Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 15th, '12

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"[Six Strikes] is an expensive program that is getting passed to ISPs, and then on to the public. It’s a cost that we’re skeptical that the American people should bear." – Parker Higgins



































September 15th, 2012




"Six Strikes" Internet Warning System Will Come to US This Year

We speak with the head of the new antipiracy effort.
Cyrus Farivar

Even as France looks set to scrap its three-strikes antipiracy scheme known as HADOPI, US Internet providers are inching forward with their milder "six strikes" program. But the head of that effort says the system is about education, and it is coming by the end of the year.

Not baseball

Last year, the newly formed Center for Copyright Information (CCI), along with major ISPs across the US and representatives from the recording and film industries, agreed to come up with a six-stage warning scheme that would progressively impose warnings—and eventually penalties—on alleged online copyright infringers. Collectively, once deployed, the system could cover 75 percent of all American Internet users.

The Copyright Alert System, as it’s formally known, was originally slated to deploy by the end of December 2011, a date that was then pushed back to July 2012. Now the CCI’s head, Jill Lesser, tells Ars the group is on track to launch by the end of the year. However, Lesser provided scant new details about the program.

"We are still very much intending to launch this year, but in no way was missing a July deadline a missed deadline," she said in a recent interview. "This isn’t the American version of the French system, and it isn’t a baseball game."

The ISPs involved are keeping quiet as well. A spokesperson for Comcast, the country’s largest ISP, e-mailed Ars to say the company did not "have anything to further announce or comment on at this time."

Strikes vs. alerts

Lesser was reluctant to provide additional details beyond the Memorandum of Understanding published in July 2011. She emphasized that this MoU refers to the program as a "learning experience" for Internet users.

"It is not a six strikes program," she said. "This is an educational program; there are a series of educational alerts that will be sent out to subscribers."

Lesser pointed out that the word "strike" has a punitive connotation—as in baseball—and the new program is meant to educate account holders and younger users about the perils of downloading unauthorized content. She argued that the program is mainly designed to help steer online users toward legal content.

Lesser did not explain how this not-quite-six-strike program would actually work in practice. As we have reported, the program will be increasing warning levels, requiring users to acknowledge receipt of those warnings and possibly reducing their Internet speed.

Will this eventually result in cutting people off from the Internet? Lesser says it's up to the Internet provider. "Each of the ISPs is going to have their own mitigation measure," Lesser added. "It will always happen after the user has been given an opportunity to conduct an independent review. The ISP has discretion what the mitigation measure is."

She said that if a user reaches the fifth or sixth stage, "they are pushed through to a 10 minute educational video," and if that doesn’t change their behavior, "they are then, from our perspective, out of the program." At that point, ISPs can make their own decision about what step to take next, including disconnection. Lawsuits could also be filed by rightsholders.

"At that point, all of the tools that the content owners and the ISPs have at their disposal are there," she said. "ISPs can, and have, taken action based on that. Content owners we know have taken action against large-scale pirates."

Practical questions remain. Will users receive an e-mail if accused of infringement? A letter? What happens if someone switches ISPs—will their strikes carry over? Who is the authority for any appeals process?

Parker Higgins, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that the delays, lack of public input, and the lack of transparency in the program’s measures pointed to a policy that appears to be effectively stillborn.

"The delays are another indication that this is an expensive program that is getting passed to ISPs, and then on to the public," he told Ars. "It’s a cost that we’re skeptical that the American people should bear."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...-us-this-year/





Dutch Court: Hyperlinks On Website Can Constitute Copyright Infringement
Marjolein van der Heide

Yesterday, the Court of Amsterdam decided that publishing hyperlinks to copyrighted content is, under certain circumstances, a copyright infringement. It’s a pioneering decision, as it is the first time that a Dutch court rules in proceedings on the merits that hyperlinks can constitute a breach of copyright and formulates clear criteria in order to test if the circumstances of a case lead to an actual infringement.

In October 2011, website GeenStijl.nl published an article about leaked nude pictures of Dutch television presenter Britt Dekker. The pictures were shot for Playboy and were planned for the December edition of the magazine. The article on GeenStijl.nl contained a hyperlink to a zip file with the pictures, hosted by Australian file sharing website FileFactory.com. Sanoma, publisher of Playboy, ordered FileFactory.com to remove the zip file. Thereafter, GeenStijl.nl updated its article with a hyperlink to Imageshack, where the photo shoot could be viewed directly. Sanoma also ordered Imageshack to remove the pictures. Meanwhile, the pictures were spread across the internet and new links to the photo shoot kept popping up. Notwithstanding several letters in which Sanoma requested GeenStijl.nl to remove the article and the links, GeenStijl.nl published two more articles with hyperlinks to the pictures. Sanoma sued GeenStijl.nl for copyright infringement and for violation of Britt Dekkers portrait rights and privacy.

The court considered if the publishing of the hyperlinks by GeenStijl.nl constituted a publication (Dutch: ‘openbaarmaking’) as defined in article 12 of the Dutch Copyright Act. In principle, placing a hyperlink on a website is not a publication, unless three criteria are met: there must be an intervention, a new audience and profit.

- Intervention: The leaked pictures of Britt Dekker were stored on FileFactory.com, a cloud service to store files and share them with others. However, these files can’t be found through search engines, only users with the exact URL have access to the files. The URL to the file with the leaked pictures was publicly unknown, until GeenStijl.nl made it available to its large audience by publishing an article about it, the court says. Therefore, the actions of GeenStijl.nl are an intervention, according to the court. Without this intervention, the public wouldn’t have had access to the pictures before their official publication in Playboy.

- New audience: According to the court, there wasn’t an audience for the pictures before GeenStijl.nl published its article.

- Profit: By publishing the URL to the pictures, GeenStijl.nl had the unmistakable intention to attract more visitors, the court states. With success: in 2011, the article about Dekker was the best viewed topic on GeenStijl.nl, according to the statistics.

Taking the three criteria and the circumstances of this specific case into account, the court concludes that GeenStijl.nl has infringed on Sanomas copyrights by publishing the URL to the leaked nude pictures of Britt Dekker.

Dutch anti-piracy foundation BREIN welcomes the decision of the court. Tim Kuik, director of BREIN, sees a parallel with illegal websites that publish links to copyrighted content. According to Kuik, they also meet the three criteria formulated by the court, meaning that they also violate copyrights by publishing hyperlinks.

In May 2010, there was a somewhat comparable Dutch case. In an ex parte decision, the Court of The Hague stated that spots on FTD, containing links to files of the movie ‘Komt een vrouw bij de dokter’, constituted a disclosure and therefore a breach of copyrights. FTD is an application that helps users to search for and browse through content on Usenet.

Read the decision of the court here.

Source: Webwereld
http://www.futureofcopyright.com/hom...ringement.html





Founder of File-Sharing Site The Pirate Bay Accused of Hacking Secret Swedish Tax Agency Info

Prosecutors said Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, who was convicted of copyright violations in 2009 along with three Pirate Bay colleagues, is suspected of hacker attacks against a company handling sensitive information for the Swedish tax authority.
AP

A Swedish man repatriated by Cambodia to serve a prison sentence for his involvement with file-sharing site The Pirate Bay was arrested in a new hacking investigation as he returned home Tuesday.

Prosecutors said Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, 27, is suspected of hacker attacks against a company handling sensitive information for the Swedish tax authority.

Svartholm Warg, also known by his Internet alias “Anakata,” was convicted of copyright violations in 2009 along with three Pirate Bay colleagues. Sweden issued an international arrest warrant after he failed to show up for an appeals hearing in which his one-year prison sentence was upheld.

He was detained last week at his rented apartment in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh and deported late Monday at the request of Swedish authorities.

Fredrik Berg, a spokesman for the Swedish Prosecution Authority, said Svartholm Warg’s detention in Cambodia was related to his prison sentence. Berg could not say whether the new investigation was also a factor.

He was formally arrested upon arrival in Sweden early Tuesday as a suspect in the hacking investigation and could face a pretrial detention hearing in that case later this week, Berg said.

That investigation centers on hacker attacks in which secret details of people living under protected identity in Sweden were illegally obtained from a technology firm handling information from the Swedish Tax Agency. Hacking is punishable by fines or up to two years in prison under Swedish law.

Svartholm Warg’s lawyer Ola Salomonsson said he couldn’t comment Tuesday because he had not yet spoken to his client and didn’t know the details of the allegations.

The Pirate Bay is one of the world’s biggest free file-sharing websites, offering millions of users a forum for downloading music, movies and computer games.

It is still running despite the convictions of Svartholm Warg and three co-defendants, who were ordered to pay 46 million kronor ($6.5 million) in damages to the entertainment industry.

Some in the international hacker community took offense at Svartholm Warg’s detention by Cambodian authorities, saying he was being persecuted for alleged links to WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange.

A hacking group calling itself NullCrew claimed to have broken into several Cambodian websites last week in retaliation.
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/wor...icle-1.1156630





Appeals Court Sides with RIAA, Jammie Thomas Owes $222,000

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit vacates a lower court's decision and rules that Thomas-Rasset, found by a judge to have lied about illegally uploading music, must pay the top four labels $222,000.
Greg Sandoval

The top four record labels have won a significant decision in their long-running suit against Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the Minnesota woman found by a court to have "lied" about illegally uploading music to the Web.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit found unanimously in favor of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the trade group for Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and EMI Music:

We conclude that the recording companies are entitled to the remedies that they seek on appeal. The judgment of the district court is vacated, and the case is remanded with directions to enter a judgment for damages in the amount of $222,000, and to include an injunction that precludes Thomas-Rasset from making any of the plaintiffs' recordings available for distribution to the public through an online media distribution system.

Attorneys for Thomas-Rasset were not immediately available for comment. We'll update the story as soon as we hear from them. The RIAA issued a brief statement: "We are pleased with the appellate court's decision and look forward to putting this case behind us."

In 2007, the RIAA accused Thomas-Rasset of copyright infringement for sharing 1,700 copyrighted songs -- the equivalent of 150 CDs. But the RIAA whittled down the number to 24. A jury heard the proof against her and rendered a $222,000 verdict against her.

That decision was thrown out by U.S. District Court Judge Michael Davis in Minnesota after he acknowledged erring in his jury instructions. In 2009, Thomas-Rasset's case was retried and again 12 jurors decide against her. This time, however, the jury awarded damages of $80,000 for each of the 24 songs she was accused of sharing for a total of $1.92 million. That award was again thrown out along with the verdict.

Davis lowered the sum to $2,250 per song and that meant Thomas-Rasset, who is from Minnesota, owed the music labels $54,000. The RIAA appealed to the Eighth Circuit, which has now reinstated the original damages award against her.

This is a case that refuses to die, so it's very likely that Thomas-Rasset will continue to fight if she can. Her attorneys have promised to appeal all the way to the Supreme Court if need be. In the past, they have argued that the damages award laid down by Congress for copyright infringement was meant to punish organized criminal groups and not individual online file sharers. They argue that the awards amount is cruel and unusual punishment and therefor unconstitutional.

If the case does make it the Supreme Court, the RIAA will take with it multiple favorable jury verdicts and a successful appeal. The trade group had asked for the original jury decision to be reinstated. The labels also wanted the court to grant an injunction against Thomas-Rasset that prevented her from making the copyrighted works available again. The RIAA got most of it wanted from the appeals court.

The court, however, did not make any rulings about whether Judge Davis made the right call by granting Thomas-Rasset a second trial. It called the issue "moot."

The appellate panel wrote that Thomas-Rasset also asked for the first jury decision regarding her liability be reinstated but also requested that the court determine whether that $222,000 damages amount was constitutional. The appeals court declined to make the determination.

"Our response to these tactical maneuvers," wrote the appeals court, "is to observe that this court reviews judgments, not decisions on issues.... We also conclude that statutory damages of at least $222,000 were constitutional, and that the district court erred in holding that the Due Process Clause allowed statutory damages of only $54,000."

Updated at 1:47 p.m. PT to correct misstatement that Jammie Thomas-Rasset acknowledged pirating. A judge concluded that Thomas-Rasset had lied about the possibility that it her boyfriend and children were the ones that illegally uploaded songs to the Web. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57510453-93/appeals-court-sides-with-riaa-jammie-thomas-owes-$222000/





French Court Levies First Fine Under Three-Strikes Law on Illegal Downloads

A man was fined €150 on Thursday for failing to secure his Internet connection
Peter Sayer

A French court fined a man €150 (US$193) on Thursday for failing to secure his Internet connection, according to a spokesman for the French High Authority for the Distribution of Works and the Protection of Rights on the Internet (Hadopi).

Hadopi's Commission for Rights Protection, the body that investigates reports of copyright infringement, has passed just 14 case files to the courts for prosecution under the country's controversial three strikes law since it began its work in October 2010. This is the first of the cases to reach trial.

The law makes it illegal to download copyright content such as music, video, or games without the copyright holder's permission. It also makes it illegal for Internet subscribers to allow other people to do so over their Internet connection, even if they only allow them to do so inadvertently.

The Belfort Police Tribunal, which tries minor offenses, found the man guilty of negligence for failing in his obligation to secure access to his Internet connection, the spokesman for Hadopi said.

During the hearing, the man said it was his wife that had downloaded the files, not him. He admitted failing to secure his Internet access.

Local newspapers reported that his wife had signed a statement admitting to downloading two tracks by the artist Rihanna, although these were not the only downloads the man was accused of allowing.

Last week Mireille Imbert-Quaretta, president of the Commission for Rights Protection, said Hadopi had sent out 1,153,460 warning emails to Internet subscribers by June 30. When the Commission receives complaints of copyright infringement from rights holders, it sends emails warning the Internet subscribers concerned that their connections are involved in illegal downloads. Not all recipients of the emails heeded the warnings, prompting rights holders to make further complaints about 102,854 of them, prompting the Commission to send second warnings by registered letter to the subscribers.

Just 340 of those have been the subject of continued complaints by rights holders, the third strike that may -- if they are the subject of further complaints during the year following their final warning -- eventually land them in court.
http://www.itworld.com/it-management...legal-download





US Judge: Wi-Fi Network Owner Not Obligated to Secure Network to Stop Illegal File-Sharing

It looks like it might be hard for rights holders in various entertainment industries to sue individuals who have open Wi-Fi networks for copyright infringement done by guests, if the following court case is any indication. A California man whose open network was allegedly used to download a copyrighted video cannot be sued, according to a ruling by a federal judge.

The complaint filed in April of this year alleged that Hatfield was negligent because he didn't secure his network, and therefore liable.

AF Holdings, who admitted in its case that it does not know the identity of the user who downloaded its video using BitTorrent, targeted Josh Hatfield with a lawsuit in federal court because it was downloaded via his unsecured home Internet connection. Hatfield moved for a dismissal on the grounds that the plaintiff failed "to state a claim" and that the claim "is barred by Section 301 of the Copyright Act and by immunity under the Communications Decency Act."

U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton dismissed the claim last week. The Electronic Frontier Foundation planned on submitting an amicus brief on behalf of Hatfield if the case had gone forward.

"In Weitrum v. RKO General, Inc., 15 Cal. 3d 40 (1975), the California Supreme Court explained that the general principle that 'one is not obligated to act as a 'good samaritan' is 'rooted in the common law distinction between action and inaction, or misfeasance and non-feasance,'" Hamilton wrote.

While AF Holdings may not have liked that Hatfield's alleged actions or inactions related to the illegal download, the court found that there was no obligation for him to act one way or the other. AF Holdings also never proved that Hatfield had a legal duty to prevent infringement because he did not have a "special relationship" with AF Holdings that would obligate him to protect its copyrights.

Judge Hamilton dismissed the negligence claim with prejudice and vacated a Sept. 5 hearing. AF Holdings had also asserted two claims of copyright infringement and one claim of contributory copyright infringement against the unidentified BitTorrent user. The court ruled that the company must serve this mysterious individual by Oct. 5, or those claims will be dismissed without prejudice as well. You can read the ruling here (PDF).
http://www.gamepolitics.com/2012/09/...l-file-sharing





Three Artists On Piracy: Sharing, Disruption And Turning Filesharers Into Your Street Team
Tim Cushing

There's a lot of discussion here at Techdirt about filesharing. Much of the discussion focuses on various legacy industries and their efforts to fight infringement, as well as their continued cultivation of artificial scarcity, which often sends potential customers towards unapproved sources. Various artists have also weighed in on the matter, offering their perspective as those most directly affected by filesharing. Some embrace it. Others view it as a threat to their chosen professions. No matter which side they take, it's largely viewed as inevitable or inescapable. But inevitable or not, the discussion continues.

In the interest of furthering the discussion, I'd like to draw your attention to three separate posts on the subject of filesharing, each one written by an artist with "skin in the game," as they say.

The first post is very timely, considering the recent rumor that Bruce Willis was taking Apple to court to secure his ability to pass his iTunes library on to his next-of-kin. Dessa, a rapper and member of the Doomtree Collective, draws a parallel between Monsanto and Apple and their sale of licenses rather than goods in order to better "secure" easily duplicated items and prevent sharing. Dessa also makes a further connection (filesharing to seed-sharing collectives), showing that these restrictive licenses fly in the face of normal human behavior.

Peddling a product that consumers can duplicate for free is a tricky business. With affordable consumer technology, you can now copy a song a hundred times, with no degradation in the sound quality—and most people seem to immediately recognize why that’s gonna make it harder to get paid for songs. But my first experiences with lossless, duplicable technology didn’t have anything to do with my career as a rapper. My first encounter wasn’t with a torrent site. Or a bootlegged disc. It was a tomato.

Seeds, quite obviously, are the mechanism of plant duplication. You drop a sunflower seed in wet dirt and, bang, you get a brand new one. Essentially, you just 'burned’ a sunflower. The seeds of this new plant can then be harvested and planted to create an infinite, almost lossless supply of flowers and seeds.

The connection continues. Monsanto sells licenses for the technology in the seed, not the seed itself, explicitly forbidding the resale or transfer of its seeds to unlicensed "users." iTunes does the same. Purchasers are forbidden from doing anything with their library other than what is explicitly allowed by the EULA. The right of first sale is stripped away because the purchasers have nothing to sell. They own nothing.

In addition, she points out that users agree to stipulations they'd never agree to with physical goods (as opposed to licenses), like being monitored (Apple says "technologies" will be used to verify compliance with the license terms; Monsanto's verification method is even more Big Brother-ish -- "aerial photography").

These rules and regulations can undermine our fundamental ideas of what it means to actually own something. In most of our purchasing lives, we pay for product and then we can do with it as we like... So If I’m only allowed to interact with my purchase in meticulously prescribed ways...it starts to feel less like mine. Like a pet I'm not allowed to touch or see.

Losslessly reproducible technologies are just complicated things to own... In many ways, the whole ownership model just seems poorly suited to duplicable technology... When we try to force new technology into the old model, our contracts end up sounding really, well, creepy. Instead of asking, Whose is this, who gets paid for it, and how much?, the conversation might be better reset by asking What is this, who made it, who uses it, and what’s fair?

The second post features the writing of recording artist and netlabel co-founder Bunny Intonamorous (presumably not his real name). His post goes long, spurred on by a statement made by a different set of artists, a pair that create likenesses of recording artists using the artists' own CDs.

Mirco Pagano and Moreno de Turco were quoted in the article as saying that "Piracy infects and destroys music, preventing artists to succeed and become idols as in the past."

My fury is two-fold: piracy of music prevents no-one from succeeding let alone infecting and destroying music, and also this (frankly outdated) notion that to be successful in music you have to be some kind of mega-stadium-level superstar money-machine.

There's a lot in Bunny's post (which runs a few thousand very entertaining and informative words) discussing what's wrong with these assumptions. While piracy has affected some artists ability to sell music, for the most part, that wasn't where they were making the most money anyway. Touring is where the money was and still is for many (though not all) artists. Piracy can't touch that.

The other positive aspect of piracy is that it has changed the music landscape from an industry that sold artists (and their art) to consumers, presenting the artists as "idols" and "icons," to something more democratic, more varied, and perhaps most importantly, more personal:

For better or worse (read: better) piracy is here and it's changed things. These days an artist has to have a presence over data-rich streaming sites such as soundcloud and bandcamp if they accurately want to gauge the size of their audience and tour efficiently enough to get money out of it and start building a reputation. And even then, it's risky, but it negates the main problems with piracy and money can, and will, still be made. I certainly wouldn't say that piracy is killing music. In fact, it's making a lot more music more widely available, which increases the amount of different breeding grounds there are, technically (though not necessarily) increasing the amount of interesting acts and artists out there.

In fact piracy of music software has broken down boundaries even further. Not only can people hear and experience a wider range of inspirational existing music, but now musical creation has become more widely available.

Just as there are those whose musical stasis prompts them to ask questions about who the next "Dylan" or "Led Zeppelin" or "Beatles" will be, there are those who wonder how today's severely fractured market and wealth of distractions will ever produce another 25-million-album seller like Michael Jackson (or even $35K a year). Those that blame this lack of multimillionaire chart dominators solely on piracy, rather than on underlying cultural shifts, economic woes, a multitude of new distractions and other disruptions are merely settling for a convenient whipping boy, rather than actually working on fixing their problems.

And this is one of many reasons I really appreciate how piracy has changed the face of musical culture (along with the internet in general, of course): it has forced musicians to stop the whole rock 'n' roll, "untouchable", get-the-fuck-away-from-me attitude that beleaguered "legends" for some time, and encouraged artists to interact with their fans. This not only creates entirely new platforms for interaction other than just through audio, but has also de-fangs and de-mystifies these people, which then decreases the amount of "artist anxiety" someone faces when looking to create.

Yearning for idols and blaming piracy for today's "weak" music market is nothing more than rose-tinted nostalgia rewriting the history of the recording industry, turning it from an exploitative commercial venture into the deflowered victim of millions of basement dwellers. Those who rail against the "level playing field" are constantly working to conform this disruption to fit their favored narrative.

My biggest gripe with the whole "legends" argument, however, is that there needs to be some form of monopoly on 1) record sales, and 2) the public consciousness in terms of music. The second point, I fear, is the impulse of monoculture - that same impulse that abhorred subcultures in times past (which is slowly also being eroded, thankfully - be who you want! choose your friends! etc. - another wondrous example of what technology can bring you). Either way the suggestion is that, the way musical culture has been headed for the past few years is utterly wrong.

Granted, musical culture and money are in a strange state of flux at the moment, but the trends have been leaning towards a more aware, more (arguably) moral state of business: that you pay for what you enjoy so that these musicians - who generally tend to be very thankful - get if not all the cash you gave them, then at least a fairly sizeable chunk.

There's a thought: Support your favorite artists directly, rather than hoping a small portion of your $14.99 makes its way to them after passing through an entire office full of unrelated staff and a multi-level supply chain.

The final stop on this filesharing three-fer is over at Feral Intensity, home of self-published author Gayla Drummond. If you're not familiar with her, all you need to know is this: she is one of the few authors who came to the defense of LendInk during the Twitter-fed witch hunt.

Drummond begins her filesharing saga by describing herself as someone who originally felt piracy was "bad," but unlike others, she didn't just make the assumption and move on :

I researched to discover what the major reasons for piracy were, and came up with three: availability, DRM, and price.

Her reaction?

As a result, I distributed my work to as many sites as possible, made it DRM free where I was able to, and experimented with pricing to find what people were willing to pay for it. I stated more than once that I was totally okay with people loaning my ebooks to others (before lending systems on Amazon, etc), but did ask that they please not put my work on file sharing sites.

This is a refreshing change of pace from so many other stories that begin and end with "there's no excuse for piracy" and result in the ratcheting up of various piracy countermeasures until they reach the "draconian" level. However, the story continues:

Then someone did. Tria’s Tale ended up on one in January 2011.

My reaction was something along the lines of ‘Jeeze, the one thing I ask people not to do!’ and then it was ‘Oh, well’. Except when I checked the file sharing site, I discovered they required people to pay a membership fee in order to download anything. That got my back up; the site was making money from offering access to my, and others’, content. They weren’t selling the actual files themselves, just access to them. That was not okay with me. I sent a DMCA notice and within 72 hours, the site removed the link to Tria’s Tale.

So far, par for the course. Sharing is one thing, piracy is quite another, etc. DMCA served and content removed. Except... this isn't the end of Drummond's brush with piracy. First, she noticed this:

I can’t say whether it’s related or not, since I actually just realized it last night, but my sales doubled in 2011. That link was only up for 10 days at the most, but for all I know, it was related to the sales increase.

Anecdotal. Correlation and causation, etc. It would be easy to dismiss this as a coincidence, but rather than just wave it away, Drummond decided to pursue this angle. Discouraged by a lack of feedback and the grind of self-publishing and self-promotion, she decided to turn over her books to the dark side. Her thought process was basically: why kill myself handling all the promotional work when so many others are willing to do it for me?

When everything you’re doing isn’t producing the desired results, it’s time to try something different.

That is why I’ve become a ‘self-pirate’.

I want readers. Readers who will enjoy my work and let me know in some fashion. So when Ashen made his suggestion to me after the Lendink mess, I said YES.

While he was busy doing the heavy work of file prep and ‘seeding’ (the FSM bless him for putting up with my stupid questions and general cluelessness!), Google alerts notified me that The Contract Bride was mentioned on a certain forum. I always check out my Google alerts, and went for a look.

Lo and behold, file sharing links to it had been posted.

For just a second, I was all petulant about it: ‘That’s not one of the titles I picked out!’, but I got over that and ran with it because someone thought it good enough to recommend to others, AND THAT IS WHAT I WANT! Joined the forum to leave a comment with a link to a newly created page on my author site.

The next day, I had 3 new sales on Amazon and had received a donation from someone from that forum. That is the most action I’ve seen in a single day in regards to my ebooks since March, people.

It has been said that filesharers purchase more music, ebooks, etc. than non-filesharers. The argument goes back and forth on this, but one thing's for sure: pirates know how to get your work in front of thousands of people you'd never reach otherwise.

Don’t get me wrong, I by no means think doing this is going to catapult me into fame and fortune. But file sharing is widespread, and may possibly be the most effective, least time consuming method of getting my work in front of eyeballs.

It’s not any different than offering freebies through Amazon’s Select program or other sites when you decide to put your own work out there, and it’s certainly not going to have anymore negative of an effect than doing that. It’s a different platform with content hungry people.

It's not exactly advertising but it's certainly better than locking your creative efforts up behind DRM or endless legal threats. And if you feel piracy is unstoppable/inevitable (no matter which side you come down on "morally"), why not start seeding your own stuff? If you think you can't stop someone else from doing it, get a step ahead of them and become your own worst enemy/best friend. Let the system work for you.

Drummond's put her money where her mouth is:

Wanna pirate some of my ebooks? Go here.

As she points out, the Harry Potter books were being passed around on the internet long before official ebook versions were (finally) made available and yet, millions of copies were sold.

Filesharing will continue to be villainized by certain industries and members of various creative fields, many of whom would rather find someone to blame than actually deal with massive disruption. But to see only the negative is to miss out on a lot of the positive effects while also scapegoating potential fans.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...eet-team.shtml





Australians Using BitTorrent Less: Study

Are iiTrial, content convenience to blame?
Juha Saarinen and James Hutchinson

Use of BitTorrent and peer-to-peer filesharing services in Australia has fallen to its lowest level in four years, a new study by the Swinburne University of Technology has found.

The report, part of a biannual survey of 1001 respondents on internet use in Australia, found that while use of file-sharing services increased slightly from 23.6 percent to 27.8 percent of respondents between the 2007 and 2009 versions of the study, the figure has fallen to 22.6 percent in the latest version of the study.

A total 77 percent of respondents said they never used file-sharing services in 2011, an increase from 73 percent in 2009 and the same level as 2007.

The study extrapolated the results as partly reflecting "greater awareness of the illegality of some of this activity", resulting largely from more coverage through the iiNet versus AFACT court trial and greater availability of legitimate download or streaming services.

Of those responding to the survey, more said they used file-sharing sites to download music rather than movies but the activity in general remained prevalent for males surveyed between the ages of 18 and 34.

The report drew a direct correlation between internet use in Australia and income. Almost all of those earning $60,000 a year or more had internet access but only two-thirds of people earning $30,000 or less a year had internet access. The latter number has increased from 43 percent of respondents in 2007 and 58 percent in 2009.

Julian Thomas, study co-author and director of Swinburne's Institute for Social Research, told iTnews that while some of the results could fall within the study's margin of error, the aggregate evidence indicated at the very least a slowed growth for file-sharing use in Australia over the past two years.

"I think however you read it, clearly services like BitTorrent aren't growing," he said.

"From our point of view that's the most significant finding — it's not necessarily that there's a small decrease in some of those numbers. Obviously the number of people who are doing it are still growing because our user base has grown over those couple of years [but] this is not a strongly growing area of activity."

The growing availability of ad-support or low-cost legitimate streaming services over the past several years was attributed as one reason for the slow-down in file-sharing use in Australia, which is cited as a relatively high user of BitTorrent.

"The proliferation of online stores, the proliferation of business models that have emerged, where people can subscribe to music services ... these sorts of things reinforce awareness of the fact that downloading a piece of music off a file-sharing service may be illegal," Thomas said.

However, Swinburne's Thomas said the continued introduction of legitimate services to Australia may not have an exponential impact on BitTorrent use in Australia.

"My hypothesis would be there may not be much change [in future] because there is still a significant number of people who use those services because they are free — that is one factor which is not going to go away," he said.

"There are still constraints on the availability of some material — probably more in the audiovisual area — where there are just limits on what people can easily access through legitimate services.

"There will be a portion of people who will still be going to file-sharing sites ... just because it's hard to get in other ways."

Neil Gane, chief executive of the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft — which sued ISP iiNet in 2009 for allegedly authorising its users to download movies through BitTorrent — said the survey results supported his previous argument that "there's no business model in the world that can compete with free".

"It is important to note that legal services are still having to compete with illegal file sharing where empirical research continues to show that getting something without payment is the primary motivation," he told iTnews.

"With the University of Ballarat report estimating that BitTorrent traffic is predominantly infringing (97.2 percent) the five percent decline per the Swinburne University report would suggest that some BitTorrent users are migrating to legitimate services."

AFACT, which represents film and television companies, is currently negotiating with internet service providers over a graduated response scheme that would warn users found to illegitimately download copyrighted material - for example, via file-sharing websites.

The two sides have yet to agree to the exact make-up of such a scheme.

A spokesman for the Communications Alliance, representing ISPs in the negotiations, did not return comment at the time of writing.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/315197...ess-study.aspx





More Nicks in Net Neutrality's Death By A Thousand Cuts
Nancy Scola

This week, at long last, the Federal Communications Commission explained in court why telco criticisms of its Net neutrality regulations are "baseless." Nonetheless, it has become crystal clear that the FCC's rules against online discrimination - perhaps the signature technology policy move of Barack Obama's presidency - are in the industry's crosshairs.

The Net neutrality regulations adopted by the FCC on a party-line vote just before Christmas 2010 represented the administration's attempt to find middle ground. Chairman Julius Genachowski had floated an idea variously called "The Third Way" or "Title II Lite." His plan proposed a historic, black-and-white reclassification of broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service under the Communications Act of 1934, but with caveats: the FCC would "forebear" on using all the regulatory muscle that it generally holds over common carriers, like the ability to impose sharing requirements. But Genachowski, facing a tsunami of industry disapproval, retreated to a far more modest jurisdiction over broadband. That's what Verizon now dismisses in court as the FCC's attempt to "conjure a role for itself."

Genachowski's Net neutrality rules were a tenuous play from the start, considering the Comcast v. FCC decision on BitTorrent throttling some months earlier, which challenged the commission's "ancillary authority" to regulate broadband. Verizon said it would go to court. It has.

Meanwhile, AT&T responded in public with a what's done is done air. In a hearing last March, a company executive quietly seconded a member of Congress who suggested the rules would "require no change in the business plans of AT&T." We're beginning to see why. In the run up to this week's expected release of iOS 6, AT&T has said that it will disable FaceTime, the iPhone's video chat feature, over its cellular networks except for subscribers to its pricey Mobile Share plans. Why? An uncertainty about data load, the company said. And if the FCC can make up the rules as it goes along, AT&T seems to be arguing, then so can we.

Blocking FaceTime doesn't violate Net neutrality regs, a company rep wrote, because the app is "preloaded." That's a distinction not found within the four corners of the FCC's neutrality rules. But it buys the company a little wiggle room.

Genachowski's Christmas surprise earned him the ire of critics, some of whom see an inevitability to today's challenges. "This is a mess of the commission's own making," said Derek Turner, research director of Free Press, a vociferous proponent of net neutrality regulations. Congress, it's worth noting, wasn't able to craft the FCC any clearer authority. But rather than establishing that the Internet is both the digital bits that make up its content and the (highly regulable) pipes that those bits travel along, Genachowski tried to make do with a far less coherent jurisdiction. And prodded by industry, he carved out exemptions for mobile Internet, which is exactly how more and more Americans are going online. Companies can't block competitive applications, and they have to be transparent about what they do do. But that leaves gaps big enough for AT&T to drive its FaceTime policy through.

That the FCC would claim jurisdiction over broadband, today's dominant communications medium, scares the bejeebus out of some people. Same goes for the idea that it wouldn't. The agency tried to calm roiling waters with a tempered approach to Net neutrality. But that produced only a momentary peace. Verizon is challenging it in court. AT&T is challenging it in the marketplace. What is the government's role in regulating broadband networks? More unsettled than ever. And that doesn't benefit much of anyone.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...usand-cuts.php





Judge to Twitter: Hand Over Protestor's Data or Pay Up
John Paul Titlow

The ongoing saga over one Occupy Wall Street protestor's Twitter data is about to get even more serious. Malcolm Harris, one of over 700 demonstrators arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge last year, was fighting the New York District Attorney's request for the data when a Manhattan judge ruled in July that Twitter had to hand it over. Today, the same judge threatened to hold the company in contempt of court and issue fines if it doesn't comply with the ruling by this Friday.

Twitter is being asked to supply the D.A.'s office with more than three months' worth of tweets and other data from Harris's account. The information, which includes some non-public information like IP addresses and possibly location data, is being sought to counter the protestor's version of events as they unfolded on October 1, 2011. It was on that day that police arrested hundreds of demonstrators as they marched across the Brooklyn Bridge. Harris and other protestors claim that police led the marchers onto the bridge before arresting them, an assertion that prosecutors hope to counter using Harris's own tweets.

In March, the D.A. subpoenaed Twitter for similar data about Jeffrey Rae, another activist arrested that day. In that case, the data requested included Rae's name, address, records of session times, the length of those sessions, the types of devices used by Rae to access Twitter and any IP addresses from which he connected. Rae's lawyer succeeded in reaching an agreement with prosecutors that effectively quashed the subpoena, but Harris's legal battle has continued.

The whole affair highlights a grey area where activism, social media and the law all intersect. The digital age has fundamentally changed how people communicate and store information about their whereabouts and activities, but the law is still adapting to this reality. Once upon a time, the definition of the "unreasonable searches and seizures" banned by the Fourth Amendment was a relatively clear cut, modified periodically by court rulings. The rise of smartphones, social networks and a wide range of cloud-hosted services for consumers have turned much of that on its head, upending the established definition of privacy and the balance of rights between citizens and the government.

Challenging Twitter's Commitment to Free Speech

For its part, Twitter has done its best to stand on the side of free speech and user privacy, even in the face of a rising tide of government requests for user data. In a profile of the company's chief lawyer Alexander MacGillivray last weekend, the New York Times outlined how Twitter tries to set itself apart from other tech companies by aggressively protecting its users' privacy.

In its quest to protect user privacy, Twitter is not always successful. Last November, the company was ordered by a Virginia court to hand over account data for Wikileaks supporter and Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum. The government sought data on Appelbaum from a number of tech companies, including Google and Sonic.net, a privacy-friendly ISP based in California. In another Occupy-related case, Twitter was forced to hand over one user's data to authorities in Boston after a three-month legal battle.

In case after case, Twitter has initially refused to hand over Occupy Wall Street data to authorities, more often siding with defendants than with the government. The company views protection of free speech as a valuable strategic asset. Today's legal nudge from Manhattan will serve as yet another test of Twitter's dedication to those principles. As in other recent cases, the company may ultimately have no choice but to hand over the data, despite its request for a stay.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...-or-pay-up.php





Twitter Turns Over User’s Messages in Occupy Wall Street Protest Case

Twitter on Friday turned over to a judge a printed stack of messages written by an Occupy Wall Street protester in October, around the time he and hundreds of others were arrested after walking on the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Manhattan prosecutors subpoenaed the records in January, because the messages could show that the police did not lead protesters off the bridge’s pedestrian path and then arrest them, an argument that the protester, Malcolm Harris, of Brooklyn, is expected to make at trial.

The judge, Matthew A. Sciarrino Jr., of Criminal Court in Manhattan, said he would keep the messages sealed in an envelope in his chambers until Sept. 21, when a hearing is scheduled in a challenge to his earlier ruling requiring that the messages be turned over to prosecutors.

If that challenge fails, Judge Sciarrino said he would review the messages and then turn over the relevant material to prosecutors.

Mr. Harris was one of about 700 protesters who were arrested on the bridge. He was charged with disorderly conduct, a violation.

The case has broader significance for the effect it may have on how much access law enforcement has to material published on social media Web sites. Judge Sciarrino said that once the material was broadcast, it was no longer a private record.

Twitter objected to the demand for messages that were no longer on its public site and has appealed Judge Sciarrino’s ruling.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/15/n...test-case.html





Google Has No Plans to Rethink Video Status
Claire Cain Miller

Google said on Friday that it would not comply with a White House request to reconsider the anti-Islam video that has set off violent protests in the Arab world in light of its rules banning hate speech on YouTube, which it owns.

Google said it had already determined that the video did not violate its terms of service regarding hate speech, because it was against the Muslim religion but not Muslim people.

The company also said Friday that it had blocked access to the video in India and Indonesia because it violated local laws.

These actions came after Google temporarily blocked the video on Wednesday in Egypt and Libya of its own volition — not because it violated laws or YouTube’s terms of service — an extraordinary measure that it said it took in response to the delicacy of the situation. The video is accessible in the rest of the world, even as protests spread to nearly 20 countries, from North Africa to Indonesia.

Google said its decisions were consistent with a 2007 policy for controversial content in which the company would take into account not just laws and its own policies, but cultural norms.

“One type of content, while legal everywhere, may be almost universally unacceptable in one region, yet viewed as perfectly fine in another,” Rachel Whetstone, senior vice president for communications and public policy at Google, wrote in the 2007 policy. “We are passionate about our users, so we try to take into account local cultures and needs.”

YouTube said it was continuously monitoring the circumstances in other countries.

The controversy over the video has raised questions about the role of Google in governing free expression by determining which content is acceptable to show online and which is not.

The company does not police videos uploaded to the site because of the sheer volume involved; 72 hours of videos are uploaded each minute. It reviews videos only if users flag them as inappropriate or if it receives a valid court order or government request to remove them for violating the law.

That was the case in India and Indonesia, which have laws restricting content that provokes enmity.

Also, Google removes illegal content only in the 45 countries in which it has local Web sites, which include Egypt, Indonesia and India but not Libya, Pakistan or Afghanistan.

“We’ve restricted access to it in countries where it is illegal such as India and Indonesia as well as in Libya and Egypt given the very sensitive situations in these two countries,” YouTube said Friday in a statement.

“At Google we have a bias in favor of people’s right to free expression in everything we do,” Ms. Whetstone wrote in Google’s 2007 policy. “But we also recognize that freedom of expression can’t be — and shouldn’t be — without some limits. The difficulty is in deciding where those boundaries are drawn. For a company like Google with services in more than 100 countries — all with different national laws and cultural norms — it’s a challenge we face many times every day.”

Meanwhile, a Facebook spokeswoman confirmed that the company had restricted access to a link to the film in Pakistan, at the request of its government.

Kevin Bankston, director of the free expression project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit group that focuses on digital civil liberties, said that Google, as a private company, could decide what was appropriate on its sites and what was not. But he added, “Considering the power that many of these platforms have, it’s important for them to be as clear and transparent as possible about those decisions.”

Somini Sengupta contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/15/w...os-status.html





California Man Linked to Anti-Islam Film Taken In for Questioning

A California man convicted of bank fraud was taken in for questioning on Saturday by officers investigating possible probation violations stemming from the making of an anti-Islam film that triggered violent protests in the Muslim world.

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, voluntarily left his home in the early hours of Saturday morning for the meeting in a sheriff's station in the Los Angeles suburb of Cerritos, Los Angeles County Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said.

"He will be interviewed by federal probation officers," Whitmore said. He said Nakoula had not been placed under arrest but would not be returning home immediately. "He was never put in handcuffs... It was all voluntary."

Nakoula, who has denied involvement in the film in a phone call to his Coptic Christian bishop, was ushered out of his home and into a waiting car by several sheriff's deputies, his face shielded by a scarf, hat and sunglasses.

The crudely made 13-minute English-language film, filmed in California and circulated on the Internet under several titles including "Innocence of Muslims", mocks the Prophet Mohammad.

The film sparked a violent protest at the U.S. consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi during which the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans were killed on Tuesday. Protests have spread to other countries across the Muslim world.

For many Muslims, any depiction of the prophet is blasphemous. Caricatures deemed insulting in the past have provoked protests and drawn condemnations from officials, preachers, ordinary Muslims and many Christians.

U.S. officials have said authorities were not investigating the film project itself, and that even if it was inflammatory or led to violence, simply producing it cannot be considered a crime in the United States, which has strong free speech laws.

Two attorneys visited Nakoula's home hours before he was taken in for questioning. They said they were there to consult with him.

BANK FRAUD CONVICTION

Nakoula, whose name has been widely linked to the film in media reports, pleaded guilty to bank fraud in 2010 and was sentenced to 21 months in prison, to be followed by five years on supervised probation, court documents showed.

He was accused of fraudulently opening bank and credit card accounts using Social Security numbers that did not match the names on the applications, a criminal complaint showed. He was released in June 2011, and at least some production on the video was done later that summer.

But the terms of Nakoula's prison release contain behavior stipulations that bar him from accessing the Internet or assuming aliases without the approval of his probation officer.

A senior law enforcement official in Washington has indicated the probation investigation relates to whether he broke one or both of these conditions. Violations could result in him being sent back to prison, court records show.

Clips of the film posted on the Internet since July have been attributed to a man by the name of Sam Bacile, which two people linked to the film have said was likely an alias.

A telephone number said to belong to Bacile, given to Reuters by U.S.-based Coptic Christian activist Morris Sadek who said he had promoted the film [ID:nL5E8KCLLK], was later traced back to a person who shares the Nakoula residence.

Stan Goldman, a Loyola Law School professor, said whether Nakoula is sent back to jail over potential probation violations linked to the film, such as accessing the Internet, was a subjective decision up to an individual judge.

"Federal judges are gods in their own courtrooms, it varies so much in who they are," he said, noting such a move would be based on his conduct not on the content of the film.

As well as the fraud conviction, Nakoula also pleaded guilty in 1997 to possession with intent to manufacture methamphetamine and was sentenced to a year in jail, said Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles and Bret Hartman in Cerritos; Writing by Cynthia Johnston; Editing by Louise Ireland)
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2012...alifornia.html





U.S. Spies Press for Renewal of Broad Electronic Surveillance Law
Mark Hosenball

U.S. intelligence officials made a public plea on Tuesday, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks, for quick congressional action to extend a sweeping but controversial U.S. electronic surveillance law.

Robert Litt, chief lawyer for the Office of Director of National Intelligence, told reporters that winning congressional approval to extend the electronic spying law was the U.S. intelligence community's "top priority."

If the law, which expires at the end of 2012, is not extended, Litt said, U.S. spy agencies would lose access to what he described as a "very, very important source of valuable intelligence information."

Relevant committees of both the House of Representatives and the Senate have approved similar, though not identical, versions of bills that would extend the surveillance law, an updated version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.

The Senate Intelligence Committee's version would extend it until 2017. A Senate Judiciary Committee version would extend it only until 2015.

Some congressional officials said the Obama administration was anxious to get an extension of the law approved by Congress in the next two weeks, since legislators adjourn for an election break later this month and considerable unfinished business already awaits them for a lame duck session after the November 6 general election.

But at least one congressional critic of the surveillance law says he is willing to use legislative tactics to stall the bill unless the administration and other legislators agree to include stronger provisions to protect Americans' civil liberties.

Senator Ron Wyden, a Democratic member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he had placed a "hold" on the bill that he would not lift until the Senate considers more stringent protections against warrantless spying on Americans. "My hold is on and it will stay on," he told Reuters.

Wyden said that in correspondence with a group of senators, the Obama administration had admitted that some Americans' rights prohibiting warrantless surveillance had been violated by the spying program. He said that until loopholes in the law were plugged, he believed it should only be extended for a relatively short period.

BILL CONTAINS LOOPHOLE

In his conference call with reporters, Litt declined to discuss details of how U.S. agencies, most notably the ultra-secret National Security Agency, the electronic eavesdropping organization based at Fort Meade, Maryland, go about collecting information under the act's provisions.

The law authorizes broad electronic intelligence collection by U.S. agencies targeting what a Senate report described as "persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States." Under its provisions, several officials said, U.S. agencies do not have to obtain a court warrant to monitor communications of suspected militants or other intelligence targets who are not located in the United States.

Wyden and Democratic Senator Mark Udall alleged earlier this year that the bill contained a "loophole" that could be used "to circumvent traditional warrant protections and search for the communications of a potentially large number of Americans."

Wyden and Udall proposed an amendment that would have ordered Inspectors General at the Justice Department and National Intelligence Director's office to produce a "rough estimate" of how many Americans' communications had been inadvertently collected under the law.

On Tuesday, Litt maintained that because of the way the collection program worked, producing such an estimate would be impractical.

People familiar with the program said that it involved sifting through masses of communications between foreigners that are transmitted via servers or telecommunications links that pass physically through the United States.

One official familiar with the matter said that the only way to begin to estimate the extent to which the program might have inadvertently collected information on Americans is by looking more closely at messages that intelligence officials are not supposed to look at - because Americans are on one or both ends of the messages.

One of the main points of the law authorizing the surveillance program is that officials are not supposed to be reading or listening to message traffic involving people located in the United States unless they have warrants to do so.

Steven Aftergood, a secrecy expert with the Federation of American Scientists, said there ought to be a "middle ground" under which spy agencies could provide Congress with an estimate of the "magnitude" of inadvertent collection on Americans without compromising details of the system.

"Are we talking about ten, or ten million, or ten billion" inadvertently collected messages involving U.S. people, Aftergood said. But such an estimate, he said, is "what the government is refusing to provide."

(Editing by Warren Strobel and Philip Barbara)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...88A1IF20120911





House to Vote on FISA Amendments Act Wednesday
Michelle Richardson

It’s back. On Thursday the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on a five-year reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), the 2008 law that legalized the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program and more. It permits the government to get year-long orders from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international communications—including phone calls, emails, and internet records—for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence. The orders need not specify who is going to be spied on or even allege that the targets did anything wrong. The only guarantees that the FAA gives are that no specific American will be targeted for wiretapping and that some (classified) rules about the use of intercepted information will be followed.

After four years, you’d hope that some basic information or parameters of such a massive spying program would be divulged to the public, or at least your rank-and-file member of Congress, but they haven’t. Only a small handful of members have either personally attended classified briefings or have staff with high enough clearances to attend for them. Sen. Ron Wyden—who has been on the Senate Intelligence Committee for years—has even been stonewalled by the Obama administration for a year and a half in his attempts to learn basic information about the program, such as the number of Americans who have had their communications intercepted under the FAA.

Yet the House ambles on, ready to rubber stamp another five years of expansive surveillance that can pick up American communications without meaningful judicial oversight and without probable cause or any finding of wrongdoing. Instead of blind faith in the executive branch, every member of the House should demand that the administration publicly disclose the following before proceeding with reauthorization:

• Copies of FISA court opinions interpreting our Fourth Amendment rights under the FAA, with redactions to protect sensitive information (the Department of Justice can write summaries of law if necessary);
• A rough estimate of how many Americans are surveilled under the FAA every year;
• A description of the rules that govern how American information picked up by FAA surveillance is protected.

Can you believe that 435 members of Congress who have sworn to uphold the Constitution are about to vote on a sweeping intelligence gathering law without this basic information? Act now to let them know that it’s time for Congress to fix FISA. Keep an eye on this space and the @ACLU on Twitter for updates this week (for more detailed tweets about FISA, follow @Richardson_Mich, A.K.A. Michelle Richardson, the ACLU’s lobbyist who works on FISA).

Get Involved
Tell your members of Congress: Fix FISA
Act Now
Relatedly, on October 29th, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in the ACLU’s constitutional challenge to the FAA, which was filed in 2008 less than an hour after President Bush signed the amendments into law.
http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-se...-act-wednesday





House Approves Sweeping, Warrantless Electronic Spy Powers
David Kravets

The House on Wednesday reauthorized for five years broad electronic eavesdropping powers that legalized and expanded the George W. Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program.

The FISA Amendments Act, which is expiring at year’s end, allows the government to electronically eavesdrop on Americans’ phone calls and e-mails without a probable-cause warrant so long as one of the parties to the communication is believed outside the United States. The communications may be intercepted “to acquire foreign intelligence information.”

The government has also interpreted the law to mean that as long as the real target is al-Qaida, the government can wiretap purely domestic e-mails and phone calls without getting a warrant from a judge. That’s according to David Kris, a former top anti-terrorism attorney at the Justice Department.

The measure is sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and the Obama administration has called its passage a top intelligence priority. The bill generally requires the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court to rubber-stamp terror-related electronic surveillance requests that ensnare Americans’ communications.

The government does not have to identify the target or facility to be monitored. It can begin surveillance a week before making the request, and the surveillance can continue during the appeals process if, in a rare case, the secret FISA court rejects the surveillance application. The court’s rulings are not public.

The vote was 301-118 in favor of passage, with 111 Democrats and seven Republicans voting no.

Smith, while imploring the House to pass the measure, said the FISA Amendments Act “is one of the most important votes we cast in this Congress.” Terrorists, he added, “are committed to the destruction of our country.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-California) countered during a more than hour debate on the floor, urging the House to defeat the measure. “I think the government needs to comply with the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution all the time,” she said. “We can be safe while still complying with the Constitution of the United States.”

Rep. Dan Lungren (R-California) demanded that his colleagues support the bill. “This is critical to the protection of the American people,” he said.

Rep. Terry Gowdy (R-South Carolina), in a passionate plea, sided with Lungren. ”Intelligence is the lifeblood of our ability to defend ourselves,” he said. Moments later, he added: “Are we to believe that the Fourth Amendment applies to the entire world?”

But the future of the spy powers remains murky, despite the rhetoric on both sides of the political aisle in the House.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) has put a hold on the matching bill in the Senate. Among other reasons, he said the government should disclose how many Americans’ communications have been intercepted under the law, which was adopted in 2008 as a way to legalize the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program that was initiated in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.

The intelligence services say such an accounting is not possible and may not even be legal. Though even broad outlines of the NSA’s collection program are classified, presumably the NSA is collecting a staggering amount of Americans’ conversations, but only examining a small slice of them.

The House version extends the spy powers until Dec. 31, 2017. The similar bill in the Senate, which in May passed the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, extends the powers for three years.

According to one former Justice Department official, the FISA Amendments Act gives the government nearly carte blanche spying powers.

Kris, who headed the Justice Department’s National Security Division between 2009 and 20011, writes in the revised 2012 edition of National Security Investigations and Prosecutions:

For example, an authorization targeting ‘al Qaeda’ — which is a non-U.S. person located abroad—could allow the government to wiretap any telephone that it believes will yield information from or about al Qaeda, either because the telephone is registered to a person whom the government believes is affiliated with al Qaeda, or because the government believes that the person communicates with others who are affiliated with al Qaeda, regardless of the location of the telephone.

The American Civil Liberties Union, in a letter signed by 20 rights groups, urged the House to oppose the measure. The groups echoed Wyden, saying if the measure is passed, lawmakers should require the Obama administration to publicize how often the act vacuums Americans’ communications and to ensure that “information collected under the FAA is not repurposed for government uses unrelated to national security.”

Many Democratic lawmakers, including Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan), were willing to extend the spy powers for three years, while adding in the safeguards that Wyden and the ACLU noted. “That’s a compromise you can’t turn from,” Conyers said.

For his part, Wyden has barred the Senate from a routine vote on the bill by invoking a little-used legislative power — called a hold — to block lawmakers from taking a procedural consent vote. Instead, he demands a floor debate that can draw out the approval process indefinitely via the filibuster. Still, Wyden said he would be willing to agree to a short-term extension, instead of seeing the spy powers lapse December 31, as a way to give lawmakers more time to reach a deal.

The National Security Agency told lawmakers that it would be a violation of Americans’ privacy to disclose how the measure is being used in practice. The NSA said the “NSA leadership agreed that an IG (Inspector General) review of the sort suggested would further violate the privacy of U.S. persons.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...oves-spy-bill/





Cops Might Finally Need a Warrant to Read Your Gmail

Major surveillance law change arrives in the Senate—and it might well pass.
Cyrus Farivar

Right now, if the cops want to read my e-mail, it’s pretty trivial for them to do so. All they have to do is ask my online e-mail provider. But a new bill set to be introduced Thursday in the Senate Judiciary Committee by its chair, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), seems to stand the best chance of finally changing that situation and giving e-mail stored on remote servers the same privacy protections as e-mail stored on one's home computer.

When Congress passed the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), a time when massive online storage of e-mail was essentially unimaginable, it was presumed that if you hadn’t actually bothered to download your e-mail, it could be considered "abandoned" after 180 days. By that logic, law enforcement would not need a warrant to go to the e-mail provider or ISP to get the messages that are older than 180 days; police only need to show that they have "reasonable grounds to believe" the information gathered would be useful in an investigation. Many Americans and legal scholars have found this standard, in today’s world, problematic.

Leahy, who was one of ECPA’s original authors, proposed similar changes in May 2011, but that was never even brought to a vote in the committee. The new version, which keeps the most important element of the 2011 proposal, will be incorporated into a larger bill aimed at revising the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA).

A more politically-palatable maneuver

As we reported last year, the House passed a revision to the VPPA, making it easier for online video rental services (yep, Netflix is a fan of this bill!) to share information about customers’ rental history through a simple online consent form, rather than explicit, printed, written consent. This is a legislative moved aimed squarely at making the bill more palatable to Republicans (who comprised 8 of 10 members on the Judiciary Committee), and who are generally opposed to weakening law enforcement tools.

Leahy’s new amendement would provide a major change to the privacy standard of all electronic correspondence by finally requiring a probable cause-driven warrant. If this bill does pass, it would instantaneously provide significantly more privacy to everyone in America who sends e-mail, uses Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs, or communicates online in essentially any way.

"[Currently] there’s a standard for what’s electronic communications services, and that’s where there’s the 180-day rule," said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, in an interview with Ars.

"There’s a whole class of remote computing services, which were ones that did data processing back in the 1980s], but are now cloud computing. What this does is eliminate the distinction between the two and eliminate the 180 day rule and raise them all up to a warrant. It’s very solid legislative language. It covers all private communications and would require a warrant to access them. Something that’s long overdue. We’re talking about a huge class of very private information and stuff that is so undisputedly private."

Judicial clarity

Many advocacy groups and tech companies, including Apple, Google, Amazon, Dropbox, Google, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Facebook, the ACLU and many others (collectively under an umbrella group known as Digital Due Process) have been lobbying Congress for some time now. All of these entities likely would be in favor of such a bill.

"The ECPA fix would be a major step forward for e-mail privacy," wrote Lee Tien, a staff attorney at the EFF, in an e-mail to Ars.

But more interestingly, beyond the list of usual suspects of supporters (groups like the EFF and the ACLU), are the other parties supporting the bill.

On Wednesday, members of the Judiciary Committee received copies of two letters from prominent former government officials: former Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA) and Marc J. Zwillinger, who spent three years prosecuting cybercrime from the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice. Barr is also a former federal prosecutor and Zwilinger is now in private practice and also teaches law at Georgetown University.

Both men argued that one of the primary reasons for the new bill’s passage would be to provide clarity between current case law and investigatory practice. In 2010, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Fourth Amendement protecting unreasonable searches and seizures also protects e-mail, even if it’s over 180 days old.

Because online e-mail providers (like Google’s Gmail, for instance) can’t know if their customers fall under the Sixth Circuit jurisdiction, many have taken to requiring a warrant from law enforcement when they may not need to.

"This has created uncertainty the Leahy amendment would replace with clarity: law enforcement officers would no longer wonder whether they should seek communications content without a warrant, or whether the warrant requirement applies in one jurisdiction but not another," wrote former Rep. Barr. "This clarity will help ensure that seized evidence will not be suppressed at the end of the prosecution, thereby allowing a guilty party to escape punishment."

The content of an e-mail would be protected, other data, less so

In a further bid to potentially assuage conservative committee members, Zwilinger also points out that the new amendment would "leave in place lower legal standards for the building blocks of law enforcement investigations."

Such information could include name, address, e-mail address, IP addresses, and other transactional data such as when, where, with whom and for how long someone communicated.

"This is the type of information that prosecutors use to build probable cause that enables them to seek court-ordered access to more sensitive information, such as communications content," Zwilinger wrote.

Ars e-mailed staffers of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the committee’s ranking Republican, to see what the senator thought of the Leahy amendment—as of press time they had not responded.

"E-mail and its eventual successors are simply too important to be governed by inconsistent and confusing standards," wrote Woodrow Hartzog, a professor at the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University, in an e-mail sent to Ars. "While more comprehensive and adaptable privacy protections for electronic communications are needed, I imagine dramatic improvement in the electronic surveillance regime will be politically and logistically challenging."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...ad-your-gmail/





LEAKED! Here's The White House's Draft Cybersecurity Executive Order
Mike Masnick

Earlier this week, we wrote about how the White House was working on an executive order to act as a "stand in" for cybersecurity legislation that has so far failed to pass Congress (CISPA passed in the House, but a different effort, the Cybersecurity Act, failed in the Senate, and it would have been difficult to get the two houses aligned anyway). Last weekend Jason Miller from Federal News Radio wrote about a draft he saw... but failed to share the actual draft. We got our hands on a draft (and confirmed what it was with multiple sources) and wanted to share it, as these kinds of things deserve public scrutiny and discussion. It's embedded below. As expected, it does have elements of the Lieberman/Collins bill (to the extent that the White House actually can do things without legislation). It's also incredibly vague. The specific requirements for government agencies are left wide open to interpretation. For example, the State Dept. should engage other governments about protecting infrastructure. Well, duh. As expected, most stuff focuses on Homeland Security and its responsibilities to investigate a variety of different cybersecurity issues -- but, again, it's left pretty vague.

There is, as expected, plans concerning information sharing -- but again, they're left pretty empty on specifics. It talks about an "information exchange framework." Unfortunately, it does not appear to highlight privacy or civil liberties concerns in discussing the information sharing stuff. That seems like a pretty big problem. Homeland Security is tasked with coming up with a way to share information, pulling on some existing efforts, but nowhere do they call out how to make sure these information exchange programs don't lead to massive privacy violations, despite the President's earlier promises that any cybersecurity efforts would take into account privacy and civil liberties.

Separately, it lists out 16 critical infrastructure "sectors," but those can be interpreted really broadly, which is dangerous. We all understand how things like the electric grid, nuclear power plants, water facilities and such can be seen as critical infrastructure. But does "communications" include things like social networking? It's important that any plan be very, very specific about what sorts of things are critical infrastructure, so as to avoid sweeping up all sorts of things like internet services and opening them up to information "sharing" abuse efforts by the government. We all know there's plenty of evidence that when the government is given a loophole to spy on private communications, it figures out ways to drive fleets of trucks through that hole. Unfortunately, there's little indication that any of that has really been taken into consideration.

All that said, it is important to recognize that this is a draft, and it is not only subject to change, but there are indications that it is likely to change. But, seeing as this could have significant impact, it should be something that the public has a chance to weigh in on.

Honestly, looking this over, you get the sense that it's really designed to do one thing: scare those who fought against the various bills back to the table to compromise and get a bill out. It's no secret that the administration's overall preference is to get a law in place, rather than this executive order. That's been a failed effort so far, but you have to wonder if this is a ploy to scare those who opposed the Cybersecurity Act into thinking that if they don't approve some legislation, the exec order might be a bigger problem. There are way too many things left open ended in this draft, and while the administration can't go as far as Congress on many things, the open-ended nature of this order could certainly lead to problems for the industries who opposed previous efforts.

Either way, we'll have some more on this next week, but since we just got this and want to get it out there for comment, hopefully folks can spend some time this weekend discussing the (yes, once again, vague) particulars...
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...ve-order.shtml





Crack in Internet's Foundation of Trust Allows HTTPS Session Hijacking

Attack dubbed CRIME breaks crypto used to prevent snooping of sensitive data.
Dan Goodin

Researchers have identified a security weakness that allows them to hijack web browser sessions even when they're protected by the HTTPS encryption that banks and e-commerce sites use to prevent snooping on sensitive transactions.

The technique exploits web sessions protected by the Secure Sockets Layer and Transport Layer Security protocols when they use one of two data-compression schemes designed to reduce network congestion or the time it takes for webpages to load. Short for Compression Ratio Info-leak Made Easy, CRIME works only when both the browser and server support TLS compression or SPDY, an open networking protocol used by both Google and Twitter. Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox browsers are all believed to be immune to the attack, but at time of writing smartphone browsers and a myriad of other applications that rely on TLS are believed to remain vulnerable.

CRIME is the latest black eye for the widely used encryption protocols, which act as the Internet's foundation of trust by encrypting traffic that flows over open networks and cryptographically proving websites such as Gmail are really operated by Google rather than criminal hackers or state-sponsored spies. The specter of a new attack that could subvert one of the only widely available protections preventing the interception of sensitive e-mails and web transactions, follows revelations that both Iran and China have actively worked to defeat it so they could spy on its citizens.

"The CRIME attack is the nation-state attack," Matthew Green, a professor specializing in cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, told Ars. "It's not something that some hackers are going to do when you're sitting in Starbucks. It's really something that Iran is going to do to try to find dissidents or China is going to do for the same reason. And it's a big deal because of that, especially if Google and Twitter are the ones who are vulnerable."

Representatives from Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft said their companies' browsers are no longer vulnerable to CRIME attacks. Both Chrome and Firefox were susceptible until recently. Google and Mozilla released patches after the weaknesses were privately reported by Juliano Rizzo (@julianor) and Thai Duong, the researchers who devised the CRIME exploits. Internet Explorer was never vulnerable because it never supported SPDY (pronounced "speedy") or the TLS compression scheme known as Deflate.

That still leaves open the possibility that a raft of smaller browsers are susceptible. This webpage maintained by self-described "Web tinkerer" and Adobe employee Alexis Deveria says that SPDY is supported in beta versions of Opera and production versions of both Firefox and Chrome for Android, as well as the Android browser.

Apple's Safari browser doesn't support SPDY, but its use of compression is unknown. An representative of Opera said there's no support for compression in the browser and SPDY is available only in beta versions. The status of TLS compression in smaller browsers also remained unknown at time of writing. Rizzo told Ars that encryption schemes used in a variety of chat applications, virtual private networks, and other software may also be vulnerable.

Even when a browser is vulnerable, an HTTPS session can only be hijacked when one of those browsers is used to connect to a site that supports SPDY or TLS compression. The Qualys SSL Labs page, which tracks the quality of sites that offer HTTPS protection, shows that services offered by Google and Twitter support SPDY. Ivan Ristic, director of engineering at Qualys, told Ars that 42 percent of sites surveyed by his service support TLS compression. A demonstration video taken by Rizzo and Duong on Wednesday shows Github.com, Dropbox.com, and Stripe.com, when visited with a then-patched version of Chrome, succumbing to the CRIME attack, although all three of those sites had disabled compression at time of writing, meaning they are no longer vulnerable.
CRIME vs startups

Both the GnuTLS and OpenSSL TLS implementations for clients and servers respectively support TLS, making it easy for developers and engineers to fold it into web servers.

The chosen one

Rizzo and Duong are the architects of a separate attack from last year that also defeated TLS protection. It was dubbed BEAST and was short for Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS). Like that attack, compression-based exploits wield what cryptographers call a chosen plaintext attack on an encrypted session. The technique mixes clear-text data under the control of the attacker with the encrypted payload being targeted. By modifying the clear-text payload hundreds or thousands of times and watching how each one interacts with the encrypted data, an attacker can deduce its contents, usually character by character.

Such attacks can be particularly useful against SSL, since the beginning of each web HTML request contains an authentication cookie with a secret key (which may look something like XS8b1MWZ0QEKJtM1t+QCofRpCsT2u). In a CRIME attack, the encrypted message is combined with attacker-controlled JavaScript that, letter by letter, performs a brute-force attack on the secret key. When it guesses the letter X as the first character of the cookie secret, the encrypted message will appear differently than an encrypted message that uses W or Y. Once the first character is correctly guessed, the attack repeats the process again on the next character in the key until the remainder of the secret is deduced.

Once the session cookie is decrypted, hackers can exploit it to gain unauthorized access to the user account the session cookie is designed to authenticate. The process from start to finish takes "a few minutes," Rizzo said.

Data compression reduces the number of bytes contained in a file or data stream by removing redundant information. CRIME forces a web browser to compress and encrypt requests that contain attacker-controlled data that is combined with the cookie secret. If one of the requests produces fewer encrypted network packets, that's an indication there's more redundancy in the request, and hence the attacker data and the secret data have more information in common. CRIME algorithms decrypt the session cookies by guessing their contents byte by byte. The attacks don't require any browser plugins, and the use of JavaScript isn't necessary, although it does make the brute-force attack faster.

A side effect of compression, security experts have long known, is that it leaks clues about the encrypted contents. That means it provides a "side channel" to adversaries who have the ability to monitor the data. A research paper published in 2002 by John Kelsey looks eerily similar to CRIME, but only in retrospect.

"I don't think anyone realized that this enables an attack on HTTP over TLS, or that an attacker could learn the value of secret cookies sent over a TLS-encrypted connection," a participant in this online discussion observed. "The paper looks at attacks on compression mainly in the abstract, rather than in the specific context of the web, and is pretty theoretical. So, CRIME (or Thomas Pornin's attack) is still a significant novel extension of these ideas."

("Pornin's attack" is a reference to an exploit described in this blog post, where the well-known cryptographer by that name correctly guessed how CRIME worked based on bare-bones clues offered in previous news coverage of the attack. Other speculation that proved to be correct is here.)

Chain of fools

Last year's BEAST attack worked only against an encryption mode known as cipher block chaining. That limitation allowed engineers to block attacks by using encryption algorithms ciphers such as RC4, which don't rely on the mode. There is no such restriction with compression attacks, so the only known way to block them is to disable TLS compression or apply a SPDY patch that's comparable to the one recently added to Chrome.

Rizzo and Duong are scheduled to demonstrate CRIME on September 21 at the Ekoparty security conference in Buenos Aires. Although the attack no longer works on the three most popular browsers to connect to HTTPS-protected websites, CRIME is a potent reminder of the fragility of the protection of encryption. But it likely won't be the last.

"It is easy to try the idea with a short script," Rizzo told Ars. "It's a practical attack against HTTPS and could be a starting point to attack other secure protocols. It's another powerful tool for attackers with access to your network."
http://arstechnica.com/security/2012...ttps-sessions/





Do PCs Have a Future? Intel Thinks So
Noel Randewich

Intel Corp showed off hybrid tablets and ultrabook laptops with voice and gesture recognition technology along with an upcoming low-power chip in a bid to convince Wall Street a slump in the personal computer industry is only temporary.

At the annual Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco on Tuesday, the company demonstrated a range of mobile devices, many of them crosses between tablets and laptops. Executives showed sleek "ultrabook" laptops with improved gesture- and voice-recognition features, similar to those already found on some smartphones.

Intel's upcoming processor, code-named Haswell and due to appear in a crop of laptops during next year's holiday season, will improve on computing and graphics features and is targeted to reduce electricity consumption from 17 watts to 10 watts, according to the company.

The chip will allow devices to stay on longer without needing to recharge and underscores the Intel's recognition that mobility will only become a bigger factor in personal computing.

"It was designed with mobility in mind ... from sleek tablets to ultrabooks to high-performing desktops," said David Perlmutter, general manager of Intel's Architecture Group.

In an interview with Reuters, Perlmutter steered away from strict categories of laptops and tablets and said manufacturers over the next few year will offer a wider range of mobile products for consumers, mixing and matching new features, performance and size.

Recent launches of smaller tablet sizes by Google and Amazon are examples of the already growing range of devices consumers have to choose between, a trend that will gain more steam, he said.

"There will be a variety of needs fulfilled by a variety of solutions. Some people want something very benign, very simple," Perlmutter said. "Others need performance."

INVESTORS WATCHING

For Intel, showing off its most recent innovations at the forum this week is key to convincing investors and hardware developers that the PC industry remains innovative and still has a future.

Perlmutter pointed to tablets with extendable screens and laptops with removable keyboards as devices that he said might catch on with the upcoming release of Microsoft Corp's Windows 8, which will feature touch capability.

Intel's tablet strategy so far has focused on Windows 8, but Perlmutter said tablets running Intel processors and widely-used Google's Android platform are also in the works.

The top chipmaker cut its third-quarter revenue estimate more than expected on Friday due to a decline in demand for its chips as customers reduce inventories and businesses buy fewer PCs.

Intel's processors are used in 80 percent of the world's PCs, but the Santa Clara, California, company has been slow to adapt its chips for smartphones and tablets. It now trails Qualcomm Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, which design their chips with power-efficient technology licensed from ARM Holdings Plc.

The combined market for PCs, smartphones and tablets is expected to almost double over the next four years, but Intel's share of the processors used in them will dip from 35 percent to 29 percent, according to a report this week from IHS iSuppli.

While macroeconomic troubles have weighed on sales for several quarters, the growing popularity of tablets and smartphones is seen as an existential threat to the PC industry.

The Haswell chip's improved power efficiency is a step in the right direction to offering consumers punchy performance in thin laptops without sacrificing battery life, said Evercore analyst Patrick Wang.

"Will it stymie the shift towards tablets and smartphones? Not yet, but only time will tell," Wang said.

As well as investors, Intel's forum is visited by thousands of hardware developers, many of whom face decisions about whether to focus their resources on the PC industry or mobile devices using chips made by Intel's rivals.

Intel is heavily promoting premium Ultrabook laptops powered by recently launched Ivy Bridge processors. But Wall Street investors say that adding costly touch screens to models due out soon may make them too expensive for many consumers. Many ultrabooks currently on the market, without touch screens, cost over $1,000.

Perlmutter said bringing down the costs of building ultrabooks to make them more mainstream is a challenge Intel is working on with PC manufacturers.

Underscoring the shift in focus toward mobile, Apple on Wednesday will become a distraction for participants at the forum when it is expected to launch its newest iPhone at a nearby venue.

Some analysts said Perlmutter's speech was light on details about future products than keynotes in previous years.

"This time around, the company only highlighted a few next-gen features, lacking the details to show how Intel would play more materially in the low-power segment of computing devices," Freedman said.

Shares of Intel were up 1.4 percent at $23.58 in afternoon trading.

(Reporting by Noel Randewich; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn, Andrew Hay and Sofina Mirza-Reid)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...88A14G20120911





Helium-filled WD Drives Promise Huge Boost in Capacity

Density of helium is one-seventh that of air, thus reducing hard drive platter drag
Lucas Mearian

For more than 50 years, hard disk drives have run on air. That's about to change.

Western Digital is preparing to launch a line of hard drives filled with helium gas that is said to drastically reduce internal friction and thus lower power consumption by 23% while increasing capacity by 40%.

The 3.5-in data center drives, developed by WD subsidiary Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST), are expected to be available next year.

The hermetically sealed drives are filled with helium, which is one-seventh the density of air.

Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at HGST, said helium drives reduce drag on the disk's platters while the seals keep humidity and other contaminates out. Less drag means the drives operate at temperatures that are four to five degrees cooler than today's 7200 rpm drives, Collins added.

A sealed drive can also operate in more severe environmental conditions, according to HGST.

"The industry has been trying to make this work for the past 10 years. They've been trying to ensure that the gas doesn't leak and that the drives can be efficiently produced in mass volume. That's the key to our proprietary technology," Collins said.

Collins called HGST's announcement more of a technology platform than a product. The helium-filled drives will be targeted for use in public cloud computing systems and in corporate data centers, he added.

"We believe the technology will be around for the next 10 years and will be the foundation of cloud-based storage in the data center," Collins said.

The helium gas-filled drives will let HGST increase the overall platter count from five to seven. At the same time, the technology allows for increasing platter density -- with more tracks per square inch.

HGST also expects to use helium drives for new, higher capacity drive technologies such as Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) and Shingled Magnetic Recording.

Both HAMR and SMR are about two years away from production, Collins said.

"I'm really interested to see how people react to [helium-filled drives]," said IDC analyst John Rydning. "I don't think people are aware that it's been in development for a long time."

Today, HGST data center drives offer up to 4TB of capacity on five internal platters.

While HGST would not say what capacity the helium-filled drives will sport, it could be as much as 5.6TB based on the company's estimate of a 40% increase over current technologies.

Today's capacity limitations

All drive makers have been closing in on a storage ceiling due to disk platter wobble or vibration that comes with spinning at thousands of revolutions per minute.

The speedy spinning motion causes air turbulence, which in turn disrupts both the platter and the read/write head's ability to remain on track. The phenomenon is known as track misregistration (TMR), a problem that has been exacerbated as tracks are pushed closer together.

A decade ago, for instance, technology allowed for a maximum of 100,000 tracks per inch on a disk drive's platter. Today's technology lets manufacturers offer up to 500,000 tracks per inch, according to Rydning.

"That's where you're reaching the point where it's getting hard to keep the head over the track," Rydning said.

By using the light gas helium, HGST all but eliminated internal turbulence on the 7200rpm drives, thereby over coming the TMR roadblock.

By reducing TMR, manufacturers should be able to use thinner platters, Rydning said.

HGST said the new seven-platter helium drives will weigh 29% less per terabyte of capacity that today's five-platter drives. In other words, a seven-platter helium disk will weigh 690 grams, the same as today's five-platter drives.

Reducing drag on the platters will also allow HGST's new helium drives to use 23% less spindle power to turn. A five-platter drive today draws 6.9 watts while idle. The new seven-platter helium drives will draw 5.3 watts of power in the same state.

The seven-platter, 3.5-in helium drives will also have a 50% lower cost per gigabyte than 2.5-in four-platter hard drives, Collins said.

In addition to lower unit cost, the higher capacity drives mean it will take fewer servers to fill the same data center space. For example, a petabyte of data today requires 20 servers using five-platter, 4TB drives. Using the seven-platter drives, the same data can be stored in only 14 servers, Collins said.

Collins said there are "tectonic shifts" happening as corporate data centers move from the Windows/Intel architecture to standardized hardware and software.

"Data centers are becoming more customized and using more open-source hardware and software," Collins said. "We're seeing a lot of cloud customers designing their own servers, file systems and software stacks."

For data protection, for example, IT shops are moving away from more expensive RAID arrays to using distributed storage infrastructures that uses data replication and erasure coding technologies for data durability.

An enormous portion -- up to 40% -- of the costs in new cloud based data centers will be attributed to operational costs such as power use and floor space, Collins said. Today the bulk of data center costs are capital expenditures, including hardware purchases.

"This is driving a lot of opportunities to differentiate products in the cloud," Collins said. "The attributes of the sealed drive platform make it the ideal foundation for bulk and cold storage applications in enterprise and cloud datacenters."
https://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...st_in_capacity





After a Decade of Research, Intel Shows Off its Digital Radio Chip
Dean Takahashi

Justin Rattner demonstrated Intel’s first all-digital WiFi radio chip after more than a decade of research. That radio is the stepping stone for microprocessors — from the smallest sensor chips to supercomputers — to be linked by wireless signals that are sent and received by a radio embedded in the microprocessor itself.

Speaking on the final day of the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Intel’s chief technology officer came out wearing a pair of rabbit ears. A sensor on his head measured his stress level. The ears rose if he was nervous, and they fell flat if he was calm. His ears stayed up the whole time he wore it. But he did have something interesting to show.

Rattner said he learned not to make predictions and talk only about technology he could demonstrate from a speech his predecessor, Pat Gelsinger (pictured right), made at IDF in 2002. Gelsinger famously predicted “Radio Free Intel,” where every Intel processor would ship with an onboard radio.

“Pat caught a lot of flak for that, especially the free part,” Rattner said. “We had no idea how to do that.”

One problem was that radio signals are analog, based on real-world signals such as waves, in contrast to the ones and zeroes of digital signals of computers. As you shrink a chip, the circuits of a digital computer shrink as well. But analog circuits don’t work in the same way. They no longer work. So it’s a hard problem to combine analog and digital on the same chip. Some chip companies have specialized in this work, with the result being high-demand specialty chips such as baseband radios for cellphones.

Most of the time, however, it’s better to separate analog and digital functions into separate chips. One of the tough problems is interference between the analog and digital parts. It is a big challenge for Intel to do the same with standard chips made by the millions. Intel set out to create a digital radio, over the past decade, and it has finally completed the task.

Yorgos Palaskas, the research leader of Intel’s Radio Integration Lab, said, “It was a monumental effort. We had to do it from the ground up.”

Intel created digital frequency synthesizers, sigma delta analog to digital converters, digital phase modulators, and digital radio frequency power amplifiers. Those were the elements of digital radio receivers and transmitters.

Intel has now created its digital RF Wi-Fi transceiver. It has a 40-megahertz bandwidth, built with Intel’s 32-nanometer manufacturing technology, and it improves its functions as it is miniaturized. The experimental radio is comparable to decent stand-alone WiFi radios. Rattner thinks that the quality of the radio will be better within the digital chips than in separate analog chips over time.

Jon Peddie, an analyst at Jon Peddie Associates, said that cellphone baseband chips combined different kinds of analog and digital signals on the same chip. But he confirmed that the digital radio is a lot harder to do because of the interference problems.

The Intel chip is code-named Rosepoint and it features two Atom microprocessor cores on the same chips as a WiFi radio. Rattner showed off a wafer (which is processed and then sliced into chips) that contained the Rosepoint designs, proving that the technology is in prototype production.

“Here it is, a not-so-free Radio Free Intel,” Rattner said.

He added in a question-and-answer session with the press, “We’re reasonably confident the radio will be a relatively small part of the” overall chip. He said that the interference is dealt with on the fly, as the synthesizer isolates an interfering signal and then cancels it.
http://venturebeat.com/2012/09/13/af...al-radio-chip/





Check Your Phone Bill: You’re Probably Being Overcharged for Data
Ed Oswald

The next time you get your smartphone bill, you might want to double check your data usage.

A recent study conducted by UCLA professor Chunyi Peng shows that carriers generally count data usage correctly, but those customers who commonly use their device in areas with weak signal strength or to stream audio or video are often overcharged. Peng and three other researchers used data gleaned from an app installed on Android smartphones on two different carriers.

The issue appears to be in how the system is set up to count data usage. Under the current scenario, data is charged as it is sent from the carrier’s network to the end user. What does not exist is a system to confirm whether the packets are received, and thus preventing charges for unreceived data.

Peng demonstrated this in two extreme circumstances. In one case, 450 megabytes of data was charged to an account where not a single bit of it had been received. On the flipside, Peng’s group was able to construct an app which disguised data transfers as DNS requests, which are not counted by the carriers as data usage. Here they were able to transfer 200 megabytes of data without being charged.

“The root causes lie in lack of both coordination between the charging system and the end device, and prudent policy enforcement by certain operators,” Peng writes. She declined to name the two providers targeted in the test, only offering they serve half of the current US wireless population.

Overall, the average overcharge is about 5-7% for most users. While that does not seem like much, with unlimited plans gone and data caps in style that could pose potential problems for some heavy data users. Could you be going over your data allotment based on data you never received? It’s quite possible.

Considering the carriers charge as much as $15 if not more for every gigabyte you go over your plan, that can become a big deal very quickly.

Peng suggests that a system to confirm receipt of mobile data packets is sorely needed. “We believe that the network has to take more central role in the charging process, while the end devices offer useful hints and feedback to the network. The network naturally has ‘centralized’ views on users and flows, and more resources to control and regulate the charging decision,” she concludes.

What can you do in the meantime? Unfortunately, it means being mindful of your data use even more. Don’t use data frequently in areas with poor signal, and cut down on the amount of streaming audio and video if you can. That’s about the only thing you can do right now while we wait for the carriers to fix the issue.

A better system needs to be put in place, and in this day of data caps a confirmation we’re actually receiving the data we pay for is something that we should expect. Nobody should be paying for data they’re not using, especially if there is a simple fix available to solve the problem. While the carriers might argue that they incur costs whether or not we receive the data, in the end it’s typically no fault of ours that we don’t — it’s their poor coverage — so it’s not really fair to expect us to pay for it.

What say you, cell phone companies?
http://www.extremetech.com/mobile/13...arged-for-data





Sweden Mulls Law on Kids' Phone Spending

The Swedish government said Wednesday it was considering introducing a law to prevent children from emptying their parents' bank accounts in just a few clicks when playing with their smartphones.

"It isn't okay that children can subject their parents to financial ruin with just a few clicks on their phone," consumer affairs minister Birgitta Ohlsson said in a statement.

Her comments came after her ministry received an independent committee's report, entitles "App to date", with proposals on ways to improve consumer protection on the mobile phone market.

The main author of the report, former Supreme Court judge Torgny Håstad, recommended that in disputes where parents contest exorbitant fees which they claim were charged by their children, the law should assume that the parents are dealing in good faith.

The report also proposes that controls be strengthened to verify that the person who purchases something with a cell phone or tablet computer is indeed the owner of the bank account being debited.

The report cited a case that made headlines in Sweden in April 2011, when two six- and seven-year-old brothers spent 50,000 kronor ($7,600) on berries for Smurfs in a game downloaded for free on an Apple iPad.

Their parents were not required to pay after negotiations.
http://www.thelocal.se/43186/20120912/





China Plant Again Faces Labor Issue on iPhones
David Barboza and Charles Duhigg

As Apple prepares to unveil the latest iPhone this week, the company’s manufacturing partner in China, Foxconn Technology, is coming under renewed criticism over labor practices after reports that vocational students were being compelled to work at plants making iPhones and their components.

Foxconn has acknowledged using student “interns” on manufacturing lines, but says they are free to leave at any time. But two worker advocacy groups said Monday that they had spoken with students who said they had been forced by their teachers to assemble iPhones at a Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, in north-central China.

Additionally, last week Chinese state-run news media reported that several vocational schools in the city of Huai’an, in eastern China, required hundreds of students to work on assembly lines at a Foxconn plant to help ease worker shortages. According to one of the articles, Huai’an students were ordered to manufacture cables for Apple’s new iPhone 5, which is expected to be introduced on Wednesday.

“They said they are forced to work by the teachers,” Li Qiang, founder of China Labor Watch, one of the advocacy organizations and a frequent critic of Foxconn’s labor policies, said in an interview on Monday. Mr. Li said his staff had spoken with multiple workers and students who, as recently as Sunday, said that 10 of 87 workers on an iPhone assembly line were students.

“They don’t want to work there — they want to learn,” said Mr. Li. “But if they don’t work, they are told they will not graduate, because it is a very busy time with the new iPhone coming, and Foxconn does not have enough workers without the students.”

Foxconn, in a statement, said that students made up just 2.7 percent of its 1.2 million-person work force in China — about 32,000 workers — and that schools “recruit the students under the supervision of the local government, and the schools also assign teachers to accompany and monitor the students throughout their internship.”

A spokesman for Apple declined to comment on the recent cases, but he said Apple’s code of conduct tells suppliers to follow local labor laws when dealing with interns and other workers.

Foxconn has come under intense scrutiny in recent months over working conditions inside factories that manufacture smartphones, tablet computers and other electronic devices for Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and other technology giants. Investigations by newspapers, outside groups and companies like Apple itself have revealed illegal amounts of overtime, crowded working conditions, under-age workers, improper disposal of hazardous waste and, in some cases, industrial accidents that have killed four people and injured more than 100 at Foxconn and other Chinese factories that supply Apple.

Earlier this year, following highly publicized reports of such problems, Apple asked an outside organization to audit working conditions inside the plants where the bulk of iPhones, iPads and other Apple products are built. In the wake of that audit, Foxconn announced it would significantly raise wages for many of its employees and reduce overtime hours to come into compliance with Chinese law.

In August, the Fair Labor Association — the group hired by Apple to audit Foxconn — said Foxconn had made progress at cutting employees’ hours and improving working conditions, but that those shifts would require Foxconn to recruit “tens of thousands of extra workers.” The group also said that Foxconn and Apple had adopted policies to make sure that student interns knew they could resign from Foxconn and still graduate, and to link the jobs they performed inside Foxconn with their studies.

“I am concerned about these recent reports, and we’re following up,” said Auret van Heerden, president and chief executive of the Fair Labor Association, in an interview. “If there have been any breakdowns in policies, we expect changes to be made.”

Worker advocates say Foxconn is under intense pressure at critical moments — like leading up to the release of a new product, like the iPhone 5 — to fill huge orders quickly.

“When students enroll in vocational schools, they should receive a genuine education,” said Debby Chan Sze Wan with Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior, the other group that spoke to interns. “Standing in a factory, doing the same motion for 10 hours a day, this is not an education. And they are told they cannot leave, that they must work or they will be dismissed from school.”

Articles in the Chinese press reported that some schools in Huai’an were closed so that students could work in Foxconn plants, and that students said they were forced to work 12 hours a day. Some of the students are said to have come from the law and English departments.

Foxconn has strongly defended its labor practices, complaining that the company is unfairly scrutinized because it is the biggest manufacturer for Apple, the world’s best-known consumer electronics company. Analysts say labor abuses — including improper use of student labor — also occur at factories producing goods for Samsung, Nokia and other brands.

Last week, Samsung promised to improve management and conditions at some Chinese suppliers after a labor rights groups issued a report that said the suppliers were using underage workers.

No company, however, has received more attention than Foxconn. A few years ago, a rash of suicides were reported at its factories. While the suicides were a tiny fraction of its employees, labor experts began questioning what they called a militarylike atmosphere within the company.

Apple responded soon after by sending a team to China, including a delegation led by Tim Cook, now the company’s chief executive, to look into labor conditions.

Within a year, explosions several Apple supplier factories in China highlighted the need to improve worker safety. More recently, recurring reports about how local governments and Chinese vocational schools coordinate with the company to fill worker vacancies have alarmed some labor groups.

After the recent allegations, local officials in Huai’an issued a statement ordering higher education institutions to strictly follow policies and correct any “violations.” The Huai’an government also said many vocational students had ended their work at Foxconn and returned to school.

“The university told us it’s a good way to experience corporate culture,”a 19-year-old student told China Daily newspaper. “Even though many of my classmates are reluctant to go to Foxconn, our teachers still asked us to work there starting in August.”

Charles Duhigg reported from New York.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/t...e-iphones.html





Journalist Goes Undercover Making the iPhone 5 at Foxconn
Matthew Humphries

The news feeds will be filled with talk of the iPhone today, and most of it is probably going to be positive. However, the Chinese new agency Shanghai Evening Post has posted a pretty scathing review of the working conditions at Foxconn, and in particular the iPhone 5 production line.

The agency managed to get one of its reporters a job working undercover in a Foxconn factory where the iPhone 5 is being manufactured for Apple. He spent 10 days there and then wrote up the entire experience to demonstrate just how bad it is for the thousands of workers Foxconn employs. The agency has timed the release of that report to coincide with the launch of the iPhone 5 today. Here’s a summary of what he experienced.

Getting a job at Foxconn seems to be a pretty simple task. You turn up at the factory, ignore anyone offering to fast track you to a job for a few Yuan, and prove you are healthy by answering 30 Yes/No questions which sum up your mental health. After that you get to stay in a cockroach-infested dormitory that smells of sweat and foam and where dirty sheets are the norm. It also appears that windows have had bars put over them in an attempt to cut down on suicides.

The contract each worker must sign is minimal. They have to agree to keep everything confidential, and are urged by managers to tick “No” in the sections regarding noise and toxic pollution. The journalist later describes very loud machinery and a strong smell of plastic inside the factory where he worked, making it clear why management was insistent on ticking no on the contract before they start working.

Training is a seven day intensive course (by the end of which he was ill) with the main take away being that you do exactly what you are told and nothing else. There’s also details given of 70 ways you can incur a penalty, but only 13 ways to earn a reward.

There are plenty of facilities around the Foxconn factories including a canteen, gym, post office, library, a street full of shops, and a bathing room, but the journalist reports that they are all in a very poor condition, although mostly free to use. To release stress lots of Foxconn workers apparently gather in the playground at weekends and dance and shout.

It sounds like a depressing situation to be in even before entering the factory, but then things only seem to get worse. The journalist’s one and only task was to mark the back plate of the iPhone 5 using an oil pen. Each plate has to have 4 points marked, and they have to be accurate within 5mm of the target placement. He was repeatedly reprimanded for either marking the points too low or using too much oil.

Accuracy is something that comes with experience, and the journalist had to learn fast. He was expected to do a minimum of 5 back plates every minute. So that’s an accurately placed oil pen mark every 3 seconds, with his shift lasting 10 hours without a break. That’s a minimum of 3,000 back plates per shift.

The work is clearly very stressful and the pay is terrible. The example the journalist gave was two hours of overtime earning him just $4. Another interesting point he makes is the back plate work he was assigned is usually given to female workers as they are seen as more nimble. However, there aren’t enough workers to fill the positions at the factory as they keep resigning.

As well as what are clearly very poor working and living conditions, his account makes it clear labor is still cheaper than automation at Foxconn. The oil pen task could be carried out much more quickly and accurately by a robot, yet Foxconn chooses to employ 48 people working intensively to churn out tens of thousands of these back plates every day. And that’s just one part of the iPhone 5.

Will there be a response to this report from Apple? It’s unlikely to be a public one, but I’m sure it will come up in conversation between the two companies once the iPhone 5 has launched later today.

Read more at M.I.C. Gadget and the Shanghai Evening Post (translated)
http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/...conn-20120912/





The School that Swapped its Laptops for iPads… and Wants to Switch Back

There have been several well-publicised stories of schools bringing iPads into the classroom. However, a PC Pro reader has got in touch with a cautionary tale from the other side of the fence.

The reader, who asked not to be identified, is an ICT co-ordinator at a secondary school. He tells how his “image-conscious” headmaster was seduced by a scheme that allowed all the school’s staff to replace their laptop computers with an iPad 2.

Our source says staff were initially thrilled at the prospect. “Most staff are IT illiterate and jumped at the chance of exchanging their laptop for an iPad,” he writes.

Now, however: “the staff room is full of regret.”

What’s gone wrong? The biggest obstacle is that staff still cling to old documents and resources created in software such as Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, and of course there aren’t fully-fledged versions of the Office apps available for the iPad as yet. “Some staff are needing to produce documents and resources by remoting in [to a PC] on an iPad,” our source reveals. “Trying to operate Microsoft Word using a remote app that dumps you out of the connection is a nightmare.”

One of the biggest problems is the storage, since you can’t connect USB memory sticks to it

Staff are also having problems transferring work to their devices. “One of the biggest problems is the storage, since you can’t connect USB memory sticks to it,” our teacher writes, adding that staff are now experimenting with Dropbox to get documents on their tablets, which raises inevitable questions about data security.

The school, somewhat bizarrely, also supplied teachers with Apple TVs to allow them to project their iPad display in the classroom, which seems more than a little extravagant. A simple £25 Apple VGA connector would surely have been a far cheaper and more efficient means of achieving that goal. Especially as the staff are struggling to get the Apple TV to output a full-size image. (Clarification: as several people have pointed out in comments below, the advantage of using Apple TV is that it allows the teacher to beam the iPad picture wirelessly, rather than being tethered to a projector/display, which perhaps makes the decision to deploy them not quite as bizarre as we first suggested.)

“I tried to use mine for assembly on Friday, but the picture on the Apple TV is smaller than it should be,” our teacher claims. “To add insult to injury, it didn’t recognise my ‘non-standard’ font and so I ended up borrowing an old laptop to deliver the assembly.”

The iPad experiment hasn’t been a total disaster. The staff prefer the tablets for note-taking in meetings, and they use an app called Emerge to access the school’s pupil database. “This is handy for looking up student data quickly,” our teacher explains. “It’s not all that good at adding information, but very powerful when it comes to cornering the buggers and contacting their parents!” Although you have to wonder if the school has enforced passcodes on the teacher’s iPads to prevent that sensitive data falling into the wrong hands.

The school’s iPad experiment sounds like a classic case of the chap with the chequebook making the decision before evaluating whether the hardware meets the needs of his staff. “The iPads should have been rolled out alongside laptops, not instead of them,” our source claims.

With schools now given complete autonomy to spend their IT budget as they see fit, you have to wonder if headteachers across the country are making similarly bad decisions based on little more than gut instinct, appearances and the latest fad.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2012/09...o-switch-back/





Sexual Research App Scrutinized by Lawyers
Monte Morin

Sex: There’s an app for that.

The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, along with Indiana University, have released a free smartphone application that allows users to anonymously report on sexual and intimate behavior.

The app, which is available to Apple and Android users, is intended to collect previously unreported experiences for the well-known sexual behavior research institute, and make that information available online.

“People are natural observers. It’s part of being social, and using mobile apps is an excellent way to involve citizen scientists,” said Julia Heiman, institute director. “We expect to get new insights in to sexuality and relationships today. What do people notice, what are they involved in, and what can they relate to us about their lives and their communities?”

Or at least that’s what researchers hoped to learn.

On Thursday, the institute announced that it was pulling the plug — at least temporarily — on the project after the university’s lawyer raised concerns.

A note on the Kinsey Reporter website said that while the project had undergone extensive review before approval, a new general counsel wanted to “thoroughly vet the protocols,” and ordered the service taken down. “We sincerely apologize for the interruption, and hope to have Kinsey Reporter up again very soon,” the announcement said.

It might not surprise some to learn that the idea raised eyebrows among some school officials.

“Want to be a part of sex research? Now you can with the Kinsey Reporter App,” states a promotional video. “You can report on everything, from sexual activities to public displays of affection, whether it’s you or happening around you.”

After filling out a survey that asks if they are reporting on flirting, masturbation, oral sex, a fetish, or other topics, users can log onto the Kinsey Reporter website, where the reports are aggregated and sorted by general geographic location. The surveys, researchers said, would all be anonymous, and would span the globe.

Researchers hoped to collect data on, among other areas, unreported sexual violence in different countries, and the prevalence of condom use by region. According to the researchers, the information that app users provided would be transmitted using a secure, encrypted protocol. The only data collected would be a time stamp and a geographic location selected by the user.

These protections, according to researchers, classified the data as “exempt from review,” allowing it to be shared without signed consent forms.

The app was a joint project between the Kinsey Institute and the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, or CnetS, which is part of the university’s School of Informatics and Computing. Both are based in Bloomington, Ind.

The Kinsey Institute is named for biologist Alfred Kinsey, who conducted the world’s first large-scale surveys of sexual behavior in the late 40s and early 50s.
http://www.courant.com/health/la-sci...,2315462.story





Outlaw Possession of Written Accounts of Child Abuse Says MP
BBC

A Conservative MP is seeking to change the law to close a loophole which allows paedophiles to legally possess written accounts of child abuse.

Sir Paul Beresford, the MP for Mole Valley, said such writing "fuels the fantasies" of offenders and could lead to the physical abuse of children.

For some child abusers "the written word is more powerful than the pictures", he told the Commons.

The MP has campaigned for a decade to tighten the law on child pornography.

Sir Paul wants to amend existing legislation so that written material is treated in the same way as indecent images, for which possession carries a maximum three-year prison term.

'Graphic image'

He told MPs a recent report by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop) had mentioned the possession of graphic written accounts of abuse by some offenders.

"Some offenders not only possess and distribute and produce photographs, they possess graphic notes or writings of child abuse," he said.

"For some, the written word is more powerful than the pictures. For some, the written word promotes a graphic image in their mind."

Sir Paul said he had long been aware of a correlation "between those who possess or distribute indecent printed material of children and those who commit horrific contact offences against children".

"This written material fuels the fantasies of paedophiles which is the key factor in their offending behaviour," he added.

"Therefore I believe that we crack down on any form of indecent material in the written form so that real children can be safe from abuse."

The law would be tightly written, he insisted, to cover obscene writing of a nature "that it must reasonably be assumed to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal".

Only "absolutely vile" material would be targeted, he said, adding by way of example that well-known novels such as Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita - which explores a middle-aged man's obsession and sexual involvement with a 12-year old girl - would not be covered.

Campaigner

Sir Paul, who was a minister in Sir John Major's government but has been on the backbenches since 1997, has been campaigning for ten years to tighten up laws on indecent material featuring children.

By raising issues in the Commons, amending government bills and and tabling private members' bills, he has helped change the legal definition of gross indecency with a child so that it applies to under-16s and increased the penalties for possession and distribution of indecent images of children.

He has also successfully campaigned for jail sentences for people who refuse to provide a decrypting key to allow police to inspect computers suspected of holding child pornography.

He was also involved in efforts to introduce a fast-track procedure for issuing warrants in cases where people on the sex offenders' register refuse police access to their home.

The MP's latest ten-minute rule bill was given an unopposed first reading by MPs but further progress depends on it being given sufficient parliamentary time.

The Ministry of Justice said that "as with all such issues raised in Parliament, the government will consider and respond in due course".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-19574487





Three Reasons Possession Of Child Porn Must Be Re-Legalized In The Coming Decade
Rick Falkvinge

Child pornography is a toxic subject, but a very important one that cannot and should not be ignored. This is an attempt to bring the topic to a serious discussion, and explain why possession of child pornography need to be re-legalized in the next ten years, and why you need to fight for it to happen.

When possession of this type of information was criminalized, those who opposed that criminalization (which I didn’t, at the time – this was before my activism) pointed at four major objections:

• It would not be effective, and possibly counterproductive, in catching child molesters.

• It would lead to censorship without accountability.

• Reporters complained it would undermine journalistic freedom that has stood intact for centuries.

• Constitutional and political science scholars pointed out that it undermined centuries of free speech/expression traditions in a way that would be used by special interests to silence opponents of business interests unrelated to child porn.

In retrospect, all of this has come true. This is bad enough in itself; it is downright catastrophic. There are three overarching reasons why possession of child pornography must be re-legalized: the ban prevents catching child molesters, especially in light of new technology; it creates a generation of branded sex offenders that did nothing wrong; and it is the battleground for free speech itself. Let’s take these one at a time.

1. The ban prevents catching/jailing child molesters.

This is bad enough as it is today, but it is going to get significantly worse with new technology that is just around the corner. Are you aware of Google Glass? It is a prototype new mobile phone in the shape of eyeglasses.

Essentially, we’re looking at how our mobile phones are turning into devices that look like ordinary glasses, and which let us share what we see in real time, in the present tense. It’s a quantum leap over Facebook’s photo sharing, seeing how photos are always in retrospect, changing into real-time vision sharing and storage. It’s a change as large as when CNN’s reporting of the First Gulf War was being reported in the present tense, for the first time ever: “The night skies over Baghdad are lit up by tracer fire…”.

This change is going to be significantly larger than when we went from semi-smartphones with buttons to iPhones and Android devices with touchscreens, as our communications devices become wearable and blend seamlessly with our senses.

So imagine a scenario ten years down the road, as you’re taking a stroll in the park. Your glasses (“mobile phone”) are on, as are mostly everybody else’s. You’re broadcasting and recording what you see in public, as is mostly everybody else, in case a friend drops in on your feed and start chatting about it, or in case you observe something where you need to back up your story later, if you’re so inclined – kind of why people use dashcams in cars and constantly record everything that happens.

So, on your lovely stroll in the park, you turn a corner, and to your shock, see a 12-year-old being brutally raped right in front of you.

WHAM. You are now a criminal, guilty of recording, distributing, and possessing child pornography. You are now guilty of a crime that carries higher penalties than the rape and molestation of a child right taking place right in front of you.

The rapist notices you and laughs, knowing that you can’t do anything. If you were to call the police and offer to be a witness to the rape taking place before you, you would lose your job, children, and house over the worse crime you have just committed. As you struggle in panic to delete any and all imagery that could be used to convict the child rapist, hoping that nobody was able to make a copy, you see another person coming into view of the rapist and reacting just like you did.

And on the ground, a 12-year old who is being raped watches helplessly as witnesses turn away and delete all evidence of the crime being committed against her.

This is not some far-fetched science fiction scenario. This is exactly what will happen as our mobile phones take the next step, which has already started, and we will be there in less than ten years. (The very first iPhone was released to sales about five years ago, for perspective – imagine what will happen in twice more the time since then.)

[UPDATE: Some people have complained that no court would ever convict in this scenario, since you also recorded your unintentional approach. But possession of child pornography is a strict liability offense, like possession of cocaine, at least in the entire United States, as well as several other countries. Intent, mens rea, is irrelevant: if you have it, no matter why, you're guilty.]

This brings us to the crucial question why we have the ban on child pornography in the first place.

Is possession of child pornography harshly banned because we want to catch child rapists and molesters, or because we’re so uncomfortable with its existence that we want to legislate it out of our own field of view, raped children be damned as long as we’re feeling comfortable ourselves?

I would argue that the ban on possessing child pornography is already preventing the capture of child molesters, and it will get many, many times worse so in the coming decade. I also have a very strong feeling that the ban is in place because we’d like to pretend that things like this don’t happen, and legislate it out of our field of view, throwing actual victims of crime to the wolves in the process. That’s not worthy.

The question also begs asking – why is it only documentation of sex crimes against minors that are being banned in this way? The lawmen are perfectly fine with a video documenting how a teenager is being stabbed with a screwdriver in both eyes, then murdered (warning: the link is very real, but contains a transcript before you get to the actual video, which you probably don’t want to watch). It’s not the documentation of victimization that we prohibit, nor is it molestation as such – why is the ban just related to anything sexual, and not to the bodily harm itself, which is what it sounds like from the proponents of the ban?

Moving on to a solution, this scenario and problem doesn’t necessarily mean that every part of our child porn laws must or should be torn up. The necessary legislative change would primarily mean that you would always, as in always, be allowed to record and distribute what you see with your own eyes. A journalistic protection law that supersedes all other laws, if you like. The slightest risk of a gray area here, and people will delete all evidence of witnessed crimes against children rather than risking their own jobs and families – there must be no doubt or uncertainty whatsoever, not a shadow of it. As a side-effect consequence, deliberate recording and distribution of child porn from a first-person perspective would also be legalized with this change – but that brings us back to the question why the ban is there in the first place: is it to catch child molesters, or is it there for our own sake, to make us feel good regardless of whether it helps molested children?

2. The laws brand a whole generation as sex offenders.

Our current laws treat the video of a seven-year-old being brutally raped, on one hand, and two seventeen-year-olds who have eyes for nothing in the world but each other making consensual passionate love, on the other hand, as the exact same thing. This is mind-bogglingly odd.

The former is one of the most horrifying things you can think of – trying to picture it makes you cringe in your chair. The latter is one of the most beautiful things you can possibly picture – trying to see it makes your eyes well up with tears from joy. Why are one of the most horrible things and one of the most beautiful things in the world considered one and the same by the law? They’re obviously nowhere similar and have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. I’ll return to the answer to that.

But first, let me say that I started watching porn at age ten, as did most of my friends, and I enjoyed it. I actively sought it out and kept seeking it out (as I still do). Since I didn’t have access to the net at my age ten, I imagine people would start seeking it out earlier today, basically as soon as they get past the “boys/girls are icky” phase.

This is natural.

Let’s see what else is natural for the generation growing up today:

• Exploring and understanding their bodies as they go through puberty and afterwards, just like every single generation of Homo Sapiens has done before them.

• Communicating like crazy. Communicating everything. All the time. In text, voice, images, and video.

• Documenting everything. Including themselves naked. Including sex. It’s a memory like any other, and they’re not limited to 24 photos per roll like I was in my teens.

Technically, most people growing up today lose their virginity through rape. I say “technically”: they lose their virginity through rape because legislators have redefined “rape” to include consensual, voluntary, loving sex between people of typical age of sexual debut. Such a legislative redefinition makes as much sense as redefining the act of murder to include friendly hugs, then complaining that murder rates are up. It also creates a lot of technical rapists and sex offenders who never harmed a single person, but did go against the morals of legislators. (This is not strictly information policy, but is relevant to the context up ahead.)

We observe here that today’s laws have as a horrible and completely unacceptable side effect of branding the entire growing-up generation as sex offenders, ruining their lives if caught with it, under the pretext of protecting small pre-pubescent children. This side effect includes the completely normal communication that teenagers have with each other, which would brand them as child pornographers (of themselves).

This type of dissonance between the pretext and the actual effect of the law can be seen in many lobbying efforts. I call it murder-and-jaywalking argumentation. Here’s an example:

“98% of all children have witnessed a murder or jaywalking firsthand by age seven. Witnessing a murder or jaywalking firsthand can be devastating to a child’s psyche, according to experts. Therefore, we need tougher laws against murder and jaywalking.”

Note how the “or” transforms into “and” at the end, implying that the two should be covered by the same piece of legislation. This conflation is deliberate, and is an attempt to piggyback a petty crime or harmless activity onto something vehemently detested.

In order to understand murder-and-jaywalking legislation, we turn to an ancient Latin phrase: Cui bono? (“Who benefits?”) More often than not, this gives the answer for the underlying reason for legislation.

Let’s take an example. If somebody starts talking about “rape and shoplifting”, and you discover that a chain of grocery stores is behind the wording, two things become obvious: a) they are trying to raise the penalties for shoplifting, possibly to include being branded as a sex offender for shoplifting, and b) they don’t care in the slightest that using rape as a pretext for this special interest dilutes the concept of rape and disrespects rape victims immensely.

The copyright industry has long done a similar stunt, talking about “counterfeiting and piracy”, trying to assert that teenagers who share music between them should be covered by the same legislation as people who manufacture fake and fatal medicine for profit. Pretty much all enforcement treaties of the copyright monopoly are created under the pretext of preventing counterfeiting. Take ACTA, for example (“Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement”). That’s another tangible example.

This is where we start tracing where the idea of banning child porn comes from. Cui bono?

It turns out that the pressure for banning possession of child pornography comes from a whole fruit salad of Christian fundamentalists, under the pretext of protecting children. In the United States, this is pretty much every nutjob in the entire Midwest. In Sweden, this role is primarily dominated by the front organization ECPAT, which pretends to care about abused children, but which has its roots in the fundamentalist Christian organization ECTWT (where the E stands for Ecumenical), and where these Christians keep being in majority at every general ECPAT assembly. Every time these fundamentalists have mentioned child abuse as a pretext to demand new laws, we end up with new criminalization of teenagers instead.

This is where we connect the dots of cui bono with the murder-and-jaywalking deception method, and hairs rise on our arms and chills go down our spine as we connect the dots mentally:

Making insecure teenagers feel guilt, fear, and shame over their own bodies and natural desires, causing them to suppress their instincts in fear, even criminalizing natural behavior and destroying their lives, was never a side effect. It was the whole idea.

In Sweden, ECPAT has pushed through laws that make you a jailable criminal for possessing images of yourself from before your 18th birthday. Can we have a show of hands to see how many think this makes any kind of sense? That this would catch any child molesters?

So does the fact that this law exists – criminalizing people who have photos of themselves, pushed through by Christian fundamentalist organization ECPAT – rhyme better with a concern to catch molesters, or better with the hair-rising conclusion above: an effort to scare teenagers into submission with fear of their own bodies?

Using child molestation as a pretext for shoving your fundamentalist religious morals down the throats of insecure teenagers is about as low as you can sink in my eyes. These people stand lower than earthworms in terms of human value to me.

The fix for this particular problem is to tell the fundamentalist Christians in ECPAT and similar organizations to fuck right off with their perverted high-horse dogmatic morals, throwing them out of the legislative process headfirst, and limit the child pornography laws to cover pre-pubescent children only. Murder and jaywalking should not be covered by the same legislation, because they are not the same thing. Rape of a seven-year old and two seventeen-year-olds making love should not be covered by the same legislation, because they are not the same thing. In case a hard age limit is needed, I would suggest separating children from teenagers at that exact age – children are children until they become teenagers. Many enough have their sexual debut at 13 today. (This suggestion doesn’t mean porn of 13-year-olds could, or indeed should, be sold. Commercial exploitation can always be separately regulated. What it does mean is that teenagers cannot and should not be branded as sex offenders for something they do voluntarily, happily, and consensually.)

If these despicable Christian fundamentalists – including ECPAT – really cared about children, they would welcome such a change, for all the reasons described above. But if you proposed it to them, you would see them fighting it tooth and nail. Cui bono?

(I predict some people will have problems with a 13-year age limit. The countries that already have this limit, e.g. Spain, display no problems at all. In contrast, those with an 18-year age limit have piles and piles of stories of destroyed teenage lives – victims of law, not victims of crime. I like evidence-based policymaking and much prefer it to moral-based policymaking, and a 13-year limit is evidenced to work well.)

3. The free speech war is won/lost at the battle of child porn.

When possession of this type of information was banned, only the net generation saw this as bringing back the book burning times. To the rest of the population, it is about “things on a computer”; the net generation doesn’t see a difference whether a book is on a computer or sitting in a bookshelf.

If regular people had had these laws re-worded into police being able to come into their homes, ransack their bookshelves, and if they found a banned book, they would burn it and arrest the owner – if regular people had understood that this is what the law says, they would be horrified. But those who don’t live online don’t make the connection.

As long as the ban on child porn remains, special interests will use this open wound in our enlightenment traditions of information freedom to infest it with their own ideas of what other information, speech, and communication should be banned and prohibited. We’ve seen everything from gambling companies to the copyright industry use child porn as a pretext for censoring business competition, consequences to society at large be damned, just like in the “rape-and-shoplifting” example above.

(There is a reason the copyright industry loves child pornography. This reason. It opens the door to censorship.)

European Commissioner Cecilia “Censilia” Malmström successfully pushed for an EU-wide censorship regime on the pretext of child pornography. Others have not been late in its wake to attempt exploiting and expanding the censorship regime to suit their own purposes.

Politicians have even gone as far as saying that child pornography is “not a legitimate expression”, and therefore not covered by constitutional freedom-of-expression, even if there isn’t an explicit exception in law. This is a legislative hair’s breadth from saying that your political opinion “isn’t a legitimate opinion”, and therefore not constitutionally protected speech.

Child pornography is horrible and awful from every angle and in every aspect. But it is not dangerous to the fabric of society. Censorship and electronic book burning, however, is.

The overall freedom of speech is won or lost with restoring freedom of information and, as a result, re-legalizing possession of child pornography. Yes, it’s awful – but so is the video of a teenager being stabbed in the eyes with a screwdriver; that’s no reason to create a censorship regime. Today, we have an open wound in our constitutionally protected right to speak freely that is being infested again and again.

We must heal that wound, exactly like the constitutional scholars warned when the child porn ban was first enacted. And that requires you, and every other information freedom activist, to let go of the stigma associated with this toxic subject and stand up for the enlightenment traditions.

Just daring to talk back will take many people completely by surprise. They won’t understand what’s going on and won’t have a script to follow. You won’t have to defend against “defending pedophiles” – you can refer to many others that take the same stance, like the Swedish Association of Journalists, who demand the ban on child porn to be repealed (the linked article is a statement from their chairperson). The entire journalistic profession doesn’t demand this from a desire to harm children – there is obviously something else that causes the entire reporters’ association to be sternly against, and demand a repeal of, the ban on possession on child pornography. That “something else” is a care for the open and transparent society.

“The Swedish Association of Journalists has taken a clear stand against the child pornography legislation, which prohibits possession of works classified as child pornography.” — quote from the linked article

This is where the battle stands, and this is where the war is lost or won.

If we lose the battle over freedom of information, we will lose it over the ban on possession of child pornography and infestations spreading from there until the open society has been killed. If we win it, we will win it over repealing the ban of possession of child pornography [as well as any other kind of information] and healing this wound. This is where the battle stands, this is where the war for freedom of speech and the open society is won or lost. This is the wound we must heal.

____________________________________________________________ _____

UPDATE: Lars Hallberg wrote a comment on G+ to this article that makes for a very good summary, so I take the liberty of copying it in as a conclusion and a TL;DR:

It’s not illegal to film a murder.
It’s not illegal to possess a film of a murder.
But it’s still illegal to murder people.
And it’s illegal to initiate a murder for the purpose of filming it.
If you have taken part in a murder and have film of it, the film may be usable as proof against you.

I can’t see that Rick suggests anything different here – i.e., I see no suggestions that it should be OK to molest children for the purpose of filming it. That’s good.

In the end it’s as simple as this: it should never be illegal to merely possess information, any information.
http://falkvinge.net/2012/09/07/thre...coming-decade/





Amazon Caves In, Will Remove Ads from Kindle Fire for $15 Fee

Newly announced option will strip ads from home and lock screens.
Jon Brodkin

After widespread criticism, Amazon has changed its mind about those home and lock screen ads on the new Kindle Fires. Yesterday, Amazon insisted that all Kindle Fires will come with "special offers" on the home screens and lock screens, and that unlike with Kindle e-readers, the Fire won’t provide any option to remove the ads with an extra payment.

But just now, we received confirmation from Amazon that it has decided to let customers pay $15 to opt out of the ads. "With Kindle Fire HD there will be a special offers opt-out option for $15," an Amazon spokesperson told Ars. "We know from our Kindle reader line that customers love our special offers and very few people choose to opt out. We're happy to offer customers the choice."

The Kindle Fire product pages haven’t been updated to reflect the $15 offer. With Kindle e-readers, customers unsubscribe from special offers through a Web browser, rather than from the device itself.

The Amazon statement specifies "Kindle Fire HD," but there is one new Fire that is not advertised as HD, a $159 entry-level option. Amazon told us the $15 opt-out will be available for the non-HD Fire as well.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/...re-for-15-fee/





Scott Van Duzer's Big Apple Pizza Gets Negative Yelp Reviews After Owner Bear-Hugs Obama
Harry Bradford

Now there's yet another way to lower your business’s rating on Yelp: bear-hug the president.

Scott Van Duzer, a Republican and the owner of Big Apple Pizza in Fort Pierce, Fla., became an Internet sensation Sunday when he bear-hugged President Obama during a campaign visit. But while Obama supporters claimed the episode as a heartwarming example of the president’s willingness to cross party lines for small business, others were less impressed with the viral episode, and even took a shot at Van Duzer’s business because of it.

Several negative reviews have popped up on Big Apple Pizza’s Yelp profile, featuring low, 1-star ratings and comments about the bear hug:

Well.. I'd eat there but after seeing the owner grab our leftist President I felt compelled to disrespect his establishment as much as the President disrespects our constitution. Shame on you Scott Van Duzer for thumbing your nose at all the small business owners this President has disrespected for the last four years. I guess you DIDN'T BUILD IT!

Another reviewer let his 1-star rating do most of the talking, adding only, “Owner states he is a Republican that supports Obama.”

While Big Apple Pizza's positive Yelp reviews in response to the bear hug outnumber the negative ones, the conservative backlash can be seen elsewhere on the Web. Right-leaning bloggers have criticized the gesture, questioning at best the authenticity of Van Duzer’s Republican affiliation, and at worst his intelligence, according to Daily Kos. The Gateway Pundit contributor Jim Hoft argues that the bear hug was staged, citing as proof a White House visit Van Duzer undertook with his charity last June.

Meanwhile, a photo of the hug was featured as Fox News Nation’s picture of the day Monday, where 37 readers voted it “Obnoxious”, compared to second-place rating of “Funny,” which got only 17 votes.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1871329.html





Travel Site Built on Wiki Ethos Now Bedevils Its Owner
Noam Cohen

LIVE by the wiki, perhaps die by the wiki.

When the California company Internet Brands bought the Web site Wikitravel in 2005 for $1.7 million from the two developers who had created it, the company got the site and the name, as well as a community of thousands of volunteers who generated the travel guidance that brought the audience.

Soon, with the introduction of advertising to the site, a nice business began to take shape, maybe even an ideal business: volunteers lovingly created the content; readers visited the site and clicked on the advertising. There was work to be done by the owner, certainly, like making sure the software functioned properly, but mainly this was a media site that ran itself.

There were some catches, however, that made for an unusual business proposition, starting with the fact that Internet Brands had not bought the exclusive right to the material on the site. The articles are governed by a Creative Commons license, which means they can be copied and republished by anyone as long as a mention is included of where the material came from.

Another catch: workers who do not expect a paycheck may find it easier to leave.

•

Soon after the purchase of Wikitravel, in 2006, contributors to the Italian and German sites simply left, not wanting to be part of a commercial site. They “forked” the site, meaning that they copied all of the content to a new site they named Wikivoyage.

Wikitravel is again facing a fork, this time by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia among other projects. On Thursday, the board of Wikimedia, the biggest wiki publisher, approved the creation of a travel guide after an extended online comment period that found support for the idea.

The project will seed itself with the tens of thousands of articles on Wikitravel, and already as many as 38 of the 48 the most experienced and trusted volunteers at Wikitravel have said they will move to the Wikimedia project, according to Dr. James Heilman, a Wikipedia contributor who said he had acted as a liaison between Wikitravel writers and the foundation.

On Aug. 24, Internet Brands filed a lawsuit in Superior Court of California for Los Angeles County against Dr. Heilman and a longtime Wikitravel volunteer, Ryan Holliday. The suit did not challenge the right to copy the material; instead it focuses in particular on the efforts of the two men to encourage Wikitravel contributors to consider forking.

Certainly, when Wikimedia enters a field, it has the potential to overwhelm its competitors — just ask Encyclopaedia Britannica. But other wiki-based businesses have moved into niches Wikipedia has left open. There is Wikia, for example, which was co-founded by Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, and digs even deeper into popular culture than Wikipedia. Or a site like WikiHow, which offers practical advice on how, for example, to set up a terrarium for a toad.

In its statements, the Wikimedia Foundation has emphasized it is hoping to join a community of online travel guides. But even though it is a nonprofit, the foundation represents a serious threat, and Internet Brands, which operates more than 200 Web sites, is treating it as such.

In a statement, an Internet Brands spokesman outlined the company’s complaint: “Internet Brand’s claims are not about properly licensed content, but about how certain individuals have violated I.B.’s rights as they pertain to trademark, intellectual property and unfair business practices.”

The Wikimedia Foundation filed a separate complaint last week in a different California court on behalf of the two men and itself, asking a court to rule that forking has and remains a legal activity.

In a blog post, Kelly Kay, deputy legal counsel for the foundation, described the lawsuit as an attempt to intimidate. “Our actions today represent the full stride of our commitment to protect the Wikimedia movement against the efforts of for-profit entities like Internet Brands to prevent communities and volunteers from making their own decisions about where and how freely usable content may be shared,” she wrote.

In a statement, Internet Brands in turn questioned the motives of the Wikimedia Foundation. “The foundation covets Internet Brands’ Wikitravel Web site, which we have spent seven years and millions of dollars building, supporting and growing,” the company said. “In March, the foundation began supporting efforts to recreate the Web site in its exact form. More recently, in the wake of a six-month campaign to galvanize a migration, the foundation escalated its plans by asking us to transfer this site to the foundation in exchange for nothing.”

Dr. Heilman, an emergency room doctor who is on the board of the foundation’s chapter in Canada, has often encouraged Wikipedia to “liberate” information. A few years ago, he pressed Wikipedia to publish the images used in the Rorschach inkblot test; some psychologists said the publication would allow people to “cheat” on the test, while others said it was integral to the educational purpose of an encyclopedia.

In February, he posted a note to Wikitravel proposing that Wikitravel be integrated within Wikimedia: his reasons included the absence of advertising at the Wikimedia project, and the potential for better performance because of Wikimedia’s robust infrastructure.

•

While advertising does not affect the freedom of the content it surrounds, Dr. Heilman made it clear that he viewed the situation as less than ideal, if only because it meant people like him would not want to contribute to the site and help spread “the sum of all human knowledge.”

“The ideals of the Wikimedia movement, I hold them dearly,” Dr. Heilman said by telephone from Arolla, Switzerland, where he was hiking with his wife.

He said he quickly discovered that discontent already existed among the site’s top volunteers, who are called administrators. “The current situation wasn’t tolerable,” he said, “but they never contacted the Wikimedia Foundation because they didn’t think the foundation was interested.”

Internet Brands tried to reach some compromise with the Wikimedia Foundation, both sides confirm. The idea, according to the company’s spokesman, was “to discuss partnership options.” The Wikimedia Foundation, in its court filing, said Internet Brands “proposed creating a new travel-oriented wiki that could be jointly run as a ‘semi for-profit’ company with Wikimedia,” a proposal the foundation declined “because operating such a commercial wiki project is contrary to its mission of disseminating free information.”

Lila I. Bailey, a former legal counsel for Creative Commons, the nonprofit organization that created the open copyright licenses employed by Wikitravel, said Internet Brands was in a tough spot.

Ms. Bailey, a teaching fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, law school, read both complaints and said Internet Brands faced “a community management problem” and had few options because the people involved were volunteers.

As for the notion that the Wikimedia project could somehow cause confusion in the marketplace or violate Wikitravel’s trademark, Ms. Bailey said that while the license required an attribution about where the content originated, to avoid confusion Wikitravel could require that the attribution be omitted.

Wikitravel is likely to lose its volunteers, she said, simply because Wikipedia is a “warm and fuzzy brand that is free with no ads.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/b...ils-owner.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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