Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 5th, '11

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"This case doesn’t have a victim of crime. It has a victim of law." – Anna Troberg



































November 5th, 2011




Judge Savagely Beats His Daughter For Illegal Downloads
enigmax

Downloading copyright material without the permission of rightsholders is often portrayed as a heinous crime and treated as such by many judges across the United States. But what is an appropriate punishment for this apparently increasingly wicked act? Multi-million dollar fines? Jail? For one sixteen year-old girl using file-sharing software KaZaA, it was a savage beating, delivered by the leather belt of her father, Judge William Adams. And it was all caught on camera.

These days it’s a rare week if news of some insane overreaction to illegal file-sharing isn’t being reported in the media.

We’ve seen some of the worst examples – the multi-million dollar fines, the jail sentences, PROTECTIP, SOPA, right through to the ordinary guy in the street being blackmailed by copyright trolls for a few thousands dollars.

None of these ‘punishments’ can proceed without the supposedly most upstanding members of our community that we call judges signing off on them. Judges rule on these cases, they decide on the levels of fines, they sign off on the ‘John Doe’ lawsuits.

Equally, some of them have even ruled against cruel and unusual punishments for file-sharers but not so Texas Judge William Adams, who prefers to administer punishment himself, in his own home, savagely – with a leather belt.

Below we have embedded a video shot in 2004, apparently just uploaded to YouTube by Adams’ then 16-year-old daughter Hillary Adams, the target of the cruel punishment.

“Aransas County Court-At-Law Judge William Adams took a belt to his own teenage daughter as punishment for using the internet to acquire music and games that were unavailable for legal purchase at the time,” the video’s description begins.

“She has had ataxic cerebral palsy from birth that led her to a passion for technology, which was strictly forbidden by her father’s backwards views.”

Hillary had been using the KaZaA file-sharing software to obtain music and games, a point mentioned by her mother towards the end of the video.

Gawker spoke with Hillary’s friend J. Andre Bardin who confirmed the man in the video is Judge Adams.

“That’s his voice, that’s his mannerisms, and that is his house,” Bardin said.

Hillary, who is now 23, says she decided to release the video because her father is up for re-election next week and she doesn’t want that to happen. A Facebook page called “Don’t Re-Elect Judge William Adams” can be found here.

A Reddit thread, dissecting Judge Adams’ life and rulings in the way only they know how, can be found here.

Of course, it would be completely unfair and wrong to suggest that this sort of disgusting behavior is common among judges. Many of them are upstanding citizens whose judgment is highly valued in a civilized society and this guy would have probably behaved the same way if he had pursued another profession.

Warning: Some will find the video extremely upsetting.
https://torrentfreak.com/video-judge...nloads-111102/





NZ Copyright Crackdown: Parents Nailed to Mast by Teen Pirates
Hamish Fletcher

Parents of teenage downloaders could be in for a shock with fans of female pop stars Lady Gaga and Rihanna the first targets of new attempts to crack down on internet piracy.

Telecom, Orcon, TelstraClear and Vodafone all confirmed yesterday that they had received their first notices under the Government's new copyright regime, which came into effect on September 1.

The "three strikes" law requires internet companies to issue warning notices to customers suspected of illegally downloading copyright content - such as movies or music - if a rights holder requests it and pays a $25 fee. After a third notice, rights holders can bring a case before the Copyright Tribunal, which can fine an offender up to $15,000.

All the notices received so far appear to be from the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand (Rianz).

Telecom received 42 notices - 35 for alleged download of songs by R&B star Rihanna, six for Lady Gaga tunes and one for British recording artist Taio Cruz.

All three artists are associated with subsidiaries of the recording giant Universal Music Group.

Neither Universal nor Rianz would comment on the notices.

Orcon received six notices - five of which were for downloading Rihanna songs.

TelstraClear got 27 from Rianz, but would not say what the alleged offending related to. Vodafone confirmed it had received notices, but would not reveal the number.

All four internet companies said they would be processing the notices and forwarding them to customers within the next seven days.

Given that Rihanna and Lady Gaga have a strong teenage fan base, parents responsible for home internet accounts may be in for a shock.

This is because the account owner is the one liable under the new law for any offending over an internet connection, regardless of whether they downloaded the content or not.

Telecommunications Users Association chief executive Paul Brislen said parents had paid the price for their children's downloading in other jurisdictions.

"That's the case overseas, we've seen grandmothers prosecuted for things that have been completely outside their sphere of understanding."

Brislen said the downloaders had no excuse, given the raft of services online where music could be bought and downloaded legally.

"[Accessing music legally online] is relatively cheap and it's easy to do so really I have no sympathy if they want to download stuff that is readily available legally. They have no leg to stand on."

Orcon chief executive Scott Bartlett said it was curious that the music rather than the movie industry had fired the first shot as it was believed the Motion Picture Association was keen to go after copyright infringers.

Like Brislen he had little sympathy for those downloading music, but said there was an issue of a lack of legally available video content.

"Obviously if you're downloading songs by Rihanna illegally, it's pretty black and white that you shouldn't do it - iTunes is a fabulous service where you buy a song for $1.99 and they've got all her songs. But there is still a fundamental of a lot of content, particularly video content, there is no place to go buy it. That for me is part of this which is quite bizarre, issuing notices to people for infringing something that you can't actually legally get here."

HOW IT WORKS
* Internet companies issue warning notices to customers suspected of illegally downloading content, like movies or music.
* After a third notice, rights holders can bring a case before the Copyright Tribunal and fines of up to $15,000 can be imposed.
* The owner of the offending internet account, not the actual downloader, is liable under the law.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/n...ectid=10763252





Guilty Verdict in Record-Breaking Swedish File-Sharing Case
enigmax

A guilty verdict has been handed down in Sweden’s largest-ever personal file-sharing trial. The 58-year-old female defendant avoided a jail sentence for sharing more than 45,000 songs online but now faces probation, a fine equivalent to 50 days pay, plus the costs of her defense. Pirate Part leader Anna Troberg described the verdict as “tragic”.

Last month, a Swedish court heard the case against a woman accused of sharing 45,000 music tracks online. No other personal file-sharing case in the country had ever considered so many alleged infringements.

The case dated back to the 58-year-old’s alleged actions in 2007, although it took a full year after IFPI’s investigation for her house to be visited by authorities. During the search a Direct Connect client was found installed on a computer, complete with logs which were later shown to contain entries backing up IFPI’s investigation.

Prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad said that the defendant was guilty of sharing the tracks either deliberately or through criminal negligence.

The main point in the case from the defense, that the 58-year-old did not have the technical knowledge to understand that uploading as well as downloading was being carried out, failed to convince the court of the woman’s innocence, not least because she holds down the job of a systems administrator.

Yesterday the court found the northern Stockholm resident guilty of copyright infringement. She was sentenced to probation and an income-based fine equivalent to 50 days pay – 16,000 kronor, around $2,500.

Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge previously told TorrentFreak that due to the large amount of music being shared in this case, he feared that the prosecution and copyright holders would take the opportunity to up the levels of punishment handed out to file-sharers in future cases.

But in the event, considering the volumes involved the punishment is lower than in a case heard earlier this year when a 26 year-old was found guilty of sharing just 44 tracks but was fined 13,000 kronor, around $2,000.

Nevertheless, Rick is not happy – any fine is too much – and the fact that the defendant also has to pay for her public defender really bothers him

“I attended the trial. You could really see the entitlement in the prosecutor’s eyes; this was just an open-and-shut case,” he told TorrentFreak this morning.

“I find it staggering that the establishment can be so oblivious to the fact that this entire structure is disappearing, and judge honest people who share culture — as if that was something bad — without a second thought. We need to change these laws. The establishment is not going to do it for us.”

Pirate Party leader Anna Troberg is equally disappointed with the verdict.

“This case doesn’t have a victim of crime,” Troberg adds. “It has a victim of law.”
https://torrentfreak.com/guilty-verd...g-case-111101/





Tenenbaum Demands Rehearing of $675,000 RIAA File-Sharing Case
Ernesto

After more than five years the long-running and controversial file-sharing case of Joel Tenenbaum against the RIAA continues with his legal team filing a petition for a rehearing en banc. Tenenbaum argues that the jury instruction which led to a staggering $675,000 fine was both erroneous and prejudicial.

Boston student Joel Tenenbaum is the poster child of an entire generation of downloaders, and one of the few people to stand up against the RIAA instead of signing off on a settlement.

His case has been dragging on for half a decade already. In 2009, a jury found Tenenbaum guilty of “willful infringement” and awarded damages mounting to $675,000.

July last year judge Nancy Gertner ruled that the penalty was excessive and unconstitutional and the jury-awarded damages were subsequently reduced by 90%, a decision that was reversed two months ago after a new hearing at the Court of Appeals. And this week the case moved forward again.

“The defendant seeks an en banc hearing on one ground: that it is unconstitutional to instruct a jury that it can return an unconstitutionally excessive award,” Harvard law professor Charles Nesson now writes to the court.

Nesson, who along with a group of students defends Tenenbaum, claims that it was unconstitutional for the judge to allow the jury to award damages that she later found to be unconstitutionally high.

“To instruct the jury that it may ascribe an award in a range of up to $4,500,000 against a noncommercial copyright infringer is punitive, excessive, not authorized by statute, and a denial of due process. Indeed, it is difficult to find the right word,” the petition reads.

“The trial judge misinstructed the jury that it could legally ascribe an award 67 times what she herself later found to be the legally permissible constitutional maximum. For each of thirty separately listed songs, the verdict form directed the jury to fill in a blank answering the question, ‘[W]hat damages do you award the Plaintiff for this copyrighted work, from $750 to $150,000?’: This was error, plain and simple.”

Tenenbaum’s legal team is asking for a rehearing before the full court in the hope of getting the fine reduced or thrown out altogether, as they argue that the RIAA’s campaign was not warranted in the first place.

“The defendant has challenged as unconstitutional the use of federal law and process to threaten catastrophic fines against the generation of kids who were downloading and sharing music peer-to-peer. The massive campaign of lawsuits initiated by the recording industry against people who copied music for personal use and never sold or considered selling it in any commercial way was entirely unprecedented,” the petition reads.

In an interview last year Tenenbaum described himself as someone with a passion for music, who paid for music, perhaps even more than the average consumer. For him, file-sharing was a means to discover new bands at a time where there were few legal alternatives online.

“I often have bought music as a result of the free exploration I’ve done. In that respect, I’m much like the average downloader, who actually spends more money on music than people who don’t download at all,” he said.

Although the RIAA stopped pursuing casual file-sharers years ago, for the music industry group this case is now a matter of principle. They are paying much more in lawyer fees than they will ever be able to get back from Tenenbaum, but they feel an example must be set.

To be continued, indefinitely.
https://torrentfreak.com/tenenbaum-d...g-case-111103/





Next Up to Sue BitTorrent Users: Book Publishers
John Paul Titlow

Joining their counterparts in the film industry, large book publishing houses are the latest to take aim at users of the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol. John Wiley and Sons, the publisher of the popular "For Dummies" how-to book series, is suing 27 Bit Torrent users for downloading PDF files of the books, thereby infringing on Wiley's copyrights.

How extensive is the alleged book piracy? Demonoid.me users are said to have swapped copies of Photoshop CS5 All-In-One For Dummies more than 74,000 times, according to the lawsuit.

The defendants, all of whom reside in New York state, are being sued for copyright and trademark infringement, as well as trademark counterfeiting, which the company claims may dilute the quality of its brand and thus incur even further costs.

This is a first for the publishing industry, who are following in the footsteps of Hollywood. Most famously, tens of thousands of users who used BitTorrent to download the widely-acclaimed and award-winning film The Hurt Locker were sued by the film's producers. Many of those defendants settled out of court, as is common in cases like these.

Despite the popularity of legitimate e-book marketplaces like Amazon's Kindle Store and Apple's iBooks, digital book piracy has grown in recent years, with some best-sellers being illegally downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.

It remains to be seen how this case unfolds, or if other book publishers follow Wiley in the practice of suing BitTorrent users for copyright infringement.
https://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...publishers.php





British Student Fights Extradition to US Over TVShack Link Site
Timothy B. Lee

Richard O'Dwyer, the 23-year-old British college student behind the TVShack website, appeared in court Thursday to fight extradition to the United States. His attorney argued that O'Dwyer should not be sent to the United States because operating a "link site," which links to copies of copyrighted movies but does not actually host them, is not a crime under British law.

When we last wrote about O'Dwyer's case, we noted that his case is almost unprecedented. Only a handful of people have faced extradition to the United States for crimes committed entirely online, and most of those have involved computer hacking or direct distribution of copyrighted material.

The legality of "linking sites" in the UK is disputed. Last year, a judge dismissed a case against a similar linking site, called TV-Links, ruling that its actions did not constitute a crime.

O'Dwyer's attorney argued that his client's website was no different than Google or Yahoo!: it merely linked to content copied by others. He emphasized that O'Dwyer didn't charge users for access to his website. Instead, like Google and Yahoo he relied on advertising revenues.

But the US government disagreed, arguing that O'Dwyer had deliberately promoted links to content he knew to be copyright infringing. "TVShack had the top films listed on the home page so it wasn't merely a search engine," said government attorney John Jones.

Julia O'Dwyer, Richard's mother, told Ars that she's confident the court will agree that her son's actions are not a crime under British law. She also said there were key inaccuracies in the government's case.

"Richard has challenged the accuracy of the US skeleton argument," she said, "and so the US prosecution is now flapping around to get a response together which they couldn't do in time for today."

Her son is due back in court on November 22.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-link-site.ars





British Telecom Urged to Block Illegal Filesharing Hub

Music industry body wants the UK's biggest internet service provider to clamp down on illegal filesharing site

The music industry trade body, the BPI, has asked BT to block the world's largest illegal filesharing website, the Pirate Bay. BT was told to block another pirate website, Newzbin2, after Hollywood film companies won a high court test case. If BT, the UK's biggest internet service provider, does not block the site the BPI could seek a court order. The Pirate Bay is the world's largest BitTorrent site, enabling and encouraging the mass illegal distribution of copyrighted content, including music, movies and TV programmes. It is run on a commercial scale, paying no royalties, said the BPI. John Smith, general secretary of the Musicians' Union and deputy chair of the Creative Coalition Campaign, said: "Now that the high court has clarified the law, as a sector we need to keep up the pressure on these illegal sites.

"For too long the Pirate Bay has been allowed to attack the livelihoods of individual artists and session musicians.

"We hope that BT will voluntarily block this prolific, illegal site."

BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor said: "The Pirate Bay is no more than a huge scam on the global creative sector. It defrauds musicians and other creators of their wages, and it destroys UK jobs.

"Unlike legal music download sites, it exposes consumers to the risk of viruses, theft of personal information and inappropriate content.

"We would not tolerate Counterfeits 'R' Us on the high street - if we want economic growth, we cannot accept illegal rip-off sites on the internet either. We hope that BT will do the right thing and block the Pirate Bay."

BT said it would need a court order to act.

"We can confirm we are now in receipt of a letter from the BPI (requesting that BT block the Pirate Bay site)," a spokesman said.

"BT is considering its response. In line with the Newzbin judgment, a court order will be needed before any blocking could begin."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...lesharing-site





Colombia May Block Law that Penalizes Online File-Sharing
Jean Carrere

Colombia's Congress introduces a proposal to block a controversial copyright law that would penalize online media-sharing.

Coalition Senator Roy Barreras instigated this proposal, which would put an end to a six months long controversy surrounding the draft.

Named after its creator, Interior Minister German Vargas Lleras, the law would affect Internet users, by penalizing the access to and the sharing of music, movies or books online. Sanctions could be as a serious as fines or even prison sentences.

Designed to protect author's rights on the web, the law raised massive concerns from internet users who created countless Twitter or Facebook pages in protest of the draft, and even hacked government websites.

The critics complained that the law would not only limit the free browsing and sharing of information, but also sanction service providers (such as ETB, Telefonica, Telmex) facilitating piracy, which would force these companies to preemptively block pages and restrict access.

Barreras agreed with the complaints, stating that the law failed to "address the inconsistencies that prevent from getting a clear vision of what is legally possible to ensure the protection of copyrights on the internet".

The cybernauts also interacted with the Congress through forums, in which they sought advice from legal experts.

According to Barreras, the proposal to shelve the law resulted from a "deep debate" in the First Commission, and from the reaction of cybernauts.

The project to sink the law is backed up by several senators, including Luis Carlos Avellaneda (Polo Democratico), Juan Manuel Galan (Partido Liberal), Hemel Hurtado (PIN), Karime Mota (Partido de la U) and Jorge Eduardo Londono (Partido Verde).
http://colombiareports.com/colombia-...right-law.html





Zediva's Remote DVD Streaming Forced Offline Permanently

Permanent ban follows temporary injunction

Zediva has reportedly settled its dispute with the Motion Picture Association of America, bringing a permanent end to the company's remote DVD streaming service. Following a temporary injunction that halted the service earlier this year, Zediva has agreed to pay $1.8 million in fees and put and end to its appeal and countersuit.

The company had offered a service that bridged the gap between DVD rentals and web-based streaming. Customers could rent many of the same DVDs that were available at brick-and-mortar rental outlets, however the discs were actually played on DVD players in a centralized location. Zediva's servers took the output from its DVD players and converted it into a live streaming format accessible by the customer.

The MPAA sued Zediva, claiming the service violated copyrights and lacked the necessary licensing agreements that have been established with other streaming providers. Zediva argued that its service was no different than traditional DVD rentals, as the discs were purchased legally and taken out of circulation while being played.

After imposing waiting periods between DVD releases and streaming availability, some studios have attempted to bring that same delay to DVD rental companies. Warner Bros recently attempted to force Blockbuster to a accept a 28-day wait before allowing DVDs to be rented by customers, however the rental company purchased the affected DVDs on the open market to sidestep the studio's demands and provide rentals immediately following DVD sales to the general public. [via Techdirt and Afterdawn]
http://www.electronista.com/articles...ry.injunction/





Artists File Lawsuits, Seeking Royalties
Patricia Cohen

When the taxi baron Robert Scull sold part of his art collection in a 1973 auction that helped inaugurate today’s money-soused contemporary-art market, several artists watched the proceedings from a standing-room-only section in the back. There, Robert Rauschenberg saw his 1958 painting “Thaw,” originally sold to Scull for $900, bring down the gavel at $85,000. At the end of the Sotheby Parke Bernet sale in New York, Rauschenberg shoved Scull and yelled that he didn’t work so hard “just for you to make that profit.”

The uproar that followed in part inspired the California Resale Royalties Act, requiring anyone reselling a piece of fine art who lives in the state, or who sells the art there for $1,000 or more, to pay the artist 5 percent of the resale price.

That law is now at the center of three class-action suits brought this month by artists who include Chuck Close and Laddie John Dill and the estate of the sculptor Robert Graham. They have filed suit against the auction powerhouses Sotheby’s and Christie’s and the online auction site eBay for failure to pay royalties.

“It’s a question of basic fairness,” Mr. Close said recently in an interview. When purchasers are getting extraordinary returns on their investment, he said, a royalty resale law allows the artist to share, at least in a small way, in the increase in value. (Under the California law, no payment is due if the price drops.)

The suits do not specify damages, nor do they list particular sales of art by California residents. Rather, as Eric George, the lawyer who filed them, explained, the complaints seek to force the auction houses to reveal the identities or locations of sellers, information that is often kept secret.

“What’s so perverse,” Mr. George said, is that the houses conceal “the very information necessary to know whether a royalty is due.”

The California law, which applies to living artists and those who have died in the past 20 years, states that if the seller is not able to locate the artist within 90 days, he or she is required to send the payment to the California Arts Council, a state agency charged with locating the creators.

Sotheby’s responded to the suit with a terse statement: “We believe the claim is meritless, and it will be vigorously defended.” Christie’s said that it “views the California Resale Royalties Act as subject to serious legal challenges” and that it “looks forward to addressing these issues in court.” The law has so far survived two legal challenges, and experts in art law are divided about whether it might be vulnerable on constitutional grounds.

The larger issue of whether visual artists should receive a cut of future sales remains a subject of vigorous debate. Dozens of countries already have a version of a resale royalties law, generally referred to by the French phrase droit de suite. Starting in 2012, Britain and other members of the European Union will adhere to a uniform standard that applies to both living artists and those who have died within the past 70 years. Indeed, Christie’s, on its Web site, informs prospective clients that it collects the royalty mandated in Europe at the time of the sale.

For many visual artists, the issue is clear. “We need legislation to enact the right to royalties,” said Frank Stella, the president of the International Council of Creators of Graphic, Plastic and Photographic Arts, “and we need to align it with what goes on in Britain and the E.U.” Literature, music, film, computer programming and patents all have better intellectual-property protection than American visual art, Mr. Stella added. The Visual Artists and Galleries Association, a nonprofit group that seeks to protect the intellectual-property rights of artists, also supports a national law.

The idea has never really caught on in the United States, though, and California remains the only state that requires royalties when a painting is resold. In 1986 Senator Edward M. Kennedy was unsuccessful in efforts to include a similar provision in the national Visual Artists Rights Act. A study by the Copyright Office in 1992 concluded that it was “not persuaded that sufficient economic and copyright policy justification exists to establish droit de suite in the United States.”

In the 34 years that the California law has been in effect, about 400 artists have received a total of $328,000, said Patty Milich, the resale royalty act coordinator at the California Arts Council. That list includes the estates of the Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia (who made drawings), Jean-Michel Basquiat, Albert Hirschfeld and Larry Rivers.

Most artists and galleries either don’t know about the law or ignore it, several art lawyers in California said. People often don’t realize, for example, that if a California hotel with paintings on the walls changes ownership, or if a donated sculpture sells for more than its original price at a fundraising auction, a royalty may be due.

Sellers, museums and galleries generally dislike the idea, which they view as an added tax that raises the cost of doing business and cuts into profits. They contend that the law’s main beneficiaries are artists who need it the least: those, like Mr. Close or Mr. Stella, whose work is famous enough to sell again and again.

Opponents add that resale royalties can hurt new artists selling their work for the first time — on what is known as the primary market — by reducing future resale value.

Some artists agree. In 2006, when Britain agreed to adhere to the European Union’s policy on resale royalties, David Hockney argued: “The arrival of this levy will do little or nothing for the vast majority of British artists. It will undoubtedly envelop the market, on which we as artists depend, in red tape, and it will discourage art dealers from buying particularly the work of emerging artists.”

According to one study of the droit de suite in France, approximately 70 percent of the royalty payments went to the estates of a handful of famous 20th-century artists, like Picasso. Still, in California, Ms. Milich said that while it was easier for well-known artists to track resales, “I have contacted artists with a $2,000 royalty, and they were really happy to get it; one was living on Social Security.”

John Henry Merryman, a law professor at Stanford University and an expert on art and cultural-property law, said that advocates of the droit de suite ignore how the art market operates. The increased price for Rauschenberg’s “Thaw” at the Scull auction was due not only to the artist’s continuing creative efforts, he said, but also to the dealers, collectors, auction houses and critics who took a risk in supporting and buying Rauschenberg’s work before he was famous. He noted that the increased price for a single painting simultaneously raises the value of all the artist’s work.

Mr. Merryman dismissed the argument that the droit de suite was analogous to music or literary royalties. “The idea that somehow artists are hurt because they don’t have copyright is nonsense,” he said. Artists retain copyright and must be compensated if their work is reproduced. The difference, he explained, is that “the realization of a work of art is in exhibition, not in duplication.”

The Whitney Museum of American Art at one time compensated artists for exhibiting their work. Mr. Merryman said the idea never caught on, but that it made more sense.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/02/a...-and-ebay.html





Pursuing a Piracy Claim Against Apple
John Schwartz

David Gelernter is known for many things. As a pioneering computer scientist, he first earned renown by connecting computers together into collaborative networks. Then in 1993, he gained the kind of fame no one wants, as a victim of Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who mailed a pipe bomb to his office at Yale University that left him gravely injured.

Professor Gelernter had to fight for his life then. Now he is fighting to prove his contention that his innovations were pirated by Apple for its computers, iPhones and iPads. He did it once, and a company whose original incarnation he co-founded won a stunning jury verdict, but then an extraordinary judicial ruling took it all away.

He has said little publicly about the case, and Apple did not provide comment. But with the appeal now under way, he agreed to talk about it — including an internal Apple e-mail from Steve Jobs that left one patent law expert not affiliated with the case saying, simply, “Wow.”

Last October, a jury awarded $625 million to Professor Gelernter’s company, Mirror Worlds. The verdict, one of the largest patent awards in history, seemed an astonishing windfall for the professor, now 56. “I had the feeling of everybody looking at me and thinking, ‘There’s a half billion dollars on the hoof!’ A private jet service sent an invitation to ‘join our elite clientele.’ ” Business Insider ran a photo of him with “I’m Rich!” scrawled on it.

And then it was gone. In April, in an unusual move, Judge Leonard Davis of the United States District Court overruled the jury. He wrote that the patents were valid, but that the company had not proved that Apple had infringed them.

“Mirror Worlds may have painted an appealing picture for the jury,” Judge Davis wrote, “but it failed to lay a solid foundation sufficient to support important elements it was required to establish under the law.”

When Joseph Diamante, the lead lawyer for Mirror Worlds, called his client about the decision, he was distraught at having to deliver such bad news. But Professor Gelernter gently said, “Joe, I’ve been through worse.”

The bomb that exploded in June 1993 blinded Professor Gelernter in one eye and severely damaged his right hand, which he covers with a glove. He suffered extensive internal injuries as well, and a legacy of surgeries and chronic pain.

But, as Mr. Diamante learned, David Hillel Gelernter does not let trouble daunt him. He sent an upbeat e-mail to colleagues less than two months after the bombing that said, “All in all, I am the luckiest man alive (emphasis on alive). Surviving the explosion was evidently a pretty neat trick on my part,” he wrote, and joked that in computer science, “one decent typing hand and an intact head is all you really need.”

Long comfortable in the academic realm, where his work anticipated the interactivity of the World Wide Web and cloud computing, he tried business. Mirror Worlds (the name came from one of his offbeat books about adapting technology to people instead of the other way around) offered a way to break out of the numberless files and folders that clutter computer desktops and make information hard to find. The product, Scopeware, created a stream of varied documents — word-processing files, e-mail, calendar items and presentations — in a row of icons stretching into the past and future. Users could slide the icons back and forth to view them. George Gilder, the technology analyst, called it “elegant, easy, natural and beautiful,” and predicted, “It will prevail.”
It did not, at least as part of Mirror Worlds. The company marketed its product to businesses and state agencies across the country, but sales never really took off, and the company closed its doors in 2004.

From 2005 on, Apple introduced new versions of its software, and elements of three fundamental new technologies — Spotlight, Cover Flow and Time Machine — looked and behaved more than a little like Professor Gelernter’s brainchildren. Mirror Worlds, now owned by a hedge fund, sued Apple in 2008 in Tyler, Tex., a place with a reputation for friendliness toward infringement claims.

Among the documents obtained from Apple was the e-mail Mr. Jobs sent in 2001 to his lieutenants after seeing an article in The New York Times about Scopeware.

“Please check out this software ASAP,” he wrote. “It may be something for our future, and we may want to secure a license ASAP.”

An Apple executive at the time said in a deposition that “this was the first time I recall having received a specific mail to look at a company or its technology” from Mr. Jobs. Apple subsequently met with Mirror Worlds, but nothing came of the discussions.

Jeanne C. Fromer, a patent law expert at Fordham Law School in New York, called the e-mail from Mr. Jobs “as close as you get to a smoking gun.” Peter J. Toren, a patent litigator, summed up with a single word: “Wow.”

The jury seemed to agree.

The enormous verdict pushed a hot button in the technology world, where those who sue technology companies are often derided as greedy patent trolls. But Mr. Toren said Professor Gelernter is “not a patent troll — this is clearly a brilliant guy” who “clearly had a case.” The rumpled scholar sat discussing the dispute on a recent afternoon in his high-ceilinged living room, which was crowded with books and his paintings. A parrot named Ike provided the occasional squawk, and sunlight streamed over the 400 pipes of an organ that his older son, Daniel, bought and rebuilt by hand after discovering it, unused, in the basement of Yale’s Woolsey Hall. On Professor Gelernter’s desk sat a large-screen iMac.

Of Mr. Jobs, he spoke of a kinship. “He was, above all, a designer. I am, above all, a painter. I care about aesthetics.” One of the greatest joys of the long recovery from “when I was blown up,” he said, was realizing that he could paint with his left hand.

As for the money, he said he did not know precisely what his share of any verdict might be. “I have 2 percent of something,” he said. As much as he acknowledges that the money matters, what he wants most of all, he said, is to see the record reflect his role. “I know my ideas — our ideas — when I see them on a screen,” he said.

“Whatever happens in the end with the appeal, the six months of vindication between the jury verdict and the judge’s decision were worth many lifetimes of some cheaper pleasure.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/05/u...nst-apple.html





An Open Letter To Chris Dodd: Silicon Valley Can't Help Hollywood If You First Cripple It With Bad Regulation


Dear former Senator Dodd:

It was refreshing to hear your recent speech, in which you suggested that there really isn't a "Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley" fight, and that the two sides need to work together to help create the ecosystem where both can thrive. It’s hard not to agree with that assertion, absolutely. There isn't a fight between Silicon Valley and Hollywood, and there never has been. Every new technology that Hollywood has decried as being terrible has eventually turned out to be a massive boost to Hollywood's profits and ability to make, promote, and distribute its works. If that's a "fight," then it's an odd one, in which we in the tech community keep providing all of the weapons Hollywood needs to succeed... only to see you frequently aim them at your own foot before finally working out how to use them properly.

So when you say, "'those who would pit' Hollywood content creators against those in Silicon Valley who create technology 'in a manufactured conflict more reminiscent of the Beltway chatter I learned to ignore on my last job,'" we in the tech community agree and celebrate that sentiment. The real debate isn't between our two "sides." It's between old and new -- whether there will be a level competitive playing field that enables our country's continued progress and job creation, or a market regulated so as to protect incumbents.

Unfortunately, the timing of your claim and the statement itself were odd, coming as they did on the very same day as some members of Congress introduced SOPA, which the MPAA was heavily involved in crafting. After all, despite numerous attempts to be a part of these discussions, we in the internet industry were denied any opportunity to even look at, let alone provide input on, the draft of a massive bill that would fundamentally change the nature of how the internet functions. As you well know from your decades of distinguished service in government, not circulating drafts of such laws or seeking input from those you seek to restrict and regulate is, to put it mildly, highly unusual.

That certainly did not strike us as being in the spirit of "cooperation" you put forth last week. The day after your comments, a group of us -- venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, artists and innovators alike -- all went to Washington DC to talk to elected officials, to express our grave concerns about the bill. Consider the thoughtful comments of one of us on the trip: Fred Wilson, an investor in Twitter, KickStarter (which has helped artists raise millions of dollars online), Indeed.com (a Texas-based job search engine), and many other services. In discussing the trip, he argues that this bill is the very opposite of cooperation.

At every turn during the trip, we were told that your lobbyists were working overtime to discredit the concerns of us in the internet industry, and to keep us away from the table as you sought to completely upend the legislative framework that allows the internet to thrive. How are we to work together to create all of those wonderful new opportunities for your industry to create, promote, distribute and monetize, if you are fundamentally blocking our ability to do so?

We can't build those tools for you if you restrict us by massively regulating the internet, making it much, much harder for new startups to form or receive investments. A bill like SOPA creates so much liability that it would be impossible for two engineers in a garage to build the next great startup unless they also had a dozen lawyers sitting with them. We can't help the artists and creators who were in our group with the new platforms they rely on, if these new innovative startups don't even bother starting. We can't help the users and participants who want new and convenient and legitimate access to content, as well as ways to make their own content. At the end of the day, both Silicon Valley and Hollywood work best when we focus on creating and providing what our consumers want. So, in many ways, we are in the same business.

I'm happy you can see that there's no conflict. Now, let's prove that by actually working together. If it's true that you believe that there's only a "manufactured conflict" between Silicon Valley and Hollywood, why don't we get together and work this out between us? Prior to this bill being introduced, no one from the internet side was invited to negotiate, or to review the legislation. We suspect the larger internet players would be happy to sit down with you, and can say for certain that the group of us who went to DC last week would be happy to represent investors and startups in such a conversation.

Why don't we start by throwing out SOPA and PIPA and talking about how we in the internet industry can (and already are) building the next set of weapons for you to succeed in the modern world. And let us help show you how to work those weapons, so you don't point them at your own feet first.

Let’s work together not only to help one another, but also to help artists, innovators and entrepreneurs alike. You have an open invitation to come to any of our offices and discuss this whenever you want, or we're happy to meet you anywhere in Silicon Valley, NY, LA or anywhere else in this country where amazing new technology and services are being created. But let's keep the conversation out of Washington DC, so we can focus on getting something done, rather than another round of "manufactured conflict."

Sincerely,

Mike Masnick, Floor64
Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures
Brad Burnham, Union Square Ventures
Bijan Sabet, Spark Capital
Heather Gold, artist/creator
Dennis Yang, Infochimps
Derek Dukes, Dipity (and new stealth startup)
David Ulevitch, OpenDNS
Josh Mendelsohn, Hattery Labs
And the other entrepreneurs, creators, innovators, artists and investors who came to DC last week to express our concerns about SOPA/PIPA.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...gulation.shtml





Kill Switch
Devin Coldewey

The so-called PROTECT IP act, sequel to the much-criticized COICA, is under fire again as it enters the process of becoming law. We’ve talked about it on this blog before and no doubt the discussion will continue after it passes or is rejected, but it’s important at this critical moment that everyone concerned weigh in and make an unambiguous statement regarding the quality of this bill. So then: PROTECT IP is a lunatic proposal, penned by a dinosauric industry concerned solely with the preservation of its own profits. It will do nothing to curb piracy while at the same time eroding fundamental freedoms of the internet.

The only people who can possibly be in favor of this bill are either ignorant of its implications or stand to gain by its passage. This desperate power grab by a diminishing elite fails to even comprehend the problems it aims to solve, and its blunt force methods are wide open for abuse, and very possibly unconstitutional. Make no mistake about it: this is a kill switch, and if it’s passed, it will revisit us for years to come in ways we never suspected possible. If you think that’s an overstatement, think about it again next time you’re posing naked for the TSA, and ask yourself how that came about.

The full text of the Senate and House versions of the bill can be read here and here, respectively. Can it be fixed? No. The problems it attempts to address are simply not going to be solved by any approach suggested in this bill. Activist groups, law professors, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and many more have already spoken out. Contact your Senator and Representative and urge them to reject S.968.

Acknowledging the problem

No one opposes this bill (which I will refer to as S.968 because its other names leave a bad taste in the mouth) because they are in favor of piracy or copyright infringement. The problem is real — but that doesn’t mean that the fictions regarding its effects on sales and so on are as well. Trying to make sense of the various studies, separating the propaganda from the facts, and the fluff from the insight, is a big job. The consensus is that there is no consensus, and that’s probably consensus enough. After all, if piracy were having the kind of devastating effect on music sales or theater-going that the record and movie industries say it is, that would be very clearly reflected in the numbers.

Instead, we see healthy growth in some areas, cannibalized sales elsewhere, and yes, huge illegal download numbers. But to put these pieces together properly apparently requires more than all the RIAA’s horses and all the MPAA’s men have got. Instead, they choose the data that fits their hypothesis. But this is all known; it’s enough to say that the entertainment industries have poisoned the well with their antics, and nobody should take anything they say or propose seriously.

Again, their dishonesty and absurd lawsuits do not mean the problem doesn’t exist. Music, movies, TV shows, and games are available online in a dozen places the day they are released, and thousands upon thousands of people download them. If that’s not a problem, I don’t know what is. Of course, some would say that thousands of people consuming your product, at no cost to you or them, is one of those good problems. And then there’s the whole continuum of lost sales, outright theft, distribution, fair use, and so on to consider. It’s a complex issue to say the least.

Sometimes complex issues require simple solutions, as Alexander demonstrated. Simple, but not simplistic, which is what many would call S.968.

If it ain’t broke, break it

A straw-man problem requires a straw-man solution. And that’s exactly what S.968 proposes. The approach of the bill to combating piracy is laughably inappropriate, yet at the same time so vague in critical portions that it’s hard to believe it wasn’t done that way on purpose.

Briefly stated, the bill allows for the law to target services connected or tangential to infringing sites, which not only means any financial support in the form of advertisers or payment processors, but also the search engines that index the sites and the DNS registries that direct queries to the correct IP. They would all be required, within five days, to remove the site in question from their services, listings, and registries, or be in violation of the law.

First, this notion of creating a special United States DNS listing with blacklisted sites excised. The folly of this design can’t be overstated. I feel I can say with confidence that many a security expert and network technician must have laughed aloud at this proposal. The real world equivalent, if a shop was alleged to be selling stolen goods, would be to make them take their sign down. Workarounds for a DNS blockade would be plentiful and effective and need not be described here.

This measure has been described by its proponents as akin to door locks on cars — not foolproof, but we should still use them. There’s some sense to this, but of course the fundamental difference between material theft and “content theft,” i.e. making a copy, is ignored. The situation changes somewhat when it’s impossible to steal what’s in your “car.” If people were going around making perfect copies of the CDs, radios, and umbrellas in our cars, door locks wouldn’t really be necessary, would they? Admittedly, it’s a little disingenuous to mischaracterize their metaphor in this way (half the meaning is that we should take simple precautions if they are available), but it’s also disingenuous of them to mischaracterize the problem they say they are working against.

In addition to the fact that this alternate DNS registry would be completely inadequate for its stated purpose, it’s fundamentally a bad idea to fiddle with international standards. Domain name universality is one of the underpinnings of the web. When I type Facebook.com into my browser, it goes to Facebook because of a principle set down and agreed upon by the internet infrastructure worldwide. But not everyone is on the same system: there are, of course, some countries that already have a blocking or filtering system in place. Places like China and Iran.

First, they came for the cyberlockers

A blacklist for sites, whatever the intention, is simply an idea that has no place in a free society. This is inarguable. It is censorship, plain and simple, and it is exactly as audacious as banned book lists and other more recent forms of moral, political, and ideological bootheeling. It sounds inflammatory, but this bill is a wedge to be driven over time. Permitting this blacklist would be surrendering an important guarantee of the internet, and opening the door to worse. The slippery slope argument doesn’t always hold up, but with the parties involved, there is precedent in abundance for excess and abuse. And the law is not structured to prevent such abuse.

The first red flag is the casual contravention of internationally agreed-upon standards. Any site can be blocked, regardless of where it is registered or hosted, or where the content is stored. It falls short of imposing US copyright law on the rest of the world, but it demonstrates a troubling lack of respect for the international structure of the web. The world looks down on China and Saudi Arabia for their filtering of internet content to make it comply with their local laws and beliefs. Now they will look down on us.

Next, S.968 appears to ignore due process and the presumption of innocence. These are, you will agree, somewhat elementary civil rights. Yet under S.968, sites would be eligible for takedown without any involvement on their part, and their supporting services, like advertisers, hosts, and payment processors, would be required to take action as well or share liability. All it takes is for a copyright holder to fill out the paperwork, and they’ve had that process automated for years. It’s worth noting that DOJ-issued orders are required for search engines and domain registries to take action. Copyright holders may “only” affect payment processors and advertisers without a court order — so they’re limited to only crippling the site financially. But let’s be honest. The same people who will be researching and filing complaints pretty much wrote this law. Getting the DOJ to rubber-stamp an order is trivial.

And on the topic of liability, the burden has been shifted, or rather multiplied, to include service providers. Google, for example, has long existed within a “safe harbor” provision of the DMCA, providing as it does only an information-locating and caching service. But the new bill calls for service providers specifically to immediately comply with the blacklist — in five days or less. Considering it might be quite a while before a small site can even get on a court calendar or have their request reviewed, this puts service providers in an awkward situation: take the site down, or be in violation of the law until it works its way through the courts? Very few will choose the latter.

Even then, we can’t trust the courts to make the right decision. We’ve seen numerous examples of credulous judges being taken in by industry lawyers. Sony, for example, showed no compunction at all while it took one incompetent for a ride, extracting years of irrelevant and private payment and IP records for a website during a protracted jurisdictional hearing. There are bright spots here and there, but for the most part the entertainment industry has been pillaging with impunity.

The consequences of a takedown are also totally out of proportion with the cause. One infringing file or “portion” (e.g. a forum thread) could be used as the basis to take down an entire website (or at least have them take down their sign). This has happened plenty already: Google deleted several large and legitimate music blogs after complaints about a microscopic portion of the content. That’s a hell of a lever to have at your disposal, and the process for review is slow enough that it could easily be used as a perfectly legal kill switch for any site on the internet. Despite the claims that the bill is narrowly focused on piracy-centric sites, the definition, viz. “engaging in, enabling, or facilitating the reproduction, distribution, or public performance of copyrighted works, in complete or substantially complete form” is hopelessly open to interpretation. You could find a thousand videos on YouTube in an hour that facilitate the public performance of copyrighted works, and browbeat a judge with them tomorrow. And again, while it’s trivial to get past the DNS blacklist, the compulsory compliance of associated services could be harmful.

There is little or no allowance for a site to defend itself against accusations before action is taken, which means fraudulent or predatory takedowns and embargoes will be easy to make and very effective. And as many have pointed out, the most popular sites in the world today would probably be considered “notorious” if they were introduced today, but are exempt because they have had time to establish themselves as legitimate services. For small sites and startups, however, which have neither the immunity of established services nor the money or time to fend off a damaging takedown attempt, it could be fatal. There are penalties for anyone who “knowingly materially misrepresents,” but that seems a pretty high bar, and lawyers likely already have themselves a “safe harbor” of their own — reasonable suspicion, that sort of thing.

And it is not limited to any particular kind of site; after all, infringing content could be hiding anywhere. Or information that shows that a site is “facilitating” infringement, or “enabling” it. On evidence that could be easily cherry-picked or modified and in which many judges would be unable (or too busy, as they will be) to detect the flaws, any website could be hobbled. With a little organization and legwork, one could compel the owners, advertisers, hosts, and DNS registries to stop acknowledging any website, almost instantaneously. As internet services are disproportionately US-based, S.968 is a loaded gun pointed at the rest of the world.

There is a built-in provision for a yearly review. One would expect that after a year or two, the report would conclude that the act had done nothing to inhibit copyright infringement. That much would be given. But the response to this would be far more likely to spawn further, more draconian measures (such as more complete blockage at the IP level) than produce an admission of failure.

S.968 will be completely ineffective at preventing copyright infringement or any other kind of undesired activity. Every measure it takes is trivial to circumvent, and will not deter the people doing the vast majority of illegal content distribution. It does, however, provide a set of tools that are not only easy to leverage for private or nefarious purposes, but also align the US with the human rights abuses of oppressive regimes.

The bill is transparently the work of an entertainment industry which, failing to raise itself to the standards of demand, wants to drag the law down to its level with more avenues for litigation and greater weapons at its disposal. That we are even entertaining the idea of government-ordered blacklists of certain websites is repugnant and un-American.

Everyone who cares about the freedoms provided by the internet is opposing S.968. And then there’s everyone else.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/01/kill-switch/





Rep. Blackburn, Co-Sponsor Of E-PARASITE, Explains Why Regulating The Internet Is Terrible
Mike Masnick

This one is really quite incredible. Among the sponsors of the absolutely dreadful E-PARASITE Act, which imposes massive regulations across the entire internet sector, is Rep. Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee. What's odd is that Rep. Blackburn, just a few months ago, went onto YouTube to emphatically explain why regulating the internet was a terrible idea:
It's a short video, in which Rep. Blackburn says:

You're probably watching me on a high speed internet -- the same internet that has given us our competitive advantage. You know it took years for innovators and investors to create the online experience that you enjoy today. It really is the highway for all the goods and services and jobs that we need for the creative economy. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter. They're right there at your fingertips because of the internet that we enjoy. But some people fear that without government intervention, that entrepreneurs and innovators are going to hijack the internet that you enjoy... the World Wide Web! This has never happened and there has never been a time that a consumer has needed a federal bureaucrat to intervene. But yet this policy, called Net Neutrality is the Obama administrations hysterical reaction to a hypothetical problem. Here's what they want to do: Take the private internet and put it all under government control. Think about it: what's going to happen to the next Facebook innovator, if they have to go apply with the government to get approval to develop a new application. And what would happen to your small business, if you had to depend on internet speeds that Uncle Sam says is going to be okay.... We want to keep [the internet] open free and prosperous.

First of all (and I say this as someone who agrees that the administration stretched its mandate with its net neutrality move), what she describes as net neutrality is not what net neutrality is. That said, what her comments apply much more to is the bill that Blackburn herself co-sponsored, which definitively regulates the internet -- including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter -- by putting a massive burden on them to proactively monitor the internet, to stop infringement.

Amusingly, this very video is on YouTube, via Rep. Blackburn's official account. If this bill that Blackburn is co-sponsoring was in place as law just a few years ago, it's extremely unlikely we would have YouTube still in existence today. That's because a company -- let's just say "Viacom" -- could decide that YouTube was "dedicated to the theft of U.S. property" (under this law -- which includes enabling or facilitating infringement) and could then issue a notice to all payment processors and ad providers, barring YouTube from ever being able to make money. That would have killed YouTube dead. A few years ago. And Blackburn would be stuck.

Instead, Viacom has tried suing, under existing copyright law... and to date the US courts have found that YouTube obeyed the law. And because of that, people like Rep. Blackburn can reach out to her constituents and explain why regulating the internet is bad. But what we can't figure out is, why is she co-sponsoring a bill that actually does massively regulate that same internet?
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...terrible.shtml





[video] ACTA: Get Informed & Take Action!

On the occasion of the Free Culture Forum in Barcelona, La Quadrature du Net releases three films to inform citizens and urge them to take action against ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

ACTA is a threat to Internet users' fundamental freedoms and to EU Internet companies' competitiveness and free competition. The European Parliament will soon decide whether to give its consent to ACTA, or to reject it once and for all.

Every citizen can help defeat ACTA by spreading this video across the Internet, urging their fellow citizens to mobilize, and contacting their elected representatives.

Learn more about this dangerous agreement at http://lqdn.fr/acta.
https://www.laquadrature.net/en/vide...ed-take-action





Portishead's Geoff Barrow on File-Sharing and New Music

Portishead's Geoff Barrow spoke from Denver - the last leg of the band's tour
James Murray

I forgot to ask Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, speaking to 3news.co.nz from Denver ahead of the band’s Auckland show, whether he is influenced by Gil Scott Heron.

At the beginning of the year he launched a series of tweets about Portishead’s fourth album that took on the lyrical structure of the Heron’s seminal work ‘The Revolution Will Not be Televised’.

“There will be NO free downloads There will be NO bonus tracks There will be NO remixes There will be NO hidden footage. There will be NO additional content There will be NO corporate partners There will be NO fashion lines There will be NO tabloid pictures. There will be NO £25 unit cost There will be NO streetteam There will be NO myspace There will be NO celeb producer There will be NO twitter There will be NO press/blogger gig There will be NO acoustic session There will be NO meet and greet There will be NO edited version. There will be NO iTunes only There will be NO press launch There will be NO asian version There will be NO radio friendly.”

The above is a pretty good summing-up of Barrow’s attitude to the present-day music industry.

He makes a wry joke about himself when I bring up the “iTunes only” part.

“We struggle to write 10 tracks anyway – why the hell should we give a shop two bonus tracks?”

A question on file-sharing also gets Barrow going.

“Unfortunately, the major record companies have made music meaningless by trying to scoop money out of a dying industry. After charging the public 15 quid for a CD for so many years, [file sharing] is kind of expected,” he says.

“You cannot stop technology. It’s impossible.”

But greedy record companies do not mean Barrow thinks illegal file-sharing is ethical.

“Morally I don’t think [file-sharing] is particularly correct. I have a record company and if people don’t buy those records early on those bands cannot afford to play live, they cannot afford to pay their rent, it’s as simple as that.”

He heads Invada Records, a record company that deals with young, experimental acts, so knows first hand how tough it is for unestablished talent to get exposure without the massive marketing budgets providing by major record labels.

“All the bands I know come from working backgrounds and will work two jobs to be able to pay for the van, I don’t think people really see that,” he says.

“They just see a lot of really, really well-off privately-educated kids swanning around the industry.

“It’s the wrong idea, maybe if a massive rock band comes back like Nirvana – people would see what they went through to get there and won’t mind paying the five bucks for the record.”

Barrow is keen to give young acts a chance as well.

“We develop new bands all the time. We are more on the experimental rock side than the dance side. At the moment we are touring with a band called Saltforms, unfortunately they went home after tonight.

“We are lucky in Bristol, there are some really good bands about. Obviously there is the whole dubstep culture that’s kind of on the other side of music to us basically. But if there is a band that wants to get a deal I will always stick them in [the studio] with an engineer and say, 'Go do a week or whatever,' and see how it turns out.”

However, to some extent he seems pragmatic about the future of file-sharing.

“The model that seems to be working is – a certain amount of people buy the record – that takes them [so far] – the rest download and share it illegally and then people pay to see them live.”

And people are quite happy to pay to see Portishead live. They are at the end of a successful US tour and despite claiming to be tired from too much partying, Barrow sounds happy and relaxed.

The tour has been “very, very stress free” he tells me.

“We have a very good group around us. Some of the people we have had for 20 years. We have sort of worked out how to do it properly really. We did it intensively in 1998.

“We are travelling with 32 people and its not like we are Coldplay who just turn up in helicopters play on stage then disappear – we’re with our mates. It’s a bit of a circus really – in a good way.”

Their live show has become “more refined” over the years.

“When we did our first tour we were going into clubs and Beth sings really quietly. So the band had to be really quiet and we suffered with feedback and stuff,” he says.

“Over the years we have met some really good people who have said, ‘Maybe you should try this.’ Eventually we have ended up with a sound element we are really, really happy with.”

Famously Portishead are a band with an age gap. Barrow is 39, singer Beth Gibbons is 46 and Adrian Utley – a guitar player who had forged a career playing working mens' clubs and holiday camps before joining Portishead – is 54.

But for Barrow, age has never been an issue for the band.

“Me and Ade connected massively on music and I was 21 and he was 35 and Beth was in the middle,” he says.

The difference between them are more personal – with “Ade” having “more hunger” even than Barrow to drive on and find new music.

“We are in to different things and I think that’s what makes the elements of Portishead work together,” says Barrow.

“I can’t quite put my finger on it, I think I always want to push things to the absolute limit, Ade always wants really good quality in the songwriting and Beth, when it comes to the songs it is very personal to her.

“None of her lyrics are written in a third person sense about someone she knew. It’s all very personal.”

For most listeners of Portishead, personal is a word that resonates. Their songs and lyrics evoke emotions deep inside us.

On November 10 they play the Vector Arena – and as big as that venue is if there is any band in the world that can perform like you are the only person in the room it is Portishead.
http://www.3news.co.nz/Portisheads-G...7/Default.aspx





Piracy May Boost Sales, Judge Concludes
Ernesto

A Spanish judge came to an interesting conclusion in a case dealing with a seller of pirated copies. According to the judge the defendant doesn’t have to pay compensation to the rightsholders because it is not possible to determine to what extent piracy actually decreases sales. On the contrary, the judge suggests that piracy may even boost sales.

Anyone who says that piracy is only helping or hurting content creators is wrong.

Piracy has a different effect in each unique case. Not only does it differ between the gaming, music, book and movie industries, but also between the relative popularity of the artists and the characteristics of their audiences.

As we’ve pointed out repeatedly in the past, there are plenty of cases where piracy may have a positive effect on sales. Research has shown that “pirates” are the music industry’s best customers, something EMI’s new music boss Douglas Merrill confirmed earlier this year.

“For example, there’s a set of data that shows that file sharing is actually good for artists. Not bad for artists. So maybe we shouldn’t be stopping it all the time. I don’t know,” Merrill said at the time.

Merrill’s conclusions are quite unique coming from a music industry boss, but he is certainly not alone. The same conclusion was reached by people in the anime and book industries in recent months.

The conclusion that piracy is not detrimental to sales has not gone unnoticed by the courts either. In a recent ruling in Spain a local judge noted that it’s impossible to determine the damages a seller of pirated copies had caused, because it’s unclear how many people would have bought the products for the original price.

“It is not possible to determine the damage and corresponding compensation due to loss of benefits to the rightsholder, for the simple reason that customers of pirated copies of music and movies, when making the purchase of pirated copies, externalize their decision not to be customers of music and movies as originals, so there is no profit that could have been gained.”

“In other words, those customers either buy a pirated copy at a low price or they don’t buy an original at a price between 15 and 20 Euros,” the judge added.

On the contrary, instead of hurting the income of copyright holders piracy may actually boost sales, the judge noted.

“In any case, reversing the legal argument, it is conceivable that a customer, after hearing or viewing the pirated copy, may decide to purchase the original, finding it to their taste, so that the sale of pirated copies, far from harming, benefits the market for original items.”

“I declare that there is no harm for which compensation is required,” the judge concluded in her verdict.

Although there are several studies and anecdotes that arrive at a similar conclusion, this is the first time that a judge has brought this up in a verdict. And rightly so.

In a time where people’s rights are stripped to protect the interests of a few multi-million dollar entertainment industry companies, a more realistic, balanced and independent look at the “real” consequences of piracy in individual cases should be encouraged.
https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-may-boost-sales-111102/





Stupidly Large File Sharing is Here. You Can Now Share an 11GB File!
Tony Sarno

Aussie file sharing site fyels.com has upped the size of files you can share with others - to an extraordinary 11GB - making it the world leader in supersized file sharing.

Want to share a huge, multi-gigabyte file with lots of friends? Most file sharing services have limits on the size of files you can send, so Aussie developer/entrepreneur Dominic Holland has upgraded his brutally minimalist Fyels.com file sharing service to handle files up to an insane 11GB in size each.

The site also lets you upload an unlimited amount of files.

The files aren't private, and they can show up in a list of popular files if people start downloading them, so fyels.com is no good to you if you need to send something private. But if you don't mind others seeing the file there is no more convenient way to send a truly gargantuan one. You just drag it onto an upload box on the site's home page (you can also use a traditional uploader) and that's it. None of the bureaucracy of signing in and jumping through hoops of many other file sharing sites.

Holland has upgraded the service to run on his own hardware setup, moving away from the Amazon hosting platform. "The Amazon platform became overly costly as the popularity grew. I now use dedicated infrastructure with absolute fixed costs so there are no surprises and I know I can continue to afford to find the project," he says.

He also points out that he does not run advertisements on the service, "because I don't want to detract from the simplicity of fyels both in terms of design and functionality."

So what's the business model? How can he fund a hosting service which allows people to upload an unlimited number of massive files?

Holland explains that the file sharing site showcases the web development talents of his company, Bundaberg-based Omniessent. "Fyels is also a great mechanism for us to promote our other up and coming services, one of which we are really looking to make a massive dent in the search market and Fyels is a great outlet to get that to market in the coming months."
http://apcmag.com/truly-massive-file...-11gb-file.htm





Amazon, Now a Book Lender

Kindle owners who subscribe to Prime Service will be able to borrow e-titles
Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg and Stu Woo

As the e-reader and tablet wars heat up, Amazon.com Inc. is launching a digital-book lending library that will be available only to owners of its Kindle and Kindle Fire devices who are also subscribers to its Amazon Prime program.

The program will be limited, at least at the beginning, in what is available to borrow. Amazon will initially offer slightly more than 5,000 titles in the library, including more than 100 current and former national bestsellers, such as Stephen R. Covey's "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People."

A commuter, left, reads on a Kindle, an Amazon product. Amazon's new book-lending library cannot be accessed via apps on other devices.

None of the six largest publishers in the U.S. is participating. Several senior publishing executives said recently they were concerned that a digital-lending program of the sort contemplated by Amazon would harm future sales of their older titles or damage ties to other book retailers.

Moreover, Amazon will restrict borrowers to one title at a time, one per month. Borrowers can keep a book for as long as they like, but when they borrow a new title, the previously borrowed book automatically disappears from their device.

The new program, called Kindle Owners' Lending Library, cannot be accessed via apps on other devices, which means it won't work on Apple Inc.'s iPad or iPhone, even though people can read Kindle books on both devices. This restriction is intended to drive Kindle device sales, says Amazon.

The program, which is effective Thursday, comes a few weeks before Amazon ships the Kindle Fire tablet on Nov. 15, which is a direct competitor with the iPad.

The lending library reflects a broader effort by Amazon to lure consumers to Prime, a service that costs $79 a year.

Amazon Prime began as a membership plan to offer package-shipping perks. Then, earlier this year Prime added a video-streaming feature to the subscription. Nearly 13,000 movies and TV shows are now available under the streaming feature.

Amazon, the market leader in e-readers, made Kindle titles available to libraries beginning in September and libraries said the impact already has been significant.

At the Seattle public-library system, e-book borrowing rose 32% in the month after Kindle books became available, said Seattle's electronic-resources librarian Kirk Blankenship. E-book borrowing had typically been rising 10% or 15% a month, he said.

Mr. Blankenship said he isn't worried about Amazon starting its own lending service.

"There's a lot of people that can't afford Amazon Prime," he said. "We also want to be a resource for people looking for other things beyond the best-seller list."

At an event today Amazon's Jeff Bezos announced new versions of their e-reader line. Marketwatch's Dan Gallagher has details on Markets Hub.

Russell Grandinetti, vice president for Kindle content, said "the vast majority" of participating publishers were receiving a flat fee for their titles, while a more limited group is being paid the wholesale price for each title that is borrowed. "For those publishers, we're treating each book borrowed as a sale," he said.

Despite concerns among major publishers about the potential impact on sales of the program, some see it as a positive. Arthur Klebanoff, chief executive of RosettaBooks LLC, an e-book publisher that is making Mr. Covey's title available under a flat-fee arrangement, said he did so because he believes it will spur sales of Mr. Covey's other works.

"I'm attracted to the incremental promotion/visibility for participating titles," he said. "All site promotion, especially of backlist titles, drives sales in the Kindle Store." Mr. Klebanoff said that he's providing about 200 titles in all.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...003626952.html





Espresso Book Machine Offers Entire Paperback Books in Minutes
Ben Holbrook



In an age where people want instant access to nearly everything, the Darien Library is helping to meet that need by introducing a machine that will print entire books within a matter of minutes.

The Espresso Book Machine offers patrons of the library the opportunity to print paperback copies of books that are out of copyright and some books that have been released by publishers such as Harper Collins, McGraw Hill and Simon and Schuster.

Alan Kirk Gray, chief administrative officer at the library, said the library had been considering the machine for three or four years before working out a deal with On Demand Books to bring one in.

"It is in fact a standalone machine which is married to a high-end copier, in this case a Xerox, which will print an entire paperback book," Gray said. "Right now there are about 5 million books available and publishers are starting to make books that are still in print available."

Gray was especially excited that Darien Library now has the distinction of being the only public library on the East Coast with the machine.

"We're so happy to bring this to the community because it is absolutely unique and people can get books they aren't aware of," Gray said. "I have books that I want to buy that I loved when I was growing up."

The EBM is still a fairly scarce commodity and is typically found in university libraries and in book stores. However, Bronwen Blaney, On Demand custom publishing and retail services manager, said Darien is unique because it is the first machine the company has installed and staffed themselves.

"Usually a bookstore will buy the EBM and then train their staff to use it," Blaney said. "I will be here until a full-time technician is hired."

Blaney said the process for running the EBM is fairly simply because the machine does the brunt of the work automatically once a book is selected. As long as the machine has sufficient paper, cover stock and glue, books can continued to be printed.

"The machine mills the pages and print out the cover and then it wraps the cover around the pages and hold everything together until the glue dries and then cuts the book to size," Gray said. "I love that it's transparent because then people can see how it works."

Even though the EBM was designed with idea it would mainly be used for printing books, Blaney said On Demand Books expects to learn about completely different uses for the machine as customers use it. One of the more recent uses for the EBM the company didn't think of was using it to print wedding invitations.

"I had a woman who put together a little book and it had the RSVP in the back and it looked really good," Blaney said. "She was able to print her invitations for a lot less using the EBM then if she had them printed somewhere else."

Besides printing copies of books that are out-of-print or wedding invitations, the other expected use for the EBM is for self-publishing.

"There is a growing market for self-publishing and a big part of this machine is that," Gray said. "Someone who lives in this region can put a book together and come and print out as many copies as they want. We expect to see a fair amount of that happening."

Blaney said there are a number of people who use the EBM for self-publishing. The books range from family histories to what could be the next great American novel.

"The people I have spoken to who have the EBM say they primarily see it being used to print the more obscure books that are no longer available or for self-publishing," she said.

Giving people nearly instant access to books is a benefit to the library but the EBM also helps in not so obvious ways.

"This machine helps libraries stay relevant," Blaney said. "You are giving people access to more content."

The EBM can also benefit local bookstores because they won't have to gamble as much when it comes time to order books. Blaney said the stores can focus more on stocking books that are popular and if someone wants a copy of a book the store doesn't have in stock, one can be printed out on site.

The Darien Library has not yet purchased the EBM but has the option to continue leasing it or buy it.

"Right now we're doing sort of a soft launch and won't actively start promoting it until Nov. 15. However, Gray encourages anyone, not just Darien residents, to stop by and see the machine in action.

"It is really cool and kids love watching it," Gray said. "People can come by and test it out and it helps get physical copies of books into people's hands."
http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...ck-2249221.php





You Want to Track Me? Here You Go, F.B.I.
Hasan M. Elahi

ON June 19, 2002, I ran into a bit of a problem that turned my life upside down. It happened at the Detroit airport as I was entering the country. I realized something wasn’t right when the immigration agent at United States Customs slid my passport through the reader, then froze. “Is there something wrong?” I asked. He was still frozen. After a few moments, he said, “Follow me, please,” and I ended up at the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s airport office.

It was a large room filled with foreign-looking people, and fear was written on all their faces; this was their first day in the United States, and things were evidently not going well. Typically, there is little overlap between the I.N.S. and American citizens like me, and when I tried to find out from one of the agents what I was doing there, he seemed just as confused as I was.

Eventually, a man in a dark suit approached and said, “I expected you to be older.” I asked if he could please explain what was happening, and he said, “You have some explaining to do yourself.”

We then entered an interrogation room, barren and stark white with a camera in the corner. He sat across from me at an L-shaped desk and asked me to retrace the path I’d taken since I had left the United States. He asked me various detailed questions for a good half hour and then, out of nowhere, said, “Where were you September 12?”

Fortunately, I’m neurotic about record keeping. I had my Palm P.D.A. with me; I looked up Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2001 on my calendar. I read him the contents: “pay storage rent at 10; meeting with Judith at 10:30; intro class from 12 to 3; advanced class from 3 to 6.” We read about six months of my calendar appointments. I don’t think he was expecting me to have such detailed records.

He continued, “You had a storage unit in Tampa, right?”

“Yes, near the university.”

“What did you have in it?”

“Boxes of winter clothes, furniture I can’t fit in my apartment, some assorted junk and garage sale material.”

“No explosives?”

“I’m certain I didn’t have any explosives.”

“Well, we received a report that you had explosives and had fled on September 12.”

Given that I was very cooperative, and also had meticulous records that showed what I did when, I think he began to realize that whatever report he had was erroneous.

A few weeks later, a Justice Department official called my office in Tampa and said he wanted to speak to me about my interview in Detroit. He asked me to come to the Federal Building downtown, where he led me into a room where he and an F.B.I. agent interrogated me about where I’d been and when, and had I witnessed acts that might be detrimental to the interests of the United States or a foreign country, and had I ever met anyone from Al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Hamas or Hezbollah. The F.B.I. agent seemed to know quite remarkable details about things like the regular versus the Hezbollah bus routes in Beirut, and the person memorialized in the statue at the entrance of the American University there. His knowledge frightened me.

I COULD have contested the legality of the investigation and gotten a lawyer. But I thought that would make things messier. It was clear who had the power in this situation. And when you’re face to face with someone with so much power, you behave in an unusual manner. You dare not take any action. You rely on instincts and do what you need to survive. I told them everything.

The questioning went on for the next six months and ended with a series of polygraph examinations. I must have completed these to the agents’ satisfaction; eventually an interrogating agent told me that I had been cleared and that everything was fine and said that if I needed anything I should call him. I was planning to travel in the weeks ahead and was nervous about entering the country; I asked the agent about this, and he told me to call him with the information about my flights and said he would take care of everything.

Shortly after, I called the F.B.I. to report my whereabouts. I chose to. I wanted to make sure that the bureau knew that I wasn’t making any sudden moves and that I wasn’t running off somewhere. I wanted them to know where I was and what I was doing at any given time.

Soon I began to e-mail the F.B.I. I started to send longer e-mails, with pictures, and then with links to Web sites I made. I wrote some clunky code for my phone back in 2003 and turned it into a tracking device.

My thinking was something like, “You want to watch me? Fine. But I can watch myself better than you can, and I can get a level of detail that you will never have.”

In the process of compiling data about myself and supplying it to the F.B.I., I started thinking about what intelligence agents might not know about me. I created a list of every flight I’ve ever been on, since birth. For the more recent flights, I noted the exact flight numbers, recorded in my frequent flier accounts, and also photographs of the meals that I ate on each flight, as well as photos of each knife provided by each airline on each flight.

On my Web site, I compiled various databases that show the airports I’ve been in, food I’ve eaten at home, food I’ve eaten on the road, random hotel beds I’ve slept in, various parking lots off Interstate 80 that I parked in, empty train stations I saw, as well as very specific information like photos of the tacos I ate in Mexico City between July 5 and 7, and the toilets I used.

These images seem empty, and could be anywhere, but they’re not; they are extremely specific records of my exact travels to particular places. There are 46,000 images on my site. I trust that the F.B.I. has seen all of them. Agents know where I’ve bought my duck-flavored paste, or kimchi, laundry detergent and chitlins; because I told them everything.

I also provided screenshots of my financial data, communications records and transportation logs. Visitors to my site can cross-reference these records with my images in a way that’s similar to how the F.B.I. cross-references the very same databases. I provided information from third parties (including my bank, phone company, etc.) who can verify that I was at the locations indicated, on the dates and times specified on my Web site.

PEOPLE who visit my site — and my server logs indicate repeat visits from the Department of Homeland Security, the C.I.A., the National Reconnaissance Office and the Executive Office of the President — don’t find my information organized clearly. In fact, the interface I use is deliberately user-unfriendly. A lot of work is required to thread together the thousands of available points of information. By putting everything about me out there, I am simultaneously telling everything and nothing about my life. Despite the barrage of information about me that is publicly available, I live a surprisingly private and anonymous life.

In an era in which everything is archived and tracked, the best way to maintain privacy may be to give it up. Information agencies operate in an industry that values data. Restricted access to information is what makes it valuable. If I cut out the middleman and flood the market with my information, the intelligence the F.B.I. has on me will be of no value. Making my private information public devalues the currency of the information the intelligence gatherers have collected.

My activities may be more symbolic than not, but if 300 million people started sending private information to federal agents, the government would need to hire as many as another 300 million people, possibly more, to keep up with the information and we’d have to redesign our entire intelligence system.

East Germany tried this some decades back; it didn’t work out to be such a great plan for them. We have incredibly intelligent people and very sophisticated computer systems in various agencies in Washington, but the culture of these agencies prevents us from evolving beyond the cold-war-era mind-set. (There are people in Washington who still refer to China as “Red China.”) Fortunately, people in government have begun to see that collecting information is less useful than figuring out how to analyze it.

When I first started talking about my project in 2003, people thought I was insane. Why would anyone tell everyone what he was doing at all times? Why would anyone want to share a photo of every place he visited? Now eight years later, more than 800 million people do the same thing I’ve been doing each time they update their status or post an image or poke someone on Facebook. (Just to put this in perspective, if Facebook was a country, it would have the third highest population, after China and India.) Insane?

What I’m doing is no longer just an art project; creating our own archives has become so commonplace that we’re all — or at least hundreds of millions of us — doing it all the time. Whether we know it or not.

Hasan M. Elahi is an associate professor and an interdisciplinary artist at the University of Maryland. This article is adapted from a forthcoming TED Talk.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/o...-it-wants.html





Met Police Using Surveillance System to Monitor Mobile Phones

Civil liberties group raises concerns over Met police purchase of technology to track public handsets over a targeted area
Ryan Gallagher and Rajeev Syal

A woman on her mobile next to a police cordon during protests in London in 2010. The Metropolitan police have purchased technology to track all handsets in a targeted area. Photograph: Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images

Britain's largest police force is operating covert surveillance technology that can masquerade as a mobile phone network, transmitting a signal that allows authorities to shut off phones remotely, intercept communications and gather data about thousands of users in a targeted area.

The surveillance system has been procured by the Metropolitan police from Leeds-based company Datong plc, which counts the US Secret Service, the Ministry of Defence and regimes in the Middle East among its customers. Strictly classified under government protocol as "Listed X", it can emit a signal over an area of up to an estimated 10 sq km, forcing hundreds of mobile phones per minute to release their unique IMSI and IMEI identity codes, which can be used to track a person's movements in real time.

The disclosure has caused concern among lawyers and privacy groups that large numbers of innocent people could be unwittingly implicated in covert intelligence gathering. The Met has refused to confirm whether the system is used in public order situations, such as during large protests or demonstrations.

Nick Pickles, director of privacy and civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, warned the technology could give police the ability to conduct "blanket and indiscriminate" monitoring: "It raises a number of serious civil liberties concerns and clarification is urgently needed on when and where this technology has been deployed, and what data has been gathered," he said. "Such invasive surveillance must be tightly regulated, authorised at the highest level and only used in the most serious of investigations. It should be absolutely clear that only data directly relating to targets of investigations is monitored or stored," he said.

Datong's website says its products are designed to provide law enforcement, military, security agencies and special forces with the means to "gather early intelligence in order to identify and anticipate threat and illegal activity before it can be deployed".

The company's systems, showcased at the DSEi arms fair in east London last month, allow authorities to intercept SMS messages and phone calls by secretly duping mobile phones within range into operating on a false network, where they can be subjected to "intelligent denial of service". This function is designed to cut off a phone used as a trigger for an explosive device.

A transceiver around the size of a suitcase can be placed in a vehicle or at another static location and operated remotely by officers wirelessly. Datong also offers clandestine portable transceivers with "covered antennae options available". Datong sells its products to nearly 40 countries around the world, including in Eastern Europe, South America, the Middle East and Asia Pacific. In 2009 it was refused an export licence to ship technology worth £0.8m to an unnamed Asia Pacific country, after the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills judged it could be used to commit human rights abuses.

A document seen by the Guardian shows the Metropolitan police paid £143,455 to Datong for "ICT hardware" in 2008/09. In 2010 the 37-year-old company, which has been publicly listed since October 2005, reported its pro forma revenue in the UK was £3.9m, and noted that "a good position is being established with new law enforcement customer groups". In February 2011 it was paid £8,373 by Hertfordshire Constabulary according to a transaction report released under freedom of information.

Between 2004 and 2009 Datong won over $1.6 (£1.03m) in contracts with US government agencies, including the Secret Service, Special Operations Command and the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In February 2010 the company won a £750,000 order to supply tracking and location technology to the US defence sector. Official records also show Datong entered into contracts worth more than £500,000 with the Ministry of Defence in 2009.

All covert surveillance is currently regulated under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), which states that to intercept communications a warrant must be personally authorised by the home secretary and be both necessary and proportionate. The terms of Ripa allow phone calls and SMS messages to be intercepted in the interests of national security, to prevent and detect serious crime, or to safeguard the UK's economic wellbeing.

Latest figures produced by the government-appointed interception of communications commissioner, Sir Paul Kennedy, show there were 1,682 interception warrants approved by the home secretary in 2010. Public authorities can request other communications data – such as the date, time and location a phone call was made – without the authority of the home secretary. In 2010, 552,550 such requests were made, averaging around 1,500 per day.

Barrister Jonathan Lennon, who specialises in cases involving covert intelligence and Ripa, said the Met's use of the Datong surveillance system raised significant legislative questions about proportionality and intrusion into privacy.

"How can a device which invades any number of people's privacy be proportionate?" he said. "There needs to be clarification on whether interception of multiple people's communications – when you can't even necessarily identify who the people are – is complaint with the act. It may be another case of the technology racing ahead of the legislation. Because if this technology now allows multiple tracking and intercept to take place at the same time, I would have thought that was not what parliament had in mind when it drafted Ripa."

Former detective superintendent Bob Helm, who had the authority to sign off Ripa requests for covert surveillance during 31 years of service with Lancashire Constabulary, said: "It's all very well placed in terms of legislation … when you can and can't do it. It's got to be legal and obviously proportionate and justified. If you can't do that, and the collateral implications far outweigh the evidence you're going to get, well then you just don't contemplate it."

In May the Guardian revealed the Met had purchased software used to map suspects' digital movements using data gathered from social networking sites, satnav equipment, mobile phones, financial transactions and IP network logs. The force said the software was being tested using "dummy data" to explore how it could be used to examine "police vehicle movements, crime patterns and telephone investigations."

The Met would not comment on its use of Datong technology or give details of where or when it had been used.

A spokesman said: "The MPS [Metropolitan police service] may employ surveillance technology as part of our continuing efforts to ensure the safety of Londoners and detect criminality. It can be a vital and highly effective investigative tool.

"Although we do not discuss specific technology or tactics, we can re-assure those who live and work in London that any activity we undertake is in compliance with legislation and codes of practice."

A spokesman for the Home Office said covert surveillance was kept under "constant review" by the chief surveillance commissioner, Sir Christopher Rose, who monitors the conduct of authorities and ensures they are complying with the appropriate legislation.

He added: "Law enforcement agencies are required to act in accordance with the law and with the appropriate levels of authorisation for their activity."

Datong declined to comment.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oc...e-surveillance





A Store of Images, From a Time When ‘Cut and Paste’ Meant Just That
Noam Cohen

THE sign in blue lettering read “Copyright-Free Images,” which may not rank with “Zero Percent Financing” or “Everything Must Go” when it comes to sales pitches. But it does have “free” in it, and it was enough to catch my eye while visiting London.

The sign was displayed on the storefront of the Dover Bookshop on Earlham Street in Covent Garden, tucked among the Japanese clothing outlets and graphic design stores. You won’t find best sellers or works of great literature there, or even many large, glossy coffee-table books. The books that dominate the shelves — large paperbacks with prosaic titles like “Animals” or “Plants” or “Hands” — are more like catalogs of random images that have one thing in common: their age.

Dating largely from the 19th century and culled from old magazines, advertisements and books, these pictures are not covered by copyright laws. Artists around the world can use the images any way they want — cut and copied, altered or combined. No one “owns” them anymore.

Artists describe these books of “clip art” as a spur to creativity — a way to conjure up the curved outline of a lion or the way a hand grasps a hammer. But they are also ready-made images, often of high quality, that can be easily reused or repurposed.

“We get graphic artists, designers, tattoo artists, people in education in schools,” said Stuart Tegg, 44, the assistant manager of the store, as he helped pack up a book of old maps and medieval illuminated letters for a man who said he was a book-jacket designer from Edinburgh.

“Sometimes they are looking for inspiration, sometimes a specific image — they chat you up, ‘Do you have a certain image?’ ” Mr. Tegg said.

Tattoo artists like to look at the drawings of old pistols, he said. One recent customer asked if any of the books had a picture of “a fruit pie.” Mr. Tegg found one in a book of Victorian-era illustrations, and made a sale.

The experience of browsing this bookstore, which opened in 1986, is thoroughly pre-Internet; you walk down short aisles, stopping to page through images that often come printed in different sizes so they can literally be cut and pasted onto a design. What’s more, the store challenges the idea that the Internet has created a mash-up culture, whether in the sampling of older music in new songs or the combination of two images using Photoshop.

These clip art books, with dozens of examples of plants, pipes or old-fashioned mustaches, show that people were happily doing image searches long before they had the benefit of a search engine. And people were manipulating those images long before they could click and drag them.

•

Most of the offerings at Dover Bookshop are produced by Dover Publications, an American business based in Mineola, N.Y., that also publishes children’s books, music and science works. Despite the similar names, there is no official connection between the publisher and the bookstore, other than friendly awareness.

Mark Oddie, the bookstore’s owner, said that when he was preparing to open the store he sought out Dover Publications’ founder, Hayward Cirker, who was in London for a book festival. “I asked him, ‘Can I use your name?’ ” Mr. Oddie, who is living in semiretirement near Melbourne, Australia, recalled in a telephone interview. “He said, ‘You can’t make a living selling my books.’ And I said, ‘We’ll see. I have more faith in your books than you do.’ ”

Dover Publications views the store as a boost for business, said Ken Katzman, the company’s vice president for marketing. Dover Publications is owned by a printing company, the Courier Corporation, which is based in Massachusetts and, among other things, prints Gideon Bibles.

The company still puts out new clip art collections, Mr. Katzman said, and has a staff of three who travel to book fairs, museums and estate sales looking for material to supplement the archive first collected by Mr. Cirker and his wife, Blanche, as they traveled the world.

Their home was in the Dover building in Queens, he said, which gave the company its name. Mr. Cirker died in 2000, and the company was sold after his death; Mrs. Cirker is 92.

After 25 years, it appears that Mr. Oddie is coming around to Mr. Cirker’s view about the difficulty of building a successful business around clip art books. He describes the bookstore as a “charitable operation” that barely generates enough business to pay the landlord, the staff and the British distributor.

He said he was hoping that Dover Publications or the distributor would take over the store, which in 2006 had its best year, $1.25 million in sales, though profits have always been small. “It is dearly loved, and it is a famous shop and the most important thing I have done in my life,” he said.

•

Soon Mr. Oddie will face a difficult choice. In March, he said, he would decide whether to sign a new lease for the store. Hanging over that decision is whether Dover Publications will begin to sell its images directly for downloading online.

The competition from Internet book sales has already made things hard, he said. But the availability of direct downloads from Dover Publications might be the final straw.

According to Mr. Katzman, the plan is to introduce direct downloads “within a year.” He said the company could sell the images individually or somehow bundle them together.

In that sense the Internet would have the last laugh in the world of clip art, not by creating new habits in people but by making it easier to indulge in them.

David Plunkert, an illustrator in Baltimore who has used Dover clip art books since he was a student, noted that Mr. Cirker was not unique in collecting these images.

“Fifty years ago, 75 years ago, 100 years, people kept their obsessions in little boxes and albums,” he said. Dover was among the first to publish them more broadly, and today, because of the Internet, “we are looking at everybody else’s little boxes of treasures,” Mr. Plunkert said.

He added that designers and artists had always looked to cut corners. He quoted the advice of a prominent comic illustrator, Wallace Wood, who died in 1981: “Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/31/b...ine-world.html





Fighting Over Online Sex Ads
David Carr

What if the price of having a vital, well-financed string of newspapers included rare, but inevitable, sexual predation of minors?

Not a tough call, right? But maybe more complicated than you think for the businesses involved.

Before you head out for the lanterns and pitchforks, it’s worth remembering that a free press is not free. One of the offshoots of free speech is that it will be used to pernicious ends. In this instance, Village Voice Media has a classified network called Backpage.com that includes a section labeled “adult” with categories like “escort” and “strippers & strip clubs.” The vast majority of ads involves one consenting adult seeking another, but there have been instances in which the section was used to offer minors for sexual ends.

Village Voice Media, controlled by Jim Larkin and Michael Lacey, whose weeklies include The Village Voice, Westword and Phoenix New Times. It has an anything-goes approach to advertising, but in a digital age, that policy has new implications.

In September 2010, Craigslist, which hosted a great deal of sexually related advertising, bowed to pressure and banned that advertising in the United States. A number of crimes, including several murders, had been linked to ads on the site, and many critics, including a number of state attorneys general, suggested that Craigslist was enabling the trafficking of minors.

A significant portion of the estimated $44 million in sex-related advertising on Craigslist found a home on Backpage.com. Like a lot of newspapers, Village Voice Media’s chain of 13 weeklies has struggled through the terrible economic cycle and big changes in advertising spending, so the revenue from Backpage.com, much of it unrelated to sex, has played a critical role in its survival.

But in August the country’s 51 attorneys general sent a letter demanding that the site close its “adult” section, and now a coalition of religious leaders has joined that effort. Last Tuesday, Groundswell, an interfaith social justice group sponsored by Auburn Seminary in New York, published a full-page ad in The New York Times that was signed by clergy members of all stripes and cited the arrests of adults who had sold minors for sex using Backpage.com. The ad stated, “It is a basic fact of the moral universe that girls and boys should not be sold for sex.”

“While we empathize with your business challenges and the increasingly difficult marketplace in which Village Voice Media competes,” the letter went on, “we trust that you are committed to running your business without compromising the lives of our nation’s boys and girls.”

The Rev. Katharine Rhodes Henderson, the president of Auburn Theological Seminary, said that while the issue was complicated, the bottom line was not.

“On Backpage.com, you can buy a toaster, a car or a girl for sex,” she said. “We agree with the attorney generals on the legal issues, but we are raising this as a moral issue. Even if one minor is sold for sex, it is one too many.”

Mr. Larkin and Mr. Lacey are accustomed to having people come after them. They were harassed and arrested in the middle of the night in response to the coverage by one of their newspapers of Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz. Mr. Lacey, who has made a career out of tweaking the powers that be, sees this battle as no different.

“I am beginning to like our odds,” he said. “We have all these practicing politicians and concerned clergy after us. We must be doing something right.”

In a phone call, he and Mr. Larkin pointed out that Web sites like Backpage.com are not legally responsible for posted content and added that the company had spent millions on both human and technological efforts to screen ads that feature minors. They said they had worked with law enforcement officials and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in an effort to make sure Backpage.com’s “adult” section included only adults.

Both men see the debate as a free speech issue.

“We have always had a very libertarian approach to advertising,” said Mr. Larkin, adding that classifieds represented 30 to 35 percent of their business. “We don’t ban cigarettes, we take adult advertising. We take ads that sell guns.”

From their perspective, the claims of their opponents are wildly exaggerated and all the money being spent trying to wipe out advertising would be better spent on the root causes of the problem, including drug addiction, poverty and family abuse.

“There is a lot of mythmaking around the issue and I think it’s a way of avoiding the real problem,” Mr. Lacey said.

Rob McKenna, the attorney general of Washington State and the head of the association of attorneys general that went after both Craigslist and now Backpage.com, says the issue goes beyond minors.

“I think we have to be careful to protect the First Amendment rights of publishers, but free speech does not extend to the knowing facilitation of criminal activity,” he said. “This is not just about children being prostituted, this is about human beings being trafficked into the sex trades, as adults and as children.”

It’s no news to anyone that sex is an integral component of the Internet and much of the mainstream media. Early on, AOL included lots of raunchy backrooms. The brand-name cable channels make a great deal of money on sexually explicit content, and if someone is looking to buy sex, there are any number of Web sites that cater to all manner of interests.

It’s worth remembering that while pressure from the attorneys general and Congress led to a change at Craigslist, the whack-a-mole on the Web continues. If Backpage.com retreats — not likely given the predispositions of its owners — some other alternative will immediately take its place.

It reminds me a great deal of the early 1990s, when I was the editor of The Twin Cities Reader, an alternative weekly in Minneapolis. At the time, we were under fire for publishing ads for strip clubs, escort services and massage parlors. The staff and the publisher at the time, R. T. Rybak, were keenly attuned to the community and always looking for points of difference from City Pages, our weekly competitor. With support from the staff, Mr. Rybak announced that we would no longer take ads that “objectified” women, a bold move. It was thought that beyond the good will we earned in the community, other, nonracy advertisers might find our paper to be a more suitable platform.

Our critics, including many women’s groups, were thrilled at their victory and congratulated us on our sensitivity. The policy went into effect, wiping out, as I recall, about 15 percent of the bottom line. City Pages left its ad policy unchanged. Some of what we lost went to them and little in the way of new ads materialized to fill the hole.

City Pages eventually became the dominant paper — in part because it was very good and run by smart people — and when, yes, Village Voice Media decided to enter the market, it bought both papers and closed The Twin Cities Reader. I was gone by then, but I thought the decision to be selective about ads contributed to its demise.

I called Mr. Rybak, who is now the mayor of Minneapolis, to ask if he regretted the decision.

“It was absolutely the right move,” he said. “When you engage in a certain kind of journalism that is designed to be an alternative to the mainstream, you have a special obligation to have your editorial, your values and your advertising align.”

“If we had more time, I think it may have worked out,” he said. “But I often think about what would have happened if we had those two pages of ads in the back. Would the paper still be around? It wasn’t the only reason it went out of business, but it played a role.”

Although Mr. Larkin and Mr. Lacey hardly agree, they are taking their own version of a principled stand. And just because it aligns with their business interests doesn’t mean it isn’t valid.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/31/b...e-sex-ads.html





The Weight of Memory
By C. Claiborne Ray

Q. When an e-reader is loaded with thousands of books, does it gain any weight?

A. “In principle, the answer is yes,” said John D. Kubiatowicz, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.

“However,” he said, “the amount is very small, on the order of an atogram,” or 10–18 grams. “This amount is effectively unmeasurable,” he went on, since even the most sensitive scales have a resolution of only 10–9 grams. Further, it is only about one hundred-millionth as much as the estimated fluctuation from charging and discharging the device’s battery. A Kindle, for example, uses flash memory, composed of special transistors, one per stored bit, which use trapped electrons to distinguish between a digital 1 and a 0.

“Although the total number of electrons in the memory does not change as the stored data changes,” Dr. Kubiatowicz said, the trapped ones have a higher energy than the untrapped ones. A conservative estimate of the difference would be 10–15 joules per bit.

As the equation E=mc2 makes clear, this energy is equivalent to mass and will have weight. Assuming that all these bits in an empty four-gigabyte Kindle are in a lower energy state and that half have a higher energy in a full Kindle, this translates to an energy difference of 1.7 times 10–5 joules, Dr. Kubiatowicz calculated. Plugging this into Einstein’s equation yields his rough estimate of 10–18 grams.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/science/25qna.html





Supreme Court Plays Hooky, Leaves Student Online Free Speech Rights Murky
David Kravets

The U.S. Supreme Court is declining to review a former Connecticut high-school student’s punishment for calling the school’s administrators “douchebags” on her LiveJournal blog.

The high court’s inaction Monday means the justices have never squarely addressed the parameters of off-campus, online student speech. So far, lower courts appear to be guided by a 1969 high court ruling saying student expression may not be suppressed unless school officials reasonably conclude that it will “materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school.”

In that landmark case, the Supreme Court said students had a First Amendment right to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. But that precedent, which addressed on-campus speech, is now being applied to students’ online, off-campus speech four decades later.

The case the justices rejected concerned a Connecticut school district’s discipline of banning a then high-school junior from running for school office because of the 2007 vulgar blog post.

Dozens of similar cases across the nation have had varying results.

One case the lower courts decided last year went against a 14-year-old Pennsylvania junior high student, who was suspended for 10 days in 2007. She mocked her principal with a fake MySpace profile that insinuated the principal was a sex addict and pedophile.

Another case last year favored student speech of a Pennsylvania senior, who was suspended 10 days after creating a mock MySpace profile of his principal.

The profile said the principal took drugs and kept beer at his desk. The courts ruled the fake profile did not create a “substantial disruption” at school.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...-rights-murky/





TagesWoche Portrays New Future for Swiss Media Landscape
Micz Flor

TagesWoche is a new Swiss newspaper aiming to bring together print and online content in the interests of transparency, media freedom and a Basel community still shocked by the sale of its city’s paper to unwanted investors. Sourcefabric built their new converged newsroom.

The Daily Week

When a handful of Basel-based editors, journalists and designers met in April 2011, they discussed how to fill the void that remained following the controversial sale of the Basler Zeitung to suspected right-wing owners. Six months later a staff of 30 professional journalists were launching a newspaper with transparency and community at its core and a convergent print-online newsroom built on open source software from Sourcefabric. TagesWoche was born.

Based in Basel with a nationwide distribution, TagesWoche's (The Daily Week) editorial team produce daily news and commentary on the website. Every Friday, TagesWoche's print issue comes out nationwide with additional background information and in-depth analysis.

The innovative concept has already gained interest beyond national boundaries. The campaign running up to the launch attracted over 5000 subscribers for the print issue while the first print issue consisted of 64 pages with a circulation of 100,000 and a format new to Switzerland (halbrheinisch, 26x36 cm).

Merging Print and Web

The least visible part of the whole TagesWoche operation is, in some ways, the most innovative. TagesWoche's newsroom is built on Newscoop, an open source content management system (CMS) developed by not-for-profit Czech organisation Sourcefabric. Over 20 new features were designed in close collaboration with the TagesWoche team to fit the journalists' desired toolset of InDesign and InCopy.

"Going beyond common web and print solutions, TagesWoche needed a news platform for that was flexible, cost-effective and scalable, " explained Sourcefabric co-founder Sava Tatić. "The developmental agility of open source software allowed us to build a complicated convergence of news feeds, editorial content and community input that outputs effortlessly to print, online and mobile platforms in only three months."

The star of the show is Sourcefabric's Printdesk, which brings print and online processes into one workflow. On creation in the layout software InDesign, each article automatically receives a unique ID (the Webcode) which can be called into the print layout and functions as a short link to the corresponding article on the web. This allows the editorial team to develop additional material for the online version while the print design is still underway and dramatically increases the speed of delivering the print content to the online readers.

Local

TagesWoche strives to keep content relevant and local. Newscoop's Feed Ingest was custom fit to integrate external newswire feeds into the editorial process meaning TagesWoche journalists can pull in and publish reliable national and international news automatically, allowing them to focus on quality, investigative and local journalistic work.

Features like Article of the Day, Recommended Comments, the Weekly Debate and playlists for popular content allow the journalists to easily recycle and reuse material to efficiently keep the site both fresh and up-to-date for community interests. Storyboard allows reporters to crowdsource local investigative work and Dossiers go deep into subjects the local community cares about most. Every article uses in-depth, geolocative data to position the news at the heart of the community.

Social

Community is at the heart of TagesWoche. The platform is free to join – registered users can comment, follow topics, watch community activity feeds, and make use of the Omnibox, a new mode of engagement on every page where readers can share not just text, but audio, pictures and documents that relate to an article, either publicly or privately with the article's author. To maintain transparency, every TagesWoche article has a 'flipside' with an impressum, list of sources and revision history.

"We believe the times where journalists alone decide what's news are over," said Co-executive editor team Remo Leupin on launch day. "Today's media landscape is diverse. TagesWoche is open to the community to bring in news, discuss issues and set trends for the publication."

Mobile

Reading TagesWoche on the move is also vital for the hardworking Baslers. A dedicated web app was built to look great on a range of tablets and smartphones from iPads to Blackberries and was built on the open source Sencha Touch framework. "TagesWoche stands for innovative, quality journalism and engages into close dialogue with its readers following cutting-edge technological possibilities, " explained co-executive editor Urs Buess.

Sustainable

Entering a new publication into an established media landscape is not easy. Sustainability requires profitability and TagesWoche are business innovators too. The Tageswoche Subscription Shop offers a range of subscription print offers, while online TagesWoche material is freely accessible, but Pay What You Like allows individuals to microdonate on an article by article basis. A mix of print and online advertisements appeals to a range of commercial interests, with future plans to add hyperlocal classified ads and coupon offers set to extend the paper's revenue sources further.
http://sourcefabric.org/en/community/blog/788





Army of 'Socialbots' Steal Gigabytes of Facebook User Data

Social networks prone to large-scale infiltration
Dan Goodin

Updated A small array of scripts programmed to pass themselves off as real people stole 250 gigabytes worth of personal information from Facebook users in just eight weeks, researchers said in an academic report to be presented next month.

The 102 “socialbots” included a name and picture of a fictitious Facebook user and used programming interfaces from iheartquotes.com to automatically embed pseudo-random quotes into status updates. They also used Facebook interfaces to send connection requests to about 5,000 randomly selected profiles. They then sent connection requests to the friends of those who accepted the initial invitation, and with each acceptance, they scraped whatever information was available.

At the end of the eight-week experiment, the researchers made off with 250 gigabytes of personal data, much of it configured to be available only to people on the user's list of friends.

A defense known as the Facebook Immune System, which is designed to automatically flag fake profiles, did little to thin the army of socialbots used in the study. While about 20 percent of them were blocked, the closures were the result of feedback from other users who reported spam, the researchers said. Their socialbot network targeted Facebook, but they said similar ones could penetrate virtually any OSN, or online social network.

“As socialbots infiltrate a targeted OSN, they can further harvest private users' data such as email addresses, phone numbers, and other personal data that have monetary value,” the researchers, from the University of British Columbia Vancouver, wrote in the paper (PDF), which is scheduled to be presented at next month's Annual Computer Security Applications Conference in Orlando, Florida. “To an adversary, such data are valuable and can be used for online profiling and large-scale email spam and phishing campaigns.”

During the initial “bootstrapping” phase of the experiment, the socialbots sent friendship requests to 5,053 randomly selected Facebook users. To prevent the triggering of fraud detection systems, each fake account sent only 25 requests per day, a constraint that required two days for all of them to be processed. Within two weeks, 976, or about 19 percent of the requests, were accepted.

Over the remaining six weeks, the bots sent requests to the Facebook friends of those who accepted the initial invitations. Of the 3,517 users who received the second round of requests, 2,079, or about 59 percent, accepted. With further refinements, the socialbots could achieve a large-scale infiltration with a success rate of about 80 percent, the researchers said.

The significant jump exhibits what researchers call the “triadic closure principle,” which predicts that the likelihood of someone accepting a connection request in a social network is about three times higher when the pair has mutual connections. This principle proved to be a boon to the socialbots in another respect: they received 331 requests from Facebook users in the socialbots' extended neighborhoods.

A Facebook spokesman declined to comment on the report.

“However, we always remind our users to only accept friend requests from those they know and trust,” he wrote in an email to The Register. “We use a combination of three systems here to combat attacks like this – friend request and fake account classifiers, and rate-limiting techniques. These classifiers block and disable inauthentic friend requests and fake accounts while rate-limiting truncates the damage that can be done by any one entity.”

Besides stealing gigabytes worth of pictures, phone numbers, and other data, socialbots could be used to generate comments that are designed to appear as if they spontaneously came from thousands of individuals, when in fact they are an astroturf campaign that's the work of a single actor. The computer worm known as Koobface already uses compromised Facebook accounts to trick friends into installing malware on their computers. Other socialbots are sold online for about $29 apiece, the researchers said.

The researchers behind the army of socialbots include Yazan Boshmaf, Ildar Muslukhov, Konstantin Beznosov, and Matei Ripenu. In an email, Boshmaf said their objective was to improve the security of privacy of social networks.

He said: “Overall, our research goal is not to expose Facebook Immune System's vulnerabilities per se, but to help Facebook and the wider community to build more secure systems that are less vulnerable to both human exploits (i.e., social engineering) and technical exploits (i.e., platform hacks).”

Updated to Add

Since this article was published, Facebook representatives have been back in touch. According to Facebook, the socialbots' results were unrealistically successful owing to a trusted university IP address being used - and the company claimed that its records showed a higher success rate for its security systems than that given by the researchers, though no figure was offered. The social-networking firm also warned that such research efforts could lead to irritating extra security checks for people associated with the university's IP addresses.

A spokesperson said:

"We have serious concerns about the methodology of the research by the University of British Colombia and we will be putting these concerns to them."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11...ltration_bots/





EA's Origin May be Glorified Spyware, Causes Mass Upset
Jim Sterling

In case you hadn't heard already, Electronic Arts' Origin is more than just a petty attempt to undermine Steam. It's an insidious petty attempt to undermine Steam. The service has upset gamers since it reserves the right to act like Spyware, allowing EA to dig around in your hard drive as explicitly stated in the terms of service.

The EULA says that EA can identify your computer, operating system, installed/uninstalled software/hardware, and use that information for marketing purposes while merrily sharing it with third party companies. It's all fairly disgusting, and there's no opt-out offer. If you don't want EA to know everything about you and pass the information along, your only recourse is to not install Origin -- which will mean you can't play Battlefield 3 on PC at all.

Reddit, known for its anger over everything, is naturally furious over this one, and is organizing the masses to complain. It's certainly a complaint I can get behind. Origin was already an annoying waste of time, but this nasty little parasitism takes it to a whole new level of sleaze. Origin really can slurp the interior of every anus in town.
http://www.destructoid.com/ea-s-orig...t-209745.phtml





Mac OS X Trojan Steals Processing Power to Produce Bitcoins

Security researchers warn that DevilRobber malware could slow down infected Mac computers
Lucian Constantin

A newly identified Mac OS X Trojan bundles a component that leverages the processing power of video cards (GPUs) to generate Bitcoins, a popular type of virtual currency.

The new Trojan was dubbed DevilRobber by antivirus vendors and is being distributed together with several software applications via BitTorrent sites.

Interview: Bitcoin technical lead Gavin Andresen

"This malware is complex, and performs many operations," security researchers from Mac antivirus vendor Intego warned. "It is a combination of several types of malware: It is a Trojan horse, since it is hidden inside other applications; it is a backdoor, as it opens ports and can accept commands from command and control servers; it is a stealer, as it steals data and Bitcoin virtual money; and it is a spyware, as it sends personal data to remote servers," they explained.

The Bitcoin mining program that DevilRobber installs on infected computers is called DiabloMiner and is a legitimate Java-based application used in the virtual currency's production.

Bitcoin is a form of virtual cash that can be exchanged by users without the need for an intermediary bank or payment service. Bitcoins are actually cryptographic hashes that get generated piece by piece using specialized programs like DiabloMiner, according to a public algorithm.

One Bitcoin is currently valued at around US$3.20, and it is a good source of profit for both Bitcoin miners, who legitimately use their computer resources to generate them, and cybercriminals who steal them.

The DevilRobber trojan steals processing power, which can lead to slow computer performance, as well as actual Bitcoins, which are kept in virtual wallets on the victim's machine.

"OSX/Miner-D [DevilRobber] also spies on you by taking screen captures and stealing your usernames and passwords," warned Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at antivirus vendor Sophos.

"In addition, it runs a script that copies information to a file called dump.txt regarding truecrypt data, Vidalia (TOR plugin for Firefox), your Safari browsing history and .bash_history," he added.

So far, the Trojan has been detected in a BitTorrent download for GraphicConverter version 7.4, an image editing application for Mac OS X. However, this doesn't mean that there aren't similarly Trojanized torrents out there.

"Clearly, Mac users -- like their Windows cousins -- should practice safe computing and only download software from official websites and legitimate download services," Cluley said. He also stressed that Mac users should install an antivirus program, which is not hard to do and costs nothing.

There are several providers of free antivirus solutions for Mac and all of their solutions are more capable than Mac OS X's default anti-malware defense mechanism, which some Trojans already bypass or even disable.
http://www.techworld.com.au/article/...oduce_bitcoins





WikiLeaks' Julian Assange Loses Extradition Appeal
Cassandra Vinograd

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Wednesday lost his appeal against extradition to Sweden to answer sex crime allegations, but may now take his protracted fight to Britain's highest court.

British High Court Judges John Thomas and Duncan Ousely rejected Assange's claims that it was unfair and unlawful to send him to Scandinavia to be questioned over the alleged rape of one woman and the molestation of another in Stockholm last year.

The 40-year-old has denied wrongdoing, and insists the case is politically motivated by those opposed to the work of his secret-spilling organization.

After the judgment, Assange lawyer Mark Summers said he could not say whether or not his client planned to attempt an appeal to Britain's Supreme Court. His legal team has 14 days to decide whether or not they plan to keep fighting the extradition.

Wearing a gray suit, Assange flipped through pile of documents and shook hands with supporters as he appeared in court to hear the verdict.

The court said that, for the time being at least, Assange would remain held on bail, under virtual house arrest at a supporter's lavish country estate.

In their ruling, the appeals judges rejected arguments put forward by Assange's legal team — who said the decision by Swedish prosecutors to seek Assange's extradition was disproportionate.

"In any event, this is self evidently not a case relating to a trivial offense, but to serious sexual offenses," the judges said.

Assange would not take questions as he left the courtroom, but supporters indicated that his prospects appeared bleak.

"It's not good news," said Vaughan Smith, the owner of the country mansion where Assange has been residing while he fights extradition.

Assange has said the sexual encounters were consensual and his lawyer Ben Emmerson had previously argued that the allegations would not be considered crimes in England — an argument dismissed by the appeals judges.

"There can be no doubt that if what Mr. Assange had done had been done in England and Wales, he would have been charged," the ruling said.

The judges said that apparent inconsistencies in some of the allegations against Assange should not affect his extradition to face questioning — even though those issues could be valid in any future trial.

The judges cited as one example the fact that one woman who claimed Assange had unprotected sex with her against her will while she was asleep had later said she might have been partially awake.

"These are matters of evidence which would be highly relevant at trial," the judges said in their ruling. But "it is not for this court to assess whether the allegations may fail."

Inside Britain's High Court, WikiLeaks supporters packed inside a public gallery alongside friends of Assange.

The appeals judges confirmed that any attempt to turn to the Supreme Court would be decided at a future hearing, but did not set a date for Assange and his lawyers to return to court.

Karen Todner, a prominent British extradition lawyer not involved in the case, said that the appeals court must grant Assange permission to lodge a further appeal, a process that typically takes about two or three weeks.

If the appeals court rules that his extradition does raise issues of legal significance, Assange could then take his case to Britain's Supreme Court, Todner said. But if it doesn't, "then that's it."

Todner also said the WikiLeaks frontman could try to appeal to European Court of Human Rights as a last resort — although she said such a maneuver would be unlikely to succeed.

________

Associated Press Writers Raphael G. Satter and David Stringer contributed to this report.
http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...al-2247910.php





Journalist’s Arrest Spreads Scandal to 2nd British Newspaper
Sarah Lyall

A journalist at the tabloid The Sun was arrested Friday on suspicion of making illegal payments to police officers, a sign that the scandal has spread beyond The News of the World to other papers in Rupert Murdoch’s British media empire.

The suspect, a 48-year-old man, is the sixth person to be arrested in Scotland Yard’s investigation into illegal payoffs by newspapers to police officers in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal at The News of the World. He was arrested outside London “in connection with allegations of corruption,” the police said, and taken to a police station in southwest London for questioning.

The police would not identify the man, but News International, the British newspaper arm of Mr. Murdoch’s media conglomerate, said in a statement that he was an employee of the company, and the British news media has identified him as Jamie Pyatt, the district editor of The Sun, the Murdoch-owned tabloid that is the most popular daily newspaper in Britain.

The arrest suggests that payoffs to the police may have extended beyond The News of the World, which was closed by Mr. Murdoch in July in an effort to contain the scandal, to other parts of the Murdoch newspaper stable. Mr. Pyatt is the first journalist not employed by The News of the World to be arrested in connection with the police corruption case; he has been at The Sun for more than 20 years and has never worked at The News of the World.

In 2006, Mr. Pyatt won the Scoop of the Year prize at the British Press Awards for his report on how Prince Harry, the younger son of Prince Charles, attended a costume party dressed as a Nazi.

There is increasing evidence that The Sun might also have been involved in phone hacking, a technique used to illegally intercept voice mails. Documents in the case of Guy Pelly, who sued News International this year when it became clear that his phone might have been hacked, show that information illegally obtained by The News of the World was passed to The Sun “from time to time.”

Scotland Yard opened the investigation into police payoffs by journalists, known as Operation Elveden, this summer after e-mails turned over to the police by News International showed that its journalists might have paid more than $200,000 to police officers in exchange for news tips, including information about the movements of members of the royal family.

Those arrested in the Elveden case so far include Andy Coulson, former editor of The News of the World and the former chief spokesman for Prime Minister David Cameron; and Rebekah Brooks, who also worked as the editor of The News of the World and is a former chief executive of News International.

Operation Elveden is running alongside the phone-hacking investigation, known as Operation Weeting, which has produced 16 arrests so far.

No charges have yet been brought in either inquiry; typically, suspects are questioned, released and asked to present themselves to the police for possible criminal charges at a later date.

Meanwhile, News International announced Friday that it had set up what it called a “speedy, cost-effective alternative to litigation” that would allow phone-hacking victims to apply for swift out-of-court settlements through a company Web site. The purpose of the program, called the Voicemail Interception Compensation Scheme, is to “progress good claims quickly to an award of compensation, not to get bogged down in complex legal arguments and speculative requests for disclosure of documents,” the company says on the site.

People claiming to be victims and wanting compensation are asked to fill out and submit electronic forms detailing their claims.

News International has already set aside more than $30 million to pay phone-hacking victims; this move is intended to contain its legal costs as it deals with an increasing number of claims.

Earlier this week, the police admitted that as many as 5,795 people might have been victims of The News of the World’s phone hacking. This summer, they said the figure was 3,870.

Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/05/w...newspaper.html





Narcos, Meet Hackers: 2 'Anonymous' Groups Spar
Mark Stevenson

One of the world's most secretive movements is taking aim at a just as clandestine mafia, right out in the open.

Bloggers and tweeters claiming to belong to the hacker movement "Anonymous" say they plan to expose collaborators of Mexico's bloody Zetas drug cartel, even if some of them seem to have backed away from the plan out of fear.

Their debate is playing out on chatboards, websites and Twitter messages, many of them open to public view.

But just what they might do, as a claimed Friday deadline approaches, remains unclear, perhaps even to the loosely coordinated Internet community. Its participants generally hide their real-world identities even from one another, partly as protection from officials and prosecutors who often consider them outlaws.

Self-proclaimed members of a movement best known for hacking public corporate and government websites are now talking about attacking a drug cartel that largely shuns the Internet and has killed, even beheaded, ordinary bloggers for posting information about it.

"The problem is, hack what? There are no drug cartel websites, that I know of, that would be hackable," said Raul Trejo, an expert on media and violence at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

In an Internet video posted last month, a person wearing a Guy Fawkes mask claimed the Zetas had kidnapped a member of Anonymous in the state of Veracruz while he was handing out political pamphlets. The video doesn't give the victim's name, and prosecutors say they know nothing about the supposed abduction.

The speaker in the video said that if the kidnap victim is not released, Anonymous will post the names, photos and addresses of taxi drivers, police, journalists and others allegedly working with the Zetas. He did not say how the movement would get such information, but suggested it can locate and blow up cartel associates' "cars, houses, bars and whorehouses" starting Friday.

"It won't be difficult, we all know who you are and where you can be found," said the masked speaker.

But members of Anonymous are more of a volunteer crowd, and generally don't even know where their own colleagues can be found. The participants are known more for sabotaging websites than for WikiLeaks-style exposes.

Anonymous-style videos from Veracruz have been posted on the Internet for at least two months, but none before has drawn as much attention, and none of the others threatened violence, or promised to take on a drug cartel.

"What the video is announcing is not hacking, but rather much more violent acts," Trejo said.

Some tweeters using the threat's OpCartel hashtag said the whole idea is too dangerous to carry out.

"They denounced the op after safety concerns. They thought about it and saw it was too dangerous," posted a tweeter under the name GeneralSec. "DragnDon" tweeted back: "The fear that surrounds this idea is astounding. Fairweather revolutionaries?"

Fear would be well-founded. In September, police in the Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo found a woman's decapitated body alongside a handwritten sign saying she was killed in retaliation for postings on a social networking site. The message was signed with a "Z," the Zetas' trademark.

Earlier that month, the bodies of a man and a woman were found hanging from an overpass in Nuevo Laredo with a message threatening, "this is what will happen" to troublemaking Internet users.

"Are we afraid? Clearly so. Do we fear for our lives? Obviously. Notwithstanding that, we think it is time to say 'enough,'" according to a statement from the purported organizers posted on the website Anonymous IberoAmerica. "We will go ahead with the operation, because people have asked us to."

The movement, if it is one, may have more success than did the bloggers in Nuevo Laredo, who posted information on drug cartel shootouts and safehouses under online aliases. Somehow, and nobody has yet said how, the Zetas apparently found out their real identities.

The Anonymous IberoAmerica website says it will form a "special task force" by invitation only to find out and publish information about cartel collaborators, a potentially deadly undertaking since rivals often kill identified members of the Zetas.

The website even included a series of security steps, such as urging members to send messages through a proxy server, and never to identify themselves as part of Anonymous.

The page also offers a supposedly secure widget to help protect users.

So far only one act has been attributed to the group: It apparently created a website decorated with jack o' lanterns that accuses a former state prosecutor of being a Zeta.

Perhaps the most telling detail is that the Anonymous IberoAmerica site is now soliciting anonymous tips on cartel collaborators. That suggests that, if the promised revelations materialize, they could be nothing more than common rumors or gossip sent in by tipsters or foes of those named.
http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...ar-2247835.php





U.S. Blames China, Russia for Cyber Espionage
Tabassum Zakaria

China and Russia are using cyber espionage to steal U.S. trade and technology secrets to bolster their own economic development, which poses a threat to U.S. prosperity and security, a U.S. intelligence report said on Thursday.

So much sensitive information and research is on computer networks that foreign intruders can collect massive amounts of data quickly and with little risk because they are difficult to detect, according to the report to Congress titled "Foreign Spies Stealing US Economic Secrets in Cyberspace."

Foreign intelligence services, corporations and individuals increased their efforts to steal U.S. technologies which cost millions of dollars to develop, according to a report by the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, a U.S. government agency. The report covers 2009-2011.

"The nations of China and Russia, through their intelligence services and through their corporations, are attacking our research and development," National Counterintelligence Executive Robert Bryant said.

"That's a serious issue because if we fuel their economies on our information, I don't think that's right," he said at a news conference.

Intelligence services, private companies, academic institutions and citizens of dozens of countries target the United States, the report said. But it only named China and Russia.

"Chinese actors are the world's most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage," the report said.

Russia was also singled out. "Russia's intelligence services are conducting a range of activities to collect economic information and technology from US targets," the report said.

It acknowledged the difficulty of determining who exactly is behind a cyber attack. U.S. companies have reported intrusions into their computer networks that originated in China, but U.S. intelligence agencies cannot confirm who specifically is behind them.

"To a certain degree that's determined by the sophistication of the attack," Bryant said. "If it's a very sophisticated attack we basically assume that either a foreign intelligence service or a government sponsor is somewhere involved."

'Quiet Menace'

Information and communications technology, military technologies such as unmanned aerial vehicles, and civilian technologies such as clean energy, and healthcare and pharmaceuticals are areas that may be of interest as foreign cyber espionage targets, the report said.

The National Science Foundation said research and development spending by U.S. government, industry and universities was $398 billion in 2008. But there are no reliable gauges for how much is stolen through cyber spying.

"This is a quiet menace to our economy with notably big results," Bryant said. "Trade secrets developed over thousands of working hours by our brightest minds are stolen in a split second and transferred to our competitors."

Intelligence officials say it is part of the national policy of China and Russia to try to acquire sensitive technology which they need for their own economic development, while the United States does not do economic espionage as part of its national policy.

The State Department in June said it had asked Beijing to investigate Google's allegation of a major hacking attack that the Internet giant said originated in China.

China is often blamed for cyber attacks, but Beijing's response has been that it is unfairly accused by countries unhappy with its economic rise and that it has also been a victim of cyber attacks.

House intelligence committee Chairman Mike Rogers, a Republican, said the report confirmed what he is constantly hearing. "This once again underscores the need for America's allies across Asia and Europe to join forces to pressure Beijing to end this illegal behavior."

The intelligence report said some U.S. allies and partners use their access to U.S. institutions to acquire sensitive economic and technology information, mainly through human spying tactics. But they were not named in the report, which included input from intelligence agencies, the private sector, and academia.

The pace of foreign economic and industrial espionage against the United States is accelerating, the report said.

"We judge that the governments of China and Russia will remain aggressive and capable collectors of sensitive US economic information and technologies, particularly in cyberspace."

China and Russia are "motivated by the desire to achieve economic, strategic, and military parity with the United States," the report said.

The intelligence report was released publicly to raise awareness of the issue in the hopes that public, private and academic partnerships can find solutions, officials said.

"This is a national long-term strategic threat to the United States of America," Bryant said. This is an issue where "failure is not an option."

(Editing by Mohammad Zargham and Doina Chiacu)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7A23FX20111103





China a Minimal Cyber Security Threat: Paper

Despite having an Information warfare strategy since the mid '90s China's offensive cyber-warfare capabilities are “fairly rudimentary”
Tim Lohman

Despite growing concern about China’s cyber-warfare capabilities, Australia and other Western nations have little to worry about when it comes to their national security.

That’s the view of Desmond Ball, a professor in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University, who in a recent journal paper argues China's offensive capabilities are limited and its own Internet security has notable deficiencies and vulnerabilities.

According to Ball, China had carried out a number of high-profile and successful hacks, denial of service attacks and website defacements in recent years. However, its offensive cyber-warfare capabilities were “fairly rudimentary.”

“[China has] evinced little proficiency with more sophisticated hacking techniques,” the paper reads. “The viruses and Trojan Horses they have used have been fairly easy to detect and remove before any damage has been done or data stolen. There is no evidence that China’s cyber-warriors can penetrate highly secure networks or covertly steal or falsify critical data.

“They would be unable to systematically cripple selected command and control, air defence and intelligence networks and databases of advanced adversaries, or to conduct deception operations by secretly manipulating the data in these networks.”

According to Ball, the capability gap in anti-virus and network security applications between China and other nations was immense.

“China’s cyber-warfare authorities must despair at the breadth and depth of modern digital information and communications systems and technical expertise available to their adversaries,” the paper reads.

In Ball’s view, and despite having an information warfare (IW) plan since 1995 and conducting cyber exercises since 1997, China’s cyber-warfare capability was not expected to better rivals for several decades.

“At best, [China] can employ asymmetric strategies designed to exploit the (perhaps relatively greater) dependence on IT by their potential adversaries…” the paper reads.

“China’s cyber-warfare capabilities are very destructive, but could not compete in extended scenarios of sophisticated IW operations. In other words, they function best when used pre-emptively, as the PLA now practices in its exercises. In sum, the extensive Chinese IW capabilities, and the possibilities for asymmetric strategies, are only potent if employed first.”

In the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation’s (ASIO) 2010-11 Annual Report, the agency noted that espionage by cyber means was emerging as a serious and widespread concern.

“ASIO is seeing increasingly both foreign state and non-state actors taking advantage of the access, relative anonymity and global reach of the internet,” the report reads. “From the comfort of wherever their computer terminal may be, they probe Australian information systems and data holdings for vulnerabilities and mine for valuable commercial, diplomatic and military intelligence — sometimes with success.

“Despite the rise of espionage through cyber means, ASIO has not seen any reduction in the intensity of other, more traditional forms of espionage — human spies are still being recruited and run and foreign intelligence agencies are still interfering covertly in the Australian community. Indeed, effective coordination between traditional, human-based espionage and computer network operations represents a potent threat to our most sensitive data and networks that are not connected to the Internet."

In July 2010, ASIO established a Cyber Espionage Branch to provide advice to government and business on the threat of cyber-espionage and to investigate increasingly sophisticated and frequent cyber-intrusions into computer networks.

For its part, Australia has worked during the past year to raise cyber security as a foreign policy issue on the international agenda and has moved to better secure its cyber borders.

In the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s (DFAT) 2010/11 Annual Report, the department said it had worked with the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and other agencies on a framework for Australia’s international engagement on cyber.

“The department took the lead for Australia in contributing to the development of international cyber norms by under taking work on messaging, principles to underpin norms, and mapping international activity,” the report reads.

“The department also worked with the Department of Defence to strengthen cooperation with the US and the United Kingdom on cyber in AUSMIN and AUKMIN consultations and contributed to planning for the United Kingdom’s London conference on international cyber norms, scheduled for November 2011."

In a sign of the growing government acceptance of cyber-attacks as genuine threats to national security, the Australian government said it June that it would develop its first Cyber White Paper.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/arti..._threat_paper/





Microsoft Research Proposes E-Voting Attack Mitigation
Dennis Fisher

Microsoft Research has proposed a mitigation for a known potential attack against verifiable electronic voting machines that could help prevent insiders from being able to alter votes after the fact. The countermeasure to the "trash attack" involves adding a cryptographic hash to the receipts that voters receive.

Many verifiable voting systems already include hashes on the receipts, but that hash typically is of the ballot data for each specific voter. The idea proposed by Microsoft Research involves using a running hash that would add a hash of the previous voter's receipt to each person's receipt, ideally preventing a privileged insider from using discarded receipts to alter votes. The trash attack that the mitigation is designed to address involves election workers or others who might be motivated to change votes gathering discarded receipts and then altering those votes.

"The provision of receipts to voters who may not want them, however, suggests a very simple means by which election workers could find votes that are good candidates for alteration: poll workers could simply collect the contents of the nearest trash receptacles. Any receipts that have been discarded by voters would be strongly correlated with votes that could be altered without detection.3 Active collection of receipts may also be viable through social engineering," Josh Benaloh of Microsoft Research and Eric Lazarus of DecisionSmith wrote in a research paper, "The Trash Attack".

Electronic voting systems have made their way into a lot of jurisdictions in recent years, replacing older manual machines. But security researchers have discovered a number of serious security vulnerabilities in various machines, which could lead to vote alteration and questionable election results.

The solution that Benaloh and Lazarus propose would involve generating an initial value for each machine, and the value would comprise in part the date of the election and a unique identifier for the device.

"If a running hash were to be incorporated, this insider’s options would be severely limited. If the insider had the ability to alter a ballot and a corresponding running hash value in real time (i.e. before the next voter uses a device), then the same 60% success rate could be achieved. But if the insider cannot mount a real-time attack, after-the-fact alteration of 10 ballots would only escape detection if they were all cast after the last ballot whose corresponding receipt was verified by a voter. Not only does this substantially restrict the pool of ballots available to the insider, but this threat can now be completely eliminated by a single diligent voter or observer recording the final running hash value at the end of the voting period," the paper says.

The researchers said that the mitigation may need to be implemented differently in each voting system, but that the result would be the same.

"Although the details may vary between systems, it is clear that the simple inclusion of a running hash within voter receipts mitigates a serious vulnerability that may occur when insiders or others, who may have the ability to change votes after they have been cast, can use external information to tell which voters are more likely to check their receipts against published lists," they wrote.
https://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/m...ck-mitigation-


















Until next week,

- js.

















Tuesday, November 8th Is Election Day.

Don't Forget To
























Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

October 29th, October 22nd, October 15th, October 8th

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