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Old 21-11-12, 09:20 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 24th, '12

Since 2002



Volume XI, Issue Number I






























"I feel it is an invasion of my religious beliefs, I feel that it’s the implementation of the Mark of the Beast, I feel that it’s an invasion of my privacy and an invasion of all my rights as a citizen." – Andrea Hernanadez


"The developments also bring to a crashing halt the recent perception in America that News Corporation had begun to recover its confidence after months on the defensive as a result of the phone-hacking scandal." – Ed Pilkington and Dominic Rushe


































Aluminum Day

Turns out when it comes to the increasingly unlikely event of making it to your tenth wedding anniversary, you can look forward to receiving a handsome reward of… tin or aluminum. Not sure how the whole mineral-for-year thing got started, but aluminum to me seems a fairly pedestrian compensation (beyond the altogether earthy return) for putting up with a decade of daily concession. Then I remembered that for much of human history aluminum was considered an extremely rare and valuable material, so much so that no less a majestic symbol of fertility than the Washington Monument is capped in the shiny stuff. Well there you go.

And here I am alongside my very own aluminum tower, banging away on whatever keyboard is handy (today it’s a model M) cutting, pasting and cranking out yet another compendium of facts and groovy tales for the hardcore traders and terminal info junkies that still wander these slate green cells.

The whole mess started back in ’99 with Napster and the breathless, change the world prose it engendered. It then matured if I can use that phrase, into something a bit more measured if scattershot, until in 2002 I decided it all had to be collected and put in one place to make it easy to archive and peruse, and I had to be the one to do it, since I doubted any other sucker would take the job. And really, that was it. I was tired of spending all my time ferreting out stories about P2P, legal, technical, moral, fantastical, and having no time to examine them, and simply wanted them all in one place so I could read for hours without having to leave a page, let alone a site. It actually seemed easier, even if I was the one who had to spend all week doing the research, which may make no sense to you, or me now that I’m thinking about it, but did back then, so long as once a week with warm Thinkpad on lap I got to put my feet up and consume it in a marathon infusion of digital bulk. Easier to focus or something.

And so it was, ten years ago to the day, November 22nd 2002, that this little compendium came up for air and popped out a couple of stories that had caught my eye. Five to be precise. Three more went up on the 23rd, and the practice of regular updates was born as well. Alright, truth be told, the archive part was the driving factor. I didn’t have much confidence in these news articles having staying power on the web and I wanted a place that researchers could comb when the day finally came that file sharing achieved the recognition it was due. See, I believed then and still do that digital P2P file sharing is the single most important advance in publishing and distribution in history, and will be acknowledged as such by our descendents. And when it is historians will be falling all over themselves trying to get the story straight. A big part of that story was covered in the press, and now remains here for all to see. Matter of fact, since many of the old articles I’ve reproduced only exist on this site, the Week in Review has already been important for research and is even cited in footnotes. Back in 2000 I was afraid those stories might be lost and with it the true origins of a nascent movement so I figured that by putting them up here they’d have a better chance of survival. It worked, but that’s not all: in addition to appearing on this site the entire ten year run is also available on disc & download and is hosted on several file sharing sites as well, so the archive is robust.

As for the process of putting it together, it remains as time consuming as ever. If I told you how long I spend on it each week you’d think me mad. Every few months I come very close to hiring a coder and working out a one-click process for loading the stories that writers have generously provided but I’ve never seriously explored it. And so the Week in Review continues to be done the same way it was in the beginning: cut, pasted, formatted into vBulletin code and edited, by hand. Each single story (out of potentially dozens) taking on average fifteen minutes to find, read and process into the final form seen here. For completists, I browse and copy with Firefox (after originally using Opera), strip with Notepad, paste into Word, format by hand, and post with IE. Archaic? Perhaps, but ultimately less than enervating and if not exactly Zen like then to some extent calming. Anyway, I’m used to it.

And yet…

I do feel the call of other demands on my time and after publishing this for ten years, which was my original goal, there are moments when I want to retire the keyboard and pursue other interests, or none, so the future of this little endeavor is becoming less clear.

And yet…

Experiencing a week without participating in it seems heretical, so at this point it’s my intention to continue, if for nothing else than my own state of mind and perhaps those who may at some future date share at least a byte of the excitement in the file sharing movement that I have. Happy Aluminum Day, WiR! Shine on.



















Enjoy,

Jack
























November 24th, 2012




That Was Fast: Hollywood Already Browbeat The Republicans Into Retracting Report On Copyright Reform
Mike Masnick

So, late Friday, we reported on how the Republican Study Committee (the conservative caucus of House Republicans) had put out a surprisingly awesome report about copyright reform. You can read that post to see the details. The report had been fully vetted and reviewed by the RSC before it was released. However, as soon as it was published, the MPAA and RIAA apparently went ballistic and hit the phones hard, demanding that the RSC take down the report. They succeeded. Even though the report had been fully vetted and approved by the RSC, executive director Paul S. Teller has now retracted it, sending out the following email to a wide list of folks this afternoon:

From: Teller, Paul
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2012 04:11 PM
Subject: RSC Copyright PB

We at the RSC take pride in providing informative analysis of major policy issues and pending legislation that accounts for the range of perspectives held by RSC Members and within the conservative community. Yesterday you received a Policy Brief on copyright law that was published without adequate review within the RSC and failed to meet that standard. Copyright reform would have far-reaching impacts, so it is incredibly important that it be approached with all facts and viewpoints in hand. As the RSC’s Executive Director, I apologize and take full responsibility for this oversight. Enjoy the rest of your weekend and a meaningful Thanksgiving holiday....

Paul S. Teller
Executive Director
U.S. House Republican Study Committee
Paul.Teller@mail.house.gov
http://republicanstudycommittee.com


The idea that this was published "without adequate review" is silly. Stuff doesn't just randomly appear on the RSC website. Anything being posted there has gone through the same full review process. What happened, instead, was that the entertainment industry's lobbyists went crazy, and some in the GOP folded.

Frankly, if they wanted to win back the youth vote, this was exactly how not to do it. If you just look through the comments on our post on the original, or through the Twitter response to this report, there were tons of people -- many of whom were lifelong Democrats -- claiming that they would switch parties if the GOP stuck with this. Instead, they folded like a cheap card table in less than 24 hours.

In the long run, that's going to hurt the GOP, because the people who were suddenly interested in supporting the GOP will assume that any such effort is subject to a similar bait-and-switch. Meanwhile, this leaves open an opportunity for the Democrats as well. The Republicans just came close to becoming the party that actually listened to what was important to young people today -- and they quickly changed their mind. The Democrats can sweep in and take the issue since apparently it's there for the taking. All they have to do is be willing to tell some Hollywood lobbyists to pipe down.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...t-reform.shtml





Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren Courts Reddit Users for a Crowdsourced Copyright Reform Bill
Tom Cheredar

When it comes to Reddit users, its much better to work with them than against them. And at least one U.S. representative has decided to get proactive.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) has released a new post on her congressional website asking Reddit for help in crafting a new bill about the government’s ability to seize domain names suspected of mass copyright infringement.

“During SOPA I saw firsthand the Reddit community’s strong dedication to free expression. Because of that dedication, I thought I would attempt an experiment: crowdsourcing a legislative proposal on Reddit,” Lofgren wrote. “The goal of the legislation would be to build due process requirements into domain name seizures for copyright infringement. I’d like your thoughts on the proposal.”

The U.S. Department of Justice, in conjunction with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has conducted two separate sting operations that seized hundreds of domain names that were accused of copyright infringement or piracy. The first operation came about a year ago during the week of Black Friday, and went after digital media pirates (including Megaupload) as well as foreign websites that were selling counterfeit goods. The second happened just before the 2012 NFL SuperBowl, and focused on seizing sites that illegally live streamed sporting events. In both sting operations, the federal government took ownership of the domain name these organizations were using, which essentially shut them down (at least temporarily).

The practice of seizing domain names is highly criticized by online communities like Reddit because there is no due process involved. Suspected sites have their domain seized without going through trial, and (in the event of a) wrongly seized domain, people aren’t easily able to clear their names and get their websites back up.

Lofgren said she may introduce a new bill that reforms the process of domain seizure due to copyright infringe in the future, which would seemingly address the lack of notice given to sites in danger of being taken by the government.

Lofgren’s letter was submitted to Reddit earlier today, and the congresswoman has responded to some of the comments over the last hour. The submission currently has 84 “upvotes” and 25 comments — far less than some of the other politician’s who’ve taken to Reddit to further their causes. However, Reddit General Manager Erik Martin told me he and the team would be happy to provide the congresswoman with tips to get a better response in the future, should she reach out.

This isn’t the first time a politician has asked Reddit for help on a bill. Rep. Darrel Issa (R-Calif.) has done a handful of AMAs (ask me anything) to help people understand unpopular legislation like SOPA, PIPA, and international treaty ACTA.
http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/19/co...t-reform-bill/





Hardware Vendors Sue Dutch Government Over Copyright Levies

The planned levies are way to high and disproportionate to the losses of the music and movie industries, the companies said
Loek Essers

Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Dell and Imation are suing the Dutch government over new levies on hard disks, smartphones, tablets and MP3 players that are meant to compensate the music and movie industries for losses caused by home copying.

"The companies now hold the State liable for all damages caused by the levies," the hardware vendors said in a joint news release on Wednesday. Trade association FIAR Consumer Electronics, which has as members companies such as Samsung, Sharp, Sony and LG, is also a party to the litigation. The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in the District Court of The Hague.

The entertainment industry estimates lost income of ¬40 million, which is much too high, according to the hardware companies. "That amount is excessive and completely unfounded," they said. The ¬40 million also incorporates damages for illegally downloaded music and movies which, according to the companies, legally cannot be recovered by a levy on devices. Furthermore the Dutch government established a levy on all devices including devices for professional use that are not used for private copying, they said.

The companies are also suing the Dutch Home Copying Foundation (Stichting de Thuiskopie), which is responsible for the collection of the levies, demanding that the foundation pay collected levies back to the hardware makers.

The Dutch government will introduce a levy of up to ¬5 (US$6.40) for devices and discs in January 2013 to comply with a European regulation.

An 8 GB iPad for example will become ¬5 more expensive as will all laptops and PCs as well as smartphones and HDD recorders with more than 160GB of storage. Devices with a lower storage capacity will have a lower levy, with the lowest being a ¬0.03 levy per DVD or CD-R.

The lawsuit comes just two days after Dell, HP and Imation sent a letter of concern to the State Secretary for Security and Justice, Fred Teeven, that was also signed by Fujitsu, Intel, Nokia, Panasonic, RIM, Samsung and Digital Europe. Acer, a party to the court action Wednesday, did not sign the letter.

Implementing the levy will harm the companies' ability to serve customers in the Netherlands and raise the cost of digital technology, the companies said in the letter. "Furthermore, it will cause trade barriers and serious disincentives to operating logistics hubs and distribution centers in the Netherlands," they said, adding that they have serious doubts about the legality of the decision.

"It is likely to be in conflict with the [European] Copyright Directive. It does not live up to the requirement that fair compensation be based on assessment of harm of private copying, and it seems to include compensation for illegal copies," they said. Furthermore, the system lacks a workable system for exempting products sold to professional users, and there are several points of uncertainty and ambiguity in the decision that would make it extremely difficult and costly to implement in practical terms, they added.

In the letter, the companies had said some of them were seeking legal advice, but also said that they were "keen to work with" Teeven and his staff to find constructive solutions and urged him to reconsider the decision and at a minimum to postpone the implementation.

"The ultimate objective should be the abolition of media/device-based levies systems, both in the Netherlands and in other European countries," they said, adding that it is not only in the Netherlands that levies on ICT products cause difficulties.

The Ministry of Security and Justice could not be immediately reached for comment on the lawsuit.
http://www.itworld.com/it-management...pyright-levies





“Anonymous” File-Sharing Darknet Ruled Illegal by German Court
Ernesto

A court in Hamburg, Germany, has granted an injunction against a user of the anonymous and encrypted file-sharing network RetroShare . RetroShare users exchange data through encrypted transfers and the network setup ensures that the true sender of the file is always obfuscated. The court, however, has now ruled that RetroShare users who act as an exit node are liable for the encrypted traffic that’s sent by others.

Anonymous file-sharing is booming. Whether it’s BitTorrent through a VPN, proxy, or other anonymizing services, people are increasingly looking to hide their identities online.

One application that gained interest earlier this year is RetroShare. Despite being actively developed for more than half a decade, its user-base suddenly increased tenfold in just a few months.

The RetroShare network allows people to create a private and encrypted file-sharing network. Users add friends by exchanging PGP certificates with people they trust. All the communication is encrypted using OpenSSL and files that are downloaded from strangers always go through a trusted friend.

In other words, it’s a true Darknet and virtually impossible to monitor by outsiders. At least, that’s the idea.

This week a Hamburg court ruled against a RetroShare user who passed on an encrypted transfer that turned out to be a copyrighted music file. The user in question was not aware of the transfer, and merely passed on the data in a way similar to how TOR works.

The court, however, ruled that the user in question, who was identified by the copyright holder, is responsible for passing on the encrypted song.

The judge ordered an injunction against the RetroShare user, who is now forbidden from transferring the song with a maximum penalty of €250,000 or a six month prison term. Since RetroShare traffic is encrypted this means that the user can no longer use the network without being at risk.

“The defendant is liable for the infringement of troublemakers,” the court explained in its ruling.

The Hamburg court’s decision goes quite far according to some legal experts. IT lawyer Thomas Stadler, for example, writes on his blog that the legal opinion is “quite risky” as it puts all users of RetroShare in danger.

“It ultimately accuses the offender of failing to secure his Internet connection by running RetroShare, and allowing other users of the RetroShare network to transfer copyright-protected works via his computer,” Stadler writes.

While the ruling is obviously a threat to RetroShare users, in part it’s also a human error by the user in question.

RetroShare derives its security from the fact that all transfers go through “trusted friends” who users themselves add. In this case, the defendant added the anti-piracy monitoring company as a friend, which allowed him to be “caught.”

More troubling is the precedent the ruling sets for people who run open wireless networks, as the same issues arise there. According to this ruling Internet subscribers are responsible for the transfers that take place on their networks, making them liable for the copyright infringements of others.

Update: Contrary to the U.S. and elsewhere, a previous ruling in Germany already makes wireless network operators liable for copyright infringements of others.
https://torrentfreak.com/anonymous-f...-court-121123/





Megaupload Search Warrant Requests Ignored Massive Non-Infringing Use
Ernesto

As a direct result of the Megaupload raid many legitimate users of the site lost access to their personal files. To find out why the Government put the interests of copyright holders before those of the public, one user convinced the court to unseal the seizure warrant matarials. Surprisingly, however, there is absolutely no mention of Megaupload’s legal use in the released records. In a response Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom says the whole case is a tragic copyright comedy.

In the wake of the January shutdown of Megaupload, many of the site’s legitimate users complained that their personal files had been lost.

Among these users are many people in the U.S. military who used the site to share pictures and videos with family. TorrentFreak learned that least 15,634 soldiers had accounts at Megaupload, between them sharing hundreds of thousands of files.

One of the users, entrepreneur Kyle Goodwin, asked the court to return his files. As part of this request his attorneys filed a motion to unseal the Megaupload search warrants so they can see on what grounds the data was taken.

This week Judge O’Grady granted the request and ordered the release of the warrants and their applications, albeit redacted. This means we can now see how the U.S. put forward its request to seize the domains and servers.

The search warrant applications don’t offer any new facts and mostly recite what has already been written in the indictment. The Government describes Megaupload as nothing more than a place where copyright infringing files are stored, and this is what the judge signed off on.

However, what is striking is that none of the released records even mention the legitimate use of the site. In other words, the rights of Megaupload’s legitimate users were never taken into consideration.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Kim Dotcom shares our surprise, noting that nearly half of all files stored on Megaupload were never downloaded.

“The legitimate use was completely ignored in the seizure warrant applications. Almost 50% of files stored on Megaupload didn’t have a single download. There was massive non-infringing use by those who just wanted to store data in the cloud,” Dotcom says.
The lack of discussion about the many legitimate users of Megaupload is concerning.

Several of the allegations made against Megaupload could easily apply to other hosting and video services. The FBI, for example, explains in detail how their undercover agent was able to upload, view and download copyrighted videos, something that’s also quite common on YouTube.

More direct allegations against Megaupload are misleading according to Dotcom. For example, that the Megaupload team failed to delete infringing files that were pointed out in a criminal search warrant back in 2010.

“A member of the Mega Conspiracy informed several of his co-conspirators at that time that he located the named files using internal searches of the Mega Conspiracy’s systems. As of November, 18 2011, thirty-six or the thirty-nine infringing copies of the copyrighted motion pictures were still being stored on servers controlled by the Mega Conspiracy,” the DoJ writes.

However, Dotcom now explains that they didn’t touch the files because they were never asked to do so, and didn’t want to interfere with evidence in a criminal case. A document seen by TorrentFreak backs this up.

“The FBI asked us for uploader information regarding 39 files and told us to keep their investigation confidential. We assisted and obviously didn’t touch the uploader accounts or files because of the ongoing investigation,” Dotcom tells us.

“To use this against us and to tell a Judge that the Megaupload domain seizure is justified because we have not removed those 39 files is totally unethical and misleading,” he adds.

In another section the DoJ points out that Megaupload only deleted links to files when they received DMCA-notices, not the actual files themselves.

“Copyright holders were led to believe that the Mega Conspiracy’s systems would then remove, or disable access to, the infringing content. In practice, however, only the specific URL links identified in the notices were disabled,” the seizure application reads.

What isn’t mentioned is that this is common practice. YouTube doesn’t delete all the same videos either when they get a DMCA notice. After all, the file may also be hosted by the person who actually owns the rights.

Dotcom says the there are numerous other examples of weaknesses in the case, some of which we’ve discussed before.

“This case makes the DOJ look increasingly stupid and will become an embarrassment for the White House. If it wasn’t such a tragedy for our Megaupload staff and users as well as our families I would just be smiling. Brain deficiencies and lag of knowledge become increasingly obvious in DOJ court filings.”

“I can’t believe I’m in the middle of this tragic copyright comedy,” he says.

Beyond the current case, the unsealed search warrant materials will aid in the national discussion about copyright infringement related domain and data seizures. How easy should it be for the DoJ to take sites offline without due process, and what about the damage done to the public?

To be continued.
https://torrentfreak.com/megaupload-...ng-use-121118/





Megaupload Assisted U.S. Prosecution of Smaller File-Sharing Service
David Kravets

Eighteen months before Megaupload’s operators were indicted in the United States, the company complied with a secret U.S. search warrant targeting five of its users, who were running their own file-sharing service using Megaupload’s infrastructure, according to interviews and newly unsealed court documents.

The June 24, 2010 warrant to search the Megaupload servers in Virginia was part of a U.S. criminal investigation into NinjaVideo, which was piggy-backing on Megaupload’s “Megavideo” streaming service. Though the feds had already begun quietly investigating Megaupload months before, in this case the government treated Megaupload as NinjaVideo’s internet service provider, serving Megaupload with the warrant and asking them to keep it quiet.

Megaupload responded as “good corporate citizens,” said Ira Rothken, who represents founder Kim Dotcom. The company kept the warrant a secret and turned over information on the alleged NinjaVideo operators, as well as database information on the 39 pirated movies detailed in the warrant. The NinjaVideo probe led to the indictment of the five top NinjaVideo administrators, including founder Hana Beshara, on charges similar to those now faced by Dotcom and other Megaupload operators.

“Megaupload complied with the warrant and cooperated with the government’s request,” Rothken said. He said Megaupload had gotten “a number of such warrant and subpoena type requests a year and still have an expectation that as classic ‘online service providers’ they are immune from liability for the acts of users who are the target of such warrants and subpoenas.”

Despite Megaupload’s cooperation, the 39 infringing NinjaVideo files were later used against the popular file-sharing service as evidence to seize Megaupload.com domains and prosecute Dotcom and others connected to the site.

One possible reason for that: An e-mail obtained by prosecutors showed that Megaupload executives quickly discovered that the 39 files were not confined to the accounts controlled by NinjaVideo.

“The 39 supplied MD5 hashes identify mostly very popular files that have been uploaded by over 2,000 different users so far,” Megaupload’s co-founder, Mathias Ortmann, wrote to DotCom five days after the search warrant, in an “urgent” e-mail cited in the amended indictment in the Megaupload prosecution.

Despite this discovery, Megaupload did not delete the 39 movies from its servers. The government used that fact to demonstrate that the company knew full well that its service was being used for piracy.

In the Megaupload domain seizure warrant unsealed Friday, a federal agent whose name was redacted not only accuses Megaupload of “uploading infringing content themselves,” but also pointedly notes that most of the 39 NinjaVideo files were left on Megaupload’s servers.

According to the application to seize Megaupload’s domains:

On or about June 24, 2010, members of the Mega Conspiracy were informed, pursuant to a criminal search warrant from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, that thirty-nine infringing copies of copyrighted motion pictures were present on their leased servers at Carpathia Hosting, a hosting company headquartered in the Eastern District of Virginia. A member of the Mega Conspiracy informed several of his co-conspirators at that time that he located the named files using internal searches of the Mega Conspiracy’s systems. As of November 18, 2011, thirty-six of the thirty-nine infringing copies of copyrighted motion pictures were still being stored on servers controlled by the Mega Conspiracy.

Rothken calls the government’s argument “outrageous.” Given the NinjaVideo search warrant, and the government’s specific request for secrecy and to retain the files, Megaupload might have been accused of evidence-spoliation if it had taken the movies down, says Rothken.

“If anything, such a cooperation request by the government bolstered Megaupload’s view that as a cloud storage intermediary it was operating lawfully even if some users may have been misbehaving,” Rothken said.

Federal prosecutors declined comment.

Rothken insists that the 2010 NinjaVideo search warrant in no way warned Megaupload that they too might be prosecuted for the same files. Under the DMCA, Rothken notes, internet service providers can’t be held legally liable for piracy if they respond promptly to takedown notices by copyright holders, which he says Megaupload always did.

“Megaupload qualifies for the DMCA safe harbor,” Rothken said in a telephone interview.

The feds dispute that. A January 13, 2010 warrant to seize Megaupload’s domains claims that copyright holders — including Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., Sony Music Entertainment Inc., and the Business Software Alliance — had sent Megaupload “thousands” of notices under the DMCA, and they were ignored.

Days after a judge signed the order to seize Megaupload, Dotcom’s New Zealand compound was raided on Jan. 19, 2012, in what prosecutors have called one of “the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States.” In all, the Justice Department seized 18 domains connected to Megaupload, including Megaworld, Megaclick and Megaporn. The agency said it executed more than 20 search warrants in the United States and eight countries, seizing $50 million in assets.

Four of the members, including Dotcom, were arrested in Auckland, New Zealand. They remain free on bail, pending potential extradition to the U.S. to face charges in what authorities say was a seven-year scheme that netted Megaupload $175 million in subscriber and advertising fees.

The seized Megaupload.com sites had gotten a combined 50 million hits daily, compared to NinjaVideo’s roughly 6 million hits monthly. When the indictment was unsealed in January, the sites were redirected to the control of the FBI. They greet visitors with a message from the Justice Department that they have “been seized pursuant to an order issued by a U.S. District Court.”

The authorities said Megaupload facilitated copyright infringement of movies “often before their theatrical release, music, television programs, electronic books, and business and entertainment software on a massive scale.” The government said Megaupload’s “estimated harm” to copyright holders was “well in excess of $500 million.”

Even beyond the NinjaVideo investigation, Dotcom long ago had reason to be concerned that the United States might target him. In July 2010, the Dutch-based news site, TorrentFreak, published a story about recent seizures under the Department of Homeland Security’s program known as Operation in Our Sites. The headline was “Pirate Bay and Megaupload Escape Domain Seizure by US.”

On July 8, 2010, Dotcom sent a link to the story in an e-mail to Ortmann and Sven Echternach, head of business development for Megaupload, according to the Megaupload superseding indictment. “This is a serious threat to our business. Please look into into this and see how we can protect ourselves,” according to the indictment.

Dotcom asked, “Should we move our domain to another country.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...igation-roots/





Dotcom: We've Hit the Jackpot

Indication of FBI double-cross coup in extradition fight, says internet mogul
David Fisher

A fresh legal bid to throw out the case against Kim Dotcom in the United States is being made after claims of an FBI double-cross.

Evidence has emerged showing the Department of Homeland Security served a search warrant on Mr Dotcom's file-sharing company Megaupload in 2010 which he claims forced it to preserve pirated movies found in an unrelated piracy investigation.

The 39 files were identified during an investigation into the NinjaVideo website, which had used Megaupload's cloud storage to store pirated movies.

When the FBI applied to seize the Megaupload site in 2012, it said the company had failed to delete pirated content and cited the earlier search warrant against the continued existence of 36 of the same 39 files.

The details emerged after the US District Court in East Virginia allowed partial access to the FBI application which led to the shutdown of the Mega family of websites.

Other information from the case to emerge this week includes a collection of photographs from the day of the raid at Mr Dotcom's Coatesville property on January 20 this year.

The High Court released the material after applications from the Herald.

Mr Dotcom said Megaupload co-operated with the US Government investigation into copyright pirates NinjaVideo and was legally unable to delete the 39 movies identified in the search warrant.

Mr Dotcom said: "We were informed by (the US Government) we were not to interfere with the investigation. We completely co-operated.

"Then the FBI used the fact the files were still in the account of the ... user to get the warrant to seize our own domains. This is outrageous."

He said the revelation was the first insight into the FBI's case against Megaupload and it showed bad faith on the part of the US Government. "Immediately we hit the jackpot - the first little piece of paper is this super-jackpot."

New Zealand's district court has ordered the FBI to provide documents relating to its investigation through an order for discovery. It was currently being appealed.

"I understand why the US is working so hard to appeal the discovery decision."

Mr Dotcom said the warrant obliged Megaupload to keep the files. It was among a string of legal requests from law enforcement agencies around the world.

"We have always co-operated. We have responded to takedown requests, we have been a good corporate citizen."

The FBI application to seize the sites said the "Mega Conspiracy" members were told by "criminal search warrant" in June 2010 "that 39 infringing copies of copyrighted motion pictures were present on their leased servers". The application was approved to allow the seizure of the domain names.

However, the application to seize the domain names, made on January 13, 2012, did not state the earlier search warrant was not issued against Megaupload.

Instead, the Department of Homeland Security application sought the help of Megaupload to track down files of interest in its investigation of NinjaVideo. The warrant application was by Special Agent William Engel and stated that the data storage company Carpathia "will work with its customer Megaupload to access content to provide in response to the search warrant".

The investigation was a success and saw its central figure Hana Amal "Queen Phara" Beshara sentenced to prison for 22 months and ordered to pay $256,000 of her illegally gained money to the Motion Picture Association of America - the same Hollywood lobby group blamed for pitting the FBI against Megaupload.

The access was granted after a bid by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on behalf of a Megaupload customer whose business files were lost when the cloud storage site was shut down.

Mr Dotcom's US-based lawyer Ira Rothken said he would ask the US court to return the Megaupload websites.

He said the discovery of the FBI's evidence of wrongdoing was part of a "trail of misconduct" stretching from the US to New Zealand which would ultimately lead to asking for the FBI charges to be dismissed.

"What we have uncovered, in our view, is misleading conduct. It looks like the Government wants the confidentiality because they would be concerned their conduct would be scrutinised."

The 39 files were not only used by NinjaVideo, according to the FBI affidavit. The Megaupload system identified files which were already on the system and kept only one copy of each. Unique weblinks were produced for each user providing multiple paths to the same file. The FBI indictment cited an email by Mr Dotcom's co-accused Mathias Ortman in which he said more than 2000 users had uploaded the 39 files.

A month after Homeland Security sought MegaUpload's help, NinjaVideo and a range of other sites were shutdown without warning. Coverage of the action led to Mr Dotcom emailing staff about the domain seizures, saying the manner of the US action posed "a serious threat to our business". He asked: "Should we move our domain to another country (Canada or even HK?)." The company, which has maintained it operated inside the law, stayed in the US.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/ar...ectid=10849627





How RapidShare Plans To Avoid MegaUpload's Fate
John Paul Titlow

It's not everyday an Internet company watches its traffic numbers plummet - and rejoices. But that is precisely the scenario that cloud storage service RapidShare finds itself in as it seeks to draw a clear distinction between its business model and that of the now-defunct Megaupload.

Since the raid that saw Megaupload shut down and its founder arrested last last year, RadidShare and similar services have been taking measures to reduce piracy on their networks, in many cases limiting their functionality and potentially sacrificing the overall user experience. If it means avoiding the fate of Megaupload, even drastic changes are worth it to these companies.

On November 27, RapidShare will start putting a tight cap on outbound downloads for its free users. Paid members will still have 30 gigabytes in outbound downloads per day, but everybody else will be capped at one gigabyte. This will apply to public downloads, whereas direct Dropbox-style sharing between users won't be affected. The change is expected to further deter pirates from using RapidShare to distribute copyright material on a large scale.

An Ongoing, Newly Urgent Battle

The download caps are just the latest in a list of anti-piracy moves the company has made, as Chief Legal Officer Daniel Raimer outlined in a presentation at the Future of Music Summit in Washington, D.C. earlier this week. Those earlier efforts include a three-strike policy for repeat infringers and Web-crawling technology that helps RapidShare find links to illegal content so it can take corrective measures with those accounts.

"That's really helpful to delete a lot of accounts in a short amount of time and to get rid of a lot of piracy that happens on a large scale," Raimer told ReadWrite in an interview after his talk. "It's kind of hard to identify guys who do piracy on a very low level, like some Norwegian kid who has a music blog with very low traffic. Sooner or later that guy is going to be detected."

Earlier this year, RapidShare published a document titled "Responsible Practices For Cloud Storage Services" (see below), which outlines an anti-piracy framework for cyberlockers like to use in dealing with DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown requests to remove allegedly pirated content and policing activity on their services.

RapidShare Handicaps Itself To Save Its Own Life

In the case of RapidShare, the association with piracy is difficult to shake. For years, links to RapidShare pages containing movies and albums have littered the Web. According to Google Trends, the second most closely related search term to "RapidShare" is "Megaupload." Included on the list of top-ten related search terms are "rapidshare movies" and "rapidshare crack." It's this close association with piracy that RapidShare is hoping to change with its download caps, three-strike policy and Web-crawling technology.

The company has already seen a substantial drop-off in traffic as a result of the company's existing anti-piracy measures, Raimer said. Their goal is to make using RapidShare as unpalatable as possible for copyright infringers, and the initial response to its anti-infringement measures suggest that the strategy is working. The pirates are not happy.

RapidShare isn't the only company taking these kinds of precautions. In the aftermath of the Megaupload shutdown, FileSonic and FileServe stopped allowing users to download files uploaded by other users, and MediaFire went on a PR offensive in an attempt to draw a line between itself and Megaupload.

This is an odd and risky position for a business to be in, deliberately handicapping its own product in a bid to shoo away some users while hoping to cling to enough members to avoid a detrimental drop in revenue.

RapidShare is trying to strike a very delicate balance. How effectively it's able to do that depends, in part, on how much of the content on RapidShare infringes on copyrights, and how much does not. That's a difficult thing to measure, but no doubt the company's crawlers and other anti-piracy technology is starting to illuminate. Come November 27, the picture will start to get even clearer.
http://readwrite.com/2012/11/19/how-...gauploads-fate





Hollywood, Wake Up and Smell the File-Sharing. And Stop Making Kim Dotcom a Scapegoat
Mic Wright

They’ll never admit it but record executives and Hollywood movie moguls are delighted that Kim Dotcom exists. The overweight German hacker with the silly pseudonym, a taste for guns, a fleet of cars boasting personalised number plates (one read “MAFIA”), a huge mansion in New Zealand and penchant for grand gestures – he recently promised to provide free broadband to the country – makes for a striking adversary. He’s just a death ray and a volcano hideout away from being a Bond villain.

The entertainment industry claims Dotcom’s creation, the cloud storage site Megaupload, cost it more than $500 million in lost revenue through copyright infringement and the US wants to extradite him. The case began with a raid on Dotcom’s mansion in January this year by armed police. There have been many twists and turns since including New Zealand’s Prime Minister, John Key, being forced to apologise after the country’s secret service was found to have illegally monitored the Megaupload founder’s communications. To some, Dotcom’s situation is more about the cosy relationship between the United States and New Zealand than copyright issues.

Dealing with household names like Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft, all of which have cloud services which could be used to share files illegally is a tricky business. To the lawyers at the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) and Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Dotcom was always going to look like a better prospect. Like Sean Parker at Napster in the late-90s, he’s a prominent figure and an easy scapegoat. Had he built MegaUpload with the backing of Silicon Valley venture capitalists and kept his head down he may never have found himself waking up to armed police and an extradition warrant.

Record companies and movie studios want an Al Capone figure to blame for their lost revenue. Dotcom, who once styled himself as Doctor Evil, gave them just that. When it was pursued by Viacom, YouTube was able to argue in a US court that it was protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s Safe Harbour provisions. It was a civil case and YouTube continued to operate. Megaupload was shut down and Dotcom faces criminal charges including racketeering and money laundering.

Of course the legal arguments are complex but it certainly helps the entertainment industry’s case that Dotcom is such a character. With the German's list of “youthful indiscretions” that includes convictions for insider trading and embezzlement, it’s easy for MPAA's CEO, Chris Dodd, to call him “a career criminal”. But whether or not the US succeeds in bringing Dotcom to trial, the problem of online piracy will remain. It’s a question of fixing a business model and fighting a mindset, not defeating any one man, no matter how large.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technol...m-a-scapegoat/





Police Raid 9-Year-Old Pirate Bay Girl, Confiscate Winnie The Pooh Laptop
enigmax

An anti-piracy company has found itself in the middle of a huge controversy. CIAPC, the company that had The Pirate Bay blocked by ISPs in Finland, tracked an alleged file-sharer and demanded a cash settlement. However, the Internet account holder refused to pay which escalated things to an unprecedented level. In response, this week police raided the home of the 9-year-old suspect and confiscated her Winnie the Pooh laptop.

Very soon in the United States, letters will be sent out to Internet account holders informing them that they should stop sharing copyrighted material on BitTorrent.

The message in the US from mainstream rightsholders is designed to be educational, but more aggressive companies carry out the same process but with a sting in the tail – a request for cash-settlement to make potential lawsuits go away.

One such request for cash landed on the doorstep of an Internet account holder in Finland during the spring. Known locally as TTVK, Finnish anti-piracy group CIAPC sent the man a letter informing him that his account had been traced back to an incidence of online file-sharing.

To stop matters progressing further the man was advised to pay a settlement of 600 euros, sign a non-disclosure document, and move on with his life. He chose not to give in to the demands of CIAPC and this week things escalated as promised.

Tuesday morning the doorbell of the family home rang around 8am and the man, who works in the hospitality sector, had quite a shock. Police were at his door with a search warrant authorizing the hunt for evidence connected to illicit file-sharing.

Surprisingly, the man isn’t a previously unknown Kim Dotcom-related “co-conspirator”, nor does he run a warez site or BitTorrent tracker. He is, however, guilty of having a 9-year-old daughter with a taste for pop music.

Having failed in her quest to put enough money in her piggy bank to buy the latest album from local multi-platinum-selling songstress Chisu, in 2011 she turned to the Internet, first via Google and then The Pirate Bay.

The girl’s father said the resulting downloads didn’t work so the following day they went to the store to buy music. Nevertheless, this week’s police visit shows that CIAPC mean business, no matter how young the targets or whether or not they also buy music.

In concluding their search, the police confiscated the girl’s file-sharing weapon of choice – her Winnie The Pooh laptop – and according to her father offered some final words.

“It would have been easier for all concerned if you had paid the compensation,” the police advised

“I got the feeling that there had been people from the MAFIA demanding money at the door,” the girl’s father explained.

“We have not done anything wrong with my daughter. If adults do not always know how to use a computer and the web, how can you assume that children or the elderly – or a 9-year-old girl – knows what they are doing at any given time online?

“This is the pinnacle of absurdity. I can see artists are in a position, but this requires education and information, not resource-consuming lawsuits,” he added.

Electronic Frontier Finland say that this week’s developments are an indication of just how far copyright enforcements issues have progressed in Finland.

“It is not in anyone’s interest, that in the name of the copyright, little girls are being harassed. This shows poor judgment, and consideration from TTVK and from the police,” vice chairman Ville Oksanen said in a statement.

However, there are signs that support might come from an unexpected corner. In a statement the artist in question – Chisu – said that she doesn’t want to sue anyone and that no artist needs this kind of media attention. Indeed, the criticism of the move on her Facebook page is fierce.

“I hope that the matter will be resolved soon and sorry to my 9-year-old girls,” Chisu wrote, pointing them to this free link to her music on Spotify.

The girl’s father’s welcomed Chisu’s comments but bemoaned their apparent lack of power to get anything done.

“It is sad to see how even the big artists have no idea what CIAPC / TTVK is doing in their name. And the worst part is that even after learning about this, like Chisu did just now and took part in the discussion on Facebook, they can’t stop it since all copyright protection and monitoring is centralized,” he explained.

“I hope all musicians realize that the fan hunt that involves confiscating laptops and signing deals that require you to be silent about the payments are severely hurting the image of copyright and creators. Authors of works should actively rise up to say NO to what CIAPC/TTVK is doing if they wish to keep their fans,” he concludes.

CIAPC confirmed that the case against the 9-year-old is only the latest in a line of attempted settlements. Last fall a total of 28 Internet account holders settled with CIPAC, but of course we haven’t heard of the cases due to the confidentiality agreements recipients are required to sign.
https://torrentfreak.com/police-raid...laptop-121122/





Editorial: Vanishing 'Copywrong' Document Blasts RIAA, Suggests Radical Reform, and Should be Taken Seriously
Brad Hill

Something startling happened over the weekend. It came and went in a flash, but the repercussions could, and should, be lasting. An unexpected and most unusual policy brief from the Republican Study Committee was released. (The RSC is a 165-member congressional policy review group.) Entitled Three Myths About Copyright Law and Where to Start to Fix It, the eight-page document is an astonishing declaration of revisionism, bristling with policy arguments that align with the most excitable rants of P2P advocates over the last 10 years. It is a devastating indictment of American copyright law.

Then, in less than 24 hours, the paper was rescinded. The committee's Executive Director, Paul S. Teller, offered an obscure apology with no explanation. Of course the thing is easily available, and its message remains a permanent part of the conversational record, deletion be damned.

By arguing that the current iteration of American copyright law is broken in several respects, and by proposing extreme solutions, the rogue document debilitates the talking points of institutional copyright holders and their agencies such as the RIAA. Anyone who has been following the hardened rhetoric over what copyright should be in a copy-share digital world will be startled by the accusatory language and sharply reformist intent of this document.

Part history lesson, the review emphasizes the original purpose of American copyright law as protective of society, not of creators and businesses. On that basis the committee skewers three "myths" of current law:

• The historical myth: that copyright was created to compensate creators of intellectual property. Quoting the Constitution, the role of copyright is to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." The copyright term, originally set at 14 years, was contrived to incentivize creators by establishing a short monopoly window for monetizing an original creation, after which works of art and literature would enter the public commons and enrich society. Serial extensions of copyright term have blurred the sweet spot between incentive and welfare entitlement for creators, the report argues, distorting the historical role of copy protection.
• The marketplace myth: that present-day copyright represents free-market capitalism. Current term lengths are partly the result of corporate lobbying, most famously in the case of the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, colloquially known as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. It forestalled Mickey's drift into the public domain. The congressional paper asserts that such a degree of government subsidization acts as an artificial container within which a regulated market operates unfairly for some participants. The report brings forth surprising business cases.
• The incentive myth: that current copyright leads to innovation and productivity. In league with the first point, this contention criticizes modern law for failing to effectively induce creative productivity by disproportionately protecting creators. That argument might seem circular or contradictory. The committee seems concerned with creators resting on their laurels instead of getting back to their desks -- the peril of extended government protection.

Creators and consumers have been at loggerheads over copyright. Recent frays in the file-sharing era have centered around consumer ignorance in both senses of the word: lack of awareness on one hand, and ignoring copyright on the other hand. Blindness and scorn are the two banes of rights-holders in the age of copying. Any message board on the topic of buying and stealing music, no matter how erudite some of the voices, also spotlights a breathtaking ignorance of how copyright applies to unauthorized sharing. Alongside the lack of education is often a blow-it-all-up disdain for legal structure around creative work as property.

The philosophy of copyright protection certainly reduces the stature of creative property compared to material property. If you acquire a leafy suburban estate, the government will not take it from you and turn it into public housing after an ownership term. That property can be passed down through generations forever. Arguably, intellectual property is rarer than material property, therefore more inherently valuable. For that very reason, it is deemed to essentially belong to society. You might say creators are allowed to rent exclusive ownership of their own work for a term, long enough to cash in before creating something new for society's benefit.

For all these reasons, historical and current, creators feel embattled about the term and enforcement of copyright. On the other side, society has reason to feel shafted by the evolution of lightweight regulation into bloated law. Individual creators are granted copyright monopoly for 70 years after their death, a term that inarguably benefits descendants more than it induces further creative output. Corporate copyright lasts for 120 years. The congressional committee frames these exaggerated protection windows as a corruption of America's historic agreement with society.

To ground its conceptual arguments, the report suggests five industry cases in which existing copyright harms society and secondary creators. The lead argument is a startling advocacy of the DJ / Remix industry, spinning a hard-luck business case in support of DJs who are inhibited from freely sampling music and creating mix tapes for sale. Reminder: we are talking about a congressional white paper in the hizzle. It explicitly calls for the deregulation of mashups and remixes, recognizing and sanctioning an existing subterranean market. ("While there is an underground remix black market, this market is nothing like it would be if this were legalized.")

The committee hurls a spear into the heart of book publishers in a starry-eyed "imagine this" passage which recommends liberating to the public domain all books published before 1980. A dagger stabs directly at textbook publishers: "Assigned books in high school classes could be all downloaded to a student's Kindle, rather than bought in a book store."

After six pages of uncommonly progressive and sometimes harrowing impeachments of how the law operates today, the point is clear: copyright is messed up. On to the solutions.

Radically, this congressional document prescribes shortening the copyright term to 12 years, a briefer exclusivity period than in the original Constitution. Creators could re-up for an extension, but would be charged a sort of opt-in fee based on a percentage of revenues earned during the first term. This frictional disincentive would induce creators to release their artistic works into the claws of society and secondary creators.

Editorial Change copyright now

Importantly, the review insists on statutory damages reform, aimed squarely at outrageous claims of business injury from record labels. The document frankly ridicules the 2011 action of the record labels vs. LimeWire for $75 trillion in damages resulting from shared music files. The risk of laws which allow damage valuation up to a regulated (statutory) ceiling is that damage can become theoretical instead of actual. The congressional committee further undermines basic record-label assumptions by arguing for the potential innocence of lawsuit targets: "...in a world where everyone copies stuff at home all the time, the idea that your iPod could make you liable for a billion dollars in damages is excessive ... Scaring a large number of potentially innocent people into settling should not be an effect of copyright law ... Copyright awards were meant to make the copyright holder whole -- they were not supposed to be punitive."

Quasi-hacker rhetoric like this understandably infuses joy into the hearts of P2P champions, while tempting the wrath of entertainment powerhouses by savaging the RIAA's litigation tactics. It is easy to imagine that the report's quick retraction was a response to horrified institutional rights-holders and lobbyists. As of this writing, nobody knows what exactly happened.

What is the upshot? Retraction notwithstanding, the world now knows that some congressional minds are not buying into business-serving manipulation of original copyright principles, and that reform is needed. In my view, the proposed 12-year term is an aggressive stake in the ground that probably cannot, and should not, stay in place. Book authors, movie producers and music owners would potentially lose important income opportunities that take longer than 12 years to develop. A book that is optioned for a movie 15 years after publication. A film franchise stretching over seven movies, each of which takes years to produce. A successful band that loses control of its portfolio before it can release a Greatest Hits collection. But the incentivizing balance has clearly been lost, and that is the main point of the report.

If today's lawmakers agree with the constitutional philosophy of copyright as a protector of society's common ownership of human creativity, the call to rebalance the law should be heard, and acted upon.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/20/c...copyright-now/





Phone Patents: An Absurd Battle
Paul Rubens

You only have to look at some of the ridiculous numbers involved in the smartphone wars to see why they continue to rage.

Apple blocks Samsung sales. Samsung blocks Apple sales. Apple ban overturned. Samsung ban lifted. On any given day it's hard to keep track of which company's smartphones, tablet computers or other products are temporarily banned in which countries.

And it's not just Apple and Samsung which are at each other's throats - it seems that every week brings new stories of alleged patent infringement involving companies ranging from household names like HTC to more obscure outfits like VirnetX. (In case you're wondering, Apple was recently ordered to pay $368 million to Connecticut-based VirnetX after a US court ruled that its Facetime video chat tool infringed two of VirnetX's patents).

But what's the reason for this apparently endless series of patent battles involving smartphone and tablet firms? Why do they appear to be incapable of taking more effective steps to avoid infringing other companies patent rights?

One reason boils down to the nature of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, according to Daniel O'Connor, a self-styled anti-trust and internet policy wonk as well as senior director of public policy at the Computer and Communications Industry Association. He says that software is a particularly active area for patents, especially anything to do with telecommunications, semiconductors and 4G data networks. Software patents are also particularly broad and vague, and that makes infringement difficult to avoid. "That creates the conditions for a kind of patent perfect storm," O'Connor says.

Number crunch

To get an idea of the size of the problem facing the likes of Apple and Samsung, consider this: O'Connor believes - based on estimates from patent firm RPX - that there are about 250,000 active patents in the United States that may have some relevance to the activities of mobile device manufacturers out of a total of about 1.5 million active patents. That means that about 17% of all active patents in the United States are potentially patents on smartphone technology.

But that only begins to scratch the surface. That's because, as O'Connor points out, most of these patents don't just make a single claim to a particular intellectual property right - on average each patent makes more like 20 such claims. That means that this collection of 250,000 patents actually describes about five million restrictions on what mobile device makers can do while they design a new model. Realistically an individual may be able to keep five, 10 or maybe 20 restrictions in mind when designing a new feature for a mobile device, but probably not 50 or 500. And five million? Not a chance.

Now, you might think that large technology companies like Samsung or Apple must have busy legal departments brimming with patent attorneys whose job it is to make sure that any new products don't infringe other companies' patents. But in the VirnetX case, this was allegedly not the case. "Apple says they don't infringe, but Apple developers testified that they didn't pay any attention to anyone's patents when developing their system," a lawyer for VirnetX was quoted as saying.

Apple's behaviour may sound bizarre, but there's a very good reason why many companies ignore the patent system when it comes to software. A recent study found that if every software producing firm in America wanted to check just the new software patents issued in a given year, about two million patent attorneys working full time would be needed to do the job.

That's a problem because there are only about 40,000 registered patent attorneys and agents in the entire United States according to the United States Patent and Trademark Office. And even if two million hard working attorneys could somehow be found, at an hourly rate of $371 (the average cost of a patent attorney, as estimated by American Intellectual Property Law Association), their fees would come to about $1.5 trillion - or nearly 10% of the GDP of the USA. And that's assuming the attorneys didn't slack, spending no more than 10 minutes examining each patent.

‘Fingers crossed’

Christina Mulligan, one of the authors of the report and a postdoctoral associate at Yale Law School, says that the main problem is that software patents are so broad and vague that they are essentially impossible to index, and that means they can't be searched efficiently. "It's because it is more or less impossible to search them that no-one does it, and even if you tried you'd probably only find 25 of the 50 patents your software may infringe," she explained. "It's cheaper just to cross your fingers and hope for the best."

And, she adds, since companies are likely to have to pay less if they accidentally infringe a patent than if they read a patent and then wilfully ignore it, the "cross your fingers and hope" strategy is probably the most rational strategy to adopt.

Of course this strategy inevitably leads to patent disputes, but many technology companies end up resolving them by coming to some cross-licensing agreement with the other party - just this month Apple and Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC halted their hostilities this way. But, before this happens, companies often spend considerable sums buying up patent portfolios that they can use as bargaining chips during negotiations.

And these defensive portfolios do nothing to protect against so-called non practicing entities (NPEs) or “patent trolls”, as they have become known. These NPEs manufacture nothing themselves, but buy up software patents with the sole purpose of making money from them by enforcing the patent rights against purported infringers. As they have no products of their own, they have no need to engage in cross licensing deals.

A possible solution to the problem uses the concept of “defensive patent aggregation”. Instead of individual companies spending cash to build up defensive patent portfolios, companies like California-based RPX buy up patents and make them available to their customers, who pay an annual subscription. John Amster, RPX's CEO, says that ultimately patent pooling companies could act like performance rights organizations such as American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (Ascap) do in the music industry. "We would like to see a mandated clearing house (for patents). Everyone should have to pay a reasonable price, and everyone could avoid having to pay outsized damages," he said.

Of course there are other solutions too, ranging from a complete overhaul of the patent system to more subtle changes such as the inclusion of laws that would allow companies to use an independent inventor defence – essentially meaning that an inventor could argue that they came up with the an idea on their own.

But, for the moment , the software patent perfect storm shows no sign of abating. The only likely winners are the patent attorneys.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2012...-absurd-battle





Avid Library Ebook Borrowers Claim it Doesn’t Affect Their Book Buying
Laura Hazard Owen

Do people who borrow ebooks from libraries buy fewer books? A new survey of about 75,000 library users suggests no — but because the respondents were self-selecting and already active library users, the results can’t be extended to the general population.

Publishers have grappled with how and whether to make ebooks available to libraries — fearing, in part, that a library ebook checkout means a lost sale. A new survey from digital library distributor OverDrive and the American Library Association suggests that ebook borrowing from libraries does not cannibalize avid library users’ book-buying habits. However, this finding does not necessarily apply to the general population.

OverDrive and the ALA conducted the online survey at “thousands of U.S. public library websites powered by OverDrive. 75,384 people completed all or part of it. 78.4 percent of them were female, and the most common age group was 50- to 64-year-olds (34.9 percent), followed by 40- to 49-year-olds (20.1 percent). 40.9 percent had a 2- or 4-year college degree and 33.1 percent had a graduate degree.

Respondents were dedicated readers and library users and were familiar with ebook borrowing: More than half of them — 55.5 percent — had been borrowing ebooks from the library for over 6 months. On average, they visited a physical branch of a library 2.4 times a month, and they visited a digital library site 6.9 times a month.

To reiterate, these are very active library users — 60 percent of them said the library was their preferred place to get books — and big readers. The survey didn’t ask them how many books they read each month, but on average they bought one print book a month and 2.2 digital books (ebooks or digital audiobooks) a month.

An optional question asked respondents whether their book purchases had increased or decreased over the past 6 months. Here’s the breakdown between purchases of print books and ebooks:

We don’t know why many users’ book-buying habits changed and whether this had to do with increased library usage or other factors, but it seems that many of the same people who are borrowing ebooks are also buying more ebooks.

One finding that surprised me is this:

It’s pretty easy to answer “yes” on a question like this, so the fact that nearly half of respondents said no is surprising. It could suggest that users are primarily using library ebook collections to borrow titles they’re not super-passionate about. That wouldn’t be surprising, since digital editions of new titles and bestsellers tend to be scarce in library collections. And the answer could change if more publishers began making new titles available to libraries as ebooks.
http://paidcontent.org/2012/11/15/av...r-book-buying/





New E-Textbooks Report Student Study Habits

Students may no longer enjoy the luxury of slacking off in privacy because of new electronic textbooks that report their study habits.

Teachers can track the time spent reading e-textbooks and see the notes or highlights made by students through the new service offered by CourseSmart Analytics. Three U.S. universities and colleges have signed on to test the e-textbook service before it becomes widely available in 2013 — a way to identify students who need help and gauge the e-textbooks that hold student interest.

“With the CourseSmart dashboard, professors will be better able to fine-tune lesson plans, critique student performance, and even tailor suggestions for specific students on how to study more effectively to help them stay on track and stay in school,” said Ellen Wagner, executive director at the Cooperative for Educational Technology (WCET).

Such a service represents the latest possibility for using digital learning to get better feedback on how well students are doing at all times — even when those students are studying on their own without teachers or parents. The information could allow professors and teachers to fine-tune lesson plans and focus efforts on struggling students.

Some digital textbook services already track the study habits of users, but the CourseSmart effort makes the information readily available and useful for educators.

“We have long believed in the benefits of analytics as a means to improve learning outcomes, increase retention and graduation rates, and help lower the costs of higher education,” said Sean Devine, CEO of CourseSmart.

The first three educational institutes testing the idea include Texas A&M University in San Antonio, Villanova University and Rasmussen College, according to an announcement made at the EDUCAUSE 2012 conference on Nov. 7.

But some students will likely find it creepy to have textbooks keeping an eye on their study habits. The new pilot program may at least allow educators to navigate the privacy issues or concerns that can arise from deploying the digital textbook service.
http://mashable.com/2012/11/20/coursesmart-e-textbook/





Spotify’s Plan for Rescuing the Music Industry: Let it Fall Apart First
Christopher Mims

Spotify, the music-streaming service, just scored a $100 million round of financing. That values the company at $3 billion—but Daniel Ek, its founder, probably isn’t all that hung up on the fact that he’s now the head of one of the few European startups to have exceeded a billion-dollar valuation. (Spotify was started in Sweden, Ek’s home.) “I don’t spend a lot of time talking about our finances at all,” says Ek, sitting in a conference room in Spotify’s Manhattan offices back in September.

“We want to build this for the long run,” says Ek, who compares Spotify to Amazon, another company in a low-margin business that is willing, in the words of its founder, Jeff Bezos, to be “misunderstood for long periods of time”. Ek says, “We want to get the 500 million people on the Internet listening to music, which I think will be a billion and a half in the next few years, to listen to music [through a paid service like Spotify].”

Try telling that to the music industry. Most of it seems to be up in arms about the tiny payments the company makes to artists each time their songs are played. One musician and industry scholar compared Spotify and competitor Pandora’s models to financial speculation: “Pandora and Spotify are not selling goods; they are selling access, a piece of the action.”

Ek is well aware of these criticisms, but he also believes that the music industry will stop pressing CDs within 18 months, leaving it at the mercy of Apple’s iTunes. The industry, he argues, has already been ravaged by piracy and changes in consumer behavior. All he wants to do is rebuild it.

To understand Ek’s plan, it helps to understand how music was sold before companies like his turned streaming music into a mass phenomenon. Artists were paid when their record was purchased on physical media, or, more recently, via iTunes. That led to a spike in sales when a recording was released, and a rapid drop-off in revenue after. But according to internal Spotify data, after an initial burst of interest that resembles the pattern for sales of music, a funny thing happens. Songs in the company’s catalog are played again and again, with no diminution in popularity. The reason is simple: people are building playlists. It’s as if an artist were paid every time one of their fans dropped a needle on their record.

“They’re saying, oh, they’re just paying a fraction of a cent every time someone plays a song,” says Ek. “And then you compare it versus the download revenue. Well, I can tell you it will take you 200 song listens before you make the same amount of money [as a download]. But because the consumption behavior is entirely different, and the revenue then increases in perpetuity, it’s not even a question of if this model is better, it’s just when in the lifecycle it’s better.”

What’s more, according to Ek, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has told him in private conversations that the same is true for the movie-streaming service, whose cheap all-you-can-watch monthly rates have worried many in the film industry. “It’s equally true for anything that’s an access model,” says Ek. In other words, as the world moves from owning content to getting access to it on demand, Ek’s experience is likely to generalize across all kinds of content. It’s a fundamental transformation of how artists and their industries will make money.

When describing how this will change the way that music labels develop artists, Ek resorts to the language of finance. In the old days, he says, record companies bet on a bunch of different acts, and just a few became big. But that was enough to pay for all the acts that never made it. (Movie studios do the same, relying on a few blockbusters to cover their smaller films and flops.) Likewise, venture capitalists bet on a portfolio of companies, knowing most will fail. “If you start looking at this from a longer term perspective, I actually believe that what we’re going to see is, we’re going to move from a venture capital model to more of a private equity model.” In other words, instead of bankrolling artists at the beginning of their careers, record labels will wait until they have achieved some success on their own, then invest in them for a stake of the proceeds.

Spotify now has a library of 20 million songs, and has negotiated contracts with more than 4,000 record labels and artists, says Ek. The service is now available in 17 countries, but it has plenty of competition on its home turf, including well-entrenched internet radio service Pandora and startup Rdio, and even more overseas, including France-based Deezer and India’s Saavn.

One way Spotify set itself apart from its competitors is its obsessive focus on helping users discover new music. That comes straight from Ek, who says his inspiration was his youth in Sweden, one of the first countries to get high speed broadband internet. At 17, when most of the world was on dial-up internet, Ek already had a 10 megabit-per-second connection direct to his house—the typical speed of a standard internet plan in the US today. By 2001, it was 100 megabits, and today, it’s a full gigabit. Like many Swedish youth, he used his super fast connection to trade music with friends—one reason why Sweden, home to file-sharing site The Pirate Bay and an active Pirate political party, is one of the world capitals of media piracy.

Spotify outsources the job of music discovery to hundreds of other developers. Their apps, built on top of Spotify’s library, are available through the service much like apps in iTunes or on Facebook. They include music blog aggregators that fuse algorithms with human judgment, like Hype Machine, and sites that are mainstays of online music journalism, like Pitchfork. If the key to getting people to consume more music is finding new ways to delight them with it, its app store gives Spotify many more ways to introduce fans to new acts and old favorites.

“We distinctly don’t think we’ll figure out every single use case around music,” says Ek. “We realize that someone who reads Pitchfork is someone who is very different from someone reading Rolling Stone. But we do want to be the platform for music… I just fundamentally believe that music is an integral part of people’s lives. If there’s music somewhere, we should power that.”
http://qz.com/28389/a-breakdown-of-t...-bp-committed/





Data: the Ultimate Internet Music Royalty

In the battle over music streaming royalties, one musician wants something more valuable than money: information
Phil Johnson

Will more data make some artists a little less starving?

The recently proposed Internet Radio Fairness Act (IRFA) has been leading many to take sides in a battle that continues to heat up. While it’s been easy to predict who would be on which side of the issue, one musician has offered new and interesting perspective, and her take may not be what you expect.

First, though, some background information.

I wrote about the IRFA in September, but here’s a quick recap: Internet radio stations, like Pandora, pay a significant amount of their revenue in royalties, most of it to recording artists and music labels (called performance royalties). In Pandora’s case, more than 50% of their revenue. Satellite radio (SiriusXM) also pays these royalties, but at a much lower rate (actually, a fixed percentage of their revenue), while terrestrial broadcasters don’t pay performance royalties at all. The IRFA is proposed legislation to reduce the royalties paid by Internet radio to be in line with what satellite radio pays.

Not surprisingly, Pandora backs it, claiming that the amount that Internet radio pays in royalties discourages innovation and entry into the market by other streamers and that the IRFA would “level the playing field” and, in the long run, help artists by encouraging new technologies and growth of the business. Also in favor of the bill are broadcasters like Clear Channel and Cox Media Group. These organizations, and others, have joined together to form the Internet Radio Fairness Coalition to push for passage of the IRFA.

On the other side of the aisle, opponents of the IRFA include songwriters and music publishers, Grover Norquist (WHEW! I’ve been waiting for him to weigh in), labels and, of course, musicians. In fact, opponents have formed their own coalition, musicFIRST, to oppose the bill, and support a competing piece of legislation, the Interim Fairness in Radio Starts Today Act (FIRST), which proposes to raise the royalties paid by satellite radio to match those paid by Internet radio.

None of this is all that surprising. What was surprising, though, was the analysis and opinion provided last week by Zoë Keating, a cellist, composer and recipient of the music royalties in question. Rather than just following the leads of Katy Perry, Megadeath and Pink Floyd by opposing the IRFA, Keating took some time to study the issue and her own situation and come to her own conclusions. She believes that royalties shouldn’t just be paid in money, but also in data.

After reviewing (and sharing with all of us) the payments that she gets from the various performance rights organizations (PROs), Keating notes that what’s missing from the reports she gets from the PROs is information. How many times was her music played? How many people heard it? Where is her music most popular? “How can I grow my business on this information?” she asks.

Keating argues that by knowing who is listening to her music she can better market to them.

“How do I reach them? Do they know I’m performing nearby next month? How can I tell them I have a new album coming out?”

As she points out, unlike broadcast radio, digital transmission should allow for the exact measurement of audience size. That information would be valuable to artists. In the end, while she’s happy to receive money, she writes that it’s “not as valuable as information. I’d rather be paid in data.”

Ultimately, she proposes a middle ground between the IRFA and FIRST: impose a single, equal royalty rate per listen, across all outlets, Internet/broadcast/satellite radio, one that’s lower than what Internet radio currently pays, but higher than what satellite radio pays. Most importantly, she wants data on the people that are listening to her music.

“I want my data and in 2012 I see absolutely no reason why I shouldn’t own it,” she wrote.

I think she makes a cogent argument that could provide the key to a solution that will make everyone happy (or, perhaps, equally unhappy). It’s logical and fair enough that I think it’s worth consideration by all parties - which, of course, is why it probably won’t happen.
http://www.itworld.com/big-data/3177...-music-royalty





What I Want from Internet Radio
Zoë Keating

Ever since SFMusicTech on Oct 9, I’ve been meaning to blog about the whole internet radio fairness act thingummybob. Almost every day someone has asked me: “What do you think about the proposed Internet Royalty Fairness Act?” and I haven’t had a proper answer. I’ve thought all kinds of things about it in the dead of the night, but those thoughts are often conflicting.

I had a vague understanding of the current system as it pertains to me, but didn’t feel that I had enough authority to write on the subject. So, I decided to do what I usually do: read up. I would absorb the fascinating history of internet performance royalties: what laws were made, when, what was the historical context, who was involved and who had the power. Then, I’d learn how the current laws are applied and what are the proposed changes.

This took a long time.

In between being a mom, being on tour, filing my 2011 taxes, recording a new song and scoring a TV commercial….I’ve been reading everything I can find and talking to people who know about it. The subject of internet performance royalties is not only mind-numbing and very hard to focus on, especially when you have a toddler attached to your leg, but it is also joyless. It’s not rocket science, but I think rocket science would be more fun.

After reading all this exciting literature, I had hoped my own opinion about IRFA would become crystal clear. It did not. Reading snippets of the histrionic-filled debates that led to the penning of the current laws (the Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act of 1995, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998, the Webcaster Settlement act of 2008 and 2009) just left me with a vaguely nauseous feeling (oh, so THAT’S how the sausage is made…eewww). Reading contemporary commentary for and against the new proposed law made me feel more nauseous still.

Ok. Now what?

It helps me when framing these issues to look at my own situation. So to that end, I gathered up all the info I could find on my own internet radio royalties from the last year and dumped them into another Google spreadsheet. Thanks again Google for making such excellent tools. They make me feel like I have some modicum of control over the world.

Here it is: Zoë Keating’s Internet Royalties 2011/2012

What is in it?

ASCAP

Every quarter I get two statements from ASCAP, one for me as composer, one for me as publisher. Last year a new category showed up: “Internet”. There is never any more information about it, just the word “Internet” and a dollar figure.

SoundExchange

Every quarter I get two, very nicely laid-out statements from SoundExchange, one for me as performer, one for me as the sound recording copyright owner. While these statements are slightly more illuminating than those from ASCAP, they still don’t tell me how many performances I’ve had, but they do list the name of each service and a dollar amount.

LastFM

I had forgotten about LastFM and remembered that years ago I claimed my artist profile. After I managed to log in, I could see a quarterly accounting that includes the number of plays (not scrobbled plays though) and a dollar figure. I’ve never actually collected any money from LastFM and when I went through the process to collect it a few days ago I read that I’m not supposed to be eligible (because I’m a member of SoundExchange and ASCAP). They haven’t replied to my inquiry, so I’m not sure what happens next. Will they send the money I’ve accumulated to SoundExchange? I’ll let you know.

When I look at this spreadsheet two things jump out at me:

• Over 90% of my internet radio royalties are from Pandora.
• There is hardly any data. None of the laws require any entity to tell me how many performances I had, and so no one does. It’s nice to know how much money I made, but where did it come from? How can I grow my business on this information?

Ok Zoë, nice numbers. Whatever. Are you for IRFA or against IRFA?

Neither. If I were able to lobby on behalf all artists everywhere I would ask for this:

1) Data

I want my data and in 2012 I see absolutely no reason why I shouldn’t own it. It seems like everyone has it, and exploits it…everyone but the creators providing the content that services are built on. I wish I could make this demand: stream my music, but in exchange give me my listener data. But the law doesn’t give me that power. The law only demands I be paid in money, which at this point in my career is not as valuable as information. I’d rather be paid in data.

For the first 6 months of 2012, I calculate I had more than 1.5 million listens on Pandora, for which I received $1652.74. That seems great on the surface and I’m grateful for the extra money, but I want to know: Do these listeners also own my music? How many of these listens are on Zoë Keating stations? What other user stations do I pop up in, and sandwiched between what other artists? How many listeners gave me a “thumbs up”? How do I reach them? Do they know I’m performing nearby next month? How can I tell them I have a new album coming out?

The new model says that in the future I’m not supposed to sell music: I’m supposed to sell concert tickets and tshirts. Ok fine, so put me in touch with the people who will buy concert tickets and tshirts (p.s. I’d like the same from on-demand services like Spotify too).

In short, I think I’m solving my obscurity problem, so now what?

2) Don’t replicate the past

Please do not model internet royalties after the broken terrestrial performance rights system (i.e. the PROS: ASCAP, BMI, etc). Those of you who deal with this know what I’m talking about: random sampling and surveys to determine what songs have been played when, opaque organizations without accountability. Let’s take advantage of this wonderful digitized world and do 100% census reporting, all the time…..and figure out how we can make it easy for services to do this.

Slightly related to this, why do I pay 5% of my performer royalties to the AFM? And what do they do with it? I’m not a member of the AFM and there are no non-featured performers on my solo-recordings.

3) What are we measuring?

I hope the parties at the table are thinking more broadly about what unit we are measuring and what is the appropriate compensation, financial or otherwise, for the exploitation of that unit.

Are we measuring:

• Performances - a single performance of a musical work?
• Listens - a single listen by a pair of ears?
• Dollars - a percentage of each dollar of revenue earned, essentially a music tax?

I’d argue we should be measuring Listens…and that we should make royalties equitable and fair for every kind of service: internet radio, satellite, commercial terrestrial radio. On the internet we can determine how many people are listening. I admit I don’t understand how satellite radio works, but given that I can see the song titles go by on SiriusXM and that box in my car sure knows when I haven’t renewed by subscription, I would think they know I’m listening or not. As for commercial terrestrial radio….make them pay using the same listener stats that they give to their advertisers.

In essence, let there be One Royalty Rate To Rule Them All and get rid of the percentage-of-revenue system (unless a broadcaster is non-profit, or maybe even during a well-defined start-up period). And now, for my next trick, I will make all sides really mad at me! I think this means internet royalty rates will need to come down (although not as much as proposed), and satellite and terrestrial will come up. I’m bracing myself for the public flogging…

Reading Senator Wyden’s comments at the Future of Music Summit yesterday I was struck by this:

“It is the job of policymakers to ensure that the law and public policy doesn’t favor one business model over another, and particularly, that it doesn’t favor incumbents over insurgents,”

I actually think that I am the insurgent here but the law doesn’t even acknowledge that I exist.
http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/post/35...internet-radio





File-Sharing's Cloudy Future
Peter Suciu

"Instead of misguided legislation, we need to create incentives where there can be a business model that pays the content owners and provides the consumer with a way to get the content," said EFF staff attorney Julie Samuels. "With this, people are getting paid for what they do, and people can get legal access to what they want." Whether the cloud will provide that business model is far from certain.

Last month Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, who is facing charges in the United States for engaging in digital piracy, announced that he would relocate a new version of his site, Me.ga, outside the United States.

The belief was that this would free him from coming under fire by U.S. law enforcement, but Gabon -- which controls the ".ga" domain -- has already suspended it. This comes after other torrent and file-sharing sites have been shut down by local ISPs. The Pirate Bay, a high-profile sharing site, has been banned or otherwise blocked in a dozen nations including Sweden, the UK, the Netherlands, Finland and Ireland.

Still, file sharers are trying to stay one step ahead of the law, oftentimes with users hiding their IP-addresses as a response to antipiracy initiatives.

"What we've seen are that the efforts to block peer-to-peer file sharing, even as it moves to cloud computing, [are like] a game of whack-a-mole," said Julie Samuels, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "People will find a way to use new technology to share what they want to share."

A Mega Headache

One of the most notorious file-sharers -- pirate to some, innovator to others -- is Kim Dotcom, formerly Kim Schmitz. He recently announced that he would move the Megaupload servers completely outside of the United States -- and moreover, encrypt everything.

It's questionable whether this approach will indeed be enough to get file-sharers a pass.

"It is difficult to say. It certainly is a good start," said Chet Wisniewski, senior security advisor at Sophos Labs.

However, given that the United States was able to win approval of a request to extradite TV-Shack founder Richard O'Dwyer from the UK this part March, the reach of Uncle Sam could be virtually limitless, Wisniewski told TechNewsWorld.

The case is pending appeal.

Up in the Cloud

A possibility for the future of file-sharing could be a move to the cloud, and this will likely only increase the whack-a-mole game between copyright holders and file-sharers.

"Torrent sites moving to the cloud will make instant takedown more difficult, but not impossible," Wisniewski said. "The question that remains is whether using the cloud to stay ahead of law enforcement is the right way to solve our problems."

Is compromise an available option?

"Instead of misguided legislation, we need to create incentives where there can be a business model that pays the content owners and provides the consumer with a way to get the content," said Samuels. "With this, people are getting paid for what they do, and people can get legal access to what they want."

Cloudy Issues

Whether the cloud will provide that business model is far from certain, but what is likely to happen is that the legislation and new laws will likely only hurt technological development, which in turn will hurt the content creators who often thrive with new distribution methods.

"So many people in the content industry seem to be willing to cause harm to this exciting technology so that they can squeeze a bit more out of the current business models," Samuels observed.

The issue of hosting outside the United States likely isn't going to be good for American innovation.

"It seems that the United States is in fact pushing a regime of intellectual property laws that offer incentives to companies to host offshore, and I'm concerned for what means for the economy," Samuels stressed. "We should want to protect those who create new technologies despite what users may or may not be doing."

Cryptic Messages as Well

Dotcom's new Me.ga and other file-sharing ventures are planning to encrypt data so that they can claim no knowledge of what a transfer contains. Would this be enough to protect file-sharing services?

"Congress has created laws that protect service providers," said Samuels. "Otherwise, it could create a world where no one would want to host cloud storage because of liability. That is a good decision. That is a good compromise. It is a good policy."

However, encryption itself remains a sticky side point in the United States, especially since 9/11 -- and the laws might only make it worse.

"This comes down to the privacy rights of individuals and companies, and the incredible investigative power the United States has since the Patriot Act," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. "This doesn't address the fact that what is being done may be illegal, but it does make it far harder to get evidence without committing a crime to get it by the media industries."

There are few encryption schemes that can keep a government out for long, and once a law enforcement agency sees evidence of a crime, even if it isn't the crime they are looking for, they tend to report it -- and that would then lead to an arrest or fine, Enderle told TechNewsWorld.

Breaking Censorship

At the other end of the spectrum is the notion that file-sharing, with the use of encryption, could also allow for freedom of information -- notably in nations with strict, even draconian, censorship laws. In such cases, it isn't about the sharing of files -- it's about the sharing of information and ideas.

The question here is that if governments can find evidence of violations, as noted above, file-sharing and encryption might not be the most reliable methods for protecting the identities of senders.

"Do torrent sites offer advantages in getting information to countries with strict censorship laws?" Wiseniewski asked. "Potentially, but the same technology being used to prove you are a criminal for downloading Mad Men can be used to prove activity among dissidents. I certainly would not rely on torrent technology to protect my identity or activities from prying eyes."

Nor would such a move come easily. While file-sharing is a dirty word to many, it is likely something that the content creators will have to get on board with. Just like other technologies that were feared -- from recorded music to the VCR to the MP3 -- this just suggests the times are changing.

"This is a hard process because it creates disruption," said Samuels. "We should welcome the disruption because it doesn't just benefit those sharing files, but results in technology that makes a difference ... around the world."
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/F...ure-76671.html





BitTorrent Updates uTorrent Beta for Android with Wi-Fi Only Option
Emil Protalinski

BitTorrent has released a small but important update to its µTorrent client for Android: Wi-Fi support. You can download the new version now from the official Google Play store.

Version 1.13′s changelog lists just two changes: “WiFi-only option – provides ability to opt to download while on WiFi networks only” and “Fixed stability issues.” BitTorrent provided TNW with more details about the first one:

The new WiFi-only mode feature pauses download activity when you’re outside a WiFi area, and automatically resumes downloading once WiFi is accessible again. This means you can download media, without running up mobile data charges. Intelligent, on-the-go downloading. No size or speed caps on media files. And RSS subscriptions to featured independent artists, brought to you by BitTorrent. Our users have helped us build an incredibly powerful app.

Two months ago, BitTorrent quietly released a beta of µTorrent for Android. We asked the company if this release is still a beta, and were told that it is.

So, when can we expect a final version? That question didn’t yield an answer right away, so unfortunately we don’t yet have a date to mark down on our calendars. We’re hoping to get an answer soon though, and if we do we will update this article.

Even though the app isn’t final yet, Android users have it pretty good. All other mobile operating systems are out of luck right now, including iOS, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone.

For example, if you have an iPhone, an iPad, or an iPod touch, you might as well forget about it. An iOS version of uTorrent won’t be released anytime soon, if ever. There are many BitTorrent clients and BitTorrent remote clients for iOS, but Apple doesn’t let any of them into its App Store.
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/11/2...i-only-option/





Time Warner CEO: Cord Cutters Not An Issue, “Cord Nevers” Might Be
Jeff John Roberts

A media CEO reminded people that, despite new internet distribution platforms, content owners remain in the drivers seat. He played down the idea of “cord cutters” but did acknowledge the emergence of people who have never had cable at all.

Few people are trading in their cable services for digital alternatives, according to Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes. He argues that “cord cutting” is overstated and that the phenomenon is limited to a small segment of low income Americans.

Speaking Friday morning in New York, Bewkes also expressed confidence that the TV business is not threatened by the likes of Netflix or Amazon because these services are largely distribution platforms that don’t own the quality content audiences want to watch. He added that such platforms compete with each other and not with traditional TV companies.

“It’s a good thing to have more of them,” said Bewkes, adding that multiple universal platforms are good for consumers because they mean the content industry “can’t be held hostage” to a given distributor.

Despite his dismissal of cord-cutting, Bewkes did acknowledge the emergence of “cord nevers,” which are younger people who never acquire cable in the first place. For them, he said it’s not a question of money — “they can afford three Starbucks a day” — but rather different habits and expectations. Bewkes pointed out that the “cord nevers” are not receiving the best content (it will be interesting to see if this argument one day sways them into signing up).

In the meantime, the traditional cable model is under other strains, including the spiraling cost of sports. As Bewkes noted, “half of the population that doesn’t want sports is subsidizing the other half that does” because the former are forced to buy expensive sports channels they don’t want as part of their cable plans.

All of this suggests that the cable industry will finally have to give in and offer consumers a full-blown a la carte model — but don’t hold your breath. As Peter Kafka has pointed out, even a company as rich and powerful as Apple has proved incapable of dislodging “the TV industrial complex.” The simple reality is that the mighty incumbents are going to ensure that a cable subscription remains a toll to get access to things like HBO and the NFL on the iPad.

Finally, there is the question of advertising. According to Bewkes, advertising-only models are not viable for most types of content, pointing to the era of the big three networks as a “wasteland” for TV. He called on companies to make more ads that people want to watch, citing a James Bond trailer or ads in GQ magazine as examples.

Bewkes made the remarks during a chat with Reuters’ Chrystia Freeland at the Paley Center for Media’s “Innovation without Borders” event. (Highlights available here).
http://paidcontent.org/2012/11/16/ti...vers-might-be/





FCC Chairman Backs Dish Network Plan to Compete with Wireless Giants
Cecilia Kang,

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday proposed to greenlight Dish Network’s long-fought plan to create a wireless service that would compete with those of giants AT&T and Verizon Wireless.

The plan, which needs the approval of the agency’s four other commissioners, would achieve a key FCC goal of creating fresh competition to the lucrative wireless industry, which is starting to resemble a near duopoly.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski favored a similar plan by a company, known as LightSquared, that wanted to create a network through satellite signals. But after gaining key approvals by the FCC, LightSquared’s wireless project fell apart after getting hung up by technical problems and fierce opposition from rivals.

LightSquared’s problems and the long delays in Dish’s plans illustrate just how hard it is to create fresh competition in the wireless industry, even as consumers face ever-rising bills and few choices for providers.

Six of 10 wireless contracts are held by AT&T and Verizon. And the two companies have virtually cornered the market on providing the fastest wireless speeds, known as 4G LTE service.

“If approved, these actions will promote competition, investment and innovation, and advance commission efforts to unleash spectrum for mobile broadband to help meet skyrocketing consumer demand, while unlocking billions of dollars of value to the public,” FCC spokesman Neil Grace said.

The FCC is expected to vote on the proposal before the end of the year.

The proposal calls for an auction of airwaves that will be partly used as a communications network for emergency first-responders. That effort, if successful, would realize an 11-year government effort.

During the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, public safety officials complained of shoddy service and the inability of different emergency response groups to coordinate and communicate.

In a speech Tuesday, Genachowski emphasized his push to create more competition in the wireless industry. He pointed to the agency’s decision to reject AT&T’s merger with T-Mobile late last year and a planned auction of broadcast TV airwaves as successes on that front.

“The mobile marketplace two years ago was on the doorstep of duopoly. But our rejection, along with the Justice Department, of the proposed AT&T T-Mobile deal, and other pro-competition actions we’ve taken, have led to an improving competition picture in the United States,” Genachowski told the Council on Foreign Relations.

But Dish panned the plan, saying the FCC also attached limits on how it can use its wireless spectrum. The agency’s proposal calls for Dish to use lower power levels on its network to minimize the chance of interfering with neighboring airwaves.

That requirement, supported by rival Sprint Nextel, could limit the capabilities of the network, Dish said. When users upload photos or videos, the process would be much slower, the company said.

“Telling us to lower our power levels cripples our ability to enter the business,” Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen said in a phone interview. “We want to enter the wireless business. We have $6 billion more we want to spend on building out this business. But the FCC could make it extremely risky for us.”

Ergen complained that the FCC has delayed its decision on Dish’s wireless plan by 20 months. If the Englewood, Colo., company had gained approvals earlier, he said, a network could have been built by next year. Now, the company must seek partners and the effort could take until 2015, he said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...9ee_story.html





Google-Dish Wireless Service is a Go, Plans for 2013 Launch Being Hatched

Regarding the Google-Dish tie up that was reported last night, we just got word that this is really happening. While the details haven’t been finalized, Google is already deep into development on plans to roll out the service and have it live by mid-late 2013.

Google plans to make the service data-only with voice and SMS only being used as VoIP services, likely with Google Voice. Google of course already has its ISP feet on the ground with its Fiber rollout on the Stanford Campus and its just-opened Kansas City network.

Google is launching its Glass head gear next year and would benefit from total control of the network. Without full control, Google is seeing its Voice and Wallet services being blocked by carriers, specifically AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile.

Dish has previously said on numerous occasions that it would like to build a wireless network with the wireless spectrum it has acquired since 2008, but the company wants a partner to help fulfill this endeavor. As the Wall Street Journal noted in its report from yesterday, Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen said potential partners include companies that would like to be in the industry and currently don’t have a wireless sector.

The chairman would not comment on Google specifically when discussing potential partners. However, as we noted, our sources said partnership plans between the two companies regarding a wireless network are already well underway.
http://9to5google.com/2012/11/16/goo...being-hatched/





Your Smartphone's Dirty, Radioactive Secret

The rare earths inside microcomputers make our lives easier. But just how toxic are the guts of your smartphone?
Kiera Butler

It's a sweltering late February afternoon when I pull into the Esso gas station in the tiny town of Bukit Merah, Malaysia. My guide, a local butcher named Hew Yun Tat, warns me that the owner is known for his stinginess. "He's going to ask you to buy him tea," Hew says. "Even though he owns many businesses around here, he still can't resist pinching pennies."

An older man emerges from the station office. His face and hands are mottled with white patches, his English broken.

"I'll talk to you," the man says, "but only if you buy me tea." He grins.

"You should be ashamed of yourself," says Hew, laughing. "A rich man like you."

At a bustling open-air café nearby, we order tea and ais kacang [1], giant shaved-ice desserts laden with chopped-up jello and sweet, sticky red beans. I dig in, but the station owner—I'll call him Esso Man, since he doesn't want me to use his real name—is moodily stirring his into a slushy puddle. We're here to ask him about something he doesn't like to talk about: a job he did 30 years ago, when he owned a trucking company. He got a contract with a local industrial plant called Asian Rare Earth [2], co-owned by Mitsubishi Chemical [3], that supplied special minerals to the personal electronics industry.

Esso Man couldn't believe his luck. He wasn't a rich man back then, and Asian Rare Earth offered three times as much as his usual gigs, just for trucking waste away from the plant. They didn't say where or how to dump the waste, and he and his three drivers were paid by the load—the quicker the trip, the more money they earned. "Sometimes they would tell us it was fertilizer, so we would take it to local farms," Esso Man says. "My uncle was a vegetable farmer, so I gave some to him." Other times, the refinery officials said the stuff was quicklime, so one driver painted his house with it. "He thought it was great, because it made all the mosquitoes and mice stay away."

In fact, Esso Man and his drivers were hauling toxic and radioactive waste [4], as they'd discover a year later, when Asian Rare Earth tried to build a dump in a neighboring town. Residents there began to protest, and a few activists took a Geiger counter to the plant, where they found levels of radiation that were off the charts—up to 88 times higher than those allowed under international guidelines. In 1985, after residents sued, the government ordered the plant to be closed until Asian Rare Earth cleaned up its mess.

Two years later, the site still wasn't completely clean, but Asian Rare Earth got permission to reopen the plant. The protests began anew, and Hew, one of the leaders of the opposition, was jailed for two months. When he got out he snuck back to the protests, which grew in size and popularity. In 1992, the residents who'd sued Asian Rare Earth won a permanent injunction against the plant. It was overturned by the Supreme Court, but Asian Rare Earth had had enough, and it pulled out of Bukit Merah and shut down operations entirely.

But by then, Hew says, the villagers were anxious. Pregnant women living near the plant had miscarried [4]; some gave birth to children who were sickly, or mentally disabled, or blind. Other children in the village developed leukemia.

Officials told residents that the waste was properly disposed of. But in 2010, a local paper visited Asian Rare Earth's dump site and found 80,000 drums containing 4.2 million gallons of radioactive thorium hydroxide. That year, Mitsubishi broke ground on a secure, underground storage area to properly house the waste of its former subsidiary. The New York Times recently called [2] the $100 million Asian Rare Earth recovery "the largest radiation cleanup yet in the rare earth industry."

As we finish our dessert, I ask Esso Man about the white patches on his skin, which started appearing several years after he'd worked with Asian Rare Earth's waste. His doctors speculate they might have to do with his exposure to radioactivity, he says, but they can't be sure. Such medical guesswork is common in Bukit Merah, since no one has ever formally studied the impact of radiation exposure among the village's 11,000 residents. (Mitsubishi denies any health effects.) And anyway, sometimes Esso Man thinks it might just be stress that's causing his skin condition. "I feel regret about working for that company," he says glumly. "I feel bad that I gave people all that toxic waste. Even my own uncle." All of Esso Man's drivers have died young—not one lived past his 50s. "I don't know why they died and I am still alive."

After we drop Esso Man back at his gas station, Hew takes me to the nearby home of Lai Kwan, a local woman who worked as a bricklayer at the Bukit Merah plant while she was pregnant in 1982. Hunched over and walking slowly, she looks older than her 69 years. In her modest living room, photos of her eight children, now grown, line the walls. In the corner is a small cluster of flowers and vials of powder that I take for a Buddhist shrine, but Lai Kwan explains that they are gifts from her friends and neighbors, and that the vials contain chicken essence, known in Chinese medicine for its healing properties.

Lai Kwan recalls that soon after she started working in the plant, she heard rumors from the Japanese workers that the materials they were refining were dangerous. Several of her coworkers miscarried, and when she found out she was pregnant, she worried about her baby's health. So a few months later, she quit. Her son, Cheah Kok Liang, was born in 1983, profoundly retarded and nearly blind. Lai Kwan's husband left when the boy was a toddler. Now 29, Cheah still lives at home and requires full-time care. He's suffered from frequent chest infections his whole life, but it's hard to tell when he's getting ill, since he can't communicate. I ask to meet him, but Lai Kwan explains that he is sleeping. "If he were awake right now, I couldn't be talking to you."

What will happen to Cheah when she can't care for him anymore? "It's getting harder now," she says. "He's heavy, and I have arthritis." Money is tight—since Lai Kwan can't read or write very well, she'd only be able to find work at a factory, and she can't leave Cheah alone for a whole shift. A few months ago, a local politician visited and promised to help, but "every time I call she says she is too busy," says Lai Kwan, showing us a picture of the politician and her son in the local newspaper.

A doctor from Kuala Lumpur tells me that he visited Bukit Merah to treat the eight children there who developed leukemia, seven of whom have died. Though there has never been a formal epidemiological study of the area, radiation exposure is a known cause [6] of childhood leukemia, and no local I talked to could remember a single case of the disease before the plant opened.

About six weeks after I get back to the United States, I receive word that Cheah passed away suddenly. The cause of his death is still unknown.

I have come to Malaysia because of my iPhone. I already knew that behind its sleek casing lurked a problematic history. I'd read the stories about Apple's Chinese factories [7]—about teenage girls working 15-hour shifts [8] cleaning screens with toxic solvents, about suicides among exhausted workers whose lives are no longer their own. But I had a much dimmer idea of my phone's history before the Foxconn plant—where did those components they put together come from? What were its guts made of? My phone's shady past, it turned out, began long before it was assembled in a Chinese factory. The elements used to power all our high-tech gadgets come from a very dirty industry in which rich nations extract the good stuff from the earth—and leave poor countries to clean up the mess.

"Never again" is a common refrain among Bukit Merah residents who have lived through 20 years of Asian Rare Earth aftermath. But the Malaysian government doesn't agree. In 2008 [9], it approved an Australian company's plan to build a brand new rare-earth refinery on the country's east coast. The company, Lynas Corporation, will do its mining in Australia, but it will refine the rare earths—a process that generates vast quantities of toxic and radioactive waste—in Kuantan, Malaysia, a sleepy coastal city in a state where the average resident makes $7,314 a year [10]. When completed, the plant will be the largest of its kind, meeting a full fifth [11] of the world's rare-earth demand. Its waste will not be permanently stored in an underground facility. Instead, toxic wastewater will be treated and released into the productive fishing grounds of the South China Sea, home to more than 3,300 species of fish [12]. As for the plans for the radioactive solids? Well, they remind people all too much of what happened in the days of Esso Man.

To the Malaysian government, the Lynas plant represents an opportunity to become a major player in one of the most lucrative, fastest-growing industries in the world. In the 20 years since the Bukit Merah plant closed, demand for rare earths has increased tenfold [13], from roughly $1 billion to $10 billion today. A recent report [14] predicted it to grow another 36 percent by 2015.

The 17 rare-earth elements [15] aren't as rare as was thought when they were discovered in the 1800s. But they often perform specific, crucial functions. For example, "virtually all polished glass products [16]" depend on cerium, according to the US Geological Survey; the element is also vital to catalytic converters [17]. Other rare earths help form the world's strongest magnets. If you hold a chunk of magnetized neodymium, a chunk a few feet away will fly through the air [18] to meet it. Because rare-earth magnets are so strong, a little goes a long way. They're the reason your smartphone has computing power that would have filled two rooms just 30 years ago yet today fits in the palm of your hand.

Walk down the aisles of your local Best Buy and you'll be hard-pressed to find a phone, laptop, or TV that doesn't contain at least one of the rare earths. The elements are also key to all kinds of green technology: Neodymium is found in wind turbines [19]; hybrid and electric cars often contain as many as nine different rare earths [20]. Yttrium can form phosphors that make light [21] in LED displays and compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Rare earths are also crucial for defense technology [14]—radar and sonar systems, tank engines, smart bombs.

The rare earths lurking inside your hybrid car and smartphone.

But here's the catch. Rare earths always occur alongside [22] the radioactive elements thorium and uranium, and safely separating them is a complex process. Miners use heavy machinery to reach the raw ore, which contains anywhere between 3 and 9 percent rare earths, depending on the deposit. Then the ore is taken to a refinery and "cracked," a process wherein workers use sulfuric acid to make a liquid stew of sorts. The process is also hugely water- and energy-intensive, requiring a continuous 49 megawatts (enough to power 50,000 homes [23]) and two Olympic swimming pools' worth of water every day.

Workers then boil off the liquid and separate out the rare earths from rock and radioactive elements. This is where things get dangerous: Companies must take precautions so that workers aren't exposed to radiation. If the tailings ponds where the radioactive elements are permanently stored are improperly lined, they can leach into the groundwater. If they are not covered properly, the slurry could dry and escape as dust. And this radioactive waste must be stored for an incomprehensibly long time—the half-life of thorium is about 14 billion years [24], and uranium's is up to 4.5 billion years [25]. Reminder: Earth itself is 4.5 billion years [26] old.

Not coincidentally, the refining tends to happen in areas where weak environmental rules mean that companies can process the elements on the cheap. Take the Baotou region [27] of Inner Mongolia, where most of China's rare-earth mines are clustered, and where waste has leached into waterways and irrigation canals [28], according to several independent investigations. Communities around one former mine in Mongolia blame at least 66 cancer deaths [29] on leaked radioactive waste, and local people complain that their hair and teeth [30] have fallen out.

All this so that my friends and I can settle an argument about the order of Metallica's first three albums from the comfort of our bar stools.

Kuantan, the town where Lynas has built its new rare-earth refinery, is a popular vacation spot [31]—laid-back and unpretentious, with uncrowded beaches and delicious seafood. By early fall, Lynas' rare-earth ore will begin to arrive.

Shipping ore thousands of miles is extremely expensive. But the company says [32] the cheaper labor, electricity, and chemicals in Malaysia make it worthwhile. Malaysians who oppose the plant see a much more troubling dynamic. "Australia is a first-world country that wants the developing world to do its dirty work," says Fuziah Salleh [33], Kuantan's parliamentary representative and an outspoken critic of the Lynas project. "Our environmental laws are very lax, and Lynas knows exactly where to take advantage of it. If you look at Australia, there are very strict laws about controlling the waste, dust, and air quality. But here in Malaysia—even if we have those laws—it is very hard to enforce."

Lynas emphasizes [34] that this refinery will be "completely different to the Bukit Merah rare-earths plant" and that "there are now much higher standards in place which mean Bukit Merah could never be repeated." Last year, the Malaysian government asked the International Atomic Energy Agency to recommend a list of 11 safety requirements [35] and standards that should be in place in order to operate. But Lynas was allowed to open [36] its refinery without meeting the most important one—a long-term storage solution [37] for the waste. Instead, Lynas says it will treat the highly acidic liquid waste before releasing it into waters that support a thriving mangrove ecosystem and fish that local residents depend on.

That hasn't done much to reassure the people of Kuantan. "Lynas doesn't care what happens to us," one fisherman tells me. "They just want their money." They are also less than thrilled that their government has promised Lynas a 12-year tax holiday.

But even more dubious is what Lynas proposes to do with the radioactive solids: Isolate them—the company is not forthcoming with any details as to how—before diluting them with soil or concrete and selling the mixture as fertilizer or construction materials [37].

"They have yet to establish it is either economically or practically feasible," says Dr. Peter Karamoskos, a radiation safety adviser for the Australian government. Noting that Lynas' waste is six times as radioactive as levels recognized as safe, he does a quick calculation: "By the end of 10 years of 1 million tons of waste, where are you going to find 6 million tons to dilute it with? Where are you going to find the clients to take up that stuff? Where are their contracts? Any builder who touched this waste would be out of business immediately. You can argue that if you diluted it adequately you could use it. However, remember the problem is that buildings get demolished. Once you start doing that, you release that back into the environment."

No wonder the plant has become a rallying cause for the opposition parties in upcoming elections. Even in Kuala Lumpur, 150 miles from the plant, I saw bumper stickers bearing the words "Save Malaysia! Stop Lynas! [38]" and here in Kuantan, the slogan is everywhere—on flyers in store windows, on T-shirts, and even on umbrellas.

Among the local protesters is an environmental consultant and Kuantan native named Lee Tan, who now lives mostly in Australia but hasn't forgotten a single crevice of her hometown. A stout, cheerful woman in her early 50s, Tan takes me to a roadside fish stand in the nearby village of Sungai Karang, where a handful of families sit around plastic tables as kids dart around underfoot and a few hungry cats lick their chops near the trash area out back. This is a Muslim village, and Tan and I are the only women not wearing a tudung, the Malaysian headscarf. The shop's owner, 31-year-old Jamil Jusuf, is making his specialty: fried fingers of selayang and padang fish dusted with spicy meal, wrapped tightly in leaves and grilled over an open flame. Jusuf says he first heard about the refinery from tourists. "They told me that the waste will go right where I get my fish from," he says.

Over at a fishing dock on the Balok River, just a few hundred yards from Lynas' waste release site, a fisherman says that he has heard that the opposition party, which is largely made up of ethnic Chinese, is using the Lynas issue to get more votes; the Malay-dominated government has been very supportive of Lynas. He produces a beat-up booklet bearing the Lynas logo. "Lynas has come here many times to hand out pamphlets," he says. Later, Tan translates the pamphlet for me. "The Lynas plant will not be dangerous to the public, the surrounding area, or its workers," declares one bolded heading.

The next day I snag a meeting with a senior government spokesman, who agrees to speak if I don't publish his name. I ask him what locals will gain from having the plant nearby. "A lot, a lot," he says, before admitting that Lynas will only employ about 300 people. "But because Lynas is here, some other industries will also come."

"Which ones?"

"Siemens," he says. I ask whether the German electronics conglomerate has made a formal commitment. He concedes that it hasn't.

"So have any other companies officially said they would come?"

"Thus far, no other commitments yet."

And what of the plant's potential chilling effect on tourism? He brushes that aside. "Fears created by the opposition have influenced a very tiny segment of the people, especially among the Chinese," he says. "The Malays are not worried, because we have been telling them that this project is safe, so why would they fear?"

From Kuantan, I head back to noisy, frenetic Kuala Lumpur. In my hotel room, I can hear tourists at the karaoke bar next door belting out Whitney Houston hits. Tourism accounts for around 6.7 percent of the country's GDP. Over the last decade, the number of foreign tourists has more than doubled [39], making it the ninth most visited [40] country in the world, just shy of Germany. That it's a Muslim country makes it an especially popular destination [41] for visitors from the Arab world. I wonder if radiation fears will hurt tourism.

Most of the 12 rare-earth experts I've spoken to say it's technically possible for Lynas to scrub its waste of all the toxic elements—acids, radioactive substances, and corrosive tailings. But not one has seen sufficient explanation—from either Lynas or Malaysian officials—of exactly how it will do this.

When I ask Lynas if it has plans for a permanent waste storage facility, I receive no response. When I ask how the plant will treat its liquids for release into the river, or the radioactive solids it aims to recycle into construction materials, spokesman Alan Jury declines to provide answers and instead refers me to the International Atomic Energy Agency's review of the plant.

I track down an engineer who worked on the Kuantan plant; he agrees to speak with me if given anonymity. Early on in the construction process, the engineer says, his team noticed serious flaws, including moisture seeps and cracks, in the 22 waste tanks the company was building. The problems led AkzoNobel, a Dutch company that Lynas had contracted to create the linings for the tanks, to pull out of the project, a story [11] that the New York Times broke early this year. When I asked about the incident, an AkzoNobel spokeswoman wrote, "Due to changes in the Project specification, AkzoNobel would only recommend the use of its linings on the Project subject to the successful results of longer-term testing. That testing could not be completed within the project timescale."

"My personal opinion is that the plant can operate safely," the engineer tells me, "providing that i's effectively engineered." So far, though, he isn't convinced it is.

"I don't see the waste as impossible to manage, but you can't do it in secret, and you can't do it without good numbers," agrees Gavin Mudd, a senior lecturer of civil engineering at Australia's Monash University. "If Lynas is so confident in its methods, then it should have no problem being transparent."

Lynas spokesman Jury says that the change of contractors was a "commercial decision" and assures me that the new one, Trepax Innovation, is lining the tanks "to meet the international industry standard."

I attend a press conference with Raja Dato' Abdul Aziz bin Raja Adnan, the head of Malaysia's Atomic Energy Licensing Board, the body that subsequently granted Lynas a license to operate. I ask Aziz, who never seems to break a sweat or lose his grin as reporters pelt him with pointed questions, whether the board has looked into the plant flaws. Aziz responds that the plant has been inspected by a registered engineer. When I ask for the engineer's name, Aziz declines to give it. Why wasn't the report available to the public? I ask.

"Because it's Lynas' document," says Aziz.

So it was Lynas that looked into the allegations made by the Dutch contractor? He demurs, so I ask again who inspected the plant.

"I looked into the allegations," he says.

"You personally looked into them?"

"We looked into them."

"So then why can't you tell me the name of the engineer who inspected the building for the safety flaws?"

"That's for you to find out."

Right. When I later ask Jury about the alleged inspection report, he says he doesn't have it.

On the day that I leave Malaysia, a group of Kuantan residents files suit [42] against Lynas and the licensing board, alleging in part that the board had a conflict of interest when it made a deal to receive 0.05 percent of the plant's revenue for "radiation research." When the news site Malaysian Insider asks Aziz about the suit, he responds, "I don't know anything about it."

Does my phone have to have such a toxic footprint? Not if manufacturers—and consumers—are prepared to spend more. In the shadow of the Clark mountain range in California's Mojave Desert, about an hour outside of Las Vegas, is the Mountain Pass Mine, America's only major rare-earth mine and refinery. Owned by a company called Molycorp [43], it opened in 1952 and for decades produced europium, crucial for making color TVs. But in the late '90s, its wastewater pipes burst [44], and California shut the plant down; cleanup is still ongoing.

Then, in 2007, Molycorp executives decided to try to get the plant up and running again. The incentive was becoming too great. At the time, China was producing about 97 percent of the global supply of rare earths. But in 2010 it cut exports by 35 percent [45] in order to keep the valuable metals for its own manufacturers. Prices rose and, fearing a shortage, members of Congress introduced a bill [46] that would kick-start a domestic rare-earth renaissance by handing out federal subsidies. In March 2012, the United States, European Union, and Japan filed a formal complaint [47]with the World Trade Organization over China's manipulation of the rare-earth market.

By then engineers had developed several major improvements to refining methods. Molycorp's new facility uses hydrochloric acid to remove thorium earlier in the process, when it is still in a solid state. Thorium and other waste solids are mixed into a cementlike substance, which workers spread out in layers over a 100-acre pit lined with high-density polyethylene.

Molycorp isn't perfect. That state-of-the-art tailings field is only permitted for 30 years; after that, a new pit would need to be built. The facility uses about half the water that the old plant used, but its energy demands are seven times greater. What's more, officials are tight-lipped about how much ore Molycorp ships to a refinery in Estonia, and about the methods used at its two Chinese refineries.

And even once Mountain Pass and other new US rare-earth plants are running at full capacity, we won't come close to producing all the rare earths that we consume. The United States contains only 10 percent of the world's known deposits. A recent Congressional Research Service report recommended that the US ensure reliable access to sources in countries like China, where rare earths are more abundant or—more to the point—cheaper to extract and refine. "Unless the consumers (industry or end buyers or both) demand that China and others do things in an environmentally sound manner," Jim Kuipers, a Montana-based engineer and mining consultant, wrote me, "they'll continue to do business as usual."

Could recycling help? After all, Americans are buying ever more personal electronics, but only 24 states [48] require manufacturers to pay for e-waste recycling, which means only 25 percent [49] of electronics of any kind (and 11 percent of phones and other mobile devices) are ever even collected. What programs do exist often amount to shipping old phones and TVs to Chinese villages [50], where they are broken up and bathed in acid to remove gold and silver—resulting in terrible lead and dioxin pollution. Upshot: Though rare earths are recyclable, only 1 percent [51] currently are. A bit of good news: Sick of being buffeted by China's export policies and eager to go green, Japan's major car [52] companies [53] recently began recycling the rare earths in their hybrids' batteries. Get on it, Detroit.

One night toward the end of my visit to Kuantan, I'm lying in bed in a hostel in the middle of a dark neighborhood. I've been told that I'm the only guest tonight, and the hostel's owner lives on the other side of town. In the middle of the night, I awake to the sound of men's voices yelling outside my room in Mandarin. The front door slams. I sit up in bed, heart pounding. The yelling doesn't stop, and I'm becoming increasingly panicked. Something crashes, and that's it: I grab my phone, call Tan, and text a friend back in the States: "Don't freak out, I'm fine, but can you look up how to make an emergency call in Malaysia just in case?" She quickly texts back, and I feel immediately better. A little while later, the hostel owner, whom Tan called, arrives. "No scared, la!" he assures me. (Malaysians often use "la" at the end of sentences for oomph.) They are just last-minute guests, tea merchants who were out partying. Very drunk but totally harmless. Mortified, I text my friend back. Then I apologize over and over—in English and tortured Malay—to the tired owner.

As I try to fall back asleep, I realize that in this situation, my phone was my security blanket. In different circumstances, it could have been my lifeline.

A few days later Tan and I meet up with a group of anti-Lynas activists, including a chatty local man named Chow Kok Chew. He explains that he moved to the area 30 years ago—from Bukit Merah. "Every day when I went to work, I saw awful smoke," he says. "There were a lot of factories, but none had as much smoke as Asian Rare Earth." It was hard, he says, to start a new life here on the east coast, hundreds of miles away from his hometown. But Chow built a successful career as a construction supervisor and raised three children here. Now it feels like home.

So if the plant gets built, I ask him, will he move yet again? He shakes his head. "I am old." Still, he has been spending most of his spare time reading up about the plant—and encouraging his friends to do the same. Next month, Chow and his friends plan to shave their heads in protest. "If I don't do something," he says, "I'm worried that my grandson will say, 'Grandfather, the first time you kept quiet. The second time you kept quiet, too. Why?'"
http://www.motherjones.com/environme...phone-malaysia





Tech’s New (Geographical) Frontier: ‘Silicon Prairie’
Mark Kegans

As Ben Milne sought money for the mobile-payment company he began developing here three years ago, investors responded with rejections by the dozens.

Eventually, he coaxed $1 million from a pair of local investors. His app, Dwolla, has since attracted more than 100,000 users, and now moves $30 million to $50 million in transactions a month.

So when he decided to seek a second round of financing last year, Mr. Milne, a 29-year-old college dropout, had an easier sell. This time investors courted him. This year, he announced that Dwolla had drawn another $5 million in capital from investors on both coasts, including Ashton Kutcher and a firm with Twitter and Foursquare in its portfolio.

From Des Moines to Omaha to Kansas City — a region known more for its barns than its bandwidth — a start-up tech scene is burgeoning. Dozens of new ventures are laying roots each year, investors are committing hundreds of millions of dollars to them, and state governments are teaming up with private organizations to promote the growing tech community. They are calling it — what else? — the Silicon Prairie.

Although a relatively small share of the country’s “angel investment” deals — 5.7 percent — are done in the Great Plains, the region was just one of two (the other is the Southwest) that increased its share of them from the first half of 2011 to the first half of this year, according to a report commissioned by the Angel Resource Institute, Silicon Valley Bank and CB Insights.

Fifteen to 20 start-ups, most of them tech-related, are now established each year in eastern Nebraska, a more than threefold increase from five years ago, according to the Omaha Chamber of Commerce. Today, there is more than $300 million in organized venture capital available in the state, as well as tax credits for investors; six years ago there was virtually none, according to the chamber.

About a dozen start-ups flocked to a single neighborhood in Kansas City, Kan., after Google Fiber installed its first ultrafast Internet connection there last week. And over the past seven months, about 60 start-ups have presented their ideas in Kansas City at weekly forums organized by Nate Olson, an analyst with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. In Iowa, Startup City Des Moines, an incubator financed with $700,000 in public and private money, including a quarter-million dollars from the state, received applications from 160 start-ups over the past two years. It has accepted 9 so far.

“Traditionally, you’d say, ‘Hey, if I want the safe lifestyle, I’ll stay here and I’ll do what generations before have done,’ ” said Jeff Slobotski, an Omaha native who four years ago started Silicon Prairie News, a Web site covering the region’s tech scene. Now, he continued, “there is a newer potential in terms of what can take place here and not having to hop on the first plane out of here — saying, ‘Hey, I’m going to set up shop in the Midwest in our cities and make a go at it here.’”

Still, the region’s entrepreneurs insist that they are not striving to replicate Silicon Valley or other well-known tech hubs like Boston.

“We’re creating different types of start-ups using local ingredients,” said Christian Renaud, a principal at an information technology start-up incubator here.

Among the companies that have started in the region over the past few years are Ag Local, a firm that created an online marketplace for trading meat; EyeVerify, which verifies people’s identities through eye-vein patterns; and Tikly, which created a platform for bands to sell concert tickets. But there also are many start-ups outside the information technology realm, focusing on fields like biotechnology, advanced manufacturing and medical devices.

Many entrepreneurs credit Silicon Prairie News for the region’s start-up growth. In addition to writing about start-up activity, The News also organizes conventions that connect entrepreneurs and investors. In the four years since its creation, Silicon Prairie News has covered the emergence of more than 80 companies in the region and more than 50 additional endeavors that spawned mobile or Web apps.

The Silicon Prairie still lags in national recognition as a start-up hub, however. Capital remains relatively sparse, and software engineers are in shorter supply than on the coasts.

“We’re just not aware of, potentially, the opportunities that exist in a variety of places in the middle of the country,” said Stephen T. Zarrilli, the president and chief executive of Safeguard Scientifics, a Philadelphia venture capital firm that has invested in companies across the country but not in the Great Plains.

Tech enthusiasts in the region are hoping to change that by pointing to other strengths: lower costs and a work force focused more on building strong companies than moving on to the next big thing, they say.

“In Nebraska and the Midwest in general, because the work ethic is so strong, you will find people that will work like they worked on the farm,” said Gordon Whitten, the chairman of VoterTide, an Omaha start-up that tracks and analyzes social media trends for campaigns, media companies and others.

Dwolla exemplifies both the potential and the challenges for the region’s start-ups.

Business owners here said that few people in Des Moines seemed familiar with Dwolla, which allows real-time money transfers that are less costly for merchants than credit card fees. Yet the fast-talking, matter-of-fact Mr. Milne, in his jeans and untucked shirts, has proved to be a savvy ambassador for his company and the region. He always pays with Dwolla when he can.

“How much do I owe you?” he asked a barista at a coffee shop he frequents in Des Moines, his hometown, before tapping his iPhone and watching his payment register on the shop’s touch screen.

He eagerly rattles off the advantages of building Dwolla here, where his headquarters boast all the trappings of Silicon counterculture: beer-stocked refrigerators, neon orange accent walls with well-used whiteboards tacked to them, and a legal counsel who comes to work in flip-flops.

One of the biggest boons, he said, was siphoning the expertise of executives in the city’s robust financial services sector. They advised him on structuring the company so it would not have to hold customers’ money, saving millions of dollars in licensing and bonding costs. That structure also led the company to create a unique system for transferring money without the usual days of processing delays.

“I don’t know if we would have found that relationship in the Valley,” Mr. Milne said. “We just hit so many golden-nugget opportunities in Des Moines and golden-nugget pieces of feedback.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/u...at-plains.html





Russia Demands Broad UN Role in Net Governance, Leak Reveals

Leaked document from upcoming treaty negotiations reveals Russia wants transfer of authority over Net to national governments. The U.N.'s increasingly shrill denials are ringing ever more hollow.
Larry Downes

The Russian Federation is calling on the United Nations to take over key aspects of Internet governance, including addressing and naming, according to documents leaked on Friday from an upcoming treaty conference.

The Russians made their proposal on November 13 in the lead-up to December's World Conference on International Communications in Dubai. The conference will consider revisions to the International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs), a treaty overseen by the UN's International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The treaty has not been revised since 1988, before the emergence of the commercial Internet.

Russia's proposals would, if adopted, dramatically affect Internet governance, transferring power from engineering-based organizations such as the Internet Society and ICANN to national governments, all under the authority of the UN.

There are 193 Member States participating in the WCIT. Each gets a single vote on proposed changes to the treaty. The treaty negotiations and its documents are secret, though many have been exposed through the Web site WCITLeaks, run by two researchers at George Mason University.

"The [proposed] additions to the ITRs...are aimed at formulating an approach that views the Internet as a global physical telecommunications infrastructure, and also as a part of the national telecommunications infrastructure of each Member State," the Russian proposal says.

Russians propose bringing "IP-Based Networks" under UN control

Currently, the ITRs cover only international telecommunications services. But the Russians propose adding a new section to the treaty to deal explicitly with "IP-based networks." Bringing the Internet into the treaty in any capacity would represent a major expansion of the scope of the ITU's authority.

The leaked proposal would strongly endorse national control over those parts of the Internet that reside within a country's borders, including ISPs, traffic, and engineering. One suggested change to the treaty, for example, declares that "Member States shall have the sovereign right to manage the Internet within their national territory, as well as to manage national Internet domain names."

Russia is also calling for a major revision to the multi-stakeholder governance process that has long-presided over domain names and Internet addressing, which it calls a "critical transnational resource." Under a proposed revision, the treaty would be amended to make clear that "Member States shall have equal rights in the international allocation of Internet addressing and identification resources."

Today, oversight of domain names and IP addresses is delegated to ICANN, a nongovernmental organization, which manages key Internet resources through a complex mechanism. According to ICANN, its model is "bottom up" and includes "registries, registrars, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), intellectual property advocates, commercial and business interests, noncommercial and nonprofit interests, representation from more than 100 governments, and a global array of individual Internet users."

The ITU, by contrast, allows only its member nations to vote. Private organizations can participate in its proceedings by paying a large annual fee but cannot propose amendments or vote.

The multi-stakeholder system is seen as a major roadblock to long-standing efforts by some governments to control both incoming and outgoing Internet traffic, particularly for political purposes. Critics inside and outside the U.S. have been warning all year that some countries as well as private members of the ITU were determined to hijack the conference and transform the UN's increasingly trivial international telephone rules into a broad, UN-sanctioned takeover of Internet governance.

Proposals leaked earlier from Russia, China, Iran, and others would authorize member nations, with UN blessing, to inspect and censor incoming and outgoing Internet traffic on the premise of monitoring criminal behavior, filtering spam, or protecting national security.

Curbing the Internet is a priority for these countries that goes well beyond the WCIT process. China, for example, recently hosted its first annual "Internet Roundtable for Emerging Countries," attended by Russia, Brazil, India, and South Africa. According to observers of the meeting, the participants agreed that "The Internet must be managed by governments, with a particular focus on the influence of social networks on society."

The Russian proposal, however, is the most audacious power grab to date. And it comes as little surprise to observers of the ITU, which has deepened ties to Russia in a bid to demonstrate its relevance in cybersecurity. Last year, during a meeting between Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Toure, Putin bluntly told Toure that Russia was keen on the idea of "establishing international control over the Internet using the monitoring and supervisory capability of the International Telecommunications Union."

Some private organizations are also exploiting WCIT in an effort to overcome local regulatory constraints. As first reported by CNET in June, for example, a trade association of European telephone companies known as ETNO proposed altering the ITRs to mandate new transit agreements for Internet traffic, implementing a "sending party network pays" model that would have taxed Internet content companies on behalf of local telecommunications companies.

So far, the Internet traffic tax proposed by ETNO has not been endorsed by any European member nation, but versions of the plan have appeared in secret proposals from some African and Arab states.

ITU efforts at spin go badly out of control

Even before the Russians' latest proposal, the ITU had become increasingly desperate to cast itself as an innocent third party in the growing firestorm of criticism ahead of the WCIT meeting. Secretary-General Toure has been sharply critical of "sensationalist claims in the press" that characterize any WCIT proposal as antidemocratic or that suggest the ITU has a stake in extending its reach to IP-based networks. "WCIT is definitively not about taking control of the Internet or restricting people's freedom of expression or freedom of speech," Toure said in a speech in September.

In a follow-up interview with Bloomberg BNA, Toure denied that his organization had any interest in Internet governance. "Internet Governance as we know it today," he said, concerns only "Domain Names and addresses. These are issues that we're not talking about at all," Toure said. "We're not pushing that, we don't need to."

The Russian proposal, and earlier leaked proposals dealing with Internet engineering and protocols, belies that claim. Nor is WCIT the start of UN efforts to wrest control from existing multi-stakeholder organizations. Since 2004, the UN has tried in particular to seize power from ICANN, an effort the Russian proposal now endorses.

To counter negative attention focused on the secrecy of ongoing treaty negotiations, the ITU has conducted a clumsy PR campaign rife with misdirection and misstatements. Today, for example, three days after receiving the Russian proposal and translating it into English, the ITU issued a statement on its Web site reiterating that "there have not been any proposals calling for a change from the bottom-up multi-stakeholder model of Internet governance to an ITU-controlled model."

The ITU, which dates back over 150 years, seems increasingly desperate to control criticism that is now coming not only from government officials and private sources but from Internet users worldwide.

In an op-ed published November 7 on Wired, Toure pleaded with readers to accept his "heartfelt" assurance that the ITU's only agenda was to expand Internet access for developing nations:

The conference will address issues that relate to improving online access and connectivity for everyone. (To be clear, the conference will not examine management of critical Internet resources such as domain names and IP addresses. These functions are already performed by ICANN and regional Internet registries.)

After commenters on the piece savaged Toure's hypocrisy, the secretary-general added a postscript as "an engineer who comes from one of the world's poorest countries." He reassured readers that, "For me and the ITU, it's about giving people the power to totally transform their lives through education, health care, and everything else the online world can deliver."

With the added postscript, Wired also notably changed the headline of the article, without any notice or explanation. The original title, "UN Must Regulate the Internet" was revised to "UN: We Seek to Bring Internet to All."

In response to growing criticism about the ITU's lack of transparency, Toure also encouraged Internet users to "participate" in the WCIT process. "ITU has opened an online space where anyone can post an opinion on the issues, to be shared with all conference delegates," he said in the Wired article.

A link directed readers to the WCIT 12 "Public Views and Opinions" page , which, since it was created in July, has received only 15 posts.

But perhaps that's because the ITU required commenters to first register, provide extensive identifying information, and agree to a lengthy terms of service agreement before they could "express their views" on the contents of a single, and highly redacted, early draft of the proposals the ITU decided to release. (The complete document, as well as many more recent versions, are available on WCITLeaks.)

Or perhaps that's because, as one of Wired's reader's pointed out, the "Public Views and Opinions" page had actually been shut down before Toure's editorial was even published.

Weeks ahead of the conference, and just as some of the worst proposals are leaking out of the ITU's information fortress, the public comment page now reads solemnly: "We inform you that the WCIT-12 Open Consultation process is now closed."

That statement captures, in a nutshell, everything that's wrong with the WCIT, and the ITU's pathetic effort to spin it.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57...-leak-reveals/





Google Attacks UN's Internet Treaty Conference
BBC

Google has warned that a forthcoming UN-organised conference threatens the "free and open internet".

Government representatives are set to agree a new information and communications treaty in December.

It has been claimed some countries will try to wrest oversight of the net's technical specifications and domain name system from US bodies to an international organisation.

However, the UN has said there would be consensus before any change was agreed.

Google has asked web users to add their name to an online petition to support its view.

"The [UN agency] International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is bringing together regulators from around the world to renegotiate a decades-old communications treaty," it wrote on its Take Action site.

"Some proposals could permit governments to censor legitimate speech - or even allow them to cut off internet access.

"Other proposals would require services like YouTube, Facebook, and Skype to pay new tolls in order to reach people across borders. This could limit access to information - particularly in emerging markets."

Google added that it was concerned that "only governments have a voice at the ITU" and not companies or others who had a stake in the net, concluding that the World Conference on International Telecommunications (Wcit) was "the wrong place" to make decisions about the internet's future.

However, the ITU has said that each country could invite whoever it likes to be part of its delegation at the meeting.

Leaked documents

The ITU has said a new treaty was needed to ensure "the free flow of information around the world, promoting affordable and equitable access for all and laying the foundation for ongoing innovation and market growth".

It added that the growth of the internet and adoption of mobile phones meant the existing agreement - signed in 1998 - needed to be updated.

The agency is not openly publishing each government's proposals ahead of the conference, however a site called Wcitleaks, run by researchers at George Mason University, has revealed some of the details.

Most recently these included a proposal from Russia suggesting that the US should have less control over the internet's operation.

"Member states shall have equal rights to manage the internet, including in regard to the allotment, assignment and reclamation of internet numbering, naming, addressing and identification resources and to support for the operation and development of basic internet infrastructure," it said in a document submitted on 17 November.

This would mark a shift from the current set-up in which such matters are looked after by non-profit bodies which are officially under the remit of the US Department of Commerce, but in effect operate at arm's length from the US government.

The Russia Today news service had previously reported that China and India backed the Kremlin's view that the ITU could take over these functions.

However, the US's ambassador to the conference, Terry Kramer, has already signalled he would not support this saying the existing institutions had "functioned effectively and will continue to ensure the health and growth of the internet".

Tolled traffic

Parts of the US tech industry have also been concerned by remarks by the ITU's secretary general, Dr Hamadoun Toure, that the meeting should "address the current disconnect between sources of revenue and sources of costs, and to decide upon the most appropriate way to do so".

Dr Toure said that the new treaty should be designed to help encourage broadband rollout and investment, later adding that telecom companies had the "right to a return on [the] investment" needed to avoid congestion.

But Google is not alone in fearing some countries will suggest the best way to do this will be to introduce "tolls" in which popular sites have to pay developing nations money if they send a lot of traffic through their data networks.

"Many countries are used to getting revenue from telephone calls, and those telephone calls have gone away in favour of various internet-based video services which don't produce revenue for them," Gary Shapiro, president of the US's Consumer Electronics Association, told the BBC.

"So they are looking to recover it and they are trying to put a charge on incoming internet access. So if you have a website which is very popular worldwide you would have to pay to get access to them - we think that is wrong.

"We think the value of the internet is that it is available to everyone for free without international barriers."

Unanimous decisions

The ITU is hosting the conference to draw up the treaty between 3 to 14 December in Dubai.

Dr Toure has signalled that if there were any serious disagreements he would try to avoid putting an issue to a majority vote.

"We never vote because voting means winners and losers and you can't afford that," he told the BBC in July.

"Whatever one single country does not accept will not pass."

But experts warn this poses a risk that participants leave some issues unresolved.

"In the worst case there's a danger you could see a splintering of the internet," said Prof Alan Woodward, from the department of computing, University of Surrey.

"Some countries including Russia already restrict which sites can be accessed, but if people start going off and doing their own things in term of naming conventions and net addresses you could end up with different parts of the internet being unable to send traffic to each other.

"It would be the online equivalent of not being able to make a telephone call from one nation to another."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20429625





Google's Eric Schmidt Tells Parents To 'Have Online Talk Before Sex Talk' With Kids. Survey Suggests Many Do.

“We need to fight for our privacy or we will lose it,” said Google chairman Eric Schmidt to Reuters in a recent on-camera chat. “[All of the user generated material on the web] is a privacy nightmare especially if you’re 15.”

Schmidt noted that the justice system will wipe a kid’s criminal record when he or she turns 18, but if a teenager does something incredibly stupid on the Internet — like sending out racist tweets about the president — “it’s going to follow you for the rest of your life,” he said.

“I’d argue for those of you with teenagers and preteens, you should probably have the online talk before the sex talk with your kids,” advised Schmidt. In other words, talk to them about virality before STDs.

Schmidt’s own daughters are well past the age where they need the birds, bees, and bits talk, but a new survey from the Pew Center and the Berkman Center suggests that today’s parents are well aware of the need to talk to their kids about their online bodies.

In a survey of 802 parents and their teens, parents were particularly freaked out by their kids mixing it up with strangers online, but “reputation management” and “impact on future opportunities” also rated high when it came to the worries that keep them up at night. And across the board, parents are worried about the information advertisers are collecting from their kids.

As for the 15% of parents who are “not at all concerned” about how their child manages their reputation online, please read this article.

A good number of parents are acting on these worries and counseling their kids on “Just Saying No To Being Stupid Online.” Via Pew:

• 59% of the parents of teen users of social networking sites (SNS) have talked with their child because they were concerned about something posted to their profile or account. (That translates to 46% of parents of all online teens.)
• 39% of the parents of teen users of SNS have helped their child set up privacy settings for a social networking site. (That translates to 31% of parents of all online teens.)

Pew revealed there’s a big privacy awareness gap when it comes to household income and race though:

And of course, rather than just talking to their kids, some parents are actively monitoring them. Half of the parents surveyed say they use parental controls on electronic devices or software to monitor, block, and filter what their kids see.

In a focus group, one 14-year-old boy says his parents simply monitor him and his siblings by friending them on Facebook, and he doesn’t mind: “We don’t have to worry much about what we put up, because what we put up we know that our family is going to see, so it’s like if there’s something that we don’t want—I remember like my mom told me don’t put anything you wouldn’t want your grandparents to see or something.”

But of course, others are savvy enough with their privacy controls to outsmart their parents. Another 14 year old: “So it’s like, now when they go online, they see info, and then it’s like — they see, like, my likes and interests [...] but they don’t see my posts, see my pictures…”

Meanwhile, 42% of parents Googled (or Binged) their kids to “see what information is available about him or her.” The percentage of parents who do this shoots up to 61% when their kids are 17, i.e., applying for college. (This is also a good thing to do before your baby even arrives, just to see what kind of online footprint exists for your proposed name.)

Astonishingly, 44% said they’d actually read the privacy policies of websites or social networking sites that their child uses. Bravo, parents. Apparently, there are people in the world who read privacy policies.

So, it’s fair to say that Schmidt’s words are not landing on deaf ears. Though it’s hard to say whether “the talk” will result in kids practicing “safe surfing.”

“We’ve got a real problem,” said Schmidt at the end of the Reuters interview. “We’re going to bear the cost of people being inattentive to the fact that there is no delete button on the Internet and that it’s easy to lose your privacy. That’s my basic message: It’s in our control, it’s in our behavior and in the way we advocate things.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirh...gests-many-do/





You Can’t Say That on the Internet
Evgeny Morozov

A BASTION of openness and counterculture, Silicon Valley imagines itself as the un-Chick-fil-A. But its hyper-tolerant facade often masks deeply conservative, outdated norms that digital culture discreetly imposes on billions of technology users worldwide.

What is the vehicle for this new prudishness? Dour, one-dimensional algorithms, the mathematical constructs that automatically determine the limits of what is culturally acceptable.

Consider just a few recent kerfuffles. In early September, The New Yorker found its Facebook page blocked for violating the site’s nudity and sex standards. Its offense: a cartoon of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Eve’s bared nipples failed Facebook’s decency test.

That’s right — a venerable publication that still spells “re-elect” as “reëlect” is less puritan than a Californian start-up that wants to “make the world more open.”

And fighting obscenity can be good for business. Impermium, a Silicon Valley company that helps Web sites deal with unwanted reader comments, has begun marketing technology that identifies “all kinds of harmful content — such as violence, racism, flagrant profanity, and hate speech — and allows site owners to act on it in real-time, before it reaches readers.” Impermium will police the readers — but who will police Impermium?

Apple, too, has strayed from its iconoclastic roots. When Naomi Wolf’s latest book, “Vagina: A New Biography,” went on sale in its iBooks store, Apple turned “Vagina” into “V****a.” After numerous complaints, Apple restored the title, but who knows how many other books are still affected?

True, these books are still on sale. Unlike the good old United States Post Office, which once confiscated “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and other books it deemed too lewd, Silicon Valley does not engage in direct censorship. What it does, though, is present ideas and terms that have gained public acceptance as something to be ashamed of. Silicon Valley doesn’t just reflect social norms — it actively shapes them in ways that are, for the most part, imperceptible.

The proliferation of the Autocomplete function on popular Web sites is a case in point. Nominally, all it does is complete your search query — on YouTube, on Google, on Amazon — before you’ve finished typing, using an algorithm to predict what you’re most likely typing. A nifty feature — but it, too, reinforces primness.

How so? Consider George Carlin’s classic comedy routine “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” See how many of those words would autocomplete on your favorite Web site. In my case, YouTube would autocomplete none. Amazon almost none (it also hates “penis” and “vagina”). Of Carlin’s seven words, Google would autocomplete only “piss.”

Until recently, even the word “bisexual” wouldn’t autocomplete at Google; it’s only this past August that Google, after many complaints, began to autocomplete some, but not all, queries for that term. In 2010, the hacker magazine 2600 published a long blacklist of similar words. While I didn’t verify all 400 of them on Google, a few that I did try — like “swastika” and “Lolita” — failed to autocomplete. Is Nabokov not trending in Mountain View? Alas, these algorithms are not particularly bright: unable to distinguish between Nabokov’s novel and child pornography, they assume you want the latter.

Why won’t tech companies let us freely use terms that already enjoy wide circulation and legitimacy? Do they fashion themselves as our new guardians? Are they too greedy to correct their algorithms’ mistakes?

Thanks to Silicon Valley, our public life is undergoing a transformation. Accompanying this digital metamorphosis is the emergence of new, algorithmic gatekeepers, who, unlike the gatekeepers of the previous era — journalists, publishers, editors — don’t flaunt their cultural authority. They may even be unaware of it themselves, eager to deploy algorithms for fun and profit.

Many of these gatekeepers remain invisible — until something goes wrong. Thus, in early September, the online livestream from the Hugo Awards, the Oscars of the science fiction world, was interrupted with a cryptic copyright warning, right before the popular author Neil Gaiman was to deliver an acceptance speech.

Apparently, Ustream — the site streaming the ceremony — was using the services of another company to determine whether its streamed videos violated any copyrights. The partner company draws on a very large video archive to see, in real time, if what’s being streamed matches anything in its collection. Somehow, the celebratory video that preceded Mr. Gaiman’s speech tripped a copyright match, and the feed was cut off, even though the organizers had all the requisite permissions (and, under the doctrine of fair use, probably didn’t need them anyway).

The limitations of algorithmic gatekeeping are on full display here. How do you teach the idea of “fair use” to an algorithm? Context matters, and there’s no rule book here; that’s why we have courts. From the perspective of sticky, amorphous human culture, semi-automation — pairing up humans with algorithms — beats full automation. Sometimes, gaps are productive. But will profit-driven Silicon Valley ever acknowledge this insight?

Our reputations are increasingly at the mercy of algorithms, too. No one knows this better than Bettina Wulff, the former German first lady who has sued Google for autocompleting searches for her name with words like “escort” and “prostitute.” Ms. Wulff insists that Google’s algorithms spread false rumors about her; Google says that the suggested terms are just an “algorithmically generated result of objective factors, including the popularity of the entered search terms.”

Google’s defense would sound tenable if its own algorithms weren’t so easy to trick. In 2010, the marketing expert Brent Payne paid an army of assistants to search for “Brent Payne manipulated this.” Soon anyone typing “Brent P” into Google would see that phrase in their autocomplete suggestions. After Mr. Payne publicized his experiment, Google removed that particular suggestion, but how many similar cases have gone undetected? What is “objective” about such algorithmic “truths”?

Quaint prudishness, excessive enforcement of copyright, unneeded damage to our reputations: algorithmic gatekeeping is exacting a high toll on our public life. Instead of treating algorithms as a natural, objective reflection of reality, we must take them apart and closely examine each line of code.

Can we do it without hurting Silicon Valley’s business model? The world of finance, facing a similar problem, offers a clue. After several disasters caused by algorithmic trading earlier this year, authorities in Hong Kong and Australia drafted proposals to establish regular independent audits of the design, development and modifications of computer systems used in such trades. Why couldn’t auditors do the same to Google?

Silicon Valley wouldn’t have to disclose its proprietary algorithms, only share them with the auditors. A drastic measure? Perhaps. But it’s one that is proportional to the growing clout technology companies have in reshaping not only our economy but also our culture.

Obviously, Silicon Valley won’t develop or embrace similar norms overnight. However, instead of accepting this new reality as a fait accompli, we must ensure that, in pursuing greater profits, our new algorithmic gatekeepers are forced to accept the idea that their culture-defining function comes with great responsibility.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/o...-internet.html





Outrage in India Over Arrests for Facebook Post
Nirmala George

As India's financial capital shut down for the weekend funeral of a powerful politician linked to waves of mob violence, a woman posted on Facebook that the closures in Mumbai were "due to fear, not due to respect." A friend of hers hit the "like" button.

For that, both women were arrested.

Analysts and the media are slamming the Maharashtra state government for what they said was a flagrant misuse of the law and an attempt to curb freedom of expression. The arrests were seen as a move by police to prevent any outbreak of violence by supporters of Bal Thackeray, a powerful Hindu fundamentalist politician who died Saturday.

"We are living in a democracy, not a fascist dictatorship," Markandey Katju, a former Supreme Court justice who now heads the Press Council of India, wrote in a protest letter to the chief minister of Maharashtra.

Katju demanded that the state government suspend the police officers who had ordered the arrests and prosecute them.

The women withdrew the comment and apologized, but angry Thackeray supporters ransacked an orthopedic clinic run by the uncle of one woman.

A lawyer representing the women, Sudheer Gupta, said police arrested them Sunday, the day of the funeral, on charges of creating enmity and hatred. They were released on bail Monday.

Shaheen Dhada, the 21-year-old who posted the comment appeared on television Tuesday, her face covered by a scarf so that only her eyes were visible.

Clearly terrified by her arrest and the attack on her uncle's clinic, Dhada told NDTV television she would never again make comments on a social networking site. Both women said they have deactivated their Facebook accounts.

Dhada described her arrest as "unfair."

"It was not a crime," Renu Srinivas, Dhada's friend who also was arrested, told NDTV.

India's Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal said he was "deeply saddened" by the arrests of the two women.

"Freedom of speech is a very important right, and we need to protect it," Sibal told reporters. He said the government would re-examine the laws governing information technology to prevent its misuse by the police.

"We want to make sure that this law is not meant to prevent people from stating their point of view on any issue," Sibal said Tuesday.

Shops and offices were closed Sunday as more than 1.5 million people attended Thackeray's funeral.

He was never elected to office but was seen for decades as Mumbai's most powerful man. He created an army of supporters by weaving Hindu fundamentalism with ardent defense of Marathis, Mumbai's dominant ethnic group.

Thackeray founded his political party, the Shiv Sena — which means Shiva's Army — with the sole aim of keeping people who are not from Maharashtra out of the state and stemming the spread of Islam and Western values.

Spurred by Thackeray's rabble-rousing speeches, his supporters routinely resorted to violence against Muslims and migrant workers who had come to Mumbai in search of work. He is among those blamed for a wave of religious violence in 1992 that left nearly 1,000 people dead in Mumbai alone.

Analysts say it was as sense of fear that kept millions of people off the streets of the bustling city on Sunday. Nearly 20,000 policemen patrolled the deserted streets, mainly because of the violent history of the Shiv Sena.

No violence occurred Sunday. A day later, a relieved Mumbai police chief, Satyapal Singh, praised the "unexpectedly orderly behavior" of Thackeray's supporters.

But the thuggish behavior was in evidence Monday when a mob of Thackeray's supporters stormed the orthopedic clinic, destroying its operating rooms and much of its equipment. Nurses and patients fled but no one was hurt.

On Tuesday, police said they had detained nine men for their involvement in the attack of the clinic. It was not immediately clear if the men belonged to the Shiv Sena.

The Mumbai arrests came barely two months after the Maharashtra police arrested a political cartoonist on sedition charges for drawings that mocked corruption in the Indian government. The charges were dropped and the cartoonist is out on bail. Earlier this year, a university professor was arrested in the state of West Bengal for forwarding an email cartoon that caricatured the chief minister there.
http://www.chron.com/business/techno...st-4051877.php





Pak to Cut Phone Services to Prevent Muharram Attacks
AP

Pakistan's interior minister Friday said the government will suspend cell phone services in most parts of the country over the next two days to prevent attacks against Shia Muslims during a key religious commemoration.

Militants often detonate bombs using cell phones and this is the first time the government has implemented such a wide-scale suspension.

Saturday and Sunday are the most important days of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar, especially important to Shias. Pakistani Shias Sunday observe Ashoura, commemorating the 7th century death of Imam Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson. Different parts of the Muslim world mark Ashoura on different days — neighbouring Afghanistan, for example, observes it on Saturday.

“The suspension of cell phone services will begin at 6 am Saturday and run through the next day,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik told reporters in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. He said 90 per cent of the bombs set off by militants in Pakistan have been detonated using cell phones.

Some criticized the government for suspending services, saying it was a huge inconvenience.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/pa...tacks/1035541/





Google.com.pk and 284 Other .PK Domains Hacked
Aamir Attaa

Start page for majority of Pakistanis – when they first visited it this morning – was found hacked and defaced. Yes, Google.Com.PK along with 284 other .PK domains were hacked today (and are still defaced).

According to Irfan Ahmed, an expert on Pakistani websites and web-servers, this defacement is due to change in DNS entries for 284 .PK domains that are managed by MarkMoniter.

Defaced domains include Microsoft.PK, apple.PK, paypal.PK, ebay.PK, blogspot.PK, chrome.PK, Cisco.PK and others.

Apparently no one has claimed the responsibility for the incident, but a message appearing on defaced pages, including on Google.com.pk is displaying a message in Turkish language, hinting that the hacker could be Turkish in origin.

Hacker hasn’t left any message for anyone, unlike the norm that hackers follow to convey their message through such defacements.

However, there is a phrase saying “Downed Pakistan”, a sign of victory for hackers when the deface a website.
http://propakistani.pk/2012/11/24/go...k-gets-hacked/





Scientists Find Cheaper Way to Ensure Internet Security
John Markoff

Scientists at Toshiba and Cambridge University have perfected a technique that offers a less expensive way to ensure the security of the high-speed fiber optic cables that are the backbone of the modern Internet.

The research, which will be published Tuesday in the science journal Physical Review X, describes a technique for making infinitesimally short time measurements needed to capture pulses of quantum light hidden in streams of billions of photons transmitted each second in data networks. Scientists used an advanced photodetector to extract weak photons from the torrents of light pulses carried by fiber optic cables, making it possible to safely distribute secret keys necessary to scramble data over distances up to 56 miles.

Such data scrambling systems will most likely be used first for government communications systems for national security. But they will also be valuable for protecting financial data and ultimately all information transmitted over the Internet.

The approach is based on quantum physics, which offers the ability to exchange information in a way that the act of eavesdropping on the communication would be immediately apparent. The achievement requires the ability to reliably measure a remarkably small window of time to capture a pulse of light, in this case lasting just 50 picoseconds — the time it takes light to travel 15 millimeters.

The secure exchange of encryption keys used to scramble and unscramble data is one of the most vexing aspects of modern cryptography.

Public key cryptography uses a key that is publicly distributed and a related secret key that is held privately, allowing two people who have never met physically to securely exchange information. But such systems have a number of vulnerabilities, including potentially to computers powerful enough to decode data protected by mathematical formulas.

If it is possible to reliably exchange secret keys, it is possible to use an encryption system known as a one-time pad, one of the most secure forms. Several commercially available quantum key distribution systems exist, but they rely on the necessity of transmitting the quantum key separately from communication data, frequently in a separate optical fiber, according to Andrew J. Shields, one of the authors of the paper and the assistant managing director for Toshiba Research Europe. This adds cost and complexity to the cryptography systems used to protect the high-speed information that flows over fiber optic networks.

Weaving quantum information into conventional networking data will lower the cost and simplify the task of coding and decoding the data, making quantum key distribution systems more attractive for commercial data networks, the authors said.

Modern optical data networking systems increase capacity by transmitting multiple data streams simultaneously in different colors of light. The Toshiba-Cambridge system sends the quantum information over the same fiber, but isolates it in its own frequency.

“We can pick out the quantum photons from the scattered light using their expected arrival time at the detector,” Dr. Shields said. “The quantum signals hit the detector at precisely known times — every one nanosecond, while the arrival time of the scattered light is random.”

Despite their ability to carry prodigious amounts of data, fiber-optic cables are also highly insecure. An eavesdropper needs only to bend a cable and expose the fiber, Dr. Shields said. It is then possible to capture light that leaks from the cable and convert it into digital ones and zeros.

“The laws of quantum physics tell us that if someone tries to measure those single photons, that measurement disturbs their state and it causes errors in the information carried by the single photon,” he said. “By measuring the error rate in the secret key, we can determine whether there has been any eavesdropping in the fiber and in that way directly test the secrecy of each key.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/20/t...y-cheaply.html





Cyber Corps Program Trains Spies for the Digital Age

At the University of Tulsa school, students learn to write computer viruses, hack digital networks and mine data from broken cellphones. Many graduates head to the CIA or NSA.
Ken Dilanian

Jim Thavisay is secretly stalking one of his classmates. And one of them is spying on him.

"I have an idea who it is, but I'm not 100% sure yet," said Thavisay, a 25-year-old former casino blackjack dealer.

Stalking is part of the curriculum in the Cyber Corps, an unusual two-year program at the University of Tulsa that teaches students how to spy in cyberspace, the latest frontier in espionage.

Students learn not only how to rifle through trash, sneak a tracking device on cars and plant false information on Facebook. They also are taught to write computer viruses, hack digital networks, crack passwords, plant listening devices and mine data from broken cellphones and flash drives.

It may sound like a Jason Bourne movie, but the little-known program has funneled most of its graduates to the CIA and the Pentagon's National Security Agency, which conducts America's digital spying. Other graduates have taken positions with the FBI, NASA and the Department of Homeland Security.

The need for stronger cyber-defense — and offense — was highlighted when Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta warned in an Oct. 11 speech that a "a cyber-terrorist attack could paralyze the nation," and that America needs experts to tackle the growing threat.

"An aggressor nation or extremist group could gain control of critical switches and derail passenger trains, or trains loaded with lethal chemicals," Panetta said. "They could contaminate the water supply in major cities, or shut down the power grid across large parts of the country."

Panetta said the Pentagon spends more than $3 billion annually for cyber-security. "Our most important investment is in skilled cyber-warriors needed to conduct operations in cyberspace," he said.

That's music to the ears of Sujeet Shenoi, a naturalized citizen from India who founded the cyber program in 1998. He says 85% of the 260 graduates since 2003 have gone to the NSA, which students call "the fraternity," or the CIA, which they call "the sorority."

Shenoi subjects his students to both classroom theory and practical field work. Each student is assigned to a Tulsa police crime lab on campus and uses digital skills to help uncover evidence — most commonly child pornography images — from seized devices. Several students have posed as children online to lure predators. In 2003, students helped solve a triple homicide by cracking an email account linking the perpetrator to his victims.

"I throw them into the deep end," Shenoi said. "And they become fearless."

The Secret Service has also tapped the Cyber Corps. Working from a facility on campus, students help agents remove evidence from damaged cellphones, GPS units and other devices.

"Working alongside U.S. Secret Service agents, Tulsa Cyber Corps students have developed techniques for extracting evidence from burned or shattered cellphones," Hugh Dunleavy, who heads the Secret Service criminal division, said in a written statement. More than 5,000 devices have been examined at the facility, he added.

In 2007, California's secretary of state, Debra Bowen, hired the University of California to test the security of three electronic voting systems used in the state, and Shenoi and several students joined one of the "red" teams assigned to try to hack the voting machines. They succeeded. One of the students, who now works at the NSA, showed that someone could use an off-the-shelf device with Bluetooth connectivity to change all the votes in a given machine, Shenoi said.

"All our results were provided to the companies so they could fix the machines to the extent possible," Shenoi said.

In May, the NSA named Tulsa as one of four national centers of academic excellence in cyber-operations. The others were Northeastern University in Boston, Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., and Dakota State University in Madison, S.D.

"Tulsa students show up to NSA with a lot of highly relevant hands-on experience," said Neal Ziring, a senior NSA official who visited the school recently to consult about the curriculum and to interview students for jobs and internships. "There are very few schools that are like Tulsa in terms of having participation with law enforcement, with industry, with government."

Shenoi's students have ranged in age from 17 to 63. Many are retired from the military, or otherwise starting second careers. They are usually working toward degrees in computer science, engineering, law or business. About two-thirds get a cyber-operations certification on their diplomas, or what Shenoi calls a "cyber-ninja" designation "because they have to be super techie."

To be accepted into the corps, applicants must be U.S. citizens with the ability to obtain a security clearance of "top secret" or higher. But not all of them spend their careers in government.

One former student, Philip McAllister, worked after graduation at the Naval Research Laboratory, which does scientific research and development for the Navy and Marines. He later moved to San Francisco and worked at several startup companies before he joined Instagram, which developed a photo-sharing mobile application, early this year. Facebook purchased Instagram, which had only 13 employees, for $1 billion three months later.

"Sujeet gets incredibly talented people," said Richard "Dickie" George, who retired last year after a three-decade career at the NSA.

Shenoi speaks proudly of students who pushed the boundaries or broke the rules.

One, who now works at the NSA, hacked the school's computer system and created a fake university ID to impersonate his cyber-stalking target, for example. Another spoofed a professor's email account to fool his target into spilling details. As part of a vulnerability study, one student sneaked into a Tulsa water system facility and stole blueprints that a more malign attacker could use to wreak havoc.

A few years ago, Shenoi says, a group of students rummaged through trash bins outside offices on campus and obtained confidential information about football recruits, professors' salaries, and major financial donors.

"We are now banned from Dumpster diving on campus," he said with a smile.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...,7345893.story





PASSTEAL Malware Lurking on File Sharing Sites
Brian Donohue

Variants of the PASSTEAL malware are propagating by masquerading as key generators for paid applications, popular e-books, and other software on file sharing services, according Alvin John Nieto, a threat response engineer at TrendMicro's TrendLabs.

PASSTEAL, as its name suggests, is a piece of malware that uses various password recovery tools to steal passwords stored in the browsers of its victims. Nieto claims PASSTEAL is novel in its deviation from keyloggers that simply log keystrokes.

The TrendMicro report names “WebBrowserPassView” and “PasswordFox” as two of the password recovery tools that they have found bundled with PASSTEAL, but Nieto believes that those responsible for PASSTEAL could be using any number of other recovery tools as well.

Password stealing malware such as PASSTEAL is particularly dangerous for users who share passwords across various online accounts, which is one of the many reasons that password sharing is a bad idea.
https://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/p...g-sites-112112





Hacked Go Daddy Sites Infecting Users with Ransomware
Fraser Howard

Go DaddyUsers are getting infected with ransomware thanks to criminals managing to hack the DNS records of Go Daddy hosted websites.

That's not welcome news for the world's largest domain name registrar, especially so soon after the recent denial of service attack.

To understand how these attacks work, a short primer on DNS is required.

In a nutshell, DNS provides a system where computers on a network (the internet) can be referenced by a user-friendly name. These names are known as hostnames, and DNS translates them into what is known as an IP address.

A key feature of DNS is that changes can be made and applied very rapidly, allowing resources to be moved between machines/networks/locations without affecting end users. The hostnames remain constant, and DNS handles any changes in the IP address as the resources move.

In this current spate of attacks, criminals are exploiting DNS by hacking the DNS records of sites, adding one or more additional subdomains with corresponding DNS entries (A records) referencing malicious IP addresses. The legitimate hostname resolves to the legitimate IP address, but the added sub-domains resolve to rogue servers.

This enables the attackers to use legitimate-looking URLs in their attacks, which can help to evade security filtering and trick users into thinking the content must be safe.

In some cases, users have had several subdomains added, pointing to one or more malicious IP addresses.

owner.[redacted].com
move.[redacted].com
mouth.[redacted].com
much.[redacted].com
muscle.[redacted].info
music.[redacted].mobi

The rogue servers are running an exploit kit calling itself 'Cool EK'.

As noted last week, this is actually very similar to Blackhole exploit kit.

The Russian origin of the kit is evident from the login page for the admin panel.

Users hitting the malicious site are hit with various malicious files, exploiting several vulnerabilities, in order to infect them with ransomware.

snake.[redacted].info/r/l/certainly-devices.php (exploit landing page, Mal/ExpJS-AV)
snake.[redacted].info/r/32size_font.eot (CVE-2011-3402, Troj/DexFont-A)
snake.[redacted].info/r/media/file.jar (Mal/JavaGen-E)
snake.[redacted].info/r/f.php?k=1&e=0&f=0 (ransomware payload, Troj/Ransom-KM)

Once running, the ransomware displays the familiar payment page, with contents that vary based on the country of the victim.

Here is a British example, which uses the name of the Police Central E-Crime Unit:

And here is the type of lock page you would see if you lived in, say, Bulgaria:

Note the use of an animated GIF in this lock page to mimic the video from the user's webcam! This sort of attention to detail is what helps convince many users that the warning is legitimate.

At the time of writing, an important question remains to be answered. How were the attackers able to hack these Go Daddy DNS records?

One likely cause is compromised user credentials (stolen or weak passwords). To help confirm this I suggested one of the affected webmasters check his historical login activity. Sadly, this does not seem to be readily possible for users. Furthermore, the response from Go Daddy offers no help as well.

Thank you for contacting Online Support regarding your account. Please note we have security devices and protocols in place to protect our network and infrastructure. As stated previously, we can not release information regarding account logins or activity. If you feel that someone has logged into your account, you best defense is to change your password. Please see our previous response for instructions on how to do this.

Sigh. Enabling users to view historical login activity is a very simple way of helping to spot malicious activity early. Let's hope Go Daddy change their stance on this.

Go DaddyGiven the prevalence of attacks against web sites for the purpose of malware distribution it is high time that associated services (Registrars, hosting providers etc) pay adequate consideration to security.

Users should not be allowed to use weak passwords. Two-factor authentication should be readily available, if not enforced.

With a little forethought and consideration to what happens when the keys to the kingdom get lost, malicious activity can be disrupted more quickly.

Go Daddy customers who wish to check they have not been affected by these attacks should check their DNS configuration according to the Go Daddy support page.

Aside from contacting some of the affected webmasters, we have contacted Go Daddy to alert them to these attacks.

Thanks to the webmasters who responded to my notifications about these attacks, whose input was very helpful in putting together the content for this post.
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012...dy-ransomware/





Why Big Data Could Sink Europe’s ‘Right to be Forgotten’
David Meyer

A report by Europe’s cybersecurity agency points out several flaws with the proposed ‘right to be forgotten’. A big one has to do with the challenges presented by the increasing use of aggregated data.

Europe’s proposed ‘right to be forgotten’ has been the subject of intense debate, with many people arguing it’s simply not practical in the age of the internet for any data to be reliably expunged from history.

Well, add another voice to that mix. The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) has published its assessment of the proposals, and the tone is sceptical to say the least. And, interestingly, one of the biggest problems ENISA has found has to do with big data.

The European Commission‘s proposals define the sort of data that has to be erased (if the data subject asks for it) in more than one way. Without wishing to get into comparison of various sections’ wording, here’s what ENISA has to say:

“[The definitions] leave to interpretation whether [personal data] includes information that can be used to identify a person with high probability but not with certainty… Neither is it clear whether it includes information that identifies a person not uniquely, but as a member of a more or less small set of individuals, such as a family.”

Here comes the kicker:

“A related question is how aggregated and derived forms of information (e.g. statistics) should be affected when some of the raw data from which statistics are derived are forgotten. Removing forgotten information from all aggregated or derived forms may present a significant technical challenge. On the other hand, not removing such information from aggregated forms is risky, because it may be possible to infer the forgotten raw information by correlating different aggregated forms.”

That’s a pretty big problem. If data gets aggregated and crunched by analytics software, you can’t say in all cases that the process can’t be reverse-engineered, particularly when you’re correlating different sets of derived data. But getting it out is, well, a challenge.

This isn’t the only problem ENISA’s identified. Here’s a tl;dr rundown of the report’s other comments and questions:

• When you have a photo on a social network that features multiple people, “who gets to decide if and when the photo should be forgotten?”

• The internet is not a closed system, and it spans multiple jurisdictions. “Enforcing the right to be forgotten is impossible in an open, global system, in general.”

• “Unauthorized copying of information by human observers is ultimately impossible to prevent by technical means.”

• You could try DRMing all data, but these things can be bypassed, and people wouldn’t like it.

• So what could work? “A possible partial solution may be a legal mandate aimed at making it difficult to find expired personal data, for instance, by requiring search engines to exclude expired personal data from their search results.”

ENISA is too politically savvy to just come out and say that the right to be forgotten is doomed, but they come pretty close.

Is it doomed? Quite possibly – which is a pity, in some ways, as it would be nice to avoid an inexorable slide into a world where people lose control over their own history.

As ENISA points out in its report, a fundamental problem with European laws such as this proposed revision to the data protection directive is that they need to be broad enough to be interpreted by member states in ways that fit with their national principles. Technical solutions don’t do ‘broad’. They need ‘specific’.

And with problems such as those highlighted by ENISA, good luck to the European Commission with nailing down those specifics in a way that pleases everyone.
http://gigaom.com/europe/why-big-dat...-be-forgotten/





The Man Who Hacked Hollywood

They've become a part of the pop-culture landscape: sexy, private shots of celebrities (your Scarletts, your Milas) stolen from their phones and e-mail accounts. They're also the center of an entire stealth industry. For the man recently arrested in the biggest case yet, hacking also gave him access to a trove of Hollywood's seamiest secrets—who was sleeping together, who was closeted, who liked to sext. What the snoop didn't realize was that he was being watched, too
David Kushner

The hacker's eyes widened as the image filled his screen. There, without her makeup, stood Scarlett Johansson, her famous face unmistakable in the foreground, her naked backside reflected in the bathroom mirror behind her, a cell phone poised in her hand snapping the shot. Holy shit, he thought. This was a find—even for him. For years, he had stealthily broken into the e-mail accounts of the biggest players in Hollywood. He had daily access to hundreds of messages between his victims and their managers, lawyers, friends, doctors, family, agents, nutritionists, publicists, etc. By now he knew more dirt than almost anyone in L.A.—the secret romances, the hidden identities, films in all stages of development. Still, this photo, a private self-portrait of one of our biggest stars, was something new, something larger than life, especially his. "You feel like you've seen something that the rest of the world wanted to see," he says. "But you're the only one that's seen it."

•••

Chris Chaney never wanted to become famous as The Man Who Hacked Hollywood. In the beginning at least, he was just a 33-year-old loner looking for something to do. Two years unemployed, he lived in a rundown brick house in a middle-class neighborhood in Jacksonville, Florida, where the streets are named for fairy tales: Cinderella Road, Peter Pan Place. He'd spent his entire life in this same area, had never flown on a plane or traveled beyond the occasional trip to see family in Iowa or Alabama. His parents separated when he was 4, and during his freshman year in high school he moved into this house near Mother Hubbard Drive with his grandmother. Taking a room hardly bigger than his bed, he hung a Fight Club poster on the wall, stacked his DVDs in the corner, lined up his He-Man dolls below the television, and called it home.

One night in early 2008, while his grandma slept, the balding, 290-pound Chaney was idly surfing movie sites like Ain't It Cool News when he stumbled on the latest celebrity scandal. Stolen pictures had leaked online of Miley Cyrus posing half-dressed, her midriff exposed. Chaney sparked a clove cigarette and considered the story. He couldn't have cared less about the Miley shots themselves. What intrigued him was the guy who stole them. How'd he do it? Chaney wasn't a hacker; he didn't even own a computer until his late twenties and couldn't write a lick of code. But he'd always loved solving puzzles—completing crosswords, shouting out answers to Jeopardy! This was a tantalizing new riddle: "I was like, 'How hard could this be if it's happening all the time?' "

What Chaney lacked in technical skills, he made up for in effort. Finding a working e-mail address was a simple process of trial and error. In a Word document, he made a list of random celebrities and, one by one, entered them into Gmail—first name followed by last—until, days later, an address was finally accepted. (In the blur of celebs to follow, he wouldn't be able to recall his first.) Unlocking the account, he knew, would be more difficult. To retrieve a lost password, sites often ask subscribers so-called challenge questions: What's your mother's maiden name? What's your place of birth? Or, in the case of this celebrity, what's your pet's name? It was widely known that the hacker who broke into Paris Hilton's phone had done it with her Chihuahua's name, Tinkerbell. If her dog's name was easily available online, so too, Chaney figured, were other clues.

Oops!
Chris Chaney's hacking life started after spotting a leaked
image of Miley Cyrus.

Chaney found what he was looking for on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). After punching in the pet's name, he watched in awe as the star's private e-mails poured down his smudgy PC screen. "I don't want to compare it to throwing a touchdown pass," he says, "but it was a rush." He quickly scrolled through the contact list, cutting and pasting the e-mails of anyone he recognized into a separate file: actresses, actors, athletes—"It was pretty much anyone with a name," he says. He then set the victim's account to forward a copy of every e-mail to him, so even if the celeb reset the password, the e-mails would keep coming in.

Chaney eyed his in-box. He'd get to reading the messages in good time, but for now he wanted to crack more addresses. "You find the right pieces," he says, "and then it unlocks." There were favorite colors to ascertain. Elementary-school names. Social Security numbers. Chaney became an expert. He found old school names on Classmates.com, friends on Facebook, and hometowns on free directories like Intelius. "If they've had their names removed, their parents are probably still on there," he says.

Before long, he had total access to e-mail accounts of stars including Mila Kunis, Busy Philipps, Ali Larter. And still without work and living with the help of his mom and stepdad, he had plenty of time to read through their messages. He'd wake at noon, chug a can of Java Monster, and check his in-box to find up to 800 e-mails waiting for him—a virtual universe to explore. "It's the whole Star Trek thing," he says. " 'Going where no man has gone before.' "

•••

Chaney's new universe wasn't so much terra incognita as terra obscura, the murky territory of the celebrity-skin underworld. It's a domain run by dubious hackers like TrainReq and anonymity-seeking bloggers like Deep at Sea. Known by their screen names, these "suppliers" provide the photos and videos that drive the market. But not all suppliers are hackers—and yes, occasionally the stars and their cohorts are complicit. One of the very first was Paris Hilton's then boyfriend Rick Salomon, who in 2004 brought a night-vision tape of their tryst to Red Light District video. Almost overnight, the video, repackaged as 1 Night in Paris, sold a reported 700,000 DVDs.

Salomon's go-between on that deal, the man who negotiated with Red Light, was Kevin Blatt. At the time, Blatt was a marketer for porn sites, but the Hilton tape lit a fire, and soon he was inundated with calls and e-mails from people who claimed to have sex tapes and photos. Today, Blatt says, the Internet has driven demand for illicit images sky-high: A single nude shot of a high-profile star like a Jennifer Lopez or Natalie Portman, he says, is "worth a million dollars, easy." Websites like TMZ and Perez Hilton cash in by luring people to click on advertising banners. Nik Richie, owner of the popular gossip site The Dirty, calls a celebrity nude a "five-timer," because it generates five times the usual traffic—as many as 500,000 visitors in a day.

Posting stolen pictures, however, is a precarious business. No one can legally publish them without the owner's permission, and even when it's granted, celebrities don't want their cooperation made public. "If you believe what they tell you, these are all rogue tapes that found their way on the Net," Blatt says. "Nothing could be further from the truth." When celebrities do give their consent, it's often after a payout. Kim Kardashian reportedly settled with porn giant Vivid Entertainment for $5 million.

Even without permission, less scrupulous publishers will test their luck, uploading the pictures to rack up page views, then taking them down if they're served by lawyers. Between ad revenues and new subscriptions, a single photo can bring in as much as $50,000 a day. Illegal uploads are a frequent enough occurrence that Blatt saw them as a second business opportunity: Today celebrities not only pay him to distribute tapes but also to keep them off the Internet. In one notable episode, Blatt says he was blindfolded, then driven to a secret location to view a sex tape of Colin Farrell. There he worked as an intermediary between Farrell's lawyers and the perps to obtain the video. (A few stills were leaked online.) Blatt charges an hourly fee of $250 for his services, and if he's able to broker a deal between the seller and the celebrity, he collects a 10 percent commission, which can range between $500 and $50,000.

To an outsider, Blatt's arrangement may seem as if it presents a conflict of interest or even the possibility for extortion. But the stars see it as something else: a necessary service in the digital age. As guitarist Dave Navarro, who worked with Blatt to keep a groupie tape off the market, told me, "I appreciate that in this case, there was someone looking out for my better interest."

Hack Attack
Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Seyfried, Kim Kardashian, and Blake Lively have all been targeted by hackers.

•••

Hacking didn't just take Chaney into the secret world of sex photos. It gave him access to the hidden world of Hollywood itself—the behind-the-scenes deals and day-to-day workings of the business. And Chaney, a die-hard film buff since he was a kid, says that's what drove him deeper. His ideal victim, at least at first, wasn't a starlet but a location scout. "I thought that was one of the awesomest [jobs]," he says. "They go around, find these places, take pictures of them, and send them to the directors. It was cool seeing a part of the process that nobody ever sees."

After hacking the account of one producer, Chaney saw the entire filmmaking process, from start to finish. The producer was working on In Time, a film starring Justin Timberlake, Olivia Wilde, and Amanda Seyfried. Chaney breezed through copies of the script, set in a dystopian future where people die at age 26 unless they can afford to buy another day. He marveled over production photos of arms imprinted with numbers that count down the actors' hours. He read in astonishment as one producer discussed visiting strip clubs to find a body double for an actress, perhaps Seyfried. Another had to negotiate a deal with Seyfried's agent over how much flesh she'd show. "It seemed a fairly convoluted process just to show a butt crack," Chaney says.

Though Chaney was never one for gossip, he became fascinated by the secret lives of his celebrity victims. While reading e-mails about the film Friends with Benefits, Chaney admired star Mila Kunis's effortless jokes. "She was almost the kind of person you see portrayed," he says. "Not ditzy, but she was as funny in person as she is in [movies]." Despite later rumors of sex shots of her and Timberlake, Chaney says he "never saw any communication between [them] that would insinuate anything."

There were plenty of other juicy affairs, however. "Everyone dated everyone eventually," he says. "It always reminded me of [Beverly Hills] 90210." He once followed an exchange between a famous actor and actress who tried to keep their relationship private, opting to see each other at, say, Canter's Deli at 3 a.m. instead of dodging paparazzi at the Ivy. He later read about Johansson's separation from Ryan Reynolds long before the tabloids caught on. "They were discussing, I guess, aspects of who gets what," he recalls: what furniture, what photos, what souvenirs. "It was weird to read stuff like that," he went on. "It was almost too personal."

But Chaney wasn't just reading about celebrity sex lives; he was following them in real time. Among the more surprising revelations he discovered were a handful of explicit e-mails that leading men sent to their secret male partners. "I'm trying to figure out how to say it without names," he says. "There were some that, you know, their public persona is they're kind of a player, and their private persona is they're batting for the other team.... They may have been batting for both teams, I don't know."

Chaney also saw hundreds of illicit images, so many that he created a special folder within a folder on his computer, organized by name. He estimates that about 60 percent were nudes—mainly cell-phone "self-shots." And they weren't all of young actors. Chaney remembers seeing one actress "in her mid-to-late forties," he says. "Been acting for a while. Huge. I'll just say everyone knows her name." Um, Julia Roberts? "I'm not going to say names," he replies with a nervous laugh. Still, as much as he knew how hackers, real hackers, would kill for his stolen photos, he had the discipline, initially at least, to keep them to himself. "I didn't want fame," he told me. "It was a personal thing." But soon that wouldn't be enough.

•••

The farther Chaney plunged into the Hollywood rabbit hole, the more he wanted to tell someone, anyone, what he was finding. The urge only got worse when, in April 2010, his grandmother passed away. Suddenly the house near Mother Hubbard felt crushingly empty. Eating just a can of ravioli a day, Chaney lost eighty pounds. He Googled the symptoms of depression—each of which he met. After taking a break from his computer, he went back with a vengeance. "There was already a lack of sleep," he says, "that just became no sleep."

One night, he finally gave in to the temptation to talk. "I let my curiosity—and I think my marijuana—get the best of me," he recalls. A well-known actor had sent a wish-you-were-here photo of a European mountainside to an actress. Stoned and feeling uninhibited, Chaney logged in to the actress's e-mail against his better judgment and sent a reply saying how fantastic the view looked. He shuddered the moment he hit send. "I was like, 'You're a fucking idiot for doing this,' " he says.

But the screwups, or the impulse to share, didn't go away. While perusing the e-mail of celebrity stylist Simone Harouche in early November 2010, he stumbled across photos of her client Christina Agui-lera trying on outfits in a dressing room, wearing little more than silver pasties. Chaney found a random guy on a celebrity message board and sent him an e-mail telling him he knew "someone" who had hacked pictures of Aguilera. Did he want to check them out?

Fifteen Painful Minutes
Chaney, outside federal court in Los Angeles, says he
doesn't "plan on being famous for anything else again."

Chaney freaked the moment he sent it. What the hell am I doing? he thought. He was using a phony e-mail address, but he didn't know how to effectively cover his tracks. On December 8, a headline appeared on TMZ: "Christina Aguilera: My Private Sexy Pics Were Hacked." Aguilera's rep told TMZ they were "attempting to determine the identity of the hackers and will pursue them aggressively."

When Chaney saw his Aguilera photos online, "it was like a gut punch," he says. But it was also a little exhilarating. After that initial wave of anxiety, he was left with a rare feeling of accomplishment. He'd spent years peering into the fishbowl; now he was finally stirring the waters. He soon got an unsolicited e-mail from a mysterious hacker named TrainReqSucks, a play on TrainReq, the Tennessee teen who'd released the Miley shots. The stranger wanted photos and was eager to connect Chaney to buyers. Chaney rejected his offer, but the stranger was good. He pressed all of Chaney's buttons, effusively praising his hijacking prowess, and when he asked for proof that he had the goods, Chaney couldn't resist. In fact, Chaney had something everyone in the industry wanted: pictures of Johansson—a shot in bed, another topless, and more. "I don't know why I responded," Chaney told me. "It was part bragging and part proving who I was to someone."

Chaney picked what he thought was the tamest image: the "butt shot," as he put it. The nerves kicked in again the moment he hit send, and twisted his stomach in knots when he later saw the shot online—covered in Photoshopped squiggles. "Yeah, I squiggled over that," TrainReqSucks told him, adding that he offered to remove the lines for TMZ if they met his price. To Chaney's shock and relief, the photo was discounted as a fake. No one paid any attention to it.

TrainReqSucks wasn't done. He e-mailed Chaney a fake topless shot of Selena Gomez, the perky Disney star, and said he was going to sell it as real. In it, Gomez was standing in front of a door, her hand resting on a bureau, an exotic medallion hanging between her too-ample breasts. Chaney found it "creepy" and told the guy off. This only raised TrainReqSucks's ire. "You really need to cover your ass better, 'cause they're all over you," TrainReqSucks replied. "There's heat on you."

Chaney didn't know if the guy was bluffing (were the feds really watching him?), but he couldn't quit the game. "There wasn't the functioning ability to stop myself," he says. He reached out to the infamous blogger Deep at Sea. Deep was more of a fanboy than a hacker, posting photos he found across the Web. Chaney knew the guy had a thing for Renee Olstead, the redheaded star of The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and Chaney had recently stumbled on a trove of her private pictures—showering in a tight white shirt, using a baby blue vibrator. He decided to share them with Deep. "You don't want to release these," Chaney typed. "You don't want to put them on your blog, because it'll bring heat down on you, and it'll bring heat on me." Then he hit send and let the rush wash over him.

A Star is Porn
Not all private videos and photos are hacked. Some are sold. Others are lost and found. A couple you may never see at all. Here, we follow a few notable paths to stardom.—Cole Louison
(Click to enlarge)

•••

Chaney was sound asleep when he heard the knocking at his front door. It was around 6 a.m. on February 11, 2011, and he could barely make out the sun rising. He ambled down the hall, but before he'd reached the door, federal agents barreled through with a battering ram, stampeding into the room past his wide-screen TV and towering stacks of DVDs. They drew their guns, freckling Chaney's body with red laser pointers. Chaney immediately spun around and put his hands behind his back for the handcuffs. "I'm glad you did this," he said calmly, "because I wasn't going to be able to stop this on my own."

To Chaney's surprise, the feds told him he wasn't under arrest—not yet. They were confiscating his computer, and they strongly suggested that he help them get to others. Others? "They constantly repeated, 'We're after the big fish; you're just the little fish,' " Chaney says. "They were after a ring of celebrity hackers." They asked him, "Would you be willing to work with us to bring other hackers down?"

"Yeah, whatever you want."

And that was it. Chaney was left alone for months, haunted by the specter of the feds. He knew they had everything—his computer, his e-mails, the nudes—and he figured his arrest was only a matter of time.

The moment came that fall. Chaney had recently landed a data-entry job at a trucking company when, one day in September, he read online that fully nude photos of Johansson had been leaked—this time without the squiggles. "My stomach dropped," he recalls, "because I knew I'd be the first person they came to."

At 2:50 p.m. on September 14, a user nicknamed Mr. Green sent two nude shots of Johansson to Richie at The Dirty along with a message. "I love [the] fact that she probably sent some of these out to some Hollywood actor or producer and she never figured they would do her like that," Mr. Green wrote. "Well, you might be a movie star and be famous, but doesn't mean no one will fuck you over."

Richie took one look at the photos and figured they'd been faked. There were three in all: one from behind, another topless, and another from the crotch up. To his surprise, his Photoshop experts deemed the pictures legit. Richie saw dollar signs. This went way beyond a "five-timer," as he put it. "This, in Scarlett's case, was times ten; it meant a million people coming to the site," he said.

Chaney was stunned. He claims to have sent out only one shot. So how did the others get online? The only people who had seen them, he says, besides himself were the FBI, Scarlett, and her husband. Had someone hacked Chaney or Reynolds, or had someone else hacked her? Chaney's mind was spinning. "Every night after that was very little sleep, hot and cold flashes. I knew that they were coming for me," he says.

Indeed, on October 12, Chaney was in his bedroom alone when he heard the pounding. He raced down the hall, trying to get to the door before they busted in. As Chaney was surrounded, he felt the room begin to spin and darken, like some twister sucking him up through the roof, far beyond Jacksonville to some strange Oz. He fell to one knee, then passed out cold. And when he woke up, he was famous, too.

•••

It felt like some crazy version of The Twilight Zone—the nobody obsessed with Hollywood becomes a Hollywood obsession. As Chaney peered out his venetian blinds, he saw the paparazzi camped outside his house in vans and lawn chairs. Every time he walked to his pickup truck, they swarmed. "Do you have anything to say to Scarlett?" they shouted.

"I was in zombie mode," Chaney recalls. "Head down, go to the car; head down, get out, go to the house. Almost tried to pretend like they weren't there." At an arraignment in L.A. on November 1, 2011, the paparazzi were out in force. Chaney dressed up for the occasion in Dwight Schrute chic—a spinach-colored shirt with a green patterned tie, khakis, and thick black Munster sneaks. Flushed and pale, he was clearly disoriented. "First flight and first espresso," he told me with a sigh of regret. "I guess people will know my name now, but I would rather it not be that way.... I don't plan on being famous for anything else again."

Chaney eventually pleaded guilty to nine counts, including unauthorized access to a computer and wiretapping, and faces sixty years in prison and $2.25 million in fines. In all, he had access to more than fifty celebrities. Wes Hsu, chief of the Cyber and Intellectual Property Crimes Section of the U.S. Attorney's Office, was amazed at the breadth and depth of Chaney's infiltration. "I've been doing this for more than a decade, and it's the first time I've seen this," he said.

With Chaney himself the stuff of gossip sites, the business of Hollywood hacking has been reeling. "It's changed a lot," Richie said. "When you get the FBI involved it starts getting real." The industry went quiet for months after Chaney's arrest but erupted again this spring with alleged photo leaks of Olivia Munn and Christina Hendricks. To his peers, Chaney has become a cautionary tale. "I personally think what he did was pretty idiotic," Josh "TrainReq" Holly told me. "Hacking celebrities is for the kids, and—35? I mean, I personally think he was too old for that."

Back in Jacksonville, meanwhile, Chaney's family is struggling to make sense of what drove him to his end. Over lunch at a local sandwich shop (where the waitress does a double take at Chaney), they offer their theories. "He was bored," says his half brother, Jonathan. "I don't think he was trying to be a creep or a perv," his half sister, Abigail, adds. "He was just curious."

Chaney's mom, Cathy, can't talk about her son without welling up. "My heart's hurting for Chris, because he's not the monster that they make him out to be," she says. "One reporter on television called him 'creepy,' " she continues. "It's not right." Hearing this, Chaney looked up from his grilled cheese. The paparazzi just caught him on a bad day, he figures. "I hadn't shaved in a while," he tells his mom. "I kind of looked like a creep."
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/news...lett-johansson





The Hollywood Reporter, After 65 Years, Addresses Role in Blacklist
Gary Baum, Daniel Miller

This story first appeared in the November 30 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.

Billy Wilkerson was nervous. It was July 1946, and The Hollywood Reporter owner, editor and publisher was preparing to embark on a landmark campaign that would expose communists working in Hollywood. He would name the alleged Reds in his "Tradeviews" column and expose this lurking menace.

Wilkerson already had begun his crusade a year or so earlier, penning fiery editorials that railed against communism and targeted the Screen Writers Guild, the WGA precursor that he believed was the seat of what he termed the "Red Beachhead." But this would be different. Wilkerson -- who was mustachioed, 5-foot-7 and had a penchant for pinstripe suits -- was going to brand people like Spartacus screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and Casablanca co-writer Howard Koch as leftists and communist sympathizers.

But the stakes were high. The possibility of a boycott of Wilkerson's trade newspaper, which he founded in 1930 and kept afloat through the Great Depression, loomed large. And there were moral considerations: He was, after all, going to damage hundreds of lives -- perhaps many more.

So Wilkerson turned to his religion. He went to confession.

The Blessed Sacrament Church in Hollywood was located just two blocks down Sunset Boulevard from The Reporter's office. It was a Saturday, and Wilkerson, then 56, made his way over to the soaring Roman Catholic edifice, which was the site of Bing Crosby's first marriage. Built in the Italian Renaissance style, the church could accommodate more than 1,000 people. But on this afternoon, as Wilkerson slipped into the confessional, he only wanted to speak with one person: Father Cornelius J. McCoy.

"Father, I'm launching a campaign, and it's gonna cause a lot of hurt. But they are, you know, antipathetic to my faith. They are my natural enemies. And I just need to know what to do," Wilkerson said. "You know, father, I'm having misgivings about doing this campaign."

Wilkerson waited for an answer. All across Tinseltown, livelihoods -- and lives -- hung in the balance.

"Get those bastards, Billy," McCoy replied.

On July 29, Wilkerson published a "Tradeviews" column that included the names of Trumbo, Koch and nine other Hollywood players the THR editor branded as communist sympathizers. "This is not an issue that concerns merely a few hundred writers," he wrote. "It concerns millions of readers who must depend upon the free trade of ideas. … It concerns still more millions of children -- who can't read yet -- but who were born with the right to hope for a free world." The column was a pivotal one, sealing the fate of Wilkerson and the people he'd gone after. Ultimately, eight of the 11 men would be blacklisted. And Hollywood would never be the same.

♦♦♦♦♦

Nov. 25 marks the 65th anniversary of the inception of the infamous Hollywood Blacklist, when studio chiefs and the head of the Motion Picture Association of America gathered at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York and decreed an employment ban on the 10 members of the film industry who'd chosen not to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which had launched an investigation into the supposed communist infiltration of the business. These days, when the phrase "black list" isn't mistaken (especially among younger members of the industry) for Franklin Leonard's highly anticipated annual survey of best unproduced screenplays, it's reduced to catchall history-class terms like "the Red Scare" and "McCarthyism." But it's alive in vivid detail among the dwindling number of surviving victims of the period.

THR's own role in fomenting the Blacklist has long been overlooked: obscured by scholars and, out of shame, for decades never properly addressed in this publication's pages. Wilkerson's key advocacy is at most a footnote in the definitive book-length histories of the period, yet his unsparing campaign, launched early on and from the heart of the movie colony -- the front page of one of its two daily trade papers -- was crucial to what followed. There eventually might have been a Hollywood Blacklist without Wilkerson, but in all likelihood, it wouldn't have looked quite the same, or materialized quite when it did, without his indomitable support.

For this story, most of the living blacklisted Hollywood players involved in the industry's tragic entanglement with this strain of fanaticism were interviewed and photographed. A few could not be reached for comment or declined to participate, perhaps because recollecting the period is too painful. For those who shared their stories, there was relief that THR is now recognizing its role in something so shameful. Says blacklisted actress Marsha Hunt, "It means doing what I knew to be right is no longer lonely."

♦♦♦♦♦

The Blacklist era is perhaps Hollywood's darkest chapter. Screenwriters, actors, directors, composers and others were, based on their alleged political beliefs, systematically rooted out and denied work. The lists -- there were several, including an informal tally known as the Graylist -- included both real and imagined communists. Careers were ended. Families fled the country. Lives were irrevocably changed.

The first formalized Blacklist hit Hollywood on Nov. 25, 1947, two days before Thanksgiving, 65 years ago. The next day, THR ran a lengthy story emblazoned with the headline "Studios Will Fire 'Hostile 10' " on the front page. Wilkerson's column didn't appear that day. But his work was done: The release of the first list, which included the names of the famed Hollywood Ten, had been presaged by countless "Tradeviews" columns that attacked alleged communists.

"The town turned against us. Just about-face," says Hunt, a rising actress who appeared in 52 films from 1935 to 1949 but found little work after being blacklisted in 1950. "I was appalled, hurt, shocked that journalism could be so far out in prejudice."

At the time, much of the country was concerned with the threat of communism. In the years following the end of World War II in 1945, the United States was confronted with an increasingly aggressive Soviet Union, which already had established proxy governments around the world. And there were many in Hollywood who were wary of communism's collectivist ideal, contradictory to the industry's fundamentally capitalist, hierarchical studio system. Executives, producers and some talent opposed the ideology on moral grounds or considered it a threat to their way of life. "All of a sudden there were sides -- and there never had been until instantly after World War II," Hunt says. "We won the war, and our ally, without whom the war would not have been won, was, overnight, the enemy."

The release of the first Blacklist presaged the widely known McCarthy Era. If not for the first and subsequent blacklists, Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy might have never had the ability to begin his four-year reign of often baseless accusation, which began in earnest in 1950. The so-called Hollywood Ten had been brought before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in November 1947 as part of an investigation into whether communists and communist sympathizers had been sneaking their propaganda into films. People like Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan, then the head of the Screen Actors Guild, testified before the committee about the communist menace; others, like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, who were members of the left-leaning Committee for the First Amendment, flew to Washington to stand up for their colleagues, though ultimately to no avail.

After each of the Hollywood Ten refused to testify, they were then sentenced to a year in prison and named in the Waldorf Statement, which effectively banned them from Hollywood. (Four members of the Ten had been named in Wilkerson's pivotal July 29 column; four others would be blacklisted later.) The two-page Waldorf Statement, released Nov. 25 by MPAA president Eric Johnston on behalf of 48 movie executives, decreed that the 10 Hollywood men who had been cited for contempt by the House of Representatives would not be allowed to work in the business until each "purged himself of contempt and declares under oath that he is not a communist." None of the Ten, it should be noted, is known to have ever worked or advocated for the violent overthrow of the U.S. -- ostensibly the chief fear of anti-communist zealots.

In THR's Nov. 26, 1947, edition, Koch, who wrote the screenplay for the controversial 1943 film Mission to Moscow, took out a full-page ad to affirm that he was not a member of the Communist Party and make a plea: "We can stand firm, defend ourselves by defending each other, and stop this tide before it sweeps further." Even after years of Wilkerson's red-baiting, Koch -- and a handful of others who took out similar ads -- were still willing to hand over their money to THR. They had to: It was the conversational town square of the industry. Koch nevertheless was blacklisted in 1951.

In the weeks and months after the release of the Waldorf Statement, THR continued to cover the "commie" issue nearly every day. Soon, several other blacklists were created. Red Channels, a pamphlet published by an anti-communist, right-wing journal called Counterattack, included 151 names when it was released in June 1950. The American Legion, a conservative veterans group, distributed a list of more than 100 people to the studios in 1949, and HUAC also put out annual reports that included rosters of alleged communists.

The institutions of Hollywood, many of which were complicit in the blacklisting, have rarely recognized this painful era. One notable exception was in 1998, when AFTRA, the Directors Guild of America, SAG and the Writers Guild of America West gathered in Beverly Hills to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the HUAC hearings. Billy Crystal and Kevin Spacey gave speeches, those who had been blacklisted spoke emotionally, and the organizations apologized for not protecting their members.

The audience was left in tears.

♦♦♦♦♦

Wilkerson was a pioneering driver of the Blacklist. But it is difficult to make sense of his motives. The portrait of Wilkerson that emerges is a complex one. He is considered by some to have merely been a henchman of the studio heads, eager to wage a war for them in exchange for advertising commitments and entrance to their inner circle. Larry Ceplair, author of The Inquisition in Hollywood, says Wilkerson was little more than a "cheerleader" parroting anti-communist rhetoric spewed by politicians and business titans. But others, including Wilkerson's son Willie and writers and actors who were blacklisted, view Wilkerson as a shadowy, organized-crime-connected figure who ran roughshod over Hollywood and used his column as a bully pulpit to ruin people's lives for his personal gain.

Wilkerson, it should be noted, wasn't alone. Syndicated columnists such as Walter Winchell and Hedda Hopper also railed against communism. But as THR's owner, editor and publisher, Wilkerson had unique influence at his publication. And whereas Winchell, Hopper and others spoke to a national audience about Hollywood's sins, Wilkerson wrote specifically to an industry audience, thereby exercising much more direct influence and power. His daily columns, which used the "W.R. Wilkerson" byline, were brash and bold. He threw around the word "commies" regularly, named names and questioned whether people could explain their loyalty to or membership in the Communist Party.

It was pretty simple, says Clancy Sigal, a talent agent-cum-writer whom Wilkerson once tried to have fired: No one wanted to appear in one of Wilkerson's columns. "People for about 10 years were scared to death of Billy and scared to death of THR," he says.

Wilkerson was born in Nashville in 1890 to a cardsharp father who went by the name "Big Dick" and, as family lore has it, won the bottling rights for Coca-Cola in 13 Southern states in one poker game, only to lose them in another. A practicing Roman Catholic who wound up marrying six times, the younger Wilkerson briefly considered the priesthood before studying medicine in Philadelphia until his father passed away, leaving Wilkerson with a pile of inherited gambling debts. Needing to support himself and his mother, he began working at a small nickelodeon theater in New Jersey, in time climbing through the lower ranks of the East Coast film industry -- a sales job here, a gig producing one-reelers for a small production company there, eventually becoming a district manager in charge of distribution for Universal Pictures during the Carl Laemmle era. In 1927, he even tried, and failed, to start his own studio.

Looking for equity, in 1929 he briefly partnered in a Manhattan trade paper covering the entertainment business but soon realized that an L.A.-based publication -- out in Hollywood, where the real action was -- would fill a market void. (Variety would not follow from New York until 1933.) The Hollywood Reporter launched inauspiciously just as the Great Depression got under way. But within a few years, thanks in large part to hardball sales tactics (such as withholding news coverage unless a deal was made), it was packed with studio advertisements, and Wilkerson branched out to other ventures that directly served the industry. These included a liquor-importing business, top nightclubs Ciro's and Cafe Trocadero (where Judy Garland got her start) and a slew of Parisian-style, star-studded restaurants including Vendome, L'Aiglon and LaRue, as well as the Flamingo hotel in Las Vegas. (Wilkerson's larger-than-life playboy adventures have interested Johnny Depp and Graham King, whose production companies are developing a biopic with Lifetime.)

Wilkerson's varied enterprises were meant to make him rich and support an extravagant lifestyle. Along with his ever-multiplying alimony payments, he owned five cars, including a custom-built Cadillac, and a French Colonial mansion in Bel-Air, where he regularly entertained the likes of Joan Crawford, Clark Gable and Lana Turner -- the latter of whom he famously discovered while both were purchasing Cokes at a Hollywood soda fountain. But the businesses, THR most centrally, also were meant to make Wilkerson uniquely necessary to the industry. He positioned himself as its kingpin and gatekeeper in matters of work and play.

According to a 1960 Hollywood Close-Up magazine profile, "the biggest men in the studios as ever seek his counsel -- and quail at his censure." Indeed, there was a darkness to Wilkerson. "He was a guy with a hard eye and a quick snarl and a seething contempt for phoniness," Close-Up wrote two years later in its obituary of Wilkerson.

The surviving blacklisted actors and writers THR spoke with for this story say they never met Wilkerson, which only contributed to his sinister reputation. He might have palled around with Crawford, Gable and Turner, but Wilkerson didn't fraternize with the rank-and-file Hollywood workers whose fates he'd help seal. "I knew that Billy Wilkerson was a great right-wing asshole," says Walter Bernstein, who was blacklisted via Red Channels in 1950 and would contribute to the screenplay of the 1960 film The Magnificent Seven without receiving credit. Screenwriter Norma Barzman is equally blunt in an interview from her Beverly Hills apartment, which is replete with Spanish bullfighting posters designed by Pablo Picasso, her neighbor in the South of France when she lived there in blacklisted exile in the 1960s. "People thought Wilkerson was a big shit."

Actor Kirk Douglas, who in later years worked to break the Blacklist (though the families of some of those blacklisted have in the past questioned his contributions to the cause), might have met Wilkerson once or twice at a party but didn't know him well. "I just saw Wilkerson as one of those guys that I didn't agree with," Douglas says. "But when it started, I couldn't imagine it to be so invasive -- the damage that was done. In retrospect, the Blacklist era was the most sinful period in Hollywood history."

♦♦♦♦♦

The wellspring of Wilkerson's anti-communist fervor is up for debate. Manifold impulses and influences might have affected his thinking. Indeed, only one thing can be said for certain: His motivation, as it turns out, wasn't simply a matter of right-wing political ideology.

Some Blacklist scholars, including Nat Segaloff, co-author of the 1993 play The Waldorf Conference, think that he took his stand, in key part, on religious grounds. Communism had an atheist ideal, and the Soviet Union attempted to eliminate religion, banning all faiths. "It was the atheism of communism that bothered him," he says. "Wilkerson thought it was anti-Catholic."

Wilkerson's son, Willie, 61, who like his father uses the W.R. moniker, strongly believes his dad's red-baiting of screenwriters was really just a misguided ploy for retribution. He notes that his father blamed his own failure to set up a studio on the East Coast in 1927 on the Hollywood moguls' thwarting of his distribution efforts. "They sidelined him, and he was so angered and offended by this that he made it a lifetime vow of revenge to get even with these guys," he says. "He said, 'I will finish the movie moguls by going after their writers, by exposing them as communists.' " (This theory is complicated by the fact that by the 1940s, Wilkerson had long since become the ultimate industry insider, collegial in print with his antagonists of decades prior. More important, the stridently anti-labor moguls nurtured little affection for the politically oriented cohort of screenwriters Wilkerson targeted.)

Another intriguing hypothesis pertains to Wilkerson's complex history with organized crime figures of the era, from Meyer Lansky and Mickey Cohen to union enforcers such as Willie Bioff and George E. Browne. Wilkerson welcomed them at his restaurants and clubs, and when he ran into financing trouble while developing the Flamingo in Las Vegas, it was Bugsy Siegel who became his business partner. Although Wilkerson occasionally found himself on the wrong side of the mob -- Siegel at one point threatened to kill him in a dispute over ownership rights to the Flamingo, prompting Wilkerson to hide out at Paris' Hotel George V for months -- some argue that his long acquaintanceship with the underworld might have further aligned him against the communist cause.

"Communists had been at odds with gangsters since Poland in the late 19th century, when the gangsters were brought in as enforcers at the factories in the Jewish shtetls," says historian Dave Wagner, co-author of Blacklisted and Radical Hollywood. "These roles were pretty much recapitulated in New York and then in Hollywood. Gangsters were hired to break strikes by the guilds and put down left-wing union agitation. The studio bosses greeted Bioff and his guys as welcoming heroes."

A more concrete explanation can be found in Wilkerson's long-running feud with the Screen Writers Guild. "He didn't just start attacking the guild at the point of the Blacklist," says Emerson College professor Miranda Banks, author of the forthcoming Scripted Labor: A History of American Screen Writing and the Writers Guild. Wilkerson steered THR to side with the studios in opposing the union's creation during its negotiations with the National Labor Relations Board in the late 1930s. In one editorial he railed, "What has this great industry done to all of you that you must throw down your work, march in picket lines, go into frenzies about the injustices that is done to you, pack into meetings with speechmaking, arm-waving, searching for the power to kill the very business that has made many of you rich … ?"

Even once the guild was organized, it continued to lock horns with Wilkerson. Unlike studios and other industry firms that engaged in the exchange of news coverage in return for ad buys, the SWG found this distasteful. It established a policy of fining and even suspending any member who bought an ad -- a policy for which Wilkerson punished the guild by refusing to run screenwriting credits alongside those of the director, cast and others in the paper's movie reviews.

It was against this backdrop that Wilkerson, on July 29, 1946 -- days after his visit to the Blessed Sacrament Church for confession -- blew his top in a column titled "A Vote for Joe Stalin," in which he named names for the first time. The SWG's executive board had just endorsed the creation of a program called the American Authors' Authority, devised by screenwriter James M. Cain to hold writers' copyrights instead of the studios, which would function much like ASCAP, the performance-rights organization for musicians. Wilkerson compared it to "thought-police," saying it was not unlike a system carried out by Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels. Wilkerson declared it would result in nothing less than "a complete dictatorship of American opinion and a throttling monopoly upon the various channels for dissemination of ideas." (The AAA never got off the ground.)

Once the Blacklist era began, the guilds, which to varying degrees initially had fought anti-communist zealotry, ultimately caved, stranding their under-siege members; and for part of the 1950s, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would be an accessory to the Blacklist by passing a bylaw that made it impossible for those who invoked the Fifth Amendment in front of HUAC to be nominated for an Oscar. In 1947, the studio system was still dominant, and these orbiting institutions were much more subservient to it than they are to equivalent media companies today.

What might have rankled Wilkerson most was his sense that those he was targeting had transgressed his most devout principle: the profit motive. Explains his son: "My dad said, 'Look, I don't give a shit what people are on their own time. But what they're doing is bad for business.' " The prospect of voices in the film community advocating -- or even just being seen to sympathize with -- radical politics would have the effect, he felt, of turning off audiences across the country by tainting all of Hollywood as subversive. "Our ticket buyers are being influenced against us in a cause that's growing like a typhoon. That influence might well curtail everything that has made our industry one of the greats in the world," Wilkerson wrote on Nov. 5, 1947, justifying his call for an industry-enforced Blacklist: "Any man or woman who, under the guise of freedom of speech, or the cloak of the Bill of Rights, or under the pseudo protection of being a liberal, says things, causes things to be said, or who actually is involved with many of the conspiracies that have now infested this great land of ours, has no place among us, be he commie or what. He or she should be rushed out of our business."

In those days, "commie" was a blanket term often directed at those who held political beliefs across the entire end of the political spectrum to the left of President Harry Truman. Some, like screenwriter John Howard Lawson of the Hollywood Ten, actually were members of the Communist Party; others were affiliated with connected groups like the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of Arts, Sciences and Professions. Perhaps for this reason, on the advice of his attorney Greg Bautzer, Wilkerson developed an interrogatory approach to targeting individuals in print so as to avoid any potential libel lawsuits. Thus, guild treasurer Harold Buchman wouldn't outright be called a communist in a Wilkerson column on Aug. 21, 1946. Instead, the editor would simply inquire, in prosecutorial language and in incriminating detail: "Are you a Communist? Are you a member of the Party's Northwest Section (composed of motion picture people), and do you hold Communist Party Card No. 46802? Also, were you not a member of the Young Communists League?"

Wilkerson is known to have had some high-level associations that likely paid dividends when it came time to name names. According to his son, Wilkerson's original conduit for intelligence on Hollywood's communists was his close friend Howard Hughes, who had extensive contacts in the government through his aerospace work. Later, Hughes connected Wilkerson directly with his own ultimate source: FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who himself, in turn, eventually became friendly with the publisher, apparently either unaware of or undisturbed by Wilkerson's underworld affiliations.

"He was a close pal of Hoover -- whenever he came to California, they'd have lunch," says Sigal, a script reader who had been dismissed from Columbia Pictures in the late 1940s for refusing to name names. In the early 1950s, Sigal worked at prominent Hollywood producer-agent Sam Jaffe's eponymous firm, but Sigal says that Wilkerson called and demanded that the young agent be fired. "He would threaten to insert blind items in The Reporter," he says. "The movie industry tends to be run on fear, and all it took was a rumor or a whisper for people to collapse."

A few years after the Blacklist commenced and McCarthy began ramping up his own larger crusade, Wilkerson's son claims the senator dialed his father, asking him how he'd pieced together his data. "Of course, he didn't have anything to go by [in his campaign]," says Willie Wilkerson of McCarthy. "At least my father did his research." (THR requested the FBI's files on Wilkerson under the Freedom of Information Act. The agency said any documents it might have amassed were likely destroyed.)

♦♦♦♦♦

The impact of the Blacklist era was significant. The purge of hundreds drained Hollywood of talent, but more significantly, robbed people of their livelihoods. In total, at least 300 people were formally named to various public lists including Red Channels and HUAC's own official tallies. And many more, from spouses to siblings and secretaries, similarly found themselves crippled by their graylisting -- whether through whisper campaigns or unofficial outings in publications like THR. Ultimately, thousands would be affected. Many who could no longer find jobs got out of the business -- not everyone was able to work under pseudonyms (an impossibility for actors) or with fronts (the non-blacklisted, whose clean names were used in place of the damned). Still others, like Barzman, were forced to flee to Europe in part to search for employment in the film business. Hunt, a rising star in the late 1940s, lost her contract at MGM and could barely find a gig in the '50s. "Word got to the studio that I might be one," she says. "I was no longer workable." Only a handful of those blacklisted are still alive, and those who remain are in their 80s or 90s. The last of the Hollywood Ten, screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr., died in 2000.

The Reporter paid a price, too, though the damage paled in comparison to the suffering of those who were blacklisted. Still, in journalism circles, the publication was panned. It lost readers, though it's difficult to determine how many. Hy Hollinger, who was a Variety reporter in the 1950s, told THR that the publication's Blacklist coverage was considered by the industry to be "an embarrassment" and shameful by many of the publication's staff at the time. When THR editors were asked about the Blacklist and communists, "they just declined to talk about it," recalls Hollinger, 94, who later wrote for THR in the 1990s and 2000s. "It was an ugly period."

It's hard to say whether THR suffered financially -- if at all -- as a result of its virulently anti-communist bent. It's unknown, for example, how circulation was impacted -- the Audit Bureau of Circulations' records on THR start in 1978. Anecdotal information from the era shows that circulation increased through the Blacklist era, but there's no way to know if this was due to the coverage of the communist issue. According to the October-November 1947 issue of Pageant magazine, THR counted 6,300 subscribers. A July 1967 story in The Day newspaper said THR's circulation was more than 10,000.

In the years after the Blacklist went into effect, Wilkerson held firm in his views. But he mostly ceded the editorial soapbox to his star writer at THR, Mike Connolly, who wrote the daily "Rambling Reporter" gossip column and was even more aggressively anti-communist than his boss. The sharp-tongued, vehemently right-wing Connolly -- a sort of midcentury Perez Hilton by way of Roy Cohn -- led the paper's red-baiting assault into the McCarthy-era 1950s, attacking both identified communists and unfriendly HUAC witnesses with epithets like "vermin" and "scummie." Even after targets had been driven out of the industry, Wilkerson would support Connolly as he tauntingly published the victims' new work addresses in other fields, apparently to incite picketing: "Charles Page, one of the three Screen Writers Guild secretaries who invoked the Fifth, is now teaching at U of C in Riverside -- a member of the Department of Humanities, Room 2234, Administration Building." Altogether, it was, as Connolly biographer Val Holley put it in his 2003 tome Mike Connolly and the Manly Art of Hollywood Gossip, a "long, devastating campaign of harassment and injury," allowed to "proceed without restraint" due to the encouragement of Wilkerson.

After Wilkerson's 1962 death, his wife, Tichi Wilkerson, took over as THR's publisher and editor, but if she disagreed with her husband's crusade, she never took steps to acknowledge any wrongdoing. And when she sold the publication in 1988, the new ownership wasn't moved to address issues that had long been ignored, either. But it wasn't for a lack of trying on the part of THR labor reporter David Robb, who in the 1990s worked to help blacklisted screenwriters, including Lawrence of Arabia's Michael Wilson, get their names put on movies they'd written under pseudonyms or using fronts while exiled. Around the time of the 50th anniversary of the Waldorf Statement, Robb penned a lengthy story on the publication's dark history. Robb delivered the piece to then-publisher and editor-in-chief Robert J. Dowling, but he spiked it, telling the reporter that while it was a good story, THR couldn't run it. "I understood his point," Robb says. "He said, 'We're going to have to pass.' He just didn't know how bad The Hollywood Reporter had been in those days, and he didn't want to be the one to slam the old people in the paper." (Dowling declined comment.)

Around town, people remembered the Blacklist long after it was broken around 1960. Willie Wilkerson says that he personally felt the scorn of the entertainment industry many years after the era. In the 1970s and 1980s, Wilkerson pursued a career as a songwriter and musician but found that some people stymied his efforts out of anger for his father's crusade. "Behind closed doors, there was more than one time that I got a real haranguing for something my dad had done," he says. "It was the Blacklist in reverse. It was karma coming home."

And when it was announced that director Elia Kazan, who testified as a friendly witness before HUAC in 1952, would receive an Academy Award for lifetime achievement in 1999, broad swaths of Hollywood were outraged. Even at the ceremony, many in attendance refused to recognize the On the Waterfront director.

♦♦♦♦♦

Some of those who were complicit in the blacklisting of friends and colleagues would try to make amends. Take the case of Oscar-winning In the Heat of the Night producer Walter Mirisch, who, as the production head at Allied Artists, denied employment for some. "I needed my job, and I had little children to support, and so I did what I was told to do. I'm not proud of it," he says. But later, Mirisch, who met Trumbo when he wrote the screenplay for the Mirisch-produced Hawaii, worked to get the screenwriter an Oscar for his 1956 film, The Brave One. (After being blacklisted as part of the Hollywood Ten, Trumbo had written the script under the name Robert Rich.)

And director Edward Dmytryk, another Hollywood Ten member who, after being jailed for refusing to cooperate with HUAC, later testified before the committee and named fellow members of the Communist Party, was excused by some of his former Blacklist cohorts, including actor-director Leo Penn.

Yes, there is plenty of blame to go around. And many people from the era heap a great deal of it at the feet of the long-dead studio heads. Says screenwriter Bernstein: "That was where the power came from. If the studios stood up to [anti-communist zealots], they wouldn't have had that power." Douglas concurs. "The people who should apologize are all the heads of the studios," he says. "Because they had the power to fight. But they gave in."

Wilkerson was never contrite. He never apologized for his actions, even appearing to minimize them. Back in the autumn of 1947, Wilkerson either didn't believe he was having much of an impact or was devilishly coy about admitting so. "What I think and write doesn't have much influence," he was quoted in the 1947 Pageant article. "I can't reform Hollywood. No one can -- thank God."

In 1962, when Wilkerson died from emphysema -- he smoked three packs a day -- the Red Scare was on the wane. Yet THR was still boasting of his crusade. The paper's obituary on its founder touted what it considered his life's work: "Perhaps the biggest and most important campaign waged by Wilkerson was against communist infiltration in Hollywood. He named names, pseudonyms and card numbers and was widely credited with being chiefly responsible for preventing communists from becoming entrenched in Hollywood production -- something that foreign film unions have been unable to do."

But obscured in the laudatory obituary and remembrance was that Wilkerson's systematic campaign led to the ruination of the lives of many. He used his publication as a blunt-force weapon. His insinuations deprived people of their livelihoods.

In a separate front-page appreciation on the same day, then-editor Don Carle Gillette echoed the sentiment of the obituary. "He made big sacrifices, paid a high price, for some of his campaigns," he wrote. Gillette then added approvingly, and with no apparent sense of the irony, "but when carrying out a conviction, he never considered the cost."

Scott Feinberg contributed to this report.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/new...role-65-391931





Senate Bill Rewrite Lets Feds Read Your E-Mail Without Warrants

Proposed law scheduled for a vote next week originally increased Americans' e-mail privacy. Then law enforcement complained. Now it increases government access to e-mail and other digital files.
Declan McCullagh

A Senate proposal touted as protecting Americans' e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law.

CNET has learned that Patrick Leahy, the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, has dramatically reshaped his legislation in response to law enforcement concerns. A vote on his bill, which now authorizes warrantless access to Americans' e-mail, is scheduled for next week.
Revised bill highlights

• Grants warrantless access to Americans' electronic correspondence to over 22 federal agencies. Only a subpoena is required, not a search warrant signed by a judge based on probable cause.

• Permits state and local law enforcement to warrantlessly access Americans' correspondence stored on systems not offered "to the public," including university networks.

• Authorizes any law enforcement agency to access accounts without a warrant -- or subsequent court review -- if they claim "emergency" situations exist.

• Says providers "shall notify" law enforcement in advance of any plans to tell their customers that they've been the target of a warrant, order, or subpoena.

• Delays notification of customers whose accounts have been accessed from 3 days to "10 business days." This notification can be postponed by up to 360 days.

Leahy's rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies -- including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission -- to access Americans' e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant. It also would give the FBI and Homeland Security more authority, in some circumstances, to gain full access to Internet accounts without notifying either the owner or a judge. (CNET obtained the revised draft from a source involved in the negotiations with Leahy.)

It's an abrupt departure from Leahy's earlier approach, which required police to obtain a search warrant backed by probable cause before they could read the contents of e-mail or other communications. The Vermont Democrat boasted last year that his bill "provides enhanced privacy protections for American consumers by... requiring that the government obtain a search warrant."

Leahy had planned a vote on an earlier version of his bill, designed to update a pair of 1980s-vintage surveillance laws, in late September. But after law enforcement groups including the National District Attorneys' Association and the National Sheriffs' Association organizations objected to the legislation and asked him to "reconsider acting" on it, Leahy pushed back the vote and reworked the bill as a package of amendments to be offered next Thursday. The package is a substitute for H.R. 2471, which the House of Representatives already has approved.

One person participating in Capitol Hill meetings on this topic told CNET that Justice Department officials have expressed their displeasure about Leahy's original bill. The department is on record as opposing any such requirement: James Baker, the associate deputy attorney general, has publicly warned that requiring a warrant to obtain stored e-mail could have an "adverse impact" on criminal investigations.

Christopher Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said requiring warrantless access to Americans' data "undercuts" the purpose of Leahy's original proposal. "We believe a warrant is the appropriate standard for any contents," he said.

An aide to the Senate Judiciary committee told CNET that because discussions with interested parties are ongoing, it would be premature to comment on the legislation.

Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said that in light of the revelations about how former CIA director David Petraeus' e-mail was perused by the FBI, "even the Department of Justice should concede that there's a need for more judicial oversight," not less.

Markham Erickson, a lawyer in Washington, D.C. who has followed the topic closely and said he was speaking for himself and not his corporate clients, expressed concerns about the alphabet soup of federal agencies that would be granted more power:

❝ There is no good legal reason why federal regulatory agencies such as the NLRB, OSHA, SEC or FTC need to access customer information service providers with a mere subpoena. If those agencies feel they do not have the tools to do their jobs adequately, they should work with the appropriate authorizing committees to explore solutions. The Senate Judiciary committee is really not in a position to adequately make those determinations. ❞

The list of agencies that would receive civil subpoena authority for the contents of electronic communications also includes the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Maritime Commission, the Postal Regulatory Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Mine Enforcement Safety and Health Review Commission.

Leahy's modified bill retains some pro-privacy components, such as requiring police to secure a warrant in many cases. But the dramatic shift, especially the regulatory agency loophole and exemption for emergency account access, likely means it will be near-impossible for tech companies to support in its new form.

A bitter setback

This is a bitter setback for Internet companies and a liberal-conservative-libertarian coalition, which had hoped to convince Congress to update the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act to protect documents stored in the cloud. Leahy glued those changes onto an unrelated privacy-related bill supported by Netflix.

At the moment, Internet users enjoy more privacy rights if they store data on their hard drives or under their mattresses, a legal hiccup that the companies fear could slow the shift to cloud-based services unless the law is changed to be more privacy-protective.

Members of the so-called Digital Due Process coalition include Apple, Amazon.com, Americans for Tax Reform, AT&T, the Center for Democracy and Technology, eBay, Google, Facebook, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, TechFreedom, and Twitter. (CNET was the first to report on the coalition's creation.)

Leahy, a former prosecutor, has a mixed record on privacy. He criticized the FBI's efforts to require Internet providers to build in backdoors for law enforcement access, and introduced a bill in the 1990s protecting Americans' right to use whatever encryption products they wanted.
An excerpt from Leahy's revised legislation authorizing over 22 federal agencies to obtain Americans' e-mail without a search warrant signed by a judge.

But he also authored the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which is now looming over Web companies, as well as the reviled Protect IP Act. An article in The New Republic concluded Leahy's work on the Patriot Act "appears to have made the bill less protective of civil liberties." Leahy had introduced significant portions of the Patriot Act under the name Enhancement of Privacy and Public Safety in Cyberspace Act a year earlier.

One obvious option for the Digital Due Process coalition is the simplest: if Leahy's committee proves to be an insurmountable roadblock in the Senate, try the courts instead.

Judges already have been wrestling with how to apply the Fourth Amendment to an always-on, always-connected society. Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that police needed a search warrant for GPS tracking of vehicles. Some courts have ruled that warrantless tracking of Americans' cell phones, another coalition concern, is unconstitutional.

The FBI and other law enforcement agencies already must obtain warrants for e-mail in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee, thanks to a ruling by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2010.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57...hout-warrants/





Leahy Scuttles His Warrantless E-Mail Surveillance Bill

After public criticism of proposal that lets government agencies warrantlessly access Americans' e-mail, Sen. Patrick Leahy says he will "not support" such an idea at next week's vote.
Declan McCullagh

Sen. Patrick Leahy has abandoned his controversial proposal that would grant government agencies more surveillance power -- including warrantless access to Americans' e-mail accounts -- than they possess under current law.

The Vermont Democrat said today on Twitter that he would "not support such an exception" for warrantless access. The remarks came a few hours after a CNET article was published this morning that disclosed the existence of the measure.

A vote on the proposal in the Senate Judiciary committee, which Leahy chairs, is scheduled for next Thursday. The amendments were due to be glued onto a substitute to H.R. 2471, which the House of Representatives already has approved.

Leahy's about-face comes in response to a deluge of criticism today, including the American Civil Liberties Union saying that warrants should be required, and the conservative group FreedomWorks launching a petition to Congress -- with more than 2,300 messages sent so far -- titled: "Tell Congress: Stay Out of My Email!"

A spokesman for the senator did not respond to questions today from CNET asking for clarification of what Leahy would support next week. (We'll update this article if we receive a response.)

A Democratic aide to the Judiciary committee did, however, tell CNET this afternoon that Leahy does not support broad exceptions for warrantless searches of e-mail content.

A note from Leahy's Twitter account added: "Technology has created vacuum in privacy protection. Sen. Leahy believes that needs to be fixed, and #ECPA needs privacy updates." That's a reference to the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which currently does not require that police always obtain a warrant for the contents of e-mail and other communications.

This revised position will come as a relief to privacy advocates and business lobbyists, who have been scrambling since last week to figure out how to respond to Leahy's revamped legislation. Some portions would have imposed new restrictions on law enforcement, while others would lessen existing ones, making the overall bill unpalatable to many groups.

The Center for Democracy and Technology, which is coordinating an industry coalition pressing for surveillance reforms, said today that: "We wouldn't support the rewrite described in CNET." (Members of the coalition include Apple, Amazon.com, Americans for Tax Reform, AT&T, the Center for Democracy and Technology, eBay, Google, Facebook, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, TechFreedom, and Twitter.)

Leahy's proposal would have allowed over 22 agencies -- including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission -- to access Americans' e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant. It also would have given the FBI and Homeland Security more authority, in some circumstances, to gain full access to Internet accounts without notifying either the owner or a judge.

That was an abrupt departure from Leahy's earlier approach, which required police to obtain a search warrant backed by probable cause before they could read the contents of e-mail or other communications. He boasted last year that his bill "provides enhanced privacy protections for American consumers by... requiring that the government obtain a search warrant."

One person participating in Capitol Hill meetings on this topic told CNET that Justice Department officials have expressed their displeasure about Leahy's original bill. The department is on record as opposing any such requirement: James Baker, the associate deputy attorney general, has publicly warned that requiring a warrant to obtain stored e-mail could have an "adverse impact" on criminal investigations.

Leahy, a former prosecutor, has a mixed record on privacy. He criticized the FBI's efforts to require Internet providers to build in backdoors for law enforcement access, and introduced a bill in the 1990s protecting Americans' right to use whatever encryption products they wanted.

But he also authored the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which is still looming over Web companies, and the reviled Protect IP Act. An article in The New Republic concluded Leahy's work on the Patriot Act "appears to have made the bill less protective of civil liberties." Leahy had introduced significant portions of the Patriot Act under the name Enhancement of Privacy and Public Safety in Cyberspace Act a year earlier.

Here's more reaction to Leahy's proposed changes:

• Executives at DataFoundry, a provider of data center services in Austin, Tex., said the proposed changes were an unacceptable breach of Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

Ronald Yokubaitis, co-CEO of Data Foundry, said giving the government near-unchecked authority to search consumer information stored in the cloud would destroy confidence in cloud-based services and encourage more businesses to move overseas, where protections are greater.

"If this language comes in, we are opposed to the bill," Yokubaitis said. "It will kill cloud computing."

• Several members of the coalition contacted by CNET today reiterated support for the September version of Leahy's amendment, which included a warrant provision. An Intel spokeswoman forwarded a letter in support of the earlier version of the legislation, adding: "Our position of support for the warrant requirement is unchanged."

• Kim Hart, a spokeswoman for Neustar, also endorsed the September version of the measure.

"As a member of the Digital Due Process coalition, we supported Senator Leahy's original legislation," she said in an e-mail. "We have not yet had the opportunity fully to consider revisions to the legislation, though our experience has been that Senator Leahy addresses these difficult issues in a thoughtful and balanced way."

CNET's Casey Newton contributed to this story.

Updated at 5:09 p.m. PT with more reaction to the proposed amendments.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57...eillance-bill/





Steinitz: Israel Beat Back 43,999,999 and a Half Cyber Attacks

Despite declarations by hacker group Anonymous that it would disable the government’s IT infrastructure, websites have been largely immune
David Shamah

Ever since the beginning of Operation Pillar of Defense, hackers have been working overtime to strike a blow against the Israeli government’s computer systems, Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said Sunday. No fewer than 44 million attacks have been recorded since the operation began five days ago — with nearly all of them failing, thanks to the recent strengthening of computer defense systems in Israel.

Speaking at a special press conference at the Government Computing Center in Jerusalem about the cyber war against Israel that has accompanied Hamas’s rocket attacks, Steinitz said that hackers “are trying to disable the symbols of Israeli sovereignty, to enter web sites and install anti-Israel content, thus compromising information and data and damaging the government’s ability to serve the public.” Most of the attacks, he said, were against government sites, like the Prime Minister’s Office site, and security-related sites, such as that of the Home Front Command, the body charged with informing Israelis on how to protect themselves in the event of an attack.

Out of those 44 million-plus attacks on government and defense related sites, said Steinitz, only one succeeded – partially. One site, which he did not name, was “wobbly for a few minutes,” but quickly recovered. Even though the government has been successful in warding off hack attacks, Steinitz said that government sites were fully backed up and mirrored, meaning that they could be replaced by a duplicate site instantly if the original site were compromised.

So just who is behind the attacks? Steinitz said that the government’s computing unit had traced many of the attacks to IP addresses in the US and Europe, and not to Arab countries. While Steinitz could not say whether these hackers were affiliated with Anonymous, the international hacker organization that has pledged to destroy Israel’s computing system in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, the methods being used by the hackers were consistent with the kinds of attacks Anonymous is known for.

Carmela Avner, the government’s chief information officer said that “we haven’t seen many attempts to enter sites and steal data. Most of the attacks have been of the type where hackers try to overload servers with excessive data,” such as in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks or “e-mail bomb” attacks — both of which try to overload servers to the extent that they are unable to function. According to Avner, the web site of President Shimon Peres has been a major target of hackers using these methods, with over 20 million attempted DDoS attacks on the site, all of which have failed.

Other types of common attacks on Israeli sites include hackers pejoratively known as “script kiddies” running prepared scripts looking for security holes. While such attacks have succeeded against sites stored on servers that haven’t been updated with the latest security software, the government sites are secure from such attacks, said Avner. “We have not closed any sites, but we have prevented access from IP addresses that we determined were problematic,” she said.

The news probably comes as a huge disappointment to Anonymous, whose #OpIsrael hashtag was riding high on Twitter Friday and Saturday, but dropped precipitously on Sunday, possibly because the attacks on Israeli government sites were not working. However, the hackers were able to change the web pages of numerous private sites that presumably were not well protected.

The government computing unit was informed in advance that the Gaza operation was set to begin, and it shored up defenses of sites under its responsibility accordingly. “We’ve been facing some very tough challenges, but we have succeeded,” said Avner. “We are used to working in emergency conditions, and we are prepared to continue meeting those challenges.”
http://www.timesofisrael.com/steinit...cyber-attacks/





A Family’s Fight for Freedom: Lawyers Move to Block RFID Expulsion

Preliminary Injunction Sought in School RFID Tracking Badge Case
Melissa Melton

A Texas school district has come under legal fire after a student was expelled for failure to comply with the “School Locator Project,” an RFID chip tracking program currently being piloted in a San Antonio middle and high school.

John Jay High School sophomore Andrea Hernandez was involuntarily withdrawn after protesting her school’s tracking badge policy for months. When appeals to respect her rights were repeatedly ignored, the family decided to fight back, seeking legal council.

In a just-released statement, civil liberties organization The Rutherford Institute, which represents the Hernandez family, has announced it will immediately seek a preliminary injunction against the district to prevent Andrea from being moved to another school.

Under the “Smart ID” program, all 4,200 students are forced to wear an ID badge with an RFID tracking chip in it at all times to attend school. Due to her persistent refusal, the school’s administration finally offered Andrea a deal; she would comply with the project by wearing a program badge with the chip removed.

Not wanting to endorse the program in any way, Andrea refused. On November 13, the school sent Andrea’s father a letter expelling her because “all students are expected to comply with the Smart ID policy.”

This case is quickly setting a precedent that students can be kicked out of school for not complying with programs they feel violate their rights.

“I feel it is an invasion of my religious beliefs, I feel that it’s the implementation of the Mark of the Beast, I feel that it’s an invasion of my privacy and an invasion of all my rights as a citizen,” Andrea said at a school RFID protest shown in an Infowars report below.

“What we’re teaching kids is that they live in a total surveillance state and if they do not comply, they will be punished,” John Whitehead, constitutional attorney and Rutherford founder said in a telephone interview with Infowars. “There has to be a point at which schools have to show valid reasons why they’re doing this.”

On the district’s Student Locator Project website, it notes that “Northside ISD is harnessing the power of radio frequency identification technology (RFID) to make schools safer, know where our students are while at school, increase revenues, and provide a general purpose ‘smart’ ID card.” Although the district will pay $500,000 up front for the program, is expects to garner $1.7 million from the state government in increased attendance funds.

The district’s website also confirms the “smart” student ID cards are just the newest edition to the school’s surveillance grid. A letter to parents regarding the Smart ID project’s implementation mentions that digital cameras have been installed in all high and middle schools and all school buses. Whitehead noted that the schools have already been fitted with 290 surveillance cameras.

In addition, according to the district, the Smart ID will “provide access to the library and cafeteria” and “allow for the purchase of tickets to the schools’ extracurricular activities,” meaning students who refuse to comply with the program will not be allowed to access those facilities and activities. The school also makes the ambiguous statement, “Other uses [for the Smart IDs] will be rolled out during the pilot program.”

As Infowars previously pointed out, in addition to a vast privacy encroachment, the Hernandez’s feel the program is a direct violation of their Christian religious beliefs, as it bears a striking resemblance to Revelations 13: 16-18 warning of the Mark of the Beast:

“16. He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, 17. and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or[a] the name of the beast, or the number of his name. 18. Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man: His number is 666.” (New King James Version)

The Student Locator Card program is set to expand to all 112 schools in the San Antonio Northside Independent School District.

A student’s rights should not end simply because they set foot on school property. This big brother takeover in our schools is an alarming trend, as it would appear schools are attempting to condition the youngest members of our society to accept government intrusion into – and control over – their lives.

“Regimes are formulated in the schools. Every dictator – every regime-changer – has always implemented a dictatorship in the schools first,” Whitehead said. “The ramifications are really ominous: if you grow up in that environment all your life, it’s normal to you. We’re moving into a total compliance society.”
http://www.infowars.com/preliminary-...ng-badge-case/





Judge: Northside ISD CANNOT Expel Student for Rejecting RFID Tracking Chip

Says district's tracking program 'violates fundamental Constitutional Rights'
Jim Forsyth

A judge in Texas has barred a school district from expelling a student because she refused to wear a Radio Frequency Identification chip as part of an effort by the school to track students and make sure they attend class, 1200 WOAI news has learned

"This is a national issue," John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute, a free market advocacy from which filed the lawsuit, told 1200 WOAI news. "Do we want to live in a surveillance state where everybody is watched?"

The controversial move by the San Antonio Northside School District to require students to wear RFID locators embedded into their student ID cards so administrators can track their movements in the school building has become a major issue in the fight over personal freedom, and the limits of government agencies to track individuals.

The school district, according to Executive Director of Communications Pascual Gonzalez, introduced the chip policy at two schools this year with an idea to extending it to all of the sprawling districts' 112 schools in coming years. The experiment by Northside, which is the fourth largest school district in Texas, is being closely watched not only by other school systems, but by privacy advocates as well.

He says the goal is not to 'spy' on students or record who they meet with. In Texas, state education funding to school districts is based on the number of students who are in class when the first period bell rings, and Northside is losing $1.7 million per year because students are in the building but not in the classroom.

"If the student is not in first period class but he is in the building, then we are able to locate him, and get him into the class," Gonzalez said.

He says the RFID tracking doesn't extend 'beyond the walls of the school building,' and the school district does not keep any records of the movements of students.

But this issue has angered activists on both ends of the political spectrum. It has been denounced by liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, which say it amounts to 'tagging children like cattle.' It has also been blasted on conservative web sites and radio talk shows as an example of the increasing control the government is attempting to exert over individuals.

"The court's willingness to grant a temporary restraining order is a good first step, but there is still a long way to go," Whitehead said. "Not just in this case, but dealing with the mindset in general that everybody needs to be monitored and controlled."

The judge prohibited the district from expelling sophomore Andrea Hernandez from the Science and Engineering Magnet School that she has been attending, and issued an order prohibiting the district from 'intimidating or retaliating' against Andrea, ruling that the RFID system is a 'clear violation of her constitutional rights.'

Andrea and her father have become vocal critics of the RFID program, and the judge also issued an order preventing school officials from blocking them from 'peacefully distributing literature' about their objections to the program on school grounds.

Whitehead says what is happing in American schools today is symbolic of a disturbing historical trend.

"Regimes in the past have always started with the schools, where they develop a compliant citizenry," he said. "These 'Student Locator' programs are ultimately aimed at getting students used to living in a total surveillance state, where there will be no privacy, and wherever you go and whatever you text or e-mail will be watched by the government."
http://radio.woai.com/cc-common/main...ticle=10591077





Anonymous Hacker Behind Stratfor Attack Faces Life in Prison

A pretrial hearing in the case against accused LulzSec hacker Jeremy Hammond this week ended with the 27-year-old Chicago man being told he could be sentenced to life in prison for compromising the computers of Stratfor.

Judge Loretta Preska told Hammond in a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday that he could be sentenced to serve anywhere from 360 months-to-life if convicted on all charges relating to last year’s hack of Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor, a global intelligence company whose servers were infiltrated by an offshoot of the hacktivist collective Anonymous.

Hammond is not likely to take the stand until next year, but so far has been imprisoned for eight months without trial. Legal proceedings in the case might soon be called into question, however, after it’s been revealed that Judge Preska’s husband was a victim of the Stratfor hack.

According to the indictment filed in March, Hammond illegally obtained credit card information stolen from Stratfor and uploaded it to a server that was unbeknownst to him maintained by the federal government. Months earlier the FBI had arrested Hector Xavier Monsegur, a New York hacker who spearheaded LulzSec under the alias “Sabu,” and relied on from thereon out to help the authorities nab other individuals affiliated with Anonymous and LulzSec. The feds say Hammond openly admitted to compromising Stratfor’s data in online chats with their informant and unsealed a three count indictment against him relating to hacking back in March.

After Anons gained access to Stratfor’s servers, they collected a trove of internal emails and more thousands of credit card details belonging to the firm’s paid subscribers that were released last Christmas. A class action suit was filed against Strafor over the breach of security, and in June the company settled with its customers at an estimated cost of $1.75 million. Just now, though, it’s been learned that Judge Preska may have a vested interest in seeking a prosecution by any means necessary.

Among the thousands of Statfor client’s whose credit card data was compromised in the hack alleged to be linked to Hammond is Thomas J. Kavaler, a partner at the law firm of Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP and the husband of Judge Preska. The archived document dump released by LulzSec last year includes personal information from Mr. Kavaler that suggests he was victimized in the attack and thus qualifies for the class action settlement.

In a press release issued under the branding of the Anonymous collective, supporters for Hammond call for Judge Preska’s immediate resignation from the case.

“Judge Preska by proxy is a victim of the very crime she intends to judge Jeremy Hammond for. Judge Preska has failed to disclose the fact that her husband is a client of Stratfor and recuse herself from Jeremy's case, therefore violating multiple Sections of Title 28 of the United States Code,” the statement reads.

“Judge Loretta Preska's impartiality is compromised by her Husband's involvement with Stratfor and a clear prejudice against Hammond exists, as evident by her statements,” it continues. “Without justice being freely, fully, and impartially administered, neither our persons, nor our rights, nor our property, can be protected.”

According to Sue Crabtree, a member of the Jeremy Hammond Solidarity Network and a witness to his bail hearing this week, Judge Preska ordered the continue incarceration of Hammond on the basis that he is a danger to the community and likely to flee the country if released from holding. Crabtree notes that Hammond does not now nor has he ever had a passport, though, and has also since been added to a terrorist watch list.

“In the end, Jeremy was denied bail because he was deemed a flight risk and more dangerous than [a] sexual predator. And yes, if you are asking yourself if this was said, it was said. Jeremy's legal team stated they would appeal this denial of bail,” she writes on a Facebook group for Hammond.

After Anonymous went public with the hack of Strafor in December 2011, the internal emails from the intelligence firm were handed off to WikiLeaks, who soon after began publishing the findings. Among the information stored in the emails was documentation alleging that law enforcement agencies spied on Occupy Wall Street protesters and proof of an international surveillance system called Trapwire. Hammond is at this point likely to be the first US citizen tried in a civilian court for crimes relating to the whistleblower site.

Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) tells The Real News network this week that the denial of bail is both “very disturbing” and “legally wrong.”

“The bigger story is what they've done in this country to Jeremy Hammond, Bradley Manning, and what they have proposed to do to Julian Assange, and that's really say that they're going to come down as heavily as they can on people who expose government secrets, whistleblowers,” Ratner says.
https://rt.com/usa/news/anonymous-st...ond-judge-440/





Europarliament Scolds Visa, MasterCard, PayPal For Killing WikiLeaks Donations; Initiates Regulation
Rick falkvinge

Today, the European Parliament ordered new legislation to regulate credit card companies’ ability to refuse service. This regulation follows the unilateral and rightless cutoff of donations to WikiLeaks, as well as similar trampling on small entrepreneurs. The Pirate Party took the initiative to the new regulation.

It has become an increasingly large problem that Visa, MasterCard, and Paypal control the valve to any money flow on the planet. Today, the European Parliament established this as a clear problem, and initiated regulation of the companies, limiting and strictly regulating their right to refuse service. The Pirate Party was the initiator of this regulation, following the damaging cutoff of donations to WikiLeaks after said organization had performed journalism that was embarrassing to certain governments.

In the week leading up to this initiation of regulation, banks in Sweden were caught in the act of arbitrarily discriminating against fully legal business owners that the banks claimed sold (according to the banks) “questionable products” like horror movies, movies with nudity, or sex toys; meanwhile, these same banks happily channeled stock in corporations under investigation of genocide. When pressed on the matter, the banks referred to vague rules from Visa and MasterCard – who are apparently in a position to shut down any business or organization on the planet they don’t agree with for any reason. This is an obvious and severe problem.

The European Parliament adopted the following passage today as part of a larger report, requesting legislation to be drafted on the matter, having the crucial text inserted by Pirate MEP Christian Engström:

32. [The European Parliament] Considers it likely that there will be a growing number of European companies whose activities are effectively dependent on being able to accept payments by card; considers it to be in the public interest to define objective rules describing the circumstances and procedures under which card payment schemes may unilaterally refuse acceptance

While this may seem like vague political language, this is a clear request for legislation to be drafted on the matter which will eventually come to a vote.

The initiator of this part of the bill, MEP Christan Engström with the Pirate Party, comments in a press release:

“It is not reasonable that Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal can shut Swedish entrepreneurs out from trading online when they sell horror movies or sex toys, just because the payment providers are scared of American fundamentalist moralism”, says Christian Engström, Member of the European Parliament for the Pirate Party.

“Another example is when Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal blocked donations to WikiLeaks. This happened without legal grounds and shall be regarded as the three companies collaborating in helping the American government to silence an inconvenient voice. It is unacceptable that private corporations has that kind of power over free speech”, says Engström.
http://falkvinge.net/2012/11/20/euro...es-regulation/





Clouds Lifting Over Murdoch, He’s Out to Buy Again
Amy Chozick

The media conglomerate, which had been on its heels for more than a year because of the phone hacking scandal in Britain, is looking to make acquisitions again. First on the list could be a 49 percent stake in the Yes Network in New York, a purchase that could aid in the formation of a new nationwide sports network to compete with ESPN.

News Corporation’s stock has reached highs as the company prepares to transfer its underperforming publishing assets, including newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, into a separate publicly traded entity.

One of the crucial factors in the decision was that the split would allow Rupert Murdoch, the company’s chairman and chief executive, to buy into the businesses he loves without upsetting investors who are more interested in cable and broadcast. Potential targets include The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and more education companies.

“Rupert has his mojo back,” said Todd Juenger, a media analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. “The stock is up, investors are happy with the company’s recent decisions.”

“He is definitely rubbing his hands together,” a person with knowledge of News Corporation’s deal-making discussions said of Mr. Murdoch.

In the last several weeks, Mr. Murdoch has exuded a satisfaction and sure-footedness that people close to the company said they had not seen since before Mr. Murdoch’s British newspaper unit became embroiled in a phone hacking scandal. That is in part because hacking has been overtaken in the press by an unfolding scandal at the British Broadcasting Corporation.

The BBC, which Mr. Murdoch and his son James have frequently criticized, is accused of canceling a news program’s segment about serial child molesting committed by longtime host Jimmy Savile, and broadcasting false reports of pedophilia about a member of Margaret Thatcher’s administration.

People close to Mr. Murdoch said he considered the BBC scandal karmic justice for months of negative coverage of News Corporation, and he has provided almost daily commentary via Twitter. “BBC getting into deeper mess,” he wrote on Nov. 10. “After Savile scandal, now prominent news program falsely names senior pol as pedophile.”

And the BBC scandal touches another Murdoch rival — The New York Times, whose parent company’s new chief executive, Mark Thompson, served as director general at the BBC. Mr. Thompson’s replacement at the BBC, George Entwistle, resigned on Nov. 11 after just 54 days on the job. “Look to new CEO to shape up NYT unless recalled to BBC to explain latest scandal,” Mr. Murdoch wrote on Twitter last month.

As News Corporation sank into its hacking scandal last year, it delayed new acquisitions. In September, Britain’s Office of Communications, known as Ofcom, said that British Sky Broadcasting, 39.1 percent owned by News Corporation, was “fit and proper” to hold a broadcast license. The decision removed a cloud of uncertainty at News Corporation’s Manhattan headquarters and cleared the company to revisit deals, analysts said.

“The internal narrative at the company is that the boss is in shopping mode,” said one person close to News Corporation who could not discuss Mr. Murdoch’s thinking publicly.

Dropping its $12 billion bid for the portion of BSkyB that it did not already own gave News Corporation ample cash to complete share buybacks and consider other acquisitions. The company had $9.6 billion in cash at the end of its 2012 fiscal year and in September borrowed another $1 billion.

On a recent earnings call, Chase Carey, News Corporation’s president and chief operating officer, said: “We always seem to be the topic of the day when it comes to a rumor of some transaction.” Still, he added: “There are places where we think we should kick the tires on things.”

Last week News Corporation neared a deal with Yankees Global Enterprises to buy a 49 percent stake in the Yes Network, a regional New York sports network with a valuation of about $3 billion. A stake in Yes would add to News Corporation’s lineup of regional sports channels and contribute to its reported plans to introduce a national cable sports channel that could take on the Walt Disney Company’s ESPN.

“It’s one of the only businesses where there’s no No. 2,” said Michael Nathanson, a media analyst at Nomura Securities. “In our view, sports is the safest asset in media.”

This month the company paid an estimated $250 million for the portion of ESPN Star Sports that it did not already own. ESPN Star Sports, based in Singapore, operates 17 sports networks in five languages around Asia.

Then there are publishing assets that the 81-year-old Mr. Murdoch has long coveted, like The Los Angeles Times. Its owner, the bankrupt Tribune Company, is looking for a buyer for its struggling newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune.

Julie Henderson, a spokeswoman for News Corporation, called recent reports that News Corporation was in talks with Tribune Company and The Los Angeles Times “wholly inaccurate.” News Corporation’s last major acquisition, of Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Journal and Barron’s, for $5.6 billion in 2007, was unpopular among investors.

But the structure of the coming split of News Corporation could give Mr. Murdoch considerable resources to indulge his love of newspapers. While the final details of the split won’t be announced until next month, News Corporation has arranged for its sluggish publishing division to be bolstered by Australian pay television assets, which will make up the bulk of the earnings in the newly formed company. In Australia, the company recently paid $2.01 billion to increase its stake in Australia’s dominant pay TV provider, Foxtel.

“All of the Australian assets go into the split-off company,” Mr. Murdoch said in June. “It is just a lot simpler.”

That structure also gives the company’s hard-hit newspapers a financial safety net and Mr. Murdoch capital. Mr. Carey, News Corporation’s president, has said the company will invest in its fledgling education division. Run by a former New York City schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, the education group, called Amplify, will be part of the new company.

Last month, News Corporation explored a $1.6 billion cash offer for Pearson’s Penguin publishing house. Penguin ultimately merged with Bertelsmann’s Random House. But News Corporation’s interest raised questions about other acquisitions that would bring scale to its HarperCollins book division, also part of the publishing company.

“He’ll have the currency” to do whatever he wants, said a person who discussed the split plan with Mr. Murdoch.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/20/b...uisitions.html





News Corp Exposed to Growing Legal Threat Following Charges for Tabloid Duo

Charges for Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson raise prospect that News Corp could be prosecuted under US anti-bribery laws
Ed Pilkington and Dominic Rushe

The new round of criminal charges brought in the UK against former senior News International editors has once again raised the prospect that Rupert Murdoch's New York-based parent company may be prosecuted under US anti-bribery laws, and complicates the rehabilitation of his son James as a possible successor to lead the global media empire.

The charges brought against Rebekah Brooks, who ran Murdoch's newspaper holdings in Britain, Andy Coulson, former editor of the now defunct News of the World, and two other former News International employees exposes the parent News Corporation to possible action under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The FCPA exists to prosecute US-domiciled companies for acts of bribery and corruption that they might commit abroad.

An official of the British ministry of defence, Bettina Jordan Barber, also faces trial for allegedly receiving £100,000 from Murdoch's tabloid newspapers for information that led to a series of published stories. The allegation that money passed hands clearly falls within the legal remit of the FCPA.

Mike Koehler, professor of law at Southern Illinois school of law and author of the blog fcaprofessor.com, said the charges "would be hard for the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission to ignore. We have been hearing allegations for a year and a half now, now we clearly have charges against high ranking officials at a foreign subsidiary," he said.

The new charges, and the allegation of bribery of a military official, come at a very sensitive time for the company. The media giant is preparing to split itself in two, separating the TV and broadcasting arm from the scandal-hit newspaper and publishing division.

The developments also bring to a crashing halt the recent perception in America that News Corporation had begun to recover its confidence after months on the defensive as a result of the phone-hacking scandal. Only on Monday, the New York Times ran an article headlined Clouds Lifting Over Murdoch, He's Out to Buy Again.

News Corp has largely shrugged off the scandal in the US, where its shares have risen over 34% in the last year. At News Corp's recent annual shareholder meeting in October, Murdoch comfortably saw off attempts to appoint an independent chairman to the company. James Murdoch has recently been tipped to head Fox Networks, the News Corp television division that includes its flagship Fox channel, home to The Simpsons and American Idol.

But the new charges will increase pressure on the company. Koehler said US authorities would be looking to see how high up the chain of command the bribery scandal reached. "The question will be what did James know and when did he know it," he said. Ultimately he predicted News Corp would reach a settlement with the Justice Department rather than go to trial, but he said that News Corp faced some uncomfortable investigations in the coming months.

The FCPA has two main components, one that relates to the bribing of foreign officials and another that relates to books and record keeping. It is often the latter that causes companies the biggest headaches. Characterising a bribe as "miscellaneous expense" is a serious offence.

"This latest news is an escalation of the FCPA case," said Koehler. But he said he expected the case could still take some years to be resolved.

The latest legal difficulties to hit News Corporation could also potentially have ramifications on its 27 TV licences within the Fox network – the real financial heart of the operation. Three of the licences are up for renewal, and in August the ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) filed a petition with the US broadcasting regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, that called for them to be denied on the grounds that the company did not have the requisite character to run a public service.

Melanie Sloan, Crew's director, said the charges of the four former News International employees played into its petition. "News Corp argues that the conduct in Britain shouldn't matter here in the US, but the Atlantic ocean doesn't have cleansing properties – if Murdoch is seen to be unfit to run a global company in the UK, then he's unfit in this country, too."

In May, the UK Commons culture committee censured Murdoch in their report into the phone hacking scandal, saying that he was "not a fit person" to exercise stewardship of a major international company.

So far there have been no confirmed cases of News Corporation employees engaging in illegal activities within the US. This week the Daily Beast alleged that the Murdoch tabloids the Sun and the New York Post may have made payments to a US official on American soil in order to obtain a photo of a captive Saddam Hussein, the deposed Iraqi leader, in his underwear. News Corporation has denied the claims.

Mark Lewis, the UK-based lawyer who has represented many of the victims of News of the World hacking, has been investigating possible cases of data breaches within the US but has yet to issue legal proceedings.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012...oulson-charges





Former Murdoch Aides to Be Charged With Bribery
Alan Cowell and John F. Burns

In a dramatic new turn in the scandals swirling around Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper outpost, prosecutors said on Tuesday that two former top executives — Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks — will be charged with making corrupt payments to public officials along with an an array of previous accusations.

The development has far-reaching implications for Prime Minister David Cameron, who hired Mr. Coulson, a former editor of The News of the World tabloid, as his director of communications while in opposition and kept him on after coming to power in the 2010 elections. Mr. Cameron said at the time that he had accepted Mr. Coulson’s assurances that he was not involved in any criminal wrongdoing while he was the paper’s editor. But the Labour opposition has frequently accused the prime minister of poor judgment.

Ms. Brooks was also a neighbor and personal friend of Mr. Cameron. In one of several inquiries into the hacking scandal, she testified in May that they kept in touch by telephone, text message and e-mail, meeting at lunches and dinners and socializing at parties, summer outings and Christmas celebrations. The Crown Prosecution Service said on Tuesday that Mr. Coulson and Ms. Brooks, the former chief executive of News International, the British newspaper subsidiary of Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation, were among five people who should be charged as part of a police inquiry called Operation Elveden. The investigation ran in parallel with other investigations related to a phone hacking scandal that led to the closing of The News of the World.

Among the five were Clive Goodman, a former royal correspondent at The News of the World, who served a brief jail term in 2007 for hacking into voice mail accounts in the royal household.

“We have concluded, following a careful review of the evidence, that Clive Goodman and Andy Coulson should be charged with two conspiracies,” said prosecutor Alison Levitt. “The allegations relate to the request and authorization of payments to public officials in exchange for information, including a palace phone directory known as the ‘Green Book’ containing contact details for the Royal Family and Members of the Household.”

Mr. Coulson was deputy editor of The News of the World from 2000 to 2003 and editor from 2003 to 2007, when he became Mr. Cameron’s spokesman. He resigned in 2011 as the hacking scandal intensified. The charges against him relate to two periods between August 2002 and January 2003 and January and June of 2005, before he joined Mr. Cameron’s office, the prosecutors said.

Ms. Brooks, who was editor of The Sun tabloid between 2003 and 2009, will face charges along with the newspaper’s former chief reporter between 1990 and 2011, John Kay, and an employee of the Defense Ministry, Bettina Jordan-Barber. The accusation relates to payments for information said to total 100,000 pounds, around $160,000.

“We have concluded, following a careful review of the evidence, that Bettina Jordan-Barber, John Kay and Rebekah Brooks should be charged with a conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office between 1 January 2004 and 31 January 2012,” Ms. Levitt said.
“This conspiracy relates to information allegedly provided by Bettina Jordan-Barber for payment, which formed the basis of a series of news stories published by The Sun. It is alleged that approximately £100,000 was paid to Bettina Jordan Barber between 2004 and 2011.”

The hacking scandal itself reached a climax in July 2011, when Mr. Murdoch closed The News of the World and Ms. Brooks resigned as chief executive of News International .

Since then, Parliament and the police have launched investigations while a separate inquiry led by Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson has called scores of witnesses, including Mr. Murdoch and his son James, to testify about the practices and behavior of the British press.In the course of the Operation Elveden investigation, more than 50 people have been arrested; two of them have been told they will face no further action.

Ms. Brooks, 44, is among a group of former Murdoch employees who are to face trial next year on charges related to the scandals at the company.

Altogether, more than 50 former newspaper executives, lawyers, editors, reporters and investigators have been arrested and questioned in extensive police inquiries.

At a court appearance in May, Ms. Brooks was charged along with her husband, a well-known racehorse trainer, and four other people with perverting the course of justice by concealing documents, computers and other evidence from detectives.

In June, she returned to court for a hearing on charges relating to the phone hacking scandal.

And in September, she appeared in court again, this time along with Mr. Coulson, on charges of intercepting communications without lawful authority, including an incident in which News of the World employees broke into the voice mail account of Milly Dowler, a schoolgirl who was murdered.

Before her fall, Ms. Brooks was a close confidante of Mr. Murdoch and one of the most powerful figures in the British news media.Over nearly 20 years with the company, she rose rapidly to become editor of The News of the World, a weekly, and later of The Sun, Britain’s most widely circulated daily paper, before being promoted to chief executive of News International in 2009.

As the scandal erupted, Mr. Murdoch flew to London to offer a public show of support for Ms. Brooks, who had been his personal choice to lead his British newspaper operation. But she resigned shortly afterward with a lucrative severance package that included continued use of a chauffeur-driven car and the payment of legal fees.

The Crown Prosecution Service said on Tuesday that the charges against Ms. Brooks and Mr. Coulson related to two files of evidence sent by detectives at Scotland Yard. It did not say when charges would be formally brought against her and the other four people named in the evidence.

Alongside Operation Elveden, police are conducting Operation Weeting relating to accusations of phone hacking and Operation Tuleta which concerns computer hacking and other privacy breaches.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/21/w...h-bribery.html





Jail Looms for Man Who Revealed AT&T Leaked iPad User E-Mails

The case highlights a troubling disconnect between online life and the rule of the law.
Tom Simonite

AT&T screwed up in 2010, serving up the e-mail addresses of over 110,000 of its iPad 3G customers online for anyone to find. But today Andrew Auernheimer, an online activist who pointed out AT&T’s blunder to Gawker Media, which went on to publicize the breach of private information, is the one in federal court this week.

His case highlights some potentially troubling disconnects between the practicalities of online life and the rule – and application – of the law.

Auernheimer, whose pugnacious online persona is Weev, is up on two counts, each with the potential to land him with five years in jail. One alleges that by being in possession of the e-mails from AT&T’s leaky system he handled “identification information” in breach of a law intended to protect against identity theft, USC 1028. It’s worth noting that so far there appears to be no indication that Weev had plans to use the e-mails collected for anything more than proof that AT&T was leaking its customers’ data.

The more concerning charge to online activists watching Weev’s case is based on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which forbids “unauthorized access” to a computer. Weev and a fellow hacker who originally uncovered AT&T’s mistake and collected the e-mails didn’t ask the company for permission to access the Web addresses that shared iPad users’ private information. But those Web addresses weren’t hidden behind password prompts or any kind of protection – they were publicly accessible. Getting AT&T's system to spit out a customer's e-mail address simply required visiting an AT&T web address with a particular – and easy to guess – code tagged onto the end.

Groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) worry that should that charge succeed it will become easy to criminalize many online activities, including work by well-intentioned activists looking for leaks of private information or other online security holes. Weev’s case hasn’t received much attention so far, but should he be found guilty this week it will likely become well known, fast.
http://www.technologyreview.com/view...-user-e-mails/





Security Hole Allows Pirates to Get a Legitimate Windows 8 Activation for Free
Stephen Hall|

A new security hole has been discovered in Microsoft’s product activation process that allows pirates to get a free legitimate activation of Windows 8 using the current Windows Media Center upgrade promotion. Pirates have been having a harder time with Windows 8 because Microsoft no longer allows volume keys — each Windows 8 activation requires a unique key. However, a hole was discovered that involves using the KMS (Key Management System) , and then applying the freely available Windows Media Center upgrade on top of it.

Essentially, those who wish to get a free legitimate installation only need a key for the Windows Media Center upgrade, which is available directly from Microsoft. They simply use any Windows 8 key to reach the desktop during installation of a pirated copy of Windows 8, apply a KMS activation for their current version (to prevent piracy we will not be covering this step in detail), and then go on to use the Windows Media Center upgrade key they obtained from Microsoft themselves. Due to the fact that the WMC upgrade process does no checks for the validity of the activation, any activated copy of windows (even ones which were activated via KMS) are upgraded to a valid version of Windows 8 via the WMC upgrade. Uh oh!

A Key Management System activation allows your unlicensed copy of Windows to be fully usable for 180 days. It’s typically used to help Volume Licensing customers automate and manage the activation process, but pirates have found a way to take advantage of it. On top of that, Microsoft is simply handing out unlimited upgrade keys for Windows Media Center, providing a gateway to free activations.

Effectively, the upgrade key will replace the KMS activation, allowing you to be legitimately activated. Reddit user noveleven explains how we know that Microsoft will not again check for legitimacy after 180 days:

When you activate Windows via KMS, in the activation window it says “Windows is activated until…” and a date (so if you were to install it today, it would say it’s activated until May). After installing the upgrade, the window just says “Windows was activated on…” and the date of activation. That means the activation is permanent.

When you install the upgrade key, that replaces the existing product key; only the new upgrade key is used for future checks. Windows won’t check the key you used to install because it no longer has it.


I already have Windows 8 installed on my main machine, but another editor here at WindowsWave tested it out after he came across the Reddit article and it was successful. Luckily, the promotion period for the free upgrade ends in January, so the damage that could potentially be done by pirates within the next month and a half is probably minimal.
http://windowswave.com/security-hole...tion-for-free/





You are Committing a Crime Right Now
Robert David Graham

Are you reading this blog? If so, you are committing a crime under 18 USC 1030(a) (better known as the “Computer Fraud & Abuse Act” or “CFAA”). That’s because I did not explicitly authorize you to access this site, but you accessed it anyway. Your screen has a resolution of 1024x768. I know this, because (with malice aforethought) I clearly violated 18 USC 1030(a)(5)(A) by knowingly causing the transmission of JavaScript code to your browser to discover this information.

So we are all going to jail together.

That's silly, you say, because that’s not what the law means. Well, how do you know what the law means? The law is so vague that it’s impossible to tell.

The CFAA was written in 1986. Back then, to access a computer, you had to have an explicit user account and password. It was therefore easy to tell whether access was authorized or not. But then the web happened, and we started accessing computers all over the world without explicit authorization.

So, without user accounts or other form of explicit authorization, how do we tell if access to a website is “authorized” or not?

Well, we could come up with a theory of “implicit” authorization. Obviously I intend people to read this blog, and therefore, I’ve implicitly authorized you to do so. Likewise, your browser makes your screen size available to JavaScript so that websites can render better, so it’s implicit that you’ve authorized me to grab this information.

But what are the limits of implicit authorization? Let’s say you are reading a website that has “articleId=31337” at the end. You wonder what the next article is, so you go to the URL and change it “articleId=31338” and hit return. Have you “exceeded authorized access”? It’s hard to say. If article “31337” is public, why not “31338”?

But in our scenario, let’s say that article “31338” is a press release that is not intended to be published until tomorrow announcing the quarterly corporate earnings. While the article itself is online, a link to it won’t be posted to the home page until tomorrow, so not even Google spiders can find it. Because you’ve gotten early access, you can make a huge profit buying/selling stocks.

Is it your fault for accessing the pre-posted financial results? Or their fault for making them accessible? What does the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act say on this matter?

A well-known legal phrase is “ignorance of the law is no defense”. But that doesn’t really apply here. You know the law exists. You may have read it in detail. You may have even consulted your lawyer. It’s just that nobody can tell precisely whether this act as crossed the line between “authorized” and “unauthorized” access. We won’t know until if and when somebody tries to prosecute you.

Let’s say that instead of trying to profit from your accidental discovery, you simply post it to your blog, saying “look at what these idiots have done”. As a Fortune 500, the FBI takes notice, searches your home, confiscates all your computers, arrests you, and successfully convicts you under the CFAA.

This is selective enforcement. The FBI doesn’t go after everyone who adds one to a URL, only those who embarrass the Fortune 500. They don’t go after any cow in the herd, only those who stick their heads up. This violates the concept of “rule of law”. Everyone isn’t treated equally under law, some are treated more equally than others.

For cybersecurity researchers like me, this creates chilling effect. In order to fix security we have to point out when it’s broken. When we see this broken press release, what do we do? Do we keep our head down, or do we speak up? Even if we'll probably be found innocent, why take the risk? Better to keep quiet.

This is the issue behind the recent conviction of Andrew Auernheimer for “hacking” AT&T. The guy isn’t a criminal. He wasn’t trying to profit. He simply noticed that AT&T had made user accounts publicly available, and published proof. He believed that since the information was publicly available he was not exceeding authorization. He stuck his head up above the herd. For that, he was convicted today under the CFAA and is on his way to jail (well, currently still out on bail awaiting sentencing).

By the way, this post is based on the legal concept “void for vagueness". It’s good reading.
http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2012/1...right-now.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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