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20-04-11, 07:32 AM
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Join Date: May 2001
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Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 23rd, '11
Since 2002
  "I've downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records - why would I care if somebody downloads ours? That was how I discovered almost everything when I was a teenager – my dad brought home a modem." – Robin Pecknold, Fleet Foxes "If anyone is charged with a crime solely for using an open wireless connection, have them give me a call. I will defend them." – Orin Kerr April 23rd, 2011  Filesharing: BT and TalkTalk Fail in Challenge to Digital Economy Act Internet service providers' claim that new law infringes web users' 'basic rights and freedoms' rejected by high court Josh Halliday The music industry claims illegal filesharing is damaging sales of acts such as Black Eyed Peas. Photograph: Jim Cooper/AP Government plans to curb illegal filesharing received a significant boost on Wednesday, as a judicial review of the controversial Digital Economy Act failed to halt the legislation. The UK's two largest internet service providers, BT and TalkTalk, were dealt a blow as their judicial review of the DEA was thrown out of London's high court on all but one of the legal grounds they had raised. BT and TalkTalk argued the act infringed internet users' "basic rights and freedoms" and received insufficient parliamentary scrutiny. Plans to send thousands of warning letters to alleged illegal downloaders should now go ahead in the first half of next year. However, the ISPs immediately signalled they could appeal against the high court ruling. A spokesman for TalkTalk said: "We're disappointed that we were unsuccessful on most of the judicial review. On the question of the proportionality of the act, we're pleased the judge identified issues but disappointed that he felt that the evidence of the futility of the measures imposed by the act, and the cost and harm they will cause, is not sufficiently definitive enough at this stage to uphold our claim. "We are reviewing this long and complex judgment and considering our options, which may include an appeal to the court of appeal, or a request that the court of appeal make a reference to European court of justice. Though we may have lost this particular battle, we will continue fighting to defend our customers' rights against this ill-judged legislation." Under the act, rights holders will collect data about people believed to be illegally downloading film and music from filesharing sites. ISPs will then match the rights holders' data against their customer database and send warning letters to those accused. Repeat copyright infringers could have their internet access slowed or even blocked under secondary measures in the act. However, this second phase is understood to be about 18 months away from being considered as part of the measures. Rights holders, including music and film industry companies and the Premier League, assert that illegal filesharing is costing UK businesses £400m a year in lost sales. The chief executive of the industry music trade body the BPI, Geoff Taylor, said: "This judgment gives the green light for action to tackle illegal downloading in the UK. "It confirms that the DEA is proportionate and consistent with European law. Shareholders and customers of BT and TalkTalk might ask why so much time and money has been spent challenging the act to help reduce the illegal traffic on their networks. "It is now time for BT and TalkTalk to work constructively with government and rights holders to implement the Digital Economy Act." The high court judge, Mr Justic Parker, dismissed the ISPs' argument that the previous Labour government, which rushed through the DEA in the dying days of the last parliament in April 2010, should have notified the European Commission; that it makes ISPs liable in damages for copyright infringement on their network; that it breaches data protection laws; and that it is a disproportionate response to copyright infringement. However, the ISPs' contention that the DEA is unlawful because it forces them to foot 25% of the bill of the "mass notification system" and its appeals process was upheld. The ISPs will now no longer have to pay 25% of the costs of establishing an appeals body. But they will still have to foot 25% the cost of mass letter sending to internet users, with rights holders paying the remaining 75%. Parker said: "From the point of view of both copyright owner and subscriber, the DEA represents a more efficient, focused and fair system than the current arrangements. "Although it is difficult to predict the effect of measures such as those contemplated by the DEA, there are reasons for believing that such measures may well have a positive effect [on reducing illegal filesharing]." http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...al-economy-act  Righthaven’s Secret Contract Revealed: Will Its Strategy Collapse? Angered at Righthaven’s behavior, a Las Vegas federal judge unsealed the company’s heretofore confidential agreement with the Las Vegas Review-Journal late on Friday. The contract reveals that the controversial copyright-enforcement company and LV R-J parent company Stephens Media are splitting their net earnings from suing hundreds of bloggers on a 50-50 basis. It also shows that the LV R-J is still largely in control of Righthaven’s litigation strategy—a fact that could end up being ruinous for Righthaven’s campaign of copyright lawsuits. The contract shows that it was Stevens Media who had ultimate control of who to sue. A clause of the contract (Section 3.3) allows Stephens Media to call off any lawsuit if a particular target is “a charitable organization, is likely without financial resources, is affiliated with Stephens Media directly or indirectly, [or] is a present or likely future valued business relationship of Stephens Media.” Amazingly, despite Stephens Media’s ability to stop lawsuits, Righthaven went on to sue people in all of those categories with no objection from the newspaper. Righthaven has sued charities, impoverished hobby bloggers, reporters, and the newspaper’s own sources. This agreement is under attack by defense lawyers—and if those attacks are successful, it will undermine Righthaven’s entire business. Righthaven sued political blog Democratic Underground in August for printing an excerpt of an article from the LV R-J. DU hooked up with pro bono lawyers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who are now arguing that this agreement to move around copyrights and sue over them is invalid and a “sham.” The problem is that Stephens Media didn’t actually assign any of the rights related to copyright to Righthaven except the right to sue—and that’s arguably illegal under case law. (Copyright geeks, see Silvers v. Sony Entertainment for more detail.) In other words, none of the important things that come with a copyright—such as the right to make copies of a work, or distribute it, or make “derivative works”—were handed off to Righthaven. Only the right to sue was given, and that makes the copyright transfer bogus, argue DU lawyers. If the lawyers representing DU are successful in this argument, it would undermine every lawsuit Righthaven has filed based on LV R-J copyrights. Righthaven has filed more than 250 lawsuits, mostly against small blogs and websites; every one defendant now has access to this unsealed agreement. If Righthaven’s agreement with MediaNews and The Denver Post is similar, it really could destroy their whole project, since those are their two main clients. DU lawyers want to go after attorneys’ fees—and there is now a scenario in which it’s not just Righthaven but its newspaper clients that will have to pay. Since Stephens Media never truly lost control of its copyrights, it should be brought into the lawsuit as a party, DU lawyers argue. Attorneys’ fees in a case like Democratic Underground—which is employing top IP lawyers from both the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Fenwick & West, one of Silicon Valley’s go-to law firms—could easily run into the low six figures. (These lawyers have taken the DU case on a pro bono basis, but that doesn’t mean they can’t collect attorneys fees at market rates.) So what began as a business deal in which there was no downside for Stephens Media now looks like a situation where the company could be on the hook for a serious chunk of change. It’s worth noting that the contract actually has a specific clause (see Section 11) in which Righthaven indemnifies Stephens Media in the event that attorneys’ fees need to be paid to an opponent. But could Righthaven really fulfill that obligation? What assets does Righthaven really haven? Likely not much; it’s a company set up just to file lawsuits. One generous estimate is that the company has made a couple hundred thousand dollars of gross revenue in the single year it’s been in business. That’s surely been distributed to attorneys and staff. That means that a situation where newspaper companies ultimately end up on the hook for payments is a real possibility. Righthaven wanted to keep these documents sealed, but they utterly failed to convince the U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt to take their side. Other defendants, and the public at large, should have a right to view the contracts, as well as DU’s arguments that they are a sham, which were sealed until Friday. “Because these cases have generated a great deal of public interest, particularly in the media and on the internet, that there is a right of the public to this information which overrides any claimed confidential commercial rights,” Hunt wrote in his order. Hunt also shows how peeved he is at Righthaven’s litigation behavior. (The company truly seems to have a knack for angering judges.) Judge Hunt criticizes how Righthaven has attacked opposing counsel, writing: “There is an old adage in the law that, if the facts are on your side, you pound on the facts. If the law is on your side, you pound on the law. If neither the facts nor the law is on your side, you pound on the table. It appears there is a lot of table pounding going on here.” Case Documents: » Righthaven’s Contract With Stephens Media [PDF] » Judge Hunt’s Order To Unseal [PDF] » Democratic Underground Memorandum Describing Flaws Of Righthaven Contract [PDF] http://paidcontent.org/article/419-r...tegy-collapse/ Senior Judge Slams File-Sharing Law Firm, Orders Costs Payout enigmax Today, Judge Birss QC authorized UK law firm ACS:Law to be pursued for “wasted costs” in connection with their controversial attempts to squeeze cash settlements from alleged file-sharers. The judge slammed the firm, describing owner Andrew Crossley of engaging in improper conduct that has brought the legal profession into disrepute. Following a ruling by a senior judge in the Patents County Court today, law firm ACS:Law and owner Andrew Crossley can indeed be pursued for so-called “wasted costs” relating to more than two dozen abandoned cases. The decision follows the law firm’s campaign of threats against individuals accused of sharing movies, many of them pornographic, on BitTorrent networks. Recipients of ACS:Law letters were told to pay cash settlements of around £500 or face being taken to court by Media C.A.T, a client of ACS:Law. While many resisted, thousands paid up. ACS:Law owner Andrew Crossley, Media C.A.T and other clients together collected around £1.5m in the scheme. Always accused of not wanting to bring any cases to court, in the end ACS:Law was effectively forced to deal with 27 cases they had filed earlier with the Patents County Court in London. Few observers were surprised when they tried to abandon them all at the 11th hour. However, the defendants and their lawyers had run up significant bills dealing with Crossley’s accusations. They called for ACS:Law and Media C.A.T to pay “wasted costs”, something that Judge Birss has been considering since the cases were dismissed last month and has ruled on today. “I am quite satisfied to the standard necessary for this stage of a wasted costs application that Mr Crossley is responsible for the Basic Agreements [the licence agreements between Media CAT and original copyright holders] and has thereby acted in breach of the Solicitors Rule 2.04,” said Judge Birss, as reported by Ralli Solicitors, a law firm in court today representing some of the defendants. “In my judgment the combination of Mr Crossley’s revenue sharing arrangements and his service of the Notices of Discontinuance serves to illustrate the dangers of such a revenue sharing arrangement and has, prima facie, brought the legal profession into disrepute. It may be better placed under the revenue sharing heading in this judgment but it is, prima facie, improper conduct in any event,” Birss added. The language being used by Birss will undoubtedly damage Crossley’s prospects of continuing his career in the legal profession. Having your conduct described by a senior judge as both “chaotic and lamentable” and “amateurish and slipshod” is damning. Both ACS:Law and Media C.A.T, who were previously accused by Judge Birss of doing everything they could “to avoid judicial scrutiny”, pulled their departing stunt at the end of January 2011, by quietly closing down both of their businesses. http://torrentfreak.com/senior-judge...payout-110418/ ACS:Law Solicitor 'Breached Code with Filesharing Claims' Pursuit of alleged filesharers was 'amateurish and slipshod' and 'brought the legal profession into disrepute', judge rules Josh Halliday ACS:Law sent out tens of thousands of letters demanding 'settlement' payments for alleged filesharing. Photograph: Getty Images/Fuse The London-based lawyer at the heart of a huge row over internet piracy, Andrew Crossley, breached the solicitors code of conduct with his method of accusing people of illegal filesharing, a judge has ruled. ACS:Law, the law firm created by Crossley, sent tens of thousands of letters demanding "settlement" payments of about £500 from people it accused of illegal downloading. The firm apparently recouped hundreds of thousands of pounds from the controversial "speculative invoicing" scheme before it finally brought 27 cases to court earlier this year. However, Crossley tried to halt the trial before he had to bring any evidence. Ruling in the Patents County Court in London on Monday, Judge Birss QC described ACS:Law's pursuit of illegal filesharers as "amateurish and slipshod" and said it had "brought the legal profession into disrepute". Birss said Crossley had breached the solicitors code of conduct because he was responsible for the licence agreement between Media CAT and the original copyright holders, and stood to profit from it. The code of conduct states that "you must not enter into an arrangement to receive a contingency fee for work done in prosecuting or defending any contentious proceedings" before the court. The judge said: "I am quite satisfied to the standard necessary for this stage of a wasted costs application that Mr Crossley is responsible for the basic agreements [the licence agreements between Media CAT and original copyright holders] and has thereby acted in breach of the solicitors rule 2.04. "In my judgment, the combination of Mr Crossley's revenue sharing arrangements and his service of the notices of discontinuance serves to illustrate the dangers of such a revenue sharing arrangement and has, prima facie, brought the legal profession into disrepute. It may be better placed under the revenue sharing heading in this judgment but it is, prima facie, improper conduct in any event." Crossley is due to face the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal later this year. A spokeswoman for the Solicitors Regulation Authority, which finalised proceedings against Crossley in March, said on Monday: "Today's judgment supports our concerns about the effects this sort of correspondence has on the public." Crossley could also now have to pay up to £100,000 in legal costs to those he accused of illegal filesharing. One solicitor representing five of the defendants says its bill is £90,000. The solicitor now has about 25 days to appeal to the high court to overturn the costs order. However, Birss on Monday refused his application to appeal. Birss said: "ACS:Law's conduct was chaotic and lamentable. Documents which plainly should have been provided [as evidence before the court] were not provided. This was not the behaviour of a solicitor advancing a normal piece of litigation." Michael Forrester, a solicitor for the law firm Ralli which represented some of the 27 defendants accused by ACS:Law, described how they "cannot possibly have uploaded or downloaded copyright protected material". In February, ACS:Law announced that it would no longer pursue copyright litigations after Crossley claimed death threats were causing an "immense hassle" to his family. ACS:Law was catapulted into the spotlight in September last year when the personal details of thousands of internet users leaked from its website in the aftermath of an attack on by the hacker group Anonymous. The information commissioner is still investigating the leak, and could hand ACS:Law a £500,000 fine if it is found to have stored the details insecurely. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...sharing-claims Illegal Filesharing: Web Blocking in the Dock Josh Halliday Anti-piracy measures move apace despite long delay to Digital Economy Act The culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, appeared to have kicked the ball into the long grass when he asked Ofcom to review the workability of the government's controversial web blocking plans earlier this year. In fact, measures that could put some 100 alleged illegal filesharing websites behind a new internet firewall continue to move apace. Proposals are being mooted on two fronts: one could establish a new version of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) – the organisation which presently scours the net for illegal images of children, obscene adult content and "non-photographic child sexual abuse hosted in the UK" – to deal with illicit filesharing; the other would put Google and the government on a collision course. Proposal #1 Rights holders and internet providers are understood to be roughly in favour of an industry-wide "voluntary code". This code would govern how and which filesharing sites are censored. Rights holders would likely have to satisfy a number of points – for example, how much of the site is infringing? – before a Pirate Bay-like site would appear to vanish from British screens. It would still be there, just unreachable. But that wouldn't be the end of the process. The code could establish a independent third body akin to the IWF that would implement the code and ultimately decide which filesharing sites are censored. No small feat. Detractors argue that such a newly created body would simply be too expensive and time consuming – not to mention how you decide who sits on its board. A second variant, favoured by the legal professionals, is for a judge to rule whether a site should be blocked after the voluntary code has been satisfied. This would quell ISPs' fears about having to paying compensation to sites that claim to have been wrongly blocked, and also negate the need for a new body. The blocking techniques involve a variety of methods. The belief is that they will be powerful and effective. But they are potentially expensive, because as the idea is not to block entire sites, but just the parts of them where there is pirated material. That's rather like the IWF, which does the same (with mixed results in the worst case), and it's very labour-intensive. Get it wrong - by banning the wrong part of a site, or the wrong site, or not banning something - and there could be no end of trouble. Proposal #2 How about Ofcom's web blocking review? The first key difference with the Ofcom review is that it has been asked to do its work against the backdrop of the Digital Economy Act - in other words, this won't be voluntary, but set in a statutory context. The media regulator is expected to advise Hunt at the end of the month on the following terms: • Is it possible for access to a site to be blocked by internet service providers? • How robust would such a block be – in other words would it have the intended effect, and how easy would it be to circumvent for most site operators? • What measures might be adopted by internet service providers to prevent such circumvention? • How granular can blocking be – i.e. can specific parts of a site be blocked, how precise can this be, and how effective? • How effective are sections 17 and 18 of the Act in providing for an appropriate method of generating lists of sites to be blocked? OK. So how would blocking work in the Ofcom model? According to people consulted by Ofcom in recent weeks, the regulator is thought to be "leaning down the domain name blocking route". Although Ofcom is not expected to recommend one blocking method over another, it will spell out the pros and cons of each. Domain name blocking – or DNS blocking – makes an entire site unavailable, not just parts of it, and is relatively inexpensive for ISPs to implement. Italy has used it to block the Pirate Bay, while parts of Scandinavia use it to censor child abuse sites. However, British internet users will be able to subvert this block simply by going to Google. The search giant offers an "alternative DNS provider", meaning any internet user can ditch the setup offered by their ISP and use Google's own. Would Google block sites like the Pirate Bay, BitTorrent or Newzbin2? We'll let that question hang. A lost cause? Whether any of this will work depends on your terms of definition. While acknowledging that the "most determined" infringers can circumvent web censors, rights holders insist that most people don't bother and it is simply to "enforce a code of behaviour". If something is on the internet, it must be legal. Right? Others argue that blocking access to filesharing sites will simply make workarounds a common currency. Asked how easy these filters are to circumvent, one prominent web blocking expert told me: "You need a reading age of about 8. You should go talk to school children and ask whether the blocks their school puts up are effective." "I don't expect ministers to be experts, but I expect them to talk to experts for a few minutes to see how it works before they open their mouth." http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...al-filesharing IMSLP & the Music Publishers Association Philidor IMSLP is currently under an extraordinarily underhanded legal attack by the Music Publishers Association of UK (http://mpaonline.org.uk). The MPA, without notifying us, sent to our domain registrar GoDaddy a bogus DMCA takedown notice. GoDaddy took the entire IMSLP.ORG domain down. IMSLP has filed a DMCA counter notice with GoDaddy, however, the DMCA seems to require the registrar to wait no less than 10 days before restoring service. This means that IMSLP is inaccessible from IMSLP.ORG during this period of time. We will be working to restore service as soon as possible. What is the MPA complaining about? Rachmaninoff’s Bells, which is public domain both in Canada and the USA: [link]. MPA’s claim is entirely bogus. Workaround: You can still reach the site by using either petruccilibrary.org or petruccimusiclibrary.org Note, however, that some links on the site that refer to IMSLP.ORG may be broken; you will have to manually replace IMSLP.ORG with one of the two above domain names manually in the URL bar. Anyone who is interested in suing or helping to sue the MPA under DMCA section 512(f) (misrepresentations) please contact me at imslproject <at> yahoo.ca. Note that the feldmahler <at> imslp.org address is likewise offline. The following is the e-mail that GoDaddy received from the MPA. IMSLP / Project Petrucci LLC grants everyone permission to reproduce it in part or in its entirety. I also grant everyone permission to reproduce the above post in part or in its entirety. Please feel free to make this incident as widely known as possible. Quote:
Anonymous Targets NZ Govt Over Copyright Laws Dan Satherley Online activist collective Anonymous has delivered a message to the New Zealand Government, opposed to the passing of the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill. In a video posted on the group's YouTube page, a computer-generated voice reads a script, saying it is an "unlawful and unjust" policy, and "both a form of censorship and an invasion of privacy". The video has since been taken down due to violating YouTube's rules. The controversial bill, supported by all the major parties except the Greens, aims to stamp out illegal filesharing over the internet by introducing a series of warnings, or strikes, and the possibility of a $15,000 fine. There is also a provision in the bill – as yet inactive – to boot accused repeat offenders off the internet. Anonymous objects to the bill, and has announced New Zealand now has their "full attention". What this means in practical terms is unclear – Anonymous is not, as far as anyone knows, an organised group in the traditional sense. If past actions are anything to go by, a DDos – distributed denial of service – attack is the most likely form any protest from Anonymous would take. That involves bombarding websites and other internet services with as many requests as possible, overloading the server until it stops working. Internal Affairs' website went down in March after a threat from Anonymous, opposed to a voluntary internet filter ISPs could use to block illegal content. Internal Affairs said there was no evidence to suggest the downtime was caused by a DDos attack from Anonymous. Here is the full text of the speech in the new video. 'This is a message to the New Zealand Government. We are Anonymous. We have been watching the actions taken by you and your legislation. The passing of the Infringing File Sharing bill is both a form of censorship and an invasion of privacy. Anonymous will not let this go by unnoticed. Your beliefs that one is guilty until proven innocent is an unlawful and unjust policy. We do not believe that one, when accused of copyright infringement should be questioned by their internet support provider and eligible to pay a $15,000 fine unless proven innocent. We do not believe that one, when accused of copyright infringement should be sentenced to six months suspension of internet usage unless proven innocent. We do not believe that one, when accused of copyright infringement shall be called a criminal in the eyes of the Government for the simple act of accessing information unless proven innocent. Those opposing the copyright law via online protest – we are with you. New Zealand, you now have the full attention of Anonymous. We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us. http://www.3news.co.nz/Anonymous-tar...9/Default.aspx Fleet Foxes' Robin Pecknold Explains His File-Sharing Stance Rob Inderrieden Update: Shortly after news of Robin Pecknold’s comments about the issue of illegal file sharing began circulating the web, the Fleet Foxes frontman, upset that his words had been misinterpreted, took to the band’s Twitter account to explain himself further. “I said music has no inherent CASH value. Why the sensationalism all the time?” Pecknold said in an @-mention to NME. The singer went on, saying, “Cash value of all ‘art’ is subjective is all I was trying to say. A [Pollock] is worth millions for cultural reasons, not for cost of paint.” Another Tweet continued, “That the prices of music ‘products’ have dropped post-filesharing (post-scarcity) proves the lack of objective CASH value.” Fleet Foxes frontman Robin Pecknold recently spoke out about his support for illegal file sharing, arguing that music “has no inherent value.” In an article in The Sunday Times, the singer said that music piracy was crucial to the success of the band’s 2008 debut, and he would continue to support the activity for the band’s sophomore effort, Helplessness Blues, dropping later this year. “How much money does one person need before it’s just a number and I can buy whatever I want – and just be like a big baby?” he said. Pecknold has been vocal about his support of illegal downloading in the past. In 2009, insisted to BBC News that file sharing exposes musicians to a wider variety of influences, making music “richer as an artform.” “That was how I discovered almost everything when I was a teenager – my dad brought home a modem,” he said, naming Brian Wilson’s Smile and The Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle among the albums he was exposed to through file sharing. http://www.pastemagazine.com/article...steal-the.html From 2009 Bands 'Better Because of Piracy' Ian Youngs The rise of illegal downloading has been good for the music scene, helping to create a generation of exciting new acts, according to US band Fleet Foxes. File-sharing has been the scourge of record labels for the past decade. But singer Robin Pecknold said it had made it easier for musicians, including him, to discover lots of classic music that has influenced and inspired them. "As much music as musicians can hear, that will only make music richer as an artform," Pecknold told BBC News. "I think we're seeing that now with tons of new bands that are amazing, and are doing way better music now than was being made pre-Napster." The original Napster launched in June 1999 and became the first mass file-sharing service, sparking an ongoing battle between the music industry and popular but unlicensed song services. Pecknold, 23, says his band, one of the success stories of 2008, would have been different had he not had access to Napster and similar music sources while growing up. "That was how I discovered almost everything when I was a teenager - my dad brought home a modem," he said. "That was how I was exposed to almost all of the music that I love to this day, and still that's the easiest way to find really obscure stuff. "I've discovered so much music through that medium. That will be true of any artist my age, absolutely." Brian Wilson's Smile and The Zombies' Odessey and Oracle were among the albums he discovered through the service, he said. Record companies argue that piracy means people buy less music, which in turn means the labels have less money to spend on developing new acts. The music industry has been hit hard in the last 10 years, with global album sales down more than 50% since 1999 - and the blame largely aimed at file-sharing. Complaints 'disgusting' But Pecknold said he did not object to file-sharing. "I've downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records - why would I care if somebody downloads ours? That's such a petty thing to care about. "I mean, how much money does one person need? I think it's disgusting when people complain about that, personally." Fleet Foxes' self-titled debut album was released last June and was named best album of 2008 by Billboard, The Times, Mojo, Pitchfork and Uncut. The harmonic Seattle folk rock five-piece also earned two Brit Award nominations at the start of the year. Their slow-burning success continued as the album peaked at number three in the UK chart in February. On Thursday, the group beat Leonard Cohen and Radiohead to be named best live act at the Mojo magazine awards in London. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...nt/8097324.stm Pirate Bay Signs Up to File Sharing Research Study Peter Vinthagen Simpson Swedish file sharing website The Pirate Bay has agreed to participate with researchers at Lund University in a major survey of the habits and norms of those using the popular website. "Understanding online norms and values is essential to developing relevant and effective laws and policies. The purpose of this survey is to help researchers to better understand habits and norms within the file-sharing community," a statement introducing the survey stated. Visitors to The Pirate Bay, renamed on Monday as "The Research Bay" are invited to click on a modified logo of the famous galleon logo to enter the survey. The survey was launched on Monday and will remain open for three days and has been designed by the Cybernorms research group at Lund University in southern Sweden. The Pirate Bay has issued a statement on its blog urging users to participate in the name of science. "This may be the time when YOU can tell the world about the real mind of the torrent community," the statement read. The website also takes lengths to reassure users that no IP addresses nor other personal data will be collected for the survey. "The privacy of our users is our number one priority." The Local reported in March that The Pirate Bay was named on a US government list of the world's top marketplaces for pirated and counterfeit goods. In addition to The Pirate Bay, a slew of other BitTorrent sites -- which permit speedy downloads of large files like music, videos and books -- were named, including IsoHunt of Canada, Russia-based Rutracker, Ukraine's Demenoid, and Publicbt. The Pirate Bay recently ranked among the top 100 websites in both global and US traffic, according to the report, which also pointed out that the site had been the subject of a "notable criminal prosecution" in Sweden. In April 2009, a Stockholm court convicted the four men behind The Pirate Bay - Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Carl Lundström and 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 ($4.7 million) in damages. Following a ruling by an appeals court in November 2010, from which Svartholm Warg was absent due to illness, the three remaining men had their prison sentences reduced, although the collective fine was bumped up to 46 million kronor. http://www.thelocal.se/33276/20110418/ The Pirate Bay Plugs Hybrid File-Sharing Platform Ernesto In recent years the file-sharing world has become more diverse than ever before. Torrents, streaming and cyberlockers have all entered the mainstream with millions of users. Tube+ is a newly launched website that brings most of these sharing platforms together. Backed by The Pirate Bay, there is little doubt that this file-sharing platform will not only pique the interest of many Internet users, but that of Hollywood too. Half a decade ago BitTorrent was the absolute king of media distribution, but this has changed in recent years. Cyberlockers such as Megaupload and Hotfile have become as popular as BitTorrent, and movie streaming services have also gained large audiences. Tube+ is a newly launched service that combines all the above, and more. In what can be described as a file-sharing hybrid, the site offers the latest movies and TV-shows streamed directly to user’s browser. In addition, Tube+ also offers links to the files on BitTorrent, cyberlockers and eMule. As far as we know this kind of hybrid approach has never been tried before. Although the site is still quite buggy and doesn’t always suggest the correct links, the fact that it’s being promoted by The Pirate Bay means that it will quickly gather a significant audience. As users may have noticed, Tube+ is being promoted on The Pirate Bay next to their torrent and magnet links. There appears to be some geographical restrictions, meaning that the Tube+ link is not shown globally, but it is available to the majority. The Tube+ site itself is not a project of The Pirate Bay people but nonetheless, the prominent ‘plug’ will pique the interest of many curious users. In just a few days the Tube+ Facebook page has quickly swollen to over 10,000 users, who all appear to ‘like’ the site. Aside from linking to a variety of file-sharing and streaming sources, Tube+ also lists the IMDb ratings for movies and films. In addition, users can search for content based on genre or the year that it was released. According to the reviews on Facebook, these features are liked by many. With backing from The Pirate Bay, Tube+ is destined to become a big player, that is, if the promotion lasts long enough. The downside from a user perspective is that one has to navigate though a minefield of ads. Aside from a few authorized releases, the site also appears to list unauthorized content. The latter means that Tube+ will not receive a very warm welcome in Hollywood circles. It is of course needless to say that Tube+, though its ‘partnership’ with The Pirate Bay, already has big target on its back. This hasn’t gone unnoticed by the people who run the site either as they recently changed their domain from .com to .me in anticipation of a possible domain seizure. For now at least, the hybrid file-sharing platform is still open to the public. http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-b...atform-110417/ uTorrent 3.0 Adds Ratings, Comments and Streaming Ernesto The uTorrent development team officially released the long-awaited version 3.0 Beta of their popular BitTorrent client today. In what can be described as the most significant iteration ever released, uTorrent 3.0 introduces torrent ratings, comments, streaming and various other new features. With this release uTorrent hopes to appeal both to novices and long time BitTorrent users. Torrent for Windows saw its first public release in September 2005 and soon became the most widely used BitTorrent application. Today close to 100 million users worldwide use the client regularly and this number continues to rise. Today, the beta of uTorrent 3.0 was officially released. This version introduces a wide range of new features and improvements that have been extensively tested over the last months. uTorrent parent company BitTorrent Inc. hopes that through these additions their flagship client will appeal to an even larger audience. One of the most anticipated new features is the option to rate and comment on torrent files added to uTorrent. Many users have asked for a commenting feature in the past making it the 4th most-requested function in the uTorrent “Idea Bank“. Although some fear that it will bloat the application and open the door for spammers, the majority see the addition of comments as a useful feature. Aside from adding the option to comment on downloaded torrents, users of uTorrent 3.0 can also rate torrent files by awarding them one to five stars. Together, the comments and star ratings are supposed to give downloaders information on the quality of the various files they’re downloading. Another feature new to uTorrent 3.0 is the option to stream video before the download finishes. A streaming feature was already introduced in some experimental uTorrent releases and will now be added to the core uTorrent functionality. Streaming can be used to preview video files or to watch while downloading. Aside from the above features uTorrent 3.0 also has an updated look. The user interface has been revamped and a “simplified view” added, allowing users to minimize parts of the uTorrent interface to focus attention on the most essential client features. This should make uTorrent less ‘overwhelming’ to novices, who now often drop out because it looks too complex. One of the features implemented to keep novices on board are the “getting started” guides that now have a prominent placement in the client. Here, newcomers can find a beginner’s guide, tutorial videos and other tips and tricks to master BitTorrent quickly. Creating and sharing torrents has never been easier before with uTorrent either. Users will notice a “drop files to send” area in the bottom left-hand corner where they can drop files into. uTorrent will then automatically create the torrent and start seeding. Users can then get a link to share the torrent with their friends directly. Friends who don’t have uTorrent installed yet get the option to download the torrent bundled with a copy of uTorrent. For BitTorrent savvy users the new uTorrent also has plenty of new features in store. Aside from comments and ratings, uTorrent 3.0 also adds remote access to the core functionality. This means that people can securely control their torrents from smartphones and other devices. In addition, uTorrent now has a portable mode so users can carry it conveniently on a USB-stick. “Our design goal is to simplify the way people interact with uTorrent while continuing to offer and expand features and expert capabilities,” BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management Simon Morris told TorrentFreak. “This will likely broaden the appeal for many users while maintaining the technical capabilities popular with power users.” “From a functionality perspective, we’re taking two approaches. First, embed high-demand features like streaming, ratings and remote access that are valuable to many users. Second, creating the ability for people to add-on features via the Apps platform,” Morris added. In the coming months uTorrent will continue to expand its features and capabilities, TorrentFreak was told. “We have an active roadmap for uTorrent for 2011, and the company. We see uTorrent as offering an ideal file sharing experience with deep insight into the background data. Ideally, such a client would enable someone to find, get, play, send, and shift large files over the Internet,” he said. “In particular, major initiatives are underway focused on sending or synching of large files, and introducing support for live streaming,” Morris added. A full overview of all the new features in uTorrent 3.0 and the latest beta are available on the uTorrent website. http://torrentfreak.com/utorrent-3-a...eaming-110419/ Amazon to Allow Library Lending of Kindle Books Amazon.com Inc will start allowing users of the Kindle to borrow e-books from many U.S. public libraries later this year in its latest move to speed the adoption of its electronic reading device. Amazon, the world's largest online retailer by sales, said that Kindle owners will be able to borrow e-books from 11,000 libraries and make electronic annotations in the books but did not give the exact timing of the service's launch. Amazon introduced the market-leading Kindle in 2007 and has priced most of the e-books it sells for less than $9.99 to speed up adoption and ward off competition from devices such as Barnes & Noble Inc's Nook and Apple Inc's iPad. Barnes & Noble introduced library lending at the same time it launched Nook in October 2009. Amazon shares rose 2.2 percent in morning trading. (Reporting by Phil Wahba, editing by Gerald E. McCormick) http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...73J3F720110420 File-Sharers Await Official Recognition of New Religion enigmax A group of self-confessed radical pirates are pinning their hopes on gaining official recognition of their own unique belief system. The founders of the Missionary Church of Kopimism – who hold CTRL+C and CTRL+V as sacred symbols – hope that along with this acceptance will come harmony, not just with each other, but also with the police. ‘Thou shall not steal’ is one of the most well-known of the Ten Commandments. Although most familiar to those in Christian circles, its message is universal and cuts across most religious boundaries. But while stealing – taking another’s property and therefore depriving him of it – is widely frowned upon, some have a wider definition for the word. Make no mistake, if the entertainment industries were God passing their sacred rulings to Moses, there would have almost certainly been one more – Thou Shalt Not Copy. But for the followers of a brand new religion in Sweden, this commandment would be against everything they believe in. The congregation at Missionary Kopimistsamfundet – The Missionary Church of Kopimism – believe that copying is to be embraced by religion and they hope that very shortly this way of life will be officially accepted by the authorities. Founded by 19-year-old philosophy student, Isaac Gerson, this brand new church believes that copying and the sharing of information is the most beautiful thing in the world. To have your information copied is a token of appreciation, say the church, a sure sign that people think you have done something good. For those thinking this is some kind of late April Fool’s joke, think again. In late 2010 the church applied to the authorities to be accepted as an official religion. That application was denied at the end of March on the basis that although the church is indeed a community, its meetings did not constitute ‘worship’. Undeterred, the church founders have requested a meeting to find out what is required in order to gain official acceptance. They certainly aren’t giving in. “Throughout history, various groups around the world have been persecuted by oppressors. They have since taken refuge in religion with a desire for a peaceful coexistence. Without threats and harassment,” the church explain. “In our belief, communication is sacred. Communication needs to be respected. It is a direct sin to monitor and eavesdrop on people. Absolute secrecy is holy in the Church of Kopimism.” The church has its own set of axioms, most of which revolve around free access to knowledge and the sharing of information. They include: • Reproduction of information is ethically right. • The flow of information is ethically right. • Remix Spirit is a sacred kind of copying. • Copying or remixing information conveyed by another person is an act of respect. The church is also acutely against DRM and other methods of protecting or hiding code. “To appropriate software (to keep source code hidden from others), is comparable to slavery, and should be banned,” they declare. Perhaps predictably the church use the ‘Kopimi’ logo (a pyramid with the letter K inside) as their official symbol and hold CTRL+C and CTRL+V as sacred. Joining the church seems fairly easy too. All you have to do is agree that everything should be copied and information should be free in line with the axioms above, then load the church’s website so that the ‘kopimi’ logo refreshes (or indeed draw it, or copy it in any way) and you’re in. Potential followers can request more information by using the online form here. In common with many other religions around the world, expect the followers of the Missionary Church of Kopimism to be widely persecuted for their beliefs. Praying they don’t get caught while practising them will offer little protection. After all, even the Pope backs up his faith with bullet-proof glass. http://torrentfreak.com/file-sharers...ligion-110410/ Copyright Hurdle for Fast Internet Hamish Fletcher New copyright law could hinder the uptake and use of ultra-fast broadband networks, says an international industry analyst. Ericsson's director of government and industry relations, Rene Summer, said the enforcement of copyright does not encourage the growth of markets that will drive the demand for high-speed internet. "We have done three global studies [over the last four years] - the bottom line of it is that media regulation and copyright impact the prospect of take-up on new ultra-fast broadband services," he said. The Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill passed through Parliament on Thursday. It seeks to tackle illegal file sharing, including unauthorised movie and music downloads. Summer argued enforcing copyright does not go to the heart of the problem of why internet users illegally share content. "Enforcement [of copyright breaches] is addressing a symptom of limited legal availability of digital content," he said. "There is a root cause to the problem which enforcement doesn't address and hence will not provide a solution to, and that [is the problem of growing] legal digital markets." Under the current copyright regime, rights holders tightly control how and when content can be distributed, rather than offer users flexibility, Summer said. He gave the example of Hollywood films which are released at the cinema and then after a period of time released on to DVD. This controls the conditions under which the public can consume the content, rather than offering choice. Summer stressed that intellectual property rights were still very important, but claimed that illegal file-sharing was about more than consumers wanting "a free lunch". "The problem is there is no legal choice. Sometimes you need the whip, but you also need the carrot and the carrot is missing here. And the carrot would be rights holders making sure competing platforms [like internet movie services] can provide new offerings." Developing the platforms and markets where users could access more content, like movies and television shows, across a range of formats and distributed to a range of devices would help drive the demand for high-speed broadband, Summer said. The New Zealand Federation Against Copyright Theft, a lobby group connected to the Motion Picture Association, lauded the legislation as a tool for "promoting and protecting the continued growth of New Zealand's creative industries". "The legislation ... will prove invaluable to our efforts to educate consumers about the value of intellectual property while at the same time deterring copyright infringement," said NZFACT director Tony Eaton. The Government's ultra-fast broadband scheme is rolling out fibre internet cables across 75 per cent of New Zealand over the next 10 years. This network aims to offer internet speeds of 100 megabits per second. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/connect/ne...ectid=10720042 New Time Warp for ‘Doctor Who’ Brian Stelter The namesake character in “Doctor Who” can travel through time and space, but he cannot outrun the Internet. When new episodes of that long-running BBC science-fiction drama were broadcast in Britain last year, executives at the BBC America cable channel observed a major spike in illegal file sharing of the show in the United States. Some stateside fans, it seemed, were unwilling to wait the two weeks between the British and American premieres. Many other “Who” fans who did wait were frustrated by online spoilers on blogs and Twitter. The BBC’s solution is to compress time and space. Taking a page from the same-day worldwide premieres of blockbuster films, the new season of “Doctor Who” will start on Saturday not just in Britain, but in the United States and Canada too. “Frankly, there are compelling reasons to do it more quickly,” said Perry Simon, the general manager for channels at BBC Worldwide America, citing an opportunity to make the telecasts feel like worldwide events for fans. But the main reason relates to online piracy. “The moment it airs in the U.K., it’s open season for pirates around the world,” Mr. Simon said. “It’s the dark side of living in a global media village.” The simultaneous broadcast date is a boon to American audiences, who have typically waited months or even years for British series to be shown in the United States. Other television networks are also rethinking their release strategies to address both the potential for the stealing of shows and the potential for spoilers. AMC arranged for its international partner to start the first season of “The Walking Dead” in dozens of countries almost simultaneously last fall. Executives there said such a premiere was unprecedented. “I think you’ll see a lot more of that,” Gale Anne Hurd, an executive producer of “The Walking Dead,” said at the National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas last week. Like Mr. Simon, she cited piracy as a primary reason. “While I think fans very much want to do the right thing,” she said, “they’re not going to wait months and months and months for something that they’re that eager to watch.” Like “The Walking Dead,” “Doctor Who” has a fervent base of fans, many of whom write about each episode on Twitter and other social networking Web sites. At the Las Vegas conference, Chloe Sladden, the director of media partnerships at Twitter, cited the “Doctor Who” release-date strategy as an example of social media’s possibly affecting programming decisions. That’s because the Internet overcomes time-zone borders. Twitter data in the United States indicates that there are fewer tweets about the West Coast broadcasts of television shows than about East Coast broadcasts. Population differences aside, a theory postulated by Twitter is that people are less interested in chatting online about a show when they know that the same chat has already occurred three hours earlier. Twitter, Ms. Sladden said in an e-mail, emphasizes “one shared experience.” Mr. Simon said the so-called online water-cooler trend contributed to the decision to speed up the “Doctor Who” telecasts. While they will not happen at the same hour in each country, they will at least happen on the same day. “There’s a tremendous amount of social media interest in all of our programming, particularly ‘Doctor Who,’ and we want to tap into all of that,” he said. In the first episode of the new season, the sixth since the franchise was restarted in 2005, the Doctor zips to the United States for the first time — another reason BBC America executives were keen to compress the scheduling. Steven Moffat, who took over as the lead writer and executive producer of “Doctor Who” about a year and a half ago, said the characters also wound up on a 17th-century pirate ship and on an asteroid in coming episodes. The BBC is splitting up the 13-episode season into two halves, with the first ending in June, and the second picking up in the fall. By then, the bicontinental schedule will have been interrupted by an American holiday. BBC America is running old episodes of “Doctor Who” on Memorial Day weekend — because television viewing levels are generally low that weekend — so the June episodes will be a week behind Britain. Mr. Simon said BBC America was working on “collapsing” the window of time between local and global premieres of other shows too. Episodes of “The Graham Norton Show” are now shown in the United States only a week after they are in Britain. “Piracy continues to be television’s dirty little secret,” he said. “The bigger the show, the bigger the secret.” https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/23/a...e-delayed.html In the UK? Being told you’re already downloading or have failed the CAPTCHA too many times by file hosting sites for no reason? You might be being IWF’d. If you’d tried to download a file from either filesonic or fileserve some time between 3am on 15/04/2011 to 7pm on 16/04/20111 you might’ve noticed something kind of odd. You might have got an error similar to one of the following. Your first assumption for the first case, as mine was, might be that you’ve been assigned an IP address previously assigned to someone which has failed the CAPTCHA many times. However, the second claims someone else is downloading at the same time. At first glance, this seems to only leave two possibilities: someone else on your connection is downloading a file (nope) or ISP doing large scale NAT (nope, which is a relief). After a brief IM with an acquaintance who has clearly done their homework, but wishes to remain anonymous I was informed I’d been IWF’d, something that didn’t sound particularly pleasant and, as it turns out, isn’t. Wait, who are the IWF? What are they doing exactly? The IWF are the quango who have taken it upon themselves to filter bits of the Internet in the UK. ISPs then subscribe to a list of blocked domains and individual URLs. Enforcing the blocking of an individual domain is relatively easy: don’t respond to DNS requests if the user happens to be using your nameserver, but more importantly, drop any packets to and from the associated ip. Therefore this can be done at the IP layer.2 Sites which allow user content, including one-click file hosting sites (eg Rapidshare) present a more complex challenge for censors. Clearly since anyone can upload files to them, people can upload the types of files the IWF block. Although these types of files will almost always eventually be removed by the administrators of such sites following a complaint, there will inevitably be a delay between a complaint being filed and an actual take down. In this interim period, the IWF want to prevent the files from being downloaded. However, blocking the whole domain would be too agressive. Therefore, the IWF want to only block individual URLs. Unfortunately, this can only be done at the HTTP layer since URLs exist at this layer, which means its necessary to proxy all traffic through a HTTP proxy. This is done by your ISP routing any packets addressed to, say Fileserve’s IP address, to their own proxy instead of to Fileserve’s servers. Your ISP’s proxy then checks to see if the url is blocked. If it is, several different things may happen depending on your ISP. In some cases the connection is dropped. In others a 404 File Not Found (dishonest) or a 403 Forbidden (honest) is returned. If the URL isn’t blocked, the ISP’s proxy will make the request on your behalf to Fileserve and respond with Fileserve’s response. Actually it turns out this second technique is fully general, so there’s no need to use the first one, so CleanFeed and co don’t. How does this relate to the original problem? Putting lots of people behind a proxy breaks many web services. This is because as far as the service is concerned, it appears as if all of a particular ISP’s users are coming from a few IP address (for example, Virgin Media Broadband have just three proxy servers). Many web services make the (often false, but close enough to true to be workable) assumption that one IP address means one user. Perhaps the most famous case of IWF causing this type of breakage is when they blocked Wikipedia’s Virgin Killer page thereby breaking anonymous edits. In this case, it only takes a relatively small proportion of Fileserve users to fail the CAPTCHA for everyone to be locked out. Even if that weren’t the case, the one file per IP policy of both Fileserve and Filesonic ensure that only a few people from a whole ISP will be able to download at once. How can I be sure I’ve been IWF’d (This answer is likely to be more technically in depth than the rest of the post, so feel free to skip it.) There are many different techniques and this is an area in which your mileage is likely to vary significantly given each ISP has a different set up for filtering traffic. Two particular systems are Cleanfeed and WebMinder. In general though there are three families of techniques: Inspecting the HTTP response headers. Using traceroute in various ways. Convincing the website to display what it thinks your IP address is and comparing it to your external IP received from an unblocked site, say whatismyip.com. The first way is probably easiest. Here’s an example from Virgin Media Broadband: $ telnet filesonic.com 80 Trying 78.140.176.180... Connected to filesonic.com. Escape character is '^]'. HEAD / HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently Server: nginx Date: Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 178 Location: http://www.filesonic.com/ Age: 0 Via: HTTP/1.1 webcache1-know.server.virginmedia.net (Traffic-Server/5.7.0-59705 [cMs f ]) The important line here is the Via header. The HTTP standard specifies that proxy servers must insert this, however some are naughty and don’t. If your response has a Via header in and you aren’t explicitly using a proxy server, then its presence probably indicated you’re being IWF’d. It is possible that some reverse proxies will insert a Via header. To be sure, you should look at the hostname of the proxy server after the “Via: “. If it contains your ISP’s name, then it seems very likely you’re being IWF’d. Instead of telnet, you may prefer to use the header inspection tool in your web browser (eg in Chrome spanner→tools→developer tools). Unfortunately, most ISPs aren’t this up front. Therefore it is likely you will have to resort to using traceroute in most cases. One technique with traceroute is to Do a traceroute. Check each intermediate node against a list of known IWF proxies. One such list was created during the Wikipedia incident. Even if there isn’t an exact match, it is worth being suspicious in the case that one of the nodes is in the same class C (or possibly, as is the case with Virgin Media Broadband, class B) subnet as a known IWF proxy. It’s probably also wise to look for suspicious names in the hostname such as webblock, proxy, or webcache. Another technique is to traceroute multiple IP addresses known to not be IWF’d and your suspected IWF’d address. If it’s IWF’d the path should deviate from the normal path sooner, indicating the packet is making its way to your ISP’s proxy, which is within the ISP’s network. Some ISPs may route the ICMP packets sent by standard traceroute differently from the HTTP traffic we’re concerned about. Therefore it might be desirable to use tcptraceroute with 80 as the destination port for this purpose. Anyway, I’d be very interested if people want to post their experience with detection of this on different ISPs in the comments. People within the IWF must view illegal content to verify whether it should be taken down. Can’t they be arrested? Apparently, and this is nth hand information where n≥3, there are six people in the UK who have special permission to view this content and the verification is done in a sealed room. So no. Edit 17/04/2011: As is so often the case with such hearsay, this is incorrect, or at least not the full story. Rather the police have published a Memorandum of Understanding which is more general purpose. Thanks to mkb for pointing this out. The IWF are mentioned in particular in the memo so it’s possible the original statement related to there being six employees of the IWF who do the actual checking. What can I do about it? As a workaround the usual trick of using your own proxy based somewhere outside IWF land works. This includes other countries, but also some ISPs within the UK since IWF blocking doesn’t necessarily apply to all Internet providers within the UK. The IWF have a list of companies who recieve their blocklist. As a rule of the thumb, most home ISPs have it, but some commercial and educational ISPs may not. For example, JANET does not subscribe to the IWF blocklist and therefore the situation will vary from University to University. You are unlikely to have much luck with public proxies since in this case, again, you are sharing an IP with many other people. Still, given there are so many public proxies, you may have some luck if you manage to find an unpopular one. Longer term, it is important to keep in mind that ISPs subscribe to the IWF voluntarily. The reason for them even bothering at all is there’s a large lobby including politicians and tabloids3 who conflate being able to access certain urls with the act of abusing a child. The only way to counter a large lobby is to create your own. This is left as an exercise for the reader. The actual interval is probably larger, but this was the only time I was monitoring. As of writing it seems like it may still be in effect for filesonic. ↩ Well, maybe not, since this might result in over aggressive blocking for where there isn’t a one to one mapping between IPs and domains/web sites, so DNS manipulation may be preferable. Of course in that case the website may still be accessible by visiting the IP address but manipulating the Host header. Anyway, I digress. ↩ I include The Observer in this, who may very well have helped pave the way for bringing the IWF into existence with their mud flinging claim that Clive Feather (a director of Demon) “provides paedophiles with access to thousands of photographs of children being sexually abused” by providing unfiltered USENET access. ↩ http://grimboy.co.uk/blawg/in-the-uk...be-being-iwfd/ Burning Question: Is Wi-Fi Squatting Illegal? Ryan Singel It’s so easy: You see an open wireless connection called Linksys or dlink and you jump on to check your email or see if anyone has retweeted you. In fact, we did all the reporting for this story, including VoIP calls, over an unsecured Wi-Fi network. Were we breaking the law? “It’s not clear,” says Orin Kerr, a professor at George Washington University Law School and an expert in cyberlaw. “It’s probably OK, but you can’t rule out a prosecution.” Though using an open Wi-Fi network doesn’t feel like hacking, the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act sees things differently. That 1986 law makes it a felony to access computer systems, including routers, without authorization. But the few cases of someone in the US being prosecuted solely for Wi-Fi theft generally read like that of the Michigan man who drew a sheriff’s attention four years ago by regularly parking outside a café with an open laptop but never buying anything. He was charged with using a computer system without authorization, pleaded guilty, and paid a $400 fine. Over time, however, the law has apparently become more tolerant of Wi-Fi squatting. For example, you’re not committing multiple felonies if your iPhone jumps from network to network while you walk down the street. “You have to know it was unauthorized,” says attorney Jennifer Granick, former civil liberties director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Otherwise, you are an accidental criminal, and generally we don’t allow that.” Granick thinks you’re probably safe even if you purposely direct your laptop to an open signal. That’s because, as Internet users have grown more sophisticated, most networks have become password-protected. So one could argue that it’s reasonable to assume open networks are intentionally so. “Now, more than in the past, using open wireless can be considered authorized,” Granick says. Still, no one can say for sure. The reason we lack a definitive answer, according to Kerr, is that authorities tend to prosecute open Wi-Fi usage only when they are piling charges onto real hacking crimes in order to snag a plea deal. As a result, authorized use, as it applies to the vaguely worded CFAA, has never been laid out definitively in court. “But if anyone is charged with a crime solely for using an open wireless connection, have them give me a call,” Kerr says. “I will defend them.” Hopefully we won’t have to take him up on that. http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/0...ifi_squatting/ Australia Makes Top 4 of Internet Freedom List But limits on content and violation of user rights drag rating down Hamish Barwick Australia has scored highly for internet freedom in its first appearance on a Freedom House report into 37 countries, but violation of user rights and lack of access for some users were cited as concerns. Freedom House is a US-based private organisation which publishes surveys on subjects such as press freedom, political rights and civil liberties. The report, entitled Freedom on the Net 2011: A Global Assessment of Internet and Digital Media, placed Australia in fourth place behind Germany, the US and Estonia. Countries received a score from 0 for the most free to 100 for the least free. Demerit points for obstacles to access, content limits and violation of user rights - including government moves to block applications - filtering and blocking of websites, surveillance, privacy and legal prosecution for online activity - were awarded. For example, Australia's score was 18 while Iran received the worst score of 89. A previous Freedom on the Net report published in 2009 examined 15 countries, with Estonia in the number one position and Cuba in last place. In the 2011 report, Freedom House outlined that the Australian government had adopted a strong policy of technical neutrality, with no limits to the amount of bandwidth that internet service providers (ISPs) can supply. "While the government does not place restrictions on bandwidth, ISPs are free to adopt internal market practices on traffic shaping," the report said. "Some Australian ISPs practice traffic shaping under what are known as fair-use policies. "If a customer is a heavy peer-to-peer user, the internet connectivity for those activities will be slowed down to free bandwidth for other applications." However, the organisation raised concerns about an election law passed in the state of South Australia in January 2010. Under the law, any individual posting a political comment in the run-up to local elections would be required to do so with their real name and address. "The law applied to blogs and online news sites and non-compliance would draw a fine of up to $AUD1,250 ($US1,230)," the report said. "Following a public outcry, the state’s attorney general and premier agreed to repeal the law. "This compulsory data retention policy, if enacted, could become a great threat to online freedom in Australia. The document is not official policy in Australia nor has it evolved into a concrete proposal or bill." As of December 2010, it was "unclear" whether such a policy would be realised in Australia stated the report. Freedom House also drew attention to the proposed mandatory filtering system run through ISPs. "Draft legislation was proposed under the Labor government led by Kevin Rudd, but was then put aside in the run-up to elections held in August 2010," the documents said. "Under the previously proposed draft, the list of sites to be blocked would initially focus on images of child abuse, particularly child pornography. "The Australia Communications Media Authority (ACMA) would have the responsibility of maintaining the blacklist, but the criteria for blocking sites remained nebulous. "Under the latest proposal, the ACMA would blacklist any content classified as restricted, and its early trials of internet filters used an initial list of over 1,300 sites." Freedom House praised the move to roll out the National Broadband Network (NBN) as it would remove obstacles to access, particularly for indigenous people. Approximately 50 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders living in indigenous communities (not major cities) have access to the internet, with 36 per cent having access in the home. "Wireless systems can reach 99 per cent of the population, while satellite capabilities are able to reach 100 percent," the report said. "The phasing out of dialup continues, with nearly 90 per cent of internet connections now provided through other means. "Once implemented, the NBN will eliminate the need for any remaining dial-up connections and make high-speed broadband available to Australians in remote and rural areas." http://www.computerworld.com.au/arti..._freedom_list/ Foreign Money Fuels Faltering Bid to Push Online Poker Eric Lipton For the past four years, the foreign companies that control the global Internet poker industry have helped bankroll an elaborate lobbying campaign here, seeking to keep the United States from shutting their American operations down. Former Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato, Republican of New York, has been the public face of the effort, which has included charity poker tournaments featuring members of Congress, as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to a disparate assortment of lawmakers, including Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the majority leader. But late last week, the United States Justice Department delivered an unexpected thunderbolt to this huge lobbying campaign when it indicted top executives at PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker, accusing them of fraud and money laundering. In doing so the government has taken on a politically powerful industry that for a while seemed like it might transform gambling around the world. As evidence of the industry’s shifting fortunes, major gambling operators like Wynn Resorts are already distancing themselves from the three Internet gambling companies, canceling planned business alliances. ESPN has removed poker-related content from its own Internet site. This is exactly what the industry was trying to prevent when it set out to block enforcement of a law intended to ban Internet games or to get the law repealed. Interviews show that the companies named in the indictment, while foreign-based, have indirectly been paying more than half of the lobbying and operating bills for a nonprofit organization that is championing Internet gambling in the United States. Mr. Frank, in an interview on Monday, said he had no plan to back down. “It is a bad law,” he said. “How is it possible that a United States attorney in New York does not have anything more to do than indict people for a full house? He should be indicting people for the empty houses we have around,” referring to the troubles in the mortgage industry. Mr. Frank and Representative John Campbell, Republican of California, in March introduced yet another bill, backed by the Poker Players Alliance, a Washington-based nonprofit group. Its budget is subsidized by a Canadian trade association whose members include the companies that run Poker Stars and Full Tilt Poker. As a senator, Mr. D’Amato played a regular poker game that featured lobbyists. On Friday, he said in a statement, “Online poker is not a crime and should not be treated as such.” An estimated 10 million online poker players in the United States have turned to these Internet sites, helping generate perhaps as much as $5 billion in annual revenues for the companies. On Friday the Justice Department said the companies had illegally moved their earnings to corporate headquarters in spots like the Isle of Man in Great Britain and Costa Rica by conspiring with middlemen who disguised them as sales of items like flowers, pet supplies and golf clubs. John Pappas, the executive director of the Poker Players Alliance, pointed out on Monday that the organization is made up of an estimated 1.2 million members in the United States, including both amateur and professional players, who want to be able to bet online. One of the executives indicted, Raymond Bitar, 39, of California and Ireland, is a contributor to the Players Alliance Political Action Committee, donating about $15,000 of the $200,000 the committee has given to members of Congress in the last four years, with Mr. Frank collecting the biggest amounts. But most of the money the committee gives to politicians here comes from individuals not cited in the indictment. And Mr. Pappas said the power of his group came not from industry giants but from its members. “It is the 1.2 million members who live and vote in Congressional districts across the country,” he said. He did confirm that more than half of his organization’s budget is supported by industry companies, including those indicted Friday. But the push in Washington, and much of the fund-raising, is coordinated by Poker Players Alliance, which relies in large part on contributions from the Internet-based operators. The organization spent $1.6 million on lobbying last year, using nine lobbying firms, and lobbyists like former Representative Jon Porter, Republican of Nevada, and Mr. D’Amato. The Poker Players Alliance is enlisting players around the nation to call or write lawmakers to protest the restrictions. It hosts an annual “fly-in” day, when players fan out across Capitol Hill. And it sent representatives to — and set up a poker tournament at — the Conservative Political Action Conference this year, convinced it could find some recruits to its cause at the popular annual event. In October 2009, 19 members of Congress signed a letter sent to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, urging them to impose a one-year delay on enforcing regulations intended to cut off payments to the Internet poker companies. One of the lead signers of the letter was Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York; he calls Mr. D’Amato a friend and mentor, and Mr. D’Amato has served as one of his top fund-raisers. In total, 15 of the 19 signers of the letter received contributions from the Poker Player Alliance political action committee in the last election cycle. Mr. Frank has been celebrated as one of the industry’s most important champions in Washington. He worked last year to push legislation through the Financial Services Committee, where he served as chairman until this year, that would legalize Internet poker, although the bill never got taken up by the Senate or the full House. Mr. Frank, no poker player himself, has said he opposes the ban based on his distaste for government intervention into the private lives of citizens. His advocacy, he said, goes back to 2002, even before the Poker Players Alliance was set up. Mr. Pappas, the executive director of the Poker Players Alliance, delivered $51,200 worth of bundled campaign contributions to Mr. Frank’s re-election campaign in late 2009, according to campaign finance reports. These contributions follow up on at least $30,000 more that Mr. Frank took in from the industry in the prior two years, including contributions from some of the industry’s most famous players, like Annie Duke (“The Duchess Of Poker”), Howard Lederer (“The Professor”) and Andy Bloch (“The Rock”). For now, the companies that have been indicted — and their Internet site addresses seized by the Justice Department — have stopped taking bets from players in the United States, generating a wave of resentment from the millions of players who turned to the games, many several times a day. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/u...s/19lobby.html Children Fail to Recognize Online Ads, Study Says Matt Richtel “Hey kids, this is advertising.” A thin banner with those words, or some variation of them, appears on various game sites that are aimed at children and sponsored by food companies like General Mills. The companies say such banners alert players that the games are a form of advertising, meant to encourage loyalty to cereals or junk food whose images often appear somewhere in the game. But the banners and other notifications do not work, according to a study published in the spring edition of The Journal of Advertising. The paper finds that, despite the presence of the banners, children fail to recognize the games as advertising. The banners “do not raise awareness of who put the game up or why they put the game up,” said one of the paper’s two authors, Susannah Stern, an associate professor of communication studies at the University of San Diego. My Thursday story documents how food companies are seeking to reach children through “advergames.” Critics argue that such tactics blur the line between marketing and entertainment, while the companies contend that they have clearly labeled their sites as advertising. Ms. Stern and a colleague looked at the reactions of 112 fourth-graders who played “Be a Popstar,” a game focused on the Honeycomb cereal brand that was available on Postopia, a site sponsored by Post Foods. The research found that the advertising notifications — which the study refers to as “ad breaks” — didn’t succeed in communicating the commercial nature of the site to most of the children. Some children played a version of the game with ad labels, and some played a version with the labels removed. When the children were asked to identify the source of the game, there were no significant differences in the responses of the two groups. Thirty-four percent of all participants said the site had been created by a pop star or celebrity — the most common response. Some children even named particular stars, hypothesizing that the site was the product of, say, the Jonas Brothers. Only 10 percent correctly identified the source as the cereal maker or the Honeycomb brand. In fact, researchers found that the children were more likely to believe that the site was trying to turn them into a pop star than that it was trying to make them want to eat Honeycomb cereal. (However, the research also showed that students who saw the ad labels were significantly less likely to believe that the site had star-making intentions.) Even children who identified the cereal company or brand as the site’s sponsor tended not to recognize that it was intended to sell cereal. Only one participant picked up such “selling intent,” while 35 percent said the site was meant to be entertainment and 40 percent said it was intended to be informative. Ms. Stern said the research suggested to her that companies or policy makers needed to consider some way to standardize notifications about advertising online so children understood what they were seeing. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/0...ds-study-says/ Apple Asks Judge to Dismiss Lawsuit Alleging Music Downloading Monopoly Pamela MacLean and Karen Gullo A federal judge was asked by Apple Inc. (AAPL) to dismiss a consumer antitrust lawsuit claiming the company limited choice by linking iPod music downloading to its iTunes music store. Robert Mittelstaedt, an attorney for the Cupertino, California-based company, yesterday told U.S. District Judge James Ware in San Jose, California, that blocking iPod music downloads that used competitors’ software was intended to improve downloading quality for iTunes customers. Changes that Apple made in 2004, just days after Internet music software company RealNetworks Inc. (RNWK) announced a technology allowing songs from its online store to be played on iPods, weren’t anticompetitive, he said. “Apple’s view is that iPods work better when consumers use the iTunes jukebox rather than third party software that can cause corruption or other problems,” Mittelstaedt said at a hearing. Apple had cited 58 consumer downloading complaints as the source of its decision to upgrade iPods to exclude other companies’ downloads working with the hand-held devices. Ware asked whether Apple had tried to confirm through scientific tests whether other companies’ downloads were the true cause of consumer complaints. Mittelstaedt said the company had not done such tests. ‘Battle of Experts’ Bonny Sweeney, a lawyer representing iTunes customers who sued, said the plaintiffs could not locate any legacy software that would allow them to conduct accurate tests, prompting Ware to say that a trial may become a “battle of experts.” Ware said he will rule by May on the request to dismiss the case. By March 2009, digital music files offered on iTunes were sold without proprietary software, according to court records. Apple co-founder and chief executive officer Steve Jobs, ordered by a separate judge to answer questions in the case, met with plaintiff attorneys for a deposition on April 12, Sweeney said yesterday. She declined to comment further. Jobs took a medical leave from the company starting Jan. 17. The CEO, who has battled a rare form of cancer, has taken time off for medical reasons three times in the past seven years. Kristin Huguet, an Apple spokeswoman, declined to comment on pending litigation or on the Jobs deposition. The RealNetworks media team didn’t respond to a phone call and e-mail seeking comment. The case is Apple iPod, iTunes Antitrust Litigation, C05- 0037JW, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Jose). http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-0...-monopoly.html Grooveshark Stands Up For Its Service – Makes Android App Available Online And Sends Out Open Letter To The Music Industry Zak Stinson Companies like YouTube and Grooveshark are at the center of the ongoing controversies around online distribution of copyrighted materials. This controversy reared its ugly head earlier this month when the Grooveshark app was removed from the Android Market. While this disappointed many of the users who stream all their favourite tunes without having to posses an actual digital copy, Google was justified in kicking these pseudo-pirates out of the Market, right? Not so, says Grooveshark. In protest to Google’s decision to drop the app, Grooveshark has re-released it to the public. Although the app is still absent from the Market, it has been made available on Grooveshark’s mobile website. Unfortunately, not all Android users are able to get the app onto their devices, as some carriers (*cough* AT&T) prevent installation of non-Market applications. In an interesting turn of events, Grooveshark also put out an open letter to the music industry today via Digital Music News (available in full at the bottom of this page). In it they state that it was unclear which aspects of Google’s Terms of Service the music streaming app violated. They also defended the legality, and even the importance, of the service they provide. Grooveshark maintains that they operate a legal service "within the boundaries of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA)" and that they are indeed doing the music industry a service by utilizing the Safe Harbour component of the DMCA, which "encourages technology companies to innovate in hopes that they will eventually solve some of the problems that are plaguing content producers today." Many of the producers who partner with Grooveshark – and there are many – are paid a fee by the company, along with getting secondary benefits such as promotion of tours and sales, targeting for marketing dollars, and the ability to test singles or merchandise with surveys or panels. Grooveshark also states that they aren’t stopping the defense of their activities with this letter. They "will defend [their] service, and the letter and the spirit of the law, in court and in Congress." Them’s fightin’ words. And we like ‘em! The music industry has been dragging their feet in adopting new ways to harness the Internet for monetization of their content. Let’s hope that Grooveshark can keep up the good fight and help improve the delivery of media for both producers and consumers. via: MobileCrunch, Digital Music News Quote:
To Tug Hearts, Music First Must Tickle the Neurons Pam Belluck The other day, Paul Simon was rehearsing a favorite song: his own “Darling Lorraine,” about a love that starts hot but turns very cold. He found himself thinking about a three-note rhythmic pattern near the end, where Lorraine (spoiler alert) gets sick and dies. “The song has that triplet going on underneath that pushes it along, and at a certain point I wanted it to stop because the story suddenly turns very serious,” Mr. Simon said in an interview. “The stopping of sounds and rhythms,” he added, “it’s really important, because, you know, how can I miss you unless you’re gone? If you just keep the thing going like a loop, eventually it loses its power.” An insight like this may seem purely subjective, far removed from anything a scientist could measure. But now some scientists are aiming to do just that, trying to understand and quantify what makes music expressive — what specific aspects make one version of, say, a Beethoven sonata convey more emotion than another. The results are contributing to a greater understanding of how the brain works and of the importance of music in human development, communication and cognition, and even as a potential therapeutic tool. Research is showing, for example, that our brains understand music not only as emotional diversion, but also as a form of motion and activity. The same areas of the brain that activate when we swing a golf club or sign our name also engage when we hear expressive moments in music. Brain regions associated with empathy are activated, too, even for listeners who are not musicians. And what really communicates emotion may not be melody or rhythm, but moments when musicians make subtle changes to the those musical patterns. Daniel J. Levitin, director of the laboratory for music perception, cognition and expertise at McGill University in Montreal, began puzzling over musical expression in 2002, after hearing a live performance of one of his favorite pieces, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27. “It just left me flat,” Dr. Levitin, who wrote the best seller “This Is Your Brain on Music” (Dutton, 2006), recalled in a video describing the project. “I thought, well, how can that be? It’s got this beautiful set of notes. The composer wrote this beautiful piece. What is the pianist doing to mess this up?” Before entering academia, Dr. Levitin worked in the recording industry, producing, engineering or consulting for Steely Dan, Blue Öyster Cult, the Grateful Dead, Santana, Eric Clapton and Stevie Wonder. He has played tenor saxophone with Mel Tormé and Sting, and guitar with David Byrne. (He also performs around campus with a group called Diminished Faculties.) After the Mozart mishap, Dr. Levitin and a graduate student, Anjali Bhatara, decided to try teasing apart some elements of musical expression in a rigorous scientific way. He likened it to tasting two different pots de crème: “One has allspice and ginger and the other has vanilla. You know they taste different but you can’t isolate the ingredient.” To decipher the contribution of different musical flavorings, they had Thomas Plaunt, chairman of McGill’s piano department, perform snatches of several Chopin nocturnes on a Disklavier, a piano with sensors under each key recording how long he held each note and how hard he struck each key (a measure of how loud each note sounded). The note-by-note data was useful because musicians rarely perform exactly the way the music is written on the page — rather, they add interpretation and personality to a piece by lingering on some notes and quickly releasing others, playing some louder, others softer. The pianist’s recording became a blueprint, what researchers considered to be the 100 percent musical rendition. Then they started tinkering. A computer calculated the average loudness and length of each note Professor Plaunt played. The researchers created a version using those average values so that the music sounded homogeneous and evenly paced, with every eighth note held for an identical amount of time, each quarter note precisely double the length of an eighth note. They created other versions too: a 50 percent version, with note lengths and volume halfway between the mechanical average and the original, and versions at 25 percent, 75 percent, and even 125 percent and 150 percent, in which the pianist’s loud notes were even louder, his longest-held notes even longer. Study subjects listened to them in random order, rating how emotional each sounded. Musicians and nonmusicians alike found the original pianist’s performance most emotional and the averaged version least emotional. But it was not just changes in volume and timing that moved them. Versions with even more variation than the original, at 125 percent and 150 percent, did not strike listeners as more emotional. “I think it means that the pianist is very experienced in using these expressive cues,” said Dr. Bhatara, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Paris Descartes. “He’s using them at kind of an optimal level.” And random versions with volume and note-length changes arbitrarily sprinkled throughout made almost no impression. All of this makes perfect sense to Paul Simon. “I find it fascinating that people recognize what the point of the original version is, that that’s their peak,” he said. “People like to feel the human element, but if it becomes excessive then I guess they edit it back. It’s gilding the lily, it’s too Rococo.” The Element of Surprise Say the cellist Yo-Yo Ma is playing a 12-minute sonata featuring a four-note melody that recurs several times. On the final repetition, the melody expands, to six notes. “If I set it up right,” Mr. Ma said in an interview, “that is when the sun comes out. It’s like you’ve been under a cloud, and then you are looking once again at the vista and then the light is shining on the whole valley.” But that happens, he said, only if he is restrained enough to save some exuberance and emphasis for that moment, so that by the time listeners see that musical sun they have not already “been to a disco and its light show” and been “blinded by cars driving at night with the headlights in your eyes.” Dr. Levitin’s results suggest that the more surprising moments in a piece, the more emotion listeners perceive — if those moments seem logical in context. “It’s deviation from a pattern,” Mr. Ma said. “A surprise is only a surprise when you know it departs from something.” He cited Schubert’s E-Flat Trio for piano, violin and cello as an example. It goes from a “march theme that’s in minor and it breaks out into major, and it’s one of those goose-bump moments.” The departure “could be something incredibly slight that means something huge, or it could be very large but that’s actually a fake-out,” Mr. Ma said. The singer Bobby McFerrin, who visited Dr. Levitin’s lab and walked through several experiments, said in a video of that visit that “one of the things that I have found valuable to me in a performance, whether I’m performing or someone else is, is a certain element of naïveté,” as if “as we’re performing we’re still discovering the music.” In an interview, the singer Rosanne Cash said the experiments showed that beautiful compositions and technically skilled performers could do only so much. Emotion in music depends on human shading and imperfections, “bending notes in a certain way,” Ms. Cash said, “holding a note a little longer.” She said she learned from her father, Johnny Cash, “that your style is a function of your limitations, more so than a function of your skills.” “You’ve heard plenty of great, great singers that leave you cold,” she said. “They can do gymnastics, amazing things. If you have limitations as a singer, maybe you’re forced to find nuance in a way you don’t have to if you have a four-octave range.” The Musical Brain The brain processes musical nuance in many ways, it turns out. Edward W. Large, a music scientist at Florida Atlantic University, scanned the brains of people with and without experience playing music as they listened to two versions of a Chopin étude: one recorded by a pianist, the other stripped down to a literal version of what Chopin wrote, without human-induced variations in timing and dynamics. During the original performance, brain areas linked to emotion activated much more than with the uninflected version, showing bursts of activity with each deviation in timing or volume. So did the mirror neuron system, a set of brain regions previously shown to become engaged when a person watches someone doing an activity the observer knows how to do — dancers watching videos of dance, for example. But in Dr. Large’s study, mirror neuron regions flashed even in nonmusicians. Maybe those regions, which include some language areas, are “tapping into empathy,” he said, “as though you’re feeling an emotion that is being conveyed by a performer on stage,” and the brain is mirroring those emotions. Regions involved in motor activity, everything from knitting to sprinting, also lighted up with changes in timing and volume. Anders Friberg, a music scientist at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, found that the speed patterns of people’s natural movements — moving a hand from one place to another on a desk or jogging and slowing to stop — match tempo changes in music that listeners rate as most pleasing. “We got the best-sounding music from the velocity curve of natural human gestures, compared to other curves of tempos not found in nature,” Dr. Friberg said. “These were quite subtle differences, and listeners were clearly distinguishing between them. And these were not expert listeners.” The Levitin project found that musicians were more sensitive to changes in volume and timing than nonmusicians. That echoes research by Nina Kraus , a neurobiologist at Northwestern University, which showed that musicians are better at hearing sound against background noise, and that their brains expend less energy detecting emotion in babies’ cries. Separately, the Levitin team found that children with autism essentially rated each nocturne rendition equally emotional, finding the original no more emotionally expressive than the mechanical version. But in other research, the team found that children with autism could label music as happy, sad or scary, suggesting, Dr. Levitin said, that “their recognition of musical emotions may be intact without necessarily having those emotions evoked, and without them necessarily experiencing those emotions themselves.” A Matter of Time The ability to keep time to music appears to be almost unique to humans — not counting Snowball the cockatoo, which dances in time to “Everybody,” by the Backstreet Boys, and became a YouTube sensation. Both the Levitin and the Large studies found that the timing of notes was more important than loudness or softness in people’s perceptions of emotion in music. This may be a product of evolutionary adaptation, said Dr. Kraus, since “a nervous system that is sensitive and well tuned to timing differences would be a nervous system that, from an evolutionary standpoint, would be more likely to escape potential enemies, survive and make babies.” Changes in the expected timing of a note might generate the emotional equivalent of “depth perception, where slightly different images going to your two eyes allows you to see depth,” said Joseph E. LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University. And musical timing might relate to the importance of timing in speech. “The difference between a B and a P, for example, is a difference in the timing involved in producing the sound,” said Aniruddh D. Patel, a music scientist at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego. “We don’t signal the difference between P and B by how loud it is.” Michael Leonhart, who played trumpet and produced for Steely Dan, said he thought “the ears of most people have started to become less sensitive to dynamics” as music recordings crank up the volume and “the world has become a louder place.” Subtle timing differences, on the other hand, are critical, Mr. Leonhart said, citing a triplet figure in the beginning of Steely Dan’s song “Josie.” “The tendency is to start rushing it, to get excited,” Mr. Leonhart said. But the key is “to lay it back, don’t rush, make sure it’s not ahead of the snare drum. It changes the slingshot effect of where things snap and pop.” Mr. Simon plays with timing constantly, surfing bar lines. He squeezes lyrics like “cinematographer” — six short notes — into the space of a two-syllable word, and will “land on a long word with a consonant at the end, so that you really hear the word,” he said. “My brain is working that way — it’s dividing up everything. I really have a certain sense of where the pocket of the groove is, and I know when you have to reinforce it and I know when you want to leave it.” Musicians like Mr. Simon consider slight timing variations so crucial that they eschew the drum machines commonly used in recordings. Dr. Levitin says Stevie Wonder uses a drum machine because it has so many percussion voices, but inserts human-inflected alterations, essentially mistakes, so beats do not always line up perfectly. And Geoff Emerick, a recording engineer for the Beatles, said: “Often when we were recording some of those Beatles rhythm tracks, there might be an error incorporated, and you would say, ‘That error sounds rather good,’ and we would actually elaborate on that. “When everything is perfectly in time, the ear or mind tends to ignore it, much like a clock ticking in your bedroom — after a while you don’t hear it.” Unknown, Maybe Unknowable Of course, science has not figured out how to measure other elements of musical expression, including tone, timbre, harmonics and how audience interaction changes what musicians do. While there may be some consensus about what makes music expressive, performers say it is hardly immutable. “Every day I’m a slightly different person,” Mr. Ma said. “The instrument, which is sensitive to weather and humidity changes, will act differently. There’s nothing worse than playing a really a great concert and the next day saying, ‘I’m going to do exactly the same thing.’ It always falls flat.” Ms. Cash, who on a recent road trip listened to multiple versions of Chopin nocturnes and quizzed herself on which pianist she preferred, learned a lot about musical flexibility after developing polyps on her vocal cords in 1998. “Because of these little polyps I’ve had to learn how to resing some of our songs, use breath where I used to use force, use force where I used to go delicate,” she said. “The World Unseen,” on her album “Black Cadillac,” “gained some curves and some sweetness that I didn’t realize was there,” she said. “We recorded that really late at night, a live track, and it wasn’t that good of a vocal. The producer said he wanted to get a better vocal so we did it a few more times, but we kept going back to that live version. I keep it in a certain part of my voice. If I do it too breathy it sounds cloying. If I hit it too hard, it sounds like rock.” But thinking things through goes only so far. For one melody, Mr. Simon started out using the words “going home,” he said. “But I said I’m not going to write ‘going home.’ Nothing interesting about that,” he said. “Then I stumbled on this word, ‘Kodachrome,’ which of course, had no meaning.” In Dr. Levitin’s lab, Mr. McFerrin gamely tried several experiments, including seeing how long he could hold his hand in ice water while listening to different types of music (an effort to find out if music can ameliorate pain). He described a story by Hermann Hesse in which a violinist, granted his wish to be the best musician he can be, vanishes as soon as he starts to play. “He completely disappears into the music,” Mr. McFerrin says on the video. “And I think that’s actually a big key to a successful creative moment for me, is when I disappear, and maybe the audience disappears into the music and becomes so engaged in the music that you forget that you’re even there.” As Ms. Cash put it: “Some things you can break down, and some things are ineffable. Some things are just part of that mystery where all creative energy comes from. It’s part of the soul. Music is an ever-moving blob of mercury.” https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/science/19brain.html Roger Nichols, Artist Among Sound Engineers, Dies at 66 Ben Sisario Roger Nichols, a recording engineer whose meticulous studio work with Steely Dan and others earned him seven Grammy Awards, died on April 9 at his home in Burbank, Calif. He was 66. The cause was pancreatic cancer, his family said. In a four-decade career, Mr. Nichols worked with John Denver, Rickie Lee Jones, Bela Fleck, Toto, Rosanne Cash and many others. But he is most associated with Steely Dan and its two principal members, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, whose 1970s recordings are still hallowed by audiophiles for their pristine sound and attention to even the most minute detail. Mr. Becker, Mr. Fagen and their producer, Gary Katz, were known for exacting standards, and as their favored engineer Mr. Nichols played a crucial part in their quest for sonic perfection. That included control over all the machinery in the studio and even making some to order: partly to satisfy Mr. Fagen’s demands for inhumanly steady drumming, Mr. Nichols invented an early drum machine, the Wendel, which plays a significant part on the band’s 1980 album, “Gaucho.” “Roger made those records sound like they did,” Mr. Katz said in an interview on Friday. “He was extraordinary in his willingness and desire to make records sound better.” Roger Scott Nichols was born on Sept. 22, 1944, in Oakland, Calif., and grew up in Rancho Cucamonga, near Los Angeles, where his interest in audio recording sprouted early: while in high school he made home recordings with a guitar-playing classmate, Frank Zappa. Mr. Nichols studied nuclear physics at Oregon State University and from 1965 to 1968 worked at the San Onofre nuclear power plant outside San Diego. But his interest in high-fidelity audio led him to quit that job and work in recording, first at a garage studio he opened with friends and later at ABC-Dunhill Records in Los Angeles. One evening Mr. Katz brought Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen to ABC-Dunhill to record a demo, and Mr. Nichols was the only engineer available. But from the start they all clicked, and Mr. Nichols — whose sobriquet in Steely Dan’s liner notes was “the Immortal” — became a fixture with the studio-focused band. In a group portrait on the back cover of the 1973 Steely Dan album “Countdown to Ecstasy,” Mr. Nichols’s seemingly disembodied hand creeps out from under the recording console to adjust some sound levels. Mr. Nichols won six of his seven Grammys for work with Steely Dan, including three in 2001 for “Two Against Nature,” the band’s comeback album after a hiatus of nearly 20 years. His seventh was for his work with John Denver. In addition to his studio work, Mr. Nichols was a longtime columnist at the pro audio magazine EQ. He also founded Roger Nichols Digital, a company that develops plug-ins, a component of digital recording systems. He is survived by his wife, Connie; two daughters, Cimcie and Ashlee; a sister, Melinda Ryan; and a brother, Jeffrey Nichols. In an interview, Mr. Nichols once ascribed his close professional connection with Steely Dan and Mr. Katz to the obsession they all had with getting the most out of the technology in the recording studio. “We’re all perfectionists,” Mr. Nichols said. “It wasn’t a drag for me to do things over and over until it was perfect.” He added: “It would have driven a lot of other engineers up the wall. In my own way, I’m just as crazy as they are.” https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/a...ies-at-66.html New AT&T Phone Contracts Dive in 1Q AP AT&T subscribers are still buying iPhones, but with Verizon now selling the phone too, it seems to have lost its power to draw new subscribers to AT&T. AT&T, the country's largest telecommunications company, reported Wednesday the addition of 62,000 net new subscribers on contract-based plans in the first quarter, a record low. A year ago, the figure was 512,000. Net income rose 39 percent to $3.41 billion, or 57 cents per share, for the January-March period. That's up from $2.45 billion, or 42 cents per share, a year ago. Excluding items, earnings were 58 cents per share, beating the average analyst as polled by FactSet by a penny. Revenue was $31.2 billion, up 2.3 percent from a year ago. It matched analyst expectations. https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/201...Earns-ATT.html Amazon EC2 Goes Down, Taking With It Reddit, Foursquare And Quora Mike Butcher Cloud computing is all very well until someone trips over a wire and the whole thing goes dark. Reddit, Foursquare and Quora were among the sites affected by Amazon Web Services suffering network latency and connectivity errors this morning, according to the company’s own status dashboard. Amazon says performance issues affected instances of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service and its Relational Database Service, and it’s “continuing to work towards full resolution”. These are hosted in its North Virginia data centre. http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/21/ama...are-and-quora/ Final Report: Pan-European Cyber Security Exercise The EU's cyber security agency, ENISA, has issued its final report on the first Pan-European cyber security exercise for public bodies, Cyber Europe 2010. The report underlines the need for more cyber security exercises in the future, increased collaboration between the Member States and the importance of the private sector in ensuring IT security. Supporting EU-wide exercises concerning cyber-security preparedness is a priority for the EU within its "Digital Agenda for Europe", in order to ensure that businesses and citizens are secure when they are online. The exercise was conducted on the 4th of November, 2010. Its objective was to trigger communication and collaboration between countries in the event of large-scale cyber-attacks. Over 70 experts from the participating public bodies worked together to counter over 300 simulated hacking attacks aimed at paralysing the Internet and critical online services across Europe. During the exercise, a simulated loss of Internet connectivity between the countries took place, requiring cross-border cooperation to avoid a (simulated) total network crash. Key findings Member States’ Information Technology bodies communicate in a wide variety of ways. Harmonisation of standard operating procedures would lead to more secure and efficient communications between them. The ability of participants to find the relevant points of contact within organisations varied. In the event of a real crisis, some 55 % of countries were not confident they would be able to quickly identify the right contact, even with the available directories. Participants were evenly divided about if a ‘Single Point of Contact’ (SPOC) or ‘Multiple Points of Contact’ (MPOC) would be better. A SPOC would be easier, however, realistically today there are multiple points of contact. Having MPOC also avoids there being a single point of failure. The report’s main recommendations include that: • Europe should continue to hold exercises in Critical Information Infrastructure Protection (CIIP): 86% of the participants found the ‘dry run’ either ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ useful. • The private sector can contribute value to future exercises by increasing levels of realism. • The ‘Lessons Identified’ should be exchanged with those holding other (national or international) exercises. • Member States should be well organised internally by, for example, developing and testing national contingency plans and exercises. European countries are organised nationally in a variety of ways. Given the differences in structures and process, it is vital to know whom to contact. The dialogue on the necessity of a SPOC or MPOC at the EU level should continue, and ENISA can be the facilitator of this. • A roadmap for pan-EU exercises should be created. This would include a definition of standard procedures and structures for large scale events. “The Cyber Europe report identifies how we can make our online economic and social activities more secure. ENISA is dedicated to supporting European exercises, processes and plans to protect the Information Communications Technology infrastructure, on which we are all increasingly dependent,” says Prof. Udo Helmbrecht, Executive Director of ENISA. The full report is available here. http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=10908 iPhone Keeps Record of Everywhere You Go Privacy fears raised as researchers reveal file on iPhone that stores location coordinates and timestamps of owner's movements Charles Arthur Security researchers have discovered that Apple's iPhone keeps track of where you go – and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to the owner's computer when the two are synchronised. The file contains the latitude and longitude of the phone's recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner's movements using a simple program. For some phones, there could be almost a year's worth of data stored, as the recording of data seems to have started with Apple's iOS 4 update to the phone's operating system, released in June 2010. "Apple has made it possible for almost anybody – a jealous spouse, a private detective – with access to your phone or computer to get detailed information about where you've been," said Pete Warden, one of the researchers. Only the iPhone records the user's location in this way, say Warden and Alasdair Allan, the data scientists who discovered the file and are presenting their findings at the Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. "Alasdair has looked for similar tracking code in [Google's] Android phones and couldn't find any," said Warden. "We haven't come across any instances of other phone manufacturers doing this." Simon Davies, director of the pressure group Privacy International, said: "This is a worrying discovery. Location is one of the most sensitive elements in anyone's life – just think where people go in the evening. The existence of that data creates a real threat to privacy. The absence of notice to users or any control option can only stem from an ignorance about privacy at the design stage." Warden and Allan point out that the file is moved onto new devices when an old one is replaced: "Apple might have new features in mind that require a history of your location, but that's our specualtion. The fact that [the file] is transferred across [to a new iPhone or iPad] when you migrate is evidence that the data-gathering isn't accidental." But they said it does not seem to be transmitted to Apple itself. iphone-data-map Map shows location data collected from an iPhone that had been used in the southwest of England Although mobile networks already record phones' locations, it is only available to the police and other recognised organisations following a court order under the Regulation of Investigatory Power Act. Standard phones do not record location data. MPs in 2009 criticised the search engine giant Google for its "Latitude" system, which allowed people to enable their mobile to give out details of their location to trusted contacts. At the time MPs said that Latitude "could substantially endanger user privacy", but Google pointed out that users had to specifically choose to make their data available. The iPhone system, by contrast, appears to record the data whether or not the user agrees. Apple declined to comment on why the file is created or whether it can be disabled. Warden and Allan have set up a web page which answers questions about the file, and created a simple downloadable application to let Apple users check for themselves what location data the phone is retaining. The Guardian has confirmed that 3G-enabled devices including the iPad also retain the data and copy it to the owner's computer. If someone were to steal an iPhone and "jailbreak" it, giving them direct access to the files it contains, they could extract the location database directly. Alternatively, anyone with direct access to a user's computer could run the application and see a visualisation of their movements. Encrypting data on the computer is one way to protect against it, though that still leaves the file on the phone. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at the security company Sophos, said: "If the data isn't required for anything, then it shouldn't store the location. And it doesn't need to keep an archive on your machine of where you've been." He suggested that Apple might be hoping that it would yield data for future mobile advertising targeted by location, although he added: "I tend to subscribe to cockup rather than conspiracy on things like this – I don't think Apple is really trying to monitor where users are." The location file came to light when Warden and Allan were looking for a source of mobile data. "We'd been discussing doing a visualisation of mobile data, and while Alasdair was researching into what was available, he discovered this file. At first we weren't sure how much data was there, but after we dug further and visualised the extracted data, it became clear that there was a scary amount of detail on our movements," Warden said. They have blogged about their discovery at O'Reilly's Radar site, noting that "why this data is stored and how Apple intends to use it — or not — are important questions that need to be explored." The pair of data scientists have collaborated on a number of data visualisations, including a map of radiation levels in Japan for The Guardian. They are developing a Data Science Toolkit for dealing with location data. Davies said that the discovery of the file indicated that Apple had failed to take users' privacy seriously. Apple can legitimately claim that it has permission to collect the data: near the end of the 15,200-word terms and conditions for its iTunes program, used to synchronise with iPhones, iPods and iPads, is an 86-word paragraph about "location-based services". It says that "Apple and our partners and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device. This location data is collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you and is used by Apple and our partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services. For example, we may share geographic location with application providers when you opt in to their location services." http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...-privacy-fears Inquiries Grow Over Apple’s Data Collection Practices Miguel Helft and Kevin J. O’Brien The controversy surrounding the security of Apple’s iPhone and iPad escalated Thursday as some European governments said they would investigate whether the company had violated privacy laws by collecting and storing users’ geographic location data. At the same time, some researchers said that contrary to reports published Wednesday, the iPhone’s recording of location information in a hidden file on the device, later stored on iTunes on a PC, has been known for some time, and that the information has, on some occasions, been used by law enforcement agencies in investigations. “This data that was supposedly discovered yesterday has existed in earlier iPhones,” said Alex Levinson of Katana Forensics, a company that specializes in extracting data from electronic devices for legal cases. Mr. Levinson said that he and colleagues had explained Apple’s practices at conferences and in research papers, and that his firm has helped law enforcement agencies “harvest geolocational evidence from iOS devices,” a reference to the Apple operating system. Mr. Levinson said that an update to Apple’s operating system changed the location of the file storing the information, but that the file had existed previously. Security experts say law enforcement agencies can often get more precise location information from cellphone carriers than from the hidden file. While privacy advocates and many iPhone users were alarmed by the revelations, Mr. Levinson and other security experts said they suspected that Apple had been using the data to be able to pinpoint a phone’s location more quickly, saving bandwidth and battery life, when their owners used location-based services like maps and navigation. Still, the controversy has been magnified by Apple’s silence. For the second day, the company did not respond to calls and e-mails seeking comment. But in a letter sent by Apple in July to two congressmen — Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Joe L. Barton, Republican of Texas — the company appeared to confirm that it has been storing and collecting location information for some time. In the letter, Apple said it collects the location data anonymously and only when consumers agree to use its location-based services like maps, or any apps that ask a user’s location, and for its advertising system, iAds. The company said that it has been offering location-based services since 2008, but that only in 2010, when it released iOS 3.2, did it begin relying on its own databases for those services. Explaining its need to collect data from its customers’ phones, Apple wrote, “These databases must be updated continuously.” Security experts say companies like Apple and Google collect the location of Wi-Fi networks and cell towers to pinpoint the location of phones without using GPS technology. Some suggested Apple was doing so through the users of its iPhones. Mark Seiden, an information security consultant in Silicon Valley, said that Apple’s letter to the congressmen suggests that it uses the location data from the previously hidden file “so a phone knows where it is quickly.” Mr. Seiden said that Apple did not appear to be using the data to track people, but that the company should probably be more diligent about deleting dated location information. “I don’t know why they would want to keep old data on the device,” he said. Mr. Markey on Thursday sent a follow-up letter to Apple asking it to explain why it was storing the information in the user’s device, and raising concern that its actions could violate the Communications Act. “Apple needs to safeguard the personal location information of its users to ensure that an iPhone doesn’t become an iTrack,” Mr. Markey said in a statement. On Wednesday, Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, also sent a letter asking Apple for an explanation. The controversy erupted on Wednesday, when two computer programmers issued a report at a conference in San Francisco describing the files with the hidden data. The programmers also released a program that allowed users to see their stored location data on a map. Some privacy experts were particularly concerned that the files were not encrypted, and that they were backed up on users’ computers. The concerns quickly spread to Europe, where privacy laws are typically stricter than in the United States. The Bavarian Agency for the Supervision of Data Protection, in Germany, said it would examine whether — and if so, why — the iPhone and iPad were storing such user data. Thomas Kranig, the director of the agency, said his office had asked Apple whether geographic information was being stored and for what purpose. “If it’s true that this information is being collected, and it is being done without the approval and knowledge of the users, then it is definitely a violation of German privacy law,” Mr. Kranig said. The Italian Data Protection Authority also opened an investigation into Apple’s data collection, expanding one it had begun on how mobile applications process personal data, Reuters reported. France may follow suit. Yann Padova, the secretary general of CNIL, the French data protection authority, said the agency was trying to verify the report by the American programmers. The French agency plans to send Apple France a letter asking for an explanation next week, Mr. Padova said. A major concern will be whether the information remained on the device or whether it was transferred by Apple to one of its commercial partners. “In the first case, it is a matter of simply not obtaining the consent of the consumer for the data to be collected,” Mr. Padova said. “In the second case, if the information is marketed without the knowledge of the consumer, it is much more serious.” https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/22/t...gy/22data.html Jailbreak Utility Blocks iOS from Storing Recorded iPhone Location Data Mark Gurman Noted jailbreak developer Ryan Petrich has released a new jailbreak-only utility tonight named untrackerd, which promises to block iOS and Apple’s ability to log your device’s location information. Petrich’s application comes in light of a new discovery that Apple’s mobile operating system tracks iOS device’s longitude and latitude. That location information is then stored on your computer’s hard drive and can later be accessed by just about anyone with the right computer skills or software. Untrackerd is [available for free on the Cydia jailbreak store. Thanks, Will. Untrackerd’s description in Cydia: Quote:
The Government Internet ID Proposal’s Pros and Cons An expert on electronic privacy walks through the possibilities and perils on a national online security system designed, in part, by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Emily Badger Last Friday, the U.S. government unveiled its National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, a blueprint for the private-industry development of voluntary tools that would authenticate and consolidate your identity online. We need such a thing, the government says — in a pamphlet titled, well, “Why We Need It” — because our proliferating online passwords are inconvenient and insecure, and because last year 8.1 million adults in the U.S. suffered identity theft or fraud, at a cost of $37 billion. The idea seems like one mandated by the moment. Increasingly, important commerce, banking and government services have migrated online, demanding ever more accounts and passwords and logins to remember. But Amie Stepanovich, national security counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, explains that this proposal has actually been years in the making. And the history of its development suggests the concept is equal parts promising and risky — a reality hardly captured in the government’s enthusiastic 45-page rollout, complete with “Envision it!” sidebar scenarios. Idea Lobby Stepanovich dates the idea back to early last decade when private companies first began designing “Internet credential” systems to verify users’ identities in online transactions. In 2004, the government launched such a system for federal employees, who today carry microchip-embedded ID cards that grant access to both buildings and websites while recognizing individual security clearance levels. That system seemed a logical efficiency (and federal employees, after all, have a different relationship to the government than the rest of us do). But the following year, Congress passed legislation, the REAL ID Act, mandating elements of a national ID card for the rest of us. “In that [government employee] capacity there really wasn’t a huge privacy concern,” Stepanovich said. “And then it started growing, this need to authenticate everybody.” In 2009, the government released a Cyberspace Policy Review first proposing the objective of a national plan for online identification — what sounded like a national ID card for the Internet — and concerns grew. “That’s what a lot of people feared — that the government was going to take REAL ID and put it on the Internet and be able to track everybody’s Internet activity,” Stepanovich said. That is not what’s contained in the NSTIC proposal, to the relief of privacy advocacy groups. “I think that they learned a lesson with REAL ID that people are not receptive to a centralized government database,” Stepanovich said. “The history, all the way back to the 1930s with Social Security numbers, has been that people reject the idea of a national identity number.” The NSTIC sidesteps that, in part, by deferring to private industry to develop the “identity ecosystem.” But the idea, as it is roughly outlined in the government’s proposal, still comes with a lot of unsettling complications. The government has set out principles — chief among them “choice, efficiency, security and privacy” — more than mechanics. But the basic idea is that you could have your offline identity verified online by a company of your choosing. That company would then provide you with a single credential you could then present (when you don’t want to be anonymous online) to Amazon, or VA.gov, instead of having to re-establish that you are who you say you are with every online transaction. The device carrying your credential — a flash drive, a cellphone, a smart card of some kind — would authenticate itself, rather than referring Amazon to the company that vouches for you. Amazon would know the buyer was secure, and the credential would know it was communicating with a bookseller, but the authentication provider would never learn that you just bought Bob Woodward’s new book. In this way, all of the parties involved would never freely communicate with each other, creating precisely the web of information that you probably don’t want anyone — private company or government agency — to track. The first problem with this idea is obvious: If you consolidate all of your passwords in one place, that actually makes your identity even easier to steal. And if you’re carrying that identity around on a pocket-sized device, you’re about as likely to lose it as you are your wallet — now with added disastrous consequences. The alternative to a self-authenticating physical credential would be some kind of authentication via the cloud. But that has problems, too. Inside the cloud, it would be more difficult to erect blinders between the ID provider, you and the sites you want to access or the products you want to buy. “It cuts both ways,” Stepanovich said of the benefits and pitfalls of an authentication device. “It’s more secure. Because there’s no database of everything you’re doing, they’re not going to be able to track you. But in the end, you’re carrying around your entire identity. Imagine losing your cellphone if in the future your Visa card were on your cellphone.” Because of this, she doesn’t expect anyone in the future will truly use just one credential. Maybe you’ll have a high-security ID for banking (on a thumb drive), a medium-security one for e-commerce (on your keychain), and a low-security one for social networking (in your wallet). Three access points is still probably fewer than you use today, although Stepanovich’s vision does dampen the government’s suggestion that NSTIC would give you one magic key to the whole Internet. Privacy advocates also worry about whether the program would truly be voluntary and how long it could stay that way. It’s easy to imagine an online world where authentication becomes practically mandatory, if not legally so. Advocates can point to the mission creep of the Social Security number as an example. “It’s not enough to say they won’t be mandatory — you affirmatively have to say that they are voluntary,” Stepanovich said. “People need to be given a choice. If I want to use my credential to say I am who I am, that’s great. But if I want to keep 10,000 passwords, if I want to keep everything separate, I should be given that opportunity. I shouldn’t be excluded from activities on the Internet simply because I don’t want my data aggregated.” We also don’t want to exclude demographics that will be slow adopters of this technology, Stepanovich adds, or to discourage foreign companies from doing business with U.S. online platforms that require authentication. The last problem with NSTIC is the murkiest. Nowhere in the government’s 45-page proposal is the Department of Homeland Security mentioned, but that agency has been involved throughout the idea’s history, dating back to its lead in developing the federal employee ID card system. The public face of the proposal, instead, has been Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, within Commerce, is set now to lead the plan forward. Homeland Security’s involvement, though, sends up yellow flags. “We don’t really know what their role with NSTIC is,” Stepanovich said. “We know they were a partner in developing the strategy, and supposedly they have transitioned their role to NIST to implement it. I think, though, that we have to be aware as consumers of this program that if DHS continues to be involved, there are definitely concerns that are going to come with that.” If the system works as the government’s proposal says it should, there wouldn’t be much opportunity for Homeland Security to track your compartmentalized online information anyway. But there’s no denying that the government is currently pursuing two policies in cyberspace that now seem at odds with each other. On the one hand, it wants to make your online identity so secure and private — even more so than in the real world — that it swears even the government can’t track you. But on the other, federal law enforcement agencies are actively pursuing expanded powers to wiretap online communications. In an ideal universe, where all of these concerns could be resolved, an online identity system could be a good idea. The question is whether we can guarantee those conditions. “That’s where the legislation is going to have to come in,” Stepanovich said. “An agency regulating itself and what it can do is not going to be enough here. We’re going to have to have legislation that there are certain protections that come with this program, and we’re going to have to make sure that those are implemented and that there are strict consequences if those are not complied with, either by private industry or by government. “If it comes out that there is a back door, if some of this technology has been developed in a way that government can access the information, I think the government needs to be held accountable for that.” http://www.miller-mccune.com/politic...nd-cons-30448/ Michigan: Police Search Cell Phones During Traffic Stops ACLU seeks information on Michigan program that allows cops to download information from smart phones belonging to stopped motorists. CelleBriteThe Michigan State Police have a high-tech mobile forensics device that can be used to extract information from cell phones belonging to motorists stopped for minor traffic violations. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan last Wednesday demanded that state officials stop stonewalling freedom of information requests for information on the program. ACLU learned that the police had acquired the cell phone scanning devices and in August 2008 filed an official request for records on the program, including logs of how the devices were used. The state police responded by saying they would provide the information only in return for a payment of $544,680. The ACLU found the charge outrageous. "Law enforcement officers are known, on occasion, to encourage citizens to cooperate if they have nothing to hide," ACLU staff attorney Mark P. Fancher wrote. "No less should be expected of law enforcement, and the Michigan State Police should be willing to assuage concerns that these powerful extraction devices are being used illegally by honoring our requests for cooperation and disclosure." A US Department of Justice test of the CelleBrite UFED used by Michigan police found the device could grab all of the photos and video off of an iPhone within one-and-a-half minutes. The device works with 3000 different phone models and can even defeat password protections. "Complete extraction of existing, hidden, and deleted phone data, including call history, text messages, contacts, images, and geotags," a CelleBrite brochure explains regarding the device's capabilities. "The Physical Analyzer allows visualization of both existing and deleted locations on Google Earth. In addition, location information from GPS devices and image geotags can be mapped on Google Maps." The ACLU is concerned that these powerful capabilities are being quietly used to bypass Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches. "With certain exceptions that do not apply here, a search cannot occur without a warrant in which a judicial officer determines that there is probable cause to believe that the search will yield evidence of criminal activity," Fancher wrote. "A device that allows immediate, surreptitious intrusion into private data creates enormous risks that troopers will ignore these requirements to the detriment of the constitutional rights of persons whose cell phones are searched." The national ACLU is currently suing the Department of Homeland Security for its policy of warrantless electronic searches of laptops and cell phones belonging to people entering the country who are not suspected of committing any crime. http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/34/3458.asp Dropbox Lack of Security Miguel de Icaza I am a fan of Dropbox. It is a great tool, a great product, and clearly they have a passionate team over at Dropbox building the product. Dropbox recently announced an update to its security terms of service in which they announced that they would provide the government with your decrypted files if requested to do so. This is not my problem with Dropbox. My problem is that for as long as I have tried to figure out, Dropbox made some bold claims about how your files were encrypted and how nobody had access to them, with statements like: All transmission of file data occurs over an encrypted channel (SSL). All files stored on Dropbox servers are encrypted (AES-256) Dropbox employees aren't able to access user files, and when troubleshooting an account they only have access to file metadata (filenames, file sizes, etc., not the file contents) But anyone that tried to look further came out empty handed. There really are no more details on what procedures Dropbox has in place or how they implement the crypto to prevent unauthorized access to your files. We all had to just take them at their word. This wishy-washy statement always made me felt uneasy. But this announcement that they are able to decrypt the files on behalf of the government contradicts their prior public statements. They claim that Dropbox employees aren't able to access user files. This announcement means that Dropbox never had any mechanism to prevent employees from accessing your files, and it means that Dropbox never had the crypto smarts to ensure the privacy of your files and never had the smarts to only decrypt the files for you. It turns out, they keep their keys on their servers, and anyone with clearance at Dropbox or anyone that manages to hack into their servers would be able to get access to your files. If companies with a very strict set of security policies and procedures like Google have had problems with employees that abused their privileges, one has to wonder what can happen at a startup like Dropbox where the security perimeter and the policies are likely going to be orders of magnitude laxer. Dropbox needs to come clear about what privacy do they actually offer in their product. Not only from the government, but from their own employees that could be bribed, blackmailed, making some money on the side or are just plain horny. Dropbox needs to recruit a neutral third-party to vouch for their security procedures and their security stack that surrounds users' files and privacy. If they are not up to their own marketed statements, they need to clearly specify where their service falls short and what are the potential security breaches that Unless Dropbox can prove that algorithmically they can protect your keys and only you can get access to your files, they need to revisit their public statements and explicitly state that Dropbox storage should be considered semi-public and not try to sell us snake oil. http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Apr-19.html Yahoo Will Keep Search Queries for 18 Months Verne G. Kopytoff Three years ago, Yahoo cast itself as a defender of privacy by saying it would keep detailed records of its users’ search queries for just 90 days. The company said it would then purge that information in an effort to “strengthen Yahoo’s relationship of trust” with its users. Now Yahoo is reversing course. On Friday, it disclosed plans to keep user data for much longer: 18 months. “Over the last three years, the way we and other companies offer services online and the way consumers experience the Internet has changed dramatically,” Anne Toth, Yahoo’s chief trust officer, said in a blog post. “So, we will keep our log file data longer than we have been — offering consumers a more robust individualized experience — while we continue our innovation in the areas of transparency and choice to protect privacy.” The changes will go into effect in mid- to late July. Yahoo’s users will get notifications over the next four to six weeks. Privacy advocates complain that the changes erode consumer privacy and amount to a flip-flop by Yahoo. They suspect that Yahoo intends to use the information gleaned from search queries, along with details about the pages they view and the ads users click on, to present users with more focused advertising. “Frankly it was pretty disappointing,” Richard Esguerra, a senior activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said of Yahoo’s decision. He continued that “we felt like, good, search engines are finally getting that they can compete on privacy — that it is another piece of the puzzle.” But he said this “signals something different.” Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, called Yahoo’s move “a bait and switch” and said he planned to complain to the Federal Trade Commission. Yahoo adopted the 90-day retention policy amid rising concern by consumers about Internet privacy and pressure by European regulators to limit the data that companies store. Search data, a number of privacy groups feared, could contain sensitive or embarrassing information that could be traced back to an individual. In response, Yahoo said it would erase from its records the last eight bits that make up an Internet Protocol address, which identifies the computer used to make a search query. Yahoo said it would also delete logs of search terms that contain personal information such as names, credit card numbers and addresses. With the change in policy, Yahoo goes from keeping data the shortest amount of time compared to its rivals to one of the longest. Google retains data for nine months, while Microsoft’s policy is to keep data for six months. Ms. Toth said the new policy would place its data retention policy “closer to the competitive norm across the industry.” Yahoo uses Microsoft’s search technology as part of a partnership, but Yahoo retains control of the design. Yahoo’s new policy may be in conflict with European Union data protection rules that require search engines to purge all individual data after six months. Yahoo said that it would continue to work with the European Union “to discuss the future of privacy regulation modernized for the Internet age,” according to a Yahoo statement. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/0...for-18-months/ Google Wi-Fi Judge Asks if Packet Sniffing Is Spying David Kravets The question of whether Google is liable for damages for secretly intercepting data on open Wi-Fi routers across the United States is boiling down to the definition of a “radio communication.” That appears to be the legal theory embraced by the Silicon Valley federal judge presiding over nearly a dozen combined lawsuits seeking damages from Google for eavesdropping on open Wi-Fi networks from its Street View mapping cars. The cars had been equipped with Wi-Fi–sniffing hardware to record the names and MAC addresses of routers to improve Google location-specific services. But those cars were also capturing the contents of internet packets that were sent over unencrypted Wi-Fi as they drove by, something the company said was an accidental leftover from testing. While the company quickly admitted that it had made a mistake and temporarily grounded its fleet of mapping vehicles last year, the company was confronted with a number of investigations around the world, as well as class-action lawsuits that were joined in San Jose, California. The lawsuits are being heard by U.S. District Judge James Ware. At the center of the legal flap is whether Google breached the Wiretap Act. The answer is important not only to Google, but to the millions who use open, unencrypted Wi-Fi networks at coffee shops, restaurants or any other business trying to attract customers. Google said it is not illegal to intercept data from unencrypted, or non-password-protected Wi-Fi networks. Plaintiffs’ lawyers representing millions of Americans whose internet traffic was sniffed by Google think otherwise, and are seeking unspecified damages. Judge Ware, however, suggested the answer to the far-reaching privacy dilemma lies in an unanswered question. He has asked each side to define “radio communication” as it applies to the Wiretap Act, and wants to know whether home Wi-Fi networks are “radio communications” under the Wiretap Act. In response, Google wrote last week that open Wi-Fi networks are akin to “radio communications” like AM/FM radio, citizens’ band and police and fire bands — and are “readily accessible” to the general public. Indeed, packet-sniffing software, such as Wireshark and Firesheep, is easily available online. Hence, because unencrypted Wi-Fi signals travel over the radio spectrum, they are not covered by the Wiretap Act, Google responded. “There can be no doubt that the transfer of any sign, signal, writing, images, sound, data, or intelligence of any nature transmitted over the radio spectrum constitutes a ‘radio communication.’ Indeed, there is nothing in the text or legislative history of the Wiretap Act that would exclude any transmission sent over the radio spectrum from the definition of ‘radio communication,’” Google wrote. The plaintiffs’ lawyers countered that the communications in question started on a computer and only briefly were relayed on radio waves “across the living room from the recipient’s router to her laptop.” “The fact that either the first or final few feet of the electronic communication may have gone via wireless transmission ['Wi-Fi'] does not transform the communication into a ‘radio communication’ broadcast similar to an AM/FM radio or a CB.,” plaintiffs’ lawyer Elizabeth Cabraser wrote. “Nor is there anything in the statute to define ‘radio communications’ as synonymous with anything sent on a radio wave, however briefly and without regard to the entirety of the communication system at use.” Both sides agree, however, that it’s illegal to listen in on cordless phones. According to the Wiretap Act, it’s not considered felony wiretapping “to intercept or access an electronic communication made through an electronic communication system that is configured so that such electronic communication is readily accessible to the general public,” according to the text of the federal wiretapping statute. The Federal Trade Commission closed its investigation into the brouhaha in October, without imposing any sanctions on the Mountain View, California, internet giant. The Federal Communications Commission commenced a probe in November, but has not announced a conclusion. The FCC’s government affairs chief wrote last year that “Google’s behavior also raises important concerns. Whether intentional or not, collecting information sent over Wi-Fi networks clearly infringes on consumer privacy.” Several state attorneys general are also looking into the debacle. Google said it didn’t realize it was sniffing packets of data on unsecured Wi-Fi networks in about a dozen countries over a three-year period until German privacy authorities began questioning what data Google’s Street View cars were collecting. Google, along with other companies, use databases of Wi-Fi networks and their locations to augment or replace GPS when attempting to figure out the location of a computer or mobile device. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...i-fi-spy-flap/ The SSD Project The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created this Surveillance Self-Defense site to educate the American public about the law and technology of government surveillance in the United States, providing the information and tools necessary to evaluate the threat of surveillance and take appropriate steps to defend against it. Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) exists to answer two main questions: What can the government legally do to spy on your computer data and communications? And what can you legally do to protect yourself against such spying? After an introductory discussion of how you should think about making security decisions — it's all about risk management — we'll be answering those two questions for three types of data: First, we're going to talk about the threat to the data stored on your computer posed by searches and seizures by law enforcement, as well as subpoenas demanding your records. Second, we're going to talk about the threat to your data on the wire — that is, your data as it's being transmitted — posed by wiretapping and other real-time surveillance of your telephone and Internet communications by law enforcement. Third, we're going to describe the information about you that is stored by third parties like your phone company and your Internet service provider, and how law enforcement officials can get it. In each of these three sections, we're going to give you practical advice about how to protect your private data against law enforcement agents. In a fourth section, we'll also provide some basic information about the U.S. government's expanded legal authority when it comes to foreign intelligence and terrorism investigations. Finally, we've collected several articles about specific defensive technologies that you can use to protect your privacy, which are linked to from the other sections or can be accessed individually. So, for example, if you're only looking for information about how to securely delete your files, or how to use encryption to protect the privacy of your emails or instant messages, you can just directly visit that article. https://ssd.eff.org/ Pirate Party to Provide Secure Browsing Services to Protect Canadians from Potential Conservative Majority During the 2011 revolution in Tunisia, internet access was monitored and censored, and popular networking sites like Facebook and Twitter were blocked. Dissidents relied on secure browsing services to access the full internet. In support of the people of Tunisia, the Pirate Party of Canada launched its own VPN service to provide them with free and secure uncensored web browsing. After the internet filters were removed, the services were continued, making them available to citizens of other countries subject to censorship and monitoring. If given a majority government, the Conservatives are promising to ram through a bill that would provide unprecedented systematic interception and monitoring of Canadians’ personal communications. In short, Canada will soon join the growing list of countries subject to invasion of privacy and internet censorship. Therefore, the Pirate Party is preparing to extend the services presently offered to residents of repressive regimes to protect the people affected by the aspiring dictator right here at home. “We will provide VPN service to Canadians at a rate of $10 / 200GB. For every paid account we open, we will also provide a free VPN account to a citizen of a nation with censored internet,” said party leader Mikkel Paulson today. “This allows us to simultaneously provide protection to Canadians and expand our humanitarian support abroad. We won’t keep logs of the activity, although we will of course cooperate with law enforcement in the event of abuse of our services.” Until such a time those in power begin to respect the rights of those they claim to represent, the Pirate Party will work to defend Canadians from the abuses of their government. Interested parties can send an e-mail to vpn@pirateparty.ca for information on how to pre-order. The Pirate Party of Canada is a federal political party focused on open government, copyright and patent reform, and defending Canadians’ right to privacy. We support genuine democracy, civil liberties, and freedom of the internet. You can find us online at www.pirateparty.ca. https://www.pirateparty.ca/uncategor...ecure-browsing Until next week, - js. Current Week In Review  Recent WiRs - April16th, April 9th, April 2nd, March 26th Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved. "The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black |
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