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Old 07-03-12, 09:19 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 10th, '12

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"The tablet is like a temptress. It’s constantly saying, 'You could be on YouTube now.' Or it’s sending constant alerts that pop up, saying you just got an e-mail. Reading itself is trying to compete." – James McQuivey


"Anonymous is a wake-up call. Any company that is patting themselves on the back and saying that they’re not a target or not susceptible to attack is in complete and utter denial." – Roger Cressey



































March 10th, 2012




BT and Talk Talk Lose File-Sharing Appeal

BT and Talk Talk say the Digital Economy Act risks infringing user privacy
BBC

BT and Talk Talk have lost an appeal over controversial measures to tackle copyright infringement online.

The internet service providers (ISPs) had argued the UK's Digital Economy Act was incompatible with EU law.

The Act will mean ISPs will have to send warning letters to alleged illegal file downloaders, as well as potentially cutting users off.

The creative industry argues that piracy costs £400m a year in lost revenue.

The firms' lawyers said the stricter measures could result in an invasion of privacy and run up disproportionate costs for both ISPs and consumers.

In a statement, Talk Talk said it was now "considering our options".

"We're disappointed that our appeal was unsuccessful though we welcome the additional legal clarity that has been provided for all parties," the company said.

"Though we have lost this appeal, we will continue fighting to defend our customers' rights against this ill-judged legislation."

A spokesman for BT said: "We have been seeking clarification from the courts that the DEA is consistent with European law, and legally robust in the UK, so that everyone can be confident in how it is implemented.

"Now that the court has made its decision, we will look at the judgment carefully to understand its implications and consider our next steps."

'Stop fighting'

The decision was welcomed by copyright advocates.

Christine Payne, general secretary of the Actors' union Equity, called on the ISPs to "stop fighting and start obeying the law".

"Once again the court is on the side of the almost two million workers in the creative industries whose livelihoods are put at risk because creative content is stolen on a daily basis," she said.

However Loz Kaye, the leader of the UK Pirate Party, argued there was no proof the measures outlined in the Act - such as cutting off users - aided the fight against illegal file-sharing.

"This decision brings the draconian Digital Economy Act another step closer," he said.

"The coalition government must be clear now once and for all on whether it supports this anti-internet piece of legislation.

"No-one has proved that the Act will help the creative industries financially, that is just lobbyists' spin.

"A recent study on a similar system in France suggests that there is no benefit for music sales. Threats to chuck entire households off the web will be bad for the economy, bad for society - and for us as a creative nation too."

'Proper scrutiny'

Adam Rendle, a copyright specialist at international law firm Taylor Wessing, said he expected BT and Talk Talk to now appeal to the UK's Supreme Court.

He added that it was also likely the companies would step up lobbying efforts, perhaps harnessing support from groups recently protesting against the US Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and the EU's proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Acta).

"We know how keen internet users are to protect what they see as freedom of speech," Mr Rendle told the BBC.

"When the Digital Economy Act itself was passed in the dying stages of the Labour government, there was a huge amount of disquiet that this kind of important legislation was being introduced without proper scrutiny.

"That kind of disquiet didn't result in the kind of action we've seen against Acta and Sopa. It wouldn't be surprising to see a lot more public outcry than there was when the Act was first passed."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17270817





Court Filings Suggest Google Fighting Feds Over Megaupload Emails
Jeff Roberts

A pair of cryptic court filings surfaced in Virginia this week that suggest Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is in a fight with the federal government over Megaupload, the file-sharing site that was shut down in a dramatic raid in January.

It appears that the FBI likely demanded that Google turn over Kim Dotcom’s email account and any related information, and then forbid the company to notify him of the investigation. In the past, companies—notably Twitter—have been aggressive in challenging gag orders so that they can notify customers about government searches. Such notification gives subscribers the option of challenging the searches in court.

The new filings are two orders in which U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Jones Jr. refuses to extend a gag order that the government has imposed upon Google.

The gag order forbids Google from telling a subscriber that an account has been the target of a search warrant and subject to a § 2703(d) investigation—a controversial search procedure that gained attention when the Justice Department used it to obtain the Twitter accounts of people tied to WikiLeaks.

The judge does not identify the Google subscriber but there is strong circumstantial evidence to suggest the case is tied to Megaupload and its controversial founder, Kim Dotcom who is currently facing extradition charges in New Zealand.

First, the orders came from the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia which is where an indictment was unsealed against Dotcom and Megaupload in January. Secondly, the two-page orders refer to recent events to explain why the government’s investigation will not be compromised by a disclosure:

The sole potential problem that notification might create that was raised by the government with specificity in its unredacted brief has now been eliminated by subsequent events. [...]

The existence of the investigation in issue and the government’s wide use of § 2703(d) orders and other investigative tools has been widely publicized now. It is difficult to imagine circumstances in which this Google subscriber, as described by the government in its brief, has not assumed government access to this account and acted accordingly


A connection between the Google court orders and Megaupload is for now entirely speculative, but it is hard to think of another secret investigation that has recently been “widely publicized.”

Christine Chen, Senior Manager for Global Communications and Public Policy, said by email that Google does not comment on specific cases.

The court papers also show that federal agents began their search of the suspect’s Google accounts in July of 2011. The Megaupload investigation reportedly began in 2010.

The seizure of Megaupload’s servers and the arrest of Kim Dotcom and other company executives made global headlines in January. The case received additional attention due to the outlandish character of Dotcom, an enormous man nicknamed Dr. Evil who was reportedly found in a panic room clutching a shotgun at time of his arrest in New Zealand (there are conflicting reports about the gun). The Megaupload episode also led the hacking collective Anonymous to launch a wave of retaliatory attacks that temporarily took down the websites of the FBI and the Justice Department.

Today’s orders also states that Google may notify its subscriber unless the government appeals within 14 days. The rest of the case for now remains under seal.

Here is a copy of one of the orders
https://paidcontent.org/article/419-...upload-emails/





Dotcom Extradition Papers Filed
Edward Gay

The United States Government has filed its application to have Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and three associates extradited to face charges of breaching copyright.

Crown Law is handling the case on behalf of the US Government.

A spokeswoman from Crown Law confirmed today that the papers had been filed in the North Shore District Court.

Crown Law had 45 days to file the papers following raids on the internet millionaire's rented $30 million Coatesville mansion and other sites across Auckland in January.

The 38-year-old and his associates, Mathias Ortmann, Bran van der Kolk and Finn Batato, are accused of breaching international copyright laws to the value of US$500 million.

The US alleges that the group used the file-sharing site Megaupload in what US prosecutors allege was a "mega conspiracy".

They face charges of conspiring to commit racketeering, conspiring to commit money-laundering, copyright infringement and aiding and abetting copyright infringement.

A date for the extradition hearing has been set down in August.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology...ectid=10789958





After Megaupload Bust, Putlocker and RapidShare Pick Up Slack
Robert McMillan

The Feds shut down Megaupload two months ago, but browser-based filesharing hasn’t slowed down. It has just moved to other websites.

Before the takedown, Megaupload was the most popular web-based filesharing service — by far. In a recent study of 1,600 networks, Palo Alto Networks — a company that makes its living scanning corporate networks for unauthorized software — found that it accounted for about a quarter of all filesharing traffic on these networks. That was about 10 percent more than its nearest competitor.

But Megaupload was shut down on Jan. 19, and its CEO, Kim Dotcom, and other company associates were arrested in a dawn raid in New Zealand. The U.S. Department of Justice is looking to extradite him to the U.S. to face criminal conspiracy charges.

Now that Megaupload is gone, some filesharers may have tapped the brakes on their downloading, but mostly, they’ve just moved on to other websites that let them do the same thing. “If you look after the takedown, you see some other folks taking up the slack,” says Chris King, a director of product markeing with Palo Alto Networks.

Putlocker seems to be the big winner. It went from being the source of about 6 percent of web-based filesharing to 28 percent, when measured by the amount of networking bandwidth used. To put that in perspective, Megaupload accounted for about 25 percent of bandwidth before it was shut down. “Putlocker is on the rise,” King said.

Rapidshare got a boost too, jumping from 8 percent to 15 percent, according to Palo Alto’s latest data, which is based on a survey of 241 networks, conducted after the Megaupload takedown.

But a few popular filesharing sites have taken a hit. Megaupload competitor Mediafire was used on 60 percent of networks before the takedown, and now it shows up on 54 percent. Other sites such as Filestube, 4share and Filesonic saw similar marginal drops.

Traffic on peer-to-peer clients such as BitTorrent has not changed significantly, King said.

Because companies are moving larger and larger files — many of them too big to be sent via email — over the corproate network, filesharing is actually becoming an important enterprise application. Palo Alto Networks says that 92 percent of organizations have some kind of browser-based file sharing. That number includes services like Dropbox and Box.net as well as sites like RapidShare and MediaFire that are geared toward entertainment.

The bottom line? Ninety-two percent of organizations are still doing some kind of browser-based file sharing. There’s been a “chilling effect on use” of the free movie sites, King says. But he expects it to “ramp back up after the furor from this dies down.”
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise...er-megaupload/





MPAA Attempts Hotfile Takedown: Online File-Sharing is Dead
Zack Whittaker

Summary: Forget earthquakes or floods and fire. Hackers and server intrusions are more of a threat. But the law itself poses the greatest headache for file-sharing services like Hotfile.

File-sharing site Hotfile faces being shut down without a lengthy trial or investigation into its alleged illegal practices or business conduct, after a leading U.S. rights group seeks to obtain a summary judgement.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) argues in a court filing, unsealed this week, that Hotfile is a “haven” for repeat copyright infringers, and should be shut down.

“Defendants even admit that they formed Hotfile ‘to compete with’ Megaupload”, the filing says on page 10. “More than 90 percent of the files downloaded from Hotfile are copyright infringing, and nearly every Hotfile user is engaged in copyright infringement,” the MPAA claims.

The papers name 20th Century Fox, Columbia Pictures, Disney, Universal Studios, and Warner Bros. as the plaintiffs.

But Hotfile, and others, make their money from premium memberships and affiliate programs. It’s a core piece to their business model. Those with premium accounts have any download speed limits lifted, and affiliate accounts can generate vast sums of money. It beats advertising, hands down.

The MPAA argues that the system encourages users to upload and share copyrighted material and promote the links to link-sharing sites. Users earn more money depending on how many times a file has been downloaded. With a popular film or television series, this could generate hundreds of dollars in hours.

Whether or not Hotfile is in the wrong, the business model of file-sharing is at threat. It worked well until the Megaupload takedown.

Hotfile has since changed its policy, and “affiliate payments will no longer be based on download volume or referrals from websites,” in a bid to climb out of the legal hole it has found itself in.

The seizure of Megaupload domains, servers, and assets by U.S. and New Zealand authorities forced a massive shift in online sharing culture, as other file-sharing sites reacted by either restricting service or limiting speeds.

Many of the companies behind these sites were quick to wipe their servers of any infringing content to stave off the inevitable swoop of law enforcement that many still expect.

The problem with cases like these is that — as seen with TV Shack, which offered only links to infringing content, and was argued that it was “no different to Google” — these services will always be abused by those who upload content illegally. Every service has its troublemakers. Does it mean the service should suffer? From a utilitarianism approach, users can always be kicked off the service for the greater good of the service or the community. But it rarely happens, because it generates these companies money.

Google takes down content based on Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requests, as do other file-sharing sites. It’s not only required by law to comply, but it is in their favour to do so.

Hotfile says it removes copyright infringing files upon request. It has a similar backend scanning system to determine whether a file is infringing copyright, like Google-owned YouTube, which has a system in place to prevent copyright material from the viewing public.

“Hotfile uses fingerprinting technology to block the uploading of files identified as infringing on copyright holders’ rights. Hotfile has recently upgraded its fingerprint technology to vCloud9, the latest, state-of-the-art fingerprint technology provided by Vobile,” the company said in a news post.

These companies know the risks, but can do little about the online piracy problem. It’s a far safer way to download content over HTTP than through the BitTorrent network, but as more people turn to file-sharing sites, the more of a target these sites become.

Because torrent sharing is peer-to-peer, it involves individual file-sharers rather than a conduit company. Individuals can be targeted easier than companies, and there’s less fallout. There may be case law precedent, but it doesn’t involve mass swathes of files being deleted or destroyed by the authorities.

Cloud services will continue to be plagued by similar copyright-related suits. It will not be long before rights-holders will muster up enough small fry sites like FileServe, Hotfile and Megaupload, to take on the behemoths of Google and Microsoft.

If the case against Hotfile goes through and the site is shutdown by way of a summary judgement — which is likely, let’s not fool ourselves — then the file-sharing business will suffer a blow it probably will not recover from.

The cloud, in which file-sharing sites are a part of, should not be concerned with flood or fire, earthquakes or other natural disasters. While hacking and server breaches are a significant worry, the largest threat to the file-sharing industry is the law itself.
https://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/mpaa-...-is-dead/71145





Leaked: Police Plan to Raid The Pirate Bay
Ernesto

More than half a decade after Swedish police officers first raided The Pirate Bay, there is talk that a second police raid against the world’s most famous torrent site is in the planning. The Pirate Bay team has learned that local authorities have acquired warrants to take action against the site, and expect that both servers and the new .se domain name may be targeted soon.

In the spring of 2006 a team of 65 Swedish police personnel entered a datacenter in Stockholm. The officers were tasked with shutting down the largest threat to the entertainment industry at the time – The Pirate Bay’s servers.

The raid eventually led to the conviction of four people connected to The Pirate Bay, but the site itself remained online.

Today, the Pirate Bay team has informed TorrentFreak that a second raid is being prepared by the Swedish authorities. The site’s operators, who are well-connected in multiple ways, learned that a team of Swedish investigators is gearing up to move against the site in the future.

The suspicions were also made public by The Pirate Bay a few minutes ago.

“The Swedish district attorney Fredrik Ingblad initiated a new investigation into The Pirate Bay back in 2010. Information has been leaked to us every now and then by multiple sources, almost on a regular basis. It’s an interesting read,” the Pirate Bay crew notes.

“We can certainly understand why WikiLeaks wished to be hosted in Sweden, since so much data leaks there. The reason that we get the leaks is usually that the whistleblowers do not agree with what is going on. Something that the governments should have in mind – even your own people do not agree.”

The Pirate Bay team confirmed to TorrentFreak that the announcement is no prank. The authorities have obtained warrants to snoop around in sensitive places and two known anti-piracy prosecutors, Frederick Ingblad and Henrik Rasmusson, are said to be involved.

Employing a little psychological warfare aimed at putting the investigators off-balance, the Pirate Bay team has chosen to make the news public to make the authorities aware that they are not the only ones being watched.

According to The Pirate Bay team they aren’t doing anything illegal, but nonetheless they noticed that the investigation intensified after the site’s recent move to a .SE domain.

“Since our recent move to a .SE domain the investigation has been cranked up a notch. We think that the investigation is interesting considering nothing that TPB does is illegal,” they say.

“Rather we find it interesting that a country like Sweden is being so abused by lobbyists and that this can be kept up. They’re using scare tactics, putting pressure on the wrong people, like providers and users. All out of fear from the big country in the west, and with an admiration for their big fancy wallets.”

Behind the scenes The Pirate Bay team is working hard to ensure that the site will remain online in the event that servers, domain names and Internet routes are cut off. In this regard The Pirate Bay has learned a valuable lesson from its former operators.

Those who are aware of the site’s history know that without a few essential keystrokes in May 2006, The Pirate Bay may not have been here today. When Pirate Bay founder TiAMO heard that something was amiss, he decided to make a full backup of the site before heading off to the datacenter, where he was greeted by dozens of police officers.

TiAMO’s decision to start a backup of the site is probably the most pivotal moment in the site’s history. Because of this backup the Pirate Bay team were able to resurrect the site within three days. If there hadn’t have been a recent backup, things may have turned out quite differently.

It was a close call at the time, and a defining moment in the history of the site. The determination to get the site back online as soon as possible set the defiant tone for the years that followed. Today, the site prides itself in being the most resilient torrent site around.

In recent years The Pirate Bay has implemented a variety of changes to guarantee that the site remains online. It added several backup domains, placed servers all over the world, and removed resource intensive processes.

Earlier this week The Pirate Bay took another important step by removing .torrent files altogether to become a “magnet link” site. As a result, the entire site can now be reduced to a few hundred megabytes, small enough to fit on the tiniest thumb drive.

For the police, this makes a successful Pirate Bay raid almost impossible. While they can take steps to put the site out of business briefly, it’s inevitable that it will re-appear in a matter of hours, or days.

Or to use the words of the Pirate Bay team. “We’re staying put where we are. We’re going no-where. But we have a message to hollywood, the investigators and the prosecutors: LOL.”
https://torrentfreak.com/police-plan...te-bay-120309/





Uncle Sam: If It Ends in .Com, It’s .Seizable
David Kravets

When U.S. authorities shuttered sports-wagering site Bodog.com last week, it raised eyebrows across the net because the domain name was registered with a Canadian company, ostensibly putting it beyond the reach of the U.S. government. Working around that, the feds went directly to VeriSign, a U.S.-based internet backbone company that has the contract to manage the coveted .com and other “generic” top-level domains.

EasyDNS, an internet infrastructure company, protested that the “ramifications of this are no less than chilling and every single organization branded or operating under .com, .net, .org, .biz etc. needs to ask themselves about their vulnerability to the whims of U.S. federal and state lawmakers.”

But despite EasyDNS and others’ outrage, the U.S. government says it’s gone that route hundreds of times. Furthermore, it says it has the right to seize any .com, .net and .org domain name because the companies that have the contracts to administer them are based on United States soil, according to Nicole Navas, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman.

The controversy highlights the unique control the U.S. continues to hold over key components of the global domain name system, and rips a Band-Aid off a historic sore point for other nations. A complicated web of bureaucracy and Commerce Department-dictated contracts signed in 1999 established that key domains would be contracted out to Network Solutions, which was acquired by VeriSign in 2000. That cemented control of all-important .com and .net domains with a U.S. company – VeriSign – putting every website using one of those addresses firmly within reach of American courts regardless of where the owners are located – possibly forever.

The government, Navas said, usually serves court-ordered seizures on VeriSign, which manages domains ending in .com, .net, .cc, .tv and .name, because “foreign-based registrars are not bound to comply with U.S. court orders.” The government does the same with the non-profit counterpart to VeriSign that now manages the .org domain. That’s the Public Interest Registry, which, like VeriSign, is based in Virginia.

Such seizures are becoming commonplace under the Obama administration. For example, the U.S. government program known as Operation in Our Sites acquires federal court orders to shutter sites it believes are hawking counterfeited goods, illegal sports streams and unauthorized movies and music. Navas said the U.S. government has seized 750 domain names, “most with foreign-based registrars.”

VeriSign, for its part, said it is complying with U.S. law.

“VeriSign responds to lawful court orders subject to its technical capabilities,” the company said in a statement. “When law enforcement presents us with such lawful orders impacting domain names within our registries, we respond within our technical capabilities.”

VeriSign declined to entertain questions about how many times it has done this. It often complies with U.S. court orders by redirecting the DNS (Domain Name System) of a domain to a U.S. government IP address that informs online visitors that the site has been seized (for example, ninjavideo.net.)

“Beyond that, further questions should be directed to the appropriate U.S. federal government agency responsible for the domain name seizure,” the company said.

The Public Interest Registry did not immediately respond for comment.

Bodog.com was targeted because federal law generally makes it illegal to offer online sports wagering and to payoff online bets in the United States, even though online gambling isn’t illegal globally.

Bodog.com was registered with a Canadian registrar, a VeriSign subcontractor, but the United States shuttered the site without any intervention from Canadian authorities or companies.

Instead, the feds went straight to VeriSign. It’s a powerful company deeply enmeshed in the backbone operations of the internet, including managing the .com infrastructure and operating root name servers. VeriSign has a cozy relationship with the federal government, and has long had a contract from the U.S. government to help manage the internet’s “root file” that is key to having a unified internet name system.

Still, the issue of the U.S.’s legal dominion claim over all .com domains wasn’t an issue in the January seizure of the domain of megaupload.com, which is implicated in one of the largest criminal copyright cases in U.S. history. Megaupload.com was registered in the United States with a registrar based in Washington state.

The United States would have won even more control over the internet with the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. But the nation’s biggest online protest ever scuttled the measures, which would have allowed the government to force internet service providers in the U.S. to prevent Americans from being able to visit or find in search engines websites that the U.S. government suspected violated U.S. copyright or trademark law.

But as the Justice Department demonstrated forcefully with the takedown of Megaupload, just a day after the net’s coordinated anti-SOPA protest, it still has powerful weapons to use, despite the deaths of SOPA and PIPA.

So how does International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the global body that oversees the domain-naming system, feel about the U.S. government’s actions? ICANN declined comment and forwarded a 2010 blog post from it’s chief Rod Beckstrom, who said ICANN has “no involvement in the takedown of any website.”

ICANN, a non-profit established by the U.S., has never awarded a contract to manage the .com space to a company outside the United States — in fact VeriSign has always held it — despite having a contentious relationship with ICANN that’s involved a protracted lawsuit. But, due to contract terms, VeriSign is unlikely to ever lose control over the immensely economically valuable .com handle.

ICANN is also seeking to distance itself from the U.S. government by being more inclusive, including allowing domain names in a range of written, global languages, ending the exclusivity of the Latin alphabet in top-level domains.

Still, many outside the United States, like China, India and Russia, distrust ICANN and want control of the net’s naming system to be turned over to an organization such as the International Telecommunications Union, an affiliate of the United Nations. Last year, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin met with Hamadoun Toure, the ITU’s chief, and said he wanted international control over the internet “using the monitoring capabilities of the International Telecommunication Union.”

“If we are going to talk about the democratization of international relations, I think a critical sphere is information exchange and global control over such exchange,” Putin said, according to a transcript from the Russian government.

Just last week, Robert McDowell, a Federal Communications Commission commissioner, blasted such an idea.

“If successful, these efforts would merely imprison the future in the regulatory dungeon of the past,” he said. “Even more counterproductive would be the creation of a new international body to oversee internet governance.”

ICANN was established in 1998 by the Clinton administration, and has been under global attack to internationalize the control of the Domain Name System ever since. A United Nations working group in 2005 concluded that “no single government should have a pre-eminent role in relation to international internet governance.”

But those pressures don’t seem to have registered with President Barack Obama’s Justice Department. Hollywood was a big donor to Obama, and Obama reciprocated by naming at least five former Recording Industry Association of America attorneys to posts in the Justice Department, which has been waging a crackdown on internet piracy. The Justice Department is looking for even more money in next year’s budget to hire more intellectual-property prosecutors.

Without SOPA or PIPA, the Justice Department lacks any mechanism to prevent Americans from visiting sites that are on a domain not controlled by a U.S. corporation. Knowing that, the world’s leading BitTorrent site, The Pirate Bay, recently switched its main site from a .org domain to .se, the handle for Sweden.

The Pirate Bay’s lead is unlikely to be followed by the millions of non-U.S. companies that rely on .com, which remains the net’s beachfront real estate, even if it is subject to being confiscated by the U.S.

But it is possible that the U.S. government’s big-footing over dot-com domains in the name of fighting copyright could add more weight to the arguments of those who want to put the U.N. in charge of the internet’s naming system. While that’s not inevitably a bad thing, it could lead to a world where any .com might be seizable by any country, including Russia, Libya and Iran.

Still, don’t expect Uncle Sam to give up its iron grip on .com without a fight.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...foreign-sites/





The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)

Stopping SOPA and PIPA was a historic victory for digital citizens, but ACTA potentially poses a similar threat to the global Internet community. While the agreement’s stated goal of strengthening intellectual property rights is one all should support, it does so by undermining individual privacy rights and by empowering an unaccountable enforcement bureaucracy. And just like SOPA and PIPA, ACTA was crafted without input from citizens and key stakeholders in a secretive, closed-door process.

Worse, ACTA appears to be an unconstitutional power grab started by President George W. Bush and completed by President Barack Obama - despite the White House’s January 14 criticism of legislative solutions that harm the Internet and erode individual rights. The Constitution gives Congress the power to pass intellectual property legislation - like SOPA and PIPA - and gives the Senate the power to ratify treaties. But the Obama Administration maintains that ACTA is not even a treaty, justifying the exclusion of both American citizens and their elected representatives. It is a practice Vice President Joe Biden decried as a U.S. Senator. Closed doesn’t cut it. We opened up ACTA in Madison so you can sign up, speak out and collaborate to build a better “treaty.”
http://keepthewebopen.com/acta





Chris Dodd: The Internet Developed Because Of Strict Copyright Enforcement
Mike Masnick

It's really quite amazing just how badly Chris Dodd still doesn't seem to get what happened in the SOPA/PIPA fight. Every time he opens his mouth to "explain" what happened, he just looks less and less and less aware of what actually happened.

His latest discussion on the topic came at the National Association of Attorneys General meeting in Washington DC -- a "friendly" audience for Dodd. His discussion starts around the 2 hour, 10 minute mark if you want to fast forward the video. For reasons that are unclear, CSPAN has disabled embedding on this video. Either way, Dodd continues to show off that he has no idea what happened. The specific "panel" that he's on is (of course) pretty one-sided. It involves him, old friend Rick Cotton from NBC Universal ("just think about the poor corn farmers!") and then two university officials to talk about how they're forced to censor the internet because of draconian laws that the MPAA pushed through (where there's at least a little pushback on the ridiculousness of copyright law, but just barely).

Dodd does his usual nod to the fact that the MPAA is "pro-internet" and "pro-innovation" and how any "solution" has to keep a free and open internet. That's funny, because the proposal he backed over the last year didn't actually do that. So, it's a bit late to say that now. And, next time, if he really wants to protect the free and open internet, perhaps invite some of the folks who actually built it to the table, rather than shutting them out, calling them liars and trying to dismiss their concerns. It might help people take him more seriously when he talks about how much he loves the internet.

He goes on to talk about how an example of "good" legislation was the kind that the MPAA shoved through a few years ago, forcing colleges and universities to become copyright cops. Not surprisingly, Dodd happens to leave out the part where the MPAA was so egregious in lying with bogus stats to get that law passed that it eventually had to admit it lied. Of course, that didn't stop the law from passing.

From there he launches into a defense of SOPA without naming SOPA. He takes us on a tour for the ages of bogus, debunked or misleading stats, in talking about just how evil "foreign rogue websites" are -- leaving out the actual facts, including that existing laws seem to be doing just fine in tracking those guys down. He neatly conflates counterfeit drugs and bulletproof vests with people downloading movies. Funny, because I don't think anyone's ordering bulletproof vests from Megaupload.com. On top of that, he claims that (unnamed) search engines are reaping billions in profits from these sites, which is flat out bunk.

He concludes by asking the assembled attorneys general for "help" in dealing with this "ever growing problem." Wait, I thought that the MPAA was insisting that the "problem" was getting under control... but now they're admitting that it's "ever growing"? Yeah, okay...

Rick Cotton's talk is no less ridiculous. He kicks off by telling the attorneys general that it's time to end "the wild west" of the internet, and that we can't think of the internet as "Somalia" any more. This is, of course, totally and completely ridiculous and Cotton should be ashamed for such blatant misinformation. After all, he's been a key player in helping to pass many of the 15 different copyright laws in the past 30 years targeting "piracy" -- with many focused directly on the internet. To pretend that the internet is "the wild west" is just flat out ridiculous. He quotes the bogus Mark Monitor report claiming tons and tons of traffic to infringing sites. And while he admits that Megaupload has been shut down, and that it represented a huge portion of that traffic, he ignores the point that this was under existing laws. And yes, he says this right after insisting the internet is lawless.

Rick Cotton is shameless in his disinformation efforts.

When they get to the question section, the first question is to Dodd about SOPA (which neither he nor Cotton mentioned directly). Dodd starts out with his usual talking points about how this was unprecedented -- that the bill had tremendous bipartisan support, and how SOPA was just about foreign sites (ignoring that the original draft of SOPA was not limited to foreign sites -- yay misinformation!). Dodd pretends that a bunch of these sites "learned" from the "over 300" domain seizures to set up in foreign territories -- ignoring that most of the sites he's complaining about have been around for much longer. He also skips over the bogus seizures and the questionable legality of the seizures themselves. Minor details, apparently.

He then states that it's unlikely that these bills will move forward this year, but "there are efforts underway" and he's hopeful that solutions to "this problem" are being worked on.

And he concludes on the doozy that I point out in the title, claiming that the internet itself would have been at risk if the tech industry had "the same attitude" to copyright as they do today:

The internet itself would have been in deep trouble, if you'd had this attitude about copyright twenty years ago -- where the very ideas that gave birth to this industry would be at risk.

Oh really? Which ideas? Ideas about freely sharing information and code? Ideas about not caring if anyone could copy your source code -- in fact requiring that such copying be allowed? To claim that the internet industry's view on copyright law has somehow shifted from being protectionist to not just shows, yet again, how Dodd has absolutely no clue what he's talking about on this subject, and should maybe take some time to talk to people who actually work in the industry before he makes a bigger fool of himself.

From there Mark Shurtleff, Utah's Attorney General, blamed the whole SOPA/PIPA situation on a "well-orchestrated" online campaign that was based on pure lies. Um. It's ridiculous to hear him say this after sitting through nearly an hour of lies from the pro-SOPA/PIPA camp. He even admits that his own kids argued against him. Perhaps he should listen to them, because it appears they were a lot better informed than their father. He notes that he's now afraid that any attorney general that tries to "stick his or her neck out" on these issues will get similar SOPA/PIPA treatment -- so he asks Chris Dodd and Rick Cotton to come up with "a plan" to help them.

That, right there, is pretty incredible. A US state attorney general, asking private industry how to help them avoid having to deal with the public speaking out against plans to censor the internet and attack internet openness. Wow.

Dodd responds by saying that the movie industry "needs to move into the social media space. We were not in that space at all." That's pretty ridiculous. The MPAA has a blog. I mean, they don't allow comments on it, and it's sort of the laughingstock of anyone who actually understands these issues, but they have that. They also funded and supplied the key employees for "Creative America" -- the astroturfing group that supposedly is trying to round up supporters for SOPA and had an active Facebook page and blog... though the Facebook page mostly involved discussions about just how laughable Creative America's positions are.

SOPA supporters had an online and social media presence. It's just that they didn't have reality on their side. That's the problem. If Dodd and the MPAA ever bothered to understand what actually happened perhaps he'd stop making these crazy claims.

Either way, the clear conclusion from this talk is that folks like Dodd and Cotton still have no clue what happened and still don't understand the issues at hand. They're still approaching this from the old way of doing things, where it's politics as usual. They're not interested in really understanding what the public was concerned about and they have no intention of actually listening to what was said. All of the strategies discussed were about "reloading" on their side, not about actually talking to the people who understand the internet. It's sad, but it means that SOPA and PIPA will be back, though as Dodd explicitly says "hopefully it won't be called SOPA any more..."
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...orcement.shtml





An Invincible File-Sharing Platform? You Can’t Be Serious
Mark Gregory

A new version of the peer-to-peer sharing application Tribler has created a buzz online following claims by the software’s lead developer that the app is impervious to attack.

In a recent interview with TorrentFreak, Dr Johan Pouwelse from the Delft University of Technology, said “the only way to take [Tribler] down is to take the internet down”.

Tribler has been in development for five years and, as with many other file-sharing applications, is based on the BitTorrent protocol. But unlike other BitTorrent platforms, Tribler is a decentralised system that works without the need for torrent sites – lists of links to files available for download through the BitTorrent protocol – and trackers. Instead, Tribler has been designed to search the internet for hosts that contain the desired files.

Dr Pouwelse’s claims of Tribler’s invincibility are simply amazing. If he is to be believed, peer-to-peer file-sharers finally have a tool that can’t be turned off nor attacked by government and the music and movie industry.

Sadly, these are difficult claims to take seriously.

In the 1980s and 90s, music and movie companies flooded the internet with hosts containing music and movies that had been altered from their original form. The aim was to trick users into wasting time and bandwidth downloading a file that wasn’t the file they were looking for.

One way files could be modified was with the addition of a cuckoo egg (as we all know, the cuckoo lays its eggs in another bird’s nest to trick the victim bird into tending the cuckoo egg).

A cuckoo egg is a file that looks the same as the file a user is searching for – in filename and filesize – but is actually a totally different file.

Watermarks can also be added to music and movies, allowing the files to be tracked across the network. This allows organisations such as PeerMedia Technologies – who provide this service to the music and movie industries – to identify people who have breached copyright.

As countries move towards implementing traffic filters and systems to prevent cyberattack, it has become easier to identify and then disrupt, stop or distort Tribler traffic streams.

The process of distorting, altering or substituting a different stream is not complex and in some ways may occur much as a “man-in-the-middle attack” is used to penetrate secure systems. (In such an attack, a third party intercepts traffic between two users, creating a fake stream of data, while making one – or both – users believe they are communicating with the other).

Another approach is to filter the Tribler stream and if a copyrighted music or video stream is found, the source and destination IP addresses could be added to a blacklist, blocked by filters or blocked from essential network services such as the Domain Name System (DNS). (DNS is the service used to translate web address names – such as amazon.com – to IP addresses – such as 72.21.214.128.)

Late last year a group of Australian ISPs – including Telstra and Optus – proposed a copyright infringement policy that would allow ISPs to send users a warning after five illegal downloads. The policy lists a range of consequences for customers that fail to comply with the warning notice, such as providing the copyright holder with access to the customer’s details upon request.

Over time, we’re likely to see music, movie and media companies developing closer links with network carriers and ISPs because the internet is becoming the medium of choice for distributing this content. For carriers and ISPs, revenue from access systems is decreasing due to competition, leading to a decrease in the number of ISPs. At the same time, we’re seeing an increase in revenue from bundled products including music, movie and media distribution.

Carriers and ISPs will increasingly want to reduce the amount of pirated content on their networks as copyright infringement reduces income from customers subscribing to IPTV – television delivered over the internet – video on-demand and music-streaming services.

This symbiotic relationship between ISPs and media companies should be a cause for concern for peer-to-peer file-sharers. We shouldn’t be surprised if we even see music and movie companies buying ISPs in the near future.

Regardless, claims about Tribler’s invincibility are almost certainly overblown, and it’s clear the battle between file-sharers and copyright holders is far from over.
http://theconversation.edu.au/an-inv...e-serious-5343





Disruptions: No More Innovation for the Fun of It
Nick Bilton

I wouldn’t describe the car industry as fun. The airline industry isn’t fun either. Phone companies are far from fun. Yet these industries all started out fun. They began with tinkerers and innovators, just like, say, the Internet today.
The fun was sucked out when companies grew large and started squashing smaller competitors. In the process, these companies also stopped making products that were in the best interest of their customers. Either customers moved on, or the regulators were forced to move in. And we all know that regulators are far from fun.

The Internet, with companies sniping at one another and blithely ignoring major privacy violations, is on the verge of the same fate as the true-blue American industries before it: losing its sense of fun.

Take Apple. When Steven P. Jobs and Steve Wozniak started the company, they were just a couple of guys tinkering with technology. Now Apple is a machine that seems unwilling to stop at anything to win.

Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS, is a prime example. The company has always contended that it puts a lovely manicured walled garden around iOS to protect customers from nefarious individuals out to take their most personal and private information. Apple has refused to list thousands of applications in the App Store — often ones that competed with Apple’s products — based on this premise.

Yet over the last few weeks it has become apparent that Apple hasn’t necessarily been keeping its customers as safe as it has claimed. Last month it came to light that the company was approving apps that were freely taking people’s address books from their phones without permission. An Apple loophole also allows developers to take someone’s entire photo library. To me, that sounds more like a circus tent than a walled garden.

Last week Apple also refused to allow “Stop Selling Dreams,” a new book by the writer Seth Godin, into the iBookstore. Apple’s reasoning: Mr. Godin’s book contains links in the bibliography, he said, which make it easy for readers to buy books from Amazon. (Imagine if a physical bookstore refused to sell a print book because it referred to Barnes & Noble?)

What does Apple say about all of this? The company declines to comment, of course. When your valuation is nearly half a trillion dollars, why would you need to explain yourself?

Google doesn’t seem to be much fun anymore either. Apps running on its Android software can also snag photos off a phone. The company is so focused on winning that it is force-feeding customers Google Plus, a product that seems slightly unoriginal for a company as original as Google. And of course Google’s privacy policies are about as much fun as leaning back in a dentist’s chair.

“There was a time when people building things on the Internet didn’t have a dream to be one of the biggest companies out there; their goal was not to be the next General Motors,” said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School. “But that is all changing. Now you have a battle of cultures on the Web where fun is being chiseled away.”

It’s not just the big companies either. I’m increasingly wary of downloading an app, or signing up for a new service or Web site, for fear that the creator had an ulterior motive. Does Angry Birds really need to take my address book when I install it on my phone? Will I really want to see constant warnings popping up to tell me an app is taking this or that bit of once-private data?

For many other people, the privacy debate is eroding trust on the Internet.

For example, a message I sent out on Twitter last week telling people how to clear their Google search history before the company’s new privacy policy went into effect was reposted more than 2,000 times. That’s more than four times the number of shares than any Apple announcement, Steve Jobs quote or video of funny cats I’ve ever shared on Twitter has generated. (For the record, videos of cats are still fun.)

This isn’t to say that the Internet is a bad place and that every technology company is out to get us. Silicon Valley and the rewards of technology are the new American dream.

“On one side of the Web, we have fun and transformative technologies,” Mr. Wu said, “and on the flip side we have this corporate American culture that says if you don’t make it big you’re a failure: if you don’t double your revenue every year, then you’re a loser.”

Silicon Valley still has a beautiful audacity to believe it can change anything, that everything is just a little bit broken and can be fixed and improved with software and technology.

Entrepreneurs routinely begin talking about the mission of their company by explaining that something is broken: banking, travel, chores, education — even fun can be made more fun. More often than not, these entrepreneurs are right and have solutions to make the world a better place.

But for the technology companies that started out with this same goal to innovate and make things better for people, it seems as if the fate that befell the auto, airline and phone industries is destined to happen here, too. And that’s not much fun.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0...the-fun-of-it/





Video Game Industry Looks for New Plan to Reach Players
Liana B. Baker

The $64 billion global video games industry, shaken up by the likes of Zynga in recent years, may be on the verge of another identity crisis.

Hardware and software sales for consoles keep dropping, market-leading Activision Blizzard, which makes the "Call of Duty" and "World of Warcraft" mega franchises laid off 8 percent of its staff in February, and a proliferation of games on app stores is making it costlier to stand. So, an estimated 20,000 video game industry types, executives and game designers will descend on this week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco looking for answers.

The interactive entertainment industry has been trying to cope with the rapid growth of online and mobile gaming for a few years, but now even the companies making games in these burgeoning areas are finding it harder to turn a profit.

Also, young companies that are not as big as Zynga or Electronic Arts are finding it difficult to stand out in increasingly crowded app stores on mobile devices without spending heavily on ads, executives say.

"The number of apps is growing exponentially and with that, costs of user acquisition is going up. If you are not a company with a series of franchises like us, it becomes a lot tougher," said Ben Liu, the chief operating officer of PocketGems, the makers of hit casual mobile games "Tap Zoo" and "Tap Pet Hotel".

The increasing marketing burden is driving some fledgling companies into the arms of deeper-pocketed partners.

Philip Holt, CEO of Row Sham Bow, said it has 5,000 daily active users but it was getting expensive to attract players to its Facebook strategy game "Woodland Heroes", where raccoons fight to make the forest safe from an evil bear.

The Orlando-Fla.-based company said last week it had signed a revenue-sharing agreement with Zynga, where the gaming giant promotes the animal game on Facebook and on its own new platform, Zynga.com.

"Working with Zynga was better than going to spend money on Facebook ads to acquire users and spending per click. For an independent developer without a lot of cash, you end up with a significant marketing spend," Holt said.

NEW PLATFORMS

Even Zynga, considered a success story after a billion dollar IPO in December, is trying to reinvent itself to keep its 240 million users coming back.

This week, it will pitch its new games service, Zynga.com -- which analysts say is an attempt to whittle down its heavy reliance on Facebook for gamers -- when chief operating officer John Schappert gives the keynote speech at the conference.

Other companies, like Pocket Gems, believe the future is mobile. The company's games, where players run zoos and hotels, have been downloaded more than 60 million times on Apple and Android devices.

But even then, the startup is hedging its bets, said Liu, the chief operating officer. The company is holding hackathons -- marathon programming sessions -- to develop for HTML5 technology, which allows programs to run in mobile Web browsers that people do not need to download. ABI Research has said that 2.1 billion mobile devices are expected to use HTML5 browsers by 2016.

Away from the development sphere, a battle is brewing between operating software players. Research in Motion is making its biggest gaming push to date at the conference, said Meggan Scavio, the director of the Game Developers Conference.

The Blackberry maker is hosting sessions on how to make games and turn a profit using its system, all in the hopes of attracting developers to its ailing tablet, PlayBook.

"They are trying to draw attention to their platform and their hope is to do what Google did with Android," Scavio said, referring to how Google boosted the number of games on its system by appealing to developers at last year's conference.

Google itself will be pitching its new "native client" technology that video game makers can use to bring games to the Internet. So far, 15 games on Google's Chrome Web store use the technology, including one by Japan's Square Enix. Google has also been trying to woo developers to its "Google +" social network with more attractive fees for companies than Facebook and Apple, which take a 30 percent cut of revenue of games on its system.

While this week's conference is all about predicting the next big thing in gaming, sometimes it just isn't clear what is around the corner. Apple's expected iPad 3 announcement on Wednesday, for example, being made just blocks away from the conference center, could usher in a whole new way to play games.

"Every two or three years, there's a new trend, a new technology and a new way to make video games you never would have thought of," said Colt McAnlis, a game developer advocate at Google whose job it is to bring game makers to the Internet giant's platforms.

After all the changes he has seen working for the past decade at former employers Microsoft and Activision Blizzard, he has learned that, "if you manage to last 10 years in the industry, you're that old guy on he porch."

(Reporting By Liana B. Baker; Editing by Bernard Orr)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8240P720120305





Actress’s Privacy Lawsuit Challenges a Web Site
Michael Cieply

Junie Hoang is famous now, in a 15-minutes sort of way.

But the media world and its legal eagles have yet to figure out how much she really matters.

Ms. Hoang is a B-movie actress who used to get nameless roles like the Headless Woman in “Domain of the Damned” or the Zombie Postwoman in “Z: A Zombie Musical.”

In January, however, she grabbed attention by identifying herself as the “Jane Doe” who had filed an anonymous lawsuit against the Internet Movie Database and its parent, Amazon.com, for disclosing her age, 41, in an online profile.

Now, Ms. Hoang is working with 42West, a publicity firm that represents Woody Allen and Meryl Streep. “Good Morning America,” “People” and others have requested interviews, in vain. (She declined to comment for this article as well.)

“She’s currently shooting a TV pilot,” Allan Mayer of 42West said via e-mail, when asked about Ms. Hoang’s professional activity. “No details are available.”

Meanwhile, Ms. Hoang’s lawsuit against IMDb and Amazon, filed last October in the United States District Court in Seattle, is promising to become a drawn-out battle that may expose more than the ire of an actress who claims her career was damaged by the revelation that she is older than she looks.

As the suit proceeds, the discovery process could show how IMDb, a vast repository of movie and television information that has become Hollywood’s quasi-official record book, compiles the facts and figures by which people in the entertainment industry are publicly defined. If Ms. Hoang’s lawyers prevail, moreover, the case may provide a road map for others who believe they have been abused by the biggest data collector in the film industry.

“Hundreds of people have come to us,” John W. Dozier Jr., who represents Ms. Hoang, said. Speaking by telephone last week, Mr. Dozier contended that “hundreds or thousands of people” might have similar claims, opening the door either to a class-action suit against Amazon and IMDb, or to additional suits challenging the site’s use of data. So the financial damage might conceivably reach beyond the $1 million-plus sought by Ms. Hoang.

Most of those contacting his Dozier Internet Law firm, Mr. Dozier said, have voiced complaints about their ages being listed on IMDb. But the core assertions in Ms. Hoang’s complaint relate not to the publication of age, per se, but rather to the way in which IMDb supposedly got its information.

According to Ms. Hoang’s suit, the IMDbPro professional portion of the site, which charges an annual access fee, used her credit card information to learn her real name, Huong Hoang. Then, she asserts, the site “scoured” publicly available data to find and publish her birthday, July 16, 1971 — which remains posted.

Amazon’s lawyers and a company spokeswoman declined to comment, citing a company policy against public discussion of pending litigation. But in their multiple legal responses, they have alternately dismissed Ms. Hoang’s claim as “selfish, contrary to public interest and a frivolous abuse” of the court, and bluntly denied the assertion that credit card information had been used to identify her.

What the Amazon team has not done yet is to disclose how IMDb did, in fact, link the actress Junie Hoang, a stage name, with the IMDb Pro subscriber Huong Hoang, one of perhaps 600 people in the United States with the same name, according to a public records database maintained by Nexis. If credit card information had been used, Amazon’s lawyers say in court filings, there still would have been no violation of law or the company’s privacy agreement.

Indeed, data-mining of that sort could appear downright primitive compared with the online tracking and behavioral advertising addressed in a set of online privacy principles outlined for Web-based business like Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others by the Obama administration this month.

But any court decision in the area will be closely watched.

“A judgment would likely be a great concern for the many companies who actively use mining services and information,” Jonathan Turley, a professor at the George Washington University Law School, said of Ms. Hoang’s suit in an e-mail last week. But he also pointed out that a dearth of specific legislation governing data use had left much in the hands of the courts.

Debate about age bias, Mr. Turley noted, has obscured the potential import of the case. “The age claim is so tenuous that it distracts from a legitimate concern over the mining of such information,” he said. Several publicists for movie stars, in fact, said last week that they had not collided with IMDb over age. “Age has never come up — just credits — and, yes, they were responsive,” said Kelly Bush, whose ID public relations firm has counted Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman and Diane Lane among its clients.

But IMDb looms large because of its reach — it claims more than 110 million monthly unique visitors worldwide and is often at or near the top of movie-related Google searches. And while its publication of vital statistics might not affect the stars, whose lives are widely scrutinized anyway, many second-tier performers and film workers believe the site exposes them to a film industry bias against older people.

The Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists both criticized IMDb last October for its habit of publishing ages. “It is time for IMDb to step up and take responsibility for the harm it has caused,” they said in a joint statement.

Then, again, Ms. Hoang has achieved new prominence through her dispute with the site.

And the message boards at IMDb are still hot with discussion about her suit.

“I hope she wins,” begins one thread that was provoking comment last week. “I hope she loses and has to pay 100% of all fees,” begins another.

Either way, IMDb gets the traffic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/b...t-privacy.html





YouTube Phenomenon has Girls Asking: Am I Pretty?
Leanne Italie

The young girl shows off her big, comfy koala hat and forms playful hearts with her fingers as she drops the question on YouTube: "Am I pretty or ugly?"

"A lot of people call me ugly, and I think I am ugly. I think I'm ugly, and fat," she confesses in a tiny voice as she invites the world to decide.

And the world did.

The video, posted Dec. 17, 2010, has more than 4 million views and more than 107,000 anonymous, often hateful responses in a troubling phenomenon that has girls as young as 10 — and some boys — asking the same question on YouTube with similar results.

Some experts in child psychology and online safety wonder whether the videos, with anywhere from 300 to 1,000 posted, represent a new wave of distress rather than simple self-questioning or pleas for affirmation or attention.

How could the creators not anticipate the nasty responses, even the tender tweens uploading videos in violation of YouTube's 13-and-over age policy? Their directness, playful but steadfast, grips even those accustomed to life's open Internet channel, where revolutions and executions play out alongside the ramblings of anybody with digital access.

Commenters on YouTube curse and declare the young video creators "attention whores," ask for sex and to see them naked. They wonder where their parents are and call them "fugly" and worse.

"Y do you live, and kids in africa die?" one responder tells the girl in the koala hat who uses the name Kendal and lists her age as 15 in her YouTube profile, though her demeanor suggests she was far younger at the time.

Another commenter posts: "You need a hug.. around your neck.. with a rope.."

Some offer support and beg Kendal and the other young faces to take down their "Am I Pretty?" and "Am I Ugly?" videos and feel good about themselves instead.

Much has been made of cyberbullying and pedophiles who cruise the Internet, and of low self-esteem among pre-adolescents and adolescents, especially girls, as their brains continue to develop.

There have been similar "hot or not" memes in the past, but as more young people live their lives online, they're clearly more aware of the potential for negative consequences.

"Negative feedback that is personal is rarely easy to hear at any age, but to tweens and teens who value as well as incorporate feedback into their own sense of worth, it can be devastating," said Elizabeth Dowdell, a nursing professor at Villanova University in suburban Philadelphia. She has researched child Internet safety and risk behavior in adolescents in partnership with the Justice Department.

In another video posted by Kendal, she offers to "do two dares" on camera, inviting her open-channel audience to come up with some as she holds a little white stuffed monkey.

In heavy eye makeup and neon orange nail polish, a girl who calls herself Faye not only asks the pretty/ugly question but tells in other videos of being bullied at school, suffering migraines that have sent her to the hospital and coping with the divorce of her parents.

"My friends tell me that I'm pretty," she says. "It doesn't seem like I'm pretty, though, because, I don't know, it just doesn't, because people at school, they're like, 'Faye you're not pretty at all.'"

She narrates a slideshow of still close-ups of herself to make the judging easier (she's had more than 112,000 views) and joins other girls who have posted videos on another theme, "My Perfect Imperfection," that have them noting what they hate and love about the way they look.

"I just don't like my body at all," says Faye as she pulls up her sweat shirt to bare her midriff.

Faye's profile lists her age as 13. Tracked down in suburban Denver, her mom, Naomi Gibson, told ABC's "Good Morning America" she knew nothing of the video until reporters started to call. "I was floored," she said.

Faye told ABC she has been called names and gossiped about behind her back.

"Deep down inside, all girls know that other people's opinions don't matter," she said. "But we still go to other people for help because we don't believe what people say."

A third girl who uploaded one of the pretty/ugly videos in September attempts a few model poses in childlike pedal pushers and a long, multicolored T-shirt after posing the question. She takes down her ponytail and brushes her hair as she stares into the camera.

"If you guys are wondering, I am 11," she offers. Her video has been viewed more than 6,000 times.

"COMMUNICATE WITH YOUR PARENTS AND CLEAN YOUR ROOM!!! BUT TAKE THIS TERRIBLE VIDEO DOWN YOU ARE A CHILD AND SHOULD NOT HAVE THIS KIND OF ACCESS TO THE INTERNET," one commenter screams.

None of the three girls responded to private messages on YouTube seeking comment from The Associated Press. Gibson told ABC she was considering revoking her daughter's YouTube privileges, but stopped short of demanding that Faye take down the video.

"Hopefully it will open up the eyes of the parents," Gibson said. "The kids aren't letting their parents know what's wrong, just like Faye didn't let me know."

YouTube would not comment directly about the "Am I Pretty?" controversy, but it issued a statement advising parents to visit the site's safety center for tips on how to protect their kids online.

The site's posting policy prohibits videos and comments "containing harassment, threats or hate speech" and encourages users to flag such material for review, the statement said.

Emilie Zaslow, a media studies professor at Pace University in New York, said today's online world for young people is only just beginning to be understood by researchers.

When the Internet is your diary and your audience is global, she said, "The public posting of questions such as "Am I ugly?" which might previously have been personal makes sense within this shift in culture."

Add to that the unattainable pressures of the beauty industry, a dose of reality TV, where ordinary people can be famous, and superstars who are discovered via viral video on YouTube, she said.

"These videos could be read as a new form of self-mutilation in line with cutting and eating disorders," Zaslow said.

That potential is real, added Nadine Kaslow, a family psychologist and professor of behavioral sciences at Emory University in Atlanta.

"There's this constant messaging about looks and beauty," she said. "Their world is taking it to a new level. It can be humiliating, there may be a lot of shame, and you start to become public objects instead of being your own person."
http://www.newstimes.com/living/arti...ty-3379249.php





Council Bans Daughter Contact Over Child Images
BBC

A man who informed police when he found child abuse images on his computer has not been allowed to be alone with his daughter for four months.

Nigel Robinson from Hull said he called police after trying to download music but instead finding pornographic images on his laptop last November.

As a result social services said he "should not have unsupervised access with his own or other children".

He said he was "totally innocent". No arrests or charges have been made.

Mr Robinson, 43, recalled how on discovering the images he discussed the situation with his wife and immediately called police to report the incident.

Shortly after his call the police and East Riding social services came to Mr Robinson's house to take statements from him.

During the meeting social services requested Mr Robinson did not have unsupervised access with his child.

'No control'

A council statement said: "The council's social care team considers that, on the information it presently has about this case, it is a proportionate response to request that Mr Robinson should not have unsupervised access with his own or other children.

"The council will keep the case under review but cannot comment further as this is an on-going investigation."

The police took the laptop away for investigation and said it could be a year before it is returned, Mr Robinson said.

Humberside Police said: "We are conducting an investigation that has resulted in the confiscation of a laptop in order for the relevant enquiries to take place - standard procedure for this type of investigation.

"The laptop is sent away to be examined and, as this forms the basis for a number of different investigations, Humberside Police have no control over the amount of time it takes for the laptop to be returned."

'Very stressful'

Mr Robinson said: "It makes you feel as though you shouldn't have reported it in the first place."

He added it would have been "a lot easier" to just throw the machine in the bin.

Mr Robinson said the restrictions on seeing his daughter had come to a head after his wife had returned to work.

When his wife works late, as regularly happens, Mr Robinson's daughter goes to his mother-in-law's home.

He goes round to see his daughter and them comes home on his own.

He said the experience was "very stressful for the family".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-17274848





The Dark Side of Facebook

Our social networking pages are being policed by outsourced, unvetted moderators.
Iain Hollingshead, and Emma Barnett

For most of us, our experience on Facebook is a benign – even banal – one. A status update about a colleague’s commute. A “friend” request from someone we haven’t seen for years (and hoped to avoid for several more). A picture of another friend’s baby, barely distinguishable from the dozen posted the day before.

Some four billion pieces of content are shared every day by 845 million users. And while most are harmless, it has recently come to light that the site is brimming with paedophilia, pornography, racism and violence – all moderated by outsourced, poorly vetted workers in third world countries paid just $1 an hour.

In addition to the questionable morality of a company that is about to create 1,000 millionaires when it floats paying such paltry sums, there are significant privacy concerns for the rest of us. Although this invisible army of moderators receive basic training, they work from home, do not appear to undergo criminal checks, and have worrying access to users’ personal details. In a week in which there has been an outcry over Google’s privacy policies, can we expect a wider backlash over the extent to which we trust companies with our intimate information?

Last month, 21-year-old Amine Derkaoui gave an interview to Gawker, an American media outlet. Derkaoui had spent three weeks working in Morocco for oDesk, one of the outsourcing companies used by Facebook. His job, for which he claimed he was paid around $1 an hour, involved moderating photos and posts flagged as unsuitable by other users.

“It must be the worst salary paid by Facebook,” he told The Daily Telegraph this week. “And the job itself was very upsetting – no one likes to see a human cut into pieces every day.”

Derkaoui is not exaggerating. An articulate man, he described images of animal abuse, butchered bodies and videos of fights. Other moderators, mainly young, well-educated people working in Asia, Africa and Central America, have similar stories. “Paedophilia, necrophilia, beheadings, suicides, etc,” said one. “I left [because] I value my sanity.” Another compared it to working in a sewer. “All the ---- of the world flows towards you and you have to clean it up,” he said.

Who, one wonders, apart from the desperate, the unstable and the unsavoury, would be attracted to doing such an awful job in the first place?

Of course, not all of the unsuitable material on the site is so graphic. Facebook operates a fascinatingly strict set of guidelines determining what should be deleted. Pictures of naked private parts, drugs (apart from marijuana) and sexual activity (apart from foreplay) are all banned. Male nipples are OK, but naked breastfeeding is not. Photographs of bodily fluids (except semen) are allowed, but not if a human being is also shown. Photoshopped images are fine, but not if they show someone in a negative light.

Once something is reported by a user, the moderator sitting at his computer in Morocco or Mexico has three options: delete it; ignore it; or escalate it, which refers it back to a Facebook employee in California (who will, if necessary, report it to the authorities). Moderators are told always to escalate specific threats – “I’m going to stab Lisa H at the frat party” is given as the charming example – but not generic, unlikely ones, such as “I’m going to blow up the planet on New Year’s Eve.”

It is, of course, to Facebook’s credit that they are attempting to balance their mission “to make the world more open and connected” with a willingness to remove traces of the darker side of human nature. The company founded by Mark Zuckerberg in his Harvard bedroom is richer and more populated than many countries. These moderators are their police.

Neither is Facebook alone in outsourcing unpleasant work. Adam Levin, the US-based chief executive of Criterion Capital Partners and the owner of British social network Bebo, says that the process is “rampant” across Silicon Valley.

“We do it at Bebo,” he says. “Facebook has so much content flowing into its system every day that it needs hundreds of people moderating all the images and posts which are flagged. That type of workforce is best outsourced for speed, scale and cost.”

A spokesman for Twitter said that they have an internal moderation team, but refused to answer a question about outsourcing. Similarly, a Google spokesperson would not say how Google+, the search giant’s new social network, will be moderated. Neither Facebook nor oDesk were willing to comment on anything to do with outsourcing or moderation.

Levin, however, estimates that Facebook indirectly employs between 800 to 1,000 moderators via oDesk and others – nearly a third of its more handsomely remunerated full-time staff. Graham Cluley, of the internet security firm Sophos, calls Silicon Valley’s outsourcing culture its “poorly kept dirty secret”.

The biggest worry for the rest of us, however, is that the moderation process isn’t nearly secretive enough. According to Derkaoui, there are no security measures on a moderator’s computer to stop them uploading obscene material themselves. Despite coming into daily contact with such material, he was never subjected to a criminal record check. Where, then, is the oversight body for these underpaid global police? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Facebook itself is guarding them, according to a previous statement to which the Telegraph was referred. “These contractors are subject to rigorous quality controls and we have implemented several layers of safeguards to protect the data of those using our service,” it read. “No user information beyond the content in question and the source of the report is shared. All decisions made by contractors are subject to extensive audits.”

And yet in the images due for moderation seen by the Telegraph, the name of anyone “tagged” in an offending post – as well as the user who uploaded it – could be clearly discerned. A Facebook spokesman said that these names are shared with the moderators to put the content in context – a context sufficient for Derkaoui to claim that he had as much information as “looking at a friend’s Facebook page”. He admits to having subsequently looked up more information online about the people he had been moderating. Cluley is worried that Facebook users could be blackmailed by disgruntled moderators – or even see pictures originally intended for a small circle of friends pasted all over the web.

Shamoon Siddiqui, chief executive of Develop.io, an American app-building firm that employs people in the developing world for a more generous $7 to $10 an hour, agrees that better security measures are needed. “It isn’t wrong for Facebook to have an Indian office,” he says. “But it is wrong for it to use an arbitrary marketplace with random people it doesn’t know in that country. This will have to change.”

In Britain, for example, all web moderators have to undergo an enhanced CRB check. eModeration, whose clients range from HSBC to The X-Factor, pays £10 an hour and never lets its staff spend too long on the gritty stuff. They wouldn’t go near the Facebook account. The job, says Tamara Littleton, its chief executive, is too big, the moderating too reactive, and they couldn’t compete on cost with the likes of oDesk.

So, if no one can undercut the likes of oDesk, could they not be undermined instead? If Mr Zuckerberg will not dig deeper into his $17.5 billion pockets to pay the street-sweepers of Facebook properly, maybe he could be persuaded by a little moral outrage?

Levin disagrees. “Perhaps a minute percentage of users will stop using Facebook when they hear about this,” he says. “But the more digital our society becomes, the less people value their privacy.”

Perhaps. But maybe disgruntled commuters, old schoolfriends and new mothers will think twice before sharing intimate information with their “friends” – only to find that two minutes later it’s being viewed by an under-vetted, unfulfilled person on a dollar an hour in an internet café in Marrakech.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...-Facebook.html





Reports Raise Questions About Who Has Access To Your Facebook Profile
Dave Copeland

Gawker started a row against Facebook last month by pointing out some of the moderators it outsources work to in Morocco, India and other countries are paid $1 per day.

As Forbes points out, Gawker initially made a non-story into a story: while $1 per day is not great, it does amount to the standard minimum wage in the countries where Facebook is sending work. "One of the problems is that many people don't quite understand how poor many parts of the world are," Tim Worstall wrote for the magazine.

The bigger problem for Facebook users, as noted by the Independent, may be what information those moderators can access.

The moderators are charged with dealing with user complaints about content: everything from the use of copyrighted material without permission to offensive images or other content that violates Facebook's user agreements. When Gawker first raised the charges, Facebook responded by saying in a statement "No user information beyond the content in question and the source of the report is shared."

That, according to the Independent, is not true. The newspaper claims to have viewed information showing that moderators "are clearly able to see the names of the person who uploaded the 'offensive' content, the subject of the image or person tagged in a photo - in addition to the person who has reported the content."

We've asked Facebook to respond to the Independent's claims and will update as soon as we hear back from them.

The newspaper also notes there is nothing preventing moderators from taking screen shots of the offensive content. One former moderator showed the Independent material he had viewed and saved, and said he later went and looked up more information about those people.

"Some of the photos that people post, which under Facebook's rules may be deemed inappropriate, such as your children running around naked or a mum breastfeeding, could still end up on the open internet, if a moderator, who is able to copy the images, publishes them," Graham Cluley, of the British internet security firm Sophos, said.

Creepy? Of course. But not all that surprising. Many regular users of the Internet understand, at least in theory, the idea that what you post online can eventually end up in the hands of someone you don't want it to. But many still have not adopted practices to protect against that, seemingly taking an approach that believes that kind of thing only happens to other people.

The Independent goes on to line up the same row of security experts who, predictably, make the same demands for Facebook to overhaul its moderation system. Those are great sentiments, but not likely outcomes, as doing so would incur costs ahead of the company's initial public offering. The security experts should be stressing to Facebook users their need to overhaul their own online practices.
https://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...cess_to_yo.php





Senator Schumer Asks FTC to Probe Apple, Android

A U.S. senator has urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate reports that applications on the Apple Inc and Google Inc mobile systems steal private photos and contacts and post them online without consent.

Democrat Charles Schumer's request comes after iPhone maker Apple tweaked its privacy policies last month after prodding from other lawmakers.

The distribution of third-party applications on iPhones and phones running on Google's Android system has helped create a surge in the popularity of those devices in recent years.

However, Schumer said on Sunday that he was concerned about a New York Times report that iPhone and Android applications can access a user's private photo collection.

He also referred to a discovery last month that applications on devices such as the iPhone and iPad were able to upload entire address books with names, telephone numbers and email addresses to their own servers.

"These uses go well beyond what a reasonable user understands himself to be consenting to when he allows an app to access data on the phone for purposes of the app's functionality," Schumer said in a letter to the FTC.

The lawmaker said it was his understanding that many of these uses violate the terms of service of the Apple and Android platforms. He said "it is not clear whether or how those terms of service are being enforced and monitored".

As a result, he said, "smartphone makers should be required to put in place safety measures to ensure third party applications are not able to violate a user's personal privacy by stealing photographs or data that the user did not consciously decide to make public".

Schumer said phone makers have an obligation to protect the private content of their customers.

"When someone takes a private photo, on a private cell phone, it should remain just that: private," said Schumer.

(Reporting by Sinead Carew; Editing by Dale Hudson)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8230WZ20120304





The Bright Side of Being Hacked
Somini Sengupta and Nicole Perlroth

Hackers operating under the banner Anonymous have been poking a finger in the eye of one private company after another for two years now.

They steal files from inside corporate computer systems and occasionally, as in the case of Stratfor last week, dump company e-mail online for all to see.

The Stratfor hack, in which Anonymous claimed to have joined forces with WikiLeaks, drove home a clear lesson about the era of ubiquitous “hactivism,” or hacking as a form of protest.

Despite the arrests of dozens of suspected members of Anonymous and its offshoots worldwide, it is far from diminished. Nor have most of its corporate targets been irreparably damaged by the attacks.

Rather, what Anonymous has done, experts said at the big RSA computer security conference here last week, is raise the alarm about the unguarded state of corporate computer systems.

By and large, the Anonymous break-ins take advantage of gaping computer holes and gullible human beings. The hackers ferret out weak passwords and take advantage of unencrypted e-mail stashes. They persuade company employees — one is all it takes — to click on rogue Web sites or divulge a confidential piece of information, in an exercise known as social engineering.

“Anonymous is a wake-up call,” said Roger Cressey, senior vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton, a defense and intelligence contractor that was attacked by the group last summer. “Any company that is patting themselves on the back and saying that they’re not a target or not susceptible to attack is in complete and utter denial.”

More to the point, a company that is a target of Anonymous may also be the target of a far more potent adversary. The social engineering tactics that Anonymous members have repeatedly used are often similar to those used by criminal hackers and state-sponsored actors who penetrate company systems in order to steal valuable secrets, whether for monetary gain or competitive edge.

Anonymous draws public attention — and by extension, that of executives and shareholders. It puts a face — or rather, a mask — on a far more pernicious problem: online espionage.

“The attacks by them pale in comparison to the nation-state stuff and the criminal element,” said Eddie Schwartz, chief security officer for RSA, the organizer of the computer security conference and a maker of security tokens, which was itself the target of a highly publicized breach by suspected state-backed hackers. “There is an awakening. There is a lot more visibility in the press.”

An Anonymous attack can leave a measurable toll. In 2010, its activists broke into Sony’s systems, exposing names and credit card numbers of millions of customers; Sony said last May that the cleanup would cost it $170 million. Last year, Anonymous extracted the password of an executive at the security firm HBGary and helped itself to a pile of internal company e-mail.

News of the breach at the geopolitical analysis firm Stratfor began trickling out on Christmas Eve, when the company’s site was defaced. At first, a group called Antisec, an Anonymous offshoot, claimed responsibility, announcing that it had penetrated the company’s network. It posted the names, addresses and credit card details of 75,000 people who subscribed to Stratfor newsletters. Soon came a dump of credentials for 860,000 user accounts, not all of whom may have been paid subscribers.

Mary Landesman, a senior security researcher at Cisco who has closely studied the Stratfor breach, said the attack appears to have been twofold: a relatively commonplace attack, known as an SQL injection, on four servers that stored e-mails dating back several years, as well as a breach of a vulnerable third-party e-commerce system that Stratfor would have used to process its paid subscribers.

A company’s vulnerabilities, whether human or machine, are far easier to spot, Ms. Landesman pointed out, if a sprawling army of thieves is plotting the break-in. “The more eyes, the greater chance of success,” she said.

Soon the paid customers found themselves having to deal with purchases made with the stolen card numbers. Then they began receiving e-mails that purported to be from George Friedman, Stratfor’s chief executive, and came with malicious software attached. Mr. Friedman announced that Stratfor had not sent out the e-mails, and the company stopped charging for its subscriptions, which had been its principal source of revenue.

A class-action lawsuit followed, accusing the company of negligence in securely storing its customers’ information and failing to promptly notify them of the theft.

In its response to the lawsuit, Stratfor said it had informed the FBI as soon as it learned of the breach on Dec. 7.

The most recent salvo in the Stratfor hack began last Sunday, when WikiLeaks began releasing the contents of the company’s internal e-mail communications. Stratfor for its part refused to distinguish between e-mails that it said may have been “forged” and those that were “authentic.”

Stratfor declined requests for an interview.

Law enforcement officials at the RSA conference expressed frustration with their inability to squelch the rise of such attacks. Those who participate can be hard to find. And often they turn out to be minors who are not prosecuted as aggressively as adults.

The head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert Mueller, struck an ominous note about the threat of digital attacks on corporate America. “There are only two types of companies,” Mr. Mueller said in a keynote speech at the conference, “those that have been hacked and those that will be.”

Oddly enough, despite the stream of attacks and a security industry that is eager to sell its services, a survey of the largest American companies shows that neither their top executives nor their board members are directly involved in decisions about the security of their data.

According to the latest results of an annual survey by Carnegie Mellon University, released last week, more than 70 percent said they occasionally, rarely or never reviewed their top information security policies or staff.

How the attack will damage Stratfor in the long run remains to be seen. If HBGary is any yardstick, it may pull through. HBGary suffered an embarrassing blow last year when thousands of its internal e-mails were dumped on the Internet.

Aaron Barr, the chief executive of its sister company, HBGary Federal, who provoked the ire of Anonymous by boasting of having penetrated its anonymity, resigned. But in late February, despite the hacking, HBGary was acquired by ManTech, a giant Virginia-based defense contractor, which itself had been hacked by Anonymous last August.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/t...ng-hacked.html





Hackers Steal Unreleased Michael Jackson Tracks from Sony
Mike Lennon

Thousands of Unreleased Michael Jackson Songs Accessed and Downloaded By Attackers. Other Compromised Works Include Songs From Jimi Hendrix, Paul Simon, the Foo Fighters, and others.

The plot thickens, and Sony once again has found itself in the news surrounding another hacking-related incident. This time around, the breach doesn’t appear to be in regard any lost user data or customer accounts, but instead, some valuable property owned by the record company.

Today, the UK’s Daily Star and other British news outlets have reported that more than 50,000 music tracks have been illegally accessed and downloaded by hackers, including a large number from the late Michael Jackson.

Sony bought the catalog from Jackson’s estate for $250 Million in 2010, giving the company distribution rights to the unreleased music.

The attack reportedly occurred shortly after details of the massive PlayStation Network breach last April, but details were only revealed this past weekend.

A source reportedly told Britain’s Sunday Times that, “Everything Sony purchased from the Michael Jackson estate was compromised.”

A source told the Daily Star that the hack also compromised the works of other artists held by Sony, including Jimi Hendrix, Paul Simon, Olly Murs, the Foo Fighters and Avril Lavigne.
https://www.securityweek.com/hackers...on-tracks-sony





EXCLUSIVE: Infamous International Hacking Group LulzSec Brought Down by Own Leader
Jana Winter

EXCLUSIVE: Law enforcement agents on two continents swooped in on top members of the infamous computer hacking group LulzSec early this morning, and acting largely on evidence gathered by the organization’s brazen leader -- who sources say has been secretly working for the government for months -- arrested three and charged two more with conspiracy.

Charges against four of the five were based on a conspiracy case filed in New York federal court, FoxNews.com has learned. An indictment charging the suspects, who include two men from Great Britain, two from Ireland and an American in Chicago is expected to be unsealed Tuesday morning in the Southern District of New York.

“This is devastating to the organization,” said an FBI official involved with the investigation. “We’re chopping off the head of LulzSec.”

The offshoot of the loose network of hackers, Anonymous, believed to have caused billions of dollars in damage to governments, international banks and corporations, was allegedly led by a shadowy figure FoxNews.com has identified as Hector Xavier Monsegur. Working under the Internet alias “Sabu,” the unemployed, 28-year-old father of two allegedly commanded a loosely organized, international team of perhaps thousands hackers from his nerve center in a public housing project on New York’s Lower East Side. After the FBI unmasked Monsegur last June, he became a cooperating witness, sources told FoxNews.com.

“They caught him and he was secretly arrested and now works for the FBI,” a source close to Sabu told FoxNews.com.

Monsegur pleaded guilty Aug. 15 to 12 hacking-related charges and information documenting his admissions is expected to be unsealed in Southern District Court on Tuesday.

As a result of Monsegur’s cooperation, which was confirmed by numerous senior-level officials, the remaining top-ranking members of LulzSec were arrested or hit with additional charges Tuesday morning. The five charged in the LulzSec conspiracy indictment expected to be unsealed were identified by sources as: Ryan Ackroyd, aka “Kayla” and Jake Davis, aka “Topiary,” both of London; Darren Martyn, aka “pwnsauce” and Donncha O’Cearrbhail, aka “palladium,” both of Ireland; and Jeremy Hammond aka “Anarchaos,” of Chicago.

Hammond was arrested on access device fraud and hacking charges and is believed to have been the main person behind the devastating December hack on U.S. security company Stratford. Millions of emails were stolen and then published on Wikileaks; credit card numbers and other confidential information were also stolen, law enforcement sources told FoxNews.com.

The sources said Hammond will be charged in a separate indictment, and they described him as a member of Anonymous.

The others are all suspected members of LulzSec, the group that has wreaked havoc on U.S. and foreign government agencies, including the CIA and FBI, numerous defense contractors, financial and governmental entities and corporations including Fox and Sony.

Ackroyd, who is suspected of using the online handle “Kayla,” is alleged to be Monsegur’s top deputy. Among other things, Kayla identified vulnerabilities in the U.S. Senate’s computer systems and passed the information on to Sabu. Kayla was expected to be taken into custody on Tuesday.

A spokeswoman for the Southern District and U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara declined comment.

Monsegur’s attorney did not return FoxNews.com’s repeated requests for comment.
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/...w-enforcement/





Arrests Sow Mistrust Inside a Clan of Hackers
Somini Sengupta

For months, The Real Sabu, as he called himself on Twitter, boasted, cursed and egged on his followers to take part in computer attacks against private companies and government agencies worldwide.

“Don’t give in to these people,” he wrote on Monday, ridiculing “cowards” in the federal government. “Fight back. Stay strong.”

It turns out that Sabu had become an informant for federal law enforcement authorities. On Tuesday, in what could be one of the biggest breakthroughs in the government crackdown on a loose, large confederation of politically inspired “hacktivists,” he was unmasked and revealed to have helped the authorities catch several fellow hackers in Europe and the United States.

Four men in Britain and Ireland were charged Tuesday with computer crimes; a fifth man was arrested Monday in Chicago.

Court papers identified Sabu as Hector Xavier Monsegur, 28, of New York. He pleaded guilty last August to a dozen counts of conspiracy to attack computers. He had operated since then as usual — as The Real Sabu, instigating attacks and quoting revolutionaries online.

The prosecutions are part of a wave of coordinated efforts to rein in a leaderless, multinational movement called Anonymous, which has drawn attention for its protests against the Church of Scientology and in support of the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks. It has spawned spinoffs with different names and insignias, among them LulzSec, which claimed to attack computer security companies for laughs, or lulz, and of which Sabu was a prominent, outspoken member.

Just last week, Interpol announced the arrests of 25 people suspected of being Anonymous members in Europe. Sabu reacted to that news on Twitter by urging others to attack Interpol’s Web site.

Mr. Monsegur’s base of operations seems to have been his late grandmother’s sixth-floor apartment in a public-housing project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He was apparently self-trained, and he appears to have been equally skilled at hacking and deceiving his fellow hackers. His downfall, if nothing else, will sow even more distrust and dissension in the ranks of Anonymous.

“It is going to be very difficult for Anonymous to recover from such a breach of trust,” said Mikko Hypponen, a security researcher at F-Secure Labs in Helsinki. “You can see the Anonymous people now looking left and right and realizing, if they couldn’t trust Sabu, who can they trust?”

Whether this will temper the larger hacker cause remains to be seen. Anonymous is a decentralized movement that is, broadly speaking, opposed to state institutions and the companies that work with them, and its members have embraced an ever-shifting variety of causes, including animal rights and democracy in the Middle East.

The ranks are steadily replenished with people of varying skills. The targets have included Fox News, Sony, the government contractor HBGary and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Favored tactics are either to start brute-force attacks aimed at slowing or shutting down sites, or to break into computer systems and expose embarrassing communications.

Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist who studies the Anonymous movement and teaches at McGill University in Montreal, said she expected the latest prosecutions would most likely have “a chilling effect” on their hacking tactics.

“These are moments of massive reflection — who are we, what do we want to be?” she said of Anonymous.

The group’s latest highly publicized breach was of the geopolitical analysis firm Stratfor. Its system was first penetrated last December, and the hackers exposed its customers’ names and e-mail addresses. Then, starting last week, its internal communications were released on the Internet by a new partner, WikiLeaks.

On Monday night, the F.B.I. arrested Jeremy Hammond, 27, of Chicago, in connection with the Stratfor breach. Mr. Hammond is charged with stealing credit card information and using some of it to rack up more than $700,000 in charges.

Mr. Hammond’s neighbors on Tuesday described him as a friendly man who dressed eccentrically, sometimes wearing mismatched shoes and, other times, suspenders. He sat on the front porch of the red brick house where he rented a first-floor apartment, and sometimes played the banjo and made up songs about the goings-on on the street.

Mr. Hammond’s eccentricities apparently involved previous run-ins with the F.B.I. In 2006, he was convicted of having hacked into a political group’s computer server and stolen credit card numbers. He was sentenced to 24 months in prison.

Also charged in a separate indictment were two Britons, Ryan Ackroyd, 23, and Jake Davis, 29. Mr. Davis, who was known by his nickname Topiary and was as loquacious on Twitter as Mr. Monsegur, was arrested last July in the Shetland Islands.

Also charged in Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York were Darren Martyn, 25, whose nicknames included Pwnsauce, and Donncha O’Cearrbhail, 19, who was known as Palladium.

All four men are accused of hacking into the computer systems of, among others, Fox Broadcasting, Sony Pictures Entertainment and PBS over the last year. (Fox News first reported the prosecutions on Tuesday.)

Mr. O’Cearrbhail is separately charged with breaching the personal e-mail account of an Irish law enforcement official and using it to covertly record a conference call in January in which authorities from several countries, including F.B.I. agents, were discussing investigations of Anonymous and other hacktivist groups.

Mr. Monsegur, for his part, was described as a smart, politically motivated hacker who had steered clear of trouble with the law — unlike his father, a Bronx resident who was convicted of selling heroin and spent seven years in prison.

A family member who did not want to be identified said that Mr. Monsegur was tall and heavy, and known for being into computers, video games and cars. He had been close to his grandmother, whose apartment in the Jacob Riis Houses became his home and his workshop. He has been living there with his girlfriend’s two children, a person in law enforcement said.

Online, Mr. Monsegur was generating international mayhem, according to the complaint, participating in an attack on PayPal, defacing the Web site of the prime minister of Tunisia and breaking into the government of Yemen’s computers. His role, court documents say, was to act as a “rooter,” identifying vulnerabilities in the target’s systems.

Some residents of the housing complex were shocked to hear of the charges. “I don’t believe it,” said Jaime Reyes, who said he had known Mr. Monsegur for many years, adding: “He was a good kid.” Mr. Reyes said Mr. Monsegur seemed to be off at work a lot, and when he was home he was busy taking care of the children. “The way I see him, if somebody was a hacker, they would be home all day,” he said.

As is common in cases involving informants, a federal judge will eventually decide whether Mr. Monsegur will be sentenced to jail or to what extent his punishment will be reduced in exchange for his cooperation.

In the days just before his guilty plea was announced, Mr. Monsegur — or Sabu on Twitter — was his usual bombastic self. “You think arresting my people will stop our idea? Our love and solidarity will not cease but will be empowered. We are stronger than the gov,” he wrote last week.

His last post, on Monday afternoon, was adapted from a quote from the Marxist activist Rosa Luxemburg, in German. “The revolution says I am, I was, I will be,” it said.

Reporting was contributed by Nicole Perlroth, Steven Yaccino, Alex Vadukul and Tim Stelloh.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/t...-arrested.html





Two Murdoch Reporters Feared to be in Suicide Bids

Anger at News International over treatment of journalists
Tom Harper and Simon Freeman

Two senior journalists at News International have apparently attempted to commit suicide as pressure mounts inside the Murdoch media empire.

The reporters appeared to try to take their own lives after the company turned over 300 million emails and internal papers to detectives investigating phone-hacking and alleged bribery of public officials.

The journalists, whom the Standard has decided not to name, were checked into hospital at the expense of News International on the orders of Rupert Murdoch.

Sources said other journalists inside the Wapping HQ look “terribly stressed and many are on the edge”. It is understood the company’s offer of psychiatric help is available to any journalist who feels under pressure.

The tragic developments happened after News Corp’s Management and Standards Commitee, a branch of the empire that reports directly to independent board directors in New York, passed evidence to Scotland Yard.

Eleven reporters and senior executives from The Sun have been arrested in recent weeks by police officers from Operation Elveden, which is investigating alleged illegal payments to police officers and civil servants.

The MSC’s co-operation with the police has triggered a civil war inside the Murdoch empire. Bosses at News International, its UK-newspaper subsidiary, are furious that the committee, headed by Lord Grabiner QC, has “sold journalists down the river”. Today, anger inside Wapping was focused on Will Lewis, a former editor of the Daily Telegraph, and Simon Greenberg, ex-sports editor of the News of the World, who both work for the MSC.

A senior News International source said: “These former journalists are turning their own people over to police for ‘crimes’ that newspapers have indulged in for centuries. I doubt whether Will Lewis and Greenberg will be able to show their face around News International. They have both s*** all over their colleagues.”

Last week, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers, who is in charge of the investigations into News International, told the Leveson Inquiry she believed The Sun had established a “network of corrupted officials” inside the police, the armed forces and other key public organisations. No one from The Sun or the News International has yet been charged with an offence.

Another source said the company’s handling of the crisis had been “disastrous”. He added: “This all appears to be an attempt to save James Murdoch.” Murdoch Jnr, who was in charge of News International during the phone-hacking crisis and the alleged cover-up, resigned as executive chairman last week and moved to New York.

Today, former Scotland Yard commissioner Lord Condon told the Leveson Inquiry into the phone hacking crisis that he was “very disappointed” by events at the Met.

“I have been concerned by some of the issues that have emerged and had I still been involved in the Service I would probably be very angry,” he said.

He described the “history of police malpractice” as “cyclical” and called for Lord Justice Leveson, who is this week looking at relations between the Met and the media, to suggest “enduring” reforms to the relationship between the press and the police.

Lord Condon, who led the Met in the Nineties, said: “The history of police malpractice goes: scandal, inquiry, remedial action, relaxation, complacency, scandal, inquiry and that’s been on about a 20-year cycle.”
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/u...s-7541864.html





News Corp. Staving Off a Scandal
Amy Chozick

Last Monday, British investigators said that News Corporation’s British tabloid, The Sun, had participated in widespread bribery to “a network of corrupted officials.”

Then on Wednesday, the widening inquiry into illegal activity at News Corporation’s British newspapers led to James Murdoch’s resignation as head of the company’s embattled British publishing unit.

What happened back in New York? News Corporation’s stock went up.

The wave of incriminating headlines and the surging stock price reflect the cognitive dissonance generated by News Corporation’s phone hacking scandal. Even while Rupert Murdoch, the company’s chairman and chief executive, has doubled down on one of the newspapers at the center of the worsening scandal, creating a new Sunday edition of The Sun, investors have been cheering the possibility that the negative news in Britain could prompt the company to spin off its newspapers.

Last Tuesday, Chase Carey, News Corporation’s chief operating officer, said at a Deutsche Bank media conference in Palm Beach, Fla., that within the company “certainly there are a number of parties who feel — would push to looking at a way to spin the publishing business separate from the rest.”

James Murdoch’s resignation from News International inextricably links Mr. Carey to the British newspapers, properties he technically oversaw before but had little interest in, according to people with knowledge of the internal dynamics at the company. News International’s chief executive, Tom Mockridge, will now report directly to Mr. Carey, having previously reported to James Murdoch.

“Chase has no exposure whatsoever to the newspaper business, and Mockridge is a straight arrow,” said one of the people, who like the others requested anonymity to speak candidly about the company. “Either Chase learns the business, or they spin off the papers and Mockridge runs the new company.”

A News Corporation spokeswoman pointed to Mr. Carey’s defense of the newspapers at the conference in Florida, in which he said: “Our focus right now is in managing these businesses and improving their profitability.”

Wall Street has long disliked News International, publisher of The Sun and the closed News of the World. The unit accounts for less than 3 percent of News Corporation’s profits and brings outsize troubles. Analysts estimate that the cost of legal fees and settlements related to the hacking crisis could reach $1 billion. News Corporation has a market capitalization of $49 billion.

Other than newspapers, the company’s assets like the Fox network, the Fox studios and cable channels like FX accounted for nearly 90 percent of its $2.9 billion in profit in the six months that ended Dec. 31.

“Wall Street would love it even if negative news drove to a sale or separation of the newspaper group,” said Richard Greenfield, a media analyst at BTIG.

On Friday, News Corporation closed at $20.15, up 46 percent from a 52-week low of $13.83 reached last summer at the height of the revelations about phone hacking at News of the World. Shares have gained about 10 percent in the last 12 months.

The company is unlikely to spin off its newspapers as long as Mr. Murdoch, who turns 81 next week, runs the company. He is often said to have newspaper ink in his veins.

“He’s not even considering that path,” said one former executive at News Corporation who requested anonymity to talk about internal debates at the company.

On Feb. 26, Mr. Murdoch introduced The Sun on Sunday, partly to make up for the lost revenue at the closed News of the World, where reporters repeatedly hacked into voice mails.

The creation of The Sun on Sunday, which Mr. Murdoch said sold 3.26 million copies in its first week, also sent a message to News Corporation executives that, like it or not, Mr. Murdoch was sticking with the British publishing business.

(The company has not discussed spinning off News Corporation’s print assets in the United States like The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones & Company, and The New York Post, according to people with knowledge of discussions within the company.)

“He’s a combative guy,” Barton Crockett, a media analyst at Lazard Capital Markets, said of Mr. Murdoch. “He’s going to fight hard to stay relevant in the publishing business in the U.K., and I think investors are somewhat fearful about that.”

To ease investors’ concerns about the print business, News Corporation in July approved a $5 billion stock buyback program led by Mr. Carey. As of Feb. 7, the company had bought $2.7 billion of its own Class A shares. Last week Mr. Carey said he planned another buyback when the current one ends in June.

“We certainly have an undervalued stock, to me a woefully undervalued stock,” Mr. Carey said at the Deutsche Bank conference. “We think of another buyback to make sense.”

James Murdoch, Rupert’s younger son, has long been viewed as his father’s heir apparent. James now works from News Corporation’s New York headquarters, a move first announced last March. As the company’s deputy chief operating officer, he oversees the company’s lucrative international pay-cable channels like Star TV in Asia, Sky Deutschland and Sky Italia. News Corporation predicts that Fox International Channels will bring in $1 billion in operating income by the fiscal year 2015.

“The Fox International business plus the Star India business, which is run separately and reports directly to James Murdoch, we are the leaders in the international markets amongst the U.S. multinational media,” David Haslingden, president and chief operating officer of Fox Networks Group, told analysts at a conference the day James Murdoch resigned from the publishing unit.

James’s position in New York does not sit well with some shareholders who have called for his removal from News Corporation’s board.

“Responsibility for this debacle ends with the board,” said Michael Pryce-Jones, a spokesman for the CtW Investment Group, a shareholder activist group in Washington that works with pension funds for large labor unions like the Teamsters. “This is a governance issue, and obviously much of the burden falls upon James given his role as a key executive.”

There is no clear end in sight to the scandals embroiling the company, as British investigators continue to inspect documents turned over by News Corporation’s management and standards committee. If the accusations of bribes authorized by “people at a very senior level within” The Sun to elected officials, the British police and the military are true, it could lead to heightened scrutiny in America.

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act makes bribery of international officials by American companies and their foreign subsidiaries a criminal offense.

In a statement released last Monday, Rupert Murdoch said the bribery practices explained in the investigation were “ones of the past, and no longer exist at The Sun.”

That defense signaled that he saw a future for his besieged tabloid. “Rupert is unlikely to make decisions when backed into a corner,” said Doug Mitchelson, an analyst at Deutsche Bank Securities. “If they ever spun off print, it’d be because he fixed it and wanted to highlight the value of print, not to remove the cancer from the organization.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/b...s-scandal.html





US Man Convicted for Helping Thousands Steal Internet Service

The business owner faces 20 years in prison for each of seven counts of wire fraud
Grant Gross

An Oregon man has been convicted of seven courts of wire fraud for helping thousands of people steal Internet service, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

Ryan Harris, 26, of Redmond, Oregon, was convicted Thursday by a jury in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. He faces a prison term of up to 20 years and a fine of up to US$250,000 on each of the seven counts.

Harris was owner of the company, TCNISO, which distributed products that helped customers steal Internet service, the DOJ said in a press release. From 2003 to 2009, Harris distributed software and hardware tools that allowed his customers to modify their cable modems to disguise themselves as paying customers, the agency said.

The products included a packet sniffer, called Coax Thief, that intercepted Internet traffic so that the users could obtain the media access control addresses and configuration files of surrounding modems. TCNISO and Harris offered customer support, primarily through forums on the TCNISO website, to assist customers in their cable modem hacking activities, the DOJ said.

"Mr. Harris tried to hide behind the banner of freedom of access to the Internet, but the evidence established that he built a million dollar business helping customers steal Internet service," Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer of the DOJ's Criminal Division, said in a statement.

Harris' lawyer wasn't immediately available for comment on the conviction.

Harris' sentencing is scheduled for May 23.
http://www.techworld.com.au/article/...ternet_service





Days Are Numbered for Unlimited Mobile Data Plans
Kevin J. O'Brien

In Indonesia, nearly a third of the population is younger than 15 years old. So Telkomsel, the leading mobile operator in the country, offers a data plan called FlexiChatting for customers who want to do just one thing: gain access to and update Twitter and Facebook accounts on their cellphones.

Tailored mobile data plans like the one in Indonesia may soon become the rule.

Telecommunications executives in Europe and the United States say that offering plans designed for heavy users of social networks or, for example, video, will allow more efficient use of overstressed wireless networks and make those who use the networks the most pay for that use.

“We are moving into a phase of microsegmentation,” said Hans Vestberg, chief executive of Ericsson, the leading maker of mobile networking equipment, during an interview at the Mobile World Congress, the industry’s largest annual convention, held in Barcelona last week.

“This is going to have a direct effect on data plans around the world,” he said. “Without more efficient use of networks, the vast majority of people on this planet will be cut off from the Internet.”

Over the past two years, most mobile operators around the world have abandoned the unlimited data plans used at the outset of the mobile Internet. In their place, operators have adopted plans that tie data download limits to prices — the more you download, the more you pay.

But such tiered plans are probably only a transition toward a new way of charging for mobile data that will be much more exact, down to the kilobyte, and often tied to the destination of the Web browser.

Rising demand for mobile data, accelerated by the adoption of smartphones, is putting a strain on most of the world’s mobile networks and operators, even those that have invested billions of dollars in capacity and speed.

One billion people, or one in four cellphone users in the world, have mobile broadband subscriptions, according to Ericsson. By 2016, the number of mobile broadband users is expected to increase fivefold, as less expensive smartphones come on the market.

Faced with such a sharp spike in demand, Vittorio Colao, the chief executive of Vodafone, a European telecommunications giant, said operators had little choice but to adopt more graduated data plans to ensure a level of basic access to the mobile Web.

“At the end of the day, some kind of relationship between what you pay and what you use should be there,” Mr. Colao said during an interview. “Today, the subsidy is the other way around. Those who use a lot are subsidized by those who use less.”

Operators will continue to experiment with new ways of linking data prices to behavior, Mr. Colao said.

“There are many ways to do this. You can have video tariffs, you can have maximums per month, or maximums per month per family,” he said. “This is all about competition. Every operator will do what they think is right, and the customers will decide.”

The industry learned painfully from all-you-can-eat data plans, said Hilde M. Tonne, an executive vice president in charge of industrial development at Telenor, a Norwegian mobile operator with 140 million customers in Europe and Asia.

Telenor was among the first operators worldwide to start selling mobile broadband generously in unlimited packages. The operator now sells tiered pricing packages.

“I think the industry just kind of jumped into the mobile data world with unlimited plans, and very little thought was given to how much investment would be needed,” Ms. Tonne said during an interview. “In the end, the unlimited approach was unsustainable.”

Ten years from now, Mr. Vestberg said, standard data contracts probably will no longer exist. Instead, consumers will buy mobile data according to their individual habits, which operators will constantly monitor. Companies are installing the software and hardware tools to make such real-time billing possible, Mr. Vestberg said.

Scott T. Stainken, the general manager for telecommunications at International Business Machines, which sells software for network operators called Smarter Planet analytics, said some operators in the United States and elsewhere were beginning to consider new tariff models, like charging for “bursting,” the accelerated delivery of data for high-definition video.

Such a change could enable operators to limit the amount of mobile video viewing per month. Citing confidentiality agreements with I.B.M.’s clients, Mr. Stainken said he could not identify the operators considering such charges. But most in the industry are considering these options, not just in the United States but globally, he said.

“The question is, How do you deal with the explosive requirements coming from all of these smart devices?” Mr. Stainkin said during an interview. “Today it is significant. It is going to become much, much more significant over the next five years.”

“I don’t think the answer is, I’m going to charge a lot for all of those gigabits we are pumping down the pipe,” he added. “The consumers will decide whether they are willing to pay for a higher level of service or a different content.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/t...ata-plans.html





Nearly Half of American Adults are Smartphone Owners
Aaron Smith

Overview

Nearly half (46%) of American adults are smartphone owners as of February 2012, an increase of 11 percentage points over the 35% of Americans who owned a smartphone last May. Two in five adults (41%) own a cell phone that is not a smartphone, meaning that smartphone owners are now more prevalent within the overall population than owners of more basic mobile phones.

Nearly every major demographic group—men and women, younger and middle-aged adults, urban and rural residents, the wealthy and the less well-off—experienced a notable uptick in smartphone penetration over the last year. Overall adoption levels are at 60% or more within several cohorts, such as college graduates, 18-35 year olds and those with an annual household income of $75,000 or more.

Although this overall increase in smartphone ownership is relatively widespread, several groups saw modest or non-existent growth in the last year. Chief among these are seniors, as just 13% of those ages 65 and older now own a smartphone.

About the Survey

This report is based on the findings of a survey on Americans' use of the Internet. The results in this report are based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International from January 20 to February 19, 2012, among a sample of 2,253 adults, age 18 and older. Telephone interviews were conducted in English and Spanish by landline (1,352) and cell phone (901, including 440 without a landline phone). For results based on the total sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the error attributable to sampling is plus or minus 2.3 percentage points. For results based Internet users (n=1,729), the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.
http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/...date-2012.aspx





Android Overtakes Opera to Become the Most Popular Mobile Web Browser
Jon Russell

Android has already become the most dominant type of mobile device on the planet, and now the Google-owned operating system is owner of the mobile Web’s most used browser, according to data from StatCounter, via Phandroid.

Figures from the online measurement service show that February saw use of Android’s ‘robot’ browser overtake Opera to take the top spot for the first time.

The chart (click to enlarge), which plots the use of mobile Internet browsers over the last twelve months, shows significant growth from Android, which had only just overtaken BlackBerry to fourth place one year ago.

StatCounter mobile browser ww monthly 201102 201202 520x304 Android overtakes Opera to become the most popular mobile Web browser

Opera, which is particularly popular in Africa and Asia, sits in second and the firm will look to increase its share with the newly released developer beta version of its popular Opera Mini Browser, aimed at giving users a more advanced and social mobile Web experience. The Scandinavian firm does not own its own devices but, thanks to deals with firms like Samsung — which pre-loads Opera onto its feature phones — the browser is well used.

StatCounter breaks out usage of the iPhone and iPod Touch, which might otherwise see Apple’s browser rank first. However, considering the numerical advantage that Android has over Apple — there are now more than 300 million Android devices worldwide, that’s up 250 percent — the fact that the iPhone ranks so closely shows that its users are proportionally more likely to browse the Web than Android owners.

However, as Google looks to push the mobile version of its Chrome browser to its devices, will it be able to increase the Internet usage of Android owners going forward?

Other interesting trends see BlackBerry’s share of Web browsing continue to plummet, while Nokia has also seen its browser account for less Web browsing over the period.

It should be said that measurement is often an imprecise science, especially when it comes to the Internet and mobile. However, the gist of the data serves to illustrate that Android is growing massively and, if not now, it is soon likely to be the mobile Web’s most used browser.

Last month, StatCounter assessed which mobile device manufacturer had the most mobile Internet-enabled devices in use worldwide (based on volume of phones rather than their usage). Nokia topped that ranking but the firm clearly struggles to convert Internet owners into regular mobile browsers, as its Web browsing traffic is particularly low.
http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/03...e-web-browser/





Plans for 'TV Everywhere' Bog Down in Tangled Pacts
Sam Schechner and Shalini Ramachandran

It was dubbed "TV Everywhere." But for many TV viewers, it has had trouble going anywhere.

Nearly three years after Time Warner Inc. and Comcast Corp. kicked off a drive to make cable programming available online for cable subscribers, the idea of TV Everywhere remains mired in technical holdups, slow deal-making and disputes over who will control TV customers in the future.

Now some media executives say the effort, aimed at insulating cable television against a rising tide of cheap online video alternatives, risks getting left behind—a concern that found voice last week at two different industry conferences.

While some cable programming is available online, much isn't, or is available only to subscribers of certain pay-TV providers. That is because TV Everywhere—which is a concept, not a specific service—requires a lot of deal-making.

Each cable operator, phone company and satellite-TV provider must negotiate separate agreements for online rights to every cable channel. So far, just a few companies have reached wide-ranging deals.

At the same time, the availability of alternative online video is exploding. Google Inc.'s YouTube is spending hundreds of millions of dollars funding new channels that are available anywhere. Netflix Inc. is ramping up spending to buy reruns and now original shows—like a cable channel but without the rest of the cable bill.

The danger for media companies, some TV executives say, is that a new content garden is growing up outside of cable TV's walls.

"We have to move much faster," said Jeff Bewkes, chief executive of Time Warner, at one of the investor conferences last week. "And if we don't, we do risk letting others take this opportunity."

Comcast offers subscriber-only online access to current TV shows, such as Showtime's 'House of Lies.'

TV Everywhere is part of a larger effort in many quarters of media, including newspapers and magazines, to build or reinforce subscription paywalls around their content in the digital age.

One sticking point on TV Everywhere, however, is how cable operators should compensate a TV channel to make it available online for subscribers. Discovery Communications Inc. Chief Executive David Zaslav, speaking at the conference, described TV Everywhere as "a very favorable platform," but added: "We need to figure out what the right value is for that."

Another big hang-up is advertising. While Nielsen measures Web viewing of shows that air exactly the same ads as on traditional TV, it doesn't yet do so on tablet computers. That makes widespread adoption of TV Everywhere difficult for channels that are more ad supported, like Scripps Networks Interactive Inc.'s Food Network. (Nielsen says it is testing a way to include Apple Inc. iPad viewing as part of TV ratings, and expects to "share additional details" in the second quarter.)

As a proponent of TV Everywhere, Comcast has been aggressive with its own website and app—called Xfinity—which offers subscriber-only online access to various current TV shows like TNT's "Southland" or Showtime's "House of Lies." The company recently struck a wide-ranging deal with Walt Disney Co., which includes online access to networks including Disney Channel and ESPN, and could be a template for other deals.

Time Warner, likewise, has rolled out a TV Everywhere version of its HBO channel—called HBO Go—and has struck deals with cable operators to make it available to essentially all HBO subscribers. But while Time Warner has other similar offerings like a live online feed of CNN, not all providers carry them. For instance, Time Warner Cable Inc.'s 11.9 million video subscribers don't have access to live streams of college basketball's March Madness games on Time Warner channels.

Big media's goal with the online paywalls is to preserve lucrative offline subscription businesses as consumers increasingly watch and read over the Internet.

Subscription fees are crucial to the survival of many cable-TV channels, which reap nearly $38 billion a year from households' cable bills, according to market-researcher SNL Kagan. But even if TV executives agree that it is a good idea to protect that business with something like TV Everywhere, they don't all agree on where the networks should be available online.

The reason is that new apps from TV networks—like HBO Go and WatchESPN—threaten the traditional monopoly that cable operators have had on interactions with TV viewers, from the interface on a set-top box to the monthly bill in a mailbox.

The new apps give networks the opportunity to be in direct contact with consumers, sometimes for the first time. That allows the networks to collect email addresses and other information about their viewers directly, and could eventually make it easier for channels to compete with cable operators—or survive without them.

That potential for conflict has bogged down TV Everywhere's rollout, as cable operators and TV channels wrangle over whose websites and applications subscribers can use to watch shows online. For instance, News Corp . and Disney have so far insisted that they will include shows from their broadcast networks in TV Everywhere only if subscribers also can watch them through their joint-venture online-video site Hulu LLC.

(News Corp. also owns The Wall Street Journal.)

But many pay-TV providers, including Time Warner Cable, have resisted, with some cable executives arguing that Hulu is a "Trojan horse" that could eventually compete with them.

A Time Warner Cable spokeswoman said that the company, which was spun off from Time Warner Inc. in 2009, doesn't want its customers to pay extra for content that is available free elsewhere online.

The question of controlling the consumer experience is also a factor in why Comcast blocks its subscribers from watching TV Everywhere content on devices where the cable giant isn't releasing its own TV Everywhere app.

As a result, Comcast subscribers can't use the app that HBO released last fall for Roku Inc.'s set-top boxes that stream Web video on TV.

"One of the principles behind TV Everywhere is the mirrored approach," said Marcien Jenckes, senior vice president and general manager of video services for Comcast. "We want to do things holding hands."

Like many things about TV Everywhere, however, not everyone agrees on that point.

Some providers are trying to "hold the customer to themselves," says Dave Shull, senior vice president of programming at Dish Network Corp., which is currently the only pay-TV provider to allow its subscribers to sign in to Hulu to watch shows from News Corp.'s Fox network the day after they air.

Of subscribers, Mr. Shull says, "I'd rather let them tell us where they want to view the video."
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/...DEwNDQyWj.html





DVRs and Streaming Prompt a Shift in the Top-Rated TV Shows
Bill Carter and Brian Stelter

For almost a decade, identifying the most popular show on television has been easy: “American Idol,” case closed.

But that conclusion is not a given anymore, and not only because the numbers for “Idol” have plummeted this winter. The daily ratings are in many ways a mirage now, sure to change significantly once the people who time-shift their television viewing are taken into account.

In fact, because of that behavior, there has been a change in the standings. Among the group that determines much of the revenue of the television business, viewers ages 18 to 49, ABC’s “Modern Family” now is the most popular show on television.

No other show on television comes close to that comedy in adding 18- to 49-year-old viewers who record shows and watch them later. So far this season, new episodes of “Modern Family” have grown from a first-day average of 7.1 million viewers in that age group to 10.2 million, counting seven days’ worth of added viewing — a gain of 3.1 million each week, according to Nielsen Research.

These time-shifters, though, cannot be counted in the overnight ratings, where “Modern Family” tends to trail both “Idol” and NBC’s “The Voice.”

The overnights still “set the tone and the agenda” at the television networks, said Charles Kennedy, the head of research for ABC, influencing marketing and programming decisions. But “we’ve had to build in this fudge factor,” Mr. Kennedy said, “when we know — at least with shows that already have a track record — that the total number will be significantly higher.”

When the television season ends in May, what will matter most — for both networks and advertisers — is the ranking of shows once digital video recorder playback is included in the viewership totals. In a comeback victory for scripted shows, original episodes of “Modern Family” will most likely dethrone “Idol” this season as television’s favorite show for those valuable 18-49-year olds — just as the CBS drama “NCIS” will most likely beat “Idol” for the first time for most overall viewers with its original episodes.

“On behalf of all the comedies that were wiped out by ‘Idol’ over the past 10 years, it’s very gratifying,” said Steve Levitan, one of the creators of “Modern Family.”

Total popularity does not perfectly correlate with profitability, however, since the networks all agree to sell ad time based on a metric called “C3.” It measures the average viewing of the commercials within a show within three days of the first broadcast, so it excludes people who wait to watch Wednesday’s “Modern Family” until Sunday or Monday.

Still, advertisers are paying, happily so, for the three days that are counted.

“We do like viewing in the playback mode,” said Tim Spengler, the global chief executive of the media-buying firm Magna Global. “We’re finding that the viewers are more attentive. They are less distracted. They have picked a time when they have the opportunity for more engagement than they would have if their kids were bugging them or they had three things to do at once.”

Mr. Spengler said many advertisers, like fast food restaurants, movie companies and some retailers, do not want to pay for ads beyond three days because what they have offered might be out of date. But, he said, other advertisers recognize there is “some value” to the four additional days of viewing that are not counted by C3 — even among fast-forwarders, because they do see glimpses of messages here and there.

The networks would eventually like to sell ad time based on seven days of viewership, but most viewership happens in the three-day window; Paul Lee, the president of ABC Entertainment, said ABC is able to “capture about 93 percent” of the value of the “Modern Family” audience with the C3 ratings.

“So we can now truly monetize appointment television,” Mr. Lee said. He noted that in the past, Thursday night shows carried the highest prices in television, because advertisers paid a premium to reach people before their movie openings or weekend car sales.

“Now they buy us on Wednesday,” Mr. Lee said, the day that new “Modern Family” episodes are broadcast, “and they know they are going to get Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. We get that C3, and so do they.”

DVRs are now in 43 percent of the American households that have televisions. The growth in DVR ownership is starting to slow down, but other manners of time-shifting — like cable video-on-demand views and Internet stream views — are speeding up, making it harder than ever to assess the total popularity of a show.

Three of the four most-watched TV episodes on Hulu in February were “Modern Family” episodes. All together, Mr. Kennedy said, the video-on-demand and Web streams amount to millions of additional viewers for “Modern Family” each week.

Mr. Lee and Mr. Levitan said that the comeback of the scripted shows this season has something to do with the glut of reality competition shows and the fact that, as Mr. Lee put it, “reality television has lost the shock of the new.”

Those competition shows also tend to be recorded and viewed later much less frequently, so the DVR has been a special enhancement to scripted shows. Among the prime-time hits that get a 40 percent or higher lift among 18- to 49-year-olds because of time-shifting: Fox’s “House,” “Glee,” “New Girl,” and “Alcatraz”; ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Private Practice” and “Revenge”; and NBC’s “The Office” and “Up All Night.”

“It used to be that you figured even the most ardent fans of a show saw only two of every four episodes,” Mr. Levitan said. “I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I think with DVR and other ways people can catch up more and more, people actually see the entire season of a show.”

Mr. Spengler can support that hypothesis. He said he and his wife found some time last week and sat down for some viewing. “We watched three straight episodes of ‘Modern Family,’ ” he said.

Mr. Levitan has heard that kind of anecdotal support in even bigger numbers this year, in the wake of his show’s sweep of awards at the Emmys and Golden Globes. He was speaking by telephone from Disneyland, where the show was shooting an episode last week.

“It’s all good,” he said. “I’m literally in the middle of the happiest place on earth and I’m not going to lie to you: I’m one of the happiest guys on earth.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/b...-tv-shows.html





Roger Ebert Says Netflix has Stopped Buying Indie Films
Greg Sandoval

The famed film critic laments that the movie rental company has "largely stopped buying streaming rights" to independent films. Netflix denies this.

Roger Ebert, perhaps the country's best-known film critic, has posted a note to Twitter that says Netflix has "largely stopped buying streaming rights to indie films."

Ebert, a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times who was also part of the long-running TV show "Siskel and Ebert and The Movies," began tweeting about Netflix's lack of independent films on Friday. Ebert's Twitter posts were first spotted by Hackingnetflix.com.

The first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize, Ebert is well-sourced in Hollywood, but he did not offer any other details to support his claim. In response to questions from CNET, Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman, responded to Ebert's Twitter post this way: "Not true. Not true. Will get back to you with specifics."

Swasey responded more fully this afternoon.

"Netflix continues to license films from more than 100 independent studios and filmmakers," Swasey said. "While we can't license everything, our acquisition team that's dedicated to indies continues to acquire streaming rights to movies like Best Picture Oscar winner 'The Artist' and others like 'I Am Love,' 'Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey,' and 'Bill Cunningham New York,' in addition to thousands of foreign, documentary and U.S. indie films. In all, indies comprise about 40 percent of the Netflix streaming catalog."

Netflix announced a licensing deal two weeks with The Weinstein Company, the firm founded by indie-film legends Bob and Harvey Weinstein. The agreement will bring "The Artist," to Netflix. We also know that some indie filmmakers have been critical of the money they see from Netflix.

Ebert made his statement at a time when there's slim pickings at Netflix's streaming-movie library. The company is unable to license movies from most of the six top Hollywood titles and the service has begun concentrating on offering TV shows.

On Friday, Ebert began his lament about the lack of indie films on Netflix this way: "Sadly, Netflix is tending to ignore indie filmmakers in favor of blockbusters," he wrote. "What's special is its indie and foreign choices."

He then followed that with his claim that Netflix having stopped licensing films, which he called a "mortal blow."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57...g-indie-films/





Warner Bros. Embarrasses Self, Everyone, With New “Disc-to-Digital” Program
Michael Weinberg

In an announcement that was either an inspired piece of Yes Men-esque performance art or a stunning example of corporate myopia, last week Warner Home Entertainment Group President Kevin Tsujihara discussed a new DVD digitization service called “disc-to-digital.” The program, which would have merely been ill-advised had it been announced ten years ago, today stands as a testament to the ability of movie studios to blind themselves to reality.

The entire program is designed to give consumers a way to take movies they already own on DVD and turn them into more portable digital files. If this entire thing sounds familiar, that may be because it is exactly what Public Knowledge is currently petitioning the Copyright Office to let people do on their own. It may also sound familiar because this is exactly what people have been doing with music on CDs since the Clinton Administration.

As reported by the LA Times, the first phase in this process is to let DVD owners bring their DVDs to a store that will handle the digital conversion. Tsujihara described this process as allowing consumers to convert their libraries “easily, safely and at reasonable prices.”

You did read that last paragraph correctly. The head of Warner Home Entertainment Group thinks that an easy, safe way to convert movies you already own on DVD to other digital formats is to take your DVDs, find a store that will perform this service, drive to that store, find the clerk who knows how to perform the service, hope that the “DVD conversion machine” is not broken, stand there like a chump while the clerk “safely” converts your movie to a digital file that may only play on studio-approved devices, drive home, and hope everything worked out. Oh, and the good news is that you would only need to pay a reasonable (per-DVD?) price for this pleasure.

To be fair, this plan is easy, safe (safe?), and reasonably priced compared to the movie studio’s current offer to people who want to take movies they own on DVD and turn them into a digital file to watch on, say, their iPad. That offer is a lawsuit, because personal copying of a movie on DVD requires circumventing DRM, which is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Furthermore, right now all of the major studios are arguing passionately to stop the Copyright Office from granting a exemption that would make personal space shifting of movies on DVD legal.

Try to picture the real alternative to this hokum – people making their own copies of their movies at home. Luckily you won’t have to use your imagination too much because people making their own copies of media they own is exactly what people do with their CDs. They download a free program, make a copy of the CD at home, put the MP3 files on whatever device they want, and go on with their lives.

Of course, the movie studios would prefer to control this process. Although they may pay some lip service to wanting to prevent piracy – a claim that is undermined by the fact that they argue in any forum available that piracy of motion pictures is already rampant – it really is about charging customers again. Why let customers make legitimate personal copies of movies they own at home when you could charge them to do it at a store?

So we are left hoping that Kevin Tsujihara is on the wrong end of a trick played by some junior executive being let go for greenlighting a remake of Arthur. Because if the top brass at a major studio think that this is what providing a great service to consumers looks like, we are a long way from figuring this whole “digital movie” thing out.
http://www.publicknowledge.org/blog/...ew-%E2%80%9Cdi





Michigan Man Sues Movie Theater Over Snack Prices
AP

A suburban Detroit man is suing his local AMC theater over what he says are its too-high snack prices.

The Detroit Free Press reports (http://on.freep.com/wZuQx7 ) Joshua Thompson filed a lawsuit last week in Wayne County Circuit Court.

The suit accuses AMC of violating the Michigan Consumer Protection Act by charging grossly excessive prices for snacks. It seeks refunds for customers who were overcharged and a civil penalty against the theater chain.

A message seeking comment from AMC Theatres was left by The Associated Press before business hours on Wednesday.

Thompson is a security technician from Livonia.

The suit says that on Dec. 26, he paid $8 for a Coke and a package of Goobers at the Livonia theater.
http://www.newstimes.com/business/ar...es-3388322.php





Germany Wants To Charge Search Engines To Use News Excerpts
Robert Andrews

Germany’s government wants search engines and news aggregators to pay news publishers for using pieces of their material.

Its coalition committee has resolved that a collecting society should charge royalties to re-publishers of news material.

“The term of protection should be one year,” according to the committee.

“Commercial traders out there such as search engines and news aggregators should pay a fee to the publishers in the future for the distribution of press products (such as newspaper articles) on the internet.”

This could bring Germany in to line with the UK, where the Newspaper Licensing Agency (originally formed to charge royalties on photocopies of news clippings that are used commercially) now requires commercial news aggregators and their customers each pay a license to, respectively, process and receive summaries of newspapers’ online articles.

As in the UK, Germany is proposing “normal” private re-users of web news article summaries be exempt from royalties. But, whilst the UK mechanism avoids charging Google (NSDQ: GOOG) News because it targets only pay-for news aggregators, Germany’s proposal mentions both search engines and news aggregators.

The debate over whether search engines should pay for the privilege of crawling and using excerpts has been a long-running one that Google has sought to contain on multiple fronts…

Belgian newspapers won a European court case forcing Google to stop excerpting stories, demanding a phenomenal €49 million in damages. They even sued the European Commission for the same thing.

Since then, Germany’s publishing industry has been lobbying lawmakers for action, too…

In 2009, Germany hosted some 169 publishing execs (149 of them German) who signed what they called the Hamburg Declaration on Intellectual Property Rights - effectively a lobbying attempt on Europe’s then-media commissioner that complained: “Numerous providers are using the work of authors, publishers and broadcasters without paying for it.”

A year later, Germany’s Federation of Newspaper Publishers (BDZV) and Association of German Magazine Publishers (VDZ) complained to the federal government about Google’s use of snippets.

Now the German coalition, in its legislative attempt, is weighing heavily the fact that newspaper publishers are facing hard economic times.

Legal firm Pinsent Mason’s Out-Law site, which first reported the government’s intention, writes: “The European Court of Justice ruled in 2009 that ‘isolated sentences’ or even parts of sentences were copyright-protectable if they conveyed ‘to the reader the originality of a publication such as a newspaper article, by communicating to that reader an element which is, in itself, the expression of the intellectual creation of the author of that article’.”
https://paidcontent.org/article/419-...news-excerpts/





As New iPad Debut Nears, Some See Decline of PCs
Nick Wingfield

The chief executive of Apple, Timothy D. Cook, has a prediction: the day will come when tablet devices like the Apple iPad outsell traditional personal computers.

His forecast has backing from a growing number of analysts and veteran technology industry executives, who contend that the torrid growth rates of the iPad, combined with tablet competition from the likes of Amazon.com and Microsoft, make a changing of the guard a question of when, not if.

Tablet sales are likely to get another jolt this week when Apple introduces its newest version of the iPad, which is expected to have a higher resolution screen. With past iterations of the iPad and iPhone, Apple has made an art of refining the devices with better screens, faster processors and speedier network connections, as well as other bells and whistles — steadily broadening their audiences.

An Apple spokeswoman, Trudy Muller, declined to comment on an event the company is holding Wednesday in San Francisco that is expected to feature the new product.

Any surpassing of personal computers by tablets will be a case of the computer industry’s tail wagging the dog. The iPad, which seemed like a nice side business for Apple when it was introduced in 2010, has become a franchise for the company, accounting for $9.15 billion in revenue in the holiday quarter, or about 20 percent of Apple’s total revenue. The roughly 15 million iPads Apple sold in that period was more than twice the number it sold a year earlier.

In the fall, Amazon introduced the iPad’s first credible competitor in the $199 Kindle Fire. Although Amazon does not release sales figures for the device, some analysts estimate it sold about four million in the holiday quarter. Later this year, tablets from a variety of hardware manufacturers based on a new, touchscreen-friendly operating system from Microsoft, Windows 8, could further propel the market.

“Tablets are on fire, there’s no question about that,” said Brad Silverberg, a venture capitalist in Seattle at Ignition Partners and a former Microsoft executive, who hastened to add that he was speaking mainly of the iPad, which dominates current sales.
Tablets are not there yet. In 2011, PCs outsold tablets almost six-to-one, estimates Canalys, a technology research company. But that is still a significant change from 2010, the iPad’s first year on the market, when PCs outsold tablets 20-to-one, according to Canalys. For the last two years, PC sales were flat, while iPad sales were booming. The Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook gave the market an additional lift over the holidays. Apple is banking on the tablet market. Its iPad brought in nearly 40 percent more revenue during the holidays than Apple’s own computer business, the Macintosh, did.

“From the first day it shipped, we thought — not just me, many of us thought at Apple — that the tablet market would become larger than the PC market, and it was just a matter of the time that it took for that to occur,” Mr. Cook of Apple said recently at a Goldman Sachs investor conference.

Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, estimated that Mr. Cook’s prediction would come true in 2017, but others contend tablets will be on top sooner than that.

For example, in a blog post on Friday, Horace Dediu, an analyst with Asymco in Finland, made a detailed argument that tablet sales would pass traditional PC sales in the fall of 2013. His projections rest heavily on an assumption that Apple will face more serious competition in the tablet market from Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Windows 8 and a wave of other devices based on Google’s Android, an operating system that has been mostly successful in the smartphone market.

Tim Bucher, an entrepreneur who has held senior positions at Apple, Microsoft and Dell, said tablet sales would “absolutely” pass those of PCs, a trend he argued will become even more pronounced as a younger, tablet-savvy generation ages.

“I think the older generation does not pick up on the way of interacting with the new devices,” Mr. Bucher said, contrasting older people with the next generation. “I don’t know how many YouTube videos there are out there showing everyone from babies to animals interacting with iPads.”

Where does that change leave the PC, the lowly machine that defined computing for decades?

At a technology conference in 2010, Steven P. Jobs, then Apple’s chief executive, heralded what he called the post-PC era and compared personal computers to the trucks that prevailed in the automobile industry until society began moving away from its agrarian roots. PCs are “still going to be around and have a lot of value,” said Mr. Jobs, who died in October. “But they’re going to be used by one out of X people.”

Even Mr. Cook in his recent speech said he was not predicting the demise of the PC industry, although he did say the iPad was cannibalizing some computer sales, more Windows PCs than the much smaller market for Macs. One category of PCs where that is especially true is netbooks, the inexpensive notebook computers that have had a steep decline in shipments in the last couple of years. “What the iPad is doing is taking growth away from the PC market that would have gone to a secondary or tertiary device,” said Mr. Dediu. “It’s not so much people are going to drop PCs. They’re going to add this additional device.”

Traditional PCs are not standing still. Boxy desktop computers are an ever-diminishing part of the PC business, while Apple’s MacBook Air and a category of Windows laptops with Intel processors called ultrabooks have reinvented traditional clamshell notebooks as super-thin devices that turn on instantly like tablets.

Microsoft’s introduction of Windows 8 promises to shake up computer designs further. Microsoft and its hardware partners have shown laptops with keyboards that can be swiveled around or removed altogether, turning them into tablets.

“The tablet and PC markets are all going to blur,” said Tim Coulling, an analyst at Canalys. “We’re going to see a lot of form-factor innovation. We’ll be asking what is a tablet and what is a traditional PC?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/t...ne-of-pcs.html





Finding Your Book Interrupted ... By the Tablet You Read It On
Julie Bosman and Matt Richtel

Can you concentrate on Flaubert when Facebook is only a swipe away, or give your true devotion to Mr. Darcy while Twitter beckons?

People who read e-books on tablets like the iPad are realizing that while a book in print or on a black-and-white Kindle is straightforward and immersive, a tablet offers a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks.

E-mail lurks tantalizingly within reach. Looking up a tricky word or unknown fact in the book is easily accomplished through a quick Google search. And if a book starts to drag, giving up on it to stream a movie over Netflix or scroll through your Twitter feed is only a few taps away.

That adds up to a reading experience that is more like a 21st-century cacophony than a traditional solitary activity. And some of the millions of consumers who have bought tablets and sampled e-books on apps from Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble have come away with a conclusion: It’s harder then ever to sit down and focus on reading.

“It’s like trying to cook when there are little children around,” said David Myers, 53, a systems administrator in Atlanta, who got a Kindle Fire tablet in December. “A child might do something silly and you’ve got to stop cooking and fix the problem and then return to cooking.”

“These apps beg you to review them all the time,” he said, but he remains a fan of the device.

For book publishers, who have already seen many consumers convert from print books to e-readers, the rise of tablets poses a potential danger: that book buyers may switch to tablets and then discover that they just aren’t very amenable to reading.

Will those readers gradually drift away from books, letting movies or the Internet occupy their leisure time instead?

Maja Thomas, the senior vice president for Hachette Digital, part of the Hachette Book Group, hopes just the opposite occurs.

“Someone who doesn’t have a habit of reading, and buys a tablet, is going to be offered all these opportunities for reading,” Ms. Thomas said, noting that tablets tend to come with at least one e-book app.

“We’re hoping they will grow the number of people who will read.”

Sales of e-readers surged during the Christmas holiday season, according to a Pew Research Center report, which showed that the number of adults in the United States who owned tablets and e-readers nearly doubled from mid-December to early January.

But there are signs that publishers are cooling on tablets for e-reading. A recent survey by Forrester Research showed that 31 percent of publishers believed iPads and similar tablets were the ideal e-reading platform; one year ago, 46 percent thought so.
“The tablet is like a temptress,” said James McQuivey, the Forrester Research analyst who led the survey. “It’s constantly saying, ‘You could be on YouTube now.’ Or it’s sending constant alerts that pop up, saying you just got an e-mail. Reading itself is trying to compete.”

Indeed, the basic menu for the Kindle Fire offers links to video, apps, the Web, music, newsstand and books, effectively making books (once Amazon’s stock in trade) just another menu option. So too with the multipurpose iPad, which Allison Kutz, a 21-year-old senior at Elon University in North Carolina, bought in 2010. She says her reading experience has not been the same since.

She is constantly fending off the urge to check other media, making it tough to finish books. For example, in late September 2010, she bought “Breaking Night,” a memoir about a homeless girl turned Harvard student. Ms. Kutz said the only time she was able to focus on it was on an airplane because there was no Internet access.

“I’ve tried to sit down and read it in Starbucks or the apartment, but I end up on Facebook or Googling something she said, and then the next thing you know I’ve been surfing for 25 minutes,” Ms. Kutz said.

The issue of changing reader habits has been widely discussed by executives at Amazon, maker of the Kindle and Kindle Fire. Russ Grandinetti, the vice president for Kindle content, said one reason that the original Kindle, introduced in 2007 for $399, was not a multipurpose device was precisely so that people could immerse themselves without interruption.

The new Kindle Fire, by contrast, costs $199 and offers a variety of media options: video, Internet and all the potential interruptions that come with it. But Mr. Grandinetti said the device was not meant as a replacement for the first Kindle but, rather, a complement to it; different devices for people who want different experiences.

Many publishers believe that the market for both print books and black-and-white e-readers is not going away, despite the pull of tablets.

Voracious book buyers were the first people to latch onto e-readers, prizing them for their convenience, portability and features like text zooming that made it easier for older people to read. Now those e-readers are lighter, sleeker and cost less than $100 — even a cheap tablet is more than double the cost — so tech-shy consumers who want a device just for reading books and not much else have little incentive to upgrade.

As long as e-readers remain significantly less expensive than tablets, there may be a market for them for a long time.

But Mr. McQuivey of Forrester said that it was more likely that tablets would eventually edge out black-and-white e-readers. “The historical precedent suggests that’s the case,” he said, citing the Palm Pilot, digital point-and-shoot cameras and portable GPS systems for the car as items that have been gradually displaced by multifunction devices. “There’s less and less reason to have these as stand-alone devices.”

For Erin Faulk, a 29-year-old legal assistant and voracious reader in Los Angeles, the era of e-readers has had one major effect: she has accumulated many more books that she categorizes as “DNFs” — Did Not Finish. But she is also buying more books, she said, and she thinks that all the interruptions have, in a way, made her a more discerning reader.

“With so many distractions, my taste in books has really leveled up,” Ms. Faulk said. “Recently, I gravitate to books that make me forget I have a world of entertainment at my fingertips. If the book’s not good enough to do that, I guess my time is better spent.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/b...tractions.html





Justice Dept May Sue Apple, Publishers on E-Book Pricing: WSJ

The Justice Department has warned Apple and five of the biggest U.S. publishers that it plans to sue them, accusing them of colluding to raise the prices of electronic books, the Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.

Several parties have held talks to settle the potential anti-trust case, the paper cited the people as saying. It added that a successful settlement could lead to cheaper e-books for consumers.

However, not all publishers are in settlement discussions, the Journal said.

The five publishers identified in the Journal report are Simon & Schuster Inc, a unit of CBS Corp, Lagardere SCA's Hachette Book Group, Pearson PLC's Penguin Group (USA), Macmillan, a unit of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH and HarperCollins Publishers Inc, a unit of News Corp. News Corp also owns the Wall Street Journal.

Representatives for the five publishers, Apple and the Justice Department declined to comment to the Journal. Reuters could not reach any of the parties for comment outside of regular U.S. business hours.

The publishers have denied acting jointly to raise prices, according to the Journal. They have told investigators that the shift to an "agency pricing model" enhanced competition in the industry by allowing more electronic booksellers to thrive.

Under the "agency model", publishers would set the price of the book and Apple would take a 30 percent cut. Apple also specified that publishers could not let rival retailers sell the same book at a lower price.

Amazon Inc, the early pioneer in e-books, had sold many new best sellers at $9.99 to encourage consumers to buy its Kindle electronic readers. But the company's pricing strategy had ruffled the feathers of many publishers.

(Reporting by Sakthi Prasad; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8270B020120308





Apple’s Job Creation Data Spurs an Economic Debate
Nick Wingfield

Apple has made its first attempt to quantify how many American jobs can be credited to the sale of its iPads and other products, a group that includes the Apple engineers who design the devices and the drivers who deliver them — even the people who build the trucks that get them there.

On Friday, the company published the results of a study it commissioned saying that it had “created or supported” 514,000 American jobs. The study is an effort to show that Apple’s benefit to the American job market goes far beyond the 47,000 people it directly employs here.

Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., released the study on its Web site but declined to say why it published the results.

The company’s employment practices have come under closer examination. Apple and other high-tech companies, including Internet companies, employ relatively few people compared with other stalwarts of American business, like General Motors and General Electric in their heyday.

Apple, which is now the world’s most valuable company, has created more jobs overseas, approximately 700,000 through a network of suppliers that make iPhones, iPads and other products.

The accuracy of the Apple jobs calculation in the United States may well be debated among economists for years. “Apple has a big effect, and big is about as precise as I can make it,” said Gary P. Pisano, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. “It’s hard to say the exact size.”

David Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said via e-mail that the “entire business of claiming ‘direct and indirect’ job creation is disreputable” because most of the workers Apple is taking credit for would have been employed elsewhere in the company’s absence.

“But of course, they might not have been as well paid or gratified with their work,” Mr. Autor said. “We’ll never know.”

Mr. Autor also said that Apple should not be held accountable for employment problems in the United States. “Generating the conditions that give rise to high rates of employment and wage growth is the domain of policy makers, not individual companies,” he said.

A number of companies, including Microsoft, have commissioned similar research aiming to tally up such indirect employment, by suppliers and other partners. The use of “job multipliers” has become common practice, sometimes by businesses lobbying for tax breaks from local and state governments.

But the calculations of such multipliers are often fiercely debated both in economic and political terms. For instance, the Congressional Budget Office, which calculated the impact of the 2009 federal stimulus on jobs, has set estimates that vary between as few as 1.6 million jobs and as many as 8.4 million jobs.

Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, says companies often have a stronger case when quantifying their effects on a regional economy, rather than on the entire national economy. It does matter to a state, for example, whether a big business is there, though it might not matter nationally if the business moves to a different state, he said.

The Analysis Group, the consulting firm Apple hired, concluded that 257,000 jobs were in companies that work directly with Apple, including employees in Kentucky and New York at Corning, a company that creates glass for the iPhone, and people at a Samsung plant in Texas.

The Analysis Group arrived at that figure by analyzing how much Apple spent on goods and services in the United States in 2011 and applying that information to a formula developed by the federal government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis called an “employment multiplier.” The group used this multiplier to calculate direct and indirect employment figures from Apple’s spending, though it omitted any jobs created through spending by those people on, say, nannies, vacation homes or restaurants.

Among the outside jobs Apple said it helped support were the delivery services that bring packages of Apple devices to its retail stores and directly to customers’ homes. Norman Black, a spokesman for United Parcel Service, said the company estimated that for every 40 new packages a day transported through its system, the company hired one more person. He declined to say how many packages Apple shipped through U.P.S. and, therefore, how many jobs could be credited to the company.

“They rely on us for a lot of shipping,” Mr. Black said. “There’s no question that as they roll out and launch products, that’s creating new jobs in the U.S.”

Apple’s study said the company also supported an additional 210,000 jobs among companies creating apps for Apple devices like the iPhone and iPad. The study based that figure on the 466,000 app-related jobs that TechNet, a high-tech lobbying group, recently estimated existed in the United States. Apple’s study estimated that 45 percent of that figure could be credited to development of software for Apple devices, based on an analysis of online job listings.

While several economists and employment experts agree that Apple has an economic impact that goes beyond the people it directly employs, they said it was difficult to conclude from Apple’s study what the company’s benefit is to the overall jobs market. “They certainly have a big economic impact, as does every other firm,” Mr. Cappelli said. “If you say, ‘If there had been no Apple, those people would not have jobs,’ that’s not true.”

As an example, Mr. Cappelli said that if there were no iPad, the $500 an Apple customer would have spent on the device most likely would not have been put into savings, but rather spent on some other product or service. That impact could have been more or less than Apple’s. Apple is, however, an innovative company that created a market for tablets and radically increased demand for smartphones.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/t...ic-debate.html





FTC to Require Western Digital to Sell off Assets in Acquisition
Grant Gross

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission will require Western Digital to sell off assets used to manufacture desktop hard drives to a competitor as a condition of its US$4.5 billion acquisition of rival Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, the agency announced.

The deal, as originally proposed, would have left Western Digital as one of two companies that control the worldwide market for desktop hard disk drives, the FTC said. The agency announced a proposed settlement allowing the deal to go forward on Monday.

The deal was anticompetitive, the FTC said in a press release. "Protecting competition in the high-tech marketplace is a high priority for the FTC," Richard Feinstein, director of the FTC's Bureau of Competition, said in a statement. "This order will ensure that vigorous competition continues in the worldwide market for desktop hard disk drives, and that consumers are not faced with higher prices or reduced innovation as a result of this deal."

Western Digital announced last Tuesday that it had reached an agreement to sell off assets to competitor Toshiba as a way to address regulatory concerns. The agreement will enable Toshiba to manufacture 3.5-inch hard drives for the desktop and consumer electronics markets and will allow Toshiba to expand its manufacturing of 3.5-inch drives for the near-line storage market, Western Digital said then.

Western Digital also announced that it has agreed to purchase Toshiba Storage Device (Thailand), a hard drive manufacturing division that suspended operations after massive flooding in the country in 2011.

The Toshiba transactions are conditional on Western Digital's closing of the Hitachi deal, the company said.

The FTC's proposed settlement order requires Western Digital to divest selected Hitachi Global Storage Technologies assets related to the manufacture and sale of desktop hard disk drives to Toshiba within 15 days of the acquisition. The time for the divestiture can be extended by 15 days, if necessary, to allow the companies to receive regulatory approval in other jurisdictions.

Western Digital announced a year ago that it planned to acquire Hitachi Global Storage Technologies -- now known as Viviti Technologies -- from Hitachi. The deal, as proposed, would have given Western Digital a larger share of the data center internal disk drive market. The company has largely focused in recent years on selling external hard drives for consumers.

At the time of the announcement, Western Digital held about 31 percent of the hard disk drive market, followed by Seagate Technology with 29 percent. Hitachi had about 18 percent of the market.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2512...isi tion.html





Judge Strips Righthaven of Rights to 278 Copyrights and its Trademark
Steve Green

Like a gunfighter with no bullets, Las Vegas copyright company Righthaven LLC no longer has any copyrights to sue over.

A federal judge in Las Vegas on Monday stripped Righthaven of whatever interests it has in its 278 federal copyright registrations as well as its trademark.

Judge Philip Pro ordered that the copyrights and trademarks be transferred to a court-appointed receiver so they can be auctioned to cover some of Righthaven’s debts.

Righthaven gained notoriety beginning two years ago when it started filing no-warning copyright infringement lawsuits over material from the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Denver Post.

Righthaven, in its 275 lawsuits, targeted individuals, nonprofit groups and companies it said posted material from those papers online without authorization.

Righthaven said the suits were needed to crack down on rampant copyright infringement, but defense attorneys said Righthaven was running a lawsuit shakedown operation aimed at coercing defendants into settling so Righthaven could earn a profit.

As the lawsuits progressed, judges sided with defendants. In four cases they ruled defendants were protected by the fair use doctrine of copyright law.

Also, eight judges in three states ruled Righthaven lacked standing to sue.

Righthaven claimed to own the material it was suing over, but judges found that under flawed copyright assignments, the newspapers actually maintained control of that content. That meant Righthaven had no standing to sue.

Righthaven, even while accumulating legal expenses to appeal several of the adverse court rulings, has lately said it has no cash or assets to pay its debts, including $186,680 in legal fees of defendants who defeated it in court.

Pro’s ruling came Monday in the case of defendant Wayne Hoehn, whose attorneys are owed $34,045 by Righthaven.

Hoehn was sued for posting an entire R-J column on a sports betting website message board. His attorneys defeated Righthaven on both standing and fair use grounds.

When Righthaven couldn’t or wouldn’t sign over its assets to a receiver so they could be auctioned to cover Hoehn’s legal fees, the receiver went ahead and seized Righthaven’s website and auctioned it for $3,300.

Hoehn’s attorneys at Randazza Legal Group in Las Vegas then asked Pro on Monday to issue a “writ of body attachment” requiring U.S. Marshals to haul Righthaven CEO and Las Vegas attorney Steven Gibson into court to sign over the copyrights.

Righthaven complained in January this request was part of “scorched-earth” legal tactics by Hoehn’s attorneys.

However, no one from Righthaven showed up at a hearing Monday on the bodily attachment motion.

“The plaintiff having failed to attend today’s hearing, the court deems that an admission or acquiescence to the order to transfer,” Pro said.

Righthaven has argued it’s been in an odd position of having to transfer rights to copyrights it potentially doesn’t own because of prior rulings throwing out its lawsuits.

Pro acknowledged that argument, saying, “I can’t order them to transfer what they don’t have.”

So his order was that “the copyright interests, to the extent any such interests remain, be transferred” to the receiver for auction.

Marc Randazza, a Las Vegas attorney representing Hoehn, said after the hearing that Pro’s order wipes out Righthaven’s interest in all of its pending lawsuits and appeals. Since Righthaven now owns no copyrights, it has nothing to sue over or litigate over in appeals courts, he said.

“It moots them,” Randazza said of the appeals.

Randazza said the copyrights to be auctioned likely will be sold for memorabilia value, though some defendants may want to buy them just to make sure Righthaven doesn’t try to revive its lawsuits with amended copyright assignments.

It’s unknown whether Righthaven will appeal Pro’s order stripping it of its copyright interests and its trademarks, and Righthaven’s Las Vegas attorney couldn’t immediately be reached for comment Monday.

Monday’s developments are likely to be followed in coming months by efforts by some Righthaven defendants to recover damages for being targeted in what they call fraudulent lawsuits.

The defendants may go after the Review-Journal, the Denver Post and Righthaven’s investors — Gibson and the owner of the Review-Journal — since Righthaven itself doesn’t seem to have any assets they can go after.

Most of the copyrights to be transferred under Pro’s order cover material assigned to Righthaven for lawsuit purposes by the Review-Journal and the Denver Post.

Some exceptions include some sports betting material that Righthaven used in its single lawsuit that didn’t involve newspaper material.

Other exceptions include two porn movies — Ebony Amateurs Vegas Edition #10 and Ebony Princess #3 — and a document called “The Righthaven Philosophy” that apparently spells out the company’s failed plan to make money by suing over copyright infringements.
http://www.vegasinc.com/news/2012/ma...pyrights-and-/


















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