual property from businesses, secrets from governments and money from everybody. Access speaks to the ability of cyber criminals to leverage the interconnectedness of the Internet for their efforts and risk aversion is, well, pretty much nonexistent.

"Back then, if the Soviets fired a missile you knew it was the government and could tell where it was fired from," George said. "Today, it’s bits and you don’t see them coming through the air."

While one country may be able to determine if a nation-state orchestrated a cyber attack, it’s still difficult to definitely attribute it to a source. And besides, it’s not just nations that launch attacks but criminal hackers, terrorists or organized crime. The attack vector also has widened from the Cold War days, he said, with individuals, government agencies and corporations being targeted. And like building missile defense systems or bomb shelters, as was done in the 1950’s, the key to defending against today’s cyber cold war threat is to "make ourselves harder targets."

"The cyber security professionals that we are creating today have to make security invisible to the end user," George said. "They have to make it inherent in the out-of-the-box product that you buy and the only way to do that is for us all to work together, industry, government and academia. We need to be partnering on this."
http://www.networkworld.com/communit...r-then-and-now





UK Gov Issues DA Notices Over WikiLeaks Bomb

Editors asked to keep mum

The UK Government has issued Defence Advisory Notices to editors of UK news outlets in an attempt to hush up the latest bombshell from whistle-blowing web site WikiLeaks.

DA Notices, the last of which was issued in April 2009 after sensitive defence documents were photographed using a telephoto lens in the hand of Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick as he arrived at No 10 Downing Street for a briefing, are requests not to publish, and therefore not legally enforceable.

Which means there are no 'official' repercussions for ignoring the notices, but they are generally adhered to.

The news came to light in two Tweets from WikiLeaks one of which said, "UK Government has issued a "D-notice" warning to all UK news editors, asking to be briefed on upcoming WikiLeaks stories." the follow up pointed out that the notices were "Type 1" which relates to "Military Operations Plans and Capabilities", and "Type 5" which relates to "United Kingdom Security and Intelligence Special Services."

WikiLeaks says the forthcoming mega-leak is seven times larger than the 400,000-document Iraq War Dossier and would redefine global history
http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/11/26/uk...ikileaks-bomb/





Assange Beseiged
Israel Shamir and Paul Bennett

The plot thickens as our favorite hero of the Matrix; our own “Captain Neo” Julian Assange, faces danger yet again. When we last parted company with the legendary founder of WikiLeaks, he was breathing a sigh of relief after dodging spurious double-rape charges. The complaints were dropped, and our hero was free to roam the globe once again. But soap opera plots are repetitive; the story was quickly recycled and now our brave captain is again under threat of being castrated on Stockholm’s Stora Torget, or whatever the latest craven penalty is for molesting sacred Nordic virgins in a land where Vikings once ruled.

In other words, the farcical rape charges have once again been leveled against the Pentagon’s Public Enemy Number One. Julian Assange now stands accused of: (1) not calling a young woman the day after he had enjoyed a night with her, (2) asking her to pay for his bus ticket, (3) having unsafe sex, and (4) participating in two brief affairs in the course of one week. These four minor charges, worthy of Leopold Bloom’s mock trial in the Nightown chapter in Ulysses, have been shaken and fermented until they were able to cook up a half-baked rape case! Step down Iran; Sweden takes the cake! While Iran is notorious for unyielding conservative sentences against adulterers, Sweden shows us what the liberal side of the coin looks like as she invents criminal charges for failing to telephone and for careless use of preservatives in consensual acts of affection. Worse, they are purposely conflating consensual sex with rape for political purposes. In this, Sweden makes a mockery of the very real crime of violent rape.

The Swedes have a practical reason behind their deceptively slapstick police-work. The WikiLeaks founder, pursued by malevolent forces around the world, sought momentary relief beneath Sweden’s reputation as a bastion of free speech. But the moment Julian sought the protection of Swedish media law, the CIA immediately threatened to discontinue intelligence sharing with SEPO, the Swedish Secret Service. That got the present right-wing government out of its chair, as it does everything it can to bury the Prime Minister Olof Palme’s legacy of careful neutrality. The suspicion of whether the rape farce is an orchestrated campaign, might be illuminated by these facts: (1) Sweden sent troops to Afghanistan, (2) Assange’s WikiLeaks published the Afghan War Diary which exposed this cruel and needless neo-colonial campaign. Furthermore, the expected release of new secret materials by WikiLeaks might just influence the general elections on September 19. Perhaps that explains the sudden police raid on a WikiLeaks server.

An American Tea Party website the RightwingNews.com suggested that “a CIA agent with a sniper rifle rattle a bullet around [Assange’s] skull the next time he appears in public as a warning”. Rest assured that the CIA is wiser than the Tea Party. They at least have learned the lesson of Che Guevara. Nowadays they ruin a rebel’s reputation instead of wasting a bullet. They won’t raise Assange up to become a martyr, they simply use his own erstwhile allies to reduce him to a laughing stock. They stain him with opprobrium. It is much more certain and final than the marksman’s shot. History is witness to their growing efficiency in using this tactic. In the 70’s, they could only bring themselves to say that Philip Agee was a womanizer and a drunkard. Nowadays they do not stint at charges of pedophilia, for example to humiliate Scott Ritter for failing to go along with George W Bush’s charade of Iraqi WMD. As you might expect, the rape campaign against Assange might be just an initial volley. Perhaps they will decide he is a pedophile too. The unspoken threat is enough to send some faint-hearted supporters of WikiLeaks scurrying for cover.

The bullet can always come later, once the victim has been successfully isolated by the smear campaign. The Gospels tell us that hardly anyone followed Jesus to Golgotha, though just a week earlier the people of Jerusalem hailed Him with hosannas. A Jewish anti-Gospel explains that this was the result of a successful smear campaign managed by Judas, a surprisingly modernist reading for an early medieval story.

For a smear that really sticks, you need to get it from an ex-apostle. An accusation by a Caiaphas does not impress. If you are targeting a leftist, hire leftists. For example, Trotskyites were willing and useful tools against the Communists. Pseudo Anti-Zionists are currently being used to hamstring a genuine Pro-Palestinian movement. Who are the Judases of this campaign against our Julian?

* An anonymous group claiming to be “Wikileaks insiders” uploaded a new site full of “revelations” about Assange’s past and present, claiming he lives in luxury in South Africa on donated funds – though he appears almost daily in Swedish media and police reports.

* Another ex-apostle is the Icelander politician Birgitta Jonsdottir, who is misrepresented as a “Wikileaks spokesperson”. She called on Assange “to step down” and leave Wikileaks to drift without his guidance – as if WikiLeaks is somehow separate from Assange.

* The pseudo-progressive organization Reporters Sans Frontières attacked Assange for endangering the lives of innocent American secret agents in Afghanistan. Despite its ‘leftist’ terminology, RSF is a private organization drawing funds from US government sources aiming to destabilize Cuba. It is connected to Cuban émigrés in Miami.

* Anna Ardin (the official complainant) is often described by the media as a “leftist”. She has ties to the US-financed anti-Castro and anti-communist groups. She published her anti-Castro diatribes (see here and here) in the Swedish-language publication Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas put out by Misceláneas de Cuba. From Oslo, Professor Michael Seltzer points out that this periodical is the product of a well-financed anti-Castro organization in Sweden. He further notes that the group is connected with Union Liberal Cubana led by Carlos Alberto Montaner whose CIA ties were exposed here. Note that Ardin was deported from Cuba for subversive activities. In Cuba she interacted with the feminist anti-Castro group Las damas de blanco (the Ladies in White). This group receives US government funds and the convicted anti-communist terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is a friend and supporter. Wikipedia quotes Hebe de Bonafini, president of the Argentine Madres de Plaza de Mayo as saying that “the so-called Ladies in White defend the terrorism of the United States.”

However we do not have to accept the single-bullet theory. Life is more complicated than that. In addition to her anti-Castro, pro-CIA streak, Anna Ardin apparently indulges in her favorite sport of male-bashing. A Swedish forum reports that she is an expert on sexual harassment and the male “master suppression techniques”. Once, as she was lecturing, a male student in the audience looked at his notes instead of staring at her. Anna Ardin reported him for sexual harassment because he discriminated against her for being a woman and because she claimed he made use of the male “master suppression technique” in trying to make her feel invisible. As soon as the student learned about her complaint, he contacted her to apologize and explain himself. Anna Ardin’s response was to once again report him for sexual harassment, again because he was using the “master suppression technique”, this time to belittle her feelings.

Ardin is apparently involved with a “Christian” Social-Democrat group. The Swedish church has a precious few male priests: what was once the struggle for female equality has ended up with men being effectively removed from service. Nowadays very few Swedish male-female couples marry in the church, or get married at all; most Swedish gay couples, however, are proud to become “man and wife” in the church. This is all good news for wealthy Swedes: deserted churches sell their properties (once enjoyed by the community) to be fenced off by the nouveau riche created by the latest privatization wave. So much for Swedish social democracy!

The second accuser, Sofia Wilen, 26, is Anna’ friend. Here is a video of an Assange press conference where one can see the girls together. Those present at the conference marveled at her groupie-like behavior. Though rock stars are used to girls dying to have sex with them, it is much less common in the harsh field of political journalism. Sofia worked hard to bed Assange, according to her own confession; she was also the first to complain to police. She is little known and her motives are vague. Why might a young woman (who shares her life with American artist Seth Benson) pursue such a sordid political adventure?

The brilliant Israeli writer Gilad Atzmon describes, in his funny novel My One and Only Love, how the secret services employ young ladies for honey-traps. Is this the case here? Perhaps it is nothing more than a case of gold digging. New legislation, in Sweden and all over Europe, has made men extremely vulnerable to extortion scams of this sort. A young Swedish woman, 26 (her name withheld) succeeded in winning over a million dollars during the course of one vacation in Greece, as reported by the Daily Telegraph. She complained of being raped. Four men were arrested, their names disclosed, and their jobs jeopardized. She went back home a millionaire, her sacred identity safely preserved. Her success begs imitation: according to an EU report, Sweden has twenty times more rape complaints than were generated by the hot-blooded Italians. Most are dismissed right away, and justly so.

Rape is a horrible crime, and it should not be stretched to encompass minor misdemeanors and moral failings (like the failure to give an encouraging phone call the next day). Tellingly, when the complainant’s advocate was asked why the young women were unsure whether they were raped, he replied: “They are not lawyers”. Rape (like murder) is a crime that one needs no lawyers to understand. Rape is a capital crime: if the rape charges are proved false, then certainly the complainant should be charged with criminal defamation.

As for Julian Assange, we need him. We need our captain Neo, whether chaste or womanizer, in order to uncover the secret doings of our governments behind the Matrix. For our own sakes, we must all do our part to protect him from castrating feminists and secret services alike.
http://www.counterpunch.org/shamir09142010.html





Swedish Court Rejects Assange Appeal

A Swedish court ruled on Wednesday to reject WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange's appeal against an arrest warrant for rape, meaning that the Australian remains wanted worldwide.

"The Svea Court of Appeal has today decided to reject Julian Assange's appeal against the Stockholm district court decision to remand him," the court wrote in a statement on Wednesday afternoon.

The appeals court said that it had "in certain parts" of its ruling come to a different conclusion than the district court but that "grounds for a remand order remained".

An international arrest warrant was issued for the 39-year-old Australian on November 20th following a decision by the district court on November 18th.

The Stockholm district court ordered an arrest warrant for Assange for questioning on "probable cause of suspected rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion" in Sweden in August.

The court order allowed prosecutor Marianne Ny, who had requested Assange's detention, to prepare the international arrest warrant for the head of the whistleblower website, who is believed to be in Britain.

Ny insisted on Thursday that arresting Assange was the only way she could be sure of questioning him about the allegations of raping one woman and sexually molesting another.

Assange has strongly denied the charges and hinted that they could be part of a "smear campaign" against his whistleblower website for publishing classified US documents on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He has also claimed, via his Swedish lawyer Björn Hurtig, that he has made several offers to be interviewed by police. Prosecutor Marianne Ny has since stated that she was not aware of any such offers.

WikiLeaks last month published an unprecedented 400,000 classified US documents on the Iraq war and posted 77,000 secret US files on the Afghan conflict in July.

The website recently claimed on its Twitter feed that it was preparing its largest leak ever, claiming that "coming months will see a new world, where global history is redefined".
http://www.thelocal.se/30408/20101124/





WikiLeaks Ditches Swedish Web Host

WikiLeaks has abandoned the Swedish internet hosting company it had previously used to store many of the confidential documents revealed by the whistleblower website.

“They left without saying anything to us. They haven’t used our services for awhile,” Mikael Viborg, CEO of Swedish web hosting company PRQ, told the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper.

Viborg told the newspaper that he estimates stopped using his facilities about a month ago. He has since turned off the machines.

“They should have actually said they didn’t want to use our services any longer. We sent a final bill a few weeks ago which still hasn’t been paid,” he said.

Instead of servers based in Sweden, WikiLeaks now relies on machines based in France, according to DN, which used a traceroute to track the path traveled by internet traffic seeking to reach WikiLeaks.

But internet service provider Bahnhof denied the DN report that WikiLeaks had abandoned Sweden altogether.

According to Bahnhof board chair Jon Karlung, WikiLeaks has used servers at his company’s facilities located on Södermalm in southern Stockholm since September.

“They are still in Sweden and are now customers with us. They have their homepage and database with us in a nuclear weapon-proof bunker under Vita Bergen,” Karlung told the TT news agency on Sunday, referring to the company's underground facilities housed in a former civil defence communications centre.

“We see that there is traffic going both to the homepage and the database right now, so it’s absolutely in operation.”

Karlung explained that the Bahnhof servers now house the database which includes much of the material related to the Iraq war which WikiLeaks released in October.

“WikiLeaks has databases in many parts of the world, like in Paris and Amsterdam, for example, which is natural for what they do. But it’s not true that they’ve left Sweden,” he said.

PRQ revealed in August, just two weeks before the surfacing of rape allegations against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, it had been helping the whistleblower websites since 2008 by hosting its servers at a secret basement location in a Stockholm suburb.
WikiLeaks "contacted us through a third party in Sweden a few years ago and... their traffic goes through us," the 27-year-old Viborg told AFP at the time.

He said the company's server hall housed several hundred servers and was located "somewhere in Solna," some five kilometres (three miles) from Stockholm's centre.

WikiLeaks had purchased a so-called tunnel service, he said, meaning "the material itself is somewhere else but is sent through our machines so for someone downloading the material, it looks like it is coming from us."

He stressed however that "we have no control over what WikiLeaks publishes.

Sweden's constitutional protections for confidential sources was cited at the time as one of the reasons behind WikiLeaks' choice of Sweden as a home for its servers.

Rules on source protection are written into the Swedish constitution and effectively block individuals and government agencies from attempting to uncover journalists’ sources. Revealing the identity if sources who wish to remain anonymous is a punishable offence.

However, the law only applied to websites or publications that possess a special publishing licence (utgivningsbevis) granting them constitutional protection, and WikiLeaks has not acquired the requisite paperwork, it was reported at the time.

WikiLeaks, which was founded in December 2006 and styles itself "the first intelligence agency of the people," published some 77,000 classified documents on the US-led war in Afghanistan in late July.

Then in October, the website released nearly 400,000 classified documents concerning the US war in Iraq.

An international warrant for Assange’s arrest was issued by Swedish police on Friday. The WikieLeaks founder has been accused of raping one woman in Sweden and sexually molesting another while visiting Sweden in August.

He has strongly denied the charges and hinted that they could be part of a "smear campaign" against his whistleblower website for publishing classified US documents on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
http://www.thelocal.se/30340/20101121/





‘Harry Potter’ Has $330 Million Debut Weekend
Brooks Barnes

The seventh Harry Potter movie opened to a jaw-dropping $330 million in global ticket sales over the weekend, underscoring the magical powers of the Warner Brothers marketing and distribution departments.

That brawny total easily made “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1” No. 1 in North America, where the boy wizard generated an estimated $125.1 million. It was the second-biggest domestic opening for the Harry Potter franchise; adjusting for higher ticket prices, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” sold $127.4 million over its first three days in November 2005.

The strong results for the film, the penultimate in the franchise, reflect the continued popularity of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, and “Deathly Hallows” also earned strong reviews.

But equally important was a yearlong, full-court press by Warner’s global marketing chief, Sue Kroll, to position “Deathly Hallows” as a must-see event for children and adults alike. The advertising campaign played up the sophisticated, darker elements of the plot. Harry and pals are now grown up, for instance, and the good-versus-evil battle is intensifying as the story line reaches its climax.

The marketing materials also injected some edge into the franchise by taking risks like identifying the film only by the letters “HP7” and splattering posters and billboards with what looked like blood; one poster depicted the Hogwarts castle in flames.

It paid off: about 25 percent of the North American audience for “Deathly Hallows” was in the 18-to-34-year-old demographic, according to Dan Fellman, Warner’s president of domestic distribution. In comparison, about 10 percent of the audience for the first film in the series came from that age bracket. Mr. Fellman noted that “Deathly Hallows” beat “Alice in Wonderland” to become the top opening movie in Imax history.

Imax showings on 239 screens accounted for $12.4 million of the domestic box office and contributed $16.6 million (on 340 screens) of the international gross. At its opening, “Alice” took in $12.1 million domestically from Imax and $15.3 million internationally.

“No other franchise has been able to age and expand the audience this way,” Mr. Fellman said.

Early last week, the first 36 minutes of “Deathly Hallows,” about a quarter of the movie, leaked onto the Internet, prompting a fresh round of hand-wringing about piracy and leading to some worries that the movie’s opening weekend would suffer as a result. Mr. Fellman said that the studio was investigating but that the pirated footage did not appear to hurt the release. (If anything, the news media coverage of the leak helped.)

The Harry Potter series will conclude with the 3-D release of the second half of “Deathly Hallows” on July 15. The franchise, overseen by Alan F. Horn, Warner’s chief operating officer, has generated some $6 billion at the global box office and billions more in DVD, television and merchandise sales.

The success of “Deathly Hallows” underscores just how big a hole Warner, owned by Time Warner, will have to fill once the series ends, box office analysts said.

The weekend was also big for “Tron: Legacy,” the forthcoming Walt Disney Studios release; that picture’s final trailer played before “Deathly Hallows” in a push by Disney to attract the broadest audience possible for the science-fiction adventure, which arrives in theaters on Dec. 17 after three years of marketing.

That pre-Christmas weekend promises to bring one of the more brutal box office battles of the year. Typically, rival studios would steer clear of a release as enormous as “Tron: Legacy.” But “Yogi Bear” (Warner), the James L. Brooks comedy “How Do You Know” (Sony Pictures Entertainment) and “The Fighter” (Paramount Pictures) will all enter the marketplace or expand to wide release on Dec. 17, setting up an intense showdown going into the crucial Christmas holiday.

DreamWorks Animation’s “Megamind” was second at the box office last weekend, selling about $16.2 million in North America in its third week in theaters for a new domestic total of $109.5 million, according to Hollywood.com, which compiles ticketing statistics. “Unstoppable,” a thriller about a runaway train, from 20th Century Fox, was third, with $13.1 million in its second week for a new total of about $42 million.

The Warner comedy “Due Date,” in its third week, was fourth with $9.2 million for a new total of $72.7 million.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/22/bu.../22potter.html





Netflix’s Move Onto the Web Stirs Rivalries
Tim Arango and David Carr

In a matter of months, the movie delivery company Netflix has gone from being the fastest-growing first-class mail customer of the United States Postal Service to the biggest source of streaming Web traffic in North America during peak evening hours.

That transformation — from a mail-order business to a technology company — is revolutionizing the way millions of people watch television, but it’s also proving to be a big headache for TV providers and movie studios, which increasingly see Netflix as a competitive threat, even as they sell Netflix their content.

The dilemma for Hollywood was neatly spelled out in a Netflix announcement Monday of a new subscription service: $7.99 a month for unlimited downloads of movies and television shows, compared with $19.99 a month for a plan that allows the subscriber to have three discs out at a time, sent through the mail, plus unlimited downloads. For studios that only a few years ago were selling new DVDs for $30, that represents a huge drop in profits.

“Right now, Netflix is a distribution platform, and has very little competition, but that’s changing,” said Warren N. Lieberfarb, a consultant who played a critical role in creating the DVD while at Warner Brothers.

For the first time, the company will spend more over the holidays to stream movies than to ship DVDs in its familiar red envelopes (although it is still spending more than half a billion dollars on postage this year). And that shift coincides with an ominous development for cable companies, which long controlled home entertainment: for the first time in their history, cable television subscriptions fell in the United States in the last two quarters — a trend some attribute to the rise of Netflix, which allows consumers to bypass their cable box to stream movies and shows.

Netflix now has the frothy stock price to show for its success. The stock has enjoyed a Google-like rise, nearly quadrupling from its 52-week low in January, and with a market value of nearly $10 billion, Netflix is now worth more than some of the Hollywood studios that license movies to it.

In some ways, the closest parallel as a one-stop digital marketplace is iTunes, the Apple service that has put itself at the center of the digital world and has used that power to demand concessions from its suppliers.

“How did Hollywood end up supplying Netflix in the first place, particularly a product that was given to them on a flat-rate, wholesale basis?” said Jonathan A. Knee, a media investment banker and co-author of “The Curse of the Mogul.”

As recently as a few years ago, Netflix didn’t look like a case study in success: if anything, it seemed to be just the latest media company destined to be run over by technology.

From the company’s beginning in 1997, Reed Hastings, the chief executive and co-founder, had always thought of Netflix as an entertainment distribution service rather than a mail-order company, and by 2000, the company was experimenting with delivering movies over the Internet. In 2003, Netflix came up with a hardware solution, a $300 hard drive that would download films. But slow speeds — it could take six to eight hours to download a feature length film — doomed that effort. (Mr. Hastings declined to be interviewed for this article.)

But the advent of streaming — watching video in real time as opposed to downloading — gained prominence in 2005 with the explosive success of YouTube. Mr. Hastings decided that software, not hardware, was the key to delivering films over the Internet and pushed to develop high-quality streaming technology. Pricing remained an issue, however, and in a move that gave Netflix a big head start, the company decided to give the service away to existing mail-order customers.

Netflix now has more than 16 million subscribers. The company does not release figures on the most popular films or television shows streamed, but as a general rule, films that can be streamed instantly are not fresh out of theaters or plucked from the current TV season. People who want to relive past seasons of “The Office” can do so instantly, but if they are looking for the current season — or any season of “Mad Men” — they are out of luck.

“We are very proud to announce that by every measure we are now a streaming company, which also offers DVD-by-mail,” Mr. Hastings recently told Wall Street analysts.

Just as important, Netflix arrived with an open checkbook at a time when the film industry’s main source of profits, the sale of DVDs, was plummeting.

“As the home entertainment industry comes under pressure, they are the only guy standing there in a red shirt writing checks,” said Rich Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG Research. “That makes Netflix really unique right now.”

The biggest check came a few months ago, when the company spent nearly $1 billion to stream movies from three Hollywood studios — Paramount, MGM and Lionsgate.

Steve Swasey, the company’s vice president for communications, said, “As we move from paying U.S. postage to acquiring movies and television episodes from the studios and networks, Netflix can become one of their top customers.”

But digital economics can be much less lucrative to content companies. For example, under the terms of Netflix’s deal with Starz, the pay-TV channel, which allows Netflix to stream movies from Sony and Disney, Netflix pays about 15 cents a month for each subscriber, much less than the $4 to $5 a month that cable and satellite owners pay for access to Starz, according to research by Mr. Greenfield.

For that reason, Netflix is increasingly viewed as a threat by cable companies and movie studios, who are considering a variety of ways to put the brakes on the company’s growth.

For example, big media companies like Time Warner are moving quickly to offer their own streaming products. Studios have pushed back on release dates, requiring Netflix to wait through a window of 28 days while studios pushed more expensive and lucrative sales of the DVD and on-demand versions on cable.

And the studios are positioning themselves to demand more money in future negotiations over streaming rights, especially next year when Netflix’s deal with Starz expires.

“Though already a significant customer, they’ve grown faster than anyone anticipated, and going forward we expect the economics to improve significantly," said John Calkins, executive vice president of digital and commercial innovation at Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

For now, Netflix has become a barometer of the apparently voracious consumer appetite for streaming movies: a recent study by Sandvine, a broadband equipment maker, showed that Netflix, surprisingly, accounted for more than 20 percent of all Internet download traffic in North America in peak evening hours.

“Netflix used an open-source network, the U.S. Postal Service, to launch an alternative distribution business without asking anyone for permission,” said Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor and author of “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.” “Now they are using another open-source network, the Internet, to transform the business. It is much easier for Netflix to change, because they don’t have to undergo a kind of religious conversion like media companies will have to.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/25/bu...25netflix.html





Netflix's Secret Sauce for Acquiring Content
Greg Sandoval

If you're a Netflix subscriber, you should be happy with the sounds coming out of Hollywood.

One entertainment executive told me last week that other Web video companies looking for content should use Netflix as a model for how to work with the major studios. He called the company a "good partner," high praise coming from an industry in which few have anything good to say about Internet companies. This bodes well for Netflix's chances of obtaining more streaming content. When it comes to the studios' complaints about Netflix, there's also something positive to be found.

"While there are things in the Netflix system that are clearly cannibalistic [to sales], there are things we can change," Craig Kornblau, president of Universal Pictures' home entertainment unit, said during a conference appearance earlier this month. "They can pay us more, or we can reduce the quality of what we give them."

Kornblau obviously doesn't think that Netflix paid enough for content it licensed in several high-profile deals with the studios this year. That may mean trouble in the future, but Kornblau's statement, coming so soon after Netflix landed the licensing agreements, also suggests that the company's ability to acquire content isn't solely dependent on the size of its checks. Netflix appears to have more to bargain with than just cash.

The hit rental service is now the supreme power in U.S. video rentals. It has put itself in that position by building one of the most loyal followings and strongest brands of any digital-entertainment company. Netflix is respected by consumers for doing away with the much-loathed late fees, offering low prices, and providing one of the best viewer experiences online. Netflix has also stood out among Silicon Valley companies for its willingness to partner with the studios.

"It's not just about writing the big check," Ted Sarandos, Netflix's chief content officer, said in a recent interview with CNET. "A lot of people have written big checks and didn't get what they needed."

One of the best stories in digital entertainment this year is how Netflix built up its streaming-video library against the odds. It wasn't long ago that pundits predicted that Netflix would be unable to pay the studios' rates and would see its supply of streaming content cut off. The naysayers argued that Netflix would go bankrupt or alienate subscribers by forcing steep price increases on them.

So far, the company has defied the doubters.

Embedded in Hollywood
For tech companies, acquiring rights to film and TV content has proven to be a challenge. For instance, the four major broadcast networks have blocked Google TV from accessing their Web content. To some studio insiders, the Silicon Valley guys were just the latest hustlers to come to town. The Web video companies were either devising software or sites to pirate or port in films and TV shows, or were dismissive of the studios' digital strategies. YouTube employees once famously referred to the video portal created by NBC Universal and News Corp. as the "clown company." It turned out to be Hulu.

A high-handed attitude isn't what Reed Hastings wanted. Netflix's CEO, named "Person of the Year" last week by Fortune magazine, dispatched Sarandos to Los Angeles to pursue a different strategy.

"Unlike the companies that [tried to strike partnerships with the studios] before, we didn't make the mistake of relegating relationships to agents and lawyers to broker deals," Sarandos said in a recent interview with CNET. "The same way we don't outsource our [intellectual property], we don't outsource our relationships...It's our goal to be embedded into the studios' business and understand what drives their decision making. We do our best to be good partners."

The close Hollywood ties help Netflix managers find ways to help the studios, as well as themselves. One example involves the recent decline in sales of DVD box sets. Many TV shows aren't selling well on DVD, even as the costs of producing one-hour serialized shows go up, Sarandos said. When it comes to syndication, a dramatic series that includes more adult themes, such as Showtime's "Dexter" or Fox's "Lie to me," are traditionally a tough sell. One issue with most serialized shows is that if viewers miss an episode, they fall behind in the story.

Netflix's streaming service is one solution. Users don't have to worry about falling behind. They choose which episode to watch and when.

Netflix also impressed many at the studios by agreeing to help protect DVD sales. Earlier this year, the Los Gatos, Calif.-based company agreed to delay renting some of the studios' newly released DVDs until 28 days after their titles hit store shelves. In return, Netflix received access to more TV shows and films for its streaming service.

Blockbuster and Netflix data
There are other, more practical reasons for strong Netflix-Hollywood ties: Blockbuster is all but gone. The brick-and-mortar retail chain, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September, was a big source of revenue for the studios. And just as DVD sales plummet, Hollywood's attempt to persuade consumers to upgrade film collections to Blu-ray discs has largely failed. The studios know that Netflix, with its 18 million subscribers, can help fill these holes.

More importantly, the studios know the trend in renting movies is to do it online. If there's a better way than Netflix for the studios to stake out prime digital turf, it hasn't presented itself.

And then there's all that customer data. Eric Garland, CEO and co-founder of Big Champagne, a company that tracks digital-media consumption, argues that Netflix's greatest advantage--indeed, one of the things that appeals most to Hollywood--is what it knows about its customers' renting and viewing habits.

"Netflix is cleaning up because they started seeing changes in consumer behavior before consumers knew they changed their behavior," Garland said. During the period before it started offering streaming content on demand, for example, Netflix noticed that its subscribers had already started to slow down the volume of their DVD viewing.

"We were updating the queues, we were creating the lists, but that ping-pong of DVDs going back and forth in the mail had started to slow. You didn't know what that meant. You were busy going 'Ah, I need to watch that DVD, but I don't want to watch it tonight.' You put it back down. What they saw was that you needed better and more immediate access to more titles," Garland said. "That's old news now, but they've been in possession of that for years. So the reason that Netflix is of such strategic value to Hollywood is that they already own the new consumer who doesn't want to bother with the disc."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20023439-261.html





Netflix's Advice on Moving to Amazon Web Services
Alex Williams

This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware. Read their latest case study: Ausclad Responds to Energy Demands with Virtualization.

The Netflix's video streaming service has nearly tripled in growth during the past year. To scale the service, Netflix has moved its API and other operations to Amazon Web Services (AWS) over the past several months.

In an interview today on the Cloudscaling blog, Netflix Cloud Architect Adrian Cockcroft discusses why Netflix moved to AWS. He gives advice for those that wish to follow in Netflix's path. In particular, he outlines why a public cloud infrastructure has certain advantages compared to building out a data center.

Cloudscaling CEO Randy Bias conducted the interview. Cloudscaling works with telecommunications companies, service providers, and enterprises to build Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) environments. The interview is part of a series Bias is doing with cloud computing innovators.

Cockcroft said encoding movies for streaming, log analysis, the production website and the API moved from the Netflix data center to AWS, and that most everything that scales with customers and streaming usage is now on AWS.

Operations staying in Netflix data centers include "most internal IT that scales with employee count, legacy stuff, DVD shipping systems. account sign-up and billing systems," Cockcroft said.

Netflx uses Akamai, Limelight and Level3 content delivery networks for streaming movies. Cockcroft says that AWS CDN service isn't a big enough player in the space at this point to use for that service.

Cockcroft says business agility and the inability to predict capacity are the main drivers for moving to AWS. Business is accelerating. Netflix customer growth is up 52% compared to last year. Customers using streaming services are up 145% to 11 million subscribers.
The Return on Investment

Cockcroft says its Netflix data centers run Oracle on IBM hardware. He says Netflix could have added commodity hardware and scaled its data center but the cost would have been substantial.

It would have also meant hiring any number of systems administrators and database managers. In contrast, Cockcroft says Netflix has "added four to five times as many systems in the cloud as the total we have in our datacenter over the last year."

Scaling is elastic with AWS. Costs are based on usage. When Amazon drops prices, capacity gets cheaper for Netflix. When AWS introduces a new instance type, the technology is available within hours. AWS introduced its 11th new instance last week. It is called the Cluster GPU Instance processes and renders some of the most complex actions such as those required in financial services and the sciences.
Netflix Gives Some Advice

Cockcroft says the biggest challenge is to get in a Google mindset. It means re-architecting applications for a multi-tenant environment:

"You have to assume that the hardware and underlying services are ephemeral, unreliable and may be broken or unavailable at any point, and that the other tenants in the multi-tenant public cloud will add random congestion and variance. In reality you always had this problem at scale, even with the most reliable hardware, so cloud ready architecture is about taking the patterns you have to use at large scale, and using them at a smaller scale to leverage the lowest cost infrastructure."

The next challenge is a political one. Cockcroft says a CIO would prefer to build data centers than become irrelevant to internal customers. These internal customers will eventually turn to services like AWS. The cost comparisons are pretty clear. AWS is far less expensive.

"For me, if its not multi-tenant, it's not cloud, and only the biggest organizations should be building datacenters to host clouds, and they should be offering them publicly. If you are doing internal cloud and you have a dominant internal customer then you are doing it wrong, because you have to choose between baking in a lot of unused extra capacity or the risk that at some point that customer will blow up your cloud."

Compliance issues still create problems. Organizations do not consider the cloud in their checklists. That will change. It's just a matter of when it will occur.

In the end, Bias presents a solid testimony from Cockcroft about the disruptions we see in the market. The interview shows how one customer is scaling its services with a cloud infrastructure. That's helpful on a number of levels for companies considering a move to cloud computing.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/20...-its-api-a.php





Netflix Raises Prices, Offers Stream-Only Service

Netflix Inc said it will offer its first unlimited streaming-only subscription plan in the U.S. for $7.99 a month, and raise prices of its popular unlimited streaming and unlimited DVD plan by a dollar to $9.99 a month.

Netflix shares rose 5 pct in premarket trade following the announcement.

The company said on Monday the plan will take effect immediately.

"We are now primarily a streaming video company delivering a wide selection of TV shows and films over the Internet," said Chief Executive Reed Hastings in a statement.

Netflix, which gained success as a DVD rental by mail service, has more than 16 million members in the U.S. and Canada. It debuted its first streaming only service in Canada in September.

Netflix has undergone stellar growth since its 1999 debut. Its shares have gained many-fold since a 2002 IPO.

(Reporting by Liana B. Baker, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6AL2QR20101122





Google Seeks Digital Rights to Miramax Films: Report

Google Inc is talking with Filmyard Holdings to gain digital rights to film studio Miramax's archives to boost its efforts to turn YouTube into a destination with longer-form content, the New York Post said, citing people close to the situation.

The current deal may include rights for more than 700 films, the paper said.

Google may have to compete with streaming and mail-in rental company Netflix, which has also shown interest in Miramax's film library, the Post said.

In July, Walt Disney Co sold Miramax, the studio behind such films as "Trainspotting" and "No Country for Old Men," to Filmyard Holdings for more than $660 million.

Google's official blog showed that 35 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute as of last week, up from 24 hours in March.

A Google spokesman told the Post: "We're always talking to the studios about different things and Disney remains a valuable YouTube partner. Outside of that, we don't comment on rumor or speculation."

Reuters could not immediately reach Google for comment.

(Reporting by Thyagaraju Adinarayan in Bangalore; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6AL2HF20101122





Cyberthieves Still Rely on Human Foot Soldiers
Alicia A. Caldwell and Pete Yost



Sitting at a computer somewhere overseas in January 2009, computer hackers went phishing.

Within minutes of casting their electronic bait they caught what they were looking for: A small Michigan company where an employee unwittingly clicked on an official-looking e-mail that secretly gave cyberthieves the keys to the firm's bank account.

Before company executives knew what was happening, Experi-Metal Inc., a suburban Detroit manufacturing company, was broke. Its $560,000 bank balance had been electronically scattered into bank accounts in Russia, Estonia, Scotland, Finland and around the U.S.

In August, the Catholic Diocese in Des Moines, Iowa, lost about $680,000 over two days. Officials there aren't sure how hackers got into their accounts, but "they took all they could" before the bank noticed what was going on, according to Jason Kurth, diocese vice chancellor.

The diocese and the Detroit company were among dozens of individuals, businesses and municipalities around the country victimized by one of the largest cybertheft rings the FBI has uncovered.

In September, the bureau and its counterparts in Ukraine, the Netherlands and Britain took down the ring they first got wind of in May 2009 when a financial services firm tipped the bureau's Omaha, Neb., office to suspicious transactions. Since then, the FBI's Operation Trident Breach has uncovered losses of $14 million and counting.

Overall in the last two years, the FBI has opened 390 cases against schemes that prey on businesses that process payments electronically through the Automated Clearinghouse, which handles 3,000 transactions every five seconds. In these cases, bureau agents have uncovered attempted thefts totaling $220 million and actual losses of $70 million.

But the court records of Operation Trident Breach reveal a surprise: For all the high-tech tools and tactics employed in these computer crimes, platoons of low-level human foot soldiers, known as "money mules," are the indispensable cogs in the cybercriminals' money machine.

A dozen FBI criminal complaints filed in New York provide an inside look at how this cybertheft ring worked:

Operating from Eastern Europe and other overseas locations, the thieves used malicious software, known as malware, to infect the computers of unsuspecting users in the United States by e-mail. The malware-infected e-mails were written to look like they came from a company manager or colleague who might send an e-mail message to everyone in a company, such as the head of human resources.

When the e-mail recipient clicked on an embedded link to a website or opened an attachment, a Trojan horse virus called Zeus installed itself and gathered usernames, passwords and financial account numbers typed by the victims on their own computers. The hackers then used this information to move the victims' money electronically into bank accounts set up in the United States by the money mules.

The money mules set up shell bank accounts to receive the money. Then they withdrew the funds from the shell accounts in amounts they thought were small enough to elude detection by banks and law enforcement. In some cases, the cyberthieves bombarded telephone numbers attached to the targeted accounts with calls to block the company from calling to verify the transactions.

The mules sent most of the stolen funds overseas electronically to accounts controlled by the ring leaders; the mules usually kept 8 to 10 percent as their cut.

For instance, the FBI said money belonging to one TD Ameritrade customer landed in the bank account of a fake company, the Venetian Development Construction Service Corp., which was registered at an unmarked, two-story brick building in Brooklyn. The sole name on the construction company's account was that of one of the money mules. Eventually some of the money wound up in accounts in Singapore and Cyprus and some walked out the bank's door in the pockets of mules. TD Ameritrade spokeswoman Kim Hillyer said the company has reimbursed customers who lost money

Just like in the illegal drug trade, the ring leaders overseas reaped the big profits but relied on the mules to do the risky, dirty work.

For each shell account, a mule had to walk into a bank, in full view of surveillance cameras and leave copies of personal identification documents. The ring leaders hid behind computer screens overseas.

Operation Trident Breach found many mules are Eastern Europeans who came to the U.S. on student visas.

Among the allegations in the FBI's criminal complaints:

One mule was an immigrant from Moldova who within a few months of her arrival in New York this year had opened at least six bank accounts using a trio of names. Another mule, a Russian national, opened eight accounts at three different banks using five different aliases.

The criminal networks used so many money mules that full-time recruiters were needed. One recruiter placed advertisements on Russian language websites seeking students with U.S. visas.

A pair of Russian roommates living in Brooklyn worked together. One smuggled at least $150,000 in cash to hackers in Russia, arranged for fake passports to be smuggled into the U.S., and acted as a middleman picking up and delivering stolen money from other mules. The other roommate opened accounts with fake names and false passports in New York and New Jersey this summer.

This cybertheft ring zeroed in on individuals and small- and medium-sized businesses because they usually have fewer computer security safeguards than huge companies. Among its targets: municipalities in Massachusetts and New Jersey, the account held by a hospital at a California bank and the computers of at least 30 customers of E Trade Financial Corp.

Like a number of victims, Experi-Metal has sued its bank over the thefts.

A lawyer for Experi-Metal, Richard Tomlinson, said the thieves emptied the company's account and then tried to siphon another $5 million out through an empty savings account of an Experi-Metal employee. They actually transferred another $1.34 million before the bank shut down the mystery wire transfers, Tomlinson said.

According to court records, the company's bank, Dallas-based Comerica Inc., has recovered all but the company's original balance of $560,000. Tomlinson said the bank should be liable for the company's losses because the wire transfers were obviously dubious — the company hadn't made any transfers in more than two years and never to Eastern Europe.

"Canada was maybe as exotic as we got and it was maybe three or four years before this," Tomlinson said.

Comerica says it wasn't part of the problem.

"This was caused solely by the actions of that (Experi-Metal Inc.) employee," a lawyer for the bank wrote in a court filing. "The criminal that accessed Experi-Metal's accounts was able to do so only because Experi-Metal gave him its key."
http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...ers-825263.php





With Kinect Controller, Hackers Take Liberties
Jenna Wortham

When Oliver Kreylos, a computer scientist, heard about the capabilities of Microsoft’s new Kinect gaming device, he couldn’t wait to get his hands on it. “I dropped everything, rode my bike to the closest game store and bought one,” he said.

But he had no interest in playing video games with the Kinect, which is meant to be plugged into an Xbox and allows players to control the action onscreen by moving their bodies.

Mr. Kreylos, who specializes in virtual reality and 3-D graphics, had just learned that he could download some software and use the device with his computer instead. He was soon using it to create “holographic” video images that can be rotated on a computer screen. A video he posted on YouTube last week caused jaws to drop and has been watched 1.3 million times.

Mr. Kreylos is part of a crowd of programmers, roboticists and tinkerers who are getting the Kinect to do things it was not really meant to do. The attraction of the device is that it is outfitted with cameras, sensors and software that let it detect movement, depth, and the shape and position of the human body.

Companies respond to this kind of experimentation with their products in different ways — and Microsoft has had two very different responses since the Kinect was released on Nov. 4. It initially made vague threats about working with law enforcement to stop “product tampering.” But by last week, it was embracing the benevolent hackers.

“Anytime there is engagement and excitement around our technology, we see that as a good thing,” said Craig Davidson, senior director for Xbox Live at Microsoft. “It’s naïve to think that any new technology that comes out won’t have a group that tinkers with it.”

Microsoft and other companies would be wise to keep an eye on this kind of outside innovation and consider wrapping some of the creative advances into future products, said Loren Johnson, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan who follows digital media and consumer electronics.

“These adaptations could be a great benefit to their own bottom line,” he said. “It’s a trend that is undeniable, using public resources to improve on products, whether it be the Kinect or anything else.”

Microsoft invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Kinect in the hopes of wooing a broader audience of gamers, like those who enjoy using the motion-based controllers of the Nintendo Wii.

Word of the technical sophistication and low price of the device spread quickly in tech circles.

Building a device with the Kinect’s capabilities would require “thousands of dollars, multiple Ph.D.’s and dozens of months,” said Limor Fried, an engineer and founder of Adafruit Industries, a store in New York that sells supplies for experimental hardware projects. “You can just buy this at any game store for $150.”

On the day the Kinect went on sale, Ms. Fried and Phillip Torrone, a designer and senior editor of Make magazine, which features do-it-yourself technology projects, announced a $3,000 cash bounty for anyone who created and released free software allowing the Kinect to be used with a computer instead of an Xbox.

Microsoft quickly gave the contest a thumbs-down. In an interview with CNet News, a company representative said that it did not “condone the modification of its products” and that it would “work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.”

That is not much different from the approach taken by Apple, which has released software upgrades for its iPhone operating system in an effort to block any unsanctioned hacks or software running on its devices.

But other companies whose products have been popular targets for tinkering have actively encouraged it. One example is iRobot, the company that makes the Roomba, a small robotic vacuum cleaner. That product was so popular with robotics enthusiasts that the company began selling the iRobot Create, a programmable machine with no dusting capabilities.

Mr. Davidson said Microsoft now had no concerns about the Kinect-hacking fan club, but he said the company would be monitoring developments. A modification that compromises the Xbox system, violates the company’s terms of service or “degrades the experience for everyone is not something we want,” he said.

Other creative uses of the Kinect involve drawing 3-D doodles in the air and then rotating them with a nudge of the hand, and manipulating colorful animated puppets on a computer screen. Most, if not all, of the prototypes were built using the open-source code released as a result of the contest sponsored by Ms. Fried and Mr. Torrone, which was won by Hector Martin, a 20-year-old engineering student in Spain.

The KinectBot, cobbled together in a weekend by Philipp Robbel, a Ph.D. candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, combines the Kinect and an iRobot Create. It uses the Kinect’s sensors to detect humans, respond to gesture and voice commands, and generate 3-D maps of what it is seeing as it rolls through a room.

Mr. Robbel said the KinectBot offered a small glimpse into the future of machines that could aid in the search for survivors after a natural disaster.

“This is only the tip of the iceberg,” he said of the wave of Kinect experimentation. “We are going to see an exponential number of videos and tests over the coming weeks and months as more people get their hands on this device.”

Toying around with the Kinect could go beyond being a weekend hobby. It could potentially lead to a job. In late 2007, Johnny Lee, then a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon, was so taken by the Wii that he rigged a system that would allow it to track his head movements and adjust the screen perspective accordingly.

A video of Mr. Lee demonstrating the technology was a hit on YouTube, as were his videos of other Wii-related projects. By June 2008, he had a job at Microsoft as part of the core team working on the Kinect software that distinguishes between players and parts of the body.

“The Wii videos made me much more visible to the products people at Xbox,” Mr. Lee said. “They were that much more interested in me because of the videos.”

Mr. Lee said he was “very happy” to see the response the Kinect was getting among people much like himself. “I’m glad they are inspired and that they like the technology,” he said. “I think they’ll be able to do really cool things with it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/22/te...gy/22hack.html





Be Your Own Big Brother

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Mac Users Not Invincible Against Malware
Matt Liebowitz

Mac users are not invincible against online attacks, and file sharing sites using the popular BitTorrent protocol have recently been found to harbor Mac-specific malware, according to researchers at the security company Sophos.

Sophos security analysts examined the nearly 50,000 pieces of malware detected by its free Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition software from Nov. 2 – Nov. 16, and found several instances of malware built to specifically target Mac OS X.

Those Mac-specific Trojans "are typically disguised by hackers on BitTorrrent sites, or planted on websites as alluring downloads or plugins to view videos," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. BitTorrent is a widely-used protocol that enables the sharing of share large music and video files.

Although Mac users generally have an air of invincibility regarding malware, the security tide is shifting, and everyone is now seen as a potential target, said Cluley.

"We don’t see as much Mac malware as Windows malware," said Cluley. "Not by a long shot. But that doesn’t mean that Mac users can afford to have their heads in the sand about protecting their precious computers. And unfortunately, so long as Mac users don’t properly defend themselves they will increasingly be perceived as a soft target by cybercriminals."
http://www.securitynewsdaily.com/mac...-attacks-0301/





Anonymizer Labs Develops ‘Anonymizer Nevercookie’ to Contend With the Evercookie Threat

Introducing Anonymizer Nevercookie™, a FREE Firefox plugin that protects against the Evercookie API. The plugin extends Firefox’s private browsing mode by preventing Evercookies from identifying and tracking users.

Evercookie is a new, more persistent cookie form that enables the storage of cookie data in a number of different locations, such as Flash cookies and various locations of HTML5 storage. This allows websites to track user behavior even when users have enabled private browsing. Because an Evercookie stores data in locations outside of where standard cookies are stored, an Evercookie can rebuild itself unless users go through a number of steps to completely clear and reset their local storage.

Anonymizer Nevercookie simplifies this process and eliminates the manual steps required to completely remove Evercookies. And it does so without also removing all of the necessary cookies that a user actually wants to keep, such as those for browsing history and remembered logins. When Anonymizer Nevercookie is engaged along with Firefox’s private browsing mode, it quarantines an Evercookie and removes it after the browsing session.
http://nevercookie.anonymizer.com/





Shunned Profiling Technology on the Verge of Comeback
Steve Stecklow and Paul Sonne

One of the most potentially intrusive technologies for profiling and targeting Internet users with ads is on the verge of a comeback, two years after an outcry by privacy advocates in the U.S. and Britain appeared to kill it.

The technology, known as "deep packet inspection," is capable of reading and analyzing the "packets" of data traveling across the Internet. It can be far more powerful than "cookies" and other techniques commonly used to track people online because it can be used to monitor all online activity, not just Web browsing. Spy agencies use the technology for surveillance.

Now, two U.S. companies, Kindsight Inc. and Phorm Inc., are pitching deep packet inspection services as a way for Internet service providers to claim a share of the lucrative online ad market.

Kindsight and Phorm say they protect people's privacy with steps that include obtaining their consent. They also say they don't use the full power of the technology, and refrain from reading email and analyzing sensitive online activities.

Use of deep packet inspection this way would nonetheless give advertisers the ability to show ads to people based on extremely detailed profiles of their Internet activity. To persuade Internet users to opt in to be profiled, Kindsight will offer a free security service, while Phorm promises to provide customized web content such as news articles tailored to users' interests. Both would share ad revenue with the ISPs.

Kindsight says its technology is sensitive enough to detect whether a particular person is online for work, or for fun, and can target ads accordingly.

"If you're trying to engage in one-stop-shopping surveillance on the Internet, deep packet inspection would be an awesome tool," says David C. Vladeck, director of the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection. When deep packet inspection is used for targeted ads, the FTC has made it clear that broadband providers "should, at a minimum, notify consumers that the ISP was mining the information and obtain clear consumer consent," Mr. Vladeck says.

Kindsight, majority owned by telecommunications giant Alcatel-Lucent SA, says six ISPs in the U.S., Canada and Europe have been testing its security service this year although it isn't yet delivering targeted ads. It declined to name the clients.

"These are tier-one ISPs we're working with," says Mike Gassewitz, Kindsight's chief executive. He says his company also has been placing ads on various websites to test the ad-placement technology and build up a base of advertisers, which now number about 100,000.

Two large ISPs in Brazil—Oi, a unit of Tele Norte Leste Participacoes SA, and Telefonica SA—currently have deals with Phorm. Oi, Brazil's largest broadband provider with about 4.5 million customers, has launched the product initially with about 10,000 people in Rio De Janeiro.

"We want to grow that," says Pedro Ripper, Oi's strategy and technology director.

A spokesman for Telefonica says it is testing the service on about 1,000 broadband customers and will evaluate the results before deciding whether to roll it out. "The user has the choice to enable or disable the service anytime he or she wants to," the company said in a statement.

Phorm is hoping to introduce its service in South Korea and eventually in the U.S. "It is designed from the ground up to ensure one thing and that is privacy," says Kent Ertugrul, Phorm's chief executive.

Kindsight and Phorm say the ISPs don't provide them with subscribers' real identities. Both also say they don't collect any personal information, read email, store users' browsing histories or monitor sensitive sites such as health blogs. Subscribers must "opt in," or give their consent to participate, both companies say.

Both the Kindsight and Phorm systems study people's behavior and interests based on the websites they visit to show them relevant ads. Mr. Gassewitz says that unlike web-based tracking methods, which generally create a single behavioral profile no matter how many people share a computer, Kindsight can "generate multiple characters per human."

"If I come online and I'm in work mode, I will show up as a very different character than when I go online Saturday morning and I'm in recreation mode," he says. The targeted ads would reflect which "character" is online.

Mr. Gassewitz calls that some of Kindsight's "secret sauce." The company this year filed a patent on its "character differentiation" technology.

A new revenue source would mark a welcome change for ISPs. The companies have been under pressure to offer ever-faster Internet services at lower prices, while Google Inc. and other companies raked in billions of dollars selling ads. Targeted ads based on people's interests or behavior generally fetch higher fees.

ISPs "feel like they have data and they ought to be able to use it," says Tim McElgunn, chief analyst at Pike & Fischer Broadband Advisory Services. "They really desperately want to."

This isn't the first time ISPs have tried this. Two years ago, ISPs in the U.S. and Britain signed deals with companies offering deep packet inspection services and a cut of ad revenue.

Those pacts fell apart after a privacy outcry. In the U.K., an uproar ensued after BT Group PLC admitted it had tested Phorm's technology on some subscribers without telling them. Last year, BT and two other British ISPs that explored deploying Phorm's service—Virgin Media Inc. and TalkTalk—abandoned it.

In the U.S., controversy erupted in 2008 over the practices of a company called NebuAd Inc., which planned to use deep packet inspection to deliver targeted advertising to millions of broadband subscribers unless they explicitly opted out of the service. At a congressional hearing, Bob Dykes, the company's founder, was grilled over its policy. NebuAd stopped doing business last year; several U.S. ISPs who signed deals with NebuAd have been hit with class-action lawsuits accusing them of "installing spyware devices" on their networks.

In an interview, Mr. Dykes said, "If I had to do things over again, I would have figured out how to architect an opt-in model."

The companies now offering ad services based on deep packet inspection believe they have learned how to make the services acceptable to privacy advocates and Internet users. This includes asking for permission up front and offering people incentives to receive targeted ads, such as Kindsight's free security service, which includes identity-theft protection. Customers can pay a monthly fee to receive no ads.

In Brazil, Phorm is emphasizing customized content on partner websites if people agree to opt in. For example, users visiting a sports website might see articles about their favorite teams (gleaned from an analysis of their surfing habits), providing an online experience different from other people.

"Receive your favorite content in an easy and practical way and without spending money!" says Oi's main opt-in screen for the Phorm service, called Navegador. "We guarantee your privacy! No personal information is input in the program, so your privacy is guaranteed!"

Oi's Mr. Ripper says more than half the subscribers offered the service in the initial launch have opted in to date. "We were very happy with it," he says. He says two outside auditors verified Phorm's privacy-protection settings.

Until 2007, Phorm was known as 121Media Inc. It delivered targeted ads, particularly pop-ups, to users who downloaded free software. The ads were "based on an anonymous analysis of their browsing behavior, which is likely to indicate their commercial and lifestyle interests," according to corporate filings.

Several Internet security companies, including Symantec Corp., flagged part of 121Media's adware system as "spyware." Microsoft's Malware Protection Center called it a "trojan," or malicious software disguised as something useful.

Facing "a combination of public perception and legal and technological challenges," 121Media said it shifted its focus in 2005 from the desktop-adware business to ISPs.

It eventually shuttered its adware business and renamed itself Phorm. The company is led by Mr. Ertugrul, a Princeton-educated, former investment banker who in the early 1990s formed a joint venture with the Russian Space Agency to offer joy rides to tourists in MiG-29 fighter jets. The venture was later sold.

In February 2008, Britain's biggest ISPs—BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk—announced plans to implement Phorm's service. Those plans quickly unraveled.

Suspicions earlier had arisen among some BT subscribers who discovered they were being routed through an unfamiliar Internet address when they tried to visit a website. Some of them contacted BT and were advised their computer might be infected with a virus, according to a person familiar with the matter.

A BT spokesman said it is "standard procedure" to take customers through "a number of steps to try and identify the issue" if they call with a question about their service.

In fact, the subscribers were part of tests BT conducted in 2006 and 2007 using Phorm's technology. When BT disclosed the testing in April 2008, the backlash was fierce, with online protests by privacy advocates and government investigations. Four members of the board of directors later resigned, including former AT&T chief executive David Dorman and ex-Coca-Cola Co. president Steven Heyer, citing differences with Mr. Ertugrul. Messrs. Dorman and Heyer declined to comment.

The three ISPs eventually bailed out. "Phorm was bad news," says David Smith, deputy commissioner of Britain's Information Commissioner's Office, which oversees data protection. He says he's not surprised Phorm is looking for clients abroad. "It was pretty clear that no one was going to touch them in the UK."

Kindsight's roots trace to an in-house project known as Project Rialto at Alcatel-Lucent, where Mr. Gassewitz once worked as a vice president of strategic planning.

A 2007 job posting on Project Rialto's website described the company's work as developing "systems that can handle [a] massive volume of data for in-depth analysis of user behavior to enable targeted advertising."

Project Rialto eventually became Kindsight, a spinoff. At an Alcatel-Lucent conference held in September 2008 in Beverly Hills, Mr. Gassewitz spoke at a session called "Merging Technology and Advertising." A summary of his comments, posted on Alcatel's website, reads in part: "Through technologies like deep packet inspection," Internet service providers "can gather even more information about consumers" than rivals such as Google or Facebook.

Mr. Gassewitz also talked about "significant privacy concerns," the summary says, and stressed that ISPs must find a way to provide measurable value to consumers "to avoid backlash."

To win over Internet users to its services, Kindsight plans to offer what it has described as a "free, always-on, always-up-to-date security service."

"Say hello to your new best friend…" it said on its redesigned website in 2008. The company later dropped the slogan. "That was early days," says Mr. Gassewitz.

Before giving away the security service free, Kindsight plans to display an opt-in screen to ISP users that explains how its technology analyzes "web sites visited and searches conducted to assign a numerical value to various interest categories." The "score" is used to deliver relevant ads.

In market-research tests in North America, France and the U.K., Kindsight found that about 60% of users were willing to take the service free in exchange for receiving targeted ads, he says. Another 10% were willing to pay for it.

Mr. Gassewitz says six ISPs have tested Kindsight's security service on subscriber groups as big as 200,000. Mr. Gassewitz says, "There was no profiling occurring, no advertising occurring, no data collection occurring."

Oi's Mr. Ripper believes that the technology's time has come. "The Internet is becoming more and more a platform to deliver very targeted messages," he says. As for deep packet inspection, "Everyone is going to get there. It's just a matter of timing."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...094784516.html





HTTPS Everywhere Gets Firefox "Firesheep" Protection

Electronic Frontier Foundation offers protection for Firesheep, other vulnerabilities
Layer 8

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today said it rolled out a version of HTTPS Everywhere that offers protection against "Firesheep" and other tools that seek to exploit webpage security flaws.

Hitting the streets in October, Firesheep caused a storm of controversy over its tactics, ethics and Web security in general. Firesheep sniffs unencrypted cookies sent across open WiFi networks for unsuspecting visitors to Web sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and lets the user take on those visitors' log-in credentials.

What's up with encryption?

HTTPS secures Web browsing by encrypting both requests from your browser to websites and the resulting pages that are displayed. Without HTTPS, users' online reading habits and activities are vulnerable to eavesdropping and hijacking, EFF states.

EFF says the new version of HTTPS Everywhere (0.9.x) is a direct response to growing concerns about website vulnerability in the wake of Firesheep on social networking sites or webmail systems, for example -- if the browser's connection to the web application either does not use cryptography or does not use it thoroughly enough.

"These new enhancements make HTTPS Everywhere much more effective in thwarting an attack from Firesheep or a similar tool," said EFF Senior Staff Technologist Peter Eckersley in a statement. "It will go a long way towards protecting your Facebook, Twitter, or Hotmail accounts from Firesheep hacks. And, like previous releases, it shields your Google searches from eavesdroppers and safeguards your payments made through PayPal."

EFF says that HTTPS Everywhere now protects site such as Bit.ly, Cisco, Dropbox, Evernote, and GitHub. In addition to the HTTPS Everywhere update, EFF also released a guide to help website operators implement HTTPS properly. Websites may default to using the unencrypted, and therefore vulnerable, HTTP protocol or may fill HTTPS pages with insecure HTTP references. EFF's HTTPS Everywhere tool uses carefully crafted rules to switch sites from HTTP to HTTPS, the company stated.

Firesheep creator Eric Butler wrote on his blog during the recent storm of protest:

"I've received hundreds of messages from people who are extremely happy that the issue of website security is receiving attention. Some, however, have questioned if Firesheep is legal to use. I'd like to be clear about this: It is nobody's business telling you what software you can or cannot run on your own computer. Like any tool, Firesheep can be used for many things. In addition to raising awareness, it has already proven very useful for people who want to test their own security as well as the security of their (consenting) friends. A much more appropriate question is: 'Is it legal to access someone else's accounts without their permission'."
http://www.networkworld.com/communit...iresheep-prote





Security Warnings: Whether or Not You Plan to Drink and Drive a Keyboard this Weekend
Darlene Storm

As the holiday season approaches, shoppers hunt for the best bargains and parties kick off in full swing. Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are almost here, each presenting their own type of temptation to you and to cyberthugs. But here are some security warnings whether or not you plan to drink and drive a keyboard this weekend--such as attack of the tricky hacked-friend Facebook bot. Have you had any strange conversations with online friends lately?

Right now as I write this, people are tweeting about bots that have taken over their friends' Facebook accounts. These bots have access to all the data of anyone connected to the hacked account. After the launch of Facebook new messages, which combines all personal communication like chats, texts, and emails in one place, security firm Sophos warned, "Facebook accounts will now be linked with many more people in your social circle - opening up new opportunities for identity fraudsters to launch attacks."

Most of these Facebook bots are hacked accounts in which your "friend" starts chatting with you and mentions the name of mutual friend before asking you to click on a link to take a quiz, play a game, or watch a shocking video. You might click for a friend, but these sites can be filled with malware. Some bots are clearly bots while other are friendly, relatively more advanced, and can even deny it's a bot. Use caution, ask a question that bots couldn't normally answer as in a Turing test. But this user reported the bot knew the name of someone from high school. Some of these chat bots are clever, but I don't think we are the point where we need secret passphrases with friends to be sure it's them - yet.

Installing BitDefender's Safego Facebook application would probably be a wise move before holiday shopping or any additional Facebook activity, but the app doesn't analyze malware distributed via personal messages. According to CNET, BitDefender published these statistics: 16% of malware on Facebook urges users to watch a shocking video, 15.4% of malware is linked to games, over 60% of malware attacks come from "notifications from malicious third-party applications," and 1/5 of Facebook users have malware in their news feeds.

Ironically though, before installation, Safego offers users an opportunity to a take a "personality quiz" or "who is your evil twin." Normally I would call this "survey spam" which is often malicious and warn users against taking them. Safego said it was "a joke." You can skip the quizzes and just go for the free Safego protection.

PandaLabs suggests not to underestimate cyber criminals this holiday shopping season. Cybercrooks have created fake advertisements, shopping carts and poisoned search terms in order to infect computers and steal personal data like credit card information, social security numbers, and other data that can be used for identity theft. PandaLabs said that 66% of the malware in their database are "trojans that specialize in sensitive data extraction." Panda Cloud Antivirus software is free.

Patrik Runald, senior security research manager at Websense, warned, "It is more likely to get an attack on your PC now while searching current topics like Black Friday than it would be searching for adult content," reported SearchSecurity. "The bad guys are trying to manipulate search results for the topics people are searching for. Then you are brought to a site that could compromise your computer and install a Trojan to steal login credentials."

This year, more people will shop by using mobile devices where you can't always see the full URL. Don't click on embedded links in advertisement sent via email. It's much safer to go directly to the site where you plan to shop. Make sure you only purchase on sites with HTTPS (SSL) even though it's still possible that sensitive data can be transferred to cyber criminals. Run anti-malware scans.

Even if you are in the mood to shop, it's unlikely you would drop $335,000 on a piece of virtual property like was reported by Forbes. But if you have been drinking, you might be feeling chatty on social networks where you need a clear head to make sure your "friend" is not actually a bot with some advanced AI to better scam you with phishing links.

Although Webroot launched Social Media Sobriety Test to help you protect your social media accounts from drunken posts that might later come back to bite you, it might also be a good idea to install it now. It may even help in case you have been drinking at a holiday party and then come home to shop online. You can setup custom URLs, besides the default social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube.

It's similar to Gmail Goggles that has you solve five math problems after you click send to make sure you really wanted to send that email to your boss at 2 a.m. telling him what he could do with his job . . . or any other email that might later regret.

The Social Media Sobriety Test plug-in works for Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer. Here is a video tutorial. You set the hours when you might be intoxicated, and if you try to login to one of those sites during those times, you'll be asked to pass a test. There are five tests, ranging from simple like draw a straight line with your mouse, to not so simple. The test in which you must type the alphabet backwards in 60 seconds might even be something to help fully sober but excited shopaholics who need to cut back on spending. If you fail the test, however, the plug-in will post for you...like NAME is too intoxicated to post right now.
http://blogs.computerworld.com/17418...d_this_weekend





Virtual Healing for the Real World
Benedict Carey

His talk was going just fine until some members of the audience became noticeably restless. A ripple of impatience passed through the several dozen seated listeners, and a few seemed suddenly annoyed; then two men started to talk to each other, ignoring him altogether.

“When I saw that, I slowed down and then stopped what I was saying,” said the speaker, a 47-year-old public servant named Gary, who last year took part in an unusual study of social anxiety treatment at the University of Quebec.

The anxiety rose in his throat — What if I’m not making sense? What if I’m asked questions I can’t answer? — but subsided as his therapist, observing in the background, reminded him that the audience’s reaction might have nothing to do with him. And if a question stumped him, he could just say so: no one knows everything.

He relaxed and finished the talk, and the audience seemed to settle down. Then he removed a headset that had helped create an illusion that the audience was actually there, not just figures on a screen. “I just think it’s a fantastic idea to be able to experience situations where you know that the worst cannot happen,” he said. “You know that it’s controlled and gradual and yet feels somehow real.”

For more than a decade, a handful of therapists have been using virtual environments to help people to work through phobias, like a fear of heights or of public spaces. But now advances in artificial intelligence and computer modeling are allowing them to take on a wider array of complex social challenges and to gain insight into how people are affected by interactions with virtual humans — or by inhabiting avatars of themselves.

Researchers are populating digital worlds with autonomous, virtual humans that can evoke the same tensions as in real-life encounters. People with social anxiety are struck dumb when asked questions by a virtual stranger. Heavy drinkers feel strong urges to order something from a virtual bartender, while gamblers are drawn to sit down and join a group playing on virtual slot machines. And therapists can advise patients at the very moment those sensations are felt.

In a series of experiments, researchers have shown that people internalize these virtual experiences and their responses to them — with effects that carry over into real life.

The emerging field, called cybertherapy, now has annual conferences and a growing international following of therapists, researchers and others interested improving behavior through the use of simulations. The Canadian military has invested heavily in virtual-reality research; so has the United States Army, which has been spending about $4 million annually on programs with computer-generated agents, for training officers and treating post-traumatic stress reactions.

The trend has already generated a few critics, who see a possible downside along with benefits.

“Even if this approach works, there will be side effects that we can’t anticipate,” said Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and author of “You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto” (Knopf, 2010). “And in some scenarios I would worry about defining humans down: defining what’s normal based on what we can model in virtual environments.”

But most researchers say that virtual therapy is, and will remain, no more than a therapist’s tool, to be used only when it appears effective. “There’s a real and understandable distrust of technology as a shortcut for good clinical skills,” said Albert Rizzo, a psychologist at the University of Southern California, “but I think, deep down, most therapists will want any tool that can help them do their work, and they’ll be open to using virtual approaches.”

Virtual Humans, Real Therapy

“My abilities are somewhat limited,” says a female voice. “For example, I can speak and listen to what you say, but I can’t do any physical activity.”

In an office at the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California, a virtual woman named Angelina is addressing a college student from a computer screen.

Angelina looks to be about 30 or so, a pretty, athletic figure with an open, intelligent face framed by short black hair. Her eyes and expression, guided by video cameras and microphones, stay in sync with the student’s, as an empathetic therapist’s would. “What are some of the things you hate about yourself?” asks the voice.

The student stalls for a moment. “Well,” she says, in a video of the exchange, “I don’t like that I can be really quiet in social situations. Sometimes people take that as me being rude, but it’s just me being quiet.”

Angelina nods sympathetically and then asks another question, about what the student fears most.

Interacting with a virtual human programmed to be socially sensitive in this way is oddly liberating. The figures are clearly not human; some are balky with language, others mute. Many have a two-dimensional graphic-arts quality.

But the faces are mobile, blinking, alive, the body language and gestures seemingly natural; in some cases, the voice recognition and choice of replies are good enough to conduct a stiff but convincing conversation. The result is a living presence that is responsive but not judgmental.

In a recent study using this virtual confidant, researchers at U.S.C. have found that Angelina elicits from people the crucial first element in any therapy: self-disclosure. People with social anxiety confessed more of their personal flaws, fears and fantasies to virtual figures than to live therapists conducting video interviews, the study found.

The researchers are incorporating the techniques learned from Angelina into a virtual agent being developed for the Army, called SimCoach. Guided by language-recognition software, SimCoach — there are several versions, male and female, young and older, white and black — appears on a computer screen and can conduct a rudimentary interview, gently probing for possible mental troubles.

Using SimCoach on a laptop, veterans and family members would anonymously ask about difficulties they’re having, whether due to post-traumatic stress or other strains of service.

“It does not give a diagnosis,” said Jonathan Gratch, a co-author of the Angelina study with Sin-Hwa Kang, also of U.S.C. “But the idea is that the SimCoach would ask people if they would like to see a therapist; and if so, could then guide them to someone in their area, depending on what it has learned.”

Once people are in treatment, therapists can use virtual technology to simulate threatening situations — and guide patients through them, gradually and incrementally, calibrating the intensity of the experience.

In person-to-person sessions to address anxieties or phobias, for instance, therapists may have patients do this in their imaginations. Revisit a dreaded experience — say, a rooftop party, for a person afraid of heights — while defusing the physical reactions to the memory in the office. Out in the world, patients then practice the same techniques, gradually increasing their exposure, beginning with modest heights, for instance, and working up.

Using virtual environments, therapists can run this entire drill in their offices. At the Virtual Reality Medical Center in San Diego, psychologists have treated hundreds of patients using gradual virtual exposure, for post-traumatic stress and agoraphobia, among other anxieties. At U.S.C., Dr. Rizzo has designed a program specifically for veterans of the Iraq war.

In one scenario, wearing a headset, the patient is in a virtual Humvee, motoring along a desert road toward a small Iraqi village. To the right is a passenger, another soldier; behind and above rides a gunner; in front is another Humvee. As the motorcade approaches the village, engines rumbling, there is a flurry of gunfire, and more. A roadside bomb goes off, bullets pierce the window — your fellow soldier on the right is wounded badly, now dying — all of it under control of the therapist.

“We can control the intensity of the experience, and then work on the patient’s response,” Dr. Rizzo said.

When it works, the therapy breaks the association between reminders of an upsetting experience and the racing heart, the flushing, the panic that the person has been struggling with.

Adding autonomous virtual humans to the landscape allows therapists to begin addressing some of the most complex problems of them all — social ones. In one continuing study at the University of California, Davis, for instance, researchers are trying to improve high-functioning autistic children’s ability to think and talk about themselves while paying attention to multiple peers.

The hope is similar for people with social anxiety: that practice interacting with a virtual boss, suspicious strangers or virtual partygoers who are staring as one enters the room will also lead to increased comfort, with the help of a therapist. “The figures themselves don’t even have to be especially realistic to evoke reactions,” said a psychologist, Stéphane Bouchard, who directs the cybertherapy program at the University of Quebec in Ottawa. “People with social anxiety, for example, will feel they are being judged by virtual humans who are simply watching them.”

In the pilot study that included Gary, the University of Quebec researchers tracked two groups of patients: one that received an hour of talk therapy once a week for 14 weeks and another that got talk therapy with a virtual component, practicing virtual interactions. Both groups showed improvement, faring much better than a comparison group put on a waiting list, preliminary results suggest. But those who got virtual therapy achieved the same gains without having to practice interactions in the real world, deliberately putting themselves in embarrassing situations or dreaded encounters. The researchers are now working to identify which people benefit most, and whether combining virtual and real-world experiences accelerates recovery.

My Avatar, Myself

The face in the mirror does not look familiar; it has a generic, computer-generated look. Yet it does appear to be staring out from a mirror. Lift a hand and up goes its hand. Nod, wave, smile, and it does the same, simultaneously. Now, look down at your own body: and there, through the virtual reality headset, are a torso, legs, clothes identical to those in the mirror.

In a matter of minutes, people placed in front of this virtual mirror identify strongly with their “body” and psychologically inhabit it, researchers at Stanford University have found. And by subtly altering elements of that embodied figure, the scientists have established a principle that is fundamental to therapy — that an experience in a virtual world can alter behavior in the real one.

“The remarkable thing is how little a virtual human has to do to produce fairly large effects on behavior,” said Jeremy Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford and the author, with James Blascovich, of the coming book “Infinite Reality” (HarperCollins 2011).

In one recent experiment , Dr. Bailenson and Nick Yee, now at the Palo Alto Research Center, had 50 college students enter a virtual environment and acquire a virtual body, an avatar. Each student then participated in a negotiation game with a member of the experimental team, who was introduced as another student.

But all the avatars were not created equal. Some were four inches taller than their human counterparts, and others were four inches shorter. The participants didn’t notice this alteration, but those made taller negotiated in the virtual game much more aggressively than those made shorter. A later study led by Dr. Yee found that this effect carried over into face-to-face negotiations after the virtual headsets were removed.

The researchers have demonstrated a similar effect in the case of attractiveness. In another experiment, they created generic avatars for some participants that were about 25 percent “more attractive” than average, based on features that the group had rated as attractive. Compared with study participants whose avatars were made 25 percent “less attractive,” the virtual beauties were more socially confident, standing closer in virtual conversation, revealing more about themselves — an effect that also seeped into social interactions after the headsets came off.

Again, no one noticed the manipulation; its effects were entirely subconscious.

The authors argue that the participants, in effect, psychologically internalized their virtual experience. “What we learn in one body is shared with other bodies we inhabit, whether virtual or physical,” they concluded.

It seems people will psychologically inhabit almost any virtual body if the cues are strong. In recent research a team led by Mel Slater, a computer scientist at the University of Barcelona, induced what it calls body-transfer illusion — showing that men will mentally take on the body of a woman, for instance, if that’s the body it appears they’re walking around in virtually. The experience is especially powerful, Dr. Slater said, when the men feel a touch (on a shoulder, in a recent study) at the same time the avatar is touched.

“You can see the possibilities already,” said Dr. Slater. “For example, you can put someone with a racial bias in the body of a person of another race.”

These kinds of findings have inspired a variety of simple experiments. Dropping a young man or woman into the virtual body of an elderly person does in fact increase sympathy for the other’s perspective, research suggests.

“This is to me the most exciting thing about using virtual environments for behavior change,” Dr. Bailenson said. “It’s not only that you can create these versions of reality; it’s that you can cross boundaries — that you can take risks, break things, do things you could not or would not do in real life.”

Mini-Me in Action

In the virtual studio at the University of Quebec, patients wearing a headset can have a short conversation with a diminutive, attentive virtual therapist. Except for slight stature, it is a ringer for Dr. Bouchard: the same open face, the same smile, the same pelt of dark hair around a bald pate.

“Mini-Me, we call it,” Dr. Bouchard said.

The hologramlike figure seems at first to be minding its own business, looking around, biding time. Then it approaches slowly, introduces itself and kindly asks a question, like some digital-age Socrates: “What is the best experience you’ve ever had?”

For now, Mini-Me cannot do much more than cock its head at the answer and nod, before programmers begin to guide the conversation; the scientists are adding more language-recognition software, to extend interactions. Yet Mini-Me offers a glimpse of where virtual humans are headed: three-dimensional forms that can be designed to resemble people in the real world.

“You could scan in a picture of your mother or your boss or someone else significant and, with some voice recording samples, use a system that would automatically and quickly recreate a virtual facsimile of that person,” said Dr. Rizzo of U.S.C., where programmers have set up an Old West bar scene, complete with a life-size, autonomous virtual bartender, a waitress and a bad guy. “Then, perhaps, we’d be able to stage interactions that might closely resemble those in a patient’s life to help work through challenging issues.”

Anyone could rehearse the dance of social interaction, tripping without consequence, until the steps feel just about right.

“The great thing about it,” said Gary, the civil servant, referring to his own virtual therapy, “is that you can do anything you want and just see what happens. You get to practice.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/science/23avatar.html





Nov. 23, 1889: S.F. Gin Joint Hears World’s First Jukebox
Tony Long

1889: The first jukebox is installed at the Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco. It becomes an overnight sensation, and its popularity spreads around the world.

That first jukebox was constructed by the Pacific Phonograph Co. Four stethoscope-like tubes were attached to an Edison Class M electric phonograph fitted inside an oak cabinet. The tubes operated individually, each being activated by the insertion of a coin, meaning that four different listeners could be plugged into the same song simultaneously.

Towels were supplied to patrons so they could wipe off the end of the tube after each listening.

The success of the jukebox eventually spelled the end of the player piano, then the most common way of pounding out popular music to a line of thirsty barflies.

The machine was originally called the “nickel-in-the-slot player” by Louis Glass, the entrepreneur who installed it at the Palais Royale. (A nickel then had the buying power of $1.20 today.) It came to be known as the jukebox only later, although the origin of the word remains a bit vague. It may derive from “juke house,” a slang reference to bawdy house, where music was not unknown.
http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2...first-jukebox/





'Nothing Wrong' With Naked Swedish Farm Student Video

An internet video featuring naked Swedish high school students frolicking with farm animals and riding tractors on school property is nothing out of the ordinary for Sweden, according to the school’s principal.

“This kind of thing happens all the time,” the school’s principal, Peter Gustavsson told The Local.

“There’s nothing wrong with being naked. That’s still allowed.”

The eight-minute-long video, entitled “farmers daughters”, opens with a shot of a young man in bed with two young women. As the scene unfolds, it becomes apparent that all three students are naked.

“Damn, do you know what I just realised?,” says one of the girls.

“It’s our student cabaret night tonight. We forgot again!”

The two girls then run out of the room and proceed to let two other naked girls, both of whom are bound and gagged, out of the back of a truck.

Gustavsson explained that students at the school, the Natural Resource Use Programme high school (Naturbruksgymnasiet) in Strömma in western Sweden, periodically organise cabaret nights in which they perform satirical skits.

“These nights are a way for the students to poke fun at themselves and be creative,” he said.

Other scenes in the film feature half-naked young men sitting in a pig pen, a bare-bottomed young woman laying bareback on a horse, as well as a trio of young ladies who appear to be showing their breasts to a cow.

Nevertheless, the tone of the film is light and humourous, rather than erotic, and the students take great pains to keep their sex organs and nipples covered.

“I think the film is rather nice, actually. No one is drunk; there is no alcohol, no drugs. It’s just a bunch of naked kids having fun,” said Gustavsson.

In one sequence, two naked girls summon a third girl who is sawing down a tree with a chainsaw wearing only a protective helmet and lumberjack’s harness, while another scene shows a surprised young lady covering her nipples with a pair of rodents as she is called to follow to other nude co-eds.

As the video progresses, more and more bare-skinned students gather on the back of a tractor which eventually ends up at the door of one of the school’s buildings, at which point all of the students disembark and run inside the building.

In the closing scene, the students are seen slamming on a door.

The film was shown for the first time at one of the school cabaret nights in front of an audience of about 30 people, according to the Aftonbladet daily.

When the film ended, the door to the auditorium opened and the stars of the film dashed into the room naked, adding yet another creative twist to the project.

According to Gustavsson, the students in the film all graduated in 2009 and thus would have been 18 or 19 at the time the movie is believed to have been filmed.

He suspected the video was made while the students were still attending the school, however because "otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to get access to the buildings and the equipment".

Despite the school’s farm theme, the video indicates there may be a number of budding cinematographers within the school’s ranks, prompting Gustavsson to think about offering classes on making movies.

“I’m actually considering it. These students have something they want to say, so we might look at adding an elective class on film making,” he said.

While Gustavsson remained relaxed about the film, there were a couple of aspects of the cinematic work which bothered him, in particular the discrepancy between the amount of skin shown by the young women relative to the young men.

“From a gender perspective, the film is out of balance. These girls are good students, capable students – they don’t need to be running around naked to prove anything,” he said.

He also regretted that the school’s efforts to educate students about the risks of putting compromising material on the internet appear to have fallen on deaf ears.

“They’ve now lost control of their film, and I find that problematic,” said Gustavsson.

He also explained that, had he known about the students' plans for their cabaret show, he wouldn't have approved it.

“We require that they tell us ahead of time what they plan to do. However in this case, the students pulled a fast one on us and showed something that we hadn’t agreed upon,” said Gustavsson.

Editors Note: The video and related screenshots have been removed at the request of the copyright holder
http://www.thelocal.se/30362/20101122/





FCC Updating 911 for the Texting Generation, SRSLY
Ryan Singel

In a bid to bring the life-saving emergency service 911 into the 21st century, the FCC is looking at letting citizens report crimes through text messages and even stream video from their mobile phones to emergency centers.

Established as a national standard in 1968, 911 handles more than 230 million calls a year — 70 percent of which now come from mobile phones.

The last real overhaul of 911 by the FCC came in 2001, when mobile carriers were required to allow 911 to identify the location of callers either through GPS or cell-tower data. In the middle of the decade, some internet telephony companies were also required to implement 911 calling that would route emergency calls to the appropriate local center — a non-trivial task given the mobility of laptops and equipment using voice-over-internet protocol (VOIP).

But the 911 system still can’t handle text messages, multimedia messages or streaming video, all of which could be very helpful to first responders. A system that could handle those messages would also allow people to report crimes without being overheard, which could be useful in situations ranging from kidnapping to seeing someone being robbed on the street.

In a press release announcing Tuesday’s changes, the FCC pointed to the now-infamous shooting rampage at Virginia Tech as an example of how a more modern system could be useful.

“The technological limitations of 9-1-1 can have tragic, real-world consequences,” the release said. “During the 2007 Virginia Tech campus shooting, students and witnesses desperately tried to send texts to 9-1-1 that local dispatchers never received. If these messages had gone through, first responders may have arrived on the scene faster with firsthand intelligence about the life-threatening situation that was unfolding.”

The FCC also plans to allow automated pinging of 911 by sensors, including chemical detection sensors, alarm systems, medical devices and systems like On-Star in automobiles.

It’s not clear yet where the money will come from for the upgrades, whether they will be federal requirements states and cities must carry out or if they will simply be suggestions. It’s also unclear whether Facebook’s new Messages service will let you send a note to 911 straight from your Facebook page or mobile app (that’s a joke, sort of).
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/11/fcc-911-texting





Facebook Makes People More Social: Study

Contrary to common belief social media websites such as Facebook do not weaken personal ties, they strengthen them in unique ways for different age groups, according to a new study.

The rapid spread of Facebook, which has more than 500 million users worldwide, has prompted concerns about its negative effects, but researchers at the University of Texas have reached a different conclusion.

"Our findings suggest that Facebook is not supplanting face-to-face interactions between friends, family and colleagues," said S. Craig Watkins, an associate professor of radio, TV and film who headed the research team.

"In fact, we believe there is sufficient evidence that social media afford opportunities for new expressions of friendship, intimacy and community."

The researchers questioned 900 college students and recent graduates about how and with whom they interact on Facebook.

More than 60 percent of Facebook users said posting status updates was among the most popular activities, followed by 60 percent who wrote comments on their profile and 49 percent who posted messages and comments to friends.

The researchers also found that although about the same number of men and women use Facebook, they do so in different ways.

"There is a noteworthy difference in orientation in how to use a tool like Facebook. We found that for women the content tends to be more affectionate, and (they) are especially interested in using it for connection," said Watkins.

"For men, it's more functional," he added.

Watkins pointed out that, for example, women are more likely to post pictures of social gatherings with friends, while men are more likely to post pictures of hobbies, or post a political or pop-culture related link.

He added that increased use of Facebook brings additional challenges as young adults are forced to adapt their Facebook behavior to an increasingly large social circle.

"Facebook brings all our different networks and social scenes together. We present ourselves in different ways, whether to friends, co-workers, or family," he said. "Facebook engagement is not uniform. It's constantly evolving and in a state of flux, and that presents a challenge."

(Reporting by Bernd Debusmann Jr; Editing by Patricia Reaney)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6AM5VG20101123





Today’s Lesson: Make Facebook Angry, And They’ll Censor You Into Oblivion
Jason Kincaid

Facebook is well on its way to becoming the most popular way that people share links, photos, and other content with their friends. For many sites it’s becoming a powerful new driver of traffic — get people to ‘Like’ your stuff, and Facebook’s network effects will expose it to dozens of their friends.

Just make sure not to do something that might make Facebook angry. Otherwise it might nuke every link to your site, choking off this river of traffic that you’ve worked so hard to build.

That’s the message Facebook sent today with its censorship of links to Lamebook, a humor site that posts lewd conversations spotted on the social network. Facebook has confirmed that it is automatically blocking all links to Lamebook and that it has also removed the company’s ‘Fan’ page. Not because the content was offensive, mind you, but because Facebook doesn’t like Lamebook.

Update: Facebook CTO Bret Taylor has written this statement, explaining that this was a mistake. Note that this story originally broke this morning and I’ve been in contact with Facebook most of the afternoon, so this clearly wasn’t just a bug:

“This was a mistake on our part. In the process of dealing with a routine trademark violation issue regarding some links posted to Facebook, we blocked all mentions of the phrase “lamebook” on Facebook. We are committed to promoting free expression on Facebook. We apologize for our mistake in this case, and we are working to fix the process that led to this happening.”

Bret Taylor
CTO

The move was precipitated by a legal battle between the two companies. Lamebook filed for a declaratory judgement earlier this month that would assert that it is not violating Facebook’s trademark (the two parties have apparently been in negotiations over this for some time). Unsurprisingly, Facebook followed that up with a suit alleging that Lamebook violated its trademark.

Okay, so Facebook doesn’t like Lamebook’s name. I don’t agree with Facebook’s stance, but fair enough — it isn’t the first big company that’s overzealous when it comes to protecting its trademark. But by blocking Lamebook’s content, Facebook is crossing a line.

Not only is it currently impossible to share a Lamebook link to your News Feed or a friend’s Facebook Wall — you can’t even include them as part of a direct message or email to friends (you get an error message indicating that it’s “abusive or spammy”, which isn’t even accurate). That’s completely outrageous, and it’s a warning flag that comes only a few days after Facebook announced a new hybrid email/IM/SMS product. Do you really want someone to be censoring your outbound email?

One reason why Google has done so well is that people trust it. If you sue Google, it isn’t going to threaten to delist your company from its search index. Likewise, Facebook needs to keep its distance from the content its users are sharing. No, it won’t be getting rid of its terms any time soon, which forbid content that is “hateful, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.” But there’s a difference between blocking content as a matter of principle and doing it to deter companies from suing you. This is setting a disturbing precedent.

I reached out to Facebook to ask if there was any reason beyond the trademark claim that drove its decision to block Lamebook — maybe there’s something else going on here that would make their decision seem slightly less Orwellian. I also asked if Facebook has previously blocked content to other sites it had a legal dispute with.

A Facebook spokesman said he was unable to answer those questions. He did, however, give me the following statement, which is similar to what Facebook has said before about the issue:

“We’re disappointed that after months of working with Lamebook they turned to litigation. We believe their website is an improper attempt to trade off of Facebook’s popularity and fame and we will continue to protect our brand and trademark. As I told Robin earlier, our terms prohibit posting of material or other activities on Facebook that infringe the rights of others. We reserve the right to pull down any content we believe is infringing. That includes linking to material we believe to be infringing. We also specifically prohibit use of any Facebook or confusingly similar marks (See SRR Sec. 5.1, 5.2 & 5.6 http://www.facebook.com/terms.php).”
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/22/facebook-censorship/





With Facebook Claiming the Word ‘Face,’ Some Alternatives
Nick Bilton

Facebook is a few steps away from getting a trademark on the word “face” with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, according to a document discovered by the technology blog TechCrunch, which it wrote about on Tuesday.

According to the document and filing, Facebook was informed on Tuesday that it could move to the next phase of the trademark process, which will include paying a fee and providing a “Statement of Use” illustrating how the word will be used in the real world and online once it has been trademarked.

So does that mean Facebook will be able to stop people from using the word “face” unless they are willing to send a check to Mark Zuckerberg, above, a company founder? Not exactly.

As the Patent and Trademark Office points out, the trademark will apply only to “telecommunication services, namely, providing online chat rooms and electronic bulletin boards for transmission of messages among computer users.”

But that still limits the use of the word for businesses when it comes to the modern-day world, as almost every business has a Web page, Twitter or Facebook account associated with it.

There are some options for people who want to a “face”-like alternative for the name of their company or start-up. A quick perusal of the thesaurus offers some options, including countenance, mug, physiognomy, veneer, front, display and facade. I guess they just don’t have the same ring to them as “face.”

The latest development is sure to inspire more frustration with the Patent and Trademark Office. For the past several years it has approved a number of strange requests related to the Internet and start-ups.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/1...-alternatives/





Open-Source Social Network Diaspora Goes Live
Joab Jackson

IDG News Service - Diaspora, a widely anticipated social network site built on open-source code, has cracked open its doors for business today, at least for a handful of invited participants.

"Every week, we'll invite more people," stated the developers behind the project, in a blog item posted Tuesday announcing the alpha release of the service. "By taking these baby steps, we'll be able to quickly identify performance problems and iterate on features as quickly as possible."

Such a cautious rollout may be necessary, given how fresh the code is. In September, when the first version of the working code behind the service was posted, it was promptly criticized for being riddled with security errors.

While Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg may not be worried about Diaspora quite yet, the service is one of a growing number of efforts to build out open-source-based social-networking software and services. Others include Identica, a Twitter-like messaging service built on open-source software, and the Free Software Foundation's GNU Social.

Four New York University students came up with the idea of Diaspora earlier this year, and quickly raised US$200,000 from investors in the project. In interviews, they have stated their collective goal was to develop open-source software for social networking as an alternative to commercial alternatives such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

"When you give up that data, you're giving it up forever," said co-developer Max Salzberg, in an interview with The New York Times. "The value [sites such as Facebook] give us is negligible in the scale of what they are doing, and what we are giving up is all of our privacy."

The students' plan with Diaspora is to allow participants to retain ownership of all the material they use on the site, and retain full control over how that information is shared. It will also allow users to divide their social connections into individual groups, called Aspects, and control which groups see which material, according to the website.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...pora_goes_live

















Until next week,

- js.



















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