Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 3rd, '12

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"I am a fighter and I am going to fight this thing. I feel confident I am going to win because at the end of the day I know, my family knows, and everybody around me knows that I am no criminal and I have done nothing wrong. So I will fight it. It’s all I can do." – Kim Dotcom



































March 3rd, 2012




Police Censor Google, Facebook and 8,000 Other Sites by Accident
enigmax

A “human error” carried out by the police resulted in thousands of websites being completely blocked at the DNS level yesterday. Danish visitors to around 8,000 sites including Google and Facebook were informed that the sites were being blocked by the country’s High Tech Crime Unit due to them offering child pornography, a situation which persisted for several hours.

Censorship online is an emotive issue.

Some people believe that all information should be free and as adults it should be our right to be able to make our own choices in deciding what to view. In other countries that is not an option since oppressive regimes take control in order to maintain their power base.

In the West, online censorship takes different forms. In addition to censorship aimed at tackling serious criminality, increasingly entertainment companies are pushing to have sites blocked to protect their corporate interests. Opponents argue that a free and open Internet overrides the need to protect a rightsholder every time, and that mechanisms such as DNS blockades could break the Internet.

In Denmark yesterday the Internet didn’t exactly collapse, but for thousands of businesses it was hardly service as usual.

For several hours, customers of ISP Siminn (although it could have easily been the whole country) were denied access to thousands of websites including Google and Facebook. When attempting to view any of the blocked pages visitors were given a worrying message relating to the most emotive blocking reason of all – the protection of children.

“The National High Tech Crime Center of the Danish National Police [NITEC], who assist in investigations into crime on the internet, has informed Siminn Denmark A/S, that the internet page which your browser has tried to get in contact with may contain material which could be regarded as child pornography,” the message began.

“Upon the request of The National High Tech Crime Center of the Danish National Police, Siminn Denmark A/S has blocked the access to the internet page.”

NITEC is responsible for maintaining a list of sites which they want to be made unavailable to Danish citizens. Each day the country’s Internet service providers retrieve the list and then apply DNS blockades across their infrastructure. Yesterday, however, someone made a huge mistake.

According to NITEC chief Johnny Lundberg, it began when an employee at the police center decided to move from his own computer to that of a colleague.

“He sat down and was about to make an investigation, and in doing so he placed a list of legitimate sites in the wrong folder,” Lundberg explained. “Before becoming aware of the error, two ISPs retrieved the list of sites.”

That list contained 8,000 sites.

After becoming aware of the problem NITEC corrected the error but it took at least 3 hours for customers of the ISPs to regain access to the sites in question. Fortunately no more ISPs adopted the erroneous lists in the meantime, but that was by sheer luck.

Lundberg said that his organization was sorry for the mistake and has now adopted a new system whereby blocked sites have to now be approved by two employees instead of one, although why that was not the case already for such a serious process is up for debate.

The other question is how at the flick of a switch do 8,000 sites suddenly get added to a blacklist – for whatever reason – without any kind of oversight. Denmark’s IT-Political Association is critical and has called for ISPs to cease cooperation with the voluntary scheme which operates without any kind of judicial review.

“Today’s story shows that the police are not able to secure against manual errors that could escalate into something that actually works as a ‘kill switch’ for the Internet,” the group said in a statement.
https://torrentfreak.com/google-face...locked-120302/





Republicans Introduce Softer Cyber Security Bill
Diane Bartz

Eight top Republicans introduced a cybersecurity bill on Thursday aimed at stopping an overarching, bipartisan measure proposed earlier this month in order to better protect critical infrastructure.

The measure, introduced by the top Republicans on eight committees, would require federal contractors to inform the government about cyber threats and make it easier for government regulators and corporations to communicate about threats.

"We believe that ensuring our nation's cybersecurity is critical. We have a bill that would do plenty to meet current challenges," said Senator John McCain in introducing the bill.

McCain, a critic of a measure supported by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, argued that the Republican-backed legislation was better because it included very little new regulation.

The Arizona Republican has also been critical of proposals to have the Department of Homeland Security take a leading role in pushing better cyber security practices on sometimes reluctant industries.

Senator Saxby Chambliss, a co-sponsor of the McCain measure, agreed, saying: "More government is seldom a solution to any problem."

The Senate is also considering a rival bill Reid has said will be brought quickly to the Senate floor.

That bill is aimed at requiring upgrades in security for critical national infrastructure, which some cyber experts argue is needed to prevent a catastrophic attack on the nation's water supply, electric grid, financial networks and transportation infrastructure.

The McCain bill does not include this requirement.

The Reid-backed bill's sponsors include Senators John Rockefeller and Dianne Feinstein, both Democrats; Susan Collins, a Republican, and Joseph Lieberman, an independent.

There has been widespread and growing concern about incursions into U.S. networks by hackers looking to steal everything from state secrets to credit card numbers.

Victims have included defense contractors like Lockheed Martin Corp, web search leader Google Inc, Citigroup bank and exchange operator Nasdaq OMX.

Politicians have not been immune. In 2008, hackers targeted both President Barack Obama and McCain's presidential campaigns.

Reid and the four lawmakers who proposed the broader bill said they viewed the McCain legislation positively.

Reid said in a statement that the McCain measure highlighted areas of agreement. Both measures discuss the need for better information sharing mechanisms. "I look forward to a debate on the Senate floor that will ensure this bill and other proposals get a fair hearing, and which will allow thorough consideration of amendments to improve the legislation," Reid said.

The White House is eager to see cybersecurity legislation, but Howard Schmidt, the White House cybersecurity policy coordinator, said that the federal government could do more even without legislation. As one example, the Department of Energy could push harder to prompt electric utilities to ward off hacking intrusions.

The U.S. House of Representatives is considering legislation that overlaps with the Senate measures on some points.

For example, the House's Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence approved a bill in December that would expand a pilot Pentagon program for sharing classified and sensitive threat information with defense contractors and their Internet service providers.

USTelecom, a broadband association, said it supported the McCain measure because it would effectively protect against cybersecurity threats, especially by improving information-sharing.

"We can support the bill introduced today because it pursues those objectives without creating new bureaucracies or regulatory mandates that would erode, rather than enhance, the ability of network providers to provide nimble and effective responses to cyber threats," said USTelecom President Walter McCormick.

(Reporting By Diane Bartz and Joseph Menn; Editing by Todd Eastham and Paul Simao)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...82024Z20120302





FBI Turns Off Thousands of GPS Devices After Supreme Court Ruling
Julia Angwin

The Supreme Court’s recent ruling overturning the warrantless use of GPS tracking devices has caused a “sea change” inside the U.S. Justice Department, according to FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann.

Mr. Weissmann, speaking at a University of San Francisco conference called “Big Brother in the 21st Century” on Friday, said that the court ruling prompted the FBI to turn off about 3,000 GPS tracking devices that were in use.

These devices were often stuck underneath cars to track the movements of the car owners. In U.S. v. Jones, the Supreme Court ruled that using a device to track a car owner without a search warrant violated the law.

After the ruling, the FBI had a problem collecting the devices that it had turned off, Mr. Weissmann said. In some cases, he said, the FBI sought court orders to obtain permission to turn the devices on briefly – only in order to locate and retrieve them.
Mr. Weissmann said that the FBI is now working to develop new guidelines for the use of GPS devices. He said the agency is also working on guidelines to cover the broader implications of the court decision beyond GPS devices.

For instance, he said, agency is now “wrestling” with the legality of whether agents can lift up the lid of a trash can without committing trespass. The majority opinion in U.S. v. Jones held that the agents had trespassed when placing the GPS device on a car without warrant.

He said the agency is also considering the implications of the concurring justices – whose arguments were largely based on the idea that a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the totality of their movements, even if those movements are in public.

“From a law enforcement perspective, even though its not technically holding, we have to anticipate how it’s going to go down the road,” Mr. Weissmann said.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/02/...-court-ruling/





Illinois Judge: Law Barring Recording Police is Unconstitutional
Megan Geuss

In Cook County today Judge Stanley J. Sacks declared Illinois' eavesdropping law—which is one of the toughest in the nation—unconstitutional in his ruling in the case of Christopher Drew, who was charged with the felony crime in 2009.

The eavesdropping law prohibits citizens from making audio or visual recordings of others without every recorded person's explicit consent. Sixty-year-old artist Drew audio-recorded his interaction with a police officer who was arresting him for selling art patches at the side of the road. A police officer found the tape recorder and Drew found himself with a Class 1 felony charge, which carries up to 15 years in prison. “That's one step below attempted murder,” Drew said in a January interview with the New York Times.

A citizen's right to record police has certainly been a contentious topic of debate recently. The First Circuit US Court of Appeals has considered whether making recordings of police with the recording device in plain sight is considered a secret recording or not, and a Miami photojournalist was arrested and had his videos of police activity deleted while he was detained.

In this particular case, however, Judge Sacks seemed to declare Illinois' law unconstitutional not because it's a citizen's right to record interactions between the police and the public, but because the law was too far-reaching.

"The Illinois Eavesdropping Statute potentially punishes as a felony a wide array of wholly innocent conduct," noted Judge Sacks in his opinion, according to the Sun-Times. "A parent making an audio recording of their child’s soccer game, but in doing so happens to record nearby conversations, would be in violation of the Eavesdropping Statute.”
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...titutional.ars





Wikileaks and Anonymous Join Forces to Reveal How Dumb Our Intelligence Is
Joshua_Kopstein

The most recent bombshell of confidential documents dropped by infamous watchdog organization Wikileaks is already looking to have an enormous impact on our understanding of government security practices. Specifically, intimate details on the long-suspected fact that the U.S. has been paying a whole lot of money to have private corporations spy on citizens, activists and other groups and individuals on their ever-expanding, McCarthy-style shitlist. But perhaps more importantly, the docs demonstrate something very interesting about the nature of U.S. government intelligence: They haven’t really got much of it.

U.S. government intelligence contractor Stratfor is the first of the red-handed entities being outed in this newest batch of docs, which were delivered to Wikileaks care of the equally infamous hacking collective Anonymous. They show that the company, at the behest of U.S. intelligence agencies, had been conspiring a program of clandestine dragnet surveillance targeting private citizens and organizations based on political beliefs and allegiances, among other things. But what’s even more ludicrous is that the government is getting a bum deal — a look at the recently revealed “intel” reveals that a lot of it is just pure hogwash, and Stratfor very likely knows it.

In one example, emails reveal that Stratfor had been tracking the political performance art collective The Yes Men, a group famous for impersonating politicians and corporate representatives in order to showcase the absurdity and corruption present within powerful institutions. But “tracking” in this case merely involved selling the government a list of public appearances planned by the group’s members.

Jamal Ghosn, associate editor at the Lebanese publication Al Akhbar, a Wikileaks media partner, also reported that Stratfor employees focused on activities in that region were simply using Google Translate on their articles as a way to glean intel for the United States. Not exactly “intelligence” on either count, but very much akin to paying untold amounts for an office temp to frequently type things into a search engine. Remember to file your taxes this month, folks!

Government waste and mismanagement in the intelligence community shouldn’t be such a shocking revelation, however. At last year’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, former senior official of the U.S. National Security Agency, Thomas Drake warned us about the U.S. government’s ham-fisted and ineffectual intelligence-gathering programs like Trailblazer, a billion dollar effort that in the end, he says, “delivered nothing but a few PowerPoint slides.”
http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/2/2...ntelligence-is





News Corp. Hacker Mulcaire Said to Have U.S. Phone Numbers Among His Notes
Erik Larson

The former News Corp. private detective who hacked phones for the News of the World had U.S. telephone numbers among the details of British hacking victims in his notes, a person familiar with the matter said.

Glenn Mulcaire, jailed in 2007 for illegally accessing mobile-phone messages of people in the U.K., had the numbers of singer Charlotte Church’s Los Angeles agent and New York publicist among thousands of pages of notes seized by police, said the person, who declined to be identified because they aren’t authorized to speak publicly.

The evidence, held by the police in London, may be of interest to U.S. prosecutors. New York-based News Corp. has been the subject of a probe into whether News of the World sought to hack phones of victims of the 9-11 terrorist attacks. A separate U.S. inquiry was begun into whether bribes of U.K. police officers violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or FCPA, which bars overseas corruption by U.S. companies.

The presence of the U.S. phone numbers in Mulcaire’s notes also may complicate the company’s effort there to contain lawsuits. News Corp. (NWS) has said it’s cooperating with three U.K. police probes into phone hacking, computer hacking and bribery of public officials by two of its tabloids.

“I’m going to work with the authorities to the fullest extent I can, and if there’s anything I can do to help the case, I will,” said Church’s publicist, Kevin Chiaramonte of Paul Freundlich Associates in New York, in a phone interview yesterday. The discovery, he said, was a “bit of a shock.” The publicist said he expects to be contacted by Scotland Yard, which declined to comment on the U.S. phone numbers. The notes didn’t indicate if the phones had been hacked, the person said.

Personal Phones Hacked

Church, 26, whose personal phones and those of her parents were hacked by Mulcaire for at least four years, settled a lawsuit against News Corp.’s U.K. unit Feb. 23.

Calls to News Corp. U.K. unit’s press office in London and News Corp. spokesman Jack Horner in New York weren’t immediately returned. Ellen Davis, a spokeswoman for Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, declined to comment.

Church’s Los Angeles-based agent works for the Hollywood talent-management company William Morris Endeavor LLC, or WME, the person said, declining to identify them. A message left at the company’s office wasn’t returned.

Two numbers of London employees at Irving Azoff’s Live Nation Entertainment Inc. (LYV), who worked with Church, were also among Mulcaire’s notes. A call to Live Nation wasn’t immediately returned.

Wedding Singer

Church sang at News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch’s wedding in 1999 when she was 13-year-old and was later targeted by his newspapers while she grew up.

Church, whose 2005 song “Crazy Chick” reached No. 2 on the U.K. pop charts, told a judge-led inquiry into press ethics in November that Mulcaire’s evidence includes “many pages of names, numbers, notes, addresses, pin numbers and the fact that my mother and I were each a ‘project.”’

News International, which shuttered News of the World in July in an attempt to contain public anger, still faces possible claims by more than 800 “likely” victims identified by police as they sift through 11,000 pages of Mulcaire’s notes.

Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, competes with News Corp. units in providing financial news and information.

The case is Church v. News Group Newspapers, High Court of Justice Chancery Division, No. HC11C03393.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-0...his-notes.html





Sherlock Confirms that ‘Irish SOPA’ has Been Signed Into Law

JUNIOR MINISTER SEÁN Sherlock has this afternoon confirmed that the controversial statutory instrument that reinforces online copyright laws in Ireland has been signed into law.

The controversial ‘Irish SOPA’ legislation was the subject of much debate last month amid concerns it would limit internet freedom. Today Sherlock confirmed that the European Union (Copyright and Related Rights) Regulations 2012 has been signed into law.

The statutory instrument will make it possible for copyright holders to seek court injunctions against companies such as internet service providers or social networks whose systems are hosting copyright-infringing material.

Sherlock, the Minister for Research and Innovation, acknowledged in his statement today that prior to signing the statutory instrument there had been a call for it to be more detailed and prescriptive.

But he said that the High Court now has “significant guidance” from the European Court of Justice regarding the implementation of the measure.

According to the Department of Jobs, Innovation and Skills, it will be now up to the court to ensure that any remedy provided will uphold the freedom of internet service providers, or ISPs, to conduct their business.

It will also have to offer an “absolute requirement” that an ISP cannot be mandated to carry out monitoring of the information it carries. It must also ensure that measures implemented are “fair and proportionate” and not “unnecessarily complicated or costly”.

It also states that fundamental rights of an ISPs’ customers must be respected by the court including their right to protection of their personal data and their freedom to receive or impart information.

Copyright review

In conjunction with the announcement that the statutory instrument has been signed, Sherlock said that he was launching the next stage of the Copyright Review Committee which is “aimed at removing barriers to innovation”.

“On many previous occasions I have outlined the reasons why it is necessary for us to proceed to sign this Statutory Instrument in order to ensure compliance with our obligations under EU law,” Sherlock said in a statement.

“As there are clearly many diverse interests, it is important that interested parties come together and work in a constructive way to map the path forward.

“For this reason I am particularly anxious that the consultation paper launched today is studied and comprehensively responded to by all interested parties.

“The challenge now is to examine what measures we can take to develop Ireland’s laws in this area in such a way as to provide the greatest possible encouragement for innovation in the creative and digital industries to take place here.”

In launching the consultation paper from the Copyright Review Committee, Sherlock said he hoped it would contribute to a debate that would establish Irish copyright law “on a firm footing”.

“I am committed to reviewing and updating the Copyright legislation currently in place in order to strike the correct balance between encouraging innovation and protecting creativity.

“This paper has been prepared by the Copyright Review Committee in response to submissions received and public engagement.

“I urge all interested parties, including information providers and ISPs, innovators, rights holders, consumers and end-users, to study it carefully and engage in a constructive debate on all the issues,” he added.
http://www.thejournal.ie/sherlock-co...69634-Feb2012/





An Open Letter to Chris Dodd
Eric Steven Raymond

Mr. Dodd, I hear you’ve just given a speech in which you said “Hollywood is pro-technology and pro-Internet.” It seems you’re looking for interlocutors among the coalition that defeated SOPA and PIPA, and are looking for some politically feasible compromise that will do something against the problem of Internet piracy as you believe you understand it.

There isn’t any one person who can answer your concerns. But I can speak for one element of the coalition that blocked those two bills; the technologists. I’m not talking about Google or the technology companies, mind you – I’m talking about the actual engineers who built the Internet and keep it running, who write the software you rely on every day of your life in the 21st century.

I’m one of those engineers – you rely on my code every time you use a browser or a smartphone or a game console. I’m not exactly a leader among them as you would understand the term, because we don’t have those and don’t want them. But I am a well-known philosopher/elder of the tribe (I’ll name two others later in this letter), and also one of our few public spokespersons. In the late 1990s I helped found the open-source software movement.

I’m writing to educate you about our concerns, which are not exactly the same as those of the group of firms you think of as “Silicon Valley”. We have our own culture and our own agenda, usually coincident with but occasionally at odds with the businesspeople who run the tech industry.

The difference matters because the businesspeople rely on us to do the actual technical work – and since the rise of the Internet, if we don’t like where a firm’s strategy is going, it tends not to get there. Wise bosses have learned to accommodate us as much as possible and pick the few fights they must have with their engineering talent very, very carefully. Google, in particular, got its huge market capitalization by being better at managing this symbiosis than anyone else.

I can best introduce you to our concerns by quoting another of our philosopher/elders, John Gilmore. He said: “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

To understand that, you have to grasp that “the Internet” isn’t just a network of wires and switches, it’s also a sort of reactive social organism composed of the people who keep those wires humming and those switches clicking. John Gilmore is one of them. I’m another. And there are some things we will not stand having done to our network.

We will not have it censored. We built the Internet as a tool to make every individual human being on the planet more empowered. What the users do with the Internet is up to them – not up to Hollywood, not up to politicians, and not even up to us who built it. Whatever else we Internet geeks may disagree on among ourselves, we will not allow our gift of fire to be snuffed out by jealous gods.

Because we will not have the Internet censored, we are also implacably hostile to any attempts to impose controls on it that could be used for censorship – whether or not that is the stated intent of the controls. That is why we were absolutely unanimous against SOPA and PIPA, and a significant reason that you lost that fight.

You speak as though you believe that the technology industry stopped SOPA/PIPA, and that by negotiating with the industry you can set up the conditions for a successful second round. It won’t work that way; the movement that stopped SOPA/PIPA (and is now scuttling ACTA) was much more organic and grass-roots than that. Silicon Valley can’t give you the political firepower or cover you’d need. All you’ll get from them is a bunch of meaningless press conferences and empty platitudes from CEOs who have nothing actually to gain by helping you and really wish you’d go away so they can get back to their jobs.

Meanwhile, the engineers inside and outside those companies will take it as their duty to ensure that you lose that battle again if you try to fight it again. Because there aren’t a lot of us, but the vast mass of Internet users – who do vote in numbers large enough to swing elections – have figured out that we’re on their side and we’re their early-warning system. When we sound the tocsin – as we did, for example, by blacking out Wikipedia – they will mobilize and you will be defeated.

Accordingly, one of the cardinal rules for any politician who wants to have a long career in a 21st-century democracy has to be “don’t screw with the Internet”. Because it will screw you right back. At least two primary challenges to SOPA/PIPA sponsors are in the news right now because they wouldn’t have happened without the popular outrage against it.

Hollywood wants you to screw with the Internet, because Hollywood thinks it has problems it can solve that way. Hollywood also wants you to think we (the engineers) are foes of “intellectual property” and in willing cahoots with criminals, pirates, and thieves. Neither of these claims is true, and it’s important that you understand exactly how they’re not true.

Many of us make our living from “intellectual property”. A few of us (not including me) are genuinely opposed to it on principle. Most of us (including me) are willing to respect intellectual property rights, but there’s a place where that respect abruptly ends. It stops at exactly the point where DRM threatens to cripple our computers and our software.

Richard Stallman, one of our more radical philosophers, uses the phrase “treacherous computing” to describe what happens when a PC, or a smartphone, or any sort of electronics, is not fully under the control of its user. Treacherous computers block what you can see or hear. Treacherous computers spy on you. Treacherous computers cut you off from their full potential as communications devices and tools.

Treacherous computing is our second line in the sand. Most of us don’t actually have anything against DRM in itself; it’s because DRM becomes a vehicle for treachery that we loathe it. Not allowing you to skip the advertisements on a DVD is a small example; not allowing you to back up your books and music is a larger one. Then there was the ironically pointed case of the book “1984″ being silently disappeared from the e-readers of customers who had paid for it…

Some companies propose, in order to support DRM, locking up computers so they can only only run “approved” operating systems; that might bother ordinary users less than those other treacheries, but to us would be utterly intolerable. If you imagine a sculptor told that his new chisel would only cut shapes pre-approved by a committee of shape vendors, you might begin to fathom the depths of our anger at these proposals.

We engineers do have an actual problem with Hollywood and the music industry, but it’s not the one you probably assume. To be blunt (because there isn’t any nice way to put this) we think Big Entertainment is largely run by liars and thieves who systematically rip off the artists they claim to be protecting with their DRM, then sue their own customers because they’re too stupid to devise an honest way to make money.

I’m sure you don’t agree with this judgment, but you need to understand how widespread it is among technologists in order to get why all those claims about “piracy” and lost revenues find us so unsympathetic. It’s bad enough that we feel like our Internet and our computers are under attack, but having laws like SOPA/PIPA/ACTA pushed at us on behalf of a special-interest group we consider no better than gangsters and dimwits makes it much worse.

Some of us think the gangsters’ behavior actually justifies piracy. Most of us don’t agree that those two wrongs add up to a right, but I can tell you this: if you make the technologists choose between the big-media gangsters and the content pirates, effectively all of us will side with the content pirates as the lesser of the two evils. Because maybe both sides are stealing on a vast scale, but only one of them doesn’t want to screw with our Internet or cripple our computers.

We’d really prefer to oppose both groups, though. Our sympathies in this mess are with the artists being ripped off by both sides.

Consider this letter our “Don’t tread on me!”. Our agenda is to protect our own liberty to create and our users’ liberty to enjoy those creations as they see fit. We have no give and no compromise on either of those, but long as Hollywood stays out of our patch (that is, no more attempts to lock down our Internet or our tools) we’ll stay out of Hollywood’s.

And if you’d like to discuss some ways of fighting piracy that don’t involve trampling on us and our users, we do have some ideas.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4155





Why Wait? Six Ways that Congress Could Fix Copyright, Now
Matthew Lasar

Putting copyright's pieces back together will take serious time and effort.

The battle over implementation of the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement in Europe is heating up, while the war of words over the Stop Online Privacy Act is still in play. Rightsholders have called critics of these measures "demagogues" and "dirty tricksters," but the critics show no sign of retreating from their opposition.

The fight against copyright maximalism has largely been negative. To offer something more positive, Public Knowledge (PK for short) has released an Internet Blueprint—six bills that the group says could "help make the internet a better place for everyone" and that "Congress could pass today."

We're not expecting Congress to pass them today (or tomorrow), but they're at least an intriguing start point for debate. Here's a quick version each.

Shorten copyright terms

The current copyright protection time window is quite large: life of the creator plus a whopping 70 years (or 95 years total for corporate authorship). It's hard to believe that when the Republic was young, copyright lasted 14 years, renewable by another 14.

"Continually expanding the term of copyright comes at a cost," the new Blueprint contends. "By giving an author a monopoly on an expression, it prevents other people from building on that expression to create new works."

The Public Knowledge reform proposal isn't particularly radical, though—it would reduce most copyright terms to life of the author plus 50 years, or "a flat 50 years if the author was an employee."

Stop abuses of the DMCA

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows copyright holders and their representatives to file takedown notices against sites that they claim are hosting infringing content. The original content poster can file a counter-notice, but the content still has to stay down for ten days.

The problem, PK says, is that right now there isn't much risk in sending a site a bogus takedown notice. "When it comes to takedown notices, it often seems like alleged infringers are assumed guilty until proven innocent," the Blueprint contends.

The proposed fix: Harmed defendants should be able to ask for damages from $200 to $2,500. A judge should be able to boost that upper limit forfeit by a factor of ten if she finds that the takedown demander was lying.

Cracking DRM

At present, if you deploy some kind of device to cut through the DRM on a DVD, you are a law breaker, even if you plan to utilize the copyrighted content legally. Public Knowledge has been calling on Congress to address this inconsistency for quite some time (as has Ars Technica's Tim Lee), allowing users to bypass digital locks if they're doing so for non-infringing purposes.

"That means that only lawful uses—such as uses with the copyright holder's permission, fair uses, or other uses under limitations and exceptions to copyright law—could legally circumvent DRM under these changes," PK's recommendation observes. The odds of this happening are slim to none; despite telling everyone who will listen that all of their works are being shared on the Internet, big rightsholders argue that making circumvention software legal in any scenario will lead to even more pirating of their works.

Stop copyright bullying

Some copyright lawsuits aren't about copyright infringement, PK warns. They're really about targeting speech that the plaintiff doesn't like. So the group wants lawmakers to create a special procedure, a "motion to strike," that would allow defendants to ask a judge to consider this possibility if the suit poses "a significant harmful effect on free expression."

The motion would suspend the expensive discovery phase of a trial until the judge makes her call on the motion. Public Knowledge's proposed legislation would also legalize "transient" copies.

"A simple fact of digital devices is that they necessarily make copies of the things that they process," the Blueprint points out. "This technicality creates liability where there should be none—for instance, it should be uncontroversial that a CD player with a buffer to prevent skipping shouldn't need a license in order to play a CD."

Make "fair use" fairer

You might believe that you have deployed copyrighted content for some fair use, but if a judge disagrees, you could find yourself on the hook for up to $150,000 in statutory damages per infringing use. Public Knowledge wants Congress to pass an amendment that would eliminate statutory fines if a defendant shows that he thought he had reasonable grounds for believing his use of a work was fair (the plaintiff could still sue for actual damages caused by the use).

"The fair use doctrine in copyright is designed to allow the public to make use of works without permission of the original author," the Blueprint notes. "The risk of a lawsuit, however, often hinders people from taking advantage of all that fair use has to offer."

Finally, Public Knowledge wants legislation requiring the US Trade Representative to publicly disclose any copyright or intellectual property-related proposals it makes to drafts of trade agreements. And any USTR advisory groups, which general include plenty of people from the "industry," should include "representatives of the public interest unaffiliated with industry."

Once you register at the Internet Blueprint site you can vote on these proposals, and submit your own.

"Our goal is for people and organizations to propose their own ideas that can also be turned into draft legislation on other topics that will evolve into a positive agenda for Internet change," says PK's Michael Weinberg.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...yright-now.ars





Piracy is Good, Canadian Indie Producers Conference Told
Etan Vlessing

Content producers meeting in Ottawa heard illegal file sharing takes product by emerging industry players into new markets.

OTTAWA - Piracy is good?

Apparently so, a Canadian media conference was told Thursday, as illegal downloading secures indie producers more business and markets for their product.

“We’re really coming to a place right now where piracy and file sharing is actually doing what it’s supposed to do: It’s showing new markets, it’s taking the content business to new places and it’s helping build big businesses for new and emerging companies but also for some of our big leading content providers,” Gavin McGarry, president of Jumpwire Media, told an afternoon panel at Prime Time, the annual gathering of major Canadian indie producers, in Ottawa.

Digital media consultant Robert Tercek told the panel entitled “The Ins and Outs of Illegal Downloading” that content producers could avoid piracy by reasonably pricing their product for consumers.

“If they make their content available, this part of the issue will go away,” he argued.

Robert Levine, a former executive editor of Billboard and author of “Free Ride,” agreed that providing access to product, rather than throwing up barriers, was key to getting paid.

“I’m not creating blocks between my content and you, I’m putting in a toll booth between my content and you,” he told the panel.

Earlier Thursday, Tercek, founder of General Creativity, delivered a keynote speech at Prime Time where he warned major studio producers that they need to prize innovation over litigation and legislation to compete in the digital space.

“We are awash in content,” he argued, as each year 300 million online videos compete for attention against 250 studio film releases.

And on the broadcast front, digital behemoths like Facebook and Google, which are colonizing traditional audiences, are turning TV into just more software competing against emerging social media sites and services.

“TV is turning into an app. It’s just another app that runs on someone else’s platform,” Tercek said.

And while Google TV may face delays and obstacles, broadcasters have no reason to drop their guard.

“Google is not stopping. They bought Motorola. They’re building expertise in the real-time insertion of advertising. They’re moving into display,” he said.

Prime Time, organized by the Canadian Media Production Association, wraps on Friday.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/new...n-indie-296430





Anonymous, Decentralized and Uncensored File-Sharing is Booming
Ernesto

The file-sharing landscape is slowly adjusting in response to the continued push for more anti-piracy tools, the final Pirate Bay verdict, and the raids and arrests in the Megaupload case. Faced with uncertainty and drastic changes at file-sharing sites, many users are searching for secure, private and uncensored file-sharing clients. Despite the image its name suggests, RetroShare is one such future-proof client.

The avalanche of negative file-sharing news over the past weeks hasn’t gone unnoticed to users and site operators.

From SOPA to Megaupload, there is a growing uncertainly about the future of sharing.

While many BitTorrent sites and cyberlockers continue to operate as usual, there is a growing group of users who are expanding their horizons to see what other means of sharing are available if the worst case scenario becomes reality.

Anonymous, decentralized and uncensored are the key and most sought-after features. For some this means signing up with a VPN to make their BitTorrent sharing more private, but new clients are also generating interest.

Earlier this month we wrote about Tribler, a decentralized BitTorrent client that makes torrent sites obsolete. We’ve covered Tribler for more than half a decade, but it was only after our most recent post that it really took off with more than a hundred thousand downloads in a few days.

But there are more file-sharing tools that are specifically built to withstand outside attacks. Some even add anonymity into the mix. RetroShare is such a private and uncensored file-sharing client, and the developers have also noticed a significant boom in users recently.

The RetroShare network allows people to create a private and encrypted file-sharing network. Users add friends by exchanging PGP certificates with people they trust. All the communication is encrypted using OpenSSL and files that are downloaded from strangers always go through a trusted friend.

In other words, it’s a true Darknet and virtually impossible to monitor by outsiders.

RetroShare founder DrBob told us that while the software has been around since 2006, all of a sudden there’s been a surge in downloads. “The interest in RetroShare has massively shot up over the last two months,” he said.

“In January our downloads tripled when interest in SOPA was at its peak. It more than doubled again in February, when cyberlockers disabled sharing or shut down entirely. At the moment we are getting 10 times more downloads than in December 2011.”

RetroShare’s founder believes that there is an increased need for security, privacy and freedom among file-sharers, features that are at the core of his application.

“RetroShare is about creating a private space on the Internet. A social collaboration network where you can share anything you want. A space that is free from the prying eyes of governments, corporations and advertisers. This is vitally important as our freedom on the Internet is under increasing threat,” DrBob told TorrentFreak.

“RetroShare is free from censorship: like Facebook banning ‘obscene’ breast-feeding photographs. A network that allows you to use any pseudonym, without insisting on knowing your real name. A network where you will not face the threat of jail, or being banned from entry into a country for an innocent tweet.”

It’s impossible to accurately predict what file-sharing will look like 5 years from now. But, a safe assumption is that anonymity will play a more central role than it ever has.

Recent crackdowns have made operators of central file-sharing sites and services more cautious of copyright infringement. Some even went as far as shutting down voluntarily, like BTjunkie.

In the long run this might drive more casual downloaders to legitimate alternatives, if these are available. Those who keep on sharing could move to smaller communities, darknets, and anonymous connections.
https://torrentfreak.com/anonymous-d...ooming-120302/





uTorrent Native Android Client On The Way
Ernesto

The uTorrent development team is working on a native Android BitTorrent client for smartphones and tablet computers. This will be the first uTorrent client for a mobile operating system, and most likely the only one. While development of uTorrent Android product is in progress, no ETA has been given for the first release.

With 140 million active users each month, uTorrent is by far the most used BitTorrent client in the West.

Despite this staggering statistic, there are still many opportunities for uTorrent to expand its user-base. In recent years mobile operating systems have become increasingly popular, but to date none of the mobile platforms has a native uTorrent client.

But, in the near future this will change.

Behind the scenes uTorrent parent company BitTorrent Inc. has been working on a new version of uTorrent that works on Android devices. Not a remote control interface, but a fully operational BitTorrent client.

“Like any software company, we know a mobile experience is really important to our users,” BitTorrent inc. told us, adding that they don’t have a planned release date for the Android app.

“At this point, we don’t yet have an ETA”

While BitTorrent is reluctant to share further details on the Android version of uTorrent, it is expected to have all the basic functions currently available in Windows and Mac versions.

Aside from the new Android app, the uTorrent developers are also working on a native Linux client. The Linux version was announced in 2010, but put on hold as the core uTorrent client had evolved considerably since the original plan.

While Android users may enjoy uTorrent on their smartphone and tablets in the future, for iOS fans there is little hope that there will ever be a native uTorrent application.

Apple notoriously bans all applications that have anything to do with BitTorrent. The company argues that BitTorrent is often used to infringe copyrights and that such applications are a no-go for the App Store.
https://torrentfreak.com/utorrent-na...he-way-120225/





Apple's FairPlay DRM for iBooks Cracked by Requiem App
Bryan Bishop

Apple dropped its FairPlay DRM system for music back in 2009, but the remaining segments of the iTunes ecosystem — apps, videos, and iBooks — still utilize versions of the copy-protection scheme. Ways to circumvent the first two have existed for some time, and now the DRM for iBooks has been cracked as well. A post on the MobileRead forums first called attention to an updated version of an OS X and Windows app called Requiem, which had previously been known as a common way to strip FairPlay from iTunes movies and music. We were able to confirm that the app is indeed able to remove the DRM from iBook's ePub files, allowing them to be opened and read on multiple non-iOS devices.

Requiem already has an established cat-and-mouse relationship with Apple, with the DRM-stripping app prompting iTunes updates that stop it from working, only to be followed by additional updates to Requiem, and so forth. While some argue that users should be allowed to create unencumbered copies of digital works that they have purchased, in this case the fact remains that tampering with security mechanisms like FairPlay is a violation of the iTunes Terms and Conditions, and we have no doubt that Apple will be responding with an updated version of iTunes sooner rather than later.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/25/28...ed-requiem-app





With E-Book Ban, Apple's "Closed" Nature Goes Too Far
John Paul Titlow

It's easy to take jabs at Apple for sometimes being too "closed." From restrictions on mobile apps to the limited customizability of the iPad, it's a reputation that the company has earned even as it sells millions upon millions of devices. Even the original Macintosh infamously discouraged tinkerers by requiring specialized tools to physically open it up.

While it may frustrate many hobbyists and hackers, this approach is simply a cost of being one of Apple's millions of otherwise satisfied customers. It's rare that the company crosses over the line between closed and alarming. But that's exactly what just happened.

The trouble started shortly after Seth Godin submitted his latest e-book to Apple's iBookstore. The marketing pundit and super-prolific author penned a book titled "Stop Stealing Dreams" and sent the finished copy along to Apple for approval. Much to his shock, the book was rejected.

The reason? An email from Apple identified "too many links to Amazon store" as the prime offense. Yes, simply linking to one of Apple's competitors is a bold and forbidden enough gesture to cause a book to get banned from its digital storefront.

As Godin himself outlines on PaidContent, this is pretty disturbing stuff. "What's inside the book shouldn't be of concern to a bookstore with a substantial choke on the marketplace," Godin writes. "If it's legal, they ought to let people read it if they choose to."

On the iPhone, Apple has certain obligations to the carriers and its own market dominance, which sometimes lead the company to forbid certain features from finding their way onto the iOS platform. In many cases, this is understandable.

But this is different from free mobile WiFi tethering or other app features that directly compete with Apple or the carriers. These are books. You know, the things that have historically been banned and burned when the powers that be don't appreciate their contents. Books contain ideas and information. You know, the stuff that's supposed to be much more fluid and accessible thanks to technology.

Of course, the book-burning analogy has its limitations. Anybody who really wants to read Godin's book can go get it from Amazon or in another format outside the iBookstore. But there's something unsettling about a dominant player in a information-centric marketplace such as this refusing to offer a piece of content strictly for competitive reasons. How would we feel if Barnes and Noble refused to carry a book about the history or corporate philosophy of Borders or Amazon? Or if they wouldn't order a book written by the CEO of a competitor, simply because doing so would inadvertently aid the enemy? Many people would rightly be freaked out by that.
https://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...es_too_far.php





Judge Awards iPhone User $850 in Throttling Case
Greg Risling and Peter Svensson

When AT&T started slowing down the data service for his iPhone, Matt Spaccarelli, an unemployed truck driver and student, took the country's largest telecommunications company to small claims court. And won.

His award: $850.

Pro-tem Judge Russell Nadel found in favor of Spaccarelli in Ventura Superior Court in Simi Valley on Friday, saying it wasn't fair for the company to purposely slow down his iPhone, when it had sold him an "unlimited data" plan.

Spaccarelli could have many imitators. AT&T has some 17 million customers with "unlimited data" plans who can be subject to throttling. That's nearly half of its smartphone users. AT&T forbids them from consolidating their claims into a class action or taking them to a jury trial. That leaves small claims actions and arbitration.

Late last year, AT&T started slowing down data service for the top 5 percent of its smartphone subscribers with "unlimited" plans. It had warned that it would start doing so, but many subscribers have been surprised by how little data use it takes for throttling to kick in — often less than AT&T provides to those on limited or "tiered" plans.

Spaccarelli said his phone is being throttled after he's used 1.5 gigabytes to 2 gigabytes of data within a new billing cycle. Meanwhile, AT&T provides 3 gigabytes of data to subscribers on a tiered plan that costs the same — $30 per month.

When slowed down, the phone can still be used for calls and text messaging, but Web browsing is painfully slow, and video streaming doesn't work at all.

AT&T spokesman Marty Richter said the company will appeal the judge's ruling.

"At the end of the day, our contract governs our relationship with our customers," he said.

AT&T area sales manager Peter Hartlove, who represented the company before Nadel, declined to comment on the ruling. He argued in court that his employer has the right to modify or cancel customers' contracts if their data usage adversely affects the network.

Companies with as many potentially aggrieved customers as AT&T usually brace themselves for a class-action lawsuit. But last year, the Supreme Court upheld a clause in the Dallas-based company's subscriber contract that prohibits customers from taking their complaints to class actions or jury trials.

Arbitration and small-claims court cases are cheaper and faster than jury trials, but they force plaintiffs to appear in person and prepare their own statements. In a class-action suit, the work can be handled by one law firm on behalf of millions of people.

That means thousands — and possibly hundreds of thousands — of people who feel abused by AT&T's policy could seek to challenge the company, one by one, in arbitration or small claims court. The customer contract specifies that those who win an award from the company in arbitration that is greater than the company's pre-arbitration settlement offer will get at least $10,000. Spaccarelli picked the same amount for his claim, though AT&T's stipulation about a minimum award doesn't apply in small claims.

Nadel looked instead at the remaining 10 months in Spaccarelli's two-year contract with AT&T and estimated that he might pay $85 a month on average for using additional data. AT&T charges $10 for every extra gigabyte over 3 gigabytes.

Nadel said it's not fair for AT&T to make a promise to Spaccarelli when he buys the phone while burying terms in his contract that give the company the right to cut down data speeds.

Spaccarelli, 39, researched his case for a few months, and then spent three days putting together a binder of documents to bring to court.

"I need the money, but for me, this case is not about money at all," Spaccarelli. "You don't tell somebody 'you have unlimited' and then cut them off."

Spaccarelli didn't quite uphold his side of the customer contract, and that's one reason his data usage was high. He used the iPhone to provide a link to the Internet for his iPad tablet, a setup known as "tethering." AT&T doesn't allow tethering unless customers pay extra for it, which Spaccarelli didn't do. It detected his tethering last year, and switched him from the "unlimited" plan to a limited one. He complained, and got his "unlimited" plan reinstated.

Even with the tethering, Spaccarelli's data usage wasn't excessive, he said — about 5 gigabytes per month. AT&T's Hartlove told Nadel about the tethering, and Spaccarelli admitted to it.

Earlier this month, a Southern California woman won a small-claims action against Honda over the gas mileage she got out of her Civic hybrid car. She was awarded $9,867. Meanwhile, a pending class action against Honda over the same issue would net Civic owners a few hundred dollars each. The plaintiff, Heather Peters, is an ex-lawyer who had opted out of the settlement.

AT&T's throttling of "unlimited" data comes as it tries to deal with limited capacity on its wireless network. When the iPhone was new, AT&T had ample capacity on its network, and wanted to lure customers with the peace of mind offered by unlimited plans. Now, a majority of AT&T subscribers on contract-based plans have smartphones, and the proportion is growing every month. That's putting a big load on AT&T's network.

Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA also throttle users, but their policies are gentler. Verizon only throttles if the specific cell tower a "heavy user" subscriber's phone is communicating with is congested at that moment. T-Mobile's throttling levels are higher for the same price, and the levels are spelled out ahead of time. AT&T subscribers have no way of knowing if they'll be throttled before a warning message drops in. If they keep using their phones, throttling kicks in a few days later.
http://news.yahoo.com/judge-awards-i...195042925.html





Study Shoots Holes In AT&T's Reasons for Throttling
Angela West

AT&T throttling unjustified, report saysAT&T has justified its throttling rules for unlimited-plan customers by saying it was only targeting its top 5 percent of bandwidth users. Validas, a company that steps consumers through choosing data plans, examined over 55,000 cell phone bills from 2011 that consumers provided from their various carriers. It found that the top 5 percent of AT&T's unlimited-data customers targeted for throttling aren't the data hogs AT&T is making them out to be.

AT&T has said it would throttle, or slow down the data traffic speed, for any unlimited plan holder who uses more than 2GB per month. That's supposed to only affect the heaviest, top 5 percent of data users on unlimited plans, not those with tiered plans, which are now the only kind available to new customers.

The Validas study reveals that the top 5 percent of bandwidth users on AT&T's unlimited data plans use an average of 3.97GB per month--hardly the kind of numbers that would choke AT&T's network. There is also little difference between 3.97GB and 3.19GB, the average among AT&T's top 5 percent tiered-plan users.

Validas estimates for free what you could save on your cell phone bill, and charges for a report that shows which plan you’d need to purchase to get the savings. Since it makes its money from consumers and not the telecommunications companies, Validas doesn’t appear to have a financial interest in skewing its study toward a particular carrier.

In a blog post, Validas concludes that throttling isn't being put in place to curb greedy data hogs, but rather to migrate users of traditional unlimited plans to tiered plans. These plans are far easier for AT&T to manage and don't pose threats to its network.

If AT&T can produce an independent, third-party study that proves its throttling measures target only a minority of bandwidth-sucking users, the case would be effectively closed. If it can't, it should stop throttling unlimited-plan users who use under 4GB of data per month, or introduce something equivalent to the transparent throttling that T-Mobile has established for customers who use over 5GB per month. Standard business-only usage, such as email and the transmission of most graphic files, is not going to add up to the average numbers that unlimited data-plan users are polling with Validas.

You can find out if your service is being throttled using a tool called Glasnost, which examines different modes of data transfer.

AT&T has grandfathered in smartphone plans that are supposed to offer unlimited data transfers per month for $30. At the other end of the spectrum, the AT&T Data Plus plan charges casual smartphone-only users $20 a month for 300MB or less.
https://www.pcworld.com/businesscent...hrottling.html





'Twisted' Waves Could Boost Capacity of Wi-Fi and TV
Jason Palmer

A striking demonstration of a means to boost the information-carrying capacity of radio waves has taken place across the lagoon in Venice, Italy.

The technique exploits what is called the "orbital angular momentum" of the waves - imparting them with a "twist".

Varying this twist permits many data streams to fit in the frequency spread currently used for just one.

The approach, described in the New Journal of Physics, could be applied to radio, wi-fi, and television.

The parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that are used for all three are split up in roughly the same way, with a spread of frequencies allotted to each channel. Each one contains a certain, limited amount of information-carrying capacity: its bandwidth.
As telecommunications have proliferated through the years, the spectrum has become incredibly crowded, with little room left for new means of signal transmission, or for existing means to expand their bandwidths.

But Bo Thide of Swedish Institute of Space Physics and a team of colleagues in Italy hope to change that by exploiting an entirely new physical mechanism to fit more capacity onto the same bandwidth.

Galilean connection

The key lies in the distinction between the orbital and spin angular momentum of electromagnetic waves.
Artist's Impression of spinning black hole (Courtesy B Thide) The orbital angular momentum of light may also manifest itself in what we see from black holes

A perfect analogy is the Earth-Sun system. The Earth spins on its axis, manifesting spin angular momentum; at the same time orbits the Sun, manifesting orbital angular momentum.

The "particles" of light known as photons can carry both types; the spin angular momentum of photons is better known through the idea of polarisation, which some sunglasses and 3-D glasses exploit.

Just as the "signals" for the left and right eye in 3-D glasses can be encoded on light with two different polarisations, extra signals can be set up with different amounts of orbital angular momentum.

Prof Thide and his colleagues have been thinking about the idea for many years; last year, they published an article in Nature Physics showing that spinning black holes could produce such "twisted" light.

But the implications for exploiting the effect closer to home prompted the team to carry out their experiment in Venice, sending a signal 442m from San Giorgio island to the Palazzo Ducale in St Mark's square.

"It's exactly the same place that Galileo first demonstrated his telescope to the authorities in Venice, 400 years ago," Prof Thide told BBC News.

"They were not convinced at all; they could see the moons of Jupiter but they said, 'They must be inside the telescope, it can't possibly be like that.'

"To some extent we have felt the same (disbelief from the community), so we said, 'Let's do it, let's demonstrate it for the public.'"

Marconi style

In the simplest case, putting a twist on the waves is as easy as putting a twist into the dish that sends the signal. The team split one side of a standard satellite-type dish and separated the two resulting edges.

In this way, different points around the circumference of the beam have a different amount of "head start" relative to other points - if one could freeze and visualise the beam, it would look like a corkscrew.

In a highly publicised event in 2011, the team used a normal antenna and their modified antenna to send waves of 2.4 GHz - a band used by wi-fi - to send two audio signals within the bandwidth normally required by one. They repeated the experiment later with two television signals.

Crowds were treated to projections beamed onto the Palazzo Ducale explaining the experiment, and then a display of the message "signal received" when the experiment worked.

Prof Thide said that the public display - "in the style of (radio pioneer) Guglielmo Marconi... involving ordinary people in the experiment", as the authors put it - was just putting into practice what he had believed since first publishing the idea in a 2007 Physical Review Letters article.

"For me it was obvious this would work," he said. "Maxwell's equations that govern electromagnetic fields are... the most well tested laws of physics that we have.

"We did this because other people wanted us to demonstrate it."

Prof Thide and his colleagues are already in discussions with industry to develop a system that can transmit many more than two bands of different orbital angular momentum.

The results could radically change just how much information and speed can be squeezed out of the crowded electromagnetic spectrum, applied to radio and television as well as wi-fi and perhaps even mobile phones.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17221490





In Attack on Vatican Web Site, a Glimpse of Hackers’ Tactics
Nicole Perlroth and John Markoff

The elusive hacker movement known as Anonymous has carried out Internet attacks on well-known organizations like Sony and PBS. In August, the group went after its most prominent target yet: the Vatican.

The campaign against the Vatican, which did not receive wide attention at the time, involved hundreds of people, some with hacking skills and some without. A core group of participants openly drummed up support for the attack using YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. Others searched for vulnerabilities on a Vatican Web site and, when that failed, enlisted amateur recruits to flood the site with traffic, hoping it would crash, according to a computer security firm’s report to be released this week.

The attack, albeit an unsuccessful one, provides a rare glimpse into the recruiting, reconnaissance and warfare tactics used by the shadowy hacking collective.

Anonymous, which first gained widespread notice with an attack on the Church of Scientology in 2008, has since carried out hundreds of increasingly bold strikes, taking aim at perceived enemies including law enforcement agencies, Internet security companies and opponents of the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks.

The group’s attack on the Vatican was confirmed by the hackers and is detailed in a report that Imperva, a computer security company based in Redwood City, Calif., plans to release ahead of a computer security conference here this week. It may be the first end-to-end record of a full Anonymous attack.

Though Imperva declined to identify the target of the attack and kept any mention of the Vatican out of its report, two people briefed on the investigation confirmed that it had been the target. Imperva had a unique window into the situation because it had been hired by the Vatican’s security team as a subcontractor to block and record the assault.

“We have seen the tools and the techniques that were used in this attack used by other criminal groups on the Web,” said Amichai Shulman, Imperva’s chief technology officer. “What set this attack apart from others is it had a clear timeline and evolution, starting from an announcement and recruitment phase that was very public.”

The Vatican declined to comment on the attack. In an e-mail intended for a colleague but accidentally sent to a reporter, a church official wrote: “I do not think it is convenient to respond to journalists on real or potential attacks,” adding, “The more we are silent in this area the better.”

The attack was called Operation Pharisee in a reference to the sect that Jesus called hypocrites. It was initially organized by hackers in South America and Mexico before spreading to other countries, and it was timed to coincide with Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Madrid in August 2011 for World Youth Day, an international event held every other year that regularly attracts more than a million Catholic youths.

Hackers initially tried to take down a Web site set up by the church to promote the event, handle registrations and sell merchandise. Their goal — according to YouTube messages delivered by an Anonymous figure in a Guy Fawkes mask — was to disrupt the event and draw attention to child sexual abuse by priests, among other issues.

The videos, which have been viewed more than 77,000 times, include a verbal attack on the pope and the young people who “have forgotten the abominations of the Catholic Church.” One calls on volunteers to “prepare your weapons, my dear brother, for this August 17th to Sunday August 21st, we will drop anger over the Vatican.”

Much as in a grass-roots lobbying campaign, the hackers spent weeks spreading their message through their own Web site and social sites like Twitter and Flickr. Their Facebook page called on volunteers to download free attack software and implored them to “stop child abuse” by joining the cause. It featured split-screen images of the pope seated on a gilded throne on one side and starving African children on the other. And it linked to articles about sexual abuse cases and blog posts itemizing the church’s assets.

It took the hackers 18 days to recruit enough people, the report says. Then the reconnaissance began. A core group of roughly a dozen skilled hackers spent three days poking around the church’s World Youth Day site looking for common security holes that could let them inside, the report says. Probing for such loopholes used to be tedious and slow, but the advent of automated tools made it possible for hackers to do this while they slept.

In this case, the scanning software failed to turn up any gaps. So the hackers turned to a brute-force approach — a so-called distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack that involves clogging a site with data requests until it crashes. Even unskilled supporters could take part in this from their computers or smartphones.

“Anonymous is a handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots,” said Cole Stryker, an author who has researched the movement. “You have four or five guys who really know what they’re doing and are able to pull off some of the more serious hacks, and then thousands of people spreading the word, or turning their computers over to participate in a DDoS attack.”

Over the course of the campaign’s final two days, Anonymous enlisted as many as a thousand people to download attack software, or directed them to custom-built Web sites that let them participate using their cellphones. Visiting a particular Web address caused the phones to instantly start flooding the target Web site with hundreds of data requests each second, with no special software required, the report says.

On the first day, the denial-of-service attack resulted in 28 times the normal traffic to the church site, rising to 34 times the next day. Hackers involved in the attack, who did not identify themselves, said through a Twitter account associated with the campaign that the two-day effort succeeded in slowing the site’s performance and making the page unavailable “in several countries.” Imperva disputed that the site’s performance was affected and said its technologies had successfully siphoned the excess data away from the site.

Anonymous moved on to other targets, including an unofficial site about the pope, which the hackers were briefly able to deface.

Imperva executives say the Vatican’s defenses held up because, unlike Sony and other hacker targets, it invested in the infrastructure needed to repel both break-ins and full-scale assaults.

Researchers who have followed Anonymous say that despite its lack of success in this and other campaigns, recent attacks show the movement is still evolving and, if anything, emboldened. Threatened attacks on the New York Stock Exchange and Facebook last autumn apparently fizzled. But the hackers appeared to regain momentum in January after federal authorities shut down Megaupload, a popular file-sharing site.

In retaliation, hackers affiliated with Anonymous briefly knocked dozens of Web sites offline, including those of the F.B.I., the White House and the Justice Department. At one point, they were able to eavesdrop on a conference call between the F.B.I. and Scotland Yard.

“Part of the reason ‘Op Megaupload’ was so successful is that they’ve learned from their past mistakes,” said Gabriella Coleman, an associate professor at McGill University who has studied Anonymous. Professor Coleman said the hackers had been using a new tool to better protect their anonymity. “Finally people felt safe using it,” she said. “That could explain why it was so big.”

In recent weeks, Anonymous has made increasingly bold threats, at one point promising to “shut the Internet down on March 31” by attacking servers that perform switchboard functions for the Internet.

Security experts now say that a sort of open season has begun. “Who is Anonymous?” asked Rob Rachwald, Imperva’s director of security. “Anyone can use the Anonymous umbrella to hack anyone at anytime.”

Indeed, in the last six months, hackers have attacked everything from pornography sites to the Web portals of Brazilian airlines. And some hackers have been accused of trying to extort money from corporations — all under the banner of Anonymous.

“Anonymous is an idea, a global protest movement, by activists on the streets and by hackers in the network,” the hackers said through the Twitter account. “Anyone can be Anonymous, because we are an idea without leaders who defend freedom and promote free knowledge.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/27/t...s-tactics.html





Opt-Out Provision Would Halt Some, but Not All, Web Tracking
Tanzina Vega

Last Thursday federal regulators, members of advertising trade groups and technology companies gathered in Washington to announce new initiatives to protect consumers’ privacy online.

But, as it turns out, privacy is in the eye of the beholder.

The Obama administration has pushed hard for a privacy bill of rights that would give consumers more control over what personal data is collected online and what limits would be placed on that data.

The advertising and technology industries, which have been under pressure to do more to ensure privacy, said they would support a “Do Not Track” mechanism that would be clearly and uniformly adopted by browser vendors and would allow consumers to opt out of having some companies, but not all, keep data on their online activities.

While the agreement would limit certain types of data collection, consumers would hardly be invisible on the Web.

“ ‘Do Not Track’ is a misnomer. It’s not an accurate depiction of what’s going on,” said Stuart P. Ingis, the head of the Digital Advertising Alliance, a trade group representing the advertising industry, which regards consumer behavior as crucial to its business. “This is stopping some data collection, but it’s not stopping all data collection.”

Thursday’s announcement was the administration’s first digital initiative since the antipiracy legislation known as the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, was met with furious reaction from the technology industry last month, and eventually dropped.

The issue of digital privacy, especially how users’ data is collected online and then employed to show those users ads tailored to them, has been hotly debated for years.

The announcements represent the attempt to satisfy consumer privacy concerns while not stifling the growth of online advertising, which is seen as the savior of media and publishing companies as well as the advertising industry. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, digital advertising revenues in the United States were $7.88 billion for the third quarter of 2011, a 22 percent increase over the same period in 2010.

The industry’s compromise on a “Do Not Track” mechanism is one result of continuing negotiations among members of the Federal Trade Commission, which first called for such a mechanism in its initial privacy report; the Commerce Department; the White House; the Digital Advertising Alliance; and consumer privacy advocates.

Until now, methods for opting out of custom advertising varied depending on the privacy settings of a user’s browser or whether a user clicked on the blue triangle icons in the corners of some digital ads. Under the new system, browser vendors will build an option into their browser settings that, when selected, will send a signal to companies collecting data that the user does not want to be tracked.

The agreement covers all the advertising alliance’s members, including Google, Yahoo, AOL, Time Warner and NBCUniversal.

Privacy advocates complain that the mechanism does not go nearly far enough in part because it affects only certain marketers. Many publishers and search engines, like Google, Amazon or The New York Times, are considered “first-party sites,” which means that the consumer goes to these Web pages directly. First-party sites can still collect data on visitors and serve them ads based on what is collected.

“There’s never been an expectation that all first-party data collection would be stopped,” Mr. Ingis said.

But third-party sites, which are networks that collect and use data to serve advertising tailored to the user, like DoubleClick (which is owned by Google); Advertising.com, owned by AOL; and a multitude of smaller ad networks would be restricted in the data they can collect on users if they select a Do Not Track option. Such companies would be limited to using data for purposes like market research and analytics but could not create detailed profiles on users or show them ads based on online behavior.

Some consumer privacy advocates, while offering measured praise for the new privacy option, saw the move as an attempt to thwart a more restrictive stance on data collection. Jeffrey Chester, the head of the Center for Digital Democracy, which is pushing for more restrictions on data collection, called the move a win for the advertising lobby.

In a statement, Mr. Chester said: “We cannot accept any ‘deal’ that doesn’t really protect consumers, and merely allows the data-profiling status quo to remain. Instead of negotiations, C.D.D. would have preferred the White House to introduce new legislation that clearly protected consumers online.”

But advertisers have plenty to fear if consumers use Do Not Track in large numbers. “If there’s a high rate of opt-out, it’s an issue,” said George Pappachen, the chief privacy officer of the Kantar Group, the research and consultant unit of WPP. “Our position is data should flow,” Mr. Pappachen said, adding that data helps drive innovation and newer commercial models.

Mike Zaneis, the senior vice president for public policy and general counsel of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, said large-scale adoption of the opt-out mechanism would have a severe effect on digital advertising networks and third parties that work with publishers to sell behaviorally targeted ads.

“The reality is if you had 50-80 percent of consumers opting out it could have a really significant negative impact on the third-party ad model,” Mr. Zaneis said. “There is no eraser button for the Internet. But we can address consumers’ concerns about having certain data about them collected, especially data for advertising and marketing.”

Google, which is one of the biggest players in online advertising, would also be affected because it is both a first- and third-party publisher. The company earns most of its nearly $40 billion in revenue through search-related advertising, which would not be affected by Do Not Track.

But its display advertising business, driven largely by its DoubleClick ad network, representing some $5 billion in revenue, is considered third party and could be affected. The company expects to have the Do Not Track option on its Chrome browser by the end of 2012.

For advertisers, a lot will depend on how consumers respond. A recent study from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press seemed to contain mixed signals on the issue: 56 percent of the respondents thought the government should not become more involved with regulating how Internet companies handle privacy issues. Yet 59 percent said collection of user data for targeted advertising was an unjustified use of a person’s private information.

And there are still unresolved technical issues regarding Do Not Track, including what defines tracking and how that would apply to first-party and third-party Web sites. Over the last few months the World Wide Web Consortium, an international group that sets voluntary technical standards for the Web, has been working with representatives from companies like Microsoft, Google and Nielsen, along with academics, privacy advocates, legislators and digital advertising groups, to define the technical standard of Do Not Track.

The consortium is also considering whether sites like Facebook, whose “like” button is used across multiple Web sites, would be considered first-party or third-party sites.

“I do think you will see a lot of contention going forward about what Do Not Track means,” said Thomas Roessler, the technology and society domain leader at the consortium.

Whether any companies should be allowed to collect data and follow users online, regardless of who they are, remains “the million-dollar question,” said Alex Fowler, the global privacy leader at Mozilla, the nonprofit organization that created the Firefox browser. Firefox was one of the first to include a Do Not Track option.

“When you look at user testing, the expectation for the user for Do Not Track means, don’t behaviorally target me and also don’t collect information on me,” Mr. Fowler said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/27/t...-tracking.html





Gigabit Internet for $70: the Unlikely Success of California's Sonic.net
Rob Pegoraro

Two things set a one-block stretch of Florence Avenue apart from other American streets. One is the quirky metal sculptures planted in front of most homes; the other is the Internet traffic coursing through recently-strung fiber-optic cables on the block’s utility poles. They offer each house up to one gigabit per second in bandwidth, making this one of the fastest streets in America.

While some other cities can also brag about gigabit access, in this Sonoma County town it costs only $69.95 a month.

The service comes courtesy of Sonic.net, the18-year-old Internet provider based in the neighboring city of Santa Rosa. And Sonic even throws in two phone lines with unlimited long-distance calling when you sign up.

Despite living on one of the best broadband streets in the country, almost none of the few dozen residents on Florence Avenue bother with the highest-end gigabit service, though. And why should they? Sonic's everyday 100 Mbps fiber offering costs just $39.95 a month, the same price Sonic used to charge for its 20 Mbps DSL connections (It includes unlimited phone, too.)

Compare Sonic’s 100 Mbps price to the two better-known area options for broadband—Comcast's Xfinity Extreme 105 Mbps service runs $199.95 a month, while AT&T's U-Verse tops out at 24 Mbps for $49.95.

SpeedTest wasn't able to keep up

Gigabit access is fast—fast enough at one Sebastopol subscriber's house to perplex Ookla's Speedtest.net. The service incorrectly reported the person’s connection at a mere 134 Mbps. Downloading the current release of Ubuntu Linux didn't help, either; on two different tries, the server simply couldn’t provide the 695-megabyte file as quickly as the connection allowed.

But there was no mistaking the speed of Sonic’s system when I pulled up a YouTube clip and saw the entire video buffer instantly, even on a “mere” 100 Mbps connection.

Even better, Sonic does not place any data caps on its service.

As ISPs often note, people keep using more data; what they usually neglect to mention is that the costs of providing it have dropped dramatically. "It's reasonable to say that consumer bandwidth consumption went up,” Sonic chief executive and co-founder Dane Jasper said when I stopped in for a visit at his Santa Rosa office late last year. “But at the same time, the cost of clearing those bits keeps going down."

Wondering "why can't somebody else do this?" You're asking the right question. But you may not like the answer.

The twilight of DSL

Privately-held Sonic is an unlikely survivor. As a small digital-subscriber-line (DSL) service, one might have expected it to go extinct like most of its brethren after the Federal Communications Commission largely deregulated the DSL business.

The FCC's 2005 decision to reclassify DSL as an "information service" (PDF) came after several bruising years for upstart ISPs that saw overleveraged firms like NorthPoint Communications and Rhythms NetConnections implode, abruptly disconnecting subscribers as they tumbled into bankruptcy. When the FCC ended incumbent carriers’ obligations to sell last-mile access to competing ISPs at regulated rates, things got even worse for independent DSL providers.

Those that survived were stuck with a growing competition problem: they couldn't provide DSL at speeds faster than the incumbents, and they were now more expensive, too.

"We were on this dead-end street… all essentially selling the same thing," said Jasper.

One way Sonic could stand out, however, was through customer service. Its consistently high reviews on DSLReports.com speak to its success there. But with cable services getting faster, Sonic had to get more out of DSL technology if it wanted to compete. In 2008, Sonic began rolling out the faster ADSL2+, finally offering speeds competitive with cable to customers who were close enough to a phone company’s central office (prices ranged from 6 Mbps for $45 to 18 Mbps for $80).

The company increased speeds while cutting costs, taking advantage of cheaper upstream connectivity. A year later, the cost of 18 Mbps service fell to $55. Sonic, having obtained a phone service license from the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) in 2006, added voice calling as an option. It then made voice a standard feature in 2010, with unlimited nationwide calling in a $50, 20 Mbps bundle. (That plan is now down to $39.95.)

The tradeoff for relying on ADSL2+ is limited coverage. The service's reach is fairly extensive in San Francisco but, in towns like Sebastopol and Santa Rosa, it doesn't get far outside the downtown.

Customers beyond that perimeter (about half of Sonic's less-than-50,000 subscribers, Jasper included) can only access the older, slower form of DSL that cable providers like to mock in their ads: 3-6 Mbps for $39.95 (although that's cut to $19.95 for the first year.)

If Sonic were to not just survive but succeed, it needed a plan for the future that wouldn't be tied up in somebody else's copper telephone wire. It settled on fiber.

The jump to fiber

Deploying fiber-to-the-home service is a big step. Sonic kicked off this buildout on favorable ground: a reasonably dense neighborhood in Sebastopol, a compact town of 7,397 that may be best-known as the home of tech-book publisher O'Reilly and Associates. Sonic began contacting DSL subscribers there last year with an absurd-to-resist offer: five times their current speed for the same price.

But why did Sonic also offer gigabit access at only twice the price of its 100 Mbps service? Said Jasper: Why not? "The cost differential between a customer who's connected at all and one who's connected at one gigabit [per second] is nominal." Calling the $69.95 service "a headline product," he noted one key reason for Sonic to offer it: because others can't.

The math behind Sonic's marketing is not so absurd. Once the company moves a DSL customer to fiber, it can stop renting the copper loop from the local phone company office to their home, which costs about $12 a month. From there, the company begins the countdown to recover the "sub-$500" cost to deploy fiber to that home.

"On paper, the model is viable," wrote Diffraction Analysis CEO and co-founder Benoît Felten. He noted Sonic's advantages of being able to start in customer-rich neighborhoods served by cheap overhead lines instead of more expensive to deploy underground conduit. He also emphasized the importance of getting enough customers to upgrade. "If you get in the 40 percent plus [range] it starts to look golden, and if you're in the 60 percent range,” he said, “you've built a cash printing machine."

But expanding on a much larger scale might create financing issues. "On the scale that Sonic.net is currently considering, they can self-finance,” he added, “but if it works and they want to go beyond that, they will need a lot of capital that, as far as I'm aware, they don't currently have."

Jasper confirmed the suspicion; Sonic will have to take on debt if it continues to expand—as it hopes to do so. In a few more months, he said, it will start to advertise the service; by the end of this year, Sonic aims to pass about 2,500 homes in Sebastopol with fiber, plus some 20,000 more in San Francisco's Sunset District.

Early adopters

Sonic's practices have kept customers happy. Back on Florence Avenue, I spoke to five of them during the week after Christmas. In general, they weren’t “techies,” and they hadn’t upgraded from DSL to fiber because they desperately needed the extra speed. They did it because faster service from a company they liked sounded like a good idea. And the price was right.

Rene Peron, a retiree, complimented the service by calling it "invisible," as in, "No slowdowns, no aggravations."

"So far, they're doing everything right," he said. "I've got nothing but good things to say about them." Having Sonic offer TV service would be even better, he said, and it may happen; the company filed for a video franchise with the California PUC last year.

Meg Jones, unemployed when we spoke, had switched from Comcast. "They're a big business. You sign up for a certain a rate and then they're upping it on you,” she said. “That feels manipulative. Sonic promised that they were not going to do that to me. So far they have not."

Scott Sauer, a horticultural distributor, opted for the $69.95 gigabit plan because it included the second phone line he needs to work from home. The extra speed was unlikely to help him personally, as Sonic made clear upfront. "The installer said you really don't need the gigabit," he noted. Indeed, the Windows XP laptop provided by Sauer’s employer could not get past 600 Mbps at one specialized speed-test site. The default TCP/IP settings ate up too much bandwidth. Routing the connection through an AirPort Extreme slowed it further, to a mere 250 Mbps.

But even speed you can’t use carries intangible benefits. ”It was a kick to tell my IT manager in our home office that I have a faster connection than he does,” Sauer said.

Alternate history

Jasper’s an ebullient fellow. He blogs regularly at Sonic's site, answers customers' e-mails himself, pops up on Twitter and Reddit, and happens to have “LINUX” license plates on his Porsche. After hearing him, you might think any reasonably clueful provider could follow Sonic’s example. “We've sort of accepted in the US that incumbent telecom and cable had won," Jasper said.

In part, this is because the huge incumbents actually improved their service dramatically. Remember Seattle-based Speakeasy Network, an indie provider that quickly became a favorite of technically-demanding residential customers starting in the late '90s? From 1999 to 2010, I subscribed, too; signing up with Speakeasy was an easy call when I had readers filling my inbox with complaints about Verizon DSL.

But Verizon's service stabilized and accelerated; Speakeasy's didn't get any faster. The company did launch an ADSL2+ product before Sonic, but it priced it as a business-only service at $149.95 a month. An acquisition by Best Buy in 2007 completed the company’s pivot away from residential service. From the perspective of its management, that was the right call.

"If we hadn't have gone national, we couldn't have sold the company," said Bruce Chatterley, CEO from 2003 to 2010. "We managed the business for growth and then achieved profitability."

(Worth noting: Chatterley complimented Sonic's fiber-upgrade plans: "It's probably the right strategy for him, and it's sustainable for him in that market for sure.")

Best Buy lived to regret its purchase, however. In 2010, it sold the operation to two other DSL survivors, Covad and Megapath. Most ISPs from the same era couldn't even manage to get bought up by a larger firm.

Felten blamed mismanagement by executives who had come in from the big incumbents and who "never understood that offering the same thing cheaper with a worse cost base could not work."

But questionable business decisions were made even more difficult by the FCC’s change of heart. Reed Hundt, FCC chair from 1993 to 1997, blamed his successors at the Commission for foreclosing real competition in DSL. "Under the Bush Administration, the policy of competition on the monopoly copper platform was repudiated," he told me by e-mail. Sonic “is an exception" but it "wouldn't have been alone" if the older approach to regulated competition had remained in place, he said.

"Inertia is a great explainer of a lot of customer activity," said Blair Levin, a senior fellow with the Aspen Institute who was the FCC's chief of staff under Hundt. "When 90 percent of the customers are already taken, that's a hard business."

It’s too late to reverse the effects of that decision—even as Verizon may be calling a halt to its own Fios expansion and AT&T stopping its fiber-to-the-node U-Verse buildout.

But that doesn't leave Sonic as the only active builder of fiber to the home service.

Google finally started deploying its gigabit fiber-optic network in Kansas City—although it has yet to mention rates beyond promising "a competitive price." The Web giant also currently runs a smaller fiber service in Stanford, operated by none other than Sonic.

A few cities, fed up with the current situation, are also getting into the broadband game. In Chattanooga, the local government-owned utility EPB Electric Power already offers gigabit access across the city--though at $349.99 a month, it's not exactly cheap. Its $139.99 cost for 100 Mbps, however, falls well below the $199.95 Comcast charges for 105 Mbps service there. (Farther afield, Cablevision asks $104.95 a month for its 101 Mbps Optimum Online Ultra, while Verizon’s Fios Internet Ultimate goes for at $194.99 while offering 150 Mbps and a phone line.)

But there is one other fiber-to-the-home service that aims to offer the same speeds as Sonic, at an even cheaper price. Vermont Telephone is rolling out gigabit fiber-optic service to homes in 14 lucky telephone exchanges in that state-for only $30 or so. (It took an $81.7 million American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grant to finance that buildout.)

Such moves do put pressure on the incumbents, which have largely responded by having state legislatures pass laws restricting municipal broadband. But they are also isolated examples.

The future might improve, but in the near term, if you want cheap, super-fast broadband your choices are limited: Google, the government, or a real estate agent with property for sale in Sebastopol.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...s-sonicnet.ars





Telstra’s NBN Plans: Just Universally Awful
Renai LeMay

Telstra’s National Broadband Network plans released today are the broadband equivalent of Kryptonite. With less choice, less download quotas, less value than any other provider on the market, but for a higher price and with some ludicrous technical decisions thrown in, Telstra’s NBN options do more than stink — they glow with a sickly radioactive foulness and should be avoided at all costs.

So why do Telstra’s NBN plans stink? As a famous romantic once said, let us count the ways. Firstly, let’s look at the issue which most customers will be interested in: Cost. We’ll examine this issue from the perspective of entry-level, mid-range and top-level users.

An entry level broadband user on the NBN will be looking for a broadband plan which offers between 5GB and 20GB of monthly download quota and at an entry level speed, plus a bundled telephone line. If you’re this kind of user, from iiNet you can pick up a 12Mbps plan with 40GB of download quota for $49.95 a month. Bundle in an Internet telephony line for $9.95 a month (which includes all your local and national calls), and you’re looking at $59.90 a month. Optus offers similar pricing — a 120GB plan with home phone and some included calls for $64.94 a month. And you can go even cheaper with cut-rate provider Exetel — $35 a month for a 50GB plan, 12Mbps with a bundled phone line.

What’s Telstra’s entry level plan? $80 a month, for a 5GB, 25Mbps plan with a bundled phone line and unlimited local calls. Yup, that’s right — $20 a month more, for a plan with a tiny amount of quota. Now, to be fair, the company does offer a $90 monthly plan with 200GB of quota and the same bundled telephone line, which is a lot more decent. But it remains a fact that entry level broadband users don’t want to spend $90 a month on telecommunications. In fact, they don’t want to spend $80. And why should they, when they can spend $35 a month (plus phone calls) from Exetel?

At the high-end, the situation is similar. If you want more than 200GB of monthly quota, with Telstra you’ll be paying a minimum of $121.90 per month, either through the stand-alone fixed broadband plans with a bundled full service telephone line, or $130 or $150 a month for bundled plans with 500GB of quota. All of these plans come with speeds of 100Mbps. In comparison, iiNet offers a terabyte, 100Mbps plan plus a telephone line for $109.90 a month, and Optus’ 500GB, 100Mbps plan with similar calling value undercuts Telstra’s top plan by $21 a month. Exetel’s top-end plan is a 300GB/100Mbps offering for just $70.

It’s only when you come to Telstra’s mid-level plans that customers get a glimmering of competitiveness. With iiNet you can get a 200GB, 100Mbps monthly plan with a bundled line for $89.90 per month, and a similar A similar plan through Telstra will cost you $100 (you get calls to mobiles included, instead of STD). So the two are comparable at that level, and things aren’t too different when you look at Optus. Exetel, of course, is always going to be cheaper.

Morale of this story? At the low-end and the high-end, you’ll be paying more each month if you sign up for the NBN for Telstra — usually $20 or more per month. And you’ll usually be getting a plan with smaller included quota than you could get for a cheaper price elsewhere.

Now we turn to non-pricing aspects of Telstra’s plans. It’s here that some of the ridiculous technical loopholes which Telstra is going to force its early NBN customers through become apparent.

Firstly, and most importantly, it’s important to note something up front which will affect all of Telstra’s initial customers on the NBN — the need to bundle copper telephone lines with your fibre connection. And yes, that is absolutely right — I did say copper.

By definition, all telephone services over the National Broadband Network will be next-generation Internet telephony services. Instead of your voice being transmitted in an analogue fashion down copper wires, the audio will be converted into a digital signal and sent over the Internet. However, for its early NBN customers, Telstra has chosen not to provide voice services over the NBN. Instead, as the Sydney Morning Herald chronicles in a puzzled-sounding article on the topic, all Telstra voice services over the NBN will initially require a bundled copper telephone line.

Read that sentence again and take it in: All Telstra voice services over the NBN will initially require a bundled copper telephone line.

Telstra executive director of customer service, Peter Jamieson, told the SMH: “Copper services will still be available in NBN areas for some time to come. Telstra will activate voice services on NBN once copper is decommissioned.”

Frankly, this is one of the most stunningly ludicrous technical decisions which I have ever been witness to in the past decade in which I have been writing about technology. Whoever made this decision at Telstra needs to be taken out into the back paddock and shot. Copper telephony services, when there’s a fibre connection to people’s houses? What a nightmarish joke. Only someone from Telstra could have come up with that one. It would be hilarious, if it wasn’t so tragically ridiculous.

Now, recognising that Internet telephony cost less than traditional PSTN telephone lines, Australian ISPs have long priced such services much more cheaply — for example, iiNet offers a standard $9.95 Internet telephony line, compared to traditional telephone lines, which can range up to $30 or more in line rental. However, because Telstra is still using its copper lines for NBN customers, it won’t be changing its telephone line rental prices to reflect this new pricing. Instead, Telstra line rental in an NBN world will cost the same as it did in a copper network world. And this can be pricey — up to $31.95 for a full service line.

And you will be using Telstra’s copper. Several of the other ISPs to have offered NBN pricing plans so far have also given customers the choice of whether they want a telephone line or not — in what are known as ‘naked’ broadband plans. With Telstra, however, you have no choice. If you sign up to an NBN plan through Telstra, you will be receiving a fixed telephone line and paying for it — whether you want one or not. Under its current plan structure, Telstra will not offer ‘naked’ NBN.

But wait — it gets worse.

When it comes to entertainment available over the Internet, Telstra has also hobbled its customers. Where companies like iiNet (including its Internode brand) and Optus will offer customers IPTV services over the NBN through their FetchTV service, Telstra today launched a range of plans which offer customers access to the Foxtel IPTV service it part-owns — but only if they have access to both the NBN and live in an area served by the existing Foxtel cable.

That’s right. If you want the full Foxtel experience on the NBN, you have to sign up for a package and get the existing HFC cable connected to your house. That makes three fixed-line connections — fibre, HFC cable and the copper telephony network — from the same provider, Telstra. All of this could be provided through the same NBN fibre cable, if Telstra was technically competent. But it appears that Telstra is not.

Now we should be fair: Telstra will also allow NBN customers to sign up to use its T-Box television set-top box over the NBN, for an additional cost per month. And a subsection of Foxtel is available through the T-Box. This solution does give customers a comparable IPTV experience to customers using FetchTV on other providers — and we’d argue that the T-Box beats FetchTV hands-down. However, not offering the full suite of Foxtel services directly through the NBN is still an oversight by Telstra. It’s services like this that the NBN is fundamentally being built for. And forcing customers to run three separate cables into their house for three separate sets of telecommunications services is simply a bad joke.

There are also other aspects to Telstra’s NBN services which are troubling.

All of the other ISPs to have offered NBN pricing plans so far have given customers the choice of four speed tiers — 12Mbps, 25Mbps, 50Mbps and 100Mbps — at various pricing points, and with different quota packages according to customers’ needs. Telstra has given customers the choice of just two speeds tiers — 25Mbps and 100Mbps, in what appeared to be a foolhardy attempt to harmonise its NBN plans with its ADSL and HFC cable plans.

To my mind, this is simply asinine. The copper, HFC cable and fibre NBN networks are technically different, and offer different speeds and capabilities. Why should Telstra limit the speeds which customers can choose over the NBN, simply because other customers can access other networks? This is the kind of ridiculous artificial technical decisions which uninformed pricing droids make when they get more power than they should at massive corporations like Telstra. Why limit the technical capabilities of a network, for marketing reasons? It makes no sense at all.

Now, you can see why Telstra has made some of these decisions. The NBN is at an early stage, and with only a few thousand people having access to its infrastructure, it makes sense in one view for Telstra to create as little disruption as possible to those customers through continuing to use its own infrastructure as much as possible. However, by doing so, the company is also holding its customers back and making them pay more for services which have already been superceded by rival companies. And that’s never a good approach.

Telstra has also stumbled on another front: Mobile bundling. Sign up for mobile broadband with a company like iiNet (although it doesn’t own its mobile network, instead piggybacking on that of Optus), and you’ll get a discount off your broadband bill. Optus offers similar mobile ‘bundles’ which see mobile phone services packaged with fixed broadband connections.

But not so Telstra. Although the telco operates the nation’s best mobile network (Next G), its site doesn’t make any mention of any ability to bundle mobile and fixed services together on the NBN, although it does allow such bundling on its other networks. You can get them on the same bill — but it doesn’t look like you get any sort of discount for buying the different types of services from the same telco. From my perspective this is just crazy. Why wouldn’t Telstra want to lock its customers in to buying more services from it, through discounting? It’s reverse logic at its worst.

Have I done enough yet to demonstrate that Telstra’s NBN plans stink? I hope so. Over the top pricing, a lack of options compared with other ISPs, and some simply ludicrous technical decisions which show just how far behind its rivals Telstra is when it comes to developing its offerings for the NBN. The telco’s current NBN offerings simply stink; and are best avoided. Of course, the plans released today are simply the earliest iterations of Telstra’s NBN plans, and I’m sure they will be modified over time. They had better be.
http://delimiter.com.au/2012/02/27/t...ersally-awful/





Metro Breakdown! Windows 8 UI is Little Gain for Lots of Pain

Nice OS, shame about the interface
Andrew Orlowski

Comment The public preview of Windows 8 has won "rave reviews" according to the Daily Mail, the newspaper that claims to reflect Middle England and is proudly conservative in every sense of the word. The Mail, it'll have you know, is a feisty opponent of "change for the sake of it".

So not only do I fear that somebody has spiked the water supply at the Kensington HQ of Associated Newspapers, the Mail’s publisher, I’m puzzled about what it is in Windows 8 that merits a "rave".

For, apart from an outbreak of violent electromagnetic storms that zap our PCs at random, nothing is going to disrupt ordinary users as much as the design changes Microsoft wants to introduce. So detached from reality has Microsoft become, it touts every one of these disruptions as a virtue.

The problem isn't Metro, it's the Maoists

Metro is a user interface designed for smartphones, which I have praised generously, and which looks good and works well on small devices. It may yet mature into something equally attractive and useful on iPad-like tablets. But welded onto a non-touch laptop or desktop PC, it represents a huge negative for the majority of Windows users.

The problem isn’t so much Metro, which by itself represents some good thinking about touch device design. It’s Microsoft’s insistence on inserting Metro between us and what we want to do – and at times Metro is spectacularly inappropriate.

But over at Redmond, the Metro team appears to be completely out of control, like the Red Guard during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. They’ve sent the educated to the countryside to dig trenches, and for good measure broken their spectacles. Nobody seems to be able to say no to the Metro Guard, it seems, for fear of punishment. But welding this immature and inappropriate smallscreen UI into the everyday Windows experience is being carried out in a quite totalitarian fashion.

And this is being welcomed not just at the Daily Mail, of all places, but on blogs and fansites. Apparently, according to WinSuperSite the vanguard of the Red Youth will spend most of its time in Metro while the legacy UI will only be relegated for use by "office workers".

Hey! That’s us!

I’ll explain a few of the problems here. This isn’t a comprehensive review - if you want a quick two-page Windows 8 Preview review, Tim Anderson has one for you right here [1]. I’m going to explain the problem. But first, it must be said, it’s a bit of a crying shame.

Hit me again with your brilliance, Active Desktop

The Windows UI today has considerable room for improvement and simplification, and this can be done without causing such huge disruption to a couple of billion users. The Windows 7 don’t-call-it-a-dock Dock [2] helped non-technical users without causing experienced users too much disruption. Many seasoned Windows users appreciate the Jump Lists, for example, and many who don’t like the feature can happily ignore it. It’s not intrusive.

It’s a shame because the underlying Windows 8 code shows considerable improvement. Windows 8 shows the fruit of several quiet years of throwing out the cruft and refactoring vital portions of the software for performance. Windows 8 boots much faster, applications spring to life, and many common operations just feel more responsive and crunchier - on the same hardware. Windows 8 without the Metro UI might even be the best version of Windows that Microsoft has produced.

So logically, Windows 8 could be released like Apple’s Snow Leopard, a minor $20 upgrade boasting no (or hardly any) new features but performance improvements all round. But of course, Microsoft doesn’t work like that. The accounts team want their margins, the marketing bureaucracy requires something to do. And an industry hangs off this. Consultants smell the prospect of fees, while bloggers hope to cash in with how-to books. Disinterested parties are hard to find.

The problem with Metro in Windows 8 is one of policy rather than execution. At the end of the day Metro is like one of those funky widget layers like Dashboard or Yahoo! Widgets or like a lockdown launcher, like At Ease. But the Maoists have dictated that this ephemeral layer must become the new shell.

You can’t avoid it.

Taking the metro: in pictures

The problems begin with the Metro screen, which is the fullscreen overlay now invoked every time you hit the Windows key, and the mandatory replacement for the old start menu.

This is what Microsoft wants you to see:

Win8 Metro Screen

The official MS publicity shot for the Metro screen

But if you scroll to the right, this is what you actually see:

The Metro screen in real life [3]

You see your iSCSI Initiator, your ODBC Data Sources and all your uninstallers. Microsoft hasn't hidden anything or cleaned it up. It's like when the camera accidentally wanders to the side of the soundstage and you see the backs of all the props.

So do you get anything from this new compulsory widget layer? Well, the quality of Metro apps varies, as you can see. The Maps app is very simple, so simple you can’t drop a pin, in fact. This next screenshot is a Twitter feed in the People app. Bear in mind that Microsoft specifies a minimum screen width of 1366 pixels for Windows 8. And look what you get.

Metro apps in Win8: great use of space

In time, no doubt, we’ll get more sophisticated desktop Metro apps – with the extra uncertainty that they won't run on a Windows Phone, and smaller devices. Ho hum.

Here's an example of both over-simplification and duplication, two issues which plague this release. Finding common items has become a crapshoot. There are two control panels, this being the simplified, Metro settings panel.

Very nice. Now where's the Bluetooth toggle? Phones have them. It's a trick question, because it's not there.

Things get quite Heisenberg from this point on. Various options float in from the right hand edge of the Metro screen: Search, Share, Devices and Settings; Microsoft calls them "charms". Click Devices and the only item populating it is "Second Screen". The Windows 7 devices page has been ripped out of Computer and unhappily relocated in Metro Settings:

Now you can't actually do anything with the devices here. Want to check the ink level of that Brother laser printer, or print a test page? Tough. Right click, and nothing happens.

Another strange inconsistency is task-switching. This seems to be something the Red Guard doesn't want you to do. In last year's developer preview of Windows 8, it wasn't possible - you had to swipe through all your applications one by one. Like you do on Windows Phone. With a back button.

Microsoft has restored Alt-Tab, which now works as it has for the past 20 years (it was introduced in v3.1):

But you're not supposed to use it in this brave new Metro World, you bourgeois recidivist! You're supposed to use Win-Tab. But look what happens when you do:

Win-Tab slides open a vertical task bar on the left, with thumbnails of your running apps. Except it doesn't. Here, Opera and Paint.net and a couple of Explorer windows are running, but not displayed. As task-switching goes it's useless.

The most persistent annoyance is being thrown back into Metro when you don't want to be, and while you can change the default handlers for every application Microsoft is going to insist on Metro.

The fix? Make Metro optional

This is just folly. Underneath we have a steadily improving OS, and we have a decent UI layer designed for smaller touch devices. That's all fine.

I have nothing against Microsoft introducing Metro as an option, as it did with Active Desktop and Windows Widgets.

But inserting Metro into our everyday workflows causes many more context switches (modal switches, in the jargon) than we need. If you're not on a touch device, there's lots of pain for very little gain. We are fairly robust creatures who can cope with context switches and UI idiosyncrasies, and the web forces us to do it more often than any UI purist would want (Facebook has its own peculiarities, Twitter and LinkedIn have their own weird design quirks too.)

Microsoft should remember computers are the things getting between us and what we want to do, and making Metro - something so inappropriate for non-touch users - mandatory is completely unnecessary. Time to tame the Metro Guard, I think.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03...does_windows8/





Afraid of Your Child's Math Textbook? You Should Be.
Annie Keeghan

There may be a reason you can’t figure out some of those math problems in your son or daughter’s math text and it might have nothing at all to do with you. That math homework you're trying to help your child muddle through might include problems with no possible solution. It could be that key information or steps are missing, that the problem involves a concept your child hasn’t yet been introduced to, or that the math problem is structurally unsound for a host of other reasons.

I have worked for over 20 years in educational publishing as a product developer, writer, and editor of curriculum materials for grades K-8. I’ve worked directly for textbook publishers and supplemental publishers (supplemental being those books that are adjuncts to the text), start-ups and large publishing houses. I’ve attended countless sales meetings, product meetings, and planning sessions, seen and taken part in the inner workings of a successful textbook from inception to completion. Over the course of my career, I’ve had the privilege of working with publishers dedicated to producing the best materials possible. Because of them, I was able to produce several successful reading, math, and assessment programs and make a darn good living doing it.

Best of all, I was able to feel proud of those books to which my name was attached. But there are no longer many projects that allow such a feeling to take hold. Why? Because the “new normal” among too many publishers is a severe lack of oversight in the quality of curriculum being produced, and a frightening prevalence of apathy to do anything about it.

The root of problem begins with this key fact: There are only a small number of educational publishers left after rabid buyouts and mergers in the 90s, publishers that all vie for a piece of a four-billion dollar (forbes.com) pie. In recent years, math has become the subject du jour due to government initiatives and efforts to raise the rankings of U.S. students who lag behind in math compared to 30 other industrialized nations. With state and local budgets constrained to unprecedented levels, publishers must compete for fewer available dollars. As a result, many are rushing their products (especially in math) to market to before their competitors, product that in many instances is inherently, tragically flawed.

At one time, a writer in this industry could write a book and receive roughly 6% royalties on sales. The salesperson who sold the product, however, earned (and still does) a commission upwards of 17% on the same product. This sort of pay structure never made sense to me; without the product, there’d be nothing to sell, after all. But this disparity serves to illustrate the thinking that has been entrenched industry-wide for decades—that sales and marketing is more valuable than product.

Now, the balance between the budgets for marketing and product development is growing farther and farther apart, and exponentially so. Today, royalties are a thing of the past for most writers and work-for-hire is the norm. Sales staffs still receive their high commissions, but with today’s outsourcing, writers and editors are consistently offered less than 20% of what they used to make. As a result, the number of qualified writers and editors is diminishing, and those being contracted by developers and publishers often don’t have the necessary skills or experience to produce a text worthy of the publisher’s marketing claims.

Here’s how it works: Many publishers solicit developers, often on the Internet and from all over the world, looking for the best bid on a project. With competition this fierce, developers are forced to drastically lower their rates just to stay in business (and publishers exploit this fact). Let’s say a publisher hires a developer for a certain low-bid fee to produce seven supplemental math books for grades 3-8. The product specs call for each student book and teacher guide to have page counts of roughly 100 pages and 80 pages, respectively. The publisher wants these seven books ready for press in five weeks—over 1,400 pages. To put this in perspective, in the not too recent past at least six months would be allotted for a project of this size. But publishers customarily shrink their deadlines to get a jump on the competition, especially in today’s math market. Unreasonable turnaround times are part of the new normal, something that almost guarantees a lack of quality right out of the gate.

Of course, the developer could say no to this ridiculous timeline, but there are plenty of others who will say yes. So, the developer accepts the work and scrambles to put together a team of writers and editors who must have immediate availability, sheepishly offering them a take-it-or-leave-it rate, a mere pittance of what they could once demand. As is the case for the developer, for each writer or editor who declines, there are scores in the wings who will say yes just to survive. Those who do accept the inferior pay and grueling schedule often do so without the ability to review the product specs to know what they’re getting into. That’s because the specs are still being hashed out by the publisher and developer even as the project begins. And when product specs are “complete”, they are often vague, contradictory, and in need of extensive reworking since they were hastily put together by people juggling far too many projects already.

Given the five-week turnaround time, one book is often broken up among several different writers, a practice which assures a lack of consistency and structure throughout a single book. But I’m being picky. Midway through the writing, the developer realizes that even more writers are needed in order to meet the deadline. Sometimes, in the rush to complete the project, there is no time to discuss resumes and qualifications; there’s a schedule to keep and the developer’s bottom line is starting to dwindle. What often happens is that writers overstate their abilities and haven’t the first clue about state educational standards, Common Core State Standards, or those put out by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, a knowledge of which is essential to produce a worthy math book or text, a knoweldge of which should be demanded by developers and publishers alike.

Educational publishing is a small world, and the pool of qualified writers and editors has always been comparatively small to that of mass market or trade publishing. Now with fewer of us willing to accept these conditions, that pool is drying up. Over the last few years I’ve stopped developing and writing educational books; there’s no longer any satisfaction in the work, no demand or appreciation for a product well crafted, no way to make a decent living or produce something that I feel proud to have my name attached to. The day I heard myself ask a publisher not to include my name or that of my company's in the credits of the book I’d consulted on (the final product was nothing like what was originally conceived) came the sad realization that my career as I'd known it was dying. I'd heard whisperings for years from other writers and editors working for other publishers about this “new normal,” but I didn’t understand until I saw with my own eyes what they’d been telling me. I finally understood all their frustration and angst, the conflicted feelings of weighing the need of a paycheck against principle, the feeling of trying to improve a product even if it meant bucking heads with those in charge, people who weren't going to appreciate the effort or compensate appropriately anyway.

So, like many of my fellow colleagues, I’ve taken a step back, chosen not to be a party to something so fundamentally backward. The only work I accept is copyediting, and only when the money is decent (which isn’t often) and when the developer is at least committed to producing curriculum of quality (which also isn’t often). Most of the work I’ve been offered in the past few years is in math, the subject du jour I spoke of. Copyediting, the work I generally do now, is the final stage of editing before the product goes to press, where only a check for grammar, punctuation and things of this nature should be required. Content editing is a whole other expertise, one that is done after the writing where the content editor reviews the writer’s work for accuracy, sense, and structure, and makes sure the material adheres to the product specs. When I’m hired to copyedit, the profound errors I see in content are often staggering enough that grammar and punctuation seem immaterial. Sometimes the content in the student materials is so poor—steps omitted, unclear directions, concepts introduced when they’re not developed till later in the text, distorted interpretations of math terms and applications —that it boggles the mind it got past a content editor. With so many errors rampant at this stage of editing, rewriting is hastily done and it’s only inevitable that some errors will show up in the final printed product. And with a different copyeditor on each book, there are those who don’t even think about, or have the experience to recognize, the content issues so they go unaddressed. For a rate of four dollars a page, most copyeditors will do only what they were hired to do—look for errors and in grammar and punctuation and move on. There's a mortgage due after all.

When I point out critical errors in content to a developer’s project manager, there’s generally a pause at the other end of the phone. I’m ruining their day, handing them a problem they don’t want, can’t possibly address given their resources and time. Some do their best; they’ll ask me to make corrections and bump up my rate a bit. Some will ask me to make notes so that they can fix the errors and do the rewrites themselves on their own time. Others will simply sigh, “The publisher knows it’s bad. Just do the best you can.” The publisher knows it’s bad. And yet, it doesn’t seem to matter. That’s because the sales and marketing team is already at work developing videos, brochures, webinars, catalog copy, and whatever else their bloated budgets will allow in order to sell what doesn’t actually exist—a quality product.

And speaking of the printed product, there’s one more step before we get there—production. These are the people who typeset the books and get them ready for press. India is a favored venue for some publishers because workers are available on three shifts and work fast, but mostly because the price is far cheaper than in the U.S. As editors, we often have to compensate for language barriers by color coding our instructions to the production staff or using simple language that is still frequently misunderstood, resulting in further unintended errors that often make it into the final product because there’s no time left in the schedule, no money left to pay someone, to do a final and thorough review in the manner it should be, and used to be, done.

You may be wondering by now where students fit into the grand plan of these practices. Let’s write and solve and equation to find out: Poorly-executed product (x) + a greater concentration of money spent on marketing to maximize profits (y) = nowhere, that’s where.

One must conclude that students and their education, if this is judged against product quality, is becoming an increasingly low priority. Not only don’t some publishers care, some have no problem expressing their lack of concern. Example: I received an email from a senior math executive of a well-established publisher responding to a concern I raised about the lack of correlations in a particular math series to the Common Core State Standards, correlations that were part of the product specs. The reason they were part of the product specs is because Common Core State Standards have been officially adopted by 43 states (ascd.org) and publishers are racing to make sure their products address them. This is how the senior executive answered my query: “It doesn’t matter if there aren’t enough correlations; our marketing materials say only that we ‘expose’ students to Common Core.”

Not only did this top-level “professional” have no problem stating this, she had no problem committing it to writing. Buyer beware: Read that marketing copy very carefully.

One math series out there is from a well-known textbook publisher incorporating the success of a particular math approach in another country (that’s a hint) into their textbooks. A while back, a group of us was hired to edit and adapt the product for the English-speaking market since it was written overseas. Not much time passed before it was clear that what the product required was not editing but extensive rewriting. One math exercise in a chapter I was assigned called for students to use a math formula to calculate their level of attractiveness, using a mathematical ratio of 1:1.618 (otherwise known as phi or divine proportion), a formula scientists have devised to set standards of beauty. Math can be tough enough for some kids without having to learn that, on top of struggling to apply math formulas to their face, they are also inherently unattractive. Talk about installing math phobia! No publisher in their right mind would allow such a problem to slip into their math books, but what does it say about the hiring practices of publishers and their developers when a writer who believes that such an exercise is appropriate gets a contract? The project was scrapped, but only temporarily. The publisher felt the writers just needed more time to clean up their work. Yeah, that’s all they needed. Meanwhile, the marketing for the product was already developed, prominent on the web and in mass media. And customers likely believed it because of the publisher’s reputation.

A more recent math project I was hired to edit was not only full of content errors, the books were so peculiar in the execution of math concepts and instruction that I hadn’t seen anything like it in all my 20+ years of experience. I asked the project manager if she’d ever seen math approached in this manner. She gave a resigned groan and said no, but this was what the publisher wanted. The books in question were a series of supplemental products designed for struggling students, which is sadly ironic because students of all abilities will indeed struggle to complete the lessons in these books. How could this happen, you might ask? Well, the books were published by a company that was reorganized a few years ago in order to boost profits. That’s when the bulk of the product development staff was let go and the budget for their department slashed. Meanwhile, the marketing and sales departments swelled, as did their budgets. And though many of those in charge now have lofty MBAs, few have little, if any, experience in publishing of any kind, never taught in a classroom, and haven’t the first clue of how to build a coherent educational book from start to finish. The lust for the bottom line—that is how this happens.

At the end of this project, the same project manager mused to me aloud, “I want to know who buys this crap.” Crap. That was the word she used after all her exhausting efforts trying to make a silk purse out of this pig’s ear. My reply to her was, “I want to know who buys it twice.” Because that’s the only way educational publishers make money, on repeat sales. Those books are out there now in print, on the shelves in the publisher’s warehouse, being packed and shipped to a school near you. So who are you people who choose to buy these books? Identify yourselves. Because you, too, a part of the problem.

Don’t get me wrong; they are many responsible educational publishers out there, publishers who are careful to hire teachers or those with a background in education and publishing to produce their materials. But they are becoming the minority. Teachers, curriculum specialists, parents, home schoolers, and anyone interested in the education of this generation of children need to beware. There are those who are capitalizing on established reputations to produce low-budget, low-quality materials with a high-concentration on disingenuous marketing all in the name of priority one—profit. Meanwhile, the people qualified to develop and write sound educational products are leaving the industry in droves to pursue more profitable careers at Wendy’s and Wal-Mart.

And so, I say to parents: Take a good look at the materials your children are bringing home. And to educators: Look at what you’re purchasing. Don’t be satisfied with the classic “thumb through” and don’t take those marketing materials or the sales pitch at face value. Take the time to study the materials; match them to your state’s desired standards and preferred benchmarks. If they’re not a good fit, take a pass and develop your own if you must. The only way kids are going to become better educated through the materials you buy, to increase their rankings among those 30 other countries, is to break the cycle and stop buying those books that are—there’s no other way to put it—crap.
http://open.salon.com/blog/annie_kee..._you_should_be





Random House Raises Library eBooks Through the Roof
Nate Hoffelder

One month ago (to the day) I reported that Random House was going to raise the prices they charge for library ebooks. I said that RH hated the idea of doing business with libraries and I even went so far as to tell a commenter that:

I think it would be more accurate to say that they used to be open to library ebooks; now RH is using higher prices to discourage libraries from buying them.

Today marked the rollout of the new prices, and librarians are already reporting sticker shock. RH increased prices for library ebooks by 200%.

I Told You So.

TBH, I really expected that my rant would seem nutty in retrospect. I will admit to being a little surprised at quite how on the mark I was.

Update: The ALA has called on RH to reconsider the prices.

RH released statement explaining the change and it follows:

Random House, Inc. is constantly experimenting, evaluating, and adjusting different retail price points for our e-books. With our price adjustments announced March 1 we are now doing the same for our library e-pricing, albeit with far less definitive, encompassing circulation data than the sell-through information we use to determine our retail pricing for e-titles. We are requesting data that libraries can share about their patrons’ borrowing patterns that over time will better enable us to establish mutually workable pricing levels that will best serve the overall e-book ecosystem.

Currently absent such information in quantity, it is important to reiterate that our guiding principles in setting these new e-prices are the unrestricted and perpetual availability of our complete frontlist and backlist of Random House, Inc. titles under a model of one-copy, one user. All our titles continue to be available to libraries day and date with the release of the retail edition.

We believe that pricing to libraries must account for the higher value of this institutional model, which permits e-books to be repeatedly circulated without limitation. The library e-book and the lending privileges it allows enables many more readers to enjoy that copy than a typical consumer copy. Therefore, Random House believes it has greater value, and should be priced accordingly.

For the most part, RH prices to library wholesalers for titles available in print as new hardcovers are now set in the range of $65- $85.
Titles available for several months, or generally timed to paperback release, will be decreased in price to a range of $25-$50.
New children’s titles available in print as hcs: $35-$85.
Older children’s titles and children’s paperbacks: $25-$45.

Of course, there will be some “outlier” titles whose respective e-pricing will be above–or below–these ranges, in parallel to their higher/lower level in print. (For example, note that the suggested physical retail price for the Robert Massie title being cited in some literary blogs is $35, higher than most hardcovers, so its corresponding library e-price is higher than the aforesaid price ranges)

As we first said last month, our new e-book pricing framework is to bring our titles in price-point symmetry with our Books on Tape audio book downloads for library lending. These long have carried a considerably higher purchase price point than our digital audio books purchased for individual consumption.

This new pricing will have no impact on Random House collections previously purchased by libraries.

We believe our new library e-pricing reflects the high value placed on perpetuity of lending and simultaneity of availability for our titles. Understandably, every library will have its own perspective on this topic, and we are prepared to listen, learn, and adapt as appropriate.

Throughout our long history of mutual respect and partnership with libraries we have endeavored to satisfy our shared goals. We are certain our ongoing straightforward dialogues with them on library e-lending will continue to yield constructive results.
http://www.the-digital-reader.com/20...ough-the-roof/





In a Flood Tide of Digital Data, an Ark Full of Books
David Streitfeld

In a wooden warehouse in this industrial suburb, the 20th century is being stored in case of digital disaster.

Forty-foot shipping containers stacked two by two are stuffed with the most enduring, as well as some of the most forgettable, books of the era. Every week, 20,000 new volumes arrive, many of them donations from libraries and universities thrilled to unload material that has no place in the Internet Age.

Destined for immortality one day last week were “American Indian Policy in the 20th Century,” “All New Crafts for Halloween,” “The Portable Faulkner,” “What to Do When Your Son or Daughter Divorces” and “Temptation’s Kiss,” a romance.

“We want to collect one copy of every book,” said Brewster Kahle, who has spent $3 million to buy and operate this repository situated just north of San Francisco. “You can never tell what is going to paint the portrait of a culture.”

As society embraces all forms of digital entertainment, this latter-day Noah is looking the other way. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur who made his fortune selling a data-mining company to Amazon.com in 1999, Mr. Kahle founded and runs the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization devoted to preserving Web pages — 150 billion so far — and making texts more widely available.

But even though he started his archiving in the digital realm, he now wants to save physical texts, too.

“We must keep the past even as we’re inventing a new future,” he said. “If the Library of Alexandria had made a copy of every book and sent it to India or China, we’d have the other works of Aristotle, the other plays of Euripides. One copy in one institution is not good enough.”

Mr. Kahle had the idea for the physical archive while working on the Internet Archive, which has digitized two million books. With a deep dedication to traditional printing — one of his sons is named Caslon, after the 18th-century type designer — he abhorred the notion of throwing out a book once it had been scanned. The volume that yielded the digital copy was special.

And perhaps essential. What if, for example, digitization improves and we need to copy the books again?

“Microfilm and microfiche were once a utopian vision of access to all information,” Mr. Kahle noted, “but it turned out we were very glad we kept the books.”

An obvious model for the repository is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is buried in the Norwegian permafrost and holds 740,000 seed samples as a safety net for biodiversity. But the repository is also an outgrowth of notions that Mr. Kahle, 51, has had his entire career.

“There used to be all these different models of what the Internet was going to be, and one of them was the great library that would offer universal access to all knowledge,” he said. “I’m still working on it.”

Mr. Kahle’s partners and suppliers in the effort, the Physical Archive of the Internet Archive, are very glad someone is saving the books — as long as it is not them.

The public library in Burlingame, 35 miles to the south, had a room full of bound periodicals stretching back decades. “Only two people a month used it,” said Patricia Harding, the city librarian. “We needed to repurpose the space.”

Three hundred linear feet of Scientific American, Time, Vogue and other periodicals went off to the repository. The room became a computer lab.

“A lot of libraries are doing pretty drastic weeding,” said Judith Russell, the University of Florida’s dean of libraries who is sending the archive duplicate scholarly volumes. “It’s very much more palatable to us and our faculty that books are being sent out to a useful purpose rather than just recycled.”

As the repository expands — from about 500,000 volumes today toward its goal of 10 million — so does its range. It has just started taking in films.

“Most films are as ephemeral as popcorn,” said Rick Prelinger, the Internet Archive’s movie expert. “But as time passes, the works we tried to junk often prove more interesting than the ones we chose to save.”

At Pennsylvania State University, librarians realized that most of their 16-millimeter films were never being checked out and that there was nowhere to store them properly. So the university sent 5,411 films here, including “Introducing the Mentally Retarded” (1964), “We Have an Addict in the House” (1973) and “Ovulation and Egg Transport in the Rat” (1951).

“Otherwise they probably would have ended up in a landfill,” said William Bishop, Penn State’s director of media and technology support services.

Not everyone appreciates Mr. Kahle’s vision. One of the first comments on the Internet Archive’s site after the project was announced in June came from a writer who said he did not want the archive to retain “any of my work in any form whatsoever.”

Even some librarians are unsure of the need for a repository beyond the Library of Congress.

“I think the probability of a massive loss of digital information, and thus the potential need to redigitize things, is lower than Brewster thinks,” said Michael Lesk, former chairman of the department of library and information science at Rutgers. But he conceded that “it’s not zero.”

If serious “1984”-style trouble does arrive, Mr. Lesk said, it might come as “all Internet information falls under the control of either governments or copyright owners.” But he made clear he thought that was unlikely.

Under a heated tent in the warehouse’s western corner the other day, Tracey Gutierres, a digital records specialist, worked on a new batch. If a volume has a bar code, she scans it to see if the title is already in the repository. If there is no bar code, she checks the International Standard Book Number on the copyright page. If the book is really old, she puts it aside for manual processing.

Before the books make it the 150 feet to the shipping containers for storage, some will have to travel 12,000 miles to China. The Chinese, who are keen to build a digital library, will scan the books for themselves and the archive and then send them back. The digital texts will be available for the visually impaired and other legal purposes.

As word about the repository has spread, families are making their own donations.

Carmelle Anaya had no idea what to do with the 1,200 books her father, Eric Larson, left when he died. Then she heard about the project. “He’d be thrilled to think they would be archived so maybe someone could check them out a hundred years from now,” said Ms. Anaya, who lives in California’s Central Valley.

Her daughter Ashley designed a special bookplate. Any readers across the centuries will know where the copies came from. “The books will live on,” Ms. Anaya said, “even if the people can’t.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/t...-of-books.html





UK Singer Gets $951,000 in Murdoch Hacking Case
Raphael Satter

Charlotte Church, who told a media inquiry of being hounded by Rupert Murdoch's journalists when she was a teen singing sensation, received 600,000 pounds ($951,000) Monday in a settlement from News International and said she had been sickened by what she learned about intrusion into her private life.

Church was present at London's High Court for the reading of a statement resolving her claim that 33 articles in the now defunct News of the World tabloid were the product of journalists illegally hacking into her family's voice mails.

Outside court, Church said: "What I have discovered as the litigation has gone on has sickened and disgusted me. Nothing was deemed off limits by those who pursued me and my family, just to make money for a multinational news corporation."

The settlement to Church includes 300,000 pounds ($476,000) in legal costs and a public apology but Church said she did not believe News International's apology was sincere.

"I have also discovered that despite the apology which the newspaper has just given in court, these people were prepared to go to any lengths to prevent me exposing their behavior," she said.

She added: "They are not truly sorry. They are just sorry they got caught."

Lawyers for Church, 26, and her parents, James and Maria, confirmed that terms had been agreed with News of the World publisher News Group Newspapers.

News International, a division of Murdoch's News Corp., has tried hard to keep phone hacking cases from going to trial. It has launched its own compensation program, overseen by a respected former judge, and has paid out millions in out-of-court settlements for about 60 cases including one brought by actor Jude Law, comedian Steve Coogan, former soccer star Paul Gascoigne and actress Sienna Miller.

Judge Geoffrey Vos has said News International had made "superhuman efforts to settle every case."

The lawsuits stem from revelations of phone-hacking and other illegal tactics at the News of the World, where journalists routinely intercepted voice mails of those in the public eye in a relentless search for scoops.

Murdoch closed the 168-year-old tabloid in July amid a wave of public revulsion over its 2002 interception of voice mails belonging to a missing 13-year-old girl, Milly Dowler, who was later found murdered. Murdoch and his company paid millions to the Dowler family.

The scandal has spawned three parallel police investigations and a U.K. judge-led inquiry into media ethics, where Church spoke of the intense, often overwhelming, media intrusion into her family's private life.
http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...se-3363504.php





WikiLeaks Publishes Intelligence Firm E-Mails
Somini Sengupta

WikiLeaks said Monday that it had begun to expose e-mail correspondence from the global geopolitical analysis firm known as Stratfor, detailing the work of the company for clients.

WikiLeaks did not disclose how it obtained the e-mails, but Stratfor acknowledged in December that its data servers were breached by a group of hackers known as Anonymous. The loose-knit group publicly supports WikiLeaks.

Anonymous posted online the names, e-mails and credit card numbers of thousands of Stratfor subscribers.

Now the contents of the e-mails are being exposed — five million pieces of correspondence in all, spanning seven years, WikiLeaks said.

It added that the organization was analyzing the documents with the help of 25 publications around the world, including Rolling Stone in the United States, L’Espresso in Italy and The Hindu in India. WikiLeaks said that Stratfor kept many records on the group and its founder, Julian Assange, who is under house arrest in Britain and wanted for extradition to Sweden in connection with allegations of sex crimes.

“The material contains privileged information about the U.S. government’s attacks against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and Stratfor’s own attempts to subvert WikiLeaks,” the group said. “There are more than 4,000 e-mails mentioning WikiLeaks or Julian Assange.”

Mr. Assange appeared Monday at a streamed news conference from the journalists’ Frontline Club in London.

Stratfor said in a statement that some of the e-mails being published “may be forged or altered to include inaccuracies; some may be authentic,” the company said in a statement quoted by Reuters.

“We will not validate either. Nor will we explain the thinking that went into them. Having had our property stolen, we will not be victimized twice by submitting to questioning about them,” the statement said.

At the London news conference, Mr. Assange said the Stratfor statement seemed to confirm the advice offered by a senior figure in the company in one of the exposed e-mails which he quoted a senior Stratfor executive as saying: “admit nothing, deny everything, make counteraccusations.”

Alan Cowell contributed reporting from London.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/t...m-e-mails.html





Android Crosses 850,000 Activations Per Day with 450,000 Apps in the Store, Andy Rubin Says
Kim-Mai Cutler

The Android platform is now seeing more than 850,000 device activations per day, up from the 700,000 figured shared back in January, according to Andy Rubin, who oversees the OS at Google.

The figures suggest that Android may be gaining some momentum again, after Apple saw a blowout $46.3 billion quarter during Christmas in the wake of the iPhone 4S launch. Given that Android was 250 million cumulative device activations during the company’s last quarterly earnings call, this rate suggests that the platform is nearing 300 million device activations to date. Update: Actually, there are more than 300 million device activations to date, according to a Google blog post.

Apple’s iOS was last at 315 million cumulative devices sold during its quarterly earnings call, and it’s probably fair to say that the company is at more than 330 million now. The figures both companies have shared suggest that we might see a crossover point sometime during this or the next quarter when Google’s Android platform will have more activations to date than Apple has in iOS device sales.

Rubin added that there are now more than 450,000 applications in Android Market, just shy of the more than 500,000 apps that are in Apple store.
http://www.insidemobileapps.com/2012...dy-rubin-says/





The Second Screen, Trying to Complement the First
Randall Stross

DO two screens create television-watching heaven? Do viewers want television content on their laps as well as on the main screen?

The Nielsen Company has some survey data confirming what we can see around us: Many TV viewers are using a computing device of some kind while they watch. Last October, Nielsen said 40 percent of smartphone and tablet owners in the United States self-reported that they used their devices daily while watching TV.

The Nielsen survey respondents also noted the various things they’re doing with that second screen. At the top of the list were checking e-mail, during programs and commercials, along with Web surfing unrelated to the TV program. Looking up information related to the program at hand finished far behind.

But users’ memories are not the best measurement tool. Radha Subramanyam, Nielsen’s senior vice president for media analytics, does not have technology to capture what users are doing on their portable devices as they watch. “We’re relying on what people tell us that they’re doing,” she says.

On the supply side, second-screen apps like those from Yap.tv, Umami, IntoNow, BuddyTV Guide and Miso are proliferating for smartphones or tablets. “Five years ago, we thought interactive TV was one screen,” Ms. Subramanyam says. “Turns out, it’s the second screen.”

Some of the new apps can recognize all the shows you may be watching on the major networks, based on what’s called their audio fingerprint. These apps then display options that can include related photos, live chats, tweets or user polls. Other apps require you to manually select a show before you can see such choices.

How badly does the television audience want to see that kind of content while watching the show itself? That’s hard to know. Trevor Stout, Yap.tv’s chief executive, declined to say how many viewers use it regularly.

Scott Rosenberg, Umami’s chief executive, said he was concerned that advertisers were rushing to embrace second screens well before they were ready to offer compelling content. “The traditional bargain with TV is, ‘We give you great content and you accept our advertising messaging,’ ” Mr. Rosenberg said. “Why should the second screen be any different? Actually, the bar for great content is even higher.”

His company offers a free iPad app and is working just on giving consumers a compelling reason to “open that second screen app in the first place and then stick around.” In the future, he says, the company will explore ways to integrate advertising into the experience in ways that won’t irritate viewers.

Mr. Rosenberg says, “Once the novelty has worn off, consumers are not going to dive for their phones just to start an app to get info about the ad they’ve just seen.”

Last year, Nielsen released a study it did for Google in which subjects were shown a 15-second commercial for a sports sedan. Of those who saw the ad only on television, half were able to recall the name of the manufacturer. Of those who saw it at different times on four screens — television, computer, smartphone and tablet — about three-quarters remembered the name.

Perhaps most surprising, however, was that even after the message was pounded in four different ways, some 26 percent didn’t recall the advertiser.

Marc DeBevoise, senior vice president and general manager of CBS Interactive’s entertainment division, seems wary of supplying the second screen with content that distracts from the main one.

“Extensions”— his term for complementary content — “are rarely meant to be watched or used at the same time that the show is watched,” he says. “They’re meant to bridge the gaps between watchings.”

So far, second-screen apps are dwarfed by the popularity of the social media giants Facebook and Twitter. “Television is social,” says Elizabeth Shaw, an analyst at Forrester Research. “We’ve always talked offline with others about what is going on in our favorite shows. Now it’s moved online. Networks know this and are trying to figure out how to move these conversations to their own Web and mobile properties.”

MR. DeBEVOISE says that “we do think social commenting during shows is a big opportunity,” citing the 13 million “social media comments” counted by Bluefin Labs during the CBS broadcast of the Grammy Awards last month. Bluefin says the number was a record for any program it has tracked.

Mr. Stout at Yap.tv contends that a second-screen app, like his company’s, is superior to social networks’ software. “If you’re on Facebook or Twitter while you’re watching TV,” he says, “you’re not getting an experience customized to the show you’re watching.”

But maybe TV-focused customization isn’t what most viewers crave. Rather, they may be happiest with the unfettered ability to do unrelated things with a second screen. And perhaps, before long, a third one, too.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/b...-watching.html





Once Film-Focused, Netflix Transitions to TV Shows
Brian Stelter

Belying the “flix” in its name, Netflix is now primarily an Internet streaming service for television shows, not feature films.

TV series now account for more than half of all Netflix viewing. That helps to explain why this Wednesday — the long-awaited moment when motion picture classics like “Scarface” and newer hits like “Toy Story 3” will vanish from the streaming service — is not the doomsday that it was once expected to be.

The vanishing films are from Starz. Its three-and-a-half-year-old deal helped Netflix persuade millions of people to sign up for Internet streaming, hastening the company’s leap to digital distribution from physical DVDs.

It became clear about a year ago that the deal would not be renewed. By then, though, Netflix was bulking up on old TV episodes and, in a direct challenge to HBO, beginning to distribute its own original shows for the streaming service.

Analysts say the prioritizing of television partly explains why the company has been able to retain about 21.7 million streaming subscribers in the United States — totaling one in four households that have broadband — despite complaints about an inadequate feature film selection. It’s a transition that Netflix has made rather successfully in the last six to 12 months, in stark contrast to its botched plan to spin off DVD-by-mail into a separate company called Qwikster last fall.

While the end of the Starz deal is bad news for Netflix, said Richard Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG Research, “given the significant increase in TV viewing, it’s not the catastrophic event that everyone thought it would be a year ago.”

The new-release movies provided by Starz account for just 2 percent of all viewing, Netflix says, down from 8 percent a year ago — illuminating the fact that the company has spent lavishly on new streaming titles that subscribers want to watch instead. (“I would contend Netflix spends wisely rather than lavishly,” a Netflix spokesman, Steve Swasey, said in response.)

Many of the new titles are full seasons of TV series like “Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad” and “Lost” that Netflix executives call “26-hour movies.”

The pivot to TV reruns was necessitated in part by the tightening of the movie spigot by major movie studios. Fearing that Netflix might grow too popular or powerful, the studios “have decided to dramatically raise prices” for films and shows, said Youssef H. Squali, a managing director for Jefferies & Company. “So in effect, the company is being forced into offering more (older) TV content because it’s cheaper,” he said.

The company’s next challenge is to come up with original shows — instead of reruns — that subscribers will latch onto, mimicking the HBO model. Such a model further distances Netflix from films and differentiates it from newfound competitors like Hulu and Amazon.

Reed Hastings, Netflix’s chief executive, told business school students in Manhattan last week that the company would try a couple of dozen original series in the coming years, but did not specify a timeframe; Netflix had previously said that five such series would premiere by the end of 2013.

A show from Norway, “Lilyhammer,” had its American debut on Netflix earlier this month, and an ambitious drama made just for Netflix, “House of Cards,” will have its debut later in the year. A revival of the Fox sitcom “Arrested Development” will come out sometime next year.

“While they are losing the Starz content later this week, and that could cause some people to cancel subscriptions to the service, the library will otherwise be generally improving throughout the year and then having a more significant step up with ‘House of Cards’ in late ’12 and ‘Arrested Development’ and Dreamworks films in ’13,” said Michael Olson, an analyst at Piper Jaffray.

Still, there is a persistent undercurrent of criticism about Netflix’s actual movie selection, and it was highlighted this week by the Starz disappearance. Mr. Olson’s firm reported last week that only four of the 50 top-grossing films of 2011 were currently available for streaming on the service, and that one of them, Disney’s “Gnomeo and Juliet,” would vanish on Wednesday.

John Hall, a graphic designer in Massachusetts, said he recently dropped the streaming service and started resorting to DVD rentals for that reason. Whenever he headed to Netflix to stream a film, he said, “more often than not, the film I wanted to see was only available on disc.”

Netflix is sensitive to that criticism — but says it doesn’t really matter. (And not just because Mr. Hall is still paying for DVDs by mail.) As long as its algorithms serve up something worth watching, even if it’s not the subscriber’s first choice, he or she will continue paying for and enjoying the service, the company believes.

“The cocktail party conversation in the media world is, the content’s terrible,” Mr. Greenfield said. “And yet the average subscriber is devouring over an hour a day, every single day. Obviously they don’t think it’s horrible.” He noted that films did not need to be box-office smashes to succeed on Netflix — in fact, some films have a second life online precisely because they were not widely seen in theaters.

Earlier this month, Netflix secured rights to “The Artist,” which won the best-picture Oscar at the Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday. It has earned just $32 million at the box office to date and will become available on Netflix in less than six months, the company said Monday.

Netflix can also replenish some of the vanishing Starz films by buying them separately. But for now, its rights to “Toy Story 3,” “Tron,” “Tangled,” “A Christmas Carol” and other films are drying up. Some TV series from Starz are vanishing too, including “Party Down” and “Spartacus,” creating new tests for Netflix’s recommendation algorithms.

Netflix declined to comment on exactly what proportion of total viewing that TV episodes make up, but its executives put the number at 50 to 60 percent last fall. Mr. Greenfield said he suspected that the percentage was 80 percent — an impressive triumph for TV over film.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/b...-tv-shows.html





Redbox Deal with Universal Keeps DVDs, Blu-Rays On 28-Day Delay Through 2014
Richard Lawler

So far, Redbox has maintained that it's only willing to delay rentals of new releases a maximum of one month, but while Warner pushes for a longer window the rental kiosk chain has reached an agreement with Universal Studios Home Entertainment. The new deal keeps the delay window at 28 days, and promises to keep the discs flowing through August 2014.

Despite Redbox's threat to start offering Warner movies day and date due to their dispute, so far it's still taken a couple of weeks for new releases like Harold & Kumar and J Edgar to make their way into kiosks. So far there's no word of other studios backing Warner's push for a 56-day delay between the date movies go on sale at retail and the earliest budget renters like Redbox and Netflix will offer them, which is a good sign.

Not mentioned in the press release? Whether or not this deal could affect the availability of content for Redbox's internet streaming service that's on the way with Verizon.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/03/01/r...-rental-delay/





Broadcasters Sue To Stop $12 Streaming Service Aereo
Jeff Roberts

Well, that was quick. Two weeks ago, media mogul Barry Diller announced an ambitious cloud-based TV service that streams over-the-air channels to internet devices for $12 a month. This week, broadcasters offered their opinion in the form of a lawsuit that seeks to shut off the service which is set to go live on March 14.

Fox (NSDQ: NWS), Univision and PBS filed a complaint in Manhattan federal court that claims Aereo infringes their copyright and that the upstart’s technology fails to qualify for a legal loophole.

Aereo works by taking over the air signals that are free to everyone and retransmitting them to individual “dime-sized antennas” that let consumers watch the content on internet devices.

Aereo plans to launch its service in Brooklyn and then roll it out across the company to subscribers who will pay $12 a month.

The company’s pitch is: “Live Broadcast TV, meet the Internet. Finally. With Aereo you can now watch live, broadcast television online. On devices you already have. No cable required.”

As my colleague Daniel Frankel recently explained, the broadcasters were unlikely to let Aereo open shop in peace after they had spent years fighting to extract lucrative carriage fees from cable companies to reproduce their channels.

Aereo is another in a succession of internet companies that have sought to disrupt traditional TV-watching. Many of the others have been sued out of existence; and Aereo has said it is anticipating a legal challenge and has a theory to get around the copyright issue.

That theory is likely to turn on a distinction rooted in the analog era that distinguishes between transmitting to one or to many viewers. Cablevision (NYSE: CVC), for instance, successfully defended its remote digital video recorder technology, after an appeals court found that there was no transmission to the public. Under the plan, each individual subscriber was connected to their own dedicated DVR at Cablevision’s head end, in much the way each Aereo subscriber is linked to their own personal dime-sized digital antenna.

In their complaint against Aereo, the broadcasters argue, “It simply does not matter whether Aereo uses one big antenna to receive Plaintiffs’ broadcasts .. or ‘tons’ of ‘tiny’ antennas .. No amount of technological gimmickry by Aereo or claims of sophisticated ‘rabbit ears’ change the fundamental principle of copyright.”

The broadcasters are seeking damages and a permanent injunction.

Update: A second group of broadcasters, including ABC (NYSE: DIS), filed a related lawsuit. Aereo has since responded with a statement saying the suits have no merit. Here is the legal tack Aereo plans to take:

Consumers are legally entitled to access broadcast television via an antenna and they are entitled to record television content for their personal use.
https://paidcontent.org/article/419-...service-aereo/





AT&T May Try Billing App Makers
Anton Troianovski

AT&T Inc. said it is considering a way to let the providers of mobile services pay for the cost of the data traffic associated with things like streaming movies and smartphone applications, opening up a new round of debate over the rules of the mobile Internet.

John Donovan, the executive responsible for AT&T's network and technology, explained the carrier's interest in the service in an interview, likening it to toll-free calling for the mobile-broadband world.

"A feature that we're hoping to have out sometime next year is the equivalent of 800 numbers that would say, if you take this app, this app will come without any network usage," Mr. Donovan said on the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress, a mobile-industry conference, here.

Carriers have been considering different pricing models for years as they look for ways to make more money from skyrocketing mobile-data use. But AT&T's approach would be novel, an attempt to push some of the cost of data traffic back onto the Internet companies and other service providers that profit from it.

It is far from clear how willing technology companies would be to pay wireless carriers for data use. Mr. Donovan said there was interest from companies that could use the feature to drum up new business from customers wary of using data-heavy services like mobile video.

"What they're saying is, why don't we go create new revenue streams that don't exist today and find a way to split them," Mr. Donovan said of the technology companies.

The incentive—or cudgel—for technology companies to participate comes from AT&T and Verizon Wireless's shift from unlimited data plans to ones that charge users higher monthly fees as their data consumption goes up.

A customer nearing his data limit for the month could be more likely to download a movie if the content provider covered the price of the data transmission.

"It'd be like freight included," Mr. Donovan said.

Some consumer advocates reacted with dismay, arguing that AT&T could stifle competition and shift the playing field toward well-heeled app developers and content providers that have the financial capacity to subsidize mobile customers' data use.

"You have to raise all this additional capital to reach the customer or alternatively you have to compete with well-established players who can afford to pay," said Harold Feld, legal director for consumer group Public Knowledge.

By allowing some companies to pay for better services for wireless customers, AT&T could be wading back into the "net neutrality" debate that played out in recent years.

Proponents of net neutrality say that telecommunications companies shouldn't be allowed to give special treatment to some service providers, because doing so would threaten the ideal of the "open Web," where easy access to customers lets new competitors like Facebook Inc. spring up quickly.

Telecom companies say they need to have the flexibility to manage traffic on their networks. They also chafe at being sidelined as "dumb pipes," relegated to spending billions to maintain networks while Internet companies collect much of the profit from the traffic.

Prepaid carrier MetroPCS Communications Inc. drew criticism from net-neutrality advocates last year after offering unlimited YouTube usage alongside its smartphone plans. The company no longer offers that plan, and a spokesman said YouTube never paid MetroPCS to subsidize data traffic.

The Federal Communications Commission has adopted "net neutrality" rules that are stricter for landline networks than mobile ones, and Public Knowledge said it would be tough to challenge AT&T's plan under the FCC's rules. Mr. Donovan, in the interview on Monday, said AT&T needed to find creative ways to deal with and profit from surging mobile-data use.

"There's a view of an entitlement that says that any impediment to riding over the top of our network is inherently wrong, is un-American," Mr. Donovan said.

The FCC declined to comment.
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/...zEyNDcyWj.html





Apple Loophole Gives Developers Access to Photos
Nick Bilton

The private photos on your phone may not be as private as you think.

Developers of applications for Apple’s mobile devices, along with Apple itself, came under scrutiny this month after reports that some apps were taking people’s address book information without their knowledge.

As it turns out, address books are not the only things up for grabs. Photos are also vulnerable. After a user allows an application on an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to have access to location information, the app can copy the user’s entire photo library, without any further notification or warning, according to app developers.

It is unclear whether any apps in Apple’s App Store are illicitly copying user photos. Although Apple’s rules do not specifically forbid photo copying, Apple says it screens all apps submitted to the store, a process that should catch nefarious behavior on the part of developers. But copying address book data was against Apple’s rules, and the company approved many popular apps that collected that information.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

The first time an application wants to use location data, for mapping or any other purpose, Apple’s devices ask the user for permission, noting in a pop-up message that approval “allows access to location information in photos and videos.” When the devices save photo and video files, they typically include the coordinates of the place they were taken — creating another potential risk.

“Conceivably, an app with access to location data could put together a history of where the user has been based on photo location,” said David E. Chen, co-founder of Curio, a company that develops apps for iOS, Apple’s mobile operating system. “The location history, as well as your photos and videos, could be uploaded to a server. Once the data is off of the iOS device, Apple has virtually no ability to monitor or limit its use.”

On Apple devices, full access to the photo library was first permitted in 2010 when Apple released the fourth version of iOS. The change was intended to make photo apps more efficient. Google declined to comment on how its Android operating system for mobile devices handles this issue.

“It’s very strange, because Apple is asking for location permission, but really what it is doing is accessing your entire photo library,” said John Casasanta, owner of the successful iPhone app development studio Tap Tap Tap, which created the Camera+ app. “The message the user is being presented with is very, very unclear.”

The New York Times asked a developer, who asked not to be named because he worked for a popular app maker and did not want to involve his employer, to create a test application that collected photos and location information from an iPhone. When the test app, PhotoSpy, was opened, it asked for access to location data. Once this was granted, it began siphoning photos and their location data to a remote server. (The app was not submitted to the App Store.)

The knowledge that this capability exists is not new, developers say, but it was assumed that Apple would ensure that apps that inappropriately exploited it did not make it into the App Store. Based on recent revelations, phone owners cannot be sure.

“Apple has a tremendous responsibility as the gatekeeper to the App Store and the apps people put on their phone to police the apps,” said David Jacobs, a fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Apple and app makers should be making sure people understand what they are consenting to. It is pretty obvious that they aren’t doing a good enough job of that.”

“We’ve seen celebrities and famous people have pictures leaked and disclosed in the past. There’s every reason to think that if you make that easier to do, you’ll see much more of it,” Mr. Jacobs said. Not just celebrities are at risk, he added. “A lot of sites are trying to obtain images from everyday people and politicians to post online.”

As the Apple Store has grown to include more than 600,000 apps, and with Apple facing pressure from Google and Android, some worry that the company is becoming less vigilant about monitoring app developers, exposing users to unnecessary risks and shoddy apps.

This month, Apple allowed a fake 99-cent Pokémon app into the App Store. Even though it offered only a series of Pokémon images, it became one of the most popular paid apps before it was removed by Apple.
Brian X. Chen contributed reporting.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0...deos-location/





Sweden to Outlaw Pics Taken by Peeping Toms

Using camera-equipped smartphones to take compromising pictures of people without their knowledge will be punishable with jail time, according to a proposal from the Swedish government.

The government has long wanted to outlaw the act of secretly taking insulting pictures of people, but previous attempts have been criticized on the grounds that doing so would compromise people's freedom of expression.

"What we're trying to prevent are insulting pictures, that is the taking of pictures or filming in secret that infringe on a specific individual," justice minister Beatrice Ask told Sveriges Radio (SR) on Wednesday.

There have been several cases in which modern-day Peeping Toms have snapped pictures of women in various states of undress while they were in department store fitting rooms, public toilets, or showers.

The proliferation of mobile phones with cameras and internet connections means that it's much easier to take and widely spread compromising pictures of people without their knowledge.

While the women often targeted in such instances have argued their right to privacy has been violated through the secretly snapped pics, the act isn't a crime according to current laws.

According to Ask, the new bill, which was presented on Wednesday, is formulated in a way to ensure that the work of journalists wouldn't be criminalized, for example.

Rather than outlawing "unauthorized" picture taking, the new law would criminalize the taking of "insulting" ('kränkande') pictures.

However, the assessment of what constitutes and "insulting" photograph would be made by a court.

The crime would be punishable by up to two years in prison, according to the new law, which Ask hopes will come into force on July 1st of this year.
http://www.thelocal.se/39424/20120301/





Interpol Arrests 25 Suspected Anonymous Hackers
AFP

Interpol has arrested 25 suspected members of the Anonymous hackers group in a swoop covering more than a dozen cities in Europe and Latin America, the global police body said Tuesday.

"Operation Unmask was launched in mid-February following a series of coordinated cyber-attacks originating from Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Spain," Interpol said.

The statement cited attacks on the websites of the Colombian Ministry of Defense and the presidency, as well as on Chile's Endesa electricity company and its National Library, among others.

The operation was carried out by police from Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Spain, the statement said, with 250 items of computer equipment and cell phones seized in raids on 40 premises in 15 cities.

Police also seized credit cards and cash from the suspects, aged 17 to 40.

"This operation shows that crime in the virtual world does have real consequences for those involved, and that the Internet cannot be seen as a safe haven for criminal activity," said Bernd Rossbach, acting director of police services at Interpol, which is in the French city of Lyon.

However, it was not clear what evidence there was to prove those arrested were part of Anonymous, an extremely loose-knit international movement of online activists, or "hacktivists."

Spanish police said earlier they had arrested four suspected hackers accused of sabotaging websites and publishing confidential data on the internet.

They were accused of hacking the websites of political parties and companies and adding fangs to the faces of leaders in photographs online, and publishing data identifying top officials' security guards, Spanish police said.

The operation, carried out after trawling through computer logs in order to trace IP addresses, also netted 10 suspects in Argentina, six in Chile and five in Colombia, Spanish police said.

Anonymous has in recent weeks targeted the websites of a series of police organizations, with subgroup Antisec vandalizing the website of a major US prison contractor last Friday.

Anonymous took credit Thursday for an online raid on the Los Angeles Police Canine Association and previously attacked websites of the CIA and FBI.
http://www.myfoxny.com/dpp/news/inte...s-20120228-ncx





Anonymous Supporters Tricked into Installing Zeus Trojan

In 2011, dozens of Anonymous members who participated in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in support of Anonymous hacktivism causes were arrested. In these DDoS attacks, supporters using the Low Orbit Ion Cannon denial-of-service (DoS) tool would voluntarily include their computer in a botnet for attacks in support of Anonymous. In the wake Anonymous member arrests this week, it is worth highlighting how Anonymous supporters have been deceived into installing Zeus botnet clients purportedly for the purpose of DoS attacks. The Zeus client does perform DoS attacks, but it doesn’t stop there. It also steals the users' online banking credentials, webmail credentials, and cookies.

The deception of Anonymous supporters began on January 20, 2012, the day of the FBI Megaupload raid. An attacker took a popular PasteBin guide, used by Anonymous members for downloading and using the DoS tool Slowloris, and modified it. In this modified version, the attacker changed the download link to a Trojanized version of the Slowloris tool with matching text:

Figure 1. a) Legitimate Slowloris post from May 2011 Anonymous campaign, and b) trojanized PasteBin post for the deception of Anonymous members.

Later that same day, a separate Anonymous DoS guide was posted on PasteBin which included links to various DoS tools. Slowloris was included in this list of tools—the Trojanized version copied from the modified guide:

Figure 2. Anonymous DoS guide with copied Trojanized Slowloris link. The Slowloris link was copied from the deceptive post earlier in the day.

This Anonymous DoS tool on PasteBin has become quite popular among the Anonymous movement with more than 26,000 views and 400 tweets referring to the post. The following is a timeline of the tweets with related hacktivism causes highlighted:

Figure 3. Attack timeline from the start of the Megaupload raid. The PasteBin including the Trojanized Slowloris link is still being commonly linked to in new Tweets to-date.

Supporters still refer to this PasteBin guide post as “Tools of the DDos trade” and “Idiot’s Guide to Be Anonymous,” seen below:

Figure 4. Twitter search results on February 15th, 2012 for references to the Anonymous DoS guide PasteBin post with Trojanized Slowloris.

Figure 5. Flow of events as the hacker specifically targeted the Anonymous group with the Trojanized Slowloris download.

When the Trojanized Slowloris tool is downloaded and executed by an Anonymous supporter, a Zeus (also known as Zbot) botnet client is installed. After installation of the Zeus botnet client, the malware dropper attempts to conceal the infection by replacing itself with the real Slowloris DoS tool. Zeus is an advanced malware program that cannot be easily removed. The Zeus client is being actively used to record and send financial banking credentials and webmail credentials to the botnet operator. Additionally, the botnet is being used to force participation in DoS attacks against Web pages known to be targets of Anonymous hacktivism campaigns. This usage is summarized in the figure below:

Figure 6. Observed usage of the installed Zeus clients in the Anonymous Slowloris attack. Cookies, online banking credentials, and webmail credentials are sent to the server from the infected machines. Commands are given to the botnet clients to execute Slowloris and attack Anonymous hacktivism targets.

Communication to the command-and-control (C&C) server is achieved through HTTP POST messages. Below are examples of decrypted POST messages sending a cookie, financial credentials, and webmail credentials to the C&C server:

Table 1. Example of decrypted POST data sent from the Zeus client to the C&C domain for a) cookie data being sent to the server, b) credentials sent to the server after stealing an online banking username and password, and c) stolen webmail account credentials.

Not only will supporters be breaking the law by participating in DoS attacks on Anonymous hacktivism targets, but may also be at risk of having their online banking and email credentials stolen. The joining of malicious financial and identity fraud malware, Anonymous hacktivism objectives, and Anonymous supporter deception is a dangerous development for the online world. We will continue to watch for new developments.
http://www.symantec.com/connect/blog...ng-zeus-trojan





Megaupload Founder Defeats US Govt Attempts To Put Him Back In Prison
enigmax

After being granted bail last week, Kim Dotcom went home to spend some quality time with his family. The Megaupload founder had been in prison for little over a month after his arrest in January. Upset at the decision to grant Dotcom freedom, the US Government, argued yesterday in an appeal hearing that he should be put back in jail. Today they failed in that attempt and Dotcom remains a free man – at least for now.

On February 22nd, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom was released on bail by North Shore District Court Judge Nevin Dawson.

Dotcom had been held in custody since an anti-terrorist police squad raided his Coatesville mansion in January following a lengthy FBI investigation.

The prosecution, acting on behalf of the US Government, argued that Dotcom had hidden resources that would enable him to flee the country should he be granted bail. Although four additional bank accounts in the Philippines were discovered, all of them were empty, and the Judge concluded that there was no evidence of significant funds elsewhere

As a result the Megaupload founder was released from prison, free to continue the fight against the US authorities who want him extradited to face racketeering, copyright infringement and money laundering charges.

When TorrentFreak spoke with Dotcom yesterday he was in high spirits but the Crown, acting on behalf of the US Government, had already appealed the decision to free the Megaupload founder.

Crown prosecutor Anne Toohey told the court yesterday that since Dotcom’s release last week two further banks accounts had been discovered – one in the Philippines and another in the British Virgin Islands containing $2000.

She said that this, along with allegations that Dotcom might have access to forged travel documents, was enough to have the 38-year-old put back in prison.

Representing Dotcom, Paul Davison QC argued that it made no sense for his client to try and flee the country, not least because his wife Mona will shortly give birth to twins.

Today Judge Tim Brewer agreed, denying the prosecution’s appeal and allowing Dotcom to remain a free man pending an extradition appeal in August.

Also in court today, Dotcom and his wife had asked for access to around NZ $220,000 (US $185,130) to cover their living costs including rent of their mansion, security guards and other household staff. The amount would also cover substantial telephone costs incurred as Dotcom prepares his defense, fuel and tutoring for Dotcom’s children.

Previously, Judge Judith Potter agreed to release NZ $74,000 from one of Dotcom’s seized bank accounts to pay creditors left out of pocket after the shutdown of his companies.

It also emerged that US authorities are now investigating Mona Dotcom on suspicion of being involved in Megaupload.
https://torrentfreak.com/megaupload-...prison-120229/





Kim Dotcom’s First TV Interview: ‘I’m No Piracy King’
John Campbell

Campbell Live has spoken exclusively with Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom in his first TV interview since being arrested.

Dotcom faces a barrage of FBI charges relating to the operation of his file sharing company Megaupload.

I spoke with the internet millionaire about the charges – which include racketeering, copyright infringement and money laundering – the internet, his time in jail and the whole business model surrounding Hollywood.

---

The full Kim Dotcom interview transcript:

PART ONE

Kim Dotcom: Well you know, it’s a little bit like a nightmare, I would say. Unexpected, horrifying for my family, my wife who’s pregnant with twins has nightmares and is feeling miserable and, you know, of course I’m facing a very interesting situation.

John Campbell: Kim, you say it was unexpected. Was it totally and absolutely unexpected, did you never, ever think that this would happen somewhere in the world at some time?

KD: Well, the business is seven years old. We have been sued only once, never by any, you know, movie company or big content company and we have spent millions of dollars on legal advice over the last few years and our legal advisers have always told us that we are secure and that we are protected by the DMCA which is a law in the US that is protecting online service providers of liability for the actions of their users, so it came completely unexpected.

JC: What did your lawyers tell you about what you were doing? As we understand Megaupload, in its simplest terms, it’s a giant kind of exchange system in the sky, right? So you upload something, someone else downloads something, you’re sharing files, those files could be anything, right? How do you protect yourself against breaches of copyright by the people using Megaupload?

KD: Well supposedly, and that’s what everyone believed, is that the law is protecting us. We can’t be liable for actions of third parties, you know? As long as we follow a regime of taking things down that are reported to us, which we have done over all these years, we are protected, according to the law and, you know, I find it very surprising that this is happening because like I said we had legal advice all these years telling us that we are an online service provider and we are not liable for the actions of third parties.

JC: Where does Megaupload come from? What was the idea behind it? It was your idea, right, why?

KD: Well, you know, one day I was sending a file to a friend via email and I got a message back saying, you know, the file’s too large and the mail server has refused to send it so I thought, you know, what can I come up with, what can I do to solve that? So I basically created a server where I could upload a file and got a unique link and then I would just email that link to my friend and he would then get the file and that’s how Megaupload was started, it was just a solution to a problem that still exists today.

JC: How quickly did it take off, were you surprised by it?

KD: Well I was surprised how quickly it took off, it grew virally because every time someone was sending a file to Megaupload to submit it to somebody else, that person would then also learn about Megaupload and that feature and it would just grow and everyone would use it because it was such a useful tool…and free.

JC: Kevin Suh, the Senior Vice President of Content Protection at the Motion Picture Association of America said, and I quote, “You are the biggest copyright infringer in the world”. Are you?

KD: Absolutely not. I’m no copyright infringer. I mean, you have to look at Megaupload in its sheer size. We are talking about a network that was running on 1.5 terabytes of bandwidth.

JC: Explain that to me, how big is that?

KD: That is about 800 file transfers completing every second. We are a relatively small company; you can’t expect us to police that kind of traffic.

JC: So 800 file transfers occurring every second.

KD: Yes.

JC: 24 hours of the day, every day of the year.

KD: Yes.

JC: Every second.

KD: Yes.

JC: And you know what’s in those file transfers? You’re able to look at those 800 file transfers a second and say…

KD: Well there are other laws that protect users and those are privacy laws. For example in the US it’s the Electronic Communication Privacy Act which prohibits us from looking into the accounts of users proactively and look for things. It’s like mail, it’s private, we cannot just go in there and police what these users are uploading. But that’s why we have our own terms of service in which we tell our users, “You cannot upload anything that is infringing on anybody’s rights, you can only upload things that belong to you and before any user uploads any file to Megaupload they have to click on a little box that says “I accept the terms of service”. So we have a legally binding agreement with these users that they are not supposed to upload anything that doesn’t belong to them.

JC: Of course, that is a romantic notion though, isn’t it, that just because we tick the box accepting the terms of service that we’re going to behave ourselves when we’re in there, right? That, I mean, you must have known that people were doing whatever they wanted once they’d gone through the front door. They were exchanging any kind of files that they wanted to exchange. What opportunity did you have to police that?

KD: Well, of course everybody knows that the internet is being used for legitimate and illegitimate uses. I think every online service provider has the same challenges that we have. YouTube, Google, everybody is in the same boat. So what you need to understand here is that we provided the content owners with an opportunity to remove links that were infringing on their rights. So, not only did they have an online form where they could take down infringing links, they had direct delete access to our servers so they could access our system and remove any link that they would find anywhere on the internet without us being involved. They had full access and we’re talking about 180 partners, including every major movie studio, including Microsoft and all big content producers and they have used that system heavily and you need to understand that that system was not even something that was even required by the law. We provided that voluntarily and they have removed over 15 million links.

JC: So every member of the Motion Picture Association, every film studio who is a member of the Motion Picture Association of America had direct delete access to Megaupload.com to take out copyright-infringing material – is that the case?

KD: Absolutely.

JC: And yet the FBI indictment against you alleges, and I quote, “Copyright infringement on a massive scale with estimated harm to copyright holders well in excess of 500 million US dollars”.

KD: Well that’s complete nonsense. If you read the indictment and if you hear what the Prosecution has said in court, it’s at least $500 million of damage were just music files and just within a two-week time period. So they are actually talking about $13 billion US damage within a year just for music downloads. The entire US music industry is less than $20 billion. So how can one website be, you know, responsible for this amount of damage, it’s completely mind-boggling and unrealistic.

JC: So are you really suggesting that you are a sacrificial lamb of some description?

KD: Well, there’s no other explanation for me because we’ve done nothing wrong. I’m no criminal, this website has not been set up to be a piracy haven. If you look at the comments out there and the discussion that is happening online, that’s what everybody feels like. It’s crazy.

JC: Because the FBI and the people that want to prosecute you are alleging, and they’ve used these words, that you are unprecedented. That the scale of your piracy is unprecedented. That there has never been anything like it before in human history, that you are the pirate to beat all pirates.

KD: Yeah. It’s kinda like weapon of mass destructions in Iraq, you know? If you want to go after someone and you have a political goal you will say whatever it takes. These are fabrications and lies. There are a hundred other companies out there that offer the same service like us. Why has not something happened to them?

JC: Can you give me a name? Just name…can you give me a couple of names?

KD: Many sites. Mediafire. It’s based in the US, offers exactly the same service like us.

JC: File-sharing opportunities?

KD: Yeah. Rapidshare, Filesurf, Filesonic. Microsoft has their own service called Skydrive. Google is launching a new service called Drive. Everyone is in this cloud arena, in the same business, has the same problems that we had battling piracy. But we are not responsible for the problem and this is, I think, what everyone needs to understand. Where does piracy come from? Piracy comes from, you know, people, let’s say, in Europe who do not have access to movies at the same time that they are released in the US. This is a problem that has been born within this licensing model and the old business model that Hollywood has where they release something first in one country but they show trailers to everyone around the world pitching that new movie but then the 14-year-old kid in France or Germany can’t watch it for another six months, you know? If the business model would be one where everyone has access to this content at the same time, you know, you wouldn’t have a piracy problem. So it’s really, in my opinion, the government of the United States protecting an outdated monopolistic business model that doesn’t work anymore in the age of the internet and that’s what it all boils down to. I’m no piracy king, I offered online storage and bandwidth to users and that’s it.

PART TWO

KD: When you create something that is popular, when you create a solution, you’re an innovator and you solve problems for people and they like what you have to offer, of course you automatically make money. If you have a product that is popular you make money. I had a product that was very popular.

JC: Why was it popular?

KD: Because people could surpass a lot of limitations. It saved people a lot of money, you know, you don’t need to buy a server to store your files, you can use us to distribute your files. Legal files, you know. You can use us to make a backup online of all your files. There are so many countless, legitimate uses for Megaupload that the piracy element is really just one that is minute and shouldn’t even be the primary focus.

JC: CNET, in an article that looked pretty well researched to me and well sourced said, and I quote, “among the copyright owners who’ve accused Megaupload of piracy, including software and video game companies none of them presented the FBI with more, quote, significant evidence, end quote, about Megaupload than the MPAA. Did any members of the MPAA come to you and say “we have concerns, Kim, about what’s going on in Megaupload”.

KD: Never. And I gotta tell you this – if you are a company that is hurt so much by what we are doing, billions of dollars of damage, you don’t wait and sit and do nothing. You call your lawyers and you try and sue us and try to stop us from what we are doing.

JC: So a cease and desist of some form or other. Did you ever receive any letters from members of the MPAA saying “the latest James Bond film is being exchanged, ad infinitum, through Megaupload, you must stop it”? Did you ever receive…

KD: Absolutely not. No legal document has ever reached us from any of these studios. The only thing that we get is Takedown Notices and them using the direct delete access on our website. So, isn’t it surprising to you that when I’m the pirate king and I’m causing all this damage that none of them has ever even attempted to sue us, to sue us for damages, you know? If you would run a business that loses billions of dollars because of me, you wouldn’t just sit there and do nothing. I mean, this investigation was ongoing for over two years, you know, the company was live for over seven years, the MPAA has always thrown names at us and called us all kinds of things but they’ve never actually done anything to you know, take us to court and for the very simple reason that there is a law in the US that protects us which is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that protects online service providers from actions of their users and this is the same law that allowed Google to still exist, that allowed YouTube to still exist. You know that Viacom sued YouTube and YouTube claimed that they were protected by the DMCA and they won. And if you look at the YouTube case files, the emails that were exchanged internally we are a lamb compared to what was going on at YouTube at the time but these guys got away. They won their lawsuit and I’m sitting in jail, my house is being raided, all my assets are frozen without a trial, without a hearing. This is completely insane, is what it is.

JC: Why you, then, do you think?

KD: I’m an easy target. My flamboyance, my history as a hacker, you know, I’m not American, I’m living somewhere in New Zealand around the world. I have funny number plates on my cars, you know, I’m an easy target. I’m not Google. I don’t have 50 billion dollars in my account and right now I’ve not a penny on my account. All my lawyers currently are basically working without a penny and they are all still on board and all still doing their job because what they see here is unfair, is unreasonable and is not justice.

JC: What did you think about when you were in jail for a month? Lot of time on your own, right? Did you have a cell to yourself? Did you have to share with anyone?

KD: Yeah, I had a cell to myself and I was primarily concerned about my family, you know, that is mainly what I was thinking about, you know, I have a wife pregnant with twins and it’s just an impossible situation and they keep the anxiety level high, they appealed my bail – I don’t even know on what grounds. It’s just ridiculous.

JC: Are you a flight risk?

KD: Absolutely not.

JC: Is there a helicopter waiting over the hill either literally or metaphorically to come and whisk you off somewhere where you can’t be extradited from?

KD: You know you gotta think about this for a minute, OK? Why would I leave after everything has been frozen, everything has been taken from me. The company that was worth probably a billion dollars plus has been given a death sentence without trial, you know, what point is there for me to run away? The only thing, and the only thing that makes sense and is logical here is to fight this and that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to fight this all the way and I promise you, and everybody who’s watching this right now, I’m going to win because I’m no criminal and I’ve done nothing illegal.

PART THREE

JC: The FBI indictment, their charges, which is a very long document full of some of the most emotive language I have ever seen…

KD: It’s a press release. An indictment of 72 pages which is so maliciously designed to basically to get a judge and a grand jury in the US to agree to these kinds of actions has been unheard of. Look out there at the professional legal opinions of everyone that has seen this. It’s nothing more but a press release filled with things out of context designed to make me look as bad as possible.

JC: Are you as bad as possible, Kim? Are you a very naughty man who has been making a lot of money for yourself at the expense of content providers who take the risk, who do the work, who make things, only for you to enable people to trade in that stuff so you get rich?

KD: That is complete nonsense. I am an innovator, I create software, I create solutions, I create a website that is popular and that people want to use and have used for a lot of legitimate uses and it is just completely bizarre how I am being put on a pedestal like this and pointed at like the over-pirate of the planet. It’s insane. There is no merit to this.

JC: Do you think you would be in this position if you hadn’t driven around with…saying doctor evil, driving your Mercedes in the Gumball Rally through Europe, behaving in a larger than life way? In a way that draws attention to you, in a way that distinguishes you from the men who run Google who dress like I am dressing and don’t post videos of themselves on YouTube behaving like a lunatic? Is that why you are such a soft target, do you think?

KD: Well first of all let me be clear. Those videos and the things that you see online are not posted there by myself. These videos are 10 years plus old and I am a fun loving guy, OK? I enjoy my life, I have a big kid inside me and I didn’t see any reason why I have to wear a suit and be stuck up. You know, when I have earned my money and, you know, enjoyed my life, fulfilled my dreams, there is nothing wrong with that. And those clips were long before I had a wife and a family and kids, you know, my priorities have changed. I’m a family man, you know, I am not doing these kinds of things – that was childish stuff, and it was fun at the time and I don’t regret it, but that is not me today, I am a different guy. I just want to have a safe future for my kids and, you know, provide my family with a great home and that’s why we moved to New Zealand and we’re really surprised what is going on here.

JC: Is that why you are here? Did you come to NZ to re-invent yourself and to become a family man or did you come to NZ to get away from this kind of stuff, the FBI. Why are you here?

KD: No, I am here because of my family. I have little kids you know we were living in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is a concrete jungle. There is no fresh grass, there are no trees, there are no grills, you know, no birds flying around. I wanted to give my kids an environment of, you know, happiness and nature and peace and that is why we came to NZ. You know, you don’t have nuclear power, you are not on any target list of any nuclear nation, you know, it’s amazing. NZ is a beautiful country, we came here on a holiday, we fell in love and we decided to move here for our kids, to give them a great future.

JC: What’s your future now, Kim?

KD: You know, I mean I am a fighter and I am going to fight this thing. I feel confident I am going to win because at the end of the day I know, my family knows, and everybody around me knows that I am no criminal and I have done nothing wrong. So I will fight it. It’s all I can do.

Campbell Live
http://www.3news.co.nz/Kim-Dotcoms-f...0/Default.aspx





Cyberlocker To Shut Down After PayPal Ban
Ernesto

RapidGator, one of the file-hosting sites that grew exponentially following the Megaupload shutdown last month, has been banned by PayPal. As a result, the Russian-based site says it will close the service in a month. According to PayPal, the RapidGator account was closed due to the “high risks” associated with processing payments to file-sharing services.

During the wake of the Megaupload raids in January, TorrentFreak kept a close eye on the cyberlocker world.

While many file-hosters panicked, former Megaupload users hopped from site to site trying to find a suitable alternative.

RapidGator was such an alternative, and in recent weeks the site saw its traffic increase from a few hundred to over a hundred thousand visitors a day. However, this newly gained popularity may only be short-lived as the cyberlocker has just lost its most popular payment option, PayPal.

“PayPal just informed us that our PayPal account is closed due to the high risks of processing file sharing payments,” RapidGator announced. According to the site’s operators this may very well be the end of the file-sharing industry.

PayPal has frozen the cyberlocker’s funds for 6 months and new users can no longer make payments through PayPal. The ban probably means that “affiliates” can’t be paid through PayPal either.

It’s not exactly clear what “high risk” PayPal refers to, but one of the most likely options concerns the many chargebacks people carried out at other cyberlocker services recently. Many users asked for their money back from PayPal when other cyberlockers such as Fileserve temporarily disabled public sharing.

RapidGator believes that PayPal’s policy will affect other file-hosters as well.

“Seems that all new file sharing hosts will experience same fate like us and all other big hosts,” they write, adding that the site will close if nothing changes in the coming month.

“We did our best to make it work, but unfortunately this circumstance doesn’t depend on us. We will run the host for a month, and if nothing will change, we will close it after,” the RapidGator team concludes.

While more cyberlockers may fall victim to the same fate in the future, for now many of the largest sites including 4Shared are still accepting PayPal payments.
https://torrentfreak.com/cyberlocker...al-ban-120226/





Spotify Exec Ken Parks On "Windowing": Mind-Boggling, Very Bad, Hostile
Austin Carr

The biggest threat right now to subscription-based music services isn't coming from consumers or record labels--with millions of customers paying for monthly plans to Spotify and Rhapsody, all four majors see the services as major new sources of revenue. Rather, the biggest threat to these fast-growing companies is coming from artists themselves, and a practice some are calling "windowing."

Instead of making their new music available on iTunes and Spotify at the same time, some big-name acts are staggering their releases in the hope of bolstering traditional album sales. Just as a Netflix subscriber has to wait 28 days before gaining access to new movies, some artists are waiting a certain period before releasing their new albums for streaming on Spotify. Coldplay, for example, "windowed" Mylo Xyloto for months; other mainstream holdouts include the Black Keys and Adele.

Recently we caught up with Rhapsody CEO Jon Irwin, who gave us his opinion on the practice of "windowing." This week, Spotify's chief content officer Ken Parks shares his thoughts.

FAST COMPANY: What's your take on windowing?

KEN PARKS: My initial take is that it's a very bad idea. From a user standpoint, it's a pretty hostile proposition. The notion that you would want to withhold records from people who are paying 120 pounds or euros or dollars a year is just really mind-boggling. It's pretty hostile to punish your best customers and fans. We think it's a wrongheaded approach. There's certainly no data whatsoever to suggest that this increases unit sales. Windowing is not coming from record labels, which have every incentive to maximize the economic return on their investment for each individual record that they release.

I think all this has to be kept in perspective. These are rare cases right now. I know a lot of ink gets spilled when a band like Coldplay withholds a record. But these are still rare instances. The overwhelming number of records that are released every week are available on our service. That includes records that shoot to No. 1. Some managers and artists who are keen to work with us actually start streaming before the street date.

You've referred to these withholding artists as "corner cases," but many of these artists are more notable acts such as the Black Keys that garner a lot of attention. These artists believe that streaming might negatively affect their sales. Is this simply a myth? And if so, why do these artists believe it to be true?

Certainly it's not supported at all by data and facts. There's no data to suggest that it does [negatively affect] sales. To the contrary, our indicators point out that if you want to increase sales, you ought to be increasing access to your music. People want to listen to music--they don't want a 30-second sample. It's kind of wrongheaded to think you're creating scarcity by withholding [music from Spotify]. When you withhold a record on Spotify, it is available on torrent sites, on Grooveshark, as well as on YouTube likely. You're not creating any kind of scarcity. The very same bands who are withholding from streaming services are often available for free to users on YouTube, which doesn't monetize nearly as well as Spotify. If you think that promoting your record via streaming is a good thing for sales on YouTube, there is no reason as all to withhold it on Spotify. So it's kind of a head-scratcher--there is a bit of schizophrenia, I think, in the camp that wants to withhold their stuff. It's ridiculous to think that an 18-year-old kid who is denied access to listening on Spotify is going to run to iTunes and buy it. That's not the way it works. They're going to go to the torrent sites.

But I want to be very clear. We are not at all demonizing people who have a different point of view. We think that most of the world has been living in a different paradigm for the entire history of recorded music. They're used to unit sales. It's very difficult for some not only to get their mind around a new format but a new business model. It would be silly to think that entrenched behavior and habits--that have developed over a century--are going to change overnight. Look at iTunes in 2003: There was an uproar at the notion of selling records on an unbundled basis. There were high-profile holdouts including Radiohead, who thought it marked the end of the world. Controversies like this are not new. It is not surprising that there will be some taking a pause. It's thankfully a very short list. Most artists are extremely excited to be associated with this platform.

Why would Paul McCartney remove his music from Spotify and Rhapsody? He's been in the music business for so long; I can't imagine this was a rash decision. What's your elevator pitch to get him back on Spotify?

I can't speak to what might be in Paul McCartney's mind. I love Paul McCartney, and wish his music would be available to young kids who predominate our platform, and--let's be honest--might not have heard of him. We're very hopeful that he comes back on the service.

[Regarding the elevator pitch], it would be about reaching fans. Paul McCartney certainly doesn't need the money. I think that artists of his stature--these artists with rich catalogs from years ago--would be interested in legacy and making sure that his work lives on. The best way to do that today is on a platform like Spotify.

But the exact mindset that's operating here with McCartney, I don't know. Remember: It took the Beatles seven years to get on iTunes. But again, we love Paul McCartney.

What about Adele, whose latest album 21 is not on Spotify in full? Would she have still sold 17 million copies of her album if it was available on Spotify?

We think it's very possible she would've sold more. Again, there's no data to support the proposition that windowing on Spotify resulted in increased sales. The strange thing about that was the entire record was not windowed. Spotify has "Rolling in the Deep," which was the biggest single on that record. The other tracks were withheld.

It's been said that the biggest risk of not being on Spotify is potentially alienating your fans. Is that the biggest risk, or are there others?

That's certainly one of the primary risks. There are a lot of risks though. Really, you risk being on the sidelines. You risk people not caring about your music.

There's one band, and they haven't authorized me to use their name, so I won't. They're a very successful band--they've sold millions of records and continue to do so. This band uses what they call the "Give-A-**** test." They want to know if people really care about them. That doesn't mean they look at SoundScan. It means they might look on Spotify to see how many people are getting jazzed about their music enough to make and share playlists with their songs. They know if people start listening to their stuff in large numbers on Spotify, they are going to profit. That's the bottom line: that people give a...well...you get the idea.

Spotify has great integration with the biggest social network in the world. If you are not plugged into that, you are really missing out on what artists have always known, which is that word-of-mouth and buzz really sells records and concert tickets. On Spotify, someone will see a track a friend shared on Facebook, they'll click on it, and then instantly be listening to that record on Spotify. They'll have the SongKick app, which will tell them when the band is playing in his or her town. I can't imagine anyone not wanting to be a part of that environment.

If all the music that is not available on Spotify (from Adele, the Black Keys, etc.) could suddenly be available tomorrow on the condition that Spotify implemented a 28-day window, would that be something that Spotify is willing to consider? Is that something Spotify is looking into?

No, we're not. If these strategies would work for users and the industry, it would be relevant. But because they don't, no, it's not something we're contemplating.

In your view, then, will windowing become more or less common?

Well, it's not common now. But we think cases, rare as they are today, will become even rarer.
http://www.fastcompany.com/1821063/s...ry-bad-hostile





Record Labels Threaten the Open Internet, isoHunt Tells Court
Ernesto

In its case against 26 major record labels at British Columbia Supreme Court in Canada, BitTorrent index isoHunt has submitted a response to the copyright infringement allegations. The BitTorrent site argues that not only do they pose no threat to the music industry, it’s the copyright industry itself that’s threatening the freedom of expression of millions of people on the Internet.

isohuntIn 2010 a conglomerate of record labels – including the ‘Big Four’ of Sony, EMI, Warner and Universal – went after BitTorrent site isoHunt.

The site and its owner are accused of facilitating copyright infringement on a massive scale. Through the lawsuit the labels hope to shut down the isoHunt website while receiving over 4 million dollars in punitive damages to compensate for their claimed losses.

“The isoHunt Websites have been designed and are operated by the defendants with the sole purpose of profiting from rampant copyright infringement which defendants actively encourage, promote, authorize, induce, aid, abet, materially contribute to and commercially profit from,” the labels wrote in their complaint.

This week isoHunt’s Gary Fung filed a response to the accusations. Turning the tables Fung argues that it’s not isoHunt but the record labels that are the real threat. The labels are waging war on the Internet and trying to restrict basic human rights by trying to shut down file-sharing services, Fung says.

“In our latest response to CRIA filed in Court, we ask the Supreme Court of British Columbia to adjudicate this crucial issue of balance between the constitutional rights of people on the Internet to communicate, share and search, versus the rights of copyright industries to limit such rights in the corporate interest of protecting and extending copyright,” Fung tells TorrentFreak.

“isoHunt urges the court to examine this issue carefully, for the sake of innovations on the Internet, free exchange of culture, and fundamental constitutional freedoms.”

In the pleading isoHunt explains how BitTorrent works and notes that isoHunt’s role in the downloading process is relatively small.

The site positions itself as a neutral technology platform that merely indexes .torrent files stored across hundreds of websites on the Internet. As such, they are not promoting, authorizing or encouraging copyright infringement, they claim.

isoHunt argues that the record labels and other copyright industries are trying to systematically shut down these neutral file-sharing systems. Thereby, they breach basic human rights such as the right to freedom of expression.

“Freedom of expression on the Internet is under attack. From SOPA in the US, ACTA internationally, and C-11 in Canada, the same theme is apparent on the agenda of copyright industry groups: instead of dealing with actual copyright violators, they want to shut down technologies and internet services that they say will be used by violators,” Fung told TorrentFreak.

“It’s the same alarmist approach that goes back to the VCR and the radio. As the Internet emerges as the de-facto medium of communication, sharing and expression, the control over distribution by copyright industries is threatened. In turn, the constitutional freedom of expression of Canadians and all participants on the Internet is threatened.”

With this case in Canada and the US case against the MPAA, isoHunt is at the forefront of the legal censorship debate in Northern America. Both cases are crucial for the future of file-sharing related services and are expected to set an important precedent.

Fung is determined to take the cases as far as possible to defend people’s rights and the open Internet, a battle that is expected to last for years.
https://torrentfreak.com/record-labe...-court-120229/





Skyfile File Share Protects Privacy with No IP Address Tracking

SkyFile, a global provider of file hosting and sharing services, announces the release and immediate availability of SkyFile 4.2. The enhanced service incorporates innovative, new technology that eliminates a frequent requirement of file sharing services of storing users’ IP addresses.

Atlanta, GA (PRWEB) March 01, 2012

SkyFile, a global provider of file hosting and sharing services, announces the release and immediate availability of SkyFile 4.2. The enhanced service incorporates innovative, new technology that eliminates a frequent requirement of file sharing services of storing users’ IP addresses. “Piracy and misuse of the identity of those remotely storing and sharing files has become an all too frequent problem,” said Alex Kvak, Director of Development of SkyFile. “The benefit to users of this new layer of protection offered in SkyFile 4.2 is that anyone wishing to share a file needs only to share a link to a file when communicating with others. There is no log-in, no email address requirement, and no capture or storage of IP addresses of people storing files or people being offered the link.” All that is required to download a file is click on the provided link.

SkyFile provides the same privacy file upload/download protection for both computers and web enabled phones. Files, regardless of format, may be distributed to or from virtually any platform. All data, digital images, audio, videos and personal information resident on the SkyFile host are manageable only by the owner; accessing links provided by the file owner through email, SMS, instant messaging or user selected social media sites are the standard means for downloading. File password protection is optional, and a public/private switch allows file owners to further control access to sensitive information or to prevent distribution prior to a scheduled release.

Two gigabyte uploads and a total of 25 GB of file storage are offered without charge or contractual commitment; free accounts allow 90 day retention of inactive files. Those with larger file storage and distribution requirements, unlimited days of inactive file storage, and the need to embed links in documents stored on SkyFile may choose from a variety of paid plans. Paid plans include 100 GB of storage with commitments ranging from one day to one year, and ability to embed SkyFile links in stored documents. “We’re not just another dot com,” said Kvak, “skyfile.co the dot co that respects and protects the privacy of our users.” Signup for a free SkyFile account and/or learn more about SkyFile and its services by visiting http://www.skyfile.co.
http://www.timesunion.com/business/p...IP-3373961.php
http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2...web9234584.htm





Track Who’s Tracking You With Mozilla Collusion
Adam Ostrow

Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs took the TED stage Tuesday morning to introduce Collusion, a Firefox browser add-on that lets you track who’s tracking you across the web for behavioral targeting purposes.

Describing the medium as “an area of consumer protection that’s almost entirely naked,” Kovacs argued that the price we’re now being asked to pay for connectivenss is our privacy, and in turn, it’s “now time for us to watch the watchers.”

Collusion looks to offer more transparency to users by creating a visualization of how your data is being spread to different companies as you navigate the web. Each time it detects data being sent to a behavioral tracker, it creates a red (advertisers), grey (websites) or blue dot on the visualization and shows the links between the sites you visit and the trackers they work with.

Mozilla has created an online demo to show just how quickly your data ends up in the hands of dozens of different companies as you move from popular sites like IMDB, The New York Times and The Huffington Post. Citing some personal examples, Kovacs said that by the time his daughter had visited four sites over breakfast, she was being tracked by 25 different places. And in the course of a day, he says, he found himself being tracked by 150.

While the visualization does an effective job of showing just how quickly your data ends up in places far and wide without your knowledge and the interconnections between various services, Collusion also features the ability to turn off such tracking.

It may seem that Mozilla is on a crusade against the current trend of personalization, but Kovacs emphasized that Collusion is about alerting users to tracking that’s happening without their consent. It’s not about creating an alarmist attitude toward services that people opt-in to that provide recommendations based on your shopping history, for example.
https://mashable.com/2012/02/28/mozilla-collusion/
















Until next week,

- js.



















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