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Old 28-11-12, 09:05 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 1st, '12

Since 2002


































"The illegal is clearly outperforming legal. That blows me away. I pay for premium cable. It's easier to use BitTorrent to watch Game of Thrones." – Peter Biddle


"The US cannot be allowed to be the copyright cops of the world." – Loz Kaye



































December 1st, 2012




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





BPI Asks Pirate Party UK to End Pirate Bay Support
Tom Pakinkis

The BPI has sent a letter to the Pirate Party UK requesting that it stops providing access to illegal file-sharing website The Pirate Bay via a proxy site.

A Pirate Party press release in October said that the proxy site serves approximately 2 million hits to The Pirate Party every day.

The BPI’s letter takes issue with the Pirate Party UK’s interpretation of freedom of expression saying, “BPI and its members also believe in freedom of expression – we rely on it every day in making music,

“But freedom of expression is not an absolute right. It comes with a duty to respect the rights of others.”

The letter reminds Pirate Party UK leader Laurence Kaye that the High Court has specifically addressed the balance between freedom of expression and copyright infringement, and upheld the legitimacy of orders for ISPs to block the Pirate Bay.

It also points to the 70 digital music services in the UK providing legal access to music.

In a statement to Music Week, Taylor said, “Record labels and retailers have worked hard to give Britain the world’s most exciting digital music market.

“Music fans can buy or stream millions of tracks from 70 legal services, all of which support continuing investment in new music. Illegal sites like The Pirate Bay make it harder for new bands to get signed and for innovative digital music services to flourish.

“Pirate Party UK’s free speech arguments are a complete red herring,” he added. “We are passionate believers in freedom of speech, but it doesn’t justify The Pirate Bay helping themselves to other people’s work. The human rights implications of blocking this illegal site have been fully considered by the High Court. Whatever their views, Pirate Party UK are no more above the law than anyone else.”
http://www.musicweek.com/news/read/b...support/052753





Sweden's Pirate Party Doubles Membership

The Swedish Pirate Party has doubled its membership to 16,000 within the last few weeks after the party's Facebook page was linked by a file-sharing website, according to a report by Sveriges Radio.

The influx of members places the Pirate Party ahead of the Left and Green parties in membership terms.

"If you compare our member figures with the parliamentary parties we are actually well placed. I hope that this bodes well for the election work which will start in 1-1.5 years," party leader Anna Troberg told Sveriges Radio's Ekot news programme.

There is one reservation to the party's booming membership however and that is the fact that it is free to join the Pirate Party while other parliamentary parties charge a fee.

Sweden's Pirate Party caused an election stir in 2009 when it claimed a seat in the EU parliament after winning 7.1 percent of the votes.

The party later added a further seat following the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty.

The reason behind the dramatic increase in membership in recent weeks is a result of a police raid on file-sharing website Tankafetast.com in October, which temporarily stopped visitors downloading files.

In protest the website directed all its traffic to the Pirate Party.

The Pirate Party's membership peaked at just over 50,000 people prior to the 2009 election in the wake of The Pirate Bay trial. This figure however dropped off sharply though 2010 and 2011 as the issue fell out of the media spotlight.
http://www.thelocal.se/44646/20121125/





Piracy Site Newzbin2 Gives Up and Closes 15 Months after Block
BBC

Newzbin2, once one of the web's most popular sites offering links to pirated content, has decided to close.

It comes 15 months after a UK court ordered internet service providers to block the site, and amid global pressure from copyright holders.

Internet rights groups said the move was "pointless" in stopping piracy.

In a statement, Newzbin2's owners said it had struggled to cover costs because payment providers had "understandably lost their nerve".

"Newzbin2 was always hoped to be a viable underground commercial venture," the site said.

"The figures just don't stack up."

The Creative Coalition Campaign, which represents groups such as the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and record industry body the BPI, welcomed the announcement.

"This is great news," chairwoman Christine Payne said.

"Pirate websites should not be allowed to trade as this undermines the ability of legitimate businesses to recoup their considerable investment and threatens jobs in the creative sector."

Heavily sued

Newzbin2 was the follow-up site to the original Newzbin1, which was sued by the MPA, leaving it with massive debts.

The site was taken over by a group of hackers known as Team R Dogs who resurrected the site as Newzbin2.

In July 2011, a court ruling meant the site had to be blocked to users in the UK.

It attempted various techniques to circumvent the ban, but users began to head elsewhere.

"Newzbin1 was said to have had 700,000 registered users," the site's statement said.

"In fact that was the total number of people who ever signed up in the history of Newzbin from 2000 onwards.

"Only a fraction were active, loads of people dropped out and went to other sites."

'Running scared'

The administrators defended their record on tackling piracy, saying they had been willing to comply with requests to remove pirated content - but that copyright holders had never sent them a "single complaint".

"The tragedy is this: unlike Newzbin1 we are 100% DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] compliant," the statement said.

Efforts to stem online piracy have in recent times focused on cutting off the public's access to websites offering links to download content.

Groups like the BPI - which represents the UK music industry - have used the courts to make internet service providers (ISPs), who typically resist such moves, block websites.

Aside from Newzbin2, this year has seen The Pirate Bay blocked by all of the UK's major ISPs, a controversial move among campaigners who believe that such censorship is ineffective.

Following the block, The Pirate Bay's traffic plummeted. However, other data has suggested the overall level of piracy has not dropped.

Beyond blocking sites, copyright holders have also called for measures to make the likes of Google give preferential treatment to search results containing legal downloads.

"We have acted on every DMCA notice we received without stalling or playing games: if there was a DMCA complaint the report was gone. Period."

As well as providing a free service listing download links, the site also offered a premium subscription option with various perks.

However, the site said not enough members had been paying, and that for those that had, the services the site had used to receive the money had been backing out.

"All our payment providers dropped out or started running scared," the site said.

It added that accepting Bitcoin - an electronic, hard-to-track currency - had not been an option because it was "just too hard for 90% of people".

The Open Rights Group, which campaigns for an open internet, said Newzbin's closure should not be taken as a sign that blocking sites was effective.

"Newzbin were rightly pursued through the courts and found to be encouraging infringement," said Jim Killock, the group's executive director.

"That is the right approach. However, censorship and block orders are disturbing and we think unnecessary given the success in tackling the businesses and payment mechanisms involved.

"Web blocking is a blunt instrument and is a dangerous practice. We wish copyright owners the best in enforcing their rights and building their businesses, but urge them not to resort to further requests for censorship."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20540853





Canada Prepares for Crackdown on BitTorrent Movie Pirates
Gillian Shaw

If you’re watching an illegally downloaded movie, someone could be watching you.

A forensic software company has collected files on a million Canadians who it says have downloaded pirated content.

And the company, which works for the motion picture and recording industries, says a recent court decision forcing Internet providers to release subscriber names and details is only the first step in a bid to crack down on illegal downloads.

“The door is closing. People should think twice about downloading content they know isn’t proper,” said Barry Logan, managing director of Canipre, the Montreal-based forensic software company.

Logan said while last week’s court case involved only 50 IP addresses, his company is involved in another case that will see thousands of Canadians targeted in a sweep aimed at deterring Internet users from illegally downloading movies and other digital content.

Logan said his company has files on one million Canadians who are involved in peer-to-peer file sharing and have downloaded movies from BitTorrent sites, identifying them through Internet Protocol addresses collected over the past five months.

Logan said the court decision means Canadians must realize they could be held liable for illegal downloading and statutory damages of up to $5,000.

He said many people ignore the warnings from their ISPs that they are engaged in illegal downloading. Now, he said, they may receive litigation letters about possible court action.

Last week’s court decision involved a Burnaby movie production company that went to court to force Internet service providers to provide names and addresses of subscribers who had illegally downloaded one of its movies.

The Federal Court, sitting in Montreal, ordered several Internet providers to disclose to the Burnaby company the names and addresses of their subscribers whose IP addresses were linked to illegal downloads.

The court case dealt with 50 IP addresses (unique identifiers assigned to computers and other devices on a network) who allegedly illegally downloaded NGN Prima Production’s movie Recoil.

“Canada is a very significant country in terms of peer-to-peer file sharing and illegal downloading of copyright works,” Logan said. “We have quite a significant evidence collection program that has been in place in Canada for a number of months, it doesn’t discriminate between ISPs.”

If ISPs hand over the subscriber data sought through court action, Logan said the copyright holders can seek statutory damages that are capped at $5,000 for non-commercial infringement.

Mira Sundara Rajan, formerly the Canada Research chair in intellectual property law at the University of B.C., said the movie industry in Canada appears to be following the lead of the United States. There, the recording and motion picture lobby was instrumental in the recent creation of a “Six Strikes” initiative, targeting Internet users who download pirated content. The graduated system starts with a notice phase and can lead to repeated offenders being blocked from certain sites. In addition to the six strike initiative, offenders can still be sued by rights holders.

“I think the end game actually is to try and make a dent in the downloading activity,” said Sundara Rajan. “What we are doing is following in the footsteps of an American approach here which has been to try to target individual users and set them as examples of what can go wrong if your illegal downloading activity is discovered.

“I think that it is much more than an issue of trying to get fines in place. I think it is a question of creating an idea of deterrence in the mind of the public.”

Logan said his company is looking for repeat or habitual illegal downloaders. He said they will only be identified by Internet Protocol addresses initially but if a legal action is launched, names will be released in statements of claim.

“I don’t think we have to limit this to just teenagers downloading Justin Bieber’s last record,” he said. “We represent a lot of mature titles that would be of interest to the 30/40/50 crowd.”

Logan said his clients in the industry are turning to the courts for rulings on the implementation of Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act, which was passed in June, and took effect earlier this month. Under the act, rights holders can send copyright infringement notices to Internet providers who in turn notify subscribers who are linked to the IP address.
http://www.globalnews.ca/pages/story.aspx?id=6442761468





Why Liability Is Limited: A Primer on New Copyright Damages as File Sharing Lawsuits Head To Canada
Michael Geist

Over the past couple of days, there have been multiple reports about the return of file sharing lawsuits to Canada, with fears that thousands of Canadians could be targeted. While it is possible that many will receive demand letters, it is important to note that recent changes to Canadian copyright law limit liability in non-commercial cases to a maximum of $5,000 for all infringement claims. In fact, it is likely that a court would award far less - perhaps as little as $100 - if the case went to court as even the government's FAQ on the recent copyright reform bill provided assurances that Canadians "will not face disproportionate penalties for minor infringements of copyright by distinguishing between commercial and non-commercial infringement."

Bill C-11, the recently enacted copyright reform bill, featured several very good provisions including an expansion of fair dealing, a user generated content provision, new consumer protections, and a balanced approach to Internet provider liability. One of the most important changes to the law, however, was the creation of a cap on potential damages for non-commercial infringement. As I highlighted during debates on the bill, Canada is among a minority of countries that have any statutory damages at all for copyright infringement as most developed countries require rights holders to prove actual damages.

Canadian copyright law once included statutory damages rules that provided for up to $20,000 per infringement, creating the potential for massive personal liability for non-commercial file sharing (the $20,000 per infringement is still available for commercial infringement). The industry insisted it had no intention of bringing such lawsuits back to Canada (CRIA members filed file sharing lawsuits in 2004), with one industry representative telling the committee studying the copyright bill that "we're not interested in sweeping up the John Does." Yet despite those assurances, the file sharing lawsuits have begun with reports indicating that thousands of Canadians may be targeted.

The lawsuits will likely follow a three-step process. First, rights holders will seek a court order requiring Internet providers to disclose customer name and address information. Second, should the court order the disclosure, rights holders will use the information to send settlement demand letters to subscribers. The letters will allege infringement and likely offer to settle the case for several thousand dollars. If subscribers refuse to settle - perhaps they believe the allegation is inaccurate or the settlement demands unfair - it will fall to rights holders to follow through with a lawsuit. Given recent changes to the law, there is reason to doubt those cases will be filed as the individual liability is very limited.

The new non-commercial statutory damages provision in the Copyright Act states:

Subject to this section, a copyright owner may elect, at any time before final judgment is rendered, to recover, instead of damages and profits referred to in subsection 35(1), an award of statutory damages for which any one infringer is liable individually, or for which any two or more infringers are liable jointly and severally

(b) in a sum of not less than $100 and not more than $5,000 that the court considers just, with respect to all infringements involved in the proceedings for all works or other subject-matter, if the infringements are for non-commercial purposes.


Note that rights holders can elect to pursue actual damages, but those are likely to be even smaller in the case of a downloaded movie or song. The law sets a maximum of $5,000 liability for all infringements if the rights holders rely on statutory damages. That would still be a very significant award, which is why the law also provides guidance to judges that may result in a figure closer to $100. The law includes the following provision as guidance for an award of statutory damages which instructs judges to consider:

in the case of infringements for noncommercial purposes, the need for an award to be proportionate to the infringements, in consideration of the hardship the award may cause to the defendant, whether the infringement was for private purposes or not, and the impact of the infringements on the plaintiff.

Concern about proportionality and hardship was also evident in the government's FAQ on the statutory damages change:

Will the Bill allow record labels to sue individuals and groups for large amounts, like in the U.S.?

This Bill ensures that Canadians will not face disproportionate penalties for minor infringements of copyright by distinguishing between commercial and non-commercial infringement. Under current law, for commercial and non-commercial infringements, copyright owners can sue for statutory damages ranging from $500 to $20,000 for each work that is infringed. This Bill will dramatically reduce an individual's potential liability in cases of non-commercial infringement. In such cases, statutory damages will be reduced to a one-time payment of between $100 and $5000 for all infringements that took place prior to the lawsuit.


The government also emphasized the change to statutory damages during debates in the House of Commons. For example, Industry Minister Christian Paradis told the House:

While our government knows that the overwhelming majority of Canadians are law-abiding, we are concerned about the threat of major penalties that hang over Canadians who infringe copyright for non-commercial purposes. Currently, those who have been found to violate copyright can be found liable for damages from $500 to $20,000 per work. If people illegally download five songs, for example, they could theoretically be liable for $100,000. In our view, such penalties are way out of line. As such, the bill proposes to reduce the penalties for non-commercial infringement. Under its provisions, the courts would have the flexibility to award total damages of between $100 and $5,000.

Similarly, Conservative MP Ron Cannon stated:

Our government also understands the difference between a large-scale violator and an ordinary consumer. The legislation introduces the concept of proportionality in statutory damages. It revises current provisions for statutory damages to distinguish between commercial and non-commercial infringement. That is very important. This bill reduces an individual's potential liability in cases of non-commercial infringement to a one-time payment of between $100 and $5,000 for all infringements that took place prior to any lawsuit being launched.

With rights holders are obviously entitled to pursue their claims in court (and seek either actual or statutory damages), the statutory damages provisions in Canada are clearly designed to dissuade them from pursuing lawsuits against individuals in non-commercial cases. If Canadians begin to receive settlement demand letters, they should be aware of the recent changes that limit their liability in light of the government's view that huge payment demands for non-commercial infringement are "way out of line."
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6710/125/





ISPs Delay Monitoring of Illicit File-Sharing
David Kravets

The nation’s major internet service providers are delaying an initiative backed by the Obama administration and pushed by Hollywood and record labels to disrupt and possibly terminate internet access for online copyright scofflaws.

The announcement Wednesday by Jill Lesser, executive director of the Center for Copyright Information — the name of the group behind the program — marks the second time the so-called “Copyright Alert System” has been delayed. The program was to begin by year’s end, but has now been tabled until early 2013 because Hurricane Sandy “seriously affected our final testing schedules,” Lesser said.

The plan, now four years in the making, includes participation by AT&T, Cablevision Systems, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon. After four offenses, it calls for these residential internet providers to initiate so-called “mitigation measures” that might include reducing internet speeds and redirecting a subscriber’s service to an “educational” landing page about infringement.

On the first offense, internet subscribers will receive an e-mail “alert” from their ISP saying the account “may have been” misused for online content theft. On the second offense, the alert might contain an “educational message” about the legalities of online file sharing.

On the third and fourth infractions, the subscriber will likely receive a pop-up notice asking the subscriber to acknowledge receipt of the alert.

After four alerts, according to the program, “mitigation measures” may commence. They include temporary reductions of internet speeds, redirection to a landing page until the subscriber contacts the ISP to discuss the matter or reviews and responds to some educational information about copyright or other measures.

Internet subscribers may challenge their dings for a $35 filing fee paid to an arbitration service. They also get a free pass, one time, if they claim the infringement was based on having an open, unencrypted Wi-Fi network.

The internet companies may eliminate service altogether for repeat file-sharing offenders, although the plan does not directly call for such drastic action.

Peer-to-peer file sharing of copyrighted works is the infringement that the initiative is trying to target. The activity is easily detectable, since the IP addresses of internet customers are generally apparent when users transfer files. Internet-snoop MarkMonitor of San Francisco has been tapped to police the traffic.

Cyberlockers, e-mail attachments, shared Dropbox folders and other ways to infringe are not included in the crackdown.

The agreement, heavily lobbied for by the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, does not require that internet service providers filter copyrighted material transiting their networks.

And despite the initiative, rights holders will remain free to sue internet subscribers who engage in infringing activities. The Copyright Act allows damages of up to $150,000 per infringement.

The initiative was set to kick in earlier this year but was tabled by ISPs who feared a backlash after federal anti-piracy proposals — the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act — went down in flames amid a huge internet protest and blackout.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ng-monitoring/





Researchers Find Megaupload Shutdown Hurt Box Office Revenues, Despite Gains for Blockbusters
Emil Protalinski

We’ve heard this one before, over and over again: pirates are the biggest spenders. It therefore shouldn’t surprise too many people to learn that shutting down Megaupload earlier this year had a negative effect on box office revenues.

The latest finding comes from a paper titled “Piracy and Movie Revenues: Evidence from Megaupload” (via TorrentFreak) from last month, conducted by from Munich School of Management (LMU) and the Copenhagen Business School (CBS). Here’s the abstract:

In this paper we make use of a quasi-experiment in the market for illegal downloading to study movie box office revenues. Exogenous variation comes from the unexpected shutdown of the popular file hosting platform Megaupload.com on January 19, 2012. The estimation strategy is based on a quasi difference-in-differences approach. We compare box office revenues before and after the shutdown to a matched control group of movies unaffected by the shutdown.

The study analyzed weekly data from 1,344 movies in 49 countries over a five-year period. Here’s the crux of the results: “In all specifications we find that the shutdown had a negative, yet in some cases insignificant effect on box office revenues.” Not all movies were negatively affected: “For blockbusters (shown on more than 500 screens) the sign is positive (and significant, depending on the specification).”

The researchers try to explain how big blockbusters gained but overall revenues dropped:

Our counterintuitive finding may suggest support for the theoretical perspective of (social) network effects where file-sharing acts as a mechanism to spread information about a good from consumers with zero or low willingness to pay to users with high willingness to pay. The information-spreading effect of illegal downloads seems to be especially important for movies with smaller audiences. ‘Traditional’ theories that predict substitution may be more applicable to blockbusters

Unsurprisingly, the dip in revenues was most visible for average size and smaller films, as people are most likely to see big blockbusters with their friends regardless of what happens on the Internet. Those flicks are less likely to require word-of-mouth promotion by people who used Megaupload to share movies.

Of course this is just one paper, and I’m sure more studies will be done that will dive deeper into the data. By then though, Megaupload’s successor, Mega, will have launched.
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/1...fice-revenues/





Cyber Monday Bust: US Law Enforcement Joins in World-Wide Seizure Of 132 Domain Names

Project Cyber Monday targets online counterfeiters
Layer 8

ICEA team of world-wide law enforcement agencies took out 132 domain names today that were illegally selling counterfeit merchandise online.

The group, made up of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and law enforcement agencies from Belgium, Denmark, France, Romania, United Kingdom and the European Police Office (Europol) targeted alleged counterfeiters selling everything from professional sports jerseys, DVD sets, and a variety of clothing to jewelry and luxury goods.

If the copyright holders confirmed that the purchased products were counterfeit or otherwise illegal, seizure orders for the domain names of the websites that sold these goods were obtained from federal magistrate judges, US ICE said in a statement. The domain names seized are now in the custody of the governments involved in these operations. Visitors typing those domain names into their Web browsers will now find a banner that notifies them of the seizure and educates them about the federal crime of willful copyright infringement.

In addition to the domain name seizures, officials identified PayPal accounts utilized by the infringing websites. Proceeds received through the identified PayPal accounts, in excess of $175,000, are currently being targeted for seizure by the investigating HSI field offices.

The 132 domain names seized are part of Project Cyber Monday 3 and Project Transatlantic, and this is the third year that group targeted websites selling counterfeit products online in conjunction with Cyber Monday. An iteration of Operation In Our Sites (IOS), Cyber Monday 3 seized 101 websites and yielded one arrest. The 101 domain names seized under Project Cyber Monday 3 bring the total number of IOS domain names seized to 1,630 since the operation began in June 2010. Since that time, the seizure banner has received more than 110 million individual views, ICE stated. Of the previous domain names seized in the US, 684 have now been forfeited to the US government.

The law enforcement team this year partnered with Europol, who, through its member countries, executed coordinated seizures of foreign-based top-level domains such as .eu, .be, .dk, .fr, .ro and .uk. This effort is titled Project Transatlantic and resulted in 31 domain name seizures, ICE stated.
https://www.networkworld.com/communi...2-domain-names





Is BitTorrent The Future Of Book Publishing? Tim Ferriss Is Banking On It
John Paul Titlow

If you walk into your local Barnes & Noble looking for a copy of Timothy Ferriss's new book, good luck. Even though he's a New York Times best selling author, the giant book retailer refuses to sell The 4-Hour Chef, the latest in his series of self-help books.

Ferriss isn't worried. He's banking on the power of digital distribution to make up for any losses in print sales. Ironically, one of his most effective tools may end up being something most content creators have grown to fear, if not outright despise: BitTorrent.

After publishing two wildly successful books via traditional means, Ferriss decided to try something different. In August, he signed on with Amazon's new publishing arm to release the follow-up to his 2010 health and fitness guide, The 4-Hour Body. That ruffled the features of not just traditional publishers, but also bricks-and-mortar retailers like Barnes and Noble, who object to the e-bookstore exclusivity Amazon requires of its authors. That's why you won't find Ferriss's latest opus down the street at Barnes & Noble.

As fast as e-books are growing, the lack of a presence in the nation's largest physical book retailer is a still serious handicap. To combat it, Ferriss struck a deal with BitTorrent earlier this month to distribute an exclusive bundle of content and, he hopes, sell a few extra books.

"We were both eager to do something to demonstrate that the same type of tools that disrupted music and film can be harnessed to benefit the content creators in publishing," says Ferriss.

How BitTorrent Is Moving Beyond Piracy

But wait. BitTorrent? Aren't they the bad guys?

To be sure, forging a partnership with the company behind the same-peer-to-peer filesharing technology that fuels rampant piracy would be unthinkable for most major publishers. In fact, they're sometimes known to sue BitTorrent users for downloading e-books. But the San Francisco-based company is working hard to rebrand itself as a legitimate partner for content creators, and there's no better way to do that than by partnering with established creators like Ferriss.

For Ferriss, BitTorrent is just an incredibly efficient way to distribute content to a large number of users. And BitTorrent has plenty of them. When asked why he wanted to enter into this partnership, the first words out of Ferriss's mouth were "one hundred and sixty million users." It's hard to argue with that.

Here's how it works: To coincide with the launch of his book, Ferriss put together a folder of additional, exclusive content: a 62-page PDF previewing the book, behind-the-scenes photos, videos and early, hand-marked notes. It's pretty meaty, but doesn't come anywhere close to spoiling the 672-page book he's trying to sell.

It's not just that this content bundle is available for free to Bit Torrent users. It's that Ferriss's face - along with a link to download the bundle torrent and buy the book - is on Bit Torrent's homepage, from which hundreds of thousands of users download the file-sharing client every day.

BitTorrent has been experimenting with this type of featured content for about two years. The list of artists it has partnered with includes increasingly higher profile names like The Counting Crows, DJ Shadow and Pretty Lights, an American DJ and producer. BitTorrent has also worked directly with the Internet Archive to make more than one petabyte of public-domain content available via the P2P network.

It's all part of the company's effort not to just to distance itself from piracy, but to figure out how it can be a bigger part of the legitimate future of digital distribution.

"If you look at what BitTorrent really is, it's quite simply the best way to move ones and zeros across the Internet," says Matt Mason, the company's Executive Director of Marketing. That makes it a valuable tool for creators, but also helps the company figure out its own strategy moving forward.

"The reason we're doing all of this is to try and figure out what to build next," says Mason. That is, if these experiments work, the company can develop tools to help publishers and artists launch their own promotional campagns and take even better advantage of the platform.

Is This Experiment Working?

So does partnering with BitTorrent work? The early numbers look promising, even if they're not all the kind of hard dollar figures media executives want to see. The payoff is less direct that that, but it can still be huge. Pretty Lights, for example, may or may not have sold more records as a result of publishing his BitTorrent bundle of free music and video of a live performance. But after his bundle soared to the top of Pirate Bay's download chart, the DJ saw a 700% increase in traffic to his website, collected 100,000 email addresses and, probably not entirely by coincidence, sold out two concerts at the Red Rocks amphitheater in Colorado.

For Ferriss, it's still too early to tell. But the initial numbers aren't bad. In the first week of the campaign, his bundle has been downloaded 211,000 times, BitTorrent told ReadWrite. More than 85,000 people have clicked through to the book's listing on Amazon (no word on how many ordered it), while 27,000 people viewed the book's trailer on YouTube.

Even if the book only sold 100 extra copies, Ferris says, the promotion would have been worth it to him, because the amount of setup time required was so minimal. He expects to sell far more copies than that, but the real value comes in experimenting with new distribution channels. He is "not overly concerned" about the prospect of his e-book itself being shared on BitTorrent, which he views as a valuable promotional tool.

"One of many reasons to embrace new technologies or new applications of existing technologies is the benefit that you get of being first," says Ferriss. If nothing else, such a paradoxical-seeming partnership has a way of garnering more media coverage than a typical book launch.

"It's a wide open field for people to play in," Ferriss says. "Very few people have taken advantage of this so I would absolutely recommend it."
http://readwrite.com/2012/11/29/is-b...-banking-on-it





How an Indie Game Store Took on Piracy and Won

You probably don't need us to tell you how bad piracy is for gamers. It means less money for developers, fewer games, and less incentive for anyone to try anything original. It's even put the future of a blockbuster series like Football Manager in doubt on your phone.

Typically, the solution's been to lock all your games down with DRM (digital rights management). It makes it harder - though not impossible - for you to copy games you've splashed out for, but it has a nasty side effect too: it stops you from playing what you've paid for wherever, often by limiting how often a game can be installed. What happens if you lose your laptop?

Good Old Games' managing director Guillaume Rambourg thinks he has the answer: stop bothering with DRM at all.

"We see DRM as something that doesn't really bother the pirates. The more sophisticated the copy-protection methods applied, the bigger the challenge and fun for crackers and the more credit for the crew that manages to overcome them," he tells Red Bull UK.

"So why not drop the whole concept if it does nobody any good? The only thing that DRM succeeds at is making life harder and the games less enjoyable for legit gamers. This is crazy."

That's exactly what he did with GOG.com, which launched in 2007. The download store, with more than 80 employees, is packed with more than 450 retro games for both PC and Mac, and they're all completely DRM-free. You could pirate them and put them online for anyone to download, but why would any paying customers bother, when they can all be found already - if you know where to look.

Instead, the service focuses on enticing paying customers with decent prices, and lots of extra goodies, Kickstarter style. Pick up a game and you can get everything from full soundtracks to wallpapers, videos and walkthroughs along with it, which you're unlikely to find in that dodgy folder in one of the internet's murky back alleys.

And it's working: Rambourg has managed to sign the biggest publishers in the industry to his approach, from Codemasters to Ubisoft, Activision, Atari, Square-Enix and even Electronic Arts. The site gets 1.4 million visitors a month, and has sold more than six million games over its short history.

Sure, that's pocket money compared to number one game download service Steam, but it's proof that millions will pay to avoid dreaded DRM.

A long history of fighting pirates

DRM-free media's a relatively new trend: even Apple only made it songs DRM-free on iTunes in 2009, so you could play them on more than a couple of computers and iPods. But Rambourg's business model actually has its roots in Poland, back in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, when GOG's parent publisher, CD Projekt, was just starting out.

"The Berlin Wall fell just a few years earlier and there weren’t many gamers in Poland with access to high-end PC gaming hardware. That created a high demand for older games and sadly it was being satisfied mostly with pirated games," he says.

"If a legit distributor wanted to compete with shady characters selling unlabelled CDs from a back of a truck it had to offer the buyer more for his money. And so CD Projekt introduced a budget collection of back-catalogue games that maintained a high quality standard with DVD-boxes, printed manuals, language localization, and bonus content. The series became a great success."

A decade later, when Rambourg was working for CD Projekt, overseeing the porting and translation of games for European countries, he says the team noticed the same thing was happening again online.

"With no legal source of classic games people reverted to underground sources to meet their retro-gaming needs."

GOG.com was born, though persuading publishers to release their classic old games - which were rarely on sale at the time anyway - DRM-free was an uphill struggle though.

"It’s been a long road for us," says Rambourg. "Back in 2007 most publishers were really skeptical about the GOG.com approach. They didn’t see how it would help them revive the sales of their PC classics." The team convinced Interplay - creator of hit RPG Fallout - to give it a go, and when the numbers came back, others suddenly got a lot more interested.

The future for GOG

But it's not just yesteryear's classics GOG distributes without the DRM shackles: it's moving into brand new games, with the very same approach.

Earlier this year, it slapped hack and slash RPG blockbuster The Witcher 2 up for sale, complete without DRM - it sold 40,000 copies in six months, making it the second biggest digital download service for the game (almost certainly after Steam).

The game was promptly put up for download online, but here's the kicker: it was a disc version of the game that was most widely pirated. That's right: rather than just sharing the DRM-free version from GOG, pirates went to the trouble of buying the game in a shop, taking it home and breaking the DRM instead. That's about all the proof Rambourg needs to show he's on to something.

"We started a new journey for GOG: convincing a growing amount of publishers and developers that releasing a day-one title without DRM can be good for their financial health," says Rambourg.

Up next is support for Windows 8 ("We should be done with that quite soon"), but Rambourg's a bit more hesitant about trying to take over the living room, as Steam's creator Valve is trying to do, or mobile and tablets.

"I think that trying to take over the living room may be a losing bet in the next few years. Instead, what is increasingly common is that the media device that people use most often - their 'second screen' is a phone or tablet. For casual gamers, this is increasingly important," he explains.

"But GOG.com’s audience tends to be a bit more 'hard core', so we’re continuing to work on providing them with the best experience that we can, rather than sacrificing some of what makes GOG.com special to try and broaden our appeal."

Still, never say never: "We know our community wants to see support for other operating systems though, and we're constantly evaluating to see if it makes sense for us."

Given just how popular mobile gaming's getting, it's only a matter of time before someone tries the same thing on your tablet.
http://www.redbull.co.uk/cs/Satellit...21243288934552





'Piracy' Student Richard O'Dwyer Avoids US Extradition

Mr O'Dwyer faced a maximum sentence of five years in prison if found guilty in the US
BBC

A student facing trial and possible imprisonment in the United States has struck a deal to avoid extradition, the High Court has been told.

Richard O'Dwyer, from Sheffield, is accused of breaking copyright laws.

The US authorities claimed the 24-year-old's TVShack website hosted links to pirated films and TV programmes.

The High Court was told Mr O'Dwyer had signed a "deferred prosecution" agreement which would require him paying a small sum of compensation.

Mr O'Dwyer will travel to the US voluntarily in the next few weeks for the deal to be formally ratified, it is understood.

'Satisfactory outcome'

The Sheffield Hallam student could have faced jail if convicted of the allegations, which were brought following a crackdown by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

A High Court judge was told that Mr O'Dwyer was expected to travel to the US in the next 14 days to complete the agreement, pay a small sum in compensation and give undertakings not to infringe copyright laws again.

Sir John Thomas President of the Queen's Bench Division

His extradition application is then expected to return to the High Court so it can formally be disposed of.

Judge Sir John Thomas said: "It would be very nice for everyone if this was resolved happily before Christmas."

Sir John, president of the Queen's Bench Division, said it was a "very satisfactory outcome".

Home Secretary Theresa May approved Mr O'Dwyer's extradition after a court ruling in January.

In May, Mr O'Dwyer was told his appeal against the decision, which was due to take place in July at the High Court, would be delayed.

The High Court heard as a result of the deal struck by Mr O'Dwyer, an appeal would no longer be necessary.

The case was brought by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which claimed the TVShack.net website earned more than $230,000 (£147,000) in advertising revenue.

The US authorities obtained a warrant and seized the domain name in June 2010.

'Copyright cops'

Human rights campaign group Liberty welcomed the proposed settlement of Mr O'Dwyer's case, but warned there was still need for reform of extradition laws.

Isabella Sankey, Liberty's director of policy, said: "This will be a huge relief for Richard, but how appalling that he had to wait so long for the US authorities to make this decision.

"Case after case shows that our extradition arrangements must be overhauled to allow people who have never left these shores to be dealt with here at home," she said.

Loz Kaye, leader of Pirate Party UK, a political party which wants to legalise non-commercial file-sharing, said the deal struck by Mr O'Dwyer showed the US extradition request had been "disproportionate and unnecessary".

"It does not remove the underlying problem, though. The US cannot be allowed to be the copyright cops of the world," said Mr Dwyer.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england...shire-20525891





Verizon Sued For Defending Alleged BitTorrent Pirates
Ernesto

A group of adult movie companies is suing Verizon for failing to hand over the personal details of alleged BitTorrent pirates. The provider systematically refuses to comply with court-ordered subpoenas and the copyright holders see these actions as more than just an attempt to protect its customers. According to the them, Verizon’s objections are in bad faith as the Internet provider is profiting from BitTorrent infringements at the expense of lower-tier ISPs.

The ongoing avalanche of mass-BitTorrent lawsuits reveal that IP-addresses can get people into a heap of trouble.

In many cases the person who pays for the account is not the person who shared the copyrighted material. However, this is the person who gets sued, something that can have all kinds of financial implications.

To shield their customers from this kind of outcome Verizon now objects to subpoenas granted by courts in these cases. Not in one case, but in dozens. One of the arguments cited by Verizon’s attorneys is that the requests breach the privacy rights of its customers.

“[The subpoena] seeks information that is protected from disclosure by third parties’ rights of privacy and protections guaranteed by the first amendment,” their counsel informed the copyright holders.

Verizon further cites arguments that have previously been successful in similar cases, including the notion that mass lawsuits are not proper as the defendants did not act in concert.

Three of the copyright holders, all makers of adult films, have had enough of Verizon’s refusals and have filed a lawsuit against the company at a federal court in Texas. Malibu Media, Patrick Collins and Third Degree Films ask the court to hold Verizon in contempt and compel Verizon to respond to the subpoenas.

“Verizon objects to the subpoenas on various grounds, all of which lack merit. Accordingly, Plaintiffs respectfully request that the Court overrule each of Verizon’s objections, compel immediate compliance with Plaintiffs’ subpoenas and hold Verizon in contempt for failing to obey the subpoenas,” they write.

Aside from countering Verizon’s arguments directly, the copyright holders claim that Verizon’s refusal to hand over customer details is in bad faith, as the ISP profits from the alleged copyright infringements.

The movie companies back up this claim by pointing to a study published last year, which concluded that large ISPs profit from BitTorrent at the expense of smaller ones.

“Verizon’s current Objections can only be seen as being asserted in bad faith, and with the expectation to continue to profit from BitTorrent infringement at the expense of other, lower-tier ISPs and the consuming public at large. There is seemingly no incentive for ISPs such as Verizon to aggressively identify infringers on their network,” they tell the court.

“Add to this the fact that Verizon and its cohorts enjoy virtual immunity from liability under the development of laws such as the DMCA, and this scenario presents multiple concerns of fairness and accountability.”

While it’s a novel argument, the movie studios omit to mention that Verizon is also one of the partners in the upcoming “six-strikes” scheme, which aims to decrease copyright infringements through BitTorrent.

The ISP previously told TorrentFreak that it sees more value in a system where users are warned and educated, as opposed to being sued in court.

“We believe this program offers the best approach to the problem of illegal file sharing and, importantly, is one that respects the privacy and rights of our subscribers. It also provides a mechanism for helping people to find many great sources of legal content,” Verizon told us.

The “six strikes” anti-piracy scheme, or copyright alerts system as it’s officially named, is expected to go live later this week. But since the adult film industry is not invited, mass-BitTorrent lawsuits are not going away anytime soon.

That said, the current case can make a huge impact according to Rob Cashman, a lawyer who represents many accused Does in these BitTorrent cases.

Cashman explains that if the ISP wins then copyright holders have no other way to identified the defendants, meaning that these and other Verizon defendants are off the hook.

“The hope and expectation on my end is that other ISPs will follow suit. This will be one more way we can shut down these trolling cases for good,” Cashman says.

“On the flip-side, if the judges grant the request to force the ISPs to comply with their subpoenas, then it will be “game on” for both of us. They will continue trying to extort money from the defendants, and attorneys such as myself and others will continue placing our “monkey wrenches” to break their operations,” Cashman adds.

Whatever happens, the case is going to be one to watch.
https://torrentfreak.com/verizon-sue...pirates121126/





Convicted File-Sharer Gets Record 40-Month Prison Term
David Kravets

A member of the in-theater camcording gang known as the IMAGiNE Group was handed a 40-month prison term Thursday in what is the nation’s longest sentence in a file-sharing case.

A Virginia federal judge handed the term to Gregory A. Cherwonik, 53, of New York, a year after he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement.

In all, five members of the group have pleaded guilty to operating what prosecutors described as being the most prolific piracy release group between 2009 and 2011.

According to the indictment, the group sought “to be the premier group to first release to the internet copies of new motion pictures only showing in movie theaters.”

The Motion Picture Association of America said IMAGiNE was more successful than any other illegal internet release group because of its “short latency periods between the theatrical release and their pirated release, their consistently good quality of audio captures, their high volume of releases, and their connection to international suppliers.”

Group members would audio-record films such as Friends With Benefits and Captain America: The First Avenger. Others members would record the film at a theater with a camcorder. Then the sound and video would be combined into a full-featured movie, the authorities said.

Other films the group recorded and uploaded included The Men Who Stare at Goats, Avatar, Clash of the Titans, Iron Man 2, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and, among others, The Green Hornet.

The authorities said the group utilized servers in France, Canada and the United States to offer in-theater-only movies from websites like unleashthe.net, pure-imagination.us and pure-imagination.info.

The indictment said the group accepted donations “to fund expenses, including the cost of renting servers used by the conspirators, and to accept payments for the unauthorized distribution and sale of pirated copies of copyrighted works.” The indictment charged that the IMAGiNE Group’s websites included member profiles, a torrent tracker, discussion forums and a message board.

Also on Thursday, Javier E. Ferrer, 41, of Florida pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement for his role in IMAGiNE. He is to be sentenced in March and faces a maximum five-year prison term.

Last month, Sean Lovelady, 28, of California, was handed 23 months and had agreed to cooperate with the authorities. Willie Lambert, 57, of Pennsylvania, was given 30 months and ordered to pay $450,000 in restitution, the authorities said. A fifth man, Jeremiah Perkins, is to be sentenced next month after pleading guilty to a criminal copyright charge in August.

Among the reasons why Cherwonik got the highest term, he was described as the “sysop,” the highest level in the IMAGiNE group. What’s more, according to prosecutors, he continued as the group’s leader for a year after his Canandaigua, New York, residence was searched by the authorities.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ate-40-months/





AT&T iPad Hacker’s Real Crime Was Embarrassing the Wrong People
Matt Blaze

Disclosing a flaw in a widely used system without making someone at least a little angry requires a delicate touch. But Andrew Auernheimer, a.k.a. “Weev,” a 26-year-old finder of security vulnerabilities, is anything but delicate.

Two years ago, Auernheimer and a friend made a surprising discovery about the way AT&T was protecting its web database of iPad cellular data accounts: That is, AT&T wasn’t protecting it at all. Any customer could access his or her account data by going to an AT&T URL containing their iPad’s unique numerical identifier. No password, cookie, or login procedure was required to bring up a user’s private information. Auernheimer wrote a script to enumerate iPad IDs and promptly collected more than 100,000 e-mail addresses belonging to AT&T iPad users, which he shared with the Gawker news site to expose the AT&T flaw.

Because computer science has yet to discover a systematic way to find and fix all the vulnerabilities in real-world systems before they get deployed, independent security researchers who discover and report weaknesses have become an essential part of the security ecosystem. Continually poking at systems to seek out hidden flaws is the only hope we have of staying ahead of the bad guys, and the software industry has largely come to recognize that the motley assortment of academics, consultants, and hackers who look for security holes are a community to be cultivated and encouraged – even if the proof of vulnerability they bring may sometimes be painful and embarrassing.

But that doesn’t mean the ones who find an exploitable flaw in a fielded system can expect to be greeted as heroes.

How to best disclose a newly discovered vulnerability is a matter of some controversy, and highly dependent on where one happens to be sitting. Vendors want the chance to address problems before they become public. Users want to know immediately about the flaws in the systems they depend on. The security community wants to study and build on new discoveries. Researchers want credit for their discoveries, and worry they might be “scooped” by someone else: publish or perish.

And everyone thinks their moral high ground is superior to all the others’.

This is the sort of quandary that security researchers grapple with all the time, and we don’t always agree on where the lines of ethical disclosure should be drawn. There’s a lot of room to agree to disagree about how to handle security flaw discoveries like this one. But Auernheimer’s problems go beyond philosophical disagreement: Last week, he was convicted in federal court of identity theft and conspiracy to access AT&T’s computers without authorization. He’s now a felon, and faces jail time.

Yes, AT&T would have preferred to have been notified first (and better yet, exclusively). But if Auernheimer was able to find such a simple and devastating problem, couldn’t someone else have already discovered the same thing and been exploiting it for nefarious purposes? It might be better to publicize the flaw quickly, lest AT&T put its public-relations interests ahead of user security interests.
Independent individuals who discover and report weaknesses have become an essential part of the security ecosystem.

Because AT&T isn’t the only stakeholder here.

And how can accessing a public URL be “unauthorized”? AT&T were the ones who made the un-encrypted data publicly available; how could Auernheimer have known that AT&T wasn’t deliberately (if ill-advisedly) publishing its customer database, perhaps as part of some service or application?

The charges seem a little dubious, but the verdict is in, and these are now questions for the appeals court.

“Respectable” security researchers might look at this case and rest smugly assured that, whatever the legalities, this would never happen to them. Auernheimer may have behaved needlessly antagonistically toward AT&T; maybe he didn’t need to download all those email addresses to make his point.

Maybe.

Ultimately, it’s hard to not to wonder if Auernheimer was charged not so much for his conduct, but for provoking AT&T’s wrath with unwelcome news. That’s what should send a deep chill down the spines of security researchers everywhere.

No matter how careful we may try to be, there’s no telling who might get angry next. How can our delicate security ecosystem survive if embarrassment becomes a crime?
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/11...comes-a-crime/





Can Police Locate Wireless Internet Moochers Without a Warrant?
Joe Palazzolo

Beware, wireless Internet moochers. A federal court in Pittsburgh has ruled that the government can track you to your location, sans search warrant, using free anti-moocher software.

The courts have ruled that Internet subscribers have no reasonable expectation of privacy in their IP address, the number assigned to devices that connect to the Internet. Nor can they expect privacy protection for the information they give their Internet service providers.

But the Pittsburgh ruling, made earlier this month, is the first to address the privacy rights of people who piggyback on their neighbors’ unsecured wireless networks. The case also raises questions about the Fourth Amendment rights — against unreasonable search and seizure — of honest folk who connect to the Internet via free public wireless access points.

Identifying these types of wireless users require law enforcement to take an extra step, since they squat on the same public IP address as a paying subscriber. (That is, police need a tool to distinguish between the person merely connecting to the Internet through a wireless router and the person who pays for the underlying Internet service.)

In the Pittsburgh case, police used a program called Moocherhunter and a directional antenna to find a man suspected of downloading child pornography. The program allows users to measure the distance between a wireless router and the devices connected to it.

Police first tried getting to the suspect through his IP address, which was linked to a Comcast Corp. account. They obtained the Comcast subscriber’s address from the company, and then a warrant to search the home, but soon ruled out the subscriber as the culprit. Someone nearby, a neighbor maybe, had been mooching the subscriber’s wireless Internet and using the connection to download child pornography, they reckoned.

Police used Moocherhunter to find other devices connected to the subscriber’s wireless router, which led them to Richard Stanley, who lived across the street from the subscriber. Police then used the Moocherhunter information to obtain a warrant to search Mr. Stanley’s home, and based on evidence they found, Mr. Stanley was indicted in November 2011 for possessing child pornography.

Mr. Stanley sought to suppress the evidence, arguing that police needed a warrant to use Moocherhunter to locate him. U.S. District Judge Joy Flowers Conti found that Mr. Stanley “could have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the signal he was sending to or receiving” from the wireless router.

“An internet subscriber does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in his IP address or the information he provides to his Internet Service Provider, such as Comcast, in order to legally establish an internet connection, and likewise, a person connecting to another person’s wireless router does not have an expectation of privacy in that connection,” she wrote in a Nov. 14 order.

Marketa Sims, an assistant federal public defender who is representing Mr. Stanley, said subscribers may forfeit their privacy by broadcasting their IP address, but that doesn’t mean wireless Internet users necessarily do too.

“When Stanley connected to the other person’s router, he didn’t reveal his location,” said Ms. Sims, adding that she plans to appeal the ruling. ”The question here is whether the government needs a warrant to find your location when you haven’t broadcast it.”

Orin Kerr, a Fourth Amendment expert and law professor at the George Washington University, said the issue was less clear cut. “When you’re connecting to the wireless network, you’re broadcasting a signal, even though you might not know it,” he said. The question then, he said, is whether people enjoy privacy in signals they don’t knowingly disclose.

In a 1979 case cited by Judge Conti, the Supreme Court held that the police didn’t need a search warrant for a device that recorded the telephone numbers dialed by a criminal suspect.

The suspect entertained no expectation of privacy in the numbers he dialed, and even if he did, it wasn’t legitimate because he voluntarily conveyed the information to a third party — namely, the telephone company, the court ruled.

The court said telephone users typically understand that when they dial a number, they are asking the telephone company to connect them to that number. Thus they are knowingly conveying information to a third party.

But Professor Kerr said whether wireless Internet users know they are sending a signal could be a trickier question. “This gets to the black box problem,” he said. “Do you assume the user knows how computers work or not?”

A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Pittsburgh, which is prosecuting the case, declined to comment on the ruling.
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/11/21/...out-a-warrant/





Consensus Eludes Courts in Searches of Cellphones
Somini Sengupta

Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where Hanni Fakhoury is a lawyer, have lobbied for legislation that would require authorities to obtain a warrant before demanding cellphone location records.

A Rhode Island judge threw out cellphone evidence that led to a man being charged with the murder of a 6-year-old boy, saying the police needed a search warrant. A court in Washington compared text messages to voice mail messages that can be overheard by anyone in a room and are therefore not protected by state privacy laws. In Louisiana, a federal appeals court is weighing whether location records stored in smartphones deserve privacy protection, or whether they are “business records” that belong to the phone companies.

“The courts are all over the place,” said Hanni Fakhoury, a criminal lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties group. “They can’t even agree if there’s a reasonable expectation of privacy in text messages that would trigger Fourth Amendment protection.”

The issue will attract attention on Thursday when a Senate committee considers limited changes to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a 1986 law that regulates how the government can monitor digital communications. Courts have used it to permit warrantless surveillance of certain kinds of cellphone data. A proposed amendment would require the police to obtain a warrant to search e-mail, no matter how old it was, updating a provision that currently allows warrantless searches of e-mails more than 180 days old.

As technology races ahead of the law, courts and lawmakers are still trying to figure out how to think about the often intimate data that cellphones contain, said Peter P. Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University. Neither the 1986 statute nor the Constitution, he said, could have anticipated how much information cellphones are privy to, including detailed records of people’s travels and diagrams of their friends.

“It didn’t take into account what the modern cellphone has — your location, the content of communications that are easily readable, including Facebook posts, chats, texts and all that stuff,” Mr. Swire said.

Courts have also issued divergent rulings on when and how cellphones can be inspected. An Ohio court ruled that the police needed a warrant to search a cellphone because, unlike a piece of paper that might be stuffed inside a suspect’s pocket and can be confiscated during an arrest, a cellphone may hold “large amounts of private data.”

But California’s highest court said the police could look through a cellphone without a warrant so long as the phone was with the suspect at the time of arrest.

Judges across the country have written tomes about whether a cellphone is akin to a “container” — like a suitcase stuffed with marijuana that the police might find in the trunk of a car — or whether, as the judge in the Rhode Island murder case suggested, it is more comparable to a face-to-face conversation. That judge, Judith C. Savage, described text messages as “raw, unvarnished and immediate, revealing the most intimate of thoughts and emotions.” That is why, she said, citizens can reasonably expect them to be private.

There is little disagreement about the value of cellphone data to the police. In response to a Congressional inquiry, cellphone carriers said they responded in 2011 to 1.3 million demands from law enforcement agencies for text messages and other information about subscribers.

Among the most precious information in criminal inquiries is the location of suspects, and when it comes to location records captured by smartphones, court rulings have also been inconsistent. Privacy advocates say a trail of where people go is inherently private, while law enforcement authorities say that consumers have no privacy claim over signals transmitted from an individual mobile device to a phone company’s communications tower, which they refer to as third-party data.

Delaware, Maryland and Oklahoma have proposed legislation that would require the police to obtain a warrant before demanding location records from cellphone carriers. California passed such a law in August after intense lobbying by privacy advocates, including Mr. Fakhoury’s group. But Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, vetoed the bill, questioning whether it struck “the right balance between the operational needs of law enforcement and individual expectations of privacy.”

Similar legislation has been proposed in Congress.

Lacking a clear federal statute, the courts have been unable to reach a consensus. In Texas, a federal appeals court said this year that law enforcement officials did not need a warrant to track suspects through cellphones. In Louisiana, another federal appeals court is considering a similar case. Prosecutors are arguing that location information is part of cellphone carriers’ business records and thus not constitutionally protected.

The Supreme Court has not directly tackled the issue, except to declare, in a landmark ruling this year, that the police must obtain a search warrant to install a GPS tracking device on someone’s private property.

“We are in a constitutional moment for location tracking,” said Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. “It’s percolating in all these places.”

The Rhode Island case began shortly after 6 a.m. on a Sunday in October 2009, when Trisha Oliver called 911 to say that her son, Marco Nieves, 6, was unconscious in his bed. An ambulance rushed the boy to the hospital. A police officer also responded to the call, and Ms. Oliver escorted him through the bedrooms of her apartment. She then went to the hospital, leaving the police officer behind.

The officer heard a “beeping” in the kitchen, according to court papers. He picked up an LG-brand cellphone from the counter and saw this message: “Wat if I got 2 take him 2 da hospital wat do I say and dos marks on his neck omg.” It appeared to be from Ms. Oliver to her boyfriend, Michael Patino, court documents said.

Mr. Patino, 30, who was in the apartment at the time, was taken to the police station for questioning. The cellphone he had with him was seized. By evening, the boy was dead. The cause of death, according to court records, was “blunt force trauma to the abdomen which perforated his small intestine.”

Mr. Patino was charged with Marco’s murder.

In the course of the investigation, the police obtained more than a dozen search warrants for the cellphones of Mr. Patino, Ms. Oliver and their relatives. They also obtained records of phone calls and voice mail messages from the cellphone carriers.

Nearly three years later, in a 190-page ruling, Judge Savage sharply criticized the police.

The first police officer had no right to look at the phone without a search warrant, Judge Savage ruled. It was not in “plain view,” she wrote, nor did Ms. Oliver give her consent to search it. The court said Mr. Patino could reasonably have expected the text messages he exchanged with Ms. Oliver to be free from police scrutiny.

The judge then suppressed the bounty of evidence that the prosecution had secured through warrants, including the text message that had initially drawn the police officer’s attention.

“Given the amount of private information that can be readily gleaned from the contents of a person’s cellphone and text messages — and the heightened concerns for privacy as a result — this court will not expand the warrantless search exceptions to include the search of a cellphone and the viewing of text messages,” she wrote.

Mr. Patino remains in jail while the case is on appeal in the state’s Supreme Court. A lawyer for Mr. Patino did not respond to a request for comment.

Just months before Judge Savage’s ruling, the Rhode Island legislature passed a law compelling the police to obtain a warrant to search a cellphone, even if they find it during an arrest. Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee, an independent, vetoed the bill, saying, “The courts, and not the legislature, are better suited to resolve these complex and case-specific issues.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/t...islatures.html





City Is Amassing Trove of Cellphone Logs
Joseph Goldstein

When a cellphone is reported stolen in New York, the Police Department routinely subpoenas the phone’s call records, from the day of the theft onward. The logic is simple: If a thief uses the phone, a list of incoming and outgoing calls could lead to the suspect.

But in the process, the Police Department has quietly amassed a trove of telephone logs, all obtained without a court order, that could conceivably be used for any investigative purpose.

The call records from the stolen cellphones are integrated into a database known as the Enterprise Case Management System, according to Police Department documents from the detective bureau. Each phone number is hyperlinked, enabling detectives to cross-reference it against phone numbers in other files.

The subpoenas not only cover the records of the thief’s calls, but also encompass calls to and from the victim on the day of the theft. In some cases the records can include calls made to and from a victim’s new cellphone, if the stolen phone’s number has been transferred, three detectives said in interviews.

Police officials declined to say how many phone records are contained in the database, or how often they might have led to arrests. But police documents suggest that thousands of subpoenas have been issued each year, with each encompassing anywhere from dozens to hundreds of phone calls.

For example, T-Mobile, which has a smaller market share than some of its competitors, like Verizon, fulfilled 297 police subpoenas issued in January 2012, according to a police document.

To date, phone companies have appeared willing to accede to the Police Department’s requests for large swaths of call records. Memos issued Sept. 28 by the chief of detectives, Phil T. Pulaski, instruct detectives to prepare subpoenas for stolen phones assigned to AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile or Metro-PCS. With these carriers, the police do not generally seek the victims’ consent; in fact, the subpoenas are executed without the victims’ knowledge. (It does not appear that subpoenas are issued when the stolen phone is served by Sprint Nextel. In those cases, detectives are instructed to ask the victim to fill out consent forms that authorize Sprint Nextel to release call records and location information to the police.)

“If large amounts of victim phone records are being collected and added to a searchable database, it’s very troubling,” said Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who represents wireless carriers, in a phone interview.

“We’re all used to the concept of growing databases of criminal information,” Mr. Sussmann, of the firm Perkins Coie, said, “but now you’re crossing over that line and drawing in victim information.”

Police officials would not say if detectives had used the call records of any cellphone theft victims in the course of investigating other crimes. Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, did not reply to more than half a dozen requests for comments.

The practice of accumulating the phone numbers in a searchable database is “eye-opening and alarming,” a civil rights lawyer, Norman Siegel, said when told of the protocol for subpoenaing phone records. “There is absolutely no legitimate purpose for doing this. If I’m an innocent New Yorker, why should any of my information be in a police database?”

Mr. Siegel also said the Police Department should not be permitted to hold on to phone records indefinitely if the records were not relevant to active criminal investigations.

Nationwide, cellphone carriers reported receiving about 1.5 million requests from law enforcement for various types of subscriber information in 2011.

Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who is co-chairman of the Bipartisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, began seeking information this year about how cellular carriers handle law enforcement’s requests for subscriber information. And on Thursday, a Senate committee will consider changes to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

Mr. Sussmann suggested that the Police Department could limit its subpoenas to phone calls beginning on the hour, not the day, of the theft, and ending as soon as the victim has transferred the number to a new phone.

According to documents reviewed by The New York Times, the police subpoenas seek call records associated with the telephone number of the stolen phone.

As a result, three detectives said in interviews, the phone companies’ response sometimes includes call records for not only the stolen phone, but also the victim’s new phone, depending on variables like how quickly the victim transfers the old phone number to a new handset and how many days of calls the subpoena seeks.

One detective said the subpoenas from recent cases typically requested about four days of phone records, but documents reviewed by The Times indicate that the subpoenas can cover longer periods, sometimes as much as two weeks or more.

In interviews, detectives said that if an arrest occurs, it is often a result of earlier investigative steps. Chief Pulaski’s memos from Sept. 28 instruct detectives to use any tracking or location application on the victim’s phone to track down a suspect. Victims are asked to immediately call the phone carrier and learn the details of any phone calls placed after the theft. In addition, detectives ask the victim not to transfer their phone number to a new phone for about four days. Finally, detectives are then required to prepare a subpoena, the results of which usually take a few weeks.

By then, most of the unsolved phone cases have been put on the back burner, and the subpoenaed records seldom lead to an arrest, four current and retired detectives said in interviews.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/n...hone-logs.html





Saudi Regulator Suspends Mobily from Selling SIM Cards
Matt Smith

Etihad Etisalat Co (Mobily), Saudi Arabia's second-biggest telecoms operator, has asked to meet the industry regulator after it was suspended from selling pre-paid SIM cards, a company spokesman said, describing the ban as "astonishing".

Mobily's sales of pre-paid, or pay-as-you-go SIM cards will remain halted until the company "fully meets the pre-paid service provisioning requirements," the firm said in a statement.

"We're not sure when we can resume selling pre-paid SIM cards," said a company spokesman. We've requested a meeting with the CITC governor today to find out what's going on," he added, in reference to the regulator.

In an earlier order the Communication and Information Technology Commission said that from September 28 all pre-paid SIM users must enter a personal identification number when recharging their accounts and this number must be the same as the one registered with their mobile operator when the SIM card was bought.

This applies not only to Mobily but also to rival operators Saudi Telecom Co (STC) and Zain Saudi.

"This isn't just about Mobily - other operators also haven't complied and so we're astonished we've been singled out," said Mobily's spokesman. "We've done a huge campaign to inform customers about the ID requirement."

The company has yet to comply with the order because not all customers have updated their details, he said.

Mobily said the financial impact of the CITC's decision would be "insignificant", claiming data, corporate and "post-paid" contract revenues would be its main growth drivers.

"This could have a significant impact on Mobily's Q4 earnings - it depends on how quickly the company resolves this," said Asim Bukhtiar, Riyad Capital's head of research.

"Newcomers and visitors buy new SIM cards and if Mobily can't target this market it will affect the business."

The new SIM registration requirements are a security measure.

"From a CITC perspective it gives them better information on who is using pre-paid cards - there were a lot of SIM cards floating around that were not registered to anyone," added Bukhtiar.

Pre-paid mobile subscriptions are typically more popular among middle and lower income groups, with telecom operators pushing customers to shift to monthly contracts that include a data allowance.

Shares in Mobily, which reported an estimate-beating 23 percent rise in third-quarter profits in October, were down 2.1 percent at 1202 GMT on the Saudi bourse.

No one at STC or Zain Saudi was immediately available for comment.

(Reporting by Matt Smith; Editing by Greg Mahlich)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8AO02R20121125





Nokia Announces Asha 205, Asha 206 Phones with ‘Slam’ File Sharing
Rajat Agrawal

Nokia today announced two new additions to its wildly popular Asha series of entry-level smart-enough phones. The Asha 205 sports a QWERTY keyboard with a dedicated Facebook button while the Asha 206 has an alphanumeric keypad and comes with a battery the company claims will provide up to 47 days of standby time. Both phones will come in single and dual SIM versions. Nokia has also introduced a new file-sharing service called ‘Slam’ that transfers data between Bluetooth-enabled phones without the need to pair the two devices.

The Asha 205 features a 2.4-inch QVGA display, GPRS/EDGE connectivity, a VGA camera, microSD card slot that can accommodate up to 32GB cards and will come in Cyan. Magenta and Orange color options. As mentioned earlier, it comes with a dedicated Facebook button. The single-SIM version has a standby of 37 days while the dual-SIM version has a 25 days standby time. It is expected to be priced around $62 (approximately Rs 3,500).

The Asha 206 also sports a 2.4-inch QVGA display but in portrait mode, has an alphanumeric keypad and a 1.3-megapixel camera. It also has loud speakers while rest of the features are similar to the Asha 205. Nokia claims its battery will provide a standby of up to 47 days in the single-SIM variant and up to 28 days in the dual-SIM variant. The Asha 206 will be available in Cyan, Magenta and Yellow colors. It too is expected to be priced around $62 (approximately Rs 3,500).

Like most Asha series phones, these two will also get 40 free EA games and have access to the Nokia Store. They also have Twitter, Facebook and eBuddy messenger pre-installed.

Nokia Asha 205 specifications

• Dimensions: 113 x 61 x 13 mm
• Weight: 94 grams
• Display: 2.4-inch 65K color QVGA landscape
• Memory: Up to 10MB free user memory, microSD card slot (up to 32GB)
• Camera: VGA
• Connectivity: GPRS/EDGE, 2.0mm charger connector, Bluetooth v2.1 with EDR, 3.5mm AV connector
• Battery: BL-5C, 1020 mAh

Nokia Asha 206 specifications

• Dimensions: 116 x 49.4 x 12.4 mm
• Weight: 91 grams
• Display: 2.4-inch 65K color QVGA landscape
• Memory: Up to 10MB free user memory, microSD card slot (up to 32GB)
• Camera: 1.3-megapixels
• Connectivity: GPRS/EDGE, 2.0mm charger connector, Bluetooth v2.1 with EDR, 3.5mm AV connector

http://www.bgr.in/manufacturers/noki...-file-sharing/





Apple Takes Smartphone Top Spot from Google in U.S. – Research

Early success for the iPhone 5 smartphone has helped Apple to overtake Google's Android software in the United States, research firm Kantar WorldPanel said on Tuesday.

Apple's U.S. market share in the 12 weeks to October 31 more than doubled from a year ago to 48.1 percent, putting it within reach of the record 49.3 percent it managed in early 2012.

Android's share dropped to 46.7 percent from 63.3 percent, Kantar WorldPanel's data showed, but it continues to dominate in key European markets. The platform 74 percent market share in Germany and 82 percent in Spain.

Its combined share of the top five European markets rose to 64 percent, from 51 percent a year earlier, while Apple's share edged up by one percentage point to 21 percent.

(Reporting By Tarmo Virki; Editing by David Goodman)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8AQ0M020121127





The Android Engagement Paradox
Horace Dediu

IBM’s Digital Analytics Benchmark reported US Black Friday sales and the news is reasonably good. Overall online sales grew by 17.4% while mobile grew to make up 24% of traffic.

The data goes further to show the split between device types. I illustrate this split with the following graphs:

Of the 24% of traffic made up by mobile devices, phones contributed 13% and tablets 11% (or 54% and 46% of mobile respectively). Of the phone traffic, iOS devices were about two thirds of traffic and Android one third. Of tablet traffic, iPad was 88%, Kindle and Nook were 5.5% Galaxy Tab was 1.8% and other tablets were 4.4%.

Overall, iOS was 77% generated mobile traffic and Android (excl. Kindle, Nook) was 23%.

That’s an interesting snapshot of the consumption of mobile devices, but is there a pattern here? I also took a look at the same data from 2011 and 2010.

Besides the pattern of significant mobile growth (from 5.2% to 24% of online in two years) there is the curious effect of iOS growth outpacing Android growth. Android went from 1.43% of Black Friday shopping traffic in 2010 to 4.92% in 2012. In same time iOS went from 3.85% to 18.46%. In other words, while Android is up by a factor of 3.4, iOS is up by a factor of 4.8.

The reason is evident in the graphs above: the iPad is now the predominant mobile shopping device. You can observe the pattern in the following graph:

Two years ago the iPad was trailing Android usage but this year it was more than twice Android usage. Curiously, the iPhone seems to also be pulling ahead of Android.

Curiously because the number of Android users in the US has gone the other way. That data is available from ComScore, though only for phones. (ComScore data for periods ending November each year, Nov 2012 is my estimate):

Having the number of users and the traffic allows us to measure consumption per capita, so to speak. That is, the percent of traffic per device user:

The ratio shown is basis points of usage (1/100 of 1% of shopping traffic) per million users of smartphones. iPhone users are about three times more engaged in shopping with their devices than Android users. Two years ago the ratio was two to one.

Overall iPad is changing shopping habits, but it has a near monopoly in its form factor at this point. The bigger question is what is causing phone users to behave differently based on the devices they own. The phone market is more mature and has had several years of competition to be able to discern differences in platforms. The pattern is pretty clear with respect to Android: engagement is down as ownership is up. This pattern has not exhibited itself with iPhone, even though it has had a longer time in market.

Of course, one would expect that later adopters would engage less, but I find it surprising that US Android users would behave so differently only two years after the platform began to be widely adopted. That pattern is not happening with iOS even after five years and certainly not with the iPad which is about as old as most Android brands.

This I consider to be a paradox: Why is Android attracting late adopters (or at least late adopter behavior) when the market is still emergent? We’ve become accustomed to thinking that platforms that look similar are used in a similar fashion. But this is clearly not the case. The shopping data is only one proxy but there are others: developers and publishers have been reporting distinct differences in consumption on iOS vs. Android and, although anecdotal, the examples continue to pile up.

And engagement is not a frivolous platform attribute. It is highly causal to success because it correlates with all cash flows associated with ecosystem value creation. Especially when a platform like Android depends more on engagement than “monetizing hardware.”

I’m not satisfied with the explanation that Android users are demographically different because the Android user pool is now so vast and because the most popular devices are not exactly cheap. There is something else at play. It might be explained by design considerations or by user experience flaws or integration but something is different.
http://www.asymco.com/2012/11/26/the...ement-paradox/





Microsoft Says It Has Sold 40 Million Windows 8 Licenses
Alexandra Chang

Microsoft has sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses in the month since it launched, suggesting that the operating system is selling faster, and in larger numbers, than Windows 7.

Microsoft executive Tami Reller announced the milestone at the Credit Suisse 2012 Annual Technology Conference, and the company reiterated it Tuesday in a blog post that said, “Windows 8 is outpacing Windows 7 in terms of upgrades.”

This is the first sales figure Microsoft has shared since CEO Steve Ballmer said the company had gotten 4 million Windows 8 upgrades in four days, and it must be taken with a big spoonful of salt. Microsoft did not specify how Windows 8 devices are selling in comparison to past launch devices. Nor did it say whether Windows 8 is selling below expectations, as recent reports have suggested. The catch in all of this is that 40 million figure includes all of the licenses Microsoft has sold, including to manufacturers building Windows 8 hardware. That means many of those 40 million copies of Windows 8 haven’t actually made their way into consumers’ hands.

Microsoft also emphasized that its Windows Store is growing in conjunction with Windows 8 growth. A report from app analytics company Distimo suggests the same thing and notes that millions of people who have upgraded to Windows 8 are downloading Windows Store apps at a healthy rate. The top 300 apps in the Windows Store have an average of 200,000 downloads per day. The top 300 apps in the Mac App Store see around 80,000 daily downloads, the firm said.

The Windows Store had grown to 21,183 apps by Nov. 22, according to Distimo’s data. That puts the Windows Store at more than twice the size it was at launch on Oct. 26 and more robust than the Mac App Store, which has around 13,000 apps. Still, it’s significantly lower than the 600,000-plus apps available in the Apple App Store and Google Play. Since the Windows Store covers both desktop computers and tablets and the Windows Phone Store offers apps for smartphones, it’s somewhat difficult to compare the various available app stores across platforms.

Missing from Distimo’s report, however, is the total download rate for both stores. Distimo does mention that when it comes to paid apps, the Mac App Store is still performing much better than the Windows Store, with five times as many downloads. While Windows 8 users are downloading plenty of apps, they aren’t necessarily paying much, or anything, for them.

Microsoft’s Windows Store has significantly fewer paid apps than its competitors. Paid apps make up only 14 percent of the Windows Store, compared to the 35 percent in Google Play and 84 percent in Apple’s App Store. Microsoft did not specify how much revenue the Windows Store has made, but noted “a number of apps in the Windows Store have crossed the $25,000 revenue mark and the developer keeps 80 percent of the revenue they make off downloads for the life of their app.” Download rates of paid apps, however, are much lower than download rates of free apps.

More notable is that Windows 8 users are actually active on the Windows Store, which will likely convince developers who have been hesitant to build for the nascent platform.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/...sales-figures/





NPD: U.S. Windows Device Sales Down 21% On Last Year; Windows 8 Tablet Sales “Almost Non-Existent”
Ingrid Lunden

Microsoft earlier this week made a point of noting that there have been 40 million downloads of Windows 8 since it launched a month ago, putting it ahead of where Windows 7 was at the same point in its sales cycle. But according to figures out today from NPD, in the midst of an overall slowdown in PC sales, this is not translating into robust hardware sales in the influential U.S. market.

U.S. sales of Windows devices in the last month are down by 21% compared to the same period a year ago, with Windows-powered notebooks — generally in decline since the rise of tablets and smartphones — down by 24%. Desktop devices were down, too, but less, at 9%.

It gets worse. Microsoft has make a big bet on the touchscreen and tablets with Windows 8, but so far, NPD’s Stephen Baker says that Windows 8 tablet sales “have been almost non-existent.” Unit sales, he says, have been less than 1% of all Windows 8 device sales to date. The caveat is that NPD’s numbers do not include sales of Microsot’s own tablet, the Surface. (We are contacting Baker at NPD to see if he can give more detail on how those are selling and why they have been left out.)

So do these numbers indicate that — despite the record-breaking sales we’ve seen so far for online shopping this holiday season, which often gives an annual boost to the consumer electronics industry — Microsoft has a turkey on its hands in the form of Windows 8? Not exactly, says NPD. The problems could be just as attributable to a sluggish market at this point.

“After just four weeks on the market, it’s still early to place blame on Windows 8 for the ongoing weakness in the PC market,” writes Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD. “We still have the whole holiday selling season ahead of us, but clearly Windows 8 did not prove to be the impetus for a sales turnaround some had hoped for.”

There are still devices being sold with earlier versions of Windows, and NPD says that since launch Windows 8 hasn’t been performing as well against legacy equipment, compared to the same period in the Windows 7 sales cycle. It says 58% of Windows devices sold are loaded with Windows 8, versu 83% powered by Windows 7 one month after its launch.

“The bad Back-to-School period left a lot of inventory in the channel,” Baker explains.

Silver lining: hybrid devices — notebooks with touchscreens, such as the Asus Transformer, pictured — seemed to be doing alright. Yes, they accounted for just 6% of notebook sales, but with an average price of $867 (compared to $433 across all Windows devices) they show that there is at least some appetite for premium products, an area where Windows OEMs traditionally compete against Apple.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/29/npd...-non-existent/





Is Windows 8 Winning? Microsoft Says Yes; Data Say No
Mark Hachman

How is Microsoft’s Windows 8 faring? Reading the tea leaves, it appears that Steve Ballmer’s “modest” comment appears to be on point - or maybe even a bit optimistic.

A number of data points have surfaced that seem to confirm earlier reports that while Microsoft’s own hardware is selling fairly well, third-party hardware is struggling. On the other hand, some people with existing Windows 7 hardware appear to be upgrading their PCs.

On Tuesday, newly appointed Windows chief marketing officer Tami Reller told investors at a Credit Suisse technology conference that Microsoft has sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses since the company launched the new operating system 32 days earlier, on Oct. 26. For reference, Microsoft chief executive Ballmer said at the Build conference at the end of October that Microsoft had sold four million Windows 8 upgrades in just four days.

But Asus chief financial officer David Chang told The Wall Street Journal that sales of Windows 8 notebooks have struggled, and declined to release sales data. “Demand for Windows 8 is not that good right now,” Chang said.

During the third quarter, the worldwide PC market had already shrunk 8.1% versus 2011, as consumers held off purchasing new PCs until the launch of Windows 8. At least anecdotally, the fourth quarter isn’t expected to be much better.

“The launch has been somewhat of a challenge, which has been reflected in all the views we’ve been getting from a variety of angles,” said David Daoud, research director of personal computing at IDC, in an interview Thursday. “ And if you triangulate, it confirms or justifies the views that it’s going to be a weak quarter.”

Daoud declined to release the shipment data that the firm has collected, but said that information out of Asia - which builds most of the actual PCs that ship with labels from Dell, HP, Lenovo and others - hasn’t been good.

The comments by Chang and Daoud echo what Newegg’s Merle McIntosh told ReadWrite: that Windows 8 sales have been “slow going,” and that hardware sales were similarly slow, though steadily increasing.

The License Question

The problem, of course, is that no one’s quite sure of what’s being discussed. Microsoft “sells licenses,” certainly, but it’s unclear whether those licenses were sold to OEMs, who may or many not have deployed them as PCs, or whether they’ve “sold through,” as it were, to consumers. And Microsoft has attempted to spin its own sales on a positive note.

There’s also a slight difference in comparing Ballmer’s comments with those of Reller, since one is talking about upgrades, and the other, total licenses. Again, the problem is this: if that number already takes into account the so-called “tens of millions” of Windows 8 licenses that Microsoft has already sold to OEMs - and don’t have to install - then the new number doesn’t prove that Windows 8 sales are on the rise. But if it does reflect “new” demand, then it may be fair to say that Windows 8 is succeeding.

Windows 8 vs. Windows 7

Here's another way to look at it: On March 4, 2010, Microsoft announced that it had sold more than 90 million Windows 7 licenses, 133 days (about 4 months, 10 days) after Windows 7 launched on Oct. 22, 2009. For comparison, Microsoft has sold an average of 1.25 million licenses per day for Windows 8; Microsoft sold an average of 0.67 million licenses per day for Windows 7.

According to Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc, who cited Reller's comments, Windows 8 is outpacing Windows 7 in terms of upgrades.

While that's impressive, it can also be partially accounted for by the increase in the total number of PCs in the market: At the end of 2009, when Windows 7 launched, the global installed base of PCs was estimated to be 1.25 billion PC. From the available data, that figure has remained relatively static, as older PCs have been scrapped, but a smaller amount has been sold. In 2011, Gartner estimated the 2010 installed PC base at 1.4 billion units, increasing to 2.3 billion by 2015. (Since then, however, analyst firms have also increasingly begun to lump Windows Phone and Windows 7 and 8 devices together, reflecting the rise of tablets and smartphones as full-fledged computing devices.)

Nowhere To Go But Up?

Ballmer’s “modest” comment reportedly applied only to sales of Microsoft’s Surface tablet - and the company said it applied only to Surface with Windows RT sales in the United States and Canada, at that.

But maybe there’s another comment that we should be paying attention to.

“We see nothing but a sea of upside!” Ballmer said in response to one of the shareholders at the company’s shareholder meeting on Wednesday. While that’s usually an optimistic statement, it could also reflect a new reality: with Windows 8, Microsoft is at the bottom, and looking up.

But here's the real bottom line: until Microsoft reports actual sales numbers in January during its quarterly report, we just don't know.

Bonus Data: How Folks Are Using Windows 8

Microsoft has also shared some usage data about how Windows 8 is used on the first day: More than 90% of customers use the charms - like Search and Share; more than 85% launch the desktop; and half visit the Windows Store.
http://readwrite.com/2012/11/29/is-w...es-data-say-no





Intel Kills Off the Desktop, PCs Go With It

Analysis: Broadwell has no socket, PCs have no relevance
Charlie Demerjian

Intel is killing the desktop, but not quite as soon as people expect it to, there will be one last gasp, but that is irrelevant. Word is finally leaking there won’t be a desktop PC chip in a bit over a year.

In a story that SemiAccurate has been following for several months, Broadwell will not come in an LGA package, so no removable CPU. The news was first publicly broken by the ever sharp PC Watch, english version here, but the news has been floating in the backchannel for a bit now. The problem? This information wasn’t floating around the OEMs or the majority of the PC ecosystem, they had no clue. What does all of this mean? Quite a bit.

The most direct effect is that of Broadwell, the 14nm successor to next year’s Haswell CPU, will essentially shut out the enthusiast. Motherboards will still be available, but the CPUs that come with them will be soldered down. In addition to being a inventory management nightmare, OEMs won’t buy CPUs any more, the few remaining mobo vendors and ODMs will. As a side effect, it also cuts the enthusiast out of the picture for good, but more on that later.

Normally, you would expect Intel to tell the companies that are affected, the Asuses, Gigabytes, MSIs, and maybe Asrocks if they are still around, well ahead of time. This time Intel didn’t, and that should tell you a great deal about their intentions. At least a few key PC players found out from SemiAccurate a few months ago, and they were rather incredulous about the news. This state of mind has probably changed to a state a bit past peeved by now, their entire business is about to be gutted. Intel didn’t just do a bad job of messaging this one, they didn’t do any job of it.

Will Intel cut out the mobo makers entirely and just do everything themselves? Grabbing more of the pie seems to be their forte of late, but cutting out everyone but the physical assembly guys seems to be a bit of a stretch in the short term. SemiAccurate suspects that this decision has not been made, but expect Intel to gut the mobo makers influence one way or the other, they are currently seen by Santa Clara as having too much power. This is not going to be pretty no matter how it ends up.

That brings us to the next issue at hand, enthusiasts. They are pretty much dead, not that Intel seems to care. Since they nearly destroyed that nascent market with Nehalem, and have since progressively removed any features the enthusiast cares about while jacking the cost to buy them back to untenable levels, enthusiasts have become an endangered species. Unfortunately Intel doesn’t care about the enthusiast, and unsurprisingly they have moved on. ARM chips are now the focus for that crowd, and they are taking the mainstream geeks with them. Broadwell will end it for good, but….

SemiAccurate has been chasing the last bit of this story for several weeks, there is a very good chance that Broadwell’s successor, Sky Lake, will bring back a socketed CPU. Unfortunately it will only be for a generation, possibly two, nothing permanent. By then, the last remaining overclockers and experimenters on the PC front will be gone, and for good technical reasons. Increasing integration will make this minor backpedalling step a rather moot point, there won’t be anything left to tweak, and any headroom will have been screened out at the fab prior to fuses being blown. Worse yet, margin requirements will effectively make it not worth extreme cost. Haswell is the end of the line, if Sky Lake does backpedal a bit, it will be a form factor change only, not a philosophical one.

And so the PC ends with a whimper, not a bang. Broadwell will be available in a ‘desktop’ variant as well as a laptop version, but neither will be socketed. There are a lot of good technical reasons to release it only as an embedded and mobile CPU, but not for anyone other than Intel. They want more of the PC ecosystem, and are taking it. Enthusiasts have been written off, and the rest of the ecosystem is being preemptively kneecapped in case they try to step out of line. The desktop is dead, and with it, PCs become irrelevant, mobile or not.S|A

Updated 11/26/12@3:25pm: One point to add, two OEMs have confirmed to SemiAccurate that they have now been briefed that Broadwell is BGA only. This was done weeks after we first told them about the problem.
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/11/26/i...cs-go-with-it/





Study Finds Rise in Texting Even as Revenue Drops
Brian X. Chen

A new report finds that certain activities that people do on a cellphone, like taking a picture and shooting video, have increased significantly in the last few years. Texting, in particular, has grown considerably — but not texting in the traditional sense.

The Pew Research Center published a study over the weekend that showed that the number of cellphone owners who text on their phones has grown to 80 percent from 58 percent in 2007.

As I reported this month, traditional text messaging — the kind where you pay to send messages over the phone network — recently declined for the first time in the United States, following a trend in countries around the world, like the Philippines and Finland, according to Chetan Sharma, an independent mobile analyst. As a result, the money that carriers earn from text messaging has been dropping, too.

So how could texting be on the rise? Instead of sending traditional text messages, cellphone owners are shifting toward Internet-based messaging services, like Apple’s iMessage, Facebook messaging and WhatsApp, Mr. Sharma says. These services are popular because they don’t charge per text; they are gradually redefining what we think of as text messaging.

The Pew study also found that the number of cellphone owners who use phones to send e-mail has jumped to 50 percent from 19 percent in 2007, and the number of cellphone owners using phones to shoot video has risen to 44 percent from 18 percent five years ago. The number of cellphone owners who use their phones to download apps is 43 percent, up from 22 percent in 2009. All these factors are directly correlated with the rise of the smartphone — more than 50 percent of American cellphone owners own one, according to Nielsen.

“Cell users now treat their gadget as a body appendage,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center, in a statement. “There is striking growth in the number of people who are taking advantage of the growing number of functions that these phones can perform, and there isn’t much evidence yet that the pace of change is slowing down.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/1...study-texting/





Adblock Plus for Android Kills Mobile Ads in All Your Apps
Alan Henry

Android: If you love Adblock Plus on the desktop, now you can take it with you on your Android phone. Adblock Plus for Android blocks ads on sites while you browse and even suppresses ads inside of ad-supported applications. Best of all, it's completely free.

Adblock Plus for Android doesn't require root access to your phone to suppress ads, but works best if your device is rooted. If you're rooted, it'll suppress ads over 3G/4G and Wi-Fi with no additional configuration required. If you're not rooted and you're running Ice Cream Sandwich, it'll block ads over Wi-Fi but not 3G/4G. If your device is running Gingerbread or earlier, you'll have to set up Adblock's proxy manually to get it to work. Speaking of proxies, that's how Adblock Plus for Android manages to strip out all of those ads: it routes all of your traffic through a local proxy on your device (update: the AdBlock team wanted to clarify: the proxy is set up locally on your device and updated periodically, your traffic is not sent to them.) their servers, and removes the ads before it gets to your phone.

I've been testing builds of Adblock Plus for Android for months now, and the app has come a long way. The app is still a little quirky, especially when your the local proxy stops working and you wonder for a few moments, frustrated, why none of your apps are refreshing and why your sites won't load, but restarting the app or your phone usually takes care of it. It works as advertised though, and once installed allows you to choose which blocking list you want to use (Fanboy's List is the default, but EasyList and other specific regional lists are also available.)

I still had an app here and there where some ads snuck through, and it's important to note that the only reason so many great Android apps remain free are because the ads support the developers, so keep that in mind. If you're tired of obtrusive and annoying mobile ads in your favorite apps though (or your favorite apps are ad-supported and you couldn't buy pro versions even if you wanted to,) Adblock Plus for Android is worth a look.
http://lifehacker.com/5963428/adbloc...-all-your-apps





Professor Finds Profiling in Ads for Personal Data Website
Adam Tanner

Dr. Latisha Smith, an expert in decompression sicknesses afflicting deep sea divers, has cleared criminal background checks throughout her medical career. Yet someone searching the Web for the Washington State physician might well come across an Internet ad suggesting she may have an arrest record.

"Latisha Smith, arrested?" reads one such advertisement.

Another says: "Latisha Smith Truth... Check Latisha Smith's Arrests."

Instantcheckmate.com, which labels itself the "Internet's leading authority on background checks," placed both ads. A statistical analysis of the company's advertising has found it has disproportionately used ad copy including the word "arrested" for black-identifying names, even when a person has no arrest record.

Latanya Sweeney is a Harvard University professor of government with a doctorate in computer science. After learning that her own name had popped up in an "arrested?" ad when a colleague was searching for one of her academic publications, she ran more than 120,000 searches for names primarily given to either black or white children, testing ads delivered for 2,400 real names 50 times each. (The author of this story is a Harvard University fellow collaborating with Professor Sweeney on a book about the business of personal data.)

Ebony Jefferson, for example, often turns up an instantcheckmate.com ad reading: "Ebony Jefferson, arrested?" but an ad triggered by a search for Emily Jefferson would read: "We found Emily Jefferson." Searches for randomly chosen black-identifying names such as Deshawn Williams, Latisha Smith or Latanya Smith often produced the "arrested?" headline or ad text with the word "arrest," whereas other less ethnic-sounding first names matched with the same surnames typically did not.

"As an African-American, I'm used to profiling like that," said Dr. Smith. "I think it's horrendous that they get away with it."

Instantcheckmate.com declined to comment. The company's founder and managing partner, Kristian Kibak, did not respond to repeated emails and phone calls over a period of several months, and other employees referred calls to management. Company officials also declined to comment when visited twice at their call center in Las Vegas. Former employees said they had signed nondisclosure agreements that barred them from speaking openly about Instant Checkmate.

Instantcheckmate.com is one of many data brokers that use and sell data for a variety of purposes. The field is attracting growing attention, both from government and consumers concerned about possible abuse. Rapid advances in technology have opened up all sorts of opportunities for commercialization of data.

Anyone can set up shop and sell arrest records as long as they stay clear of U.S. legal limitations such as using the information to determine creditworthiness, insurance or job suitability.

Companies that compete with instantcheckmate.com include intelius.com and mylife.com. An examination of Internet advertising starting last March as well as Sweeney's study did not find any rival companies advertising background searches on individual names along racial lines.

WHO CAN BE TRUSTED?

In its own marketing, Instantcheckmate.com sums up its mission like this: "Parents will no longer need to wonder about whether their neighbors, friends, home day care providers, a former spouse's new love interest or preschool providers can be trusted to care for their children responsibly."

According to preliminary findings of Professor Sweeney's research, searches of names assigned primarily to black babies, such as Tyrone, Darnell, Ebony and Latisha, generated "arrest" in the instantcheckmate.com ad copy between 75 percent and 96 percent of the time. Names assigned at birth primarily to whites, such as Geoffrey, Brett, Kristen and Anne, led to more neutral copy, with the word "arrest" appearing between zero and 9 percent of the time.

A few names fell outside of these patterns: Brad, a name predominantly given to white babies, produced an ad with the word "arrest" 62 percent to 65 percent of the time. Sweeney found that ads appear regardless of whether the name has an arrest record attached to it.

Blacks make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population but account for 28 percent of the arrests listed on the FBI's most recent annual crime statistics.

Internet advertising based on millions of name pairs has only existed in recent years, so targeting ads along racial lines raises new legal questions. Experts say the Federal Trade Commission, which this year assessed an $800,000 penalty against personal data site Spokeo.com for different reasons (related to the use of data for job-vetting purposes), would be the institution best placed to review Instant Checkmate's practices.

The FTC enforces regulations against unfair or deceptive business practices. A deceptive claim that would be more likely to get people to purchase a product than they would otherwise would be a typical reason the FTC might act against a company, said one FTC official who did not want to be identified. For example, authorities could take action against a firm that makes misleading claims suggesting a product such as records exist when they do not.

"It's disturbing," Julie Brill, an FTC commissioner, said of Instant Checkmate's advertising. "I don't know if it's illegal ... It's something that we'd need to study to see if any enforcement action is needed."

Instant Checkmate's Kibak, who is in his late 20s, works out of a San Diego office near the Pacific Ocean. The son of a California biology professor, he did not respond to repeated phone calls and emails seeking comment about his business.

"We would consider the answers to most of your questions trade secrets and therefore would not be comfortable disclosing that information," Joey Rocco, Kibak's partner according to the firm's Nevada state registration, said in an email.

Instant Checkmate LLC maintains its official corporate headquarters at an address in an industrial zone across the highway from the Las Vegas strip. At the back of a long parking lot, the company shares a warehouse building with an auto repair shop. At one end, a large roll-up garage-style door opens to the company's call center. Workers face a gray cinder-block wall, their backs to the entrance. Staff declined to answer questions.

DATA FIRMS PROLIFERATE

Professor Sweeney's analysis found that some instantcheckmate.com ads hint at arrest records when the firm's database has no record of any arrest for that name, as is the case with her own name. In other cases, such as that of Latisha Smith, the company does have arrest records for some people by that name, although not for the doctor of hypobaric medicine in Washington State.

Laura Beatty, an Internet Marketing Inc expert in helping companies achieve prominent placement in Web searches, said instantcheckmate.com appeared to choose its ads based on combinations of thousands of different first and last names and then segment them based on the first names.

"There does look like there is some definite profiling going on here," she said. "In the searches that I looked at, it seemed like the more Midwestern- and WASP-sounding the name was, the less likely it was to have either any advertisement at all or to have something that was more geared around the arrest or criminal background."

Internet firms selling criminal records and personal data to the public have proliferated in recent years, as low-cost computing enables even modest operations to maintain large databases on millions of Americans. Such sites sell access to users for a one-time fee - $29.95 in the case of instantcheckmate.com - or via monthly subscription plans.

Instant Checkmate, first registered in Nevada in 2010, said in a recent press release posted online that the firm had attracted more than 570,000 customers since its start and counted more than 200,000 subscribers.

According to alexa.com, an Amazon.Com Inc site analyzing website traffic, instantcheckmate.com has ranged roughly between the 500th and 600th most visited U.S. site in recent weeks, making it an increasingly major player in this area.

The company is able to target its ads on an individual name basis through a program called Google AdWords. Instantcheckmate.com and others companies like it use Google AdWords to bid to place small text advertisements alongside search results on major websites triggered by the names in their data base. Such ads typically cost a company far less than a dollar, sometimes just a few pennies, each time they're clicked.

Google says it does not control what names appear in AdWords. "Advertisers select all of their keywords, and ads are triggered when someone searches for that name. We don't have any role in the advertiser's selection of unique proper names," said a Google spokesman.

Some in Congress have raised concerns about developments in the use of personal data. In October, Senator John Rockefeller IV, a Democrat from West Virginia and chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, opened a probe into leading data brokers. "Collecting, storing and selling information about Americans raises all types of questions that require careful scrutiny," he said.

(Adam Tanner is a Reuters correspondent currently on a 2012-13 fellowship at Harvard University’s Department of Government.)

(Editing by Claudia Parsons and Prudence Crowther)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8AO01M20121125





Google Must Pay For Libelous Search Result, Says Court
Chris Taylor

Do Google search results amount to content that the company “publishes” and is responsible for? One high court in Australia says yes — and the decision, if unchanged on appeal, could have far-reaching repercussions.

For starters, Google will be forced to pay $200,000 to music promoter Milorad Trkulja, the plaintiff in this case. Trkulja brought the suit in 2009 after Google refused to remove links to sites that claimed, incorrectly, that the promoter has connections to organized crime in Melbourne.

Google’s stance, which makes a lot of technological sense and has been approved by other courtrooms around the world, is that it is not a publisher. Its search algorithm points to the most likely links; no human beings were involved in the presentation of your results.

“The sites in Google’s search results are controlled by those sites’ webmasters, not by Google,” a company spokesperson wrote after the result. Which is exactly what it told Trkulja in 2009: contact the sites to have the offensive content removed. (He pursued that path as well, winning a similarly-sized libel award from Yahoo, which actually hosted one of the sites.)

The jury at the Supreme Court of Victoria agreed with Google up to a point. The company wasn’t responsible for the results until Trkulja asked it to take them down, it said. (Read the decision in full here.) Because it stuck to its guns, Google must pay $200,000 in damages.

Naturally, Google is appealing the ruling. The result, if it stands, would not make Google responsible for all the Web’s content, as some have claimed. But it may well force it to comply with every takedown notice it receives from an Australian citizen — and make the Internet Down Under look a lot thinner.
http://mashable.com/2012/11/27/google-libel-australia/





Google Launches “Defend Your Net” Campaign in Germany to Protest Against Planned Copyright Restrictions
Matt Brian

For Google, what is happening in Germany right now is a very big issue. If the German Bundestag (government) gets its way, the search giant could be forced to remove publisher content and made to pay for the snippets it displays in search results.

Recognising that its German users may find it difficult to find the information they seek, Google has today launched a new campaign in the country called “Defend Your Net,” setting up a new portal designed to educate and mobilise its users to help protect the information it collects.

On this small portal, Google spells out what it believes will happen should German politicians side with publishers and force it to remove content from its search results. It explains that a change in the law could mean “higher costs, less information and massive legal uncertainty. Bloggers, politicians, the German economy and leading scientists reject this venture.”

Google suggests such a law could damage the German economy, threaten the diversity of information, result in massive legal uncertainty, set back innovative media and copyright and cause a “market economy paradox.”

Out-law.com explains the new proposals:

Later this month a proposed new section to the German Copyright Act is due to be discussed in Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag. The new section, if introduced, would provide the “producer of news materials” the general “exclusive right to make said materials publicly available, in whole or in part, for commercial purposes.”

Others would be permitted to provide “public access” to the publishers’ material unless those providing that access are “commercial operators of search engines or commercial providers of services that aggregate this content in a respective fashion”. News publishers’ right to control the commercial exploitation of their work in this regard would extend for a year after publication. Authors of the work would be entitled to be “provided with a reasonable share of the remunerations issuing from the author’s work”.


The search giant argues that publishers already have the tools at their disposal to opt out of Google’s search results and it doesn’t profit from such news as its Google News service is completely free of advertising. In fact, Google says that it even directs as many as 45 percent of one German news website’s readers via its Google.de search engine.

To fight the law, Google asks German users fill out a web form notifying the company of their views on the proposed changes (perhaps protest would be a better word). It also lists a page where visitors can locate their local member of parliament and voice their opposition to the new copyright law.

Google’s search and News service already directs four billion hits to publishers globally, equating to roughly 100,000 clicks per minute. The company reminds publishers that if they do not want to appear in its search or on Google News, they can unsubscribe easily with a short text code – meaning “an ‘intellectual property right’ is not required.”
http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/11...opyright-laws/





No VPN? No Problem. A New Way Around China’s Great Firewall
Paul Mozur

A key method for circumventing China’s Internet filters, virtual private networks have come into the crosshairs of the government lately. During the 18th Party Congress earlier this month many faced blockages and more recently China Digital Times has reported on what appear to be written warnings to Chinese who have access to VPNs on their office networks to use the services for work purposes only.

But a number of savvy Chinese Internet users have found a way to escape their fetters without a VPN. Using a little bit of computer knowledge – basically copying and pasting a chunk of text from one file to another — users can get around the China’s Facebook, YouTube and a host of other foreign sites blocked by China’s “Great Firewall.”

Here’ how it works: Most computers, running both Windows and OS X (and smartphones running Android), contain a host file, which is a document with a list of Internet Protocol addresses (the back-end address accessed by a computer when a website name is typed into a web browser’s search bar). Copying and pasting new addresses into that file allows a computer to directly access particular websites. As a result, updating the list to include recent IP addresses for websites like Facebook, and then entering those sites’ addresses into a browser with a secure “https://” in place of “http://” in front of the address will allow users to get onto many blocked Western sites, and without the slower speeds and fees associated with most VPNs.

How popular is this workaround? A search on Baidu in Chinese for “host file Facebook” turns up 434,000 hits, with the first page primarily containing explanations of how to get on Facebook and other sites by altering the host file. Various groups share lists of addresses on microblogs, over instant messaging, and on websites, according to Felix Hsu, a member of one such group, which keeps up a website that provides current addresses. There are also applications for Android which streamline the process.

Mr. Hsu said that they started helping to provide the service in October 2011 because “lots of netizens are eager to get to know what’s happening behind the wall, but it’s not easy for them.”

He pointed out that the addresses change, or get blocked, so he and his friend update the addresses as often as needed to keep the codes up-to-date and usable. Metrics he provided for his website show a jump in users in early November, right around the time Chinese authorities appeared to clamp down hard on access to Google.

Given the disparate means of disseminating the addresses, it is impossible to track just how many Chinese Internet users make use of the method to get around the great firewall, but it does show the continuing desire of China’s Internet users to jump the wall, and also how short that wall is for those with curiosity and a bit of know-how.
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2...reat-firewall/





Could It Happen In Your Country?
James Cowie

How hard is it to disconnect a country from the Internet, really?

That's the number one question we've received about our analysis of the Egyptian and Syrian Internet blackouts, and it's a reasonable question. If the Internet is so famously resilient, designed to survive wars and calamities, how can it fail so abruptly and completely at the national level?

The key to the Internet's survival is the Internet's decentralization — and it's not uniform across the world. In some countries, international access to data and telecommunications services is heavily regulated. There may be only one or two companies who hold official licenses to carry voice and Internet traffic to and from the outside world, and they are required by law to mediate access for everyone else.

Under those circumstances, it's almost trivial for a government to issue an order that would take down the Internet. Make a few phone calls, or turn off power in a couple of central facilities, and you've (legally) disconnected the domestic Internet from the global Internet. Of course, this level of centralization also makes it much harder for the government to defend the nation's Internet infrastructure against a determined opponent, who knows they can do a lot of damage by hitting just a few targets.

With good reason, most countries have gradually moved towards more diversity in their Internet infrastructure over the last decade. Sometimes that happens all by itself, as a side effect of economic growth and market forces, as many different companies move into the market and compete to provide the cheapest international Internet access to the citizenry.

Even then, though, there's often a government regulator standing by, allowing (or better yet, encouraging) the formation of a diverse web of direct connections to international providers. Here's the problem: increased diversity at the international frontier often spells less money for the national incumbent provider (typically the old telephone company, often owned by the government itself). Without some strong legal prodding and guidance from the telecoms regulator, significant diversification in smaller markets with a strong incumbent can take a long, long time.

Here's a map of the world, with countries colored according to the Internet diversity at the international frontier. We did a census, from our own view of the global Internet routing table, of all the domestic providers in each country who have direct connections (visible in routing) to foreign providers.

As a first cut at a diversity metric, this makes a lot of sense; it's easy to compute, and fairly objective (an NSP either has a foreign transit provider visible in the routing tables, or it doesn't). You can think of this, to first approximation, of the number of phone calls (or legal writs, or infrastructure attacks) that would have to be performed in order to decouple the domestic Internet from the global Internet.

• If you have only 1 or 2 companies at your international frontier, we classify your country as being at severe risk of Internet disconnection. Those 61 countries include places like Syria, Tunisia, Algeria, Turkmenistan, Libya, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, Myanmar, and Yemen.

• If you have fewer than 10 service providers at your international frontier, your country is probably exposed to some significant risk of Internet disconnection. Ten providers also seems to be the threshold below which one finds significant additional risks from infrastructure sharing — there may be a single cable, or a single physical-layer provider who actually owns most of the infrastructure on which the various providers offer their services. In this category, we place 72 countries, including Oman, Benin, Botswana, Rwanda, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uganda, Armenia, and Iran. Disconnection wouldn't be trivial, but it wouldn't be all that difficult. Egypt falls into this category as well; it took the Mubarak government several days to hunt down and kill the last connections, but in the end, the blackout succeeded.

• If you have more than 10 internationally-connected service providers, but fewer than about 40, your risk of disconnection is fairly low. Given a determined effort, it's plausible that the Internet could be shut down over a period of days or weeks, but it would be hard to implement and even harder to maintain that state of blackout. There are 58 countries in this situation, ranging from Bahrain (at the small end) to Mexico (at the largest end). India, Israel, Ecuador, Chile, Vietnam, and (perhaps surprisingly) China are all in this category.

• So is Afghanistan, reminding us that sometimes national Internet diversity is the product of regional fragmentation and severe technical challenges. It's true; the government in Kabul is powerless to turn off the national Internet, because it's built out of diverse service from various satellite providers, as well as Uzbek, Iranian, and Pakistani terrestrial transit.

• Finally, if you have more than 40 providers at your frontier, your country is likely to be extremely resistant to Internet disconnection. There are just too many paths into and out of the country, too many independent providers who would have to be coerced or damaged, to make a rapid countrywide shutdown plausible to execute. A government might significantly impair Internet connectivity by shutting down large providers, but there would still be a deep pool of persistent paths to the global Internet. In this category are the big Internet economies: Canada, the USA, the Netherlands, etc., about 32 countries in all.

So, could what happened to Egypt and Syria happen in your country? Hopefully not. But it's an important question that companies ask Renesys about all the time, as they decide which countries might reasonably host their new data centers.

Governments that want to encourage direct foreign investment in ICT should have this in mind as they head to Dubai next week for the World Conference on International Telecommunications. Next to Internet performance and stability, the political risks of Internet disconnection are starting to appear on due diligence checklists, as companies consider where to make their investments in global cloud infrastructure.
http://www.renesys.com/blog/2012/11/...r-countr.shtml





GI Returns to Fort Meade for Pretrial Hearing in WikiLeaks Case; Seeks Dismissal of Charges
AP

An Army private charged in the biggest security breach in U.S. history is trying to avoid trial by claiming he was already punished enough when he was locked up alone in a small cell and forced to sleep naked for several nights.

Pfc. Bradley Manning was expected to testify about his treatment during a pretrial hearing set to begin Tuesday and run through Sunday in a military court at Fort Meade.

His lawyers contend Manning was illegally punished by being locked up alone in a small cell for nearly nine months at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va., and having to sleep naked for several nights.

Military judges can dismiss all charges if pretrial punishment is particularly egregious, but that rarely happens. The usual remedy is credit at sentencing for time served, said Lisa M. Windsor, a retired Army colonel and former Army judge advocate now in private practice in Washington.

Manning has also offered to take responsibility for the leak by pleading guilty to reduced charges. The military judge hasn’t yet ruled on the offer and prosecutors have not said whether they would still pursue the charges against him.

He was kept at the Marine Corps brig from July 2010 to April 2011 and the military contends the treatment at Quantico was proper, given Manning’s classification as a maximum-security detainee who posed a risk of injury to himself or others. He was later moved to Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where he was re-evaluated and given a medium-security classification.

A United Nations investigator called the conditions of Manning’s time at Quantico cruel, inhuman and degrading, but stopped short of calling it torture.

The 24-year-old native of Crescent, Okla., faces possible life imprisonment if convicted of aiding the enemy, the most serious of the 22 charges.

He is accused of sending hundreds of thousands of classified Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and more than 250,000 diplomatic cables to the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks while he was working as an intelligence analyst in Baghdad in 2009 and 2010.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...680_story.html





Swedish Envoy Bashes Aussie Press on Assange

Sweden's ambassador to Australia took an Australian columnist to task for defending WikiLeaks-founder Julian Assange against rape allegations, documents recently released by the whistleblower website reveal.

The criticism comes in an email from Swedish ambassador Sven-Olof Petersson to Elizabeth Farrelly in response to an April 12th column entitled "Truth of Assange is stranger than fiction" in the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH).

Petersson offers a sarcastic thanks to Farrelly for her defence of Assange in the column.

“It is good to get this straightened out from someone who clearly was present during the 'penetrations'!” Petersson wrote in one of a series of emails published by WikiLeaks on Sunday.

Petersson also branded the newspaper "sad" for editing his response to her piece.

“The way you choose to cut down my letter sends a strong signal that while your columnists are free to write any kind of rubbish, you will not allow those effected (sic) to criticize your columnists!” he wrote in an email to editor Antony Lawes.

Petersson also told colleagues in Sweden that SMH had “mutilated” the adjoining headline.

Wikileaks’ Twitter account published a link to more than 100 pages worth of documents on Sunday and immediately faced flack on the social media site for choosing to describe Petersson’s reaction as “going berserk”.

“Berserk? I'm afraid you lost me. This kind of tabloid biased rubbish i did not expect from you,” one follower tweeted.

Another follower drew attention to the fact that the Swedish government had acted in accordance to transparency law by handing over the documents.

Assange is wanted for questioning over rape and sexual assault allegations made against him by two Swedish women in 2010.

He is currently living in Ecuador's embassy in London in an ongoing bid to avoid extradition to Sweden.

He has repeatedly cited fears that Sweden will send him on to the USA.

Sweden's ambassador also addressed those fears in his comment published in the Sydney Morning Herald, in which he details extradition law.

"A person risking the death penalty can not be extradited. Nor can a person be extradited for 'political' or 'military' offences," the ambassador wrote.

The documents also include several emails from members of the public, many of which criticize Foreign Minister Carl Bildt for his handling of the Assange case.

The docket also contains official reports from Swedish embassy officials across the work about how local media reports about Sweden and the Assange case.

Swedish Foreign Ministry spokesman Anders Jörle downplayed the significance of the documents' release.

"We're the ones who made these documents public," he told The Local.

All official documents that are not classified can be obtained by members of the public in Sweden (offentlighetsprincipen), he underlined.

"We are not biting our nails over this and I see no reason to review how the ambassador reacted to the media reports," Anders Jörle told The Local.
http://www.thelocal.se/44660/20121126/





Western Digital Adds New 4 TB Capacity Hard Drives to Its Black HDD Line

New 4 TB hard drive will sell for under $350
Shane McGlaun

When it comes to computing there are several things that enthusiasts can never get enough of. One of those things is storage; we can always use more storage space. Western Digital has announced that it has added a new 4 TB capacity drive to its line of Black hard drives.

These drives are aimed specifically at enthusiasts and gamers and are 3.5-inch 7200 RPM units. Western Digital is shipping a new 4 TB capacity drives immediately and notes that the drives have a 64 MB cache. The drives also feature WD dual actuator technology and use the SATA 6 Gb/s interface.

The new 4 TB hard drives include a dual processor controller, IntelliSeek to calculate optimum seek speeds and lower the power consumption, and StableTrac. The drives also have NoTouch ramp load technology so that the recording head never touches the disk media for significantly less wear, extending the lifetime of the drive.

The 4 TB Western Digital Black WD40001FAEX hard drive will be offered through select distributors and resellers for $339. The drive includes a five-year warranty.
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=29240





Why Pushing for a Paywall at the Washington Post Completely Misses the Point
Mathew Ingram

Critics of the Washington Post say that the only approach that will solve the newspaper’s financial problems is to put up a paywall around their content like everyone else — but while that might buy time, it’s not a long-term strategy for new-media success.

As paywalls continue to spring up at newspapers both large and small, like mushrooms after a rainstorm, those who have chosen to take a different path — the Guardian in Britain, the Washington Post and Digital First Media in the U.S. — start to stand out from the crowd even more, and inevitably their decision gets painted as a failure to adapt or a sign that they are not very bright, or both. A recent post in the Columbia Journalism Review takes this tack on the Washington Post, saying the paper has to set up a paywall immediately or risk disaster. But this focus on a paywall as a magic solution misses the point about the larger risks facing both the Post and the industry as a whole.

In his piece, Dean Starkman of the CJR uses the departure of editor Marcus Brauchli as a hook for his argument that the Post needs to have a paywall. He tries to make the case that editor’s removal — over what appears to have been a disagreement about cost-cutting at the money-losing paper, among other things — is just a smokescreen, and that the real issue is that publisher Katharine Weymouth and CEO Don Graham’s decision to avoid a paywall amounts to a “strategic failure.” As Starkman describes it:

“The paper has become the American newspaper industry’s poster child for the folly of clinging to a free digital strategy… As Monty Python would put it, the free strategy is a dead parrot. The illogic of giving away something online that you charge for elsewhere is now coming home to roost.”

Of hamster wheels and original sin

In just a few paragraphs, the CJR writer manages to hit nearly all of the major notes of the pro-paywall lobby: namely, that the free approach to content has been proven to be a total failure (Starkman later also reiterates his argument that free content turns newsrooms into a virtual “hamster-wheel,” which I have taken issue with in a previous post), and that publishers of all kinds were wrong when they committed the “original sin” of not charging for their content in the early days of the internet, a theory that others have successfully debunked a number of times.

Starkman also dismisses the idea that there is any value in the digital-first approach, arguing that the recent bankruptcy filing of the Journal-Register Co. — a unit of Digital First Media — proves this beyond dispute (even though it only affected a small portion of the larger company and was a symptom of the legacy-cost problem that all newspapers suffer from, rather than a problem with a digital-first model). He also dismisses the proposed solutions that I and others have suggested, such as a membership or “reverse paywall” model or any attempt to reinvent what the Post does:

“To say, in the absence of supporting data, that the answer for the Post is to ‘commit’ to an anti-paywall strategy, to ‘push the innovation meter to 11,’ and make ‘digital first a core mandate’ is to say nothing at all.”

In other words, Starkman sees only one potential path forward, which is that the Post has to erect a paywall just like everyone else, and that this will solve its financial problems better than any other competing strategy. But is this actually true? For all his commitment to arguments that are based on facts, there is little to support Starkman’s conclusion — except the argument that the New York Times has a paywall and it seems to be doing pretty well, which is the same argument that newspaper publishers all over the U.S. are using to justify erecting them, as though anything that works for the NYT will work for them.

Sandbags don’t solve a rising-water problem

Does that mean the Post will have similar success, or that other strategies are not worth pursuing? I don’t see how. I’ve tried to make the case before that paywalls are a sandbag strategy — one that can help keep the rising waters (in this case, the ongoing rapid decline in print advertising revenue) at bay, but not much else. Sandbags don’t solve a rising water problem, just as paywalls won’t get rid of a declining revenue problem: you need to figure out how to get the water to stop coming in, or find out what is causing it and adapt to that. Paywalls do neither.

Even the New York Times — which has what is probably one of the world’s most successful paywalls for a general-interest newspaper — is finding that the revenue from its plan is barely keeping pace with the decline in print revenue, and meanwhile digital ad revenue is also falling (possibly as a result of the decline in traffic caused by the paywall, as I described in an earlier post). As former news executive Alan Mutter notes, the failure to adapt to the rise of digital advertising is the biggest single long-term problem that newspapers have. Will a paywall solve that problem?

If what Starkman envisions as the future of the Post is a much smaller entity that subsists primarily on reader subscriptions, then that’s fine, but that’s not what he’s saying. He seems to be suggesting that a paywall can somehow stop the bleeding (i.e. the declines in revenue) and remove the need for cuts to payroll, and maintain the Post‘s presence as an “important institution” in national journalism. But unless it achieves unheard of success — beyond even that of the New York Times — there is no way a paywall is going to accomplish all of those things.

In an essay about the Post that Starkman (wrongly) cites as support for his case, Clay Shirky talks about the problem confronting the newspaper, which is a smaller version of the same problem that is confronting the entire industry: namely, the fact that the way information works has changed, and newspapers have to figure out how to give up their traditional role as gatekeepers of that information and find a new role where they can add value. Starkman’s urgent advice that the Post immediately put up a wall around its content does exactly nothing to solve that larger problem.
http://gigaom.com/2012/11/26/why-pus...ses-the-point/





The Strange World Of Copyright Misconception
Benn Jordan

Below is an article which was initially written for a larger site, but I decided that most of the biggest misconceptions have to do with musicians, rather than users:

Before I dive in, I am not an attorney. For over a decade I’ve been a professional producer and owner of a music publishing company. Without going into detail, I’ve sued for copyright infringement, I’ve been sued for copyright infringement (unsuccessfully), and I negotiate licensing and copyright contracts more than a musician would ever like to. In fact, the reason I don’t normally use an attorney for these negotiations is because, while an IP lawyer can translate a contract, he or she doesn’t necessarily understand copyright value. At least not on a scale I would trust when it means the difference of $500 and $40,000 to use a recording for a television commercial. The world of music licensing is a unique one that can only be learned with experience, and it is an industry much smaller and more incestuous than one might imagine. That being said, obviously nothing said here (or anywhere on the web) should be considered legal advice.

Copyright VS. Copywrite

In many discussions, on both internet forums and around a dinner table, I’ve heard someone break down the specific differences between copyright and copywrite. Some say that copywrite is the musical notes, while copyright is the recording. Others go as far to say that copywrite applies only to literature. Well, no matter what you think copywrite is, you’re wrong. In fact, it isn’t even a real word. “Copywriting” and “copywriter” applies exclusively to someone writing to promote a product or service. For example, a piano moving company will hire a freelance copywriter to nicely describe their services in a way that would make you trust them with your piano and credit card information. It has nothing to do with intellectual property, or copyright.

“It Is Legal To Download Content You Previously Purchased On CD/DVD/iTunes/etc”

I think this misconception is born out of common sense. You bought the intellectual property, so it would be ridiculous to consider downloading it from a torrent site as piracy. Guess what, it is considered piracy, it is illegal, and it is ridiculous. I’ve read a lot of posts about people eagerly awaiting a PC confiscation only to one-up the feds with a matching CD collection. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t prevent the charges, it wouldn’t work in your favor in court, and it most likely wouldn’t even reduce your penalty. It is, however, legal to copy a CD to your computer or download something from iTunes and re-encode it to an MP3. However, you legally cannot make a tangible duplication (burn another CD).

“If An Artist Samples Less Than 3 Seconds Of A Copyrighted Song, It Falls Under Fair Use (And Other Fabricated Fair Use Perversions)”

This specific topic is so well spread and argued that, to me, it feels like a scientist arguing with a creationist. There are all sorts of different versions of the myth: Some say 7 seconds, some say 1 second, and some say the trick is changing the pitch down or up a note. Whenever I’m somehow involved in this debate, I always make note to ask where they heard such bullshit. Astonishingly, the number one answer to that question is “college”. This means that all the way up the hierarchy to your trusted professor, nobody seems to understand fair use. I have at times, with a foil hat on my head, imagined that these misconceptions have been spread on purpose to make lawyered-up music publishers and film studios money.

So let’s set the record straight. You cannot legally sample music without clearance. It begins and ends there. If someone were to take a tiny clip of one of my songs, pitch it down to 10% speed, reverse it, and slam 8 minutes of echo on it, I could sue their pants off (not that I would, or even be able to detect such a thing). For you electronic musicians out there, also understand that a lot of sample and loop libraries do not clear their samples for professional use. This means that if you use a drum loop from a library you shelled out $499 for, and you end up licensing that song to, say, a tampon commercial, the original copyright holder can, and probably will sue you. Always check the clearances before purchasing (or pirating) a sample library.

Another very weird fair use misconception is the “Ask Three Times Rule”.

I get a lot of emails asking to use my music for college films, performances, even feature length films explaining that they have no budget. I have a nice little graphic on my site explaining the terms and conditions of using my music that these people usually ignore, choosing to send me an email anyway. If I drew up a license for every one of these requests I’d have to quit working and spend my life switching between Gmail and Microsoft Word. So, like an asshole, I ignore them. But once in a while, something strange happens:

A few days after the first email, I’ll get the same email again, but with “second request” at the end of the subject line. Then, a few days later, I’ll get a “third request”. Then I never hear from them again. This never even became a conscious thought until my friend, who has a degree in dance and worked for a large dance company mentioned the “Three Notices Rule” for music used in performances. It turns out, not only her university, but one of Chicago’s largest dance companies was under the impression that if nobody responds to your clearance request three times, you legally have clearance. I thought she simply misunderstood something until I thought about all the emails that matched this strange set of false rules. To be clear, you cannot use music for a performance unless you have a license agreement. Even if you get a response saying “go for it!”, that provides you with nothing in the terms of US copyright law.

“It Is Legal To Reuse Public Domain Material”

The short explanation: Usually, but if you’re not sure, don’t.

The medium explanation:

First things first, figuring out if something is public domain can be very difficult. A few months ago I got the idea to pitch an in-house produced version of Gershwin’s “Summertime”. As of 2012, George Gershwin has been a corpse for 75 years, thus making his writings public domain. But wait a minute, the Copyright Terms Extension Act of 1998 now comes into play, extended these terms to life of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever endpoint is earlier. Copyright protection for works published prior to January 1, 1978, was increased by 20 years to a total of 95 years from their publication date. Go ahead, take an Advil.

To make matters more confusing, while copyright is very important, it doesn’t always cover potential trademarks or source identifiers. Let’s imagine McDonalds abandons their horrible major scaled “I’m Loving It” jingle and popularizes the first 9 notes to Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” as their new mnemonic. That doesn’t make it copyrighted by McDonald’s, but you would find yourself in quite an entanglement if you went on to produce a dubstep remix of “Fur Elise” (yawn) that made its way to a Wendy’s commercial. This plays a much larger role in visual art, where copyright and trademark blend a lot more often.

Finally, there are 2 sides to every music license, the master and the synchronization license. The master is the song itself, and the synchronization is the recording. Pretty much any version of “Fur Elise” that you can buy or download is still covered by synchronization. The music is public domain, the recording is not. Stick to MIDI files, I guess.

Thanks for reading. I hope someone out there learned something. There are about 200 more misconceptions that I could cover here, but I’ll save that for another installment.
http://www.bennjordan.com/blog/?p=519





How 4 Microsoft Engineers Proved that the “Darknet” Would Defeat DRM

And how they nearly got fired for it.
Timothy B. Lee

Can digital rights management technology stop the unauthorized spread of copyrighted content? Ten years ago this month, four engineers argued that it can't, forever changing how the world thinks about piracy. Their paper, "The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution" (available as a .doc here) was presented at a security conference in Washington, DC, on November 18, 2002.

By itself, the paper's clever and provocative argument likely would have earned it a broad readership. But the really remarkable thing about the paper is who wrote it: four engineers at Microsoft whose work many expected to be at the foundation of Microsoft's future DRM schemes. The paper's lead author told Ars that the paper's pessimistic view of Hollywood's beloved copy protection schemes almost got him fired. But ten years later, its predictions have proved impressively accurate.

The paper predicted that as information technology gets more powerful, it will grow easier and easier for people to share information with each other. Over time, people will assemble themselves into what the authors called the "darknet." The term encompasses formal peer-to-peer networks such as Napster and BitTorrent, but it also includes other modes of sharing, such as swapping files over a local area network or exchanging USB thumb drives loaded with files.

Once a popular piece of information—say, a movie, a song, or a software title—"leaks" into the darknet, stopping its spread becomes practically impossible. This, the engineers realized, had an important implication: to prevent piracy, digital rights management had to work not just against average users, but against the most tech-savvy users on the planet. It only takes a single user to find a vulnerability in a DRM scheme, strip the protection from the content, and release the unencrypted version to the darknet. Then millions of other users merely need to know how to use ordinary tools such as BitTorrent to get their own copies.
Trusted computing or treacherous computing?

Ars Technica talked to Peter Biddle, the paper's lead author, last week. The basic premise of the paper came from an e-mail Biddle circulated within Microsoft in the late 1990s. The term "darknet" was coined by co-author Bryan Willman, another Microsoft engineer. Two other Microsoft engineers, Paul England and Marcus Peinado, contributed to it.

At the time they wrote the paper, Biddle and his co-authors were working on Microsoft's "Trusted Windows" project, an effort to provide hardware-level authentication features that could make PCs resistant to tampering even by those who have physical access and control. The initiative would go under a variety of names, including Palladium, TCPA, and the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base.

Biddle, who now works at Intel but stressed that he was speaking only for himself in our interview, told us that it was a project fraught with political challenges. Inside Microsoft, people bristled at the implication that vanilla Windows was untrustworthy. Outside Microsoft, critics charged that Biddle's project represented the beginning of the end for the PC as an open platform. They feared that Microsoft would use the technology to exert control over which software could be executed on Windows PCs, freezing out open source operating systems and reducing users' freedom to run the software of their choice.

One widely discussed application for Biddle's technology was digital rights management. Building DRM atop an open, general-purpose computing platform is an inherently difficult problem. Every DRM scheme requires distributing encryption keys or other secrets to users' devices without the users themselves having access to them. But on an open PC, the user has the ability to inspect and modify essentially all data stored on the device, so DRM schemes are inherently insecure.

It was "very challenging for the PC industry to make the same kinds of statements around how secure data could be on the PC compared to closed devices like CE boxes," Biddle told us. Many hoped (or feared) that a "trusted" computing platform could dramatically improve a DRM scheme's tamper-resistance by preventing a machine's owner from inspecting sensitive encryption keys or modifying DRM code. But preventing users from modifying DRM schemes also inherently meant reducing users' control over the devices they owned. The risk of Microsoft locking down everyone's PC provoked an online backlash, with critics calling the technology "treacherous computing."

Biddle says that backlash "took us completely by surprise." He told us that his team didn't "realize the level of entrenchment and fear" about the ways Microsoft might misuse the technology. In his view, the public overreacted to what was designed to be an application-agnostic security technology. "A lot of the things that were said about trustworthy computing being treacherous were actually impossible," he told us.

“I almost got fired”

Biddle says that he and his team realized early on that DRM technology would never succeed in shutting down piracy. He hoped that writing a paper saying so would reassure Microsoft's critics in the technical community that Redmond wasn't planning to lock down the PC in order to satisfy Hollywood. And by making it clear that the people behind Microsoft's "trusted computing" push were not fans of DRM, Biddle hoped he could persuade the technical community to consider other, more benign applications of the technology he was building.

Biddle couldn't be too candid about the link between his paper and the technology he was building. Explicitly admitting that DRM schemes built on "Trusted Windows" wouldn't stop piracy might make it harder for Microsoft to persuade content providers to license its products for Microsoft's technology platforms. Biddle hoped that releasing his paper at a technical security conference would allow him to send a "dog whistle" to the technology community without raising the ire of Hollywood.

It didn't work out that way. "I almost got fired over the paper," Biddle told Ars. "It was extremely controversial." Biddle tried to get buy-in from senior Microsoft executives prior to releasing the paper. But he says they didn't really understand the paper's implications—and particularly how it could strain relationships with content companies—until after it was released. Once the paper was released, Microsoft's got stuck in bureaucratic paralysis. Redmond neither repudiated Biddle's paper nor allowed him to publicly defend it.

At the same time, "the community we thought would draw a connection never drew the connection," Biddle said, referring to anti-DRM activists. "Microsoft was taking so much heat around security and trustworthy computing, that I was not allowed to go out and talk about any of this stuff publicly. I couldn't explain 'guys, we're totally on your side. What we want is a program that's open.'"

A losing battle

While Biddle and his colleagues didn't succeed in allaying the fears of Palladium's critics, the paper's central arguments have held up well. The authors predicted that the emergence of the darknet would produce a technological and legal arms race. They thought content companies and law enforcement would attack those aspects of the darknet that were most centralized, but that the darknet would adapt through greater decentralization. And they predicted that efforts to build secure DRM schemes would continue to fail. All of their predictions have continued to hold true over the last decade.

Both content companies and the US government have pursued increasingly aggressive anti-piracy strategies. The Recording Industry Association of America sued thousands of alleged file-sharers during the last decade, and content companies have sued numerous file-sharing startups out of existence. In 2010, the federal government got into the act, using the powers of the recently passed PRO-IP Act to seize domains and other assets of alleged pirate sites. And they have even begun to arrest key figures in file-sharing networks.

Yet these increased enforcement efforts have barely slowed down the darknet's momentum. A key development has been the emergence of "locker sites" that host infringing files and "link sites" that provide pointers to those files.

"The thing about the locker and link sites is that they can be very lightweight," Biddle told us. They are "not that hard to replicate because they are basically a database." That makes the network as a whole much more robust to law enforcement efforts to shut it down: close down one site and two more pop up in its place.

And while BitTorrent and Megaupload get all the attention, Biddle notes that there are other file-sharing techniques that the government is never going to stop. "Teenagers and twenty-somethings I know routinely will go over to a friend's house with a terabyte drive to swap stuff," he said. They choose the "sneakernet" approach less out of fear of liability than because it's so convenient. "You can have a ton of content on a terabyte drive," he noted.

Yet the content industry continues to try, and fail, to produce secure DRM schemes. Biddle believes this strategy has proved counterproductive because it inconveniences legitimate customers without stopping piracy.

"I'm now finding that for some kinds of content, the illegal is clearly outperforming legal," Biddle said. "That blows me away. I pay for premium cable. It's easier to use BitTorrent to watch Game of Thrones. HBO Go is trying very hard to do a good job," he said, but the user experience just isn't as good. Because HBO Go is a streaming service, he said, it's more vulnerable to network congestion than simply downloading the entire episode from the darknet.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...on-would-fail/





Let's Make Sure he WON'T be Back! Cambridge to Open 'Terminator Centre' to Study Threat to Humans from Artificial Intelligence

• Centre will examine the possibility that there might be a ‘Pandora’s box' moment with technology
• The founders say technologies already have the 'potential to threaten our own existence'

Amanda Williams

A centre for 'terminator studies', where leading academics will study the threat that robots pose to humanity, is set to open at Cambridge University

Its purpose will be to study the four greatest threats to the human species - artificial intelligence, climate change, nuclear war and rogue biotechnology.

The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) will be co-launched by Lord Rees, the astronomer royal and one of the world's top cosmologists.

Rees's 2003 book Our Final Century had warned that the destructiveness of humanity meant that the species could wipe itself out by 2100.

The idea that machines might one day take over humanity has featured in many science fiction books and films, including the Terminator, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as a homicidal robot.

In 1965, Irving John ‘Jack’ Good and wrote a paper for New Scientist called Speculations concerning the first ultra-intelligent machine.

Good, a Cambridge-trained mathematician, Bletchley Park cryptographer, pioneering computer scientist and friend of Alan Turing, wrote that in the near future an ultra-intelligent machine would be built.

This machine, he continued, would be the 'last invention' that mankind will ever make, leading to an 'intelligence explosion.'

For Good, who went on to advise Stanley Kubrick on 2001: a Space Odyssey, the 'survival of man' depended on the construction of this ultra-intelligent machine.

Huw Price, Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy and another of the centre's three founders, said such an 'ultra-intelligent machine, or artificial general intelligence (AGI)' could have very serious consequences.

He said: 'Nature didn’t anticipate us, and we in our turn shouldn’t take AGI for granted.

'We need to take seriously the possibility that there might be a ‘Pandora’s box’ moment with AGI that, if missed, could be disastrous.

'I don’t mean that we can predict this with certainty, no one is presently in a position to do that, but that’s the point.

'With so much at stake, we need to do a better job of understanding the risks of potentially catastrophic technologies

He added: 'The basic philosophy is that we should be taking seriously the fact that we are getting to the point where our technologies have the potential to threaten our own existence – in a way that they simply haven’t up to now, in human history.

'What better place than Cambridge, one of the oldest of the world’s great scientific universities, to give these issues the prominence and academic respectability that they deserve?

'Cambridge recently celebrated its 800th anniversary – our aim is to reduce the risk that we might not be around to celebrate it’s millennium.'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...elligence.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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