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Old 25-07-12, 08:15 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 28th, '12

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July 28th, 2012




Band Stops Label From Going After File-Sharing Fans

All Shall Perish were surprised back in April when they discovered that 80 people were facing up to $150,000 in damages in a lawsuit for sharing one of the band's albums via BitTorrent.

At the time that news of the lawsuit surfaced the band told fans on their Facebook page: "ALL SHALL PERISH ISN'T SUING ANYONE, least of all our fans. No idea what this blog is talking about. WE AREN'T SUING ANYONE. We have no knowledge of any lawsuit. Our management and legal representation know nothing about it. Nobody from this blog contacted us to ask about it, either. We are looking into it and exploring our options."

Last week the band's label announced: "Nuclear Blast also respects bands such as All Shall Perish that do not wish to pursue file sharers. All Shall Perish was not consulted about this course of action and did not wish to participate in it whatsoever. When they learned about it, they immediately asked us to cease all legal action against their fans, file traders or otherwise, as soon as they learned this action had been taken in their name. Therefore Nuclear Blast and World Digital Rights decided recently to stop legal actions against the file sharing with songs from the band All Shall Perish."

Here is Nuclear Blast Records' full statement: "Nuclear Blast and SKP Enforcement UG, who are experienced in tracking illegal downloads and the file sharing of music, recently decided to cooperate with World Digital Rights to fight against file sharing piracy in the USA. In the United States, the providers are obligated by law to hand out the IP addresses of the computers from which the downloads / file shares were generated. By collecting this information these companies are also acting in the interest of our artists, which is essential to the future of both our bands and the label.

"To be able to recoup the investments both parties have made, is crucial in order to produce new music and to survive in this business. Nuclear Blast, SKP Enforcement, and World Digital Rights want people to be aware that the peer-to-peer file sharing is illegal and hurts the bands and record companies they love.

"That said, Nuclear Blast also respects bands such as All Shall Perish that do not wish to pursue file sharers. All Shall Perish was not consulted about this course of action and did not wish to participate in it whatsoever. When they learned about it, they immediately asked us to cease all legal action against their fans, file traders or otherwise, as soon as they learned this action had been taken in their name. Therefore Nuclear Blast and World Digital Rights decided recently to stop legal actions against the file sharing with songs from the band All Shall Perish.

"In all other cases, the parties involved pursue those violating copyright laws to avoid the financial loss they incur and to protect the value of their copyrights.

"Nuclear Blast counts on the loyal fans which have been supporting the label and our bands for over 20 years now. Every sale helps support metal and the people that work hard to bring metal to the masses. For those that continue to buy music legally, that is something every loyal fan can be proud of."

You can read this report which was posted at the time of the filing for more details about the original lawsuit with and you'll see why the band was caught off guard.
http://www.antimusic.com/news/12/Jul...ing_Fans.shtml





Woman Gets Naked In Public To Protest Book Pirates
enigmax

In probably the most outrageous protest yet against piracy, an author has ripped off her clothes in front of a government palace. Brazilian writer Vanessa de Oliveira shocked the citizens of Lima, Peru, with nearly everything she has. “I’m doing this for my book so it is not pirated anymore anywhere in the world,” the redhead said, adding that her latest publication is based on her experiences bedding nearly 5,000 men.

The extremely stiff men behind some of the biggest entertainment companies in the world might think they know to draw attention to piracy issues, but when compared to the efforts of controversial writer Vanessa de Oliveira this week, they just aren’t a comparable hit with the youth.

Oliveira, the author of several books, was transported to the Plaza de Armas in Lima, Peru, in the back of a truck Thursday. Once in place she did what the gentleman of the **AA’s have dreamt about so often but have never had the courage to do.

She jumped out, stood in front of the government palace, and peeled back a long dark coat revealing a lacy black “dental floss” (blame Google translate for that term) struggling to cover a tiny portion of her lower body.

Words daubed across her chest and back in red ink, presumably to draw attention away from her black pull-up stockings, shouted a firm ‘NO TO PIRACY’.

“I’m doing this for my book so it is not pirated anymore anywhere in the world,” Oliveira explained, attracting the attention of the police.

“A country is made with culture, with books. When people pirate books culture is in danger. [Peru] is the first country where I see this,” she added.

Oliveira spoke about her earlier books including “100 Secrets of a Lady in Waiting” and “If He Cheats On You, It’s Your Problem”, a book filled with tips targeted at women whose partners screw around.

And Oliveira apparently isn’t writing from a position of ignorance either – in fact it appears she’s creating her own market. She admitted that the books had been written from her personal experience working as garota de compañía (a girl of company) in which she had sex with 5,000 men, proving that you can indeed charge for stuff normally available for free.

Eventually though all good things had to come to an end. Oliveira put her clothes back on, got in the truck and drove away, probably wondering how rich she’d be if each of her night-time conquests had purchased just one copy of the book for their wives instead of pirating it.

And for those cynics thinking that this was just some sort of sexually motivated anti-piracy publicity stunt to sell more books, wash your dirty minds.

The fact that Oliveira is appearing today at the Chamber of Commerce in Lima with a presentation titled “Seduce Clients” has absolutely no connection to what happened Thursday.
https://torrentfreak.com/woman-gets-...irates-120721/





More than 2,000 O2 'Porn Pirates' to be Sent Letters
BBC

More than 2,000 O2 customers will receive letters accusing them of illegally downloading porn films.

The firm behind the films - Ben Dover Productions - had originally applied to the High Court to pursue 9,000 cases on behalf of a range of copyright owners.

The judge threw out all claims apart from those relating to Ben Dover and watered down the wording of letters.

Parent company Golden Eye did not rule out the possibility that it would be pursuing other ISPs in the future.

To date, it has only requested a court order to pursue alleged copyright infringers on O2's network but this may be extended to other ISPs.

"Golden Eye (Int) Ltd continues to monitor all ISPs for our titles and pursue online and physical forms of piracy of our content," managing director Julian Becker told the BBC.

Letters seeking recompense for alleged copyright offences will start going out to 2,845 O2 customers in August.

The Citizens Advice Bureau has agreed to help those who feel they have been wrongly accused.

Final letter

The judge who granted permission for the case to go ahead has put strict limitations on how letters are worded to avoid the "pay up or else" style letters sent by law firm ACS Law.

Golden Eye will not be able to demand a one-off £700 fine as it had originally wished, instead money owed will be determined on a case-by-case basis.

The letters also make people aware of the help available to them from Citizens Advice, with links to the website and telephone numbers.

And perhaps most crucially the letters cannot hold the bill payer liable if someone else used their internet connection to download illegal material.

The final letter, a copy of which has been obtained by the BBC, reads: "In the event that you were not responsible for the infringing acts outlined above, for example, another member of your household was the user of the computer, you should make full disclosure to us of the other parties at your residence using your internet connection."

The letter that accused O2 customers will receive [PDF-252KB]

It is not clear how the bill holder should respond if they think that material was downloaded by someone illegally accessing an unsecured home wi-fi connection.

Citizens' rights group Consumer Focus, which has followed the case closely, is pleased by the concessions.

'No option'

"We do not condone copyright infringement, but innocent people should not feel bullied into settling claims and they must be made aware of where to go for help," said Mike O'Connor, chief executive of Consumer Focus.

"That is why we are working with the Citizens Advice service to provide clear advice to consumers about what to do if they are accused of copyright infringement," he added.

The group has also written to the UK's major ISPs asking that they make sure that any application to hand over consumers' personal data is supported by appropriate an consistent evidence of possible wrongdoing.

O2 is believed to be in the process of handing over names and addresses to Golden Eye.

It told the BBC: "We have no option but to comply with this court order and will be co-operating fully."
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18968223





Accused Movie Pirate Sues for Defamation and Millions in Damages
Ernesto

One of the many alleged BitTorrent users to fall victim to copyright trolls in recent years has launched an impressive counterattack against a plaintiff who accused him of downloading an adult movie. Jeff Fantalis of Louisville wants millions of dollars in damages for defamation, emotional distress and invasion of privacy, plus a prominent retraction in a local newspaper. Fantalis further asks the court to rule that porn can’t be copyrighted as it is not a “useful art.”

Since early 2010, hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. have been sued for downloading and sharing copyrighted content on BitTorrent.

Since there are so many of them these lawsuits are hardly newsworthy anymore, however, things do get interesting when defendants decide to fight back. One excellent example is the counter-suit filed by Jeff Fantalis last week.

In common with many others in similar situations, Fantalis was sued by a porn outfit (Malibu Media) who accused him of downloading and sharing one of their movies. After obtaining the personal information of alleged infringers through a subpoena, Malibu Media generally asks Internet account holders to settle their case for a few thousand dollars.

This tactic is quite effective, as settling is often cheaper than hiring a lawyer. On top of that, the prospect of being named in a lawsuit in which one is accused of downloading an explicit adult movie is something that people seek to avoid.

However, Fantalis – who says he never downloaded an adult movie in his life – has chosen to put up a fight and has submitted an elaborate counter-suit.

In dozens of pages the accused movie pirate explains how Malibu Media and other “copyright trolls” operate. Fantalis accuses these companies of harassment and extortion and also brings up the fact that the technologies that are used to collect IP-addresses are not fool proof.

Fantalis further notes that these copyright trolls show their true nature by not asking websites to remove links to their movies.

“If the plaintiff companies were truly concerned about protecting their copyrights and preserving profits thereon, one would expect to see such companies take certain actions once they had the IP-addresses and personal information obtained through their investigations and lawsuits,” he argues.

According to Fantalis, Malibu Media and others keep these links alive so they can collect data on more potential copyright infringers. In other words, they are fine with people pirating their movies, as that is their business model.

“However, [removal of links] is not the course of action pursued by these pornography companies. To the contrary, not only do they not remove their films from the Internet, they encourage the continued downloading of their work through the use of ‘honeypots’ in order to promote the income stream obtained through settlements of threatened lawsuits.”

After describing how these copyright trolls operate, Fantalis goes on to accuse Malibu Media of wrongdoing on several counts.

For defamation, the intentional infliction of emotional distress, abuse of process and invasion of privacy he asks the court for a million in damages each. In addition the accused BitTorrent pirate wants a public retraction and apology in a local newspaper ad, not smaller than a quarter page.

“…[The advertisement] shall specifically retract the claims of the Complaint, acknowledge that Plaintiff wrongfully brought this lawsuit against the Defendant, state that this lawsuit was groundless, acknowledge that the Defendant had not infringed in any manner against the plaintiff and that Defendant is innocent in this matter, and apologize to the Defendant…”

Finally, Fantalis asks the court to rule that Malibu Media’s movies aren’t protected by U.S. copyright law, as porn can’t be copyrighted. He backs up this claim with a line of reasoning we’ve seen before, namely, that explicit porn doesn’t fit the basic principle that copyright should promote “the progress of science” or “useful arts.”

Needless to say, it will be interesting to see how the court responds to this counterclaim.

While there is no guarantee that there will be a ruling on any or all counts, the counter-suit has a wealth of information for other defendants and lawyers. As Jane Doe points out, the filing in itself contains the best explanation of the copyright trolls’ “extortion” scheme that exists to date.
https://torrentfreak.com/accused-mov...mation-120723/





IOC Starts To Delete Unauthorized Video Of Olympics On YouTube
Mike Butcher

Well, we knew that Olympic organizers were likely to be tough on unauthorized content, especially after issuing regulations around social media prior to the Games. And evidence of that is surfacing today in the shape of deleted videos on YouTube. Search for scenes from the spectacular opening ceremony in London and while you will find excerpts from official broadcasters like the BBC, videos uploaded by ordinary users are being gradually being stamped out.

Viewing one example video here

Returned the phrase:

“James Bond (Daniel Craig) E…”
This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by International Olympic Committee.


This video looks like it might have been ripped from the BBC’s coverage and re-posted, in which case it would fall foul of YouTube’s rules on copyright. We have reached out to YouTube to check whether video uploaded via mobile from the opening ceremony by users on the ground will be terminated as well. (Update: Sources say this video was ripped form the BBC’s broadcast so it would be subject to a copyright take-down by the BBC/IOC. See further update below).

Meanwhile, other platforms for video are flying slightly under the IOC’s radar such as broadcasts from the cycling race today on Swedish startup Bambuser. And you’ll find some content on cheeky old Daily Motion.

But – if you’re in the UK – at least you can see still see the Queen jump out of a helicopter with James Bond, thanks to the BBC. Not in the UK? We apologise. Maybe blame global copyright laws…
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/28/ioc...cs-on-youtube/





Senate Amendment Would Allow Facebook Users to Share Netflix Videos
Brendan Sasso

A proposed amendment to a Senate cybersecurity bill would allow Facebook users to opt-in to automatically share which videos they have watched on Netflix.

The Senate could vote on the amendment, filed by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), when it takes up the Cybersecurity Act next week.

Currently, Facebook users can choose to automatically reveal which songs they listen to and which articles they read. But the Video Privacy Protection Act bans the sharing of any video history information without written consent by the consumer or a warrant from the police.

Congress passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, which was also authored by Leahy, in 1988 after the Washington City Paper published a list of video rentals by Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork during his contentious nomination process. Although Bork's rental history was mostly innocuous, members of Congress were outraged at the breach of privacy.

The change in the privacy law is Netflix's top lobbying priority in Washington.

Netflix has spent $395,000 so far this year lobbying Congress to update the law, as well as on other issues such as net neutrality.

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this year, Netflix General Counsel David Hyman argued that it makes no sense to single out a single type of data-sharing.

"Instead of trying to graft specific notions about video privacy from almost 25 years ago into the dynamic information age of today, we would encourage a measured and holistic review of privacy for the 21st century, one designed to foster continued innovation while balancing the desires and privacy expectations of consumers," he said.

The House passed legislation, authored by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), late last year to allow social media users to share their video history online.

Leahy's amendment to the cybersecurity bill would also enhance email and cloud computing privacy protections in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-va...netflix-videos





Music Stars In Plea Over File Sharing
Neil Lancefield

SOME of the biggest names in British music have written to Prime Minister David Cameron calling for a crackdown on illegal file-sharing.

Lord (Andrew) Lloyd-Webber, Sir Elton John and Simon Cowell are among those who claim the UK economy could be boosted by stronger copyright laws to protect the music industry.

They have urged the prime minister to implement the Digital Economy Act 2010 to ensure internet service providers (ISPs), search engines and online advertisers protect consumers from illegal sites.

Their letter, which was also signed by Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend from The Who, and Brian May and Roger Taylor from Queen, stated: "As the world's focus turns to the UK this summer, there is an opportunity to stimulate growth in sectors where the UK has a competitive edge.

"Our creative industries represent one such sector, which creates jobs at twice the speed of the rest of the economy.

"Britain's share of the global music market is high at present with UK artists, led by Adele, breaking through to global stardom.

"As a digitally advanced nation whose language is spoken around the world, the UK is well positioned to increase its exports in the digital age. Competition in the creative sector is in talent and innovation, not labour costs or raw materials.

"We can realise this potential only if we have a strong domestic copyright framework, so that UK creative industries can earn a fair return on their huge investments creating original content.

"Illegal activity online must be pushed to the margins. This will benefit consumers, giving confidence they are buying safely online from legal websites."

Robert Plant, Professor Green and Tinie Tempah also added their names to the letter.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news...-1226434268172





Has File-Sharing Hurt the Quality of Music? The Debate Rages On
Christopher Shea

The economist Joel Waldfogel, of the University of Minnesota, has argued that file-sharing has not, in fact, hurt the quality of music produced since its advent. He sums up his case here:

My evidence shows that program directors and the record-buying public find the vintages since 1999 more appealing than the vintages before. (I also have evidence more directly relevant to traditional notions of quality: the number of works meeting critics’ threshold for inclusion on multi-year best-of lists has not declined since 1999.)

In response, the musician David Lowery, a member of the bands Cracker and Camper van Beethoven, made some blistering criticisms of Waldfogel (prefacing them, admittedly, with the comment, “I normally like this guy”):

To Prof Waldfogel’s credit he has devised an ingenious and very complex way of seemingly measuring current music “quality” and comparing it to past music. The only problem is it does no such thing. Frankly it doesn’t measure anything. Further I’m reminded of a phrase normally applied in the financial industry: Complexity is Fraud. In this case a needlessly complex formulation leads to false conclusions.

Now Professor Waldfogel has proposed to send Lowery a copy of his most recent paper, and then meet to discuss it, either in a bar or in a public forum: “When we meet, we can share our perspectives on this work and, more generally, how the music industry is evolving. Whaddya say? Either way, I’ll buy the beer. And I’d love it if you’d autograph my love-worn copy of Kerosene Hat.”

Email Ideas Market a copy of the paper while you’re at it, professor.
http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/20...bate-rages-on/





Study: Label Litigation has Produced an Innovation "Wasteland"

Former music startup founders charge that the labels "suck companies dry."
Timothy B. Lee

Everyone knows the story of Napster, the peer-to-peer file-sharing service that was shut down by the major labels a decade ago. The destruction of Napster pushed peer-to-peer file sharing underground, leading to the rise of Grokster, the Pirate Bay, Megaupload, and dozens of other services that facilitate illicit file sharing. It may also have created a larger market for licensed services such as iTunes.

But a new Google-funded study argues that the destruction of Napster and the litigation campaign that followed it had deeper and more far-reaching implications than is commonly appreciated. The author, Rutgers-Camden law professor Michael Carrier, conducted interviews with dozens of senior executives who were working at music labels, venture capital firms, and music-related startups during the Napster era.

Many of them argued that the labels' aggressive litigation campaign against Napster and other early music startups created a venture capital "wasteland," with music-related startups unable to raise money. The result, Carrier concludes, has been a stunted pace of innovation that continues to this day.

The Recording Industry Association of American disputed Carrier's findings. "The fundamental mistake that this study, and other pieces like it, make is to assume that the only type innovation is technological," the organization said. The firms the labels sued a decade ago were "not innocent 'innovators,'" the group wrote. "Most unlicensed p2p services were very well aware that what they were doing was probably illegal, and they were deliberately architecting their software to be able to avoid knowledge."

A scorched-earth campaign

The emergence of Napster was a shock for the major labels, which had grown fat on two decades of rapid growth in CD sales. Many of them "saw the Internet as a fad." So it was a rude awakening to discover that millions of their former customers suddenly had the ability to share label music with one another at negligible cost.

The labels responded harshly, suing Napster and eventually driving the firm into bankruptcy. And Napster wasn't the only target. Around the same time, the labels also sued cloud music pioneer MP3.com. It would sue numerous music startups during the aughts.

Defending against copyright litigation can be tremendously expensive. Two people told Carrier that defending a lawsuit by a major label cost $150,000 to $200,000 per month. That's enough money that many startups would go bankrupt even if they ultimately prevailed in court.

And the intimidation tactics reportedly went beyond suing startups. The labels also threatened to file personal lawsuits against the officers and major investors of music startups.

"They suck companies dry"

The executives Carrier talked to said the labels made life miserable even for startups that tried to follow the rules.

One executive tells of a startup with millions of users that was sued by the labels. The firm told the labels "You guys made your point; we will charge anything you want to charge, and you can take any percentage you want to take." But the labels reportedly responded, "No, we want you to turn it off."

Indeed, some respondents charged that the labels treated lawsuits against music startups as a short-term revenue source. The labels "sat in meetings with digital startups and tried to take as much money as they could. They knew their business model was not going to work, that this was not recurrent revenue." But bleeding music startups dry helped the labels hit their quarterly revenue targets.

A venture capitalist reported that the labels insisted on signing short-term deals, one or two years at a time, that could be renegotiated if the startup was more profitable than expected. "As soon as the companies are profitable, they suck companies dry," the VC said.

CD protectionism

This seems short-sighted. Online piracy wasn't going away, and the failure to provide consumers with access to the music they wanted in convenient online formats surely drove some customers over to the dark side. So why did the labels pursue such an aggressive strategy?

One factor was the adamant opposition of brick-and-mortar retailers to online distribution. At the time that Napster burst onto the scene, retailers like Walmart and Tower Records were the labels' primary revenue source. Indeed, some interviewees argued that the labels treated these retailers, not individual fans, as their primary customers. Major retailers had substantial leverage over record labels because they decided whose products would be prominently featured in stores. And they insisted that music not be made available online at prices that would undercut the market for CDs.

The labels were also reluctant to undercut the market for physical CDs because they had billions of dollars invested in infrastructure for creating and distributing CDs. One label reportedly "spent a billion dollars on trucks to distribute their CDs." That investment would be wasted if the industry shifted toward low-cost digital downloads.

The labels' obsession with preserving the market for CDs led to unrealistic expectations for digital services. For example, before iTunes established the 99-cent price point for music singles, one label was "adamant" that "the single should be priced at $3.25." That was high enough that a customer who bought "two or three" singles would replace the revenue from selling a full album.

Carrier also charges that the labels were excessively focused on short-term profits. Executives' bonuses were based on quarterly profits. Nobody got a bonus for making a long-term investment that wouldn't pay off for a few years. Hence, they were more inclined to view the startups they were negotiating with as short-term sources of cash rather than long-term business partners.

The RIAA responds

The RIAA is not impressed with Carrier's study, and the organization shared with Ars a draft of a forthcoming response. It characterizes it as "wild speculation based on various assumptions, anonymous musings, and no real metrics," and as a vehicle to communicate the author's "biased views of the industry and clear preference for venture capital investment over protecting the arts."

The industry group argued that lawsuits were essential to allowing labels and artists to claim a share of the revenues from online music consumption. "Finding for Napster would have instantly granted every online service the right to copy and distribute (or at least facilitate such action) without any permission or license, and there would have been absolutely no incentive for Napster to negotiate for them," the RIAA said.

The RIAA also disputed the premise that litigation has diminished venture capital investment, though here it focused more on the 2005 Grokster decision than on the Napster case. "The legal digital music market grew from less than $200 million in 2004 to more than $3 billion in 2011," the association said. "After a unanimous Supreme Court ruling against Grokster, venture capital investment grew for Media and Entertainment to 7.1 percent of total VC dollars from just 4.6 percent before Grokster."

Finally, the industry group argued that some of the stories told in the study are "bogus." For example, Carrier pointed to a PC World article claiming that the major labels had sought $75 trillion in damages against LimeWire, "a figure higher than the Gross Domestic Product of the world." But as Mike Masnick of Techdirt, no friend of the RIAA, pointed out, there doesn't seem to be any credible evidence for the $75 trillion figure. The case was eventually settled for $105 million.

The RIAA has a point in at least one respect: given Carrier's methodology, it's worth taking the study with a large grain of salt. It's not a surprise that entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who locked horns with the recording industry in court a decade ago would be willing to badmouth the industry today. Virtually all the quotes are anonymous, and it's not clear if their claims were independently fact-checked.

Still, the study does point to some serious problems with the recording industry's litigation strategy. The fact that litigation costs have forced startups into bankruptcy after winning in court is a cause for concern. And the uncertainty of the law, along with the threat of statutory damages as high as $150,000 per work, makes it more difficult than it should be for businesses to stand up to industry bullying. The industry's litigation campaign really does seem to have hindered innovation, even if the situation is not as dire as depicted by the RIAA's worst critics.

Update: After this story went live, Carrier sent Ars the following statement:

Yes, they're correct about the Limewire claim. That, as well as the Britney Spears quote about piracy were not correct. Many folks flagged that for me, and I have already taken those points out of the next draft.

Many of the respondents were more than willing to give their names, but I decided it would be better to have all quotes anonymous. To make sure the quotes were accurate, I sent to all 31 the list of quotes I planned to use. 28 said that my quotes were fine as is or offered some minor suggestions to make them more accurate. The final 3 never responded, but the Wisconsin Law Review will be reviewing these to make sure they're all accurate.

The interviewees also included many folks from the labels, who said things very similar to what the innovators said.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...ion-wasteland/





DJ Shadow Joins Forces With uTorrent To Monetize File Sharing
Zach Walton

One thing you’ll hear from the RIAA and MPAA execs is how BitTorrent is cutting into their profits. They feel that free access to content is the worst thing that could ever happen to such an artistic medium. It robs the artists, and more importantly the company execs, of millions of dollars. The only way to make money from music, movies and the like is to put down money at a store. The Internet, specifically BitTorrent, would beg to disagree.

BitTorrent Inc. announced a crazy new plan today that will monetize BitTorrent. What’s this crazy new plan? Ads will now be included in the torrent. Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that, but the basic premise is that of any other monetization plan on the Internet. Give away content for free and support it with ads.

I mentioned that it’s a bit more complicated than that, but not by much. The first bundle on offer today is a sample from DJ Shadow’s new album “Hidden Transmissions From The MPC Era (1992-1996).” Alongside the download is some bundled software. If the person downloading the tracks also installs the software, the artist and BitTorrent get a cut of the ad revenue.

If you already have uTorrent installed, expect to see ads for DJ Shadow’s new album pop up in your client sooner or later. If you just downloaded uTorrent, the package will be advertised in the installer. It’s a simple, but effective, way to get the word out.

Oh, and before you start to get mad about ads in your downloads, nothing is being forced on you. You can skip on the software entirely and don’t even have to download it. It’s offered as a complimentary add-on and only helps the artist if it’s installed.

Of course, the argument here is that people will just download the music and skip on the software. That’s true and it will probably happen more often than not. That’s why the package only includes a selection of tracks while advertising the full album release which people will pay for. Those same people can still pirate the entire album, but music fans generally buy music from the artists who treat them right. By releasing a free sampler package, DJ Shadow has guaranteed himself at least one sale from this fan.

You can grab DJ Shadow’s uTorrent package right now. While you’re at it, grab the free album sampler from Counting Crows as well.
http://www.webpronews.com/dj-shadow-...haring-2012-07





Japan: Police Arrest "Anti DRM" Journalists...
Francesco Fondi

Last week a friend came to visit me at hospital and after a couple of hours he has been arrested by the Japanese Police.

He is one of the 4 journalists from SANSAI BOOKS arrested for selling, through the company website, a copy of a magazine published last year (with a free cover mounted disc) focused on how to backup/rip DVDs.

They violated Japan's Unfair Competition Prevention Law that recently has been revised to make illegal the sale of any DRM circumvention device or software.

It's interesting to note that Japanese cyber Police should arrest the Amazon Japan CEO too as the online giant is selling a lot of magazines, books and software packages for DVD copy and ripping: exactly what put in trouble Sansai Books staff. But I bet Amazon Japan staff will not get any visit from the Japanese police...

The Japanese entertainment industry is getting full support from politicians for laws that make SOPA looks like a liberal legislation (from this October downloading a single illegal MP3 could land a Japanese p2p user in jail for 2 years).

Among other things this law makes illegal all the Linux distributions which come pre-installed with libdvdcss like BackTrack, CrunchBang Linux, LinuxMCE, Linux Mint, PCLinuxOS, Puppy Linux 4.2.1, Recovery Is Possible, Slax, Super OS, Pardus, and XBMC Live.

Looks like the entertainment industry wants to attack Sansaibooks and make it an example for everyone because it is a publishing company focused on digital backup freedom.

There is virtually no discussion among journalists and technology experts about 4 colleagues arrested. This makes me wonder how a country so advanced like Japan can progess without developing a cultural background about these issues.

Disclaimer: in the past I collaborated with a couple of Sansai Books publications.
http://blog.wired.it/otakunews/2012/...urnalists.html





Demonoid Faces Prolonged Downtime After DDoS Attack
Ernesto

A severe DDoS attack has brought down one of the most famous BitTorrent trackers. Demonoid has been inaccessible to its millions of users for more than a day and is expected to remain offline for quite some time. The tech admin of the troubled BitTorrent tracker told TorrentFreak that the issues at hand are not easy to fix, and suggests that aside from the DDoS there might have been an attack from another angle.

Demonoid is one of the biggest torrent sites around, and has been for more than half a decade.

Over the years the site has had its fair share of downtime, sometimes disappearing for months on end.

Yesterday, a million plus Demonoid users noticed that they could no longer access the site. Instead of the usual welcome screen users were confronted with a “server busy” message, suggesting that the BitTorrent tracker is facing technical difficulties.

TorrentFreak got in touch with the tech admin of the site who informed us that they are in serious trouble. Demonoid was overloaded by a DDoS attack which hit the server hard, resulting in a series of problems that may take a while to address.

“It started as a DDoS but then it caused a series of problems. These problems need to be fixed before the site can go back up, and it’s a complicated fix this time,” the Demonoid admin told TorrentFreak.

Aside from the DDoS assault, Demonoid’s server may also have been compromised by another attack.

“There might have been an attack from another angle, an exploit of sorts, but it’s hard to tell right now without a full check of everything,” the admin says.

While Demonoid is determined to return to its full glory, it might take a while before the site is up and running again. After an exodus of staff earlier this year there is only one person available to work on server issues, so progress is slow.

“Our human resources became limited in the last few months. All tech issues are handled just by me now and there is no one else to take the job,” the admin told us, adding that his time is also limited by real life issues that take priority.

“I’ll fix the site as soon as possible, but it might be a while this time,” the admin says.

In recent years Demonoid has been in the cross-hairs of several anti-piracy outfits. It was pressured to move out of Canada by the CRIA and most recently the MPAA and RIAA reported Demonoid as a “rogue site” to the U.S. Government. However, there is no indication that the current attacks at Demonoid are anti-piracy related.

For the millions of Demonoid users there’s no other option than to wait, once again.
https://torrentfreak.com/demonoid-to...attack-120727/





Three Strikes Law Halves NZ Infringements in First Month

But no 'discernible progress' since.
Juha Saarinen

New Zealand's contentious 'three strikes' law targeting copyright infringers effectively halved the number of times popular movies were viewed illegally online in the first month, according to the rights lobby group the Federation Against Copyright Theft (NZ FACT).

In a submission to a government review of the legislation's efficiency, NZ FACT claimed New Zealanders illegally viewed movies in the top 200 online 110,000 times in August last year — the month before the new law took effect — but only 50,000 times in September.

Fairfax NZ first reported the claims after obtaining the information under the Official Information Act.

Despite the drop in the first month, NZ FACT noted there had been no “discernible progress” since then.

Another lobby group, the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand (RIANZ), argued 41 percent of New Zealand internet users accessed “copyright infringing services online” in February this year, compared to 28 percent on average globally.

Dubbed “the Skynet” law by some members of Parliament, the act allows for fines up to $NZ15,000 ($AU11,550) on individual users if found guilty by the Copyright Tribunal.

The New Zealand Government had back-tracked on plans to terminate users' internet connections if found guilty of infringement however.

But rights holder groups remained unhappy with the $NZ25 fee payable to cover internet service providers' costs of processing notices.

The regime for the notice fees is currently under review by the Ministry of Economic Development, with submissions sought from providers and rights holders.

NZ FACT said it had not sent out any infringement notices because of the fee, and called for the fee to be reduced to a few cents per notice.

RIANZ had sent out a total 2766 infringement noticed to ISPs between October last year and April 26, 2012, to be forwarded to customers allegedly downloading music from artists such as Lady Gaga and Rihanna.

Of the notices, 58 were challenged by those accused of infringement. Only two of the challenges were judged to be valid, however.

A reduced fee would allow RIANZ to send out 5000 infringement notices per month, it said.

The current low level of notices effectively rendered the law impotent, the group argued, as public fear of receiving a notice are minimal.

ISPs and telcos have continued to push for a higher processing fee however, with incumbent Telecom New Zealand suggesting a $NZ104 ($AU80) per notice fine.

The company said it had spent $NZ534,416 ($AU411,705) to comply with the “Skynet” law, sending out 1238 notices, at an individual cost of $NZ431.68 ($AU332) to the telco.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/309463...rst-month.aspx





Search Engines to Censor File-Sharing Sites? Google Loses Key Case

Google has lost a landmark case after France’s Supreme Court ruled that the search engine must filter automatically suggested links to sites that offer pirated content. The ruling may open up the floodgates for more search restrictions.

#The case was initiated by French copyright group SNEP back in 2010. It concerns Google's Autocomplete and Instant features, which automatically suggest websites based on the first few letters typed into the Google search line. SNEP claimed the feature was directing users towards illegal content, even if the searchers did not actively pursue it.

Among the examples are torrent providers, such as The Pirate Bay, and Internet file hosting services like Rapidshare and Megaupload.

A lower court did not initially rule in favor of SNEP, but France’s top judicial authority, the Court de Cassation, said the copyright group was entitled to use “all measures to prevent or stop such an attack on copyright or related rights.”

“This decision, showing that search engines should be responsible for regulating the Internet, is a first in France,” said a statement from David El Sayegh, the CEO of SNEP.

Incidentally, Google has itself voluntarily blacklisted file-sharing sites from being automatically suggested since the end of last year. Although the system is imperfect, it broadly complies with the principles demanded by SNEP.

Google said it was dismayed by the ruling, and claimed there was no criminal intent behind the operation of its Autocomplete and Instant products.

"Google Autocomplete algorithmically returns search queries that are a reflection of the search activity of all web users,” said a statement from the company.

Although the consequences of the decision will likely be minor, several Internet portals have expressed concern that intellectual property companies will now use search engines as their next weapon in the battle against piracy. Experts also noted that the censorship concerns sites that are not officially illegal or responsible for pirated content.
https://rt.com/news/google-autocompl...nch-court-718/





Google Urges End to Authors' Digital Book Lawsuit
Jonathan Stempel

Google Inc retook the offensive against thousands of authors claiming it copied their works without permission, and urged the dismissal of a class-action lawsuit arising from its ambitious plan to build the world's largest digital book library.

Friday's request by the world's largest search engine company followed a federal judge's March 2011 rejection of a sweeping $125 million settlement of the now seven-year-old case. Talks to revive an accord later broke down.

Google has said it has scanned more than 20 million books, and posted English-language snippets of more than 4 million, since agreeing in 2004 with large research libraries to digitize current and out-of-print works for its Google Books website.

While Google planned to provide only snippets online to comply with copyright laws governing fair use, The Authors Guild and groups representing photographers and graphic artists complained that it amounted to "massive copyright infringement."

In a filing with the U.S. district court in Manhattan, Google said authors have shown no economic harm from its scanning and display of their works and the creation of a searchable index to find them.

The company also said authors actually benefit because the database helps people find and buy their books, and that there is a "significant public benefit" from providing access to information that might otherwise not be found.

"Google Books creates enormous transformative benefits without reducing the value of the authors' work," it said. "(It) therefore passes with ease the ultimate test of fair use."

Michael Boni, a lawyer for The Authors Guild, whose president is novelist-lawyer Scott Turow, said he asked the court on Friday to grant summary judgment in his client's favor.

He said his filing is not public because it refers to confidential Google documents. "We're grinding away," Boni said in an interview.

In rejecting the $125 million accord, Judge Denny Chin had said it went too far because it gave Google a "de facto monopoly" to copy books en masse without permission and served to "further entrench" its market power in online searches.

Among the libraries whose works have been scanned are those of Harvard University, Oxford University, Stanford University, the University of California, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library, Google has said.

The United States, Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp had been among those to raise antitrust concerns about the settlement.

Chin began overseeing the Google case as a trial judge and kept jurisdiction after he was elevated in 2010 to the federal appeals court in New York.

He granted class-action status to authors in May, and said groups representing photographers and graphic artists may also sue. Individual plaintiffs in the case include former New York Yankees baseball pitcher Jim Bouton, the author of "Ball Four."

The case is The Authors Guild et al v. Google Inc, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 05-08136.

(Reporting By Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Steve Orlofsky, Toni Reinhold)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...86Q15Y20120727





MIT Economist: Here's How Copyright Laws Impoverish Wikipedia
Robinson Meyer

Using a little-known copyright rule and a trove of baseball-related trivia, an MIT economist figured out how current copyright laws specifically affect one online community.

Everyone knows that the flow of information is complex and tangled in society today -- so thank goodness for copyright law! Truly, no part of our national policy is as coherent, in the interest of the public or as updated for the Internet age as that gleaming tome in the US Code.

Not.

Unless you're reppin' the MPAA, you probably know that the modern copyright regime doesn't work. You don't have to believe in radical copyleftism -- or even progressivism -- to understand this. But it's hard to know how the current body of law governing copyright and intellectual property affects individual works, simply because of the way communication, and ideas in general, work. One thing connects to another, and pulling apart the causes from the effects requires an Aristotle-like familiarity with contemporary culture.

But one MIT economist, Abhishek Nagaraj*, who recently presented his work at Wikimania, has found a way to test how the copyright law affects one online community -- Wikipedia -- and how digitized, public domain works dramatically affect the quality of knowledge.

How? The story begins in 2008. That year, Google Books digitized a number of magazines, including Ebony, Popular Mechanics and New York. Google also digitized the oldest and longest-running journal of matters baseball-related: Baseball Digest, published since 1942 in Evanston, Illinois. A huge number of issues, July 1945 to 2008, had gone online. And the magazines were full of images of the players.

A small group of Wikipedians, dedicated to improving the project's baseball articles, discovered the trove. Their editing, plus the huge, new body of baseball knowledge, soon dramatically improved the encyclopedia. After the digitization, Nagaraj found articles on four decades of All-Stars between 1944 and 1984 grew by about 5,200 words per article.

But his research was able to go further. Because of a small clause in copyright law, all the issues of Baseball Digest from before 1964 had fallen in the public domain -- meaning, that though all of the Baseball Digest articles from 1944 to 1984 were online in full on the Baseball Digest site, Wikipedia editors could only use the images from the earlier years. So Nagaraj created, from his set of All-Stars, two historical sets: a "control" group of players who first played in a game between 1964 and 1984 (and thus likely have Baseball Digest material that remains privately-owned), and a "treatment" group of All-Stars who first played in the big game between 1944 and 1964.

By comparing the two groups, Nagaraj could see the direct effects of copyright on the articles in terms of length, number of images, and traffic. That first metric -- length -- proved resilient to the copyright divide. Words are easy to rescue from private-ownership, and the Wikipedia authors simply rewrote the information still owned by the Digest. Every article, post-digitization, became on average much longer.

But Nagaraj found was that the availability of public domain material dramatically improved the article's images. Before the digitization, players from between '44 and '64 had an average of .183 pictures on their articles. The '64 to '84 group had about .158 pictures. But after digitization, those numbers dramatically changed: there were 1.15 pictures on each of the older group's articles -- but only .667 in the new group. More recent players, covered by privately-owned parts of Baseball Digest, had half as many images on their pages as did old-timers.

And the effects of this -- of just having an image on the page -- cascaded to other metrics. "Out-of-copyright" players' pages saw a significant boost in traffic. Articles from the pre-'64 that were already in the top 10 percent saw their hits increase more than 70 percent. Articles from that group in the least-popular ten percent saw traffic to their articles increase by 25 percent. Those pages were more frequently edited across the board, too. And this makes sense: Google rewards updated content, and it rewards images. The out-of-copyright players provided more of both.

Nagaraj controlled for much in his study: the talent of players, their left-handedness, the duration of their careers, and he even controlled for the general drop-off of editing on Wikipedia. His report is clear: Copyright law affects to some degree what information makes its way onto Wikipedia, but what it more strongly affects is how we use that information once it's there. In other words, digitizing any knowledge increases an article's text, but only digitizing public domain images makes articles more frequently updated and visited. This may be in part due to the particularities of Google's algorithm, which rewards updates and images. Nagaraj is studying this next, in fact, comparing an article's Page Rank to its Digest copyright status.

And those results are exciting, because Nagaraj's found a way to do something rare. His Baseball Digest is a probe we need: into how copyright law controls one community, into how it impoverishes one set of knowledge, and into how it makes all knowledge less usable. Ain't no Nicomachean Ethics required.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...ipedia/259970/





Kim Dotcom Goes on Mega-Offense Against U.S. Copyright Case
Juha Saarinen

Facing extraditon and possibly decades in U..S. prison, Megaupload founder and filesharing kingpin Kim Dotcom is fighting back, internet-style, launching kim.com, in an attempt to foment a protest movement on his behalf.

Dotcom, currently on bail in New Zealand, argues the “the U.S. government has declared war on the internet” and is trying to convince the netroots community to vote against President Obama on Nov. 5 if the case isn’t dropped.

Cleverly, Dotcom includes the slogan “SOPA PIPA ACTA MEGA,” trying to make the argument that the case against his site was motivated by the same forces that unsuccessfully tried to pass stringent copyright agreements in the United States and internationally earlier this year, until they were defeated by a groundswell of protest.

But he’s not stopping with just a website. Dotcom also recorded a song and accompanying video called “Mr President,” which is addressed to Obama, asking “Whatever happened to change, Mr. President?” As of publication, the video has over 475,000 views on YouTube.

Dotcom told Wired that he set up the site to “inform about the unreasonable actions and phony charges against Megaupload and its management.”

“It is important for people understand how dangerous the Megaupload case is,” he said, adding that there “is no due process or rule of law, just politically driven aggression and destruction lobbied for by the MPAA.”

According to Dotcom, the FBI picked his business as “an easy target” with the goal being the total destruction of it without a trial.

“Megaupload was a good corporate citizen and we have always cooperated with rights holders and authorities,” Dotcom said. The indictment charges that Megaupload was dedicated to copyright infringement and that the founders knew this and encouraged it in order to increase subscriptions and ad revenue.

But Dotcom says the United States’ case is weak.

“They had good reason to seize every penny and to try and keep me locked up. They can’t win this case simply because there was never any criminality,” Dotcom said.

Dotcom earned a small fortune from Megaupload; he lived in a mansion in New Zealand, paid for a fireworks show in Auckland and had a collection of sports cars that were seized in a January raid on his house. Now all of his assets have been seized, but he says that he is not soliciting donations to pay for the court case. At least, not yet.

“We are still working on unfreezing our own assets in order to pay for our defense. Asking for donations will be our last resort,” Dotcom says.

“The reaction to the site has been overwhelmingly positive,” Dotcom said. “The support we are getting is very important to us. “The number of people following the developments of this case is growing daily. Everyone can see that something is terribly wrong here. It’s easy to fight back when you have so much support and know that you have done nothing wrong. And I would say my confidence is a reflection of the confidence in our legal team. They are looking forward to this battle.”

Asked if the “(c) 2012 All Rights Reserved” notice on the site and the site’s terms of service agreements sections on rights and copyrights could be seen as ironic considering the case against Megaupload, Dotcom replied:

“Lawyers.”

Starting Aug. 1, Dotcom will start a campaign trying to rally 200 million former Megaupload users using their e-mail addresses, according to the site.

Meanwhile, the extradition process for Dotcom and his Megaupload co-defendants Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk drags on.

District Court Judge Nevin Dawson has been selected to replace Justice David Harvey, after the latter recused himself from the case following a public remark that could be construed as revealing bias against the United States.

The Megaupload Four face up to 20 years in prison and hundreds of millions of dollars in damages if convicted.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/07/kim-com/





Government: We Can Freeze Mega Assets Even if Case is Dismissed

Judge is weighing argument that Megaupload is beyond reach of US criminal law.
Timothy B. Lee

The United States government said today that even if the indictment of the Megaupload corporation is dismissed, it can continue its indefinite freeze on the corporation's assets while it awaits the extradition of founder Kim Dotcom and his associates.

Judge Liam O'Grady is weighing a request to dismiss the indictment against Megaupload because (in Megaupload's view) the federal rules of criminal procedure provide no way to serve notice on corporations with no US address. At a hearing in Alexandria, VA, he grilled both attorneys in the case but did not issue a ruling.

O'Grady speculated, with evident sarcasm, that Congress intended to allow foreign corporations like Megaupload to "be able to violate our laws indiscriminately from an island in the South Pacific."

But Megaupload's attorney insisted that this may not be too far from the truth. Megaupload, they said, is a Hong Kong corporation with no presence in the United States. He argued it was perfectly reasonable for Megaupload to be subject to the criminal laws of Hong Kong, but not the United States.
"It's never had a US address"

For its part, the government suggested that it could sidestep the mailing requirement in one of several ways. For example, it could wait for Kim Dotcom to be extradited to the United States and then mail notice to him, as Megaupload's representative, at his address in prison. Or, they suggested, the government could send notice of the indictment to Carpathia Hosting, a Virginia company that has leased hundreds of servers to the locker site.

The government also mentioned the possibility that it could use the provisions of a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty to send notice to Megaupload's Hong Kong address.

But Judge O'Grady seemed skeptical of these argument. He noted that the "plain language" of the law required sending notice to the company's address in the United States. "You don't have a location in the United States to mail it to," he said. "It's never had an address" in the United States.

And Megaupload pointed out that the government hadn't produced a single example in which the government had satisfied the rules of criminal procedure using one of the methods it was suggesting in this case. Most of the precedents the government has produced were in civil cases, which have different rules. And most involved serving a corporate parent via its subsidiary. That's a very different relationship than, for example, the vendor-customer relationship between Megaupload and Carpathia.

The government brought up one new example during the hearing: an instance in which a judge allowed notice to be sent via e-mail to the Columbian guerilla group FARC. But Megaupload's attorneys dismissed this example as well, pointing out that FARC was not a corporation and that the propriety of that service was never tested in court.

The government also argued that it could keep Megaupload in legal limbo indefinitely. "None of the cases impose a time limit on service," the government's attorney told the judge. Therefore, the government believes it can leave the indictment hanging over the company's head, and keep its assets frozen, indefinitely.

Not only that, but the government believes it can continue to freeze Megaupload's assets and paralyze its operations even if the judge grants the motion to dismiss. That's because in the government's view, the assets are the proceeds of criminal activity and the prosecution against founder Kim Dotcom will still be pending. The fact that the assets are in the name of Megaupload rather than its founder is of no consequence, the government claimed.

Hollywood, at least, seems nervous that Judge O'Grady might buy Megaupload's argument. In a conference call held Wednesday in advance of today's hearing, a senior vice president at the Motion Picture Association of America argued that the dismissal of the case against Megaupload would have little practical impact, since the company's principals would still be facing indictment. And he rejected Kim Dotcom's efforts to frame the case as a test of Internet freedom, describing Dotcom as a "career criminal" who had grown wealthy stealing the work of others.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...-is-dismissed/





Copyright Alert System, Widely Feared, Is Toothless
John Paul Titlow

The proposed Copyright Alert System, in which U.S. Internet service providers would identify customers who download music or movies without authorization, has been roundly criticized as abusive. At first glance, the "six strikes" plan may seem scary, but the program's sponsors insist that the rhetoric has been overblown. Is the plan as worrisome as its critics contend?

The Copyright Alert System is a program proposed in July 2012 by the Center For Copyright Information, the coalition of movie, music, and bandwidth providers that includes the Motion Picture Association of America, Record Industry Association of America, and internet service providers AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon. Ostensibly designed to increase awareness of copyright infringement, the initiative calls for consumers who are detected downloading unauthorized material to be issued a series of six warnings. Consumers who failed to respond to the warnings would face "mitigation measures" that might include throttling bandwidth. Originally scheduled to roll out in July 2012, the program has been delayed indefinitely.

The plan has prompted widespread criticism by commentators who view it as intrusive and draconian. However, the Center for Copyright Information says that people need to relax. This week, CCI Executive Director Jill Lesser wrote an op-ed responding to some of the most alarmist commentary.

"Our work at CCI is about educating consumers about how to legally and ethically enjoy the movies and music they love," Lesser wrote. Educating, that is, and not punishing, as many people have been led to believe. ISPs would not be spying on consumers, according to Lesser. Instead, they would rely on tips from copyright holders, who would notify ISPs of the IP addresses of customers suspected of illegally downloading copyright material.

How the Copyright Alert System Will Work

So how would copyright holders find those IP addresses? As a blog post from Sandvine explains, third-party companies known as media defenders monitor activity on peer-to-peer file-sharing services like The Pirate Bay and can extract a list of user IP addresses by connecting to trackers for specific media files. These companies used to look up the ISP of each IP address and then ask the service provider for contact information. Under the Copyright Alert System, that step would be eliminated and users would remain anonymous. The ISPs would send a series of messages to the account holder, informing them of the evils of piracy.

"Alerts will be non-punitive and progressive in nature," according the CCI's website. "Successive alerts will reinforce the seriousness of the copyright infringement and inform the recipient how to address the activity that is precipitating the alerts."

After six warnings, the ISP may take punitive action. Throttling users' connections is apparently on the table, but nobody would be kicked offline for good, according to the CCI. Last month, TorrentFreak reported that the most egregious offenders would be deemed "unreachable" by the program and subsequently ignored.

Indeed, the system appears designed to educate consumers, as Lesser said, and that's about it. It may be toothless, but it seems likely to succeed in curtailing some infringement. Hardcore torrenters are likely to dismiss the warnings. But less savvy Web users - especially the parents of movie-downloading teenagers - would probably be spooked by a memo from their service provider telling them they're doing something illegal.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...-toothless.php





Leaked RIAA Report: SOPA/PIPA “Ineffective Tool” Against Music Piracy
enigmax

Contrary to the endless lobbying and subsequent defending of the now-dead SOPA and PIPA frameworks, a leaked report shows that earlier this year the RIAA’s Deputy General Counsel admitted that the legislation was “not likely to have been effective tool” for dealing with music piracy. All efforts are now being put behind the “six strikes” plan – but could disconnections for repeat infringers still be on the agenda?

“These illicit sites are among the culprits behind the music industry’s more than 50 percent decline in revenues during the last decade, resulting in 15,000 layoffs and fewer resources to invest in new bands,” wrote RIAA CEO Cary Sherman in a New York Times piece last year.

“It should be unacceptable to any of us involved in legitimate commerce online that a rogue Web site based outside the United States — but hawking American products or copyrighted works — can currently escape our laws.”

SOPA and PIPA

Sherman was writing in support of the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP acts, legislation that if passed would have removed infringing websites from the United States Internet. But quietly behind closed doors earlier this year one of the RIAA’s most senior lawyers admitted that the legislation would not have been effective against online piracy.

The revelation appeared in a presentation (pdf) made by RIAA Deputy General Counsel Victoria Sheckler to IFPI members in April 2012, part of which we covered yesterday in our report on how offline music swapping dominates that done online.

In a section detailing recent legal and policy developments, Sheckler said that after “opposition to bills, activated by Google, went viral,” SOPA and PIPA were “essentially dead.”

But rather than opposition staying focused on these pieces of legislation, the RIAA Deputy General Counsel admitted that dissent had spread, with “anti-SOPA sentiment in netizens being used by opponents to oppose other copyright protection measures.”

Companies, Sheckler added, were now on “heightened alert” – an assertion confirmed by the recent Internet Bat Signal initiative.

But perhaps of most interest is the confession that even if they had passed, SOPA and PIPA would have been of little help to the music industry.

Sheckler notes that the legislation put forward an “important principle regarding intermediary responsibility,” a reference to ISPs being told to block “rogue” sites – but then added the following:

“Legislation not likely to have been effective tool for music.”

So, with SOPA and PIPA dead – at apparently no real loss to the music industry after all – the RIAA is focusing on something else.

The “Six Strikes” Copyright Alert Scheme

Sheckler’s presentation states that under the scheme infringement notices face a number of “potential challenges” such as “fair use, authorized use of work, pre-1923 work, misidentification of account, unauthorized use of account and misidentification of file,” but nevertheless the RIAA believes the system is robust enough to have a positive effect with its “consumer friendly” approach.

“Evidence exists that most users would modify their behavior if alerted to the risks associated with using certain P2P services and/or made to believe they will face consequences if caught infringing,” Sheckler notes.

Those consequences are detailed as follows – temporary reduction in speed, temporary step-down in service tier, redirection to landing page until subscriber contacts ISP, temporary restriction of Internet access, and redirection until subscriber completes meaningful education on copyright.

The presentation then notes that ISPs will not be required to terminate subscribers’ accounts as part of the “six strikes” program itself, but that eventuality is not being completely ruled out it seems. Sheckler says that disconnections can be ordered by service providers themselves.

“ISP’s terms of service/acceptable use policies prohibit infringement and permit the ISP to terminate the account if it is used for infringing activity,” she writes.

Some ISPs do indeed threaten to disconnect users for infringement based on a TOS violation. However, Sheckler says that the responsibilities of Internet companies go further and as carriers they are governed by legislation.

In order for ISPs to be eligible for safe harbor provision under the DMCA, she writes, they are required to have a “termination policy for repeat infringers” under “appropriate circumstances.”

So, although account disconnections aren’t specifically included in the list of “six strikes” mitigation measures agreed in the Memorandum of Understanding, the RIAA is clearly aware that if they’ve issued infringement notices against an account holder six times, then that user has a good chance of being viewed as a “repeat infringer” by their ISP – at least if prompted to do so by the RIAA.

By not including the ultimate disconnection sanction in the MoU it’s a win-win for the RIAA and the ISPs. The RIAA can honestly state that it’s not part of the agreement, and should the ISPs disconnect a user, they can blame that on the laws of the land.

Whether or not the RIAA will prompt the ISPs to go down that route remains to be seen, but the option is there should the “six strikes” program fail to have the intended result.
https://torrentfreak.com/leaked-riaa...piracy-120727/





Leaked Report Reveals Music Industry’s Global Anti-Piracy Strategy
enigmax

A confidential internal report of the music industry outfit IFPI has been inadvertently made available online by the group itself. Penned by their Head of Internet Anti-piracy Operations, the report details the global strategy for the major recording labels of IFPI. Issues covered include everything from torrent sites to cyberlockers, what behavior IFPI expects of Internet service providers, the effectiveness of site blocking, and how pirates are accessing unreleased music from industry sources.

Dated April 2012, the IFPI report obtained by TorrentFreak was put together by the music industry group’s chief anti-piracy officer Mo Ali.

The 30-page report presents a global view of IFPI’s “problems”, “current and future threats” and the industry’s responses to them.

IFPI says it has five possible reactions to a threat: Take down, Disruption, Investigation, Lobbying and Litigation.

The Threats: P2P

Initially IFPI splits illicit content availability into two sections. The first they classify as “content held on users’ computers” and distributed via P2P networks such as BitTorrent, Gnutella, DirectConnect, eDonkey and Ares.

It says it has taken “strategic action” against The Pirate Bay (BitTorrent), LimeWire (Gnutella) and also the semi-private tracker Demonoid (BitTorrent). IFPI doesn’t elaborate on action against the latter, but it was rumored that a member of the site’s staff was targeted a while back.

Central hosting/cyberlockers

The second category is content held on central servers, including file-hosts and cyberlockers. Interestingly, the IFPI diagram below shows that when the group examined allegedly infringing URLs on the world’s major cyberlockers, Megaupload’s stats paled into insignificance when compared to the others.

IFPI is clear on their requirements for cyberlockers to operate to their liking. Their number one desire is that they “proactively filter for infringing content” but if they don’t they must “operate an effective and efficient notice and take down system.” Failure to implement either means sites will be required to “shut down”.

Hacking and phishing attacks

One of the other threats detailed by IFPI include hacking and phishing attacks against email accounts of artists and their management. Through these techniques individuals are apparently obtaining unauthorized access to pre-release music.

IFPI say a number of techniques are being used, from bogus emails claiming to be from social networking, email, or cyberlocker sites, to the compromising of password reset features. Once accessed, mail is forwarded to other accounts, either with the music attached or with valuable information which allows other systems to be accessed.

The rise of mobile data and applications

IFPI is also keeping a close eye on the downloading and sharing of content across mobile data and other wireless networks. IFPI worries that these networks are providing here-and-now streaming of content via all-you-can-eat plans. Making matters worse is that IFPI reports “challenges” when it comes to matching an IP address to a subscriber.

The recording group also reports that Apple and Android architectures are encouraging the creation of 3rd party music apps. IFPI say they are crawling both the App Store and Google Marketplace and are focusing on “quick take down agreements” with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nokia and Palm to remove apps they don’t like. They are also mulling an expansion of their “payment provider program” to target “rogue” Android app developers.

Unauthorized pay MP3 sites

IFPI say they have identified in excess of 50 Russian and Ukrainian pay MP3 download sites. The group reports that law enforcement authorities have “secured evidence that the illegal sites are annually stealing hundreds of millions of dollars” which is creating opportunities for money laundering and tax evasion investigations. IFPI say their next steps will include strangling the sites’ finances with the help of payment processors, recovering proceeds of crime, and developing asset confiscation.

Advertisers and payment processors

IFPI’s advertiser strategy is based around the “disruption of revenue streams” to unauthorized sites by several methods. In the report they speak of a “structured notice and take down programme targeting Google’s AdSense and DoubleClick advertising networks,” plus “out reach” to IASH and IAB to implement “comprehensive infringing block lists.” IFPI says it also initiates direct contact with advertisers to flag when their ads appear on infringing sites.

Agreements are said to be in place with VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, CTIA, Monitise, PaySafeCard and PhonePayPlus to strangle finances to unauthorized sites.

Dealing with Internet service providers

In common with cyberlockers, IFPI have a set of rules they’d like to impose on Internet service providers. According to the industry group, ISPs should not provide Internet access to infringing sites, services or even unidentified customers. Furthermore, ISPs are required to “Implement a system of graduated response for infringing P2P users including warnings to an effective deterrent sanction.”

Site Blocking

ISPs are also required by IFPI to block access to infringing sites and services “located outside the local jurisdiction.” The chart below shows where blocking orders have been obtained (prior to April 2012) and how they are carried out.

Surprisingly, despite reports mounting to the contrary, IFPI seems to think that site blocking is an almost perfect solution to counter infringement.

“The effectiveness of such a ‘block’ will depend on the determination of the ISP subscriber
and the content/website provider to maintain access to each other and to use circumvention techniques to bypass blocking techniques,” they write.

“There is evidence to suggest that there is limited (between 3% and 5%) adoption of these circumvention techniques although subscribers with more technical knowledge could look to circumvent ISP controls using virtual private networks (VPN) or anonymous proxies.”

Conclusions

IFPI finishes up by stressing the importance of “co-operation, partnerships and information exchange” and the building of relationships with law enforcement, judges and legal bodies in order to “provide training built around ‘real world’ experiences and challenges rather than focusing on theory.”

Amendments to relevant laws need to be planned for the future, but in the short term IFPI should “consider ‘quick, curve ball’ solutions to impact more complex operations as complement to long term investigations,” the group concludes.
https://torrentfreak.com/leaked-repo...rategy-120725/





RIAA: Online Music Piracy Pales In Comparison to Offline Swapping
Ernesto

A leaked presentation from the RIAA shows that online file-sharing isn’t the biggest source of illegal music acquisition in the U.S. The confidential data reveals that 65% of all music files are “unpaid” but the vast majority of these are obtained through offline swapping. The report further shows that cyberlockers such as Megaupload are only a marginal source of pirated music.

In April, one of the RIAA’s key employees informed a group of music industry insiders about the upcoming six-strikes anti-piracy scheme in the U.S. TorrentFreak received a copy of the presentation sheets which include a rather interesting chart on where people get their music files from.

The data presented by the RIAA comes from NPD’s Digital Music Study but has never been published in public in its current form. While NPD’s press release mentioned a decline in music acquisition through P2P file-sharing and hard drive trading, these numbers were not placed in a larger context.

A strange decision, because the chart below is of critical importance for the debate on music piracy.

As it turns out, two thirds of all music acquired in the U.S. is unpaid. However, offline trading is a much bigger source of unpaid music than online piracy. Of all “unpaid” music less than 30 percent comes from P2P file-sharing or cyberlockers.

Music sources

In total, 15 percent of all acquired music (paid + unpaid) comes from P2P file-sharing and just 4 percent from cyberlockers. Offline swapping in the form of hard drive trading and burning/ripping from others is much more prevalent with 19 and 27 percent respectively.

This leads to the, for us, surprising conclusion that more than 70% of all unpaid music comes from offline swapping.

The chart is marked “confidential” which suggests that the RIAA doesn’t want this data to be out in the open. This is perhaps understandable since the figures don’t really help their crusade against online piracy.

The RIAA is lobbying hard for legislation and voluntary agreements to deal with the online piracy problem, an issue that might seem less severe in the chart above.

While not insignificant, the fact that less than one in five music acquisitions can be traced back to online file-sharing isn’t really that convincing – especially when one takes into account that only a tiny fraction represent a lost sale.

Even if all online music piracy disappeared tomorrow, more than half of all music acquisitions would be unpaid.

But maybe the RIAA will go after these offline swappers next. The TSA could perform piracy scans of travelers’ computer equipment, for example. Or perhaps schools could search MP3 players, phones and computers of their students for unpaid music?

Just a thought.

More revealing findings from the RIAA will be published soon.
https://torrentfreak.com/riaa-online...apping-120726/





Larry Press: Cheap Cords, No Cord Cutting, No Problemo.
Larry Press

Living in the US, we can lose perspective, assuming that things are the same in other places as here. I am a cord cutter, but, if I lived in Riga or Paris or many other cities I would not have cut the cord.

Instead, I would be a “triple play” subscriber, receiving television, telephone and Internet connectivity from one service provider.

I cut the cord to save money. I live in Los Angeles and pay Time Warner $84.94 (plus $6.56 tax and fees) for telephone service and Internet connectivity at “up to” 20 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload speed. Adding digital TV to round out the triple play would cost me an additional $58.99 per month — just about what I paid for my Roku box.

If I lived in Riga, I would simply get a triple play subscription with 20 Mbps up and 5 Mbps down from service provider Balti-Com for $25.43. That price was disclosed in the New America Foundation report The Cost of Connectivity, which compares prices charged by 885 ISPs in 22 cities worldwide.

Above, you see the triple play prices of the 15 cheapest ISPs in the comparison. My triple play would be about $150 per month in Los Angeles. Now, to be fair, I don’t know how the TV content in Riga compares to what I would get in Los Angeles, speed measurements can be slippery and parts of the city may not be covered, but the price difference is dramatic.

A clue to the source of that difference is the fact that five of the top 15 ISPs are in Paris. That is what competition looks like in “socialist” France. In my neighborhood in Los Angeles, the only alternative I have to Time Warner Cable for Internet service is Verizon DSL at 3.1 Mbps, a non-starter.

As study co-author Benjamin Lennett says, our telephone and cable companies have arranged a “negotiated truce” in which cable incumbents enjoy a de facto monopoly on high-speed broadband service, while Verizon and AT&T focus primarily on their wireless platforms.

The report attributes the French success to a regulatory decision in 2000 that forced the former state-owned monopoly, France Telecom, to open its network to rival operators. The US Congress tried to spur competition in a similar manner with the Telecommunication Act of 1996, but the incumbent operators defeated that attempt in courts and state houses.

William Kennard, who, as chairman of the United States Federal Communication from 1997-2001, was charged with implementing the Telecommunications Act, stated near the end of his term that “all too often companies work to change the regulations, instead of working to change the market,” and spoke of “regulatory capitalism” in which “companies invest in lawyers, lobbyists and politicians, instead of plant, people and customer service.” He went on to remark that regulation is “too often used as a shield, to protect the status quo from new competition — often in the form of smaller, hungrier competitors — and too infrequently as a sword — to cut a pathway for new competitors to compete by creating new networks and services.”

Along with many many others, I’ve been writing about this sort of thing for years, but the situation seems to get progressively worse. In 1996, when the Telecommunication act was passed, I could choose among many ISPs. Today, I have only one viable choice, and the price is about six times what I would be paying in Riga.

Cheapest triple play ISPs

http://anewdomain.net/2012/07/21/if-...a-cord-cutter/





Google Unveils 100 Times Faster Internet Service in Kansas City

Google Inc unveiled its Google Fiber broadband Internet service in Kansas City, Missouri, on Thursday, promising access speeds more than 100 times faster than some of the fastest available from traditional U.S. cable and telecommunications companies.

The new Google Fiber TV service will be priced at $120 a month for a package of major broadcast networks, 1 gigabyte per second Internet speeds and 1 terabyte of cloud storage.

For $70 a month the service will not include the traditional TV channels.

The new advanced service will offer features such as the ability to record eight TV shows at a time and store up to 500 hours of high definition programming. The user can use a tablet or smart phone as a voice-activated remote control if the user wants. Google is offering its Nexus 7 tablet with the Google TV app to early users of the service.

Google Fiber TV will allow users to search live channels, Netflix, YouTube, recorded shows and tens of thousands of hours of on-demand programming.

The new service will also be available to residents of Kansas City, Kansas.

"The Internet is a huge positive force, and yet we are at a crossroad," said Google Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette, who has played a lead role in overseeing the Fiber project. He said Internet speeds had leveled out for broadband since around 2000, and Google would making it 100 times faster.

"We at Google we believe there is no need to wait," he said.

The download speeds would be around 1 gigabyte a second, according to Google executives who were presenting a demonstration.

Google invested in building out fiber in Kansas City, Missouri in 2011 after inviting cities back in 2010 to help identify communities that would be interested taking part in the project.

(Reporting By Carey Gillam in Kansas City, Missouri, and Yinka Adegoke in New York;editing by Sofina Mirza-Reid)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...86P16I20120726





The Economics of Google Fiber and What it Means for U.S. Broadband
Stacey Higginbotham

Google’s fiber-to-the-home network may look like a loss leader for the search engine company, but its executive teams says it’s profitable. Here are the three ways Google has managed to cut the costs of building out a network and beat ISPs at their own game.

Google launched its fiber-to-the-home gigabit network Thursday in Kansas City, KansasMo. and it wants everyone to know that this network isn’t a charity case. Several Google executives at the event were very clear that delivering gigabit internet access over fiber for $70 a month (and even free 5 Mbps fiber) is a business that will not only help advance Google’s consumer goals, but also make it money.

“There’s no sense selling a product at a loss,” said Google CFO Patrick Pichette (just look at Google’s Nexus 7 tablet). “But it’s not only about profits, it’s about changing the access costs.” His goal and Google’s goal is to bring the same efficiencies that have helped create cheaper, smaller and more powerful computers and create a cost and improvement curve for broadband access that resembles the curves for compute storage, as the chart below illustrates.

And Google may have a found a way to do that — both in terms of constructing and operating a fiber to the home network — by using its engineering team, existing consumer technologies such as QR codes and social engineering to influence how users sign up for access. Existing ISPs should take note — what Google has done here has fundamentally lowered the cost of building and deploying a network. It was cagey about if and when it would take its fiber-to-the-home show on the road, but if it does, it will pummel existing ISPs on price and service, have repercussions throughout the carrier equipment industry and entice a lot of end consumers to take on a more active role in marketing Google’s broadband.

How Google cuts costs

Delivering broadband is a capital-intensive business, with Verizon spending $23 billion to spread its fiber to the home service to 17 million homes. Analysts estimate that it cost Verizon roughly $670 to run fiber past each home in its footprint. That cost varies depending on a huge number of factors, ranging from how far apart homes are to whether or not Verizon could string fiber from telephone poles rather than bury it. Google doesn’t give its costs, and so far vendors are mum, but here’s what we do know.

It makes its own gear: From the infrastructure on the back end to the TV and Wi-Fi routers in the home, Google has built its own stuff. Most carriers rely on outside vendors to sell them networking gear and even set-top boxes. However, like Iliad, the operator in France that provides the Free mobile and wireline network, Google has built its own equipment. Several sources have told me that Google has ordered fiber gear from companies such as Ciena, asked them how the boxes work and then sent the optical engineers on their way.

Kevin Lo, the general manager of the Google Fiber business, told me that from the time the Google Fiber project was announced in February 2010, engineers have been working on the gear. There are two advantages Google gains here. The first is that it’s not shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars on specialty equipment built for ISPs, but rather taking the most basic elements of a network and assembling them into custom gear, much like it does on the data center side. The second is that it can control all of the physical infrastructure that its network relies on — updating and tweaking it as needed.

It uses social engineering: It’s accepted that one of the most costly elements of building out a fiber network is the physical labor associated with strong cable, digging trenches and hiring people to terminate the fiber into the home. Google has already strung cable on power lines throughout Kansas City and lowered those costs by working with the local utility and AT&T to get access to the utility poles without having to pay high fees.

But to reduce the cost of the actual last mile to users’ homes it’s telling people in Kansas City that if they want to be the first to get fiber, they’ll have to convince their neighbors to sign up. The goal is to get a critical mass of between 5 percent and 25 percent of the homes in a given neighborhood (Google calls it a fiberhood) committed to signing up for Google Fiber before ever sending out technicians. Residents have until Sept. 9 to get their fiberhood on the leaderboard before Google starts rolling out its fiber.

Google’s Milo Medin and a Google fiber product manager.

Milo Medin, the VP of access services at Google, explained that with this model the folks in the first fiberhood will have their access within a week. This is also why the free service is so important to Google. If people buy into that process, it can get homes attached in those initial bulk deployments and reduce the number of times Google has to send out trucks and technicians. Medin says the $300 initial connection fee will cover the costs associated with the deployments — it’s not doing that at a loss either.

It will use QR codes and the Google Play store to change your relationship with set-top boxes and routers : I’ve already covered the cost savings at the core network and the last mile access, but the final place Google is shaking things up is in the home. Customer premise equipment is the bane of the ISP industry. Those boxes are expensive so many cable providers and telcos rent them to users, which drives users nuts. Users also are slow to update the devices, which can limit the type of services ISPs can offer and in many cases force a technician to come out and install them.

Google has built its own hard drive to act as a DVR, a TV box to provide channels and a network box that acts as a modem and provides Wi-Fi connectivity in the home — cutting out traditional providers such as Arris, Scientific Atlanta (Cisco) and others that make such gear. Medin says that those boxes will have a QR code that a technician will scan. The box then sends its activation information to the cloud and the box is now provisioned and activated for that customer. Eventually consumers will be able to do this for themselves, perhaps after they order a box on Google’s Play store.

All of these things will help Google deliver a gigabit per second to the home at a profit. Granted, that profit might not be as large as the broadband profits that Comcast or AT&T currently enjoy, but it’s a profit. And hopefully regulators and average consumers will look at what Google is doing and ask themselves, “Why are the Comcasts and AT&Ts of the world complaining about how much it costs to serve up broadband when Google can deliver 100 times the traditional ISP’s top speeds for the same or a lower price.”

If they don’t ask, then let’s hope Google will continue its expansion. When I asked, Medin wasn’t direct, but said, “This is a beginning.”
http://gigaom.com/2012/07/26/the-eco...u-s-broadband/





Speak Up: The EU Commission Wants to Know Your Thoughts on Net Neutrality
Jamillah Knowles

The European Commission has launched a public consultation seeking answers to questions on transparency, switching and certain aspects of internet traffic management, with a view to its commitment to preserve the open and neutral character of the Internet.

According to the Commission, these questions have emerged as key issues in the “net neutrality” debate that has taken place in Europe over the past years, including the recent findings of the Body of European Regulators of European Communications (BEREC).

In May this year BEREC published the results of its traffic management investigation undertaken upon the Commission’s request. The organisation also looked into quality of service, transparency, competition issues and IP interconnection in the context of net neutrality.

BEREC further issued a report on best practices to facilitate consumer switching, where it concluded that for competition to be able to deliver effective outcomes for consumers it was essential to ensure transparency for consumers and called for a minimisation of unnecessary switching costs and barriers.
Not so open Internet

The BEREC results showed that the most frequently reported restrictions when it comes to Internet access are the blocking and/or throttling of peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic, on both fixed and mobile networks, and the blocking of VoIP (Internet telephony) traffic on mobile networks.

Over 400 operators participated in the investigation which showed that at least 20% of all Internet users, and potentially up to half of EU mobile broadband users, have contracts that allow their Internet service provider (ISP) to restrict services like VoIP or P2P.

According to the BEREC report among those fixed and mobile operators with contractual restrictions on P2P 96% and 88%, respectively, enforce them technically. Contractual restrictions on VoIP are technically enforced by more than half (56%) of the mobile operators with such restrictions in their contracts.
Open consultation

To get a more rounded view of the situation, the EU Commission is looking for input from all interested public and private parties, including fixed and mobile internet service providers, Internet content and application providers (including comparison websites), equipment manufacturers, transit providers, investors, public authorities, consumers and their associations.

Neelie Kroes said: “Today there is a lack of effective consumer choice when it comes to internet offers. I will use this consultation to help prepare recommendations that will generate more real choices and end the net neutrality waiting game in Europe. Input from this consultation will help turn BEREC’s findings into practical recommendations.”

In particular the Commission wants to know about internet traffic management, including congestion management, managed services and privacy issues; transparency, in particular regarding the actual internet performance (speed and quality) and restrictions of internet access products; the possibility for consumers to switch operators and internet interconnection issues between network operators.

Working to keep the Internet open for everyone is tricky if providers are up to tricks that consumers and businesses cannot control. There is hope that Kroes will help to give the debate a push and sort out the issues we can all do without.

If you’re a Cyber-utopian, no doubt you will hope that the Internet of the future will be the relatively open playground we get to enjoy today, but that can’t happen unless people speak up and get into the debate.

If you want to join in, the details can all be found on the European Commission site. Responses to the public consultation should be sent before 15 October 2012.
http://thenextweb.com/eu/2012/07/23/...et-neutrality/





Virgin and Mobile Networks Snub Net Neutrality Pledge
Barry Collins

Virgin Media, Everything Everywhere and Vodafone are among the high-profile absentees from a new voluntary code of conduct on net neutrality, due to be unveiled tomorrow.

The voluntary code lays down a set of principles in support of the open internet, including pledges to give users access to all legal content and a promise not to discriminate against content providers on the basis of a commercial rivalry. The code was drafted after discussions between Communications Minister Ed Vaizey and ISPs.

Signatories on an early draft of the agreement seen by PC Pro include BT, BSkyB, O2, TalkTalk and Three. However, there are high profile omissions, including Virgin Media, Vodafone and the two Everything Everywhere networks, T-Mobile and Orange.

A spokesman for Virgin Media told PC Pro that, after weeks of negotiation, the company had refused to sign because the agreement wasn't tough enough. "We have no intention of discriminating or treating data differently on the basis of who owns or publishes it but we are not signing up to the Code as it stands," Virgin Media said in a statement.

"We had tried to encourage something that would be clearer for industry and give consumers improved transparency. However, these principles remain open to misinterpretation and potential exploitation so, while we welcome efforts to reach a broad consensus to address potential future issues, we will be seeking greater certainty before we consider signing."

Everything Everywhere said it was "too early to know how a code of this type will affect customers' internet experience, but it is something that we will continually review".

"That said, we support the principle of the open internet and believe transparency is the way to achieve this, which is why last year we signed up to the BSG’s code of practice on traffic management in order to make our policies clear to customers."

Vodafone said it refused to sign because "the language chosen by the signatories is impractical and does not reflect the services enjoyed by millions of mobile phone users every day."

"We have a range of internet access plans and provide customers with full details of the products and services that can be accessed with each plan. These plans offer internet access to smartphone and dongle users, but under the code we would have been unable to use the phrase ‘internet access’ to describe many of the services enjoyed by customers," a spokesman for the network added.

Not "internet access"

Under the terms of the agreement, ISPs and mobile networks have agreed not to use the term "internet access" to describe any package where certain classes of content, applications or services are blocked. However, they are free to apply whatever restrictions they choose, provided they don't use the term.

The ISPs also retain the ability to choke certain types of traffic, such as P2P file-sharing services, to manage congestion on their networks.

They also agree to make any traffic management transparent to their customers.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/376024/v...trality-pledge





Consumer Data, but Not for Consumers
Natasha Singer

I recently asked to see the information held about me by the Acxiom Corporation, a database marketing company that collects and sells details about consumers’ financial status, shopping and recreational activities to banks, retailers, automakers and other businesses. In investor presentations and interviews, Acxiom executives have said that the company — the subject of a Sunday Business article last month — has information on about 500 million active consumers worldwide, with about 1,500 data points per person. Acxiom also promotes a program for consumers who wish to see the information the company has on them.

As a former pharmaceuticals industry reporter who has researched all kinds of diseases, drugs and quack cures online, I wanted to learn, for one, whether Acxiom had pegged me as concerned about arthritis, diabetes or allergies. Acxiom also has a proprietary household classification system that places people in one of 70 socioeconomic categories, like “Downtown Dwellers” or “Flush Families,” and I hoped to discover the caste to which it had assigned me.

But after I filled out an online request form and sent a personal check for $5 to cover the processing fee, the company simply sent me a list of some of my previous residential addresses. In other words, rather than learning the details about myself that marketers might use to profile and judge me, I received information I knew already.

It turns out that Acxiom, based in Little Rock, Ark., furnishes consumers only with data related to risk management, like their own prison records, tax liens, bankruptcy filings and residential histories. For a corporate client, the company is able to match customers by name with, say, the social networks or Internet providers they use, but it does not offer consumers the same information about themselves.

Jennifer Barrett Glasgow, Acxiom’s chief privacy officer, said that the company kept consumer data in different databases and that its system was not designed to assemble all the information it had amassed on a single person.

“We do not have the capability to look up an individual’s data in the system,” Ms. Barrett Glasgow said. “We don’t have a search-by-name capability.”

Data brokers like Acxiom have developed advanced techniques to collect and collate information about consumers’ offline, online and mobile behavior. But they have been slow to develop innovative ways for consumers to gain access to the information that companies obtain, share and sell about them for marketing purposes.

Now federal regulators are pressuring data brokers to operate more transparently. In a report earlier this year, the Federal Trade Commission recommended that the industry set up a public Web portal that would display the names and contact information of data brokers, as well as describe consumers’ data access rights and other choices.

Julie Brill, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, said consumers should have access to all the details that data brokers collect on them, as well as any analyses that the companies sell about their behavior.

“I include in that not just the raw data, but also how that information has been analyzed to place the consumer into certain categories for marketing or other purposes,” she said. “I believe that giving consumers this kind of granularity will greatly increase consumer trust in the information flow process and will lead to more accurate marketing.”

At the moment, however, information brokers have wildly different policies. Acxiom lets people opt out of its marketing databases, while Epsilon, another marketing services firm, allows people to opt out of having their data rented to third parties. Epsilon says it will also furnish individuals, upon request, with general information about their past retail transactions — including the categories and years of purchase. But it does not include exact product or retailer names.

Andrew Frawley, the president of Epsilon, says his company has set up a task force to explore giving consumers greater access and choices.

“We agree in principle that more transparency is better,” he said.

But setting up a system for consumers to gain access to their own marketing data could be costly and technically challenging for data brokers, said Stuart Madnick, a professor of information technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Companies would have to develop security systems to verify a consumer’s identity and to ensure that no one else could have access to that individual’s record, he said. At the same time, they would have to be prepared to respond to people who questioned the accuracy of the records.

“How correct is the information they have and are disseminating on you?” Professor Madnick asked. “How do they know who is asking for it?”

Information security experts said data brokers might be reluctant to make public access easier lest consumers react by wanting to opt out of the data collection process altogether.

In early May, when I first looked at Acxiom’s Web site, the online request form that required consumers to submit their Social Security numbers and other sensitive personal information was not encrypted. (Ms. Barrett Glasgow said the company quickly identified and fixed a broken link that had caused the problem.) After I submitted my application, I didn’t hear back from the company for several weeks. Subsequently, I left a voice mail message on Acxiom’s consumer hot line. Nobody called back.

“It sounds like this form was not a high priority for them,” said Richard M. Smith, the founder of Boston Software Forensics, a consulting firm, and an expert on Internet security. Requiring consumers to mail in a personal check as part of the verification process, he added, seemed old-fashioned and cumbersome. “It’s so last century. Why are you making it so inconvenient?”

After I reported in the article last month that Acxiom had not responded to my data request, a company representative e-mailed me to verify that I was indeed the person who had requested her file. Then Acxiom e-mailed me an encrypted report containing a list of my previous residential addresses.

Several days later, Ms. Barrett Glasgow called to explain the delay in processing: Acxiom receives, on average, fewer than 100 requests a year from consumers, she said, and my check had “ended up on someone’s desk that was on vacation.” She said she would look into why company representatives hadn’t returned my voice mail message.

“We’ll try to take some action to improve and clean up the program,” she said. “We don’t want to make it hard to do, risky to do, or leave a bad impression in the individual’s mind.”

BUT I still wanted to know the financial, retail, travel, health and hobby details that Acxiom might have collected about me. So I e-mailed Ms. Barrett Glasgow last month, asking to see at least some of my data and to find out the socioeconomic category in which Acxiom had placed me.

Ms. Barrett Glasgow was on vacation last week and could not be reached for comment.

Commissioner Brill of the F.T.C. said she could not comment on specific companies. But she said the reluctance of the data broker industry to show consumers their own records reminded her of an earlier era, when consumer reporting agencies — companies that track and sell information about people’s credit histories — protested that it would be too expensive and time-consuming for them to show individuals the same reports that creditors could see. In 1996, Congress updated the Fair Credit Reporting Act of 1970, giving people greater access to the files that those agencies held about them. Today, consumers can easily gain access to their credit reports online.

“What the credit reporting industry did was change their point of view from client-oriented to consumer-oriented, and develop the tools and technology to allow consumers to see what’s in their reports and ensure it is accurate,” Ms. Brill said. “The data broker industry could do the exact same thing.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/b...consumers.html





Apple Won't Let You See What iPhone Apps Do With Your Data
Dan Rowinski

Do you know what your apps are doing when you are not paying attention? How are they taking care of your personal data? An iOS app called Clueful from security company Bitdefender told users exactly what the apps on their iPhone were doing. That is a valuable service for consumers who may trust an app simply because it had the App Store stamp of approval, when not all apps are so trustworthy. Yet Apple has removed Clueful from the App Store for unspecified reasons.

According to Bitdefender, Clueful “identifies deviant apps on your iPhone. It looks at what applications are currently running in memory and it retrieves audit information from the Clueful Cloud. This audit info lets you know if the app is taking your address book, sharing your location, etc.”

Clueful would also let you know if an app integrated a mobile analytics platform so it could track a user’s behavior within the app. Mobile analytics is a powerful tool for developers, and the information is extremely useful to developers for marketing and designing updates. Clueful would tell you how an ad network was interacting with an app. It would tell if an app was accessing your Facebook or Twitter credentials or if it used telemetry data to ascertain your behavior across several apps. If an app was sending your data unencrypted, Clueful would let you know.

Apple has good reasons for not wanting consumers to have that information. Several companies have gotten into trouble in 2012 for improperly transmitting user data to servers, such as Path and LinkedIn.

What this comes down to is a basic matter of trust. Apple wants consumers to implicitly trust what they download from the App Store. The company has established a rigorous approval process for any app that is published on the App Store for precisely that reason. If Apple cannot keep malicious or carelessly developed apps out, people will not trust the App Store and will be less likely to download from it. That would hurt Apple’s bottom line as well as the ecosystem the company has built. Yes, iPhones and iPads are high-quality devices, but Apple’s marketing centers around what you can do with them: There's an app for that.

That said, Apple's reasoning is unclear. Bitdefender’s Chief Security Researcher Alexandru Catalin Cosoi declined to comment, citing a nondisclosure agreement. Bitdefender is working with Apple to have the app reinstituted and will resubmit it to the App Store on Monday or Tuesday of next week.

Although users can't currently download Clueful to find out what their apps are doing, Bitdefender offers statistics that illuminate the behavior of iPhone apps en masse. Between May 22, when it was published, and this week, when it was taken down, Clueful reported the behavior of 65,000 of the App Store's most popular apps. Bitdefender found that 41% of the apps studied could track users’ location and about 33% stored user information without encrypting it. 18.6% of apps could access all contact information in address books.

16.4% of apps studied can connect to Facebook. By itself, that is not a big deal, since a variety of applications use Facebook’s user authentication as the default way to log in. In fact, many of the behaviors Clueful tracked were benign and even in the user’s interest, if the app developer employed proper security and respected privacy. That said, it is still beneficial for users to know what an app is doing and how it is tracking behavior.

We have contacted Apple concerning the removal of Clueful and will update if we get a response.

The infographic below summarizes the information Clueful found before it was removed from the App Store.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2...-your-data.php





Skype Won't Say Whether It Can Eavesdrop on Your Conversations

Since Microsoft bought Skype, has the chat client started working more with law enforcement?
Ryan Gallagher

New surveillance laws being proposed in countries from the United States to Australia would force makers of online chat software to build in backdoors for wiretapping. For years, the popular video chat service Skype has resisted taking part in online surveillance—but that may have changed. And if it has, Skype’s not telling.

Historically, Skype has been a major barrier to law enforcement agencies. Using strong encryption and complex peer-to-peer network connections, Skype was considered by most to be virtually impossible to intercept. Police forces in Germany complained in 2007 that they couldn’t spy on Skype calls and even hired a company to develop covert Trojans to record suspects’ chats. At around the same time, Skype happily went on record saying that it could not conduct wiretaps because of its “peer-to-peer architecture and encryption techniques.”

Recently, however, hackers alleged that Skype made a change to its architecture this spring that could possibly make it easier to enable “lawful interception” of calls. Skype rejected the charge in a comment issued to the website Extremetech, saying the restructure was an upgrade and had nothing to do with surveillance. But when I repeatedly questioned the company on Wednesday whether it could currently facilitate wiretap requests, a clear answer was not forthcoming. Citing “company policy,” Skype PR man Chaim Haas wouldn’t confirm or deny, telling me only that the chat service “co-operates with law enforcement agencies as much as is legally and technically possible.”

So what has changed? In May 2011, Microsoft bought over Skype for $8.5 billion. One month later, in June, Microsoft was granted a patent for “legal intercept” technology designed to be used with VOIP services like Skype to “silently copy communication transmitted via the communication session.” Whether this technology was subsequently integrated into the Skype architecture, it’s impossible to say for sure. Perhaps Skype’s reason for refusing to answer the interception question is because Microsoft has instituted a stricter media strategy than back in 2008. Either way, looking at Skype’s privacy policy today, it’s clear the company is certainly in a position to hand over at least some user communications to authorities if requested.

Under Section 3 of the privacy policy, it is stated that Skype or its partners “may provide personal data, communications content and/or traffic data to an appropriate judicial, law enforcement or government authority lawfully requesting such information.” It also notes that instant messages sent over Skype will be stored for a maximum 30 days “unless otherwise permitted or required by law.”

It is perhaps unsurprising that, with 663 million registered users reported last year, Skype has come under pressure to enable interception of calls.

The overarching concern, though, is not the interception requests per se—it’s that Skype isn’t being candid about the status of its relationship with law enforcement.

The company could learn a great deal from Google’s transparency reports, detailing requests it receives from authorities on a semi-annual basis. Without openness Skype will lose trust, and without trust it will lose users. Some are already migrating elsewhere, turning to alternatives like Jitsi, which enables end-to-end encryption and a level of security that can no longer be taken for granted with Skype.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_te...rsations_.html





Skype Makes Chats and User Data More Available to Police
Craig Timberg and Ellen Nakashima,

Skype, the online phone service long favored by political dissidents, criminals and others eager to communicate beyond the reach of governments, has expanded its cooperation with law enforcement authorities to make online chats and other user information available to police, said industry and government officials familiar with the changes.

Surveillance of the audio and video feeds remains impractical — even when courts issue warrants, say industry officials with direct knowledge of the matter. But that barrier could eventually vanish as Skype becomes one of the world’s most popular forms of telecommunication.

The changes to online chats, which are written messages conveyed almost instantaneously between users, result in part from technical upgrades to Skype that were instituted to address outages and other stability issues since Microsoft bought the company last year. Officials of the United States and other countries have long pushed to expand their access to newer forms of communications to resolve an issue that the FBI calls the “going dark” problem.

Microsoft has approached the issue with “tremendous sensitivity and a canny awareness of what the issues would be,” said an industry official familiar with Microsoft’s plans, who like several people interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the issue publicly. The company has “a long track record of working successfully with law enforcement here and internationally,” he added.

The changes, which give the authorities access to addresses and credit card numbers, have drawn quiet applause in law enforcement circles but hostility from many activists and analysts.

Authorities had for years complained that Skype’s encryption and other features made tracking drug lords, pedophiles and terrorists more difficult. Jihadis recommended the service on online forums. Police listening to traditional wiretaps occasionally would hear wary suspects say to one another, “Hey, let’s talk on Skype.”

Hacker groups and privacy experts have been speculating for months that Skype had changed its architecture to make it easier for governments to monitor, and many blamed Microsoft, which has an elaborate operation for complying with legal government requests in countries around the world.

“The issue is, to what extent are our communications being purpose-built to make surveillance easy?” said Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility, a digital privacy group. “When you make it easy to do, law enforcement is going to want to use it more and more. If you build it, they will come.’’

Skype was slow to clarify the situation, issuing a statement recently that said, “As was true before the Microsoft acquisition, Skype cooperates with law enforcement agencies as is legally required and technically feasible.”

But changes allowing police surveillance of online chats had been made since late last year, a knowledgeable industry official said Wednesday.

In the United States, such requests require a court order, though in other nations rules vary. Skype has more than 600 million users, with some in nearly every nation in the world. Political dissidents relied on it extensively during the Arab Spring to communicate with journalists, human rights workers and each other, in part because of its reputation for security.

Skype’s resistance to government monitoring, part of the company ethos when European engineers founded it in 2003, resulted from both uncommonly strong encryption and a key technical feature: Skype calls connected computers directly rather than routing data through central servers, as many other Internet-based communication systems do. That makes it more difficult for law enforcement to intercept the call. The authorities long have been able to wiretap Skype calls to traditional phones.

The company created a law-enforcement compliance team not long after eBay bought the company in 2005, putting it squarely under the auspices of U.S. law. The company was later sold to private investors before Microsoft bought it in May 2011 for $8.5 billion.

The new ownership had at least an indirect role in the security changes. Skype has endured periodic outages, including a disastrous one in December 2010. Company officials concluded that a more robust system was needed if the company was going to reach its potential.

Industry officials said the resulting push for the creation of so-called “supernodes,” which routed some data through centralized servers, made greater cooperation with law enforcement authorities possible.

The access to personal information and online chats, which are kept in Skype’s systems for 30 days, remains short of what some law enforcement officials have requested.

The FBI, whose officials have complained to Congress about the “going dark” problem, issued a statement Wednesday night saying it couldn’t comment on a particular company or service but that surveillance of conversations “requires review and approval by a court. It is used only in national security matters and to combat the most serious crimes.”

Hackers in recent years have demonstrated that it was possible to penetrate Skype, but it’s not clear how often this happened. Microsoft won a patent in June 2011 for “legal intercept” of Skype and similar Internet-based voice and video systems. It is also possible, experts say, to monitor Skype chats as well as voice and video by hacking into a user’s computer, doing an end run around encryptions.

“If someone wants to compromise a Skype communication, all they have to do is hack the endpoint — the person’s computer or tablet or mobile phone, which is very easy to do,” said Tom Kellermann, vice president of cybersecurity for Trend Micro, a cloud security company.

Some industry officials, however, say Skype loses some competitive edge in the increasingly crowded world of Internet-based communications systems if users no longer see it as more private than rival services.

“This is just making Skype like every other communication service, no better, no worse,” said one industry official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Skype used to be very special because it really was locked up. Now it’s like Superman without his powers.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...39W_story.html





How a Cellphone’s Case Can Imitate Its Maker

Evaluators at iFixit, which offers online repair manuals, found the Nexus 7 tablet from Google to be easy to open and to repair.
Randall Stross

WHY is it fairly easy to open some smartphones and tablets, while others seem designed to thwart a user’s effort to repair them — or even replace the battery?
Related

Some devices, like my Android phone, a Galaxy Nexus by Samsung, have a back cover that slides off and a battery that pops out. And when evaluators at iFixit, a Web site offering do-it-yourself repair manuals and parts, disassembled Google’s new Nexus 7 tablet for a “teardown” review, they found that it was easy to open and repair.

In iFixit’s video review, the narrator describes how the battery can be replaced without unscrewing a single screw. She is moved to declare, “The sustainability-geek inside me wants to hug Google for this.”

Other vendors — Apple, would you please take a bow? — make products that are designed to keep users out. The case on my wife’s iPhone 4 is closed with screws of Apple’s own devising that require a special screwdriver.

IFixit offers a tool kit for replacing those screws with standard ones. It mischievously markets this as a “Liberation Kit.”

It isn’t surprising that Apple, the epitome of the closed organization and overlord of the iPhone’s tightly controlled software ecosystem, would design screws that, in effect, serve as locks. And one can see how it would be in Apple’s interest to make it hard for users to extend the life of older models — it’s a way to encourage the purchase of the newest, greatest Apple stuff.

Google, which until now has not done much in consumer electronics hardware with its own brand name, is positioning itself as a conspicuous alternative to Apple, in design as in other aspects. As long as Apple embraces closed systems — and closed cases — Google can take advantage of an opportunity to be the un-Apple and to open up.

Using components that are easy to recycle is one way to score points for selling an environmentally friendly product. Apple’s products rank high in that regard, says Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit. But Apple doesn’t want its users to service its devices, he says. So it scores lower in another important aspect of being “green”: extending a product’s useful life by making it easy to repair.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

In January, Sprint announced a “sustainable design” effort, in partnership with the environmental unit of UL, the independent testing and certification group. Sprint encourages all of its partner manufacturers to submit their handsets for evaluation of the “repairability and recyclability” of the devices. Those that attain a certain number of points will be designated as “certified” or, greenest of all, “platinum.”

Lois Fagan, Sprint director of product development, says, “We have a self-imposed goal that at least 50 percent of our portfolio of new phones in 2012 will be certified.”

Consumers who want to know which phones are the easiest to repair won’t get much guidance from UL Environment. It will say only whether a device has earned its “certified” or “platinum” designations. It does not say what points were earned for any particular criterion, like ease of removing the external enclosure or the battery, or availability of replacement parts. Nor does it disclose which handsets fail to earn enough points to be certified.

The ability to remove the battery is especially important to frequent phone users, because the original battery may not last the two-year commitment required in a standard contract.

Apple says its iPhone battery is designed to retain up to 80 percent of its original capacity after 400 full charge and discharge cycles. For phones out of warranty, it offers a battery replacement service for $79 if you send the phone to its repair center; shipping costs are extra. (Being without one’s phone is an inconvenience not reflected in the price.)

IFixit provides an alternative. It sells replacement batteries and the necessary tools and offers its free online repair manuals, prepared by fellow users. A replacement battery for the older iPhone 3G model is only $14.95, and there’s no painful parting with the phone in the process.

According to Mr. Wiens, iPhone batteries aren’t hard to replace, with the right screwdriver, available online. “Under five minutes; no technical skills required,” he says.

Even replacing the glass on an iPad 3 can be done by amateurs, he contends, but guidance is needed: “I have a pile of iPad 3s that we broke while trying to learn how to repair them. Last week we finally broke the code.”

IFixit offers manuals covering computers, cameras, game consoles and household appliances, too; its credo is “repair is recycling.”

Hooman Morvarid, president of CellularDR.com, a repair business that handles phones from many manufacturers, says the most frequent problem he sees is broken glass, followed by a broken LCD screen that sits behind the glass. Increasingly, he says, the glass and LCD are fused together in a way that makes them impossible to separate if one or the other is broken. “So phones are actually becoming more expensive to repair,” he says.

The more that designers of mobile devices avoid fusing parts together, the easier they are to repair. And the repairs most likely to be undertaken are those we can do ourselves.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/b...al-domain.html





Samsung Outsells iPhone, Breaks Shipping Records
Samantha Murphy

Consumers worldwide may still have iPhone fever, but it looks like Samsung shipped nearly twice as many smartphones as Apple during the second quarter.

According to research firm Strategy Analytics, Samsung shipped 50.5 million units in its second quarter — the largest number of shipments ever made by a smartphone manufacturer in a quarter — and occupied about 35% of the global market. Meanwhile, Apple shipped about 26 million units during the quarter (about 18% market share).

Samsung’s second quarter was a knockout for the company. It reported a record $5.86 billion quarterly profit, up 79% from the same period last year due largely to a strong performance in Galaxy S smartphone sales.

“Samsung has been able to deliver hit models in most major price segments, from the high-end Galaxy Note phablet to the mass-market Galaxy Y,” Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Shah said in a statement. “We believe Apple’s lackluster performance was driven by some Apple fans and operators holding off iPhone purchases in anticipation of a rumored new iPhone 5 model around September or October this year.”

But together, Samsung and Apple now make up more than half of all smartphones shipped worldwide, up from about 33% last year.

“Volumes have polarized around those two brands,” Shah added. “The growth of Samsung and Apple has come partly at the expense of Nokia, whose global smartphone marketshare has halved from 15% to 7% over the past year. This is Nokia’s lowest marketshare level in the smartphone category for a decade.”

Although global smartphone shipments increased 32% to 146 million units, the research firm said it was the slowest growth rate since the third quarter of 2009.
https://mashable.com/2012/07/27/sams...one-shipments/





Justice Department Slams Apple, Refuses to Modify E-Book Settlement
Jeff John Roberts

The Justice Department released a document today that characterized criticism by Apple and publishers of a controversial price-fixing settlement as “self-serving” and ill-founded. The Department also pointed to recent ventures by Google and Microsoft as evidence that the e-book market is thriving and that Amazon’s dominant position has been overstated.

The arguments came as a reply to the 868 public comments that were filed in response to a settlement announced in April under which three publishers agreed they would change their pricing policy in accordance with Justice Department demands.

The settlement was imposed after the Justice Department sued Apple and five publishers for allegedly conspiring to wrest pricing power from Amazon. Apple and two of the publishers, Penguin and Macmillan, refused to settle and are fighting the case in court.

The Justice Department document is posted below with key passages underlined. The primary upshot is that the Department is refusing to modify any parts of the settlement agreement despite about 800 comments in opposition to the deal and new political opposition from people like Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY).

In its filing, Justice says it addresses Apple’s objections at length because of “[Apple's] central role in the events leading to the underlying enforcement action.” It also quotes an incident in which Steve Jobs reportedly told publishers, “the customer pays a little more, but that’s what you want anyway.”

The government goes on to refute Apple’s contention that it is imposing a business model on the industry:

Nothing in the proposed Final Judgment would force Apple or B&N to exercise discounting authority—they are free to carry out their own businesses exactly as before. What they may not do is continue to rely on a conspiracy to restrain their competitors.

Under the terms of the settlement, Apple and the settling publishers must terminate existing “Apple Agency Agreements” within seven days time of the settlement’s final approval. The publishers can then sign new contracts but are forbidden for two years from using clauses that limit retailers’ rights to discount. (Amazon often offers discounts whereas Apple instead uses a commission-style system favored by publishers).

The Justice Department’s filing largely skates away from issues related to Amazon’s role in the e-book market. It states that public comments suggesting it sue Amazon for abuse of dominant market power or address issues of online sales tax issues are beyond the scope of the antitrust action.

The filing does, however, repeatedly point to a recently announced $300 million partnership between Microsoft and Barnes & Noble and to Google’s plan to use its Nexus 7 tablet and Google Play store to compete with Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

The Justice Department also addresses comments by the Authors Guild which has been one of the most virulent critics of the settlement. The Guild has complained that the settlement will allow Amazon to resume predatory pricing (one term of the settlement is that retailers can’t sell at a loss — but it allows the retailers to average their margins across their entire e-book catalogue, meaning they can sell individual titles at a loss).

The Justice Department described Authors Guild’s arguments that Amazon’s pricing policies hurt publishing and culture as a “paternalist view.” It added that many agents and authors who had submitted comments against the settlement had “taken up the torch” on the Guild’s behalf. In contrast, Justice cited self-published authors who had submitted comments saying that Amazon provided them “a path to publication that was immune from Publisher Defendants’ hegemony.”

The next step in the case is for the proposed settlement to go before Judge Denise Cote who will decide in coming months whether to approve it, reject it or delay approval pending a more detailed fact-finding investigation. In the meantime, the court case against Apple and the publishers will continue as will as a parallel case brought by class action lawyers and state governments seeking tens of millions in damages.

Judge Cote has so far appeared hostile to Apple and the non-settling publishers. In refusing to dismiss part of the related case, she referred to Apple and Steve Jobs helping publishers to “collude.”

Here is the filing with key parts underlined:

DOJ Response to Comments

http://paidcontent.org/2012/07/23/ju...ok-settlement/





Silicon Valley Says Step Away From the Device
Matt Richtel

Stuart Crabb, a director in the executive offices of Facebook, naturally likes to extol the extraordinary benefits of computers and smartphones. But like a growing number of technology leaders, he offers a warning: log off once in a while, and put them down.

In a place where technology is seen as an all-powerful answer, it is increasingly being seen as too powerful, even addictive.

The concern, voiced in conferences and in recent interviews with many top executives of technology companies, is that the lure of constant stimulation — the pervasive demand of pings, rings and updates — is creating a profound physical craving that can hurt productivity and personal interactions.

“If you put a frog in cold water and slowly turn up the heat, it’ll boil to death — it’s a nice analogy,” said Mr. Crabb, who oversees learning and development at Facebook. People “need to notice the effect that time online has on your performance and relationships.”

The insight may not sound revelatory to anyone who has joked about the “crackberry” lifestyle or followed the work of researchers who are exploring whether interactive technology has addictive properties.

But hearing it from leaders at many of Silicon Valley’s most influential companies, who profit from people spending more time online, can sound like auto executives selling muscle cars while warning about the dangers of fast acceleration.

“We’re done with this honeymoon phase and now we’re in this phase that says, ‘Wow, what have we done?’ ” said Soren Gordhamer, who organizes Wisdom 2.0, an annual conference he started in 2010 about the pursuit of balance in the digital age. “It doesn’t mean what we’ve done is bad. There’s no blame. But there is a turning of the page.”

At the Wisdom 2.0 conference in February, founders from Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Zynga and PayPal, and executives and managers from companies like Google, Microsoft, Cisco and others listened to or participated in conversations with experts in yoga and mindfulness. In at least one session, they debated whether technology firms had a responsibility to consider their collective power to lure consumers to games or activities that waste time or distract them.

The actual science of whether such games and apps are addictive is embryonic. But the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, widely viewed as the authority on mental illnesses, plans next year to include “Internet use disorder” in its appendix, an indication researchers believe something is going on but that requires further study to be deemed an official condition.

Some people disagree there is a problem, even if they agree that the online activities tap into deep neurological mechanisms. Eric Schiermeyer, a co-founder of Zynga, an online game company and maker of huge hits like FarmVille, has said he has helped addict millions of people to dopamine, a neurochemical that has been shown to be released by pleasurable activities, including video game playing, but also is understood to play a major role in the cycle of addiction.

But what he said he believed was that people already craved dopamine and that Silicon Valley was no more responsible for creating irresistible technologies than, say, fast-food restaurants were responsible for making food with such wide appeal.

“They’d say: ‘Do we have any responsibility for the fact people are getting fat?’ Most people would say ‘no,’ ” said Mr. Schiermeyer. He added: “Given that we’re human, we already want dopamine.”

Along those lines, Scott Kriens, chairman of Juniper Networks, one of the biggest Internet infrastructure companies, said the powerful lure of devices mostly reflected primitive human longings to connect and interact, but that those desires needed to be managed so they did not overwhelm people’s lives.

“The responsibility we have is to put the most powerful capability into the world,” he said. “We do it with eyes wide open that some harm will be done. Someone might say, ‘Why not do so in a way that causes no harm?’ That’s naïve.”

“The alternative is to put less powerful capability in people’s hands and that’s a bad trade-off,” he added.

Mr. Crabb, the Facebook executive, said his primary concern was that people live balanced lives. At the same time, he acknowledges that the message can run counter to Facebook’s business model, which encourages people to spend more time online. “I see the paradox,” he said.

The emerging conversation reflects a broader effort in the valley to offer counterweights to the fast-paced lifestyle. Many tech firms are teaching meditation and breathing exercises to their staff members to help them slow down and disconnect.

At Cisco, Padmasree Warrior, the chief technology and strategy officer and its former head of engineering, a position where she oversaw 22,000 employees, said she regularly told people to take a break and a deep breath, and did so herself. She meditates every night and takes Saturday to paint and write poetry, turning off her phone or leaving it in the other room.

“It’s almost like a reboot for your brain and your soul,” she said. She added of her Saturday morning digital detox: “It makes me so much calmer when I’m responding to e-mails later.”

Kelly McGonigal, a psychologist who lectures about the science of self-control at the Stanford School of Medicine (and has been invited to lecture at the business school at Stanford), said she regularly talked with leaders at technology companies about these issues. She added that she was impressed that they had been open to discussing a potential downside of their innovations. “The people who are running these companies deeply want their technology and devices to enhance lives,” said Dr. McGonigal. “But they’re becoming aware of people’s inability to disengage.”

She also said she believed that interactive gadgets could create a persistent sense of emergency by setting off stress systems in the brain — a view that she said was becoming more widely accepted.

“It’s this basic cultural recognition that people have a pathological relationship with their devices,” she said. “People feel not just addicted, but trapped.”

Michelle Gale, who recently left her post as the head of learning and development at Twitter, said she regularly coached engineers and executives at the company that their gadgets had addictive properties.

“They said, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that.’ Or, ‘I guess I knew that but I don’t know what to do about it,’ ” recalled Ms. Gale, who regularly organized meditation and improvisation classes at Twitter to encourage people to let their minds wander.

Google has started a “mindfulness” movement at the company to teach employees self-awareness and to improve their ability to focus. Richard Fernandez, an executive coach at Google and one of the leaders of the mindfulness movement, said the risks of being overly engaged with devices were immense.

“It’s nothing less than everything,” he said, adding that if people can find time to occasionally disconnect, “we can have more intimate and authentic relationships with ourselves and those we love in our communities.”

Google, which owns YouTube, earns more ad revenue as people stay online longer. But Mr. Fernandez, echoing others in Silicon Valley, said they were not in business to push people into destructive behavior.

“Consumers need to have an internal compass where they’re able to balance the capabilities that technology offers them for work, for search, with the qualities of the lives they live offline,” he said.

“It’s about creating space, because otherwise we can be swept away by our technologies.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/t...o-devices.html





Future of War Revealed by Sheffield Scientists
Paul Mannion

Models to accurately predict the future of military conflicts based on classified information from the Afghan war revealed by whistleblower website Wikileaks have been created by scientists at the University of Sheffield.

Using war logs with about 77,000 events including location, day and time of occurrence and other details from the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2009, the team of scientists – including scientists from the universities of Edinburgh and Columbia, USA – were able to predict armed opposition group activity way into the future of the battle.

The researchers’ model was able to create a strikingly accurate prediction of armed opposition group activity in 2010, based solely on the data from the previous years, including which provinces would experience more and less violence as well as anticipate by how much the level of violence would increase or decrease.

The new technology could be used in the future to help better plan deployment of resources, including soldiers, and better manage conflicts.

Professor Visakan Kadirkamanathan, a co-author, Head of the University of Sheffield’s Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering and a member of the Centre for Signal Processing and Complex Systems, said: “Conflict dynamics models of the type developed here can provide forecasts of the levels of conflict with a degree of uncertainty, and reveal geographically spatial patterns in the conflict.

“The dataset used in this study is the Afghan War Diary, a compendium of military war logs released by the whistleblower site Wikileaks in 2010 associated with the war in Afghanistan. Its disclosure is unprecedented in the history of modern warfare.

“The model was able to show in map form the growth in the intensity of the conflict during the period of 2004-2009 as well as its volatility. Independent from the data used in the models, we were able to predict the armed opposition group activity in 2010.”

He added: “Models of conflict dynamics provide a key advantage in their ability to predict and forecast how the conflicts escalate over time, an important source of information for decision making. In our study, the statistical models used can also provide a measure of the uncertainty associated with the predictions, and not just the prediction of the level of the conflict.”

The results of the project have been published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and are part of a growing movement to understand and predict episodes of political and military conflict using data driven modelling techniques.

Development of spatio-temporal modelling techniques, such as the one used in this study, are being pioneered within the University of Sheffield’s Centre for Signal Processing and Complex Systems, in the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering.
http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/nr/w...edict-1.197435





NSA Whistle Blowers Warn that the US Government Can Use Surveillance to ‘See Into Your Life’

National Security Agency whistle blowers Thomas Drake, former senior official; Kirk Wiebe, former senior analyst; and William Binney, former technical director, return to “Viewpoint” to talk about their allegations that the NSA has conducted illegal domestic surveillance. All three men are providing evidence in a lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against the NSA.

Drake says the spying affects “the entire country,” citing a “key decision made shortly after 9/11 which began to rapidly turn the United States of America into the equivalent of a foreign nation for dragnet blanket electronic surveillance.”

“It’s hard to believe that your government’s gonna actually do it,” Wiebe says. “That was the shocker.”

Binney mentions a new NSA facility under construction in Bluffdale, Utah: “That facility alone can probably hold somewhere close to a hundred years worth of the communications of the world.” Binney continues, “Once you accumulate that kind of data – they’re accumulating against everybody – [it's] resident in programs that can pull it together in timelines and things like that and let them see into your life.”
http://current.com/shows/viewpoint/v...nto-your-life/





Millions of Americans Now Fall Within Government's Digital Dragnet

DCoded: Scale of digital snooping finally becomes a political issue.
Mark Stanley and Jake Laperruque

This post is part of our "DCoded" series, a partnership with the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, DC. Each installment provides a look at the most important bills, regulations, and think tankery on issues that will affect your Internet and mobile experience.

Will government surveillance finally become a political issue for middle-class Americans?

Until recently, average Americans could convince themselves they were safe from government snooping. Yes, the government engaged in warrantless wiretaps, but those were directed at terrorists. Yes, movies and TV shows featured impressive technology, with someone’s location highlighted in real time on a computer screen, but such capabilities were used only to track drug dealers and kidnappers.

Figures released earlier this month should dispel that complacency. It’s now clear that government surveillance is so widespread that the chances of the average, innocent person being swept up in an electronic dragnet are much higher than previously appreciated. The revelation should lead to long overdue legal reforms.

The new figures, resulting from a Congressional inquiry, indicate that cell phone companies responded last year to at least 1.3 million government requests for customer data—ranging from subscriber identifying information to call detail records (who is calling whom), geolocation tracking, text messages, and full-blown wiretaps.

Almost certainly, the 1.3 million figure understates the scope of government surveillance. One carrier provided no data. And the inquiry only concerned cell phone companies. Not included were ISPs and e-mail service providers such as Google, which we know have also seen a growing tide of government requests for user data. The data released this month was also limited to law enforcement investigations—it does not encompass the government demands made in the name of national security, which are probably as numerous, if not more. And what was counted as a single request could have covered multiple customers. For example, an increasingly favorite technique of government agents is to request information identifying all persons whose cell phones were near a particular cell tower during a specific time period—this sweeps in data on hundreds of people, most or all of them entirely innocent.

How did we get to a point where communications service providers are processing millions of government demands for customer data every year? The answer is two-fold. The digital technologies we all rely on generate and store huge amounts of data about our communications, our whereabouts and our relationships. And since it’s digital, that information is easier than ever to copy, disclose, and analyze. Meanwhile, the privacy laws that are supposed to prevent government overreach have failed to keep pace. The combination of powerful technology and weak standards has produced a perfect storm of privacy erosion.

Of course, police and other government investigators have legitimate needs for electronic evidence, and citizens enjoy huge benefits from new technologies. We don’t want to deprive law enforcement of the tools it needs, and we don’t want to give up our technology. The only solution is to ensure that the government’s use of these tools is carefully focused. The best way to do that is to follow the standard in the Constitution and require the government to get a warrant from a judge before intruding in our lives.

The problem is that the courts, in cases that are decades old, ruled that information held by a third party, such as a wireless carrier, was not covered by the Constitution’s warrant requirement. And the statute that sets standards for government monitoring of cell phones and online communications, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), was written in 1986, when mobile phones were the size of bricks and Facebook and Google didn’t exist. ECPA says that the government can obtain a wide range of information, including text messages and e-mail, with only a subpoena, issued without a judge’s approval. This is a much lower standard than requiring a warrant.

Changes brewing?

We clearly have a long way to go to reclaim our privacy, but there are some encouraging developments from DC. Last January, the Supreme Court ruled in US v. Jones that the use of a GPS device to track a person’s vehicle over an extended period of time constitutes a search under the Constitution and therefore generally requires a warrant issued by a judge. And one federal appeals court has held that the government must get a warrant before reading stored text messages or e-mail.

In addition, a broad coalition of companies, think tanks, and advocacy groups from across the political spectrum has been urging Congress to reform ECPA.

There's also some movement in Congress, where a group of lawmakers has introduced the GPS Act (S.1212 in the Senate and H.R.2168 in the House) to require that government agents get a warrant from a judge in order to track people using their mobile phones. The GPS Act offers the rare chance to find bipartisan consensus—both Republicans and Democrats have come out in support of the act.

Up to now, persistent lobbying from the Justice Department and a lack of outcry from the public have left Congress with little incentive to act. But the revelation that millions of Americans are falling within a digital dragnet may be the spark needed to make this an issue that resonates with the middle class.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...gital-dragnet/





Senators Force Weaker Safeguards Against Cyberattacks
Michael S. Schmidt

Despite warnings of a potentially crippling cyberattack, a group of lawmakers led by Senator John McCain has successfully weakened bipartisan legislation that the Obama administration said was crucial to protecting computer systems responsible for operating the nation’s critical infrastructure.

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman sponsored the stronger cybersecurity measure.

Strong opposition from Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, and others on behalf of the business community forced Democratic and Republican supporters of the legislation to drop provisions that would have given the federal government the power to enforce minimum standards on systems that run power plants, air traffic control systems, dams and similar facilities.

The Senate will debate the measure next week, even though the changes have raised new questions about its effectiveness.

“The key to successfully fighting this threat is not adding more bureaucrats or forcing industries to comply with government red tape,” Mr. McCain said Friday in a statement that announced that he and seven other Republican senators had introduced their own bill that calls for more information sharing among companies. “Instead, we must leverage the ingenuity and innovation of the private sector in partnership with the most effective elements of the federal government to address this emerging threat.”

Original versions of the bill, which was first drafted in 2009, called for giving the Department of Homeland Security the power to enforce minimum cybersecurity standards on infrastructure computer systems that, if damaged, would lead to mass casualties or economic loss.

But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business lobbyists strongly objected, saying that such regulations would create a costly and cumbersome process.

The measure now before the Senate makes the minimum standards optional, dealing a significant setback to the administration, which had made legislation to safeguard computer systems a top national security priority this year. In April, the House passed its own version of the cybersecurity bill that encourages businesses and intelligence agencies to share information about attacks and threats to computer systems. Senate backers of the measure say their hope now is to pass the legislation and get into talks with the House. Even more attempts to change the Senate measure are expected.

James A. Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a cybersecurity expert, said the revised Senate measure did not provide any new powers to the federal government to protect computer systems of critical infrastructure.

“If it is passed, nobody will notice it,” he said. “You can do everything in the bill with an executive order.”

Dr. Lewis added: “The same way you wouldn’t say that we don’t need the F.A.A. because we can rely on incentives and a voluntary approach, we can’t rely on incentives and voluntary action for cybersecurity. Every day the risk gets bigger, it is not only countries but politically motivated individuals who can just download this stuff. A lot of us hoped Congress would have done better than this.”

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the independent from Connecticut who sponsored the measure as chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and the committee’s ranking member, Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said Friday that they were caught off guard by the determined opposition of Mr. McCain, who has for years made national security issues his priority.

“He knows that I’m disappointed,” Mr. Lieberman said, referring to Mr. McCain, one of his closest allies and friends in the Senate. “His natural side, based on his whole history, is to do the best thing for security and not to be worried about other factors.”

Tension between Mr. Lieberman and Mr. McCain bubbled to the surface on Wednesday at a closed-door meeting of senators and staff members about the legislation in the office of Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the No. 2 Senate Republican, said Congressional aides who attended the meeting and discussed the deliberations on the grounds that they would not be quoted by name.

The staff members said Mr. Lieberman openly questioned Mr. McCain about why he was putting the interests of the Chamber of Commerce over national security and asked Mr. McCain what he would say if he blocked the bill and the nation suffered a catastrophic cyberattack.

Mr. McCain, the staff members said, became visibly angry and shouted back at Mr. Lieberman, saying that his reputation on national security issues was unquestionable.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Lieberman acknowledged that he had had a disagreement with Mr. McCain at the meeting but declined to discuss the specifics.

“You’ll have the most emotional arguments with the people you are closest to, and we are good friends and neither of us can conceal the fact that we don’t agree on this issue,” Mr. Lieberman said. “We agree on a lot of things, and whenever we disagree, he’s wrong.”

A spokesman for Mr. McCain did not return messages seeking comment.

The White House has worked for much of the year to persuade members of Congress to pass cybersecurity legislation that would require minimum standards for computers at critical infrastructure facilities where a breach would cause significant damage.

In March, high-ranking administration officials — including Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Homeland Security Department; Robert S. Mueller III, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — provided a closed-door demonstration to roughly four dozen senators on what could happen if a cyberattack derailed the New York City electrical grid on a hot summer day. In an effort to underscore the seriousness of the threat, General Dempsey told the senators that he was so concerned about a cyberattack that he had skipped a meeting of the National Security Council on Iran to attend the briefing. The briefings gave new urgency to the legislation, which for years has been the subject of talks among senior lawmakers who include Senators Collins and Lieberman as well as Senator John D. Rockefeller, the West Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the Commerce Committee.

Ms. Collins said that while many high-ranking administration officials had been involved in lobbying members of Congress to pass the bill, she was disappointed that President Obama had not been more personally involved in raising awareness.

“Other than writing an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal and a call to both Joe Lieberman and me a couple of months ago, the president has been largely absent from the debate,” she said.

Ms. Collins said there might have been a different outcome for the bill “if the president had been more active when we were under assault.”

A White House spokeswoman declined to comment.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/28/u...rity-bill.html





Tatu Ylonen, Father of SSH, Says Security is 'Getting Worse'

Q&A: Creator of Secure Shell protocol on cyberwarfare, and why key management can be a 'ticking time bomb'
Ellen Messmer

Tatu Ylonen has garnered fame in technology circles as the inventor of Secure Shell (SSH), the widely used protocol to protect data communications. The CEO of SSH Communications Security -- whose crypto-based technology invented in 1995 continues to be used in hundreds of millions of computers, routers and servers -- recently spoke with Network World on a variety of security topics. (At the Black Hat Conference this week, his company is also announcing CryptoAuditor.)

In the past we've discussed your growing up in Finland during the Cold War. And we've talked about how you invented SSH encryption as an open protocol in the 1990s when the U.S. was trying to force vendors to install a key-escrow system in every product using encryption so the government could gain access to encrypted data. So do you think the world's security is better now or worse?

I think it's getting worse. Consumer privacy is disappearing totally. And SSL [Secure Sockets Layer] is being questioned and the problem isn't the protocol itself but the key infrastructure. There have been several incidents where someone has stolen from the certificate authorities.

This stolen SSL certificate issue is certainly well known. Do you think SSL is useless?

Probably not useless but less useful than ever. It's much too easy for someone to break the encryption itself by creating fake certificates. Any major government can do it, as well as criminal organizations. And they are doing it. Definitely, we see the example for this in the Flame virus, forging certificates.

But what if anything could replace the SSL certificate infrastructure?

For consumers in the short term, no. But SSH is an option, especially for automation. It would require an extension to SSH. I actively proposed it to replace SSL 15 years ago but I was basically railroaded at the IETF by Microsoft and Sun!

As you mentioned, consumer privacy is disappearing online, especially with the kind of hyperactive marketing we do full-tilt in the U.S. Does the European viewpoint on data privacy for consumers seem to differ?

Laws are tighter in Europe but people use the same services. The real problem in my view is that you can target information to modify how they think. ... When you can control information for people -- it's an extremely powerful political tool.

That brings to mind that the Russia parliament just passed an Internet censorship bill. What do you think about that?

It's worrisome. Information that's gathered is highly valued for cyberwarfare because people can always get access codes and backdoors into people's home computers with malware, via e-mail or whatever. On the enterprise side, firewalls are becoming less and less protective because it's difficult to do firewalling when traffic is encrypted. Take the highly specific malware, such as when RSA was compromised. That was a customized email pretending to be something else. The more you know about targets, the more you can send them.

Stuxnet and Flame are now believed to be cyberwarfare tools developed by the U.S. and Israel, with President Obama authorizing use of Stuxnet against Iran. Is this kind of cyber-weapon something that should be part of arms negotiations, for instance, or just the new normal for governments?

It's fast going to be the new normal. Secret wars? I hope not. But it might be. Flame took advantage of a fake Microsoft Update Service. Whoever controls your Internet access can install anything they want.

Attackers can gain a lot of information from the information we leave about ourselves on social networking sites. Is social networking too risky to use?

The technology is too important to not use it. We need the Internet and social-networking tools.

So when it comes to SSH, is this still an open protocol?

SSH is fully open and implementations are fully interoperable. We have extensions in our products, which are mostly used in embedded systems. It's to protect passwords and any other data you don't want to pass in the clear over the Internet or even your internal network. It's mostly used by systems administrators. There have basically been two version of the SSH protocol over the years, SSH1 and SSH2, which has been around about 15 years.

So we've heard a lot over the years about SSH used in the enterprise. But what about for cloud services? Does it fit there?

Every cloud service provider uses SSH to manage the cloud. Amazon uses SSH to manage the underlying infrastructure in two layers. There's a need to manage the keys for automation. Those keys provide access from one computer to another. Banks and every other major system out there could have 100,000 servers and 200,000 to 400,000 authentication keys. When we talk to the cloud service providers, it's in the eight digits in terms of the numbers of servers. How do we make that scale and automate the system?

Key management has always been a tough problem. But you say this issue of figuring out key management is now harder than ever?

We work a lot with the large banks that use SSH. When we go to look at their networks, which are automated, they have something like eight authentication keys for access to the network. Some haven't changed in 10 years! It's a ticking time bomb. Sometimes they don't know who can access the systems. At one large bank, there are 200 systems administrators setting up keys for 200,000 systems. These are small files. Someone could copy all the keys in a USB stick. The key continues to provide access even after you've left the organization.

The authorization keys grant you the same access as a password. You can change the encryption software. This is something that's a problem. This has been fairly little known and unnoticed for the last 15 years. Organizations haven't really handled the management of the keys. It's so technical, so deep inside the systems. Auditors haven't known about it. This is a top focus for us.

Starting this spring, we've been piloting Universal SSH Key Manager, piloting it with a customer, for machine-to-machine communications. It solves three problems, knowing what you have, the trusted relationship with computers, and automating the management of the keys. One customer has a 15-person dedicated team doing key management, and they've had three failed projects trying to solve this problem.

So what is the CryptoAuditor product that SSH Communications Security is announcing today?

It's for auditing encrypted connections for visibility of content in an encrypted session. You have internal firewalls and all the connections are encrypted. We work with DLP [data-loss prevention] providers and others with the ICAP protocol. The goal is to control what gets transmitted across the firewall, and for auditing.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/201...en-261134.html





This Cute Chat Site Could Save Your Life and Help Overthrow Your Government
Quinn Norton

Twenty-one-year-old college student Nadim Kobeissi is from Canada, Lebanon and the internet.

He is the creator of Cryptocat, a project “to combine my love of cryptography and cats,” he explained to an overflowing audience of hackers at the HOPE conference on Saturday, July 14.

The site, crypto.cat, has a chunky, 8-bit sensibility, with a big-eyed binary cat in the corner. The visitor has the option to name, then enter a chat. There’s some explanatory text, but little else. It’s deceptively simple for a web app that can save lives, subvert governments and frustrate marketers. But as little as two years ago such a site was considered to be likely impossible to code.

Cryptocat is an encrypted web-based chat. It’s the first chat client in the browser to allow anyone to use end-to-end encryption to communicate without the problems of SSL, the standard way browsers do crypto, or mucking about with downloading and installing other software. For Kobeissi, that means non-technical people anywhere in the world can talk without fear of online snooping from corporations, criminals or governments.

“The fact that you don’t have to install anything, the fact that it works instantly, this increases security,” he explained, sitting down with Wired at HOPE 9 to talk about Cryptocat, activism and getting through American airports.

To create Cryptocat Kobeissi had to deal with controversies in computer security, usability and geo-politics.

When he flies through the US, he’s generally had the notorious “SSSS” printed on his boarding pass, marking him for searches and interrogations — which Kobeissi says have focused on his development of the chat client.

Online privacy doesn’t have a lot of corporate or governmental fans these days, but Kobeissi has faced controversy before.

“During 2010 and 2011 I was a defender of WikiLeaks and the free press in general, and I thought ‘Collateral Murder’ (the WikiLeaks publication of a controversial helicopter assault video) was a highly significant piece of journalism,” he said.

He mirrored WikiLeaks content and organized a march in support of the organization during the period in late 2010 when WikiLeaks found itself thrown off of Amazon’s hosting service and blocked by credit card companies. “I know for certain that it’s contributed to other defenders of WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning being harassed, so it’s somewhat likely that I could also be targeted.” Still, Kobeissi points out that he’s never been questioned about WikiLeaks, only about Cryptocat.

His SSSS’s can mean hours of waiting, and Kobeissi says he has been searched, questioned, had his bags and even his passport taken away and returned later. But he’s kept his sense of humor about the experience, even joking from the airport on his Twitter account.

WHAT AN SSSS FOR THE FIFTH TIME IN A ROW HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN I AM SO SURPRISED THIS IS SO SURPRISING twitter.com/kaepora/status…

— Nadim Kobeissi (@kaepora) June 17, 2012


The young and cheerfully sarcastic Kobeissi is somewhat baffled by the border attention. Kobeissi said that in one of his last U.S. trips through Charlotte, NC, “In total I was searched either three or four times,” — in a single visit. “Why? Do bombs materialize? I don’t understand,” he continued. If the searches, delays, and interrogations about Cryptocat are an intimidation tactic, they haven’t worked.

“Dear US Government, I’m from Lebanon,” Kobeissi said, laughing. “You don’t scare me, you don’t understand. My friends were killed in 2008, my house was bombed and my neighborhood ruined. My father was killed in 2006. You don’t scare me at all. If you want to scare me, send me for torture in Syria. But you can’t anymore, because Syrians are revolting.”

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman declined to comment on Kobeissi’s detentions at the border, saying he was prohibited from doing so by privacy laws, though he maintains that it plays nicely with foreigners.

The United States has been and continues to be a welcoming nation. U.S. Customs and Border Protection not only protects U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents in the country but also wants to ensure the safety of our international travelers who come to visit, study and conduct legitimate business in our country.

Our dual mission is to facilitate travel in the United States while we secure our borders, our people and our visitors from those that would do us harm like terrorists and terrorist weapons, criminals, and contraband. CBP officers are charged with enforcing not only immigration and customs laws, but they enforce over 400 laws for 40 other agencies and have stopped thousands of violators of U.S. law.

CBP strives to treat all travelers with respect and in a professional manner, while maintaining the focus of our mission to protect all citizens and visitors in the United States.


To get Cryptocat to the hands of Syrians resisting their government, or Canadians resisting being profiled by marketers, Kobeissi had to build a crypto tool in a place where no crypto tool has ever flourished — your browser. “You have to make it just as easily accessible as Facebook Chat or Google Talk, which is what I’m trying to do with Cryptocat,” he said.

Google, Facebook and a infinite variety of other sites are pushing more functionality into the browser to increase the power of web apps, and the browser has become, for many people, the main interface of their computer. But from a security point of view, the browser has always failed to provide for users — in no way worse than in cryptography.

Encrypting data to keep it away from prying eyes, be they hackers or nations has proved nearly impossible in the browser, which has relied on one standard to do everything: SSL, which is known to be broken. The terrible state of browser security plagued Kobeissi in his work to build Cryptocat.

“Browsers are huge, complex, multilayered beasts with lots of moving parts, and every last one of them implements at best some dialect of each of the many standards that a modern browser has to support,” said Meredith Patterson, a senior research scientist at Red Lambda. Patterson deals with security and cryptography on an architectural level in her research, and has reviewed and commented on Cryptocat.

Problems like bad browser sandboxing meant that something in one tab could affect a session in a Cryptocat window. No libraries or standards existed to handle normal encryption functions in Javascript. The biggest problem is that delivery of Javascript code from server to browser could be intercepted and modified by breaking the SSL connection without a user ever knowing they were running malicious code.

Kobeissi faced criticism from the security community for even trying, but he persevered. Now more than a year later, “Cryptocat has significantly advanced the field of browser crypto,” he said with obvious pride. “We implemented elliptic curve cryptography, (and) a cryptographically secure random number generator in the browser,” along with creating a Cryptocat Chrome app to address the code delivery problem.

“I don’t think Nadim really knew what he was in for when he started this project, but although it got off to a bumpy start, he’s risen to the occasion admirably,” said Patterson.

But Kobeissi also knows that it’s equally important that Cryptocat be usable and pretty. Kobeissi wants Cryptocat to be something you want to use, not just need to. Encrypted chat tools have existed for years — but have largely stayed in the hands of geeks, who usually aren’t the ones most likely to need strong crypto. “Security is not just good crypto. It’s very important to have good crypto, and audit it. Security is not possible without (that), but security is equally impossible without making it accessible.”

Patterson agrees with Kobeissi’s approach. “As much as it drives all of us nerds batshit, J. Random internet user spends most if not all of her time in the browser, and generally doesn’t care to install even a separate email client — much less a separate chat client,” she said. “If you don’t go where the users live, you don’t get users. End of story.”

Nevertheless, Kobeissi has said repeatedly that Cryptocat is an experiment. Structural flaws in browser security and Javascript still dog the project as it moves toward version 2, scheduled for the end of the year. Cryptocat 2 will be a full Jabber client, allowing for both current style OTR and Multi Party, or mpOTR for group chats. OTR is Off-The-Record messaging, the current gold standard in encrypted chat. (Not to be confused with Google Talk’s OTR, which is not encrypted at all.)

He isn’t eager to bet his life on his work to date. But in environments like the Arab revolts, he acknowledges that for all of Cryptocat’s flaws, it’s better than software many people in Arab countries use right now, which can put them in tremendous danger. “If the alternative is Facebook Chat or Google Talk or Skype… please use Cryptocat by all means, but it’s still an experiment.”

Thus far Cryptocat hasn’t penetrated far into the consciousness of the common user, but for some groups in need of secure communications, it’s already part of the toolkit. “High security, simple to use,” said an active participant in the internet collective Anonymous, which has faced prosecution and worse the world over. “If it’s a hurry and someone needs something quickly, Cryptocat.”

Kobeissi himself grew up in Beirut, Lebanon. Besides authoring the secure chat tool and being a security researcher, he’s a political science and philosophy major at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. His post-college job is set — he’ll be developing Cryptocat full time, living on grant money for the project.

He emigrated to Canada after a conversation with his mother, when the-then teenager came to realize he might not live very long in Lebanon — an situation that informed his software design. He’s vocal about his love of his adopted home in Canada, as well about how the internet and games kept him going through the rough times in the wartorn country of his birth, “The happiest things in my childhood were Sega Game Gear and Sega Genesis.” It’s clear that Cryptocat’s distinctive 8-bit feel isn’t just a gimmick.
Nowadays he sees himself as coming from two cultures, North American and Middle Eastern, and it gives him a rare perspective on both the need and usefulness of getting crypto into the hands of everyone.

“This is something North Americans don’t realize. Here we’re exporting cryptography software. Generally, especially in today’s context, the Middle East imports cryptographic software, but it’s… a foreign product. A foreign civilization made it,” he said.

He believes that by building Cryptocat with more sensitivity to the pleasures of the user, he can help the people that need secure communications most. “I want it to be something that has a nice color scheme, that works in your browser, that you can open instantly, that’s easily accessible, that has a cat, that has audio notifications, that has desktop notifications,” Kobeissi said, “Because these are important security features.”

When faced with the torture of using crypto software or the torture of a repressive government, some dissidents have — intentionally or not — opted for the latter.

“I have seen someone who I know knows how to use OTR not use OTR, and get tortured as a result, in Syria… OTR is not accessible, it’s not a pleasure to use.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...n-for-all/all/





Tor Project Mulls $100 Cheque for Exit Relay Hosts
Darren Pauli

The Tor Project is considering paying operators to host exit relays in efforts to increase the speed and security of its global anonymity network.

Under early consideration is a suggestion by Tor founder Rodger Dingledine that operators receive $100 a month to cover bandwidth costs.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) has already donated an undisclosed amount of funds over 12 months to provide for at least 125 fast exit relays which would provide extra capacity for Tor users.

Exit relays are the last nodes within the global anonymity network. The Tor network becomes faster and generally more diverse as more nodes are added.

Anyone can establish an exit node by volunteering their bandwidth resources.

The burgeoning initative marks a change of stance by Dingledine who for years had declined to pay for exit relays, citing concerns it could reduce the diversityof the network.

"We've lined up our first funder BBG, and they're excited to have us start as soon as we can," Dingledine wrote on the Tor mailing list.

The backflip came about because exit node diversity was low: most Tor users choose one of just five of the fastest exit relays about a third of the time, from a pool of about 50 relays.

"Since extra capacity is clearly good for performance, and since we're not doing particularly well at diversity with the current approach, we're going to try [the] experiment," he said.

Performance of the network had steadily improved, however, thanks in part to better load balancing to larger relays and a healthier bandwidth to user ratio.

Dingledine suggested paid exit relays should have at least 100Mbit links and that organisations with large capacity networks and legal prowess be considered alongside smaller operators.

The legal muscle was necessary because of the potential for exit relays to funnel illicit traffic.

Dingledine posited other proposals to Tor users regarding the move. For example, it may turn exit relays into telcos, allow the network to operate in new legal juristictions, and require a committee of fast relay operators to decide where funding should be directed.

Yet he warned that the Tor Project must not become "addicted to external funding".

"So long as everybody is running an exit relay because they want to save the world, I think we should be fine," he said.

Tor relay operators, and interested internet providers were encouraged to join the discussion on the mailing list and Tor Project blog.
http://www.scmagazine.com.au/News/30...lay-hosts.aspx





UK PM's Ex-Media Chief, Friend Charged Over Hacking
Michael Holden and Kate Holton

Prime Minister David Cameron's ex-media chief and Rupert Murdoch's former UK newspaper boss are to be charged with phone-hacking offences in the most significant development in a scandal that has rocked Britain's establishment.

Prosecutors said on Tuesday that Andy Coulson, Cameron's communications director for four years until 2011, and Rebekah Brooks, who oversaw Murdoch's News International, would face charges of conspiracy to intercept communications.

The alleged offences were committed between 2000 and 2006 when both served as editor of the News of the World, the salacious Sunday tabloid which Murdoch was forced to close a year ago amid public disgust at the phone hacking revelations.

Among the alleged victims were two former home secretaries (interior ministers), former England soccer manager Sven-Goran Eriksson, Hollywood stars Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, former Beatle Paul McCartney and a minor member of the royal family.

Brooks and Coulson are also both accused of involvement in hacking the telephone of Milly Dowler, a missing schoolgirl who was later found murdered in 2002.

It was the revelation that News of the World journalists had hacked her phone that triggered a furor that engulfed Murdoch's News International and ultimately led to the closure of the 168-year-old News of the World.

"I am not guilty of these charges," Brooks said in a statement. "I did not authorize, nor was I aware of, phone hacking under my editorship.

"The charge concerning Milly Dowler is particularly upsetting not only as it is untrue but also because I have spent my journalistic career campaigning for victims of crime. I will vigorously defend these allegations."

Six other senior former News of the World journalists and staff, including the former managing editor, are also to be charged - a formality to be completed by police on Tuesday.

The maximum sentence for the phone-hacking charges is two years in prison and/or a fine.

The development is particularly embarrassing for Cameron because Coulson was also charged with hacking the phones of David Blunkett and Charles Clarke, two former home secretaries from the now-opposition Labour Party.

"That is an astonishing development and I think that is almost inevitably going to rebound on Cameron," Steven Barnett, professor of communications at Westminster University, told Reuters. "That is going to pose some very very awkward questions for the prime minister."

Alison Levitt, Principal Legal Adviser to the Director of Public Prosecutions, said she had concluded there was sufficient evidence to charge the eight suspects with 19 offences over the illegal accessing of voicemails on the mobile phones belonging to politicians, celebrities and sporting figures.

News International had for years denied that phone hacking was widespread after the tabloid's former royal reporter and private detective were jailed in 2007 for the crime.

LACK OF JUDGMENT

Coulson resigned in the aftermath, and took up the role as director of communications of Cameron's Conservative Party, helping to shape his campaign to become prime minister.

Critics say Cameron appointed Coulson in order to secure the backing of the journalist's former boss, Murdoch, and say the appointment showed a shocking lack of judgment.

The involvement of Coulson and Brooks - a close friend to Cameron - turned the long-running hacking story into a national political scandal that has laid bare the collusion between senior politicians, the police and the media.

Brooks, her husband and her personal staff have already been charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice over the hacking case, while Coulson has been charged in Scotland with perjury after he denied in an unrelated court case any knowledge of phone hacking.

Brooks, wooed by a string of politicians and prime ministers first in her role as editor of the News of the World and Sun tabloid, and then as the head of Murdoch's British newspaper arm News International, was one of the most powerful women in Britain, instantly recognizable by her long, curly red hair.

She was also close to Cameron, socializing with him over Christmas breaks, and both were embarrassed earlier this year when an inquiry into media ethics read out text messages sent between the two.

Cameron used to sign his frequent text messages to Brooks with an affectionate "LOL", which he thought stood for "lots of love".

Paul Farrelly, an opposition Labour lawmaker who questioned Rupert Murdoch and his son James as part of a parliamentary committee investigation into the hacking, said Tuesday's developments were damaging, but not fatal, for Cameron.

"My view is that what happens to Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks reflects on David Cameron's judgment in both the appointment of Coulson and in being seen to be so close to a certain newspaper empire," he told Reuters.

"Because it's been going on so long, it's in no way fatal to his premiership. What is more important to the survival of his premiership and the coalition is the economy."
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...86M0MS20120724





New Mac Trojan Installs Silently, No Password Required

Summary: A new Mac OS X Trojan referred to as OSX/Crisis silently infects OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and OS X 10.7 Lion. The threat was created in a way that is intended to make reverse engineering more difficult, an added extra that is more common with Windows malware than it is with Mac malware.
Emil Protalinski

A new Mac OS X Trojan has been discovered that drops different components depending on whether or not it is executed on a user account with Admin permissions. The threat installs itself silently (no user interaction required) and also does not need your user password to infect your Apple Mac. The backdoor component calls home to the IP address 176.58.100.37 every five minutes, awaiting instructions.

Intego, which had to update its anti-malware signatures upon discovering the threat, refers to it as "OSX/Crisis." The good news is that the security firm has yet to find OSX/Crisis in the wild; the company only stumbled upon it over at VirusTotal, a service for analyzing suspicious files and URLs.

This Trojan is like most: when run, it installs silently to create a backdoor. What makes this threat particularly worrying is that depending on whether or not it runs on a user account with Admin permissions, it will install different components, which use low-level system calls to hide their activities. Either way, it will always create a number of files and folders to complete its tasks.

If the dropper runs on a system with Admin permissions, it will drop a rootkit to hide itself. The malware creates 17 files when it's run with Admin permissions, 14 files when it's run without. Many of these are randomly named, but there are some that are consistent. With or without Admin permissions, this folder is created:

/Library/ScriptingAdditions/appleHID/

Only with Admin permissions, this folder is created:

/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/XPCServices/

Here's where it gets interesting. "The file is created in a way that is intended to make reverse engineering tools more difficult to use when analyzing the file," an Intego spokesperson said in a statement. "This sort of anti-analysis technique is common in Windows malware, but is relatively uncommon for OS X malware."

Curiously, this particular malware only affects OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and OS X 10.7 Lion. The latest threat further underlines the importance of protecting Macs against malware with an updated antivirus program as well as the latest security updates. That means you should start by getting OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion when it comes out Wednesday (although it's currently unclear whether OSX/Crisis or Mac security software will work on it).
http://www.zdnet.com/new-mac-trojan-...ed-7000001519/





So, Who Really Did Invent the Internet?
Michael Hiltzik

Gordon Crovitz of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page reopens the ancient debate over who invented the Internet with a column Monday calling out the notion that it was the government as an "urban legend."

And while I'm gratified in a sense that he cites my book about Xerox PARC, "Dealers of Lightning," to support his case, it's my duty to point out that he's wrong. My book bolsters, not contradicts, the argument that the Internet had its roots in the ARPANet, a government project. So let's look at where Crovitz goes awry.

First, he quotes Robert Taylor, who funded the ARPANet as a top official at the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, as stating, "The Arpanet was not an Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computer networks." (Taylor eventually moved to Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, where he oversaw the invention of the personal computer, and continued promoting research into networking.)

But Crovitz confuses AN internet with THE Internet. Taylor was citing a technical definition of "internet" in his statement. But I know Bob Taylor, Bob Taylor is a friend of mine, and I think I can say without fear of contradiction that he fully endorses the idea as a point of personal pride that the government-funded ARPANet was very much the precursor of the Internet as we know it today. Nor was ARPA's support "modest," as Crovitz contends. It was full-throated and total. Bob Taylor was the single most important figure in the history of the Internet, and he holds that stature because of his government role.

Crovitz then points out that TCP/IP, the fundamental communications protocol of the Internet, was invented by Vinton Cerf (though he fails to mention Cerf's partner, Robert Kahn). He points out that Tim Berners-Lee "gets credit for hyperlinks."

Lots of problems here. Cerf and Kahn did develop TCP/IP--on a government contract! And Berners-Lee doesn't get credit for hyperlinks--that belongs to Doug Engelbart of Stanford Research Institute, who showed them off in a legendary 1968 demo you can see here. Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web--and he did so at CERN, a European government consortium.

Cerf, by the way, wrote in 2009 that the ARPANet, on which he worked, "led, ultimately, to the Internet."

As for Ethernet, which Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs invented at PARC (under Taylor's watchful eye), that's by no means a precursor of the Internet, as Crovitz contends. It was, and is, a protocol for interconnecting computers and linking them to outside networks--such as the Internet. And Metcalfe drew his inspiration for the technology from ALOHANet, an ARPA-funded project at the University of Hawaii.

So the bottom line is that the Internet as we know it was indeed born as a government project. In fact, without ARPA and Bob Taylor, it could not have come into existence. Private enterprise had no interest in something so visionary and complex, with questionable commercial opportunities. Indeed, the private corporation that then owned monopoly control over America's communications network, AT&T, fought tooth and nail against the ARPANet. Luckily for us, a far-sighted government agency prevailed.

It's true that the Internet took off after it was privatized in 1995. But to be privatized, first you have to be government-owned. It's another testament to people often demeaned as "government bureaucrats" that they saw that the moment had come to set their child free.
http://www.latimes.com/business/mone...,5052169.story





The End of Chinese Manufacturing and Rebirth of U.S. Industry
Vivek Wadhwa

There is great concern about China’s real-estate and infrastructure bubbles. But these are just short-term challenges that China may be able to spend its way out of. The real threat to China’s economy is bigger and longer term: its manufacturing bubble.

By offering subsidies, cheap labor, and lax regulations and rigging its currency, China was able to seduce American companies to relocate their manufacturing operations there. Millions of American jobs moved to China, and manufacturing became the underpinning of China’s growth and prosperity. But rising labor costs, concerns over government-sponsored I.P. theft, and production time lags are already causing companies such as Dow Chemicals, Caterpillar, GE, and Ford to start moving some manufacturing back to the U.S. from China. Google recently announced that its Nexus Q streaming media player would be made in the U.S., and this put pressure on Apple to start following suit.

But rising costs and political pressure aren’t what’s going to rapidly change the equation. The disruption will come from a set of technologies that are advancing at exponential rates and converging.

These technologies include robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), 3D printing, and nanotechnology. These have been moving slowly so far, but are now beginning to advance exponentially just as computing does. Witness how computing has advanced to the point at which the smart phones we carry in our pockets have more processing power than the super computers of the ’60s—and how the Internet, which also has its origins in the ’60s, went on an exponential growth path about 15 years ago and rapidly changed the way we work, shop, and communicate. That’s what lies ahead for these new technologies.

The robots of today aren’t the Androids or Cylons that we used to see in science-fiction movies, but specialized electro-mechanical devices that are controlled by software and remote controls. As computers become more powerful, so do the abilities of these devices. Robots are now capable of performing surgery, milking cows, doing military reconnaissance and combat, and flying fighter jets. And DIY’ers are lending a helping hand. There are dozens of startups, such as Willow Garage, iRobot, and 9th Sense, selling robot-development kits for university students and open-source communities. They are creating ever more-sophisticated robots and new applications for these. Watch this video of the autonomous flying robots that University of Pennsylvania professor Vijay Kumar created with his students, for example.

The factory assembly that the Chinese are performing is child’s play for the next generation of robots—which will soon become cheaper than human labor. Indeed, one of China’s largest manufacturers, Taiwan-based Foxconn Technology Group, announced last August that it plans to install one million robots within three years to do the work that its workers in China presently do. It found Chinese labor to be too expensive and demanding. The world’s most advanced car, the Tesla Roadster, is also being manufactured in Silicon Valley, which is one of the most expensive places in the country. Tesla can afford this because it is using robots to do the assembly.

Then there is artificial intelligence (AI)—software that makes computers do things that, if humans did them, we would call intelligent. We left AI for dead after the hype it created in the ‘80s, but it is alive and kicking—and advancing rapidly. It is powering all sorts of technologies. This is the technology that IBM’s Deep Blue computer used in beating chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997and that enabled IBM’s Watson to beat TV-show Jeopardy champions in 2011. AI is making it possible to develop self-driving cars, voice-recognition systems such as Apple’s Siri, and the face-recognition software Facebook recently acquired. AI technologies are also finding their way into manufacturing and will allow us to design our own products at home with the aid of AI-powered design assistants.

How will we turn these designs into products? By “printing” them at home or at modern-day Kinko’s: shared public manufacturing facilities such as TechShop, a membership-based manufacturing workshop, using new manufacturing technologies that are now on the horizon.

A type of manufacturing called “additive manufacturing” is making it possible to cost-effectively “print” products. In conventional manufacturing, parts are produced by humans using power-driven machine tools, such as saws, lathes, milling machines, and drill presses, to physically remove material to obtain the shape desired. This is a cumbersome process that becomes more difficult and time-consuming with increasing complexity. In other words, the more complex the product you want to create, the more labor is required and the greater the effort.

In additive manufacturing, parts are produced by melting successive layers of materials based on 3D models—adding materials rather than subtracting them. The “3D printers” that produce these use powered metal, droplets of plastic, and other materials—much like the toner cartridges that go into laser printers. This allows the creation of objects without any sort of tools or fixtures. The process doesn’t produce any waste material, and there is no additional cost for complexity. Just as, in using laser printers, a page filled with graphics doesn’t cost much more than one with text, in using a 3D printer, we can print sophisticated 3D structures for about the cost of a brick.

3D printers can already create physical mechanical devices, medical implants, jewelry, and even clothing. The cheapest 3D printers, which print rudimentary objects, currently sell for between $500 and $1000. Soon, we will have printers for this price that can print toys and household goods. By the end of this decade, we will see 3D printers doing the small-scale production of previously labor-intensive crafts and goods. It is entirely conceivable that in the next decade we start 3D-printing buildings and electronics.

In the next decade, we will see further advances. Engineers and scientists are today developing new types of materials, such as carbon nanotubes, ceramic-matrix nanocomposites, and new carbon fibers. These new materials make it possible to create products that are stronger, lighter, more energy-efficient, and more durable than existing manufactured goods. A new field—molecular manufacturing—will take this one step further and make it possible to program molecules inexpensively, with atomic precision. The materials we use for manufacturing and techniques for production will be nothing like the assembly-based processes that exist in China—and the U.S.—today.

Even if the Chinese automate their factories with AI-powered robots and manufacture 3D printers, it will no longer make sense to ship raw materials all the way to China to have them assembled into finished products and shipped back to the U.S. Manufacturing will once again become a local industry with products being manufactured near raw materials or markets.

So China has many reasons to worry, and manufacturing will undoubtedly return to the U.S.—if not in this decade then early in the next. But the same jobs that left the U.S. won’t come back: they won’t exist. What will the new jobs be? We can only guess. Autodesk CEO Carl Bass says that just as we have created new, higher-paying jobs in every other industrial transition, we will create a new set of industries and professions in this one. Look at the new types of jobs and multi-billion dollar businesses that the Internet and mobile industries created—these came out of nowhere and changed our lives, Bass says.

Carl Bass is one of the leading authorities on 3D printing and digital manufacturing, and I share his optimism that we will create an era of abundance. But I worry if we will create the new jobs fast enough and distribute the prosperity. Carl and I discussed this at Singularity University a few months ago. And I also discussed China manufacturing with The Economist China bureau chief, Vijay Vaitheeswaran. You can find these videos below.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/singular...-u-s-industry/





Far from Silicon Valley, Tech Industry Finds an Oracle
Noel Randewich

Anand Shimpi is one of the most influential tech industry figures you've never heard of.

From his start as a teenager building PCs for students and faculty at a college in his hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina, he's become one of the semiconductor industry's most closely watched reviewers. His website, AnandTech.com, is all about product performance, plain and simple.

Shimpi measures exactly how fast the latest Intel processor really is, how quickly that graphics chip will render the latest video game, how long that laptop battery will last.

At age 30, Shimpi is courted by technology executives and followed by Wall Street analysts keen to hear his well-informed product views. He briefs Intel executives, dines with Asian PC executives and commands a loyal following of tech enthusiasts, with AnandTech.com drawing 12 million unique visitors per month.

His workbench at his home in Raleigh is cluttered with high-end storage drives, laptops and recently released tablets, one of them playing a Harry Potter movie in an endless loop. A storage room is filled with hundreds of other products shipped to him over the years, and he says UPS drops more gear off almost every day.

"All of this is used in one form or another," Shimpi says, gesturing toward the stacks of equipment.

Poor marks in one of his so-called benchmark reviews, focusing strictly on performance data, can mean trouble for a new product.

And because Shimpi amasses performance data on a wide range of chips and other products, he sometimes has more insight in certain areas than companies' own design engineers, said Alex Mei, chief marketing officer for enterprise storage vendor OCZ Technology.

"His criticism carries more weight," said Mei. "He really has a bead on what his readers are looking for."

Indeed, OCZ altered the design of a solid-state drive a couple years ago to take into account Shimpi's suggestions about how customers would likely use the product.

AnandTech is not alone in the benchmark review business; sites including The Tech Report and Tom's Hardware have a similar obsession with performance data, though smaller followings.

But many chip executives, Wall Street investors and technically minded consumers see Shimpi's meticulously collected test results as the most authoritative and highly trustable.

Dozens of widely read blogs write more subjective - and often more easily digestible - reviews of laptops, phones and tablets based to a large degree on how much the reviewer likes the product. Increasingly, those reviewers conduct limited tests of their own, using "off the shelf" benchmark tools.

Still others make mention of Shimpi's data, painstakingly collected using proprietary tests he has developed over the years.

"We have known Anand for a long time," Jonney Shih, chairman of the big Taiwanese computer-maker Asus, told Reuters by email. "We definitely share a passion for technology and we respect his in-depth knowledge and the thorough testing that he does."

HOBBYISTS GO PRO

Today, reviewers are turning to benchmark tests to evaluate the chips, touch screens and batteries in the latest tablets and smarpthones, a fast-growing market in which Apple, Samsung, Intel, Qualcomm and others are competing fiercely.

But the niche business made its mark during the personal computer boom of the 1990s, when chipmakers fought for bragging rights about everything from clock speeds to latency.

Developing scientific ways to verify manufacturers' claims and compare the performance of motherboards, processors and other components became a hobby among a small group of tech enthusiasts.

Data was compiled in reviews and posted on websites where they were read by legions of other technophiles, who in turn have become an important target for tech industry marketers.

"They're the decision makers, influencers, guys who work in IT jobs during the day and play games at night, that people go to for advice when they have questions about technology," Chris Angelini, who started reviewing PC parts while at college and is now editor of Tom's Hardware, said of his readers.

As they gained attention in the industry, the benchmark reviewers grew more sophisticated - and attracted yet more attention from industry watchers.

Stock analysts, for one, have come to rely on the data when projecting product sales.

"We don't have tools to go out and measure these things ourselves, so we depend on independent third parties to take the devices and tell us things like what does the performance look like and how does it stack up relative to the competition," said Shawn Webster, a chip analyst at Macquarie.

This year, stock analysts have cited AnandTech measurements in more than 70 reports about Intel, Nvidia and other chipmakers.

With AnandTech attracting a large, specialized audience of cutting edge techies, it has plenty of advertising. The website has more than a dozen reviewers and editors, and has done well enough to make Shimpi a wealthy man.

The rise of smartphones and tablets has presented some new challenges to performance testers, but those devices have also created demand for more reviews. Shimpi believes he can continue to prosper by sticking to a simple mantra.

"What are they not telling me?" he regularly asks, referring to the companies whose devices he tests.

HARRY POTTER

Shimpi recently demonstrated how he works, running scripted videogame sequences on a MacBook Air to test the performance of its graphics chip. That's just one example of several tests he runs on each device he reviews. The Harry Potter movie playing over and over on a Google Nexus 7 tablet was part of a test to document its battery life.

Shimpi carries out measurements several times for each device, with the results feeding spreadsheets with thousands of data points. It's a never-ending process as Shimpi adds new products to his database and runs new benchmarks on older ones.

Chip executives have embraced the most professional of the benchmark reviewers and ship them samples of their new products, often ahead of their release. In return, they get objective feedback.

"We literally go into every review site in the world we can find, and our teams read the reviews, and they decide internally whether it was a good review for us or a good review for the competition," Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive of chipmaker Nvidia, told investors at a conference in May.

To make sure his reviews are ready in time for product launches, Shimpi pulls all-nighters and lays out his testing gear in hotel rooms during his frequent travels.

"If you put in an honest seven days of work - I'm not saying eight hours a day or less, I'm saying if you don't sleep for a couple of nights, and that's all you live and breathe and do - I think it's possible to deliver a good review within that seven-day period," Shimpi said.

"Anything less and you start making sacrifices."

Evaluating PC processors is a matter of connecting them to one of the motherboards on Shimpi's table and running standard tests established over a decade ago. Testing the components in a mobile device like an iPad is trickier because it cannot easily be opened up and tinkered with.

To adapt, reviewers are resorting to some decidedly low-tech tools like stopwatches and cameras to measure the quality of tablet displays, how quickly web pages load, and battery life.

EARLY START

Soon after his start in high school building PCs for students and faculty at Saint Augustine's College in Raleigh, where his father taught computer science, Shimpi created a website and started writing about components. He quickly gained a following with a rapidly growing niche of PC enthusiasts.

"I would build the PC for free and then say I want to review this stuff before I give you your computer," Shimpi said. "As I got popular, a couple of resellers wanted to put ads on my site. So I gave them ad spots in return for more hardware to review."

As the website grew, Shimpi started getting invitations to visit with companies and attend trade shows. Self-conscious about his age, he wore suits to meetings.

AnandTech soon made the teenager financially independent. He went on to study computer engineering at North Carolina State University while continuing to build his business.

Today he stills wears a suit to meetings and trade shows - sometimes accompanied by sneakers. He deliberately maintains a distance between his personal life and the tech world, even if that means frequent, long flights to Silicon Valley to visit chip execs.

His sprawling house, which he had built, includes a storage room for the parts companies have sent him over the years. It also includes a professional-quality home theater, carefully designed with the help of a reader and controlled by a computer Shimpi cobbled together for the task.

Plastic guitars and drums - the virtual instruments of the Rock Band videogame - are strewn across a sofa but Shimpi complains that he and his girlfriend, a sculptor who lives with him, are too busy to play much.

He takes phone calls from investors who pay him for his advice and spends more and more time hunkered down with design engineers. But Shimpi says his main focus will remain AnandTech's readers - the sort of tech fans who spend hours reading up on new products before deciding which to buy.

"I don't care so much how this affects the companies," Shimpi said. "They're going to be okay. It's the guy putting $200 down that he worked really hard for, and some guy he's never met is telling him he should do that. They're the reason I get to do this."

(Editing by Edwin Chan, Jonathan Weber and Leslie Adler)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...86Q05120120727





Apocalypse Soon: Tom Hanks Discusses His Web Series ‘Electric City’
Dave Itzkoff

Whether you know Tom Hanks for his performances as a boy in a man’s body or a history-shaping simpleton, an officer in World War II or a lawyer with AIDS, his latest project may present him in his most surprising roles to date. In “Electric City,” an animated Web series that makes its debut Tuesday on Yahoo, he provides the voice of Cleveland Carr, a mysterious operative in a future world where society is still putting itself back together after cataclysmic events. He is also a creator of the series, which is produced by his company, Playtone, and the Indian media company Reliance Entertainment, and worked closely on shaping the world of “Electric City” from his colorful memories of sci-fi culture past and sometimes dark imagination of events to come.

Mr. Hanks spoke recently to ArtsBeat about the creation of “Electric City,” his thoughts on Internet content and the supreme importance of pizza to post-collapse civilization. These are excerpts from that conversation.

Q.We previously talked about this project when you announced it almost two years ago. How long has it been gestating?

A.A hundred million years. We didn’t know it but we were waiting for this current version of the Internet to exist. When we started out, I thought wouldn’t it be hilarious if we took a very familiar, kitschy form, smack-dab out of our sense of nostalgia – the thing that for me begins somewhere between 1963 and 1965, “Fireball XL5” is on now and when “Clutch Cargo” is over it’s time to get dressed to go to school – what if we took that and applied it to something that was just deadly serious? Let’s take just the audio track of the scene from “The Godfather” where Michael Corleone kills Sollozzo in the Italian restaurant and also shoots Sterling Hayden, and build it for puppets.

Q.So what happened with that?

A.Well, we never did that, but it started off this character of Cleveland Carr, a guy of extremely mixed morals, who is doing good but doing it in a bad way. We came up with the scene of a meeting between him and this old lady who is his boss. And we worked with really great marionette folks out here in Glendale that do all kinds of stuff on the Internet. And let me tell you something, the production values that go into building something like that are exactly the same as doing anything else. Where do you show this? Who buys this thing and puts it on TV? And the fact is that no one does. [laughs] But it prompted the longer, ongoing possibility – we said, “What world do they inhabit exactly?”

Q.How would you describe the world that “Electric City” takes place in?

A.We were aiming for something other than the build-up to the collapse of the world, or the immediate dystopia that exists right after it. This is now onto the third or fourth generation, after the pioneers have established everything. If you took American history, it would probably exist somewhere about 1720. As time went by, they were able to develop a version of society, but it’s not Version 2.0. It’s like Version negative 0.6. It’s smaller, it’s primitive, it’s very dangerous – you could die if you get a toothache. Winters could kill people. We took away all of the digital world, more specifically the binary world. There are no more 1’s and 0’s that you can string along. The hardware is gone. Everything that had become a common possession and part of the way society worked is gone. And it disappeared because, essentially, the power went away. The grid disappeared.

Q.What else do you have to contemplate when you’re thinking up a post-apocalyptic society?

A.We had long, long, long discussions about, what is money? We’ll call it something like credit vouchers. You can go into your local regenerating station and, in the course of a week, pump up 300 kilowatts. You get some credit vouchers and that’ll keep you in food. One day we were all sitting around talking and somebody said, “What is pizza?” I said, “Oh man. That is true.” So instead it became noodles. That’s like coming up with what warp drive is, or how it’s possible to transport down to a planet without taking a rocket ship.

Q.Of all the characters in the series, the one who is ruggedly handsome, good in a fight and gets all the ladies –

A.Gets a lady.

Q.– happens to be voiced by you. How did that work out?

A.Well, you gotta voice it somehow. Sometimes you ask somebody to come in because their voice is really great. And other times it’s like, well, who do we know? [laughs] I went in and did it. It’s enough of a vanity project as it is. Is it still called “Tom Hanks’ Electric City”? [It is.] That’s embarrassing. I like to view it like it’s Del Webb’s Sierra Tahoe or Walter Lantz’s “Woody Woodpecker.”

Q.There are many elements in the series — not only the between-the-sheets intrigue and some graphic violence, but also a persistent dystopian tone — that people might not expect from a project with your name on it. Are these the kinds of things you like to see in other people’s storytelling?

A.I’m not a huge science-fiction reader, but I read a lot of fiction that is based in non-fiction worlds. When I was growing up I discovered Heinlein, and now, I’m reading Alan Furst’s books about espionage prior to World War II. It’s all fake characters, but they’re living governed by the rules of the time. In “Electric City,” we always try to adhere to human behavior. Human nature is always: I’d like to have another piece of pizza. [laughs] Even if there’s no more pizza left, I’d like to have another one. There are savage people out there, and they use that version of savagery certainly for bad. But there are those who come along with retribution and their sense of what justice is.

Q.Could something like this, that is so different from your other work, have an impact on the Tom Hanks brand?

A.I don’t think so. The reality is, none of that stuff matters any more. I’ll speak in highfalutin tones if you wish: as an artist, my desire has always been to expand the horizon of what I get to examine. And without a doubt, I have a countenance, if you want to call it that, that does in fact permeate every role I’ve ever done. It’s me, whether I’m executing people on “The Green Mile” or if I’m trying to figure who this e-mail lover is and it turns out to be Meg Ryan. As a producer, we’ve already done some stuff that’s pretty bodacious, I must say. When the guys on “Big Love” said they want to do this thing about a renegade Mormon polygamy sect, I said, “I’ve never seen that before – let’s go.” Our World War II stuff always kind of gets grouped into the patriotic celebration-of-heroes bag. But one of the things I must say I always revert to – very rarely is there such a thing as an all-encompassing bad guy. Everybody does things for very specific reasons and they can rationalize all their behavior. And if you’re so inclined, you can agree with them.

Q.Episodic Web series are still something of a holy grail in that no one’s created one yet that has gotten a mass audience to sit up and take notice. Is that your goal here?

A.Our goal really was just to get it up and have it be a cohesive story. Although no one else has, we gave up long ago the idea that you can make money doing this. [laughs] It has yet to happen, and I think it has yet to happen because at the end of the day it is all free. The only way you could probably make money is if you put it out there and somebody else comes to us and says, “Hey, we’d like to do – blank.” “We’d like to turn it into a series or movie.” There’s no crap shoot for us in our current status. We can’t lose money on this thing. It exists purely for the content, for people to watch on – the Reliance guys come in and say, there are a billion phones in India, a billion people will watch this on their phones in India. What they’re talking about is software for their hardware. All we had to do is pay everybody’s salaries, and then after that it simply exists.

Q.But that money still comes out of somebody’s pocket somewhere.

A.Well, here’s how I understand it, because I’ve asked this question really well. I have asked this of the people who were running Yahoo back at the time when we started. Now they’re all new people. [laughs] The question was, “Explain to me how this is good for Yahoo?” And it just is: “Then you’d click on the Yahoo page.” And that’s all they want. They want the eyeballs. They say, “Let us pay you to create content,” and we say, “Great, because we have this content we’re really excited about.” But the caveat is, no one gets rich. [laughs] Everybody got a check for doing this. I don’t think anybody makes money at this thing. But they get the freedom in order to do whatever they want to do. And that’s palpable, man. That gets everybody excited. We get to do whatever we want to do here? Yeah, you do. Well, sign us up, we got another 20 story ideas. And it could go on and on and on forever.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/20...electric-city/





A Studio With Violence in Its Bones

Warner Brothers and Its Decades of Violent Films
Michael Cieply

Family films are in the DNA at Walt Disney.

Universal Pictures has a weakness for monsters.

And Warner Brothers? Its movies have often displayed a violent streak.

For decades Warner’s films have frequently put the studio in the middle of a perpetual and unresolved debate over violence in the cinema and in real life. That debate has been revived after the deadly shootings last Friday in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater at an opening night showing of “The Dark Knight Rises,” from Warner.

While the box-office success of “Dark Knight” seems assured — the opening weekend produced $160 million in North American sales — Warner executives have decided to delay the planned Sept. 7 release of another film, “Gangster Squad,” according to a person who was briefed on the studio’s plans on Tuesday and spoke anonymously because the change has not been officially announced. The film is a hard-edged cinematic portrayal of the police war on mobsters in mid-20th-century Los Angeles.

Trailers for the movie, which showed gunmen firing into a movie theater, were pulled after the shooting last week. Executives have further debated whether to go so far as to reshoot portions of “Gangster Squad,” according to published reports. Warner executives declined through a spokeswoman to discuss their plan or the studio’s posture in general toward screen violence.

To go forward with “Gangster Squad” as is might trigger revulsion at scenes that seem to recall the movie-theater slaughter in Colorado. But to change it substantially or delay it for long (no new date has been set) might seem to acknowledge an otherwise debatable link between movie violence and real events, breathing life into a discussion that is perhaps more familiar at Warner than at any of Hollywood’s major studios.

If Warner has been more daring, and often more masterly, in its handling of screen violence, that owes much to a tradition rooted in the 1930s, when brothers named Warner — Harry, Albert and Jack — were still a force at the studio. As musicals began to fade, the Warners joined their production chief, Darryl F. Zanuck, in producing a series of violent gangster films that claimed to be ripped from the headlines of newspapers that sometimes, in turn, blamed Warner for inciting the behavior it dramatized.

The best known of Warner’s early gangster titles were “Little Caesar,” “Public Enemy” and “I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang.”

A real-life chain-gang member was portrayed in “I Am a Fugitive,” which was released amid a public outcry over brutality in the name of law. A chain-gang warden sued Warner for defaming him in the film. And the studio had thus entered the fray.

Two Warner films, Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Wild Bunch,” by Sam Peckinpah, were at the heart of a social and critical debate in the 1960s over what A. O. Scott, writing more recently in The New York Times, called “the connoisseurship of violence.”

But it was “A Clockwork Orange,” which was directed by Stanley Kubrick and had its United States premiere on Dec. 19, 1971, that drew Warner deep into the controversy over movies and their presumed consequences.

A fantasy about violent young sociopaths in a skewed future, the movie was sold with a tag line that promised “rape, ultraviolence and Beethoven.” In one English town a woman was later reported in news accounts to have been raped by a gang who sang “Singin’ in the Rain,” imitating a character played by Malcolm McDowell in the movie. A fairground worker said to have been obsessed with the movie beat two women to death in incidents 13 years apart, it was also reported, and accounts said he had impersonated Mr. McDowell by wearing a bowler hat and playing the “William Tell” Overture on his rampages.

The veracity of these tie-ins to the film is uncertain. But Mr. Kubrick, said to be shaken by the movie’s reception, insisted that Warner pull “A Clockwork Orange” from release in Britain. And it was not shown there again until after his death in 1999.

But even as “A Clockwork Orange” was first being shown in the United States, Warner created a second set of shock waves, in December 1971, with the release of Don Siegel’s “Dirty Harry.” In it Clint Eastwood, as a San Francisco cop disgusted by the legal coddling of criminals, settled his scores with a .44 Magnum. “It has no pretensions to art; it is a simply told story of the Nietzschean superman and his sadomasochistic pleasures,” wrote an essayist for the Harvard Crimson, in an article that was reprinted in The Times on May 21, 1972.

By 1974 a writer for Variety had speculated on the movie’s supposed influence in a string of brutal incidents involving the San Francisco police. But Warner forged on, through five films in its “Dirty Harry” series with Mr. Eastwood and five more in its overlapping “Lethal Weapon” series, which cast Mel Gibson as a damaged Los Angeles cop who was portrayed as a danger to himself and others.

Early in the 1990s other studios and even stars as comfortable with screen violence as Arnold Schwarzenegger were backing away from an action genre that was believed by some to have gone too far. “The Last Action Hero,” released by Columbia Pictures in 1993 and starring Mr. Schwarzenegger, was actually conceived as a morality tale about a gun-crazed character who is persuaded to ease up when he perceives the corrosive effect of his craft on a real youth.

But that message was largely lost in the travails of script development at Columbia. And Warner, a powerful competitor, by then had successfully doubled down on violent genre films that, one after another, appeared to cross new thresholds.

Steven Seagal brought martial arts to the mix in a string of films that began with “Above the Law,” in 1988. Quentin Tarantino, the master of a new, more whimsical sort of violence, made his debut as a studio writer with “True Romance,” a drug-and-crime caper released by Warner in 1993.

“Natural Born Killers,” another film based on a story by Mr. Tarantino but directed by Oliver Stone and written by Mr. Stone and others, set up what may have been Warner’s most threatening encounter with real events, at least until the shooting last week.

That film, released in 1994, was about a pair of lovers, played by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, whose murderous spree was egged on by the media. Amid a flurry of crimes that were described as having copycat elements, Patsy Byers, a Louisiana store clerk, was shot and paralyzed by a couple, one of whom said she and her boyfriend had been influenced by the film.

Ms. Byers filed suit against Mr. Stone and Warner’s parent company, Time Warner. The United States Supreme Court, in a step that briefly shook the film industry, let stand a decision that allowed the lawsuit to proceed, on the theory that any movie designed to incite violence could indeed create liability. Eventually the case was dismissed in Louisiana on First Amendment grounds but not before Warner and Mr. Stone spent years in the legal system.

By the time the “Natural Born Killers” suit was ended, in 2002, “The Matrix,” again a Warner film, had already created a new kind of screen violence, by welding an elaborate fiction about hidden manipulators of the world as we know it to what had been a reliable formula in Burbank since the arrival of Steven Seagal — that is, the combination of big guns with frenetic martial arts.

With their intricacies and black-coated hero, played by Keanu Reeves, “The Matrix” and its two successors were, in a sense, antecedents to Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, which began in 2005 with “Batman Begins” and ends with “The Dark Knight Rises.” Rated R, however, the three “Matrix” movies were deadlier than the “Dark Knight” series. And they were blamed, of course, for copycat crimes, sometimes by defendants who entered pleas of insanity, claiming that they had been trying to escape from the Matrix portrayed in the film.

Three decades earlier, however, a Newsweek writer, in a review that derided the “lethal ugliness” of “Dirty Harry,” also registered the futility of worrying about the bad effects of a movie. Good-hearted pictures, the magazine reasoned, rarely seemed to do much good. “There is little chance that this right-wing fantasy will change things where decades of humanist films have failed,” the review said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/26/m...ent-films.html





Closed for Business
Matt Gemmell

I read earlier this week about a developer who made their Android version free after the $1 game was extensively pirated. Stories like this come as no surprise, but the industry press rarely deals with the core problem - and nor does Google.

I know a guy here in Edinburgh (a friend of a friend). He’s a nice guy. Runs his own business just as I do, and he’s a developer just as I am. We often end up chatting in the pub when we’re out in a large group. He has a bit of an “iOS is evil because it’s closed-source” thing going on, and likes to evangelise Android. It takes exactly one Jerry Maguire quote to chasten him (and bring a flush to his face) every time: show me the money.

People like to throw around figures about Android’s handset penetration. Yes, Android is on a lot of devices. That’s lovely. But the real question is: as a developer, can you make money from it?

If you’re not in the mobile apps business to make money, then great - congratulations. This is your bus stop. Off you go. Have a nice life. I, however, am in business to make money. I write code because I like doing that, but the business part is about making money. Otherwise I’d be a hobbyist, and I’d be doing something else during the day. I’m thrilled to be able to do something I enjoy as a business, and I’m doubly thrilled to do it from the comfort of my own home.

Whilst the aforementioned story about the Android game didn’t surprise me, it did horrify me. Android is designed to be difficult to make money from, and the core issue is that it’s open - with the corrosive mentality that surrounds such openness.

Designed for piracy

I previously wrote about the threshold of frustration at which piracy becomes easier than buying, but that’s not the case here. Buying an app on the Android Market is substantially similar to how you buys apps on iOS: you search, find the app, click Buy, confirm, and it downloads. It’s not an unduly onerous process, and certainly not a barrier to the business model. This isn’t piracy due to frustration.

It also wasn’t about price; the game was one dollar. Many iOS developers feel that the App Store is crippled with a race-to-the-bottom mentality, pricing apps far below a reasonable, sustainable value level. That’s absolutely true. Shame on you for pricing at $0.99 to chase the kind of customers who, well, think a dollar is anything but a trivial, throwaway amount of money that won’t even remotely get you a reasonable cup of coffee. Get some self-respect. Quit encouraging bad behaviour, and ruining the party for everyone else.

A price-tag of one dollar is passive smoking. You’re killing people around you, for your own short-term benefit. But again, that wasn’t the case here. It wasn’t piracy due to a high price. Instead, this was the endemic casual piracy of convenience.

If you don’t already know how to install pirated software on your Android device, here’s a tutorial on how to “sideload” Android apps (in practice, as with most articles that mention “backups” of software from nebulous sources, this is a tutorial about piracy).

Pretty easy. You search the internet for pirate copies of apps, then copy them onto your (regular, unrooted, non-“jailbroken”) device, and launch them. The system is designed for piracy from the ground up. The existence of piracy isn’t a surprise, but rather an inevitability.

A broken business model

Piracy isn’t a symptom of social disease. Well, it might be, but your bank manager won’t care about that inconsequential detail. Piracy is a symptom of failure to find an effective business model. “Effective” here means the whole gamut of product quality, availability, platform, marketing, price, delivery, support and so on. It’s not black magic. These are all factors for which we have strategies and metrics.

Piracy isn’t some unknowable thing that you can blame on teenagers in China and Russia. Those kids are practitioners of it, sure, but piracy is just a by-product of a broken model. The only relevant problem to fix is the root cause, and (conveniently) that’s the only one you can fix.

• People pirate Android apps because it’s easy.
• It’s easy because the platform was built with an open mentality.

You can say what you like about handset share, or first-party/carrier development: that’s only one piece of the puzzle. Another piece is community contributions to the OS codebase. On the first point, iOS devices are doing just fine. On the second, a closed OS has only strengthened the brand, cohesion of direction, integration, usability and design standard of the product.

The third factor is the software ecosystem. It’s about whether or not, when I pick up the handset and decide I want to do something, “there’s an app for that”.

To have apps, you need developers. To have developers, you need enthusiasm and an investment of time and talent. Enthusiasm and effort can be driven by many motivations, but the most reliable and consistent of those is money. Yes, there it is: the m-word. It’s not a dirty word. You wouldn’t have your shiny handset without it, not because you wouldn’t have been able to afford it, but because it wouldn’t exist.

There will be those who counter-argue that they got their handset for free, or indeed that they got their email service for free. No you didn’t. Nothing is free. It costs time at the least, which means that it always costs money (nobody’s time is free). More often, it costs you exposure to ads (and it costs the advertiser actual money). It may instead (or also) cost you something later, in the form of monthly fees, higher charges for data or SMS messages, or some other thing.

Somebody paid the piper, and it was usually you - even if you didn’t even notice it happen.

People have to get paid. There has to be a revenue stream. You can’t reliably have that revenue stream if the platform itself and the damaged philosophy behind it actively sabotages commerce. If you want a platform to be commercially viable for third-party software developers, you have to lock it down. Just like in real life, closing the door and locking it helps make sure that your money remains yours.

Bad behaviour has to be more difficult than good behaviour - and good behaviour means paying for your software.

Freedom from choice

Words can be tarnished and given negative connotations, even if their core meaning is positive. There are people in this world for whom the word “liberal” is an insult, for example - and that’s a frightening thing. But one word I see constantly that always seems to be used positively is “choice”. I’m guessing it’s largely related to the service-oriented consumer culture that we inhabit, with the overarching obsequious and counterproductive “the customer is always right” principle embedded in its side like a festering splinter.

No-one stops to consider that “choice” is maybe a bad word. Consider that for a moment. What would you like Windows to do with this USB key? Just show me the damned files. Do you want to be warned when you view a web page with mixed secure and insecure content? No, go away. Do you want to pick the font for this text-editing field? No, just use a sensible default. Do you want a lot of after-market crap popping up on the desktop of your new PC? No, I want an experience I’m familiar with.

Nerds like to say that people care about choice at that level. Nerds are wrong. Nerds care about choice, and nerds are such a tiny minority of people that nobody else much cares what the hell they think. Android is designed with far too much nerd philosophy, and open is gravy to those people because it’s synonymous with customisation.

Customisation matters deeply to people who are deeply troubled by what they perceive as minor imperfections or inefficiencies. These same people, as a rule, have a stunning lack of ability to even imagine that others may not share their position. “Pick a sensible default, and skip the Options window” isn’t just anathema; it’s incomprehensible. They need choice.

The problem is, choice can be a terrible thing. People perceive choice as the poster-boy of our Western watch-word freedom. Try telling people that freedom is a bad thing, and watch the handguns suddenly appear from concealed shoulder-holsters. But freedom is bad, when you get too much of it. Just like sugar, or water, or air. Too little is unsustainable and quickly dangerous. Just enough is wonderful. Too much is the worst. It’s a slow death. A thousand cuts. Starvation.

Asphyxiation.

Existence of some viable open source models doesn’t change the reality for the vast majority of developers. We don’t have a rich daddy like Mozilla. We don’t have an operating system for which we can use a paid-support model. We just want to make apps, then sell enough copies of them so that we can make some more.

The only principle that enters into it is that of survival: keeping food on the table, and making sure the lights stay on. Open doesn’t sit well with those goals.

Is contributing to open source projects (or creating and releasing your own) a good thing? Of course it is. It’s great for the community, it probably makes you feel good about yourself, and it can even bring you some actual business. I don’t even need to talk extensively about that, because I’ve done it for years, and continue to do so.

If you’re an open-source advocate taking objection to this article on the grounds that I’m somehow different from you, then I’m sorry to tell you that I’m not. I’ve walked the walk. If you’re using an iOS device or a Mac, chances are that some of my code is running on it. You’re genuinely welcome.

But that doesn’t scale to a platform, and it sure as hell doesn’t scale to the third-party developers who are supporting that platform by releasing software for it, thus adding value to the hardware and OS. Open doesn’t work. Open is a route to fragmented user experiences, handset-maker “value-adds” that are actually the old PC preinstalled crapware problem all over again, and customers who can’t get a software update for a year-old device.

Open is broken as a money-making platform model, unless you’re making the OS or the handsets. Most of us aren’t doing that. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that Google, of course, doesn’t give a damn about “open” per se; it’s just a route to get their ads into your eyeballs, and your info into their datacenters. Which is entirely fine as a business goal for Google; just don’t pretend they actually believe in open. Nor should you.

Lock it down

Open might make you feel good. It might make it seem like tomorrow is that little bit more certain, but you’re making a hell of a lot of convenient assumptions - many of which are at odds with the reality of this industry. We trade up our hardware. Apps thrive, decline and are replaced. Companies sell up and move on. Stallman’s printer-driver doesn’t get updated by the neck-beard community years later in a triumph of GPL principle, because everyone has replaced their printer with a better model anyway.

Open is an ideal, like true democracy, that’s warm and comforting but also impossible in a practical sense. It’s self-limiting. You’re spending today to pay for tomorrow, and we all know how that usually turns out. I want the futuristic, liberal, socialised utopia as much as you do, but I acknowledge that what we actually get is the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Capitalism wins, and it’ll drown you in the process if you stand in the way.

The sooner you realise that reality and come to peace with it, the happier and better-off you’ll be. You can’t afford to take insane risks with your livelihood. You’re not just some nerd who “needs” the ability to change his phone’s folder-icons. You have bills to pay. Life is serious. Pick a platform that knows it.

Closed is better for business.
http://mattgemmell.com/2012/07/23/closed-for-business/





RIP Andre Hedrick: The Engineer Who Kept the PC Open

Kernel expert stood up to mandatory hard disk DRM
Andrew Orlowski

Andre Hedrick, a principal engineer and operating system architect at Cisco Systems and a Linux kernel contributor, has died. He leaves behind a wife, four young children and many friends.

Andre made a significant contribution to personal computing history in a way few people fully realise.

In 2000, Andre was working for SuSE in Oakland and was looking after the Linux ATA subsystem, the operating system's interface with industry-standard hard disks. He was also a member of the ANSI sub-committee, T13, which defined the standard for ATA disks.

The committee was presented with proposals to incorporate a sophisticated piracy-thwarting system called CPRM, or Content Protection for Recordable Media, devised at IBM's Almaden Lab. The proposal was tabled by Intel and a group of three hard drive manufacturers: Toshiba, Matsushita (aka Panasonic) and IBM. The cryptographic system proposed was vastly more ambitious than the SDMI watermarking initiative for music, which by then had floundered.

The CRPM layer permitted the host ATA disk to fully control the copying, movement and deletion of files, making it ideal for set-top boxes and other consumer electronics appliances built using industry-standard parts. But when implemented on a PC, it gave an application complete control of data, bypassing user control via the operating system.

This troubled Andre, who could see the implications. Industry standard CPRM on ATA devices posed immediate problems for enterprise backup and RAID systems and disk integrity software, and more importantly, augured a future in which the PC may no longer be the "open" device it historically had been. He blew the whistle.

After the details emerged here, the initiative caused a furore - spilling onto the front pages (after the influential San Jose Mercury followed up our reports), and into mainstream publications such as Scientific American.

What happened next is not well known, but encapsulates the subtlety of his thinking, and a deep seam of fair mindedness.

The fight to keep personal computers open

Andre had little time for the American motion picture industry, which was pushing CPRM: he called it the "Hollywood sewer", and fulminated against "the greedy little !@#$%^&*() that are going to violate the ownership rights of products and the use of those products". Yet he set about creating a workable compromise - one his opponents couldn't reasonably destroy.

What Andre knew, and what outraged digital rights campaigners didn't understand, was that the rejection of CPRM as an official industry technical standard would result in the worst possible outcome for users and software authors. Most of the commands obeyed by the world's hard drives were not part of any standard, and were proprietary to the disk vendors - the very same disk vendors who had agreed to advance CPRM.

Rogue applications could bypass the operating system and turn CPRM back on. Andre's alternative proposal involved supplying a PIN so the PC owner could prevent the content protection from being activated in their machine.

This would allow new generations of closed playback devices to be built using off-the-shelf ATA disks while handing control of the open PC to the user.

"Control over a technology is more important than it existing," he told me. "If you know it's there, you're empowered."

The counter proposals and arguments Andre made ensured that CPRM was not implemented through the backdoor, and was used in closed devices and removable media without compromising the user's control of the PC.

And now look where we are today

CPRM is widely used today as the encryption scheme for SD cards. But by the summer of 2001, and thanks largely to Andre's unsung efforts that spring, it was never implemented as a standard, official or otherwise.

This would be the last time the entertainment industry would attempt to define standards for the technology industry. Today, millions of people use digital restriction management systems that lock down books, songs and music - the Amazon Kindle, the BBC iPlayer and Spotify are examples - but consumers enter into the private commercial agreement knowingly. It isn't set by default in the factory, as it might have been. The PC remains open rather than becoming an appliance.

Andre was never comfortable taking the credit he really deserved for this achievement.

Driving me back from our first meeting in Oakland in the summer of 2000, he described how he had deciphered the control protocol for APS power supplies - the dominant manufacturer at the time - to allow Linux to work with them.

He had to decipher the commands on the wire, which took all of an obsessive engineer's determination. He was also one of America's leading forensic experts, and was called upon to advise on retrieving data from damaged disks. In each of these cases, he preferred to take quiet satisfaction rather than public acclaim.

But it was his human ability to pursue a workable compromise that most impressed me, and really ensured that the personal computer remains an open system - a marked contrast to today's dogmatic and self-aggrandising copyfighters, who shun consensus and rational settlements, preferring both the limelight and the dubious glory of defeat. If Andre had adopted such a strategy, personal computing history would probably be very different.

He joined Cisco in January 2007 where he worked on several embedded projects, and helped define the current Cisco architecture IOS-XE.

On the Linux kernel mailing list, his friend Nate Lawson recalls Andre saying: "To work on disk drivers, you have to be a special kind of bastard." File systems are the world's most reliable databases for a reason, and built by engineers with the fierce integrity of Andre Hedrick.

Andre took his own life on Friday, 13 July. He will be greatly missed and our thoughts are with his family. His wife has set up a condolence weblog with details of a memorial service to be held in Berkeley, California, this Friday.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/26/andre_hedrick/
















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