Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 21st, '12

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Something that lets you find illegal content can also help you find legal content. When you go after intermediaries, you’re going to shut down legal and legitimate speech and commerce and innovation to get at what they perceive as illegal copyright violation." – Mitch Stoltz



































July 21st, 2012




File-Hosting Firms 'Responsible for Pirated Content', German Court Rules

Summary: Germany's top court has ruled that file-hosting service Rapidshare must strengthen its anti-piracy measures after a pirated copy of the Atari title Alone in the Dark was found on its servers
Jakob Jung

Germany's federal court of law, the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH), has decided that online file-hosting services are at least partly responsible for the contents of the files on their servers.

The legal wrangling started when Rapidshare deleted a file containing a pirated copy of the Atari game Alone in the Dark after the game company notified it of the copyright breach. Atari Europe decided to take the matter further, and went on to sue Rapidshare in order to force it to improve its anti-piracy measures.

The BGH has now overturned an earlier decision by the Higher Regional Court (Oberlandesgericht, OLG) in Düsseldorf which had found in Rapidshare's favour, after the company argued that it was impossible to check the contents of every file on its servers.

While its lawyers told the BGH that the company only offers file storing and transfer services, the argument failed to convince judge Wolfgang Kirchhoff: "The company is called Rapidshare and not Rapidstore," he said.

In its decision last week (Urt. v. 12.07.2012 - I ZR 18/11) the BGH ruled that file hosting in general is an accepted business model with perfectly legal use cases. However, it added, when a service provider is notified that a copyright violation has taken place, it must ensure by technical means that no further uploads of this kind happen.

Rapidshare must also browse its entire file collection to detect and delete pirated content, the court said. Should the service provider not carry out these measures, it will be liable for damages.

The BGH did leave Rapidshare some breathing room, however, by including a clause that anti-piracy measures must be within reasonable limits. What constitues "reasonable limits" is now up to the OLG Düsseldorf to decide, after the BGH handed the case back to the local court.
http://www.zdnet.com/file-hosting-fi...es-7000000950/





Illegal File-Sharing: French Court Requires Google To Cooperate With French Music Companies

France's Supreme Court, the Cour de Cassation, has ruled that SNEP, IFPI's national group in France, is entitled to seek an order against Google involving its "auto-complete" function. The judgment, delivered on July 12th, says that removing specific pirate terms from auto-complete would be an appropriate and proportionate measure.

SNEP had sought an order requiring Google to remove piracy terms "torrent", "megaupload" and "rapidshare" from its "auto complete" search results. This was rejected by the lower court and Court of Appeal in 2011. However, the Supreme Court has overturned the Court of Appeal's ruling, considering that Google is contributing to copyright infringements by orientating users to illegal links through its auto complete function.

The case will now be sent back to the Court of Appeal for a final decision.
http://www.mi2n.com/press.php3?press_nb=155913





First Swede Charged in FTP File Sharing Case

A 31-year-old man was formally charged on Wednesday for uploading 25 films onto the internet using File Transfer Protocol, making him the first person charged in Sweden for using FTP to share copyrighted works.

The man, working as part of a file sharing network, uploaded the films from his home in Gävle, eastern Sweden using FTP – meaning that files were transferred directly from one host to another.

“It’s the first prosecution for this technique under the new legislation. But there will be more,” said Fredrik Ingblad, a prosecutor specializing in file sharingcrimes, to the TT news agency.

Ingblad describes the FTP file sharing network as “elite file sharers” – the inner circle of people who make files available to the larger public.

According to the charges, the 31-year-old man had a server at his home that was linked to others in the network and which was used to distribute the 25 films to other users.

According to the indictment, the man is suspected of violating copyright laws and assisted in the violation of copyright laws.

In previous cases of a similar nature in Sweden, suspected file sharers have been charged mostly for sharing material via the use of BitTorrent, a technique which allows users to upload and download at the same time, in small bits from many different users.

FTP, by contrast, allows host-to-host sharing.

Even though authorities are cracking down on file sharing, investigations show that many people in Sweden continue to share copyrighted material online.
http://www.thelocal.se/42116/20120719/





Pirate Bay Blocks Did Little to Curb File-Sharing

Despite the Dutch and U.K. courts forcing Internet service providers to block access to The Pirate Bay, traffic remains at around normal levels around a month later.
Zack Whittaker

Despite court cases in the Netherlands and the U.K. forcing ISPs to place blocks on their systems to prevent customer access to The Pirate Bay, the blocks may ultimately prove futile, according to data seen by the BBC and others.

One major U.K. broadband provider said peer-to-peer traffic on its network returned to "just below normal" only a week after it was forced to block customers' access.

But in the days following the court decision in late April, traffic had reached record levels as a result of the increased media coverage. This backs up earlier claims that The Pirate Bay had a 12 million views traffic boost on May 1, thanks to the "free advertising" by the media.

The ISP -- speaking to the BBC anonymously -- said that traffic dropped by more than 11 percent following the enforcement of the block, but with the rise of proxy sites and The Pirate Bay's own server IP changes, traffic figures were "pretty much back to where they were before."

The figures are not detailed, however. The data relates to volume rather than strict user figures, possibly suggesting that prolific file-sharers downloaded more than less-interested users were discouraged. Also, the data may not relate directly to The Pirate Bay, as peer-to-peer traffic could include legitimate downloads, such as the downloading of Linux distributions, so it is difficult to see whether The Pirate Bay has returned to usual levels of traffic.

Meanwhile in the Netherlands, where blocks were put in place following similar legal challenges, Dutch ISP XS4All said its customers' traffic to The Pirate Bay went up rather than down. Two more ISPs, according to TorrentFreak, suggested the blocks imposed did not adversely affect peer-to-peer traffic.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) had brought the case to the High Court in London. BPI Chief Executive Geoff Taylor told the BBC it will continue to pursue legal action against "illegal sites" that are "ripping off" the artists.

He said the BPI's goal is to "reduce U.K. use of The Pirate Bay" and said the site's rankings had dropped from the top 50 to 282.

Alexa rankingscurrently put thepiratebay.se at 83 overall in global rankings, but 301 in the United Kingdom.

However, the U.K.'s Pirate Party Web site, which hosts one of the most popular Pirate Bay proxies, rocketed to a rank of 359 in the United Kingdom, suggesting a massive uptake in use on the block circumventing service.

Despite the court-ordered blocks, circumventing the restrictions through proxies and tunneling is not illegal under U.K. law. U.K. Pirate Party leader Loz Kaye recently wrote in The Guardian: "This proxy continues to be a legitimate route for those affected by the court orders."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57...-file-sharing/





Emily, You Did Nothing Wrong, But You Made Mistakes
-- Richard Stallman

Emily, you have not done anything wrong, but you've made a few mistakes.

I expect you don't recognize them. Indeed, I doubt anyone has brought these issues to your attention before. The fallacious attack by that copyright freak seems to have led the discussion in a different direction.

What were these mistakes?

First of all, they had nothing to do with "theft". To judge from your article, you never did that. (See copying is not theft.)

Copying and sharing recordings was not a mistake, let alone wrong, because sharing is good. It's good to share musical recordings with friends and family; it's good for a radio station to share recordings with the staff, and it's good when strangers share through peer-to-peer networks. The wrong is in the repressive laws that try to block or punish sharing. Sharing ought to be legalized; in the mean time, please do not act ashamed of having shared -- that would validate those repressive laws that claim that it is wrong.

You did make a mistake when you chose Kazaa as the method of sharing. Kazaa mistreated you (and all its users) by requiring you to run a non-free program on your computer. The Kazaa client software might have been gratis, but it wasn't free (freedom-respecting, libre) software: it didn't give users the freedom needed to control what the program did. When the users don't control a program, they should not trust it, because it is in a position to mistreat them.

You really shouldn't let a non-free program onto your computer. If you do peer-to-peer sharing again in the future, I suggest you choose a free/libre program to do it with

However, that was in the past. It's more important to consider what you're doing now, which includes other mistakes. You're not alone -- many others make them too, and that adds up to a big problem for society.

The root mistake is treating a marketing buzzword, "the cloud", as if it meant something concrete. That term refers to so many things (different ways of using the Internet) that it really has no meaning at all. Marketing uses that term to lead people's attention away from the important questions about any given use of the network, such as, "What companies would I depend on if I did this, and how? What trouble could they cause me, if they wanted to shaft me, or simply thought that a change in policies would gain them more money?"

In an ideal world, corporations would never systematically mistreat people. In this world, they often do just that; especially computer and network companies, as explained in this article.

I would guess that the inattention encouraged by the term "cloud" led to the next mistake: storing your music in a corporation's network service. Even worse, that corporation is Apple, which designs machines as jails for its users and builds them in sweatshops. (See this page.) iTunes works only with user-restricting software, and Apple has gone to great lengths to stop people from accessing it in any other way.

The difference between storing digital music in CDs and storing it in your USB stick or your hard disk is a small technical detail. It is not a choice of "physical" vs "digital" because all of those are digital; you could store the same music recording files on any of them. You can have any of them in your physical possession; then, as long as you avoid using secret formats, you can use these files as you wish, and nobody can restrict or snoop on what you do with them.

However, if you let some company store those files for you remotely, you don't really have them. You become dependent on that company, which is in a position to monitor you, restrict you, or report everything about you to Big Brother. That's where the mistake is. You did, in fact, have lots of music, and getting rid of your copies put you at that company's mercy.

You advocate making another mistake -- to use Spotify, or something like it. What's wrong with Spotify? First of all, it requires users to install a client program that the users do not control; it is not free/libre. That's bad in itself, but why does Spotify require that? To restrict them! Specifically, to prevent users from adding the most natural feature: "Save this track in a file on my disk". This keeps users dependent on Spotify, and Spotify has already changed its rules to limit users' access to music.

I suspect that Spotify also tracks its clients' listening and makes that information available somehow to other businesses, since so many other Internet companies do, but I have no evidence about that.

What's the worst part of Spotify or any similar service? Imagine that a friend visits you and would like to make copies of your recordings, as you've copied other recordings in the past. Then the difference would make itself felt. You'd have to sheepishly say, "I can't share with you any more because I don't have any recordings. I let Spotify (or whichever company) control my access to music, and it won't let me share."

Even worse, you might suggest that your friend get that song from Spotify too. Then he too would be tracked, restricted, and unable to share. "Music-screaming services" such as Spotify are not a solution, they are part of the problem. Out, out, damned Spotify!

On the other hand, there's one bad thing you have been falsely accused of. You didn't fail to support musicians.

After all, how can we support musicians? Buying recordings from record companies won't do it. For nearly all records, the musicians get none of that money; the record companies keep it. See this article and this article.

The exceptions are stars, excluding their first 5 or 7 records. But even they get only a fraction of the money you spend -- the rest goes to the record companies.

To the record companies that lobbied to censor the Internet with SOPA.

To the record companies which had lawyers sue teenagers for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

To the record companies which use the US government to push oppressive copyright treaties on other countries.

Those companies don't deserve to get one more dime -- they deserve to be wiped out, so they can't attack people any more.

Practically speaking, the only effective and ethical way you could support musicians was through concerts. You could even do so while maintaining your privacy, if you paid cash for the tickets. As an avid concert-goer, you've probably given more than your share -- so feel proud.

However, any given band's concerts occur only rarely near you. And record companies are muscling in on the income from concerts, which makes it harder to support musicians ethically.

Society should make it easier to support musicians, and other artists as well. I've proposed two systems for this, both of them compatible with legalization of sharing. See Copyright vs. Community, but here they are in brief:

* Put a tax on Internet connectivity, and divide the money among artists. Measure the raw popularity figure of each artist by polling the public, or by measuring how often P2P networks share their work, then distribute the money in proportion to the cube root of each artist's raw popularity figure.

Why the cube root? So that most of the money goes to the artists that really need help -- those who are good and somewhat successful, but not stars. Each star would get more from this system than a non-star, but not tremendously more, so the few stars together would not get most of the money.

* Give each player device a button to send 50 cents anonymously to the artists. They you could push the button and send money, when you wish. (I used to suggest one dollar, but the banksters have impoverished the American public so much that a smaller sum is now called for.)

Either way, if the system is to support the artists, we need to stop the publishers (such as record companies) from taking this money for themselves.

I beg you to reconsider this issue, and resume maintaining your own local copies of music -- copies that you are in a position to share with your friends, copies that you can listen to without letting any company monitor or control your use.
http://stallman.org/articles/response-to-emily.html





SOPA Returns On The Back Of A Czar
Simon Maloy

Remember the Stop Online Piracy Act? It was the universally reviled anti-digital piracy bill that was coasting for a quick and quiet passage into law earlier this year until basically the entire internet rose up in protest. Now SOPA is coming back piece-by-piece, according to TechDirt, and if anyone is going to rise up in opposition this time, it should be the conservative media. Because the son of SOPA brings with it a dreaded "czar."

The new SOPA-fragment bill coming before Congress is the Intellectual Property Attaché Act, which strengthens the powers of the titular diplomatic attachés to promote U.S. copyright laws abroad. The language of the bill, which is sponsored by SOPA author Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), is similar to the section of SOPA that called for intellectual property attachés "to address intellectual property rights violations in the countries where the attachés are assigned."

The new bill, however, has an added provision requiring the president to "appoint an Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property, who shall report directly to the Director." In other words: an intellectual property czar.

There was a brief period back in 2009 when czars (advisors appointed by the president and not subject to Senate confirmation) were in the eyes of conservative journalists and pundits the epitome of the Obama administration's supposed capacity for anti-democratic, big-government tyranny. (Presidents, Republican and Democrat, have made extensive use of czars for decades.) Sean Hannity said the "unconfirmed, unvetted individuals are now at the helm of a shadow government right here in the U.S." Fox & Friends' Gretchen Carlson called them "czars-slash-kings," while Neil Cavuto suggested they be called "evil despots accountable to no one." Rush Limbaugh went full Godwin, as he is wont to do.

Now we have a Republican congressman proposing legislation that would require the president to appoint yet another tyrannical, shadowy, despotic, perhaps even Hitler-ish czar to manage intellectual property issues abroad. One would think that, given the previous bipartisan opposition to SOPA and the right's well-documented vehemence toward the very idea of czars, they should be the first ones reaching for the pitchforks, no?
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/07...-a-czar/187070





Politician Pushes Extreme Anti-Piracy Bill in the Philippines

Thought the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was bad? A similar bill introduced into the Philippines’ House of Representatives would penalize people who illegally download with a minimum two-year jail sentence and fines of 50,000 to 150,000 Phillippine pesos. ($1,200-$3,600).

“Piracy is theft of intellectual property and is no more justifiable than shoplifting,” said Representative Irwin Tieng, who introduced the bill, H.B. 6187. “The damage done to the entertainment industry and legitimate end users do not outweigh the few advantages that piracy does have,” he added.

Fiercely advocating for greater copyright enforcement, though, may be a conflict of interest. Tieng’s uncle is Wilson Tieng, the CEO of Filipino entertainment conglomerate Solar.

Irwin Tieng has successfully introduced two related bills that became law. One, the Anti-Photo and Video Voyeurism Act of 2009, is designed to help government agencies better crack down on child pornography, though critics say that comes at the expense of the government having too much ability to dictate the role of citizens’ Internet service providers.

The other, the Anti-Camcording Law of 2010, severely penalizes anyone convicted of creating, selling, or possessing unauthorized hard copies of movies by sending them to jail for up to six years. According to official press release, that law was created with support from Filipino film coalitions like the National Cinema Association of the Philippines (NCAP) as well as the Motion Picture Association of American (MPAA).

The U.S.-based MPAA is notorious to Internet rights activists for lobbying for stronger copyright enforcement around the world, and for openly pushing American lawmakers to pass SOPA.

Tieng, in urging the Filipino House to pass H.B. 6187, stressed that illegal downloaders make money from filesharing.

“With the tremendous expansion of the Internet, it has regrettably become a cash-cow for the criminals and organized crime cartels that profit from digital piracy,” he said.
http://www.dailydot.com/news/sopa-bi...s-irwin-tieng/











The Death of SOPA Was Not a Fluke: Three Reasons Why Elected Officials Should Endorse the Declaration of Internet Freedom

The January 18th blackout protesting the Stop Online Piracy Act (“SOPA”) was an unprecedented event in Internet history. Within 24 hours, dangerous and draconian copyright legislation went from being a forgone conclusion in Congress to completely rejected by its members. Still, many observers have remarked that, despite the protest’s effectiveness, the result was a fluke. It was a perfect storm of companies and people coming together that could not be replicated, they've said, and nothing has really changed.

But at least three post-SOPA events in the last six months tell a different story: that the protection of digital civil liberties is a central issue to many voters. And there’s an easy way for 2012 electoral candidates to let those voters know they share that concern: sign the Declaration of Internet Freedom.

1. The Death of ACTA in the EU

Almost immediately after the successful SOPA blackout, protests organically sprung up around the world opposing the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a restrictive intellectual property treaty that was negotiated in almost complete secrecy. While most of the negotiating countries had already signed ACTA, citizens of Europe—inspired by the American reaction to SOPA—started raising alarm online and took to the streets by the tens of thousands. This public outrage not only signaled disappointment in the extremist IP policies, but was also a rejection of the secretive, government-directed process that spawned the agreement in the first place.

Protesters so immediate results: individual countries like Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany started backing off support for the agreement. The EU president criticized it, and the investigator in charge of making policy recommendations to the European Parliament advocated for voting against it. Two weeks ago, the Parliament overwhelmingly voted it down, effectively ending a treaty that had been negotiated under the radar for more than 4 years and had, until recently, been thought of as inevitable.

2. Removal of a backdoor SOPA provision in CISPA

The debate surrounding CISPA, the House’s dangerous cybersecurity bill, also showed the new strength of Internet’s collective voice. An early version of the bill contained a clause regarding “the theft of intellectual property” that could have legalized measures similar to SOPA. But when the comparisons hit the media, Rep. Rogers was so desperate to get rid of the SOPA moniker, he took the IP clause completely out of a bill.

This is an important sea change in the way Congress has approached copyright. In the past restrictive intellectual property clauses have been put into bills to get support. Now Congress is finding out they have to take IP clauses out just to avoid having bills collapse.

While the House regrettably voted to pass the bill in May, a protest in the bill’s last week of debate led to an explosion of opposition. When co-sponsors started switching their votes to oppose CISPA, Rep. Mike Rogers was forced to move the vote up a day just to get the bill through.

And the results of the protest can now be felt in the Senate, where their just-released version of the cybersecurity bill fixes many of the privacy problems found in CISPA. You can contact your Senators here to tell them to support the new privacy amendments.

3. No More Data Retention Bill

Another bill Internet activists immediately set their eyes on post-SOPA was a mandatory data retention bill disguised as the “The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act,” pushed by SOPA author Lamar Smith. The original version of this bill mandated ISPs retain all sorts of information on every Internet user—even those never accused of a crime—for law enforcement to access without court oversight. Rep. Zoe Lofgren remarked it should be renamed, “The Keep Every American's Digital Data for Submission to the Federal Government Without a Warrant Act."

After the SOPA protests, Rep. Smith scaled back the bill to force ISPs to only keep IP addresses for a year—a less draconian measure, yet still a huge privacy violation. But in the newest version of the bill, Smith, perhaps fearful of another Internet backlash, completely removed the data retention provision.

Of course, as we stated when we first explained the importance of the Declaration, the Internet is winning more battles, but we haven’t won the war. Congress is still attempting to pass several bills that would have restrictive effects on ordinary user’s Internet freedom, and that means we need to hold their feet to the fire throughout this campaign season. Step one: Ask candidates for office in 2012 to help us protect our Internet and sign the Declaration of Internet Freedom.

In addition, Free Press is encouraging everyone to hold an “Internet BBQ” this summer to discuss the Declaration and spread the word among your friends. You can also join the new Internet Defense League, which aims to act as an early warning system for new threats to Internet freedom.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/0...should-endorse





TVShack and the Expanding Reach of Criminal Copyright Law
Jon Healey

The entertainment industry may not adapt swiftly to the technology people use to acquire and enjoy media, but its lawyers certainly do. It took the music industry a matter of weeks to sue Napster, the pioneering online file-sharing site. And since then, each successive iteration of mass-scale infringement has drawn lawsuits, from distributed file-sharing platforms such as Kazaa to newsgroup indexes such as Newzbin to Bit Torrent sites such as the Pirate Bay and to online locker services such as RapidShare.

Federal enforcers are not so nimble, but they've been gradually expanding their efforts from direct infringers to enablers. The latter group would include online locker and file-sharing service Megaupload (although the indictment includes allegations of direct infringement), Bit Torrent index sites and sites that point users to unauthorized streams of copyrighted videos. The New York Times sunk its teeth into one of the latter in Friday's paper, a site called TVShack that allegedly was operated by a young Brit named Richard O’Dwyer. England has agreed to extradite O'Dwyer to face trial in the United States, but he is appealing the government's decision.

As with Megaupload, the TVShack case seems to push the boundaries of copyright law, particularly the application of criminal statutes to indirect infringers. That's not to excuse O'Dwyer's actions. It's just to suggest that prosecutors may be going further than Congress intended them to go.

The Times' story offered two defenses for O'Dwyer. One was that U.S. entertainment companies had failed to make their movies and TV shows easily available online. That's not much of an excuse; it's akin to arguing that it's OK to steal products that you can't find in local stores.

The other was that TVShack, despite its name, didn't contain any TV or movie files. It just offered links to them. From the Times' story:

"Mr. O’Dwyer’s backers say his site was effectively a search engine. To prosecute him, they argue, would set a dangerous precedent -- tantamount to holding one person accountable for the acts of another.

"'Something that lets you find illegal content can also help you find legal content,' said Mitch Stoltz, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 'When you go after intermediaries, you’re going to shut down legal and legitimate speech and commerce and innovation to get at what they perceive as illegal copyright violation.' "

That was the same issue raised by the second-generation file-sharing networks when they were sued by the major record companies and Hollywood studios. Unlike Napster, the companies behind the Kazaa, Morpheus and Grokster software didn't copy files onto their servers. They merely created indexes to the files on their users' computers. And a (very small) portion of those files could be shared legally.

After lower courts found that these companies had not violated the entertainment industry's copyrights, the Supreme Court -- troubled by the idea that businesses clearly created to capitalize on online piracy could somehow be legal -- came up with a new standard for liability. Under the Grokster ruling, a website or service could be found liable for its users' infringements if it actively induced people to violate copyrights. The justices left it up to the lower courts to decide what constituted inducement, describing it mainly as a "clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement."

That ruling came in the context of a lawsuit, however, not a criminal case. The problem for prosecutors in O'Dwyer's case is that it's not clear that any form of indirect infringement can rise to the level of a federal crime. The copyright industries have tried several times to persuade Congress to explicitly outlaw secondary infringement, most recently through PIPA and SOPA, but lawmakers have not done so. (Similarly, Hollywood has tried to persuade Congress to make unauthorized streaming a crime, but that bill hasn't become law either.)

The complaint and virtually all other court documents in O'Dwyer's case have been sealed, so it's not clear what rationale federal prosecutors in New York are using. In addition to two counts of criminal copyright infringement, O'Dwyer is charged with one count of conspiracy to infringe a copyright. The latter count appears to be the one providing the bridge between the indirect infringements allegedly committed by O'Dwyer's TVShack and the direct infringements (by TVShack's users) required under criminal copyright law.

If the feds bring criminal prosecutions against indirect infringers, will the courts import the Supreme Court's reasoning in MGM vs. Grokster as to what constitutes an inducement? If so, a search engine that's designed to help people find any kind of video online would seem to be safe under the Grokster standard, but one that's tuned to finding television and movie files or streams with no copy protection might have something to worry about.

O'Dwyer's defenders might argue that some independent film and video artists distribute their works for free online, and it's impossible to build a search engine that indexes those items but not the unauthorized copies of Hollywood movies and TV series. That's a good argument for a search engine that doesn't favor one type of video file over another. Sites such as the Pirate Bay, however, attract people looking for pirated content because they make it easier to find copies of a popular film or hit TV show than a self-distributed indie movie. Such fine-tuning may satisfy the Grokster ruling's requirement of "purposeful, culpable expression and conduct."

That's all speculation, of course. And O'Dwyer may not be first in line to clarify whether criminal copyright statutes apply to indirect infringers. That privilege, such as it is, may go to Megaupload's Kim Dotcom, who is contesting his extradition from his current homeland, New Zealand.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has launched a petition drive opposing O'Dwyer's extradition. Wales argued in an op-ed last month that O'Dwyer's site linked to authorized as well as unauthorized videos, and that he removed links to copyrighted content upon request -- one of the requirements that U.S. law sets for a legal safe harbor. Wales also contended that linking isn't illegal under the laws of England, where O'Dwyer was based. Unfortunately for O'Dwyer, his site relied on U.S.-based Internet domains for most of its existence (until the Department of Homeland Security seized them two years ago), giving the feds a jurisdictional hook for their case.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...,3057482.story





Pirate Bay Blocks Did Little to Curb File-Sharing

Despite the Dutch and U.K. courts forcing Internet service providers to block access to The Pirate Bay, traffic remains at around normal levels around a month later.
Zack Whittaker

Despite court cases in the Netherlands and the U.K. forcing ISPs to place blocks on their systems to prevent customer access to The Pirate Bay, the blocks may ultimately prove futile, according to data seen by the BBC and others.

One major U.K. broadband provider said peer-to-peer traffic on its network returned to "just below normal" only a week after it was forced to block customers' access.

But in the days following the court decision in late April, traffic had reached record levels as a result of the increased media coverage. This backs up earlier claims that The Pirate Bay had a 12 million views traffic boost on May 1, thanks to the "free advertising" by the media.

The ISP -- speaking to the BBC anonymously -- said that traffic dropped by more than 11 percent following the enforcement of the block, but with the rise of proxy sites and The Pirate Bay's own server IP changes, traffic was "pretty much back to where they were before."

The figures are not detailed, however. The data relates to volume rather than strict user figures, suggesting either prolific file-sharers downloaded more while less-interested users were discouraged. Also, the data may not relate directly to The Pirate Bay, as peer-to-peer traffic could include legitimate downloads, such as the downloading of Linux distributions, so it is difficult to see whether The Pirate Bay has returned to usual levels of traffic.

Meanwhile in the Netherlands, where blocks were put in place following similar legal challenges, Dutch ISP XS4All said its customers' traffic to The Pirate Bay went up rather than down. Two more ISPs, according to TorrentFreak, suggested the blocks imposed did not adversely affect peer-to-peer traffic.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) brought the case to the High Court in London. The BPI's chief executive Geoff Taylor told the BBC it would continue to pursue legal action against "illegal sites" that are "ripping off" the artists.

He said the BPI's goal was to "reduce U.K. use of The Pirate Bay," and said the site's rankings had dropped from the top 50 to 282.

Alexa rankingscurrently put thepiratebay.se at 83 overall in global rankings, but 301 in the United Kingdom.

However, the U.K.'s Pirate Party's website, which hosts one of the most popular The Pirate Bay proxies, rocketed to a rank of 359 in the United Kingdom, suggesting a massive uptake in use on the block circumventing service.

Despite the court-ordered blocks, circumventing the restrictions through proxies and tunneling is not illegal under U.K. law - U.K. Pirate Party leader Loz Kaye recently wrote in The Guardian: "This proxy continues to be a legitimate route for those affected by the court orders."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57...-file-sharing/





America's New Business Model: Sharing
Roger Yu

Americans with heaps of stuff, skills and time are connecting online with tech-savvy and early adopters eager to share and rent homes, cars, tools and services in exchange for deep savings.

Dubbed "collaborative consumption" — or "the sharing economy" — this movement represents the newly cemented intersection of online social networking, mobile technology, the minimalist movement and heightened penny-pinching brought on by lingering economic uncertainties.

Adam Hertz, a cable company executive in San Francisco, and his wife, Joan, have enthusiastically embraced the movement. Now that their kids are grown, the empty-nesters rent their Monterey Heights-district two-bedroom mother-in-law suite through Airbnb, an online marketplace for couch-surfers and hosts.

To greet renters and hand over the keys, Hertz sometimes hires a stand-in through TaskRabbit, a Web-based company that matches time-deprived people in need of temporary assistants with freelance errand runners who have passed criminal background checks and are looking for extra income.

"It's been a great way to meet people," says Hertz, whose suite goes for $99 a night and is occupied about half the time. "We've hosted some interesting tech entrepreneurs. We've had people from Australia and Singapore. And the money is nice, too."

The notion of individuals selling and donating to others online is hardly new. EBay and Craigslist pioneered peer-to-peer commerce through tools that allow users to be anonymous and that make uploading photos and descriptions quick and easy. But the ventures launched in recent years with gobs of venture-capital funding and targeting niche markets have accelerated the movement with user-friendly designs and a tight knit to social networks Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

"It's basically about moving to a world where access triumphs over ownership, and that unused value — things sitting in my garage — equals waste," says Lisa Gansky, who has written frequently on the topic and has listed 6,600 such sharing platforms on her site, Meshing.IT.

You can rent a room to strangers at Airbnb and CouchSurfing. Rent out your only-for-commuting car by the hour at RelayRides or Getaround. Turn your driveway into a cash cow at Park Circa or ParkatmyHouse. Find road-trip partners on Zimride. Find free office space at Loosecubes. Share your sewing machine at Zilok or trade it for an iPod at Swap.com.

"TaskRabbit has (people) making over $5,000 a month in San Francisco," says Craig Shapiro, founder of Collaborative Fund, a venture-capital fund specializing in sharing sites. "That's real money."

The dot-com boom of early 2000 saw a proliferation of similar anything-at-your-service start-ups. Remember Kozmo.com, whose employees promised delivery of DVDs and ice cream in under an hour for free? Struggling to manage costs, the start-up closed shop as quickly as it opened. What distinguishes the latest generation of start-ups is a confluence of new technologies and more-efficient business models that leave much of the logistical heavy-lifting to peers who share.

People, if not yet profits

Sharing platform companies don't need to carry inventory or hire en masse. The advent of GPS, the always-on Internet and social networks enable finding things in real time from people you somewhat trust.

"Only 3% were online when I started AOL. Now, people are across multiple devices. The ubiquity factor was not there 10 years ago," says Steve Case, whose investment firm Revolution has invested in several collaborative consumption start-ups, including Loosecubes.

While no comprehensive data about the movement exist, some prominent start-ups say their growth in the past year — in users, if not necessarily profit — affirms that the sharing movement is finding an audience beyond the technology hubs of Silicon Valley and Manhattan's trendy SoHo district.

At Zimride, a site for individuals to offer and get paid for shared car rides, the number of rides doubled to about 30,000 in the past year. The fleet of cars in Getaround has grown to 10,000 from 1,500 a year ago, and suburban customers make up about a quarter of its bookings.

The number of tasks, or temporary jobs, posted per month at TaskRabbit has tripled in the last year. Airbnb has booked about 10 million nights since it was founded four years ago, and the average customer age has risen to 35. "People are telling their parents," says CEO Brian Chesky.

Sharing start-ups are reluctant to discuss profitability levels. Industry watchers, including Shapiro, say their profit margins, if they exist at all, are negligible, at best, for now. But most of them typically make money by taking a small cut of the transaction and will find their path to greater profits if they can generate enough volume of users.

Airbnb, Zimride, RelayRides and others have embraced the fee-per-transaction model. Others, such as Loosecubes, are looking for a more consistent stream of revenue by switching to a subscription-based model.

Those drawn to peer-to-peer sharing cite a multitude of reasons for the trend, but one stands out among start-ups and users alike: finding efficiencies by shedding excess.

Julianna Iran, a tax consultant from Pasadena, Calif., turns to Zimride to fill the empty seats in her car when she drives to San Francisco several times a year. The $40 to $50 she charges for a one-way ride helps shave her costs on gas. "You can see their profile on Facebook, and you can kind of tell if they're going to be a creeper or if you have nothing in common with them."

Inspired in Zimbabwe

The founders of Zimride were inspired by drivers in Zimbabwe, who pick up strangers and give them a lift for a few bucks. The company is applying that principle in the U.S., where only about 20% of seats in cars on the road are occupied, says CEO John Zimmer. "It's highly inefficient," he says.

While Airbnb also allows professional property managers to list their rentals, a majority of its 200,000 listings are by people renting out their primary homes, the company says.

Others turn to sharing for a chance to network a little and meet like-minded folks.

Flavorpill, an event-listing website based in New York, found an intern through a designer who used office space it had offered to creative types and listed on Loosecubes. "We've had some awesome people come through," says Kim Gardner, an associate product manager at Flavorpill.

Becoming a TaskRabbit

But mostly, the business of sharing is about making some extra cash. Car owners on RelayRides make on average about $250 a month, says founder Shelby Clark.

When her contract ended in December, Cynthia De Acha, an event planner in Menlo Park, Calif., found a new income source by working as a temporary assistant at TaskRabbit.

After undergoing a criminal background check and a video interview, she was approved to be a TaskRabbit, who can bid for errands and assignments. She works about 20 hours a week for $18 to $35 an hour.

Tasks range from organizing office supply cabinets to delivering cupcakes and balloons.

"If I find a full-time job, I may not need the money. But I'm going to continue for extra income," De Acha says.

Entrepreneurs have also tapped sharing platforms to directly market their goods and services, somewhat blurring the line between unadulterated peer-to-peer co-ops and direct sales channels.

Trust — the willingness to do business with strangers — remains the crux of the matter in peer-to-peer sharing, an issue that continues to befuddle start-ups and keeps them from amassing more users.

Online social networks, such as Facebook, have made verification and fraud detection easier by giving users the impression that they are dealing with people who have left traceable footprints on the Web.

Loosecubes requires users to sign up with their Facebook or LinkedIn account. Zimride users also sign up via Facebook. "We try to make it like it's your friend walking in," says Campbell McKellar, CEO of Loosecubes.

Zimride also primarily markets its ride-share service to universities and large companies, to give people a sense that they're carpooling with people in their physical networks.

Hertz prefers to rent his rooms to Facebook account holders who've previously used Airbnb. "As a user, the trust factor is huge," he says.

Collaborative Fund's Shapiro isn't so sure online social networks and peer-review systems alone can solve the issue. "I think insurance companies have a role in it."

It only takes a few incidents to steer the spotlight to potential dangers lurking in the nooks and crannies of such transactions. Last year, a woman in San Francisco blogged that her apartment was ransacked and trashed by a guest who found the place on Airbnb.

Since the incident, Airbnb partnered with insurance firm Lloyd's of London to introduce a Host Guarantee program that insures homeowners up to $1 million on most items in the house. It doesn't cover personal liability and items hosts should remove prior to renting, such as jewelry and rare art. "Airbnb's (move) quieted a lot of conversations," Shapiro says.

RelayRides, which also provides $1 million-per-incident in insurance for car owners, is dealing with a case in Massachusetts that might have a sobering effect on its operations. A woman in Massachusetts rented her vehicle to a RelayRides customer, who was killed in an accident after hitting another car. The injured parties in the other car sued and may claim damages in excess of the $1 million limit. RelayRides CEO Clark declined to comment on the case because it's still pending.

"Our insurance limits are very generous," Clark says. "They are often higher than the state minimum." Competitor Getaround has also raised its insurance to $1 million. "The previous standard was caveat emptor (buyer beware)," says CEO Sam Zaid. "A good component of what we do is screening people."

Economic impact?

Collective sharing, while a still-growing trend, may also have a broader economic impact, says Rob Atkinson, an economist and president of The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation.

While the classic Keynesian economic view suggests healthy consumer consumption spurs economic growth, sharing encourages more-efficient use of existing goods and diverts capital to other types of consumption and investment, he says.

It's a fallacy to assume that a consumer who sought to buy a car — but ultimately decides to rent it from a sharing site instead — would stop spending the money reserved for the car, Atkinson says.

"People can now spend on things that are of value to them," he says. "Why buy a chain saw when you use it once a year? If we share a chain saw, we have the value of having a chain saw, and we use the money to create jobs in other industries. So the economy is better off."
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/st...omy/56243142/1





The Most Important Tech Company You've Never Heard Of

Information about every cell phone in the country is in a Neustar database. Which is why it's kind of weird that 400 or so companies trust them to deal with law enforcement surveillance requests.
Reyhan Harmanci

A Delaware-based company that didn't exist 20 years ago has quietly become one of the major players in surveillance infrastructure — but they've been so under the radar that leading online privacy and security expert Chris Soghoian, a fellow at the Open Society Foundations, calls them the "Keyzer Söze of surveillance." Meet Neustar, one of the most important companies you've never heard of.

Over 400 telecommunications companies go to Neustar when they want to outsource law enforcement data requests. While it's not known how many law enforcement requests for cell and VoIP data they get, consider the volume that one of their client's, Cricket, copped to: 116 a day on average, or 42,500 law enforcement requests last year.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that cell phone surveillance requests by law enforcement have grown massively. This past year, police and federal agents asked wireless carriers for access to data —including text messages, cell phone locations, wiretaps —1.5 million times.

Neustar isn't a wireless carrier. But they are one of a number of companies that work in the background, providing part of the invisible network that undergirds all the electronic communication. And sometimes it takes a specific issue, like how phone companies deal with law enforcement queries, to illuminate the big and complicated and potentially scary institutions hidden in plain sight.

Information gleaned from Neustar's latest SEC filing, as well as their own website, shows that they have their hands in many different pots, outsourced surveillance being only one of them.

The company was originally founded as a department inside aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, developed to help phone carriers assign phone numbers in a portable fashion — that is, letting people keep the same (landline) number even if they switched phone companies. Neustar was spun off in 1999 after the parent company bought a telecommunications company and concerns rose about its ability to maintain "neutrality." In 2003, the business changed again when Neustar introduced cellphone portability: the ability to keep your phone number across different carriers.

By then, Neustar had also gotten into the internet game, winning a contract to administer ".biz" domain in Australia. (They would eventually control ".biz," and ".us" and are currently applying for over 300 new top-level domains, including ".nyc.") The company timeline details a series of acquisitions that leveraged its existing strength managing databases: buying Webmetrics, for instance, in 2008, gave it the ability to provide website management service to clients. More recently, they make money from providing web security services — a Neustar employee, Rodney Joffe, advises the White House on cybersecurity issues. In addition to issuing phone numbers, Neustar also provides caller-ID to United States carriers and, according to SEC filing, "real-time identification and location services to over 1,000 businesses in the U.S across multiple industries."

That's not even all Neustar does: They are also the people behind short codes (the five-digit text numbers often used to give donations, like the Red Cross or political campaigns) and UltraViolet, Hollywood's new DRM system for multi-platform cloud-based streaming.

Again, from the SEC filing:

With respect to our roles as the North American Numbering Plan Administrator, National Pooling Administrator, administrator of local number portability for the communications industry, operator of the sole authoritative registry for the .us and .biz Internet domain names, and operator of the sole authoritative registry for U.S. Common Short Codes, there are no other providers currently providing the services we offer.

All of these different arms of Neustar — especially their government contracts and access to huge consumer databases — worry security experts. "This is definitely an area that I want do more research. [Their government contracts] seem problematic in context of their law enforcement requests," said Alan Butler, a lawyer and fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). "When you have repeat players that represent large swaths of the industry, you can imagine that they build a rapport [with law enforcement], especially when it's in their best interest to comply as much as possible to avoid any sort of extra cost or trouble for their client."

No one has alleged that Neustar has done anything wrong in its surveillance request business. According to company spokeswoman Susan Wade, they started processing law enforcement requests in 2005, after acquiring a company called Fiducianet whose sole business was handling such requests. (Conspiracy theorists, take note: Fiducianet was founded by an FBI veteran in 2002 and saw its profits grow as law enforcement got the power to monitor Internet-based VoIP like Skype, as well as phone communication.)

Wade declined to provide numbers on how many requests Neustar processes on behalf their 400 clients but affirmed that they don't accept all of them. "Yes, we do reject — and have rejected — law enforcement requests on behalf of our customers where those requests do not comply with the applicable legal standards," she wrote in an email. "For example, if a warrant is required by law and we receive only a subpoena, the request will be rejected."

But, given the breadth of their business, Soghoian and others said that it was important for the company to give the public more information under what conditions they hand over customer information to all levels of government. "Neustar plays probably the most central role — Neustar is the first company that the government calls in every investigation," he said. Soghoian explained that in order to get a court order to access wireless or VoIP information, police need to find out which carrier the target uses — and, handily, Neustar runs a website for law enforcement to access just that information.

"By running that database, Neustar knows of every single phone number in the country," he said.

That doesn't, however, mean the Neustar is listening in on your phone calls or can do much more than route your phone number. In an emailed statement, Neustar's recently-appointed chief privacy officer Becky Burr emphasized their adherence to legal protocol. "In handling these requests, Neustar's experienced staff works closely with in house counsel and our client's legal staff if appropriate," she wrote, "Subpoenas and court orders are reviewed for accuracy and sufficient legal authority."

Watch enough George Clooney movies and every bland corporate giant begins to take on frightening properties. Certainly, it's not hard to find speculation on the internet that Neustar's relationship with law enforcement reaches to the NSA level.

Regardless, it's important to know about the Keyzer Sözes of the world. The ability to protect your information is only possible if you understand who has it — and we all unwittingly put a lot of trust in Neustar's hands. As the Washington Post noted in a 2008 story, "Neustar is part of an evolving telecom industry that is creating caches of information attractive to the government without clear guidelines governing who may have access and under what circumstances."

And we will continue to have to trust Neustar: Their contract with the group that manages the phone numbering system, NPAC, was recently extended to 2017. Consider the words of company president Lisa Blow, on an earnings call earlier this year. "The U.S. NPAC is considered a critical component of U.S. telecommunications infrastructure and plays an active role in supporting a broad range of applications," she said. "Though not known to many, U.S. NPAC plays a key role in every one of our daily lives."
http://www.buzzfeed.com/reyhan/the-m...ve-never-heard





HOPE 9: Whistleblower Binney Says the NSA has Dossiers on Nearly Every US Citizen

At the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference, NSA whistleblower William Binney revealed more about how censorship and monitoring are alive and well in the USA.
Ms. Smith

This weekend in New York City was a three-day hackers' conference called HOPE Number 9 which is only held every two years; HOPE stands for "Hackers on Planet Earth" and there's always a lot of great info that comes out of it.

One of the quotes floating around in regard to #HOPE9 came from Founder and CEO of Pallorium Inc's Steven Rambam as "Rambam's first law: All databases will eventually be used for unintended purposes." This is the same man who spoke at the 2008 HOPE about "Privacy is dead - Get over it." In regard to this year, you will probably find private investigator Rambam's newest revelations coming soon to 2600. Surveillance is one of those purposes that databases may be used for and NSA whistleblower William Binney knows plenty about domestic spying.

Binney was at HOPE and while his entire keynote is not yet posted, journalist Geoff Shively and Livestreamer Tim Pool had an opportunity to speak with Binney about NSA spying. As you may recall, after covering the NATO protests, Pool and Shively were two of the journalists harassed by Chicago cops. In the short video interview, Binney explained a bit more about the NSA spying on Americans:

"Domestically, they're pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country and assembling that information, building communities that you have relationships with, and knowledge about you; what your activities are; what you're doing. So the government is accumulating that kind of information about every individual person and it's a very dangerous process." He estimated that one telecom alone was sending the government an "average of 320 million logs every day since 2001."

Censorship and monitoring are alive and well in the USA. Shively summed it up as, "It's not about being paranoid. It's not about having nothing to hide; it's about an infringing of rights that does exist" right here at home.

After the NSA claimed it would violate Americans' privacy to say how many of us it spied upon, Binney was one of three NSA whistleblowers who decided to help back the EFF's lawsuit over the government's massive domestic spying program; they intend to tell the truth about the NSA's warrantless wiretap powers. If there is a dossier on almost every American, then it's little wonder why the NSA doesn't want to release those numbers. EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien said, "The government keeps making the same 'state secrets' claims again and again. It's time for Americans to have their day in court and for a judge to rule on the legality of this massive surveillance."

NSA Chief General Keith Alexander has denied such intense spying on Americans in the past. In a keynote speech about cybersecurity legislation, Alexander said "the NSA neither needs nor wants most personal info, such as emails," while continually repeating civil liberties must be protected. Yet as Techdirt pointed out, Alexander's words might be interpreted "to actually mean they don't care about civil liberties."

According to Truthdig, Binney told the HOPE audience, "These people are still hiding behind this 'national security' curtain. All I want to do is move that aside and say 'See ... pay attention to that man behind the curtain, because he's affecting us. He's affecting all of us' because he's setting the stage for an 'Orwellian state'."

Also this weekend, The New York Times ran a piece called "The End of Privacy?" The editorial states, "Cellphones, e-mail, and online social networking have come to rule daily life, but Congress has done nothing to update federal privacy laws to better protect digital communication. That inattention carries a heavy price."

Meanwhile in America, the 'land of free,' another NYTimes article exposed how the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) operated a "wide-ranging surveillance operation" and spied on "a group of its own scientists" by secretly capturing "thousands of e-mails that the disgruntled scientists sent privately to members of Congress, lawyers, labor officials, journalists and even President Obama."

The agency, using so-called spy software designed to help employers monitor workers, captured screen images from the government laptops of the five scientists as they were being used at work or at home. The software tracked their keystrokes, intercepted their personal e-mails, copied the documents on their personal thumb drives and even followed their messages line by line as they were being drafted, the documents show.

This surveillance resulted in more than 80,000 pages of computer documents. After reviewing them, The New York Times wrote, "The documents captured in the surveillance effort - including confidential letters to at least a half-dozen Congressional offices and oversight committees, drafts of legal filings and grievances, and personal e-mails - were posted on a public Web site, apparently by mistake, by a private document-handling contractor that works for the F.D.A."

That accidental find of the database by a scientist takes us back to Rambam's quote about databases being used for "unintended purposes." It also highlights the truth of Binney's claims at HOPE that censorship and monitoring is alive and well in the USA.
https://www.networkworld.com/communi...ery-us-citizen





Posting to Facebook Isn't a Crime.

Tasmania's police force has taken the unusual step of asking the public to stop alerting it to every "abusive or harassing" comment posted to Facebook or other social media sites.

The force said it was "increasingly receiving complaints" about material posted to the sites.

However, it sought to clarify that "the use of technology to undertake some conduct does not in itself create an offence".

"If the conduct complained of would not amount to an offence if it occurred off-line, then it is not an offence simply because in a particular instance it was undertaken with the aid of digital technology," the department noted.

"For example, complaints have been received about comments posted on Facebook which are abusive or harassing. If this behavior occurred in a public place it would not be a reportable offence.

"It is not the role of Tasmania Police to censor internet content."

Acting inspector Luke Manhood urged the public to lodge complaints directly with Facebook.

"Police should be contacted only where the content relates directly to a crime," he said.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/308553...-internet.aspx





WikiLeaks Grand Jury Witness David House Publishes First Account Of Prosecutors' Questioning
Andy Greenberg

The world has known for 18 months that a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia has been exploring the potential to indict anyone associated with the secret-spilling group WikiLeaks. But as with all things WikiLeaks-related, the truth gets more interesting when documents start to emerge.

David House, a friend of WikiLeaks’ alleged source Bradley Manning who first met the young Army private at a hacker space in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has published a detailed account of his interrogation by prosecutors. House doesn’t say much in that questioning: He confirms his name and birthdate, and otherwise invokes the fifth amendment against self incrimination to avoid responding. But the questions themselves shed light on an investigation that has otherwise taken place almost entirely in secret, and show that the prosecution may be digging into Bradley Manning’s ties to a group of Boston hackers who attended BUILDS, a hackerspace House founded.

In House’s transcript, Department of Justice counterespionage prosecutor Patrick Murphy asks House specifically if he’ll answer questions related to Bradley Manning, Tor developer and WikiLeaks associate Jacob Appelbaum, and Boston-based free software advocate Daniel Clark. House refuses.

House says he took notes by hand on a legal pad and passed pages to his lawyer during their moments of consultation. “I felt kind of powerless in there,” he told me when we spoke at the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) conference, where he’s helping to run a fundraiser for the Bradley Manning Support Network. “Having a pen to write stuff down was the most subversive thing I could do.”

Here’s an excerpt of his transcript:

Patrick Murphy: Do you know what a hackerspace is?

David House: I invoke.

PM: Do you know what BUILDS is, the acronym?

DH: I invoke.

PM: Mr. House, are you involved with the Bradley Manning Support Network?

DH: I invoke.

PM: Did you respond in the affirmative when asked by the FBI if you had heard of known WikiLeaks associate Jacob Appelbaum?

PM: I would like to state for the record that Mr. House is not answering the question and is instead taking notes.

DH: I invoke.

PM: Do you intend to answer any of my questions, aside from your date of birth and your name?

DH: I invoke.

When I asked House how he might be incriminated by testifying, as he claims by invoking the fifth amendment, he gave me a predictable response: “I invoke.”

House says his lawyer initially asked him not to put the transcript online for fear of preventing further note-taking in the grand jury hearing. But after a panel at the HOPE conference Friday on WikiLeaks’ legal situation and the Obama administration’s crackdown on whistleblowers, he decided to publish it.

He admits that one of his motives in sharing the transcript is also to clear his name in the activist community. Tor’s Jacob Appelbaum, privacy activist Nadim Kobeissi, and others have accused House in veiled and not-so-veiled terms of working as a federal informant, which House denies. “I would go to prison to protect Julian Assange, Appelbaum, WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning or anyone else who claims to be part of this movement,” he says.

Update: Kobeissi has clarified in a message to me that he only “suspected” House of being an informant, and never accused him of being one. He has detailed his position about House here.

Even so, House says his admiration for WikiLeaks has diminished over the last year as the group has spent less of its resources enabling whistleblowers and more fighting for survival and dealing with the tangled legal situation of Julian Assange, who remains in London’s Ecuadorean embassy seeking to avoid extradition to Sweden to face questioning related to alleged sex crimes.

“I think the ideals of WikiLeaks when it was first conceived were profound and provocative.” says House. “Now it’s become a powerful media force subverted by the day-to-day logistics of running an organization like that.”

“A year ago, I would have released this through WikiLeaks,” he adds, referring to his grand jury transcript. “Instead I released it myself, because people need to make decisions about where to blow the whistle for themselves. We can’t outsource making decisions to the government, and we shouldn’t outsource blowing the whistle to an organization as monolithic as WikiLeaks.”

Read House’s full transcript here.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygree...s-questioning/





WikiLeaks Reopens Channel For Credit Card Donations, Dares Visa And MasterCard To Block Them Again

After 18 months of having its funding nearly completely cut off by a payment industry blockade, WikiLeaks says it’s finally found a new workaround that allows it to receive credit card donations. And after a legal victory against Visa in Iceland, the group is literally daring the card companies to shut down payments to his site again.

In a statement to press Wednesday morning, WikiLeaks writes that the Fund for the Defense of Net Neutrality (FDNN) has agreed to accept donations on behalf of WikiLeaks, and that the group can receive payments through the French payment card system Carte Bleue. WikiLeaks claims that Visa and MasterCard are contractually obligated to allow payments through Carte Bleue and thus prevented from blocking the new channel to the site as they’ve done with others in the past.

Contractual obligations haven’t necessarily stopped the card companies from cutting off WikiLeaks before. Following its release of classified State Department cables in late 2010, PayPal, Bank of America, Visa, MasterCard and Western Union all blocked payments to the site, some claiming that it had violating their terms of service by engaging in illegal activities despite the fact that no WikiLeaks staffer had been charged with a publishing-related crime. In July of last year, the Icelandic firm Valitor, then Visa Iceland, briefly opened payments to WikiLeaks through its partner firm DataCell. Visa blocked that payment channel again within less than 24 hours.

Then last week, an Icelandic court ruled that Visa Iceland had violated its contract with DataCell by unilaterally blocking payments to the firm, and ordered Valitor to re-open payment before July 26 or pay fines of more than $6,000 per day.

Valitor plans to appeal. But Assange, emboldened by the initial win, hopes to press his advantage and open WikiLeaks’ faucet of donations again–or at least draw more attention to Visa and MasterCard’s legally questionable embargo.

“We beat them in Iceland and, by God, we’ll beat them in France as well,” reads a quote from Assange in the group’s statement. “Let them shut it down. Let them demonstrate to the world once again their corrupt pandering to Washington. We’re waiting. Our lawyers are waiting. The whole world is waiting. Do it.”

I’ve reached out to Visa and MasterCard and will update the story when I hear back from them.

Assange’s public game of brinksmanship also aims to draw attention to WikiLeaks’ dire financial situation. Its statement includes a plea for credit card donations while they’re still possible: “WikiLeaks advises all global supporters to make use of this avenue immediately before VISA/MasterCard attempts to shut it down,” it reads.

WikiLeaks move may be one of desperation: Timed to that emergency pledge drive, WikiLeaks is also releasing financial reports for 2011 and the first half of 2012 from the Wau Holland Foundation, a German non-profit that manages its finances. The documents, predictably, show a steady drop-off in WikiLeaks’ funding since the payment embargo began last year, with almost all of the group’s savings now gone. WikiLeaks says it raised only $171,000 in donations last year, compared with $812,000 in expenses the same year.

It’s not the first time WikiLeaks has declared itself nearly bankrupt. In October of 2010, Assange told a press conference that WikiLeaks had been paralyzed by the financial embargo against it and would cease publication to raise money. But the group nonetheless followed up with the publications of internal documents from the private intelligence firm Stratfor and more recently, a trove of emails from Syrian government officials and companies who communicated with them.

In this case, it’s not clear how much of a cash infusion WikiLeaks’ gambit will earn it. Visa and MasterCard aren’t likely to buy Assange’s bluff, and will likely shut down the Carte Bleue workaround immediately. But the move will at least provoke the firms into further public bullying of the secret-spilling organization. And for Assange, provocation is often an end in itself.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygree...lock-it-again/





US 'the Enemy' Says Dotcom Judge
Hamish Fletcher

The judge due to hear Kim Dotcom's extradition case has referred to the United States as "the enemy" in a discussion about copyright law.

District Court Judge David Harvey has heard parts of the case against the Megaupload founder, who was arrested with three colleagues in January after a request from the United States. The FBI has accused Dotcom and others working at Megaupload website of the world's biggest case of criminal copyright violation.

Judge Harvey is not due to hear the internet mogul's extradition case until next year but made his views on copyright known during the launch of the "Fair Deal" campaign last week.

The campaign is opposing any changes to New Zealand's copyright laws that may form part of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement.

The TPP trade deal is currently being negotiated and the 13th round of talks are finishing up.

The negotiations are secret but it is known that the United States entertainment industry is pushing for stronger copyright provisions among the 11 countries in the Asia-Pacific region negotiating the deal.

When talking about how the TPP would affect copyright in New Zealand, Harvey said it could stop the practice of hacking around DVD region codes.

These codes can mean movie players in New Zealand are unable to read DVDs from other parts of the world such as the United States.

It is legal in New Zealand to use methods to get around these regional codes and make the DVDs watchable but Judge Harvey said the TPP would change this.

"Under TPP and the American Digital Millennium copyright provisions you will not be able to do that, that will be prohibited... if you do you will be a criminal - that's what will happen. Even before the 2008 amendments it wasn't criminalised. There are all sorts of ways this whole thing is being ramped up and if I could use Russell [Brown's] tweet from earlier on: we have met the enemy and he is [the] U.S."

Judge Harvey's remark is a play on the line "we have met the enemy and he is us" by American cartoonist Walt Kelly.

The judge had used Kelly's quip while speaking at an internet conference earlier last week and it was promoted on Twitter by Public Address journalist Russell Brown.

Judge Harvey, who has served on the bench since 1989, would not comment when asked if these statements were appropriate given his involvement in Kim Dotcom's case.

Auckland University law professor Bill Hodge said the comments could be seen as "unhelpful".

However, without knowing the details of the TPP discussion or related copyright issues he was unable to say whether the comments were appropriate.

"To the extent that the North Shore District Court has some jurisdiction, it can be seen as probably an extra-judicial comment that isn't helpful.

"But on the other hand, it was part of a quasi-academic conference discussing developing areas of law. I think judges should be free to make comments, as long as it doesn't appear to show any predetermination with respect to the specific case in the court before them."

Crown Law, which is representing the FBI in the extradition case, would not comment on the issue.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/n...ectid=10819927





Dotcom Judge Quits the Case
David Fisher

The judge overseeing the Kim Dotcom extradition case has stepped down after making comments suggesting the United States was the "enemy".

Judge David Harvey surrendered his role in the case after making comments during a copyright discussion at an internet conference.

An internet law expert, Judge Harvey had been considered the perfect choice to hear arguments on whether Dotcom and his Megaupload colleagues should be extradited by the United States to face charges of criminal copyright violation.

The district court's chief judge Jan-Marie Doogue said Judge Harvey had made the decision to step down from hearing the case.

"He recognises that remarks made in the context of a paper he delivered on copyright law at a recent internet conference could reflect on his impartiality and that the appropriate response is for him to step down from the case."

Hip-hop star in link to Dotcom case - See tomorrow's New Zealand Herald for full story.

Judge Harvey made the comments at NetHui during a conference discussion on copyright and trade talks with the US.

He referred to a tweet which had played on a reference to cartoonist Walt Kelly: "We have met the enemy and he is [the] U.S."

The case, scheduled for March, would now be heard by Judge Nevin Dawson. Judge Dawson has previously heard elements of the case including making the decision to allow the internet giant bail in February after a month in jail.

The case has been bruising since the outset with the judge initially hearing it reprimanded for treatment of media.

It has also seen criticism of the Crown Law Office and the police. The wrong type of restraining order was initially used to seize the cash and assets of the accused. Then the search warrants were ruled invalid because they were too broad, making the search and seizure illegal. It also emerged the FBI had taken evidence back to the US without the knowledge of the police and Crown - and now want to use it to help extradite the Megaupload accused.

Auckland university associate professor Bill Hodge said the case involved new technology arguments in an "antiquated" legal framework argued by talented lawyers. "It is uniquely high stakes."

He said it was the "case of a lifetime" for Judge Harvey. "He is recognised as one of New Zealand's experts - not just as a judge but as an expert who has gone into copyright issues."

A high court hearing next month will hear evidence of the January raid during which Dotcom, Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk were arrested. The FBI has accused Dotcom and others working at Megaupload website of the world's biggest case of criminal copyright violation.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/ar...ectid=10820496





Is Cable TV Tuning In Its Own Obsolescence?
Brian Proffitt

Cable TV may be in for a rude awakening from the dream-like hold it has managed to keep over consumers all these years. Recent content provider disputes among DirecTV and Viacom, along with legal decisions allowing websites like Aereo to stream broadcast TV, are putting the industry’s revenue model in serious risk.

Content Wars Make Customers the Losers

Three factors are bringing this disruption to a head. First is the increasing friction between cable companies and content providers, the most recent example being DirecTV's decision last week to drop Viacom content on its satellite TV network - a move that blocked nearly 20 million customers from up to 26 channels of content (if you count HD channels).

At issue are the ongoing fees Viacom charges DirecTV to deliver its content, centered around the issue of cable bundling. DirecTV wants to give its customers an à la carte type of arrangement for Viacom channels, so that they can buy only the channels they want. Viacom, fearing the potential loss of revenue from channels people don’t want to pay for, would like to keep the current bundles of cable channels.

Customers are increasingly demanding à la carte programming, and cable and satellite providers are definitely feeling the pressure. But they’re squeezed from both sides: The actual content providers, like Viacom and Disney, are scared to death of à la carte.

For example, Disney charges an affiliate fee of $5.06 per month for every user that gets ESPN, according to AllThingsD. “And, by some estimates, only about 25% of cable customers actually watch ESPN on a regular basis. So if you unbundled ESPN, the per-subscriber cost might shoot up to $20 or more, to account for the 75% drop in its customer base.”

Content providers' insistence on the bundle, however, is starting to wear thin, as last week’s fight with DirecTV and Viacom demonstrates.

The Surprising Relevance of Broadcast TV

A second area where cable TV is facing trouble comes from the unexpected area of broadcast TV. Last Wednesday a federal judge blocked an injunction against Aereo, a new video streaming service that uses tiny antennas to rebroadcast over-the-air channels to its subscribers' mobile devices, even recording broadcasts.

Local broadcast stations and their corporate parents, who also have long enjoyed a cozy deal with fees from cable companies, are fighting Aereo tooth and nail. They had hoped to kill it off quickly by requesting the injunction, but U.S. District Court Judge Alison Nathan spiked it, indicating that issues would best be sorted out in a trial.

The broadcast networks are planning to appeal the decision for an injunction, citing Aereo as a copyright infringer. Meanwhile, Aereo CEO Barry Diller has plans to expand the Aereo service beyond the New York City area where it now operates.

If Aereo prevails - and there is little doubt that, should it survive these injunctions, this will be a long, nasty court battle - it could do serious harm to broadcasters, who rely on cable affiliate fees to supplement advertising revenue. Cable providers could get hit, too, since customers may decide that they don’t need cable if they can watch and record broadcast TV shows without the big monthly bill.

New Alternatives to Cable

Both of these events add up to real trouble for cable and satellite companies because of the third factor in this pile on: Customers now have alternatives. Even before Aereo came along, the practice of cord-cutting cable has become much more prevalent, thanks largely to the pervasiveness of broadband Internet.

With more and more programming available on the Internet through services like Hulu and Netflix, cable companies know full well their customers can now do something they could never do before: vote with their feet.

Aereo just makes the alternatives more attractive, since it helps fill a key gap for cord cutters: live sports.

Online users can enjoy professional baseball, football, basketball and hockey through subscription-based seasonal passes (although often at significant expense and under Byzantine blackout rules). There is also the very real problem that not every service is available on every streaming-TV device, so consumers may have to use multiple approaches to get the content they want. By delivering broadcast sporting events to customers, Aereo makes it easier for sports fans to cut their cord.

And of course, it doesn’t help that consumers consistently say they hate their cable companies.

This triple threat adds up to cable TV’s business getting whittled away from every side, and forcing the entire sector to face some hard choices if they want to keep their customers much longer.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...solescence.php





White House Advisers Tell Obama to Share Airwaves for Broadband
Todd Shields

Federal agencies should share airwaves with commercial users to ease a shortage of frequencies and help meet surging demand from wireless smartphones and other mobile devices, a White House advisory panel said.

President Barack Obama should have U.S. agencies identify twice as much spectrum for shared use as he directed in a 2010 memorandum setting mobile-computing growth as a national priority, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology said in a letter and report issued today.

Carriers led by Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S. wireless provider, and No. 2 AT&T Inc. (T) have pushed the government to devote more airwaves to wireless high-speed Internet, or broadband, as they seek to handle data traffic that has more than doubled four years in a row.

Today’s recommendation signals a U.S. shift from granting companies exclusive use of airwaves vacated by federal agencies, and toward having frequency bands accommodate demands from multiple users.

Mobile carriers have said they prefer to have swaths of airwaves they control.

“Full ownership of the spectrum has proven over time to be the best model,” AT&T Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson said at June 1 conference. “Spectrum sharing models, it’s really hard for somebody like us to control network quality.”

Doubling Airwaves

Obama in 2010 pledged to almost double the airwaves available for wireless devices such as smartphones and tablet computers by making another 500 megahertz available over 10 years.

U.S. mobile providers are assigned 409.5 megahertz for commercial use, according to CTIA-The Wireless Association. Members of the Washington-based trade group include AT&T, Verizon Wireless, No. 3 carrier Sprint Nextel Corp. (S) and the fourth-largest, T-Mobile USA Inc.

The 500-megahertz plan has been progressing slowly, and it can be prohibitively expensive to move federal agencies aside as relocation costs mount, the White House advisory council said in today’s report. It recommended the federal government find 1,000 megahertz for shared use.

As an example of possible ways to share, the report said some users could operate in airwaves and cease when primary, federal users begin to emit signals. In another example, devices can automatically switch to different airwaves when a higher priority use takes place, the report said. Or devices could use spectrum in one place that is reserved for government uses in other locations, the report said.

Defense Spectrum

Defense agencies are the largest users of federal spectrum, holding about 37 percent of airwaves assigned to U.S. users, the White House panel said in its report.

The advisory group issuing today’s report was appointed by the president to augment the science and technology advice available to him from inside the White House. Members include Google Inc. Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt; Mark Gorenberg, a managing director of San Francisco-based investors Hummer Winblad Venture Partners; and Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft Corp.

Congress in February approved auctions of unused television airwaves for use by wireless services, another step aimed at alleviating the spectrum shortage. The Federal Communications Commission is working to devise auction rules.

Blair Levin, a former FCC official who’s now a fellow at the Washington-based policy group Aspen Institute, has said the auctions may reap 60-to-80 megahertz of airwaves, compared with 120 anticipated by the agency. Broadcasters can choose whether to sell their airwaves in the voluntary auction.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-0...broadband.html





Google Fiber Set To Launch
David Merrell

In 2010, Google announced its Google Fiber project. This project would deliver a gigabit network to a chosen community. Kansas City was ultimately chosen for the tech company’s test run. Next week, Google Fiber finally goes lives.

A gigabit network is one that runs on fiber optics, and reaches download speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second. The average American only has download speeds of up to 4 megabits per second. This network will offer speeds over 100 times faster than the average speed, and it will be bi-directional.

Why is Google launching a fiber network? Experts see two possible reasons. Google itself has stated that it wants to see what people would do with a gigabit network connection. Given the company’s plethora of online content, particularly at video sharing website Youtube, this seems like a logical enough reason. Youtube has begun streaming movies and TV shows in the past few years, and faster network speeds would help the company grow this business.

Others speculate that the move is Google’s answer to attacks on network neutrality by the big internet providers like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T. These companies complain about the price of upgrading and maintaining their network, and want to charge websites like Google extra money to allow customers fast access to its sites. This practice would violate the long held spirit of the internet, where all data traffic is treated equally. Google may be out to prove that fast networks can be built and maintained at reasonable prices.

If the latter is true, then Google is to be commended. The attacks on network neutrality by the big service providers threatens not just the internet, but the economy as a whole. Our economy is deeply connected to the internet now, and we can not afford to have internet service providers picking the winners and losers online. Discrimination of network traffic can not be allowed, or the open and free internet we have grown to love will be destroyed.
http://www.northmobilepost.com/googl...set-to-launch/





Exclusive: Comcast Prepping 305 Mbps Tier To Counter Verizon's New Quantum FiOS Offerings
Karl Bode

Last month Verizon raised the bar for residential broadband (and high prices) when they announced their new Quantum FiOS tiers, which included a new top shelf 300 Mbps downstream, 65 Mbps upstream tier for $205 a month. Not to be outdone, sources tell Broadband Reports that Comcast is planning to offer a 305 Mbps downstream tier sometime before the end of the year in FiOS markets. A reliable source tells us that all Comcast employees were treated to a live event stream discussing future Xfinity service plans today. Buried among some discussion about the Olympics and an expansion in Spanish language programming, Comcast's Neil Smit made several references to the faster tier being deployed in Verizon FiOS territories "soon."

There's no hard timeline on the offering yet, but clearly Comcast wants to keep pace on the PR front, Smit making sure employees knew they'll offer 305 Mbps just to make sure they one-up Verizon. One problem is that Comcast isn't really utilizing upstream channel bonding to its full capability yet, so it will be interesting to see just how close to 65 Mbps Comcast can get on the upstream side of the bar. Comcast upstream bonding tests last year were able to achieve 75-100 Mbps.

Consumer groups (and apparently the DOJ) have worried that Comcast's new marketing and spectrum deal with Verizon will reduce the incentive both companies have to seriously compete with one another on the landline broadband front. Whether triggered by the deal or not, Verizon has been hiking prices for FiOS services (both TV and broaband) over the last year, while eliminating many of the more aggressive introductory promotions that target cable competitors like Comcast and Cablevision.

Playing higher speed niche audience marketing patty cake keeps up appearances on the competitive front to appease regulators reviewing the deal, even if both companies are less willing than ever to actually compete on price. We'll post more detail on the faster 305 Mbps tier when we get it.
https://secure.dslreports.com/showne...ps-Tier-120450





EU Antitrust Regulators Investigate Microsoft Over Browsers

EU antitrust regulators have opened an investigation into whether Microsoft is complying with a 2009 ruling ordering it to offer users a choice of web browsers, the European Union's antitrust chief said on Tuesday.

"We take compliance with our decisions very seriously. And I trusted the company's reports were accurate. But it seems that was not the case, so we have immediately taken action," Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia told a news conference.

"If following our investigation, the infringement is confirmed, Microsoft should expect sanctions," he said, adding that regulators aimed to complete the investigation as fast as possible.

Almunia said it was the first time that the Commission had dealt with a case in which an offender was suspected of failing to meet its commitments under antitrust rulings.

(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; editing by Rex Merrifield)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...86G0CT20120717





Watch What You Store on SkyDrive–You May Lose Your Microsoft Life
Surur

In February 2011 we posted about a German photographer who had his SkyDrive suspended after uploading 4 partial nudes.

Now with SkyDrive becoming ever easier to use it may be worth reminding users that they are not free to store whatever they want on the network, and that Microsoft is monitoring it.

Dutch user ‘WingsOfFury’ had uploaded 9 GB of content, and suddenly found his Windows Live account suspended, meaning he lost access to his Hotmail, Xbox Live, could not purchase apps and could of course not upload anything to SkyDrive.

After contact with Microsoft support he found out that his account was blocked because there was a folder on his SkyDrive that contained content which was not allowed by the code of conduct of Microsoft SkyDrive. The folder was a private folder, not shared to anyone else.

Microsoft reserves the right to suspend an account for any reason, and two months of trying to fix the issue did not result in any resolution.

‘WingsOfFury’ eventually just created a new account, which of course meant his achievements and the apps he purchased were lost.

While Microsoft has the full right to police its property, with cloud services increasingly interwoven into Windows Phone and Windows 8, and even Office, users should be aware that SkyDrive is not in fact an extension of their hard drive and not store anything there, even in private and even if legal, that could in any way be questionably.

Prohibited Uses

You will not upload, post, transmit, transfer, distribute or facilitate distribution of any content (including text, images, sound, video, data, information or software) or otherwise use the service in a way that:

• depicts nudity of any sort including full or partial human nudity or nudity in non-human forms such as cartoons, fantasy art or manga.

• incites, advocates, or expresses pornography, obscenity, vulgarity, profanity, hatred, bigotry, racism, or gratuitous violence.

• misrepresents the source of anything you post or upload, including impersonation of another individual or entity.

• provides or creates links to external sites that violate this Code of Conduct.

• includes content that is protected by intellectual property laws, rights of privacy or publicity, or any other applicable law unless you own or control the rights thereto or have received all necessary consents.

• is intended to harm or exploit minors in any way.

• is designed to solicit, or collect personally identifiable information of any minor (anyone under 18 years old), including, but not limited to: name, email address, home address, phone number, or the name of their school.

• invades anyone’s privacy by attempting to harvest, collect, store, or publish private or personally identifiable information, such as passwords, account information, credit card numbers, addresses, or other contact information without their knowledge and willing consent.

• is illegal or violates any applicable local and national laws; including but not limited to child pornography, bestiality, incest, illegal drugs, software piracy, and harassment.

• threatens, stalks, defames, defrauds, degrades, victimizes or intimidates an individual or group of individuals for any reason; including on the basis of age, gender, disability, ethnicity, sexual orientation, race or religion; or incites or encourages anyone else to do so.

• harms or disrupts, or intends to harm or disrupt, another user’s computer or would allow you or others to illegally access software or bypass security on Web sites, or servers, including but not limited to spamming.

• attempts to impersonate a Microsoft employee, agent, manager, host, administrator, moderator, another user or any other person through any means.

• promotes or otherwise facilitates the purchase and sale of ammunition or firearms.

• contains or could be considered ‘junk mail’, ‘spam’, ‘chain letters’, ‘pyramid schemes’, ‘affiliate marketing’ or unsolicited commercial advertisement.

• mischaracterizes content you post or upload or contains the same or similar content to other content you have already posted.

• attempts to manipulate the services, including ranking and reputation systems in the services, by violating any of the provisions of this Code of Conduct, colluding with others on voting or using multiple profiles.

• offers to make international money transfers for amounts exceeding the asking price of an item, with intent to request a refund of any portion of the payment.

• contains advertising for money making schemes, discount cards, credit counseling, online surveys or online contests.

You will not use any form of automated device or computer program that enables the submission of postings without the express written consent of Microsoft Corporation.

Termination and Cancellation

Microsoft reserves the right, at its sole discretion, and without any obligation to do so, to review and remove user-created services and content at will and without notice, and delete content and accounts. Microsoft reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to ban participants or terminate access to services.
http://wmpoweruser.com/watch-what-yo...icrosoft-life/





Microsoft Changes Skype Supernodes Architecture to Support Wiretapping

Two months ago, Skype replaces user-hosted P2P supernodes with Linux grsec boxes hosted by Microsoft, but for what?

I found some brilliant and valuable comment about this:

I think wiretapping is one of the big reasons for the rearchitecture. Skype officially claimed they could not comply with wiretapping requests because of the P2P network as late as 2008 (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9963028-38.html), and Microsoft was already working on wiretapping VoIP in 2009 (http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keat...retapping.asp).

via Hacker News

Answer is: WIRETAPPING

So, think twice.

P.S. M$ talking, that "supernodes don't transit voice traffic" - this is bullshit. They do. In case, where you both behind NAT or in case of authority curiosity.

P.S2. Especially, for Kostya Kortchinsky at post.

Relay nodes take care of those if you can't communicate directly with the other end. There is a mutual exclusivity in that a node can't be a relay and a supernode at the same time.

Can he prove it? No. But, I can. This code, which I wrote in past, will allow for your traffic to flow via supernode(and also relay node): skyrel.c skypush.c

How to deal with AES keys? Not big problem, if you have Skype RSA CA(certificate of authority) private key, which skype/microsoft obviously have.

So, forget about security and anonymity in microsoft-skype.
http://skype-open-source.blogspot.ch...skype-now.html





Covert FBI Power to Obtain Phone Data Faces Rare Test
Jennifer Valentino-Devries

In a rare test of a tool expanded in the U.S. Patriot Act, a telecom company is fighting the government's use of a secretive tool called a national security letter to get access to customer records without a court order. WSJ's Jennifer Valentino-DeVries reports.

Early last year, the Federal Bureau of Investigation sent a secret letter to a phone company demanding that it turn over customer records for an investigation. The phone company then did something almost unheard of: It fought the letter in court.

The U.S. Department of Justice fired back with a serious accusation. It filed a civil complaint claiming that the company, by not handing over its files, was interfering "with the United States' sovereign interests" in national security.

The legal clash represents a rare and significant test of an investigative tool strengthened by the USA Patriot Act, the counterterrorism law enacted after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

A mobile and long distance company is challenging a counter-terrorism tool known as a national security letter. Take a look at important documents related to the case, and what they tell us about the issue.

The case is shrouded in secrecy. The person at the company who received the government's request—known as a "national security letter," or NSL—is legally barred from acknowledging the case, or even the letter's existence, to almost anyone but company lawyers.

"This is the most important national-security-letter case" in years, said Stephen Vladeck, a professor and expert on terrorism law at the American University Washington College of Law. "It raises a question Congress has been trying to answer: How do you protect the First Amendment rights of an NSL recipient at the same time as you protect the government's interest in secrecy?"

The confidentiality requirements make it impossible to definitively identify the company fighting the case. Its name and other identifying details have been redacted in court documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

The phone company's lawyer declined to name his client or respond to questions about its identity.

There are thousands of telecom companies in the U.S. However, the court papers offer clues that can be used to narrow down the list. The Journal cross-referenced the court papers against corporate websites and Federal Communications Commission records of telecom firms, and identified five firms that appeared to be possible matches with the company described in the case.

Four of the five companies denied any involvement in the case and declined to be interviewed about national security letters. At the fifth company, a top executive declined to confirm or deny, either on or off the record, whether his firm had received an NSL or is involved in the case.

That company, Working Assets Inc., runs a San Francisco-based telecom subsidiary called Credo, and uses some of its revenue to support liberal causes. The chief executive of Credo, Michael Kieschnick, offered his firm's view, in general terms, of these types of government requests. "There is a tension between privacy and the legitimate security needs of the country," he said. "We think it is best to resolve this through grand jury or judicial oversight."

Unlike search warrants, NSLs don't require a judge's oversight.

National security letters, which date back to the 1980s, have become more common since the passage of the Patriot Act, which expanded the government's ability to use them to collect information about people. As long as the head of an FBI field office certifies that the records would be relevant to a counterterrorism investigation, the bureau can send an NSL request without the backing of a judge or grand jury.

Nicholas Merrill mounted an early attack on 'national security letters' in 2004, forcing a change in the law, which previously offered no clear way for the letters to be challenged.

Since the 1970s, the Supreme Court has largely held that authorities don't need a full search warrant to obtain information that people have stored with "third parties"—such as their bank or phone company—on the principle that people have already willingly given up that data.

NSLs generally seek financial, phone and Internet records but don't request information about the content of emails, texts or phone calls. According to a Justice Department report, the FBI sent 192,499 such requests between 2003 and 2006. The vast majority go uncontested.

In the challenge playing out in California, the company is fighting the letters on constitutional grounds. It is arguing, among other things, that the gag orders associated with most of these letters improperly restrain speech without a judge's authorization.

The FBI says it must maintain the secrecy of national security letters to avoid tipping off potential terrorists. The letters are "critical to our ability to keep the country safe," then-Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security Todd Hinnen told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security last year.

National security letters were originally for FBI investigations where there were "specific and articulable facts" indicating the information was related to a foreign agent. The Patriot Act eliminated the requirements for specific facts and a link to a foreign agent.

Since then, use of the letters has increased. In 2000, there were about 8,500 such requests; last year, the FBI made 16,511, according to the Justice Department. That number includes letters asking for things such as records of the numbers called by a phone, or the "to" and "from" lines of emails, but it doesn't count requests that ask only what subscriber is associated with an account. Including those, more than 49,000 requests were sent in 2006, according to a report from the Justice Department's inspector general.

Justice Department officials have testified that NSLs have been instrumental in breaking up terrorist cells in Lackawanna, N.Y., and northern Virginia. But the department's inspector general also reported in 2007 that the FBI sometimes used the letters improperly, and in more than 700 cases circumvented the law altogether. To speed the processing of letters, phone-company representatives were embedded with the FBI and sometimes let investigators see data even without proper NSLs, the inspector general said in a separate finding. After the 2007 report, the FBI said it put a new system in place to address the problems.

The first public legal challenge to national security letters came in 2004. Nicholas Merrill, founder of a small New York Internet service provider, disputed the law's constitutionality after receiving an NSL. That year, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York found the law was unconstitutional in part because there was no clear way to challenge the letters. Congress changed the law in 2006 to explicitly allow challenges.

The company in the current California case is challenging the letter as well as the gag order, arguing that the national security letter statute itself is unconstitutional. The 2006 amendment allows such a challenge, the company says.

Such challenges appear to be unusual. A 2010 letter from the Office of the Attorney General indicated that over nearly two years, there were only four challenges to a letter's gag order. Statistics on challenges to the letters themselves aren't available.
The Justice Department argues that people who get these letters can't use the 2006 amendment to contest the law itself, only to fight individual letters and secrecy orders. A challenge to the law itself would need to be brought under the Constitution, not the amendments to the law, a Justice Department spokesman said. The government also said the company is violating federal law because it "has not complied with" the request in the letter.

Rep. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican who crafted the 2006 amendment, said the law means that people who challenge a letter don't need to provide the information sought by the government until the court orders them to do so.

The Justice Department also argues that the court doesn't have the right to determine the constitutionality of the law in this case because of "sovereign immunity," a long-standing legal principle that exempts the government from lawsuits unless the government consents.

Orin Kerr, a professor at George Washington University Law School and former computer-crime attorney at the Justice Department, said sovereign immunity usually is applied in lawsuits against the government that seek monetary damages, not in cases disputing the constitutionality of a law.

"I would say this is a puzzling argument," he said. "There has to be a way to challenge the constitutionality of the law."

The Justice Department declined to comment on the matter of sovereign immunity.

The Justice Department's civil suit against the unnamed telecom company seeks a judge's order compelling the firm to give up the data. The government has agreed to a temporary stay of that lawsuit, a Justice Department spokesman said. But the government is still separately seeking the judge's order to compel release of the data.

Matt Zimmerman, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil-liberties group that is representing the telecom company, said his client intends to comply with the outcome of the judicial process. "We don't appreciate the assertion that we are trying to break the law," he said.

The NSL sent to Mr. Zimmerman's client, which isn't on the regular public docket but is available for review at the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, states that the recipient has a right to challenge "if compliance would be unreasonable, oppressive, or otherwise unlawful."

The letter in the case is one of the more limited types of NSLs: It asks for the name, address and length of service associated with one or more accounts.

While it is impossible to identify the firm with certainty, court documents suggest it is an atypical phone company. Particularly, a line from the government's court papers suggests the company may be involved in actions that aren't telecom-related.

For example, the company's argument rests partly on the idea that disclosing a customer's name would impinge on the First Amendment right of free association. The government responds by saying it served the NSL on the firm "solely in its corporate capacity as a telephone company."

That exchange implies the company has other activities, perhaps involving the principle of free association.

Credo, the firm that agreed to speak with the Journal, is unusual in that it is also engaged in activities largely unrelated to telecommunications. It is active in funding and helping to organize left-leaning political events and activities. Some of its recent efforts include one to "jail Wall Street crooks" and to call on the FCC to "revoke the broadcast licenses held by Rupert Murdoch's media empire." (Mr. Murdoch is the chief executive of News Corp., which owns the Journal.)

Credo has fought various parts of the Patriot Act in the past. It also sends a percentage of its revenues to what it describes on its website as "progressive nonprofit groups" including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the legal counsel in the California case. This year, Credo started a "super PAC," a political-action committee, aimed at ousting 10 Tea Party Republicans from Congress.

Credo has about 120,000 mobile customers and three million activists on its rolls, it says.

Three of the five other companies identified by the Journal as possibly being involved in the case are more traditional small telecoms. They are: Michigan-based Long Distance Consolidated Billing Co., California-based Network Enhanced Technologies Inc. and Telecare Inc., which is based in Indiana. The fourth company, Cause Based Commerce Inc., located in Ohio, donates proceeds from its business to Catholic and antiabortion charities.

Executives at all four of these companies said they weren't familiar with or involved in the case. The CEO from Credo, Mr. Kieschnick, said he was willing to discuss NSLs in general terms in order to tell his customers that his company can't protect their privacy in all situations.

It remains unclear whether Credo is the recipient of the NSL in the court fight in California. If Credo is the company, Mr. Kieschnick is taking a risk by speaking. The penalty for knowingly breaking the gag order with the intent to interfere with an investigation is up to five years in prison.

In its legal arguments, the Justice Department says the company in question "remains free" to talk about national security letters generally, as long as it didn't get the information from the investigation. "The object of the nondisclosure provision is not to censor private speech," the Justice Department says in its filings.
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/...zExNDcyWj.html





U.S. Admits Surveillance Violated Constitution At Least Once
Spencer Ackerman

The head of the U.S. government’s vast spying apparatus has conceded that recent surveillance efforts on at least one occasion violated the Constitutional prohibitions on unlawful search and seizure.

The admission comes in a letter from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declassifying statements that a top U.S. Senator wished to make public in order to call attention to the government’s 2008 expansion of its key surveillance law.

“On at least one occasion,” the intelligence shop has approved Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to say, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court found that “minimization procedures” used by the government while it was collecting intelligence were “unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.” Minimization refers to how long the government may retain the surveillance data it collects. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution is supposed to guarantee our rights against unreasonable searches.

Wyden does not specify how extensive this “unreasonable” surveillance was; when it occurred; or how many Americans were affected by it.

In the letter, acquired by Danger Room, Wyden asserts a serious federal sidestep of a major section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

That section — known as Section 702 and passed in 2008 — sought to legalize the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance efforts. The 2008 law permitted intelligence officials to conduct surveillance on the communications of “non-U.S. persons,” when at least one party on a call, text or email is “reasonably believed” to be outside of the United States. Government officials conducting such surveillance no longer have to acquire a warrant from the so-called FISA Court specifying the name of an individual under surveillance. And only a “significant purpose” of the surveillance has to be the acquisition of “foreign intelligence,” a weaker standard than before 2008.

Wyden says that the government’s use of the expanded surveillance authorities “has sometimes circumvented the spirit of the law” — a conclusion that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence does not endorse. The office does not challenge the statement about the FISA Court on at least one occasion finding the surveillance to conflict with the Fourth Amendment. Danger Room initially misunderstood the letter to mean that its author, top intelligence official Kathleen Turner, made the statements she was merely informing Wyden he could to issue publicly without revealing classified information.

But this is a far cry from how Director of National Intelligence James Clapper typically describes the new FISA law. When the law was up for reauthorization this spring, Clapper wrote to congressional leaders to say its renewal was his “top priority in Congress,” as the law “allows the Intelligence Community to collect vital information about international terrorists and other important targets overseas while providing robust protection for the civil liberties and privacy of Americans.”

Suspicions about abuse of the government’s new surveillance powers are almost as old as the 2008 expansion of the law. In 2009, citing anonymous sources, the New York Times reported that “the N.S.A. had been engaged in ‘overcollection’ of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic,” if unintentional. The Justice Department told the Times that it had already resolved the problem.

But as the American Civil Liberties Union noted in a May letter to lawmakers, “There is little in the public record about how the government implements” the expanded law. An ACLU Freedom of Information Act request discovered that the Justice Department and intelligence bureaucracy refer to “compliance incidents” in their internal accounting of the new surveillance — which seemed to suggest difficulty staying within the broadened boundaries of the law. (Full disclosure: My wife works for the ACLU.)

Wyden has been a lonely congressional voice against renewing the government’s broadened surveillance powers. Last month, he quietly used a parliamentary maneuver to stall the renewal after it passed a key Senate committee.

Wyden’s argument was that the government had not fully disclosed the extent of its new surveillance powers. It argued to Wyden that it is “not reasonably possible to identify the number of people located in the United States whose communications may have been reviewed under the authority of the [FISA Amendments Act].” Separately, the National Security Agency insisted that it would violate Americans’ privacy even to tally up how many Americans it had spied upon under the new law.

On Friday, Wyden said in a statement: I applaud the DNI for agreeing that transparency should prevail in this situation… I believe that protections for Americans’ privacy need to be strengthened, and I believe that the FISA Court’s rulings help illustrate why this is necessary. I look forward to debating this issue on the Senate floor.”

In her letter to Wyden, Turner insisted — as the government has in the past — that all Constitutional and legal problems with the expanded surveillance have already been rectified. The government, she writes, believes the FISA Amendments Act is “a well-calibrated statute that strikes an appropriate balance between protecting national security and safeguarding privacy and civil liberties.”

“At no time,” she continues, “have these reviews found any intentional violations of law.”
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012...ce-spirit-law/





EFF: Americans May Not Realize it, but Many are in a Face Recognition Database Now

EFF Staff Attorney Jennifer Lynch testified that although "many Americans may not realize it, they are already in a face recognition database." The Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law held a hearing about facial recognition in regards to privacy and civil liberties. Between Facebook scanning 300 million photos a day and the FBI's nationwide face search, real-time face recognition is coming and we desperately need privacy protections in place.
Ms. Smith

People are not going to, nor should they have to, start walking around outside with a bag over their head to avoid security cameras capturing images of them. Yet "face recognition allows for covert, remote and mass capture and identification of images -- and the photos that may end up in a database include not just a person's face but also how she is dressed and possibly whom she is with. This creates threats to free association and free expression not evident in other biometrics," testified EFF Staff Attorney Jennifer Lynch about What Facial Recognition Technology Means for Privacy and Civil Liberties.

There are 32 states that use some form of facial recognition for DMV photos. Every day, Facebook happily slurps up and automatically scans with facial recognition software about 300 million photos that users upload to the social networking giant. "Face recognition is here to stay, and, though many Americans may not realize it, they are already in a face recognition database," Lynch said. In fact, when you stop to consider Facebook "at least 54% of the United States population already has a face print." Now it purchased Face.com which had 31 billion face images profiled.

Previously Senator Al Franken declared privacy is a fundamental right and explained in a letter to NTIA how the Fourth Amendment and privacy are taking a beating via technology. Recently Sen. Franken said "The dimensions of our faces are as unique to us as our fingerprints. And right now technology exists that gives the government and companies the ability to figure out your name and other personal information about you with nothing more than a photograph." Today the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law held a hearing about facial recognition in regards to privacy and civil liberties.

Sen. Franken brought up Facebook's FAIL on privacy by design by mentioning that it takes six clicks on the allegedly "easy to use" privacy options to opt out of facial recognition and tagging. When Rob Sherman did not have the answers to some questions, Sen. Franken sent a light jab of reminder that Sherman is the Facebook Manager of Privacy and Public Policy. Will Facebook eventually sell all these face prints? Sherman sidestepped by saying, "It's difficult to know in the future what Facebook will look like five or ten years down the road."

Lynch mentioned some advancements in camera and surveillance technology that will make facial recognition more common place and ever so handy for law enforcement "to track Americans." Did you know "the National Institute of Justice has developed a 3D binocular and camera that allows realtime facial acquisition and recognition at 1000 meters?" Lynch testified, "The tool wirelessly transmits images to a server, which searches them against a photo database and identifies the photo's subject."

What happens if you are in a crowd, wrong place, wrong time, and have your picture taken due to an allegedly suspicious person or persons? Much like the NSA whistleblowers' claims that the government is full-throttle Total Information Awareness by having a dossier on nearly every U.S. citizen, and you are "automatically suspicious" until proven otherwise, facial recognition false positives will put the burden of proof on innocent people. Funny, being that in America we are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty and not vice versa.

EFF's Jennifer Lynch did a wonderful job with her testimony in pointing out the potential dangers of face recognition and other biometrics without "data collection, transfer and search" protections in place. She touched on the FBI's nationwide face search and recognition program.

The FBI has stated it needs "to collect as much biometric data as possible . . . and to make this information accessible to all levels of law enforcement, including International agencies." Accordingly, it has been working "aggressively to build biometric databases that are comprehensive and international in scope."

The FBI has stated that a future goal of NGI is to allow law-enforcement agencies to identify subjects in "public datasets," which could include publicly available photographs, such as those posted on Facebook or elsewhere on the Internet....The FBI has also stated that it hopes to be able to use NGI to track people as they move from one location to another.

What if you apply for a job and they want a photo for your file? Some doctors ask for a photo too. Lynch pointed out that "Although noncriminal information has always been kept separate from criminal, the FBI is currently developing a 'master name' system that will link criminal and civil data and will allow a single search query to access all data. The Bureau has stated that it believes that electronic bulk searching of civil records would be 'desirable'."

According to the FBI's testimony:

The Facial Recognition Pilot provides a search of the national repository of photos consisting of criminal mug shots, which were taken at the time of a criminal booking. Only criminal mug shot photos are used to populate the national repository. Query photos and photos obtained from social networking sites, surveillance cameras, and similar sources are not used to populate the national repository. The national repository is updated as transactions, including enrollments and deletions, are submitted by law enforcement users. The national repository contains approximately 12.8 million searchable frontal photos.

Yet Lynch said, "Given the FBI's history of misuse of data gathered on people during former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's tenure and the years following September 11, 2001, 76-data collection and misuse based on religious beliefs, race, ethnicity and political leanings-Americans have good reason to be concerned about expanding government biometrics databases to include face recognition technology."

Whether you want to believe it or not, as Dr. Alessandro Acquisti pointed out, mobile real-time face recognition is coming much faster than most people believe. Yet Duke Law School professor Nita Farahany argued that the use of facial recognition software does not violate the Fourth Amendment.
https://www.networkworld.com/community/node/81052





Justice Department Sues Telco For Daring To Challenge Its Secret Demands For Private Information
Mike Masnick

The US Justice Department really does seem to be completely drunk with power these days. We've written before about how the FBI is famous for abusing the powers of "National Security Letters" (NSLs) that allow them to demand information from service providers, financial firms and the like -- with a built-in gag order. A few years ago, we wrote about an ISP, Calyx, which challenged an NSL it received, and had to fight the DOJ in complete secrecy for years, until the DOJ basically dropped the request and allowed Calyx's Nicholas Merrill to go public with the details of the legal fight.

However, in news revealed this week, there is a second telco that isn't just challenging an NSL -- which is not only expressly allowed under the law, though now the DOJ is required to tell recipients this fact with the NSL -- but also challenging the whole NSL process itself. In response, amazingly, the Justice Department sued the telco, claiming that it failed to hand over the information requested in the NSL, as required by law. There's no way to look at this other than as a vindictive move by the DOJ.

Instead of responding directly to that challenge and filing a motion to compel compliance in the way the Justice Department has responded to past challenges, government attorneys instead filed a lawsuit against the telecom, arguing that by refusing to comply with the NSL and hand over the information it was requesting, the telecom was violating the law, since it was “interfer[ing] with the United States’ vindication of its sovereign interests in law enforcement, counterintelligence, and protecting national security.”

They did this, even though courts have allowed recipients who challenge an NSL to withhold government-requested data until the court compels them to hand it over. The Justice Department argued in its lawsuit that recipients cannot use their legal right to challenge an individual NSL to contest the fundamental NSL law itself.

All of this came out this week after it having been secret for some time, thanks in part to the EFF's efforts to get some of the information public. The Wall Street Journal appears to have identified the telco in question as Credo, a small Northern California company.

The DOJ's response to the challenge -- suing the telco -- is incredibly aggressive, and is clearly designed to create a massive chilling effect for any other organization who might challenge an NSL, despite the clear legality of issuing such a challenge. This kind of response from the DOJ, however, is par for the course these days. It's been quite aggressive in trying to silence those who criticize its efforts, and this is just the latest example. While the excellent Wired article linked above finds it surprising that the government allowed the evidence of this DOJ lawsuit to become public, I don't think it's that surprising. If the goal is to create chilling effects and intimidate lots of others into not challenging NSLs, then letting it be known that you sued a telco who tried would certainly get the job done.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...ormation.shtml





Russian Legislators Approve Greater Government Control Over the Internet and Nonprofits
Ellen Barry

The upper house of the Russian Parliament overwhelmingly approved draft laws on Wednesday that will give the government greater power over the Internet and nonprofit organizations. The measures, the latest in a series being rushed through as President Vladimir V. Putin begins a six-year term, will become law when Mr. Putin signs them, strengthening his hand against an increasingly assertive opposition.

The bills approved on Wednesday empower the government to block any Web site it deems dangerous to children, and require nonprofit groups that receive any money from outside Russia to describe themselves as “foreign agents” if they are deemed by the government to be engaged in political activities.

“We understand that events have begun to take place at a faster rate, that the degree of tension in society is growing,” said Aleksandr Petrov, a lawmaker from the ruling United Russia party, in a meeting on Tuesday with the leaders of nonprofit groups, held by the American Chamber of Commerce.

“We have one goal — to try, with the help of a number of laws, to create a certain stability, to provide for the integrity of the Russian Federation,” he said. “Yes, there should be political activity, but it should not be allowed to rock the boat which is called Russia.”

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, condemned the new laws in a statement on Wednesday, saying they “will have a detrimental effect on human rights in the country.” The last two months, Ms. Pillay said, have brought “a worrying shift in the legislative environment governing the enjoyment of the freedoms of assembly, association, speech and information in the Russian Federation.”

The law on nonprofits — which passed with a vote of 141 to 1, with one abstention — require the groups to provide the government with detailed accounts of their foreign financing.

The law appeared aimed at a handful of Western-backed groups, notably Golos, an 11-year-old organization that monitors elections and is financed largely by the United States government. But it would also affect scores of other nonprofit groups that have been working in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Anatoly Maksimov, who runs an agricultural development program financed partly by the United States Agency for International Development, said that after 17 years in his post he might resign rather than label himself a “foreign agent,” a term redolent of cold war-era espionage.

Mr. Petrov tried to reassure Mr. Maksimov at the meeting, saying that the law would not apply to his group because “you are discussing agriculture, not changing of the political basis of the state.”

Kremlin officials have repeatedly suggested that the antigovernment protests of the last six months in Russia were instigated by foreign governments. Mr. Petrov said his suspicions were validated when the police seized more than $1 million in cash from a safe in the home of Kseniya Sobchak, a television star and opposition leader. Ms. Sobchak has said that the money was her savings.

“According to operative information which is being discussed now, it was intended to be used for rallies,” he said. “Why must such amounts circulate on the basis of gray schemes? Why can’t this money be officially given to the opposition and show that the money has been given?”

The Internet legislation passed equally swiftly, 147 to 0, with 3 abstentions. After vigorous protests from Russian Internet sites — including a one-day shutdown of Russian-language Wikipedia — the bill’s sponsors narrowed the law to limit the state’s blocking authority to Web sites that offer child pornography, information about illicit drugs, or instructions for committing suicide.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/19/w...onprofits.html





Censored Romney Videos Highlight YouTube Abuse of Copyright Claims
Fruzsina Eördögh

Earlier this week, YouTube took down videos attacking President Obama due to a copyright claim by music publishing giant BMG Rights Management. The clips, which featured Obama singing Al Green’s hit “Let’s Stay Together,” fell squarely within the Supreme Court's fair use guidelines. YouTube's action illustrates how its copyright enforcement policy allows politically motivated organizations to control what its audience sees and hears.

The Romney incident is especially troubling because a corporation used copyright law to censor a political campaign and a press outlet. BMG Rights Management passed over numerous unauthorized copies of Al Green’s song on YouTube to single out the ones that mocked Obama. The organization is no stranger to issuing copyright claims on YouTube, and it certainly knows what constitutes fair use.

YouTube came under heavy fire during the few days that they were unavailable (though criticism of BMG Rights Management was surprisingly muted). Timothy B. Lee at Ars Technica was convinced of a nefarious plot at YouTube, since his source there “refused to explain takedown policies.”

Alas, the blame actually lies with a series of machines. YouTube's copyright claim process, whether for a Digital Millennium Copyright claim or a complaint lodged via the site's Content ID System, is completely automated. You fill out a Web form, click a button and bam, the video is removed, just like that.

YouTube offers a counterclaim process to handle abusive takedown requests. However, it warns prospective counterclaimants that they should be prepared to back up their claim in court. Counterclaims can take weeks to process. (It took only days to restore Romney’s videos in this high-profile case).

YouTube representatives declined to comment. However, the company's executives have said in prior cases of copyright claim abuse that there's no other way to handle claims. With 72 hours of video content uploaded every minute, the site couldn't possibly monitor clips manually. Moreover, leaving humans out of the process washes YouTube’s hands of potential lawsuits.

Althought it might suit the company, YouTube's process is deeply flawed from a copyright point of view. It assumes that all claims are rightful, and because the takedowns are processed almost instantaneously, it invites abuse on a regular basis - and not just by Hollywood producers and RIAA-types. YouTube pranksters have removed music by Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, angry ex-boyfriends have removed incriminating voicemails, and feuding YouTubers have censored each other for random digital vendettas. None of these frivolous claims would have been possible if YouTube’s copyright claims weren’t automated.

Users have been complaining, even petitioning, the site for years. YouTube warns that those issuing frivolous claims will be punished, but one would be hard-pressed to find such a case. With a season of intense political debate coming with the 2012 U.S. presidential election, the Romney case only highlights the pressing need for YouTube to overhaul its copyright claim process.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...ght-claims.php





Sex Party Threatens Google After Ad Spat
Asher Moses

The Australian Sex Party has threatened Google with legal action after the search engine refused to run its ads on the eve of tomorrow's Melbourne by-election.

It comes after Sex Party ads were blocked by Google at the last federal election because the company - which is typically opposed to censorship - perceived the text as too racy (the ads were reinstated by Google the day before the election).

Sex Party candidate Fiona Patten said this time the search giant said it would not approve her ads "because we have a donate button on our page and we're not a charity".

"It's giving me the shits that in two elections we've not been able to run ads with Google when all of the other political parties have had no problem," she said.

Patten has accused Google of inconsistently applying its rules, as the Greens candidate in the state by-election, Cathy Oke, has ads running on Google despite having multiple donate buttons on her web page.

"We've sent them screenshots of the donate buttons on the ALP and the Greens sites and they've allowed all of those ads to run," she said.

Google said in an email to Patten, seen by this website, that it "doesn't allow the solicitation of funds (donations) unless they're tax exempt".

The Sex Party is an Australian political party and so, according to the ATO, donations are tax deductible. The party specifies this on its website.

Marcus Falley, who is a consultant to the Sex Party, told Google in an email that its actions were "adversely impacting the results of an election" and "this will end up in legal action if not corrected".

Patten, who is campaigning on issues such as drug law reform and 24 hour public transport on weekends in the inner-city, has been in consultation with Google on the issue this week but so far the company has refused to budge.

"It's too late now and they're still holding off we keep saying mate the election's Saturday and they've been holding off for over a week," she said.

"We need to take this further. They are blatantly treating us differently to the Greens."

The Sex Party said it was taking "legal advice relevant to the Electoral Act and the TPA [Trade Practices Act]".

Labor has held the seat of Melbourne for 100 years but the Greens have been polling well. "Our preferences are going to Labor and we're polling between 6-8 per cent," Patten said.
http://www.theage.com.au/technology/...720-22e11.html





One Secret That Stops Hackers: Girlfriends

The majority of hackers "age out" of hacking as they get older and find girlfriends, families, and other responsibilities. Why not invest in educating young hackers sooner, instead of locking them up later?
Mathew J. Schwartz

Want to put a stop to hacking? The solution is simple: Get hackers girlfriends.

To be sure, that prescription is tongue-in-cheek, but it speaks to a hacking truth: Based on arrests of alleged Anonymous, LulzSec, TeamPoison, and other hacktivist group participants--not to mention many cyber-crime gangs--it's the rare participant who's over the age of 25--or even 19.

Clearly, the early 20s are an inflection point in most hackers' lives, when they transition from engaging in criminal activity to becoming law-abiding citizens. Accordingly, might outreach programs, perhaps involving older ex-hackers, help keep them out of jail? They might even steer would-be hackers into lucrative professions that put their skills to better use, such as penetration testing.

The question of whether outreach programs would be effective requires working backwards, starting with the reason hackers--who are overwhelmingly male--stop hacking. That's typically because they get girlfriends, jobs, children, or other responsibilities. "We see a lot of adolescent hackers just 'aging out,' and there are relatively few who remain life-course persistent," says cyberpsychology expert Grainne Kirwan, a lecturer in psychology at Ireland's Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, in a phone interview.

While conducting research for her criminology Ph.D., Kirwan interviewed about 20 hackers and found that the majority stopped hacking due to their changing life circumstances. "The chances are by the time they turn 18 or 19 they'll age out, and if they haven't stopped then, by the time they get married, settle down, and have kids, they won't have time to do this type of behavior anyway," she explains. "As they get older, their moral development gets better, and they don't have the ability to commit crimes anyway."

Kirwan said the aging-out phenomenon isn't limited to young hackers. "What we know from general criminology research is that offenders age out, and that they tend to age out when they start to settle down, find a significant other, and [other] factors that will reduce the likelihood of their wanting to offend," she says.

The prevalence of minors who hack hasn't gone unnoticed in law enforcement circles. Speaking earlier this year at the RSA conference in San Francisco, Eric Strom, unit chief for the Cyber Initiative and Resource Fusion Unit Cyber Division at the FBI, said the bureau believes that in general, hacktivist groups are run by a small number of people who combine "technical knowhow and the ability to impress upon younger people" the desire to launch certain types of attacks. But, he said, "the challenges of going after the larger group [of participants] is that most of them are minors."

How should law enforcement address that, especially when those kids' parents likely think their son is upstairs doing his homework, not launching a law orbit ion canon distributed denial-of-service (DDos) attack?

To answer that question, it helps to know why hackers hack. In fact, most hackers--who are older minors or young adults--"are desperately trying to assert their own independence, and believe they can make a change in the world that their parents can't," says Kirwan. "They kind of forget that it's their parents' generation who invented hacking."

Many kids involved in hacking view their activities as a benign form of protest, when the laws--as currently written--can criminalize some types of related behavior. "They are sitting at their computer and saying, 'I'm not committing a crime,' because it doesn't feel like committing a crime," explains Kirwan.

The FBI's Strom said the bureau tries to draw a clear line between online protests and online attacks. "Certainly if they're just complaining about something, they have every right to do that--and we don't have any problem with that," said Strom. But if they hack into a system or go after someone in law enforcement and their family, that's a different story.

Also, there can be seeming inconsistencies between what's legal in the real world as opposed to online. "In the western world, we generally… encourage political activism, even when it might have a negative effect on business," said Grady Summers, vice president of Mandiant, speaking at this year's RSA conference. For example, workers can picket their place of business over poor working conditions, and people can protest in front of foreign embassies or set up Occupy Wall Street camps that may impact local businesses. But by comparison, "the digital equivalent of that--a DDoS attack that takes a site offline for a few hours--is clearly criminal," he said.

Should the laws pertaining to DDoS attacks, when launched for protest purposes, be changed? Regardless of wrong or right, in today's "must-be-seen-as-tough-on-crime" political arena, it's unlikely that related laws or jail times would ever be curtailed. Furthermore, do we really have a full enough understanding of exactly why people hack?

"What do we really know about hackers engaged in bad stuff? Do we have a proper, accurate, working taxonomy of people involved in cyber-criminal activity, cyber espionage, cyber warfare, and so on?" said Darkmarket author Misha Glenny, speaking at this year's RSA conference. "Who are the masterminds behind the attacks? Are they suave social engineers, are they highly skilled hackers, or are they psychopathic characters who combine both attacks?"

Another question concerns whether many hackers might also have Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism characterized by having difficulties with social interaction, and often also an affinity for obsessive or repetitive routines. Kirwan says a connection between hacking and Asperger's has been noted anecdotally because "it's a facet of some of the most publicized cases." For example, both the lawyers for NASA hacker Gary McKinnon and accused LulzSec member Ryan Cleary have said their clients have the disorder.

The Asperger's theory would handily explain why many kids hack, as well as why they're so good at it. "People who have Asperger's syndrome are less likely to find full-time employment or to settle down with a family," says Kirwan. "Another trait for people with Asperger's is they will find out everything they know about something they like." But she cautions against trying to reduce the cause of hacking to just a developmental disorder. "I certainly don't want to do a tarring with one brush," she says.

Keeping the potential Asperger's connection in mind, if most hackers do simply age out, could prevention programs be put in place to help deter minors before that happens? For example, why not turn to older, more mature ex-hackers to educate younger hackers about the risks, or to try and help them put their talents to a legal—and, given the state of the information security job market, likely quite remunerative--use? "Putting the two together seems like it would reduce the crime, but the next step is to test that and see if that's what really happens," says Kirwan.

Unfortunately--at least where Kirwan's hacking studies are concerned--hacking interviews and research conducted for her Ph.D. have given way to the responsibilities of a full teaching load. "It would be fantastic if I could buy out a bunch of my time and work on a project like this," she says. "But we'd need the funding to do that, and at the moment, that funding doesn't seem to be around."

So here's to a show of hands from businesses and government agencies that don't want to get taken down by hacktivists: Rather than locking up hackers after the fact, who wants to fund better hacking research and practical hacking-prevention campaigns?
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...ment/240003767





Without Social Media, 18% Of Teens Would ‘Stop Communicating’
Emily Price

18% of teens would stop communicating altogether if their favorite social networks shut down. That’s according to a recent survey of American high school and college students by email marketing company AWeber.

According to the survey, 90% of teens are on Facebook, and an astounding 93% of teenagers use mobile phones -– the same amount that use email. 74% of teens are YouTube users, and 47% use Skype to keep up with others.

Facebook and Email own almost equal parts of teens’ hearts. With teenagers going for both when they wake up in the morning, while they’re in class, and even while they’re on vacation.

6% of teens thought they might replace their cell phones with a landline or writing more letters if mobile phones suddenly became unavailable. A whopping 18%, however, thought they would stop communicating altogether if their favorite channel of communication disappeared.
https://mashable.com/2012/07/19/teen...communicating/





Even Obama Is A Pirate: BMG Issues New Takedown On Original Obama Singing Al Green Clip
Mike Masnick

Wow. So earlier today, we wrote about how BMG issued a takedown on the new web-based ad put out by the Romney campaign, which included a brief clip of President Obama singing Al Green's "Let's Stay Together." As we argued, this use seemed to be pretty clearly "fair use." And, of course, it was noteworthy that BMG only seemed to go after the Romney ad, making it pretty clear that this was politically motivated. The original clips of Obama singing Al Green were all over YouTube... and BMG only chose to go after the one used in a Romney commercial. It appears that someone pointed out to BMG's lawyers that this looks really bad, so rather than backing down, BMG has doubled down and issued takedowns to a bunch of the original videos of Obama singing that one line from Al Green.

The original one that we linked to was actually from the Associated Press, who -- as a news organization -- has an even stronger fair use claim. But that video is missing as well, though it has a slightly different message on the site now:

That's... weird, because the video was absolutely available just this morning. Has the Associated Press really decided to block that video in the US? Seems... strange. Why would the AP allow itself to be bullied like that? Because I'm curious about these things, I hopped on my handy dandy VPN system and magically transported my connection to Canada... where the video came back. Magic. So, it's not entirely clear what's going on here, but if you're in the US (and not using a VPN) it appears that these clips of Obama singing Al Green are quickly disappearing from the web, despite clear fair use claims. The entire thing is 9 seconds and there's no way that anyone could make a reasonable claim that this use takes away from the original work or somehow acts as a substitute.

And, of course, in true Streisand Effect manner, all this is doing is calling a lot more attention to the video... and BMG's ridiculous censorious response to the situation.

Update: And... as Michael Weinberg points out, BMG appears to only be targeting President Obama singing Al Green. There are tons of other clips of Al Green singing the song himself or others singing the song. All left up. Hmm...
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...al-green.shtml





Apple Must Publish Notice Samsung Didn’t Copy IPad in U.K.
Kit Chellel

Apple Inc. (AAPL) was ordered by a judge to publish a notice on its U.K. website and in British newspapers alerting people to a ruling that Samsung Electronics Co. didn’t copy designs for the iPad.

The notice should outline the July 9 London court decision that Samsung’s Galaxy tablets don’t infringe Apple’s registered designs, Judge Colin Birss said today. It should be posted on Apple’s U.K. home page for six months and published in several newspapers and magazines to correct any impression the South Korea-based company was copying Apple’s product, Birss said.

The order means Apple will have to publish “an advertisement” for Samsung, Richard Hacon, a lawyer for Cupertino, California-based Apple, told the court. “No company likes to refer to a rival on its website.”

Apple is fighting patent lawsuits around the globe against competitors including Google Inc., HTC Corp. (2498) and Samsung as it competes for dominance of the smartphone and tablet computer markets. The firms have accused each other of copying designs and technology in their mobile devices. Legal battles about the similarity of Samsung and Apple tablets are being fought in Germany, the Netherlands and the U.S.

Public Statements

Birss said in his July 9 ruling that Samsung’s tablets were unlikely to be confused with the iPad because they are “not as cool.” He declined today to grant Samsung’s bid for an injunction blocking Apple from making public statements that the Galaxy infringed its design rights.

“They are entitled to their opinion,” he said.

Apple spokesman Alan Hely didn’t immediately respond to a phone call and e-mail requesting comment on the judge’s order.

“Should Apple continue to make excessive legal claims based on such generic designs, innovation in the industry could be harmed and consumer choice unduly limited,” Samsung said in a statement after the hearing.

“The war between these two companies seems to be escalating even further,” said Colin Fowler, an intellectual property lawyer at London-based Rouse. He said much of the publicity around the July 9 ruling focused on Birss’ comments about Samsung not being as cool.

“From a victory in court they were suddenly on the back foot,” Fowler said in a phone interview. “Getting this order fits in with the context of them trying to restore the balance.”

‘Commercial Harm’

Comments made by Apple after that ruling unfairly implied that Samsung had copied designs, Samsung’s lawyer Kathryn Pickard said at the hearing. That “caused real commercial harm.”

As well as Apple’s website, the company must pay for notices in the Financial Times, the Daily Mail, Guardian Mobile magazine, and T3, according to a draft copy of the order provided by Samsung’s lawyers.

Apple’s lawyer said the company would appeal the July 9 decision and Judge Birss granted the company permission to take its case to the court of appeal.

The case is Samsung Electronics (UK) Limited & Anr v. Apple Inc., High Court of Justice, Chancery Division, HC11C03050.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-0...udge-says.html





Anti-Piracy Group Fined for Stealing Music
Zach Epstein

Oh, the irony. A musicians’ rights group in the Netherlands was fined this week for stealing music from a client, using it without his permission and failing to pay royalties. Music royalty collection agency Buma/Stemra approached Dutch musician Melchior Rietveldt in 2006 and asked him to create a composition that would be used in an anti-piracy advertisement, which the group said would be shown exclusively at a local film festival. One year later, Rietveldt purchased a Harry Potter DVD only to find that his piece was being used on DVDs around the world without his permission.

The musician approached Buma/Stemra and after some back and forth, TorrentFreak reports that the group gave him an advance of €15,000 and a promise that it would furnish a list of all DVDs that used the man’s music. Rietveldt would never receive the list he was promised, but after a drawn-out court battle and a few more small payments from the agency, it looks like the musician will finally receive the money he is owed.

Buma/Stemra was slapped with a €20,000 fine by an Amsterdam District Court this week, and ordered to pay the remainder of any money owed to Rietveldt, which the musician calculated to total at least €164,974.
http://www.bgr.com/2012/07/17/anti-p...y-buma-stemra/
















Until next week,

- js.



















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