Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 31st, '11

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Thank God 2011 is almost over, because we've had a real rough run here [in Hollywood] at the end of the year." – Paul Dergarabedian



































December 31st, 2011




Dutch Parliament: Downloading Movies and Music Will Stay Legal
Ernesto

In an attempt to reduce widespread piracy in the Netherlands, the government there recently introduced a plan that would make downloading movies and music unlawful. However, this proposal was binned yesterday by a motion from the Dutch parliament due to concerns it would restrict the free flow of information, invade the privacy of citizens and invite copyright trolls. Instead, they encourage the entertainment industry to focus their attention on providing authorized alternatives.

As in many other countries around the world, downloading music and movies is hugely popular in the Netherlands. A massive 30% of the population is said to do so.

Presently, the Dutch see downloading movies and music for personal use as “fair use” and not punishable by law. However, the current government is trying to find a solution to the ever-increasing piracy problem and has proposed a new bill to make it unlawful.

The topic has resulted in a heated political debate over the past several months, and yesterday opponents of the bill won the first battle as the Dutch parliament adopted a motion to keep downloading movies and music for personal use legal.

One of the main concerns of the parliament is that a download ban would go against the free and open Internet, as it restrict the free flow of information. The motion further states that enforcing such a ban via monitoring would invade the privacy of Internet users.

In addition, the parliament is worried that should downloading become unlawful, copyright holders will go after individual downloaders in court. This might result in a similar situation currently seen in countries like the United States and Germany, where hundreds of thousands of Internet subscribers are being sued by copyright trolls out to make a quick buck.

Instead of a download ban, the parliament suggests that the entertainment industry should focus more on offering authorized alternatives. At the moment, it is practically impossible to download high quality copies of recent movies and TV-shows via legal channels in the Netherlands.

The stance of the Dutch parliament is in line with an authoritative report commissioned by the government in 2009. In the report it was estimated that file-sharing has an overall positive effect on the Dutch economy. While it was recognized that the entertainment industry suffers some losses, these don’t outweigh the positive effects of file-sharing.

This report also motivated the Swiss government to keep downloading of music and movies totally legal a few weeks ago.

While the adopted motion is a win for the parties who want to keep downloading for personal use legal, State Secretary for Security and Justice Fred Teeven has already announced that he plans to bring the plan back in an altered form. Whether that will be able to address the current concerns of parliament is yet to be seen.
https://torrentfreak.com/dutch-parli...-legal-111224/





Megaupload to Universal: You’ve Got Some Explaining To Do
enigmax

In their 18-page response filing at the US District Court for Northern Californian earlier this month, not once did Universal Music say why they forced YouTube to remove Megaupload’s Mega Song. Since that’s what the dispute between the two companies is all about, that was a pretty strange event. In a new filing, Megaupload makes it clear that it isn’t going to be brushed aside. The cyberlocker wants answers, and it will dig deep to get them.

Early December, Megaupload’s ‘Mega Song’ was on its way to becoming a viral hit, only to be cut down from YouTube by a Universal Music takedown demand. In response, Megaupload filed a lawsuit against Universal and YouTube reinstated the video.

The basis for the takedown has never been clear. While YouTube clearly indicated that UMG had taken the Mega Song down on copyright grounds, Universal later added that it had a deal with YouTube to take down content even if it doesn’t infringe their rights. This, the company says, allows it to sidestep any claims Megaupload makes against it under the DMCA.

Notably, though, Universal has never said exactly why it had the video taken down. Soon, however, it may have to.

In a new Megaupload court filing made available to TorrentFreak today, the file-hosting service makes it clear that it will go to considerable lengths to find out exactly what has been going on at Universal, YouTube, Vimeo and other entities involved in the Mega Song takedown.

“In its opposition to the [Temporary Restraining Order], UMG did not even attempt to defend the legitimacy of its false claims to ownership of the Megaupload Video,” states the Megaupload filing. The cyberlocker adds that UMG made several assertions which now require clarification for the case to proceed correctly.

The first UMG claim is that Megaupload sued the wrong UMG ‘entity’. They say that UMG Recordings is the correct entity since they are the ones dealing with YouTube and other video hosting services.

Second, Megaupload wants to get to the bottom of UMG’s claim that the takedown request it filed with YouTube was not made under the DMCA, but as part of a private historical agreement the label has with YouTube.

The third UMG claim is that they had nothing to do with takedowns of the Mega Song carried out at other video hosting sites such as Vimeo.

Bemoaning the fact that none of UMG’s claims have been backed up by evidence or witnesses, Megaupload says it now needs facts to move forward.

“Megaupload therefore respectfully requests that the Court grant it leave to take limited but essential written discovery…regarding the UMG Entities’ private dealings with service providers regarding the takedowns of the Megaupload Video and the identity and authority of the persons or entities who requested the takedowns,” the company writes.

“Without such information, Megaupload will be unable to determine which UMG entity instructed YouTube to remove the Megaupload Video; which other, non-UMG persons may have so instructed YouTube; and on whose behalf, on what grounds, and under what authority the removal was sought.

“In addition, as UMG has denied sending notices itself to other service providers, subpoenas to any such providers who took down the video is the appropriate means to determine the party doing so,” the filing adds.

There can be little doubt that keeping the Megaupload name in the news is something that Universal should have anticipated when they took the Mega Song down. Right now, if the aim was to shut Megaupload up and dampen their campaign, they have failed. At the time of writing the standard and HD versions of the song have close to 13.7 million combined views on YouTube.

But perhaps even worse, Universal appear to have enabled an arch enemy to take the moral high-ground in their ‘rogue site’ propaganda war and that’s why this discovery process will be so interesting.

Do Universal have an ace up their sleeve, or was the Mega Song takedown simply a terribly ill-conceived, knee-jerk, and solely destructive action? We’ll all find out soon enough.
https://torrentfreak.com/megaupload-...-to-do-111228/





Auction of Righthaven Website Domain Name Under Way
Steve Green

The online auction of the righthaven.com website domain name got under way Monday, with bidders having until Jan. 6 to submit offers.

A judge has authorized a receiver to auction the intellectual property of Las Vegas-based Righthaven LLC, the newspaper copyright infringement lawsuit filer.

The auction is aimed at raising money to cover part of Righthaven’s $63,720 debt to a man who defeated Righthaven in court.

The man, Wayne Hoehn, and his attorneys defeated Righthaven when a judge threw out Righthaven’s lawsuit against him over Hoehn’s unauthorized post on a sports betting website message board of a Las Vegas Review-Journal column by columnist and former Publisher Sherman Frederick.

Hoehn was a defendant in one of Righthaven’s 275 lawsuits filed since March 2010.

The first auction covers only the Righthaven website domain name. The court-appointed receiver apparently is still trying to seize Righthaven’s federal copyright registrations so they can be auctioned, too.

Righthaven, in the meantime, is hoping the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will block the auction of its assets.

After six federal judges ruled Righthaven lacked standing to sue under copyrights assigned to it by the Review-Journal and the Denver Post, Righthaven rewrote its R-J lawsuit contract and has been hoping a judge will find that contract gives it standing to file infringement lawsuits.

The Denver Post lawsuit contract was not rewritten after that newspaper did not renew its copyright protection contract with Righthaven.

The court-appointed receiver in the Hoehn case, Lara Pearson of the law firm Rimon P.C., in the meantime, arranged for Righthaven’s website domain name to be auctioned beginning today by SnapNames.com.

With a minimum initial required bid of $100, by midmorning Monday the auction had attracted two bids that pushed the price up to $300. The bidding will continue through Jan. 6 at 12:15 p.m. PST.

One of Hoehn’s attorneys, Marc Randazza, on Monday noted the irony of Righthaven’s lawsuits in which it demanded alleged copyright infringers turn their website domain names over to Righthaven and the company now seeing its domain name auctioned.

“Righthaven went after hundreds of defendants in copyright cases. Often, the defendants were innocent and engaged in fair use. In all cases where a court has been asked, they found that Righthaven had no right to bring the suit in the first place. In all of their cases, Righthaven asked the court to award them not only money, but the defendant’s domain name,” Randazza noted in a blog post. “After losing a case to my client, Wayne Hoehn, Righthaven is at least $63,000 in debt to him. They refuse to pay. Now their domain name is up for auction to the highest bidder.”

Hoehn is the lone Righthaven defendant to defeat the company on both standing and fair use rulings. They were issued by U.S. District Judge Philip Pro in Las Vegas. Righthaven is appealing both of those rulings, as well as Pro’s decision awarding Hoehn his attorney’s fees.

As for Righthaven’s domain-name seizure demand in its lawsuits, that was found to be invalid by Las Vegas federal judge Roger Hunt, who found it wasn’t authorized by the federal Copyright Act after defendants complained it was merely a bullying tactic aimed at coercing defendants into settling.
http://www.vegasinc.com/news/2011/de...ame-under-way/





ISP Blocks Access to File-Sharing Sites
Shubhashish & Katya B Naidu

In an attempt to reduce movie piracy, Reliance Communications (RCom) shuts file-sharing sites when flicks produced by its sister company Reliance Entertainment are released. Currently, a number of such sites are not accessible on RCom’s internet, as Reliance Entertainment’s Don 2 is running in theatres.

A user who has RCom internet service at his home said, “I’m unable to access file-sharing websites like Rapidshare and Mediafire, as Reliance has shut access to these since the day Don 2 hit the screens.” He complained this was not the first time RCom had done this.

The phenomenon repeats every time Reliance Entertainment movies are released. “Earlier, during the release of Singham and Bodyguard, Reliance Entertainment releases, access to file-sharing sites was shut down. During the release of Singham, I thought this was a technical error and was resolved in a few days. However, the company has done it again, with the release of Bodyguard and now, Don 2. Hence, it’s clear RCom is trying to stop piracy of its films,” said another user.

In an emailed reply, Sanjay Tandon, vice-president, music and anti-piracy, Reliance Entertainment, said, “Yes. This is not the first time Reliance Entertainment has asked internet service providers (ISPs) and other content distributors like cable networks and direct-to-home operators, to block file-sharing sites to protect its intellectual property. A similar ‘John Doe’ order for IP protection was earlier obtained for Singham and Bodyguard also. Most ISPs and content re-distributors, including RCom, have complied with the court order.”

However, the trend has been observed only with RCom. These file-sharing sites are accessible from other ISPs, which means only RCom is blocking these sites on the behest of Reliance Entertainment. The company said the court order had been sent to all ISPs and content re-distributors, and not just RCom. “If anyone doesn’t uphold or comply with the high court order, it will amount not only to infringement of the Copyright Act, but also contempt of court,” Tandon said.

Reliance Entertainment has taken an order from the Delhi high court to block sites, citing piracy of its latest releases. Tandon said, “This specific IP protection order is called ‘John Doe’ order and is given by the court against unknown offenders to stop illegal exploitation of films. This order covers curbing piracy of films on all mediums, be it physical, cable or online.”

Dominic K, a cyber security expert, said, “A John Doe order is a type of injunction granted by courts in cases where an anonymous person maybe committing a breach of the rights of the plaintiff and cannot be identified by the plaintiff at the time of filing of suit.”

File-sharing sites help internet user to transfer large files, including movies and music, over the internet. These websites are used by people to distribute movies immediately to others on the internet. This results in mass scale downloads and piracy.

The move, however legit to stop movie piracy, still treads the thin line of ethics of business.

These file-sharing websites are not only used for uploading and transferring movies and music but also large-sized documents, pictures and files.
http://www.business-standard.com/ind...-sites/459854/





'500,000 Swedes' Risk Jail Time for Filesharing

Up to half a million Swedes who have illegally downloaded as few as ten movies could be be charged with crimes punishable by time in prison, according to precedents set by prosecutors in recent filesharing cases.

In the past, sentencing guidelines for filesharing offences have been unclear, but rulings handed down in 2011 have resulted in prosecutors developing a precedent where it has become clear when the offence is punishable by a prison sentence.

"We're talking about 10 to 20 movies or a thousand music files, that's about where the limit is normally when I think we're talking about prison," prosecutor Henrik Rasmusson told the TT news agency.

Recent rulings in filesharing case have provided guidance on how much copyrighted material can be shared before prosecutors seek to have suspected offenders sent to prison.

Despite the fact that millions of Swedes violate the law by filesharing, only a few have been convicted.

In light of several recent court cases concerning illegal filesharing, the Sweden's justice minster has appointed two prosecutors to handle filesharing cases.

During the past year, the prosecutors have successfully prosecuted about a dozen cases resulting in convictions for file sharing violations.

While some offenders have managed relatively large-scale, filesharing hubs, many "ordinary" Swedes have also been convicted.

Penalties have ranged from fines to suspended sentences equivalent to time in prison.

“We estimate that the suspended sentences have so far corresponded to a sentence of up to one to three months in prison,” said Rasmusson.

An estimated 1.4 million Swedes engage in illegal filesharing, according to recent figures from Statistics Sweden.

Lund University researcher Måns Svensson estimates that roughly one third or filesharers are active enough to risk being sentenced to prison in convicted.

"But there isn't any real threat of prison for these filesharers. In part because prosecutors lack the resources to investigate, and in part because there isn't a social acceptance to pursue legal action against half a million Swedes for a crime which the average person doesn't view as especially serious," Svensson told TT.
http://www.thelocal.se/38244/20111230/





While Drafting SOPA, the U.S. House Harbors BitTorrent Pirates
Ernesto

In recent weeks we discovered BitTorrent pirates at the RIAA, Sony, Fox, Universal and even law-abiding organizations such as the Department of Homeland Security. By now it should be clear that people are using BitTorrent pretty much everywhere, and not only for lawful downloads. Today we can add the U.S. House of Representatives to that list, the place where lawmakers are drafting the much discussed “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA).

YouHaveDownloaded is a treasure trove full of incriminating data on alleged BitTorrent pirates in organizations all across the world.

Unauthorized downloads occur even in the most unexpected of places, from the palace of the French President, via the Church of God, to the RIAA.

Although we don’t plan to go on forever trawling the archives, we felt that there was at least one place that warranted further investigation – the U.S. House of Representatives. Since it’s the birthplace of the pending SOPA bill, we wondered how many of the employees there have engaged in unauthorized copying.

The answer is yet again unambiguous – they pirate a lot.

In total we found more than 800 IP-addresses assigned to the U.S. House of Representatives from where content has been shared on BitTorrent. After a closer inspection it quickly became clear the House isn’t just using it for legitimate downloads either, quite the opposite.

Below we’ll list a few of the 800 hits we found on YouHaveDownloaded, which in turn represent just a fraction of total downloads since the site only tracks a limited percentage of total BitTorrent traffic. Again, this is real and confirmed data that is just as good as the evidence used by the RIAA when they sued tens of thousands of people for file-sharing.

Something that immediately caught our eye are the self-help books that are downloaded in the House. “Crucial Conversations- Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High,” for example, may indeed be of interest to the political elite in the United States. And “How to Answer Hard Interview Questions And Everything Else You Need to Know to Get the Job You Want” may be helpful for those who aspire to higher positions.

Books tend to be popular in the House because we found quite a few more, including “Do Not Open – An Encyclopedia of the World’s Best-Kept Secrets” and “How Things Work Encyclopedia”. But of course the people at the heart of democracy are also downloading familiar content such as Windows 7, popular TV-shows and movies.

And there was another category we ran into more than we would have wanted too. It appears that aside from self-help books, House employees are also into adult themed self-help videos. We’ll list one of the least explicit here below, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Although the above is interesting, as the House is the place where lawmakers are currently trying to push though SOPA, this revelation might actually help their cause. If even people at the House are “stealing” content, we really need SOPA to counter it, they may say.

The question is though, whether SOPA will be able to break the habits of millions of Americans, as there will always be alternatives available. And even if it manages to put a dent in the current piracy rates, is that really worth it considering the potential damage SOPA can do to the open Internet and legal businesses?

Let’s see if “Crucial Conversations – Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High” has some advice….
https://torrentfreak.com/while-draft...irates-111226/





Conservatives Lining Up in Opposition to SOPA
Timothy B. Lee

Views on copyright law have never broken down cleanly along ideological or partisan lines, but many of the key supporters for the Stop Online Piracy Act have come from the political right. The legislation is sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) and it enjoys support from right-leaning, corporate-funded organizations like the Chamber of Commerce and Americans for Tax Reform.

But a growing number of right-leaning individuals and organizations have come out against SOPA. Last Wednesday, the Heritage Foundation, one of the nation's largest and most influential conservative think tanks, published an article by senior research fellow James Gattuso warning about the "unintended consequences" of SOPA. And on Thursday, he was joined in opposing SOPA by Erick Erickson, editor of the popular conservative blog RedState.

In his article, Gattuso noted that SOPA would undermine Internet security by delaying the implementation of DNSSEC and by causing Internet users to use offshore DNS servers to circumvent DNS blocks. He also warned that government regulation of search results would be "the first step down a classic slippery slope of government interference that has no clear stopping point."

Gattuso's stance is notable because Heritage has traditionally supported strong enforcement of copyright law. As former US attorney general Edwin Meese put it in a 2005 article for Heritage, "stealing is stealing, and it must stop."

Gattuso agrees with Meese that the "stealing" needs to stop, but he argues Congress should deal with the problem "in a way that does not disrupt the growth of technology, does not weaken Internet security, and respects free speech rights." And he doesn't think SOPA fits the bill.

Erickson also opposes SOPA, and he is taking a more activist approach to the issue. In a Thursday blog post, he pledged to recruit primary challengers to run against conservatives who support SOPA.

"I love Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). She is a delightful lady and a solidly conservative member of Congress," he wrote. However, because Blackburn is a SOPA cosponsor, Erickson pledged to "do everything in my power to defeat her in her 2012 re-election bid."

Erickson proposed that liberals and conservative SOPA opponents make a pact in which each agrees to support primary challenges against SOPA cosponsors in their own parties.

Erickson and Gattuso are jumping on a bandwagon that has long been occupied by the more libertarian sectors of the American right. GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul came out against SOPA last month, and his libertarian-leaning son, Senator Rand Paul has criticized the Senate version of the legislation. Scholars from libertarian think tanks such as the Cato Institute (where I'm an adjunct scholar), the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Mercatus Center have all criticized PIPA and SOPA.

In short, the fight over SOPA is less about left versus right than it is about declining industries—Hollywood and major labels—versus the Internet community. Conservative bloggers like Erickson, Matt Drudge, and Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds are as offended by the legislation as are their liberal and libertarian counterparts. Conversely, even staunch civil libertarians seem to get confused about copyright issues if they're too closely tied to Hollywood.

Speaking to CNET last week, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) predicted that Republican opposition would help kill SOPA. "I think the Republican House leadership will look and say, 'Unless we have the support of the vast majority of Republicans, we're not going to take the bill to the floor,'" he said.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...servatives.ars





Would Obama Veto SOPA? Extremely Doubtful
Mike Masnick

I usually like the work of Arik Hesseldahl, who's pretty sharp in his reporting, but it appears he may have waded into a subject where he doesn't have much knowledge, in arguing that Obama would likely veto SOPA should it pass out of Congress and land on his desk. Arik's summary is that Obama "likes the internet," so he'd probably veto such an anti-internet bill. No offense to Arik, who perhaps just wanted a quick holiday post on the subject, but that shows little understanding of the history of Obama on intellectual property issues, or the many, many signals that the administration has been giving over the bill. In fact, the signals suggest pretty strongly that if the bill landed on his desk today, President Obama would sign it into law with little hesitation -- and declare it a victory for the economy and American jobs.

No doubt: there is a significant split inside the administration from everything we've heard. Much of the State Department is strenuously opposed to the bill, knowing darn well that it would do significant harm to their efforts to push internet freedom and openness around the globe. SOPA supporters love to point to the letter that Hillary Clinton sent to Rep. Howard Berman about how there's no conflict about protecting intellectual property and working for internet freedom. But they're significantly overplaying the letter, which was written before SOPA came out and didn't mention SOPA at all. In fact, it would be a hilariously bad breach of standard protocol for Clinton to take a position on a bill before the White House made its official position clear, and everyone involved in the debate knows that, even if they pretend otherwise. Either way, multiple sources within the State Department have made it abundantly clear that State has been putting tremendous pressure on people to either fix SOPA or kill it altogether. They're not happy. Ditto for many in the Commerce Department, who see how bad it would be for the economy to have a bill like SOPA in place. The feelings there aren't quite as strong as at State, but they definitely appear to lean towards opposed (or, at the very least, neutral).

There are also voices in both Homeland Security and the Defense Department who are worried about the online security aspects as a part of the DNS blocking features of the bill. Of course, those voices are likely outweighed by those who like the ability to shut down domains -- such as ICE, who would gladly support SOPA. The Justice Department, also, appears to be a huge, huge, huge supporter of SOPA, seeing as it would give them much greater powers to shut down websites.

Then, of course, there's the White House itself. And, again, there appears to be a bit of a mix of feelings there, but the leaning definitely appears to be towards supporting the bill. Throughout his administration, the President has left almost all intellectual property issues up to Vice President Joe Biden, who has been about as big a copyright maximalist as can be. He's the guy who claimed that the heads of the biggest entertainment companies represented "all the stake holders" (public be damned) in a roundtable about intellectual property that he convened two years ago -- from which the ideas behind SOPA and PIPA came. It's safe to assume that he's totally on board with the bills, and since Obama defers to him on these issues, you can expect this issue is pretty much decided. There are a few others in the White House who may weigh in on the subject, including IP Czar Victoria Espinel. Again, the likely guess is that she's in favor, having supported the plan to seize domains which is related to SOPA & PIPA. Others in the White House include the CTO, Aneesh Chopra, who hasn't given much of an indication of where he'd fall on the issue, but has supported open internet initiatives in the past. If I had to guess, I'd say he's mildly against the plans, but not enough to make a big deal about it. If anything, he'd probably prefer that the bill be adjusted to make it slightly more palatable and then have it pass and be signed.

Finally, there's Obama himself. Heading into what may be a difficult election year, and dependent on money from Hollywood and unions (the big Democratic funders), this is an easy call. He'd sign it in a heartbeat. Any bill that has the support of the MPAA and the AFL-CIO is red meat for him when it comes to fundraising. The whole "loves the internet" thing is great... if the internet donates. The internet was certainly useful to Obama in the primaries last time around, but when it comes to the big fight, he needs the big guns. So he's looking for the big cats, and those still support the bill in a big, bad way. If you want a blueprint for how this works, just look at how he signed the patent reform bill a few months ago, despite widespread complaints among the tech industry about how the patent system was totally broken and the bill didn't help at all. He still signed it and declared (incorrectly) that it would stimulate new jobs. He'd do the exact same thing here. Sign it, point to the AFL-CIO and US Chamber of Commerce support and talk about how this was a "jobs bill" that would "help the economy" by "protecting American jobs." The internet? Meh. No one cares about the internet when Hollywood and the unions have checkbooks open.

The only way that changes is if SOPA and PIPA become so toxic that any support is seen as career suicide -- and if that's the case, then the bill itself probably doesn't get out of Congress to get on his desk in the first place. Getting GoDaddy to switch positions is one thing. Getting these bills to the toxic level is a whole different ballgame, and we're certainly not there yet. For those celebrating the "victory" over GoDaddy last week, this fight is far, far, far from over, and the MPAA and the other supporters of SOPA don't give up easily. Both SOPA and PIPA are dangerous in the extreme, and still have a decent chance of passing, if people don't speak up directly to the politicians who continue to support these bills.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...doubtful.shtml





Why Rackspace Opposes the “Stop Online Piracy Act”
Lanham Napier

The bill now before Congress would do more harm than good. We’re working to get it amended, so it can target online thieves without hurting innocent users of the Internet.

Part of the professional code of physicians is that, when they’re treating a patient’s ailment, they should “first, do no harm.” I wish more members of Congress would follow that rule. Instead, in the name of policing the online theft of intellectual property, key lawmakers are pushing a cure that’s worse than the disease.

I refer to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), now awaiting a final vote in the House Judiciary Committee. The authors of the bill say their goal is to crack down on websites that traffic in stolen movies, music, software, and other intellectual property. That’s a goal that we at Rackspace share. But we’ve studied the SOPA bill closely and conferred with experts in our company and elsewhere in the technology industry, and we believe that it would not achieve its stated purpose. Foreign IP thieves, in particular, could find ways to evade the law.

Meanwhile, SOPA would require that Rackspace and other Internet service providers censor their customers with little in the way of due process, trumping the protections present in the current Digital Millennium Copyright Act. What’s more, the SOPA bill would seriously disrupt the Domain Name Service that is crucial to the smooth operation of the web.

The SOPA bill, as it stands, is a deeply flawed piece of legislation. It is bad for anyone who uses the Internet, including Rackspace, the more than 160,000 business customers that we serve, and the tens of millions of retail customers that they serve. It is bad for job creation and innovation.

We at Rackspace oppose SOPA in its current form.

We have been working diligently with members of Congress and their staffs in an attempt to amend the bill. Last week, I traveled to Washington to meet with key members of Congress and their aides, urging them to slow down, take the time to understand the basics of the industry that they propose to regulate, and get this legislation right. We’re continuing to work with those lawmakers over the holidays.

In the meantime, I have asked Rackspace employees to contact their representatives and tell them of the harm that the SOPA bill, as written, would do to our customers and employees, and more broadly to the Internet and the economy. I urge everyone reading this post to do the same. If you’d like to learn more about the SOPA bill, I suggest you read the articles at the links listed below. And please let me know your thoughts on this vital issue.
http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/blog/...-act%E2%80%9D/





On Eve of Net Boycott, Dump GoDaddy Exodus Begins
Perry Chiaramonte

It’s a boycott of viral proportions.

GoDaddy.com, one of the largest domain registrars on the Internet, stands to potentially lose thousands of customers on Thursday, Dec. 29, after the company gave and then repealed its support for a controversial bill before Congress that many fear could heavily restrict the web.

On the eve of what has been dubbed “Dump Go Daddy Day,” imgur.com -- pronounced "imager," it's one of the largest image hosting sites in the world, responsible for an astonishing 28 terabytes of bandwidth and nearly 200 million page views today alone -- has already changed its registry entries, foreshadowing the potential negative effect of a boycott set to begin Thursday morning.

GoDaddy.com originally supported the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) -- which opponents say will hinder free speech and infringe on first amendment rights -- but quickly recanted its position when the call of a boycott circulated.

“The outcry kind of forced our hand,” imgur founder and owner Alan Schaaf told FoxNews.com. “I’m against the SOPA act and imgur as a company is against it. We just feel it is terrible that GoDaddy.com would support this legislation.”

SOPA would make websites responsible for illegal copyright content uploaded by any user, making it difficult if not impossible for companies like Imgur, YouTube, and Facebook to operate.

“If SOPA were to pass, Imgur would not be able to exist,” Schaaf said, “We survive on user-generated content. It would be impossible for us to police the amount of traffic we get for what is or isn’t copyrighted material. It’s just not possible.”

The photo site is run by a skeleton crew of just three employees, yet the massive site is responsible for putting about 200 million cute cat pictures, skateboarding slip-ups and girls in bikinis on computer monitors every day -- and nearly 11 billion per month.

The call to dump Go Daddy started when one user of popular link-sharing site reddit.com was unhappy with the response he got from the company after writing a letter expressing how uneasy he felt about their support for the legislation.

“My heart was broken. I’ve used them for years,” the reddit poster who would only give his first name "Fred" told FoxNews.com. Fred claimed to have already transferred 51 domains to another registry. “I didn’t like the generic letter they sent back to me so I posted a call to boycott. I didn’t know it would catch on the way it did,” he said.

GoDaddy did not respond to repeated emails and phone calls from FoxNews.com.

Fred, who goes by the handle SelfProdigy, says since posting, he’s received hundreds of emails from people asking for help in transferring domains, which can normally be a tricky process.

“No one is against piracy, but not at the hand of smashing innovation,” he said.

Hopefully the message has already gotten to Washington,” Schaaf said. “I hope people can come up with other ways to fight piracy.”
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/...exodus-begins/





Namecheap Pokes Go Daddy over SOPA with $1 EFF Donations
Jon Mitchell

Domain registrar Go Daddy's support for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was the last straw for many of its already disgruntled customers. After a Reddit-powered boycott sparked a mass exodus, the registrar tried to backpedal. Go Daddy has been removed from the official list of SOPA supporters, but the damage was done. Thousands of domains have since been moved to other registrars.

Namecheap, one of Go Daddy's shrewd competitors, has taken advantage of the situation by announcing Move Your Domain Day on December 29. The announcement doesn't call out Go Daddy by name, noting only that "some of our competitors support SOPA." Namecheap unequivocally does not. On December 29, using the coupon code SOPASucks, Namecheap will allow transfers at $6.99 each. For every transfer on that day, Namecheap will donate $1 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

SOPA is a bill backed by major media companies and opposed by tech giants. It will force ISPs, search providers, payment processors and advertisers to bend to the will of copyright holders by pretending infringing sites don't exist on the Internet. It's not even the only bill in Congress right now trying to give the entertainment industry the right to reshape the Internet to protect its business interests.

Our Dan Rowinski wrote a comprehensive guide to what you need to know about SOPA. We also have an infographic and video about the effects of the bill.

Since SOPA first arrived on the scene, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been fighting it. By donating to the EFF, Namecheap shows that its opposition to SOPA is about more than snatching Go Daddy's customers.
https://www.readwriteweb.com/archive..._domain_tr.php





Burned By Fleeing Customers, GoDaddy No Longer Just ‘Doesn’t Support’ But Actually “OPPOSES” SOPA
Alexia Tsotsis

Just in time for the aptly named “Dump GoDaddy” day, our favorite PR piñata GoDaddy just emailed a number of press, with a fresh statement from new CEO Warren Adelman.

From the email …

The statement is from our newly appointed CEO, who makes it clear, we don’t just ‘not support SOPA,’ Go Daddy OPPOSES SOPA.

“We have observed a spike in domain name transfers, which are running above normal rates and which we attribute to GoDaddy’s prior support for SOPA, which was reversed,” said Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman. “Go Daddy opposes SOPA because the legislation has not fulfilled its basic requirement to build a consensus among stake-holders in the technology and Internet communities. Our company regrets the loss of any of our customers, who remain our highest priority, and we hope to repair those relationships and win back their business over time.”

In the statement GoDaddy admits to seeing a “spike” in domain transfers due to its SOPA support — I’ve emailed them to put an actual number to the spike and have yet to hear back. For those that haven’t been following along, domain registrar GoDaddy removed itself from the official list of SOPA supporting companies over the weekend after ambiguously saying it “didn’t support” SOPA the week prior.

Because its support eventually led to a mass exodus of customers, the company faced accusations of purposefully slowing down domain transfers, and even got to the point where it had representatives call users transferring domains, begging them to stay.

Not the most amazing situation, for any business. So now GoDaddy straight up “OPPOSES” SOPA (ALL CAPS theirs) – But is a statement like that enough to bring customers back? Or is this another case of too little/too late?

To read more of our in-depth SOPA coverage click here.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/29/bur...-opposes-sopa/





SOPA Opponents May Go Nuclear and Other 2012 Predictions
Declan McCullagh

The Internet's most popular destinations, including eBay, Google, Facebook, and Twitter seem to view Hollywood-backed copyright legislation as an existential threat.

It was Google co-founder Sergey Brin who warned that the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act "would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world." Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Twitter co-founders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman argue that the bills give the Feds unacceptable "power to censor the Web."

But these companies have yet to roll out the heavy artillery.

When the home pages of Google.com, Amazon.com, Facebook.com, and their Internet allies simultaneously turn black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress the next day on SOPA, you'll know they're finally serious.

True, it would be the political equivalent of a nuclear option--possibly drawing retributions from the the influential politicos backing SOPA and Protect IP--but one that could nevertheless be launched in 2012.

"There have been some serious discussions about that," says Markham Erickson, who heads the NetCoalition trade association that counts Google, Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo as members. "It has never happened before." (See CNET's SOPA FAQ.)

Web firms may be outspent tenfold on lobbyists, but they enjoy one tremendous advantage over the SOPA-backing Hollywood studios and record labels: direct relationships with users.

How many Americans feel a personal connection with an amalgamation named Viacom -- compared with voters who have found places to live on Craigslist and jobs (or spouses) on Facebook and Twitter? How would, say, Sony Music Entertainment, one of the Recording Industry Association of America's board members, cheaply and easily reach out to hundreds of millions of people?

Protect IP and SOPA, of course, represent the latest effort from the Motion Picture Association of America, the RIAA, and their allies to counter what they view as rampant piracy on the Internet, especially offshore sites such as ThePirateBay.org. It would allow the Justice Department to obtain an order to be served on search engines, Internet providers, and other companies forcing them to make a suspected piratical Web site effectively vanish, a kind of Internet death penalty.

There are early signs that the nuclear option is being contemplated. Wikimedia (as in Wikipedia) called SOPA an "Internet Blacklist Bill." Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has proposed an article page blackout as a way to put "maximum pressure on the U.S. government" in response to SOPA.

The Tumblr microblogging site generated 87,834 calls to Congress over SOPA. Over at GoDaddyBoycott.org, a move-your-domain-name protest is scheduled to begin today over the registrar's previous--and still not repudiated--enthusiasm for SOPA. Popular image hosting site Imgur said yesterday it would join the exodus too.

Technically speaking, it wouldn't be difficult to pull off. Web companies already target advertisements based on city or ZIP code.

And it would be effective. A note popping up on the screens of people living in the mostly rural Texas district of SOPA author Lamar Smith, Hollywood's favorite Republican, asking them to call or write and voice their displeasure, would be noticed. If Tumblr could generate nearly 90,000 calls on its own, think of what companies with hundreds of millions of users could do.

If these Web companies believe what their executives say (PDF) about SOPA and Protect IP, they'll let their users know what their elected representatives are contemplating. A Senate floor debate scheduled for January 24, 2012 would be an obvious starting point.

"The reason it hasn't happened is because of the sensitivity," says Erickson, "even when it's a policy issue that benefits their users." He adds: It may happen."

Or it may not. It would change politics if it did.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57...12-predictions





Copyright Office Seeks To Make It More Difficult To Retain DMCA Safe Harbors
Mike Masnick

Almost missed this one, but Eric Goldman alerts us to the dozen comments filed with the US Copyright Office concerning its plan to force everyone to keep re-registering their official DMCA agent in order to keep retaining the DMCA's safe harbors. As we've discussed in the past, in order to make use of the DMCA's safe harbors, you have to register an official DMCA agent with the Copyright Office. In fact, we've suggested that anyone running a blog or forum site do exactly that. Many of the companies that were successfully sued by Righthaven (before it was discovered Righthaven didn't really have the copyrights it needed) were caught because they failed to register a DMCA agent. While I think that such sites could make a reasonable argument in court that they still were not liable, it's a lot more difficult (and costly) to do so.

However, for reasons that escape me, the Copyright Office is thinking of making it much easier for companies to lose their safe harbor protections by requiring them to regularly re-register with the Copyright Office, or have their agent tossed out. This is part of a larger -- and useful -- effort to make the process of registering electronic, rather than the paper one it is today. That's a good thing. But dumping the database and requiring periodic re-registering is fraught with problems. The Copyright Office appears to defend this process on two grounds: first that some companies have gone out of business, and yet their DMCA agent listings live on and second, that copyright holders may want to know if a service provider is in compliance on the date of infringement.

However, as the excellent CCIA response to the request for comment notes, neither reason makes much sense. If a company is out of business, it's not doing anyone any harm to keep their names in the list:

These outdated entries impose little cost on prospective rightsholders using the database, however, since few rightsholders will ever want to send takedown notices to a service provider that no longer exists. This scenario does not justify any substantial compliance costs on the industry, startups, or members of the public who would want to claim safe harbor protections.

The second reason is equally mystifying:

However, existing [law] already requires registrations of agents to be dated, such that Copyright Office records can already enable rightsholders to ascertain whether a service provider was in compliance on a particular data. This proposed feature therefore does not provide sufficient value to justify new regulatory obligations.

The CCIA piece also notes that this retroactive yanking of safe harbors almost certainly goes against the law, as the Copyright Office has no mandate under the safe harbors of the DMCA to remove such safe harbors just because it doesn't like the fact that there are a few "dead" entries in the database. The biggest issue, of course, is that this imposes significant compliance costs on pretty much anyone running a website that wishes to avail themselves of the DMCA's safe harbors. Even worse, simply forgetting to re-register your DMCA agent when the time comes could cause you to lose the protections entirely. That seems ridiculous.

Others who came out against this insanity include Public Knowledge, EFF, with Jason Schultz & Eric Goldman and Microsoft. There's also a short and sweet filing from Matthew Neco (the only individual who filed a comment by himself), which notes that it would be an "unreasonable burden" to have to keep re-filing. It notes that a simple calendaring mistake might lead to the loss of safe harbor protections which would be "draconian" for such a simple mistake.

Amazingly, the MPAA actually appears to kinda/sorta agree with those above in saying that "resubmitting designations through the online form may be costly and burdensome for those companies with a large number of designations if separate manual entry of new forms for every existing designation is required." It later warns that this "risks being a trap for the unwary." Of course, rather than totally coming out against the idea, the MPAA says that the Copyright Office should "make clear in the designation process that failure to keep the records current (in the Copyright Office database and on the service providers' own websites) is a basis for losing DMCA safe-harbor protection." Yes, because putting a single sentence on the website will keep it from being a trap for the unwary. Huh?

On the other side of the coin entirely is the RIAA who enthusiastically supports anything that might weaken the DMCA's safe harbors. It goes so far into the ridiculous as to call such periodic re-registrations as "essential," apparently ignoring all of the legal points raised by the other filings. Somewhat surprisingly, both Verizon and the Internet Commerce Coalition don't seem to think it's that big of a deal to have to re-register every couple of years, and each provides minor suggestions for making the process simpler.

Others weighing in on the request for comment seem to focus on other issues. Google has a short comment about why it doesn't make sense to require service providers to file separately for every subdomain, and separately argues that takedown notices should be written, rather than allowing phone calls. A bunch of organizations representing rural and small telecom companies focus on making sure third parties can maintain and update the agent info.

Then... there's the filing of MiMTiD. If you don't recall, we've written about the anti-piracy outfit MiMTiD a few times in the past, and it always has to do with some wacky, totally detached from reality, argument the company has -- such as claiming that it's infringing to pass on DMCA takedown notices to ChillingEffects.org, or that the music industry has been destroyed, because Congress preferred to protect Farmville rather than record labels. Not surprisingly, MiMTiD's filing is more of the same. Much of it simply complains about Google:

From what we understand, Google takes it upon itself to conduct a manual investigation of each infringing link identified and ultimately decides, using unpublished criteria, whether or not Google agrees with the copyright owner that the link is indeed an infringement of the relevant copyright owner’s rights. As noted above, all notices sent by MiMTiD on behalf of copyright owners are DMCA compliant, so they satisfy the extensive, carefully-crafted criteria that Congress established for a notice to be valid.

The DMCA also provides other built-in safeguards and checks and balances, such as a counter-notice process for a party to object to the removal of its content and penalties against copyright owners that abuse the notice process. Nonetheless, Google inserts itself as an extra-statutory, self-appointed arbiter of the validity of DMCA-compliant notices that Congress has already determined as valid under the statute. If Google does not unilaterally agree that the links submitted in a take down notices are infringing, under whatever standard it chooses to use, Google informs the copyright owner or its agent as follows: "In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have completed processing your infringement complaint. ... At this time, Google has decided not to take action on these URLs:[list of ignored links]".

I'm not sure what that has to do with anything in the RFC from the Copyright Office. It also seems to suggest a misunderstanding of the DMCA. That is, it seems to suggest that if you send a DMCA compliant takedown, the service provider must remove the content. But that's not true at all. They only have to do that if they want to retain safe harbors. But if they believe the notice is bunk, and there's nothing to fear from a lawsuit, they don't have to remove the material at all.

When MiMTiD finally gets around to the RFC, it still doesn't appear to understand what it's talking about. It seems to not realize that the DMCA already requires service providers to designate an agent, and instead suggests what a great idea it would be to have that requirement (seriously):

Therefore, we support the proposal to require "Designation of Agent To Receive Notification of Claimed Infringement", which we believe will enable the DMCA to function as contemplated by Congress by eliminating confusion and inefficiencies, enabling a party to object to the removal of the content and the alleged infringing links from search, enabling these websites to pursue penalties against copyright owners that abuse the notice process and requiring websites seeking to receive the benefits of section 512 to be required to file designation of an agent.

Yeah. Perhaps the reason Google rejects some of your takedowns is because you don't understand the DMCA... Just saying...
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...-harbors.shtml





Florida Appeals Court Rules RipOffReport.com Absolutely Immune from Suit for Defamatory Posting

In Giovano v. Romeo, a Florida appeals court has affirmed dismissal of a case in which ripoffreport.com had published an admittedly false and defamatory posting by one of its users, on the ground that under the Communications Decency Act -- 47 USC 230 -- the site is immune from suit for postings by its users as a provider of an "interactive computer service" within the meaning of the statute.

Decision of 3rd District Court of Appeal of Florida (pdf)
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...urt-rules.html





Telecom Immunity Ruling Upheld by U.S. Appeals Court
Kate Freeman

Three appeals court judges unanimously upheld a controversial federal law on Thursday — one that grants immunity to phone companies that give government officials access to users’ online communications.

“It is disappointing that today’s decision endorsed the rights of telecommunications companies over those over their customers,” said Kurt Opsahl, Senior Staff Attorney of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in an online statement.

The EFF first filed suit against the law in January 2006; it lost that case. A second suit, filed in September 2008 — Jewel v. NSA — claims the U.S. government tapped into civilian information without cause or suspicion.

To do a wiretap, government officials need a warrant or a National Security Letter, which carries a bit more weight than a warrant. Typically, a warrant or letter doesn’t grant a free-for-all access to the private data of an American citizen, and stipulates who or what group will be searched.

The EFF’s concern is that government entities will take advantage of this privilege — and use online data to police the actions of law-abiding citizens.

In 2008, telecom companies were granted immunity from prosecution for cooperating with Federal authorities to collect information on civilians. A San Francisco judge had previously upheld the law and dismissed cases against companies working with government agencies.

The defendants in the case were AT&T, Verizon and Sprint Nextel. AT&T and Verizon both declined to comment for this story. Sprint has yet to respond. A spokesman from the Department of Justice said they have no immediate comment on the ruling.

Government investigators are increasingly partnering with technology companies who can cull the personal data of suspected criminals. In May, the CIA’s technology branch invested in a social media monitoring company. And the FBI has reportedly used social media sites to track down fugitives and solve crimes.
http://mashable.com/2011/12/29/telec...appeals-court/





Publishers vs. Libraries: An E-Book Tug of War
Randall Stross

LAST year, Christmas was the biggest single day for e-book sales by HarperCollins. And indications are that this year’s Christmas Day total will be even higher, given the extremely strong sales of e-readers like the Kindle and the Nook. Amazon announced on Dec. 15 that it had sold one million of its Kindles in each of the three previous weeks.

But we can also guess that the number of visitors to the e-book sections of public libraries’ Web sites is about to set a record, too.

And that is a source of great worry for publishers. In their eyes, borrowing an e-book from a library has been too easy. Worried that people will click to borrow an e-book from a library rather than click to buy it, almost all major publishers in the United States now block libraries’ access to the e-book form of either all of their titles or their most recently published ones.

Borrowing a printed book from the library imposes an inconvenience upon its patrons. “You have to walk or drive to the library, then walk or drive back to return it,” says Maja Thomas, a senior vice president of the Hachettte Book Group, in charge of its digital division.

And print copies don’t last forever; eventually, the ones that are much in demand will have to be replaced. “Selling one copy that could be lent out an infinite number of times with no friction is not a sustainable business model for us,” Ms. Thomas says. Hachette stopped making its e-books available to libraries in 2009.

E-lending is not without some friction. Software ensures that only one patron can read an e-book copy at a time, and people who see a long waiting list for a certain title may decide to buy it instead.

Explaining Simon & Schuster’s policy — it has never made its e-books available to libraries — Elinor Hirschhorn, executive vice president and chief digital officer, says, “We’re concerned that authors and publishers are made whole by library e-lending and that they aren’t losing sales that they might have made in another channel.”

Ms. Hirschhorn says the reason publishers didn’t worry about lost sales from library lending of print books is that buying a book is easier — no return trip is needed to the bookstore — and the buyer has a physical collectible after reading it. (One of my books was published by Simon & Schuster in 2008.)

To keep their overall revenue from taking a hit from lost sales to individuals, publishers need to reintroduce more inconvenience for the borrower or raise the price for the library purchaser. If making the books more costly to libraries seems a perverse idea, consider that the paperback edition of a book provides an artificially costly experience for its buyers too, in terms of waiting time. The delay in the paperback’s availability permits the publisher to separate those book buyers willing to pay a premium to read the book earlier from those only willing to pay less for what is essentially the same thing, but later.

Ms. Thomas of Hachette says: “We’ve talked with librarians about the various levers we could pull,” such as limiting the number of loans permitted or excluding recently published titles. She adds that “there’s no agreement, however, among librarians about what they would accept.”

HarperCollins is the one major publisher that has taken the step of changing the traditional arrangements with libraries.

Beginning last March, it stopped selling e-books to libraries for unlimited use, which it had been doing since 2001. Instead, it began licensing use of each e-book copy for a maximum of 26 loans. This affects only the most popular titles and has no practical effect on others. After the limit is reached, the library can repurchase access rights at a lower cost than the original price.

The move was prompted, the company said in a statement, by concerns that continuing to sell e-books on the old, unlimited terms would “in the end lead to a decrease in book sales and royalties paid to authors.”

HarperCollins was brave to tamper with the sacrosanct idea that a library can do whatever it wishes with a book it obtains. The publisher’s action arguably benefits the most parties because it gives library patrons access to the latest titles in e-book form while still protecting the financial interests of publishers, authors and booksellers.

Robin Nesbitt, technical services director at the Columbus, Ohio, metropolitan library, says she does not object to HarperCollins’s limit. “At least HarperCollins allows me to have access to their titles,” she says. “I don’t mind buying a title and then might have to buy it again — I do that now with print.

“I know many libraries are mad because they think the 26 loans is too low — well, how do you know 26 is too low until you try it?”

Ms. Nesbitt adds, however, that many of the library’s patrons aren’t aware that other publishers are withholding e-books from it. She says it is hard “to explain to our patrons why we don’t have something.”

THE publishers that are holding back are watching for an industrywide approach to gel. But agreement doesn’t seem imminent. David Young, Hachette’s chief executive, says: “Publishers can’t meet to discuss standards because of antitrust concerns. This has had a chilling effect on reaching consensus.”

While many major publishers have effectively gone on strike, more than 1,000 smaller publishers, who don’t have best-seller sales that need protection, happily sell e-books to libraries. That means the public library has plenty of e-books available for the asking — no waiting.

Making those lesser-known books available to patrons renews libraries’ primary function: offering readers a place for discovery.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/b...ug-of-war.html





Copyright and Open Access at the Bedside
John C. Newman, M.D., Ph.D., and Robin Feldman, J.D.

For three decades after its publication, in 1975, the Mini–Mental State Examination (MMSE) was widely distributed in textbooks, pocket guides, and Web sites and memorized by countless residents and medical students. The simplicity and ubiquity of this 30-item screening test — covering such functions as arithmetic, memory, language comprehension, visuospatial skills, and orientation — made it the de facto standard for cognitive screening. Yet all that time, it was under copyright protection. In 2000, its authors, Marshal Folstein, Susan Folstein, and Paul McHugh, began taking steps to enforce their rights, first transferring the copyright to MiniMental, a corporation the Folsteins founded, and then in 2001 granting a worldwide exclusive license to Psychological Assessment Resources (PAR) to publish, distribute, and manage all intellectual property rights.1,2 A licensed version of the MMSE can now be purchased from PAR for $1.23 per test. The MMSE form is gradually disappearing from textbooks, Web sites, and clinical tool kits.1

Clinicians' response to this “lockdown” has been muted. A few commentators have expressed concern about continuing to use a now-proprietary tool in training2 or about implications for the developing world,1 echoing debates about patented pharmaceuticals. In our experience, many clinicians are either unaware of the MMSE's copyright restrictions or simply ignore them, despite the risk of copyright infringement.

But then in March 2011, a promising new cognitive screening tool that was to be available through “open access,” the Sweet 16 — a 16-item assessment of thinking, learning, and memory developed by Harvard's Tamara Fong3 — was removed from the Internet at the request of PAR in an apparent copyright dispute.4 The Sweet 16 includes orientation and three-object recall items, similar to the MMSE's, along with a digit-span item. This action, unprecedented for a bedside clinical assessment tool, has sent a chill through the academic community; clearly, clinicians and researchers can no longer live in blissful ignorance of copyright.

Copyright derives from one of the few powers explicitly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. Any new intellectual work is under copyright protection automatically from the moment it is fixed in a tangible medium of expression — a category now including blog posts, iPhone apps, and cognitive screening tools. Copyright law grants the author (or owner, for copyright can be transferred) exclusive rights to copy the work, distribute it, make works derivative of it, and perform or display it publicly. These rights last for 70 years past the date of the author's death, or up to 120 years from the time of creation if the work was done “for hire.” This duration has been retroactively extended several times, so that works published as early as 1923 may remain under copyright today (and will until at least 2019).

For persons or entities other than the copyright holder to copy or distribute a work, they must have permission from the owner, usually in the form of a license. Copying or distribution without permission is copyright infringement and carries stiff civil or even criminal penalties. There is limited protection under “fair use” law for certain nonprofit uses of limited parts of a work — for example, for teaching or research — but that exception is narrower than it sounds. One need not have intended to infringe someone's copyright to be subject to damages of up to $30,000 per work, and willful infringers pay up to $150,000 — and may, under certain circumstances, be subject to a jail term.

For clinicians, the risk of infringement is real. Photocopying or downloading the MMSE probably constitutes infringement; those who publish the MMSE on a Web site or pocket card could incur more severe penalties for distribution. Even more chilling is the “takedown” of the Sweet 16, apparently under threat of legal action from PAR (although PAR has not commented publicly). Are the creators of any new cognitive test that includes orientation questions or requires a patient to recall three items subject to action by PAR? However disputable the legal niceties, few physicians or institutions would want to have to argue their case in court.

The MMSE case may be a harbinger of more to come. Many clinical tools we take for granted, such as the Katz Index of Independence in Activities of Daily Living, fall into the same “benign neglect” copyright category as the MMSE did before 2000. At any time, they might be pulled back behind a wall of active copyright enforcement by the authors or their heirs.

What can researchers do to ensure that our colleagues can use the tools we develop to improve patient care? One option is to essentially place works in the public domain by declaring free and open rights for all users. The Geriatric Depression Scale, the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) depression scale, and the Saint Louis University Mental Status (SLUMS) cognitive assessment tool are all in the public domain. That domain, however offers no mechanism for ensuring that authors are recognized or compensated and no means of guaranteeing that later improvements will be made freely available. The ability to improve a clinical tool is crucial. Even licenses granting wide permission to copy, such as those of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment and the Lawton Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL) scale, while laudable, might still inhibit innovation by permitting legal challenges to improved tools perceived as derivative (as may have been the case with Sweet 16 and the MMSE).

A better solution is to apply the principle of “copyleft” from the open-source technology movement to encourage innovation and access while protecting authors' rights. Copyleft is intellectual jujitsu that uses copyright protection to guarantee the right of anyone to use, modify, copy, and distribute a work, as long as it and any derivatives remain under the same license. The author retains the right to offer the work under a different license simultaneously — for example, giving a company specific license to commercialize the work without copyleft protections. Popular copyleft licenses include the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license and the GNU Free Documentation License.

Google, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter all use open-source software at the heart of their products, because there is a clear economic benefit to using well-tested, well-validated, continually improved software in the core of complex products. Similarly, there is a clear clinical benefit to using well-tested, well-validated, continually improved clinical tools in complex patient care — as demonstrated by the MMSE's use before 2000. In a sense, copyleft is how academic medicine has always been assumed to work.2 Restrictive licensing of such basic tools wastes resources, prevents standardization, and detracts from efforts to improve patient care.

We suggest that authors of widely used clinical tools provide explicit permissive licensing, ideally with a form of copyleft. Any new tool developed with public funds should be required to use a copyleft or similar license to guarantee the freedom to distribute and improve it, similar to the requirement for open-access publication of research funded by the National Institutes of Health.5 The solution can be as simple as placing a copy of the tool on the authors' Web site, with a statement naming or linking to the license. Clinicians and researchers would be free to use, copy, and improve the tool; improvements would have to offer a similar copyleft license, perpetuating the benefits. Yet authors would maintain ownership and copyright of their tool and could profit by licensing it for a fee to commercial users or publishers who wished to include it in a non-copyleft work.

The restrictions on the MMSE's use present clinicians with difficult choices: increase practice costs and complexity, risk copyright infringement, or sacrifice 30 years of practical experience and validation to adopt new cognitive assessment tools. By embracing the principles of copyleft licensing, we can avoid such setbacks and build a more open future of continually improving patient care.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1110652





Apropos Appropriation
Randy Kennedy

One recent afternoon in the offices of the Midtown law firm run by David Boies and his powerful litigation partners, a large black clamshell box sat on a conference table. Inside were raucous, sometimes wildly funny collages of photographs and magazine pages handmade by the artist Richard Prince, works of art that have become the ur-texts of one of the most closely watched copyright cases ever to rattle the world of fine art.

In March a federal district court judge in Manhattan ruled that Mr. Prince — whose career was built on appropriating imagery created by others — broke the law by taking photographs from a book about Rastafarians and using them without permission to create the collages and a series of paintings based on them, which quickly sold for serious money even by today’s gilded art-world standards: almost $2.5 million for one of the works. (“Wow — yeah,” Mr. Prince said when a lawyer asked him under oath in the district court case if that figure was correct.)

The decision, by Judge Deborah A. Batts, set off alarm bells throughout Chelsea and in museums across America that show contemporary art. At the heart of the case, which Mr. Prince is now appealing, is the principle called fair use, a kind of door in the bulwark of copyright protections. It gives artists (or anyone for that matter) the ability to use someone else’s material for certain purposes, especially if the result transforms the thing used — or as Judge Pierre N. Leval described it in an influential 1990 law review article, if the new thing “adds value to the original” so that society as a whole is culturally enriched by it. In the most famous test of the principle, the Supreme Court in 1994 found a fair use by the group 2 Live Crew in its sampling of parts of Roy Orbison’s “Oh Pretty Woman” for the sake of one form of added value, parody.

In the Prince case the notoriously slippery standard for transformation was defined so narrowly that artists and museums warned it would leave the fair-use door barely open, threatening the robust tradition of appropriation that goes back at least to Picasso and underpins much of the art of the last half-century. Several museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan, rallied to the cause, filing papers supporting Mr. Prince and calling the decision a blow to “the strong public interest in the free flow of creative expression.” Scholars and lawyers on the other side of the debate hailed it instead as a welcome corrective in an art world too long in thrall to the Pictures Generation — artists like Mr. Prince who used appropriation beginning in the 1970s to burrow beneath the surface of media culture.

But if the case has had any effect so far, it has been to drag into the public arena a fundamental truth hovering somewhere just outside the legal debate: that today’s flow of creative expression, riding a tide of billions of instantly accessible digital images and clips, is rapidly becoming so free and recycling so reflexive that it is hard to imagine it being slowed, much less stanched, whatever happens in court. It is a phenomenon that makes Mr. Prince’s artful thefts — those collages in the law firm’s office — look almost Victorian by comparison, and makes the copyright battle and its attendant fears feel as if they are playing out in another era as well, perhaps not Victorian but certainly pre-Internet.

In many ways the art world is a latecomer to the kinds of copyright tensions that have already played out in fields like music and movies, where extensive systems of policing, permission and licensing have evolved. But art lawyers say that legal challenges are now coming at a faster pace, perhaps in part because the art market has become a much bigger business and because of the extent of the borrowing ethos.

Dip almost anywhere into contemporary art over the last couple of years to see the extent. The group show “Free” at the New Museum in 2010 was built partly around the very idea of the borrowing culture, the way the Web is radically reordering the concept of appropriation, with works that “lift, borrow and reframe digital images — not in a rebellious act of stealing or a deconstructive act of critique — but as a way to participate thoughtfully and actively in a culture that is highly circulated, hybridized, internationalized,” as its curator, Lauren Cornell, wrote.

Christian Marclay’s wildly popular video “The Clock” from 2010 was 24 hours of appropriation, made from thousands of stitched-together fragments from films and television shows. Rob Pruitt’s show “Pattern and Degradation” at the Gavin Brown and Maccarone galleries in 2010 lifted designs from Lilly Pulitzer, from Web photo memes and from a couple of T-shirt designers, whose angry supporters staged a flash-mob demonstration to protest the use of the design without attribution.

Mr. Marclay and Mr. Pruitt were both born before the 1980s. But to look at the work of younger artists, especially of those who don’t remember a time before the Web, is to get a true sense of the velocity, and changing nature, of appropriation.

“For the generation that I spend my days with, there’s not even any ideological baggage that comes along with appropriation anymore,” said Stephen Frailey, an artist whose work has used appropriation and who runs the undergraduate photography program at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. “They feel that once an image goes into a shared digital space, it’s just there for them to change, to elaborate on, to add to, to improve, to do whatever they want with it. They don’t see this as a subversive act. They see the Internet as a collaborative community and everything on it as raw material.”

At the same time the tools for mining and remolding those mountains of raw material are proliferating. In November a developer and a designer introduced an iPad art app called Mixel, aimed at amateurs but certain to end up in artists’ studios. It allows users to grab images from the Web or elsewhere, collage them almost effortlessly and then pass them around, social media style, for appreciation or re-mixing.

One of its creators, Khoi Vinh, a former design director of NYTimes.com, has been surprisingly frank when asked about the tsunami of copyright problems such an idea stirs up. “This is really a case of, you have to do it, try it and ask for forgiveness later,” he said to an interviewer. “Otherwise it would never get out there.”

In a homage-to-old-“Sesame Street” video that was made to promote the app, the friendly narrator urges, “Pick anything that inspires you.” And, in a sense, that simple exhortation goes to the heart of the issues raised by the Prince case and Web-driven reuse culture in general.

American copyright law has always performed a complicated balancing act involving both commerce and culture. It tries to protect products of creativity so that people have economic incentive to keep on creating, so that a new movie, for example, is not immediately copied and resold on Canal Street, depriving the moviemaker of the possibility of income. But the law has also evolved ways to allow for creative uses of copying: the fair use exemption, which allows some copying for things like criticism, comment or news reporting.

Over the last couple of decades part of the equation for deciding whether fair use is indeed fair is how much the thing copied has been transformed. In other words, even if we are long past making anything completely new under the sun, as Ecclesiastes declared a couple of millenniums ago, copying should be allowed only to the degree to which it adds to or builds on what came before.

Deciding what is sufficiently transformative and what is not has often been tough enough in other cultural realms, like music and literature. But as copyright tensions mount and the courts increasingly confront the issue in contemporary art, the question becomes ever trickier. In large part this is because the questions turns on artistic intent, often a much grayer area in the visual arts than in other arts, and especially so over the last three decades as art movements have fragmented.

What were Mr. Prince’s intentions in re-using the Rastafarian pictures taken by the French photographer Patrick Cariou and why did he choose them? For the sake of parody? For criticism? Or did he just pick something that inspired him, for reasons as difficult to plumb as any those of many postmodern artists?

In a deposition in the case that was recently published as part of an unlikely art book by the writer and director Greg Allen, lawyers for Mr. Cariou follow Mr. Prince deep into the strange and often trackless territory of artistic intention. About as close as they get to pinning him down is that he wanted to use the borrowed pictures to explore his fascination with the painting of Willem de Kooning and also thought of his collages and paintings as part of an idea for a movie about a post-apocalyptic world in which Rastafarians, famous literary lesbians and others commandeer hotels on St. Bart’s.

“So what are four lesbians from the early 20th century doing on St. Bart’s in, now, when there’s a nuclear war, like why are they there?” a lawyer asked Mr. Prince, who responded: “Your guess is as good as mine. That’s what I do, I make things up.”

At another point in the transcript of the deposition, a lawyer asked, “What is the message?”

Mr. Prince replied, “The message is to make great art that makes people feel good.”

He also made it clear that he was not making art that commented on Mr. Cariou’s work itself. (Judge Batts ruled that for a work to be transformative it must “in some way comment on, relate to the historical context of, or critically refer back to the original works” it borrows from, a test she said Mr. Prince’s work failed.)

In an interview Daniel Brooks, Mr. Cariou’s lawyer, said that if such a subjective principle for borrowing as Mr. Prince’s were to become the legal standard — and in parts of the art world it is already much more subjective in practice — there would be no way to protect copyright.

“It can’t just be random, that he ‘liked it,’ because there’s no practical boundary to that,” he said.

But Joshua Schiller, Mr. Prince’s appeals lawyer from the firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner, said the boundary is whether a new work of art results from the borrowing. And he argued that it was clear that Mr. Prince had made parts of Mr. Cariou’s pictures into distinctive Richard Prince works, not just copy them to pass them off as his own and deprive Mr. Cariou of his livelihood. Whether the work was successful and whether Mr. Prince’s intentions were interesting or even explainable can be left to debate. But the primary intention was to create a work of art, Mr. Schiller said, and that is the kind of creativity the law seeks to encourage.

“This is not piracy,” he said. “These are not handbags.”

Mr. Prince’s appeal will probably be heard in the next few months. But the decision will not answer the larger questions about how copyright should evolve to deal with the reality of artists in a digital world or how the art world should deal with such questions morally and ethically. The possibility has often been raised of establishing an extensive system of licensing and permissions for images and other artistic material, akin to the one that operates in the music industry, but even many advocates of stricter copyright standards do not seem optimistic that such a system could work in the art world.

At a debate about the Prince case at the New York City Bar Association last month Virginia Rutledge, an art lawyer and former general counsel for Creative Commons, a nonprofit group that advocates for more open copyright standards, said she believed that the problem facing the art world was as much a “cultural attribution crisis” as a legal crisis and that the problem could be at least partly addressed by cultivating a stronger climate of simple acknowledgement and credit.

But Hank Willis Thomas, one of the artists taking part in the debate, said that the recycle and remix culture was gaining speed so rapidly that trying to bring order to it was, even now, like trying to hit a moving target.

“Whatever’s after this,” he added, “is going to be pretty crazy.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/a...opriation.html





Louis Vuitton Sues Warner Bros For Using Fake Bag In Hangover II

A studio that has been a champion of stopping piracy is now facing awkward accusations that it showed counterfeit luggage in a hit movie.

In a complaint filed Thursday in Manhattan, luxury goods maker Louis Vuitton accused Warner Bros of ignoring its instructions not to use a fake handbag in an airport scene in the Hangover II. In the scene, Alan (played by Zach Galifianakis) carries luggage marked LVM and warns another character “Careful, that is.. that is a Louis Vuitton.”

According to the complaint, the item in question is not in fact a Louis Vuitton but was instead made by a Chinese American firm called Diophy. Louis Vuitton is currently suing Diophy before the International Trade Commission in the hopes of getting its knock-off products banned from the United States.

Louis Vuitton says that Alan’s “Careful, that’s a Louis Vuitton” line been become a popular catchphrase and that the movie has produced consumer confusion. Its lawsuit also claims that there has been gossip and Internet buzz about whether or not Alan’s bag is real. Louis Vuitton has long been an obsession of sorts with certain celebrities and fashionistas.

The luxury brand also claims that Warner Bros caused further harm by refusing to edit the bag scene before it released the movie on DVD.

This is not the first time that the studio has been tangled up in intellectual property issues with Hangover II. In June, it settled a copyright suit brought by a tattoo artist who claimed that it had used a Mike Tyson body design without permission.

If the Louis Vuitton allegations are true, they may prove a huge embarrassment for Warner Bros which has been part of a full-court press in Washington this month to pass a controversial law called SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act).

The handbag maker is asking the court to grant an order to destroy all copies of the Hangover II and promotional materials that contain the airport scene with the fake bag. Louis Vuitton also wants profits from the film and triple damages.

It’s possible, of course, that the lawsuit is simply a publicity stunt to draw attention to piracy. If so, it’s working.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-l...n-hangover-ii/





Fast Five is 'Top Pirated Film of 2011'

Action movie Fast Five was the most pirated film of 2011, according to file-sharing blog, Torrent Freak.

The fifth instalment in the Fast and the Furious film series was downloaded 9.2 million times, figures have shown.

In second place was The Hangover II with 8.8 million downloads followed by Thor, thriller Source Code and I Am Number Four was in fifth place.

James Cameron's sci-fi epic Avatar was last year's top-pirated film, downloaded 16.6 million times.

Cameron had previously suggested that making movies in 3D would help put people off from downloading films illegally.

Only two of this year's top ten, Thor and Harry Potter, were released in 3D - which could be attributed as much to a decline in the popularity of the format as to the difficulty in pirating the material.

Most downloaded films and worldwide box office takings

1. Fast Five - 9.2m downloads (£405m)

2. The Hangover II - 8.8m downloads (£376m)

3. Thor - 8.3m downloads (£291m)

4. Source Code - 7.9m downloads (£79m)

5. I Am Number Four - 7.6m downloads (£93m)

6. Sucker Punch - 7.2m downloads (£58m)

7. 127 Hours - 6.9m downloads (£39m)

8. Rango - 6.4m downloads (£158m)

9. The King's Speech - 6.2m downloads (£268m)

10. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 - 6m downloads (£860m)

Figures for the entire top 10 this year have dropped in comparison with last year.

Torrent Freak said this might be explained by an increase in file sharing and streaming sites - which don't count towards download figures.

Thor, based on the comic book character of the same name, was downloaded 8.3 million times and Source Code, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, 7.9 million times.

Sucker Punch was at number six, followed by 127 Hours and Rango at number 7 and 8 respectively.

Top grossing Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and Transformers: Dark of the Moon did not feature on the pirated film list.

And The King's Speech and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 were both hugely popular at the box office, but their downloading figures remained fairly modest, appearing in ninth and tenth place on the list.

The data for the list is collected from several sources, including reports from thousands of BitTorrent trackers.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-16352785





Cruise Takes Quiet Christmas with $26.5M 'Mission'
David Germain

Tom Cruise's latest mission has won a holiday weekend that's shaping up with some silent nights at movie theaters as business continues to lag.

Studio estimates Sunday placed Cruise's "Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol" a solid No. 1 with $26.5 million domestically over its first weekend in full release. The movie raised its total to $59 million since it started a week earlier in huge-screen cinemas and expanded nationwide last Wednesday, and distributor Paramount estimated that revenues will reach $72.7 million by Monday.

Cruise's fourth "Mission" flick was a bright spot over a Christmas weekend filled with so-so tidings for Hollywood, whose usually busy holiday stretch since Thanksgiving has been a bust.

Generally well-reviewed movies from Steven Spielberg ("The Adventures of Tintin"), David Fincher ("The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo") and Cameron Crowe ("We Bought a Zoo") — with casts that include Matt Damon, Scarlett Johansson and Daniel Craig — opened with modest to weak results.

Despite predictions from studio executives that 2011 could be a record-setter that would finish with a bang, domestic revenues remained stuck at a sluggish pace that has lingered all year.

Hollywood should finish the year with $10.1 billion domestically, down 4.5 percent from 2010, according to box-office tracker Hollywood.com.

The picture gets worse taking into account higher ticket prices, which mean Hollywood brings in fewer fans for each dollar spent. Actual domestic attendance for 2011 will close out at about 1.27 billion, down 5.3 percent from the previous year's and the lowest head count since 1995, when admissions totaled 1.26 billion.

"Thank God 2011 is almost over, because we've had a real rough run here at the end of the year," said Hollywood.com analyst Paul Dergarabedian. "We always count on the holiday season to give us a big boost at the end of the year, and it just didn't happen.

"These admission numbers this year just tell me that we maybe have to set our sights a little lower in terms of attendance every year."

Since peaking at a modern high of 1.6 billion in 2002, domestic movie admissions have been on a general decline since.

Studio executives always insist that slow times result from weak films, but on paper, the strong lineup Hollywood presented this year should have had fans lining up in huge numbers. Pretty good films are out there this holiday season, yet blockbuster expectations fizzled, a sign that people might be skipping a trip to the theater in favor of home-viewing, video games or the countless other entertainment options their gadgets now offer.

Rising ticket prices, particularly the extra few dollars it costs to see 3-D films, also could be causing a backlash among fans.

With "Ghost Protocol" climbing toward the $100 million mark, it's a return to box-office form for Cruise, who had been Hollywood's most-dependable earner for two decades until he turned off fans with odd antics in his personal life six years ago.

"Ghost Protocol" will be Cruise's first top-billed $100 million hit since 2006's "Mission: Impossible III." He had a supporting role in 2008's $100 million comedy hit "Tropic Thunder," which was headlined by Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr. and Jack Black.

Even with a No. 1 debut, "Ghost Protocol" still was a shadow of its predecessors. The first three "Mission: Impossible" movies ranged from $45 million to $58 million over opening weekend, but those installments opened at the start of the busy summer season.

As of Friday, "Ghost Protocol" also had brought in a healthy $118 million overseas.

Downey's "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows" fell from No., 1 to No. 2 in its second weekend with $17.8 million. The family sequel "Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked" dropped from second to third with $13.3 million.

Both sequels trail well behind the business their predecessors did. "A Game of Shadows," from Warner Bros., lifted its domestic haul to $76.6 million, while 20th Century Fox's "Chipwrecked" pushed its receipts to $50.3 million.

The weekend's newcomers failed to light up the box office, too. Fincher and Craig's "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" from Sony was No. 4 with $13 million, Spielberg's "The Adventures of Tintin" from Paramount was No. 5 with $9.1 million and Crowe, Damon and Johansson's "We Bought a Zoo" from 20th Century Fox was No. 6 with $7.8 million.

"Dragon Tattoo" raised its total to $21.4 million since opening Tuesday night, while "Tintin" lifted its take to $17.1 million since debuting Wednesday.

European literary exports "Dragon Tattoo," adapted from Stieg Larsson's Swedish best-seller, and "Tintin," based on Belgian artist Herge's storybook classics, are finding a lukewarm reception among U.S. crowds.

"Dragon Tattoo" has been a sensation among U.S. readers yet failed to challenge "Mission: Impossible" and the other established franchises at the top of the box office.

Beloved by generations of readers overseas, "Tintin" launched internationally two months ahead of its U.S. release. But the blockbuster global attention, with nearly $250 million already in the bank from foreign markets, did not translate to crowds in the United States.

The calendar made it a tough weekend for Hollywood, with Christmas Eve — always a slow night for movie-going — falling on Saturday, usually the best day of the week at theaters.

Christmas Day typically is a strong one for movies, as fans squeeze in a film between unwrapping presents and sitting down to family dinners.

Two big holiday releases — Spielberg's World War I epic "War Horse" and Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock's Sept. 11 drama "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" — opened Christmas Day, but estimates on their revenues will not be available until Monday.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Hollywood.com. Where available, latest international numbers are also included. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.

1. "Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol," $26.5 million.

2. "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows," $17.8 million.

3. "Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked," $13.3 million ($20.1 million international).

4. "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," $13 million.

5. "The Adventures of Tintin," $9.1 million.

6. "We Bought a Zoo," $7.8 million ($1.1 million international).

7. "New Year's Eve," $3 million.

8. "Arthur Christmas," $2.7 million ($9.7 million international).

9. "Hugo," $2.03 million.

10. "The Muppets," $2 million ($500,000 international).

___

Online:

http://www.hollywood.com

http://www.rentrak.com

___

Universal and Focus are owned by NBC Universal, a unit of Comcast Corp.; Sony, Columbia, Sony Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Classics are units of Sony Corp.; Paramount is owned by Viacom Inc.; Disney, Pixar and Marvel are owned by The Walt Disney Co.; Miramax is owned by Filmyard Holdings LLC; 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight are owned by News Corp.; Warner Bros. and New Line are units of Time Warner Inc.; MGM is owned by a group of former creditors including Highland Capital, Anchorage Advisors and Carl Icahn; Lionsgate is owned by Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.; IFC is owned by AMC Networks Inc.; Rogue is owned by Relativity Media LLC.
http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...on-2424744.php





I'll Tell You Why Movie Revenue is Dropping...
Roger Ebert

Box office revenue at movie theaters "lagged far behind 2010," an article by the AP's David Germain reports. Partly that was because the year lacked an "Avatar." Partly because a solid summer slate fell off in the autumn. Germain talks to several Hollywood insiders who tried to account for the general decline of ticket sales; 2011 had "smallest movie audience since 1995." I have some theories of my own, fueled by what people tell me.

1. Obviously, the absence of a must-see mass-market movie. When moviegoers hear about "Avatar" or "The Dark Knight," they blast off from home base and land in a theater seat as quickly as they can.

2. Ticket prices are too high. People have always made that complaint, but historically the movies have been cheap compared to concerts, major league sports and restaurants. Not so much any longer. No matter what your opinion is about 3D, the charm of paying a hefty surcharge has worn off for the hypothetical family of four.

3. The theater experience. Moviegoers above 30 are weary of noisy fanboys and girls. The annoyance of talkers has been joined by the plague of cell-phone users, whose bright screens are a distraction. Worse, some texting addicts get mad when told they can't use their cell phones. A theater is reportedly opening which will allow and even bless cell phone usage, although that may be an apocryphal story.

4. Refreshment prices. It's an open secret that the actual cost of soft drinks and popcorn is very low. To justify their inflated prices, theaters serve portions that are grotesquely oversized, and no longer offer what used to be a "small popcorn." Today's bucket of popcorn would feed a thoroughbred.

5. Competition from other forms of delivery. Movies streaming over the internet are no longer a sci-fi fantasy. TV screens are growing larger and cheaper. Consumers are finding devices that easily play internet movies through TV sets. Netflix alone accounts for 30% of all internet traffic in the evening. That represents millions of moviegoers. They're simply not in a theater. This could be seen as an argument about why newspapers and their readers need movie critics more than ever; the number of choices can be baffling.

6. Lack of choice. Box-office tracking shows that the bright spot in 2011 was the performance of indie, foreign or documentary films. On many weekends, one or more of those titles captures first-place in per-screen average receipts. Yet most moviegoers outside large urban centers can't find those titles in their local gigantiplex. Instead, all the shopping center compounds seem to be showing the same few overhyped disappointments. Those films open with big ad campaigns, play a couple of weeks, and disappear.

The myth that small-town moviegoers don't like "art movies" is undercut by Netflix's viewing results; the third most popular movie on Dec. 28 on Netflix was "Certified Copy," by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. You've heard of him? In fourth place--French director Alain Corneau's "Love Crime." In fifth, "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"--but the subtitled Swedish version.

The message I get is that Americans love the movies as much as ever. It's the theaters that are losing their charm. Proof: theaters thrive that police their audiences, show a variety of titles and emphasize value-added features. The rest of the industry can't depend forever on blockbusters to bail it out.
http://www.rogerebert.com/apps/pbcs....ARY/111229973/





Back When Mother, Too, Knew Best
Tom Gilbert

TO baby boomers of a certain age Donna Reed was a sunny-bright television fixture for eight seasons, the perfect mom — at least according to the prevailing values of the day — radiantly gliding down the staircase every week to answer the beckoning phone, its ringing augmented by an impossibly perky musical theme fittingly titled “Happy Days.”

“The Donna Reed Show” is seldom rerun, hobbled by its black-and-white photography, but its eponymous star is still regularly beamed back to mind this time of year with broadcasts of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the beloved Frank Capra film in which she co-stars with Jimmy Stewart, reminding viewers of her soft-spoken, wholesome appeal. The long-unseen fourth season of the 1958-66 series was released this month on DVD (from MPI Home Video), making it available for the first time to a new generation of viewers and older ones eager to become reacquainted.

Unquestionably white bread with its generic Midwestern locale (the fictional Hilldale), “The Donna Reed Show” can be seen as a filmed affirmation of a simpler, more prosperous epoch, a feel-good interpretation by TV creative types and their sponsors that didn’t exactly reflect society at large. It was about as low concept as you can get: a pleasant if unremarkable family sitcom centered on the life and trials of Donna Stone, the gracious wife of a handsome pediatrician and a loving mother of two teenagers, a precocious boy and his sensible older sister. Pretty, charming and conservatively glamorous, Reed was also wise, tender and occasionally enterprising. For millions she represented the ideal wife and mother, the complete antithesis of a succession of harried, less-than-perfect moms that began with “Roseanne” in the 1980s and continues today with Patricia Heaton’s Frankie Heck of “The Middle.”

Most of the show’s situations revolve around a family member’s quandary, like how to get out of a blind date with an unattractive boy (potentially a son’s problem in our “Modern Family” era, but strictly a feminine conundrum back in Donna’s days). Other pivotal plot points: getting bad advice from a friend or suffering the consequences of spreading gossip. Notably, the new fourth-season set includes “Donna’s Prima Donna,” the episode in which Shelley Fabares sings the debut of her 1962 No. 1 pop hit, “Johnny Angel,” itself another touchstone of the era.

“The Donna Reed Show” didn’t offer the sharply written, kids-world humor of “Leave It to Beaver,” the down-home warmth of Mayberry of “The Andy Griffith Show” or the neatly crafted, spiritually uplifting morality plays of a similar, often-mentioned-in-the-same-breath series of the era, “Father Knows Best,” all shows that have had a more durable life in syndication. But it did boast a glamorous Oscar winner as its star, a female perspective and a set of appealing kids in Ms. Fabares and Paul Petersen (and later, his real-life sister Patti, who popped up mid-run as an orphan conveniently adopted by the Stones when Ms. Fabares left the series to pursue new opportunities). Uniquely it also carried a slightly sensual undercurrent courtesy of its comparatively sexy leads.

Unlike most of the other TV couples of the era — the Andersons, the Cleavers or even the real-life marrieds Ozzie and Harriet — the shapely Reed and her co-star, Carl Betz, with his chiseled face and palpable masculinity, had an chemistry that suggested their characters might actually enjoy the circumstances of the dangerous, sponsor-scaring conjugal bed. In the opening credits, when Betz returns to the front door assertively to kiss Reed goodbye, there’s an almost lascivious gleam in his eye, an unspoken promise to be back later for more.

Feminists criticized the show for its perpetuation of the image of the subservient, content-to-stay-at-home wife, though Reed, a working mother of four who became associated with her housewife character, took umbrage during a 1979 interview with The Associated Press: “I played a strong woman who could manage her family. That was offensive to a lot of people.”

For Reed, who died in 1986, transplanting herself to television represented a big gamble. A small-town beauty queen who found her way to Hollywood and an MGM contract in 1941, she had enjoyed a 17-year film career that peaked with the Academy Award for best supporting actress in the 1953 film “From Here to Eternity.” Then, as now, a move to the small screen was a equivalent to admitting an A-list movie career was over. But Reed was smart about it and teamed with her producer-husband, Tony Owen, to own and produce the show under their Todon Productions banner, following the leads of the ex-movie stars Lucille Ball (with Desi Arnaz) and Loretta Young (with Tom Lewis) before her.

Donna Stone’s was a world that espoused longstanding moral virtues, one in which people always strove to present their best selves and, at all costs, keep unpleasantness and dirty laundry safe from the neighbors’ view. Impeccable housekeeping (did humans actually live in that house?) and fastidiously mowed lawns were de rigueur, as were financial stability and a promising future. Its milieu embraced and reaffirmed the aspirations of “the 99 percent” of the early cold war years, a mirror of how middle class people of the time thought they should be living.

At the same time “Reed” and its milky ilk tacitly reinforced the pervasive pressure to conform to a shallow, unrealistic societal model that dominated Eisenhower America. In explaining the show’s approach, Owen, quoted in David C. Tucker’s book “The Women Who Made Television Funny: Ten Stars of 1950s Sitcoms,” said, “There’s a good side and a bad side to everyone. Sure, they’ll go for the nasty stuff at first, but you have to give them an ideal to look up to.”

That idealized fantasy world would, of course, be torn asunder and turned on its head by the civil rights movement, the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, women’s liberation and all the other varieties of social upheaval soon to arrive. As the show’s run ended, American society was already in the throes of drastic change, and the star herself became an antiwar and antinuclear activist.

To the joy and relief of wistful, graying baby boomers, however, the world that Donna Reed inhabited and perpetuated in prime-time remains pristine, an exquisitely preserved time capsule packed safely away in film cans, stored on digital tape, or entrusted to the cold care of hard drives.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/a...ow-on-dvd.html





Joseph Farrell, Who Used Market Research to Shape Films, Dies at 76
Bruce Weber

In the 1987 film “Fatal Attraction,” a psychopathic woman terrorizes a married man with whom she has had a one-night stand, making more and more threatening gestures toward him and his family until her violent demise becomes inevitable.

The film originally had a rather arty conclusion, in which the woman, played by Glenn Close, commits ritual suicide as she listens to a recording of “Madame Butterfly.” Preview audiences rejected the ending as unsatisfying, however, and at the insistence of a marketing executive, Joseph Farrell, Paramount Pictures had the director, Adrian Lyne, reshoot it.

In the revision, Ms. Close’s character and her paramour, played by Michael Douglas, have a violent struggle in which she is nearly drowned in a bathtub and is finally dispatched by a gunshot fired by his wife (Anne Archer).

With the new ending, “Fatal Attraction” was nominated for six Oscars and earned more than $300 million in box-office receipts worldwide.

“Joe is the one most responsible for ‘Fatal Attraction’ becoming the gigantic hit it became,” Sidney M. Ganis, who was Paramount’s president for worldwide marketing at the time, said in an interview. “The audience told Joe this is a great movie until the end.”

“They didn’t want to see her do herself in,” he added. “They wanted to see her done in.”

It was a prime example of the influence of Mr. Farrell, who was widely credited with expanding the use of opinion-tracking strategies for all the major studios in Hollywood, thus helping to transform how the industry thought about audiences and inflaming the perennial battle in moviemaking between art and commerce.

Mr. Farrell died in Los Angeles on Dec. 7, his wife, Jo Champa, said. He was 76.

Mr. Farrell had been an executive at the Louis Harris polling firm before he founded a company to do market research on Hollywood films in 1978. The company, National Research Group, didn’t originate preview screenings or focus groups, but it refined the process of prerelease film testing and made it part of a formidable arsenal of marketing tools for movie executives.

As “a meddling numbers man,” as Mr. Ganis referred to him, Mr. Farrell was not initially welcomed by Hollywood’s old-boy network.

“He was different; he was intellectual,” said Mr. Ganis, a recent president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “He was a suit to the nth degree, highly educated, highly verbal, and with this questionable program that none of us at the beginning understood very well. We’d all been taught that it all begins with the gut — how you’re feeling about material, how a scene should look, how a movie should be marketed.”

Over 25 years, NRG, as the company was known, became the largest and most influential marketing consulting firm in the film industry. With a partner, Catherine Paura, Mr. Farrell provided studios with demographic analysis and tracking surveys to help them develop strategies for creating film trailers, advertising and scheduling release dates. NRG pioneered the idea of demographic quadrants, dividing the potential audience for a film into four parts: men and women under and over 25. A movie with the broadest appeal became known as a “four-quadrant film.”

Whether Mr. Farrell’s influence was positive or malign was debated. Ron Shelton, the director of “Bull Durham” and “White Man Can’t Jump,” complained to The Los Angeles Times in 1992 that Hollywood’s reliance on marketing “contributes to the lowest-common-denominator mentality and the proliferation of formulaic movies and genres.”

“I want to confound expectations in my movies, not cater to them,” Mr. Shelton said.

Mr. Farrell defended his work. “The film is the athlete; I just give it every training tip I know,” he said. “Filmmaking is a creative pursuit but must ultimately go commercial. Market research, a town meeting of sorts, lets the filmmaker know if he’s communicating effectively with the public.”

Mr. Farrell was not flawless in his prognostication of success, but he said he was “accurate enough.” Mr. Ganis recalled the time the two of them stood in the back during a screening of “Ghost,” the 1990 romantic fantasy that became a huge hit.

“Joe looked at me and shook his head,” Mr. Ganis said.

Joseph Nicholas Farrell was born in New York City on Sept. 11, 1935. His father, John, was a New York City policeman; his mother, Mildred, was a librarian. Joseph seemed headed for the priesthood, like his older brother Jack, but dropped out of the seminary at 18. He graduated from St. John’s University, studied sculpture at the University of Notre Dame and earned a law degree from Harvard. He was an executive for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund before going to work for Louis Harris and Associates, where he rose to vice chairman.

Mr. Farrell practiced what he preached. He was a furniture designer who sold his original pieces under the name Giuseppe Farbino. “Who wants to buy furniture from an Irishman?” he said.

Mr. Farrell also tried his hand at producing, serving as executive producer of the 1987 comedy “Mannequin,” in which a young man, played by Andrew McCarthy, falls in love with a department store mannequin who comes to life (Kim Cattrall). The film was made based on Mr. Farrell’s marketing principles. Though not a star, Mr. McCarthy was cast after tests of his movies showed that he strongly appealed to girls, the target audience.

“Mannequin” cost $7.9 million to make. It earned $41 million in the United States and Canada.

In addition to his wife, an actress whom he married in 1998, Mr. Farrell is survived by two brothers, Jack and Frank, and a son, Sean.

After selling NRG in 2003, he and Ms. Paura started their own production company, Farrell Paura Productions. Its film “Joyful Noise,” a musical about a national choir competition with Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton, , is to be released next year.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/b...ape-films.html





Mass. Woman Says TSA Confiscated Frosted Cupcake
AP

A woman who just flew back home from Las Vegas says an airport security officer confiscated her frosted cupcake because he thought the icing on it could be a security risk.

Rebecca Hains said the Transportation Security Administration agent at McCarran International Airport took her cupcake Wednesday, telling her its frosting was enough like a gel to violate TSA restrictions on allowing liquids and gels onto flights to prevent them from being used as explosives. She said the agent told her the frosting was conforming to the jar it was inside.

"I just thought this was terrible logic," Hains said Friday.

Hains, who lives in Peabody, just north of Boston, said the agent didn't seem concerned that the cupcake could actually be explosive, just that it fit some bureaucratic definition about what was prohibited. She said he even offered to let her eat it away from the airport security area.

Hains, a 35-year-old communications professor at Salem State University, said she told the agent she had passed through security at Boston's Logan International Airport earlier in the week with two cupcakes packaged in jars, gifts from a student. But she said the agent told her that just meant TSA in Boston didn't do its job.

The TSA, which is entrusted with protecting the nation's transportation system, was reviewing the situation, agency spokesman Nico Melendez said. Passengers are allowed to take cakes and cupcakes through checkpoints, he said.

Hains ultimately surrendered the cupcake. But she said the situation highlighted a lack of common sense by the agent and the ludicrousness of TSA policies.

"It's not really about the cupcake; I can get another cupcake," she said. "It's about an encroachment on civil liberties. We're just building up a resistance and tolerance to all these things they're doing in the name of security, when it's really theater. It is not keeping us safe."
http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...ke-2422732.php





Twitter Lawsuit Threatened Over Alleged Hezbollah Aid
Kevin Flower

Is Twitter aiding and abetting terrorism?

The director of an Israeli legal outfit says yes, and is threatening to sue the micro-blogging site if it doesn't change its policies.

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, director of the Shurat HaDin Israel Law Center, sent a letter to Twitter on Thursday asserting that the company is violating U.S. law by allowing groups such as Hezbollah and al Qaeda affiliate al-Shabaab to use its popular online network.

"It has come to our attention that Twitter Inc. provides social media and associated services to such foreign terrorist organizations," Darshan-Leitner wrote.

"Please be advised that (doing so) is illegal and will expose Twitter Inc. and its officers to both criminal prosecution and civil liability to American citizens and others victimized" by Hezbollah, al-Shabaab and other foreign terrorist entities.

Twitter declined to comment when contacted by CNN.

In her letter, Darshan-Leitner noted that Hezbollah and al-Shabaab are officially designated as terrorist organizations under U.S. law. She also cited a 2010 Supreme Court case -- Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project -- which upheld a key provision of the Patriot Act prohibiting material support to groups designated as terrorist outfits.

"Your provision of social media and associated services to Hezbollah and other foreign terrorist organizations would constitute the type of seemingly innocuous material support that would render your company and you personally criminally and civilly liable," she told Twitter CEO Richard Costolo.

Hezbollah-controlled al-Manar television currently maintains a Twitter account with roughly 7,500 followers. Other groups considered terrorist organizations by the United States also maintain accounts. Hamas, the Islamist group that rules the Gaza Strip, posts regularly on at least one government-controlled account.

Darshan-Leitner says she realizes there will be stiff opposition to a potential lawsuit from free speech advocates, but told CNN she nevertheless hopes Twitter will change its policies.

"Once you bring it to their attention, they cannot say that they don't know," she said.

Aden Fine, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, told CNN that the Supreme Court "has not directly addressed the issue of whether any speech allegedly supportive of a designated terrorist organization is unlawful." But "the government can't force private companies to censor lawful speech just because the government doesn't like the speech or the people making the speech," he said.

Fine noted that since the Internet depends on private companies such as Twitter to function, any clampdown or adverse ruling could be used to restrict everyone's online communications.

Social networks Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have been lauded for the role they played in the Arab Spring, a series of anti-regime protests that erupted across the Middle East starting in late 2010. The online networks and instant messaging services were used extensively to spread the word about demonstrations, especially in the case of the Egyptian uprising that toppled longtime strongman President Hosni Mubarak.

A number of governments, however, have started arguing for stricter controls. Authorities in the United Kingdom say rioters used social the networks to coordinate mass civil disobedience earlier this year in London. State prosecutors in Mexico have accused two people of terrorism and sabotage by claiming that their Twitter posts helped spread false rumors about a school attack, leading to real-life violence on the streets of Veracruz.

The Shurat HaDin Israel Law Center describes itself as a civil rights organization dedicated to "combating the terrorist organizations and the regimes that support them through lawsuits litigated in courtrooms around the world." It supported a similar campaign earlier this year directed at social media giant Facebook.

Among other things, the center succeeded in getting Facebook to pull down a page created by Palestinian activists calling for a "Third Intifada" against Israel.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/30/world/...uit/index.html





Hacker Finds Weak Mobile Security in Europe
Kevin J. O'Brien

It may be tempting to view the illegal interception of telephone voice mails, a practice that has roiled Britain and the News Corp. media empire of Rupert Murdoch, as an arcane tool employed by scofflaw journalists with friends in Scotland Yard.

But according to a study to be presented Tuesday, cellphone users in Europe and the rest of the world may be just as vulnerable as the actor Hugh Grant and other celebrities to having their personal voice mail hacked — or worse — because of outdated mobile network security.

In a study of 31 mobile operators in Europe, Morocco and Thailand, Karsten Nohl, a Berlin hacker and mobile security expert, found that many operators provided poor or weak defenses to protect consumers from illicit surveillance and identity theft.

Mr. Nohl said he was able to hack into mobile conversations and text messages and could impersonate the account identities of cellphone users in 11 countries using an inexpensive, 7-year-old Motorola cellphone and free decryption software available on the Internet. He has tested each mobile operator more than 100 times, he said, and has ranked the quality of their defenses.

He plans to present his results at a convention of the Chaos Computer Club, a hackers’ group, in Berlin, where he will open the project to researchers in other countries.

In 2009 Mr. Nohl, who runs a Berlin consulting company, Security Research Labs, published the algorithms used to encrypt voice and data conversations on GSM digital networks, which are used in Europe and elsewhere.

In an interview, Mr. Nohl said he had made sure to conduct his latest research to avoid the illegal theft of data and communications by intercepting the phone transmissions of a colleague during field tests. In random tests, he said, he ended interceptions just one or two seconds after they began.

The technique he uses focuses on deciphering the predictable, standard electronic “conversations” that take place between a cellphone and a mobile network at the beginning of each call. Typically, Mr. Nohl said, as many as 40 packets of coded information are sent back and forth, many just simple commands like, “I have a call for you,” or “Wait.”

Most operators vary little from this set-up procedure, which Mr. Nohl said allowed him to use hacking software to make high-speed, educated guesses to decipher the complex algorithmic keys networks use to encrypt transmissions. Once he derived this key, Mr. Nohl said, he was able to intercept voice and data conversations by impersonating another user to listen to their voice mails or make calls or send text messages on their mobile accounts.

Mr. Nohl said operators could easily fix this vulnerability in the GSM system, which is found in older 2G networks used by almost every cellphone, including smartphones, with a simple software patch. His research found that only two operators, T-Mobile in Germany and Swisscom in Switzerland, were already using this enhanced security measure, which involves adding a random digit to the end of each set-up command to thwart decoding. (For example, “I have a call for you 4.”)

“This is a major vulnerability in most networks we tested, and the irony is that it costs very little, if nothing, to repair,” Mr. Nohl said. “Often it is just a question of inertia on the part of operators, or they have other priorities, such as building their networks.”

Philip Lieberman, the chief executive and president of Lieberman Software, a company in Los Angeles that sells identity management software to large businesses and the U.S. government, said much of the digital technology that protects the privacy of cellphone calls had been developed in the 1980s and 1990s and is now ripe for attack.

That said, Mr. Lieberman added that the kind of interception being done by researchers like Mr. Nohl demands a level of skill and sophistication that is beyond the abilities of most individuals.

“Your digital mobile calls are generally well protected from people like yourselves, who are not in the position to crack them,” Mr. Lieberman said in an interview. “However, the technology to do this type of surveillance, which was once possible only by government intelligence agencies, is rapidly becoming affordable to more and more people.”

In compiling his research, which was conducted from Sept. 1 through the past week, Mr. Nohl measured a network’s vulnerability to three attacks: the interception of voice and text messages, the impersonation of a cellphone user’s identity to make calls or hear voice mails and the tracking of a cellphone user’s location through the Internet and the cell network. He then ranked the operators in the three categories by compiling a risk scale, with 100 percent representing the best possible security and zero representing none.

In protecting against the illicit interception of voice and text messages, the operators Orange Switzerland and TDC Sunrise in Switzerland and True Move in Thailand performed most poorly, according to his study. Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile in Germany and Slovakia and Swisscom’s Natel in Switzerland had the best security.

In preventing the impersonation and use of another’s mobile account details for calling, texting or other purposes, Telefónica’s O2 network in the Czech Republic, Belgacom Proximus in Belgium and Orange Switzerland provided the least security, while T-Mobile Slovakia, T-Mobile Germany and SFR in France had the best, the study showed.

In guarding against the tracking of a cellphone user’s geographic position through the Internet and global positioning satellites, T-Mobile Slovakia and two Moroccan operators, Wana and Medi Telecom, had the weakest safeguards, according to the research. Vodafone Italy, T-Mobile Germany and Vodafone Germany had the best security, according to the study. The tracking of cellphone users is not tied to the interception of identities but to a network’s ability to be tricked into disclosing the calling cell where the user is located.

Many operators who performed poorly in the survey did not respond to requests for comment for this article. A spokeswoman for Deutsche Telekom, Alexia Sailer, said the company declined comment because it did not have details. A spokesman for Sunrise Communications in Zurich, Tobias Kistner, said the company would study the research and make any necessary security improvements.

France Télécom, the owner of Orange, said “Orange puts a high priority on customer and network security and invests significantly to ensure our customers are well protected.”

A spokesman for Telefónica in the Czech Republic, Hany Farghali, said the company used the latest security defenses and had experienced no security breaches in its network so far.

The GSM Association, a London organization that represents operators, said it also would await details of Mr. Nohl’s study, adding that it welcomed research designed to improve GSM technology.

“GSM networks use a range of encryption and authentication technologies and other features to make it difficult for criminals to fraudulently access and/or eavesdrop on customer communications or to identify and locate customers,” the association said in a statement.

Mr. Nohl said he had based the choice of countries for his study on the ability of him and his team to travel. His Berlin firm advises businesses, European governments and mobile operators, he said, on how to erect better digital communication defenses.

As consumers begin using cellphones for retail purchases and online banking, the potential damage from theft may increase, he said. Generally, however, the digital security tools used by banks and retailers, Mr. Nohl said, are far superior to those used by mobile operators and should thwart most attacks.

But services that let consumers make purchases by text or top up mobile account balances by sending text messages could be vulnerable, he said.

While the research was limited mostly to Europe, Mr. Nohl, a German citizen who received a doctorate in computer science at the University of Virginia, said the level of security provided by U.S. network operators was on a par with European operators, meaning there was also room for improvement.

In Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, the level of mobile security varies widely and can be much lower. Operators in India and China, Mr. Nohl said, encrypt digital traffic poorly or not at all, either to save on the network’s operating costs or to allow government censors unfettered access to communications.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/t...ht-hack26.html





Hackers Breach the Web Site of Stratfor Global Intelligence
Nicole Perlroth

While the rest of the world engaged in merriment and good cheer, hackers used the holidays to attack a United States research group that puts out a daily newsletter on security issues.

On Saturday, hackers who say they are members of the collective known as Anonymous claimed responsibility for crashing the Web site of the group, Stratfor Global Intelligence Service, and pilfering its client list, e-mails and credit card information in an operation they say is intended to steal $1 million for donations to charity. The hackers posted a list online that they say contains Stratfor’s confidential client list as well as credit card details, passwords and home addresses for some 4,000 Stratfor clients. The hackers also said they had details for more than 90,000 credit card accounts. Among the organizations listed as Stratfor clients: Bank of America, the Defense Department, Doctors Without Borders, Lockheed Martin, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the United Nations.

The group also posted five receipts online that it said were of donations made with pilfered credit card details. One receipt showed a $180 donation from a United States Homeland Security employee, Edmund H. Tupay, to the American Red Cross. Another showed a $200 donation to the Red Cross from Allen Barr, a recently retired employee from the Texas Department of Banking. Neither responded to requests for comment.

Mr. Barr told The Associated Press that on Friday he discovered that $700 had been transferred from his account to charities including the Red Cross, Save the Children and CARE, but that he had not been aware that the transfer was tied to a breach of Stratfor’s site.

Stratfor executives did not return calls for comment on Sunday. In an e-mail to subscribers Sunday morning, Stratfor’s chief executive, George Friedman, confirmed that the company’s site had been hacked and said his company was working with law enforcement to track down the parties responsible.

“We have reason to believe that the names of our corporate subscribers have been posted on other Web sites,” Mr. Friedman wrote in the e-mail. “We are diligently investigating the extent to which subscriber information may have been obtained.”

The hackers took responsibility for the Stratfor attack on Twitter and said the attack would be the beginning of a weeklong holiday hacking spree. The breach was the latest in the online group’s ongoing campaign of computer attacks which, to date, has been aimed at MasterCard, Visa and PayPal as well as groups as diverse as the Church of Scientology, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Zetas, a Mexican crime syndicate.

The breach first surfaced on Saturday when hackers defaced Stratfor’s Web site with their own message. “Merry Lulzxmas!” the group wrote in a reference to Lulz Security, a hacking group loosely affiliated with Anonymous. “Are you ready for a week of mayhem?” By Sunday afternoon, the message had been replaced with a banner message that said: “Site is currently undergoing maintenance. Please check back soon.”

According to the hackers’ online postings, the group voted on what charities to contribute to. Among their choices were cancer and AIDS research, the American Red Cross, WikiLeaks and the Tor Project, a software that enables online anonymity.

Also according to their postings, the breach appears to have been conducted in retaliation for the arrest and imprisonment of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst on trial on charges of leaking classified intelligence information and more than 250,000 diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks last year.

The attack was also likely intended to embarrass Stratfor, which specializes in intelligence and security. The hackers said they were able to obtain the credit card details because, they said, Stratfor had failed to encrypt them.

“The scary thing is that no matter what you do, every system has some level of vulnerability,” says Jerry Irvine, a member of the National Cyber Security Task Force. “The more you do from an advanced technical standpoint, the more common things go unnoticed. Getting into a system is really not that difficult.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/t...elligence.html





GSM Phones Vulnerable to Hijack Scams: Researcher
Tarmo Virki

Vulnerability in a widely used wireless technology could allow hackers to gain remote control of phones And instruct them to send text messages or make calls, according to an expert on mobile phone security.

They could use the vulnerability in the GSM network technology, which is used by billions of people in about 80 percent of the global mobile market, to make calls or send texts to expensive, premium phone and messaging services in scams, said Karsten Nohl, head of Germany's Security Research Labs.

Similar attacks against a small number of smartphones have been done before, but the new attack could expose any cellphone using GSM technology.

"We can do it to hundreds of thousands of phones in a short timeframe," Nohl told Reuters in advance of a presentation at a hacking convention in Berlin on Tuesday.

The convention takes place just days after U.S. security think tank Strategic Forecasting Inc (Stratfor) said its website had been hacked and that some of the names of corporate subscribers had been made public. Activist hacker group Anonymous claimed responsibility.

Attacks on corporate landline phone systems are fairly common, often involving bogus premium-service phone lines that hackers set up across Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia.

Fraudsters make calls to the numbers from hacked business phone systems or mobile phones, then collect their cash and move on before the activity is identified.

The phone users typically don't identify the problem until after they receive their bills and telecommunications carriers often end up footing at least some of the costs.

Even though Nohl will not present details of attack at the conference, he said hackers will usually replicate the code needed for attacks within a few weeks.

T-Mobile, SFR Lead Ranking

Mobile networks of Germany's T-Mobile and France's SFR offer their clients best protection against online criminals wanting to intercept their calls or track their movements, shows a new ranking Nohl will demonstrate at his presentation.

The new ranking, at gsmmap.org, lets consumers to see how their operators are performing and lets anyone to participate in measurement of their carriers' security.

Researchers reviewed 32 operators in 11 countries and rated their performance based on how easy it was for them to intercept the calls, impersonate someone's device or track the device.

"None of the networks protects users very well," Nohl said.

The sample is set to grow from 32 carriers dramatically next year as the tool enables anyone to participate in gathering of the data.

Nohl said mobile telecom operators could easily improve their clients' security, in many cases by just updating their software.

"Mobile network is by far the weakest part of the mobile ecosystem, even when compared to a lot attacked Android or iOS devices," he said.

Researchers reviewed operators in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Morocco, Slovakia, Switzerland and Thailand.

(Additional reporting by Jim Finkle; Editing by Matt Driskill and Vinu Pilakkott)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7BQ05020111227





Stuxnet Weapon Has at Least 4 Cousins: Researchers

The Stuxnet virus that last year damaged Iran's nuclear program was likely one of at least five cyber weapons developed on a single platform whose roots trace back to 2007, according to new research from Russian computer security firm Kaspersky Lab.

Security experts widely believe that the United States and Israel were behind Stuxnet, though the two nations have officially declined to comment on the matter.

A Pentagon spokesman on Wednesday declined comment on Kaspersky's research, which did not address who was behind Stuxnet.

Stuxnet has already been linked to another virus, the Duqu data-stealing trojan, but Kaspersky's research suggests the cyber weapons program that targeted Iran may be far more sophisticated than previously known.

Kaspersky's director of global research & analysis, Costin Raiu, told Reuters on Wednesday that his team has gathered evidence that shows the same platform that was used to build Stuxnet and Duqu was also used to create at least three other pieces of malware.

Raiu said the platform is comprised of a group of compatible software modules designed to fit together, each with different functions. Its developers can build new cyber weapons by simply adding and removing modules.

"It's like a Lego set. You can assemble the components into anything: a robot or a house or a tank," he said.

Kaspersky named the platform "Tilded" because many of the files in Duqu and Stuxnet have names beginning with the tilde symbol "~" and the letter "d."

Researchers with Kaspersky have not found any new types of malware built on the Tilded platform, Raiu said, but they are fairly certain that they exist because shared components of Stuxnet and Duqu appear to be searching for their kin.

When a machine becomes infected with Duqu or Stuxnet, the shared components on the platform search for two unique registry keys on the PC linked to Duqu and Stuxnet that are then used to load the main piece of malware onto the computer, he said.

Kaspersky recently discovered new shared components that search for at least three other unique registry keys, which suggests that the developers of Stuxnet and Duqu also built at least three other pieces of malware using the same platform, he added.

Those modules handle tasks including delivering the malware to a PC, installing it, communicating with its operators, stealing data and replicating itself.

Makers of anti-virus software including Kaspersky, U.S. firm Symantec Corp and Japan's Trend Micro Inc have already incorporated technology into their products to protect computers from getting infected with Stuxnet and Duqu.

Yet it would be relatively easy for the developers of those highly sophisticated viruses to create other weapons that can evade detection by those anti-virus programs by the modules in the Tilded platform, he said.

Kaspersky believes that Tilded traces back to at least 2007 because specific code installed by Duqu was compiled from a device running a Windows operating system on August 31, 2007.

(Reporting By Jim Finkle; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7BR1EV20111228





Debate Persists on Deadly Flu Made Airborne
Denise Grady and Donald G. McNeil Jr.

The young scientist, normally calm and measured, seemed edgy when he stopped by his boss’s office.

“You are not going to believe this one,” he told Ron Fouchier, a virologist at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. “I think we have an airborne H5N1 virus.”

The news, delivered one afternoon last July, was chilling. It meant that Dr. Fouchier’s research group had taken one of the most dangerous flu viruses ever known and made it even more dangerous — by tweaking it genetically to make it more contagious.

What shocked the researchers was how easy it had been, Dr. Fouchier said. Just a few mutations was all it took to make the virus go airborne.

The discovery has led advisers to the United States government, which paid for the research, to urge that the details be kept secret and not published in scientific journals to prevent the work from being replicated by terrorists, hostile governments or rogue scientists.

Journal editors are taking the recommendation seriously, even though they normally resist any form of censorship. Scientists, too, usually insist on their freedom to share information, but fears of terrorism have led some to say this information is too dangerous to share.

Some biosecurity experts have even said that no scientist should have been allowed to create such a deadly germ in the first place, and they warn that not just the blueprints but the virus itself could somehow leak or be stolen from the laboratory.

Dr. Fouchier is cooperating with the request to withhold some data, but reluctantly. He thinks other scientists need the information.

The naturally occurring A(H5N1) virus is quite lethal without genetic tinkering. It already causes an exceptionally high death rate in humans, more than 50 percent. But the virus, a type of bird flu, does not often infect people, and when it does, they almost never transmit it to one another.

If, however, that were to change and bird flu were to develop the ability to spread from person to person, scientists fear that it could cause the deadliest flu pandemic in history.

The experiment in Rotterdam transformed the virus into the supergerm of virologists’ nightmares, enabling it to spread from one animal to another through the air. The work was done in ferrets, which catch flu the same way people do and are considered the best model for studying it.

“This research should not have been done,” said Richard H. Ebright, a chemistry professor and bioweapons expert at Rutgers University who has long opposed such research. He warned that germs that could be used as bioweapons had already been unintentionally released hundreds of times from labs in the United States and predicted that the same thing would happen with the new virus.

“It will inevitably escape, and within a decade,” he said.

But Dr. Fouchier and many public health experts argue that the experiment had to be done.

If scientists can make the virus more transmissible in the lab, then it can also happen in nature, Dr. Fouchier said.

Knowing that the risk is real should drive countries where the virus is circulating in birds to take urgent steps to eradicate it, he said. And knowing which mutations lead to transmissibility should help scientists all over the world who monitor bird flu to recognize if and when a circulating strain starts to develop pandemic potential.

“There are highly respected virologists who thought until a few years ago that H5N1 could never become airborne between mammals,” Dr. Fouchier said. “I wasn’t convinced. To prove these guys wrong, we needed to make a virus that is transmissible.”

Other virologists differ. Dr. W. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University questioned the need for the research and rejected Dr. Fouchier’s contention that making a virus transmissible in the laboratory proves that it can or will happen in nature. But Richard J. Webby, a virologist at the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, said Dr. Fouchier’s research was useful, with the potential to answer major questions about flu viruses, like what makes them transmissible and how some that appear to infect only animals can suddenly invade humans as well.

“I would certainly love to be able to see that information,” Dr. Webby said, explaining that he has a freezer full of bird flu viruses from all over the world. “If I detect a virus in our activities that has some of these changes, it could change the direction of what we do.”

Some scientists dismiss fears of bioterrorism via influenza, because flu viruses would not make practical weapons: they cannot be targeted, and they would also infect whoever deployed them.

Dr. Fouchier said it would be easier to weaponize other germs. Which ones? He would not answer.

“That should tell you something,” he said. “I won’t tell you what I as a virologist would use, but I would publish this work.”

However, some experts argue that appeals to logic are useless.

“You can’t know who might try to re-create H5N1,” said Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

The A(H5N1) bird flu was first recognized in Hong Kong in 1997, when chickens in poultry markets began dying and 18 people fell ill, 6 of them fatally. Hoping to stamp out the virus, the government in Hong Kong destroyed the country’s entire poultry industry — killing more than a million birds — in just a few days. Buddhist monks and nuns in Hong Kong prayed for the souls of the slaughtered chickens, and world health officials praised Hong Kong for averting a potential pandemic.

But the virus persisted in other parts of Asia, and reached Europe and Africa; that worries scientists, because most bird flus emerge briefly and then vanish. Millions of infected birds have died, and many millions more have been slaughtered. Since 1997, about 600 humans have been infected, and more than half died.

Dr. Donald A. Henderson, a leader in the eradication of smallpox and now a biosecurity expert at the University of Pittsburgh, noted that even the notorious flu pandemic of 1918 killed only 2 percent of patients.

“This is running at 50 percent or more,” Dr. Henderson said. “This would be the ultimate organism as far as destruction of population is concerned.”

Dr. Fouchier was working on AIDS when the first bird flu outbreak occurred. He immediately became fascinated by the new disease and gave up AIDS to study it. He has worked on bird flu for more than a decade.

The medical center in Rotterdam built a special 1,000-square-foot virus lab for this work, a locked-down place where people work in spacesuits in sealed chambers with filtered air and multiple precautions to keep germs in and intruders out and to protect the scientists from infection. Dr. Fouchier said that even more security measures had been added recently because of the publicity about his work.

The Dutch government and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approved the laboratory, and the National Institutes of Health gave the Erasmus center a seven-year contract for flu research.

Because a government advisory panel has recommended that the full recipe for mutating the bird flu virus not be published, Dr. Fouchier declined to explain much about how it was done.

But he previously described the work at a public meeting, and various publications have reported that the experiment involved creating mutations in the virus and then squirting it into the respiratory tracts of ferrets. When the ferrets got sick, the researchers would collect their nasal secretions and expose other ferrets to the virus. After repetitions of this process, a strain of virus emerged from sick ferrets last summer that could infect animals in nearby cages without being squirted into them — just by traveling through the air.

The published reports say five mutations were all it took to transform the virus. Dr. Fouchier declined to confirm or deny that, and would say only that it took “a handful” of mutations.

Looking back on that day in July with Sander Herfst, the member of his team who told him the virus had gone airborne, Dr. Fouchier said, “We both needed a beer to recover from the shock.”

Then they planned their next step, repeating the experiment to make sure the results were reliable. There was one major obstacle: they had run out of ferrets. They ordered a new shipment from Scandinavia. So they had to wait several weeks to find out whether their discovery was real. Dr. Herfst took a vacation, timed to end the day the ferrets arrived.

They ran the tests again. Once more, A(H5N1) went airborne.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/s...-airborne.html





WiFi Protected Setup Flaw Can Lead to Compromise of Router PINs
Dennis Fisher

WirelessThe US-CERT is warning about a vulnerability in the WiFi Protected Setup standard that reduces the number of attempts it would take an attacker to brute-force the PIN for a wireless router's setup process. The flaw results in too much information about the PIN being returned to an attacker and makes the PIN quite weak, affecting the security of millions of WiFi routers and access points.

WPS is a method for setting up a new wireless router for a home network and it includes a way for users to set up the network via an external or internal registrar. In this method, the standard requires a PIN to be used during the setup phase. The PIN often is printed somewhere on the wireless router or access point. The vulnerability discovered in WPS makes that PIN highly susceptible to brute force attempts.

"When the PIN authentication fails the access point will send an EAP-NACK message back to the client. The EAP-NACK messages are sent in a way that an attacker is able to determine if the first half of the PIN is correct. Also, the last digit of the PIN is known because it is a checksum for the PIN. This design greatly reduces the number of attempts needed to brute force the PIN. The number of attempts goes from 108 to 104 + 103 which is 11,000 attempts in total," the US-CERT advisory says.

"It has been reported that some wireless routers do not implement any kind of lock out policy for brute force attempts. This greatly reduces the time required to perform a successful brute force attack. It has also been reported that some wireless routers resulted in a denial-of-service condition because of the brute force attempt and required a reboot."

Security researcher Stefan Viehbock discovered the vulnerability and reported it to US-CERT.The problem affects a number of vendors' products, including D-Link, Netgear, Linksys and Buffalo. He said via email that he has received essentially no response from vendors about the problem.

"I noticed a few really bad design decisions which enable an efficient brute force attack, thus effectively breaking the security of pretty much all WPS-enabled Wi-Fi routers. As all of the of the more recent router models come with WPS enabled by default, this affects millions of devices worldwide," Viehbock said in a blog post.

Viehbock has written a paper on the WPS vulnerability and his research and also developed a Python tool to brute-force the PINs. He hasn't released the tool yet, but says he may do so once the code is in better shape. None of the affected vendors have released fixes or workarounds for the bug, but Viehbock says in his paper that disabling WPS looks to be the main practical mitigation, Implementing long lock-out times for multiple authentication failures would help as well.

"One authentication attempt usually took between 0.5 and 3 seconds to complete. It was observed that the calculation of the Diffie-Hellman Shared Key (needs to be done before generating M3) on the AP took a big part of the authentication time. This can be speeded up by choosing a very small DH Secret Number, thus generating a very small DH Public Key and making Shared Key calculation on the AP’s side easier.," he says in the paper.
https://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/w...er-pins-122711





Attack Tool Released for WPS PIN Vulnerability
Dennis Fisher

Just a day after security researcher Stefan Viehbock released details of a vulnerability in the WiFi Protected Setup (WPS) standard that enables attackers to recover the router PIN, a security firm has published an open-source tool capable of exploiting the vulnerability. The tool, known as Reaver, has the ability to find the WPS PIN on a given router and then recover the WPA passphrase for the router, as well.

The vulnerability reported by Viehbock to US-CERT is related to the way that the WPS standard handles failed authentication attempts in some cases. In those scenarios, it will send back too much detailed information to the user--or attacker--about the PIN that's required to set up the router using WPS. Viehbock found that he was able to use that information to greatly reduce the amount of time it takes to recover the PIN for a router through a brute-force attack. Once the attacker has the WPS PIN, he can take control of the router.

Researchers at Tactical Network Solutions in Maryland on Wednesday released a tool called Reaver that implements an attack on the WPS vulnerability. The company released the tool as an open-source project on Google Code, but also is selling a more advanced commercial version.

"This is a capability that we at TNS have been testing, perfecting and using for nearly a year. But now that this vulnerability has been discussed publicly we have decided to announce and release Reaver, our WPS attack tool, to the open source community. Reaver is capable of breaking WPS pins and recovering the plain text WPA/WPA2 passphrase of the target access point in approximately 4-10 hours (attack time varies based on the access point)," the company said in a blog post.

The vulnerability in WPS affects a large number of routers from a variety of manufacturers, including Cisco, Buffalo, D-Link and others. The only real mitigation for the attack right now is for users to disable WPS. Viehbock said he hasn't received much in the way of response from vendors on the vulnerability.
https://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/a...ability-122911





Hackers Could Shut Down Train Lines: Expert

Hackers who have shut down websites by overwhelming them with Web traffic could use the same approach to shut down the computers that control train switching systems, a security expert said at a hacking conference in Berlin.

Stefan Katzenbeisser, professor at Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany, said switching systems were at risk of "denial of service" attacks, which could cause long disruptions to rail services.

"Trains could not crash, but service could be disrupted for quite some time," Katzenbeisser told Reuters on the sidelines of the convention.

"Denial of service" campaigns are one of the simplest forms of cyber attack: hackers recruit large numbers of computers to overwhelm the targeted system with Internet traffic.

Hackers have used the approach to attack sites of government agencies around the world and sites of businesses.

Train switching systems, which enable trains to be guided from one track to another at a railway junction, have historically been separate from the online world, but communication between trains and switches is handled increasingly using wireless technology.

Katzenbeisser said GSM-R, a mobile technology used for trains, is more secure than the usual GSM, used in phones, against which security experts showed a new attack at the convention.

"Probably we will be safe on that side in coming years. The main problem I see is a process of changing ... keys. This will be a big issue in the future, how to manage these keys safely," Katzenbeisser said.

The software encryption 'keys', which are needed for securing the communication between trains and switching systems, are downloaded to physical media like USB sticks and then sent around for installing -- raising the risk of them ending up in the wrong hands.

(Reporting by Tarmo Virki; Editing by David Holmes)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7BR0C520111228





Software Bug Fingered as Cause of Aussie A330 Plunge

The problem was fixed by turning the unit off and then on again
Iain Thomson

The final report into the 2008 Qantas flight QF72, which unexpectedly dived twice during a routine flight, has blamed a combination of software and hardware errors for the incident.

On 7 October 2008, the Australian-owned A330-303 aircraft was cruising at 37,000 feet when the autopilot disengaged and the aircraft rose, before plunging downwards sharply, injuring 110 of the aircraft’s 303 passengers and three-quarters of the cabin crew. Three minutes later the aircraft did it again, and the flight crew was bombarded with warnings from the instrumentation – almost all of them false.

The pilots issued a PAN distress call, but upgraded this to MAYDAY after seeing the seriousness of the injuries onboard. They disabled the automatic pilot and throttle control systems and then managed the approach and landing at Learmonth, Western Australia using backup instruments. Since the source of the problems couldn’t be immediately identified the crew used manual pressurisation control and braking equipment because the automatic systems weren’t trusted. In all, 51 passengers and crew required hospitalisation following the incident.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau’s (ATSB) final report found that one of the three air data inertial reference units (ADIRUs) installed on the A330-303 aircraft began to malfunction and went into failure mode before the incident. It then began feeding false information into the flight control systems, and the software algorithms designed to handle the information couldn’t cope, causing the erratic behavior.
ADIRU Final

Sometimes black boxes are more of a hindrance than a help

The Airbus carries three ADIRUs for safety, and the airplane’s flight control systems use data from two of the units to determine the plane’s position and attitude. When the data from the first two ADIRUs is inconsistent then the flight computer uses the data it received 1.2 seconds previously. However, the software couldn’t handle the two ADIRUs putting out data spikes that were more than 1.2 seconds apart and this caused the plane to behave erratically.

The problem was fixed by turning the unit off and then on again. It’s not clear what caused the ADIRU to shift into failure mode, as this is only the third time that it has happened in over 128 million hours of operation – although one of those other incidents was down to the same ADIRU in that aircraft. The investigators checked all the usual suspects, including the use of electronic equipment by passengers, but were unable to find a fault and suggested it may be down to a high-energy atmospheric particle striking one of the integrated circuits within the unit.

The report also blamed passengers for the relatively high level of injuries caused in the incident. Around 60 people were flying without their seatbelts fastened, despite being warned not to do so, and many were slightly or seriously injured after being thrown into the ceiling or side panels of the aircraft.

Airbus did not respond to requests for comment from El Reg.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12...e_a330_plunge/





China Seeks to Combat Hi-Tech Crimewave
BBC

The Chinese government is cracking down on home-grown cyber thieves seeking to steal online banking details.

The crackdown combats phishing by ensuring that the websites of legitimate banks appear at the top of search results.

The move comes as the personal details of more than 45 million Chinese people were stolen in separate attacks.

The government is investigating the thefts and said that the wave of attacks "threatened internet safety".

Crime spree

The 10 biggest search engines in China have signed up to the anti-phishing scheme to ensure that users looking for bank websites go to the right place.

Phishing attacks involve messages that look like they come from a bank or other organisation and direct people to a website that mimics the real thing.

When people visit the fake site and enter their login details these are recorded by cyber criminals who may loot the account soon afterwards.

By ensuring that the websites of banks appear first, the government hopes to limit the numbers of people falling for phishing scams and visiting the fake sites.

Some of the search engines will put a special icon next to the bank links in lists of results to flag them as legitimate.

Hacked accounts

The anti-phishing initiative comes at the end of a week in which the personal details of almost 10% of China's 485 million web users were stolen.

On Christmas day, the hugely popular Tianya chat site revealed that the login names and passwords from 40 million of its users had been stolen. All risk being plundered by attackers as the information was held in plain text.

Tianya has contacted the affected users and urged them to change their passwords as soon as possible.

Soon after, CDSN, one of China's largest forums for programmers, reported that the details of all its six million users had been stolen. The attackers got away with email addresses, login names and passwords. Again, all the details were stored in plain text.

The scale of the attacks prompted government action and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said it would investigate who was behind the attacks.

"The department believes the recent leak of user information is a serious infringement of the rights of internet users and threatens internet safety," the Ministry said in a statement.

The Chinese government is known to have put in place technology that monitors online chat rooms for controversial topics but the far-reaching measures have not stopped all nefarious cyber activity.

As well as criminal hackers, many activists are turning to the web to make protests more visible.

The website of Menginu, a firm at the centre of a tainted milk scandal, was vandalised and its homepage image replaced with text that read "Do you have a conscience?".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16357238





Finding the Cleanup Crew After a Messy Hack Attack
Nicole Perlroth

In the film “Pulp Fiction,” Harvey Keitel plays the Wolf, a fast-talking and meticulous man who is called in to deal with the aftermath of an accidental shooting.

In the messy world of computer security breaches, Kevin Mandia is something like the Wolf. Mr. Mandia has spent his entire career cleaning up problems much like the recent breach at Stratfor, the security group based in Austin, Tex., that was hacked over the Christmas weekend.

Hackers claiming to be members of the collective known as Anonymous defaced Stratfor’s Web site and published over 50,000 of its customers’ credit card numbers online. They have threatened to release more card details and a trove of 3.3 million e-mails between Stratfor and its clients, which include Goldman Sachs, the Defense Department, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the United Nations.

That means Stratfor is in the position of trying to recover from a potentially devastating attack without knowing whether the worst is over.

“They’re in a bad place,” said Mr. Mandia, who is not involved in the Stratfor case. “If the attacker is going to release their e-mails, there’s no way to shut them down.”

Stratfor joins a list of other hapless prominent organizations that have recently been breached by so-called hacktivists — hackers whose goal is to embarrass and expose them. Among its predecessors are Sony, the security company HBGary and the Arizona Department of Public Safety.

Unlike extortion cases, in which hackers typically demand a fee for not disclosing specific proprietary information, attacks by hacktivists put companies in a potentially more precarious and vulnerable waiting mode. The companies do not know precisely what has been stolen, how destructive its disclosure will be, when it will be dumped online or even whether the hackers are still roaming through their internal networks. All the while, they must reassure anxious clients and try to minimize the inevitable public relations fallout.

“We call it a three-alarm fire,” said Jamie May, chief investigator at Debix, the identity protection company that was hired by Sony after its breach earlier this year.

“It’s easy for companies to get ahead of themselves and rush into bad decisions that make a situation worse,” she said, “which is why it is often helpful to work with a company that has done this before.”

The breach at Stratfor, which markets its security expertise, could be particularly embarrassing if hackers can prove their claims that they were able to gain access to the company’s sensitive data because it was not encrypted — a basic first step in data protection.

Stratfor has not clarified whether its data was encrypted, and did not respond to requests for comment. With its Web site still down, the company has been using its Facebook page to share updates about matters like its offer of identity-theft protection for customers. But some customers have left comments on the page complaining that they did not hear directly from Stratfor about the breach, and found out that their card information was compromised only when their banks notified them of unauthorized charges.

Mr. Mandia’s computer security and forensics firm, Mandiant, has responded to breaches, extortion attacks and economic espionage campaigns at 22 companies in the Fortune 100 in the last two years alone, Mr. Mandia said. He calls the first hour he spends with companies “upchuck hour.”

“I need to get as much data as I can get. I come in and say ‘Get me your firewall logs. Give me your Web logs. Tell me what you know so far. Who do you think might have done this? Give me your e-mails,’ ” he said. “Everybody’s vomiting information on a table. It’s never pretty and it’s always unstructured.”

Time is of the essence. “Every minute you take to figure this out, you could be losing more e-mails and more credit data,” he said. The goal is to determine quickly the “fingerprint” of the intrusion and its scope, Mr. Mandia said: “How did the guy break in? What did he take? When did he break in? And, how do I stop this?”

The first thing a forensics team will do is try to get the hackers off the company’s network, which entails simultaneously plugging any security holes, removing any back doors into the company’s network that the intruders might have installed, and changing all the company’s passwords.

“This is something most people fail at,” Mr. Mandia said. “It’s like removing cancer. You have to remove it all at once. If you only remove the cancer in your leg, but you have it in your arm, you might as well have not had the operation on your leg.”

Likewise, if a company misses one back door or one compromised password, the intruders can immediately come back in.

Once the network has been secured, a forensics team will comb through a company’s data to determine the impact of the breach, so it can begin notifying affected customers, determine its liability and try to get ahead of the news cycle.

But in a hacktivist case like Stratfor’s, in which hackers are threatening to disburse more credit card details and sensitive correspondence, Mr. Mandia said there comes a point when “you just have to sit back and hope.”

“If anybody was any good at preventing leaks, we would have never seen WikiLeaks,” Mr. Mandia said. “The U.S. government would have stopped it and that data would never have been dumped.”

Meanwhile, Stratfor’s hackers have taken to Twitter to announce that they plan to release more Stratfor data over the next several days.

That may offer at least one possible silver lining. In the world of computer security, experts say, the most dangerous breaches are the quiet ones — the ones in which hackers make off with a company’s intellectual property and leave no trace.

“The hacks that do the most damage,” Mr. Mandia said, “don’t have Twitter feeds.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/t...-response.html





Hackers Said to be Planning to Launch Own Satellites to Combat Censorship
Christina DesMarais

Hackers reportedly plan to fight back against Internet censorship by putting their own communications satellites into orbit and developing a grid of ground stations to track and communicate with them.

The news comes as the tech world is up in arms about proposed legislation that many feel would threaten online freedom.

According to BBC News, the satellite plan was recently outlined at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. It's being called the "Hackerspace Global Grid."

If you don't like the idea of hackers being able to communicate better, hacker activist Nick Farr said knowledge is the only motive of the project, which also includes the development of new electronics that can survive in space, and launch vehicles that can get them there.

Farr and his cohorts are working on the project along with Constellation, a German aerospace research initiative that involves interlinked student projects.

You might think it would be hard for just anybody to put a satellite into space, but hobbyists and amateurs have been able in recent years to use balloons to get them up there. However, without the deep pockets of national agencies or large companies they have a hard time tracking the devices.

To better locate their satellites, the German hacker group came up with the idea of a sort of reverse GPS that uses a distributed network of low-cost ground stations that can be bought or built by individuals.

Supposedly, these stations would be able to pinpoint satellites at any given time while improving the transmission of data from the satellites to Earth.

The plan isn't without limitations.

For one thing, low orbit satellites don't stay in a single place. And any country could go to the trouble of disabling them. At the same time, outer space isn’t actually governed by the countries over which it floats.

The scheme discussed by hackers follows the introduction of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the United States, which many believe to be a threat to online freedom.

As PC World's Tony Bradley put it, the bill is a combination of an overzealous drive to fight Internet piracy, with elected representatives who don't know the difference between DNS, IM, and MP3. In short, SOPA is a "draconian legislation that far exceeds its intended scope, and threatens the Constitutional rights of law abiding citizens," he wrote.

And apparently those who typically don't follow the law -- hackers -- think there's something they can do about it.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2471...ml#tk.rss_news





Dot-Dash-Diss: The Gentleman Hacker's 1903 Lulz
Paul Marks

A century ago, one of the world’s first hackers used Morse code insults to disrupt a public demo of Marconi's wireless telegraph

LATE one June afternoon in 1903 a hush fell across an expectant audience in the Royal Institution's celebrated lecture theatre in London. Before the crowd, the physicist John Ambrose Fleming was adjusting arcane apparatus as he prepared to demonstrate an emerging technological wonder: a long-range wireless communication system developed by his boss, the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. The aim was to showcase publicly for the first time that Morse code messages could be sent wirelessly over long distances. Around 300 miles away, Marconi was preparing to send a signal to London from a clifftop station in Poldhu, Cornwall, UK.

Yet before the demonstration could begin, the apparatus in the lecture theatre began to tap out a message. At first, it spelled out just one word repeated over and over. Then it changed into a facetious poem accusing Marconi of "diddling the public". Their demonstration had been hacked - and this was more than 100 years before the mischief playing out on the internet today. Who was the Royal Institution hacker? How did the cheeky messages get there? And why?

It had all started in 1887 when Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of the electromagnetic waves predicted by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865. Discharging a capacitor into two separated electrodes, Hertz ionised the air in the gap between them, creating a spark. Miraculously, another spark zipped between two electrodes a few metres away: an electromagnetic wave from the first spark had induced a current between the second electrode pair. It meant long and short bursts of energy - "Hertzian waves" - could be broadcast to represent the dots and dashes of Morse code. Wireless telegraphy was born, and Marconi and his company were at the vanguard. Marconi claimed that his wireless messages could be sent privately over great distances. "I can tune my instruments so that no other instrument that is not similarly tuned can tap my messages," Marconi boasted to London's St James Gazette in February 1903.

That things would not go smoothly for Marconi and Fleming at the Royal Institution that day in June was soon apparent. Minutes before Fleming was due to receive Marconi's Morse messages from Cornwall, the hush was broken by a rhythmic ticking noise sputtering from the theatre's brass projection lantern, used to display the lecturer's slides. To the untrained ear, it sounded like a projector on the blink. But Arthur Blok, Fleming's assistant, quickly recognised the tippity-tap of a human hand keying a message in Morse. Someone, Blok reasoned, was beaming powerful wireless pulses into the theatre and they were strong enough to interfere with the projector's electric arc discharge lamp.

Mentally decoding the missive, Blok realised it was spelling one facetious word, over and over: "Rats". A glance at the output of the nearby Morse printer confirmed this. The incoming Morse then got more personal, mocking Marconi: "There was a young fellow of Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily," it trilled. Further rude epithets - apposite lines from Shakespeare - followed.

The stream of invective ceased moments before Marconi's signals from Poldhu arrived. The demo continued, but the damage was done: if somebody could intrude on the wireless frequency in such a way, it was clearly nowhere near as secure as Marconi claimed. And it was likely that they could eavesdrop on supposedly private messages too.

Marconi would have been peeved, to say the least, but he did not respond directly to the insults in public. He had no truck with sceptics and naysayers: "I will not demonstrate to any man who throws doubt upon the system," he said at the time. Fleming, however, fired off a fuming letter to The Times of London. He dubbed the hack "scientific hooliganism", and "an outrage against the traditions of the Royal Institution". He asked the newspaper's readers to help him find the culprit.

He didn't have to wait long. Four days later a gleeful letter confessing to the hack was printed by The Times. The writer justified his actions on the grounds of the security holes it revealed for the public good. Its author was Nevil Maskelyne, a mustachioed 39-year-old British music hall magician. Maskelyne came from an inventive family - his father came up with the coin-activated "spend-a-penny" locks in pay toilets. Maskelyne, however, was more interested in wireless technology, so taught himself the principles. He would use Morse code in "mind-reading" magic tricks to secretly communicate with a stooge. He worked out how to use a spark-gap transmitter to remotely ignite gunpowder. And in 1900, Maskelyne sent wireless messages between a ground station and a balloon 10 miles away. But, as author Sungook Hong relates in the book Wireless, his ambitions were frustrated by Marconi's broad patents, leaving him embittered towards the Italian. Maskelyne would soon find a way to vent his spleen.

One of the big losers from Marconi's technology looked likely to be the wired telegraphy industry. Telegraphy companies owned expensive land and sea cable networks, and operated flotillas of ships with expert crews to lay and service their submarine cables. Marconi presented a wireless threat to their wired hegemony, and they were in no mood to roll over.

The Eastern Telegraph Company ran the communications hub of the British Empire from the seaside hamlet of Porthcurno, west Cornwall, where its submarine cables led to Indonesia, India, Africa, South America and Australia. Following Marconi's feat of transatlantic wireless messaging on 12 December 1901, ETC hired Maskelyne to undertake extended spying operations.

Maskelyne built a 50-metre radio mast (the remnants of which still exist) on the cliffs west of Porthcurno to see if he could eavesdrop on messages the Marconi Company was beaming to vessels as part of its highly successful ship-to-shore messaging business. Writing in the journal The Electrician on 7 November 1902, Maskelyne gleefully revealed the lack of security. "I received Marconi messages with a 25-foot collecting circuit [aerial] raised on a scaffold pole. When eventually the mast was erected the problem was not interception but how to deal with the enormous excess of energy."

It wasn't supposed to be this easy. Marconi had patented a technology for tuning a wireless transmitter to broadcast on a precise wavelength. This tuning, Marconi claimed, meant confidential channels could be set up. Anyone who tunes in to a radio station will know that's not true, but it wasn't nearly so obvious back then. Maskelyne showed that by using an untuned broadband receiver he could listen in.

Having established interception was possible, Maskelyne wanted to draw more attention to the technology's flaws, as well as showing interference could happen. So he staged his Royal Institution hack by setting up a simple transmitter and Morse key at his father's nearby West End music hall.

The facetious messages he sent could easily have been jumbled with those Marconi himself sent from Cornwall, ruining both had they arrived simultaneously. Instead, they drew attention to a legitimate flaw in the technology - and the only damage done was to the egos of Marconi and Fleming.

Fleming continued to bluster for weeks in the newspapers about Maskelyne's assault being an insult to science. Maskelyne countered that Fleming should focus on the facts. "I would remind Professor Fleming that abuse is no argument," he replied.

In the present day, many hackers end up highlighting flawed technologies and security lapses just like Maskelyne. A little mischief has always had its virtues.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...1903-lulz.html





TV Prices Fall, Squeezing Most Makers and Sellers
Andrew Martin

It’s a great time to buy a television, and Ram Lall, a television salesman, isn’t happy about it. In a basement showroom of J&R, the huge electronics store in Lower Manhattan, Mr. Lall says the days of making big money from televisions are in the past. Pointing to a top-of-the line, 55-inch Sony television, Mr. Lall said it would have sold for $6,000 a few years ago. The current price? $2,599.

“We are making less money because the company is forcing us to slash prices,” Mr. Lall said, standing amid rows of flickering television sets.

Televisions have become so inexpensive that the profits have largely been squeezed out of them, a result of a huge increase in manufacturing capacity that has led to an oversupply and continued downward pressure on prices from low-cost manufacturers and online retailers.

The near fire-sale prices are great for consumers, who can now buy a television for a fraction of what one cost just a few years ago.

But what is good news for consumers has been a nightmare for manufacturers of TVs and retailers that sell them. The earnings of mainstay television manufacturers like Panasonic, Toshiba and Sony have been hammered. Sony, for instance, is overhauling its television operations because of what one executive said recently was a “grave sense of crisis that we have continued to post losses in TVs.” Even newer and more nimble competitors like Samsung and LG have struggled to make much money on TVs, if any.

Seeking to stanch its losses, Sony on Monday said it would end its flat-panel joint venture with Samsung, which was set up in 2004 to capture the boom in televisions with liquid-crystal displays. Samsung, based in South Korea, will pay about $940 million for Tokyo-based Sony’s 50 percent stake; Sony aims to save on manufacturing costs while still buying panels from Samsung.

For retailers, the picture is not much better. This month, Best Buy reported a 29 percent drop in net income for the third quarter, in part because the retail chain had slashed prices on televisions and other electronics.

Perhaps even more ominously for the long term, the future of televisions appears to be more about what content they can provide, like Netflix and iTunes, than new hardware features like flat screens or 3-D technology. It is an area where television manufacturers have struggled with little success to get an edge, even as Apple and Google vow to upend the industry.

“Everybody is fighting for a limited amount of consumer dollars,” said Gregg Richard, president of PC Richard and Son, which has 66 electronics and appliance stores. “We are selling more TVs, more units, at lower retail prices.”

It does not help that consumers are reluctant to pay much more for the latest features, like 3-D and Internet connectivity. Instead, they are likely to wait patiently for a few months until the price inevitably comes down.

“People used to pay additional to get a Sony Trinitron,” said Riddhi Patel, director of television systems at IHS iSuppli, a market research firm. “But the industry has trained the consumer that any time there is a new technology, if they wait six months the price will come down.”

Paul Gagnon, director of North America TV research for DisplaySearch, which tracks the market, noted that a 60-inch LCD television by Sharp was now selling for as little as $799 — about half of what it was selling just a year ago. “Absolutely amazing,” he said.

The slump is a hangover of sorts for an industry that binged on years of double-digit growth, as consumers rushed to replace old television sets with flashy new models with new features like high definition and flat screens.

There were roughly 32 million television sets sold in North America in 2004, for an average cost of $400, Mr. Gagnon said. The average size of a television was 27 inches. Today, 44 million sets are sold a year in North America, with an average cost of $460 and an average size of 38 inches.

Consumers buy a new television set every seven years or so, and an average household owns 2.8 TVs, he said. While those numbers would suggest a bonanza for television manufacturers, Mr. Gagnon said the larger, more sophisticated sets were expensive to manufacture and cut into manufacturers’ profit margins.

To help reduce costs, manufacturers invested heavily in sophisticated new factories or retrofitted old ones that were capable of cranking out more televisions at lower cost. The problem is that the factories became operational about the time the recession hit, creating a glut of televisions and forcing prices down.

A strong yen, relative to the dollar, has further hurt Japanese manufacturers like Sony and Panasonic, while Korean manufacturers like Samsung have benefited from a weak won.

Tablet devices like iPads that can be used like televisions are also cutting into sales.

Ms. Patel, who makes her living from the TV industry, said she had a flat-panel TV and a couple of iPads in her household. “Guess what? The price of an iPad is the same as a 42-inch LCD TV. It is more personal, yet everyone can use it.”

Despite the success of the iPad, Apple has not yet transformed the television in the same manner that it did music players and mobile phones, despite years of effort. Apple introduced a television accessory in 2007 that allowed users to stream iTunes content, but consumers were not enamored. Still, Steve Jobs vowed before his death to create a television with “the simplest user interface you can image.”

Google, meanwhile, offered a second version of Google TV in October that includes apps so viewers can search cable and Web sites for movies and shows and even live concerts.

At a conference in Paris this month, Google’s chairman, Eric E. Schmidt, boldly predicted that Google TV would be offered on the majority of new televisions by the summer.

While it is too soon to know whether Apple or Google’s television ventures will succeed, Mr. Gagnon said traditional TV makers would be wise to focus on “a more intuitive user interface that just works right out of the box with other products.”

“If Apple is going to enter the space, it certainly is going to raise the bar in terms of user experience,” he said. “Traditional TV makers will have some catching up to do.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/b...d-sellers.html





Apple Sends Takedowns to Stop Pirate-Friendly iOS Apps

Pirate app haven Apptrackr revealed in an update for its Installous app installer that Apple has been cracking down on its bootlegs. "Huge" volumes of takedown requests have made it move servers to areas with looser copyright laws and impose Captcha checks to avoid the legal ramifications of direct links. New hosts were also coming to diminish the impact.

The group is warning that it can't afford the offshoring solely through donations and will have to run ads at the same time.

Little sympathy is likely to exist for Apptrackr, whose site essentially revolves around getting normally for-pay apps for free and outside of the App Store. Piracy has been a known issue for most mobile app stores, but Apple has done little to publicly acknowledge it or curb it in a conspicuous way.

Google's piracy situation is believed to be worse by its nature. As Android owners only need to check a box to install apps that aren't available in Android Market, they can visit third-party stores or download directly from the web. The company is known to take a reactive approach even to apps within the Market and hasn't pursued pirates itself.
http://www.electronista.com/articles...s.app.culture/





Italy Anti-Trust Fines Apple for Misleading Customers

Italy's anti-trust body has fined units of U.S. technology group Apple Inc a total of 900,000 euros for failing to adequately inform customers about their rights to product guarantees and assistance.

The authority said Apple Sales International, Apple Italia and Apple Retail Italia did not properly inform customers that they were entitled to two years of free assistance under Italian law. Three Apple spokesmen contacted by Reuters weren't immediately available for comment.

Information provided about an extra guarantee scheme, the "AppleCare Protection Plan," encouraged customers to buy the service without clearly explaining that it overlapped with the free assistance required by law, the competition authority said.

Apple faces a separate investigation by European regulators into whether it struck price-fixing deals with e-book publishers, blocking rivals and hurting consumers.

EU antitrust authorities are also probing Apple over its patents dispute with Samsung Electronics due to concerns that intellectual property rights may be unfairly used by some firms against their rivals.

(Reporting By Danilo Masoni and Catherine Hornby; Writing By Catherine Hornby; Editing by Helen Massy-Beresford)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7BQ0ER20111227





Should We Organise an Apple Boycott?

Apple wants embargo on Linux devices
Dr. Roy Schestowitz

APPLE continues to trouble the Linux/Android world with lawsuits and false allegations, even doctored ‘evidence’. The cult of Mr. Jobs loves to pretend that it invented the smartphones, CrunchPad-like tablets, and all things shiny.

Apple fan sites celebrate Apple patents, too. To name the new example:

On December 23, 2011, Apple filed for the trademark and icon for “Available on the App Store” under applications 302118690 in China and 010520054 in Europe.

That’s right, Europe as well. Over here, Apple has been working hard to embargo — not just sue — the competition. Apple disregards the notion of fair competition, which takes a lot of nerve for a company that built itself on knockoffs (e.g. Xerox PARC).

Over at NASDAQ.com there is a community post which says: ‘Former Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, who died in October, ardently believed Android copied much of Apple’s patented design elements, including multi-touch, swiping and its apps arrangement, according to Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs.” Jobs told Isaacson he would “spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong.”‘

“Yet More Patent Idiocy” called it a columnist at Mother Jones, who noted:

Looking for yet more reasons to feel an all-consuming contempt for software patents and the POS companies that try to enforce them? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Apple Computer’s jihad against the rest of the world’s smartphone makers…

Given the latest actions from Apple we cannot help recommending that people buy nothing from Apple. Boycott the company for being a threat to the IT landscape and also to common sense.

Apple used to be a lot more benign and I even used a Mac at work. But when Apple started the legal assaults (starting with HTC) it made it clear that it was a frantic embargo company and not a producer. Based on a very recent ruling, Apple somehow managed to get a ‘victory’ against HTC, but how much of a victory is it when you become reliant on lawsuits? Here is some more coverage of this. The Telegraph uses Christmas Eve to attack Google with Microsoft/Apple accusations and general smear campaign (the Microsoft lobbyist is cheering this on) and to quote the opening part of the aricle with an inflammatory and reckless headline:

Google’s executive chairman should know. Android, his firm’s smartphone operating system, which is up against Apple’s iOS and Microsoft’s Windows Phone, is under heavy fire from all sides. The best-selling software – along with the Samsung, HTC and Motorola hardware on which it runs – is accused in courts worldwide of plundering the original ideas of others.

There is also an interesting article in CNN and Edward J. Black writes for the Huff & Puff that “Patent Balance Needed to Help End the Smartphone Patent Wars”. To quote: “Smartphones are at the center of a new series of “patent wars,” in which technology companies are spending billions to stockpile patent arsenals. Consumers are the biggest losers in this war, as tech companies focus on costly litigation strategies instead of innovation. Some are acquiring patents to attack competitors, while others are trying to bolster their defenses.”

“The goal here is to defend, not to offend.”In this age when software patents are under constant legal scrutiny we regret to see Apple using those sorts of patents in anti-competitive ways. Apple does not always get its way and to quote the latest example: ‘Apple loses one in its iPad tablet war On ZDNet, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols gives an update on the company’s battle with Samsung. “All I really know is that while it looks like the idiotic tablet design war may be coming to an end, with patents like the one Apple got, we can count on software patents getting in the way of true programming, design and engineering innovation for decades still to come,” he writes. What’s your opinion?”‘
http://techrights.org/2011/12/26/boycott-apple-debated/





Apple and Google Each Top 10 Billion Cumulative App Downloads in 2011
John Gaudiosi

It wasn’t too long ago that on Christmas Day, consumers spent their free time away from Church and family meals playing videogames and catching Hollywood movies at the theater. But the past few years has seen an explosion of Christmas Day activity on Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Market. It’s the perfect storm of new tablets and smartphones being opened for the first time and existing customers searching for something to play or do while away with family.

Historically, more iOS and Android apps are downloaded on Christmas than on any other day of the year. As fast as loved-ones can unwrap their shiny, new Galaxy IIs, iPhones, iPads, Kindle Fires, Nooks, et cetera, they start loading them up with new apps. According to Flurry, by the end of 2011, Apple’s App Store is on pace to exceed 10 billion downloads, which will double the cumulative number of downloads earned across 2008, 2009 and 2010. The Android Market also set records, more than tripling its life-to-date downloads of 3 billion, reached in May 2011, to now over 10 billion cumulative downloads reached this December.

The researchers explored the month of December to show just how impactful Christmas Day smartphone and tablet gifts are on the industry. Flurry established a baseline using the average from the first 20 days of December. Over this period, daily activations ranged from 1.3 to 1.8 million. On Christmas Day, activations catapulted to more than 6.8 million, a 353% increase over the baseline. Compared to Christmas Day 2010, the previous single-day record, with 2.8 million device activations, Christmas 2011 grew by more than 140%.

And the first thing new tablet and smartphone users did upon activation was to explore the App Store and Android Market. A quarter of a billion downloads occurred on Christmas Day 2011, which is more than double any other day in the history of iOS and Android devices, except December 24 (for those who just couldn’t wait another day to open their presents), which delivered roughly 150 million downloads.

Flurry expects the last week of December, when so many people take a vacation from work to celebrate Christmas and New Year’s Day, to continue a record pace. In fact, over 1 billion total app downloads are expected during this week.

Being extremely thorough, the team actually broke down by the hour on Christmas Day when people opened their smartphones and tablets under the tree and started downloading apps. They started with a baseline, which is the average for a December day (Dec 1 – 20). During this period of time, there were slow spots like 5 AM, when 720,000 downloads were recorded. But the peak was much later, at 9 PM, when over 8 million download occurred.

Comparing Christmas Day to this baseline, Flurry discovered that there were over twice as many downloads per hour. And already by 9 AM, hourly downloads on Christmas exceeded 10 million. At its zenith, from 7 PM to 9 PM, hourly downloads exceeded 15 million. Between 11 AM to 11 PM, more than 175 million apps were downloaded. By itself, this half day delivered over 70% more downloads than the entire baseline day.

With more than 140,000 apps using Flurry Analytics, Flurry detects roughly 100% of all new iOS and Android devices activated each day. Flurry expects to see continued growth in smartphone and tablet sales and app downloads for both Apple and Google in 2012 and beyond. New devices will debut in January at CES 2012 in Las Vegas.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johngaud...loads-in-2011/





Untethered Jailbreak For (Most) iOS 5 Devices Now Available
John Paul Titlow

For the last three weeks, iOS hacker pod2g has been tinkering away toward an untethered iOS 5 jailbreak and blogging about his progress. We've been keeping track as he succeeds in jailbreaking device after device, starting with a third generation iPod Touch. He's now freed almost every iOS 5-compatible device from the grips of Apple's restrictions. The only ones still underway are those with A5 processors like the iPhone 4S and iPad 2.

Aware of how eager the jailbreak community is to get their hands on an untethered solution, pod2g decided to share his work with the Chronic Dev team, who develops the greenpois0n jailbreak for public use. Early this morning, an untethered jailbreak for A4 processor-based iOS 5 devices was released via both greenpois0n and redsn0w, another popular tool for jailbreaking iOS.

This is the first time such a jailbreak has been available for iOS 5 since the new mobile operating system was released in October. Previously, users could only jailbreak the OS using a "tethered" solution, meaning it required devices be connected to a desktop or laptop whenever they are rebooted. It may have hit the spot for hardcore jailbreak addicts, but for most users a solution of that nature is too cumbersome.

Starting today, the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, first generation iPad and two most recent iPod models can be jailbroken using either the greenpois0n or redsn0w tools. Now that this release is out, pod2g is going to focus on hacking the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S.

Why Jailbreak?

When it comes to jailbreaking iPhones, iPads and iPods, there's really no "killer app" to justify the move. Rather, doing so unlocks a world of unauthorized apps and user interface tweaks that aren't available via the iTunes App Store. For some, playing vintage video game emulators makes the effort worth it. For others, they like the ability to tether their phone's Internet connection to a laptop or open the phone using facial recognition instead of a pin number. Last year we rounded up more than 30 reasons to jailbreak, a list that has only grown since then.

Some of what comes out of the jailbreak community is of such high quality that Apple itself has borrowed ideas from it. The iOS 5 user notification system may look familiar to folks who had jailbroken iOS 4. Likewise, jailbreaking iOS 3 allowed users to shoot videos and customize their backgrounds, both features that are now very familiar to most iDevice owners. The company even hired jailbreak developer Nicholas Allegra (aka @Comex) as an intern in August.
https://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...A .hackernews





Launching The Kindle Fire was a Mistake
Andrew Munn

After 12 hours of taxis, greyhounds, and crammed car rides with my family, I was home for the holidays. Despite the exhausting journey, I couldn’t be more excited. Waiting for me were two packages: an HTC HD7 and a Kindle Fire.

The two devices couldn’t be more different. One is polished, elegant, smooth, responsive, intuitive with attention paid to little details. The other is slow, ugly, inconsistent, and frustrating to operate. If one year ago you told me the first device was from Microsoft and the second from Amazon, I would have laughed in your face.

Unfortunately, the Kindle Fire is downright terrible. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to like the Kindle Fire. I really did. I pre-ordered it less than an hour after it was announced. I high-fived my roommate, who worked on the Fire, for contributing to what would surely be remembered as a revolutionary device. As a former Amazonian engineer myself, I fondly remembered the oft-repeated Amazon mantra of “we are the most customer-focused company on Earth”. I was convinced Amazon would get this right. Bezos believed in amazing user experiences just as much as I did, right?

Wrong! From the moment you pick up the strangely weighty slate and press the tiny and awkwardly placed ON button, the user experience is abysmal. The swipe-to-unlock gesture is laggy. Let me repeat that, the swipe-to-unlock gesture is laggy. This is the first interaction a user has with the device and Amazon couldn’t even get it right. Adding insult to injury, it’s an extremely simple and ugly unlock-gesture, just the sweep of a mono-color bar from right to left.

For the home screen, Amazon went with a faux-real world material design in a nod to iOS design principles. There is considerable debate in the industry whether real world design metaphors are ideal. Apple says they are. The Android team says they aren’t. However, what’s not up for debate is the Fire home screen is ugly, inconsistent, and nonsensical. The recently used app carousal sits in a wooden bookshelf. It makes little sense because the app icons don’t resemble the real world. The icons are 2D, so spinning them in 3D looks strange when situated on a real-world object like a bookshelf. The apps recede into the bookshelf infinitely, which makes it clear they aren’t actually sitting on the shelf. Why is the shelf even there and if the apps are floating in space in front of it?

The notifications and settings drop down is infuriatingly hard to access because of the Fire’s habit of dropping touch events. The browser struggles to scroll even the simplest of pages. Most embarrassing, the Kindle app itself struggles to turn pages.

I’d love to go on. But this isn’t a review of the Fire. There are plenty of those on the web and chances are you’ve already read a few. Instead, I’d like to explain why the Fire was released in in such a sorry state and why this is a mistake for Amazon.

What Happened

Everything on the Fire reeks of a rush job. It’s like the team took the Facebook engineering mantra “done is better than perfect” to the logical extreme. There is no way the the Kindle team is proud of the OS they released. So what happened?

Work on much of the Fire software began in May 2011. The device launched in November. Six months is not enough time to design, build, and iterate on an OS design. Six months is just enough time to build a technically functional version. For example, take the laggy unlock gesture: an engineer probably built it in a couple weeks, showed it to a product manager who said, “looks good to me, lets move on!”, and then re-assigned the engineer to a new task. Given the short time frame, it’s almost a miracle the Fire shipped in the state it did. It could have been much, much worse. It’s a testament to the talented group of engineers Amazon hired the Fire got released at all.

That said, the Fire software is beta quality and that’s putting it nicely. So why did Amazon set such an aggressive launch timeline? To understand , you must understand Amazon and to understand Amazon is to understand Jeff Bezos. The best insight into Bezos’s thinking is in his annual letter to shareholders. In the first letter in 1997, Bezos explained Amazon’s core philosophy:

It’s All About the Long Term

This philosophy manifests itself in every part of Amazon’s business. The Kindle Fire is no different. It’s priced at a loss to gain market share. It’s the first of many devices and form factors. Expect a Kindle phone and 10” Kindle tablet next year. A Kindle TV is probably on the table too. Amazon engineered the Fire to be the center of a customer’s consumption ecosystem. Books. Movies. TV. Music. Apps. Games. Shopping. All at your finger tips, literally. Leveraging Amazon assets is a key differentiator that other Android tablet manufactures can’t hope to match.

Amazon released the Fire during Q4 2011 to capitalize on the Holiday market. Bezos likely believes that it was more important to release early and build marketshare than release a polished product. If it could, Amazon would give the Fire away for free.

The Mistake

But there in lies the problem. It’s one thing to ship beta software for free (hello Google), but it’s inexcusable to charge $200 for it. Why? Lets back up a month. It’s November 2011, and I’m on the phone with my mother. I convince her to pre-order the Kindle Fire. I tell her it’s less than half the price of an iPad, but the software will be almost as polished because it’s made by Amazon. I tell her that I already pre-ordered mine and that it’s all but guaranteed to be awesome.

Cut to this afternoon. My mother’s Kindle Fire sits unloved in its shipping box. My mother tried and tried to use it, but became frustrated when she couldn’t download apps. The Amazon app store asks you to confirm your “purchase” when you download free apps so my mother mistakenly believed she would be charged. She also tried to use it to take notes, but the included document editor, QuickOffice, doesn’t appear to include a way to make new documents (I haven’t figured out how to either). Frustrated and disappointed my mother is returning her Kindle Fire to Amazon for a refund. She just can’t spend $200 willy-nilly.

My aunt couldn’t figure out how to unlock the Fire. Watching my dad try to open the browser was painful. After ten failed taps on the label, he gave up. My sister thinks the device is slow and ugly. This was in stark contrast to the ooo’s and aww’s she gave to Windows Phone and Ice Cream Sandwich.

By releasing the Kindle Fire before it was fully cooked, Amazon has tarnished its reputation in the tablet space. Just like Windows Phone 7 is dismissed by many for its implicit association with Windows Mobile and Hotmail and IE are considered terrible despite recent gains in quality.

Yet, the drive to quickly release a product in a hot field is almost irresistible. Amazon believes growing marketshare is more important than the reputation of their tablet. This is wrong. I believe consumer tolerance for poor products is at an all time low, thanks to ten years of amazing Apple products. Unfortunately, the idea that first movers win is widely believed across the tech industry.

Take videogames. Microsoft repeatedly claimed it released the Xbox 360 first because the first console to ship wins. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the Wii beat the Xbox 360 despite shipping a year later. It’s true that the Playstation 2 won the previous generation and shipped a year before the Xbox and Gamecube, but it always had the best value: the lowest price and the most exclusive games. The Sega Saturn was the first console released in its generation, but it performed the poorest, selling less than 1/10th the number of the PlayStation 1. Why did the Sega Saturn fail? High price point and the fewest games. In other words, poor value.

In the long term, the product with the best value wins. Belief in long term planning is central to Amazon and so they must believe the Kindle Fire will deliver the best value in the long term. But, it certainly doesn’t deliver the best value right now. To deliver roughly the same value as the iPad 2, the Fire needs to be 2 / 5ths as useful. It isn’t. The app selection is pitiful, the performance and usability is abysmal, battery life is adequate at best, and it is useless as a productivity device. Amazon didn’t even include a native email client.

Consumers are snapping the Fire up because it’s $200, but they expect a tablet. Not a black brick that plays movies. The return rate will be high and Amazon will suffer for it. There is no chance my mother will buy another Amazon tablet any time soon.

So what should Amazon have done? They should have given the Fire six more months in the oven. A summer 2012 release would have been unstoppable. Imagine a $200 Kindle Fire with amazing and beautiful software released in the typically boring summer months. The value and hype would be unprecedented (except, perhaps, for when the TouchPad was $100).

The current rumors point to a Q2 2012 launch for Amazon’s next tablet, but will consumers give Amazon another shot? Considering Amazon’s impeccable track record up to now, I think they will. But, the launch could be stronger without the memory of the Fire in the back of the mind. By releasing the Fire too early, Amazon took away the magic. Perhaps it’s time Bezos took a page of out Job’s book: consumer devices should be magical, even in version 1.0.
https://plus.google.com/100838276097...ts/EvstFnKynKf





What Makes Android Revolutionary
Thom Holwerda

It all started with Apple/TechCrunch blogger M.G. Siegler making a huge fuss over something he didn't understand, and while that in and of itself isn't particularly interesting, one of the outcomes of this little internet drama is a comment on Google+ (the tenth one) that so perfectly encapsulates just how important Android is for the world that I felt the need to share it with you. It's the holiday season after all.

As some of you may recall, way back in the day, Steve Jobs said Google's use of the word "open" was disingenuous, and that Google's use of the term in relation to Android was just smokes and mirrors. While the dripping, almost gelatinous irony of Steve Jobs accusing another company of abusing a term for marketing purposes certainly wasn't lost on me, I personally wasn't particularly happy with the lack of a public source code release for Honeycomb either; in the end, however, it didn't change anything about the openness of Android - technically speaking, that is. No licenses were violated, and all the source code that had to be released was properly released (all GPL code, for instance, was readily available).

Still, Andy Rubin, Google's Android chief, felt the need to address Steve Jobs' comments, and opened a Twitter account. His first tweet gave the definition of open - a definition as rock-solid now as it was back then. As most of us will realise, this is the sequence of commands that downloads and compiles the Android source code.

the definition of open: "mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make"

A few days ago, Rubin posted a tweet about how on December 24 and 25, 3.7 million Android devices were activated. A pretty impressive number, especially since unlike, say, Apple's numbers, this covers devices actually bought and activated by customers, but excludes devices which aren't Android certified, like the Kindle Fire or many Chinese products running Android derivatives (Apple's numbers, on the other hand, only cover shipped devices - not sold devices, like many erroneously believe. Apple uses "sold" rather... Disingenuously by redefining "shipped" to "sold" in its SEC filings).

In any case, Siegler noticed that Rubin's first tweet had been deleted - conspiracy! Proof Android isn't open! Man the trebuchets! "Where did the initial tweet go? Who knows. But it sure looks like he deleted it. Deleted it in an 'open' way, I'm sure," Siegler writes, "Luckily for us all, I saved Rubin's real first tweet from October 19, 2010." Can you imagine if he hadn't saved it for us all? What a relief!

There's no conspiracy here, of course. The simple fact of the matter is that the instructions for downloading and building Android which were given in Rubin's first tweet were outdated. After the kernel.org root server was compromised, many code repositories, including Android's, were moved away from kernel.org. In other words, Rubin's commands simply don't work any more, and as such, the tweet was deleted. Again, the irony of Siegler making a fuss about this isn't lost on me.

In case you were wondering, the new definition of open:

$ repo init -u https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest -b android-4.0.3_r1

All this is remarkably uninteresting, but there's one upside to all this. In a comment posted on Google+ (the tenth one; how do you link to Google+ comments?), Clinton DeWitt explains the importance of open source in mobile, and the effect Android will have (and already is having) on the mobile industry in places other than the rich west. For the first time, a smartphone operating system is going to impact more than rich people in the US and Europe, and that is pretty darn revolutionary.

"I believe what Android is accomplishing is truly revolutionary. Mobile is the way that billions of people will one day access the Internet. And through that access, we will soon start to narrow the massive knowledge gap that currently divides the richest from the poorest populations," DeWitt explains, "That there's now an eminently capable open source mobile operating system, one that is free to use and free to fork, means that the knowledge advantage can be better and more evenly distributed across the planet than ever before."

"For some pundits, it's all about which companies are building the fanciest and most feature-rich handheld computers. Which, if we're being honest about it, are devices for those that already have everything. When you're at the top, it's great to see the tech giants going head-to-head and competing for our dollars like this. Having a few dollars, I benefit from that, too," he adds, "And yet in spite of that, I'm even more excited about seeing a $25 mobile device that has access to a killer web browser and endless mobile apps, and watching that device appear in the hands of a billion school children over the next 10 years."

The iPhone is heralded as the most revolutionary mobile phone in human history, but the cold and harsh truth is that for all the cheering and punditry, the iPhone's impact on the world is negligible. Sure, it had a huge impact on the smartphone market in rich countries - but it didn't have such an impact on the world.

For all the bad jokes directed at the company during its trying times, Nokia is the technology company that truly changed the world. Nokia put a mobile phone within every person's reach. Even people in some of the poorest places on earth were given the ability to communicate wirelessly, thanks to Nokia making the mobile phone affordable to everyone. Personally, I see this as one of the greatest achievements of the technology world, but sadly, it's often overlooked because "ooh Apple has pinch-to-zoom!!!1!"
What Nokia did for the mobile phone, Android is doing for the smartphone. It's not Apple that's going to put a smartphone in every corner of the globe - it's not Microsoft; heck, not even Google, but Android. In ten to fifteen years' time, we will look back and regard Android as the technology that enabled even the poorest people in this world to have access to the web (and thus, knowledge), just like we regard Nokia as the company that put the mobile phone in every corner of the globe.

Of all the features, of all the first world problem whining, of all the lawsuits, of all the lacking updates, of all the antennagates, of all the pentile matrix nonsense, of all the large displays, of all the design patents, of all the everything - that is what makes Android revolutionary.

And that's worth ten billion bullshit bounce-back scrolling software patents.
http://www.osnews.com/story/25465/Wh..._Revolutionary





Free Wi-Fi Coming to Japanese Vending Machines in 2012
Emily Price

Free Wi-Fi is on its way to some Japanese vending machines. Working much like a mobile hotspot at your local coffee shop, people located near the machines would be able to connect to the internet for 30 minutes at a time and surf the web.

The vending machines are for the drink company Asahi. Connecting to the web using a machine can be done without any kind of log-in, and if your initial 30-minute connection to the network expires, you can connect again and keep on surfing. The service is available to anyone, to use with any smartphone, tablet, or computer and does not require the purchase of a drink from the machine.

Why vending machine hotspots? Free internet hotspots in the country are few and far between due in part to Japan's early adoption of mobile broadband, which led to a lack of free Wi-Fi locations. Now that tablets and smartphones have taken off, there's a growing need for Wi-Fi. While there are a few hotspots at places like McDonalds, the vending machines would allow people to get connected in more areas.

Asahi has plans to roll out 1,000 of the internet-connected vending machines in 2012, with plans to expand that number to 10,000 by the end of 2017.
http://www.gizmag.com/wifi-japanese-...achines/20955/





The Coming War on General Purpose Computation

The copyright war was just the beginning
Cory Doctorow

Here's the video of my keynote last night at the 28C3, the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin, entitled "The coming war on general computation."

The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.

The problem is twofold: first, there is no known general-purpose computer that can execute all the programs we can think of except the naughty ones; second, general-purpose computers have replaced every other device in our world. There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears. There are no 3D printers, only computers that drive peripherals. There are no radios, only computers with fast ADCs and DACs and phased-array antennas. Consequently anything you do to "secure" anything with a computer in it ends up undermining the capabilities and security of every other corner of modern human society.

And general purpose computers can cause harm -- whether it's printing out AR15 components, causing mid-air collisions, or snarling traffic. So the number of parties with legitimate grievances against computers are going to continue to multiply, as will the cries to regulate PCs.

The primary regulatory impulse is to use combinations of code-signing and other "trust" mechanisms to create computers that run programs that users can't inspect or terminate, that run without users' consent or knowledge, and that run even when users don't want them to.

The upshot: a world of ubiquitous malware, where everything we do to make things better only makes it worse, where the tools of liberation become tools of oppression.

Our duty and challenge is to devise systems for mitigating the harm of general purpose computing without recourse to spyware, first to keep ourselves safe, and second to keep computers safe from the regulatory impulse.
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the...eral-purp.html





2011: The Year Intellectual Property Trumped Civil Liberties
David Kravets

Online civil liberties groups were thrilled in May when Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), the head of the powerful Judiciary Committee, announced legislation requiring the government, for the first time, to get a probable-cause warrant to obtain Americans’ e-mail and other content stored in the cloud.

But, despite the backing of a coalition of powerful tech companies, the bill to amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act was dead on arrival, never even getting a hearing before the committee Leahy heads.

In contrast, another proposal sailed through Leahy’s committee, less than two weeks after Leahy and others floated it at about the same time as his ECPA reform measure. That bill, known as the Protect IP Act, was anti-piracy legislation long sought by Hollywood that dramatically increased the government’s legal power to disrupt and shutter websites “dedicated to infringing activities.”

This dichotomy played itself out over and again in 2011, as lawmakers — Democrats and Republicans alike — turned a blind eye to important civil liberties issues, including Patriot Act reform, and instead paid heed to the content industry’s desires to stop piracy.

“Any civil liberties agenda was a complete non-starter with Congress and the Obama administration,” said Cindy Cohn, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s legal director. “They had no interest in finding any balance in civil liberties.”

It wasn’t just on the federal level, either.

In California, for example, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed legislation that would have demanded the police obtain a court warrant before searching the mobile phone of anybody arrested. But Brown, a Democrat, signed legislation authorizing the authorities to search, without a warrant, CD-stamping plants that dot Southern California’s landscape.

Underscoring that civil liberties would take a back seat in 2011 was the debate, or lack thereof, concerning the Patriot Act. The House and Senate punted in May on revising the controversial spy act adopted in the wake of 9/11. Congress extended three expiring Patriot Act spy provisions for four years, without any debate.

The three provisions extended included:

• The “roving wiretap” provision allows the FBI to obtain wiretaps from a secret intelligence court, known as the FISA court (under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act), without identifying the target or what method of communication is to be tapped.

• The “lone wolf” measure allows FISA court warrants for the electronic monitoring of a person for any reason — even without showing that the suspect is an agent of a foreign power or a terrorist. The government has said it has never invoked that provision, but the Obama administration said it wanted to retain the authority to do so.

• The “business records” provision allows FISA court warrants for any type of record, from banking to library to medical, without the government having to declare that the information sought is connected to a terrorism or espionage investigation.

While the Obama administration was lobbying against tinkering with the Patriot Act, and telling the courts that Americans have no privacy in their public movements, the White House was quietly working with the recording and motion picture industries to help broker a deal by which internet companies would block internet access to repeat online infringers.

E-mails obtained via the Freedom of Information Act showed just how cozy the administration was with the content industry: The nation’s copyright czar, Victoria Espinel, used her personal e-mail account with industry officials to help mediate the plan.

The administration said in a statement to Wired that Espinel was undertaking “precisely the work outlined in the administration’s 2010 Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property Enforcement.”

By the same token, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board remained dormant again for another year. It was chartered by statute in 2004 and given more power in 2007 to “analyze and review actions the executive branch takes to protect the nation from terrorism, ensuring that the need for such actions is balanced with the need to protect privacy and civil liberties” and to “ensure that liberty concerns are appropriately considered in the development and implementation of laws, regulations, and policies related to efforts to protect the nation against terrorism.”

The board has remained without members since January 2008, a year before Obama’s inauguration. Its website at privacyboard.gov doesn’t resolve.

Two weeks ago, President Barack Obama finally filled out the five-member board, but his nominees still have to be confirmed by the Senate.

Had the board been active, it would have had plenty to say on the “development and implementation of laws.”

“Had the board been functional, it might have been a valuable participant in current deliberations over military detention authority, for example,” said Steven Aftergood, who directs the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy. “It might also have conducted investigative oversight into any number of other counterterrorism policies, as mandated by law.”

All the while, Espinel and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office spent the year seizing online domains of websites allegedly hawking counterfeit and copyright goods. All told, the government has seized more than 350 domains taken as part of a forfeiture program known as “Operation in Our Sites” that began a little more than a year ago. The authorities were using the same asset-forfeiture laws used to seize cars and houses belonging to suspected drug dealers.

A hip-hop music site’s domain name was seized for a year and given back three weeks ago, without ever affording the site’s New York owner a chance to challenge the taking. The legal case surrounding the takedown, which centered on MP3s posted by the site, is sealed from public view at the request of ICE. The site’s lawyer says the MP3s listed in the seizure order had been sent to the site by the labels themselves, seeking publicity.

That prompted Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) to demand that the Justice Department divulge how many other domains are caught in a legal black hole.

Lawmakers’ drive to bolster intellectual property rights of some of the country’s biggest political donors began in earnest in May when Leahy introduced the Protect IP Act, and two weeks later it sailed through his Judiciary Committee.

The Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, is nearly an exact copy and is now being debated in the House Judiciary Committee.

Both are offshoots of the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act introduced last year.

Under the old COICA draft, the government was authorized to obtain court orders to seize so-called generic top-level domains ending in .com, .org and .net. The new legislation, with the same sponsors, narrows that somewhat.

Instead of allowing for the seizure of domain names, it allows the Justice Department to obtain court orders demanding American ISPs block citizens from reaching a site by modifying the net’s Domain Name System. DNS works as the net’s phone book, turning domain names like Wired.com into IP addresses such as 165.193.220.20, which browsers use to actually get to the site.

On May 26, the day the Protect IP Act passed the Senate Judiciary Committee, Wyden exercised a rarely used Senate procedure and held the measure from going to the Senate floor for a vote, where it would likely pass. The measure is expected to come back in the new year, and it’s likely Wyden’s hold can be overridden by a vote of 60 senators.

Wyden has promised to wage a one-man filibuster if necessary.

“By ceding control of the internet to corporations through a private right of action, and to government agencies that do not sufficiently understand and value the internet, PIPA represents a threat to our economic future and to our international objectives,” Wyden said.

DNS experts Steve Crocker, David Dagon, Dan Kaminsky, Danny McPherson and Paul Vixie wrote in a white paper that the Protect IP Act “would promote the development of techniques and software that circumvent use of the DNS.”

“These actions,” they wrote, “would threaten the DNS’s ability to provide universal naming, a primary source of the internet’s value as a single, unified, global communications network.”

They also argue that the proposal undermines a government-approved new DNS security measure known as DNSSEC that aims to prevent criminals from poisoning the domain-name lookup system with false information in order to “hijack” people trying to visit their bank online.

Regardless, the SOPA measure in the House, which is virtually identical to PIPA in the Senate, looked like it would sail out of the House Judiciary Committee two weeks ago.

But Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who heads the House Judiciary Committee, abruptly continued the hearing so lawmakers could hear from internet architecture experts before taking a vote. A Motion Picture Association vice president had testified before the committee that concerns over DNS redirecting were “overstated.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-California) said the measure went too far.

“We never tried to filter the telephone networks to block illegal content on the telephone network,” she said, “yet that is precisely what this legislation would do relative to the internet.”

The hearing will resume in the new year.

But it’s unlikely that lawmakers will return to the now-forgotten bill that would prevent law enforcement from sifting through your online e-mail account without first proving probable cause to a judge.

Consider that October marked the 25th anniversary of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the law that allows the authorities to access your e-mail without a court warrant.

The law, known as ECPA and signed by President Ronald Reagan, came at a time when e-mail was used mostly by nerdy scientists, when phones without wires hardly worked and when the World Wide Web didn’t exist. Four presidencies and hundreds of millions of personal computers later, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act has aged dramatically, providing little protection for citizens from the government’s prying eyes — despite the law’s language remaining much the same.

The silver anniversary of ECPA had prompted the nation’s biggest tech companies and prominent civil liberties groups to again lobby for an update to what was once the nation’s leading privacy legislation protecting Americans’ electronic communications from warrantless searches and seizures.

In the 1980s, ECPA protected Americans’ e-mail from warrantless surveillance — despite ECPA allowing the government to access e-mail without a court warrant if it was six months or older and stored on a third-party’s server. The tech world now refers to these servers as “the cloud,” and others just think of Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Facebook and Gmail.

ECPA was adopted at a time when e-mail wasn’t stored on servers for a long time. It just sat there briefly before recipients downloaded it to their inbox on software running on their own computer. E-mail more than six months old was assumed abandoned, and that’s why the law allowed the government to get it without a warrant.

On Oct. 20, Leahy said “this law is significantly outdated and outpaced by rapid changes in technology.” He promised hearings “before the end of the calendar year” in the Judiciary Committee he heads, despite the Obama’s Justice Department opposition to the change.

But there was no hearing.

Presumably, it was just forgotten amid the rush to alter the internet at the behest of the same industry that tried to ban the VCR and MP3 players.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...-liberties-ip/













Until next week,

- js.



















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