Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 29th, '12

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"We consider as legal the usage of P2P networks as long as it is for private use." – DIAP, Portugal


"I apologize to Mr Dotcom." – New Zealand Prime Minister John Key



































September 29th, 2012




P2P File-Sharing for Private Use is Legal in Portugal, Court Rules

Summary: As long as it is not done for profit or commercial gain, Portuguese law does not prohibit people from sharing music and video files online, a judgement has stated after 2,000 people were sued by a rights-holder group.
David Meyer

The peer-to-peer file-sharing of music and videos is legal in Portugal as long as it is not done on a commercial scale, a court in the country has ruled.

The ruling, reported on Wednesday by the website Exame Informatica, came after 2,000 Portuguese citizens were sued by a rights-holder group called ACAPOR in early 2011. The court effectively found that Portuguese copyright law was so out of date that it didn't take file-sharing into account, and the people who had been sued had not actually done anything illegal.

"From a legal point of view, even though the user is actively uploading and/or downloading the files being shared, we consider as legal the usage of P2P networks as long as it is for private use — even if the user doesn't cease its participation in the sharing process after he has obtained the file," the ruling stated, with the last clause presumably referring to people continuing to seed files after downloading them.

The state prosecutor's office reportedly also said that copyright prosecutions should not prejudice people's right to "education, culture and freedom in the digital environment", particularly when the person involved was not trying to profit from their file-sharing.

An ACAPOR representative was quoted in the article as saying he did not understand how one can share a file and still keep it for private use. ACAPOR will apparently try to have the judgement overturned.

CBSInteractive's Ricardo Oliveira contributed to this story.
http://www.zdnet.com/p2p-file-sharin...es-7000004895/





‘Worst Copyright Law in History:’ Panama Set to Crack Down on Piracy

Panama's legislature has approved a draconian file sharing law that gives law enforcements free hand to pursue and punish file sharers directly, and grants officials bonuses based on fines levied.

#Proyecto 510-2012 “On Copyright and Related Rights,” or the 510 Bill, which legal watchdog InfoJustice calls "incredibly unbalanced," was passed in the Panamanian Congress Thursday. It is now awaiting the approval of President Ricardo Martinelli, which could happen in the immediate future.

The bill, which Andres Guadamuz at tech-law blog TechnoLlama called the "worst copyright law in history," was written by Panamanian officials in order to bring the country's Internet regulations into accordance with the US-Panama Trade Promotion Agreement – but overshoots many of the requirements it's meant to fulfill.

For example, it ascribes copyrighted status to temporary electronic files, like those held in a computer's random access memory (commonly known as RAM). According to InfoJustice, the 510 Bill is unique among national Internet laws in that it does not contain provisions for these so-called "transient" and "incidental" files. This means that users who stream paid-for content through services like Netflix or Pandora could be prosecuted and fined as much as $100,000, or $200,000 for repeat offenders, for having copyrighted material on their computers.

It also gives law enforcement officers incentives to punish file sharers – over and over, if they see fit – as the money collected from the fines goes directly to the Panamanian copyright office's bonus pool, with the copyright holder not seeing a dime. “The funds accrued by the General Copyright Directorate from the fees for the services it provides and the fines imposed in the exercise of its powers, will be aimed at improving its operational infrastructure and to boost the performance of its officers," the law reads.

However, the file sharer could still be liable to civil action should the copyright holder wish to file for it. And if convicted in either case, file sharers could be forced to pay for the publication of a press release noting that they've been fined for piracy.
https://rt.com/news/panama-copyright-law-piracy-168/





EU Court Asked To Rule On Legality Of Downloading From Illegal Sources
enigmax

As part of a case between several computer media companies and the organization responsible for copying levies, the Dutch Supreme Court is set to seek the advice of the European Court of Justice concerning the right to make private copies. Currently it is considered acceptable for Dutch citizens to download copyrighted material for personal use, even if that content comes from an illicit source such as file-sharing networks. A ruling in the wrong direction could change all of that.

Last week the Dutch Supreme Court decided to refer some interesting questions to the European Court of Justice. The responses it receives back could have some serious implications for the tolerant environment currently enjoyed by file-sharers in the Netherlands.

The case involves argument over the country’s private copy levy, which sees Dutch citizens granted the right to carry out personal use copying in return for rightsholders picking up revenue from levies on blank media.

These levies are set through negotiation between a foundation representing authors and composers on one side, and producers of blank media on the other. In the most recent round the argument was raised that the current levy should also extend to cover downloads made from illegal sources, i.e from online file-sharing networks.

As confusing as it might sound, downloading from illegal sources is considered legal in the Netherlands. That notion was underlined in December 2011 when the Dutch parliament adopted a motion to keep downloading movies and music for personal use legal, and considering a situation where current copyright levies could be extended to downloading-related hardware such as hard drives.

“The Court of Appeals held that downloading from an illegal source is itself legal, mainly because the Secretary of Justice had repeatedly said so in Parliament and the language of the private copying article (from the Copyright Act) did not require a legal source explicitly,” Arnoud Engelfriet, a lawyer specializing in Internet law at the ICTRecht law firm, told TorrentFreak this morning.

However, the Supreme Court now makes the observation that the EU Copyright Directive may consider that copying from an illegal source is self-evidently illegal, so it has referred the matter to the European Court of Justice.

The Supreme Court has asked the ECJ several questions including whether private copying can only be legal if carried out from a legal source.

“[If we] suppose that’s the correct reading, can the Dutch then go further than the Directive and also legalize home copying from an illegal source? Or is *only* the Directive the source of legal acts within copyright law?” Engelfriet explains.

A report commissioned by the Dutch government in 2009 found that file-sharing has an overall positive effect on the Dutch economy, which is just as well since an estimated 30% of the population are believed to engage in the activity.

The decision of the ECJ will determine the continued legality – or otherwise – of downloading for personal use in the Netherlands, with the potential to affect millions.
https://torrentfreak.com/eu-court-as...ources-120925/





Movie Pirates Handed Jail Sentences, Ordered To Pay 1.1 Million Euros
enigmax

Five men have been sentenced for their role in releasing pre-release copies of Hollywood movies onto so-called Internet ‘top sites’. A court handed out suspended sentences of between three and six months to individuals from two Internet release teams said to be responsible for causing Disney, Warner Bros. and Universal millions of dollars in damages. Together they will have to pay damages totaling more than 1.1 million euros.

As far back as 2005, piracy release group CiNEFOX had been leaking the latest movies onto the Internet. By early 2007 they were seriously on the radars of the leading studios and anti-piracy group ALPA, and before May was out an investigation against them had found itself in the hands of French authorities.

Soon after, police swooped on addresses in Lyon, Montpellier and Strasbourg, arresting three key members of CiNEFOX. Two men associated with another group called Carnage were also detained.

It’s been long time coming but earlier this month the five men finally went on trial. During the hearing the court heard how the defendants sat at the very top of the so-called ‘piracy pyramid’ from where leaked movies are distributed from a handful of individuals to the rest of the world.

In total, CiNEFOX stood accused of being responsible for the leak of 504 films including X-Men 3, Jumper, 10,000 BC and Mission Impossible 3. Carnage stood accused of a massive 2,014, although this was reduced to just 56 on procedural grounds.

CiNEXFOXNFO

Variously team members were accused of administering the so-called ‘topsite’ servers where movies were stored and shared among Scene members, recording movies in theaters using camcorders, capturing local audio to be spliced onto international versions of movies, and distributing DVDs not yet available via commercial release.

Despite there being five defendants, just one (a former member of Carnage) was present in court. He previously held an unlimited access theater pass and admitted using equipment for the hearing impaired to capture audio.

“We knew it was illegal but at that moment we did not think about the consequences, it was like a game to us,” he said. A lawyer for the defendant said his client was just a movie fan who “fell into a virtual world” but made no money from his activities.

Overall the defendants stood accused of causing Hollywood studios including Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. millions of dollars in damages, with the prosecutor calling for imprisonment and heavy fines.

This week the Paris Criminal Court handed down suspended prison sentences and seriously heavy fines to the defendants.

The three members of CiNEFOX all received six month suspended sentences and were ordered to pay a total of 710,000 euros damages to the plaintiffs.

Two members of Carnage picked up suspended sentences of three and four months respectively and were ordered to pay 410,000 euros in damages.
https://torrentfreak.com/movie-pirat...-euros-120928/





New Zealand Prime Minister Orders Enquiry Into “Unlawful” Spying of Kim Dotcom
Jon Russell

The Kim Dotcom saga continues to unfold in New Zealand after the country’s prime minister ordered a full enquiry into claims that the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) unlawfully spied on the Megaupload founder.

New Zealand PM John Key called the GCSB’s efforts to intercept Dotcom communications illegal after it emerged that the agency — the country’s equivalent of the FBI – had wiretapped his communications as part of the sting without receiving the necessary authority and permissions, Investigate Magazine reports.

A statement from Key, in which the prime minister “expressed his disappointment that unlawful acts had taken place”, read:

“I expect our intelligence agencies to operate always within the law. Their operations depend on public trust. I look forward to the Inspector-General’s inquiry getting to the heart of what took place and what can be done about it because this is also a matter for the High Court in its consideration of the Megaupload litigation.”

Dotcom took to Twitter to welcome the enquiry and he likened the latest twist to that of a James Bond film:

I welcome the inquiry by @johnkeypm into unlawful acts by the GCSB. Please extend the inquiry to cover the entire Crown Law Mega case.

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) September 24, 2012

I’m now a real life James Bond villain in a real life political copyright thriller scripted by Hollywood & the White House.

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) September 24, 2012

Authorities have been criticized for the perceived mishandling of a number of issues around Dotcom’s arrest and subsequent trial.

Police have been accused of acting with a heavy hand when footage of the raid on Dotcom’s mansion was aired in national television. Multiple helicopters and several police vehicles converging on his mansion while the multi-millionaire German Dotcom claimed he had been punched, kicked, kneed and otherwise treated unfairly during his arrest.

Authorities suffered a significant blow in June when the New Zealand high court ruled that search warrants for the raid were invalid.

Despite the trial ongoing Dotcom has continued his efforts to revive the Megaupload service and today he claimed that work is now 90 percent complete. Developers were offered early access to the project last month.

The Megaupload founder, formerly Kim Schmitz, is also working on music service Megabox, which he said will launch before the end of the year alongside a revamped Megaupload, that is said will not be operation in the US.

The US Department of Justice closed Megaupload down in January, in what it called one of the largest cases of copyright fraud ever. While there may have been infringing content on the site, many of its users have lost photos, files and other memories stored to the backup service.

Dotcom extradition hearing is set to take place in March 2013. The date was rescheduled from August 2012 following a series of issues relating to the way that police has handled the case.
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/0...ng-kim-dotcom/





Prime Minister requests inquiry into Dotcom Case
Monday, 24 September 2012, 1:08 pm
Press Release: New Zealand Government


Rt Hon John Key
Prime Minister

24 September 2012 Media Statement

Prime Minister requests inquiry into Dotcom Case

Prime Minister John Key today announced he has requested an inquiry by the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security into the circumstances of unlawful interception of communications of certain individuals by the Government Communications Security Bureau.

Mr Key says the Crown has filed a memorandum in the High Court in the Megaupload case advising the Court and affected parties that the GCSB had acted unlawfully while assisting the Police to locate certain individuals subject to arrest warrants issued in the case. The Bureau had acquired communications in some instances without statutory authority.

After being informed about the matter by the Director of the GCSB on September 17, the Prime Minister referred the Bureau’s actions to the Inspector-General, Hon Paul Neazor. The Inspector-General is an independent statutory officer with the power to enquire into any matter related to a government intelligence agency’s compliance with the law.

Mr Key says he has also asked the Inspector-General to recommend any measures he considered necessary to prevent the issue from happening again.

Mr Key expressed his disappointment that unlawful acts had taken place.

“I expect our intelligence agencies to operate always within the law. Their operations depend on public trust.

“I look forward to the Inspector-General’s inquiry getting to the heart of what took place and what can be done about it,” says Mr Key. “Because this is also a matter for the High Court in its consideration of the Megaupload litigation, I am unable to comment further.”
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA120...otcom-case.htm





New Zealand Prime Minister Apologizes To Kim Dotcom
enigmax

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key has apologized to Kim Dotcom after a report from the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security found that the government illegally monitored the Megaupload founder. The Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) carried out surveillance on Dotcom, but did not check out his residency status, instead relying on incorrect information supplied by the police.

“Of course I apologize to Mr Dotcom, and I apologize to New Zealanders.”

These were the humbling words of New Zealand Prime Minister John Key today after a report from Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security Paul Neazor found that a NZ security service did indeed wrongfully spy on Kim Dotcom and associate Bram van der Kolk.

In a media conference following the release of the report, Key said that New Zealanders had a right to be protected by the law and that the government had “failed to provide that protection to them.”

The findings of the report, commissioned by the Prime Minister on September 17, were released this morning and are a clear embarrassment to the government.

Neazor found that the Government Communications Security Bureau (GSCB), which by law can only conduct action against foreign targets, failed to check Dotcom’s immigration status. If they had done so they would have discovered he hold’s a permanent resident’s visa.

“The GCSB relied on information provided to it by the Organized and Financial Crime Agency. In my view, reliance on another party by GCSB is unacceptable,” Key said.

“It is the GCSB’s responsibility to act within the law, and it is hugely disappointing that in this case its actions fell outside the law. I am personally very disappointed that the agency failed to fully understand the workings of its own legislation.”

So just how did Dotcom come to be monitored illegally? The purported answers to that question can be found in a section of the report titled “Potential for confusion.”

“As this matter went along what was discovered in the case of Dotcom and associated people was that resident status had been obtained on their behalf under the Immigration Act 1987 and carried forward under the later 2009 Act. It was understood incorrectly by the GCSB that a further step in the immigration process would have to be taken before Dotcom and associates had protection against interception of communications,” Neazor wrote.

“The illegality arose because of changes in the Immigration Act wording and some confusion about which category Dotcom was in thereafter.”

But whatever the case, according to a document published by ComputerWorld, police clearly knew of Dotcom’s residency status when they compiled a planning document known as the “Blue Folder” in which help from the anti-terrorist Special Tactics Group was requested.

Following Mr Key’s apology today [video here], Dotcom announced his acceptance via Twitter, but called for an investigation into the case against him.

“I accept your apology,” Dotcom wrote. “Show your sincerity by supporting a full, transparent & independent inquiry into the entire Mega case.”
https://torrentfreak.com/new-zealand...dotcom-120927/





Clean IT – Leak Shows Plans for Large-Scale, Undemocratic Surveillance of all Communications

A leaked document from the CleanIT project shows just how far internal discussions in that initiative have drifted away from its publicly stated aims, as well as the most fundamental legal rules that underpin European democracy and the rule of law.

The European Commission-funded CleanIT project claims that it wants to fight terrorism through voluntary self-regulatory measures that defends the rule of law.

The initial meetings of the initiative, with their directionless and ill-informed discussions about doing “something” to solve unidentified online “terrorist” problems were mainly attended by filtering companies, who saw an interesting business opportunity. Their work has paid off, with numerous proposals for filtering by companies and governments, proposals for liability in case sufficiently intrusive filtering is not used, and calls for increased funding by governments of new filtering technologies.

The leaked document contradicts a letter sent from CleanIT Coordinator But Klaasen to Dutch NGO Bits of Freedom in April of this year, which explained that the project would first identify problems before making policy proposals. The promise to defend the rule of law has been abandoned. There appears never to have been a plan to identify a specific problem to be solved – instead the initiative has become little more than a protection racket (use filtering or be held liable for terrorist offences) for the online security industry.

The proposals urge Internet companies to ban unwelcome activity through their terms of service, but advise that these “should not be very detailed”. This already widespread approach results, for example, in Microsoft (as a wholly typical example of current industry practice) having terms of service that would ban pictures of the always trouserless Donald Duck as potential pornography (“depicts nudity of any sort ... in non-human forms such as cartoons”). The leaked paper also contradicts the assertion in the letter that the project “does not aim to restrict behaviour that is not forbidden by law” - the whole point of prohibiting content in terms of service that is theoretically prohibited by law, is to permit extra-judicial vigilantism by private companies, otherwise the democratically justified law would be enough. Worse, the only way for a company to be sure of banning everything that is banned by law, is to use terms that are more broad, less well defined and less predictable than real law.

Moving still further into the realm of the absurd, the leaked document proposes the use of terms of service to remove content “which is fully legal”... although this is up to the “ethical or business” priorities of the company in question what they remove. In other words, if Donald Duck is displeasing to the police, they would welcome, but don't explicitly demand, ISPs banning his behaviour in their terms of service. Cooperative ISPs would then be rewarded by being prioritised in state-funded calls for tender.

CleanIT (terrorism), financed by DG Home Affairs of the European Commission is duplicating much of the work of the CEO Coalition (child protection), which is financed by DG Communications Networks of the European Commission. Both are, independently and without coordination, developing policies on issues such as reporting buttons and flagging of possibly illegal material. Both CleanIT and the CEO Coalition are duplicating each other's work on creating “voluntary” rules for notification and removal of possibly illegal content and are jointly duplicating the evidence-based policy work being done by DG Internal Market of the European Commission, which recently completed a consultation on this subject. Both have also been discussing upload filtering, to monitor all content being put online by European citizens.

CleanIT wants binding engagements from internet companies to carry out surveillance, to block and to filter (albeit only at “end user” - meaning local network - level). It wants a network of trusted online informants and, contrary to everything that they have ever said, they also want new, stricter legislation from Member States.

Unsurprisingly, in EDRi's discussions with both law enforcement agencies and industry about CleanIT, the word that appears with most frequency is “incompetence”.

The document linked below is distributed to participants on a “need to know” basis – we are sharing the document because citizens need to know what is being proposed.

Key measures being proposed:

• Removal of any legislation preventing filtering/surveillance of employees' Internet connections
• Law enforcement authorities should be able to have content removed “without following the more labour-intensive and formal procedures for 'notice and action'”
• “Knowingly” providing links to “terrorist content” (the draft does not refer to content which has been ruled to be illegal by a court, but undefined “terrorist content” in general) will be an offence “just like” the terrorist
• Legal underpinning of “real name” rules to prevent anonymous use of online services
• ISPs to be held liable for not making “reasonable” efforts to use technological surveillance to identify (undefined) “terrorist” use of the Internet
• Companies providing end-user filtering systems and their customers should be liable for failing to report “illegal” activity identified by the filter
• Customers should also be held liable for “knowingly” sending a report of content which is not illegal
• Governments should use the helpfulness of ISPs as a criterion for awarding public contracts
• The proposal on blocking lists contradict each other, on the one hand providing comprehensive details for each piece of illegal content and judicial references, but then saying that the owner can appeal (although if there was already a judicial ruling, the legal process would already have been at an end) and that filtering such be based on the “output” of the proposed content regulation body, the “European Advisory Foundation”
• Blocking or “warning” systems should be implemented by social media platforms – somehow it will be both illegal to provide (undefined) “Internet services” to “terrorist persons” and legal to knowingly provide access to illegal content, while “warning” the end-user that they are accessing illegal content
• The anonymity of individuals reporting (possibly) illegal content must be preserved... yet their IP address must be logged to permit them to be prosecuted if it is suspected that they are reporting legal content deliberately and to permit reliable informants' reports to be processed more quickly
• Companies should implement upload filters to monitor uploaded content to make sure that content that is removed – or content that is similar to what is removed – is not re-uploaded
• It proposes that content should not be removed in all cases but “blocked” (i.e. make inaccessible by the hosting provider – not “blocked” in the access provider sense) and, in other cases, left available online but with the domain name removed.

Leaked document: http://www.edri.org/files/cleanIT_sept2012.pdf

CleanIT Project website: http://www.cleanitproject.eu/

Microsoft “code of conduct”: http://windows.microsoft.com/is-IS/w...ode-of-conduct

CleanIT's letter to Bits of Freedom about “factual inaccuracies” and their unfulfilled promise to produce a problem definition: http://95.211.138.23/wp-content/uplo...n-blog-BoF.doc

EDRigram article 29 August: http://edri.org/edrigram/number10.16...for-terrorists

EDRigram article 20 June: http://edri.org/edrigram/number10.12...-upload-filter

http://www.edri.org/cleanIT





Be Careful, She Might Hear You

Attorney-General Nicola Roxon wants unprecedented access to the private lives of Australians, writes Philip Dorling.

AUSTRALIA'S security and law enforcement agencies are world leaders in telecommunications interception and data access and like most successful industries, they want more. Federal Attorney-General Nicola Roxon is canvassing a further expansion of surveillance powers, most controversially a requirement that telecommunications and internet service providers retain at least two years of data for access by government agencies.

Security and privacy are in the balance as the Federal Parliament's secretive joint committee on intelligence and security considers Australia's future digital surveillance regime.

Australia was slow to get into the business of telecommunications interception. Alexander Graham Bell's invention was nearly 70 years old before Australian security authorities took advantage of the telephone as a surveillance device. But since then they've never looked back.
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David Forbes Martyn was a highly accomplished Scottish physicist who brought radar technology to Australia in 1939. He was the first chief of CSIRO's radiophysics laboratory at Sydney University, a fellow of the Royal Society and a founder of the Australian Academy of Science. He delivered the first ABC Boyer Lectures.

Martyn also had the unfortunate distinction of being a target of the first telephone tapping and bugging operation by an Australian security agency nearly seven decades ago.

Despite playing key roles in Australian defence science in World War II, his loyalty came under suspicion owing to his friendship with two women, one of whom was suspected by military intelligence, on little more than gossip, of being a Nazi sympathiser, if not an actual spy.

In early 1944, Brigadier Bill Simpson, director-general of the wartime Commonwealth Security Service, ordered the interception of Martyn's phone, the phone of his fiancee, Margot Adams, and installation of listening devices in the Sydney apartment of their close friend, Shanyi Maier, the Chinese wife of a German internee and alleged femme fatale.

By today's standards, the operation was incredibly primitive. There were no recordings. Security officers would take a trip to the local telephone exchange, sit with a switchboard operator who inserted a special plug to enable them to hook into the phone line and take notes as they listened in on the conversation.

Other agents sat in a room above Maier's apartment and listened through headphones to two microphones, one placed in the living room, the other in her bedroom.

For five months the Security Service listened to conversations such as ''I'm going down to the wine shop, should I get one or two bottles of red?'' and tried to work out if a word such as ''red'' was some sort of code. They eavesdropped as Martyn and Adams discussed their wedding plans. They also listened intently to Maier's love life and most intimate moments, filling voluminous files with verbatim transcripts.

But she was no spy. Six decades later the files were transferred to the National Archives and made publicly available. Long divorced, remarried and widowed, Shanyi Balogh, as she was then, was still alive and well, and living in the same apartment. She read some of the transcripts with deep distress, indeed broke down and cried at the violation of her privacy.

Australia's first technical surveillance operation was judged a success, even though nothing of security significance was uncovered. Brigadier Simpson thought the exercise had been ''first class from a technical viewpoint''.

There was no espionage, either. However, Martyn's career was severely damaged by suspicions that the Security Service never thought necessary to dispel. Many years later, embittered and in deteriorating mental health, he was consumed by constant fears that he was under surveillance and took his own life.

The Security Service's successor, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, quickly turned to telephone interception in its post-war investigations of Soviet spies in Australia. There was no legal authority for what were called ''special facilities'', but Labor prime minister Ben Chifley gave the go ahead in July 1949 for ASIO to tap the phone of Walter Clayton, an Australian Communist Party operative suspected, rightly, of being involved in Soviet espionage.

Within a year ASIO was phone-tapping 14 people. By the end of a decade they had tapped 174 telephones, mainly belonging to Soviet diplomats and Australian communists.

Anxious to put this growing surveillance activity on a legal footing, attorney-general Sir Garfield Barwick presented a top-secret submission to the cabinet of Sir Robert Menzies in February 1960.

''The usefulness of interception of telephones by the Security Service is undoubted,'' Barwick wrote. ''[T]he obtaining of factual evidence of subversion, espionage and sabotage is one of the most difficult aspects of investigation … One of the most vulnerable points in so far as the detection of these activities is communication … Telephone and mail interception, therefore, become of paramount importance.''

Barwick referred to the ''natural disfavour, not to say aversion, with which people regard this form of assault on the privacy of the telephone'', but concluded that interception was ''indispensable to the security of the nation.''

There were to be legislative safeguards. Subject to authorisation by warrant from the attorney-general, intercept operations were only to be carried out by ASIO for national security purposes. ''In my opinion, it is quite clear that the Commonwealth cannot carry the responsibility of providing telephone [intercept] facilities for state purposes - even for the detection of crime,'' Barwick added.

One hundred and sixty warrants were issued for interception operations, codenamed ''Bugle'', over the next 12 years. When the Whitlam Labor government took office in December 1972, 52 warrants were in force, mainly covering the USSR embassy in Canberra, Soviet bloc diplomats and Australia's feuding communist and socialist parties. Labor parliamentarians often featured in intercept transcripts thanks to their contact with communist union officials and Soviet diplomats. ASIO tapped the phone of Labor Senate leader Lionel Murphy's secretary who was having an affair with a Soviet diplomat who was a senior KGB officer.

Prime minister Gough Whitlam revoked all warrants and, after a review, attorney-general Murphy approved 29 new warrants for Soviet bloc diplomats, Croatian nationalist extremists and pro-Palestinian groups supportive of terrorist activity.

Under prime minister Malcolm Fraser, ASIO interception operations were extended to again cover Australian communist party members, anti-US alliance protesters, as well as Bill Hartley, a prominent member of Labor's socialist-left faction, a pro-Palestinian activist and paid agent of the Iraqi intelligence service.

More significant in the longer term was the Fraser government's legislation in 1979 to allow interception by the Commonwealth Police, now the Australian Federal Police, to cover the narcotics trade and wider criminal activity. Revelations that the NSW Police had for many years conducted numerous illegal phone taps eventually led the Hawke Labor government to legislate to empower state police to undertake lawful interception operations.

Aside from ASIO and the AFP, 15 police, anti-corruption and police integrity agencies now conduct telecommunications interception under warrants from judges or members of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

In 1996-97, law enforcement agencies carried out 675 phone taps. By 2001-02 the annual number had grown to 2157. The most recently published figures show the number of warrants had risen to 3488 in 2010-11 - a five-fold increase since the beginning of the Howard government. (Figures for ASIO's intercepts are classified and will only become available from the National Archives after more than 20 years.)

Also, 588 federal listening and tracking device warrants were issued in 2010-11 - a 43 per cent increase on the figure two years earlier.

This is an Australian growth industry. Telephone tapping and bugging have become routine investigative tools. Indeed, published statistics show that Australian law enforcement telecommunications interception activity is greater both in absolute and relative terms than that undertaken in the United States.

American federal and state judges issued only 1491 wiretap authorisations for law enforcement purposes in 2001. By 2011 the US figure had risen to 2732 warrants. Taking into account the difference in population between Australia and the US, the per capita rate of law enforcement telephone interception in Australia is 18 times greater than that in the US.

Australian law enforcement and government agencies are also accessing vast troves of phone and internet data without warrant. Indeed, they did so more than 250,000 times during criminal and revenue investigations in 2010-11. Comparative statistics suggest this is a far greater level of telecommunications data access than that undertaken in the US, Britain or Canada.

Data accessed includes phone and internet account information, outwards and inwards call details, internet access, and details of websites visited, though not the actual content of communications.

Federal government agencies gaining access to such data include ASIO, AFP, the Australian Crime Commission, the Tax Office, the departments of Defence, Immigration and Citizenship and Health and Ageing, and Medicare. Data is also accessed by state police and anti-corruption bodies, state government agencies, local government bodies and even the RSPCA.

Telecommunications data now accessible without warrant also includes location data, which can be accessed both historically and in real time. Few Australians would have agreed two decades ago to carry a government-accessible tracking device, but that is precisely what they do when carrying a modern mobile phone or tablet.

It is against this background of a world-class surveillance regime that Attorney-General Roxon recently echoed her conservative predecessor, Sir Garfield Barwick, saying further expansion of surveillance and data access is required to ensure national security and community safety.

According to Roxon, action is required to ensure that ''vital investigative tools are not lost as telecommunications providers update their business practices and begin to delete data more regularly and more Australians communicate online in a wider variety of ways''.

''The loss of this capability would be a major blow to our law enforcement agencies and to Australia's national security.''

The Attorney-General says she hasn't made up her mind on all the latest proposals, and her referral of the matter to a parliamentary committee is likely to delay a decision and implementation until next year, probably after the next federal election.

But in nearly 70 years, Australia's surveillance industry has never taken a step backwards.

In today's world of email, text and internet chat, Facebook and Twitter, electronic business transactions and ever wider CCTV coverage of business premises and public spaces, almost every aspect of people's daily lives will soon be recorded electronically in one medium or another.

With the costs of data collection and storage continuously falling, all-encompassing surveillance will be achievable at the touch of a button.

The pull of technology and push of security will continue to radically diminish the realm of privacy. In some ways we will be ''safer'', but privacy will be at the discretion of law enforcement, security and bureaucrats. With that will come a profound, qualitative change in the relationship between citizens and government that is yet to be considered by Parliament or the public.

All this is a long way from the first, primitive surveillance operation directed against David Martyn, Margot Adams and their friend Shanyi Maier nearly seven decades ago. From little things big things grow.
http://www.theage.com.au/technology/...924-26h6r.html





New Justice Department Documents Show Huge Increase in Warrantless Electronic Surveillance
Naomi Gilens

Justice Department documents released today by the ACLU reveal that federal law enforcement agencies are increasingly monitoring Americans’ electronic communications, and doing so without warrants, sufficient oversight, or meaningful accountability.

The documents, handed over by the government only after months of litigation, are the attorney general’s 2010 and 2011 reports on the use of “pen register” and “trap and trace” surveillance powers. The reports show a dramatic increase in the use of these surveillance tools, which are used to gather information about telephone, email, and other Internet communications. The revelations underscore the importance of regulating and overseeing the government’s surveillance power. (Our original Freedom of Information Act request and our legal complaint are online.)

Pen register and trap and trace devices are powerfully invasive surveillance tools that were, twenty years ago, physical devices that attached to telephone lines in order to covertly record the incoming and outgoing numbers dialed. Today, no special equipment is required to record this information, as interception capabilities are built into phone companies’ call-routing hardware.

Pen register and trap and trace devices now generally refer to the surveillance of information about—rather than the contents of—communications. Pen registers capture outgoing data, while trap and trace devices capture incoming data. This still includes the phone numbers of incoming and outgoing telephone calls and the time, date, and length of those calls. But the government now also uses this authority to intercept the “to” and “from” addresses of email messages, records about instant message conversations, non-content data associated with social networking identities, and at least some information about the websites that you visit (it isn't entirely clear where the government draws the line between the content of a communication and information about a communication when it comes to the addresses of websites).

Electronic Surveillance Is Sharply on the Rise

The reports that we received document an enormous increase in the Justice Department’s use of pen register and trap and trace surveillance. As the chart below shows, between 2009 and 2011 the combined number of original orders for pen registers and trap and trace devices used to spy on phones increased by 60%, from 23,535 in 2009 to 37,616 in 2011.

During that same time period, the number of people whose telephones were the subject of pen register and trap and trace surveillance more than tripled. In fact, more people were subjected to pen register and trap and trace surveillance in the past two years than in the entire previous decade.

During the past two years, there has also been an increase in the number of pen register and trap and trace orders targeting email and network communications data. While this type of Internet surveillance tool remains relatively rare, its use is increasing exponentially. The number of authorizations the Justice Department received to use these devices on individuals’ email and network data increased 361% between 2009 and 2011.

The sharp increase in the use of pen register and trap and trace orders is the latest example of the skyrocketing spying on Americans’ electronic communications. Earlier this year, the New York Times reported that cellphone carriers received 1.3 million demands for subscriber information in 2011 alone. And an ACLU public records project revealed that police departments around the country large and small engage in cell phone location tracking.

Legal Standards For Pen Register And Trap And Trace Orders Are Too Low

Because these surveillance powers are not used to capture telephone conversations or the bodies of emails, they are classified as “non-content” surveillance tools, as opposed to tools that collect “content,” like wiretaps. This means that the legal standard that law enforcement agencies must meet before using pen registers is lower than it is for wiretaps and other content-collecting technology. Specifically, in order to wiretap an American’s phone, the government must convince a judge that it has sufficient probable cause and that the wiretap is essential to an investigation. But for a pen register, the government need only submit certification to a court stating that it seeks information relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation. As long as it completes this simple procedural requirement, the government may proceed with pen register or trap and trace surveillance, without any judge considering the merits of the request. As one court noted, the judicial role is purely “ministerial in nature.”

The content/non-content distinction from which these starkly different legal requirements arise is based on an erroneous factual premise, specifically that individuals lack a privacy interest in non-content information. This premise is false. Non-content information can still be extremely invasive, revealing who you communicate with in real time and painting a vivid picture of the private details of your life. If reviewing your social networking contacts is sufficient to determine your sexuality, as found in an MIT study a few years ago, think what law enforcement agents could learn about you by having real-time access to whom you email, text, and call. But the low legal standard currently applied to pen register and trap and trace devices allows the government to use these powerful surveillance tools with very little oversight in place to safeguard Americans’ privacy.

Failure to Share These Reports with the Public Frustrates Democratic Oversight

In order to maintain a basic measure of accountability, Congress requires that the attorney general submit annual reports to Congress on the Justice Department’s use of these devices, documenting:

• The period of interceptions authorized by each order and the number and duration of any extensions of each order

• The specific offenses for which each order was granted

• The total number of investigations that involved orders

• The total number of facilities (like phones) affected

• The district applying for and the person authorizing each order.

As my colleague Chris Soghoian has noted, however, the Justice Department has routinely failed to submit the required reports. In fact, the Justice Department repeatedly failed to submit annual reports to Congress between 2000 and 2008 (submitting them instead as “document dumps” covering four years’ worth of surveillance in 2005 and 2009). The department’s repeated failure to follow the law led the Electronic Privacy Information Center to write a letter of complaint to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) in 2009.

Unfortunately, even when the Justice Department does turn over the reports, they have disappeared “into a congressional void,” as Professor Paul Schwartz has put it, instead of being released to the public. The reports for 1999-2003 were obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation through a FOIA request. Chris Soghoian obtained the 2004-2009 reports through the same process.

When no reports surfaced in 2010 and 2011, the ACLU filed a FOIA request to obtain them. After our request received no response, we filed suit to enforce it.

Although the Justice Department has in the past repeatedly failed to submit the annual reports to Congress, it appears that it has now cleaned up its act. Both the 2010 and 2011 reports were submitted to Congress in compliance with the reporting requirement. Unfortunately, Congress has done nothing at all to inform the public about the federal government's use of these invasive surveillance powers. Rather than publishing the reports online, they appear to have filed them away in an office somewhere on Capitol Hill.

This is unacceptable. Congress introduced the pen register reporting requirement in order to impose some transparency on the government’s use of a powerful surveillance tool. For democracy to function, citizens must have access to information that they need to make informed decisions—information such as how and to what extent the government is spying on their private communications. Our representatives in Congress know this, and created the reporting requirement exactly for this reason.

It shouldn’t take a FOIA lawsuit by the ACLU to force the disclosure of these valuable reports. There is nothing stopping Congress from releasing these reports, and doing so routinely. They could easily be posted online, as the ACLU has done today.

Even though we now have the reports, much remains unknown about how the government is using these surveillance tools. Because the existing reporting requirements apply only to surveillance performed by the Department of Justice, we have no idea of how or to what extent these surveillance powers are being used by other law enforcement agencies, such as the Secret Service, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or state and local police. As a result, the reports likely reveal only a small portion of the use of this surveillance power.

Congress Should Pass a Law Improving the Reporting Requirements

One member of Congress is attempting to overhaul our deeply flawed electronic surveillance laws. In August, Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) introduced a bill to amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 to reflect advances in technology that have taken place since the law was passed over twenty-five years ago. One portion of Rep. Nadler’s bill addresses all of the major problems with the current reporting requirements for pen register and trap and trace surveillance. His bill would expand the reporting requirement to apply to all federal agencies, as well as state and local law enforcement. The bill would also shift the responsibility of compiling the reports from the attorney general to the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, which already completes the reporting requirements for the government’s use of wiretaps, and proactively posts those reports on its website each year.

Congressman Nadler's bill is an opportunity to apply meaningful oversight to the government’s rapidly increasing use of a highly invasive surveillance power. These reforms are critical to protect our privacy and maintain an open and transparent government.
http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-se...-huge-increase





FBI Renews Broad Internet Surveillance Push

Director Robert Mueller tells Congress that police are "increasingly unable" to bring criminals to justice because rapid advances in technology thwart surveillance.
Declan McCullagh

The FBI is renewing its request for new Internet surveillance laws, saying technological advances hinder surveillance and warning that companies should be required to build in back doors for police.

"We must ensure that our ability to obtain communications pursuant to court order is not eroded," FBI director Robert Mueller told a U.S. Senate committee this week. Currently, he said, many communications providers "are not required to build or maintain intercept capabilities."

Mueller's prepared remarks reignite a long-simmering debate pitting the values of privacy, limited government, and freedom to innovate against law enforcement requests that often find a receptive audience on Capitol Hill. Two days ago, for instance, senators delayed voting on a privacy bill that would require search warrants for e-mail after sheriffs and district attorneys objected.

'Going Dark' timeline

June 2008: FBI Director Robert Mueller and his aides brief Sens. Barbara Mikulski, Richard Shelby, and Ted Stevens on "Going Dark."

June 2008: FBI Assistant Director Kerry Haynes holds "Going Dark" briefing for Senate appropriations subcommittee and offers a "classified version of this briefing" at Quantico.

September 2008: FBI completes a "high-level explanation" of CALEA amendment package.

May 2009: FBI Assistant Director Rich Haley briefs Senate Intelligence committee and Mikulsi staffers on how bureau is "dealing with the 'Going Dark' issue.'" Mikulski plans to bring up "Going Dark" at a closed-door hearing the following week.

November 2008: FBI Assistant Director Marcus Thomas, who oversees the Quantico-based Operational Technology Division, prepares briefing for President-Elect Obama's transition team.

December 2008: FBI intelligence analyst in Communications Analysis Unit begins analysis of VoIP surveillance.

February 2009: FBI memo to all field offices asks for anecdotal information about cases where "investigations have been negatively impacted" by lack of data retention or Internet interception.

March 2009: Mueller's advisory board meets for a full-day briefing on Going Dark.

April 2009: FBI distributes presentation for White House meeting on Going Dark.

April 2009: FBI warns that the Going Dark project is "yellow," meaning limited progress, because of "new administration personnel not being in place for briefings."

April 2009: FBI general counsel's office reports that the bureau's Data Interception Technology Unit has "compiled a list of FISA dockets... that the FBI has been unable to fully implement." FISA is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

May 2009: FBI e-mail boasts that the bureau's plan has "gotten attention" from industry, but "we need to strengthen the business case on this."

July 2010: FBI e-mail says the "Going Dark Working Group (GDWG) continues to ask for examples from Cvber investigations where investigators have had problems" because of new technologies.

September 2010: FBI staff operations specialist in its Counterterrorism Division sends e-mail on difficulties in "obtaining information from Internet Service Providers and social-networking sites."

In May, CNET disclosed that the FBI is asking Internet companies not to oppose a proposed law that would require firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, to build in back doors for government surveillance. The bureau's draft proposal would require that social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly.

An FBI representative declined to respond to requests for comment yesterday afternoon. (Mueller submitted prepared remarks for Wednesday's hearing but, because of a dental emergency, did not attend. Kevin Perkins, the FBI's associate deputy director, filled in for him.)

Mueller warned: "Because of this gap between technology and the law, law enforcement is increasingly unable to access the information it needs to protect public safety and the evidence it needs to bring criminals to justice."

The draft legislation is one component of what the FBI has internally called the "National Electronic Surveillance Strategy" and has publicly described as its "Going Dark" problem. Going Dark has emerged as a serious effort inside the bureau, which employed 107 full-time equivalent people on the project as of 2009, commissioned a RAND study, and sought extensive technical input from its secretive Operational Technology Division in Quantico, Va. The division boasts of developing the "latest and greatest investigative technologies to catch terrorists and criminals."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group in San Francisco, says there's no need to expand wiretapping law for the Internet. EFF staff attorney Hanni Fakhoury told CNET:

New technologies have provided the FBI with unprecedented capabilities to conduct surveillance, making it faster and easier for the government to take a look at the increasingly intimate online portrayal of the lives of Americans. No longer does the government face anonymous pay-phones or the challenge of physically tracking a person's location through time-consuming manual surveillance. Plus, with more and more conversations documented by some sort of electronic record, it seems to us that law enforcement has had no problem getting access to digital material from telecommunications providers with little judicial oversight or scrutiny. To ensure that the laws keep pace with new technology, we must ensure that the Fourth Amendment and due process remain paramount.

The FBI's proposal would amend a 1994 law, called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, that currently applies only to telecommunications providers, not Web companies. The Federal Communications Commission extended CALEA in 2004 to apply to broadband networks.

It's not exactly clear how much of the FBI's problems in conducting surveillance arise from wireless communications, encryption, social networks, or VoIP; the bureau has not been eager to be specific. Microsoft's Skype service has worked with law enforcement to make online chats and other user information available to police, the Washington Post reported in July.

An internal FBI strategy document from 2007 recently posted by Cryptome.org refers to "proposed amendments" to CALEA that would codify the authority of police to "process a subject's communications traffic, including IP/packet-based communications."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57...eillance-push/





PC Rental Companies Spied on Customers in Their Homes
Emma Woollacott

Seven rent-to-own companies and a software developer have settled federal charges that they spied on customers, including watching them having sex.

The companies captured screenshots of confidential and personal information, logged keystrokes and took webcam pictures of people in their homes. Their aim was to track the computers belonging to costomers who were behind with their payments.

"An agreement to rent a computer doesn’t give a company license to access consumers’ private emails, bank account information, and medical records, or, even worse, webcam photos of people in the privacy of their own homes," says FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz. "The FTC orders today will put an end to their cyber spying."

Developer DesignerWare produced the software that was used to gather the information, PC Rental Agent. The package included a 'kill switch' designed to disable a computer of it was stolen, or if payments weren't made.

However, an add-on program called Detective Mode could log key strokes, capture screen shots and take photographs using a computer’s webcam, says the FTC in its complaint.

It also presented a fake software program registration screen that tricked consumers into providing their personal contact information.

The snaffled data included user names and passwords for email accounts, social media websites and financial institutions; Social Security numbers; medical records; private emails to doctors; bank and credit card statements; and webcam pictures of children, partially undressed people and sexual activity.

The rent-to-own companies are Aspen Way Enterprises, Watershed Development, Showplace, JAG Rents, Red Zone, B Stamper Enterprises and CALM Ventures. They've got off lightly, agreeing to stop using the data-collection software and to stop deceiving customers.

It's not the first time that a rental company has come under fire for using PC Rental Agent in this way. Last year, a Wyoming couple sued rental company Aaron's after discovering that their PC had been taking webcam pictures of them at home.
http://www.tgdaily.com/business-and-...in-their-homes





California Schools, Employers Banned from Social Media Snooping

Californians who use social media like Twitter and Facebook have a little more privacy protection from employers or universities who may want access to usernames or passwords after the governor signed two bills into law on Thursday.

Job applicants and employees will have protection from employers who demand their login credentials to social media platforms or personal e-mail accounts, according to one of the bills, authored by Assembly member Nora Campos, a Democrat from San Jose.

Employers are barred from firing or disciplining those who refuse to give up any information related to their social media accounts.

"The Golden State is pioneering the social media revolution and these laws will protect all Californians from unwarranted invasions of their personal social media accounts," Governor Jerry Brown said in a statement released after he shared the news on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media accounts.

Brown also signed a similar bill by state Senator Leland Yee, a Democrat from San Francisco, prohibiting colleges or universities from demanding user names, passwords, or other identifying information from students, prospective students and student groups.

That bill, according to Brown's office, came in response to a "growing trend" of schools "snooping into student social media accounts, particularly those of student athletes."

Both laws go into effect on January 1.

(Reporting by Mary Slosson; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Leslie Gevirtz)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...88Q1UI20120927





Facebook Raises Fears with Ad Tracking
Emily Steel, April Dembosky

Facebook is working with a controversial data company called Datalogix that can track whether people who see ads on the social networking site end up buying those products in stores.

Amid growing pressure for the social networking site to prove the value of its advertising, Facebook is gradually wading into new techniques for tracking and using data about users that raise concerns among privacy advocates.

"We kept hearing back [from marketers] that we needed to push further and help them do a better job," said Brad Smallwood, Facebook's head of measurement and insights.

Datalogix has purchasing data from about 70m American households largely drawn from loyalty cards and programmes at more than 1,000 retailers, including grocers and drug stores. By matching email addresses or other identifying information associated with those cards against emails or information used to establish Facebook accounts, Datalogix can track whether people bought a product in a store after seeing an ad on Facebook.

The emails and other identifying information are made anonymous and collected into groups of people who saw an ad and people who did not. Datalogix compiles a report for Facebook and its advertisers to measure which creative approaches and demographic targeting persuade people to buy specific products offline.

Facebook said it is paying Datalogix for the data-matching. So far, the two companies have measured 45 campaigns and in 70 per cent of cases, for every dollar a marketer spent on Facebook it earned an additional $3 in incremental sales, Mr Smallwood said.
Marketers are eager for more data to see how their Facebook ad campaigns perform, but some said they still are figuring out how to evaluate the new data. Ford said the information was promising, but a spokesman added that it was too early to give a formal opinion."

Some privacy advocates question whether the practice violates the $9.5m settlement Facebook struck with the US Federal Trade Commission over charges that it deceived consumers by not keeping privacy promises.

Facebook users are automatically included in the advertising studies conducted with Datalogix, and cannot directly opt out through their Facebook account. Instead, they must go to the Datalogix website, for which Facebook has a link posted in its help centre.

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a privacy group, said this practice does not provide Facebook users with sufficient control over their data or with transparency over how it is being used.

"We don't believe any of this online-offline data should be used without express consumer approval and an opt-in," he said.

Facebook and Datalogix said individual-level purchasing data were not shared with Facebook or its advertisers. Individual Facebook user data are not shared with advertisers. Facebook said it was working with an outside auditor to monitor its practices.
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/23/bu...ook-datalogix/





Why Do Not Track is Worse Than a Miserable Failure

Summary: As a consumer, you'd think that the meaning of "Do Not Track" is pretty clear. But the big data-collecting companies that are behind this standard seem intent on making sure it does nothing at all.
Ed Bott

In theory, Do Not Track is a brilliant idea.

It’s an elegant, simple bit of technology. A user-agent (typically a web browser, but it could be anything) that is compliant with the Do Not Track standard adds a tiny snippet of information in its header. DNT=1 means that the owner of that user-agent has expressed a desire that his or her online movements not be tracked.

Too bad it doesn’t work.

The trouble with this voluntary standard is that it requires good faith cooperation from the parties at the other end of the web connection. And those parties are actively subverting the intent of DNT, as I wrote about earlier this year. (See Do Not Track debate reveals cracks in online privacy consensus.)

As a consumer, you’d think that the meaning of “Do Not Track” is pretty clear. You’re making a polite request of the web sites and advertisers: “Don’t collect and store any information about me without my explicit permission.”

And yet, according to Sarah Downey, an attorney and privacy advocate who works for the online-privacy firm Abine, that’s not what’s happening.

Two big associations, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Digital Advertising Alliance, represent 90% of advertisers. Downey says those big groups have devised their own interpretation of Do Not Track. When the servers controlled by those big companies encounter a DNT=1 header, says Downey, "They have said they will stop serving targeted ads but will still collect and store and monetize data.”

That’s a perverse interpretation, and certainly isn’t what an ordinary consumer would expect. Indeed, some giant web properties have been more faithful to the spirit of the standard. Twitter, for example, has publicly stated that it supports Do Not Track:
When you turn on DNT in your browser, we stop collecting the information that allows us to tailor Twitter based on your recent visits to websites that have integrated our buttons or widgets. Specifically, we remove from your browser the unique cookie that links your browser to visits to websites in the Twitter ecosystem. We then cannot provide tailored suggestions for you. For more on how this works, see our privacy policy.

Further, we respect DNT preferences by turning off tailored suggestions by default…

The trouble is, Twitter is one of the few online properties that actually adheres to that common-sense interpretation of Do Not Track. The Associated Press made some noise last year when it publicly committed to implementing the DNT header on the 800 sites in it AP News Registry service. But that network’s privacy policy, which was updated in January 2012, doesn’t mention DNT at all and still includes an “Opt Out” button.

And if you think this is just about online advertising, think again. As privacy advocate Downey points out, “Tracking is happening at a scale and rate we've never seen before.” And your online activities are increasingly being correlated with your offline activity.

At the recent TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Robert Scoble reported approvingly about new apps that are using mobile devices to collect data about you:

Glympse‘s CEO, Bryan Trussel, told me his team develops its contextual mapping app on Android first, then moves it to iPhone. Why is this? …

Android lets developers have access to the dialer so that app developers can watch who calls you and who you call.

Android lets developers look at the wifi and bluetooth radios on the phone so app developers can build better systems to track where you are, who you are near, and whether you are near things like your car.

Yikes.

An enormous industry has grown out of collecting and collating online and offline data, run by companies that deliberately stay under the radar. But every so often, hints of a dark future appear. In the United States, political campaigns are eager to correlate your voter registration with your online activities:

Two digital ad firms that offer voter file-driven ad targeting are now part of [Facebook]'s growing group of third-party partners. … Both Intermarkets and CampaignGrid enable advertisers to target digital ads based on publicly-available national voter file data. Intermarkets partners with data powerhouse Aristotle to aim ads based on party affiliation and degree of voter activity in addition to information such as demographic info on gender and household income levels, and psychographic information.

[…]

Facebook's real-time bidding exchange opens the site up to a large pool of data for display ad targeting, but advertisers cannot combine native Facebook profile data with its partners' outside data, which would be sure to ruffle feathers among privacy advocates. Some observers, however, expect Facebook eventually to allow integration of its rich profile data with its partners' data, in part because the company is scrambling to attract more ad dollars and such an offering could command premium ad prices.

Even if you have Do Not Track turned on, that information will be collected and stored and used to create a profile of you that may or may not be accurate. That profile can be used by credit agencies, big corporations, and health insurance companies to make decisions about you that can literally affect your life and livelihood.

And it’s not just the tracking industry that is ignoring the intent of Do Not Track. The most recent version of the open-source web server Apache ignores the DNT header completely if you use Internet Explorer 10, as CNET’s Stephen Shankland reports:

Roy Fielding, an author of the Do Not Track (DNT) standard and principal scientist at Adobe Systems, wrote a patch for Apache that sets the Web server to disable DNT if the browser reaching it is Internet Explorer 10. "Apache does not tolerate deliberate abuse of open standards," Fielding titled the patch.

As a result of the Apache update, Web servers using the software will ignore DNT settings for people using IE10.

If you install Windows 8 and choose the custom setup option, one step allows you to enable Do Not Track in Internet Explorer. It’s a clear expression of your intent, and yet that header will be ignored by the software powering more than half the web servers in the world.

So, here's the depressing tl;dr version: To advertisers, “Do Not Track” doesn’t mean “Don’t track me.” It just means they should tone down the ads a bit. And even if you explicitly set the option in your browser, it might be ignored by a web server.

In the real world, Do Not Track is a cruel joke. The companies that are collecting and storing information about you will use their support of the standard for PR purposes and then ignore its intent.

Maybe the best thing to do is to let the standard die. Meanwhile, if you care about privacy, you should ignore Do Not Track and use tools that actively block the tracking industry. I'll have a closer look at some useful active privacy tools in a follow-up post.
http://www.zdnet.com/why-do-not-trac...re-7000004634/





U.S. and Russian Experts Turn Up Volume On Cybersecurity Alarms
Joseph Menn

Uncontrolled security threats on the Internet could return much of the planet to an era without electricity or automated transportation, top U.S. and Russian experts said on Thursday.

Former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden warned that the United States had yet to resolve basic questions about how to police the Internet, let alone how to defend critical infrastructure such as electric generation plants.

And if recently discovered and government-sponsored intrusion software proliferates in the same way that viruses have in the past, "somewhere in 2020, maybe 2040, we'll get back to a romantic time - no power, no cars, no trains," said Eugene Kaspersky, chief executive officer of Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, the largest privately held security vendor.

The back-to-back presentations at a Washington conference painted the starkest picture to date about the severity of the cybersecurity problem.

The past two years have seen an escalation of such warnings, especially about what U.S. officials have termed an unprecedented theft of trade secrets and. more lately, mounting threats to infrastructure.

At the same time, Congress failed last month to pass legislation aimed at protecting vital facilities, which Hayden bemoaned, and Kaspersky earlier this year detected extremely sophisticated surveillance programs that infiltrated personal computers and energy facilities in the Middle East.

If previous viruses were like bicycles, Kaspersky said, then the Stuxnet worm that damaged uranium enrichment centrifuges at the Natanz plant in Iran two years ago would be a plane, and the latest programs, dubbed Flame and Gauss, would be "space shuttles."

Researchers are still dissecting those heavily encrypted viruses. Kaspersky and others say they are related to Stuxnet, which officials have privately admitted was designed by U.S. and Israel intelligence forces.

But Kaspersky said Stuxnet, Flame and Gauss would become templates.

Although Stuxnet infected thousands of machines in friendly nations, it was written by cautious "professionals" who minimized collateral damage, Kaspersky said at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit at the National Press Club. The knock-off versions by others will be much less discriminating, he added.

To show how quickly computer attacks can proliferate, Kaspersky said an electronic assault that disabled thousands of computers at Saudi Arabia's Aramco in mid-August had followed a separate infection reported by an Iranian oil company a few months ago.

Mounting a defense against nation-sponsored attacks will be extraordinarily difficult, Kaspersky said, as it requires new operating systems designed to manage equipment at crucial facilities. He said stopping criminals and terrorists who will adopt the same techniques would take strong international cooperation and deeper monitoring of the Internet, which many oppose on privacy grounds.

"We need to upgrade our understanding that the world is different," Kaspersky said. "We need to pay more attention to the critical information technology security issues."

Yet Kaspersky and Hayden said international treaties or even nonbinding agreements were nowhere in sight.

What is more, Hayden said, both the divided U.S. Congress and even different agencies within the executive branch have failed to reach a consensus on fundamental concepts, in part because the issues are still so new.

A Senate bill backed by President Barack Obama would have set voluntary cybersecurity standards for critical plants and allowed for greater information-sharing between intelligence agencies and private companies. But the bill encountered opposition from both the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which objected to additional regulation, and the American Civil Liberties Union, which was worried about privacy issues.

The White House is now developing an executive order that would not go so far, but it still wants more powerful laws.

Even inside the administration, Hayden said, the Defense Department has defined cyberspace as a warfare domain that it must "dominate," while the Department of Homeland Security has publicly disagreed.

A core problem is that the same communications networks are used both for military operations and civilian transactions, which are protected from unreasonable searches.

While most Americans would welcome a local police officer shining a light at a shrub in their yard after seeing something suspicious, almost no one would feel the same way about questionable Internet activity.

The National Security Agency has the most advanced capabilities for cyberattacks and defense in the world, Hayden said.

"It is awesome," he said. "But nobody there has the authorization to defend you," because the NSA is generally barred from domestic eavesdropping.

As governments and companies recognize that they have all been hacked and focus more on limiting the damage from breaches, Hayden called for more extensive debate from civilians on how the United States should treat the Internet.

"You and I have not yet given our government guidance about what we want it to do," he said.

(Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...88Q1D320120927





The Internet? We Built That
Steven Johnson

Who created the Internet and why should we care? These questions, so often raised during the Bush-Gore election in 2000, have found their way back into the political debate this season — starting with one of the most cited texts of the preconvention campaign, Obama’s so-called “you didn’t build that” speech. “The Internet didn’t get invented on its own,” Obama argued, in the lines that followed his supposed gaffe. “Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.” In other words: business uses the Internet, but government made it happen.

About a week after Obama’s speech, The Wall Street Journal’s Gordon Crovitz took on those lines from Obama’s speech, claiming it was an “urban legend” that the government built the Internet. Credit for the early networking innovations, Crovitz argued, belonged to private-sector companies like Xerox and Apple. It was no accident, he observed, that the Net languished in relative obscurity for two decades until private corporations and venture capitalists turned their focus to it.

So what had once seemed to be a relatively stable narrative grounding has in recent months erupted with all sorts of political tremors. For most of the past two decades, the story of the Internet’s origins followed a fairly standardized plot: the Internet was originally developed by computer scientists whose research was heavily financed by the federal government, most notably through Darpa, the research arm of the Defense Department. Some narratives emphasized the decentralized network architecture designed by Paul Baran to survive a nuclear strike; others gave credit to the British programmer Tim Berners-Lee, whose World Wide Web gave the Internet a more accessible hypertextual layer. And of course there were all those Al Gore jokes.

The renewed political stakes in the details of this origin story are obvious. If you believe Big Government built the most important communications platform of our time, then that success is a powerful riposte to all the standard claims about bureaucratic inefficiencies and incompetence. Government might be able to out-innovate the private sector, given the right focus and commitment (and freedom from being beholden to stockholders). But if you believe that the Internet’s success is largely attributable to the private sector, all the usual libertarian homilies remain untarnished.

So was the Internet created by Big Government or Big Capital? The answer is: Neither. This is what’s most notable about the debate over the Net’s origins: it misses the most interesting part of the story. We live in a world that assumes that the most important and original products in society — bridges, cars, iPads, hospitals, 787s, houses — are created either by states or by corporations. And yet, against all odds, the Internet came from somewhere else entirely.

Like many of the bedrock technologies that have come to define the digital age, the Internet was created by — and continues to be shaped by — decentralized groups of scientists and programmers and hobbyists (and more than a few entrepreneurs) freely sharing the fruits of their intellectual labor with the entire world. Yes, government financing supported much of the early research, and private corporations enhanced and commercialized the platforms. But the institutions responsible for the technology itself were neither governments nor private start-ups. They were much closer to the loose, collaborative organizations of academic research. They were networks of peers.

Peer networks break from the conventions of states and corporations in several crucial respects. They lack the traditional economic incentives of the private sector: almost all of the key technology standards are not owned by any one individual or organization, and a vast majority of contributors to open-source projects do not receive direct compensation for their work. (The Harvard legal scholar Yochai Benkler has called this phenomenon “commons-based peer production.”) And yet because peer networks are decentralized, they don’t suffer from the sclerosis of government bureaucracies. Peer networks are great innovators, not because they’re driven by the promise of commercial reward but rather because their open architecture allows others to build more easily on top of existing ideas, just as Berners-Lee built the Web on top of the Internet, and a host of subsequent contributors improved on Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web.

Now imagine, for the sake of argument, that some Dr. Evil invented a kind of targeted magnetic-pulse device that could home in on peer-produced software; one push of the button, and every single line of code that had been created through open-source collaborative networks would instantly vanish. What would happen if that button were pushed?

For starters, the Internet and the Web would instantly evaporate. Every Android smartphone, every iPad, iPhone and Mac would go dark. A massive section of our energy infrastructure would cease to function. The global stock markets would go offline for weeks, if not longer. Planes would drop out of the sky. It would be an event on the scale of a world war or a pandemic.

In other words, it’s impossible to overstate the importance of peer production to the modern digital world. Peer networks created and maintain the Linux operating system on which Android smartphones are based; the UNIX kernel that Mac OS X and iOS devices use; and the Apache software that powers most Web servers in the world (not to mention the millions of entries that now populate Wikipedia). What sounds on the face of it like the most utopian of collectivist fantasies — millions of people sharing their ideas with no ownership claims — turns out to have made possible the communications infrastructure of our age.

It’s not enough to say that peer networks are an interesting alternative to states and markets. The state and the market are now fundamentally dependent on peer networks in ways that would have been unthinkable just 20 years ago.

Why is this distinction worth making? Why should we avoid the easy explanations of a government-built Internet versus one animated by private-sector entrepreneurs?

One reason is that there is a growing number of individuals and organizations who believe the digital success of peer networks can be translated into the “real” world. Peer networks laid the foundation for the scientific revolution during the Enlightenment, via the formal and informal societies and coffeehouse gatherings where new research was shared. The digital revolution has made it clear that peer networks can work wonders in the modern age. New organizations are using peer-network approaches to attack low-tech problems. Consider the way Kickstarter has used networks of smaller funders to help solve the problem of supporting creative projects. Only three years old, Kickstarter is now on track to distribute more money this year than the National Endowment for the Arts.

But there is another, more subtle reason to stress the peer-network version of the Internet’s origins. We have an endless supply of folklore about heroic entrepreneurs who changed the world with their vision and their force of will. But as a society we lack master narratives of creative collaboration.

When we talk about change being driven by mass collaboration, it’s often in the form of protest movements: civil rights or marriage equality. That’s a tradition worth celebrating, but it’s only part of the story. The Internet (and all the other achievements of peer networks) is not a story about changing people’s attitudes or widening the range of human tolerance. It’s a story, instead, about a different kind of organization, neither state nor market, that actually builds things, creating new tools that in turn enhance the way states and markets work.

In the lines that followed his “you didn’t build that” comment, Obama managed to champion a collaborative ethos in much more eloquent terms: “The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires. So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country: you know what, there are some things we do better together.”

Obama is right, of course; life is full of things we do better together. But what the Internet and its descendants teach us is that there are now new models for doing things together, success stories that prove convincingly that you don’t need bureaucracies to facilitate public collaboration, and you don’t need the private sector to innovate.

That should be the story we tell our kids when they ask who invented the Internet. Yes, we should tell them about the long-view government spending that paid the initial salaries, and the entrepreneurs who figured out a way to make the new medium commercially viable. But we shouldn’t bury the lead. The Internet was built, first and foremost, by another network, this one made up not of servers but of human minds: open, decentralized, peer.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/m...uilt-that.html





EPB Throws Down the Speed Gauntlet in Chattanooga
Ellis Smith

EPB has upgraded almost all of its customers to faster Internet speeds -- for free.

The city-owned utility eliminated its slowest 30-megabit-per-second tier completely, and added a new 250-megabit-per-second tier for its high-end users as a celebration of its third year in the market.

With the announcement, EPB's new minimum speed of 50 megabits per second is now faster than the top speed of most Internet service providers, said Jack Studer, a partner at The Lamp Post Group.

"Fifteen or 30 [mbps] is where it usually tops out," Studer said. "For 50 to be what every Joe Blow gets who signs up for Internet, that's pretty compelling."

Speeds increased by 60 percent for basic customers, doubled for mid-range customers and increased by 250 percent for high-end customers.

"We have a lot of bandwidth, and we want to see our community set itself apart as a really good place for technology business," said Harold DePriest, president and CEO of EPB. "Those types of businesses like speed."

The upgrade, which EPB did not announce until after it was complete, came as the city-owned utility passed 40,000 fiber customers in the Chattanooga-area market. In its original business plan, EPB had projected a loss of $8 million in its third year, but actually made $4 million as of Saturday, DePriest said.

"I prefer to do something and then tell people about it, rather than talk about what we're going to do in the future," DePriest said. "We thought it was a nice little birthday present as well."

Joe Ferguson, chairman of EPB's board, said the upgrade proved Chattanooga's fiber network "has long legs."

"If you're working on new things, developing new applications, then this is the place to be," Ferguson said. "We want this to be the place to create jobs and create wealth."

Comcast, the utility's chief Chattanooga rival, responded to the announcement by calling attention to Xfinity's programming choices, which currently dwarf anything available from any other provider, said Jim Weigert, vice president and general manager at Comcast Chattanooga.

"I was able to watch the first Mocs game on my phone at Riverfront Nights just a few weeks ago," Weigert said.

Though Comcast offers download speeds up to 105 megabits per second for $200, its 50-megabit plan is now almost twice as expensive as EPB's equivalent plan, according to the Xfinity website.

However, Comcast also offers services ranging from home security and automation to mobile integration that are not available from other providers.

"We think our products and services still provide the best value to what customers want and really need, and we are seeing customers respond by signing up for new services and even coming back after trying other new providers."
real world speeds

The impact of EPB's upgrade may not be apparent in the normal course of sending an email or checking fantasy football scores, but it is especially significant for video and gaming applications, said Aaron Welch, president of Iron Gamer.

"The vast majority of the country is still in the 20 megs or less range," Welch said.

At the speeds available in Chattanooga, customers can watch multiple HD video streams in different rooms, Welch said, or play cloud-based online games.

"With 50 megs, your game doesn't disconnect, your movements are a lot smoother, and the gameplay itself is a lot smoother," he said. "It's not so much the faster speed, it's a much bigger pipe."

EPB also slashed the price of its gigabit Internet speeds -- the fastest in the western hemisphere -- by $50 to $300.

Though the gigabit service is available to all EPB's 170,000 Chattanooga-area customers, the utility has racked up only a few dozen subscribers since it unveiled the service in September 2010. The price cut could attract a wider audience to the blistering-fast speeds, said Ronna-Renee Jackson, interim executive director of the Chattanooga Technology Council.

"I think they're heading in the right direction to make it more affordable for everybody in Chattanooga," Jackson said.

For city boosters like Jackson, EPB's gigabit Internet is a key building block in Chattanooga's plan to attract new talent, especially technologically-sophisticated entrepreneurs.

"We're trying to create a culture here where developers want to come here because there's something here they don't have anywhere else," Jackson said.

But competitors are emerging. Google is breathing down Chattanooga's neck, as the web search giant installs its own citywide network in Kansas City. That network will be free for most customers -- outside of a $300 installation charge -- and gigabit service will cost $70 per month.

But not until the Kansas City network is complete. Currently, Google is still in the planning stages, and the company has not revealed when it will become available.
http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2...peed-gauntlet/





Dish Network Launches Nationwide Satellite Broadband Service with ViaSat, Hughes, Calls it dishNET

Dish Network's nationwide satellite brodband service could be ready to launch soon
Daniel Cooper

Dish Network's long-gestating tie-up with ViaSat and Hughes has finally arrived under the name dishNET. Sounding like an implement you'd use to clean dirty dinner plates, the nationwide satellite broadband service launches from October 1st, targeting customers in rural areas that are underserved with fixed line gear. $40 a month gets you 5 Mbps down / 1Mbps up with a 10GB data cap, while subscribers can get a $10 discount if they pick up a TV package at the same time. We asked the company if this was related to the service based upon its spectrum purchases that was hinted at back in August, and it confirmed this is just leveraging ViaSat Exede and HughesNet.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/27/d...twork-dishnet/





New Limits Considered in Airwaves
Edward Wyatt

From East Hampton to Malibu, the only limit on how much beachfront property one can own is usually however much one can afford.

Not so in the air across the continent, where the Federal Communications Commission has long set limits on how much of the airwaves one company can control.

Now, pushed by small and medium-size telecommunications companies, the government plans to begin setting new rules to govern how much of the airwaves, or spectrum, a single carrier can hold. A big goal for those small companies, which compete with the behemoths Verizon and AT&T, is a measure that would give greater importance to so-called beachfront spectrum.

Those are the highly sought-after airwaves that travel farther between antennas and pass more easily through buildings, making them especially attractive in urban areas where the largest, most profitable clusters of mobile device users congregate.

It may sound esoteric, but the issue is known to every cellphone user who has experienced a dropped call or a smartphone browser stuck endlessly loading a Web page. After years of limiting companies to no more than one-third of the available airwaves in a given territory, the F.C.C. on Friday will begin the rule-making process on whether new technologies require limits to be redrawn, recalibrated or perhaps removed.

The F.C.C.’s decision, which probably will not be final for about a year, will have broad effects on consumers and companies. It plays a part in another matter the agency is expected to consider on Friday: rules for auctioning off newly reclaimed airwaves.

In that effort, the commission is aiming to take back portions of the airwaves used by the military or by television broadcasters, offering cash incentives for companies or other groups to give up their spectrum. Those airwaves would be auctioned, with a portion of the proceeds going back to the original license holder.

By giving more weight to the best-performing spectrum, the F.C.C.’s overall limits could increase competition by restricting the big companies from buying too much of the airwaves, said Matt Wood, policy director for Free Press, a consumer advocacy group. “It is not the sheer amounts that matter,” he said. “It is where it is located on the radio dial that makes certain spectrum more valuable to a wireless company’s business.”

Some wireless company executives disagree, saying that the fact that some airwaves can travel farther than others is meaningless in a large city like New York, where so many users are congregated that a company already has to put in extra towers to keep airwaves from being overloaded. Overloading, of course, results in dropped calls.

Nevertheless, the quest for new rules is being welcomed by large and small mobile phone companies alike, each looking for a competitive advantage. Public interest groups that often oppose the companies’ efforts to trade spectrum also favor changes.

“There are a lot of competing interests here,” said Walter G. D. Reed, a partner at Edwards Wildman Palmer in Providence, R.I., who has worked on telecommunications issues. And the F.C.C.’s challenge is how to allow companies like AT&T and Verizon expand their businesses while ensuring that smaller carriers do not get shut out.

Wireless industry executives say that they would welcome almost any new standards because that would remove the uncertainty cast by the agency’s past practice of weighing potential spectrum deals case by case.

“Spectrum policy in this country needs to be built on a full factual record and rational economic policy,” Joan Marsh, vice president for federal regulatory issues at AT&T, said in an interview. “Carriers need a clear and reliable understanding of when and under what circumstances spectrum acquisitions will be permitted, something we do not have today. This proceeding will provide the vehicle to meet both goals, and take spectrum policy out of merger-specific proceedings and place it in an industrywide rule-making, subject to judicial review.”

The F.C.C. staff has circulated its proposals to the five-member commission, but the agency would not discuss the possible outcomes before the Friday meeting.

“The FCC’s goal in reviewing its spectrum holding policies is to enable a healthy and competitive wireless marketplace with clear and predictable rules of the road, so that providers can serve the needs of the growing number of mobile Internet consumers,” Tammy Sun, an F.C.C. spokeswoman, said in a written statement.

The issue of whether to revise spectrum restrictions arose during the commission’s debate over whether to approve AT&T’s proposed acquisition of T-Mobile last year, and again during its consideration this summer of Verizon’s purchase of spectrum assets from cable companies.

Verizon’s purchase was cleared but only after it was forced to sell some spectrum to maintain wireless competition in certain areas. AT&T’s dropped its effort to buy T-Mobile after the Justice Department and the F.C.C. both objected, saying it involved an overly large concentration of spectrum.

As part of those proceedings, companies like Sprint Nextel and industry associations like the Rural Telecommunications Group advocated for change in the F.C.C.’s control standards.

The best airwaves for mobile phone companies are low on the electromagnetic spectrum, around 700 megahertz. Airwaves higher on the spectrum can carry more data — an important characteristic in the age of video-playing smartphones — but the signals cannot go as far and therefore require more towers.

“Because of the physical characteristics of spectrum at various places in the electromagnetic spectrum, it makes no sense to use a spectrum screen that considers one megahertz to be equal to another megahertz in a completely different band,” Sprint Nextel said in a commission filing that opposed the recent Verizon deal.

F.C.C. officials say they hope to complete the new screening limits in time to use them in the incentive auctions, which probably will not take place for two years at least. Those auctions “will drive faster speeds, greater capacity and ubiquitous mobile coverage,” Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman, said this month in announcing the F.C.C.’s spectrum agenda. “As smartphones and tablets proliferate, the opportunities to benefit consumers and businesses become clearer every day.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/26/b...companies.html





Cellphones Are Eating the Family Budget
Anton Troianovski

Families across America have cut back on food, clothes and entertainment to make room for ever-higher phone bills. Now, carriers are betting that they can push that bill even higher, as Anton Troianovski explains on The News Hub. Photo: Bloomberg.

Heidi Steffen and her husband used to treat themselves most weeks to steak at Sodak Shores, a restaurant overlooking a lake near their hometown of Milbank, S.D. Then they each got an iPhone, and the rib-eyes started making fewer appearances.

"Every weekend, we'd do something," said Ms. Steffen, a registered nurse whose husband works at a tire shop. "Now maybe once every month or two, we get out."

More than half of all U.S. cellphone owners carry a device like the iPhone, a shift that has unsettled household budgets across the country. Government data show people have spent more on phone bills over the past four years, even as they have dialed back on dining out, clothes and entertainment—cutbacks that have been keenly felt in the restaurant, apparel and film industries.

The tug of war is only going to get more intense. Wireless carriers are betting they can pull bills even higher by offering faster speeds on expensive new networks and new usage-based data plans. The effort will test the limits of consumer spending as the draw of new technology competes with cellphone owners' more rudimentary needs and desires.

So far, telecom is winning. Labor Department data released Tuesday show spending on phone services rose more than 4% last year, the fastest rate since 2005. During and after the recession, consumers cut back broadly on their spending.

People tend to move out to the suburbs for a yard, the quality of the school districts, or to afford a bigger house than they can in the city. MarketWatch's Christopher Noble and Laura Mandaro discuss a new list of the top 10 best places to live for suburbanites.

But as more people paid up for $200 smartphones and bills that run around $100 a month, the average household's annual spending on telephone services rose to $1,226 in 2011 from $1,110 in 2007, when Apple Inc.'s iPhone first appeared.

Families with more than one smartphone are already paying much more than the average—sometimes more than $4,000 a year—easily eclipsing what they pay for cable TV and home Internet.

The trend has been a boon for companies like Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc. U.S. wireless carriers brought in $22 billion in revenue selling services such as mobile email and Web browsing in 2007, according to analysts at UBS AG. By 2011, data revenue had jumped to $59 billion. By 2017, UBS expects carriers to be pulling in an additional $50 billion a year.

But the question for the industry is how much bigger bills can get before the cuts in other parts of the family budget grow too painful.

Melinda Tuers, an accounting clerk at a high school in Redlands, Calif., said she already pays close to $300 a month for her family's four smartphones. She and her husband have cut back on dining out, special events and concerts to make room for the bigger phone bill.

Her household may soon have an even bigger hole to fill. Two of the Tuers's smartphones are on unlimited data plans, meaning she pays the same price no matter how much she surfs the Web. She has taken advantage of that freedom to watch TV shows such as "Covert Affairs" and "Grey's Anatomy" on her phone almost every day.

Ms. Tuers now wants to replace those three-year-old smartphones. But her carrier, Verizon, announced this summer that customers would have to give up unlimited data plans if they want to upgrade their phones at the subsidized price.

Ms. Tuers figures that she and her husband would need to scrape together more than $1,000 to pay full price for two new high-end phones or settle for one of Verizon's tiered-data plans, which she fears would cost a lot more given her video habit.

Streaming 30 minutes of video per day over a 4G connection and doing nothing else on her phone would cost Ms. Tuers roughly $120 a month on one of Verizon's new data plans, according to the carrier's website.

Carriers fully expect people to use more data and pay more for it. "Speed entices more usage," Verizon Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo said at an investor conference last week, according to a transcript. "The more data they consume, the more they will have to buy."

But some question where the money for that data will come from. Americans spent $116 more a year on telephone services in 2011 than they did in 2007, according to the Labor Department, even as total household expenditures increased by just $67.

Meanwhile, spending on food away from home fell by $48, apparel spending declined by $141, and entertainment spending dropped by $126. The figures aren't adjusted for inflation.

The increase in telephone-services spending masks an even higher rise in cellphone bills, because people have been paying less for landline service.

Much of the revenue growth that industry executives and investors are hoping for is likely to come from higher-income households that do have the money to spend more on wireless data. But the wireless industry also generates a lot of revenue from lower-income users.

Almost nine in 10 of all U.S. adults have a cellphone, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Middle-income consumers increased their telephone spending in 2011 by $59, almost as much as the $64 in additional telephone spending by the 20% of consumers with the highest incomes, according to the Labor Department data.

As wireless service gets more expensive, the trade-offs become more painful. That could threaten to further crimp consumer spending elsewhere—or slow the upward swing in consumer spending on wireless.

That trend is evident in the home of 40-year-old Scott Boedie, a neighborhood service representative for a cable company.

Mr. Boedie said he and his wife now pay $200 a month for cellphone service, up by about $50 from early last year, even as they have managed to cut spending on groceries by shopping at discount chain Aldi and on "fun stuff" by going out to dinner and movies less often.

Looking over the family budget on Sunday night, Mr. Boedie said, his wife marveled at how much of it was going to the phone company.

"It stinks," Mr. Boedie said. "I guess it's the cost of modern-day America now."
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/...jAyODY3Wj.html





Why Your Phone, Cable & Internet Bills Cost So Much
Stacy Curtin

The U.S. has fallen behind much of the Western world when it comes to phone, cable and Internet service. Americans actually pay much more for inferior service compared to their global counterparts.

In his new book, The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use 'Plain English' to Rob You Blind, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Cay Johnston highlights these astounding facts:

• Americans pay four times as much as the French for an Internet triple-play package—phone, cable TV and Internet—at an average of $160 per month versus $38 per month.
• The French get global free calling and worldwide live television. Their Internet is also 10 times faster at downloading information and 20 times faster uploading it.
• America has gone from #1 in Internet speed (when we invented it) to 29th in the world and falling.
• Bulgaria is among the countries with faster Internet service.
• Americans pay 38 times as much as the Japanese for Internet data.

Since the mid-1970's when Ma Bell was cited as holding a monopoly over phone service, Americans have been told more competition would lower their phone bill. But the promise of lower prices has actually led to higher prices, says Johnston.

In his book, he tells of a woman who in 1984 paid $9.51 for her local phone service. He writes:

"By 2003 her bill had swollen fourfold to $38.90. In the two decades since the breakup of the AT&T monopoly, even after adjusting for inflation, [her] telephone cost $2.30 for each dollar paid in 1984. And that was without any charges for long-distance calls."

Not only have prices increased, phone service providers now charge fees for everything, including options that used to be free, such as directory service. Bills have also become increasingly complicated. A poll of 1,000 people found that only three people actually knew how to read their statement. That means virtually no one understands their phone bill in its entirety.

Of cable service Johnston writes:

"Since 1995, average cable prices have been rising 2.6 times faster than the cost of living, reaching an average of almost $53 a month for basic, no frill service in 2009, FCC reports show....

According to SNL Kagan, a market research firm, the average cable bill in 2011 was $78, almost double the price of $40 in 2001 and significantly higher than the FCC figure.

How did this happen?

"The telecos got the rules changed while we weren't watching," says Johnston in the accompanying interview. Basically, the phone and cable companies lobbied Washington to change laws and regulations to favor their business over their customers.

And remember the so-called "Information Superhighway"?

Over the course of the last 20 years, nearly $500 billion has been collected by the telecom companies to (allegedly) bring America into the 21st century with an "Information Superhighway," says Johnston. That works out ot $3,000 per household to have access to high-speed Internet.

But America did not get what it was promised and much of the country will never get fiber optic lines, Johnston tells The Daily Ticker. And even in cities that do have the faster service, the service is not always accessible.

"This is terrible for commerce and our economic future," says Johnston, adding that our global competitors are investing in the proper infrastructure.

"The companies essentially have a business model that is antithetical to economic growth," he says. "Profits go up if they can provide slow Internet at super high prices."

The relationship between phone and cable providers has essentially become a cartel, says Johnston, who cites the relationship between Verizon and Comcast.

He writes:

Verizon announced in 2008 that it would stop building out its FiOS (fiber-optic system) once it reaches about 16 million of America's 100 million households....

Instead, it has made deals with Comcast to sell its services using Comcast cables. Verizon said it anticipates similar deals with other cable providers to sell of their systems.

In terms of phone service, what America really got was a duopoly, says Johnston, noting that AT&T and Verizon control 60% of phone service in America.
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily...130914030.html





Insight: Italy's Slow Internet Set for Reboot
Danilo Masoni and Leila Abboud

IMM Hydraulics, a small exporter of hoses for industries such as agriculture and mining, is the kind of firm that should be at the center of Italy's efforts to rekindle its stagnant economy.

Instead, the company, located in the Abruzzo region of central Italy, is wrestling with a basic impediment to profitability: a woefully slow broadband connection. With just 2 megabits (MB) per second, IMM Hydraulics' broadband connection lags behind the 5 MB typical in Italian cities, which in turn is well behind an average of 12 MB in France and 16 MB in Germany.

"It takes us days to process an order whereas it could take half an hour," said finance director Marcello Di Campli. "Broadband is one of our biggest problems, probably just after our access to credit."

Europe's fourth-largest economy has long been an Internet laggard, its creaky networks stunting the development of online commerce and banking. Italians pay among the highest prices in Europe for broadband speeds on a par with Estonia or Cyprus. As a result, only half the population uses the Internet at least once a week and Italian firms generate 5.4 percent of sales on-line compared to 13.9 percent elsewhere in Europe.

Now the reformist government of Prime Minister Mario Monti has identified better broadband as a national priority to spur growth and reduce Italy's 11 percent unemployment and bulging deficits.

"The statistics on e-commerce are chilling ... The broadband gap constrains growth by reducing the competitiveness of export-oriented companies," said Paolo Gentiloni, former communications minister and member of a group of deputies that has made proposals to support online commerce and government services.

In the government's sights is one-time monopoly Telecom Italia, which it believes has long thwarted competition and put off investing in its domestic network because of its huge debts.

Monti's government has enlisted state-backed finance body Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP) to work out a plan with Telecom Italia and its rivals to create a nationwide super-fast fiber optic broadband network.

One of the most radical options under discussion is for Telecom Italia to spin off its existing network of decades-old copper lines - worth between 9 and 15 billion euros - into a separate company that would run Italy's fixed telephone and broadband system and sell capacity to other Internet providers on a wholesale basis. The new "access network company" could be partly state-owned and would have more incentive to invest in broadband, say advocates, because it would have neither debt to pay nor market share to defend.

Such a move would amount to something of a revolution in Europe and would test whether the state can be more effective than the private sector in building national broadband infrastructure.

Australia's government provided the blue-print in 2009 when, frustrated with the slow pace of investment, it became the first country to create a national company charged with building a single open access fiber broadband network to 90 percent of homes by 2021. Britain adopted a slightly different approach, requiring BT Group to create a separate subsidiary to sells wholesale access to competitors and build fiber broadband across the country.

TO SPLIT OR NOT TO SPLIT

Telecom Italia, like other former telecom monopolies in Europe, owns the last meters of copper lines to homes and businesses, which it then rents out to competitors - mobile operators Vodafone, Wind, and Hutchison's 3 - for a monthly fee set by regulators.

In Italy and elsewhere, it is these decades-old copper lines that need to be replaced by fiber optic wires to boost broadband speeds to up to 100 megabits per second. Updating those wires will cost 200 billion euros, says the European Commission, a sum telecom operators will struggle to mobilize.

Italy can't just issue orders to Telecom Italia because the company is no longer owned by the state but by individual shareholders and a consortium of three Italian banks and Telefonica. So government officials are using other ways to persuade it.

After months of fruitless negotiations between Telecom Italia chairman Franco Bernabe and CDP head Franco Bassanini, the state pledged to invest up to 500 million euro in Metroweb, a competing fiber broadband project in Italy's north, to up the pressure, a source close to the Metroweb group said.

Bassanini told Reuters that the CDP was "absolutely open to finding an agreement" and that talks with Telecom Italia were ongoing on "a broader hypothesis" than just the Metroweb investment. He acknowledged that the creation of a combined network company that merged all the current Italian network assets would be "highly sensitive" for Telecom Italia.

According to a person close to Telecom Italia, the CDP has hired Deutsche Bank to analyze the value of its network in preparation for hiving it off.

The pressure is taking effect: Telecom Italia is debating the spin-off idea internally and Bernabe has promised a decision by the end of this year.

Telecom Italia has also agreed to share some infrastructure with rival broadband provider Fastweb and to co-ordinate the rollouts of their respective fiber networks in a bid to cut costs - a deal that could make negotiations over a broader nationwide project easier, analysts say.

But Telecom Italia executives are divided over whether spinning off its fixed network is wise, said two people close to the company. Chief Executive Marco Patuano is backing the move because he believes the infrastructure's value will decline with the advent of super-fast mobile technology known as LTE, as well as competing fiber projects in Italy.

By contrast Bernabe believes owning the last meters of copper into people's homes represents a competitive advantage since rivals must pay to access it to be able to offer broadband to their customers. He has repeatedly said Telecom Italia will not do anything to lose control over its network.

UPGRADE STRATEGIES

Governments around the world are trying different strategies to upgrade their systems.

The United States is relying solely on competition in the private sector while Japan and Korea have ploughed public money into building nationwide fiber-optic networks, a task made easier by dense urban geography. Sweden and Norway became European leaders in fibre-optic broadband penetration via a mixture of tax breaks, subsidies for rural deployments, and in Sweden's case, requiring state-owned municipal utilities to create local networks.

Although it is early to judge Australia's nationwide fibre project, Britain's effective separation of BT in 2005 has taken the country from the middle of Europe's rankings on broadband speeds, cost and usage to near the top.

In the European Union, telecom operators and policymakers have spent the past year fighting. Operators argue they shouldn't have to share the new networks with rivals if they are to bear the cost of building them alone. The wrangling has contributed to upgrade delays in Italy and elsewhere.

Brussels now says member states will not be required to make the operators share fibre networks and has given operators free rein to choose what technology to deploy, in a regulatory framework that will operate to at least 2020.

Crucially, regulators will no longer set the prices at which incumbents sell wholesale access to smaller competitors on new fibre networks, so long as incumbents offer "equivalent" prices to everyone.

Gabrielle Gauthey, a former telecoms regulator in France who now works at Alcatel-Lucent, argues governments have a role to play in enabling adequate broadband coverage.

"Many telcos just don't have the money to invest the sums that are needed," said Gauthey. "It's a massive effort not unlike electrifying a whole country."

A network spin-off could help Telecom Italia reach its debt reduction targets and cut its 30.4 billion euro debt pile - and the operator seems to be seriously considering the idea. In a recent presentation to investors at a Sanford Bernstein conference, Telecom Italia said the rewards of a separating out its fixed network now outweighed the risks.

A banker close to Telecom Italia put the probability of the group going through with the spin-off at 70 percent, and two other banking sources say the company is considering appointing two banks to advise it on the mechanics.

A decision can't come soon enough for businessmen like Siro Badon, who owns a business in a shoe manufacturing district near Venice where local companies export 92 percent of the 20 million pairs of shoes made every year.

"Some companies in our district work with brands like Louis Vuitton and Armani with stylists in Paris and all over the world. Imagine the huge damage it causes not being able to communicate swiftly," Badon said.

"Sometimes I feel we are carrying an old country on our shoulders. I wait and hope."

(Editing by Sophie Walker)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...88P0EN20120926





Wozniak Likes NBN so Much, He’s Applying for Citizenship
Negar Salek

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has listed the rollout of a national broadband network as one of the reasons he wants to become an Australian.

Mr Wozniak told The Australian Financial Review in Sydney that he had spoken to Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and was in support of the federal government’s fibre rollout.

“I spoke to him and they plan to roll it out to everyone in the country,” Mr Wozniak said.

“I support it very much. It’s one of the reasons why I actually like this country and want to become a citizen. I live in a country where we don’t have any regulation of telecommunications.”

In Australia for the launch of the Apple iPhone 5 last week, Wozniak told Brisbane’s 4BC breakfast radio that he was “underway to become an Australian citizen”.

“It turns out I can keep my American citizenship. I intend to call myself an Australian and feel an Australian, and study the history and become as much of a real citizen here as I can.”

Despite his status as a technology icon, Mr Wozniak said he was not connected to a broadband service in his home in California, classing the options available to him as a “monopoly”. “There’s only one set of wires to be on and I’m not going to pull strings to get them to do something special for me,” he said. “When I worked at Hewlett-Packard we treated ourselves like a family and protecting each other and I believe in that.

“I’ve sat with our FCC [Federal Communications Commission] commissioner and told him that story in his office, but it’s not going to happen. We just don’t have the political idea to bring broadband to all the people who are 1 kilometre too far away.”

Mr Wozniak was in Sydney to meet customers and partners of his employer, server-based flash manufacturer Fusion-io, a NYSE-listed technology company that speeds up traditional access to data.

It boasts Facebook and Apple as large global clients and Woolworths and Westpac as local customers.

“I’m not an expert on banking but bankers have told us how important this technology is to them and it is one of our big customer areas,” he said. “Some success in banking is all done in computers nowadays, not through humans, and milliseconds matter, the speed of transactions matter to them.”

Mr Wozniak co-founded Apple – the world’s most valuable company – with Steve Jobs in 1976 and created the original Apple computer. A philanthropist and author, the tech guru has amassed a global fan base since leaving Apple in 1987.

He said Silicon Valley was today abuzz with start-up activity, defying US economic woes. “There’s a lot going on right now in Silicon Valley; the recession aspects just really don’t hit us at all.” He said he would help young start-ups, time permitting.

“I’m just meeting people when I can, really young entrepreneurs, just inspiring them. I’m incredibly busy just speaking around the world on many different topics,” he said.

In a visit earlier this year he told the AFR he feared the torrent of intellectual property lawsuits being filed by companies such as Apple, Samsung, Google, HTC and Nokia because they could prevent future entrepreneurs from treading a path to technology fortune.

“I care so much about the young person that has some technical knowledge and want to start their own business,” he said.

A true gadget enthusiast, Mr Wozniak lined up outside the Apple store in Chermside in suburban Brisbane on Friday to buy the iPhone 5 where he tweeted: “In line for first iPhone 5’s in the world! (@ Apple Store w/ 2 others).”
http://www.afr.com/p/technology/wozn...pS2PvD55EJ4eoL





Australians Surge in Quest for New Class of Computer
John Markoff

In an article that appeared on Thursday in the journal Nature, a team of Australian and British scientists, led from the University of New South Wales, reported that they had successfully constructed one of the basic building blocks of modern quantum computing by relying on manufacturing techniques now used by the modern semiconductor industry.

Quantum computing will potentially lead to a new generation of supercomputers that are not intended to replace today’s machines but will instead open new computing vistas, from drug and material design to code breaking, by offering speed to address a new class of problems.

“We are used to designing cars and airplanes with computers,” said Andrew Dzurak, a physicist who is director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility and lead researcher on the latest advance. “Imagine if you could start building your molecule or your material on a computer and then completely simulate its behavior.”

The basic building blocks of quantum computers are quantum bits, or “qubits.” Unlike today’s digital computers, which process information in a binary fashion based on logic states of “on” and “off,” a qubit can for brief periods represent multiple states simultaneously. Potentially, this means it is possible to tackle vast new problems by performing parallel computations using a relatively small set of qubits — perhaps as few as several hundred. The advance by Dr. Dzurak’s team involves placing a single electron — embedded in a silicon chip — in a “quantum state,” and then repeatedly measuring the state.

In February, a second group based at the University of New South Wales published an article in the journal Nature Nanotechnology reporting their advance: the construction of a single-atom transistor using a different but related design approach.

In both cases, the research teams are international. There is an increasing awareness, however, that Australian scientists have made significant advances this year toward this long-promised new type of computing.

While there is a growing consensus among scientists that working quantum computers will emerge during this decade, there is also a growing belief that they will not replace the conventional computers that are now carried in the pockets of more than half the world’s population. For one thing, most of the quantum computing approaches only worked when temperatures were cooled to near absolute zero.

Though there are only a handful of workable algorithms designed to run on quantum computers, scientists say their application may prove vastly more useful than today’s technology in simulating a wide variety of biological, chemical and physical systems. That means they could become the standard tool for a wide range of new industries, like drug and material design.

The achievements of the two teams is a payoff from an investment the Australian government began making in the 1990s.

“Both groups are highly competitive and leading in the world in what they do,” said Gerhard Klimeck, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue, who has collaborated with both groups and was a co-author of the Nature Nanotechnology paper.

Dr. Dzurak’s group’s work contrasts with a research team led by Michelle Simmons, director of the ARC Center for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at the University of New South Wales. That group has taken an approach based on placing individual atoms using a scanning tunneling microscope, allowing great precision in building devices on an atomic scale.

The team led by Dr. Dzurak uses conventional semiconductor techniques to implant a phosphorus atom just 10 to 15 nanometers below the surface of a silicon chip. That approach has the twin advantages of using industry standards and potentially extending the individual electron’s duration in a quantum state.

The United States has federally financed, corporate and university research efforts under way to design usable quantum computers. I.B.M., for example, recently expanded its research at its Almaden laboratory in California.

Andreas Heinrich, a physicist who is a quantum researcher at I.B.M., pointed out that neither Australian group had shown the ability to interconnect multiple qubits. That capability is necessary for a quantum computer.

Dr. Dzurak said he believed that capability could be achieved as soon as a year from now.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/29/t...-computer.html





Foxconn China Plant Closes After Clash Involving 2,000
Clare Jim

Taiwan's Foxconn Technology Group, which assembles Apple's iPhones and makes components for top global electronics companies, closed a plant in China on Monday after about 2,000 workers were involved in a brawl at a company dormitory.

It was not clear how long the shutdown would last at the plant, which employs about 79,000 people in the northern Chinese city of Taiyuan, while police and company officials investigate the cause of the disturbance.

Foxconn said the trouble started with a personal row that blew up into a brawl. But some people posting messages on a Twitter-like site said factory guards had beaten workers and that sparked the melee.

"The plant is closed today for investigation," Foxconn spokesman Louis Woo told Reuters. An employee contacted by telephone said the closure could last two or three days.

Pictures from just outside the plant and provided to Reuters showed broken windows at a building by an entrance gate and a line of olive-colored paramilitary police trucks parked inside the factory grounds.

The unrest is the latest in a string of incidents at plants run by Foxconn, the trading name of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co and the world's largest contract maker of electronic goods. Hon Hai's Taipei-listed shares fell 1 percent on Monday in a broader market that rose 0.2 percent.

Drawing attention as a supplier and assembler for Apple products, the company has faced accusations of poor conditions and mistreatment of workers at its operations in China, where it employs about 1 million workers.

The company has been spending heavily in recent months to improve working conditions and to raise wages.

Foxconn said in a statement the incident escalated from what it called a personal dispute between several employees at around 11 p.m. on Sunday in a privately managed dormitory, and was brought under control by police at around 3 a.m.

"The cause of this dispute is under investigation by local authorities and we are working closely with them in this process, but it appears not to have been work-related," Foxconn said. Hon Hai said about 2,000 workers were involved.

Comments posted online, however, suggested security guards may have been to blame.

In a posting on the Chinese Twitter-like microblog site Sina Weibo, user "Jo-Liang" said that four or five security guards beat a worker almost to death.

"FRUSTRATION"

Another user, "Fan de Sa Hai", quoted a friend from Taiyuan as saying guards beat up two workers from Henan province and in response, other workers set bed quilts on fire and tossed them out of dormitory windows.

The accounts could not be independently confirmed.

The state-run Xinhua news agency quoted a senior official with the Taiyuan city government as saying investigators initially determined the fight broke out as workers from Shandong Province clashed with workers from Henan.

The agency reported earlier that about 5,000 police were sent to end the violence, according to Taiyuan City's public security bureau.

Foxconn cited police as saying 40 people were taken to hospital and a number were arrested, while Xinhua added that three people were in serious condition.

Calls to the Taiyuan police were not immediately answered, while an official at the plant declined to comment when reached by telephone.

"Clearly there is deep-seated frustration and anger among the employees and no outlet, apart from violence, for that frustration to be released," Geoff Crothall, communication director at China Labor Bulletin, a Labor rights group in Hong Kong, said in a statement.

"There is no dialogue and no means of resolving disputes, no matter how minor. So it is not surprising when such disputes escalate into violence."

Foxconn does not confirm which of its plants supply Apple, but an employee told Reuters that the Taiyuan plant is among those that assemble and make parts for Apple's iPhone 5.

In June, about 100 workers went on a rampage at a Foxconn plant in Chengdu, in southwestern China.

(Additional reporting by Sally Huang, Ben Blanchard and Ningyi Sun in Beijing; Editing by Ben Blanchard and Robert Birsel)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...88N00L20120924





US Calls Assange 'Enemy of State'
Philip Dorling

THE US military has designated Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as enemies of the United States - the same legal category as the al-Qaeda terrorist network and the Taliban insurgency.

Declassified US Air Force counter-intelligence documents, released under US freedom-of-information laws, reveal that military personnel who contact WikiLeaks or WikiLeaks supporters may be at risk of being charged with "communicating with the enemy", a military crime that carries a maximum sentence of death.
Julian Assange ... "enemy of the state".

The documents, some originally classified "Secret/NoForn" - not releasable to non-US nationals - record a probe by the air force's Office of Special Investigations into a cyber systems analyst based in Britain who allegedly expressed support for WikiLeaks and attended pro-Assange demonstrations in London.

The counter-intelligence investigation focused on whether the analyst, who had a top-secret security clearance and access to the US military's Secret Internet Protocol Router network, had disclosed classified or sensitive information to WikiLeaks supporters, described as an "anti-US and/or anti-military group".

The suspected offence was "communicating with the enemy, 104-D", an article in the US Uniform Code of Military Justice that prohibits military personnel from "communicating, corresponding or holding intercourse with the enemy".

The analyst's access to classified information was suspended. However, the investigators closed the case without laying charges. The analyst denied leaking information.

Mr Assange remains holed up in Ecuador's embassy in London. He was granted diplomatic asylum on the grounds that if extradited to Sweden to be questioned about sexual assault allegations, he would be at risk of extradition to the US to face espionage or conspiracy charges arising from the leaking of hundreds of thousands of secret US military and diplomatic reports.

US Vice-President Joe Biden labelled Mr Assange a "high-tech terrorist" in December 2010 and US congressional leaders have called for him to be charged with espionage.

Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee - both once involved in presidential campaigns - have both urged that Mr Assange be "hunted down".

Mr Assange's US attorney, Michael Ratner, said the designation of WikiLeaks as an "enemy" had serious implications for the WikiLeaks publisher if he were to be extradited to the US, including possible military detention.

US Army private Bradley Manning faces a court martial charged with aiding the enemy - identified as al-Qaeda - by transmitting information that, published by WikiLeaks, became available to the enemy.

Mr Ratner said that under US law it would most likely have been considered criminal for the US Air Force analyst to communicate classified material to journalists and publishers, but those journalists and publishers would not have been considered the enemy or prosecuted.

"However, in the FOI documents there is no allegation of any actual communication for publication that would aid an enemy of the United States such as al-Qaeda, nor are there allegations that WikiLeaks published such information," he said.

"Almost the entire set of documents is concerned with the analyst's communications with people close to and supporters of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, with the worry that she would disclose classified documents to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

"It appears that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are the 'enemy'. An enemy is dealt with under the laws of war, which could include killing, capturing, detaining without trial, etc."

The Australian government has repeatedly denied knowledge of any US intention to charge Mr Assange or seek his extradition.

However, Australian diplomatic cables released to Fairfax Media under freedom-of-information laws over the past 18 months have confirmed the continuation of an "unprecedented" US Justice Department espionage investigation targeting Mr Assange and WikiLeaks.

The Australian diplomatic reports canvassed the possibility that the US may eventually seek Mr Assange's extradition on conspiracy or information-theft-related offences to avoid extradition problems arising from the nature of espionage as a political offence and the free-speech protections in the US constitution.

Mr Assange is scheduled this morning to speak by video link to a meeting on his asylum case on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. The meeting will be attended by Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino.

In a separate FOI decision yesterday, the Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed that the release of Australian diplomatic cables about WikiLeaks and Mr Assange had been the subject of extensive consultation with the US.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politi...#ixzz27cjH9qSk





Assange Mocks Obama Via Video at U.N. Event
Brian Winter

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, speaking via a choppy video feed from his virtual house arrest in London, lashed out at U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday for supporting freedom of speech in the Middle East while simultaneously "persecuting" his organization for leaking diplomatic cables.

Assange, who has been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy since June to avoid extradition, made the comments at a packed event on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.

Assange mocked Obama for defending free speech in the Arab world in an address to the United Nations on Tuesday, pointing to his own experience as evidence that Obama has "done more to criminalize free speech than any other U.S. president."

"It must have come as a surprise to the Egyptian teenagers who washed American teargas out of their eyes (during the Arab Spring) to hear that the U.S. supported change in the Middle East," Assange said.

"It's time for President Obama to keep his word ... and for the U.S. to cease its persecution of WikiLeaks," he said.

Assange's combative comments, plus statements made by Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino and his other allies at the event, suggested no solution is in sight to the diplomatic standoff surrounding the 41-year-old Australian.

British authorities have surrounded the Ecuadorean Embassy and said if Assange sets foot outside, they will arrest him and extradite him to Sweden to face rape and sexual assault allegations.

Assange's lawyers and Ecuador's government fear that could lead in turn to extradition to the United States, where they say he would face "inhumane" prison conditions and even the death penalty.

Assange, who looked to be in good health as he sat at a desk in front of a bookshelf and addressed the 150 or so people at the event, said Britain and Sweden have so far refused to provide guarantees he would not be extradited to the United States.

U.S. and European government sources have countered that the United States has issued no criminal charges or launched any attempts to extradite Assange.

IN BRITAIN'S COURT

Patino is scheduled to meet with British Foreign Secretary William Hague in New York on Thursday to discuss Assange, and he said there are "multiple paths" that could lead out of the standoff. Yet, in an interview with Reuters following the U.N. event, Patino made clear that Ecuador is not willing to cede much ground.

"The ball's in their court right now," Patino said.

Patino held in his hands a mimeographed copy of an 1880 agreement signed between Britain and Ecuador, which he said prohibits extradition in cases such as Assange's. He said he would show the document to Hague on Thursday.

Patino rigorously defended Ecuador's decision to grant political asylum to Assange, expressing disbelief that Britain is "determined" to arrest the former computer hacker even though he said there are no criminal charges against him. "This means you have reason to suspect he's being persecuted," Patino said.

He said Assange is in relatively good spirits but expressed concern his physical and psychological condition could deteriorate.

"I think of myself, how I'd react in that situation, not being able to go outside, being isolated," Patino said. "It's practically like being jailed."

(Editing by Eric Beech)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...88Q03V20120927





The Case for Abolishing Patents (Yes, All of Them)
Jordan Weissmann

Our patent system is a mess. It's a fount of expensive litigation that allows aging companies to linger around by bullying their more innovative competitors in court.

Critics have suggested plenty of reasonable reforms, from eliminating software patents to clamping down on "trolls" who buy up patent portfolios only so they can file lawsuits. But do we need a more radical solution? Would we be possibly be better off without any patents at all?

That's the striking suggestion from a Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis working paper by Michele Boldrin and David Levine, professors at Washington University in St. Louis who argue that any patent system, no matter how well conceived, is bound to devolve into the kind of quagmire we're dealing with today.

Here's the (slightly jargony) core of their argument, which we'll unpack together in a moment:

A closer look at the historical and international evidence suggests that while weak patent systems may mildly increase innovation with limited side-effects, strong patent systems retard innovation with many negative side-effects. Both theoretically and empirically, the political economy of government operated patent systems indicates that weak legislation will generally evolve into a strong protection and that the political demand for stronger patent protection comes from old and stagnant industries and firms, not from new and innovative ones. Hence the best solution is to abolish patents entirely [emphasis mine] through strong constitutional measures and to find other legislative instruments, less open to lobbying and rent-seeking, to foster innovation whenever there is clear evidence that laissez-faire under-supplies it.

In plain-speak, the authors are arguing that, yes, the evidence suggests that having a limited amount of patent protection makes countries slightly more innovative, presumably by encouraging inventors to cash in on their great ideas without fear of being ripped off. But patent protections never stay small and tidy. Instead, entrenched players like intellectual property lawyers who make their living filing lawsuits and old, established corporations that want to keep new players out of their markets lobby to expand the breadth of patent rights. And as patent rights get stronger, they take a serious toll on the economy, including our ability to innovate.

We can see that cost today as tech companies like Google spend billions on "defensive patents," which are essentially useless other than as a protection against lawsuits. We see it whenever a cool startup firm is forced to license a bogus patent from a litigious troll. And we see it in the untold dollars spent on legal fees and unnecessary patent filings for ludicrously broad or impractical ideas. The authors' extreme case in point: Somebody out there actually patented a method for moving information through the fifth dimension. As in the Bruce Willis movie. As in faster than the speed of light.

What do we get from all this? Precious little, the paper argues. They find virtually no statistical evidence that rising patent applications actually make our economy more productive.

Eliminating patents altogether, Boldrin and Levine say, would also have fewer negative consequences than most of us assume. Most industries, they argue, only resort to patent litigation once their pace of innovation has slowed. As long as they still cranked out out new, popular products, companies like Apple would continue to profit by being the first to market, which often confers a long-term advantage.

The poster child for strong patent protection is usually the pharmaceutical industry, as drugs are easily copied and can cost upwards of a billion dollars to develop. Here, Boldrin and Levine admit that the government would likely need to step in. But rather than giving companies a legal monopoly over their formulas, the authors suggest we should modify the drug approval process to let makers start recouping their costs faster. They would also set up a prize system to reward companies that invent the new medicines we need.

Because ending all patent protections immediately would be impractical, Boldrin and Levine advocate several transitional steps, such as shortening patent terms. "The aim of policy, in general, should be that of slowly but surely decreasing the strength of intellectual property interventions," they write, "but the final goal cannot be anything short of abolition."

Again, it's a somewhat radical idea -- but maybe one that deserves a place in the debate.
http://m.theatlantic.com/business/ar...f-them/262913/





Open-Access Deal for Particle Physics

Consortium brokers agreement with 12 journals.
Richard Van Noorden

The entire field of particle physics is set to switch to open-access publishing, a milestone in the push to make research results freely available to readers.

Particle physics is already a paragon of openness, with most papers posted on the preprint server arXiv. But peer-reviewed versions are still published in subscription journals, and publishers and research consortia at facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have previously had to strike piecemeal deals to free up a few hundred articles.

After six years of negotiation, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) is now close to ensuring that nearly all particle-physics articles — about 7,000 publications last year — are made immediately free on journal websites. Upfront payments from libraries will fund the access.

So that individual research groups do not need to arrange open publication of their work, the consortium has negotiated contracts with 12 journals (see ‘Particles on tap’) that would make 90% of high-energy-physics papers published from 2014 onwards free to read, says Salvatore Mele, who leads the project from CERN, Europe’s high-energy physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, and home of the LHC. According to details announced on 21 September, six of the journals will switch their business models entirely from subscription to open access. It is “the most systematic attempt to convert all the journals in a given field to open access”, says Peter Suber, a philosopher at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, and a proponent of open access.

Table

Particles on tap

Twelve journals will publish all their articles in high-energy physics as open access from 2014, in return for a yearly fee. Together they published 90% of last year’s articles in the field.

Publisher Journal No. of high-energy-physics articles in 2011 Charge per article

American Physical Society Physical Review C 107 US$1,900
American Physical Society Physical Review D 2,989 US$1,900
Elsevier Physics Letters B 1,010 US$1,800
Elsevier Nuclear Physics B 284 US$2,000
Hindawi Advances in High Energy Physics 28 US$1,000
Institute of Physics/Chinese Academy of Sciences Chinese Physics C 16 £1,000 (US$1,600)
Institute of Physics/DPG New Journal of Physics 20 £1,200 (US$1,950)
Institute of Physics/SISSA Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics 138 £1,400 (US$2,270)
Jagiellonian University Acta Physica Polonica B 23 €500 (US$650)
Oxford University Press/Physical Society of Japan Progress of Theoretical Physics 46 £1,000 (US$1,600)
Springer/Società Italiana di Fisica European Physical Journal C 326 €1,500 (US$1,940)
Springer/SISSA Journal of High Energy Physics 1,652 €1,200 (US$1,550)

Source: http://scoap3.org/news/news95.html

The consortium invited journals to bid for three-year open-access publishing contracts, and ranked them by an undisclosed algorithm that weighed their fees against their impact factors and the licences and delivery formats they offer. Under the deal, the journals will receive an average of €1,200 (US$1,550) per paper. Physical Review D, the journal that publishes most papers in the field, negotiated a fee of US$1,900 per article “on the principle that we should maintain our revenue”, says Joe Serene, treasurer and publisher at the American Physical Society, which owns the journal. But the society’s prestigious Physical Review Letters missed out because its bid was too high, says Serene (the journal currently charges authors $2,700 for individual open-access articles). CERN and SCOAP3 will continue to negotiate individual open-access agreements with journals not included in the deal, and more could join when the contract is renegotiated in 2016.

Mele says that the goal of SCOAP3 is to switch the discipline’s journals to open access without researchers noticing any effect on their grant funding or on the way they publish papers. The consortium will pay the contracts from an annual budget of €10 million, which is funded not by authors or research grants, but by pledges from more than a thousand libraries, funding agencies and research consortia across the world. In effect, existing journal subscription fees are being repurposed to provide the open-access funds.

“It is the most systematic attempt to convert all the journals in a given field to open access.”

Before any contracts can be signed, however, publishers must reduce the price of their subscription packages to offset the income from SCOAP3 — a complex calculation to ensure that libraries don’t pay twice for the same content. Then SCOAP3 must collect its pledges — not a foregone conclusion, as some libraries may be tempted to renege, figuring that their institution won’t lose access to the free papers anyway.

Mele hopes that success could trigger a domino effect in fields such as astronomy and astrophysics. “I personally believe that once this is demonstrated to work, some variations, fine-tuning and adaptation of the idea will emerge,” he says.

But Serene and others caution that SCOAP3 may be hard to replicate. It has unique advantages in that most high-energy-physics papers are published in just a few journals, and that the field can be driven and coordinated by one central organization, CERN.

Suber notes the stark contrast between the quiet brokering of SCOAP3 and the battles playing out over mandates for open-access publication by research funders such as foundations and government agencies (see Nature 486, 302–303; 2012). “I call it the peaceful revolution,” he says.
http://www.nature.com/news/open-acce...hysics-1.11468





California Passes Groundbreaking Open Textbook Legislation
Timothy Vollmer

It’s official. In California, Governor Jerry Brown has signed two bills (SB 1052 and SB 1053) that will provide for the creation of free, openly licensed digital textbooks for the 50 most popular lower-division college courses offered by California colleges. The legislation was introduced by Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and passed by the California Senate and Assembly in late August.

A crucial component of the California legislation is that the textbooks developed will be made available under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY):

The textbooks and other materials are placed under a creative commons attribution license that allows others to use, distribute, and create derivative works based upon the digital material while still allowing the authors or creators to receive credit for their efforts.

The CC BY license allows teachers to tailor textbook content to students’ needs, permits commercial companies to take the resources and build new products with it (such as video tutorials), and opens the doors for collaboration and improvement of the materials.

Access to affordable textbooks is extremely important for students, as textbook costs continue to rise at four times the rate of inflation, sometimes surpassing the cost of tuition at some community colleges. So, in addition to making the digital textbooks available to students free of cost, the legislation requires that print copies of textbooks will cost about $20.

This is a massive win for California, and a most welcome example of open policy that aims to leverage open licensing to save money for California families and support the needs of teachers and students. We’ll continue to track this initiative and other Open Education Policies at our OER registry.
https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/34288





Finnish Teachers Write Open Textbook in Weekend Hackathon

A group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students write an upper secondary mathematics textbook in a booksprint. The event started on Friday 28th September at 9:00 (GMT+3) and the book will be (hopefully) ready on Sunday evening. The book is written in Finnish.

The result — LaTeX source code and the pdf — is published with open CC-BY-license.

As far as we know, this is the first time a course textbook is written in three-day hackathon. The hackathon approach has been used earlier mainly for coding open source software and writing manuals for open source software.

If you want to follow the progress, visit the repository at Github or our Facebook page (the conversation is mainly in Finnish, but you are welcome to comment and we will gladly answer in English).
http://linja-aho.blogspot.fi/2012/09...ers-write.html





Google's Copyright Crackdown Punishes Author For Torrenting His Own Book
Mike Masnick

Over the years, we've pointed out repeatedly a massive Achilles Heel for Google: its often dreadful customer service. Trying to communicate with Google can often be like facing a giant white monolith, rather than any sort of human being. More recently, we've been concerned about Google's willingness to be overly aggressive in "enforcing" copyright, in an effort to keep Hollywood (and Hollywood's supporters in government) off its back. Combine those two issues, and you've got quite a story... such as the one from Techdirt reader Cody Jackson.

A few years ago, Jackson, while deployed in Iraq, wrote a book about Python (the programming language) called Start Programming with Python. He decided to give away the book for free, as a "thank you" to the open source community which, he notes, has provided him with tremendous value over the years. He has always made the book available for free, and linked to various sources where you can get it. At the same time, he's offered people the option to support him via donation. He also made a little bit of money via Google AdSense ads on his site.

Last week, he was contacted by a Google bot, telling him that AdSense had been disabled. Why? Because they claimed he was distributing copyrighted content illegally. The email, which I've seen, notes that his account has been disabled for the following reason:

Violation explanation

COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL: As stated in our program policies, AdSense publishers are not permitted to place Google ads on sites involved in the distribution of copyrighted materials. This includes hosting copyrighted files on your site, as well as providing links for or driving traffic to sites that contain copyrighted material. More information about this policy can be found in our help center ( http://www.google.com/adsense/suppor...&answer=105956 ).

To be honest, Google's terms here make no sense. Basically EVERY website "contains copyrighted material." Based on what Google sent to Jackson, no one could link to any website if they wanted to run AdSense. Google has a number of really good copyright lawyers, but they must have let this one slip by. I'm sure Google means "unauthorized" or "infringing" copyrighted material, but that's not what it says.

Either way, it seems ridiculous and serious overkill to suggest that any links to a site that carries infringing content -- even if the link is to legitimate content -- should be deemed a terms of service violation. The email provides one link as an "example page" of the kind of problems they're talking about. That page is the one where Jackson announces that he's put up a torrent of the 2nd edition of his book, and points people to The Pirate Bay and Demonoid to get it. Remember, this is his own book, which he's published himself and is giving away for free... on purpose.

You could argue that Google's terms here are overbroad and perhaps they're within those rules. But saying that you can't link to legitimate content that you yourself released on the Pirate Bay could have a real chilling effect for those who choose to put their own works on such sites.

Jackson reached out to Google for more information, explaining to them the situation, pointing out that he's the author and publisher, and that the work is published under a Creative Commons BY-SA license, and thus all copies on The Pirate Bay are perfectly legal and authorized. Google told him it would review the account... and then sent the following:

Thank you for providing us with additional information about your site. However, after thoroughly reviewing python-ebook.blogspot.com and taking your feedback into consideration, we're unable to re-enable ad serving to your site at this time, as your site appears to still be in violation.

If you'd like to have your site reconsidered for participation in the AdSense program, please review our program policies (https://www.google.com/adsense/policies) and make any necessary changes to your webpages. For more information regarding your policy issue, please visit https://www.google.com/adsense/suppo...?answer=113061.

Confused about this after reading through everything and still not seeing any violation, he removed the links to the torrent files, even though it made perfect sense to him to keep them up. As he noted to me via email: "The torrent was one of the first ways that I had made my book available, since that is where the technical people are likely to hang out. I figured a torrent file on the most popular torrent site was a no-brainer."

So he, once again, responded to the Google bot, this time after removing the links... and he still got back the exact same message. The current post (and, again, this was a post that Google specifically called out as an "example" of a problem page) still mentions The Pirate Bay and Demonoid, but has no links (and even when it did have links, they were authorized!). And yet, Google's AdSense team still insists that he's violating AdSense's inscrutable terms. They won't explain why. They won't seem to actually comprehend what he's saying. They just block.

For what it's worth, we hear from Google haters all the time that it somehow refuses to take down Ads on "pirate sites." This experience seems to suggest the exact opposite: that Google is overly aggressive in trying to block ads showing up in any way, shape or form, near sites that it has deemed to be problematic, even if the content is 100% guaranteed legal and authorized. Combine that with Google's horrendous customer service-by-bot, and you have an unfortunate situation where an author is being punished for doing something perfectly legal and can't seem to find a human at Google who will actually take the time to understand what's going on.

These are the reasons why we get so nervous when Google cranks up its "automation" at the insistence of Hollywood. The collateral damage is very real.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...own-book.shtml





Opinion: Why File-Sharing Cannot and Should Not be Stopped
Rick Falkvinge, Special to CNN

The development of technology means that "anybody can sit in a café and copy the entire collection of human music to anybody else in the café, completely without traceability," Falkvinge says.

Rick Falkvinge is the founder of the Swedish Piratpartiet, the first Pirate Party worldwide
He argues that the development of mobile devices makes it impossible to stop file-sharing
He argues this means almost everybody can access all of humanity's collective knowledge and culture

Editor's note: Rick Falkvinge is the founder of the Swedish Piratpartiet, the first Pirate Party worldwide, and a campaigner for "next-generation civil liberties and sensible information policy to safeguard the parts of Internet that guarantee civil liberties."

(CNN) -- For the past 20 years, the copyright industry has waged a war against teenagers sharing culture and knowledge with each other. First, it was music ("home taping will kill music"), then games, then movies, then books.

The copyright industry has tried to portray the teenagers and others who are thus sharing as if they were somehow being immoral.

The problem with this depiction is that it resonates very poorly with the people doing the actual sharing -- to them, sharing a record or a game with a friend or a stranger is a good social act.

Thus, we have a severe disconnect in how different parts of society regard the activity of sharing culture and knowledge on the sidelines of the established distribution chains -- or in violation of copyright, if you like.

As mobile devices develop, it becomes increasingly clear that this is a war that cannot be won. Today, our mobile devices can typically house some 16 to 64 gigs of data.

Hard drives that can hold 60 terabytes have been announced and are just around the corner. As this storage capacity becomes affordable and even expected for one person to carry around, each and every person can hold a complete copy of all music ever produced.

When connecting this phenomenon to mobile devices that can broadcast information anonymously, over technologies like Bluetooth and ad-hoc wi fi, it means that anybody can sit in a café and copy the entire collection of human music to anybody else in the café, completely without traceability: they wouldn't even know themselves whom they were copying to and from.

Train and subway cars will form spontaneous clouds of connections that keep owners of mobile devices up-to-date with all music ever produced.

Shortly thereafter, personal storage capacities will also be enough to house all movies ever produced. Regrettably, cellphones are a centralized, trackable technology -- they have been called "governmental tracking devices that you can also use to make phone calls", and rightly so -- the built-in trackability possibilities are something that goes far beyond what existed east of the former Iron Curtain.

But mobile phones can also connect directly to each other, without central trackability, logs or traces -- as long as they are within short range of one another. "Short range" usually means about 10 to 25 meters in practice.

This kind of person-to-person distribution of digitizable material -- sometimes called a "sneakernet", as people use their feet to move data -- is not as effective in distributing information as the internet, but effective enough.

It's how we shared primitive games on the early computers, before we had BBSes, and before we had the internet. It took about three days for a new game from its release somewhere in the world to reach everybody who wanted it. That's fast enough.

So realizing that people cannot be stopped from sharing knowledge and culture, in violation of the distribution monopoly we know as copyright, because of the rapid development of mobile devices -- seeing that it cannot be stopped with any amount of applied violence, is there a flip side to this?

It turns out that there is a rather strong flip side.

For the first time in history, all of humanity -- at least everybody with an internet connection, which is increasingly fast becoming "everybody" -- can access all of humanity's collective knowledge and culture, as well as contribute freely to it.

That is a huge leap ahead for us as a civilization.

It's not even a fantasy project with a ridiculous price tag to it, like the space elevator, vacuum-tube satellite launcher, or moon base. All the technology has already been developed, all the infrastructure has already been built, all the tools have already been rolled out.

All that we have to do to achieve this leap of civilization is just to remove the ban on using the greatest library mankind has ever built.

(Ironically, the exact same discussion about sharing knowledge and culture was held when public libraries were introduced into law in the 1850s, when publishers had argued that people should be banned from lending books from one another. The more things change, the more they stay the same.)

So not only can sharing not be stopped -- I argue that it shouldn't be stopped, either, once you see the flip side.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/25/tech/m...rty/index.html





The Flipside Of BitTorrent - Why Many Musicians Still Hate It
Brian Proffitt

Last week, I wrote a popular post on the continuing of BitTorrent, and how some artists are now choosing to embrace it as a marketing tool to expose their music to a wider audience. But many activist musicians disagree with the notions that BitTorrent is anything more than outright theft. Singer-songwriter David Lowery of the band Camper Van Beethoven is a good example.

For this group of musicians, BitTorrent and other channels for often-illegal file downloads continues to represent a real and present threat to their livelihoods. The only debate in their minds is how to best squash the problem of BitTorrent.

Why BitTorrent Doesn't Work

You pretty much going to know the week isn't going to go well when the first email you get on Monday morning comes from a pissed-off rock star, and he's none too happy with you. But that was my start to the week, as Lowery dropped me a line to bust my balls in a humorous way, as he put it, about BitTorrent Downloads

Booming - And Benefitting Musicians.

Lowery, whose skills go far beyond music and into mathematics and business - he's a lecturer in the University of Georgia's music business program - disputed the very idea that anyone could successfully make a go of using BitTorrent as a way of increasing exposure for musicians.

"In particular for the last 18 months I have studied in detail BitTorrent activity for my critically acclaimed cult band Camper Van Beethoven. I also have reams of data on file sharing and searches at Cyberlocker sites. You really think there are no lost sales in BitTorrent activity?" Lowery wrote. "Can I have some of what you are smoking? Why would you search for a song called 'Take the Skinheads Bowling' unless you heard the song? There are no current magazine articles on Camper Van Beethoven, TV shows, or mentions on squidbillies. They heard it and they wanted it. Occam's Razor, dude."

It's All About The Middle Class

In particular, Lowery is very concerned about the "middle class" of artists who are getting the worst hit by illegal file sharing. Big name artists, he argued, can weather lost sales, and smaller artists are busy trying to do anything to catch a break. But the non-superstar successes are getting squeezed hard by file sharing.

"You should hang out in a town like Athens, Georgia… where I teach. There are at least 60 small national/regional touring acts, The middle class of the music business. I've not met one that is honestly cool with people sharing files instead of buying them," Lowery stated.

So what about artists like Ed Sheeran in the UK, who recently said in a BBC interview, "You can live off your sales and you can allow people to illegally download it and come to your gigs. My gig tickets are £18 and my album is £8, so it's all relative." How does this position fit with Lowery's point of view?

"Ed Sheeran clearly has never looked at his own show settlement sheet, if he thinks he's making 18 pounds a show. He and his touring party is lucky to gross 9 pounds minus management and agent fees (15% and 20% in UK - much higher than US) Then he pays touring expenses. I bet he nets the same or less per fan live than he would from a decent record deal per fan. And of course most artists are lucky if they manage to play for twenty percent of those who bought/"shared" their CD that year," Lowery replied. "Still he's in the top tier, so I bet he makes a decent amount of money. For now.

"There are no major stars with significant sales that have used BitTorrent. Counting Crows did this year for an EP and then mysteriously pulled out after a couple weeks. No announcement. Totally scrubbed from BitTorrent site. Smells bad," he added.

Creative Conundrum

Lowery's experience in the music industry has led him to a pretty pragmatic insight demonstrating that BitTorrent doesn't really work.

"Most artists and labels are not creative thinkers. They follow the latest trend or style cause that's where the money is. When college radio or Grey's Anatomy is successful for one artist/label. Everybody tries the exact same thing," he explained. "If BitTorrent is really is a way for artists/labels to increase revenue they will be on it like a flash mob. That flash mob should have happened by now."

Lowery is certainly not alone in his disapproval of BitTorrent, but he's no ally of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Lowery's concern is mostly with that of the musicians like himself. He does, however, get frustrated with what he sees as straw man arguments that paint RIAA as an evil business monstrosity that somehow justifies the practice of illegal downloads.

It's Not Just An RIAA Issue

Lowery's concerns are mostly shared by Casey Rae, co-director of the Future of Music Coalition. But their preferred solutions are pretty different.

For Lowery, the solution is advocating and creating the environment for an ethical Internet. For Rae and the rest of the FMC, it's more about creating much easier access to music - so easy, in fact, that the desire to use illegal file sharing will be greatly reduced.

"We believe artists should be paid for their work," Rae explained, and that's the environment his organization is trying to set up.

It's not particularly easy. The major record labels in the US are still living in the past and their licensing process reflects that. Negotiating digital sales or streaming rights for a music catalog can take up to two years, and labels often want their cash up front.

The problem is so acute, Rae added, that when Spotify finally came to the U.S., the Swedish company had to give up some of its own equity to the three major record labels to get them onboard. "The music and motion picture industry are still working under a scarcity model," Rae lamented. "Unfortunately the Internet doesn't recognize scarcity."

And Rae does not care for the RIAA's tactics of litigation and legislation. "We need to wallpaper the Internet with available content."

That available content will probably be streaming content, if Rae's predictions hold. Even the "traditional" paid download services lie Amazon, Apple and Google are shifting to the cloud model, where local downloads become the backup for the user's music collection in the cloud.

If licensing music can become a more streamlined process, Rae envisions a world where illegal downloads will be pointless, since songs can be easily found and played on demand. Artists and their labels will receive equitable payment, and the wave of illegal piracy should start to subside.

The technology is already there. Now it's a matter for the business processes to catch up.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/biz/2012...bittorrent.php





Mediacom Disconnects and Bans Alleged Internet Pirates
Ernesto

Mediacom, one of the larger Internet providers in the United States, has not joined the controversial six-strikes anti-piracy scheme set to start later this year. But that doesn’t mean Mediacom customers can pirate without consequences, on the contrary. The Internet provider rigorously terminates the Internet access of subscribers who receive two DMCA notifications and after a third notice customers are permanently disconnected and banned for life.

For nearly a decade copyright holders have been sending DMCA takedown notices to Internet providers.

Some ISPs choose to ignore these letters, and others simply forward them to the appropriate subscriber and then that’s that. At least, for most Internet providers.

Mediacom has a unique interpretation of their perceived obligations under the DMCA and they include cracking down on those who are accused of sharing files. Effectively, Mediacom has adopted the most rigorous three-strikes policy that we’ve ever encountered.

It works as follows.

Strike 1: After the first DMCA notice the account is flagged and the subscriber receives a letter informing him or her about the alleged violation.

Strike 2: The second DMCA notice is more serious and results in an account suspension. Internet access can only be reinstated if the subscriber fills out some paperwork.

Strike 3: After the third DMCA notice it is game over for the subscriber. The account holder in question will lose Internet access and he or she is banned for life.

Customers who argue that someone else must have used their connection to share infringing material will also lose their Internet access. Mediacom argues that the account holder is responsible for whoever uses the connection, without exceptions. In some cases the the ISP adds to the injury by charging an early termination fee.

Mediacom’s three-strikes policy goes much further than the upcoming six-strikes anti-piracy scheme in which permanent disconnections are a no-go. Needless to say it raises eyebrows at digital rights groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) who heavily criticize Mediacom’s termination policy.

“Given the importance of connectivity these days, it’s extremely unfortunate that any ISP would terminate after three DMCA notices,” EFF’s Corynne McSherry told TorentFreak.

“DMCA notices are merely accusations — they are not proof of wrongdoing, and ISPs should not treat them as such. Where possible, I would urge customers of any ISP that has a strict three-strikes policy to vote with their feet and find an ISP that puts its customers first,” she adds.

Subscribers should indeed move away from ISPs that ignore their rights, but the real problem is that customers don’t always have a choice. Those who live in an area where Mediacom is the only provider are in serious trouble.

In all fairness, Mediacom does give subscribers the chance to dispute allegations of copyright infringement. However, Mediacom’s description of the counterclaim process is rather negative and is likely to scare the average subscriber.

“Once this [counter notification] paperwork is returned, Mediacom turns it over to the copyright holder, who pursues action as they choose. This may include legal action such as lawsuits between the copyright holder and the customer,” Mediacom explains.

The prospect of getting involved in a legal battle with Hollywood or the major music labels is not really encouraging, to say the least. Even those who know that the evidence used for DMCA notices is often shoddy and inaccurate will probably hesitate to file a counterclaim.

It’s clear that Mediacom’s policy favors copyright holders over consumers. This is worrisome, not least because the United Nations declared Internet access a human right last year, something President Obama seems to agree on.

Human right or not, for now that’s not going to do much for all those former Mediacom customers who are banned from using the Internet for life.
https://torrentfreak.com/us-internet...irates-120925/





Former Copyright Boss: New Technology Should Be Presumed Illegal Until Congress Says Otherwise
Mike Masnick

One of the reasons why we live in such an innovative society is that we've (for the most part) enabled a permissionless innovation society -- one in which innovators no longer have to go through gatekeepers in order to bring innovation to market. This is a hugely valuable thing, and it's why we get concerned about laws that further extend permission culture. However, according to the former Register of Copyrights, Ralph Oman, under copyright law, any new technology should have to apply to Congress for approval and a review to make sure they don't upset the apple cart of copyright, before they're allowed to exist. I'm not joking. Mr. Oman, who was the Register of Copyright from 1985 to 1993 and was heavily involved in a variety of copyright issues, has filed an amicus brief in the Aereo case.

As you hopefully recall, Aereo is the online TV service, backed by Barry Diller, that sets you up with your very own physical TV antenna on a rooftop in Brooklyn, connected to a device that will then stream to you online what that antenna picks up. This ridiculously convoluted setup is an attempt to route around the ridiculous setup of today's copyright law -- something that Oman was intimately involved in creating with the 1976 Copyright Act. The TV networks sued Aereo, but were unable to get an injunction blocking the service. Oman's amicus brief seeks to have that ruling overturned, and argues that an injunction is proper.

But he goes much further than that in his argument, even to the point of claiming that with the 1976 Copyright Act, Congress specifically intended new technologies to first apply to Congress for permission, before releasing new products on the market that might upset existing business models:

Whenever possible, when the law is ambiguous or silent on the issue at bar, the courts should let those who want to market new technologies carry the burden of persuasion that a new exception to the broad rights enacted by Congress should be established. That is especially so if that technology poses grave dangers to the exclusive rights that Congress has given copyright owners. Commercial exploiters of new technologies should be required to convince Congress to sanction a new delivery system and/or exempt it from copyright liability. That is what Congress intended.

This is, to put it mildly, crazy talk. He is arguing that anything even remotely disruptive and innovative, must first go through the ridiculous process of convincing Congress that it should be allowed, rather than relying on what the law says and letting the courts sort out any issues. In other words, in cases of disruptive innovation, assume that new technologies are illegal until proven otherwise. That's a recipe for killing innovation.

Under those rules, it's unlikely that we would have radio, cable TV, VCRs, DVRs, mp3 players, YouTube and much, much more. That's not how innovation or the law works. You don't assume everything innovative is illegal just because it upsets some obsolete business models. But that appears to be how Oman thinks the world should act. Stunningly, he even seems to admit that he'd be fine with none of the above being able to come to market without Congressional approval, because he approvingly cites the dissent in the Betamax case (which made clear that the VCR was legal), which argues that the VCR should only be deemed legal with an act of Congress to modify the Copyright Act. You would think that the success of the VCR in revitalizing the movie industry would show just how ridiculous that is... but in Oman's copyright-centric world, the rules are "first, do not allow any innovation that upsets my friends."

Elsewhere, he argues -- quite correctly -- that Aereo's design was clearly done with the help of lawyers to stay on the legal side of the line, but he gets the exact wrong lesson out of that:

The Aereo system was not designed for the purpose of speed, convenience and efficiency. With its thousands of dime-sized antennae and its electronic loop-the-loops, it appears to have been designed by a copyright lawyer peering over the shoulder of an engineer to exploit what appeared to Aereo to be a loophole in the law and shoehorn the Aereo business model into the Cablevision decision.

In other words, he's admitting that the system was designed carefully to remain on the right side of the law... but he's somehow upset that this is possible. In his incredible worldview, you should not be able to design around the contours and exceptions to copyright law -- because anything that upsets Hollywood is, by default, illegal.

Perhaps we've learned who put the clause in the '76 Act that explicitly says that the law should be used to stop disruptive innovation if it gets in the way of the status quo.

Either way, he goes on at length, claiming that his efforts in helping to put together the '76 Act and his other work on copyright were continually focused on benefiting the copyright holder. He never mentions that this is not the purpose of copyright law. It is the means. But the intent is to benefit the public. Oman does not ever seem to take that into consideration.

Indisputably, Congress drafted the Copyright Act to prevent the creative efforts of authors from being usurped by new technologies. That core principle is at the heart of the Copyright Act. Congressional intent would be undercut by any decision that would sanction the use of technologies which could be used indirectly to undermine its goals. Congress enacted a forward-looking statute that would protect those who create precisely so they have incentives to create.

Actually, that's quite disputable. The Copyright Act can only be designed to benefit the public. The means of doing so is by creating the ability of copyright holders to exclude, but that is hardly the only incentive to create. Allowing new technologies that disrupt old business models does not necessarily remove the incentive to create. Instead, as we've shown over and over again, the incentive to create appears to have increased greatly, even as respect for copyright has weakened tremendously over the past decade. So I fail to see how Congress' "intent" could possibly be undermined by new disruptive technologies coming along -- without permission -- and creating new and expansive markets that both help the public and provide new opportunities for content creators.
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovat...therwise.shtml





Federal Government Pulls Ads from Notorious File-Sharing Website
Glen McGregor

The Department of Finance has temporarily suspended online advertisements it had placed through Yahoo! for its Economic Action Plan after an ad was spotted on a notorious Swedish file-sharing website that traffics in stolen software and bootlegged movies.

The department took the decision after the Citizen inquired about an EAP ad that appears to have shown up on The Pirate Bay. A reader took a picture of the banner ad next to a list of search results for Dr. Who videos. It is surrounded by other ads for a gambling site, a dating service and a banner offering to help to “Find a Chinese bride.”

Pirate Bay hosts “torrents,” a file-format that allows bulk downloads of movies and large software packages by spreading the data across a network of other downloaders. The site has repeatedly been the target of lawsuits alleging copyright violation.

In an email, the finance department says it didn’t intentionally buy a spot on Pirate Bay. It placed the ad through four website advertising networks, including Bell Media, Canoe, Microsoft and Yahoo.”

According to the department, these networks “use the most effective brand safety filters available and follow strict guidelines for all Government of Canada advertising campaigns.

The networks each confirmed that they don’t own the Pirate Bay and that the appearance of the government advertisement on the site is unauthorized, the department said.

However, it was eventually determined that some banner ads were appearing with an “ad choices icon” which is traceable to Yahoo!

Yahoo! is now looking into the matter, the department said.

“In the meantime, we have asked Yahoo! to halt all EAP ads until the matter is resolved.”
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/busines...917/story.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

September 22nd, September 15th, September 8th, September 1st

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black

[gazdet]

btw/...Jack, ThankYou For Your amazing Dedication and enthusiatic efforts over all these years.. in providing us with Your Compassion, Experience, Commitment and Reliability toward Sharing with All of Your Peer to Peer followers within Your P2P Forum.

Just wanted to say..I'm sure as a collective bunch of like minded P2P (oh and yea socially) minded enthusiasts at ALL levels..we Thank ..an luv ya~ .

Cheers Mate

[multi]

I'll drink to that !

[JackSpratts]

this mag is such a little thing in such a big internet, but it means something to me, and i'm glad it means something to you too. thanks guys. and gaz, thanks for keeping the place alive.

- jack.