P2P-Zone  

Go Back   P2P-Zone > Peer to Peer
FAQ Members List Calendar Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

Peer to Peer The 3rd millenium technology!

Reply
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Old 09-01-13, 08:55 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
JackSpratts's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 12th, '13

Since 2002


































"Experts crack - Chinese people. Sorry can not reveal more." – Xiang Li



































January 12th, 2013




Hollywood Hires Anti-Piracy Pro
Mark Milian

The Motion Picture Association of America, Hollywood’s trade group, is touting today’s hiring of Neustar executive Diane Strahan as a sign that the movie industry is embracing technology. What the MPAA’s announcement doesn’t mention is that Strahan’s tech expertise happens to be in the anti-piracy locks that are the bane of many movie-loving techies.

Strahan will join the MPAA as chief operating officer, and among her tasks is to “guide MPAA’s strategic direction,” according to a statement. As a senior vice president at Neustar, Strahan negotiated deals for UltraViolet, the movie industry’s preferred method of online distribution paired with digital rights management. She also worked to develop mobile barcodes and changes to the Web’s domain registration system.

Kate Bedingfield, an MPAA spokeswoman, declined to comment. In the statement announcing Strahan’s appointment, Chris Dodd, the former Democratic senator who is now the MPAA’s chief executive officer, said Strahan can lead the industry in “technology, innovation and industry alliances.”

Strahan’s hiring seems to indicate that Hollywood is committed to DRM, even as the music industry has largely moved away from it. Cracking down on Internet piracy is perhaps the most important priority for the film industry as it struggles to protect its business from technology upheaval. In a recent Bloomberg Businessweek feature, Dodd acknowledged that he may not be the best person to address the issue. “But I’m a quick learner,” he said.

During Strahan’s tenure, Neustar developed the cloud infrastructure for UltraViolet, an initiative that won support with most of the major studios. The system lets consumers register the movies they’ve purchased to an online account providing streaming or downloading of copy-protected files to various devices.

Yet UltraViolet has failed to gain traction as an alternative to online movie rental services or subscription plans from Netflix and Hulu. Tech bloggers and online reviewers have often been critical of the system, calling it clumsy and restrictive.
http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-blog/20...ti-piracy-pro/





Censoring Pirate Sites Doesn’t Work, Researchers Find
Ernesto

A new study released by researchers from Boston’s Northeastern University shows that censoring “pirate” sites by blocking or seizing their domains is ineffective. The researchers looked at the availability of various pirated media on file-hosting sites and found that uploaders post more new content than copyright holders can take down. A better solution, according to the researchers, is to block the money streams that flow to these sites.

The file-sharing landscape has often been described as a hydra. Take one site down, and several new ones will take its place.

Blocking or censoring sites and files may have a short-lived effect, but it does very little to decrease the availability of pirated content on the Internet.

Researchers from Boston’s Northeastern University carried out a study to see how effective various anti-piracy measures are. They monitored thousands of files across several popular file-hosting services and found, among other things, that DMCA notices are a drop in the ocean.

The researchers show that file-hosting services such as Uploaded, Wupload, RapidShare and Netload disable access to many files after receiving DMCA takedown notices, but that this does little to decrease the availability of pirated content.

Similarly, the researchers find evidence that the Megaupload shutdown did little to hinder pirates. On the contrary, the file-hosting landscape became more diverse with uploaders spreading content over hundreds of services.

“There is a cat-and-mouse game between uploaders and copyright owners, where pirated content is being uploaded by the former and deleted by the latter, and where new One-Click Hosters and direct download sites are appearing while others are being shut down,” the researchers write.

“Currently, this game seems to be in favour of the many pirates who provide far more content than what the copyright owners are taking down,” they conclude.

The study also looked at the number of sites where copyrighted content is available. The researchers scraped the popular file-hosting search engine FilesTube and found that there were nearly 10,000 distinct domain names and 5,000 IP-addresses where alleged pirate content was hosted.

For example, a search for “dvdrip” returned results on 1,019 different domains using 702 distinct IP-addresses.

From the above the researchers conclude that anti-piracy measures aimed at reducing the availability of pirated content are less effective than often suggested. A more fruitful approach, they argue, may be to take away their ability to process payments, through PayPal or credit card processors.

This is already happening widely, especially with file-hosting services that offer affiliate programs. However, as the researchers rightfully note there are also many perfectly legitimate file-hosting services that operate within the boundaries of the law and can’t be simply cut off.

The researchers end with the now common mantra that when it comes to online piracy, innovation often trumps legislation.

“Given our findings that highlight the difficulties of reducing the supply of pirated content, it appears to be promising to follow a complementary strategy of reducing the demand for pirated content, e.g., by providing legitimate offers that are more attractive to consumers than pirating content.”
http://torrentfreak.com/censoring-pi...s-find-130108/





PayPal Assault On File-Sharing Sites Makes Business Case For Bitcoin
Jon Matonis

BitTorrent and Bitcoin were made for each other. An article on TorrentFreak reports that PayPal is requiring private BitTorrent tracking sites to provide them free access for purposes of monitoring user content for possible copyright infringement.

On the very same day, another TorrentFreak article claimed that researchers at Boston’s Northeastern University show domain seizure of file-sharing sites to be ineffective and that blocking the money streams to these sites would be a more ‘fruitful’ solution. And, it is already happening in a major way. The money stream targeting even extends to ISPs that happen to be BitTorrent friendly.

Just as with the payment-oriented attacks against the online pharmacy industry, censorship-resistent bitcoin appears to solve the problem by providing a decidedly nonpolitical currency. Used properly, bitcoin can have the privacy attributes of paper cash and bitcoin doesn’t make morality judgements about what you choose to do with your money. It is purely a value transfer protocol and it functions generally in accordance with the same distributed peer-to-peer principles as BitTorrent.

Of course, many commenters to the articles have already made the connection to a bitcoin solution but with varying degrees of endorsement. Private BitTorrent trackers traditionally rely on donations for the operation of their service and PayPal is so widely used that donations would drop if forced to rely on lesser-known payment methods.

Indeed PayPal is a private corporation and using their payment service is voluntary. But the problem is that, through fear of liability or outright pressure from authorities, PayPal enforces a blanket global policy across legal jurisdictions as a substitute for due process. File-sharing sites comprise both file-hosting and BitTorrent tracking sites each of which may have different legal status in different jurisdictions depending on interpretation and enforcement of various copyright laws.

PayPal is actually setting the stage for its payment successor. “Bitcoin as a viable currency keeps growing in appeal with every incident like this. These companies are undermining their own viability,” said a veteran redditor.

According to TorrentFreak, PayPal has started freezing the accounts of private BitTorrent trackers until they provide PayPal unfettered access to the site in question. File-hosting services MediaFire, DepositFiles, and Putlocker have had their PayPal accounts disabled too. Additionally, file-hoster PutLocker had their PayPal funds frozen for six months because they objected to the backend monitoring of their customer’s files.

This action wouldn’t seem so difficult if PayPal were barely used, but for those unable to prepare for alternatives it can have a significant impact on revenue. “This has a paralyzing effect on the file-hosting industry where 90% of the users of some sites pay using PayPal,” declared an owner of a major file-hosting service.

Established private tracker TorrentBytes announced that they may have to shut down unless they can find a way to process payments:

Problem is not lack of donations, but entirely on handling them. As of current every service provider the site has to pay for only accepts PayPal, Credit/Debit cards or direct bank wiring. Only one provider allows bitcoin. Unless we can figure out some realistic and possible way to do site finances completely PayPal free, it seems like the story of TorrentBytes will end very soon after January 2013.

Bitcoin can be accepted fine without any third-party involvement. Spending them remains the bigger hurdle. While services like BitPay and Coinbase exist that will accept bitcoin payments on your behalf and convert out to national currencies, operators like TorrentBytes may not have a bank account or a credit card to use for their own procurement. If businesses don’t want to exchange bitcoin for cash physically or load bitcoin onto a surrogate offshore debit card for purchases, bank accounts are still required with most online bitcoin exchanges. Life can be tough in the early days of a stateless currency.

If PayPal free is the goal, several VPS providers already accept bitcoin for payment of hosting services. In turn, file-hosting sites and private torrent sites that have successfully adopted the bitcoin payment method from their users include Lumfile, filecloud.io, and TorrentLeech.

Maybe the researchers have a point about targeting the money stream. It has been speculated that blocking the money stream to governments would solve the regulation of the economy and unbridled spending problems too.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmaton...e-for-bitcoin/





Bombing BitTorrent and File-Sharing Websites Back to the Stone Age
enigmax

In the last decade file-sharing has turned from a hobbyist activity into something with mass market appeal. From just a handful of sites there are now many thousands, many of them in the rat-race to become the biggest, fastest, most exclusive location, or a combination of all three. The problem is that for many options are narrowing, particularly when it comes to financing their operations. Is it time for file-sharing to go back to its roots?

While more people than ever before are sharing files online, one would be hard pressed (SOPA aside) to find a balance of positive and inspiring news stories in the file-sharing space last year.

Sure, many of the bigger public sites (Pirate Bay, Torrentz, KickAss, isoHunt, ExtraTorrent etc) continue to do well, but 2012 was awash with stories of web blockades, site shutdowns, arrests, copyright trolls and, perhaps most importantly, developing financial restrictions that limit sites’ abilities to operate.

Last year hundreds of sites lost their ability to do business with PayPal and other payment processors and this year it looks like that trend will continue.

Just yesterday we published an article on research from Boston’s Northeastern University that recommended going after sites’ opportunities to process payments through PayPal or credit card processors.

And just a few hours later we published another which explained the plight of some private trackers that are being subjected to PayPal demands for invites so the company can snoop around the site to decide whether to carry on doing business with it.

A site mentioned in the article, the 16,000 member TorrentBytes (TBy), is facing closure after its options for processing donations ran out. Founded in late 2004, TorrentBytes has its next server bill due at the end of January but thanks to a PayPal withdrawal has no way to collect money from users to pay it. Not even Bitcoins will work according to an admin.

“Bitcoin is not an option. We can pay next to nothing with it and there seems to be no ‘certain’ way to convert it to something we can use,” he says.

Additionally, a suggestion on how to bypass PayPal’s verification system by using a third party site is also rejected by the TorrentBytes admin.

“Using another site/community/forum/whatever as a ghost site to funnel funds to this one is also a no-go. If you people can find the link from this page, so can PayPal,” he explains.

So how do you fund a file-sharing site if donations are wiped out? Well there is advertising, but apparently that is also a problem when applied to the largely tech-savvy private site community.

“Advertisements would work if 99% of the userbase did not run Adblock. And even then the funds that come from somewhere would have to get passed through. And they are something that has been on the no-no list for this site since before day 1,” the TBy admin concludes.

Of course, advertising is being cracked down on too.

As reported earlier this month, the University of Southern California has just published its first Advertising Transparency Report in which it criticized the use of ads on ‘pirate’ sites. The report received widespread coverage and seems to be having an effect. According to Digital Music News, several advertisers including Levis are ordering their ads to be removed from file-sharing related sites.

However, at least for the immediate future and despite the rhetoric, public sites will still be able to finance their operations from advertising and affiliate programs. There are apparently enough companies prepared to place ads on the big sites at the moment but the drawback is that they don’t want to pay good rates to put them there, at least not when compared to those placed on a ‘normal’ website.

The future for some private communities is not so rosy. Despite being able to run on a $200 per month server many have taken on many extra costs, not least seedboxes and other servers to ensure that their sites are competitive in the torrent racing scene. Many are also investing in VPN tunnels to ensure their true locations aren’t discovered. These costs are continually adding up, just as sites’ abilities to receive funds are being throttled.

But it’s not all bad news, far from it.

There are still hundreds of sites to choose from and more content than ever before, but things will probably have to change if things get worse. Just like any other entity going through financial issues, belts will have to be tightened, compromises will have to be made. Do sites really need ten seedboxes and an expensive pay account on some scene topsite to exist?

The beauty of P2P and BitTorrent is that it’s a distributed system. Indeed, as far as sites are concerned bandwidth between users (and of course content) are both available for free and running in basic mode requires only a few dollars a month on top to pay for a server. Trading in the big gas guzzler for a something a little more frugal should be a survival option.

Of course, in many cases this could potentially mean file-sharing backing up in sophistication to 2004, to what may as well be the stone age to many of today’s younger enthusiasts. That said, ask anyone who was around at the time if it was so bad. Yes, at times Suprnova required 30 refreshes until a page actually loaded and yes, initial seeders uploaded at a snail’s pace, but the scene was buzzing and people were having fun. And if it’s not about having fun anymore, something has gone wrong along the way.

Maybe a fresh start and a resurgence of some old fashioned non-monetary gain values is what is needed. The money can’t be targeted if there isn’t any.
http://torrentfreak.com/bombing-bitt...ne-age-130110/





BitTorrent Brings Torrent Discovery, Downloading Directly to the Browser with Surf Chrome Extension
Emil Protalinski

BitTorrent on Thursday announced Surf, a Chrome extension that lets you discover and download torrents directly in Google’s browser. The company says it also plans to release an add-on for Firefox soon, as well as for other browsers, but for now Chrome users can get an alpha version of the extension directly from the Chrome Web Store.

So what’s the point of having an extension instead of a dedicated torrent client? BitTorrent hopes that by adding a torrent search window directly into Chrome, it will be able to “advance and simply content discovery and download” for a broader consumer base. In other words, it’s part of the company’s initiative to bring the BitTorrent protocol to the masses.

BitTorrent Surf is currently being made available as an “early Alpha” with the goal of gathering feedback from consumers looking for “simplified content discovery.”

Here, this video explains it better:

So far, BitTorrent lists the following features:

• Search: Quickly find torrents across multiple search sites, automatically detect search sites, and add your favorite sites to create a search custom engine.

• Download: Get media from sites like the Internet Archive directly from your search results in one click, manage downloads and notifications from your browser while you surf, and use file health estimates to help you select the best quality media to download.

• Play: Just push play.

The integrated search function allows for site auto-detection and has custom discovery built in. You can even save your favorite sites, and use them to create your own combined engine. The second point is rather self-explanatory.

That last one will be naturally be the key to getting Chrome users interested in the extension. BitTorrent claims “Surf is simply the most fluid and streamlined way to find, access and enjoy Internet content” but if it can’t play the content users discover and download, then it won’t get very far.

BitTorrent says Surf has been development for the past six months. We’ll keep you updated as the new Web client moves from alpha to final, and beyond.
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/01/1...ome-extension/





Chinese Man Pleads Guilty in Copyright Violation Case
Andrew Martin

Nearly five years ago, a Chinese man named Xiang Li registered several domain names, including www.crack99.com, and embarked on an ambitious, and ultimately illegal, venture.

Mr. Li, who was based in Chengdu, paid a network of computer experts to scour the Internet to find commercial software they could “crack,” meaning they bypassed security protocols designed to prevent unauthorized access or reproduction.

Ultimately, Mr. Li offered more than 2,000 pirated software products that could be used as applications in the military, engineering, space exploration, mathematics and explosive simulation, and sold them at a fraction of their retail price, which federal prosecutors said was over $100 million.

Among his biggest customers were an electronics engineer at NASA and the chief scientist at a government military contractor, but his clients also included students, inventors and small-business owners. Mr. Li sold the products for $20 to $1,200, accepting payments by Western Union and MoneyGram, according to government documents.

But Mr. Li’s criminal enterprise officially ended last year when he was arrested by undercover agents. On Monday, he pleaded guilty in Federal District Court in Delaware to one count of conspiring to steal copyrighted software. He faces a maximum of five years in prison.

Mr. Li, who is 36, could not be reached for comment, nor could his lawyer, Mingli Chen. Mr. Li’s wife, Chun Yan Li, was also indicted on charges of participating in the illegal scheme; she remains at large, presumably in China, officials said.

Mr. Li was arrested in June 2011 in Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands during a meeting that had been arranged by undercover agents posing as American businessmen. The agents arranged the meeting under the guise of picking up their purchase of pirated software, design packaging and 20 gigabytes of proprietary data, and to discuss a plan to transmit cracked software over the Internet so they could resell it to small businesses in the United States.

After the arrest, agents recovered six disks from Mr. Li containing an assortment of data pirated from an unidentified American software company, including military and civilian aircraft image models and a software module containing data about the International Space Station.

Edward J. McAndrew, one of the prosecutors on the case, said Mr. Li’s arrest was among the largest criminal copyright cases to be successfully prosecuted by the government.

Mr. McAndrew and his colleague, David L. Hall, explained in court documents that once Mr. Li obtained cracked software, he would advertise it on his Web sites, which also included www.cad100.net and www.dongle-crack-download.com. Mr. Li’s customers would then wire him money, some of which he deposited in an account at the Bank of China. From February 2008 to June 2011, Mr. Li and his customers exchanged more than 25,000 e-mails about pirated products, according to the government, which obtained a search warrant for his Gmail account.

Mr. Li used his Gmail account to orchestrate more than 500 illegal transactions with customers in at least 28 states and more than 60 foreign countries, according to court documents. Software was pirated from more than 200 manufacturers.

Mr. McAndrew said none of the pirated software obtained by the undercover agents from Mr. Li contained classified material. But Mr. McAndrew said the government could not determine whether any classified material was distributed to other buyers since it did not have access to all the pirated products that Mr. Li sold.

One of Mr. Li’s biggest customers was Cosburn Wedderburn, a NASA electronics engineer, who bought 12 cracked software programs with a retail value exceeding $1.2 million. Another was Dr. Wronald Best, chief scientist at an unidentified government contractor that provides services to the United States military and law enforcement, like radio transmissions, microwave technology and vacuum tubes used in military helicopters. Dr. Best exchanged more than 260 e-mails with Mr. Li to obtain 10 cracked software programs, with a retail value of more than $600,000, prosecutors said.

Both Mr. Wedderburn and Dr. Best pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. Both are awaiting sentencing.

Starting in January 2010, undercover agents began buying pirated software from Mr. Li’s Web sites, receiving electronic files with the pirated software or hyperlinks that allowed the agents to download the software from servers in the United States.

In all, the agents paid the Lis $8,615 for the software.

For instance, in January 2010, the agents bought a pirated copy of Satellite Tool Kit 8.0, a software product from Analytical Graphics that has a retail value of more than $150,000. The software includes several functions used by the military and intelligence communities, including three-dimensional warfare simulations.

Mr. Li’s e-mails suggest he was aware of the illegality of his venture, prosecutors say. “I am not a crack production engineers (my job is to collect)(.) This is an international organization created to crack declassified document (s),” he said in a 2009 e-mail. In another he wrote, “I need to use your money to seek the help of experts to cracker master I earn 10 percent of the profits.”

One customer asked who did the cracking. “Experts crack,” Mr. Li wrote. “Chinese people. Sorry can not reveal more.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/bu...tion-case.html





Verizon’s “Six Strikes” Anti-Piracy Measures Unveiled
Ernesto

During the coming weeks the controversial “six-strikes” anti-piracy system will kick off in the U.S. While none of the participating ISPs have officially announced how they will handle repeat infringers, TorrentFreak has obtained a copy of Verizon’s full policy. Among other things, offenders will have to watch a video about the consequences of online piracy, before their speeds are reduced to 256kbps. Also worth mentioning is that the copyright alert system will also apply to business customers.

In 2011 the MPAA and RIAA teamed up with five major Internet providers in the United States to launch the Center for Copyright Information (CCI).

The parties agreed to implement a system through which subscribers are warned that their copyright infringements have been monitored by rightsholders. After several warnings ISPs may then take a variety of repressive measures against alleged infringers.

After more than a year of delays the plan will officially roll out in the first weeks of this year.

One of the ISPs taking part is Verizon. Previously, the ISP made some remarks about the various punishments it would hand out to subscribers but in common with other participating providers the company has not yet announced the full details. Today, we can do this for them.

TorrentFreak has obtained a complete overview of how Verizon’s alert scheme will work and details of the mitigation measures they intend to put in place. The document is stored on Verizon’s web server but due to its placement is currently unfindable using Google.

When the IP-address of a Verizon customer is caught sharing copyrighted works on BitTorrent, the responsible account holder will first get two notification alerts. These inform the customer about the alleged copyright infringements and also explain how file-sharing software can be removed from their computer.

Alert 1 and 2

“Are delivered by email and automatic voicemail to the telephone number we have on file for you. Notify you that one or more copyright owners have reported that they believe your account has been involved in possible copyright infringement activity.”

“Provide a link to information on how to check to see if file sharing software is operating on your computer (and how to remove it) and tell you where to find information on obtaining content legally.”

If more infringements are found after the first two alerts then the account holder is moved on to the acknowledgment phase where “popups” appear on-screen. Customers will have to acknowledge that they received the new alert and will be instructed to watch a video about the consequences of online piracy.

Alert 3 and 4

“Redirect your browser to a special web page where you can review and acknowledge receiving the alerts. Provide a short video about copyright law and the consequences of copyright infringement.”

“Require you to click on an “acknowledgement” button before you will be able to freely browse the Internet. Clicking the acknowledgement button does not require you to admit that you or anyone else actually engaged in any infringing activity, only that you have received the alert.”

If the infringements continue after the fourth alert the subscriber will move on to the mitigation phase. Here, the customer can either ask for a review by the American Arbitration Association or undergo a temporary speed reduction to 256kbps.

Alert 5 and 6

“Redirect your browser to a special web page where you will be given several options. You can: Agree to an immediate temporary (2 or 3 day) reduction in the speed of your Internet access service to 256kbps (a little faster than typical dial-up speed); Agree to the same temporary (2 or 3 day) speed reduction but delay it for a period of 14 days; or Ask for a review of the validity of your alerts by the American Arbitration Association.”

If more infringements are found after the sixth alert “nothing” will happen. The user will receive no more alerts and can continue using his or her Internet connection at full speed.

However – and this is not mentioned by Verizon – the MPAA and RIAA may obtain the IP-addresses of such repeat infringers in order to take legal action against them. While the ISPs will not voluntarily share the name and address linked to the IP-address, they can obtain a subpoena to demand this information from the provider.

The potential for copyright holders to use the alert system as solid evidence gathering for lawsuits remains one of the most problematic aspects of the six-strikes scheme.

Finally, TorrentFreak also confirmed that the alerts outlined above will also apply to business customers. This means that coffee shops and other small businesses will have to be very careful over who they allow on their company networks. It could mean the end of free WiFi in many places.

Aside from Verizon we previously received some details on the measures AT&T and Time Warner Cable will take.

Leaked AT&T documents showed that they will block users’ access to some of the most frequently-visited websites on the Internet, until they complete a copyright course. Time Warner Cable will temporarily interrupt people’s ability to browse the Internet.

It’s expected that the two remaining providers, Cablevison and Comcast, will take similar measures. None of the ISPs will permanently disconnect repeat infringers as part of the plan.
http://torrentfreak.com/verizons-six...veiled-130111/





Internet Piracy Law Put to Test at Hearing
Tom Pullar-Strecker

The first hearing under the "Skynet" anti-piracy regime is scheduled to be heard by the Copyright Tribunal in Christchurch next month in what may become an important test case.

A Ministry of Justice spokesman said the Recording Industry Association (Rianz) was seeking an award against an unnamed internet user in Christchurch who had received a "third strike" for allegedly pirating music through a file-sharing service.

Rianz, which represents big record labels, has applied to bring 17 cases to the Copyright Tribunal and issued thousands of warning notices since the Copyright Act was amended in 2011 to provide "streamlined" justice for internet pirates.

Six of those applications had been dropped, the spokesman said, leaving 11 cases still live.

All the other alleged pirates are understood to have asked the tribunal to reach a decision on their cases based on the paperwork, without a full hearing.

The spokesman could not say whether any of those rulings might be out before next month's hearing.

The tribunal can make awards of up to $15,000 against pirates, and Rianz had sought awards of several thousand dollars in at least two of the dropped cases.

In one, Rianz sought about $2700 from a Wellington student whose internet account was allegedly used without her knowledge to download five songs valued at $11.75. That case also seemed destined for a formal hearing.Fairfax NZ
http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-dail...est-at-hearing





Court To Decide If Voltage Pictures To Get Internet Subscribers' IDs
Daniel Tencer

Some 1,100 internet users in central Canada could find out Monday if they will be targeted for litigation by a Hollywood movie company.

As the case — one of the first attempts at a file-sharing lawsuit in Canada — moves ahead, consumers’ advocates are questioning why the internet provider involved in the case has decided not to challenge the lawsuit.

Voltage Pictures, maker of The Hurt Locker, went to court in December to compel Teksavvy, an independent Ontario-based internet provider, to hand over the identities of subscribers the film company says were engaged in unauthorized file-sharing.

Voltage has requested the identities of internet users linked to about 2,000 IP addresses, but because multiple IP addresses can be assigned to one user, only about 1,100 people could have their identities handed over to Voltage.

Teksavvy initially won applause from consumers’ advocates for publicizing the request in a press release. It was further lauded in December when it requested a delay in the case in order to give advance notice to the customers targeted by Voltage Pictures.

But when the company said it would not actually oppose the motion in court, consumers’ advocates raised fears that capitulating to what some observers describe as a “copyright troll” would set a bad precedent under Canada's new copyright regime.

In a blog posting, lawyer Howard Knopf pointed out that, when BMG went to court against five Canadian ISPs in 2004 in order to identify 29 alleged music file-sharers, the ISPs, all major companies, opposed the request. The result was that the federal court dismissed the case, largely on the grounds that the copyright holder didn’t provide enough evidence of infringement.

“If the motion remains unopposed and is granted, the result could ... help to pave the way for future mass litigation — or the threat thereof in order to obtain vast numbers of “settlements” — in Canada in the future,” Knopf wrote. “Such litigation would be new to Canada.”

Teksavvy hasn't yet responded to a request for comment from The Huffington Post, but in a posting to the DSLReports forum, company CEO Marc Gaudrault explained that the company only meant to give its customers a chance to challenge Voltage’s request themselves, and never meant to fight the request on behalf of their customers.

“[W]e have looked into all angles to determine what our position should be in this situation and after spending a significant amount of time and soliciting a considerable amount of advice from numerous respected sources, we found that we simply could not comment on the merits of the case,” Gaudrault wrote.

“Our place is to ensure that we provide adequate notice and also to make known to others that these requests have occurred.”

The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) has filed a motion to intervene in the Voltage case, in the hopes of making a similar argument to the one in the BMG case — that Voltage doesn’t have enough evidence of file-sharing to compel the release of Teksavvy customers’ identity.

CIPPIC director David Fewer has described Voltage's case as being built on "hearsay evidence" that he doubts meets the legal burden for the court to grant their request.

But with the case headed to court on Monday, it’s unlikely CIPPIC will be granted intervenor status in time, the National Post reports.

The case soon could be followed by more file-sharing lawsuits. Canipre, a Canadian copyright enforcement group that works for the Canadian and U.S. film industry, said last November it had identified one million Canadians it says were engaged in unauthorized file-sharing.

If the federal court in Toronto hearing the case grants Voltage’s request, the likely next step will be for the company to send out letters to the identified users, asking them to pay an out-of-court settlement over the issue. Voltage would likely ask users for several thousand dollars. (That’s the tack the company took during an earlier, aborted attempt at suing alleged file-sharers.)

Then the accused have a choice. They can pay the several thousand dollars and be done with it, or they can go to court and face down Voltage Pictures, and face the possibility of a maximum $5,000 fine under Canada’s new copyright law.

But, as Teksavvy’s Gaudrault notes, "the best way to protect against these requests is to simply not engage in these activities.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/01...n_2459087.html





104 John Does Dropped From Porn File-Sharing Suit
Stewart Bishop

A Colorado federal judge on Friday slashed 104 unidentified defendants from sex industry company PHE Inc.’s copyright suit asserting they used the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol to illegally download its pornographic movie, finding that bundling so many different defendants together is not appropriate.

PHE, the parent of sex toy purveyor and adult film producer Adam & Eve, brought the suit in late December, accusing the John Doe defendants of downloading parts of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer XXX: A Parody.”
http://www.law360.com/articles/40580...e-sharing-suit





Chicago Attorney Moves to Defend Clients Accused of Illegal File-Sharing in Improper Copyright Troll Cases

Litigation attorney Jeffrey J. Antonelli launches new practice area defending clients accused of copyright infringement in recent boom of file-sharing lawsuits
Press release

In response to a recent surge of often-frivolous BitTorrent lawsuits used to force settlement payments out of potentially innocent defendants, the Law Offices of Jeffrey J. Antonelli, Ltd. dba Antonelli Law recently launched a new practice area in Internet Service Provider (ISP) subpoena defense. Antonelli, experienced in copyright and computer litigation, works with his team of file-sharing attorneys to defend the rights of dozens of clients recently targeted in an onslaught of BitTorrent file-sharing lawsuits brought on by production companies looking to acquire extra revenue.

Copyright cases have been flooding courtrooms across the U.S. during the past year ever since a rapidly increasing number of production companies have begun threatening to reveal the identities of computer users accused of downloading or sharing certain unauthorized media files through BitTorrent clients like LimeWire, Vuze, and websites including Pirate Bay. Some being sued by an entity called Guava LLC are accused of computer hacking. A computer user targeted in a lawsuit will receive a notice from their ISP in the mail demanding upfront payment of a settlement by a certain deadline, and if that payment is not received the defendant is threatened with a copyright infringement lawsuit and the publication of their identity. The defendants in these cases are initially identified only by their IP addresses, but if the case reaches court their name could be revealed.

Production companies of mainstream and adult-orientated media began launching these lawsuits against alleged unauthorized sharers of movies, videos, eBooks, and music as a tool to recoup financial losses. When someone is targeted in these cases, it means their Internet Protocol (IP) address has been identified for downloading copyrighted works. Many defendants in copyright infringement cases, however, are wrongly accused and have fallen victim to hackers who piggyback onto the IP addresses of unknowing computer users, or who use an open Wi-Fi router that allows unknown users to access an open IP address.

“The incidence of BitTorrent lawsuits has blown up over the past year and these cases are flooding our federal courts,” Antonelli said. “I’ve seen clients accused of downloading just one video to more than 25 downloads and they’re often asked to pay up to $150,000 or more in damages.”

He continued, “I began receiving calls in 2011 from people receiving notices from their ISP stating their identity was being subpoenaed, and many of them didn’t understand what was going on or why this was happening to them. Many innocent people receive these notices, and the Copyright Act needs to be changed to address consumers downloading internet files rather than large scale for-profit piracy infringers. Until then, we’re here to fight for their rights.”

Antonelli and his copyright defense team helps to defend the wrongly accused against these improper copyright infringement claims by moving to dismiss cases or quash subpoenas in an effort to put a stop to this epidemic of frivolous lawsuits.

For the latest information regarding copyright law, visit the Antonelli Law Firm’s blog, “Torrent Defenders,” at torrent-defenders.com.
http://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=168242





Bunches of Bananas

Banana Republic Justice: Behind The Scenes Of The Pirate Bay Trial
Rick Falkvine

Process of law failed on so many accounts in the trial against the two operators of The Pirate Bay, its media spokesperson, and a fourth unrelated person that it’s hard to get a bird’s-eye view. This trial was characterized by first deciding that the operations were criminal, then finding somebody to punish, and finally trying to determine a criminal act they could be held accountable to. In any civilized country where process of law works, the exact reverse order is followed.

First, we know that the United States ordered the shutdown and trial of The Pirate Bay. This was confirmed by Swedish Public Television, showing how the then-Swedish Minister of Justice Thomas Bodström had been in contact with the US State Department through intermediaries.

Then, in the raid on May 31, 2006, the Police emptied an entire server hall and didn’t just seize The Pirate Bay, in an apparent deliberate attempt to create a public fear of association. Almost 200 mom-and-pop stores got their servers seized in collateral damage. The copyright lobby’s reps were quoted as saying, “you should be careful with where you place your servers”. (Later, some constitutionally protected servers – registered news publications – were actually given back, but not before a judge had intervened hard. Other servers, such as The Pirate Bureau’s discussion forum, remained in seizure.)

To further create a fear of association, the police harassed the site’s legal counsel by forcibly sampling and registering their DNA for any and all future use.

The lead investigator with the Police for the case, Jim Keyzer, was hired by Warner Brothers, one of the plaintiffs, before finishing the investigation and while still on notice with the Police, and was already hired by Warner when conducting the hearings and wrapping up the investigation. This is a textbook bribe, which is why you will find many Swedish blogs referring to “the bribed policeman Jim Keyzer” (den mutade polisen Jim Keyzer). The Swedish then-Minister of Justice Beatrice Ask commented on the case: “it’s positive that our policemen are hired from outside the Police Authority. That indicates they’re attractive”.

The presiding judge in the District Court, Tomas Norström, picked the case to himself. This is not supposed to be possible, but he argued that his court department (which specialized in copyright monopoly cases) should have the case, and he just happened to be the only available judge there. Norström was a signed-up member in the Swedish Association For Copyright, just like all the plaintiffs were, as well as a board member in The Swedish Association for Protection of Intellectual Property, giving him a political as well as social interest in the outcome of the case and making him textbook corrupt. (This is why you see a lot of Swedish blogs discuss “the corrupt judge Tomas Norström”.)

In the investigation, the two operators of The Pirate Bay were initially indicted. For some reason, its media spokesperson Peter Sunde, which had openly talked back to the copyright industry, was indicted too despite having done nothing but talking, and a fourth completely unrelated person was indicted more or less because he was rich and could be ruined as a warning to others, to create yet more fear of association. (This would not be the official reason, but the obvious reason to everybody else.)

During the trial, the defense pointed out that it had not been proven that any crime had been committed at all which the four were on trial for aiding and abetting. (Sharing culture is fully legal in many countries, and the prosecution hadn’t cared to show that a criminal act had been committed – only that sharing of culture had happened somewhere, but not that it was illegal in that location. If it had happened in Spain at the time, for instance, it would have been fully legal.) The prosecution agreed with the fact that no crime had been proven to have been committed in the first place, and then, that quite crucial fact magically vanished from the end verdict of aiding and abetting that non-shown crime.

And the media spokesperson, Peter Sunde? He was convicted for part in operating The Pirate Bay based on a load balancer he had placed in a server rack, a box that had not had a single wire attached to it in The Pirate Bay’s server hall, and which was configured for something completely different than The Pirate Bay. Documentation of this configuration had gone completely missing from the investigation where everything else was meticulously documented.

The judges in the Appeals Court denied a retrial in the District Court based on the charges of a biased judge. Those judges had been part of the same pro-copyright political organization as Tomas Norström, and didn’t see any bias.

Nobody paid much attention to the appeals trial in the Appeals Court, as the landmark case was expected to go to the Supreme Court. It was the middle act in a three-act play. Still, in the Appeals Court, not one but two of the judges had a background from the same kind of pro-copyright lobby organizations as the District Court’s Norström.

Then, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. At that point, the four people went into exile.

This is just a small subset of the things that are… remarkable… about the trial against the two operators of The Pirate Bay, its media spokesperson, and a fourth unrelated person.

Sweden has a justice system unworthy of a banana republic. When the establishment is threatened, or when the US of A calls for Sweden to jump, all rights and due process go out the window.
http://falkvinge.net/2013/01/06/bana...ate-bay-trial/





Republican Staffer Fired for Copyright Memo Talks to Ars

Derek Khanna needs a new job, but he's unapologetic about his reformist views.
Timothy B. Lee

When the Republican Study Committee, an influential group of Republicans within the House of Representatives, released and then retracted a controversial memo on copyright reform in November, its author declined to talk to us on the record. A month later, when news of his firing over the memo broke, Derek Khanna stuck to his "no comment" line. At the time, he was still officially on the RSC's payroll until the end of the 112th Congress.

But when the 113th Congress began at noon on Thursday, Khanna became a free agent. We reached Khanna by phone on Thursday afternoon to discuss the memo, his departure from the RSC, and the prospects for copyright reform in the coming years.

Khanna's memo advocated several common-sense reforms to the copyright system, including reducing the term of copyright protection and reining in "statutory damages" that can be as high as $150,000 per infringement.

RSC executive director Paul Teller said he spiked the memo because it had been published "without adequate review." But Khanna says his memo went through exactly the same review process as other RSC publications. "There was nothing particularly unusual about this memo," he told us.

For a typical RSC memo, "a staffer will write it up, and then we'll go through the process to revise it accordingly and receive the final sign-off." When an RSC staffer is preparing a memo, he is "not allowed to do peer review or show it outside the organization." But Khanna told us that his memo had "input from several of our staff members, when typically it only requires the approval of one staff member."

Khanna said he hoped his memo would start a conversation about copyright reform and perhaps draw the attention of the tech community. But the "level of backlash it received from the content industry" took him by surprise.

Khanna says he didn't personally hear from any members of Congress upset about the memo, and he refused to comment on the exact circumstances of his departure. The Washington Examiner's Tim Carney reported Khanna was let go under pressure from Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), whose district in the suburbs of Nashville gives her close ties to the recording industry.

Support from pundits but not politicians

Khanna told us the memo received broad support from commentators on the political right. In The New York Times, conservative columnist David Brooks praised Khanna's memo, which Brooks said "differed from the usual lobbyist-driven position" on copyright.

"The Republican establishment has traditionally gone along with whatever big business asked for on copyright," one blogger at the influential conservative blog Redstate.com wrote in defense of Khanna's memo. Jordan Bloom at The American Conservative wrote Khanna's position provided Republicans with an opportunity for "winning millennials and screwing Hollywood."

But so far, no Republican members of Congress have endorsed Khanna's memo or the policy ideas he put forward. Khanna said he's optimistic that will happen in the coming months. "Creating policy is sometimes a slow process," Khanna told us. (And Congress certainly had a lot on its plate over the last two months.) Khanna argued that with a new Congress beginning it was "time for an enterprising member to take up [copyright reform] in a fashion that he feels is appropriate and run with it."

Khanna believes there's a broad constituency for copyright reform. He has fond memories of the January 2012 Internet protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. At the time, he was on the staff of Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA). Brown was one of sixteen Republican Senators who announced their opposition to PIPA on the day of the historic protests against the legislation.

"The feedback was absolutely deafening," Khanna said of e-mails and phone calls from constituents opposing the legislation. "It was unlike anything I had ever seen, and most congressional staffers I worked with had seen." He said that to this day, members of Congress ask "is this the next SOPA?" when considering Internet-related legislation.

"You work for the American people"

Khanna's firing generated a lot of press coverage, but so far it hasn't netted him a new job. "Today is my last day working @RepublicanStudy Committee," he tweeted on Thursday. "To Congressman interested in smart tech policy—call me maybe?"

In the short term, Khanna has been offered a number of opportunities to further expound on his copyright reform views. He said he's in the process of talking to potential employers, but right now he's out of a job.

Khanna expressed no regrets and he urged other Hill staffers not to be intimidated.

"I encourage Hill staffers to bring forth new ideas. Don't be discouraged by the potential consequences," Khanna told us. "You work for the American people. It's your job, your obligation to be challenging existing paradigms and put forward novel solutions to existing problems."

We look forward to seeing what novel solutions Khanna comes up with in the months and years ahead.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...-talks-to-ars/





Sony Issues Dylan CDs to Extend Copyright
Allan Kozinn

In an unusual response to provisions in a new European copyright law, scheduled to take effect by 2014, Sony Music has released a compilation of early Bob Dylan recordings that is bound to become one of his most collectible albums. “The 50th Anniversary Collection,” which carries a subtitle — “The Copyright Extension Collection, Vol. 1” — that explains its purpose, was rushed to only a handful of record shops in Germany, France, Sweden and Britain just after

Only about 100 copies of the four-CD set were produced, with sparse packaging and an insert listing the details of the set’s 86 tracks, all previously unreleased studio outtakes and live recordings from 1962 and 1963.

It also comes as a downloadable version, available through the singers’s Web site, bobdylan.com, but only to fans who log on from France or Germany. (Prices for the CD set vary from country to country, from the equivalent of $39 to, in Britain, $138)

American collectors are locked out, although for those desperate to have an original CD set, several have made their way to eBay, where bids have gone as high as about $1,450. (For collectors who want the recordings, but who don’t care about having one of the 100 original CDs, the set has been turning up on file-sharing sites.)

Two spokesmen for Sony confirmed that the set was legitimate, its bootleglike appearance notwithstanding. They explained that the point of the release was to keep the recordings under copyright protection in Europe, where the laws are in flux. Currently, recordings can be copyrighted in Europe for 50 years, a much shorter term than in the United States, where recordings made since 1978 will remain copyrighted until 70 years after the death of the last surviving author.

In 2011 the European Union revised its copyright laws to extend copyright to 70 years. The change is not yet in effect but will be by 2014. And there’s a catch, a “use it or lose it” provision: recordings cannot benefit from the 20-year extension unless they were published before the 50-year term expired. The recordings on “The 50th Anniversary Collection” were about to fall over that legal precipice.

Because Sony has been considering some tracks on “The 50th Anniversary Collection” for its Bootleg Series, a program of archival releases that now encompasses nine multidisc sets, the company decided to throw a few dozen tracks onto the market, however tenuously, to ensure their ownership.

There was another concern. In Europe smaller labels have been releasing recordings that have gone out of copyright as public domain compilations — so-called gray market discs — including some by Mr. Dylan. Typically, these companies have not had access to master tapes but have released material that has already appeared on bootlegs, often in superb but not master quality. Sony hopes to fight those labels with this release and any sequels.

“The 50th Anniversary Collection” is an idiosyncratic compilation, made up largely of recordings from the sessions for Mr. Dylan’s second album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” Included are alternative takes of several songs from that record, including “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Bob Dylan’s Dream” and “I Shall Be Free,” as well songs that didn’t make the finished album, often in multiple versions.

Among the highlights is a series of seven increasingly rollicking versions of “Mixed Up Confusion,” which Mr. Dylan released as a single in 1962, and three takes — one on piano, two on guitar — of the Robert Johnson blues classic “Milkcow’s Calf Blues.”

Some of the studio recordings, as well as live performances from the Gaslight Cafe, Carnegie Hall and the Finjan Club, in Montreal, are familiar to collectors of bootlegs, though the quality here is improved. In fact, the outtakes from the “Freewheelin’ ” sessions sound notably clearer than “Freewheelin’” itself.

So far, few record labels have responded to the pending shift in European copyright protection by releasing copious amounts of archival material, although fans of bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones are hoping that such releases are in the offing.

But Sony is not alone. Universal, which owns the Motown catalog, has released a series of jazz, gospel and rhythm and blues albums under the rubric “Motown Unreleased 1962,” which makes a large body of its unissued archives eligible for the European copyright extension.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/a...copyright.html





Amazon’s AutoRip Automatically Downloads Free MP3s for CDs Purchased from Amazon
Thorin Klosowski

Amazon launched its new AutoRip service today. The service works with the Amazon MP3 store to give you free MP3 copies of CDs you've purchased from Amazon dating all the way back to 1998.

The AutoRip feature is turned on automatically, so if you purchase a CD from Amazon it will automatically download the MP3 version to the Amazon Cloud Player. When you log into your Cloud Player, any CDs you've purchased since 1998 that qualify for the service are added to your cloud drive as well. You can click the "Purchased" tab in your Amazon Cloud Player to see what tracks have been added. Currently, only about 50,000 CDs are eligible for AutoRip, but most new releases will be available as well.
http://lifehacker.com/5974800/amazon...ed-from-amazon





New Version of Dish's Hopper DVR Likely to Rile Broadcasters
Liana B. Baker

Satellite television provider Dish unveiled on Monday the latest version of its controversial digital video recording device, dubbed the Hopper, with new features such as the ability to stream live TV and recorded programs outside the home.

Already embroiled in a legal battle with all the major broadcast networks over the DVR's first iteration, Dish could engender a new round of lawsuits with its updated version, which it is calling "Hopper with Sling."

Announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the updated Hopper uses "sling" technology that redirects a live or recorded TV signal from the set-top box to Internet-connected devices. That means that Dish subscribers with the new version can watch live TV wherever their mobile device or computer has Internet access.

The updated Hopper also features an app that allows customers to transfer saved TV programs to an Apple iPad so they can access shows on planes, subways or other areas where Internet access is unavailable. Such a transfer can only occur once.

Vivek Khemka, vice president of product management at Dish, said that the updated Hopper falls within "fair use policy" and does not violate copyrights.

"We believe this is consumer initiated. The consumer is choosing to watch their content, so it's well within the fair use policy," Khemka said.

But a source familiar with programming deals, who asked not to be named, said Dish may be violating contracts with media companies by offering Internet streaming of TV outside the home.

"The definitions are really tight and primarily talk about residential use and define the delivery technology," the source said about programming contracts.

In terms of transferring a copy of the iPad to content, the source said that Dish could find itself in legal trouble because "download rights are specifically negotiated," and often complicated.

A Fox spokesman had no comment on Dish's new Hopper. Representatives for CBS, NBC, ABC did not immediately return requests for comment.

When Cablevision Systems Corp released a similar app in 2011 that allowed for streaming in the home it was sued by Viacom for violating its contract with the programmer. The case settled in August 2011.

Dish, which ranks as the nation's second-largest satellite television provider with 14 million subscribers, is using the new Hopper as a way to attract customers to its service. The company plans to give it away for free to new customers who sign up for a two-year contract. The price for existing Dish customers will be revealed later.

Dish's sister company, EchoStar Communications, acquired Sling Media, the company that developed the technology, in 2007 for $380 million. Both Dish and EchoStar are controlled by eccentric billionaire Charlie Ergen.

Currently, all of Dish's channels ranging from ESPN to premium channels such as HBO or Showtime are available for live viewing on devices other than the TV depending on what programming package customers have. Subscribers can also watch any recorded programs that are saved on their DVR.

"If you get it at home, it's here (on the Hopper). Any channel on the guide is available, or anything you've DVR-ed," Khemka, the Dish executive, said.

BROADCASTERS UPSET

Dish last year introduced DVRs with an "autohop" function that allows subscribers to skip commercials entirely when they are watching recorded shows, drawing the ire of broadcast network television owners such as CBS and News Corp's FOX.

Analysts at the time said Dish was using its Hopper DVR as a way to fight back against retransmission fees, which are payments cable and satellite companies pay to broadcast stations to carry their networks.

The autohop feature is also available on the new Hopper, which Dish touted as being twice as fast as the last one.

Watching TV over the Internet on mobile devices or computers through a pay TV provider is not new. In fact it's part of an industry effort dubbed "TV Everywhere" that's aimed at stopping consumers from cutting the cord in favor of cheaper online services such as Netflix or streaming on Amazon.com.

But these TV Everywhere services have not been widely adopted by consumers largely because the offerings are limited. Not all channels can be viewed on mobile devices and only a few networks can be streamed live, depending on specific agreements. Time Warner, which has the "HBO GO" app is considered a rare success.

Dish CEO Joe Clayton said that "consumer behavior of watching Internet video is not going away" and Dish needs to adapt as the pay TV market shrinks.

"With Hopper, the value equation for pay TV becomes radically different. Customers pay only once for their content and can access it anywhere they choose, in the home, or on the go," he said.

(Additional reporting by Lisa Richwine in Los Angeles; Editing by Peter Lauria, Cynthia Osterman and David Gregorio)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...90700W20130108





Walmart Now Lets You Convert DVDs to UltraViolet Digital Copies Without Leaving Home
Chris Welch

Walmart first launched its disc-to-digital initiative last year, allowing customers to bring a DVD collection to any of the retailer's stores and pay to receive UltraViolet digital copies of their movies. But now the company is going to let you complete the entire process from home; no more inconvenient visits to Walmart's Photo Center (which handles disc-to-digital) will be necessary.

"No need to leave the house anymore"

From here on out, you'll simply need to log onto Vudu and download an app which handles authentication; Walmart says the software checks to ensure that the disc in your computer is a retail copy and not sourced from rental vendors like Redbox or Netflix. After selecting the movies you'd like digital copies of (and assuming Vudu's disc-to-digital catalog contains the content in question) you'll immediately get a copy in your UltraViolet locker. You get to keep your original disc, of course, and also won't have to deal the unsightly stamp Walmart applies in-store. From there the movie will be available for streaming (or download) from any UV-compatible application.

Pricing remains unchanged: a standard definition copy of a DVD will run you $2, with an HD upgrade demanding a bit more at $5. Blu-rays are also eligible for disc-to-digital and prove to be the better option since you pay $2 for a high-def version.

"Will it help UltraViolet gain traction?"

Walmart's new process may be convenient, but it's also necessary for UltraViolet to have any chance of becoming a central, cloud-based hub for your entire movie collection. And make no mistake: that continues to be the ultimate ambition here. We expect UltraViolet to have a significant presence CES, so stay tuned for the latest news on the platform throughout the entire week.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/7/384...ital-from-home





Postal Service Must Stop Favoring Netflix DVDs Over GameFly Ones, Says Appeals Court
Adi Robertson

A US appeals court has ruled in favor of GameFly in a long-running suit against the Postal Service, determining once again that the Postal Service gave preferential treatment to Netflix and Blockbuster by sorting their DVDs. In 2009, GameFly filed a lawsuit claiming that while postal workers manually sorted Netflix or Blockbuster envelopes for free to stop them from being broken, it refused to extend the same courtesy to GameFly, leading to high breakage rates and forcing it to ship with more expensive flat cardboard packaging.

In 2011, a lower court agreed that GameFly had indeed been wronged, but it rejected two proposed solutions: that the Postal Service either provide free manual sorting to GameFly as it did for other companies or substantially reduce the rate for flat pack envelopes. Now, the appeals court has ruled that this decision was faulty, especially because the justification was based on the fact that GameFly used flat packaging — something it was only doing in the first place because the Postal Service refused to treat its envelopes with the same care given Netflix.

""Switching to letter mail could subject GameFly to an epidemic of cracked and shattered DVDs.""

"Without special manual processing like that afforded to Netflix," the ruling says, "switching to letter mail could subject GameFly to an epidemic of cracked and shattered DVDs." Now, the Postal Service will either have to offer the same service to all parties or explain once again why discrimination is justified. This ruling marks one of the last developments in a long-running case with significant repercussions for DVD-by-mail services, but it's a little amusing to see it handed down at a time when Netflix is far better known for streaming than discs and even GameFly is moving to digital distribution.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/11/38...tial-treatment





Exclusive: Disney Looks for Cost Savings, Ponders Layoffs – Sources
Ronald Grover

Walt Disney Co (DIS.N), which reported record earnings in November, started an internal cost cutting review several weeks ago that may include layoffs at its studio and other units, three people with knowledge of the effort told Reuters.

Disney, whose empire spans TV, film, merchandise and theme parks, is exploring cutbacks in jobs no longer needed because of improvements in technology, one of the people said.

It is also looking at redundant operations that could be eliminated after a string of major acquisitions over the past few years, said the person, who did not want to be identified because Disney has not disclosed the internal review.

Executives warned in November that the rising cost of sports rights and moribund home video sales will dampen growth.

"We are constantly looking at eliminating redundancies and creating greater efficiencies, especially with the rapid rise in new technology," said Disney spokeswoman Zenia Mucha.

In terms of profit margin, Disney's studio is the least profitable of the entertainment conglomerate's four major product divisions.

Its fifth division, the interactive unit that creates online games, lost $758 million over the last three years, according to the company's financial filings.

Disney could trim jobs at both the studio and interactive divisions as well as its music arm, said Tony Wible, an analyst with Janney Montgomery Scott, who has a neutral rating on the company's stock.

The media company is in what CEO Bob Iger calls a "transition year" after spending on projects such as the "Cars Land" expansion at the Disneyland Resort in California and a new cruise ship that launched last year.

"We invested a lot of money in our theme parks and resorts business," Disney chief financial officer Jay Rasulo told a media conference in December. "We want to execute against delivering the returns that we've been promising all of you for the years that we've been making those investments. We really want to hunker down on it."

Staff cuts are not a certainty at this point, the person added, although the company has a history of streamlining operations through layoffs.

In 2011, the interactive group laid off about 200 people at its video games unit after what Disney executives said at the time was a shift away from console games to focus on online and mobile entertainment. In September, 50 employees at Disney Interactive were laid off in a restructuring of the money-losing unit, according to one of the sources.

The company also made cuts at its publishing unit last year, and cut workers at its studio in 2011.

"This is not necessarily a negative thing," said Michael Morris, an analyst with Davenport and Company who has a buy recommendation on the stock but was not aware of the review.

"It speaks to a fiscally responsible management."

STUDIO COULD BE TARGET

Walt Disney increased its earnings by 18 percent to $5.7 billion in its 2012 fiscal year that ended September 29, on $42.3 billion in revenues.

The present review, headed by CFO Rasulo, has already identified areas to change in the company's travel policy, said one of the people. It is also looking at a hiring freeze rather than layoffs, said a second source.

Cuts are most likely at the studio, said two of the three people, where the strategy has changed to focus on fewer films and rely more on outside producers such as Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks studio, which finances its own films and pays Disney a fee to market and distribute them.

The film strategy shift began when Iger took over as CEO in late 2005. Under Iger, the company purchased "Toy Story" creator Pixar Animation and Marvel, which brought it characters such as "Thor" and "Iron Man" that featured in this summer's blockbuster hit "The Avengers."

Disney completed a $4.06 billion acquisition of "Star Wars" creator George Lucas' Lucasfilm in December, and has said that it will begin producing new installments of the lucrative franchise in 2015, and make a film every two to three years.

The studio's 12.3 percent profit margin in 2012 was the lowest of Disney's four major operating units. The interactive unit lost $216 million last year.

Shares in the company gained 1.9 percent to close Friday at $52.19.

(Editing by Edwin Chan and Richard Pullin)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...9060AH20130107





At Disney Parks, a Bracelet Meant to Build Loyalty (and Sales)
Brooks Barnes

Imagine Walt Disney World with no entry turnstiles. Cash? Passé: Visitors would wear rubber bracelets encoded with credit card information, snapping up corn dogs and Mickey Mouse ears with a tap of the wrist. Smartphone alerts would signal when it is time to ride Space Mountain without standing in line.

Disney in the coming months plans to begin introducing a vacation management system called MyMagic+ that will drastically change the way Disney World visitors — some 30 million people a year — do just about everything.

The initiative is part of a broader effort, estimated by analysts to cost between $800 million and $1 billion, to make visiting Disney parks less daunting and more amenable to modern consumer behavior. Disney is betting that happier guests will spend more money.

“If we can enhance the experience, more people will spend more of their leisure time with us,” said Thomas O. Staggs, chairman of Disney Parks and Resorts.

The ambitious plan moves Disney deeper into the hotly debated terrain of personal data collection. Like most major companies, Disney wants to have as much information about its customers’ preferences as it can get, so it can appeal to them more efficiently. The company already collects data to use in future sales campaigns, but parts of MyMagic+ will allow Disney for the first time to track guest behavior in minute detail.

Did you buy a balloon? What attractions did you ride and when? Did you shake Goofy’s hand, but snub Snow White? If you fully use MyMagic+, databases will be watching, allowing Disney to refine its offerings and customize its marketing messages.

Disney is aware of potential privacy concerns, especially regarding children. The plan, which comes as the federal government is trying to strengthen online privacy protections, could be troublesome for a company that some consumers worry is already too controlling.

But Disney has decided that MyMagic+ is essential. The company must aggressively weave new technology into its parks — without damaging the sense of nostalgia on which the experience depends — or risk becoming irrelevant to future generations, Mr. Staggs said. From a business perspective, he added, MyMagic+ could be “transformational.”

Aside from benefiting Disney’s bottom line, the initiative could alter the global theme parks business. Disney is not the first vacation company to use wristbands equipped with radio frequency identification, or RFID, chips. Great Wolf Resorts, an operator of 11 water parks in North America, has been using them since 2006. But Disney’s global parks operation, which has an estimated 121.4 million admissions a year and generates $12.9 billion in revenue, is so huge that it can greatly influence consumer behavior.

“When Disney makes a move, it moves the culture,” said Steve Brown, chief operating officer for Lo-Q, a British company that provides line management and ticketing systems for theme parks and zoos.

Disney World guests currently plod through entrance turnstiles, redeeming paper tickets, and then decide what to ride; food and merchandise are bought with cash or credit cards. (Disney hotel key cards can also be used to charge items.) People race to FastPass kiosks, which dispense a limited number of free line-skipping tickets. But gridlock quickly sets in and most people wait. And wait.

In contrast, MyMagic+ will allow users of a new Web site and app — called My Disney Experience — to preselect three FastPasses before they leave home for rides or V.I.P. seating for parades, fireworks and character meet-and-greets. Orlando-bound guests can also preregister for RFID bracelets. These so-called MagicBands will function as room key, park ticket, FastPass and credit card.

MagicBands can also be encoded with all sorts of personal details, allowing for more personalized interaction with Disney employees. Before, the employee playing Cinderella could say hello only in a general way. Now — if parents opt in — hidden sensors will read MagicBand data, providing information needed for a personalized greeting: “Hi, Angie,” the character might say without prompting. “I understand it’s your birthday.”

The data will also be used to make waiting areas for rides (“scene ones” in Disney parlance) less of a drag. A new Magic Kingdom ride called Under the Sea, for instance, features a robotic version of Scuttle the sea gull from “The Little Mermaid” that will be able to chitchat with MagicBand wearers.

“We want to take experiences that are more passive and make them as interactive as possible — moving from, ‘Cool, look at that talking bird,’ to ‘Wow, amazing, that bird is talking directly to me,’ ” said Bruce Vaughn, chief creative executive for Walt Disney Imagineering.

Guests will not be forced to use the MagicBand system, and people who do try it will decide how much information to share. An online options menu, for instance, will offer various controls: Do you want park employees to know your name? Do you want Disney to send you special offers when you get home? What about during your stay?

“I may walk in and feel good about giving information about myself and my wife, but maybe we don’t want to give much about the children,” Mr. Staggs said. Still, once using the MagicBand, even if selecting the most restrictive settings, Disney sensors will gather general information about how the visitor uses the park.

Rumors about MyMagic+ have been circulating on Disney fan blogs for months and offer a window into the likely debate over the service.

“Although I know this type of technology is making its way into every facet of life, it still makes me feel a bit creeped out,” wrote Jayne Townsley on StitchKingdom.com.

Pam Falcioni, another StitchKingdom user, had the opposite response. “I think it sounds awesome,” she wrote, adding, “As far as ‘Big Brother’ watching over us as we wander the parks, anyone worried about ‘real’ privacy wouldn’t be wandering around a theme park full of security cameras.”

The logistical challenges involved in pulling this off are extensive. Disney has 60,000 employees here and many must be retrained to use new technology. Already, Disney has installed free Wi-Fi at Disney World, a 40-square-mile area, so smartphone users can access the My Disney Experience app more readily. And all of the new procedures must be communicated to Super Bowl-size crowds daily.

What happens if your MagicBand is lost or stolen? Park employees will be trained to deactivate them or guests can use the My Disney Experience app, a Disney spokeswoman said. As a safety precaution, Disney will also require guests to enter a PIN when using the wristbands to make purchases of $50 or more. “The bands themselves will contain no personal identifiable information,” Mr. Staggs said.

Mr. Staggs said Disney’s board decided to move ahead with the technology upgrades in February 2011 only after identifying multiple ways in which the initiative could expand profits. “If Disney can drive more value from existing infrastructure by layering on technology, that is extremely powerful,” said Mr. Brown of Lo-Q. “They can’t just compete by building new rides; it’s already a theme-park arms race out there.”

Disney expects MagicBands to turn into a big business in and of themselves; the company plans to introduce collectible sets of MagicBand accessories and charms.

Prodding guests to do more advance planning, combined with the tracking of guests as they roam the parks, will help Disney manage its work force more efficiently. More advance planning will also help lock visitors into Disney once they arrive in Orlando, discouraging people, for instance, from making impromptu visits to Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

Some cosmetic changes to the parks are included in the initiative’s cost. For instance, eventually guests will no longer enter the parks through turnstiles. Instead, they will tap their MagicBand on a post. Mr. Staggs explained that research indicated that guests — particularly mothers with strollers — viewed the turnstiles as an unpleasant barrier. “Small, subtle things can make a big difference,” Mr. Staggs said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/b...and-sales.html





Student Loses Lawsuit Challenging Texas School's RFID Tracking Program
Will Oremus

A Texas public school district's controversial pilot program to keep track of its students on campus with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips has survived a legal challenge in federal court. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia dismissed a request for a preliminary injunction from Andrea Hernandez, a sophomore at John Jay High School in San Antonio who refused to wear the school’s ID cards on religious grounds.

The girl’s evangelical Christian father, Steven Hernandez, had equated the badges to the Biblical "mark of the beast." Northside Independent School District officials told Andrea last fall she would have to either wear the card or transfer from John Jay, a magnet school, to her local campus, which is not part of the RFID pilot program. Lawyers from the nonprofit Rutherford Institute took the girl’s case, seeking an injunction to block the school from enforcing its policy.

Tech blogs, civil rights groups, and even Anonymous joined the fray on the family’s side, calling the RFID badges an egregious invasion of privacy. But as I reported in November, the outrage overlooked a crucial fact: The district had offered Hernandez a compromise, allowing her to wear the ID card with the chip removed. She and her father refused, saying that would amount to showing support for a program that violates their religious convictions.

The judge disagreed. In a 25-page ruling, he wrote that the Hernandez’s refusal to wear the badge even without the tracking chip undermined her claims that the district was violating her religious freedom. “Plaintiff's objection to wearing the Smart ID badge without a chip is clearly a secular choice, rather than a religious concern,” Garcia wrote.

Some claims of religious discrimination are subject to heightened scrutiny in court, but Garcia opined that the school’s policy didn’t qualify, because it applied equally to all students. And the program “easily passes” the less-stringent “rational basis” test, he went on, because the district has “a legitimate need to easily identify its students for purposes of safety, security, attendance, and funding.” Requiring all students to carry a Smart ID badge is “certainly a rational means to meet such needs,” he added. For example, he wrote:

Very recently, a parent of a special needs student was concerned that the child did not get on the bus after school, and the school staff was able to pull the sensor readings to determine when the student was on campus and when he left, thus reassuring the parent. On another occasion, a building was evacuated and campus administrators were able to quickly identify and locate students' badges that had been left in the building during the evacuation.

Garcia also dismissed a separate claim that requiring Hernandez to wear the ID card without the chip would violate her freedom of speech. While students in public schools "do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate," he wrote, they don’t automatically have all the same rights as adults would in other settings.

The judge concluded that the student must either accept the school’s compromise and wear the badge without the chip, or return to her home school next semester.

The Rutherford Institute said in a statement that it will appeal the decision. “The Supreme Court has made clear that government officials may not scrutinize or question the validity of an individual’s religious beliefs,” said John Whitehead, president of the nonprofit civil rights law group. “By declaring Andrea Hernandez’s objections to be a secular choice and not grounded in her religious beliefs, the district court is placing itself as an arbiter of what is and is not religious. This is simply not permissible under our constitutional scheme, and we plan to appeal this immediately.”

So it seems that the appeal, too, will focus on religious beliefs rather than privacy concerns. That's a shame, because the privacy issues around the use of RFID chips in schools (and elsewhere) are far more interesting. Let's hope they get a thorough airing—somehow, somewhere—before the technology becomes so pervasive that we take it for granted.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_te...g_program.html





Their Apps Track You. Will Congress Track Them?
Natasha Singer

THERE are three things that matter in consumer data collection: location, location, location.

E-ZPasses clock the routes we drive. Metro passes register the subway stations we enter. A.T.M.’s record where and when we get cash. Not to mention the credit and debit card transactions that map our trajectories in comprehensive detail — the stores, restaurants and gas stations we frequent; the hotels and health clubs we patronize.

Each of these represents a kind of knowing trade, a conscious consumer submission to surveillance for the sake of convenience.

But now legislators, regulators, advocacy groups and marketers are squaring off over newer technology: smartphones and mobile apps that can continuously record and share people’s precise movements. At issue is whether consumers are unwittingly acquiescing to pervasive tracking just for the sake of having mobile amenities like calendar, game or weather apps.

For Senator Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat, the potential hazard is that by compiling location patterns over time, companies could create an intimate portrait of a person’s familial and professional associations, political and religious beliefs, even health status. To give consumers some say in the surveillance, Mr. Franken has been working on a locational privacy protection bill that would require entities like app developers to obtain explicit one-time consent from users before recording the locations of their mobile devices. It would prohibit stalking apps — programs that allow one person to track another person’s whereabouts surreptitiously.

The bill, approved last month by the Senate Judiciary Committee, would also require mobile services to disclose the names of the advertising networks or other third parties with which they share consumers’ locations.

“Someone who has this information doesn’t just know where you live,” Mr. Franken said during the Judiciary Committee meeting. “They know the roads you take to work, where you drop your kids off at school, the church you attend and the doctors that you visit.”

Yet many marketers say they need to know consumers’ precise locations so they can show relevant mobile ads or coupons at the very moment a person is in or near a store. Informing such users about each and every ad network or analytics company that tracks their locations could hinder that hyperlocal marketing, they say, because it could require a new consent notice to appear every time someone opened an app.

“Consumers would revolt if this was the case, and applications could be rendered useless,” said Senator Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican, who promulgated industry arguments during the committee meeting. “Worse yet, free applications that rely on advertising could be pushed by the consent requirement to become fee-based.”

Mr. Franken’s bill may seem intended simply to protect consumer privacy. But the underlying issue is the future of consumer data property rights — the question of who actually owns the information generated by a person who uses a digital device and whether using that property without explicit authorization constitutes trespassing.

In common law, a property intrusion is known as “trespass to chattels.” The Supreme Court invoked the legal concept last January in United States v. Jones, in which it ruled that the government had violated the Fourth Amendment — which protects people against unreasonable search and seizure — by placing a GPS tracking device on a suspect’s car for 28 days without getting a warrant.

Some advocacy groups view location tracking by mobile apps and ad networks as a parallel, warrantless commercial intrusion. To these groups, Mr. Franken’s bill suggests that consumers may eventually gain some rights over their own digital footprints.

“People don’t think about how they broadcast their locations all the time when they carry their phones. The law is just starting to catch up and think about how to treat this,” says Marcia Hofmann, a senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group based in San Francisco. “In an ideal world, users would be able to share the information they want and not share the information they don’t want and have more control over how it is used.”

Even some marketers agree.

One is Scout Advertising, a location-based mobile ad service that promises to help advertisers pinpoint the whereabouts of potential customers within 100 meters. The service, previously known as ThinkNear and recently acquired by Telenav, a personalized navigation service, works by determining a person’s location; figuring out whether that place is a home or a store, a health club or a sports stadium; analyzing weather and other local conditions; and then showing a mobile ad tailored to the situation.

Eli Portnoy, general manager of Scout Advertising, calls the technique “situational targeting.” He says Crunch, the fitness center chain, used the service to show mobile ads to people within three miles of a Crunch gym on rainy mornings. The ad said: “Seven-day pass. Run on a treadmill, not in the rain.”

When a person clicks on one of these ads, Mr. Portnoy says, a browser-based map pops up with turn-by-turn directions to the nearest location. Through GPS tracking, Scout Advertising can tell when someone starts driving and whether that person arrives at the site.

Despite the tracking, Mr. Portnoy describes his company’s mobile ads as protective of privacy because the service works only with sites or apps that obtain consent to use people’s locations. Scout Advertising, he adds, does not compile data on individuals’ whereabouts over time.

Still, he says, if Congress were to enact Mr. Franken’s location privacy bill as written, it “would be a little challenging” for the industry to carry out, because of the number and variety of companies involved in mobile marketing.

“We are in favor of more privacy,” Mr. Portnoy says, “but it has to be done within the nuances of how mobile advertising works so it can scale.”

A SPOKESMAN for Mr. Franken said the senator planned to reintroduce the bill in the new Congress. It is one of several continuing government efforts to develop some baseline consumer data rights.

“New technology may provide increased convenience or security at the expense of privacy and many people may find the trade-off worthwhile,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote last year in his opinion in the Jones case. “On the other hand,” he added, “concern about new intrusions on privacy may spur the enactment of legislation to protect against these intrusions.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/t...one-users.html





Ottawa's Anti-Spam Proposals Prohibit Secret Monitoring Software
Kady O'Malley

After more than a year of closed-door consultations, the government has finally released an updated draft proposal for those long-awaited anti-spam regulations.

The latest proposed rules, which were published in the Canada Gazette over the weekend, would add several new exemptions to the law, including inter-organizational email -- messages sent by one employee to another, for instance, or to a contractor or franchisee.

It would also expand the definition of "personal relationship," and would not apply to "the first commercial electronic message" that is sent as a result of a referral from someone with an existing relationship -- family, business, personal or otherwise -- with the recipient.

But an attempt by Canadian ISPs to garner an all-access pass that would let them secretly install software to monitor potentially illicit user activity was thwarted, at least in part.

According to the note accompanying the draft regulations, industry representatives "had argued for exemptions from the requirement for consent to install software to prevent unauthorized or fraudulent use of a service or system, or to update or upgrade systems on their networks."

Under the revised rules, service providers would only be permitted to install software "where illegal activities pose a threat to [their] networks."

In fact, the legal text goes even further than the explanatory note: it would only allow such programs to be installed "to prevent activities that the telecommunications service provider reasonably believes are in contravention of an Act of Parliament and which present an imminent risk to the security of its network." (Note: that's an "and" not an "or", and the risk has to be "imminent," which would seem to reduce potential ambiguity.)

Consent would still be needed to install software to "prevent legal activities that are merely unauthorized or suspicious, or where an installation is not required for a system-wide upgrade or updates."

Other new proposed exemptions:


• email sent to "satisfy a legal or juridical obligation," as well as provide notice of, and/or enforce "a right, legal or juridical obligation, court order, judgment or tariff" or "a right arising under a law of Canada, of a province or municipality of Canada or of a foreign state"

• email sent "by a person located outside Canada or that is sent from a computer system located outside Canada ... that relates to a product, good, service or organization located or provided outside Canada that is accessed using a computer system located in Canada .. if the person sending the message did not know and could not reasonably be expected to know that the message would be accessed using a computer system located in Canada"

• any email "sent in response to a request, inquiry, complaint or .. is otherwise solicited by the person to whom the message is sent."


The analysis statement notes that Industry Canada received 55 submissions from "representatives of the retail, financial services, legal services, real estate, telecommunications, information technology, and general business sectors as well as public interest groups and private citizens" in response to the initial draft regulations, which were published on July 7, 2011.

Interestingly, it also acknowledges that, at press time, the government has "no specific plans for implementation, enforcement or service standards related to these particular regulations" beyond its overall anti-spam strategy.

In any case, interested parties have 30 days to submit their thoughts on the latest changes. Stay tuned!
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/insi...r-consent.html





Nokia Admits Decrypting User Data But Denies Man-in-the-Middle Attacks

Nokia says it does decrypt some customer information over HTTPS traffic, but isn’t spying on people
Tom Brewster

Nokia has rejected claims it might be spying on users’ encrypted Internet traffic, but admitted it is intercepting and temporarily decrypting HTTPS connections for the benefit of customers.

A security professional alleged Nokia was carrying out so-called man-in-the-middle attacks on its own users. Gaurang Pandya, currently infrastructure security architect at Unisys Global Services India, said in December he saw traffic being diverted from his Nokia Asha phone through to Nokia-owned proxy servers.

Pandya wanted to know if SSL-protected traffic was being diverted through Nokia servers too. Yesterday, in a blog post, Pandya said Nokia was intercepting HTTPS traffic and could have been snooping on users’ content, as he had determined by looking at DNS requests and SSL certificates using Nokia’s mobile browser.

“When checked, the DNS request was sent for ‘cloud13.browser.ovi.com’ which is same host where we had seen even HTTP traffic being sent,” he wrote.

“It is evident … that even HTTPS requests are also getting redirected to Nokia/Ovi servers, which raises a question about [the] certificate that [is] being received from Nokia’s servers and [the] trusted list of certificates in Nokia [phones].

Having checked the trusted certificates list in the phone, the researcher found Nokia had pre-configured the device to trust certificates sent from its servers. “Which is the reason why there are no security alerts being shown during this man-in-the-middle attack by Nokia,” he added.

“From the tests that were preformed, it is evident that Nokia is performing man-in-the-middle attack for sensitive HTTPS traffic originated from their phone and hence they do have access to clear text information which could include user credentials to various sites such as social networking, banking, credit card information or anything that is sensitive in nature.”

Nokia said it was diverting user connections through its own proxy servers as part of the traffic compression feature of its browser, designed to make services speedier. It was not looking at any encrypted content, even though it did temporarily decrypt some information. This could still be defined as a man-in-the-middle attack, although Nokia says no data is being viewed by its staff.

“The compression that occurs within the Nokia Xpress Browser means that users can get faster web browsing and more value out of their data plans,” a spokesperson said, in an email sent to TechWeekEurope.

“Importantly, the proxy servers do not store the content of web pages visited by our users or any information they enter into them. When temporary decryption of HTTPS connections is required on our proxy servers, to transform and deliver users’ content, it is done in a secure manner.

“Nokia has implemented appropriate organisational and technical measures to prevent access to private information. Claims that we would access complete unencrypted information are inaccurate.”

Nokia said it would review the information provided in the mobile client “in case this can be improved”.

Other browser makers do compression using their own servers – Opera, for instance, is vocal about it.
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news...attacks-103799





U.S. Warns on Java Software as Security Concerns Escalate
Jim Finkle

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security urged computer users to disable Oracle Corp's Java software, amplifying security experts' prior warnings to hundreds of millions of consumers and businesses that use it to surf the Web.

Hackers have figured out how to exploit Java to install malicious software enabling them to commit crimes ranging from identity theft to making an infected computer part of an ad-hoc network of computers that can be used to attack websites.

"We are currently unaware of a practical solution to this problem," the Department of Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team said in a posting on its website late on Thursday.

"This and previous Java vulnerabilities have been widely targeted by attackers, and new Java vulnerabilities are likely to be discovered," the agency said. "To defend against this and future Java vulnerabilities, disable Java in Web browsers."

Oracle declined on Friday to comment on the warning.

Java is a computer language that enables programmers to write software utilizing just one set of code that will run on virtually any type of computer, including ones that use Microsoft Corp's Windows, Apple Inc's OS X and Linux, an operating system widely employed by corporations.

Computer users access Java programs through modules, or plug-ins, that run Java software on top of browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The U.S. government's warning on Java came after security experts warned on Thursday of the newly discovered flaw.

It is relatively rare for government agencies to advise computer users to completely disable software due to a security bug, particularly in the case of widely used programs such as Java. They typically recommend taking steps to mitigate the risk of attack while manufacturers prepare an update, or hold off on publicizing the problem until an update is prepared.

In September, the German government advised the public to temporarily stop using Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser to give it time to patch a security vulnerability that opened it to attacks.

Java is so widely used that the software has become a prime target for hackers. Last year Oracle's Java surpassed Adobe Systems Inc's Reader software as the most frequently attacked piece of software, according to security software maker Kaspersky Lab.

Java was responsible for 50 percent of all cyber attacks last year in which hackers broke into computers by exploiting software bugs, according Kaspersky. That was followed by Adobe Reader, which was involved in 28 percent of all incidents. Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer were involved in about 3 percent of incidents, according to the survey.

The Department of Homeland Security said attackers could trick targets into visiting malicious websites that would infect their PCs with software capable of exploiting the bug in Java.

It said an attacker could also infect a legitimate website by uploading malicious software that would infect machines of computer users who trust that site because they have previously visited it without experiencing any problems.

They said developers of several popular tools, known as exploit kits, which criminal hackers use to attack PCs, have added software that allows hackers to exploit the newly discovered bug in Java to attack computers.

Security experts have been scrutinizing the safety of Java since a similar security scare in August, which prompted some of them to advise using the software only on an as-needed basis.

At the time they advised businesses to allow their workers to use Java browser plug-ins only when prompted for permission by trusted programs such as GoToMeeting, a Web-based collaboration tool from Citrix Systems Inc.

Java suffered another setback in October when Apple began removing old versions of the software from Internet browsers of Mac computers when its customers installed new versions of its OS X operating system. Apple did not provide a reason for the change and both companies declined to comment at the time.

Adam Gowdiak, a researcher with Polish security firm Security Explorations, told Reuters he believes that Oracle fails to properly test its software fixes for security flaws. "It's definitely safer for users to stay away from Java 'til Oracle starts taking security seriously," he said.

(Reporting by Jim Finkle; Editing by Dan Grebler)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...90A0S320130111





EU Lawmakers Seek to Limit Use of Data by Internet Firms
Claire Davenport

Internet companies such as Facebook and Google may have to get more permission to use information if European Union lawmakers give users more control over their personal data.

EU lawmakers want to limit companies' ability to use and sell data, such as internet browsing habits, to advertising companies, especially when people are unaware their data is being used in such a way.

"Users must be informed about what happens with their data," said Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German Member of the European Parliament who is driving the reform. "And they must be able to consciously agree to data processing - or reject it."

Facebook and Google, who were among the first to profit from users' data, have been lobbying against the curbs. Other data-reliant sectors such as health services, rail and smart-meter makers have also voiced concerns.

Albrecht, a Green politician, plans to announce on Wednesday a plan to make sure users of search engines and social networks can control how much of their data is sold to advertisers.

A report he produced, which was seen by Reuters, builds on a proposal announced by the European Commission last January for tougher data protection.

The European Parliament, the Commission and the bloc's 27 countries will seek an agreement on the rules in coming months.

Internet companies worry it will have a chilling effect on a thriving business.

"We are concerned that some aspects of the report do not support a flourishing European digital single market and the reality of innovation on the internet," Erika Mann, head of EU policy for Facebook, said.

The digital market was inescapably global in nature, and included important partners in the United States, she said.

The amount of online data collected and sold has grown rapidly. Currently, over 60 hours of YouTube content is uploaded every minute.

U.S. privacy advocates estimate a Facebook user can make $10 a year for the company by clicking on ads. At last count, the company said it had over 1 billion users.

Albrecht also said national authorities might be allowed to levy fines ranging from 0.5-2.0 percent of annual turnover for compromising customer data - which could mean losing or divulging the data.

However, high-ranking politicians in the European parliament are lobbying for the maximum fine to be no more than 1 percent of turnover, saying anything higher could push big data offshore. Albrecht's final report will voted on in April.

The push to regulate use of customer data comes as consumers appear to be turning against the practice. In December, image-editing and hosting application Instagram dropped an idea to sell users' photos to advertisers after it lost almost a quarter of its users within a week of announcing the plan.

Privacy lobbyists say companies do not take sufficient consideration of users' privacy concerns.

"They may do so if they feel that their reasons for doing so are more compelling than the individual's right to privacy," said Joe McNamee, a privacy advocate in Brussels.

Albrecht said there would be exceptions in his proposed curbs. For example, a company would still be able to send junk mail to a user based on data it had gathered itself.

(Editing By Sebastian Moffett.)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...9080BC20130109





U.S. Spy Law Authorizes Mass Surveillance of European Citizens: Report
Ryan Gallagher

Europeans, take note: The U.S. government has granted itself authority to secretly snoop on you.

That’s according to a new report produced for the European Parliament, which has warned that a U.S. spy law renewed late last year authorizes “purely political surveillance on foreigners' data” if it is stored using U.S. cloud services like those provided by Google, Microsoft and Facebook.

Europeans were previously alarmed by the fact that the PATRIOT Act could be used to obtain data on citizens outside the United States. But this time the focus is a different law—the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Amendments Act—which poses a “much graver risk to EU data sovereignty than other laws hitherto considered by EU policy-makers,” according to the recently published report, Fighting Cyber Crime and Protecting Privacy in the Cloud, produced by the Centre for the Study of Conflicts, Liberty and Security.

The FISA Amendments Act was introduced in 2008, retroactively legalizing a controversial “warrantless wiretapping” program initiated following 9/11 by the Bush administration. Late last month, it was renewed through 2017. During that process, there was heated debate over how it may violate Americans’ privacy. But citizens in foreign jurisdictions have even greater cause for concern, says the report’s co-author, Caspar Bowden, who was formerly chief privacy adviser to Microsoft Europe.

According to Bowden, the 2008 FISA amendment created a power of “mass surveillance” specifically targeted at the data of non-U.S. persons located outside America, which applies to cloud computing. This means that U.S. companies with a presence in the EU can be compelled under a secret surveillance order, issued by a secret court, to hand over data on Europeans. Because non-American citizens outside the United States have been deemed by the court not to fall under the search and seizure protections of the Fourth Amendment, it opens the door to an unprecedented kind of snooping. “It's like putting a mind control drug in the water supply, which only affects non-Americans,” says Bowden. The lack of attention European data protection authorities have paid to this provision has been “shocking,” Bowden adds. But with FISA’s renewal and the release of the report, that could be about to change.

Most countries’ spy agencies routinely monitor real-time communications like emails and phone calls of groups under suspicion on national security grounds. However, what makes FISA different is that it explicitly authorizes the targeting of real-time communications and dormant cloud data linked to “foreign-based political organizations”—not just suspected terrorists or foreign government agents. Bowden says FISA is effectively “a carte blanche for anything that furthers U.S. foreign policy interests” and legalizes the monitoring of European journalists, activists, and politicians who are engaged in any issue in which the United States has a stake. FISA, according to Bowden, expressly makes it lawful for the United States to do “continuous mass-surveillance of ordinary lawful democratic political activities,” and could even go as far as to force U.S. cloud providers like Google to provide a live “wiretap” of European users’ data.

U.S. officials, perhaps unsurprisingly, have continually rejected claims of mass snooping on Europeans. In a speech last year, William Kennard, U.S. ambassador to the European Union, addressed what he called the “fear of unlimited U.S. government access to data,” saying that all law enforcement and national security investigations in the United States are subject to legal and judicial constraints designed to protect individual privacy. It’s certainly questionable whether a U.S. court, even in secret, would be audacious enough to actually authorize mass spying on European journalists, even if it is a theoretical possibility. But in Europe, serious skepticism remains. Not satisfied with assurances from U.S. officials, Bowden and co.’s report calls for EU citizens to receive “prominent warnings” that their data could be vulnerable to U.S. political surveillance. The report also proposes that Europeans be granted equal protection in American courts.

Concerns on the issue of U.S. access to foreigners’ data have been simmering for several years—and could soon reach boiling point. Dutch politician Sophia in 't Veld, vice-chair of the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, is among a handful of European parliamentarians working to address the issue. The problem is a complex one, Veld tells me, because companies are required to comply with two conflicting jurisdictions, so new legislation won’t necessarily fix the situation. There’s also politics involved. “It’s very clear that the European Commission [the EU’s executive body] is turning a blind eye,” says Veld. “So are the national governments—partly because they don’t grasp the issue and partly because they are afraid to stand up to U.S. authority.”

Now, though, it seems inevitable that Europe’s policymakers will eventually have to face up to questions over U.S. snooping, no matter how controversial. The latest report uses words like “heavy-calibre mass surveillance fire-power aimed at the cloud”—the kind of language that can’t be brushed under the carpet for long.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_te..._european.html





Spy Agency ASIO Wants Powers to Hack Into Personal Computers
Natasha Bita

New powers allowing Australian spies to hack into personal computers would target suspected terrorists, says a spokesman for the Attorney-General's Department.

SPY agency ASIO wants to hack into Australians' personal computers and commandeer their smartphones to transmit viruses to terrorists.

The Attorney-General's Department is pushing for new powers for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation to hijack the computers of suspected terrorists.

But privacy groups are attacking the ''police state'' plan as ''extraordinarily broad and intrusive''.

A spokesman for the Attorney-General's Department said it was proposing that ASIO be authorised to ''use a third party computer for the specific purpose of gaining access to a target computer''.

''The purpose of this power is to allow ASIO to access the computer of suspected terrorists and other security interests,'' he told News Limited.

''(It would be used) in extremely limited circumstances and only when explicitly approved by the Attorney-General through a warrant.

''Importantly, the warrant would not authorise ASIO to obtain intelligence material from the third party computer.''

The Attorney-General's Department refused to explain yesterday how third-party computers would be used, ''as this may divulge operationally sensitive information and methods used by ASIO in sensitive national security investigations.''

But cyber specialist Andrew Pam, a board member of the Electronic Frontiers lobby group, predicted ASIO could copy the tactics of criminal hackers to seize control of target computers.

Australians' personal computers might be used to send a malicious email with a virus attached, or to load ''malware'' onto a website frequently visited by the target.

''This stuff goes on already in the commercial and criminal world, and security agencies could be using the same techniques to commandeer people's computers and use them to monitor a target,'' Mr Pam said.

''Once you get control of a computer and connect to their network you can do whatever you want.''

The ASIO Act now bans spies from doing anything that ''adds, deletes or alters data or interferes with, interrupts or obstructs the lawful use of the target computer by other persons''.

But ASIO wants the ban lifted, so Attorney-General Nicola Roxon can issue a warrant for spies to secretly intercept third-party computers to disrupt their target.

The departmental spokesman said the federal government had made ''no decisions'' about whether to grant ASIO the new power.

The government would first consider advice from the federal Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, which is reviewing national security legislation.

Victoria's acting Privacy Commissioner, Dr Anthony Bendall, has told the committee that ASIO's proposed new powers are ''characteristic of a police state.''

''To access a third party's computer, which has no connection with the target, is extraordinarily broad and intrusive,'' his submission states.

But the Attorney-General's Department insists that ASIO will not examine the content of third-party computers.

''The use of the third party computer is essentially like using a third party premises to gain access to the premises to be searched, where direct access is not possible,'' it states in response to questions from the committee.

''It involves no power to search or conduct surveillance on the third party.''

The department said technological advances had made it ''increasingly difficult'' for ASIO to execute search warrants directly on target computers, ''particularly where a person of interest is security conscious.''

Australian Council for Civil Liberties president Terry O'Gorman yesterday said ASIO should have to seek a warrant from an independent judge, rather than a politician.

He warned that ASIO might be able to spy on individuals - including journalists protecting a whistleblower - by tapping into their computers.

''I'm concerned they will access all sorts of information on a computer that has nothing to do with terrorism,'' he said.
http://www.news.com.au/technology/sp...-1226552661701





Tentative Deal Reported in Chinese Censorship Dispute

Censorship Incites Protests in China: Protests over censorship at one of China's most liberal newspapers descended into ideological confrontation on Tuesday.
Edward Wong and Chris Buckley

A tentative agreement to defuse a newsroom strike by Chinese journalists over censorship controls in this southeastern provincial capital had been reached by early Wednesday, and some reporters working for Southern Weekend, the newspaper at the heart of the dispute, were told that the paper would publish as usual on Thursday, one journalist in the newsroom said.

“The paper is coming out tomorrow, and the propaganda department is going to hold a meeting with staff about this tomorrow,” said the journalist, who spoke Wednesday on the condition of anonymity. Several other reporters said that details of the agreement remained murky Wednesday morning, and that the deal could fall apart.

Protests over censorship at Southern Weekend, one of China’s most liberal newspapers, had descended into ideological confrontation on Tuesday, pitting advocates of free speech against supporters of Communist Party control, who wielded red flags and portraits of Mao Zedong.

The face-off outside the headquarters of the company that publishes Southern Weekend came after disgruntled editors and reporters at the paper last week deplored what they called crude meddling by the top propaganda official in Guangdong Province, which has long had a reputation as a bastion of a relatively free press.

With a number of celebrities and business leaders rallying online to the liberal cause, senior propaganda officials in Beijing began this week to roll out a national strategy of demonizing the rebel journalists and their supporters. The Central Propaganda Department issued a directive to news organizations saying the defiant outburst at Southern Weekend, also known as Southern Weekly, had involved “hostile foreign forces.”

The order, translated by China Digital Times, a research group at the University of California, Berkeley, that studies Chinese news media, said that Chinese journalists must drop their support of Southern Weekend and insisted that “party control of the media is an unwavering basic principle.”

An editor at a party news organization said the term “hostile forces” had been used in an internal discussion with a senior editor about the Southern Weekend conflict. Several Chinese journalists outside Guangdong said Tuesday that a call by Southern Weekend reporters and editors for the dismissal of Tuo Zhen, the top provincial propaganda official, who took up his post in May, was probably too radical for higher authorities to accept.

The protesting journalists at Southern Weekend blame Mr. Tuo, a former journalist, for ordering a drastic change in a New Year’s editorial that had originally called for greater respect for constitutional rights. The revised editorial instead praised party policies. Mr. Tuo has not commented on the accusation.

Early Wednesday, there was online chatter among Chinese journalists that Dai Zigeng, the publisher of The Beijing News, had balked at an order from the Central Propaganda Department to print an editorial attacking Southern Weekend. A truncated version ran on Wednesday deep inside the paper, and several Beijing News reporters confirmed that Mr. Dai had been uncomfortable with it.

A former editor for the Nanfang Media Group, which includes Southern Weekend, said provincial propaganda officials and disgruntled journalists talked Tuesday in Guangzhou. The talks focused on the journalists’ demands for an inquiry into the New Year’s episode and for the newspaper’s managers to rescind a statement that absolved Mr. Tuo of responsibility for the editorial.

“They want that statement to be removed, and they also want assurances about relaxing controls on journalists — not removing party oversight, but making it more reasonable, allowing reporters to challenge officials,” the editor said. “The other main demand is for an impartial explanation of what happened, an accounting so it won’t happen again.”

Senior Chinese officials have not commented publicly on the censorship dispute at the paper, which could test how far the recently appointed Communist Party leader, Xi Jinping, will go in support of more open economic and political policies.

“I don’t believe that Xi is totally hypocritical when he talks about reform,” said Chen Min, a prominent opinion writer for Southern Weekend who was forced out of the newspaper in 2011 during a party-led crackdown on potential dissent.

Defenders of Communist orthodoxy turned up at the newspaper headquarters on Tuesday to make the case for firm party control of the media.

“We support the Communist Party. Shut down the traitor newspaper,” said a cardboard sign held up by one of 10 or so conservative demonstrators.

“Southern Weekend has an American dream,” another sign said. “We don’t want the American dream. We want the Chinese dream.”

Most of the party supporters refused to give their names. One who did, Yang Xingfa, 50, from Hunan Province, said: “Southern Weekend belongs to the people. However, the paper always ignores the achievements of the Chinese Communist Party and asks why China isn’t more like the United States. Outrageous!”

The participants said they had come on their own initiative.

The dueling protests outside the newspaper headquarters reflected the political passions and tensions raised by the quarrel over censorship. Finding a resolution to the standoff poses a challenge both to the central authorities and to Hu Chunhua, the new party chief of Guangdong and a potential candidate to succeed Mr. Xi in a decade.

Hundreds of bystanders watched and took photos on cellphones as the party supporters shouted at the 20 or more protesters who had gathered to denounce censorship, and shoving matches broke out.

One defender of the Southern Weekend journalists was Liang Taiping, 28, a poet who wore a Guy Fawkes mask popularized by “V for Vendetta,” the Hollywood movie and British comic book. Mr. Liang said he had bought the mask after watching the movie recently on state-run China Central Television, which had surprised many Chinese with its willingness to show the film uncut, since the film advocates the overthrow of a one-party dictatorship.

“It’s the only newspaper in China that’s willing to tell the truth,” said Mr. Liang, who added that he had traveled by train about 350 miles from the southern city of Changsha. “What’s the point of living if you can’t even speak freely?”

Edward Wong reported from Guangzhou, and Chris Buckley from Hong Kong. Jonah M. Kessel contributed reporting from Guangzho
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/wo...newspaper.html





Kuwait Sentences Second Man to Jail for Insulting Emir

US state department urges Gulf ally to respect freedom of speech after two men sentenced over tweets

A Kuwaiti court sentenced a man to two years in prison on Monday for insulting the country's ruler on Twitter, his lawyer said, the second person to be jailed for the offence in as many days.

The Gulf state has clamped down in recent months on political activists who have been using social media websites to criticise the government and the ruling family.

Kuwait has seen a series of opposition-organised protests, including one on Sunday night, since the ruling emir, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, used emergency powers in October to change the voting system.

The court sentenced Ayyad al-Harbi, who has more than 13,000 followers on Twitter, to the prison term two months after his arrest and release on bail.

Harbi used his Twitter account to criticise the Kuwait government and the emir. He tweeted on Sunday: "Tomorrow morning is my trial's verdict on charges of slander against the emir, spreading of false news."

His lawyer, Mohammed al-Humidi, said Harbi would appeal.

"We've been taken by surprise because Kuwait has always been known internationally and in the Arab world as a democracy-loving country," Humidi said. "People are used to democracy, but suddenly we see the constitution being undermined."

On Sunday, another man, Rashid Saleh al-Anzi was given two years in prison over a tweet that "stabbed the rights and powers of the emir", according to the online newspaper Alaan. Anzi, who has 5,700 Twitter followers, was expected to appeal.

In Washington, the US state department said it had seen the reports of the two men's sentences and had raised the issue with the Kuwaiti government, which it urged to respect freedom of speech.

"We call on the government of Kuwait to adhere to its tradition of respect for freedom of assembly, association, and expression," spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said. "You know how strongly we feel about locking people up for their use of Twitter."

Public demonstrations about local issues are common in Kuwait, a state that allows the most dissent in the Gulf, and the country has avoided Arab Spring-style mass unrest that has ousted four veteran Arab dictators in the past two years.

But tensions have risen between Kuwait's hand-picked government, in which ruling family members hold the top posts, and the elected parliament and opposition groups.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013...insulting-emir





Linguistics Identifies Anonymous Users
Darren Pauli

Researchers reveal carders, hackers on underground forums.

Up to 80 percent of certain anonymous underground forum users can be identified using linguistics, researchers say.

The techniques compare user posts to track them across forums and could even unveil authors of thesis papers or blogs who had taken to underground networks.

"If our dataset contains 100 users we can at least identify 80 of them," researcher Sadia Afroz told an audience at the 29C3 Chaos Communication Congress in Germany.

"Function words are very specific to the writer. Even if you are writing a thesis, you'll probably use the same function words in chat messages.

"Even if your text is not clean, your writing style can give you away."

The analysis techniques could also reveal botnet owners, malware tool authors and provide insight into the size and scope of underground markets, making the research appealing to law enforcement.

To achieve their results the researchers used techniques including stylometric analysis, the authorship attribution framework Jstylo, and Latent Dirichlet allocation which can distinguish a conversation on stolen credit cards from one on exploit-writing, and similarly help identify interesting people.

The analysis was applied across millions of posts from tens of thousands of users of a series of multilingual underground websites including thebadhackerz.com, blackhatpalace.com, www.carders.cc, free-hack.com, hackel1te.info, hack-sector.forumh.net, rootwarez.org, L33tcrew.org and antichat.ru.

It found up to 300 distinct discussion topics in the forums, with some of the most popular being carding, encryption services, password cracking and blackhat search engine optimisation tools.

While successful, the work faces a series of challenges. Analysis could only be performed using a minimum of 5000 words (this research used the "gold standard" of 6500 words) which culled the list of potential targets from tens of thousands to mere hundreds.

It also needs to separate discussion on product information like credit cards, exploits and drugs from conversational text in order to facilitate machine learning to automate the process, according to researcher Aylin Caliskan Islam.

And posts must be translated to English, a process which boosted author identification from 66 to around 80 per cent but was imperfect using freely available tools like Google and Bing.

However both of these tasks were performed successfully, and further development including the use of "exclusive" language translation tools would only serve to boost the identification accuracy.

Leetspeak, an alternative alphabet popular in some forum circles, cannot be translated.

The project is ongoing and future work promises to increase the capacity to unmask users. This Islam said would include temporal information which would exploit users who logged into forums from the same IP addresses and wrote posts at around the same time.

"They might finish work, come home and log in," Islam said.

It could also tie user identities to the topics they write about and produce a map of their interactions, identify multiple accounts held by a single author, and combine forum messages with internet relay chat (IRC) data sets.

"We want to automate the whole process."

Afroz said while the work appeals to law enforcements and government agencies, it is not designed to catch users out.

"We aren't trying to identify users, we are trying to show them that this is possible," she said.

To this end, the researchers released tools last year, updated last December, which help users to anonymise their writing.

One tool, Anonymouth, takes a 500 word sample of a user's writing to identify unique features such as function words which could make them identifiable.

The other, JStylo, is the machine learning engine which powers Anonymouth.

The Drexel and George Mason universities research team is composed of Sadia Afroz, Aylin Caliskan Islam, Ariel Stolerman, Rachel Greenstadt, and Damon McCoy.
http://www.scmagazine.com.au/News/32...ous-users.aspx





MPs Unsettled By Potentially ‘Fatal’ Government Cyber Warfare Strategy

We rely on heavily on badly-protected technology, say MPs
Tom Brewster

MPs have complained about government “complacency” in their assessment of when military forces should involve themselves in cyber warfare, pointing to a potentially fatal reliance on inadequately protected systems.

In a report released today, the Defence Committee said the government did not appear to have a fully-constructed plan for dealing with a major cyber attack. Meanwhile, the ever-changing threat landscape, coupled with a major reliance on IT, made for a potentially lethal brew for the UK military as it prepares for cyber warfare.

The current government pumped an extra £650 million into cyber security in 2011. Most – £157 million – has gone on “national sovereign capability to detect and defeat high end threats”, as shown in the chart below. By comparison, £28 million has gone to police via the Home Office, and £31 million to the Ministry of Defence.

Cyber warfare worries

“The evidence we received leaves us concerned that with the Armed Forces now so dependent on information and communications technology, should such systems suffer a sustained cyber attack, their ability to operate could be fatally compromised,” the report read.

“In its response to this report the government should set out details of the contingency plans it has in place should such an attack occur. If it has none, it should say so – and urgently create some.”

The committee also said there appeared to be little consensus on identifying the source of attacks – something that would be necessary in determining whether to retaliate to a cyber hit.

Many professionals agree attribution is very difficult, given the tools available for encrypting and routing traffic through servers across the world. Former minister for the Armed Forces, Nick Harvey MP, said it was doable in “many cases”, but not all.

But the government’s own Cyber Security Strategy said ”with the borderless and anonymous nature of the internet, precise attribution [of attacks] is often difficult and the distinction between adversaries is increasingly blurred”.

“There is clearly still much work to be done on determining what type or extent of cyber attack would warrant a military response,” the MPs wrote.

“Development of capabilities needs to be accompanied by the urgent development of supporting concepts.

“We are concerned that the then Minister’s responses to us betray complacency on this point and a failure to think through some extremely complicated and important issues.”

MPs demanded greater clarity for the government on executive authority in the event of a major cyber incident. The report called for “a programme of regular exercises, involving ministers as well as officials, is put in place to test the arrangements”

It also recommended the Ministry of Defence should provide Parliament with a report on cyber incidents and performance against metrics on at least an annual basis.

“The government needs to put in place – as it has not yet done – mechanisms, people, education, skills, thinking and policies which take into account both the opportunities and the vulnerabilities which cyberspace presents,” added chair of the Committee, James Arbuthnot MP.
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news...t-fatal-103575





Bank Hacks Were Work of Iranians, Officials Say
Nicole Perlroth and Quentin Hardy

The attackers hit one American bank after the next. As in so many previous attacks, dozens of online banking sites slowed, hiccupped or ground to a halt before recovering several minutes later.

But there was something disturbingly different about the wave of online attacks on American banks in recent weeks. Security researchers say that instead of exploiting individual computers, the attackers engineered networks of computers in data centers, transforming the online equivalent of a few yapping Chihuahuas into a pack of fire-breathing Godzillas.

The skill required to carry out attacks on this scale has convinced United States government officials and security researchers that they are the work of Iran, most likely in retaliation for economic sanctions and online attacks by the United States.

“There is no doubt within the U.S. government that Iran is behind these attacks,” said James A. Lewis, a former official in the State and Commerce Departments and a computer security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Mr. Lewis said the amount of traffic flooding American banking sites was “multiple times” the amount that Russia directed at Estonia in a monthlong online assault in 2007 that nearly crippled the Baltic nation.

American officials have not offered any technical evidence to back up their claims, but computer security experts say the recent attacks showed a level of sophistication far beyond that of amateur hackers. Also, the hackers chose to pursue disruption, not money: another earmark of state-sponsored attacks, the experts said.

“The scale, the scope and the effectiveness of these attacks have been unprecedented,” said Carl Herberger, vice president of security solutions at Radware, a security firm that has been investigating the attacks on behalf of banks and cloud service providers. “There have never been this many financial institutions under this much duress.”

Since September, intruders have caused major disruptions to the online banking sites of Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bancorp, PNC, Capital One, Fifth Third Bank, BB&T and HSBC.

They employed DDoS attacks, or distributed denial of service attacks, named because hackers deny customers service by directing large volumes of traffic to a site until it collapses. No bank accounts were breached and no customers’ money was taken.

By using data centers, the attackers are simply keeping up with the times. Companies and consumers are increasingly conducting their business over large-scale “clouds” of hundreds, even thousands, of networked computer servers.

These clouds are run by Amazon and Google, but also by many smaller players who commonly rent them to other companies. It appears the hackers remotely hijacked some of these clouds and used the computing power to take down American banking sites.

“There’s a sense now that attackers are crafting their own private clouds,” either by creating networks of individual machines or by stealing resources wholesale from poorly maintained corporate clouds, said John Kindervag, an analyst at Forrester Research.

How, exactly, attackers are hijacking data centers is still a mystery. Making matters more complex, they have simultaneously introduced another weapon: encrypted DDoS attacks.

Banks encrypt customers’ online transactions for security, but the encryption process consumes system resources. By flooding banking sites with encryption requests, attackers can further slow or cripple sites with fewer requests.

A hacker group calling itself Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters has claimed in online posts that it was responsible for the attacks.

The group said it attacked the banks in retaliation for an anti-Islam video that mocked the Prophet Muhammad, and pledged to continue its campaign until the video was scrubbed from the Internet. It called the campaign Operation Ababil, a reference to a story in the Koran in which Allah sends swallows to defeat an army of elephants dispatched by the king of Yemen to attack Mecca in A.D. 571.

But American intelligence officials say the group is actually a cover for Iran. They claim Iran is waging the attacks in retaliation for Western economic sanctions and for a series of cyberattacks on its own systems. In the last three years, three sophisticated computer viruses — called Flame, Duqu and Stuxnet — have hit computers in Iran. The New York Times reported last year that the United States, together with Israel, was responsible for Stuxnet, the virus used to destroy centrifuges in an Iranian nuclear facility in 2010.

“It’s a bit of a grudge match,” said Mr. Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Researchers at Radware who investigated the attacks for several banks found that the traffic was coming from data centers around the world. They discovered that various cloud services and public Web hosting services had been infected with a particularly sophisticated form of malware, called Itsoknoproblembro, that was designed to evade detection by antivirus programs. The malware has existed for years, but the banking attacks were the first time it used data centers to attack external victims.

Botnets, or networks of individual infected slave computers, can typically be traced back to a command and control center, but security experts say Itsoknoproblembro was engineered to make it very difficult to tie it to one party. Security researchers have come up with a new name for servers infected with Itsoknoproblembro: they call them “bRobots.”

In an amateur botnet, the command and control center can be easily identified, but Mr. Herberger said it had been nearly impossible to do so in this case, suggesting to him that “the campaign may be state-sponsored versus amateur malware.”

Attackers used the infected servers to fire traffic simultaneously at each banking site until it slowed or collapsed.

By infecting data centers instead of computers, the hackers obtained the computing power to mount enormous denial of service attacks. One of the banks had 40 gigabits of Internet capacity, Mr. Herberger said, a huge amount when you consider that a midsize business may only have one gigabit. But some banks were hit with a sustained flood of traffic that peaked at 70 gigabits.

Mr. Herberger declined to say which cloud service providers had been compromised, citing nondisclosure agreements with Radware’s clients, but he said that each new bank attack provided evidence that more data centers had been infected and exploited.

The attackers said last week that they had no intention of halting their campaign. “Officials of American banks must expect our massive attacks,” they wrote. “From now on, none of the U.S. banks will be safe.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/te...cials-say.html





Aaron Swartz, Precocious Programmer and Internet Activist, Dies at 26
John Schwartz

Aaron Swartz, a wizardly programmer who as a teenager helped develop code that delivered ever-changing Web content to users and later became a steadfast crusader to make that information freely available, was found dead on Friday in his New York apartment.

He was 26.

An uncle, Michael Wolf, said that Mr. Swartz had apparently hanged himself, and that Mr. Swartz’s girlfriend had discovered the body.

At 14, Mr. Swartz helped create RSS, the nearly ubiquitous tool that allows users to subscribe to online information. He later became an Internet folk hero, pushing to make many Web files free and open to the public. But in July 2011, he was indicted on federal charges of gaining illegal access to JSTOR, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals, and downloading 4.8 million articles and documents, nearly the entire library.

Charges in the case, including wire fraud and computer fraud, were pending at the time of Mr. Swartz’s death, carrying potential penalties of up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines.

“Aaron built surprising new things that changed the flow of information around the world,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York who served in the Obama administration as a technology adviser. She called Mr. Swartz “a complicated prodigy” and said “graybeards approached him with awe.”

Mr. Wolf said he would remember his nephew as a young man who “looked at the world, and had a certain logic in his brain, and the world didn’t necessarily fit in with that logic, and that was sometimes difficult.”

The Tech, a newspaper of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported Mr. Swartz’s death early Saturday.

Mr. Swartz led an often itinerant life that included dropping out of Stanford, forming companies and organizations, and becoming a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

He formed a company that merged with Reddit, the popular news and information site. He also co-founded Demand Progress, a group that promotes online campaigns on social justice issues — including a successful effort, with other groups, to oppose a Hollywood-backed Internet piracy bill.

But he also found trouble when he took part in efforts to release information to the public that he felt should be freely available. In 2008, he took on PACER, or Public Access to Court Electronic Records, the repository for federal judicial documents.

The database charges 10 cents a page for documents; activists like Carl Malamud, the founder of public.resource.org, have long argued that such documents should be free because they are produced at public expense. Joining Mr. Malamud’s efforts to make the documents public by posting legally obtained files to the Internet for free access, Mr. Swartz wrote an elegant little program to download 20 million pages of documents from free library accounts, or roughly 20 percent of the enormous database.

The government abruptly shut down the free library program, and Mr. Malamud feared that legal trouble might follow even though he felt they had violated no laws. As he recalled in a newspaper account of the events, “I immediately saw the potential for overreaction by the courts.” He recalled telling Mr. Swartz: “You need to talk to a lawyer. I need to talk to a lawyer.”

Mr. Swartz recalled in a 2009 interview, “I had this vision of the feds crashing down the door, taking everything away.” He said he locked the deadbolt on his door, lay down on the bed for a while and then called his mother.

When an article about his Pacer exploit was published in The New York Times, Mr. Swartz responded in a blog post in a typically puckish manner, announcing the story in the form of a personal ad: “Attention attractive people: Are you looking for someone respectable enough that they’ve been personally vetted by The New York Times, but has enough of a bad-boy streak that the vetting was because they ‘liberated’ millions of dollars of government documents? If so, look no further than page A14 of today’s New York Times.

The federal government investigated but decided not to prosecute.

In 2011, however, Mr. Swartz went beyond that, according to a federal indictment. In an effort to provide free public access to JSTOR, he broke into computer networks at M.I.T. by means that included gaining entry to a utility closet on campus and leaving a laptop that signed into the university network under a false account, federal officials said.

Mr. Swartz turned over his hard drives with 4.8 million documents, and JSTOR declined to pursue the case. But Carmen M. Ortiz, a United States attorney, pressed on, saying that “stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars.”

Mr. Malamud said that while he did not approve of Mr. Swartz’s actions at M.I.T., “access to knowledge and access to justice have become all about access to money, and Aaron tried to change that. That should never have been considered a criminal activity.”

Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author and online activist, posted a tribute to Mr. Swartz on BoingBoing.net, a blog he co-edits. In an e-mail, he called Mr. Swartz “uncompromising, principled, smart, flawed, loving, caring, and brilliant.”

“The world was a better place with him in it,” he said.

Of the indictment, he said, “The fact that the U.S. legal apparatus decided he belonged behind bars for downloading scholarly articles without permission is as neat an indictment of our age — and validation of his struggle — as you could ask for.”

Mr. Swartz, he noted, had a habit of turning on those closest to him, saying that “Aaron held the world, his friends, and his mentors to an impossibly high standard — the same standard he set for himself.” He added, however, “It’s a testament to his friendship that no one ever seemed to hold it against him (except, maybe, himself).”

In 2007, Mr. Swartz wrote about his struggle with depression, distinguishing it from the emotion of sadness. “Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don’t feel any better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel. Everything gets colored by the sadness.” When the condition gets worse, he wrote, “you feel as if streaks of pain are running through your head, you thrash your body, you search for some escape but find none. And this is one of the more moderate forms.” Earlier that year, he gave a talk in which he described having had suicidal thoughts during a low period in his career.

On Wednesday JSTOR announced that it would open its archives for 1,200 journals to free reading by the public on a limited basis.

Lawrence Lessig, who heads the Safra Center at Harvard and had worked for a time on behalf of Mr. Swartz’s legal defense, noted in an interview that Mr. Swartz had been arrested by the M.I.T. campus police two years to the day before his suicide. That arrest led to the eventual federal indictment and financial ruin for Mr. Swartz, who had made money on the sale of Reddit to Condé Nast but had never tried to turn his intellect to making money. “I can just imagine him thinking it was going to be a million-dollar defense,” Mr. Lessig said. “He didn’t have a million dollars.”

In an online broadside directed at prosecutors, Mr. Lessig denounced what he called the federal “bullying,” and wrote, “this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.”

Still, Mr. Lessig said, he had seen Mr. Swartz just weeks before, at a Christmas party at his home, and before that, at Thanksgiving. “He seemed fine,” he said.


Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/t...ies-at-26.html





Don't Burn Your Books—Print Is Here to Stay

The e-book had its moment, but sales are slowing. Readers still want to turn those crisp, bound pages
Nicholas Carr

Lovers of ink and paper, take heart. Reports of the death of the printed book may be exaggerated.

Ever since Amazon introduced its popular Kindle e-reader five years ago, pundits have assumed that the future of book publishing is digital. Opinions about the speed of the shift from page to screen have varied. But the consensus has been that digitization, having had its way with music and photographs and maps, would in due course have its way with books as well. By 2015, one media maven predicted a few years back, traditional books would be gone.

Half a decade into the e-book revolution, though, the prognosis for traditional books is suddenly looking brighter. Hardcover books are displaying surprising resiliency. The growth in e-book sales is slowing markedly. And purchases of e-readers are actually shrinking, as consumers opt instead for multipurpose tablets. It may be that e-books, rather than replacing printed books, will ultimately serve a role more like that of audio books—a complement to traditional reading, not a substitute.

How attached are Americans to old-fashioned books? Just look at the results of a Pew Research Center survey released last month. The report showed that the percentage of adults who have read an e-book rose modestly over the past year, from 16% to 23%. But it also revealed that fully 89% of regular book readers said that they had read at least one printed book during the preceding 12 months. Only 30% reported reading even a single e-book in the past year.

What's more, the Association of American Publishers reported that the annual growth rate for e-book sales fell abruptly during 2012, to about 34%. That's still a healthy clip, but it is a sharp decline from the triple-digit growth rates of the preceding four years.

The initial e-book explosion is starting to look like an aberration. The technology's early adopters, a small but enthusiastic bunch, made the move to e-books quickly and in a concentrated period. Further converts will be harder to come by. A 2012 survey by Bowker Market Research revealed that just 16% of Americans have actually purchased an e-book and that a whopping 59% say they have "no interest" in buying one.

Meanwhile, the shift from e-readers to tablets may also be dampening e-book purchases. Sales of e-readers plunged 36% in 2012, according to estimates from IHS iSuppli, while tablet sales exploded. When forced to compete with the easy pleasures of games, videos and Facebook on devices like the iPad and the Kindle Fire, e-books lose a lot of their allure. The fact that an e-book can't be sold or given away after it's read also reduces the perceived value of the product.

Beyond the practical reasons for the decline in e-book growth, something deeper may be going on. We may have misjudged the nature of the electronic book.

From the start, e-book purchases have skewed disproportionately toward fiction, with novels representing close to two-thirds of sales. Digital best-seller lists are dominated in particular by genre novels, like thrillers and romances. Screen reading seems particularly well-suited to the kind of light entertainments that have traditionally been sold in supermarkets and airports as mass-market paperbacks.

These are, by design, the most disposable of books. We read them quickly and have no desire to hang onto them after we've turned the last page. We may even be a little embarrassed to be seen reading them, which makes anonymous digital versions all the more appealing. The "Fifty Shades of Grey" phenomenon probably wouldn't have happened if e-books didn't exist.

Readers of weightier fare, including literary fiction and narrative nonfiction, have been less inclined to go digital. They seem to prefer the heft and durability, the tactile pleasures, of what we still call "real books"—the kind you can set on a shelf.

E-books, in other words, may turn out to be just another format—an even lighter-weight, more disposable paperback. That would fit with the discovery that once people start buying digital books, they don't necessarily stop buying printed ones. In fact, according to Pew, nearly 90% of e-book readers continue to read physical volumes. The two forms seem to serve different purposes.

Having survived 500 years of technological upheaval, Gutenberg's invention may withstand the digital onslaught as well. There's something about a crisply printed, tightly bound book that we don't seem eager to let go of.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...353697002.html





France Rejects Plan to Block Online Ads
Eric Pfanner

The French government on Monday ordered a major Internet service provider to stop blocking online advertisements, saying the company had no right to edit the contents of the Web for its users.

Fleur Pellerin, the minister for the digital economy, said she had persuaded the service provider, Free, to restore full access after meetings with French online publishing and advertising groups, which had complained about a loss of revenue.

Free had moved last week to block online ads for some of its users when it introduced a new version of its Internet access software. While some Internet users already use ad-blocking programs to rid their screens of annoying pop-ups and other online ads, the software upgrade from Free did this automatically.

“An Internet service provider cannot unilaterally implement such blocking,” Ms. Pellerin said at a news conference Monday. Advertising should not be treated differently from other kinds of Internet content, she said, adding: “This kind of blocking is inconsistent with a free and open Internet, to which I am very attached.”

While Ms. Pellerin said Free, which has 5.2 million broadband customers, had agreed to stop blocking ads by the end of the day, she said the company’s initiative had highlighted an important question: Who should pay for the infrastructure that telecommunications providers need to carry ever-growing volumes of Internet traffic?

Network operators like Free complain that much of the benefit of their investments has gone to Internet companies like Google, which generate billions of dollars worth of revenue from online advertising. The move by Free was widely seen here as a tactic to try to get Google to share some of its ad revenue with service providers.

Google was not represented at the meetings Monday with Ms. Pellerin. In an interesting twist, its case was effectively argued by other Web publishers, including French newspapers, even though these sites are separately seeking a revenue-sharing arrangement with Google, in a related dispute.

Free, which is controlled by a French technology entrepreneur, Xavier Niél, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/t...nline-ads.html





Adobe Almost Does Something Amazing by Accident

Making Creative Suite 2 free seemed like a genius move. Unfortunately, it wasn't.
Peter Bright

It seemed like an intriguing deal. An old version of Adobe Creative Suite—the 2005 vintage CS2, to be precise—became freely downloadable from Adobe, with nothing more than a free-to-create Adobe ID required from users. Although basically useless for Mac users, as CS2 is only available for PowerPC, for Windows users this is a powerful, if not quite cutting edge, suite of graphics apps.

This looked like a clever move from Adobe. Photoshop is widely held to be one of the most routinely pirated applications there is. In making an old but still servicable version of the software it appeared that Adobe was offering a good alternative to piracy: instead of using a knock-off copy of CS6, just use CS2.

A free CS2 would also go some way toward starving alternative applications of oxygen. Given the choice between a free copy of CS2 and downloading, say, the GIMP, one imagines that many users would plump for the commercial application. It's more of a known quantity, with a more polished user interface. And Photoshop is, frankly, the gold standard of bitmap image editing. Even an older version has a prestige that GIMP doesn't. This is not to say that CS2 is necessarily superior to the GIMP; it may or may not be. It doesn't really matter; Photoshop has a reputation and respect that the GIMP doesn't have, and even if some might argue that it was undeserved, it influences the decisions users make.

Giving away an old version in this way certainly appears unusual, and perhaps even a little brave for a commercial company such as Adobe. But Adobe is already being quite brave at the moment. The company is in many ways reinventing the way it both develops and licenses its products. It is creating a wide range of HTML5-oriented tools under the Edge brand that use a mix of open source and proprietary technology, and it is pushing hard its subscription software model with the Creative Cloud.

In this context, giving away an old version of its software doesn't seem quite so outlandish. It might sacrifice some revenue (though one suspects not all that much), but it strengthens Photoshop's dominance—and also makes Adobe look pretty good, to boot. And although an unusual move, it's not entirely unprecedented. Just last month, Microsoft made its previously commercial Expression suite freely downloadable after the company decided to cease further development. But this isn't quite the same; Creative Suite is still a going concern for Adobe. Expression isn't for Microsoft.

Unfortunately, it appears that Adobe wasn't really intending to give out CS2 for everyone. Shortly after news of the apparently free software spread across Twitter on Monday, the download page became unavailable, producing an error instead. Subsequent blog and forum posts indicate that this wasn't an inspired decision to liberate an obsolete but still useful application after all. It was something between a mistake, an error of judgement, and a misunderstanding.

CS2 used a product activation scheme to control licensing. When you install the software, it interrogates an Internet server to ensure that the license key you entered is acceptable. In December, Adobe retired the activation servers used by CS2. This posed a problem for CS2's licensed users, because without the activation servers, they can no longer reinstall the software.

To help these people out, Adobe offered versions of CS2 that didn't need activation. Mere entry of the serial numbers that Adobe put on the download page would suffice. The company says that although it looks like it was giving the software away for free, it in fact wasn't. It was just trying to assist its customers. Adobe says in order to legally use CS2, users still require a purchased license.

There are ways that Adobe could have helped out these users that didn't result in putting the software up on a server that anyone could get at. For example, the company could have released a patch that removed the activation checks from the applications and the license key entry from the installer. This could work with original media, and hence not require distribution of CS2. For whatever reason, the company decided not to go this route.

So it turns out that rather than doing something a little bit daring and unusual—something that might even inspire a new approach to licensing old, obsolete software—Adobe was doing something somewhat useful for existing, paid up, licensed users, in a rather peculiar way. This is a shame. The company could have earned a lot of goodwill by making CS2 free, and it would have been easy enough to offer a no-cost license for the software.

There is one final surprise. Originally, acquiring CS2 required an Adobe ID. It seemed a fair enough trade; Adobe knows your e-mail address and name, and in return you get some no-cost software. Since the whole issue blew up on Twitter, forcing the company to issue its clarification, perhaps one would have expected it to restrict access to the downloads, or use some other technique to remove the activation check.

It has not. Instead, Adobe has made CS2 even easier to get, by removing the Adobe ID requirement. The company created a new CS2 download page, and this time around, it had no registration requirement at all.

It's almost as if the company wanted people to download the software.
http://arstechnica.com/information-t...g-by-accident/

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

January 5th, December 29th, December 22nd, December 15th

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


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public."
- Hugo Black
JackSpratts is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 11-01-13, 08:58 PM   #2
theknife
my name is Ranking Fullstop
 
theknife's Avatar
 
Join Date: Dec 2001
Location: Promontorium Tremendum
Posts: 4,391
Default

Quote:
Both Dish and EchoStar are controlled by eccentric billionaire Charlie Ergen.
that's what i wanna be when i grow up: an eccentric billionaire
theknife is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 11-01-13, 09:17 PM   #3
theknife
my name is Ranking Fullstop
 
theknife's Avatar
 
Join Date: Dec 2001
Location: Promontorium Tremendum
Posts: 4,391
Default

Quote:
Problem is not lack of donations, but entirely on handling them. As of current every service provider the site has to pay for only accepts PayPal, Credit/Debit cards or direct bank wiring. Only one provider allows bitcoin. Unless we can figure out some realistic and possible way to do site finances completely PayPal free, it seems like the story of TorrentBytes will end very soon after January 2013.
i cheerfully donated to several nzb index sites, knowing they have their costs and appreciating what they provide. and now they seem to all facing this dilemma of finding a way to accept cash. i was wondering why snail mail wouldn't work - i'll send a donation via money order with an email address in the envelope, they send me an e-mail activating the access upon receipt - Paypal is not involved. frankly, it's no less certain than giving up your credit card online via paypal and completely anonymous for me. a couple of days wait is worth it to bypass the online financial system.
theknife is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-01-13, 11:19 AM   #4
JackSpratts
 
JackSpratts's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by theknife View Post
i cheerfully donated to several nzb index sites, knowing they have their costs and appreciating what they provide. and now they seem to all facing this dilemma of finding a way to accept cash. i was wondering why snail mail wouldn't work - i'll send a donation via money order with an email address in the envelope, they send me an e-mail activating the access upon receipt - Paypal is not involved. frankly, it's no less certain than giving up your credit card online via paypal and completely anonymous for me. a couple of days wait is worth it to bypass the online financial system.
yeah, i've wondered about this too. why allow yourself to be held hostage to paypal? perhaps it's the impulse factor. maybe people will drop ten bucks on a link, but they won't when purchasing stamps, envelopes and money orders requires leaving the house. still, if i was facing oblivion, i'd be promoting all kinds of alternatives.

- js.
__________________
Thanks For Sharing
JackSpratts is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-01-13, 05:40 PM   #5
theknife
my name is Ranking Fullstop
 
theknife's Avatar
 
Join Date: Dec 2001
Location: Promontorium Tremendum
Posts: 4,391
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by JackSpratts View Post
yeah, i've wondered about this too. why allow yourself to be held hostage to paypal? perhaps it's the impulse factor. maybe people will drop ten bucks on a link, but they won't when purchasing stamps, envelopes and money orders requires leaving the house. still, if i was facing oblivion, i'd be promoting all kinds of alternatives.

- js.
i know of one in particular that's trying to funnel it's users into Bitcoin, and getting a lot of kickback from it's users about it. i haven't looked at it closely and even tho i like the concept, it has to involve me putting a credit card number onto a Bitcoin site at some point. i'm very reluctant to do this, at this point in time.
theknife is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-01-13, 08:06 PM   #6
JackSpratts
 
JackSpratts's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by theknife View Post
that's what i wanna be when i grow up: an eccentric billionaire
you're halfway there!

- js.
__________________
Thanks For Sharing
JackSpratts is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply


Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 16th, '11 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 13-07-11 06:43 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 9th, '11 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 06-07-11 05:36 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 30th, '10 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 27-01-10 07:49 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 16th, '10 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 13-01-10 09:02 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 5th, '09 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 02-12-09 08:32 AM






All times are GMT -6. The time now is 01:43 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
© www.p2p-zone.com - Napsterites - 2000 - 2024 (Contact grm1@iinet.net.au for all admin enquiries)