Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 11th, '12

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"We spend too much time going through the administrative process to clear videos slapped with needless copyright claims. YouTube seems to be missing a 'common sense' button to its processes, especially when it involves public domain material paid for by the American taxpayer." – Bob Jacobs, NASA



































August 11th, 2012



Over 1,000,000 Torrents of Downloadable Books, Music, and Movies
brewster

The Internet Archive is now offering over 1,000,000 torrents including our live music concerts, the Prelinger movie collection, the librivox audio book collection, feature films, old time radio, lots and lots of books, and all new uploads from our patrons into Community collections (with more to follow).

To download the Torrent of the files in the item, click the Torrent link at the bottom of the download box; your Torrent client (such as transmission and uTorrent) can use the Torrent file you get to download the files in the Archive item, including the original item files, plus all derivative and metadata files. Individual files can be selected (or deselected) from the list within most BitTorrent clients, allowing Torrents to be used to retrieve an entire item or a specific subset of files within it.

BitTorrent is the now fastest way to download items from the Archive, because the BitTorrent client downloads simultaneously from two different Archive servers located in two different datacenters, and from other Archive users who have downloaded these Torrents already. The distributed nature of BitTorrent swarms and their ability to retrieve Torrents from local peers may be of particular value to patrons with slower access to the Archive, for example those outside the United States or inside institutions with slow connections.

To upload files to the Internet Archive, please use
http://archive.org/upload or http://archive.org/create.

We are starting to track some BitTorrent statistics, which can be fun to watch.

“I supported the original creation of BitTorrent because I believe in building technology to make it easy for communities to share what they have. The Archive is helping people to understand that BitTorrent isn’t just for ephemeral or dodgy items that disappear from view in a short time. BitTorrent is a great way to get and share large files that are permanently available from libraries like the Internet Archive,” said John Gilmore, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Thank you, BitTorrent community, for evolving such a valuable technology for the rapid, reliable, and resilient distribution of large numbers of files! And to Aaron Ximm, here at the Internet Archive, for helping the Internet Archive’s patrons and, we hope, libraries and archives worldwide to distribute public materials quickly, efficiently, and inexpensively.
http://blog.archive.org/2012/08/07/o...ic-and-movies/





Demonoid Busted As A Gift To The United States Government
enigmax

The nightmare week for Demonoid has just reached a huge crescendo, with news coming out of Ukraine that following a massive DDoS attack the site has now been busted by local authorities. Those looking for a U.S. connection to the raid won’t be disappointed – a source in the country’s Interior Ministry says that the action was scheduled to coincide with Deputy Prime Minister Valery Khoroshkovsky’s trip to the United States.

Last week thousands of Demonoid users feared the worst when their beloved site disappeared from the Internet. Many thought that the site had been busted, but were eventually relieved to hear that it was ‘only’ a massive DDoS attack.

But today the roller-coaster ride plummeted to new depths, with confirmation coming out of Ukraine that the DDoS was just the beginning – the site has been busted by the authorities.

ColoCall is the largest datacenter in Ukraine and a place that has been Demonoid’s home in recent years. But in the middle of last week, in the wake of the DDoS attack, government investigators arrived at ColoCall to shut Demonoid down.

“Investigators have copied all the information from the servers Demonoid and sealed them,” an anonymous ColoCall source confirmed. “Some equipment was not seized, but now it does not work, and we were forced to terminate the agreement with the site.”

As reported on TorrentFreak following our discussions with Demonoid’s admin last week, there were suspicions that the site may have been subjected to some kind of exploit or hack in addition to the DDoS. That version of events is now confirmed by the ColoCall source.

“Shortly after [the DDoS] a hacker break-in occurred, and a few days later came the investigators,” the source added.

But aside from the busting of the site, which is the biggest BitTorrent-related raid in recent memory and one that has taken out the world’s largest torrent site/tracker combo, there is a rather large international sting in the tail.

Despite general opinion that Demonoid did not contravene Ukranian law, especially since it blocked all Ukranian IP addresses to avoid upsetting the locals, the site still attracted the attention of the authorities there. That, according to a source in the country’s government, is all down to the United States getting involved.

A source inside the Interior Ministry has informed Kommersant that the raid on Demonoid was timed to coincide with the very first trip of Deputy Prime Minister Valery Khoroshkovsky‘s trip to the United States. On the agenda: copyright infringement.

Ukraine had promised the United States that it would improve its attitude and efforts towards enforcing copyright and no doubt its Western partner will be very pleased indeed that Demonoid’s head has been presented on a platter.

But while Demonoid’s servers are in custody, the site’s admin does not appear to be. The ColoCall source would not say who is behind the site, only that its management is located in Mexico. The devil may yet be back….

TorrentFreak contacted the Demonoid admin for a comment but we have yet to hear back
https://torrentfreak.com/demonoid-bu...rnment-120806/





Large Ukraine-Based BitTorrent Site Demonoid Shut Down
BBC

Ukrainian authorities have taken down Demonoid.com, one of the world's largest torrent file-sharing sites.

Investigators from the country's Ministry of Internal Affairs raided the data centre that was hosting the website's servers.

Torrents allow users to download music, video and other internet content by downloading small bits of files from others' computers at the same time.

The shutdown is the latest news in a campaign against file-sharing sites.

It follows the US's closure of Megaupload, and several European ISPs (internet service providers) being ordered to block access to The Pirate Bay.

Demonoid was listed alongside both of these sites in The Notorious Markets List - a document drawn up by the US government at the end of last year highlighting services that "merit further investigation for possible intellectual property rights infringements".

It noted that Demonoid "recently ranked among the top 600 websites in global traffic and the top 300 in US traffic".

Back online?

Users first became aware of the action on 26 July, when attempts to access Demonoid's site yielded a "server busy" message.

The Torrentfreak news site reported that Ukraine's Division of Economic Crimes acted after receiving a request from the international police organisation Interpol.

It said the local authorities then contacted Demonoid's ISP, Colocall, which decided to pull its service, and allowed investigators to copy data off its servers.

"Demonoid is known for its links to relatively rare content which may be harder to come by now," Torrentfreak's editor Ernesto Van Der Sar told the BBC.

"However, it's not going to stop the majority of people from sharing files as the most popular items are available though hundreds of other BitTorrent sites."

The action follows the arrest of one of Demonoid's administrators in Mexico last October. But despite the setbacks Mr Van Der Sar suggested it was too soon to consign the site to history.

"In 2006 The Pirate Bay came back online three days after it was raided, and in the years that followed it grew out to become the largest BitTorrent site," he said.

The BPI, which represents the UK music industry, and the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) - which have both campaigned against online copyright infringement - declined to comment when approached by the BBC.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19166779





Demonoid Operators Face Criminal Investigation in Mexico
enigmax

Following the news yesterday that Demonoid had been shut down by Ukrainian police, today brings further woes for the site. According to a source at the site’s former webhost, the owners of Demonoid are now the subject of a criminal investigation and prosecution in Mexico after one of the site’s admins was arrested there last year.

Confirmation came out of Ukraine yesterday that not only had Demonoid suffered a DDoS and hacker attack, it had also been raided by the authorities.

In the middle of last week government investigators arrived at ColoCall, Demonoid’s webhost, to shut Demonoid down.

“Investigators have copied all the information from the servers Demonoid and sealed them,” an anonymous ColoCall source confirmed to local news site Kommersant.

With the dust settling today, the sequence of events is becoming a little more clear.

ColoCall Commercial Director Peter Vlasenko has now confirmed that his company had repeatedly warned Demonoid of complaints being made against it. He added that the company had also cautioned Demonoid’s operators that problems could lead to the ISP severing its relationship with the site. Last week, that’s exactly what happened.

“The Division of Economic Crimes [DEC] received an international request from Interpol to send a request to the company ColoCall. DEC sent the request to the provider, after which the ISP decided to stop working with Demonoid,” said Sergei Burlakov of Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs.

But the bad news for Demonoid doesn’t end there. The Interpol request that finally forced the closure of the site was the result of call from thousands of miles away in North America.

“In Mexico a criminal case against the owners of Demonoid has been initiated and the tracker is charged with intellectual property rights violations,” Burlakov confirmed.

Demonoid’s links to Mexico have been rumored for some time, but it was action taken last year that finally gave them credibility.

TorrentFreak learned that in October 2011, Mexican authorities carried out a raid in Monterrey, the capital city of the northeastern Mexican state of Nuevo León. The prime target was one of Demonoid’s staff. Following the action the authorities completely blocked access to the site in Mexico.

Movie industry sources confirmed to TorrentFreak that the raids had indeed resulted in the arrest of one of Demonoid’s administrators. It remains unclear whether the current investigation centers around the same individual.
https://torrentfreak.com/demonoid-op...mexico-120807/





Megaupload Founder Accuses NZ Police of Beating Him

Kim Dotcom, the founder of the Megaupload online file-sharing site embroiled in U.S. piracy and fraud investigations, said on Tuesday New Zealand police punched and kicked him during a raid on his mansion.

Dotcom, a German national who is fighting extradition to the United States from New Zealand, said he was terrified during a raid in January by armed police using helicopters.

He said when he heard shouting and banging he went to a safe room, where police found him.

"And then they were all over me. I had a punch to the face, boots kicking me down to the floor," Dotcom said in court.

"I was screaming and I was in pain ... I told them there was no need for punching me or hurting me and please stop."

Acting on a request from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), New Zealand authorities raided Dotcom's rented estate outside Auckland, confiscating computers and hard drives, art work and luxury cars.

However, the raid and seizure of evidence has since been ruled illegal and the court hearing this week is to determine what should happen to the seized material.

The FBI says Dotcom led a group that has netted $175 million since 2005 by copying and distributing music, movies and other copyrighted content without authorisation.

Lawyers for the flamboyant entrepreneur say the company simply offered online storage.

Dotcom and three others were arrested in the raid. Dotcom was kept in custody for a month before being granted bail.

The hearing is scheduled to last until Thursday.

A New Zealand court is due to hear an application from U.S. authorities to extradite Dotcom on internet piracy, money laundering and breach of copyright charges in March.

(Reporting by Gyles Beckford; Editing by Robert Birsel)
http://news.yahoo.com/megaupload-fou...042751120.html





VIDEO: What Really Happened in the Dotcom Raid?
John Campbell

The police raid on the mansion of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom has been discussed for so many months and now the footage of that morning has begun to emerge.

It generally shows what was always said to have happened, but it sheds little light on why it happened.

The FBI is charging Dotcom with internet piracy on a massive scale.

He and his lawyers, both here and in America, assert no helicopters were needed to arrest him, no police officers with semi-automatic weapons with the FBI not too far in the background.

As the legal battle continues over a High Court finding that the search warrants used in the raid were invalid, the raid itself is coming under scrutiny in the High Court.

An elite police office with identity suppression has given evidence in court about what happened.

Those involved are protected for their own safety in future operations unrelated to this case.

At 6.46am on January 20, the raid was underway. The helicopter carrying members of the elite special tactics group flew into the Coatesville home of Dotcom.

“Ground units, Gates are open,” someone says into the radio.

Dotcom’s pregnant wife their three children, some guests and about a dozen staff were also there.

All is quiet below.

Within seconds four armed members of the special tactics group ran towards the main door.

The helicopter immediately took off. The main justification for using it at all was that Doctom’s security staff could have stopped police vehicles at the gates. But as the chopper flew out, ground forces were already arriving just seconds behind.

In court today Dotcom explained his experience of the officers arriving.

“First of all it was not unusual for me to hear helicopter noise, because we were expecting guests to arrive and it’s usual that sometimes guests arrive early in the morning, especially if they’ve come from the US and are being picked up by helicopter. So the noise of the helicopter wasn’t really a surprise, but then I heard pinging of stones of rocks to my bedroom window. My shields were down so I couldn’t see outside what was happening. Then shortly after within a few seconds I heard heavy banging on my door.”

The helicopter then circled the property and recorded the police radio conversation.

“I need two guards working, one at the gate and one roaming,” it said.

“Main entry into the bedroom of the target, door’s closed, slammed and had a security lock on it, we’ve breached it. Moved through, he’s done a runner, can’t find him in either the studio or bedroom.”

Dotcom then told the court what he was doing at that point.

“I was on my bed, once the banging started, I pressed an alarm button that is situated right at my bed which was installed in case of an emergency. When I press that it automatically sends a signal to all security guards including Mr [Wayne] Tempero’s room including SMSs to everybody informing them there is an alert. Then I stood up from the bed and made my way to the red room.”

The red room is a secret emergency room inside the mansion.

Despite knowing of the room’s existence, having the plans and the door to the room not being locked, it still took police 13 minutes to find Dotcom there.

“I was sitting in front of that pillar in the room and heard loud banging noises, I was scared and worried.”

Meanwhile the house was being closed down, everyone present was being accounted for and contained.

“We have five Philippine females and three children,” the police radio said.

By 7:10am armed officers were on the roof and Dotcom had been found and detained.

Dotcom had stayed in the red room until police found him.

“I thought I better wait for them to come to me rather than me popping out of that secret door maybe scaring someone who might shoot me. So I waited in the red room. I knew the door wasn’t locked, there was a button I could have engaged to lock the door but I haven’t done that. So I waited in the room upstairs for them to come. Once they came up the stairs I had my hands like this [in the air]. And then very quickly they approached me and within two seconds they were there and all over me.”

He then described what the police did to him.

“I had a punch to the face, I had boots kicking me down to the floor, I had a knee into the ribs, then my hands were on the floor, one man was standing on my hand.”

At 7.11am police told each other they had got Dotcom.

“For the log, Mr Dotcom has been shown the warrant to search the property, he acknowledges it.”

Two helicopters had been used, dogs deployed along with four police vehicles. There were armed offenders squad and the special tactics squad.

The elite police officer who has identity suppression described to the court what weapons he was carrying.

“A gun belt which had my secondary weapon, a police issued glock pistol on the right hand side, and additional magazines on the left and my primary weapon which is a Colt CommandoM4 556 weapon.”

The FBI were there and during the planning period for the raid.

CCTV footage taken from a tree near the property recorded a helicopter arriving, men and dogs. The house was surrounded.

But the officers were not dressed in full combat gear.

“We wanted to match the threat level, in this case a low threat with our dress,” the elite officer says. “We made that conscious decision not to wear full tactical kit.”

Dotcom’s lawyer asked him if he had seen anything deliberate done to Dotcom.

“Yes there was deliberate force applied,” he said.

So what was behind such a large and pointed operation?

“Primary objective: secure suspect as soon as possible to prevent destruction of evidence,” the elite officer said.

But Dotcom could not have destroyed evidence because the FBI had allegedly seized the Megaupload servers before the raid.

“All of that is so invalid and really angers me because you know the FBI was already in the data centre disabling access to the data they feared we would manipulate. So primary to you arriving there was no chance for anyone to do anything with that evidence,” Dotcom said.
http://www.3news.co.nz/VIDEO-What-re...1/Default.aspx





Thousands in N.J. are Targeted by File-Sharing Lawsuits
Peter J. Sampson

An independent record label, a foreign film company and several pornography studios have declared war on illegal file sharing in New Jersey, suing more than 12,000 people since June for allegedly using peer-to-peer networks to unlawfully distribute copyrighted material over the Internet.

After a lull of several years, 44 lawsuits have been filed in the state’s federal courthouses over the past 18 months against more than 15,000 “John Doe” defendants who, initially, are identified only by Internet addresses that stretch from Fort Lee to Honolulu.

Twenty-four of those suits, seeking to identify 12,615 potential offenders, were filed in June and July alone — a sign that this area of mass litigation is on the rise.

While the major motion picture studios and record companies have largely abandoned efforts to go after individual file swappers, chalking up piracy to the cost of doing business, smaller independents and producers of pornography have taken up the cause.

Their efforts, however, have drawn criticism from judges and advocacy groups over predatory tactics that appear to be aimed at coercing settlements.

A Hackensack attorney, Jay R. McDaniel, is one of the lawyers leading the charge. He has filed 17 suits on behalf of three clients in U.S. District Court in Newark, alleging copyright infringement by more than 14,000 file swappers.

“What’s critical to these cases, and what many people don’t understand, is that it’s the distribution that is the evil influence,” McDaniel said. “It’s the distribution that does the real damage and harm, not just to the client but to the culture industries and to creative endeavors in general.”

McDaniel’s clients include a London-based record company, Century Media Ltd., which is suing fans of two popular metal bands for allegedly using the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol to unlawfully distribute their music online.

Two of the suits aim to halt the illicit distribution of “Dark Adrenaline,” the most recent album by the Italian band Lacuna Coil. The suits collectively target 3,136 John Doe defendants.

Four similar civil complaints accuse another 4,327 unnamed file swappers of illegally distributing “Dystopia,” the 2011 album by Iced Earth, a Florida-based metal band on the Century Media label.

McDaniel is also representing a German film company, Amselfilm Productions GmbH & CO. KG of Berlin, which holds the rights to the 2011 Russian movie “Bablo,” or “The Dough.” Three suits, filed in late June at the same time as the six Century Media cases, contend 4,654 people shared pirated copies of the film.

“Illegal downloading has reached epidemic proportions, as thousands of works are pirated on a daily basis through bit torrents that rob copyright holders of the value of their creative work,” McDaniel wrote in a suit he filed last year in Newark on behalf of another German client, Baseprotect UG Ltd.

In that suit, the company is asking a judge to enforce its exclusive license to distribute the 2011 British film “Weekend” via file-sharing networks.

In each of the suits, the defendants are alleged to have participated in a cyberspace “swarm” — a collection of users who engaged in the illegal uploading and downloading of a copyrighted work over the Internet using the BitTorrent protocol. BitTorrent allows users to easily download large data files, such as digital copies of movies, in small chunks from multiple sources.

As a first step in each of the suits, McDaniel must seek court permission to subpoena various Internet service providers to obtain the names and home addresses of the alleged infringers. Once identified, an Internet account holder typically faces the prospect of settling the case for a few thousand dollars or hiring a lawyer to fight the charges.

Since 2010, more than a quarter of a million BitTorrent users have been sued in federal courts across the United States for allegedly sharing copyrighted material online. The two largest suits each targeted about 24,000 people for illegally downloading either the Oscar-winning war film “The Hurt Locker” or the Sylvester Stallone action movie “The Expendables.”

The avalanche of suits has led to an evolution of legal strategies as lawyers and judges grapple with issues such as whether hundreds or thousands of far-flung defendants can be joined in a single suit.

In the first six months of this year, McDaniel noted, judges nationwide permitted 27 federal suits to go forward as multi-defendant cases while refusing to join the various members of a swarm in 17 cases.

“In terms of the volume and the speed in which this area of law is developing, it’s probably the most litigated issue in the federal courts right now,” McDaniel said.

In a new approach, McDaniel’s Century Media and Amselfilm complaints name not only the John Doe parties as defendants, but also a specific swarm that was allegedly detected on various dates sharing a specific copy of a pirated work.

“If you examine what a BitTorrent swarm actually is, it’s a thing. It has a life of its own,” McDaniel said. “It exists as a network spanning states and even countries.”

To date, he noted, no appellate court has answered the question of where and how you seek relief.

“We brought these cases in New Jersey in the manner in which we did,” he said, “because we believe that the swarm — that is the network of users — is capable of being sued as an entity, and the entity has a physical presence in New Jersey in the form of the various equipment that its New Jersey resident users are using to further the operations of the swarm.”

“This kills the little producer and it has an extremely destructive effect on the entertainment industry,” McDaniel added. “Frankly, record sales don’t drive the music business anymore; touring does. So illegal sharing of music on the Internet has killed an entire industry.”

Along with the infringement suits, McDaniel filed applications for expedited disclosure of the defendants’ identities and for an order restraining them from continuing to copy or distribute the protected works.

Ruling in separate suits, U.S. District Judges Faith S. Hochberg and Dennis M. Cavanaugh rejected as premature Century Media’s bid for a preliminary injunction and an order to show cause. They directed McDaniel to address concerns raised by judges in similar cases that the widespread use of wireless routers today makes it less certain that the Internet subscriber cited in a suit actually engaged in an illegal download.

With wireless routers now in most U.S. homes, the alleged infringer could be the subscriber, a family member, an employee, guest, neighbor or interloper.

In one of the decisions cited by the Newark judges, a judge in Brooklyn, decrying the “nationwide blizzard” of infringement suits brought by purveyors of pornography, reduced several multi-defendant lawsuits to one defendant each.

“The plaintiffs seemingly have no interest in actually litigating the cases, but rather simply have used the court and its subpoena powers to obtain sufficient information to shake down the John Does,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Gary R. Brown wrote in May, citing evidence of harassing calls to one defendant demanding $2,900 to end the litigation.

Unlike cases involving popular music downloads, the fear of having one’s reputation tarnished by being publicly charged with illegally downloading pornography could compel even an innocent person to settle, the judge said.

“It’s tough. If you get one of these letters you’ve been put in a difficult and unfair spot,” said Rebecca Jeschke, a spokeswoman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil-liberties group, referring to the notices that go out once a John Doe has been identified.

“In many of these situations,” she added, “the goal doesn’t seem to be to fight infringement; it seems to be to get settlements. That’s where the money-making is.”

Two of the plaintiffs in the New York cases, Malibu Media LLC and Patrick Collins Inc., and a third pornography producer, Third Degree Films, filed 15 lawsuits in New Jersey this summer alleging 498 defendants stole their movies.

Several of those suits allege groups of file swappers engaged in a practice known as a “siterip” by copying and distributing an entire website containing between 15 and 35 copyrighted movies.

The works — including such titles as “Daddy’s Office” and “Jennifer Naughty Angel” — were converted into a single torrent file that was shared by BitTorrent users from Bergenfield, Clifton, Dumont, Hackensack, Harrington Park, New Milford, Park Ridge, Paterson, Ridgefield, Ridgewood, Totowa, Wayne, Westwood and elsewhere between March and June.

Unlike McDaniel’s cases, which target defendants from all over the country, the recent batch of pornography suits are directed only against New Jersey residents.

The suits seek to halt unlawful distribution, force defendants to delete the pirated copies and award plaintiffs statutory damages of up to $150,000 per defendant and copyrighted work infringed, or actual damages caused by lost sales, price erosion and a diminution of the value of their copyrights.

Meanwhile, judges in three of the New Jersey pornography cases gave lawyers the green light in July to subpoena Verizon, Comcast and other Internet providers for the names, addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses of 82 subscribers accused of illegal downloading.

Another 2,434 defendants accused of downloading “Dark Adrenaline,” “Bablo” and “Weekend” have received or will be getting letters from McDaniel as a result of recent court rulings.
http://www.northjersey.com/news/busi..._lawsuits.html





Is File Sharing Killing Karaoke?
Kory Grow

The vocal-free tracks you sing at bars are made by companies like Sound Choice, who is now fighting illegal downloading to survive

Don't expect to hear slick recreations of the latest hits by Lady Gaga or Katy Perry at your local karaoke bar anytime soon — Sound Choice, one of the companies that was once responsible for 70 percent of the note-for-note reproductions of songs specifically made for drunk people to warble in public, is scaling back. Revenue for the company is way down, according to Seattle Weekly (via the Daily Swarm), as karaoke establishments have begun obtaining the music through illegal file sharing, forcing the North Carolina company to reconsider its business model.

Recently, Sound Choice has been investing its money not into recording but into lawsuits, aggressively pursuing venues and KJs (karaoke DJs) who use its music illegally. In the Washington area alone, Sound Choice has gone after more than 40 defendants, offering amnesty to those who will delete the pirated tracks and purchase legit versions on CD for a few thousand dollars.

That last stipulation — purchasing a CD — it turns out has been a major contributor to the karaoke company's problems. Music publishers are slow to offer licenses to downloads of karaoke tracks, the Seattle Weekly reports, forcing companies like Sound Choice to offer CDs only. The individual karaoke tracks people can buy on Amazon are licensed for home and personal use only. Moreover, karaoke clubs have been facing unclear policies about what they're paying for; many venues pay fees to blanket music licensors like BMI and ASCAP for the music they have on their regular jukebox, but that money doesn't go to karaoke producers like Sound Choice.

One solution might be the emergence of a Spotify- or Rhapsody-like on-demand service. A company called DigiTrax is launching one called Karaoke Cloud soon coming at a cost of $199 a month. But according to Chris Avis, a KJ quoted in the Seattle Weekly article, this would only appeal to KJs who make enough money to cover its costs. Until then, Sound Choice's CEO, Kurt Slep, says he's figuring out a way where he could sell hard drives directly. If that doesn't work out, it looks like we'll be "Rolling in the Deep" for a very long time.
http://www.spin.com/articles/file-sh...illing-karaoke





Google to Begin Punishing Pirate Sites in Search Results
Nilay Patel

Google constantly tweaks how its search engine delivers results to people, but it's rolling out a major new change next week: it'll start generally downranking sites that receive a high volume of copyright infringement notices from copyright holders. Google says the move is designed to "help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily" — meaning that it's trying to direct people who search for movies, TV shows, and music to sites like Hulu and Spotify, not torrent sites or data lockers like the infamous MegaUpload. It's a clear concession to the movie and music industries, who have long complained that Google facilitates piracy — and Google needs to curry favor with media companies as it tries to build an ecosystem around Google Play.

Google says it feels confident making the change because because its existing copyright infringement reporting system generates a massive amount of data about which sites are most frequently reported — the company received and processed over 4.3 million URL removal requests in the past 30 days alone, more than all of 2009 combined. Importantly, Google says the search tweaks will not remove sites from search results entirely, just rank them lower in listings. Removal of a listing will still require a formal request under the existing copyright infringement reporting system — and Google is quick to point out that those unfairly targeted can still file counter-notices to get their content reinstated into search listings.

""Google cannot determine whether a particular webpage does or does not violate copyright law.""

Of course, Google's existing copyright system has long had its critics, who claim the system disproportionally favors big companies who abuse it to block legitimate speech. Allowing past abuse to affect future search results is far from ideal, but Google isn't planning to make judgement calls. "Only copyright holders know if something is authorized, and only courts can decide if a copyright has been infringed; Google cannot determine whether a particular webpage does or does not violate copyright law." What Google can do is remain transparent about copyright removals — in May the company began reporting all listing removal requests it's received in the past 30 days, which companies have complained, and which sites they target. The most-targeted domains? filestube.com, downloads.nl, isohunt.com, and torrenthound.com. We'll have to see where they land on search results when Google flips the switch on the new rankings next week.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/10/32...copyright-dmca





How YouTube Will Escape Google’s New Pirate Penalty
Danny Sullivan

Google has announced that it will soon penalize sites that are repeatedly accused of copyright infringement. But one site in particular doesn’t need to worry: Google’s own YouTube. It has a unique immunity against the forthcoming penalty.

The penalty — which we’ve dubbed the Emanuel Update — impacts Google’s web search results. If someone has reported a web search listing as being a copyright violation, using the DMCA takedown mechanism, that’s a strike against the entire site.

Accumulate enough strikes (how many, Google’s not saying), and a publisher may find their entire site hit with a penalty. Every page, whether it was reported for copyright infringement or not, will have less chance of ranking well.

Strike Count Against Publishers

If you’re trying to understand what sites might be at risk, Google has a page where it discloses which publishers have the most takedown strikes against them:

But many, if not all, the copyright strikes against YouTube won’t show up on this list. Google even tells you this:

Requests for products other than Google Search (e.g, requests directed at YouTube or Blogger) are not included.

The YouTube Exemption

See, people who are upset with alleged infringement on YouTube are directed to a completely separate DMCA form to use. Try it yourself. Use the form Google talked about in its blog post today. The form warns you away from using it to report YouTube violations right at the top, and if you still try to pick the YouTube option, you get a further warning to go elsewhere:

When you do go elsewhere, YouTube jumps you through more hoops before you can just report. You go the YouTube Copyright Center:

From there, if you follow the “Content Owners” option, you get to a new page with several further options:

There, YouTube will let those who want to do a removal do so, but it also pitches a way to submit multiple notices more easily through a special Content Verification Program (a sign that YouTube gets lots of takedown requests), as well as the pretty cool Content ID system, which lets those who have infringement allegations decide to be mellow, let those videos stay up with ads and collect some income off of it.

Content ID is very nice, but if copyright owners aren’t convinced, they can still go the takedown route and get a video removed. The page at YouTube hosting the video itself remains up. The page also remains potentially listed in Google. The request definitely doesn’t count against YouTube in the tallies that will be used in the new pirate penalty, since these aren’t considered web page removals.

If Google had a common DMCA takedown system, YouTube would face a threat with the forthcoming penalty. How much is uncertain. Since Google doesn’t seem to disclose the number of YouTube takedown requests it has acted upon (I have asked for a figure), there’s no way to assess YouTube against the other sites on the strikeout list above.

YouTube In Search Results

Now let’s see how this works in action. You might recall earlier this year, Saturday Night Live did an absolutely hilarious parody of how Downton Abbey might be promoted if it ran on Bravo.

Unfortunately, for reasons that have never been made clear (but likely a rights dispute between NBCUniversal & the makers of Downton Abbey), it was never aired outside the East Coast of the US nor posted online officially.

That didn’t stop people posting it unofficially, without explicit permission. Here’s how the results currently look at Google, if someone were seeking that video in a common way right now:

The first result leads to the Perez Hilton site, where you can still watch the video hosted on that site just as you might watch it hosted on YouTube. If NBCUniversal filed a DMCA request, chances are, that page would get removed (assuming there’s not some licensing agreement, and I doubt there is). Perez Hilton’s entire site would have accumulated a strike against it.

Next, Styleite also self hosts the video, it seems, so it’s the same situation as with Perez Hilton. The same is true for Gawker, as best I can tell.

Several other pages listing in the top results above show the video, but because they embed from YouTube, they’re not really at risk for a DMCA takedown. These include known pirate sites like Time and Entertainment Weekly.

NBCUniversal’s own Today site was cheerfully embedding a pirated version of the video on YouTube until that got taken down, but it’s still promising to assist with second-hand infringement as soon as the clip turns up elsewhere:

Sorry! NBC Universal has blocked the YouTube clip that showed the “SNL” skit. If it shows up anywhere else online, we’ll get it back up here.

How The Google Search Umpire Doesn’t See YouTube’s Strike

Now let’s talk YouTube. In the screenshot above, I’ve pointed to where YouTube is listed, with a “Safe!” caption. It’s not that the video is safe. NBCUniversal could file a DMCA request to get the clip removed. But as I said, doing this just removes the clip as what we could call a “YouTube takedown,” not a “Search takedown.” YouTube, in the eyes of Google Search, has not suffered a copyright strike against it.

Technically, the YouTube listing appearing in the screenshot above isn’t a web search result but a Google Video result, inserted by Google Universal Search. That’s also true for the other video under it, a different listing from the Perez Hilton site. But that Perez Hilton video listing would get removed via the web search takedown system, as there is no Google Video removal. The YouTube one, as I’ve explained, would fall under the YouTube removal system.
Google: “We’re Treating YouTube Like Any Other Site”

I did ask Google about all this and was told

We’re treating YouTube like any other site in search rankings. That said, we don’t expect this change to demote results for popular user-generated content sites.

I just don’t see that. There’s no way to treat YouTube — or Blogger — like any other site in the search rankings, when those sites have special takedown forms that don’t allow their alleged infringing activity to measured up against other sites.
http://searchengineland.com/how-yout...penalty-130180





Internet Pirates Will Always Win
Nick Bilton

STOPPING online piracy is like playing the world’s largest game of Whac-A-Mole.

Hit one, countless others appear. Quickly. And the mallet is heavy and slow.

Take as an example YouTube, where the Recording Industry Association of America almost rules with an iron fist, but doesn’t, because of deceptions like the one involving a cat.

YouTube, which is owned by Google, offers a free tool to the movie studios and television networks called Content ID. When a studio legitimately uploads a clip from a copyrighted film to YouTube, the Google tool automatically finds and blocks copies of the product.

To get around this roadblock, some YouTube users started placing copyrighted videos inside a still photo of a cat that appears to be watching an old JVC television set. The Content ID algorithm has a difficult time seeing that the video is violating any copyright rules; it just sees a cat watching TV.

Sure, it’s annoying for those who want to watch the video, but it works. (Obviously, it’s more than annoying for the company whose product is being pirated.)

Then there are those — possibly tens of millions of users, actually — who engage in peer-to-peer file-sharing on the sites using the BitTorrent protocol.

Earlier this year, after months of legal wrangling, authorities in a number of countries won an injunction against the Pirate Bay, probably the largest and most famous BitTorrent piracy site on the Web. The order blocked people from entering the site.

In retaliation, the Pirate Bay wrapped up the code that runs its entire Web site, and offered it as a free downloadable file for anyone to copy and install on their own servers. People began setting up hundreds of new versions of the site, and the piracy continues unabated.

Thus, whacking one big mole created hundreds of smaller ones.

Although the recording industries might believe they’re winning the fight, the Pirate Bay and others are continually one step ahead. In March, a Pirate Bay collaborator, who goes by the online name Mr. Spock, announced in a blog post that the team hoped to build drones that would float in the air and allow people to download movies and music through wireless radio transmitters.

“This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system,” Mr. Spock posted on the site. “A real act of war.” Some BitTorrent sites have also discussed storing servers in secure bank vaults. Message boards on the Web devoted to piracy have in the past raised the idea that the Pirate Bay has Web servers stored underwater.

“Piracy won’t go away,” said Ernesto Van Der Sar, editor of Torrent Freak, a site that reports on copyright and piracy news. “They’ve tried for years and they’ll keep on trying, but it won’t go away.” Mr. Van Der Sar said companies should stop trying to fight piracy and start experimenting with new ways to distribute content that is inevitably going to be pirated anyway.

According to Torrent Freak, the top pirated TV shows are downloaded several million times a week. Unauthorized movies, music, e-books, software, pornography, comics, photos and video games are watched, read and listened to via these piracy sites millions of times a day.

The copyright holders believe new laws will stop this type of piracy. But many others believe any laws will just push people to find creative new ways of getting the content they want.

“There’s a clearly established relationship between the legal availability of material online and copyright infringement; it’s an inverse relationship,” said Holmes Wilson, co-director of Fight for the Future, a nonprofit technology organization that is trying to stop new piracy laws from disrupting the Internet. “The most downloaded television shows on the Pirate Bay are the ones that are not legally available online.”

The hit HBO show “Game of Thrones” is a quintessential example of this. The show is sometimes downloaded illegally more times each week than it is watched on cable television. But even if HBO put the shows online, the price it could charge would still pale in comparison to the money it makes through cable operators. Mr. Wilson believes that the big media companies don’t really want to solve the piracy problem.

“If every TV show was offered at a fair price to everyone in the world, there would definitely be much less copyright infringement,” he said. “But because of the monopoly power of the cable companies and content creators, they might actually make less money.”

The way people download unauthorized content is changing. In the early days of music piracy, people transferred songs to their home or work computers. Now, with cloud-based sites, like Wuala, uTorrent and Tribler, people stream movies and music from third-party storage facilities, often to mobile devices and TV’s. Some of these cloud-based Web sites allow people to set up automatic downloads of new shows the moment they are uploaded to piracy sites. It’s like piracy-on-demand. And it will be much harder to trace and to stop.

It is only going to get worse. Piracy has started to move beyond the Internet and media and into the physical world. People on the fringes of tech, often early adopters of new devices and gadgets, are now working with 3-D printers that can churn out actual physical objects. Say you need a wall hook or want to replace a bit of hardware that fell off your luggage. You can download a file and “print” these objects with printers that spray layers of plastic, metal or ceramics into shapes.

And people are beginning to share files that contain the schematics for physical objects on these BitTorrent sites. Although 3-D printing is still in its infancy, it is soon expected to become as pervasive as illegal music downloading was in the late 1990s.

Content owners will find themselves stuck behind ancient legal walls when trying to stop people from downloading objects online as copyright laws do not apply to standard physical objects deemed “noncreative.”

In the arcade version of Whac-A-Mole, the game eventually ends — often when the player loses. In the piracy arms-race version, there doesn’t seem to be a conclusion. Sooner or later, the people who still believe they can hit the moles with their slow mallets might realize that their time would be better spent playing an entirely different game.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/s...lways-win.html





Ge.tt Takes its Real-Time File-Sharing Service to Gmail and Outlook.com with these Chrome Extensions
Paul Sawers

We first covered Ge.tt way back in 2010, calling it simply a better option for cloud-based file sharing. The Next Web’s Brad McCarty said at the time:

“Ge.tt is, to put it plainly, an incredibly simple way to share files. While we have had services such as Rapidshare and the like for years, the interface alone is ugly to the point of revolting and its usefulness is limited because of how the money is made.

With ge.tt, all you have to do is head to the site, select what files you want to upload, then you’re given a link by which you can share those files. Interestingly, ge.tt adds a few more features as well and everything appears to be free, at least for now.”

That’s Ge.tt in a nutshell. But from this week, it’s making its real-time file-sharing service available for Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail) and Gmail users.

The Chrome extensions allows files to be uploaded in the background, with users able to share them immediately.

Using Ge.tt essentially means that you don’t have to worry about file sizes, or even wait for files to upload before sending. Any documents or media files you with to attach are actually directed to your Ge.tt account.

It works with videos, photos, documents…anything. Of course, if you’re sending a small Word document, for example, Ge.tt might not really sell itself to you – but if you’re looking to send a 150Mb monster, well, you can send your email instantly as the file uploads to Ge.tt.

“Ge.tt was always meant to be included in different platforms and services that we know people use and appreciate,” says Tobias Baunbæk, CEO and co-founder of Ge.tt. “Therefore, the introduction of our services to Outlook.com and Gmail users is a natural step for our company. By adding Outlook.com and Gmail to the Ge.tt offering, we expect file-sharing through Ge.tt to increase rapidly during the coming months.”

In addition to offering the company’s features to some of the most popular online services, Ge.tt also allows users to add the technology to their own applications through an open API.

Ge.tt was formed in October 2010, and is based in Copenhagen, Denmark. We’re told that since launch, Ge.tt users have shared more than seven million files.
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/08/0...me-extensions/





Video Embedding Site Isn't a Contributory Copyright Infringer, But Sideloading Could Be Direct Infringement--Flava Works v. myVidster
Eric Goldman

myVidster is a "social bookmarking" website that allows users to link to videos hosted elsewhere on the Internet and thereby embed the videos in myVidster's user interface. Today, myVidster scored a big win at the Seventh Circuit, which held that it had not committed contributory infringement by allowing users to embed infringing videos via myVidster. It's hard to state just how amazing this ruling was for myVidster, because myVidster's principal, Gunter, often refused to honor takedown notices (on the dicey premise that anything posted somewhere elsewhere on the Internet was freely linkable) and thus presumptively failed to qualify for the 17 USC 512(d) safe harbor. Normally, when a website fails to honor takedown notices, judges come down hard on the website—just like the district court did in this case.

While the opinion offers good news for myVidster and possibly other linking websites, it does raise a concern about sideloading, i.e., grabbing a remote file that a user links to and making an archive copy of that file for further delivery. The opinion, without much elaboration and without using the term, breezily characterizes sideloading as direct infringement by the website for grabbing and republishing the remote file. This is almost certainly bad news for Pinterest, which (I believe) routinely engages in sideloading without a lot of explanation to its users, presumably premised on the idea that storing the remotely linked files is authorized by the user and thus qualifies for the 512(c) safe harbor. It remains to be seen what will happen if Pinterest's sideloading is directly challenged and Pinterest is around to defend its interests, but this ruling provides a warning that judges may not see it the way Pinterest does.

Judge Posner drafted this opinion, which means that (as usual for him) it reads like a barely edited first-draft. As usual for Seventh Circuit opinions, it makes a number of questionable and undefended offline analogies, makes assumptions about factual questions that could/should be remanded to the district court, barely engages with or cites to other legal precedent, raises and addresses issues that the litigants never raised, and is filled with gratuitous digressions (e.g., an uncomfortable discussion that gay ethnic pornography might be illegal, a contention neither party advanced; and an odd discussion about the reputational capital benefits of sharing content). If I were Flava Works, I would be hopping mad about the manifest procedural defects in the opinion (and motivated to seek en banc review). As a result of the opinion’s characteristic affectations, parsing this opinion is needlessly difficult, so I can only do so much to deconstruct the legal principles in it.

The main ruling is that the folks uploading infringing videos are direct infringers, but myVidster isn't contributorily liable for letting users link to those infringing videos. Posner unhelpfully rejects the standard Gershwin definition of contributory infringement; instead, he idiosyncratically defines it as “personal conduct that encourages or assists the infringement.” (In my opinion, the last thing we need is further proliferation of definitional standards for secondary infringement!). myVidster wasn't responsible for any infringing activity mostly because it didn't copy or distribute the infringing videos or help users copy or distribute the infringing videos.

Posner sidesteps the concerns from amici Google and Facebook about possible “tertiary” liability, saying myVidster didn’t commit contributory liability and that ends the inquiry. And because the opinion doesn’t find any secondary infringement, it says the 512(d) safe harbor for linking to infringing content is not needed. That turns out to be good news for myVidster because it had a low chance of succeeding with a 512 defense. myVidster avoided an inducement claim because it didn’t “invite” its users to link to infringing files.

Posner does separately address the 106 public performance right, but I found the opinion about that especially inscrutable. I'm hoping someone else can help me understand what Posner was trying to say and, in particular, why he discussed Fonovisa (an offline swap meet case) when discussing the performance right. Although the opinion cited the Ninth Circuit’s Perfect 10 v. Amazon ruling, I also don’t understand why Posner did not discuss the Ninth Circuit’s thoughtful and highly relevant discussion about public display and the difference between embedding content via links and hosting it. The only thing that is clear to me is that Posner thought that linking to infringing content is just like citing to someone else's content, and thus myVidster was too remote from any infringing activity to be responsible for it.

[Rebecca provided this helpful distillation of Posner's public performance discussion: "the site hosting the unlawfully copied videos is publicly performing them, but the watcher is not, and therefore assisting the watcher (without hosting the video) does not assist copyright infringement." If that's where he was going, it would have been interesting to see Posner analogize to and distinguish the Cablevision case.]

The district court's ruling against myVidster reflected, in part, Posner's own opinion in Aimster, which basically threw a P2P file-sharing service under the bus. I personally think Aimster was one of numerous P2P exceptionalist cases and therefore only has precedential value in the P2P file-sharing context. Here, Posner distinguishes his own Aimster opinion in a way that strongly supports that interpretation, even though he doesn't explicitly acknowledge that implication.

In particular, he invokes the troublesome methodology of determining a service's liability based on the percentage of infringing activity taking place on it, saying most (all?) files on Aimster were infringing but that wasn’t the case for myVidster. Comparing infringement rates is a realpolitik approach, but one fraught with peril because (a) those ratios can and do change over time, and (b) they are notoriously difficult to measure properly. Worse, here it appears Posner (or possibly his clerks) did his own ad hoc empirical assessment of myVidster’s infringement rates--on July 4, no less. Your honor, like the American public you serve, you deserve to enjoy the holiday! If the outcome will turn on the current percentage of infringing activity—which it shouldn’t—that question should be remanded to the district court for further fact-finding, not by having a septuagenarian surfing for gay erotica (on court computers?) on a national holiday.

Posner also doesn’t renounce his ill-considered discussion Aimster about the service’s name, where he castigated it for using the –ster suffix just like Napster. Of course, myVidster also uses the –ster suffix, but to no legal consequence this time. Another reason to relegate Aimster to the P2P exceptionalist branch.

While the secondary infringement ruling is favorable to myVidster, the opinion indicates that myVidster could be enjoined from allowing users to archive the linked videos as part of a paid membership service. myVidster had already discontinued that premium service, so the opinion doesn’t spend much time discussing it. Nevertheless, the opinion flatly says that the archiving videos from other sites qualifies as direct infringement, not secondary infringement, even if it’s presumptively initiated by the users themselves as one of the benefits of a premium membership. I think it’s erroneous to treat sideloading as direct infringement when it’s done at a user’s direction, but chalk that up as another thing this opinion got wrong.

This opinion is not an instant classic. This opinion touches on so many important questions in secondary copyright jurisprudence—e.g., the 512(d) safe harbor, liability for tertiary infringement, the legitimacy of UGC linking sites that often link to infringing files stored somewhere else, sideloading and more. Unfortunately, because the opinion’s drafting is a train wreck, I’m skeptical it will be all that important or influential. As a result, it’s a big win for myVidster and less helpful for everyone else.

Nomenclature watch: I believe this is the first appellate opinion to use the term “pay wall” (or “paywall”). The only other opinion I found using either term in Westlaw or Lexis was the district court opinion in this case.
http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives...mbedding_1.htm





Judge Posner: Embedding Infringing Videos Is Not Copyright Infringement, And Neither Is Watching Them
Mike Masnick

Recently we've seen a number of cases, both civil and criminal, brought against websites that involve either links or embeds of videos hosted elsewhere. UK student Richard O'Dwyer is facing extradition and criminal charges for hosting a site that did exactly that. But, as many of us have wondered in the past, how is such a site infringing at all? After all, the videos themselves were uploaded by other people to other sites. The streaming occurs from those other servers. The embed just points people to where the content is, but it does that neutrally, no matter what the content might be.

A few months ago, we wrote about how the MPAA had jumped into a copyright infringement appeal involving porn producer Flava Works against a video "bookmarking" site called MyVidster. The MPAA argued that links and embeds are infringing, in support of a questionable district court ruling against MyVidster.

The appeals court ruling has now come out, written by Judge Posner, and it's absolutely worth reading (embedded below). Posner goes into great detail about how MyVidster's linking and embedding features don't even come close to infringing. They're not infringement and they're not contributory infringement. He goes through a pretty accurate description of how embedding works, and why MyVidster is separate from the uploading/hosting/streaming. But then he notes that those watching the videos aren't even infringing, so there isn't even any infringement for MyVidster to contribute to:

Is myVidster therefore a contributory infringer if a visitor to its website bookmarks the video and later someone clicks on the bookmark and views the video? myVidster is not just adding a frame around the video screen that the visitor is watching. Like a telephone exchange connecting two telephones, it is providing a connection between the server that hosts the video and the computer of myVidster’s visitor. But as long as the visitor makes no copy of the copyrighted video that he is watching, he is not violating the copyright owner’s exclusive right, conferred by the Copyright Act, “to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies” and “distribute copies . . . of the copyrighted work to the public.” 17 U.S.C. §§ 106(1), (3). His bypassing Flava’s pay wall by viewing the uploaded copy is equivalent to stealing a copyrighted book from a bookstore and reading it. That is a bad thing to do (in either case) but it is not copyright infringement. The infringer is the customer of Flava who copied Flava’s copyrighted video by uploading it to the Internet.

Got that? It's actually important. He's saying that those who are watching a video that someone else uploaded are not infringing on the reproduction right under copyright. Only the uploader has potentially violated that right. So there can't be a contributory infringement claim over that right.

Of course, copyright includes a few other rights beyond reproduction. There's also the "public performance" right. After running through a few different theories there, Posner again finds no clear case of infringement.

Flava contends that by providing a connection to websites that contain illegal copies of its copyrighted videos, myVidster is encouraging its subscribers to circumvent Flava’s pay wall, thus reducing Flava’s income. No doubt. But unless those visitors copy the videos they are viewing on the infringers’ websites, myVidster isn’t increasing the amount of infringement.... An employee of Flava who embezzled corporate funds would be doing the same thing—reducing Flava’s income—but would not be infringing Flava’s copyrights by doing so. myVidster displays names and addresses (that’s what the thumbnails are, in effect) of videos hosted elsewhere on the Internet that may or may not be copyrighted. Someone who uses one of those addresses to bypass Flava’s pay wall and watch a copyrighted video for free is no more a copyright infringer than if he had snuck into a movie theater and watched a copyrighted movie without buying a ticket. The facilitator of conduct that doesn’t infringe copyright is not a contributory infringer.

In other words, the person watching the video isn't doing a public performance (though the hosting server may be). But since myVidster is only helping the person watching the video, then it's not violating the public performance right either.

As we noted in our post about the original case, part of the ruling hinged on myVidster losing its DMCA safe harbor protections by not having a repeat infringer policy. But Posner notes that the DMCA safe harbor isn't even in question here because those viewing the videos have not infringed and thus there is no copyright infringement related to myVidster for showing the embeds:

myVidster received “takedown” notices from Flava designed to activate the duty of an Internet service provider to ban repeat infringers from its website, and Flava contends that myVidster failed to comply with the notices. But this is irrelevant unless myVidster is contributing to infringement; a noninfringer doesn’t need a safe harbor.

This ruling makes it clear that watching embedded videos is not infringing and then neither is hosting the embed code. While limited to the 7th Circuit, this ruling could still be quite handy in a number of other cases, including O'Dwyer's and the Rojadirecta case, which also involves embedded videos. Eric Goldman is a bit more skeptical of the impact of the ruling, arguing that Posner reasoning isn't particularly clear (well, he calls it a "train wreck.") While I rarely disagree with Goldman, I'm not convinced that this is such a train wreck. While Posner's explanation is, at times, convoluted, he does clearly make the main point: if there's infringement, it's completely disconnected from the user watching the video and the site doing the embedding.

Either way, Posner vacates the lower courts ruling, and notes that there are a few other issues with the case (mainly having to do with some other aspects of myVidster's business), but the main fight shows no infringement. Oh yeah, and Posner doesn't even reference the MPAA's filing in the case, suggesting how compelling that argument was...
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...ing-them.shtml





NASA's Mars Rover Crashed Into a DMCA Takedown
Alex_Pasternack

NASA’s livestream coverage of the Curiosity rover’s landing on Mars was was practically as flawless as the landing itself, a refreshing alternative to all that troubled Olympics coverage. The broadcast – full of suspense, lucky peanut-eating, and ecstatic congratulations – was slow and hard to reach at times, but NASA servers never failed. Along with burnishing its online publicity credentials, NASA had prepared for a global audience of millions

But NASA couldn’t prepare for everything. An hour or so after Curiosity’s 1.31 a.m. EST landing in Gale Crater, I noticed that the space agency’s main YouTube channel had posted a 13-minute excerpt of the stream. Its title was in an uncharacteristic but completely justified all caps: “NASA LANDS CAR-SIZE ROVER BESIDE MARTIAN MOUNTAIN.”

When I returned to the page ten minutes later, I saw this:

Stop the band. The video was gone, replaced with an alien message: “This video contains content from Scripps Local News, who has blocked it on copyright grounds. Sorry about that.” That is to say, a NASA-made public domain video posted on NASA’s official YouTube channel, documenting the landing of a $2.5 billion Mars rover mission paid for with public taxpayer money, was blocked by YouTube because of a copyright claim by a private news service.

Within hours, the problem was fixed (and the title switched back to a calmer regular title case — see the video below). But it was still a disappointing blip in an otherwise exceptional moment for humanity, what President Obama called “an unprecedented feat of technology.” It was also an interesting little object lesson in what’s still wrong with online copyright enforcement.

On Monday afternoon, a spokesperson for E.W. Scripps Company, owner of the Scripps News Service, emailed Motherboard a statement apologizing for the accidental takedown. “We apologize for the temporary inconvenience experienced when trying to upload and view a NASA clip early Monday morning," wrote Michele Roberts, referring to a video of the NASA livestream that Scripps uploaded and claimed as their own. "We made a mistake. We reacted as quickly as possible to make the video viewable again, and we’ve adjusted our workflow processes to remedy the situation in future.”

This isn’t the first time that a claim by Scripps News Service has grounded a NASA video on YouTube. According to Bob Jacobs, NASA’s Deputy Associate Administrator for Communications, such claims happen once a month, and tend to be more common with popular videos. If claimed videos aren’t blocked, they are slapped with ads from the fraudulent claimant. In April, Scripps also claimed ownership for a video of one of NASA’s Space Shuttles being flown atop a 747, causing it to disappear from NASA’s account.

“Everything from imagery to music gets flagged,” Jacobs said of the blocks and ad-claims that have hit NASA’s YouTube page. "We’ve been working with You Tube in an effort to stop the automatic disabling of videos. So far, it hasn’t helped much.

“The good thing about automation is that you don’t have to involve real people to make decisions. The bad thing about automation is that you don’t have to involve real people to make decisions.”

This isn’t a phenomenon limited to NASA’s videos: YouTube’s sophisticated copyright policing system is riddled with problems that make it prone to abuse, accidents and spam – and, if you end up on the receiving end of a copyright claim, really hard to fix.
How YouTube’s Copyright Robots Work (or Don’t)

YouTube will block or censor content for one of three reasons: if a video violates the site’s terms of service, if its content is automatically found to match copyrighted content, or if it receives a request from a copyright owner to remove a pirated video. The blockage of pirated content is is governed by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, the Congressional law that governs how websites deal with intellectual property violations and that stood to be replaced in part by this year’s Stop Online Piracy Act.

Content ID, YouTube’s automated copyright monitor, was meant to be the site’s secret weapon in its fight to stay legal, and make some sense – or cents – out of the video chaos: by algorithmically matching content, robots can, ideally, keep track of which videos contain copyrighted material. If owners (like record companies) want to make ad revenue from creative reworkings – or wholesale copies – of their content, they can do so while allowing uploaders to keep their copyrighted videos online. And the system also allows copyright owners to automatically block videos that appear to infringe their copyright.

In its early days, YouTube made much of its revenue from illegal uploads; now content companies are taking Google to court to ensure the system is as strict as it can be.

But three years after Content ID launched, YouTube’s copyright policing regime, like the general copyright system it tries to enforce, is still flawed. It mistakenly blocks videos that shouldn’t be blocked, and encourages excessive claims. A few months ago, one user’s video of foraging for salad in a field was taken down because the media company Rumblefish claimed to own the soundtrack of singing birds.

YouTube’s system is also heavily biased in favor of claimants, and a system that is increasingly controlling of content that has serious educational or scientific value, or arguably falls under “fair use” provisions. Claims of fair use of video content are immaterial to the Content ID or DMCA takedown system. Creative remixes are easy targets, as are videos of teenagers singing Christmas songs. As I discovered last year, many of Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s speeches are no longer available on YouTube thanks to automatic and manual copyright claims by the owner of King’s speeches, the British music giant EMI Publishing. This despite the fact that YouTube is still a haven for illegal and uncontested uploads of millions of hours of Hollywood and music material.
YouTube’s first line of defense against bogus claims? A warning that says, “Don’t make false claims!”

-

And because anyone can claim a YouTube video belongs to them, YouTube’s system allows cheaters to steal videos and direct traffic – and ad revenue – to their own versions. (Some preferred companies, like Universal Music Group, can even block videos manually, without filing a claim.) Of course, hiring enough staff to pre-screen the 72 hours of video uploaded to the site every minute for possible copyright infringement would cost Google something close to its ad revenue for 2011, about $37 billion, one site estimated. But YouTube’s first line of defense against bogus claims is little more than a boldface notice on its copyright claims page that reads, simply, “Don’t make false claims!”

Not Nominal

If the system made it easy for users who were falsely accused of copyright violations to reinstate their videos, abuses and failures of the system might be easier to prevent. But the process for reinstating a video is byzantine and difficult, and puts the burden of proof on the accused, not the accuser. Under Google’s system, users who accumulate three strikes may be subject to a total termination of their Google accounts.

“We spend too much time going through the administrative process to clear videos slapped with needless copyright claims,” says NASA’s Bob Jacobs. “YouTube seems to be missing a ‘common sense’ button to its processes, especially when it involves public domain material paid for by the American taxpayer.”

According to the DMCA, if a user disputes a claim from a copyright holder, YouTube should make a video available again, at least until the copyright holder files a second claim to take the disputed video offline again. Instead, YouTube’s policy requires the alleged violator to submit a signed counter-claim, under penalty of perjury, then awaits a response from the original supposed owner before possibly restoring the video. (Copyright owners must also file their claims under penalty of perjury, but filing a claim, called a Copyright Infringement Notification, is a relatively easier process, and enforcements of the penalty are rare.) YouTube forwards the claim to the supposed copyright owner and waits ten days for a response. “If we do not receive such notification, we may reinstate the material,” says YouTube, emphasis mine.

“Guys, our video is back online!”

NASA fans were incensed at the brief takedown. “If this isn’t a legitimate copyright claim, then they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” wrote user eluhn on a YouTube forum. At a different forum, another commenter quipped, “I doubt any local news station got Cameras on Mars before NASA to watch the landing.”

Jacobs, who manages the agency’s main YouTube channel, isn’t just concerned about accidents that result from automated systems like Content ID, but about the rise of fraudulent blocks by uploaders wanting to claim NASA content as their own. This enables them to either block NASA’s videos or to place ads next to NASA’s videos, earning them Google AdWords revenue from public domain videos of spaceflight. And because anyone can rip and upload a NASA video to their YouTube accounts, – and because ownership claims operate on the honor system – any user could claim to own a NASA video, even by accident.

“There seems to be few consequences for companies that engage in such activities, which often include legitimate news organizations,” he said. “We do agree that people who make false copyright claims against our material should be held accountable, regardless of their automated systems.”

Robots, which are still built by humans, fail humans all the time: remember how Frankenstein algorithms burned through $10 million a minute on Wall Street last week. Good thing then that we have the video in question to remind us how exciting it can be when our robots don’t fail.

But for a moment there, Houston, we had a problem. Mountain View and Capitol Hill, we still have a problem.
http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/8/6...-dmca-takedown





The Spotify Effect Shows Up: Streaming Music Boosts Warner’s Bottom Line

Streaming services like Spotify and Pandora have made a lot of noise. Now they’re actually generating money for the music labels, too.

Warner Music Group says streaming services contributed 25 percent of the digital revenue that its “recorded music” group saw last quarter. That works out to be about $54 million, or about 8 percent of Warner’s total revenue for the period.

What’s more encouraging for Warner — and, presumably, the rest of the big labels — is that streaming revenue is growing quickly, but doesn’t seem to be cutting into traditional digital sales from outlets like iTunes.*

Just as encouraging: Warner says that after you net out the effect of currency fluctuations, the increase in digital sales was bigger than the decrease in physical sales. That’s the goal the industry has been aiming for since the late 1990s.

*Warner defines “streaming” revenue as money it gets from subscription services like Spotify and Rhapsody, along with Web radio revenue from the likes of Pandora, Sirius and Clear Channel. It doesn’t include the new cloud/locker services from Apple and Amazon. [UPDATE: That number does include YouTube, though, which is a significant income source for some corners of the business.]
https://allthingsd.com/20120809/the-...s-bottom-line/





Is Barry Diller Stealing Broadcasters' Content? Aereo Patent Applications Say Maybe Not
Gina Smith

Aereo, the controversial Barry Diller-backed service that is streaming live and pre-recorded TV over the airwaves in New York City, is celebrating its recent preliminary court victory against 18 broadcasters by offering a free hour of service and new pricing options. But the real key for the viability of this high-flying IPTV startup in court might well be revealed in four patent applications filed earlier this year.

In March, ABC and 17 other New York City broadcasters filed a copyright infringement suit against Aero, claiming the service was essentially stealing and rebroadcasting its over-the-air (OTA) programming for its $8 to $12 a month Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) service.

Now in beta, Aereo lets Apple iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Roku users access round-the-clock live and prerecorded over-the-air (OTA) TV channels on their screens. The company defeated a preliminary injunction demandedy by ABC et al in July that would’ve shuttered its service. As a result, the four patent applications it’s filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark and Office (USPTO) are increasingly relevant to Aereo’s futre and this particularly nasty copyright infringement case.

“Typically, patents or patent applications have no relevance in a copyright infringement case,” said Tom Ewing, an IP expert who trains attorneys for the United Nations on IP matters. “But after this July 11 ruling, the case is becoming a different bird. That’s because the judge expressly signaled her interest in the technologies employed by Aereo, saying the details will decide the case.

“If in fact the four patent applications Aereo filed four months before the suit hit it accurately describe Aereo’s deployed technology in New York City,” he added, “then these patent apps could give Aereo a leg up.”

Aereo representitve Virginia Lam told ReadWriteWeb that they do. “On your question of whether or not our technology works as we have described, the answer is a resounding, yes,” Lam said. “In fact, the recent decision by Federal Judge Alison J. Nathan in favor of Aereo (denying a preliminary injunction that had been filed against the company) bears this out.”

In her July 11 order Federal District Court Judge Alison Nathan was explicit that the case is all about the technology: Is Aereo simply copying and redistributing copyrighted over-the-air broadcasts as ABC et al claims. Or is Aereo just providing people the equivalent of virtual rabbit ears to grab freely available material on the airwaves, as it claims. In her opinion, she indicated that the merits of the case will lie on whether the Aereo system can be considered “one” or “many” antennae.

According to the USPTO, patent examiners have yet to take a look at the applications. So it may be too soon to party. But early indications from Judge Nathan’s order signal that Aereo’s use of a tiny and separate antenna in NYC for each user “reinforce(s) … that the copies (of broadcasts) are unique and accessible only to a particular user, as they indicate that the copies are created using wholly distinct paths.”

The patent applications appear to support this provided, as Ewing noted, that Aereo is doing exactly what the patent applications say it is doing: Providing an antenna per user, ala rabbit years, just 21st century remote style.

The four filed patent applications show how the company would use a rooftop array of tiny, dime-sized antennae at its New York City building - and assigniing each one per user as his or her own remote antenna.

The system, at least according to the patents, is essentially designed to provide each user with his or her own remote antenna – one of the tiny ones in Aereo’s rooftop array of millions of them.

Here are the four applications Aereo has filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office:

Its application (20120129479)called “Method and System for Processing Antenna Feeds Using Separate Processing Pipelines” supports the idea that the system’s intent is to assign an antenna per user as opposed to just stealing, recording and rebroadcasting, as ABC and the other broadcasters claim.

Its application (20120127374) “System and Method for Providing Network Access to Antenna Feeds” describes how Internet users get access to live antenna feeds, which appearst to be consistent with what Aereo reps have described about the system in its PR materials and in court.

The same goes for its application (20120127363) “Antenna System with Individually Addressable Elements in Dense Array,” which describes in detail how the system assigns users to individual antennas.

Accessing the recordings users make with their Roku, Apple TV or other DVR is the heart of application 20120131621, titled a “System and Method for Providing Network Access to Individually Recorded Content.”

In New York City, Aereo currently offers 28 broadcast channels available over-the-air, including WABC, WCBS, WNBC WNYW-FOX, WPIX-11, WNET-PBS, Telemundo Univision and other special interest and foreign channels.

Aereo plans to extend the service to PC and Android users in New York City later this quarter, and enter other markets in the United States in 2013.

This should be be an interesting case. It is a rare copyright infringement case that hinges on technology, much less patents. And the stakes are high.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...-maybe-not.php





How to Watch Internet TV Across Borders

Many Internet TV broadcasters limit their broadcasts to certain countries, but that doesn't mean you can't watch their shows with the right network configuration.
Steven Vaughan-Nichols

Welcome to the BBC from the States with the help of a VPN.Living in the U.S., one of my greatest regrets is that I can't watch BBC video with iPlayer. If I were living in the U.K., I'd feel the same away about not being able to watch shows on Hulu. But, with a Web proxy or a virtual private networks (VPN)s and an Internet Protocol (IP) address in a country where the content is available, you can watch these shows.

All of these services block you from watching video by simply checking to see if your IP address is in the “right” country. Your IP address, under today's IPv4 Internet, can place you to a particular neighborhood, so it's trivial to see if you're in the proper nation. But, if you use a Web proxy or a VPN with an IP address from the authorized region, you'll look to the video Web servers like you have permission to watch the video.

Technically, it's easy to set your browser up to use a Web proxy or VPN software. With a Web proxy and Windows XP, for example, you just go to Internet Options, click the Connections tab, and then click LAN Settings. Next, under Proxy server you click to select the “Use a proxy server for your LAN” check box. Finally, you enter the IP address of the proxy server and in the Port box, type the IP number that is used by the proxy server for client connections—that's usually 8080. It's usually pretty simple to do that in any browser and operating system. There are also programs, such as Proxy Switchy, for Chrome that makes it easy to switch from one proxy to another in a single session.

When you use a proxy, though, all your traffic is still open to network administrators. If you want to visit another country and watch their TV in privacy, you'll need a VPN.

In either case, the problem is to find a proxy server, or a VPN, that offers addresses in the country you want video access from. There are many “free” proxy servers or VPNs, but their service tends to be poor and, frankly, except for services like Tor, which are meant to protect free speech, I don't trust them. Oh, and don't get any ideas about using Tor to watch the Olympics on the BBC; Tor blocks Flash.

There are many commercial proxy servers. Two that I've tried, and I can recommend, are AllAnonymity, with proxy servers in, among other countries, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and HideMyAss, with numerous supported countries.

If you want to use a VPN, you'll need to set yourself up with a private VPN service. These companies, such as Banana VPN, Black Logic, StrongVPN, and Unblock Us, will set you up with their VPN software and connections in other countries. Generally speaking, you'll end up paying a monthly service fee of $10 to $20 a month for either proxy or VPN services.

There are also services, such as Expat Shield, which in this case only works if you're trying to appear with a U.K. address, that are designed to hide all the technical details from users. These tend to be in the same price range.

No mater which service you try, though, you should keep in mind that even the best of them have only a limited amount of bandwidth to serve their customers. So, for example, I wouldn't try watching HD video across the Atlantic with any real hope of watching a high-quality video.

Finally, the content owners, say NBC for the Olympics in the U.S., don't like people sneaking across borders to watch “their” content from another provider. Can they legally stop you? I am not a lawyer and I don't know, so if you decide to use any of these services, you have my best wishes, but you're on your own.
https://www.networkworld.com/community/node/81175





Google Fiber Gets a Fast Start in Kansas City

Analysts say that more than 7,000 households have already pre-registered for the new broadband service, while 23 percent of designated 'fiberhoods' have cleared the hurdle for .
Marguerite Reardon

After just one week on the market, Google Fiber is taking off in Kansas City (in both Kansas and Missouri), where 46 of the designated neighborhoods -- or "fiberhoods" -- have qualified for the service, the company reports on its Google Fiber site.

Google announced its fiber-to-the-home network last week, which offers speeds of up to one gigabit per second and a new TV service. Google said it would prioritize construction of the network in neighborhoods -- so-called "fiberhoods" -- in which residents show the most interest. It set up a website where residents interested in the service can pre-register for the service for a $10 fee. When that particular "fiberhood" reaches a predetermined threshold, Google will commit to offering service in that area.

The response to the service in the first week has been huge -- Google has already managed to sign up 23 percent of the eligible neighborhoods in the two cities. Missouri residents seem to be more enthusiastic about the service; 31 percent, or 40 out of 128 eligible "fiberhoods" qualifying for service. Kansans are lagging, by contrast; only eight percent, or six out of 74 "fiberhoods," have so far qualified for the service. (I pulled this data from the Google Fiber page, which breaks down the Missouri and Kansas data separately.)

In a research note to investors (not online), analysts at Macquarie Capital estimate Google has signed up 7,000, out of a possible 165,000 households. That translates into about 4 percent market penetration in the first week alone.

Google says it's happy with the uptake in the service.

"We didn't really know what to expect," said a spokeswoman for Google Fiber. "But we're thrilled with the progress so far. And we're working hard on the ground to educate people about the benefits of the fiber network."

Google has "fiber trucks" going through various neighborhoods eligible for the fiber network to help educate residents. And Google has also established a "fiber space" demonstration center where local residents can make appointments to learn more about the personal and community benefits of having a fiber network.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that people are enthusiastic about the service. Google's service offers subscribers much faster speeds for a lot less than what they'd pay competing broadband providers. Google's main package costs $120 and gives customers the 1Gbps broadband and Fiber TV service plus 1 terabyte of Google Drive cloud storage.

The 1Gbps broadband-only service is only $70 and also includes 1 Terabyte of data storage. Time Warner Cable, Google's biggest competitor in this market, offers a 50 Mbps Internet service for an introductory price of $80 a month. And its total package with TV service and home phone service included is $200 a month.

But installing a fiber network and running it is not cheap. Macquarie analysts estimate that even if Google manages to sign up 25 percent of Kansas City households, Google Fiber will still operate at a loss.

"We expect this initial rollout to be net negative for GOOG. It reminds us that this initiative is less about a long-term revenue opportunity for Google and more about pushing current Internet providers to increase speeds and innovate (which could benefit Google in the long run)," the analysts said in the research note.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-574...n-kansas-city/





The Next Internet? Inside PARC’s Vision of Content Centric Networking
Wade Roush

The Internet may be hurtling toward collapse under the strain of too much traffic. But PARC research fellow Van Jacobson thinks he knows how to fix it.

He’s done it before. Back in the mid-1980s, when the Internet was seeing its first modest surge in usage, Jacobson noticed that data packets were piling up on the message routers of the day, like cars waiting for cross-traffic to clear before entering an intersection. Working with fellow Berkeley computer science instructor Mike Karels, he came up with a small change to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) that, in essence, allowed packets to ease into the intersections gradually, curing the congestion. Later, Jacobson also came up with a way to compress the “headers” or address sections of Internet Protocol (IP) packets from 40 bytes down to about 3 or 4 bytes, which made a big difference at a time when so many packets were still squeezing through narrow telephone lines.

But the challenges the Internet is facing today are very different, and call for a much broader solution, Jacobson believes. He argues that the global computing network was never designed to carry exabytes of video, voice, and image data to consumers’ homes and mobile devices, as it’s now doing, and that it will never be possible to increase wireless or land-line bandwidth fast enough to keep up with demand. In fact, he thinks the Internet has outgrown its original underpinnings as a network built on physical addresses, and that it’s time to put aside TCP/IP and start over with a completely novel approach to naming, storing, and moving data.

Jacobson’s alternative is called Content Centric Networking, or CCN, and it’s grown into the single biggest internal project at PARC, the Xerox-owned research center that’s famous as the birthplace of graphical computing, laser printing, and the Ethernet standard. If the ideas behind CCN were broadly adopted, PARC researchers believe, it would speed the delivery of content and vastly reduce the load on the networking equipment at the Internet’s core.

It would also pose a challenge to the model of utility-style storage and processing that’s come to be known as cloud computing. And that might undermine many current business models in the software and digital content industries—while at the same time creating new ones. In other words, it’s just the kind of revolutionary idea that has remade Silicon Valley at least four times since the 1960s. And this time, PARC doesn’t want to miss out on the rewards.

“When there is widespread adoption of CCN there will be lots of opportunities to build valuable businesses on top of it that are really impossible to foresee today,” says Teresa Lunt, vice president of PARC’s Computing Science Laboratory. “The main reason we’re investing is because we’re in love with the technology, and we want CCN to make it out into the world…[but] we know that PARC will be able to participate in the upside as well.”

Replacing “Where Is It?” with “Who Wants It?”

To understand why Content Centric Networking is so different, you have to start by looking at today’s Internet, which was designed back in the days when there were only a handful of machines that needed to talk to each other, and the network was used mainly for short bursts of point-to-point communication. In this established scheme, every piece of content has a name, but to find it you have to know in advance where it’s stored—which means the whole system is built around host identifiers and file hierarchies like http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco...next-internet/. (The first part of that URL gets translated into the IP address 63.246.24.145, which leads to the server at St. Louis, MO-based Contegix where Xconomy’s content database is hosted. The rest refers to the sub-sub-sub-folder on that server where WordPress, our content management system, stored this page.)

The fundamental idea behind Content Centric Networking is that to retrieve a piece of data, you should only have to care about what you want, not where it’s stored. Rather than transmitting a request for a specific file on a specific server, a CCN-based browser or device would simply broadcast its interest in that file, and the nearest machine with an authentic copy would respond. File names in a CCN world look superficially similar to URLs (for example, /parc.com/van/can/417.vcf/v3/s0/Ox3fdc96a4…) but the data in a name is used to establish the file’s authenticity and provenance, not to indicate location.

It’s easy to see how much sense this makes compared to the current client-server model. Say I’m using my Apple TV box to browse my Flickr photo collection on my big-screen TV. To get each photo, the Apple TV has to connect to Flickr, which is hosted on some remote data center owned by Yahoo—it could be in Utah or North Carolina, for all I know. The request has to travel from the Apple TV over my Wi-Fi network, into Comcast’s servers, then across the Internet core, and finally to Yahoo. Then the photos, which amount to several megabytes each, have to travel all the way back through the network to my TV.

But the photos on Flickr are just copies of the originals, which are stored on my camera and on my laptop, about 15 feet away from my TV. It would be much smarter and more economical if the Apple TV could simply ask for each photo by name—that is, if it could broadcast its interest in the photo to the network. My laptop could respond, and I could keep browsing without the requests or the data ever leaving my apartment. (In Jacobson’s scheme, file names can include encrypted sections that bar users without the proper keys from retrieving them, meaning that security and rights management are built into the address system from the start.)

“The simplest explanation is that you replace the concept of the IP address as the defining entity in the network with the name of the content,” says Lunt. “Now all the talk in the network is about ‘Have you seen this content?’ and ‘Who needs this content?’ as opposed to ‘What is the routing path to particular terminus in the network?’ It’s a simple idea, but it makes a lot of things possible.”

For example, now that memory is so much cheaper than when the Internet was first built, it’s becoming more economical to cache popular content at many places throughout the network. This minimizes the distance content has to travel to reach end users, and hence the amount of bandwidth consumed. Lunt uses a real-world analogy. “It used to be that if you had a store and you needed a product, you called up the factory for delivery and they sent a truck,” she explains. “That model works for a small business in one town, but it doesn’t scale up to a nationwide or global network. So people have built warehouses where you can cache a lot of stuff, and then people order from the nearest warehouse. You can have a very efficient system without having to go back to the factory for each order.”

Similarly, in a content-centric network, if you want to watch a video, you don’t have to go all the way back to the source, Lunt says. “I only have to go as far as the nearest router that has cached the content, which might be somebody in the neighborhood or somebody near me on an airplane or maybe my husband’s iPad.”

Of course, caching data at different points in the network is exactly what content distribution networks (CDNs) like Akamai do for their high-end corporate clients, so that Internet videos will start playing faster, for example. But in a content-centric world, Lunt says, the whole Internet would be a CDN. “Caching becomes part of the model as opposed to something you have to glue onto the side.”

Tinkering with Applications

Computer scientists have been discussing the idea of name-based (as opposed to location-based) networking since the 1970s. But the proposal began to pick up steam in 2006. That’s when Jacobson, who’d done stints as head of the Network Research group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and as chief scientist at Cisco Systems and Packet Design, joined PARC to lead a new Content Centric Networking research program.

PARC had been operating as a contract R&D lab—independent of Xerox, but wholly owned by it—-since 2002. Its business model is to build internal intellectual property and expertise, often with the help of government funding and university collaborators, and then to get the technologies to market through spinoffs or commercialization agreements with industry partners. In 2006, for example, PARC licensed some of its natural language search technology to a spinoff called Powerset, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2008 for $100 million.

In 2009, after three years of design work, Jacobson’s team released CCNx, an open-source software implementation of the protocols needed to build research-stage content centric networks. The next year they released an Android version of CCNx, optimized to run on smartphones, and joined the Named Data Networking (NDN) initiative, a network of 11 university labs that won $8 million in National Science Foundation funding for further development of the CCN idea.

It’s unlikely any of that could have happened if Jacobson had tried to develop his ideas inside a company like Cisco or Packet Design. “Having worked at both large companies and startups, I came to PARC to make Content Centric Networking a reality,” Jacobson said in a 2010 statement. The lab “understands the importance of openness and collaboration to achieve success for new network architectures,” he said.

In that vein, PARC hosted the first meeting of the Emerging Networks Consortium this spring. It’s a group of big companies like Alcatel-Lucent, BT, France Telecom-Orange, Huawei, Panasonic, and Samsung who want to experiment with CCN technologies and have agreed to share what they’re learning. “That has been a good validation for us that it’s not just us or the academic sector” who are interested in CCN, says Jatinder Singh, PARC’s director of mobile innovation strategy. “A lot of these industries are actively tinkering with use cases they might want to implement.”

What might those cases be? To be clear, no one is talking yet about replacing the existing Internet with a content-centric system. That would be impractical, not to mention expensive. (And in practice, a new networking standard would probably be implemented as an “overlay” on the existing TCP/IP-based Internet, just as the Internet started out as an overlay on the telephone network.) Rather, Lunt and Singh say the CCN approach is likely to turn up first in specific applications on the edges of the network. Then, if it’s successful enough, it might filter back toward the center.

The world of wireless medical devices is one area PARC is eyeing. The traditional TCP/IP-based approach would be to equip these devices to connect to the Internet via Wi-Fi; collect their data on a centralized server; then retrieve the data from PCs or smartphones. But that comes with privacy and security hazards—and there are no common standards yet for formatting or exchanging medical data. “The medical device ecosystem is sort of fragmented,” says Singh. “You have vendors producing blood pressure monitors and scales and glucose meters, but so far there isn’t a clear mechanism for aggregating data across those devices.”

On top of that, it’s overkill to send health data up to cloud servers if it’s only needed within the confines of a single home or clinic. Imagine, instead, that your CCN-equipped smartphone is constantly polling your scale, your sleep monitor, and all your other home health devices for new data. Then when you visit your doctor, the office network pulls the stored data directly from your phone. “Using smartphones as hubs, we are looking at how CCN can allow data to be gathered, contextualized, and shared in a secure fashion,” says Singh.

Members of the Emerging Network Consortium also have some very different applications in mind, including using CCN-based networks to ease the burden on cellular networks. That could work either by using CCN-based networks for “backhaul” of data between wireless towers, or by offloading mobile data from 3G and 4G networks onto CCN-based Wi-Fi networks. “Voice over CCN” is another possibility, as are lighting and environmental control systems for buildings and home media sharing—pairing TVs, PCs, tablets, and smartphones with one another without the need for a central Wi-Fi hub.

Twitter Without Twitter, Facebook Without Facebook

If it all sounds very speculative, that’s because it is. At this stage, companies like Samsung may be investigating CCN mainly as a hedge against uncertainty. “The technology industry is so fast-paced that they know that whatever their cash cow is this year, in five to 10 years it’s going to be something else,” says Lunt. “They have to be constantly looking for the next big thing … Samsung makes equipment for carriers, they make handsets, they make consumer devices. CCN could mean a whole new set of businesses for them.”

But Content Centric Networking could also mean a whole new set of challenges for companies in the content business. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Netflix, and their ilk have spent hundreds of billions of dollars building siloed, centralized, proprietary storage and distribution infrastructures, designed wholly around the client-server model and often reachable only via tollbooths like the iTunes Store or Xbox Live. (See my colleague Greg Huang’s recent take on the Four Horsemen of the Consumer Apocalypse.)

In a CCN world, consumers would probably still have to look at ads and pay for movies, music, books, apps, and the like, but they might not be so dependent upon a few giant cloud operators.

“One of the things that’s intriguing about not having to go to the source is that you could start to think about implementing applications differently,” Lunt says. “You could build apps that don’t have any notion of a server at all. So you could have Twitter without Twitter or Facebook without Facebook—that is, without having to have a major investment in hosting content, because the network is caching it all over the place.”

Such architectures might give users more control over privacy and security of their data, and let them share their own data across devices without having to go through proprietary services like Apple’s iCloud, PARC executives say.

“What Apple is trying to do with iCloud is to say: You shouldn’t have to care which device you got an app on, or which device you took a photo on, whether it was your iPad or iPhone or MacBook Air. You just want your content to be on the other devices when you want it,” says Steve Hoover, CEO of PARC. “That validates our vision. But the way they are solving that puts more load on the network than it needs to, and it requires consumer lock-in. So Apple may be a user of this [CCN] technology one day, because it will make it easier. On the other hand, they could also hate it, because it will make it a lot easier for other people to provide that capability of getting the content whenever you want.”

Already, there’s at least one startup, Cambridge, MA- and New York-based Silver Lining Systems, that says it’s using concepts from Content Centric Networking to solve performance problems in data centers and virtualized computing environments. (The company includes former Verizon, Netezza, and Endeca executives, according to the Boston Globe. It isn’t working directly with PARC.) The CCN initiative could eventually lead to PARC spinoffs as well, though nothing formal is in the works. “There could be a B2C play, an Akamai for consumers,” Hoover speculates. “Right now, for example, I have photos on Photobucket, Shutterfly, and Flickr, and I have to think about where those photos are before I can go get them. Somebody could build a CCN layer that interfaces with every photo-sharing service out there, and every time you upload a photo, they manage that for you.”

How much might consumers be willing to pay for such a service? It’s hard to know until someone builds it. Hoover says PARC’s job is to help companies move in that direction.

“When Bob Metcalfe sat in this building and drew Ethernet on a paper napkin, there wasn’t even an Internet, so nobody could have predicted that the business model [for the Internet] was going to be Google search and advertising,” Hoover says. “We can sit here and speculate about where the tollbooths will go, but to me, it’s more about whether there are pockets of money out there ready to address problems that people have now. The tollbooths will go where they need to be.”
http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco...ic-networking/





Sprint CEO Dan Hesse's Plan to Fight AT&T and Verizon: 'Doing the Right Thing'
Dieter Bohn

Sprint is feeling pretty positive about itself these days. Most obviously, it dodged a bullet when AT&T failed to acquire T-Mobile, but since then Sprint's last quarterly results were better than usual by Sprint's usual standards — though perhaps that's damning the company with faint praise. Nevertheless, Sprint was eager to tout them to a small group of reporters at its headquarters today, noting that its ARPU, OIBDA, FD-LTE, and churn were all headed in the right direction.

"ARPU, OIBDA, FD-LTE and churn" are all terms that the average human will justifiably ignore, though they are critically important to understanding whether Sprint will still be a viable carrier in a few years. Fortunately for those of us not deeply embedded in the minutiae of the mobile industry, CEO Dan Hesse has a much simpler idea that customers can keep in mind: Sprint wants to be the "good guys." Another way to put it: he's betting that nice guys don't always finish last.

"At Sprint, we describe it internally as being the good guys, of doing the right thing," he said today. That moral component pervades many of the PR-friendly activities Sprint engages in, from eco-friendly recycling programs to distracted driving prevention, but it also, Hesse says, informs what would otherwise seem like calculated business decisions like continuing to offer unlimited data.

""At Sprint, we describe it internally as being the good guys, of doing the right thing""

The topline example is Sprint's place in the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which since Hesse's four-and-a-half-year tenure as CEO have gone from worst to first amongst carriers. Hesse says that "doing the right thing" when it comes to better customer service not only makes customers happier, but saves the company money: "Customer care costs are roughly half of what they were four and a half years ago."

While Sprint is making some headway in customer service and its cash position, that's not to say the company or its CEO has illusions that everything is great, "What you’re not going to see around here are any mission accomplished signs," Hesse says. Amongst the reasons Sprint is struggling is the vastly more powerful and entrenched competition it's up against: AT&T and Verizon.

""The industry does have an issue with the size of the duopoly of AT&T and Verizon""

Hesse didn't mince words about those larger competitors: "There’s no question that the industry does have an issue with the size of the duopoly of AT&T and Verizon." As for how Sprint itself will deal with that issue, it's probably not a mistake that Hesse's next comment was to express his belief that there would be "more consolidation" in the industry. Smaller players will have to try to size-up so they can compete "because the gap between the top two and number three is so large." Sprint reportedly considered acquiring MetroPCS recently, but whether Sprint has a similar merger in its future is still up in the air — without naming names, Hesse only reiterated that consolidation amongst the smaller players would be "beneficial" to the industry.

Beyond direct competition, Sprint's other big challenge is staying on track to launch LTE with its "Network Vision" strategy. After a major hiccup with the LightSquared fiasco, the company is working hard to deploy special "Multimode" boxes at towers that can handle both 3G and 4G signals in a cabinet that has a much smaller footprint than traditional cellular tower systems. Sprint has officially launched LTE in 15 cities with more on the way.

While Sprint is optimistic about its own plans, it can't control what its partner, Clearwire, does. Clearwire is committed to launching a (slightly different, from a technical perspective) LTE network, which is "part of [Sprint's] spectrum plan going forward," Hesse says. When we asked if it was an "essential" part, Hesse said that it is. In fact that with the Clearwire partnership, Sprint "would run out of capacity sometime in roughly a couple years, including our 800[MHz] and 1900[MHz bands]." Should Clearwire fail to get its LTE rolled out, Hesse didn't dance around the fact that Sprint would have to find other ways to acquire spectrum.

""The net net today, yes, I think [launching WiMAX] was the right decision.""

Hesse's optimism about Sprint's future isn't leavened with quite as much humility about its past as you might expect. Specifically, he defended the decision to roll out the WiMAX network — the very network that Sprint is now slowly turning off in its transition to LTE. Asked whether he would do it all over again, Hesse replied "Yes." According to Hesse's view, "it was the right decision" from a brand perspective, because if nothing else it made Sprint "first" to a 4G network. Even so, it's hard to get around the fact that, as with the iDEN network it acquired from Nextel, Sprint has spent a large amount of money on dead-end wireless technology and is spending still more to shut it down.

Another recent challenge for Sprint was the decision to carry the iPhone. Not surprisingly, Sprint simply had to wait to get "the call from Apple," and once it did, Hesse and the board had to weight the short term costs and the long term gains. There was some concern recently that the company had to spend too much in order to get Apple's smartphone on its network, but Hesse believes that "the long term value of an iPhone customer [...] is higher than other phones in the high-end smartphone segment." It's a $15.5 billion dollar gamble, but one that Hesse believes will pay off: "We saw no reason to bet against Apple."

""What you’re not going to see around here are any mission accomplished signs.""

So while Sprint is spending more now in terms of subsidies, in the long-term Hesse believes that it will help push up that all-important Average Revenue Per User (the ARPU referenced earlier). It also, he emphasizes, fits in with the "good guys" philosophy at Sprint, doing right by the many customers who trusted the carrier to finally get the iPhone.

Right now, Sprint does seem to be doing better than most other carriers when it comes to being the nice guy (though you could say that's like being the nicest bully in school). It's offering unlimited data, ramping up customer-friendly pre-paid offerings via its Virgin Mobile brand, shelling out billions to Apple, and spending a significant amount of capital to build up a brand-new LTE network. Dan Hesse says that Sprint is "on a long term turnaround plan," but as the challenges before the carrier mount, the question will be whether "doing the right thing" is the right way to achieve profitability. People hate seeing the nice guy finish last, but nobody likes seeing him turn into a jerk.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/7/322...n-att-strategy





The New York Times Reports a Digital Success Story
Peter Kafka

The New York Times’ pay wall, long debated in and outside of the company, now looks like a bona fide success.

The company has more than 530,000 paying subscribers for its digital editions, and it credits the plan with a consistent increase in circulation dollars. Which it needs, because its ad dollars continue to shrink.

Here’s another data point in favor of the plan: A report from Barclays analyst Kannan Venkateshwar, who estimates that the paper will have more digital subscribers than print subs within a couple of years.

The caveats: Even if Venkateshwar’s projections are right, the digital subscription story won’t solve all of the Times’ problems. For starters, each digital customer generates much less revenue than a print customer: The digital sub pays around $220 a year for the Times, versus approximately $730 for the paper-and-ink version.

And while the profits that each kind of sub generates for the paper should be roughly equal — because it’s a whole lot cheaper to produce and deliver a digital copy than a print one — that only holds true if the Times isn’t overly reliant on discounts to sell its digital subscriptions.

Still, Venkateshwar, who has been bullish on the Times for a while, argues that most of the digital subscribers to date seem to be new customers. So all of this is incremental revenue. That’s a best-case scenario for the paper.
https://allthingsd.com/20120806/the-...success-story/





Amazon Sells More E-Books than Print Titles in the UK

Britons are now buying more e-books than printed ones through Amazon’s online store, according to the latest figures released by the US retailer.

Fifth place for the 00s goes to the e-reader, epitomised by Amazon's Kindle. First released in 2007, the Kindle stores thousands of books, downloading more via WiFi or 3G, and boasts a battery life of up to a month. It's been suggested that the increased privacy of reading on a Kindle, compared with a book, has altered public reading habits.

Amazon, which owns the Kindle, a popular e-reader, has revealed that in the UK it is selling 114 e-books to every 100 printed hardbacks and paperbacks.

The trend for digital books outselling printed books on the popular e-reading platform has been the case for the last few years in the US, but had yet to happen in the UK.

Jorrit Van der Meulen, vice president of Kindle EU, said: “As a result of the success of Kindle, we’re selling more books than ever before for authors and publishers.

“We hit this milestone in the United States less than four years after introducing Kindle, so to reach this landmark after just two years in the UK is remarkable. It shows how quickly UK readers are embracing Kindle.”

Amazon launched the Kindle in the UK in 2010 and has enjoyed success with all age groups. Its book-like interface has been popular with both men and women and proved a hit Christmas present.

Part of the Kindle’s appeal to writers is that authors who have yet to sign a book deal can self-publish their stories as e-books.

The store’s most popular author this year is Fifty Shades of Grey writer EL James, whose surprise bestseller has enjoyed a major success as an e-book. It has sold more than two million copies in just four months.

Amazon’s Kindle costs £89, has a battery life of one month and weighs around 170g.

It faces competition from Apple’s iPad, the Kobo reader and Sony’s various e-book Readers.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...in-the-UK.html





Rethink Forced on the Use of Facebook by Brands
Simon Canning

BRANDS could be forced to abandon social media campaigns after a landmark advertising watchdog finding ruled they were responsible for derogatory comments posted by users on their Facebook pages and other sites.

The Advertising Standards Bureau is poised to release a report attacking Carlton & United Breweries for user comments posted on its official VB Facebook page that vilified sexual identity, discriminated against women and used obscene language.

The judgment, expected soon, could have far-reaching implications for marketers using social media.

In a copy of the report obtained by Media, the ASB said comments left by people on the social network site constituted advertising, even though the company had not posted them.

The complaint to the ASB claimed that the Facebook page breached alcohol advertising guidelines by connecting alcohol with social or sexual prowess and promoted irresponsible drinking and excessive consumption.

In an argument that the ASB rejected, CUB said that the VB page was a destination sought out by users who had to meet age guidelines and the comments on the site reflected conversations that might go on between people in any pub.

"It would be unduly onerous on alcohol beverage producers and indeed any company participating in this medium to interpret the code as including user comments on Facebook pages as falling within the scope of 'advertising or marketing communications', since CUB does not have a reasonable degree of control over them," the company said.

It said that while it checked the comment stream twice a day and removed inappropriate comments, live moderation was not possible and "contrary to the spirit of social media".

A spokesman for CUB said that the offensive comments had been removed.

"Clearly, some of the comments dealt with are inappropriate and are in no way endorsed by CUB," the spokesman said.

"While we did not consider user comments to be advertising, we acknowledge the decision of the ASB and support what is clearly a robust process."

Legal experts agreed with the company's warning to the watchdog that a finding against it would have ramifications for the use of social media by brands.

John Swinson, a partner with King & Wood Mallesons, which has assessed ASB judgments on social media, said marketers would be forced to abandon platforms such as Facebook if they were held responsible for comments left by the public.

"If this decision is carried, then brand owners will have to be continually monitoring their Facebook pages to make sure that comments about their products are not in breach of advertising standards or may be misleading," Mr Swinson said. "The burden has been placed on advertisers."

He warned that the ASB rulings could also become a benchmark for future court rulings involving brands and social media.

Search giant Google is appealing to the High Court against a decision where it was deemed to be responsible for misleading ads created by advertisers using its self-service AdWords program.

Mr Swinson said that with brands flocking to social media, the implications of the ASB determination might prove greater, with companies forced to divert large resources to the channel.

He said that where social media was often monitored by the marketing department or ad agency team, legal advisers would also have to monitor posts on a brand's Facebook page. "You simply can no longer have two-way conversations with your customers," he said.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/medi...-1226443411307





Refugee from Facebook Questions the Social Media Life
Craig Timberg,

Not long after Katherine Losse left her Silicon Valley career and moved to this West Texas town for its artsy vibe and crisp desert air, she decided to make friends the old-fashioned way, in person. So she went to her Facebook page and, with a series of keystrokes, shut it off.

The move carried extra import because Losse had been the social network’s 51st employee and rose to become founder Mark Zuckerberg’s personal ghostwriter. But Losse gradually soured on the revolution in human relations she witnessed from within.

The explosion of social media, she believed, left hundreds of millions of users with connections that were more plentiful but also narrower and less satisfying, with intimacy losing out to efficiency. It was time, Losse thought, for people to renegotiate their relationships with technology.

“It’s okay to feel weird about this because I feel weird about this, and I was in the center of it,” said Losse, 36, who has long, dark hair and sky-blue eyes. “We all know there is an anxiety, there’s an unease, there’s a worry that our lives are changing.”

Her response was to quit her job — something made easier by the vested stock she cashed in — and to embrace the ancient toil of writing something in her own words, at book length, about her experiences and the philosophical questions they inspired.

That brought her to Marfa, a town of 2,000 people in an area so remote that astronomers long have come here for its famously dark night sky, beyond the light pollution that’s a byproduct of modern life.

Losse’s mission was oddly parallel. She wanted to live, at least for a time, as far as practical from the world’s relentless digital glow.

Losse was a graduate student in English at Johns Hopkins University in 2004 when Facebook began its spread, first at Harvard, then other elite schools and beyond. It provided a digital commons, a way of sharing personal lives that to her felt safer than the rest of the Internet.

The mix has proved powerful. More than 900 million people have joined; if they were citizens of a single country, Facebook Nation would be the world’s third largest.

Despite a messy initial stock offering in May that left investors feeling bruised, Facebook has become one of the most potent and pervasive technology companies in the world, with a massive potential revenue stream from targeting ads to its users. (Donald E. Graham, chairman and chief executive of The Washington Post Co., is a Facebook board member.)

As it has grown, Facebook has increasingly drawn scrutiny from American and European regulators while provoking debate over the consequences of digital socializing — especially when it’s happening on platform built by a profit-seeking company.

At first, Losse was among those smitten. In 2005, after moving to Northern California in search of work, she responded to a query on the Facebook home page seeking résumés. Losse soon became one of the company’s first customer-service reps, replying to questions from users and helping to police abuses.

She was firmly on the wrong side of the Silicon Valley divide, which prizes the (mostly male) engineers over those, like Losse, with liberal arts degrees. Yet she had the sense of being on the ground floor of something exciting that might also yield a life-altering financial jackpot.

In her first days, she was given a master password that she said allowed her to see any information users typed into their Facebook pages. She could go into pages to fix technical problems and police content. Losse recounted sparring with a user who created a succession of pages devoted to anti-gay messages and imagery. In one exchange, she noticed the man’s password, “Ilovejason,” and was startled by the painful irony.

Another time, Losse cringed when she learned that a team of Facebook engineers was developing what they called “dark profiles” — pages for people who had not signed up for the service but who had been identified in posts by Facebook users. The dark profiles were not to be visible to ordinary users, Losse said, but if the person eventually signed up, Facebook would activate those latent links to other users.

(A Facebook spokesman declined to comment on Losse or her book, “The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network,” published in June by Free Press.)

All the world a stage

Losse’s unease sharpened when a celebrated Facebook engineer was developing the capacity for users to upload video to their pages. He started videotaping friends, including Losse, almost compulsively. On one road trip together, the engineer made a video of her napping in a car and uploaded it remotely to an internal Facebook page. Comments noting her siesta soon began appearing — only moments after it happened.

“The day before, I could just be in a car being in a car. Now my being in a car is a performance that is visible to everyone,” Losse said, exasperation creeping into her voice. “It’s almost like there is no middle of nowhere anymore.”

Losse began comparing Facebook to the iconic 1976 Eagles song “Hotel California,” with its haunting coda, “You can check out anytime you want, but you can never leave.” She put a copy of the record jacket on prominent display in a house she and several other employees shared not far from the headquarters (then in Palo Alto., Calif.; it’s now in Menlo Park).

As Facebook grew, Losse’s career blossomed. She helped introduce Facebook to new countries, pushing for quick, clean translations into new languages. Later, she moved to the heart of the company as Zuckerberg’s ghostwriter, mimicking his upbeat yet efficient style of communicating in blog posts he issued.

But her concerns continue to grow. When Zuckerberg, apparently sensing this, said to Losse, “I don’t know if I trust you,” she decided she needed to either be entirely committed to Facebook or leave. She soon sold some of her vested stock. She won’t say how much; they provided enough of a financial boon for her to go a couple of years without a salary, though not enough to stop working altogether, as some former colleagues have.

‘Touchy, private territory’

Among Losse’s concerns were the vast amount of personal data Facebook gathers. “They are playing on very touchy, private territory. They really are,” she said. “To not be conscious of that seems really dangerous.”

It wasn’t just Facebook. Losse developed a skepticism for many social technologies and the trade-offs they require.

Facebook and some others have portrayed proliferating digital connections as inherently good, bringing a sprawling world closer together and easing personal isolation.

Moira Burke, a researcher who trained at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and has since joined Facebook’s Data Team, tracked the moods of 1,200 volunteer users. She found that simply scanning the postings of others had little effect on well-being; actively participating in exchanges with friends, however, relieved loneliness.

Summing up her findings, she wrote on Facebook’s official blog, “The more people use Facebook, the better they feel.”

But Losse’s concerns about online socializing tracks with the findings of Sherry Turkle, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology psychologist who says users of social media have little understanding of the personal information they are giving away. Nor, she said, do many understand the potentially distorting consequences when they put their lives on public display, as what amounts to an ongoing performance on social media.

“In our online lives, we edit, we retouch, we clean up,” said Turkle, author of “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other,” published in 2011. “We substitute what I call ‘connection for real conversation.’ ”

Connected former cow town

After quitting in summer 2010, Losse decided to move to Austin, known for its vibrant cultural scene and lefty sensibilities. But on the way, she stopped over in Marfa, a cow-town-turned-artists-colony on an austere desert plateau three hours from the nearest city.

After Austin proved too crowded and expensive for Losse’s taste, she returned to Marfa and bought an adobe house. And she got a shiny aluminum Airstream trailer that let her get even farther away when the mood struck.

There, away from the clamor of her former life, she would write her book — something she called “an act of resistance.” She took it as an unexpected blessing that Marfa’s weak cellphone coverage could not sustain enough data flow for her to Tweet directly from her iPhone.

Marfa was just a dusty ranching town when minimalist artist Donald Judd moved here in the 1970s, drawn by the entrancing landscape and the chance to escape the hectic, claustrophobic New York art scene. Other artists gradually followed, many on fellowships from the foundations that set up here, and Marfa developed into a bustling, if unlikely, cultural center.

By the time Losse came around in January 2011, Marfa featured fine dining, its own NPR station and more than its share of digital connections.

Even as Losse deactivated her Facebook page, others were proliferating around town. Celebrities had found Marfa, too. The town’s beloved food truck, the Food Shark, has nearly 1,700 “Likes” on its Facebook page — including ones from such luminaries as Bob Dylan, Tammy Wynette and Willie Nelson.

Many here have mixed feelings about the transformation, even as they accept that rising technology has been crucial to Marfa’s growing economic health. “Most of the people who live here have very complicated relationships with all forms of media,” said Tim Johnson, 34, an artist who moved to Marfa in 2006 and now owns the bookstore here.

Ester Partegas, an artist who came to Marfa on a fellowship, often works with basic materials like plaster and paint. She uses e-mail, Facebook and text messages to keep in touch with friends in Berlin and New York, sometimes sharing images of her emerging works. It helps the creative process, she said, though she wonders how her art would be different if she had worked in a pre-digital Marfa.

“Sometimes I really miss that, not being interrupted,” Partegas said.

‘You can’t get away from it’

For Losse, writing a book in the 21st century proved technologically intense. She wrote on a Macintosh desktop. Iterations of her manuscript zipped back and forth to her editor through a speedy WiFi connection in her adobe home. When her iPhone’s coverage flagged, Losse resorted to Google Voice for calls.

Losse eventually reactivated her Facebook account. Rejecting it altogether felt, to her, extreme. But she approached it this time with a new wariness, not as a place to make and maintain friendships but one where a new author could cultivate a public image.

She carefully minded the privacy controls and signed on using a browser setting that limited the ability of Web sites to track her as she surfed the Internet. She prefers to carry out conversations on the phone, by e-mail or, when possible, in person.

“The Boy Kings,” meanwhile, has no Facebook page — a rarity in today’s book industry.

Along the way Losse has found a point of balance, a mix of technological connection and disconnection that, for now, suits her.

“You can’t get away from it. It’s everything. It’s everywhere,” Losse said. “The moment we’re in now is about trying to deal with all this technology rather than rejecting it, because obviously we can’t reject it entirely. We can avoid one site or another, but we can’t leave our phones at home anymore.”

But sometimes she does. A dusty trail leading out of town, past desert flowers blooming under the huge West Texas sky, allows her to make even Marfa disappear behind her. On these hikes, the iPhone stays in the car, giving her priceless — if all too brief — moments of perfect solitude.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...dcd_story.html





Beware, Tech Abandoners. People Without Facebook Accounts Are 'Suspicious.'
Kashmir Hill

The term “Crackberry” seems silly today — and not just because consumers OD’ed on Blackberry and moved on to iDealers. The term arose in an earlier “aughts” time when Blackberry dominated the smartphone market and lawyers and execs were nearly the only ones who had them, due to their need to be able to respond to email immediately. Things have changed. Now we all need to be able to respond to email immediately. And to tweet. And to instantly share our photos on Facebook. We’re all addicted to technology now, and not just to the Blackberry. We’re “addicted” to our iPhones, and Facebook, and Twitter, and Android, and Pinterest, and iPads, and Word with Friends, and fill-in-the-blank-with-your-digital-dope-of-choice.

The sudden and dramatic advent of social-media-enabling technologies into our lives seems to be causing some mid-digital-life crises. Not only has Silicon Valley developed a guilty conscience about addicting us to screens, we the users are starting to question how technology is changing us: making us fat, making us unhealthy, making us depressed, making us lonely, making us narcissistic, and making us waste time worrying about whether it’s making us fat, unhealthy, depressed, narcissistic and/or lonely. That’s leading some users to consider abandoning the whole enterprise. My colleague Haydn Shaughnessy gave up his smartphone last year. Now, inspired by the example of former Facebooker Katherine Losse, he’s considering giving up Facebook.

I am writing with some words of caution. I used to say that “if you’re not on Facebook, it’s possible you don’t actually exist.” I think it’s time to update that, courtesy of Slashdot: Facebook abstainers will be labeled suspicious.

Slashdot flagged a German news story in which an expert noted that mass murderers Anders Breivik and James Holmes both lacked much of a social media presence, leading to the conclusion, in Slashdot’s phrasing, that “not having a Facebook account could be the first sign that you are a mass murderer.”

That’s a tad extreme, but I’m seeing the suggestion more and more often that a missing Facebook account raises red flags. After a woman found out via Facebook that a man who’d ‘poked’ her in real life had a long term girlfriend, she turned to digital manners advice givers Farhad Manjoo and Emily Yoffe of Slate to ask whether she should tell the girlfriend. They said she should and then went on a digression about transparent romances in the age of Facebook:

Farhad: I think we’ve mentioned it before that if you are going out with someone and they don’t have a Facebook profile, you should be suspicious.

Emily: Wait a minute. You may have mentioned that.

Farhad: I think I’ve recommended that. You know why, though? Imagine if this guy didn’t have a Facebook profile. That’s why. You should be suspicious of someone who is not making your relationship known publicly on a site like Facebook. I’m going to go on record with that.

Emily: I’m fine with people not having a Facebook page if they don’t want one. However, I think you’re right. If you’re of a certain age and you meet someone who you are about to go to bed with, and that person doesn’t have a Facebook page, you may be getting a false name. It could be some kind of red flag.

via Transcript: Facebook stalker: Should I tell a cheating guy’s girlfriend that we hooked up? – Slate Magazine.

It’s not just love seekers who worry about what the lack of a Facebook account means. Anecdotally, I’ve heard both job seekers and employers wonder aloud about what it means if a job candidate doesn’t have a Facebook account. Does it mean they deactivated it because it was full of red flags? Are they hiding something?

Increasingly, it’s expected that everyone is on Facebook in some capacity. The idea that a Facebook resister is a potential mass murderer, flaky employee, and/or person who struggles with fidelity is obviously flawed, but it seems that a negative assumption is starting to arise about those who reject the Big Blue Giant’s siren call. Continuing to navigate life without having this digital form of identification may be like trying to get into a bar without a driver’s license.

Case in point: Katherine Losse, the ex-Facebook employee that quit the company and the social network after cashing in her stock options, and who inspired my colleague to consider UnFacebooking, couldn’t stay off Facebook for long. She wound up opening a new account.

“You can’t get away from it. It’s everything. It’s everywhere,” she told the Washington Post. “The moment we’re in now is about trying to deal with all this technology rather than rejecting it, because obviously we can’t reject it entirely.”

Well, you can, but it might lead to your being rejected down the line too.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirh...re-suspicious/





Apple Account Break-In Highlights Security Weakness
Brian X. Chen

The break-in of a journalist’s Apple iCloud account serves as a cautionary tale about how vulnerable people can be to malicious hackers, no matter how digitally sophisticated they are. Mat Honan, a seasoned technology writer, was spectacularly hacked over the weekend.

On Friday evening, the password for Mr. Honan’s iCloud account was reset. Later the bad guys broke into his Gmail account, and eventually they erased the data on his iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air using Apple’s remote-wipe feature — a self-destruct mechanism of sorts designed for use when a device has entered the wrong hands. To make matters worse, they also gained access to his personal Twitter account, as well as the account belonging to the tech blog Gizmodo, where he used to work.

Mr. Honan published a detailed account of the story on Wired. He says the hackers gained entry by phoning Apple’s tech support and using some clever “social engineering” to let them bypass security questions. That may point to a weakness in Apple’s identity verification process. But the root of the issue was brought to light when Evelyn M. Rusli and I reported on iTunes account hacks back in March: Apple encourages customers to use the same Apple ID and password for just about everything. That’s a concern because iTunes is no longer just a music store; it’s also a place to buy e-books, apps and TV shows. And the same credentials are used to log in to iCloud, Apple’s cloud service, where confidential documents could be retrieved or a remote wipe done, as in Mr. Honan’s case.

A security expert pointed out back in March that this would be a problem:

“Apple wants to pretend that everything is magic,” said Alex Stamos, co-founder of iSEC Partners, a security firm. “They need to admit that their products can be used by bad people to do bad things.”

One problem, Mr. Stamos said, is that iTunes customers use a single account and password for access to all Apple services. For example, the same login can be used to download a $1 game or buy a $2,000 laptop through the Apple Store app. He said that Apple could adopt a two-step verification method like Google’s. For example, if a user wanted to log in to the iTunes store on a new device, Apple could send a message to his iPhone containing a code, which he would enter to verify his identity.

To be fair, iTunes is successful largely because it was one of the first friction-free ways to purchase digital content. But perhaps iTunes has grown too big and too powerful to be so simple.

In a statement issued late Monday, Apple said that it had made a mistake when resetting Mr. Honan’s Apple ID password because it had not completely followed protocol.

“Apple takes customer privacy seriously and requires multiple forms of verification before resetting an Apple ID password,” said Natalie Kerris, an Apple spokeswoman, in a statement. “In this particular case, the customer’s data was compromised by a person who had acquired personal information about the customer. In addition, we found that our own internal policies were not followed completely. We are reviewing all of our processes for resetting account passwords to ensure our customers’ data is protected.”

However, Mr. Honan challenged the idea that an Apple employee had not followed protocol. He said a colleague was able to reset an Apple ID password by replicating the hacker’s technique.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0...n-itunes-hack/





How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking
Mat Honan

Meet Mat Honan. He just had his digital life dissolved by hackers. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired. Illustration: Ross Patton/Wired

In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. And worst of all, my AppleID account was broken into, and my hackers used it to remotely erase all of the data on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.

In many ways, this was all my fault. My accounts were daisy-chained together. Getting into Amazon let my hackers get into my Apple ID account, which helped them get into Gmail, which gave them access to Twitter. Had I used two-factor authentication for my Google account, it’s possible that none of this would have happened, because their ultimate goal was always to take over my Twitter account and wreak havoc. Lulz.

Had I been regularly backing up the data on my MacBook, I wouldn’t have had to worry about losing more than a year’s worth of photos, covering the entire lifespan of my daughter, or documents and e-mails that I had stored in no other location.

Those security lapses are my fault, and I deeply, deeply regret them.

But what happened to me exposes vital security flaws in several customer service systems, most notably Apple’s and Amazon’s. Apple tech support gave the hackers access to my iCloud account. Amazon tech support gave them the ability to see a piece of information — a partial credit card number — that Apple used to release information. In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification. The disconnect exposes flaws in data management policies endemic to the entire technology industry, and points to a looming nightmare as we enter the era of cloud computing and connected devices.

This isn’t just my problem. Since Friday, Aug. 3, when hackers broke into my accounts, I’ve heard from other users who were compromised in the same way, at least one of whom was targeted by the same group.

‬The very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the Web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification.‪

‬Moreover, if your computers aren’t already cloud-connected devices, they will be soon. Apple is working hard to get all of its customers to use iCloud. Google’s entire operating system is cloud-based. And Windows 8, the most cloud-centric operating system yet, will hit desktops by the tens of millions in the coming year. My experience leads me to believe that cloud-based systems need fundamentally different security measures. Password-based security mechanisms — which can be cracked, reset, and socially engineered — no longer suffice in the era of cloud computing.

I realized something was wrong at about 5 p.m. on Friday. I was playing with my daughter when my iPhone suddenly powered down. I was expecting a call, so I went to plug it back in.

It then rebooted to the setup screen. This was irritating, but I wasn’t concerned. I assumed it was a software glitch. And, my phone automatically backs up every night. I just assumed it would be a pain in the ass, and nothing more. I entered my iCloud login to restore, and it wasn’t accepted. Again, I was irritated, but not alarmed.

I went to connect the iPhone to my computer and restore from that backup — which I had just happened to do the other day. When I opened my laptop, an iCal message popped up telling me that my Gmail account information was wrong. Then the screen went gray, and asked for a four-digit PIN.

I didn’t have a four-digit PIN.

By now, I knew something was very, very wrong. For the first time it occurred to me that I was being hacked. Unsure of exactly what was happening, I unplugged my router and cable modem, turned off the Mac Mini we use as an entertainment center, grabbed my wife’s phone, and called AppleCare, the company’s tech support service, and spoke with a rep for the next hour and a half.

It wasn’t the first call they had had that day about my account. In fact, I later found out that a call had been placed just a little more than a half an hour before my own. But the Apple rep didn’t bother to tell me about the first call concerning my account, despite the 90 minutes I spent on the phone with tech support. Nor would Apple tech support ever tell me about the first call voluntarily — it only shared this information after I asked about it. And I only knew about the first call because a hacker told me he had made the call himself.

At 4:33 p.m., according to Apple’s tech support records, someone called AppleCare claiming to be me. Apple says the caller reported that he couldn’t get into his .Me e-mail — which, of course was my .Me e-mail.

In response, Apple issued a temporary password. It did this despite the caller’s inability to answer security questions I had set up. And it did this after the hacker supplied only two pieces of information that anyone with an internet connection and a phone can discover.

At 4:50 p.m., a password reset confirmation arrived in my inbox. I don’t really use my .Me e-mail, and rarely check it. But even if I did, I might not have noticed the message because the hackers immediately sent it to the trash. They then were able to follow the link in that e-mail to permanently reset my AppleID password.

At 4:52 p.m., a Gmail password recovery e-mail arrived in my .Me mailbox. Two minutes later, another e-mail arrived notifying me that my Google account password had changed.

At 5:02 p.m., they reset my Twitter password. At 5:00 they used iCloud’s “Find My” tool to remotely wipe my iPhone. At 5:01 they remotely wiped my iPad. At 5:05 they remotely wiped my MacBook. Around this same time, they deleted my Google account. At 5:10, I placed the call to AppleCare. At 5:12 the attackers posted a message to my account on Twitter taking credit for the hack.

By wiping my MacBook and deleting my Google account, they now not only had the ability to control my account, but were able to prevent me from regaining access. And crazily, in ways that I don’t and never will understand, those deletions were just collateral damage. My MacBook data — including those irreplaceable pictures of my family, of my child’s first year and relatives who have now passed from this life — weren’t the target. Nor were the eight years of messages in my Gmail account. The target was always Twitter. My MacBook data was torched simply to prevent me from getting back in.

Lulz.

I spent an hour and a half talking to AppleCare. One of the reasons it took me so long to get anything resolved with Apple during my initial phone call was because I couldn’t answer the security questions it had on file for me. It turned out there’s a good reason for that. Perhaps an hour or so into the call, the Apple representative on the line said “Mr. Herman, I….”

“Wait. What did you call me?”

“Mr. Herman?”

“My name is Honan.”

Apple had been looking at the wrong account all along. Because of that, I couldn’t answer my security questions. And because of that, it asked me an alternate set of questions that it said would let tech support let me into my .Me account: a billing address and the last four digits of my credit card. (Of course, when I gave them those, it was no use, because tech support had misheard my last name.)

It turns out, a billing address and the last four digits of a credit card number are the only two pieces of information anyone needs to get into your iCloud account. Once supplied, Apple will issue a temporary password, and that password grants access to iCloud.

Apple tech support confirmed to me twice over the weekend that all you need to access someone’s AppleID is the associated e-mail address, a credit card number, the billing address, and the last four digits of a credit card on file. I was very clear about this. During my second tech support call to AppleCare, the representative confirmed this to me. “That’s really all you have to have to verify something with us,” he said.

We talked to Apple directly about its security policy, and company spokesperson Natalie Kerris told Wired, “Apple takes customer privacy seriously and requires multiple forms of verification before resetting an Apple ID password. In this particular case, the customer’s data was compromised by a person who had acquired personal information about the customer. In addition, we found that our own internal policies were not followed completely. We are reviewing all of our processes for resetting account passwords to ensure our customers’ data is protected.”

On Monday, Wired tried to verify the hackers’ access technique by performing it on a different account. We were successful. This means, ultimately, all you need in addition to someone’s e-mail address are those two easily acquired pieces of information: a billing address and the last four digits of a credit card on file. Here’s the story of how the hackers got them.

By exploiting the customer service procedures employed by Apple and Amazon, hackers were able to get into iCloud and take over all of Mat Honan’s digital devices — and data. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

On the night of the hack, I tried to make sense of the ruin that was my digital life. My Google account was nuked, my Twitter account was suspended, my phone was in a useless state of restore, and (for obvious reasons) I was highly paranoid about using my .Me account for communication.

I decided to set up a new Twitter account until my old one could be restored, just to let people know what was happening. I logged into Tumblr and posted an account of how I thought the takedown occurred. At this point, I was assuming that my seven-digit alphanumeric AppleID password had been hacked by brute force. In the comments (and, oh, the comments) others guessed that hackers had used some sort of keystroke logger. At the end of the post, I linked to my new Twitter account.

And then, one of my hackers @ messaged me. He would later identify himself as Phobia. I followed him. He followed me back.

We started a dialogue via Twitter direct messaging that later continued via e-mail and AIM. Phobia was able to reveal enough detail about the hack and my compromised accounts that it became clear he was, at the very least, a party to how it went down. I agreed not to press charges, and in return he laid out exactly how the hack worked. But first, he wanted to clear something up:

“didnt guess ur password or use bruteforce. i have my own guide on how to secure emails.”

I asked him why. Was I targeted specifically? Was this just to get to Gizmodo’s Twitter account? No, Phobia said they hadn’t even been aware that my account was linked to Gizmodo’s, that the Gizmodo linkage was just gravy. He said the hack was simply a grab for my three-character Twitter handle. That’s all they wanted. They just wanted to take it, and fuck shit up, and watch it burn. It wasn’t personal.

“I honestly didn’t have any heat towards you before this. i just liked your username like I said before” he told me via Twitter Direct Message.

After coming across my account, the hackers did some background research. My Twitter account linked to my personal website, where they found my Gmail address. Guessing that this was also the e-mail address I used for Twitter, Phobia went to Google’s account recovery page. He didn’t even have to actually attempt a recovery. This was just a recon mission.

Because I didn’t have Google’s two-factor authentication turned on, when Phobia entered my Gmail address, he could view the alternate e-mail I had set up for account recovery. Google partially obscures that information, starring out many characters, but there were enough characters available, m••••n@me.com. Jackpot.

This was how the hack progressed. If I had some other account aside from an Apple e-mail address, or had used two-factor authentication for Gmail, everything would have stopped here. But using the .Me e-mail account as a backup meant told the hacker I had an AppleID account, which meant I was vulnerable to being hacked.

Be careful with your Amazon account — or someone might buy merchandise on your credit card, but send it to their home. Photo: luxuryluke/Flickr

“You honestly can get into any email associated with apple,” Phobia claimed in an e-mail. And while it’s work, that seems to be largely true.

Since he already had the e-mail, all he needed was my billing address and the last four digits of my credit card number to have Apple’s tech support issue him the keys to my account.

So how did he get this vital information? He began with the easy one. He got the billing address by doing a whois search on my personal web domain. If someone doesn’t have a domain, you can also look up his or her information on Spokeo, WhitePages, and PeopleSmart.

Getting a credit card number is tricker, but it also relies on taking advantage of a company’s back-end systems. Phobia says that a partner performed this part of the hack, but described the technique to us, which we were able to verify via our own tech support phone calls. It’s remarkably easy — so easy that Wired was able to duplicate the exploit twice in minutes.

First you call Amazon and tell them you are the account holder, and want to add a credit card number to the account. All you need is the name on the account, an associated e-mail address, and the billing address. Amazon then allows you to input a new credit card. (Wired used a bogus credit card number from a website that generates fake card numbers that conform with the industry’s published self-check algorithm.) Then you hang up.

Next you call back, and tell Amazon that you’ve lost access to your account. Upon providing a name, billing address, and the new credit card number you gave the company on the prior call, Amazon will allow you to add a new e-mail address to the account. From here, you go to the Amazon website, and send a password reset to the new e-mail account. This allows you to see all the credit cards on file for the account — not the complete numbers, just the last four digits. But, as we know, Apple only needs those last four digits. We asked Amazon to comment on its security policy, but didn’t have anything to share by press time.

And it’s also worth noting that one wouldn’t have to call Amazon to pull this off. Your pizza guy could do the same thing, for example. If you have an AppleID, every time you call Pizza Hut, you’ve giving the 16-year-old on the other end of the line all he needs to take over your entire digital life.

And so, with my name, address, and the last four digits of my credit card number in hand, Phobia called AppleCare, and my digital life was laid waste. Yet still I was actually quite fortunate.

They could have used my e-mail accounts to gain access to my online banking, or financial services. They could have used them to contact other people, and socially engineer them as well. As Ed Bott pointed out on TWiT.tv, my years as a technology journalist have put some very influential people in my address book. They could have been victimized too.

Instead, the hackers just wanted to embarrass me, have some fun at my expense, and enrage my followers on Twitter by trolling.

I had done some pretty stupid things. Things you shouldn’t do.

I should have been regularly backing up my MacBook. Because I wasn’t doing that, if all the photos from the first year and a half of my daughter’s life are ultimately lost, I will have only myself to blame. I shouldn’t have daisy-chained two such vital accounts — my Google and my iCloud account — together. I shouldn’t have used the same e-mail prefix across multiple accounts — mhonan@gmail.com, mhonan@me.com, and mhonan@wired.com. And I should have had a recovery address that’s only used for recovery without being tied to core services.

But, mostly, I shouldn’t have used Find My Mac. Find My iPhone has been a brilliant Apple service. If you lose your iPhone, or have it stolen, the service lets you see where it is on a map. The New York Times’ David Pogue recovered his lost iPhone just last week thanks to the service. And so, when Apple introduced Find My Mac in the update to its Lion operating system last year, I added that to my iCloud options too.

After all, as a reporter, often on the go, my laptop is my most important tool.

But as a friend pointed out to me, while that service makes sense for phones (which are quite likely to be lost) it makes less sense for computers. You are almost certainly more likely to have your computer accessed remotely than physically. And even worse is the way Find My Mac is implemented.

When you perform a remote hard drive wipe on Find my Mac, the system asks you to create a four-digit PIN so that the process can be reversed. But here’s the thing: If someone else performs that wipe — someone who gained access to your iCloud account through malicious means — there’s no way for you to enter that PIN.

A better way to have this set up would be to require a second method of authentication when Find My Mac is initially set up. If this were the case, someone who was able to get into an iCloud account wouldn’t be able to remotely wipe devices with malicious intent. It would also mean that you could potentially have a way to stop a remote wipe in progress.

But that’s not how it works. And Apple would not comment as to whether stronger authentification is being considered.

As of Monday, both of these exploits used by the hackers were still functioning. Wired was able to duplicate them. Apple says its internal tech support processes weren’t followed, and this is how my account was compromised. However, this contradicts what AppleCare told me twice that weekend. If that is, in fact, the case — that I was the victim of Apple not following its own internal processes — then the problem is widespread.

I asked Phobia why he did this to me. His answer wasn’t satisfying. He says he likes to publicize security exploits, so companies will fix them. He says it’s the same reason he told me how it was done. He claims his partner in the attack was the person who wiped my MacBook. Phobia expressed remorse for this, and says he would have stopped it had he known.

“yea i really am a nice guy idk why i do some of the things i do,” he told me via AIM. “idk my goal is to get it out there to other people so eventually every1 can over come hackers”

I asked specifically about the photos of my little girl, which are, to me, the greatest tragedy in all this. Unless I can recover those photos via data recovery services, they are gone forever. On AIM, I asked him if he was sorry for doing that. Phobia replied, “even though i wasnt the one that did it i feel sorry about that. Thats alot of memories im only 19 but if my parents lost and the footage of me and pics i would be beyond sad and im sure they would be too.”

But let’s say he did know, and failed to stop it. Hell, for the sake of argument, let’s say he did it. Let’s say he pulled the trigger. The weird thing is, I’m not even especially angry at Phobia, or his partner in the attack. I’m mostly mad at myself. I’m mad as hell for not backing up my data. I’m sad, and shocked, and feel that I am ultimately to blame for that loss.

But I’m also upset that this ecosystem that I’ve placed so much of my trust in has let me down so thoroughly. I’m angry that Amazon makes it so remarkably easy to allow someone into your account, which has obvious financial consequences. And then there’s Apple. I bought into the Apple account system originally to buy songs at 99 cents a pop, and over the years that same ID has evolved into a single point of entry that controls my phones, tablets, computers and data-driven life. With this AppleID, someone can make thousands of dollars of purchases in an instant, or do damage at a cost that you can’t put a price on.

Additional reporting by Roberto Baldwin and Christina Bonnington. Portions of this story originally appeared on Mat Honan’s Tumblr.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/...n-hacking/all/





Appeals Court OKs Warrantless Wiretapping
David Kravets

The federal government may spy on Americans’ communications without warrants and without fear of being sued, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday in a decision reversing the first and only case that successfully challenged President George W. Bush’s once-secret Terrorist Surveillance Program.

“This case effectively brings to an end the plaintiffs’ ongoing attempts to hold the executive branch responsible for intercepting telephone conversations without judicial authorization,” a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote.

The case concerned a lower court decision in which two American attorneys — who were working with the now-defunct al-Haramain Islamic Foundation — were awarded more than $20,000 each in damages and their lawyers $2.5 million in legal fees after a tortured legal battle where they proved they were spied on without warrants.

They sued under domestic spying laws Congress adopted in the wake of President Richard M. Nixon’s Watergate scandal. The government appealed their victory, and the appeals court Tuesday dismissed the suit and the damages.

Jon Eisenberg, the lawyer for the two attorneys, said he may request the court to reconsider its decision with a larger panel of judges, or petition the Supreme Court.

“This case was the only chance to litigate and hold anybody accountable for the warrantless wiretapping program,” he said in a telephone interview. “As illegal as it was, it evaded accountability.”

The San Francisco-based appeals court ruled that when Congress wrote the law regulating eavesdropping on Americans and spies, it never waived sovereign immunity in the section prohibiting targeting Americans without warrans. That means Congress did not allow for aggrieved Americans to sue the government, even if their constitutional rights were violated by the United States breaching its own wiretapping laws.

“Under this scheme, Al-Haramain can bring a suit for damages against the United States for use of the collected information, but cannot bring suit against the government for collection of the information itself,” Judge M. Margaret McKeown wrote for the majority. She was joined by Judge Michael Daly Hawkins and Judge Harry Pregerson. ”Although such a structure may seem anomalous and even unfair, the policy judgment is one for Congress, not the courts.”

The court, during oral arguments in June, expressed concern that it may reach this result.

Judge Hawkins, during those arguments, noted that the law spells out that those who were illegally spied upon may seek monetary damages. But if Congress did not intend for the government to be sued, “it would make the remedy illusory,” Hawkins said.

The court did not comment on the spying allegations of involved in the case. It also dismissed claims against FBI Director Robert Mueller, saying there was not enough evidence linking him to the spy program the Bush administration adopted in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks.

Subsequently Congress authorized Bush’s spy program in 2008, five years after the illegal wiretapping involved in this case.

The Bush spy program was first disclosed by The New York Times in December 2005, and the government subsequently admitted that the National Security Agency was eavesdropping on Americans’ telephone calls without warrants if the government believed the person on the other end was overseas and associated with terrorism. The government also secretly enlisted the help of major U.S. telecoms, including AT&T, to spy on Americans’ phone and internet communications without getting warrants as required by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law at the center of the al-Haramain dispute.

A lower court judge found in 2010 that two American lawyers’ telephone conversations with their clients in Saudi Arabia were siphoned to the National Security Agency without warrants. The allegations were initially based on a classified document the government accidentally mailed to the former al-Haramain Islamic Foundation lawyers Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoor.

The document was later declared a state secret, removed from the long-running lawsuit and has never been made public. With that document ruled out as evidence, the lawyers instead cited a bevy of circumstantial evidence that a a trial judge concluded showed the government illegally wiretapped the lawyers as they spoke on U.S. soil to Saudi Arabia.

The other major case challenging the wiretapping program, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s case against the government, alleges a wholesale vacuuming of Americans’ communications. That case was sent back to a district court after it survived an appeals court ruling in December.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...s-wiretapping/





U.S. Will Not Challenge Computer Fraud Case to High Court
Grant McCool

The government has decided not to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review a divided appeals court ruling in a criminal case that drew attention to a 28-year-old computer hacking law that critics argue is being used too broadly.

The decision means that a 9-to-2 ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissing criminal charges against a defendant accused of illegally downloading confidential data from his employer will stand. The appeals court ruled in April that the defendant in that case could not face charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

The 9th Circuit ruling had been suspended to give the U.S. Department of Justice until August 8 to consider petitioning the Supreme Court to review the case. In a filing last Thursday, prosecutors said "the Solicitor General will not file a petition" to the high court to take up the matter. No reason was given.

The ruling stemmed from the prosecution of David Nosal, a former managing director at executive search firm Korn/Ferry International. Nosal was indicted in 2008 over allegations he persuaded colleagues to download confidential source lists and contact information from the firm to use at his new business.

Three of Nosal's co-defendants pleaded guilty to CFAA violations. But Nosal fought the charges, arguing that he and his colleagues had been authorized to access Korn/Ferry's database.

The majority of the appeals court supported Nosal's argument and dismissed the CFAA charges against him. Civil liberties advocates have also supported those arguments, saying that the anti-hacking law can potentially criminalize activity that should be dealt with privately between employers and their employees.

Nosal's lawyer, Steven Gruel, said on Wednesday that his client "looks forward to clearing his name of the few remaining charges in court."

Nosal still faces separate charges of trade secrets theft in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. The charges carry a maximum possible prison term of 15 years.

The office of U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, did not respond to requests for a comment.

The case is USA v David Nosal in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals 10-10038

(Reporting By Grant McCool; Editing by Maureen Bavdek)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8771BK20120808





Judge in Google, Oracle Case Seeks Names of Paid Reporters, Bloggers
Alexei Oreskovic

Google Inc and Oracle Corp's copyright and patent battle took a strange twist on Tuesday, after a judge ordered the companies to disclose the names of journalists, bloggers and other commentators on their payrolls.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup said he was concerned that Google and Oracle and/or their counsel may have retained or paid people who may have published comment on the case.

The order, several months after a jury found that Google did not infringe on Oracle's patents, hints at the possibility of a hidden world of for-pay press coverage and injects uncertainty into the widely-followed case.

Alsup issued a one page order but did not go into full details of the court's concerns.

"The court is concerned that the parties and/or counsel herein may have retained or paid print or internet authors, journalists, commentators or bloggers who have and/or may publish comments on the issues in the case," Alsup wrote in Tuesday's order.

He said the information "would be of use on appeal" and could "make clear whether any treatise, article, commentary or analysis on the issues posed by this case are possibly influenced by financial relationships to the parties or counsel."

The companies must submit the information by noon August 17.

Oracle sued Google in federal court, claiming the search engine giant's Android mobile platform violated its patents and copyright to Java, seeking roughly $1 billion on its copyright claims.

But the jury ruled in Google's favor and the judge decided Oracle could not claim copyright protection on most of the Java material that Oracle took to trial.

Oracle has said it will appeal.

The trial, which featured testimony from high-profile technology executives including Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison and Google CEO Larry Page, attracted heavy media coverage from the mainstream press and technology-focused blogs.

One of the more well-known bloggers on intellectual property matters and on the Oracle vs Google case, Florian Mueller, revealed three days into the trial that Oracle had recently become a consulting client of his. People who followed the case said they weren't aware of any other similar examples.

An Oracle spokeswoman said in a statement that the company has "always disclosed all of its financial relationships in this matter, and it is time for Google do to the same. We read this order to also include indirect payments to entities who, in turn, made comments on behalf of Google."

Google said the company would comply with the order.

What impact the order could have on the case remains unclear, legal experts said.

"I haven't seen anything quite like this before. I think the judge is in uncharted territory with this order," said Eric Goldman, a professor of Internet law at Santa Clara University School of Law.

Goldman said two potential reasons for the order would be if there were evidence that the jury had been swayed by extensive press coverage of the case or if the jury had relied on evidence not properly labeled as unbiased, such as a for-pay news article offered as an exhibit in the trial.

Goldman, who blogged about the case, said that he might likely appear on the list, since his website features ads distributed by Google's online advertising network.

"The court has really wide discretion in granting a remedy to fix any kind of wrongdoing," said Julie Samuels, an intellectual property attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Samuels said the judge could order a retrial, but stressed that would be a highly extreme and unlikely scenario.

The case in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California is Oracle America, Inc v. Google Inc, 10-3561.

(Editing by Michael Perry)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...87705620120808





Creepy Spying System Revealed by Wikileaks, Which Then Gets Hit by a Massive Attack
J.D. Tuccille

What does it mean, when Wikileaks publishes a trove of documents hacked by Anonymous from the strategic intelligence firm Stratfor — a trove that apparently details a massive electronic spying system run by the U.S. government — and is then hit by a massive and sustained distributed denial of service attack that prevents journalists and people at large from examining the documents in question? I can't be the only person that finds that just a tad ... suggestive.

The best round-up of the story so far is at RT:

Former senior intelligence officials have created a detailed surveillance system more accurate than modern facial recognition technology — and have installed it across the US under the radar of most Americans, according to emails hacked by Anonymous.

Every few seconds, data picked up at surveillance points in major cities and landmarks across the United States are recorded digitally on the spot, then encrypted and instantaneously delivered to a fortified central database center at an undisclosed location to be aggregated with other intelligence. It’s part of a program called TrapWire and it's the brainchild of the Abraxas, a Northern Virginia company staffed with elite from America’s intelligence community. The employee roster at Arbaxas reads like a who’s who of agents once with the Pentagon, CIA and other government entities according to their public LinkedIn profiles, and the corporation's ties are assumed to go deeper than even documented.

It's difficult to check on RT's report, though, because, as my old employer ZDNet has it:

WikiLeaks is down. The site has been down for the last five days, during which it has been experiencing a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

This isn't the first time this has happened. Back in May, Wikileaks was also taken down by a DDoS attack. That one lasted four days, however, meaning this one has already gone on for longer, according to the site's Twitter account.

Note that the ZDNet story was published two days ago and the attack still continues. Wikileaks mirrors are also offline. So are newly established mirrors to which documents were posted just hours ago.

The presumed Wikileaks hackers call themselves AntiLeaks and claim:

You can call me DietPepsi. I am the leader of AntiLeaks. We are not doing this to call attention to ourselves. We are young adults, citizens of the United States of America and are deeply concerned about the recent developments with Julian Assange and his attempt at aslyum in Ecuador.

Assange is the head of a new breed of terrorist. We are doing this as a protest against his attempt to escape justice into Ecuador. This would be a catalyst for many more like him to rise up in his place. We will not stop and they will not stop us.

Yeah. So ... an ad hoc group of young super-patriot anti-terrorism activists has knocked Wikileaks and all of its mirrors offline for a week? Right.

Maybe it's all an awesomely effective Wikileaks marketing ploy, because, frankly, I want to know more about TrapWire.
http://reason.com/blog/2012/08/10/cr...led-by-wikilea





Australia’s Roxon Puts Web Surveillance Plans On Ice
Philip Dorling

A CONTROVERSIAL internet security plan to store the web history of all Australians for up to two years has been stalled by the federal government until after the next election.

Security bureaucrats have drafted legislation to expand internet surveillance and security powers, but Attorney-General Nicola Roxon decided to first refer a discussion paper to a parliamentary committee.

Senior intelligence officials, who have been pushing for the increased powers, complain the legislation will be delayed until after the election due next year.
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The national security discussion paper released last month by Ms Roxon canvasses proposals for compulsory internet data retention, forcing people to give up computer passwords, streamlining telecommunications interception approvals, and enhancing stop and search powers for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.

A senior national security official told Fairfax Media yesterday that Ms Roxon's decision to refer the proposals to the parliamentary joint committee for intelligence and security was symptomatic of ''the risk adverse character of the government''.

"These reforms are urgently needed to deal with a rapidly evolving security environment, but there isn't much appetite within the government for anything that attracts controversy," the official said.

National security community dissatisfaction with Ms Roxon comes as Prime Minister Julia Gillard yesterday announced a long delayed review of federal and state counter-terrorism laws introduced after the 2005 London terrorist bombings.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard said yesterday a committee led by retired NSW judge Anthony Whealy, QC, would review legislation governing control orders, preventative detention and ''certain emergency stop, question and search powers held by police''. The review had originally been scheduled to commence in 2010.

Attorney-General's department briefing papers released under freedom of information legislation show that when Ms Roxon took office as Attorney-General last December, her department had already prepared an "exposure draft" of amendments to Australia's security and intelligence laws.

Subject to Ms Roxon's agreement and consultation with the security watchdog, the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security, it was proposed by her department that the draft legislative package be considered by the National Committee of Cabinet in February, and the full cabinet in May.

However, the department also warned that amendments to surveillance powers "usually draw media and public attention" and that "the scale of changes being developed will mean that it is highly likely that there will be significant public interest".

In a recent interview, Ms Roxon said she was "not yet convinced" about the merits of the proposal for compulsory data retention that would enable intelligence and security agencies to examine a person's internet usage.

A spokesman for Ms Roxon has confirmed she rejected the approach of her predecessor, former attorney-general Robert McClelland, who had approved the development of the legislative package.
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/tec...809-23x9l.html





Energized: New Batteries Could Triple Drone Airtime
Adam Popescu

With the drone market projected to double to $1.2 billion by 2020, two recent innovations to extend battery life could significantly propel the drone ecosystem forward.

Thanks to a Congressional bill passed earlier this year and a pair of innovations significantly extending battery life, drones are moving from the battlefields to the backyards and airspace of American cities. While the military use of targeted drone airstrikes is well-known, what’s not is their limitations: namely battery life for the small, handheld devices.

One company working on fixing that problem is aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, which is tweaking the electric version of its Stalker drone, a 10-foot-wingspan drone that can fly as high as 15,000 feet. The Stalker normally stays in the air for about two hours, but Lockheed Martin has managed to extend its endurance by wirelessly recharging it via laser power, allowing the Stalker to stay in the air up to 48 hours. This could be a huge development, but the long-term potential has yet to be proven in outdoor flights - so far it's only been demonstrated in indoor trials.

Also in the development stage is Los Angeles-based Somatis Technologies, Inc., which is working on a kinetic energy composite that turns the interaction of wind pressure and vibrations into an an electrical power energy source and could more than triple battery life for handheld and gliding drones. These small drones - which have wings span of around five feet - have an endurance of only about 45 minutes when fully loaded with munitions, compared to larger drones, which have a battery life of about 14 hours when fully loaded. The company has created an energy harvesting formula that can extend the battery life of a handheld drone to about three hours, and even recharge it in flight. The key is piezoelectric composites, a material which helps convert mechanical energy into electrical energy.

"This vibration is energy," explained Dr. Baruch Pletner, Somatis' chief executive. "It's not a better battery in fact, but it's something that will recharge your battery.

Legalization, Grants and Public Safety Programs

In February, Congress passed the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill, requiring the FAA to ease restrictions and legalize unmanned aerial vehicles in U.S. airspace by 2015. A host of industries are poised to take advantage of this change, namely law enforcement, fire departments, surveillance, security, and even data collection and journalism.

While Congress hashes out the details, the Department of Homeland Security has begun to prep for its Robotic Aircraft for Public Safety program. The DHS has begun testing drones, awarded grants to at least 13 police departments to buy small surveillance drones, and is working to accelerate use by inviting drone manufacturers to Ft. Sill, Okla. to conduct more intricate real-world testing scenarios this October.

As drone producers like Lockheed Martin and Somatis move from prototype to production within the next few years, battery life will be a key component in making unmanned aerial vehicle use attractive to a range of industries. If and when they get it right, drones will likely become an inherent part of everyday life in the not-to-distant future. When that day comes, our biggest concern may be what detractors are saying now: is drone use a moral dilemma or justified?

Last Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she hoped drones could one day see through thick jungle to locate international criminals, like warlord Joseph Kony. That wish may not be far off, as long as the drones have enough battery power to get there.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...ne-airtime.php





Wis. boy, 17, is the Fastest Texter in America
Fay Abuelgasim

A 17-year-old boy who says he has "abnormally fast thumbs" has been named the fastest texter in America for the second year in a row.

"It feels incredible," said Austin Wierschke of Rhinelander, Wis., after winning the sixth annual U.S. LG National Texting Competition in Times Square on Wednesday. He gets $50,000 in prize money, which he says he'll save and use to pay for college, along with the $50,000 he won last year.

Eleven contestants from around the U.S. competed, all using the same type of cellphone, an LG Optimus Zip phone with QWERTY keyboard. Cellphone-maker LG Electronics sponsored the contest.

The competition tested three skills — speed, accuracy and dexterity — on four different challenges. They were "do you know text speak?", in which contestants had to spell out text abbreviations; texting while blind-folded; "text blitz," where phrases were shown to the contestants for a length of time and they copied them as fast as they could; and texting backward, where jumbled words were given to the contestants and they had to figure out the word.

To practice for the competition, the 17-year-old champion said he sent almost 500 texts a day to his friends.

Runner-up Kent Augustine, 16, from Queens, said he was "a little disappointed," but he won't be walking away empty-handed, since the second-place winner gets $10,000. He said he was going to try again next year.

Fellow competitor Kelly Barracato was not surprised that Wierschke won. She said she noticed that during the press tour, "his thumbs were flying."

Anita Levine, 16, and Anan Arias, 17, came out to see the competition.

Arias is an avid texter who says she sends more than 100 texts a day. "Texting is part of the new generation," she said.

Levine said she loves texting but her father won't let her. "My dad thinks it is pointless," she said.

Jan and Lori Emanuele, both in their 50s, were curious to see the competition. Both text often but say it can sometimes get a bit overwhelming.

"When I first saw 'ttyl,' I thought, 'what is that?'" Jan Emanuele said. TTYL stands for talk to you later.
http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...ca-3770856.php





Ohio Teen Collapses After 4-day Xbox Marathon
AP

A four-day Xbox gaming marathon apparently was too much for one 15-year-old Ohio boy.

WCMH-TV (http://bit.ly/N3Ugln ) reports that the Columbus teen collapsed and was hospitalized Tuesday after becoming severely dehydrated. His mother says he emerged from his bedroom during the four days only to pick up snacks or take a quick shower.

The boy was so engrossed in playing Modern Warfare 3 on Xbox that he made himself sick.

He's expected to be OK — but his mom has taken away the Xbox.

Dr. Mike Patrick, an emergency physician at Nationwide Children's Hospital, recommended that gamers use some common sense: Get plenty of food and fluids, take breaks for physical activity and get some sleep.
http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...on-3771567.php





Anonymous Donors Bring Hollywood Production Values to Anti-MPAA Video

Video has been featured on the Pirate Bay, generating 10 million views.
Timothy B. Lee

A video accusing the American government of selling out to Hollywood has made a splash after being featured on the front page of the Pirate Bay, where it has garnered over 10 million views. Anti-Hollywood sentiment is nothing new, especially on The Pirate Bay, but what sets this video apart is its top-notch—one might even say Hollywood-caliber—production values.

On Wednesday, Ars talked to an individual behind the video. He said he and a friend paid for the video out of their own pockets. They are hoping to "raise awareness" of what they view as America's repressive copyright policies.

The video has three scenes. In the first, the "American Motion Picture Association" announces it has hired "Senator Chris Rodd" (clearly references to the MPAA and its chairman, former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT)) to represent Hollywood. In the second scene, police carry out a military-style raid on a London home. The final scene takes place in an "undisclosed location." The kid arrested in London is now in chains, wearing an orange jumpsuit and a hood over his head. The young soldier guarding the prisoner asks an older American in a suit what the suspect did, and looks incredulous when he's told that he's been arrested for copyright infringement.

Obviously, the video is over-the-top. Nothing exactly like the incident depicted has happened in real life. The US government doesn't subject copyright defendants to the same harsh treatment as suspected terrorists. But after the commando-style raid on Kim Dotcom's mansion in January, it may be close enough to the truth to make effective propaganda.

The website associated with the video depicts Kim Dotcom, Richard O'Dwyer, and others as victims of a copyright regime run amok. The site is short on details about who's behind it, providing only an email address.

On Wednesday, Ars spoke to one of the producers, who identified himself as "Andrew," via Skype. He told us he's a financial professional outside the United States. He created the video with a friend who also works "on the stock exchange."

Believing a video would attract a wider audience than a text-based website, they hired a director and a sound professional to produce a 3-minute video. "Andrew" told us the whole video cost about $5000 to produce, and that he and his friend funded the project out of their own pockets. "We really don't have much to do with the Internet industry as a whole," he told us.

If this video is a hit, it could be the first in a series of videos focused on "online freedom and copyright." The next one might be tied to the American elections in November.

Why the secrecy? "You see what's happening with people who are involved in this kind of stuff," "Andrew" told us. "Especially when you're directly attacking against political figures. We don't want to attract unnecessary attention in our lives."

He said he was motivated by the sight of people being "getting arrested left and right in different countries for various copyright infringement 'offenses.'" He said that copyright issues "affect pretty much anybody."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...ti-mpaa-video/
















Until next week,

- js.



















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