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Old 21-03-12, 07:45 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 24th, '12

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"Our corporate image has been totally ruined. The point is whatever media that cited the programme should not have reported it without confirming (with us)." – Simon Hsing, Foxconn spokesman


"All those things are very much in place. I don't think there's been any alleviation (of these problems) in the past few months. I don't think Foxconn's done anything, really." – Geoffrey Crothall, China Labour Bulletin spokesman


"Einstein could not patent his celebrated law that E = mc2; nor could Newton have patented the law of gravity." – Stephen G. Breyer, U.S. Supreme Court Justice


"From now on, any person who habitually consults websites that advocate terrorism or that call for hate and violence will be punished. France will not tolerate ideological indoctrination on its soil." – Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France



































March 24th, 2012




Sen. Wyden Demands Vote on American Copyright, Patent Treaties
Nate Anderson

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) is a long-time opponent of the secretly negotiated Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Today he introduced an amendment to a Senate "jobs bill" that would force ACTA to come before Congress for approval. A second amendment would make the US Trade Representative, which negotiates US trade deals, drop the veil of secrecy around its copyright and patent negotiations.

USTR currently insists the president can ratify ACTA without the usual Senate sign-off on treaties. The current legal thinking seems to be that Congress delegated this authority to the executive branch by passing 2008's PRO-IP Act, which contained a general call to cut down on counterfeiting, etc.

That legal approach is contested; Wyden's amendment simply overrules it. "Notwithstanding section 303 of the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008 (15 U.S.C. 8113) or any other provision of law," it says, "the President may not accept, or provide for the entry into force with respect to the United States of, any legally binding trade agreement that imposes obligations on the United States with respect to the enforcement of intellectual property rights, including the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, without the formal and express approval of Congress."

His second amendment tries to force a change in how the whole process around such treaties is handled. Right now, the US attempts to keep its negotiating positions a secret. What vital national security interests could be at stake if the public knew USTR was promoting "graduated response" laws or proposing changes in ISP liability? Wyden doesn't believe there are any.

Even with ACTA, where the text was officially kept secret until it was too late to make major changes, unofficial leaks stirred public debate and ultimately removed many of the most odious provisions from the final text. The "next ACTA" is the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), a regional trade deal involving countries from around the Pacific Rim. Wyden wants to ensure the public doesn't have to rely on leaks to find out what's being proposed in its name.

He proposes a rule that would force USTR to release any negotiating proposals already shared with other nations in the TPP talks if they apply to "intellectual property, the Internet, or entities that use the Internet, including electronic commerce." In the future, USTR would have to post such documents from all trade negotiations within 24 hours of being shared with other countries.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...t-treaties.ars





Senate Order: Greens Demand Secret Piracy Docs
Renai LeMay

The Australian Greens have filed a motion in the Senate requesting that the Government release documents regarding its closed door meetings on Internet piracy which the Attorney-General’s Department has blocked from being released under Freedom of Information laws.

On 8 February this year, major Australian ISPs sat down with the representatives of the film, television and music industries and the Federal Attorney-General’s Department, with the aim of discussing a potential industry resolution to the issue of online copyright infringement. The meeting was the fourth such meeting to be held, after a series of other meetings were held late last year under similar circumstances.

However, the Attorney-General’s Department has used a series of complex legal arguments to deny the release of documents associated with the meetings under Freedom of Information laws — redacting, for example, an entire 14 pages of notes taken by a departmental staffer at the event and other four pages of notes taken by a senior staffer from Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s department.

The Attorney-General’s Department stated in its response to a FoI request that it “does not hold” a list of the attendees who actually attended the February meeting. Furthermore, the department censored the names of the individuals invited to attend the meeting. It also completely redacted a document consisting of the agenda of the meeting, which had been distributed to those invited to attend. Delimiter is appealing portions of the blocked FoI request.

This morning, Greens Communications Spokesperson Scott Ludlam filed an order in the Senate that the Government disclose details of the most recent meeting. “The Government refuses to reveal almost any information about the attendees, the substance or the outcomes of the meeting,” he said in a separate statement. “A Freedom of Information request from a journalist looks like it’s been met with maximum resistance.”

“Major ISPs and representatives of the film, television and music industries have held a series of meetings with the Attorney-General’s Department to discuss an industry fix to the issue of online copyright infringement. This would be fine if everyone was at the table. But for some reason, former Attorney General McClelland decided to lock out the people that actually matter – the people who produce, and the people who purchase and use, the content.

Previous documents released under FoI laws have shown that the Attorney-General’s Department actively blocked representatives of consumer groups from attending the meetings.

“Even with the best will in the world, simply inviting the intermediaries to come up with something that suits their collective commercial interests is hardly an encouraging recipe for looking after the public interest,” said Ludlam. “I acknowledge that ISPs have done their best to prevent predatory behaviour by rights holders in the past, but there’s no substitute for a diversity of views in a forum such as this.”

“New Attorney General Roxon has inherited this situation from the former AG, and I call on her to table this material in an act of good faith and open the doors of these meetings so that the public can get a sense of what’s being cooked up.”

Senator Ludlam’s order for the production of documents asks that lists of invitees and attendees, notes and minutes arising from the meeting, any documentation issued to attendees, departmental correspondence regarding the meeting and any documents relating to future meetings be tabled in the Senate, on Thursday 22 March.

The sole organisation to publicly reveal any information about the talks is iiNet, which has attended the talks. Yesterday, the ISP’s regulatory chief Steve Dalby posted comments on Delimiter stating that there was a “massive” gap in the talks between what the ISP and content industries wanted. “Most, if not all of the discussions over the years have been conducted between the rights holders and the ISPs,” he said. “These have been fruitless. The rights holders want all the benefits of remedial action, but want the ISPs to foot the bill. ISPs don’t want to pay to protect the rights of third parties. The gap between the parties is considerable and unlikely to close.”

“Government probably wishes the whole thing would go away, but given that it hasn’t, they have reluctantly joined in the conversation, to see if a commercial solution could be encouraged.”

It’s not the first time Ludlam has criticised the Government over the issue. In late January the Senator said the various parties had been “locked in a room by a former Attorney-General and told to sort something out” — asked to resolve the question of how content creators could make money in a world where file sharing through platforms such as BitTorrent was popular.

“What I find the most offensive about that, is that they locked the people out of the room that actually matter,” Ludlam said at the time. “All of the writers, the creative artists, the performance people, they’re not in there. The rights holders are in there. The end users, the consumers … us, are locked out of the room as well.” Ludlam said it was the “intermediaries” who were discussing the issue under the auspices of the Attorney-General’s Department, who had been told to come up with something that was “not too offensive” for their corporate interests. “They’ve locked out the producers and consumers. The model which will be introduced in Australia, when we get to hear about it, will probably be stuffed and offensive,” he added.

Delimiter is seeking to contact the office of the Attorney-General for a response to Greens’ Senate move.

Update: Delimiter has received news from Scott Ludlam’s office that the vote on the motion for the production of documents has been held over until tomorrow (Thursday).
http://delimiter.com.au/2012/03/21/s...t-piracy-docs/





Blackout: Govt Piracy Meeting Completely Censored
Renai LeMay

The Federal Government has declined to reveal almost any information about a second secret industry meeting held in February this year to address the issue of Internet piracy, using a variety of complex justifications to avoid releasing virtually any detail of the meeting under Freedom of Information laws.

The closed door meeting, held on 8 February, saw major Australian ISPs sit down with the representatives of the film, television and music industries and the Federal Attorney-General’s Department, with the aim of discussing a potential industry resolution to the issue of online copyright infringement. The meeting is the fourth such meeting to be held, after a series of other meetings were held late last year under similar circumstances.

The Attorney-General’s Department acknowledged in early February that another anti-piracy meeting had taken place. As we did with the first meeting in September, Delimiter subsequently filed a wide-ranging request for information about the meeting to be released under Freedom of Information laws, seeking details such as a list of attendees, notes taken by any government staff, a copy of documentation issued to attendees, email correspondence related to the calling and conduct of the meeting, and internal departmental correspondence regarding it.

Late last week, the Attorney-General’s Department responded to that Freedom of Information request, providing a series of five documents. However, using a variety of justifications, the department has redacted almost all of the information previously contained in the documents — including 14 pages of notes taken by a departmental staffer at the event and other four pages of notes taken by a senior staffer from Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s department.

According to the documents (which are available to download in full here in compressed RAR format), the following organisations were invited to the February meeting: The Digital Entertainment Alliance of Australia (represented by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft), the Australian Content Industry Group (represented by Music Industry Piracy Investigations), the Communications Alliance, Telstra, iiNet and the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, represented by first assistant secretary Richard Windeyer.

The meeting was to be chaired by AGD secretary Roger Wilkins.

However, the Attorney-General’s Department stated in its response to Delimiter’s FoI request that it “does not hold” a list of the attendees who actually attended the meeting. Furthermore, the department censored the names of the individuals invited to attend the meeting. also It completely redacted a document consisting of the agenda of the meeting, which had been distributed to those invited to attend.

In a briefing issued to Attorney-General Nicola Roxon regarding the meeting, the department noted that it continued to prefer an industry-negotiated solution to the issue of Internet content piracy. However, the note added, former Attorney-General Robert McClelland had indicated that “the Government will consider other options if the industry is unable to reach an agreement”.

In addition, the note added, a public communications plan regarding the talks was “not required”. “There has been media interest in the progress of these discussions, but information discussed will not be released publicly,” it stated.

It had previously been believed that only two of the secret meetings — in February and September — had been held by the Attorney-General’s Department on the issue. However, the briefing note adds that other closed door meetings were held on 28 November last year, as well as on 19 December.

Legalese
The rationale which the overseeing Freedom of Information officer at the Attorney-General’s Department has given for not releasing information about the meetings is complex and multi-faceted. Principally, in its statement of reasons given for not releasing information, the department has relied on several sections of the Freedom of Information Act which allow government departments to exempt certain documents from being released under FoI requests.

One of the main legal instruments used was section 47C of the FoI Act, which exempts material from being disclosed if it would disclose material which was involved in the deliberative or consultative processes of the government. AGD senior legal officer Jane Purcell wrote the following in her response to Delimiter’s FoI request about the use of 47C:

“The documents which I have decided to exempt consist of information about proposed industry solutions to the issue of online copyright infringement. At this stage of the process, discussions are still taking place; discussions which involve various stakeholders with competing interests. It is worth noting that these discussions have not been completed.”

“I have decided that the contents of the exempt documents comprise material recording the substance of consultation and deliberation that has taken place in the course of, and for the purposes of, the deliberative processes involved in the functions of this department. I have therefore decided that the documents are ‘conditionally exempt’ under subsection 47C of the Act.”

The FoI Act still requires that such documents be released, unless to do so would be contrary to the public interest. However, Purcell noted that “the disclosure of these documents, in the absence of any solution or agreement, would be contrary to the public interest” — because the discussions are “at a very delicate, sensitive and important stage”.

“Disclosure of the documents while the negotiations are still in process, would, in my view, prejudice, hamper and impede those negotiations to an unacceptable degree,” wrote Purcell. That would, in my view, be contrary to the interests of good government — which would, in turn, be contrary to the public interest.”

The department also used section 47F of the FoI Act to block the release of the names of individuals involved in the process — even to the extent that one un-named public servant personally requested to have their name removed from the documents, “for personal reasons”. Again, that material would still have to be released if it was in the public interest. However, Purcell again blocked that idea. “The release of the material here in question would, in my view, be contrary to the public interest as I believe that it is firmly in the public interest to uphold the rights of individuals to their own privacy,” Purcell wrote.

In addition, the department blocked the release of some information because its release might stop organisations involved in the discussions from contributing information to the Government in future.

The decision by the Attorney-General’s Department this month to block almost all FoI attempts to obtain information about its secret anti-piracy hearings is not the first time the department has blocked information about the meetings. The department has consistently attempted to withhold information about the meetings from reaching the public domain (for examples, see the following articles — here, and here). In addition, it is not known when the next meeting will be held.

Requests by at least one consumer group to attend the talks have been denied by the department, leading to Greens Communications Spokesperson, Senator Scott Ludlam, to slam the secret meetings as “offensive”. “What I find the most offensive about that, is that they locked the people out of the room that actually matter,” Ludlam said in January. “All of the writers, the creative artists, the performance people, they’re not in there. The rights holders are in there. The end users, the consumers … us, are locked out of the room as well.”

Ludlam said it was the “intermediaries” who were discussing the issue under the auspices of the Attorney-General’s Department, who had been told to come up with something that was “not too offensive” for their corporate interests. “They’ve locked out the producers and consumers. The model which will be introduced in Australia, when we get to hear about it, will probably be stuffed and offensive,” he added.

Delimiter is currently investigating options for appealing the redaction of some portions of the department’s Freedom of Information release this week.
http://delimiter.com.au/2012/03/19/b...tely-censored/





Op-ed: Imminent "Six Strikes" Copyright Alert System Needs Antitrust Scrutiny
Sean M. Flaim

Five more before something Really Bad happens.

With the "Copyright Alert System" going into operation over the next few months, major American ISPs will start sending out "strikes" to users accused of infringing copyrights online. Sean Flaim, who has just completed extensive research on the topic, argues that the system has real benefits—but it needs close supervision. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Ars Technica.

Eight months ago, content owners and Internet service providers (ISPs) agreed to the Copyright Alert System, a "six-strike" plan to reduce copyright infringement by Internet users. Under the system, ISPs will soon send educational alerts, hijack browsers, and perhaps even slow/temporarily block the Internet service of users accused of online infringement (as identified by content owners). At the time it was announced, some speculated that the proposed system might not be legal under the antitrust laws. Were they right?

Recently, I completed a draft research paper where I explored the potential antitrust aspects of "six strikes" even further. There, I concluded that while the system has some promise for reducing online infringement, its private nature, combined with a lack of government oversight, raises significant antitrust concerns. It will require careful monitoring by regulators.

Power plays

Just what is antitrust law? If I had to explain antitrust in a single word, it would not be "competition"—it would be "power." The power to raise prices above a competitive level; the power to punish people who break your rules. Such power is something society usually vests in government. Antitrust law is in part concerned with private industry attempting to assert government-like power.

In a democratic society, people can exert some control over government power at the ballot box. Private power cannot be controlled with the same sort of vote. Rather, private power only responds to consumer choice in the marketplace. When the marketplace fails to function correctly and lacks competitive pressure, nothing keeps companies from exerting private power in ways that benefit them. This hurts consumers overall.

The Copyright Alert System represents a raw exercise of concerted private power. Content owners as a group have control over their product. They have leveraged this control to forge this agreement with ISPs, who need to work with content owners in order to offer content to their own users. ISPs, in turn, have power over us as users. When was the last time you looked into alternatives to your home Internet service? If you are like people in 75 percent of this country, only one truly high-speed broadband alternative will soon be available—your local cable television company. In most locations, that company has agreed to participate in the Copyright Alert System.

Given that Internet companies have the power to determine how—and whether—consumers can access the Internet, this makes the Copyright Alert System even more problematic. The proposed system flips copyright on its head. In a normal copyright infringement claim, the copyright owner must first identify the alleged infringer and then sue them in court. Once there, the owner must prove that the alleged infringer downloaded, shared, or publicly performed a work without authorization.

Not so in the Copyright Alert System. If a consumer gets to the point where an ISP is going to take an action, the consumer is given the option of participating in a private "due process" proceeding, provided they have $35 to spare. In the proceeding, the content owner is presumed to have both identified the copyrighted work correctly and correctly identified the alleged infringer. The burden of proof is on the consumer to prove them wrong. And the alleged infringer is even limited in the ways they can attempt to do that. In essence, the Copyright Alert System is an effort to privately rewrite copyright law to make an accused liable for infringement until proven innocent.

What justifications do companies offer for taking these actions? For one, the companies assert the overall economic costs of piracy are too high. Yet when making these claims, they continue to assert fuzzy numbers which have not held up to any serious scrutiny.

Further, implementing the Copyright Alert System is not "free" by any means. Investigators need to detect infringement, rightsholder need to oversee their investigators, and the ISPs need to implement a tracking and punishment system for users. Estimates range from $4 to $32 per notification sent, and those costs are not borne by the person receiving the notice. They are paid for by all of us, in the form of higher prices for both content and Internet service. In essence, the system places a tax on Internet service designed to benefit content owners without any corresponding benefit for the vast majority of consumers.

Another justification the parties have given: the educational nature of the Copyright Alert System is preferable to the coercive nature of copyright infringement litigation. This is a valid point. The merits of such an arrangement, however, are directly related to whether a person has been accurately identified as an infringer. So far, content owners have not always acted in a fashion that instills confidence they can correctly identify infringing users or works at scale. That's extremely problematic when creating a system which presumes that identifications are correct, and that forces consumers to prove that they are not.

Is "less government" a good thing?

This isn't to say that the Copyright Alert System is necessarily a bad idea, in general. It is possible—even probable—that educational alerts will both reduce piracy and keep consumers out of federal court for minor charges.

But the issue is the complete exclusion of the government from involvement; though the White House helped broker the deal, government power—and therefore democratic accountability and judicial oversight— are absent. Everyone agrees something needs to be done to lower the cost of copyright enforcement, but copyright is still a right that originates from the government. Ultimately that is where any relief for content owners should begin.

In her recent book, Consent of the Networked (read our review), author Rebecca MacKinnon discusses how many consumers are now residents of "Facebookistan" and "Googledom," reminding us of the power these two companies hold over consumers. But this power pales in comparison to the power exercised over consumers by their local ISPs, which control the very pipes that connect people to Google and Facebook.

Congress is the body that writes laws affecting interstate commerce. Antitrust, at least in part, offers protection against private companies doing the same. Recent reports indicate that the alert system, until now off to a slow start, will soon start affecting Internet users. Once it does, regulators must look closely to make sure the system lives up to its main promise as an educational tool rather than a system of vigilante justice.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...t-scrutiny.ars





File Sharing Law - NZ Downloaders Simply Shift Tactics
Donald Clark

The worst case scenario with NZ's new internet file sharing law was that a few chumps would get punished, while hardcore downloaders would simply change their tactics.

But that's what seems to be what's happening.

The first wave of infringement notices were sent under the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act in November last year, following months of publicity about the new "three strikes" law.

My anecdotal experience is that, so far, many casual users have not been scared off by the Act - possibly because of the relatively small number of notices sent so far (a function of the fact that, at least for the first year of the law, ISPs can charge a copyright holder, such as a movie studio or record copy, a $25 fee for each notice sent. Rights-holders say that's too much).

I was at a BBQ recently, where I was in a minority - being the only person who actually paid for his movie loads (well, at least to the degree I only break Apple's iTunes terms and conditions, rather than the law, with my iTunes US subscription, which allows me to buy more movies and TV shows than are available on iTunes NZ).

I'm constantly shocked that so many otherwise upstanding, law-abiding middle class citizens illegally download movie and TV content - still citing the moral argument that it's okay to do so since so little street-legal online content is available to New Zealanders.

One person I spoke to said, "I'm just waiting for my first letter". He was using RapidShare, and not making any attempt to hide the fact from his ISP (which would have to probe his usage details if it received a notice).

Below, Donald Clark - a former head of the government broadband network company Reannz, and a former advisor to the Prime Minister, summarises University of Waikato research that shows sophisticated internet users have simply switched the way they download material, using software and services that cover their tracks.

"It’s hard to escape the conclusion that people sharing copyrighted material have simply switched mechanisms," Mr Clark concludes.

"I suspect that there has been little net-change in the sharing of copyrighted material."

- Chris Keall


NZ Legislation shifts file-sharing from bittorrent to tunnels

The last week in January was NZNOG’s - the NZ Network Operators' Group - annual meeting. It’s the place where the people who design, build, and operate ISPs, telco and Internet infrastructure get together to argue.

And there was a very interesting presentation from Waikato University’s world-renowned WAND group - they measure and study the way traffic flows on networks (slides and full notes here).

The group has come up with a new way of measuring traffic so that they can tell (with a pretty high degree of accuracy) what *type* of traffic any particular packet is part of without having to fully unwrap the packet and open up the box. Think of it like looking at the postmark, and then giving the parcel a bit of a squeeze!

They call this technique “mildly penetrative packet inspection” (as opposed to “deep packet inspection”). It’s key features are:

• Requires only 4 bytes of application payload instead of full DPI
• Examines first payload-bearing packet in each direction only
• Classifications based on payload signatures, size and ports
• This all results in a much “lighter” measurement burden, whilst still achieving 95% accuracy (or 70%-80% when port 80 flows are excluded). This places it well above other packet-inspection-lite approaches.

Measured impact of legislation

Crucially, the WAND team managed to take some measurements in January 2011, and then again in September 2011 and January 2012 - ie the measures straddle the dates when the new File Sharing law came into force in NZ!

Does the data show a change in online behaviour? Oh yes.

We can see that while overall traffic has remained fairly constant, so can conclude that end-user activity hasn’t altered significantly.

We also see that, immediately following the law coming info force on 1 September 2011, there was a 75% reduction in measured peer-to-peer traffic, and this was sustained into January this year. Newsgroup traffic (a large source of file sharing) has dropped to almost zero!

However, there was a more than doubling in secure tunneling and remote-access protocol traffic volumes.

Conclusions

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that people sharing copyrighted material have simply switched mechanisms - from bittorrent to technologies like VPN, SSH or the use of file downloading services (yes, like MegaUpload) and seedboxes in other jurisdictions.

I suspect that there has been little net-change in the sharing of copyrighted material and that the answer remains business models that make it available easily and at reasonable price - that’s why Netflix (online movie service) accounts for 1/3 of total internet traffic in the US!

The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Legislation will never be able to keep up with technical innovation.
http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/file-sh...tics-ck-113345





Paperwork Goof May Mean Kim DotCom Can Reclaim Assets

Incorrect court order, issued to seize assets of the MegaUpload founder, is now "null and void." As a result, the New Zealand government may be required to return his belongings.
Greg Sandoval

Authorities in New Zealand have acknowledged making a procedural error prior in seizing property belonging to MegaUpload founder Kim DotCom, and the mistake could mean the government will now be required to return them.

Police arrested DotCom at the mansion he lived in outside Auckland on January 19 at the request of the United States government. The U.S. Department of Justice alleges that DotCom is the mastermind of a criminal enterprise designed to help the masses pirate music and movies. U.S. officials say he made millions from piracy and seek to extradite DotCom to this country to stand trial.

Following the raid on DotCom's home, police were photographed removing cash, Cadillacs, jet skis, artwork and scores of other valuables from his home. In addition, they shut down the MegaUpload site and threw DotCom into jail, where he stayed until being released on bail a month later.

New Zealand police filed for the wrong kind of restraining order--the kind that didn't allow for DotCom to have a court hearing prior to the seizure--and that was a mistake, according to a report in the New Zealand Herald.

A court has now ruled that the restraining order that enabled police to seize his assets is "null and void," and a review of the mistakes made will soon be conducted by New Zealand's attorney general, according to the Herald.

The paper noted that there's no guarantee that DotCom will prevail. His lawyers must prove the absence of good faith when the procedural error was made.

There was no word on when a decision on this may come down.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57...eclaim-assets/





Fake Filesharing Lawsuits? Dang, That’s Devious
Christopher Danzig

After the feds took down Megaupload in January, the major change to many people’s lives is that it is now much harder to stream bootleg versions of the new season of Archer. What also happened is authorities took control of content hosted on the site and a lot of people who posted files there are worried getting busted as well.

Well, one man’s crisis is another man’s golden opportunity.

Keep reading to see how a new batch of criminals is trying to cash in on folks already worried about Megaupload-related copyright liability. It’s actually quite a clever plot…

TorrentFreak tells the story of a fake law firm that is sending fake settlement letters to people who put files on the now defunct site.

Criminals are attempting to extort Internet users by claiming there could be financial implications for those who used file-sharing site Megaupload for infringing activities. For the past several days a fake law firm claiming to act on behalf of entertainment companies such as Universal, Sony, EMI and Paramount has been claiming cash settlements from innocent victims.

Schemes which require alleged copyright infringers to pay cash settlements to make lawsuits disappear are nothing new.…

Over the past couple of days a pair of cast-iron scams have been targeting file-sharers, one mimicking the model used by so-called ‘pay-up-or-else’ lawfirms and another with a more technical approach.

The first targets users of the now-defunct cyberlocker service Megaupload. Playing on the fears of people who may have used the site for infringing purposes, the documents supporting the scam claim to be from legitimate-sounding German lawfirm “Dr. Kroner & Kollegen” of Munich.


We have covered these types of letters before. They engender a unique terror in those who receive them. And a whole cottage industry has grown up around it. In many cases, copyright owners are quite successful in securing damages. In others, the attorneys fall more along the lines of copyright trolls, for whom judges have less patience.

This scam is just plain dirty, but it’s not without several tells. First off, these scammers say you can make the whole thing go away for only €147. Baha! As if the entertainment industry would ever be that benevolent.

TorrentFreak gives more details that any self-respecting file-sharer should watch out for:

“[N]o specific copyright works are named and the claim is missing the usual ‘cease and desist’ element common to these schemes. Furthermore, according to a OnlineKosten, any cash payments made would end up at an address in Slovakia.”

Regardless of the actual liability of people who contributed to Megaupload (and what the government decides to do about it) it’s unfortunate that this junk is now added to the mix as well.

That said, there is one other great way to tell the difference between the government and a scam. Scammers ask you for something; the government demands it.
https://torrentfreak.com/criminals-t...emands-120321/





MPAA Wants Megaupload User Data Retained for Lawsuits — Updated
David Kravets

Hollywood studios want a federal judge to preserve data on all the 66.6 million users of Megaupload, the file-sharing service that was shuttered in January due to federal indictments targeting its operators.

The Motion Picture Association of America is requesting Carpathia, Megaupload’s Virginia-based server host, to retain the 25 petabytes of Megaupload data on its servers, which includes account information for Megaupload’s millions of users. That’s according to a newly surfaced court filing in the Megaupload prosecution in connection to charges of racketeering and criminal copyright infringement.

The MPAA said it wanted to have that data because it might sue Megaupload and others for contributing to copyright infringement.

Howard Gantman, a MPAA vice president, said in a telephone interview that the studios are not intending on suing individual users, but are considering suing Megaupload or other “entities involved.”

“The reason we did that filing [was] that there is a possibility that litigation might be pursued against Megaupload or various intermediaries involved in Megaupload’s operation. We’re not talking about individual users,” Gantman said.

Gantman declined, however, to name the “intermediaries” that might be sued.

Here is the data the MPAA is seeking:

“In light of the potential civil claims by the studios, we demand that Carpathia preserve all material in its possession, custody, or control, including electronic data and database, related to Megaupload or its operations. This would include, but is not limited to, all information identifying or otherwise related to the content files uploaded to, stored on and/or downloaded from Megaupload; all data associated with those content files, the uploading or downloading of those files, and the Megaupload users who uploaded or downloaded those files,” MPAA attorney attorney Steven Fabrizio wrote Carpathia Jan. 31, the letter of which Carpathia lodged in a legal filing Tuesday.

A hearing on the matter is set for next month. Federal authorities have said they have copied some, but not all of the data, and said Carpathia could delete the 25 million gigabytes of Megaupload data it is hosting.

Carpathia said it is spending $9,000 daily to retain the data, and is demanding a federal judge relieve it of that burden. Megaupload, meanwhile, wants the government to free up some of the millions in dollars of seized Megaupload assets to be released to pay Carpathia to retain the data for its defense and possibly to return data to its customers.

The criminal Megaupload prosecution concerns seven individuals connected to the Hong Kong-based file-sharing site, including founder Kim Dotcom. They were indicted in January on a variety of charges, including criminal copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Five of the members of what the authorities called a 5-year-old “racketeering conspiracy” have been arrested in New Zealand, pending extradition to the United States.

The government said the site, which generated millions in user fees and advertising, facilitated copyright infringement of movies, often before their theatrical release, in addition to music, television programs, electronic books, and business and entertainment software. The government said Megaupload’s “estimated harm” to copyright holders was “well in excess of $500 million.”

Gantman said the MPAA is not concerned about the identities of the individual Megaupload users. He said Hollywood wants to know the uploading and downloading activity of the Megaupload users in a bid to prove a case that Megaupload or other “intermediaries” contributed or facilitated the users’ behavior.

“If there’s evidence of a frequent infringers, high volume infringers, who are able to continue that operation despite knowledge by Megaupload, that could point to evidence that was involved in this infringing campaign,” Gantman said.

Similar user data was part of the Grokster and Napster civil lawsuits.

Megaupload was on the recording and movie industries’ most-hated lists, often being accused of facilitating wanton infringement of their members’ copyrights. The indictment claims Megaupload induced users to upload copyrighted works for others to download, and that it often failed to comply with removal notices from rights holders under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Megaupload, which was not based in the U.S., says it did comply with DMCA orders, despite not being legally required to due to jurisdiction issues.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ser-litigatio/





Company Hosting File Sharing site Megaupload’s Frozen Data Says Somebody Needs to Pay Bill
AP

The company hosting the frozen data of millions of users of the file sharing site Megaupload says somebody needs to pay the company’s bill or allow it to delete the data.

Carpathia Hosting filed an emergency motion this week in U.S. federal court in Virginia seeking protection from the expense of hosting the data of up to 66 million users. It says it is using more than 1,100 servers to store the 25 million gigabytes of data.

In the motion filed Tuesday, the Virginia-based company said it is paying $9,000 a day to host the data, which works out to more than $500,000 since January. That is when U.S. authorities shut down the Megaupload site and worked with authorities in New Zealand to have its founder, Kim Dotcom, arrested.

U.S. prosecutors are seeking Dotcom’s extradition from New Zealand, where he remains under house arrest. They accuse him of racketeering by facilitating millions of illegal downloads of copyrighted material on the site.

Megaupload says many of its users are legitimate and storing important files on the site.

Carpathia said in January it would work with a nonprofit group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to try to preserve the data. In its court filing, the company said it had so far refrained from deleting the data given the interest from so many parties in keeping it.

Among those asking for the data to be saved is the Motion Picture Association of America, which wants it kept for possible civil action.

Carpathia said another reason it can’t delete the data at the moment is because it would “risk a claim by a party with an interest in the data.”

It is asking the court to either have others take possesion of the data, ensure that Carpathia be paid until the completion of the case or let it delete the data after allowing users access for a brief period for selective copying.

Carpathia is seeking a court hearing on the motion next month.

In another development in the case, a judge in New Zealand on Thursday released a ruling that Dotcom be allowed up to 60,000 New Zealand dollars ($49,000) per month from his frozen bank accounts to pay for his living expenses as he prepares his defense. He is also allowed the use of one of his cars, a 2011 Mercedes Benz.

New Zealand authorities in January seized Dotcom’s assets, which included 10 million New Zealand dollars ($8.1 million) worth of bonds and a fleet of luxury cars.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...xSS_story.html





Pirate Bay ‘Financier’ Will Serve Sentence Electronically Tagged
enigmax

Carl Lundström, one of the persons convicted in The Pirate Bay trial, will not be going to jail for his role in the operations of The Pirate Bay. The millionaire, who gave the site a crucial helping hand with hardware and other services in its early days, was sentenced to four months in prison but will now spend that time in a Swedish apartment. He will be electronically monitored and allowed to leave in order to attend a government-arranged job.

While Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm were grabbing most of the headlines, a fourth defendant in The Pirate Bay trial – Swedish businessman Carl Lundström – was trying to keep a lower profile.

That would not prove easy. Famous in his own right for being the grandson of Karl Lundström, founder of the world’s largest crisp bread producer Wasabröd, Carl Lundström made a fortune when the company was sold in the early 80′s. But it would be his involvement with The Pirate Bay that would shoot him onto the international stage.

Lundström provided an early Pirate Bay with structural support through his company Rix Telecom/Port80 and in 2009 he paid the price for that assistance when a Swedish court found him and his co-defendants guilty of copyright infringement offenses.

In 2010 the Court of Appeal upheld the original guilty verdict but reduced Lundström’s sentence from 1 year in jail to 4 months and ordered him to pay his share of 46 million kronor ($6.78m) in damages. Last month a Supreme Court appeal was rejected and Lundström’s sentence was made final.

Now Lundström is ready to serve his sentence and perhaps surprisingly he won’t be going to jail at all. Under Swedish law anyone sentenced to spend less than six months in jail can apply to serve their time in the community. Lundström applied and was accepted as a suitable candidate.

The businessman, who will turn 52-years-old next month, will leave his home in Switzerland and return to Sweden to serve his sentence. There he will spend four months electronically tagged in a Gothenburg apartment. He will only be allowed to leave in order to attend a job arranged for him by the authorities.

“He will have employment arranged, it is a regulated schedule that is very strict,” probation officer Sven Simonsson told TT.

Although Lundström is liable to pay his share of 46 million kronor ($6.78m) in damages, Swedish authorities have only been able to find assets worth 225,000 kronor ($33,149).

The three other defendants – Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm – are yet to be informed how their sentences will be served. None are currently living in Sweden and Svartholm hasn’t been heard from in a long time, leading Sunde to speculate recently that he might even be dead.
https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-...tagged-120319/





Pirate Bay Plans Sky-High Flying Proxy Servers

RIAA will need to muster Air Force to stop LOSS
Iain Thomson

The Pirate Bay says it is planning a fleet of airborne servers to evade the attempts of anti-piracy forces to shut down their file-sharing service.

And, no, it's not yet April Fools' Day.

The team behind the site says that the falling cost of GPS and remote-controlled drone technology, coupled with the advent of systems such as the $35 Raspberry Pi Linux machine, have inspired the idea. Since the situation on land is getting trickier, the team said they are planning Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS) to evade both state controls and the site's current legal issues.

"We're going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air," said team member Mr. Spock in a blog posting. "This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system. A real act of war."

The designs call for a basic proxy system of drones that would allow data speeds of 100Mb/s per node from up to 50km away, although Spock provided no information about the wireless technology to be used that was any more specific than "modern radio transmitters".

The Pirate Bay thinks that they could get a basic front-end for the system up and running – and flying – which would then redirect users to secret land-based servers. Looking much further ahead, the post claims that plans are afoot for a "galactic" service, which would use parts fabricated from downloadable plans, possibly from its 3D archive.

So, are the Swedish pirates serious, or is this just publicity stunt intended to worry Big Media? Probably a bit of both. For years the team has been looking at different ways to evade legal controls, and it set up a short-lived collection to buy the so-called Kingdom of Sealand – a collection of anti-aircraft stations rotting off the Suffolk coast. Since then it has relied on mirror sites to keep the service going.

But drones are a very different matter. Although software-assisted flight control in rough weather is getting better, all of the really good stuff is military-grade. Drones are becoming more capable, but they have very limited flight time – and you'd need a lot of them, all ready to take to the skies if the RIAA comes knocking.

El Reg recommends a good dose of skepticism until further information is released – if it ever is.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03...y_loss_drones/





Pirate LOSS? An alternative ...
Charlie Stross

I'm going to assume that you know who and what The Pirate Bay are.

The Pirate Bay just announced a nifty but somewhat questionable application for the Raspberry Pi low-cost Linux computer:

With the development of GPS controlled drones, far-reaching cheap radio equipment and tiny new computers like the Raspberry Pi, we're going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air. This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system. A real act of war.

We're just starting so we haven't figured everything out yet. But we can't limit ourselves to hosting things just on land anymore. These Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS) are just the first attempt. With modern radio transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away. For the proxy system we're building, that's more than enough.


I applaud their ingenuity, but I think this can be improved upon.

The LOSS concept has several drawbacks. First among these is power consumption and payload weight constraints. The Raspberry Pi is a low power device, but still draws juice via micro-USB, at up to five watts. On top of which, TPB propose to broadcast a wifi signal from their LOSS drones. To blanket an area of a square kilometre with a strong enough signal to sustain a high data rate (they say around 100mbps) is going to take both a decent antenna and a fair amount of electricity. All of which is going to drive up the weight, complexity, and cost of the LOSS.

LOSS needs to either be self-sustaining (which implies solar propulsion, along the lines of ELHASPA or NASA's Pathfinder aircraft) or it's going to have to land regularly to take on fuel. (I am ruling out nuclear propulsion because I assume The Pirate Bay do not have access to a supply of fissionable materials. Otherwise, it's Game Over for the MPAA.) This means that a cat-and-mouse game can be easily won by the authorities; there's no need to deploy air-to-air missiles over built-up areas when you can just have the Police keep an eye out for pirates refuelling their drones after midnight.

The sad truth is, quadrotors and small UAVs have lamentably poor airborn endurance, with flight durations measured in double or triple digit seconds rather than minutes, let alone hours. And baloon-type UAVs have the slight problem of being at the mercy of the winds, or requiring an anchor cable (which again makes them trivially easy for the Police to take down).

Rather than looking up at the stars, I believe the Pirate Bay should be looking down at the sewers. Their robot minions would be better modelled on the humble sewer rat than on the soaring seagull.

In the city, you are never more than three metres away from a rat. They're spectacularly successful. We've built them a wonderful habitat replete with high-speed autoroutes — storm drains and sewers — and convenience stores to snack from in the shape of dumpsters and trash. And ground level is where most of us wifi users happen to be, most of the time.

Small ground-traversing robots would not be subject to the same weight penalties as airborn drones. The wifi range would be shorter, but their power consumption would be lower and they'd be far more concealable — it's quite easy to imagine a ratbot that is, literally, no larger than a real rat.

Powering ratbot would be easier, too. In suitably hospitable environments Pirate Bay operatives could lay down inconspicuous inductive charging mats plumbed into power outlets. Alternatively, SlugBot shows the way towards a truly autonomous ground-dwelling robot—one that hunts for biological prey, digests it, and uses an on-board microbial fuel cell to provide electricity. In an urban environment ratbot need not hunt and kill moluscs to survive; instead, it could subsist on pizza rinds and the dregs from Mountain Dew cans, which would doubtless be easier to stalk and kill. Indeed, the rich pickings behind any fast food outlet would attract ratbots to the very same location where bittorrent users might congregate to furtively use their provided bandwidth.

Finally, if ratbot detects the presence of Police ferretbots in the neighbourhood, it can make its escape in a number of ways — climbing a nearby wall, clinging to the underside of an automobile (an especially efficient way of spreading the mesh network to other cities), diving into a storm drain (better hope the waterproof seals hold!), or asking a friendly Pirate Bay user for a ride.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog...ternative.html





Google Steps In To Defend Hotfile From “Overbroad And Ill-Conceived” MPAA Lawsuit
Devin Coldewey

Cyberlocker services are under attack from every direction: not only are their services looking less and less necessary as more personal file-sharing services (like Dropbox) become popular, but the services they do offer are viewed by the media industry as solely used for evil. In the wake of the Megaupload takedown, many cyberlocker sites are voluntarily shutting down, for fear of being sued or raided.

Hotfile is one of the sites in question, and they haven’t escaped the wrath of the MPAA. There are a couple lawsuits between the two pending, and most recently the MPAA tried to get the site shut down summarily. But Google has taken a sudden interest in the case and issued an amicus brief with some choice words for the MPAA’s tactics.

The brief is a bit jargon-y and full of footnotes and precedent, as legal documents often are, but the gist is perhaps best summed up by Google itself:

The DMCA requires plaintiffs to show that the service provider failed to act on knowledge of specific infringing material and puts responsibility for policing online infringement [primarily] on copyright owners.

(“primary” was printed, but “primarily” is clearly intended)

Google takes a sort of hard-line approach via the DMCA, telling the court that however the MPAA may try to mislead them, Hotfile is in fact protected under safe harbor provisions. And furthermore, Google suggests that the MPAA’s approach is contrary to the language in and precedents surrounding the DMCA. The onus is on copyright holders to alert a service to the nature and location of an infringement, and the service’s responsibility is to alert the user if possible and remove the material within a reasonable period of time.

Various examples of Hotfile and others allegedly not complying fully (e.g. removing one link to infringing material and not removing the file or alternative links) also get the whip. Why, they ask, should a file-hosting service do more than is asked of them by the law? They are complying with the letter of the law promptly and willingly, and if there are still infringing files being traded, it is up to the copyright holders to report them.

In other words, it doesn’t matter whether they know there is infringement going on. They could remove the file or link, but they’re not required to by law, and some would say it would be presumptuous of them to do so anyway. Why not give a file or link the benefit of the doubt? If it’s infringing, surely the copyright holder will request it to be taken down. At least, this is how Google frames Hotfile’s DMCA responsibilities.

While it would be nice to think that Google is White-Knighting in this case out of the goodness of its heart, that probably isn’t the reason. Google Drive, you’ll remember, is right around the corner. With the amount of space they will likely offer and the lack of restrictions (your files, privately or publicly shared, sync with any computer, etc), they might soon find themselves in a similar position as Hotfile. Certainly they already are to some extent, indexing as they do so much illegal content. But given recent events, the specific requirements (and specific things not required) for a cyberlocker service are very relevant to their interests.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/19/goo...-mpaa-lawsuit/





Justices Back Mayo Clinic Argument on Patents
Adam Liptak

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Tuesday that medical tests that rely on correlations between drug dosages and treatment are not eligible for patent protection.

Writing for the court, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said natural laws may not be patented standing alone or in connection with processes that involve “well-understood, routine, conventional activity.”

The natural law in question was the relationship between thiopurines, which are drugs used to treat gastrointestinal disorders, and metabolites in patients’ blood. Relying on its research into that relationship, Prometheus Laboratories patented a method to help doctors find the dose that is large enough to work and small enough to cause no needless harm.

After a unit of the Mayo Clinic developed its own test using slightly different correlations, Prometheus sued for infringement of its two patents for its method. Mayo responded that Prometheus was seeking to protect an abstract idea based on natural phenomena that was not eligible to be patented.

In a statement, Prometheus said Tuesday’s decision against it “will, in our view, encourage imitation, not innovation.”

“Without the availability of patent protection,” the statement went on, “future health care will suffer as companies may opt out of new research and development.”

A lawyer for Mayo, James A. Rogers III, said the decision “is going to be a benefit for patient care, spur innovation in the field and allow access to good quality diagnostic tests.”

In his opinion for the court in the case, Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, No. 10-1150, Justice Breyer started with first principles.

“Einstein could not patent his celebrated law that E = mc2; nor could Newton have patented the law of gravity,” he wrote.

The basis for Prometheus’s invention, Justice Breyer said, was also a law of nature — “namely, relationships between concentrations of certain metabolites in the blood and the likelihood that a dosage of a thiopurine drug will prove ineffective or cause harm.”

The question for the court was whether the use that Prometheus made of this relationship was eligible for patent protection. In general, Justice Breyer wrote, an inventor must do more than “recite a law of nature and then add the instruction ‘apply the law.’ ”

“Einstein, we assume, could not have patented his famous law by claiming a process consisting of simply telling linear accelerator operators to refer to the law to determine how much energy an amount of mass has produced (or vice versa),” he wrote.

Justice Breyer said Prometheus had done essentially the same thing. The company’s instructions, he wrote, “simply tell doctors to gather data from which they may draw an inference in light of the correlations.”

In holding Prometheus’s process ineligible for patent protection, the court struck a balance, Justice Breyer wrote.

“On the one hand, the promise of exclusive rights provides monetary incentives that lead to creation, invention and discovery,” he wrote. “On the other hand, that very exclusivity can impede the flow of information that might permit, indeed spur, invention.”

Justice Breyer rejected a proposed middle ground that had been offered by the federal government. It had urged the court to rule that the Prometheus method was eligible to be patented as an initial matter but could then probably be challenged as invalid because it was obvious and insufficiently novel.

Justice Breyer said that approach would make “a dead letter” of the exception to patent eligibility for laws of nature.

Just before the argument in the case in December, Prometheus told the court that it had been bought by Nestlé in July. Justice Breyer’s wife owned stock in Nestlé, and that would have required his disqualification.

She sold the stock on the morning of the argument, allowing Justice Breyer to sit and to write the court’s opinion in the case.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/21/b...g-dosages.html





8,200+ Strong, Researchers Band Together To Force Science Journals To Open Access
David Hill

Academic research is behind bars and an online boycott by 8,209 researchers (and counting) is seeking to set it free…well, more free than it has been. The boycott targets Elsevier, the publisher of popular journals like Cell and The Lancet, for its aggressive business practices, but opposition was electrified by Elsevier’s backing of a Congressional bill titled the Research Works Act (RWA). Though lesser known than the other high-profile, privacy-related bills SOPA and PIPA, the act was slated to reverse the Open Access Policy enacted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2008 that granted the public free access to any article derived from NIH-funded research. Now, only a month after SOPA and PIPA were defeated thanks to the wave of online protests, the boycotting researchers can chalk up their first win: Elsevier has withdrawn its support of the RWA, although the company downplayed the role of the boycott in its decision, and the oversight committee killed it right away.

But the fight for open access is just getting started.

Seem dramatic? Well, here’s a little test. Go to any of the top academic journals in the world and try to read an article. The full article, mind you…not just the abstract or the first few paragraphs. Hit a paywall? Try an article written 20 or 30 years ago in an obscure journal. Just look up something on PubMed then head to JSTOR where a vast archive of journals have been digitized for reference. Denied? Not interested in paying $40 to the publisher to rent the article for a few days or purchase it for hundreds of dollars either? You’ve just logged one of the over 150 million failed attempts per year to access an article on JSTOR. Now consider the fact that the majority of scientific articles in the U.S., for example, has been funded by government-funded agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, NIH, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, NASA, and so on. So while taxpayer money has fueled this research, publishers charge anyone who wants to actually see the results for themselves, including the authors of the articles.

Paying a high price for academic journals isn’t anything new, but the events that unfolded surrounding the RWA was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It began last December when the RWA was submitted to Congress. About a month later, Timothy Gowers, a mathematics professor at Cambridge University, posted rather innocently to his primarily mathematics-interested audience his particular problems with Elsevier, citing exorbitant prices and forcing libraries to purchase journal bundles rather than individual titles. But clearly, it was Elsevier’s support of the RWA that was his call to action. Two days later, he launched the boycott of Elsevier at thecostofknowledge.com, calling upon his fellow academics to refuse to work with the publisher in any capacity.
Seemingly right out of Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, researchers started taking a stand in droves. And the boycott of Elsevier continues on, though with less gusto now that the RWA is dead. It’s important to point out though that the boycott is not aimed at forcing Elsevier to make the journals free, but protesting the way it does its business and the fact that it has profits four times larger than related publishers. The Statement of Purpose for the protest indicates that the specific issues that researchers have with Elsevier varies, but “…what all the signatories do agree on is that Elsevier is an exemplar of everything that is wrong with the current system of commercial publication of mathematics journals.”

The advantages of open access to researchers have been known for some time, but its popularity has struggled.

It’s clear that all forms of print media, including newspapers, magazines, and books, are in a crisis in the digital era (remember Borders closing?). The modern accepted notion that information should be free has crippled publishers and many simply waited too long to evolve into new pay models. When academic journals went digital, they locked up access behind paywalls or tried to sell individual articles at ridiculous prices. Academic research is the definition of premium, timely content and prices reflected an incredibly small customer base (scientific researchers around the globe) who desperately needed the content as soon as humanly possible. Hence, prices were set high enough that libraries with budgets remained the primary customers, until of course library budgets got slashed, but academics vying for tenure, grants, relevance, or prestige continued to publish in these same journals. After all, where else could they turn…that is, besides the Public Library of Science (PLoS) project?

In all fairness, some journals get it. The Open Directory maintains a list of journals that switched from paywalls to open access or are experimenting with alternative models. Odds are very high that this list will continue to grow, but how fast? And more importantly, will the Elsevier boycott empower researchers to get on-board the open access paradigm, even if it meant having to reestablish themselves in an entirely new ecosystem of journals?

As the numbers of dissenting researchers continue to climb, calls for open access to research are translating into new legislation…and the expected opposition. But let’s hope that some are thinking about breaking free from the journal model altogether and discovering creative, innovative ways to get their research findings out there, like e-books or apps that would make the research compelling and interactive. Isn’t it about time researchers took back control of their work?

If you are passionate about the issue of open access to research, you’ll want to grab a cup of coffee and nestle in for this Research Without Borders video from Columbia University, which really captures the challenge of transition from the old publishing model to the new digital world:
http://singularityhub.com/2012/03/18...o-open-access/





Belgian Rightsholders Group Wants to Charge Libraries for READING BOOKS TO KIDS
Robin Wauters

I would have never, ever expected to be able to write a The Next Web blog post that involves my local library, but this story is just too crazy to not bring to your attention. It’s not really related to tech, though, so bear with me.

People with a healthy interest in fundamental freedoms and basic human rights have probably heard about SABAM, the Belgian collecting society for music royalties, which has become one of the global poster children for how outrageously out of touch with reality certain rightsholders groups appear to be.

In the past, SABAM has sought to require Internet and hosting service providers to install filters that would prevent the illegal downloading of files. They lost that battle.

Then, they wanted social networking companies to install monitoring, filtering or blocking systems to prevent illegal trading of digital music and other copyrighted material. They lost that battle. Don’t expect those setbacks to make them back down in their quest to display a stunning amount of stupidity to the world, though.

If you questioned the sanity of the folks over at SABAM before, now I hope you’ll realize just how plain evil they really are.

This morning, word got out in Belgian media that SABAM is spending time and resources to contact local libraries across the nation, warning them that they will start charging fees because the libraries engage volunteers to read books to kids.

Volunteers. Who – again – READ BOOKS TO KIDS.

Don’t bother looking at the date: it’s not April Fools Day just yet.

Newspaper De Morgen reported this morning that the local library in Dilbeek (my hometown), as well as a handful of other libraries across Belgium, have already been contacted by SABAM about the ridiculous claim.

Twice a month, the library in Dilbeek welcomes about 10 children to introduce them to the magical world of books. A representative of the library in question is quoted in the De Morgen report as saying there’s no budget to compensate people who read to the kids, relying instead on volunteers (bless them).

Obligatory feel-good photo of children reading a book – story continues below.

Photoxpress 5302350 Belgian rightsholders group wants to charge libraries for READING BOOKS TO KIDS

SABAM got in touch with the library to let them know that it thinks this is unacceptable, however, and that they should start coughing up cash for the audacity to read stories from copyrighted books out loud. The library rep calculates that it could cost them roughly 250 euros (which is about $328) per year to pay SABAM for the right to – again – READ BOOKS TO KIDS.

Schools are apparently exempt from SABAM’s wacky rule. Imagine that.

The De Morgen reporter then contacted SABAM (probably to check if this wasn’t an elaborate hoax or some grave error in judgment) and received a formal statement from the organization asserting that, indeed, public libraries need to pay up for the right to – once again – READ BOOKS TO KIDS.

Kafkaian as this whole ordeal may seem, in a way, I’m really happy that SABAM is doing this. Maybe this story is just crazy enough for the world to pay even more attention to their wicked ways.

In my view, it’s not enough for people to call out the morons at SABAM for losing touch with reality. It’s not enough to make funny jokes about it. It’s not enough to bitch and moan about their behavior on Twitter and Facebook.

SABAM is already facing court after accusations of falsifying accounts to cover up bribe payments, abuse of trust, copyright fraud and embezzlement.

Maybe there’s more we can do. I’ve asked the Twitter community what Belgians (and possibly people outside the country) can do to nail SABAM to the cross in a way that will actually do some good, and I’m doing it here. This is an organization that is desperate for a thorough clean-up and maniacal regulatory oversight.

Contacting the government to speak up seems to be the right thing to do. It would be super helpful if someone could point out in the comments if this is indeed the best place to file complaints, or if there are other ways to get the right government representatives to realize SABAM is crossing the line.
http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/03/...books-to-kids/





Chinese Writers' Group Sues Apple, Reports State Media

A group of 22 Chinese authors have filed a claim against U.S. technology group Apple, alleging its App Store sells unlicensed copies of their books, Chinese state media reported on Sunday.

The group, the Writers Rights Alliance, petitioned Apple last year to stop electronic distribution of the writers' books and had earlier persuaded Baidu, China's largest search engine, to stop publishing their material on its Baidu Library product.

The writers are seeking 50 million yuan ($8 million) compensation from Apple, saying it was selling pirated versions of 95 books via its online store, Xinhua reported, without stating where the claim had been filed.

"As an IP holder ourselves, we understand the importance of protecting intellectual property, and when we receive complaints we respond promptly and appropriately," Apple spokeswoman Carolyn Wu said.

The Writers Rights Alliance could not be reached for comment. Foreign companies have complained for years about lax enforcement of intellectual property rules by China, and a growing number of Chinese copyright holders are now also pressing for better protection.

The lawsuit adds to Apple's list of problems in China.

The world's most valuable technology company has been embroiled in a long-running lawsuit with Chinese firm Proview Technology, which is fighting for control of the iPad trademark in China.

The unit of near-bankrupt Proview International Holdings has asked Chinese distributors to stop selling the iPad after Apple launched the latest version.

Apple is also battling allegations of poor working conditions among its army of low-cost suppliers in China.

Three workers at Foxconn Technology died in a blast last year when dust from polishing iPads ignited, and labor rights groups have said 18 workers at Foxconn sites killed themselves, or tried to, in 2010.

Apple has commissioned the non-profit Fair Labor Association to interview 35,000 workers at three of Foxconn's sprawling factories and prepare a report on working conditions. {ID:nL4E8E54NL]

(Reporting by Don Durfee; Editing by Dan Lalor)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...82H05K20120318





Pact Sets China's Filmmakers Fighting for Silver Screens
Michael Martina

Underdogs fighting off a foreign invasion or small-time hopefuls competing against all odds for the spotlight.

Those could be plot lines for Hollywood scripts - or the real world plight of China's movie producers, now that Beijing has approved imports of a new wave of American blockbusters.

A deal hammered out during Vice President Xi Jinping's visit to the United States last month paved the way for the import of 14 premium format films, such as IMAX or 3D, which will be exempt from China's annual quota of 20 foreign films per year.

That pleased U.S. trade officials, who were pushing China for concessions after winning a 2009 World Trade Organization dispute dealing partly with film access.

But while Chinese theatre owners are likely to welcome the opportunity to fill more seats by screening Hollywood spectacles, the deal means more competition for China's already out-gunned directors and producers on silver screens in their own country.

"The imports of these movies, I believe, will be a huge shock to Chinese filmmakers," said Qin Hong, the chairman of Stellar Megamedia, a major Chinese film producer and cinema owner.

Qin said the deal could make it very difficult for China's small film producers to survive and consolidate industry resources into the hands of a few major film conglomerates.

China was more than a year behind schedule in opening access to U.S. films following the WTO ruling, something of an outlier for China, which has complied closely with the global trade body's decisions.

The sluggish resolution also took a personal visit by Xi, who is widely expected to assume China's presidency for the next decade, underscoring the difficulties in tense U.S.-China trade relations heightened by a tepid global economy and sharpened rhetoric from U.S. politicians in an election season.

China's film industry has been growing rapidly, with box office revenues jumping more than 25 percent annually over the past decade, according to state media.

But for all the films Chinese producers are cranking out, their pull at Chinese box offices, like their budgets, often pale in comparison to big Hollywood features.

In 2011, ticket sales topped 13 billion yuan ($2.1 billion), about a fifth of U.S. theatre revenues. But almost half of that came from showings of 50 foreign films.

The rest was split among China's 791 domestic productions, the head of China's film and television watchdog said, according to state media.

Silver Screen Lining

Industry experts say Hollywood's looming shadow means Chinese producers will need to focus on quality over quantity if they are going to elevate their appeal to a Chinese audience.

That sentiment was echoed by Chinese director Zhang Yimou last week in a statement to media during the annual session of China's parliamentary advisory body, of which he is a member.

But even as one of China's most celebrated directors, Zhang's movies are out-performed.

His "Flowers of War" was China's top earning domestic film last year, pulling in about $74 million. That is a far cry from the country's 2011 box office favorite, the third installment of Hollywood's Transformers series -- which raked in almost $174 million, according to Artisan Gateway, a Shanghai-based Asian film consultancy.

Competing on the grounds of good scripts and quality acting is one thing, but adding the gloss and sheen of a big production requires budget and technical expertise that China currently lacks.

Christopher Bremble, who heads Beijing-based special effects firm Base-FX, said China's movie industry is playing catch-up, and certain fields, such as special effects, lag 15 years or more behind Hollywood.

Still, Bremble said China is a country of fast learners and that the new film deal could be a silver lining to spur higher quality domestic movies.

"There was a time that 'made in China' meant not very good. Now, of course, 'made in China' means iPads, iPhones, high-tech," he said, noting that the film industry is going through a similar upgrade.

A larger Hollywood footprint in China could also mean more partnership opportunities for Chinese film and production companies down the road.

Qin, of Stellar Multimedia, said film producers thanked the government for its help in resisting Hollywood's drive into the market after China joined the WTO, but that the movie deal marked an "appropriate opening", one that ultimately was needed to drive quality and creativity.

"We can't forever exist under a protective umbrella. We need to develop and expand on our own," he said.

(Reporting by Michael Martina; Editing by Ken Wills and Elaine Lies)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...82F0H320120316





Foxconn Not Off Hook After Radio Retraction, Critics Say

Foxconn Technology Group, the top maker of Apple Inc's iPhones and iPads, is not off the hook after a U.S. radio show retracted a program critical of working conditions at one of its Chinese factories.

The Hong-Kong based China Labor Bulletin said Foxconn still employed harsh working conditions, while a fund manager with shares in Foxconn's parent said investors were watching how the company treats workers.

"The retraction has somewhat cleared Foxconn's name, but not all the way. The press and stock investors will continue to watch how Foxconn treats its workers going forward," said Simon Liu, fund manager and deputy investment officer at Polaris Financial Group's fund unit in Taipei. The unit owns share's in Foxconn's parent company, Hon Hai Precision.

"Obviously, Apple is starting to take serious step asking Foxconn to properly treats its China workers," Liu said.

The radio programme "This American Life" last week retracted the episode, saying it had contained "numerous fabrications".

Foxconn said on Monday it had no plans to take legal action although the programme had hurt its reputation.

"Our corporate image has been totally ruined. The point is whatever media that cited the programme should not have reported it without confirming (with us)," said Simon Hsing, Foxconn's spokesman.

"We have no plans to take legal action... We hope nothing similar will happen again."

Rights groups have criticized Foxconn for several years for what they describe as harsh working conditions.

Working practices at Foxconn's huge plants in China, which combined employ a million people, came under intense scrutiny in 2010 after a series of suicides among young workers. Last June three workers died in an explosion at a Foxconn plant in Chengdu, western China.

Geoffrey Crothall, a spokesman for workers' rights group China Labour Bulletin, said workers at Foxconn were still subject to a list of poor working conditions, including long working hours, strict management that sometimes borders on abusive practice, and unsafe work practices in some factories.

"All those things are very much in place. I don't think there's been any alleviation (of these problems) in the past few months. I don't think Foxconn's done anything, really," Crothall said.

The retracted episode, broadcast on January 6, was based heavily on a one-man theatrical show by actor Mike Daisey: "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs."

Daisey's play and its attendant publicity, including the radio segment, played a big role in pressuring Apple to allow outside inspectors at its contract manufacturing facilities in China, mostly owned by Foxconn Technology.

The executive producer of "This American Life" said in a broadcast last week that most of the retracted program's content was true and corroborated by independent investigation.

The inaccuracies were linked to the actors' account of his trip to China. For example, Daisey said guards at a Foxconn factory had guns, but the programme said only the military and police are permitted to carry guns in China.

Apple, criticized over working conditions at its chain of suppliers in China, said last week that a U.S. non-profit labor group had begun an "unprecedented" inspection of working conditions at its main contract manufacturers.

Last month the New York Times published an investigation into working practices at Apple supplier's plants in China that documented poor health and safety conditions and long working hours.

Hon Hai Precision fell 0.48 percent on Monday, slightly underperforming a 0.14 percent fall in the main Taiwan stock index.

(Additional reporting by Sisi Tang in Hong Kong; Reporting by Faith Hung; Editing by Neil Fullick)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...82I03120120319





Ads in Mobile Apps Aren't Just Annoying -- They're Risky, Too

North Carolina State University researchers say ads in mobile apps pose privacy, security risks
Bob Brown

Many mobile apps include ads that can threaten users' privacy and network security, according to North Carolina State University researchers.

The National Science Foundation-funded researchers studied 100,000 apps in Google Play (formerly Android Market) and found that more than half contained ad libraries, nearly 300 of which were enabled to grab code from remote servers that could give malware and hackers a way into your smartphone or tablet.

"Running code downloaded from the Internet is problematic because the code could be anything," says Xuxian Jiang, an assistant professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of a paper titled "Unsafe Exposure Analysis of Mobile In-App Advertisements." "For example, it could potentially launch a 'root exploit' attack to take control of your phone -- as demonstrated in a recently discovered piece of Android malware called RootSmart."

Apps that feature ad libraries are attractive in that they enable developers to provide apps for free, but the ad delivery process can open up users to privacy and security risks, according to Jiang, whose mobile- and Android-focused research we've covered in the past (See "Researchers use Woodpecker to single out vulnerable Android phones"). One problem with ad libraries, which are served up via Google, Apple or other such companies, is that app users essentially give them the same access permissions as the apps themselves, allowing them to skirt standard security processes.

It turns out that about half the ad libraries could track a user's location via GPS, and 1 in 23.4 apps used ad libraries that let advertisers themselves access a user's location via GPS.

Jiang says that even though it is convenient to house the ad libraries in mobile apps, a way to isolate the libraries needs to be created in order to improve security and privacy.
https://www.networkworld.com/news/20...ps-257438.html





Who Pays for Online Surveillance?: Police Recommended "Public Safety" Tax on Internet Bills
Michael Geist

One of the major unanswered questions about Bill C-30, the lawful access/online surveillance bill, is who will pay for the costs associated with responding to law enforcement demands for subscriber information ("look ups") and installation of surveillance equipment ("hook ups"). Christopher Parsons has an excellent post that takes a shot at estimating some of the costs. I recently obtained documents from Public Safety under the Access to Information Act that indicates that the government doesn't really have its own answer. As of December 2011, the issue was still the subject of internal debate with Public Safety working with the RCMP and CSIS to develop a fee schedule for the costs.

The document is particularly interesting because it places the spotlight on how the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP) would like to handle the issue. In 2009, the CACP proposed several possibilities, including the creation of new public safety tax that would appear on monthly customer bills. The CACP adopted the position that law enforcement should not have to pay for the associated costs claming it "brings the administration of justice into disrepute." Instead, it proposed three alternatives:

• the telecom companies and Internet providers could pass along the costs in the form of a "public safety tariff" that would apply on monthly consumer bills
• the government could provide tax credits to telecom companies and Internet providers
• the government could establish a federal funding pool to cover the costs

The government rejected all three possibilities, but incredibly does not seem to have its own plan to address the tens of millions of dollars in costs created by its online surveillance plans. As I noted in a post on fixing the bill, both the regulations and the cost issues should be made public before the bill is considered by a House of Commons committee.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6379/125/





Dangerously Vague Cybersecurity Legislation Threatens Civil Liberties
Dan Auerbach and Lee Tien

There is a spate of proposed cybersecurity legislation working its way through the House and Senate. The bills are aimed primarily at facilitating cooperation regarding so-called “cybersecurity” issues among different branches of government as well as between government and the private sector. The bills range from being downright terrible to appropriately intentioned, yet they all suffer from the fundamental inability to clearly define the threats which are being defended against and the countermeasures that can be taken against those threats. Without good definitions and an emphasis on transparency, we cannot be certain that government entities and corporations will refrain from abusing their power, interpreting the definitions in the statute expansively, and infringing on civil liberties. Below we provide some pitfalls of broad definitions, with a separate legal analysis forthcoming.

Defining threats too broadly

How do the bills define cybersecurity threat? Each bill has its own nomenclature, but the core concepts are quite similar. In Senator Joseph Lieberman's Cybersecurity Act of 2012 (S. 2105), for example, a "cybersecurity threat" is what is being guarded against, and a "cybersecurity threat indicator" is the activity of a possible cybersecurity threat that allows private or government entities to monitor and operate countermeasures. For technical readers, a cybersecurity threat could be stealing passwords from a secure government server, and the corresponding threat indicator could be a port scan to search for vulnerabilities. Senator John McCain's SECURE IT Act (S. 2151) does not use the term "cybersecurity threat indicator" but uses virtually identical language to define "cyber threat information." In all cases, the language of what constitutes the notion of a "threat" and "threat indicator" is just too vague.

For example, one current provision of the Lieberman bill states:

The term “cybersecurity threat” means any action that may result in unauthorized access to, exfiltration of, manipulation of, or impairment to the integrity, confidentiality, or availability of an information system or information that is stored on, processed by, or transiting an information system. [text]

Moreover, a cybersecurity threat indicator is defined in the text as a huge disjunction of vaguely worded scenarios that include, for example: “a method of defeating a technical [or operational] control.” Such a broad definition implicates far more than what security experts would reasonably consider to be cybersecurity threat indicators --- things like port scans, DDoS traffic, and the like. Indeed, merely using a proxy or anonymization service to let you browse the web privately could be construed to be a cybersecurity threat indicator. Using cryptography to protect one's communications or access systems securely could similarly be taken as a way to defeat an operational control. Measuring the performance of one's Internet service provider, or analyzing whether packets are being modified maliciously could all be seen as cybersecurity threats under this definition. Finally, it is conceivable that violating intellectual property rights could be construed as a threat, in which threat indicators could be as innocuous as the use of the BitTorrent protocol.

This definition of threat indicators is troubling because § 701 of the Lieberman bill and § 102(a)(1) of the McCain bill would each authorize private sector entities to surveil any traffic that transits their own networks for cybersecurity threats or cyber threat information, without being bound by the Wiretap Act or other legal limits. Effectively, the broad definitions of threats could immunize a whole host of monitoring activities by a huge swath of different government and non-government actors.

Defining countermeasures too broadly

In addition to defining threats, these bills also authorize private entities to operate “countermeasures.” Once again, the language varies from bill to bill, but for the most part, the strongest restriction on the countermeasures is that there be a “defensive intent” (language that appears in both the Lieberman and McCain bills). The Lieberman bill mentions "modify[ing] or block[ing] data packets," while the McCain bill is more vague. But without more restrictions on what sorts of countermeasures are allowed, the door is open to a host of abuses.

Let's consider one example scenario, where we examine a particular threat and the myriad possible mitigation techniques that an intermediary might employ. One straight forward cybersecurity threat is DDoS, in which many different IP addresses are used to send an incredible amount of traffic towards a target, knocking it offline and making the targeted service unavailable to legitimate users. No doubt this is a hazard that can be hugely detrimental to the service in question, and it is quite legitimate for a bill about cybersecurity to aim to defend against this threat. But how exactly do we defend against it? In this case, the devil is very much in the details.

One way to defend against DDoS attacks would be for the entity under attack to disclose a list of traffic sources to its ISP and ask the ISP to temporarily filter out traffic from these sources, effectively blocking them from accessing the resource during the blackout period, say, of a few hours. This seems like a pretty reasonable thing to do. But suppose instead of waiting for the DDoS victim to disclose the traffic sources, the ISP uses its own traffic inspection tools to detect the DDoS and stop it preemptively. Well that's nice, but are ISPs now inspecting everyone's traffic? Are they looking at content of data packets, or just the destination and volume of traffic? More ISP involvement in traffic analysis is an alarming trend that would raise many civil liberties concerns.

Our hypothetical DDoS-mitigating ISP could go even further. Tor is an extremely valuable privacy-enhancing technology that routes one's web traffic through a rigorous anonymization service. Our ISP could find that it is too hard in general to distinguish the legitimate Tor traffic from the illegitimate, and so either on purpose or by accident start blocking Tor traffic entirely under the guise of operating cybersecurity countermeasures.

And why stop with one pesky privacy-enchancing technology? Our ISP could block all traffic on certain ports, or filter at the DNS level or based on the content of packets. Cryptographic protocols could be crippled, all in the name of defensively “operating countermeasures” against the alleged threat of DDoS. Finally, our ISP could decide that your computer is part of a botnet, and so trick you into downloading software that gives the ISP or other agencies access to your computer so that it can root out the botnet. After all, the best defense in many cases is a strong offense. Furthermore, beyond the DDoS example, operating countermeasures could be taken to include intellectual property enforcement, for example by filtering at the DNS level.

The above scenarios are speculatory, and we have no idea what countermeasures actually will be employed. The important point is that beyond the phrase “defensive intent,” the bills give no guidance at all as to which countermeasures outlined above are reasonable. The real decisions will be made behind closed doors with no input from stakeholders outside of the intelligence community and the private sector, and with no transparency about what is actually being done.

Towards a better bill

In order to write a cybersecurity bill that appropriately safeguards civil liberties, specificity is of the utmost importance. The bill's authors have chosen to avoid using specific language (e.g. port scan, DDoS, intrusion detection system), presumably because they want the bill to stay relevant even as technology changes. While this is a laudable goal, it is unrealistic given how rapidly the technological landscape changes. A better approach is to use concrete language, and to be crystal clear about what information is being shared and how. The particulars should NOT be left to be decided via an opaque process, but rather debated openly and transparently right now. Being specific has the ostensible disadvantage that it makes the bill less relevant in the future as technology changes. We actually think this is an advantage, since it effectively limits the lifetime of the bill, and forces new legislation and a fresh look once the technology changes and we are facing a potentially very different set of issues.

We've so far discussed the pitfalls of vagueness without getting into what we think are the right answers are. While it is beyond the scope of this post to, say, propose an entire draft of a better cybersecurity bill, there are some guidelines we can give from the technical point of view when deciding upon the specifics.

• Keep the Internet working and reliable. Giving ISPs and other entities the ability to operate countermeasures poses a serious threat to the reliability of Internet communications. Limiting countermeasures to "defensive intent" is not enough of a safeguard to ensure the reliability and availability of systems that we rely upon.
• Cybersecurity for the 99%. The intelligence community within the government benefits from keeping attacks secret so that they can be deployed against our enemies, and very likely stockpiles zero-day exploits for this offensive purpose. There is then pressure to selectively harden sensitive targets while keeping the attack secret from everyone else and leaving popular software vulnerable. This is "security for the 1%," and it makes the rest of us less safe. A good cybersecurity bill serious about defending against security threats would address this issue directly and insist that any threats that are found are fixed for everyone, and explicitly disallow any clandestine operations that do not disclose vulnerabilities.
• Privacy-enhancing technologies are not threats. Tools such as Tor are used every day by activists around the world in sensitive situations. These should be explicitly protected in a good cybersecurity bill.

Take action

As written, these bills could provide immunity to ISPs and other private and government actors for all of the egregious behavior outlined above involving the monitoring, blocking, and modification of data packets. Until a better bill emerges, we urge you to take action to oppose these bills in their current form.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/0...ty-legislation





Gunman Dies in Hail of Bullets as French Siege Ends
John Irish and Nicholas Vinocur

A 23-year-old gunman who said al Qaeda inspired him to kill seven people in France died in a hail of bullets on Thursday as he scrambled out of a ground-floor window during a gunbattle with elite police commandos.

Mohamed Merah, a Frenchman of Algerian origin, died from gunshot wounds at the end of a 30-hour standoff with police at his apartment in southern France and after confessing to killing three soldiers, three Jewish children and a rabbi.

He was firing at police as he jumped out of the window, Interior Minister Claude Gueant told reporters near the five-storey building, in a suburb of the southern city of Toulouse.

Two police commandos were injured in the operation - a dramatic climax to a siege which riveted the world after the killings shook France a month before a presidential election.

"At the moment when a video probe was sent into the bathroom, the killer came out of the bathroom, firing with extreme violence," Gueant said. "In the end, Mohamed Merah jumped from the window with his gun in his hand, continuing to fire. He was found dead on the ground."

Elite RAID commandos had been locked in a tense standoff since the early hours of Wednesday with Merah, periodically firing shots or deploying small explosives until mid-morning on Thursday to try and tire out the gunman so he could be captured.

Surrounded by some 300 police, Merah had been silent and motionless for 12 hours when the commandos opted to go inside.

Initially, he had fired through his front door at police when they swooped on his ground-floor flat on Wednesday morning, but later he negotiated with police, promising to give himself up and saying he did not want to die.

He told negotiators he was trained by al Qaeda in Pakistan and killed three soldiers last week and four people at a Jewish school on Monday to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and because of French army involvement in Afghanistan.

President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is running for re-election next month called Merah's killings terrorist attacks and announced a crackdown on people following extremist websites.

"From now on, any person who habitually consults websites that advocate terrorism or that call for hate and violence will be punished," he said in a statement. "France will not tolerate ideological indoctrination on its soil."

His handling of the crisis could well impact an election race where for months he has lagged behind Socialist challenger Francois Hollande in opinion polls.

Early on Thursday, the first opinion poll since the school shooting showed Sarkozy two points ahead of Hollande in the first-round vote on April 22, although Hollande still led by eight points for a May 6 runoff.

Three years of economic gloom, and a personal style many see as brash and impulsive, have made Sarkozy highly unpopular in France, but his proven strong hand in a crisis gives him an edge over a rival who has no ministerial experience.

Sarkozy vowed on Wednesday that justice would be done and urged people not to seek revenge.

Merah had been under intelligence surveillance and the MEMRI Middle East think tank said he appeared to belong to a French al Qaeda branch called Fursan Al-Izza, ideologically aligned with a movement to Islamise Western states by implementing sharia law.

He boasted to police negotiators that he had brought France to its knees, and that his only regret was not having been able to carry out more killings.

French commandos had detonated three explosions just before midnight on Wednesday, flattening the main door of the building and blowing a hole in the wall, after it became clear Merah did not mean to keep a promise to turn himself in.

They continued to fire shots roughly every hour, and stepped up the pace from dawn with flash grenades.

"These were moves to intimidate the gunman who seems to have changed his mind and does not want to surrender," said interior ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet.

He was tracked down after a no-holds-barred manhunt in France, during which presidential candidates suspended their campaigning.

Immigration and Islam have been major campaign themes after Sarkozy tried to win over supporters of Le Pen, who accused the government of underestimating the threat from fundamentalism.

Leaders of the Jewish and Muslim communities have called for calm, pointing out the gunman was a lone extremist.

On Thursday, far-right candidate Marine Le Pen accused Sarkozy's government of surrendering swathes of often impoverished suburban districts to Islamic fanatics, demanding that the last month of pre-election debate put the focus back on failing security.

(Additional reporting by Jean Decotte in Toulouse and Daniel Flynn in Paris; Writing by Catherine Bremer; editing by Philippa Fletcher)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...82I07N20120322





Liberating America's Secret, For-Pay Laws
Carl Malamud

[Editor's note: This morning, I found a an enormous, 30Lb box waiting for me at my post-office box. Affixed to it was a sticker warning me that by accepting this box into my possession, I was making myself liable for nearly $11 million in damages. The box was full of paper, and printed on the paper were US laws -- laws that no one is allowed to publish or distribute without permission. Carl Malamud, Boing Boing's favorite rogue archivist, is the guy who sent me this glorious box of weird (here are the unboxing pics for your pleasure). I was expecting it, because he asked me in advance if I minded being one of the 25 entities who'd receive this law-bomb on deposit. I was only too glad to accept -- on the condition that Carl write us a guest editorial explaining what this was all about. He was true to his word. -Cory]

Boing Boing Official Guest Memorandum of Law
To:  The Standards People
Cc:  The Rest of Us People
From:  Carl Malamud, Public.Resource.Org
In Re:  Our Right to Replicate the Law Without a License

I. “Code Is Law”—Lessig

Did you know that vital parts of the US law are secret, and you're only allowed to read them if you pay a standards body thousands of dollars for the right to find out what the law of the land is?

Public.Resource.Org spent $7,414.26 buying privately-produced technical public safety standards that have been incorporated into U.S. federal law. These public safety standards govern and protect a wide range of activity, from how bicycle helmets are constructed to how to test for lead in water to the safety characteristics of hearing aids and protective footwear. We have started copying those 73 standards despite the fact they are festooned with copyright warnings, shrinkwrap agreements, and other dire warnings. The reason we are making those copies is because citizens have the right to read and speak the laws that we are required to obey and which are critical to the public safety.

When Peter Veeck posted the Building Code of Savoy, Texas on the Web, the standards people came after him with a legal baseball bat. The standards people run private nonprofit organizations that draft model laws that states then adopt as law, through a mechanism known as incorporation by reference.

Peter thought the people of his town should be able to read the law that governed them. But the standards people were adamant that the model building codes were their copyright-protected property and that nobody could post this information without a license, nobody could copy their property without paying the tollmaster.

The U.S. Court of Appeals disagreed, saying that there is a “continuous understanding that ‘the law,’ whether articulated in judicial opinions or legislative acts or ordinances, is in the public domain and thus not amenable to copyright.” Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress, 293 F.3d 791 (5th Circuit, 2002).

II. “If a Law Isn't Public, It Isn't a Law”—Justice Stephen Breyer

Based on the Veeck decision—and a long line of other court opinions that steadfastly maintain that public access to the text of the laws that govern us is a fundamental aspect of our democratic system— Public.Resource.Org has been posting the building, fire, plumbing, and other state public safety codes since 2007. For the last two years, we've taken the public safety codes of California and converted them to HTML. A group of students in the RDC rural mentoring program have converted the formulas and graphics to SVG and MATHML, and we put the whole thing into an open code repository.

However, the building, fire, and plumbing codes are just a subset of the technical standards that have become law. Despite the 2002 Veeck decision, standards incorporated by reference continue to be sold for big bucks. Big bucks as in $65 for a 2-page standard from the Society of Automotive Engineers, required as part of the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards in 49 CFR § 571. Big bucks as in $847 for a 48-page 1968 standard from Underwriters' Laboratories required as part of the OSHA workplace safety standards in 29 CFR § 1910.

Public.Resource.Org has a mission of making the law available to all citizens, and these technical standards are a big black hole in the legal universe. We've taken a gamble and spent $7,414.26 to buy 73 of these technical public safety standards that are incorporated into the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations. We made 25 print copies of each of these standards and bound each document in a red/white/blue patriotic Certificate Of Incorporation stating that the documents are legally binding on citizens and residents of the United States and that “criminal penalties may apply for noncompliance!”

III. Our $273.7 Million Gamble on Print

Why print copies you may ask? Frankly, because we're scared and wanted to take a cautious and prudent first step in duplicating these legal documents. With a print edition, we are able to limit distribution with none of those infinite-copy side effects we know and love about our digital world. Print seemed to be a medium the standards people and the legal people could relate to.

We know from all the copyright warnings, terms of use, scary shrink wrap agreements, and other red-hot rhetoric that accompanies theses documents that the producers continue to believe that copies may not be made under any circumstances. Those of you familiar with copyright math know that statutory damages for unlawful replication of a document is $150,000 per infraction. So, even though we strongly believe that the documents are not entitled to copyright protection, and moreover that our limited print run is in any case definitely fair use, if a judge were to decide that what we did was breaking the law, 25 copies of 73 standards works out to $273,750,000 in potential liability. While whales may make bigger bets, we draw the line at $273 million.

Those copies were bound up in 27.9-pound boxed sets and dispatched to 3 classes of recipients:

10 sets were sent to the Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) with a Notice of Incorporation, stating that comments must be received by Public.Resource.Org by May 1, 2012. The recipients include the American National Standards Institute, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, American Society for Testing and Materials, British Standards Institute, IEEE, International Organization for Standardization, National Fire Protection Association, National Sanitation Foundation, Society of Automotive Engineers, and the Underwriters' Laboratories.
7 sets were sent to U.S. government offices, including the White House, Senate (Senators Grassley and Whitehouse), House (Representatives Issa and Lofgren), National Archives, Administrative Conference of the United States, Federal Trade Commission, and the Copyright Office raising 21 points of law and policy ranging from excessive CEO compensation to cahootenizing in restraint of trade.
The remaining copies have been reserved for public exhibition and legal defense, including copies furnished to EFF, the Harvard Law School faculty, two copies for the Mainstream Media, and one to our legal counselor, David Halperin.

Upon the close of the May 1 comment period, it is our intention to begin posting these 73 standards in HTML and begin the process of providing a unified, easy-to-use interface to all public safety standards in the Code of Federal Regulations. It is also our intention to continue this effort to include all standards specifically incorporated by reference in the 50 states. That the law must be available to citizens is a cardinal principle of law in countries such as India and the United Kingdom, and we will expand our efforts to include those jurisdictions as well.

IV. A Poll Tax on Access to Justice

The argument for the status quo is that it costs money to develop these high-quality standards and that it is the stated public policy of government that these standards shall be developed by the private sector using a voluntary, consensus-based approach. (Having spent a lot of time with these documents, we can vouch that many of these standards are very high-quality technical documents. This is important stuff and groups like ASME and NFPA do a great job.)

All nonprofits need money and SDOs are no exception. But, no matter how you slice the cheese, you can't do this on the backs of the informed citizenry. Access to the law is a fundamental legal right.

Do these organizations need the revenue from standards sales in order to keep making high-quality standards? While SDOs have come to rely on this very lucrative monopoly over pieces of the public domain, a look at their revenue streams and executive compensation levels indicates that perhaps they don't need quite as much as they're getting. They all have a variety of revenue streams in addition to document sales ranging from membership fees to conferences to training and directed research (often done with grants, subsidies, or direct support from government). As 501(c)(3) nonprofits with an explicit goal of making their standards into law, SDOs have moral and legal obligations to make those standards that have already become law available to the public and in no case can they prohibit others from doing so.

The scale of these operations is indicated in Table 1, which lists the CEO compensation for ten leading standards-making nonprofits. (ISO refuses to divulge executive compensation despite their status as a nongovernmental organization based in Switzerland.)

Table 1: Compensation of Major Nonprofits Involved in Standards Setting

Rank Name of Nonprofit Organization Name of Leader Year Amount

1. Underwriters' Laboratories K. Williams 2009 $2,075,984
2. National Sanitation Foundation Kevin Lawlor 2009 $1,140,012
3. British Standards Institution Howard Kerr 2010 $1,029,161
4. National Fire Protection Association James M. Shannon 2009 $926,174
5. American National Standards Institute Saranjit Bhatia 2010 $916,107
6. ASTM International James A. Thomas 2009 $782,047
7. IEEE James Prendergast 2009 $422,412
8. Society of Automotive Engineers David L. Schutt 2009 $422,128
9. American Society of Mechanical Engineers Thomas G. Loughlin 2009 $420,960
10. The United States of America Barack Obama 2011 $400,000

The status quo assumes that the only way to fund a standards-making process is to charge lots of money for the end product. But that is a self-serving self-delusion. The SDOs would actually grow and prosper in an open environment, and they would certainly carry out their mission more effectively. They might need to change their business models, but hasn't the Internet made the rest of us change our business models?

V. “Let Every Sluice of Knowledge Be Set A-Flowing”—John Adams

The Internet was built on open standards that are freely available. Many readers may not realize it, but there were originally two Internets. The one we use is based on TCP/IP and was developed by the IETF and other groups such as the W3C. But, there was another Internet called Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) which was being pushed in the 1980s and early 1990s by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and other SDOs. The OSI Internet was based on very expensive standards and it failed miserably. It was open that won and open that scaled.

It is our contention that the physical standards that we're posting are just as important as Internet standards. By making things like the National Fuel and Gas Code, the standard for safety in wood and metal ladders, or the standards for safety and hygiene in water supplies readily available to all without restriction, we make society better. People can read the standards and learn, they can improve upon them by making searchable databases or better navigational tools, they can build new kinds of businesses.

Innovation and education are just two of the benefits of opening up this world, but at the root are basic issues of democracy and justice. We cannot tell citizens to obey laws that are only available for the rich to read. The current system acts as a poll tax on access to justice, a deliberate rationing and restriction of information critical to our public safety. That system is morally wrong and it is legally unconstitutional.

VI. Supporting Materials

In response to a petition drafted by Professor Strauss of Columbia Law School, the Office of the Federal Register is taking comments from the public as to whether they should provide greater public access to standards incorporated by reference. You have until March 28 to respond. Please let them know what you think!
The Administrative Conference of the United States recently considered the issue of Incorporation by Reference, but ended up not taking any significant action. A particularly strong letter of protest was submitted by EFF.
For makers and doers interested in the craft of public printing, we posted photographs of the construction of these boxes of in our print factory.
A copy of the packing slip that was in the boxes, including the Notice Of Incorporation, the shipping manifest, and the 7 letters of transmittal to government officials is available for your review as a PDF file as is a sample Certificate Of Incorporation.
http://boingboing.net/2012/03/19/lib...as-secret.html





NSA Chief Denies Wired's Domestic Spying Story (Fourteen Times) In Congressional Hearing
Andy Greenberg

In his recent bombshell story for Wired magazine, National Security Agency chronicler James Bamford writes that the joke that the agency’s acronym stands for “never say anything” applies now more than ever. In fact, it seems the NSA does speak. It says “no” quite a lot.

In a budget hearing Tuesday in the Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee, Georgia Representative Hank Johnson directly questioned NSA director general Keith Alexander about Bamford’s Wired article, which lays out the agency’s domestic spying program in new detail. Alexander denied the article’s claims, which included on-the-record interviews with multiple ex-NSA staffers describing phone- and data-based surveillance of Americans, fourteen times.

Here’s a video of that exchange, with my transcript below. Representative Johnson’s questions are in bold.

General Alexander, if Dick Cheney were elected president and wanted to detain and incessantly waterboard every American who sent an email making fun of his well-known hunting mishaps, what I’d like to know is, does the NSA have the technological capacity to identify those Cheney bashers based upon the content of their emails? Yes or no.

No. Can I explain that?

Yes.

The question is where are the emails and where is NSA’s coverage. I assume by your question that those emails are in the United States.

Correct.

NSA does not have the ability to do that in the United States.

You say the emails are located…Let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing. An American emailing another American about Dick Cheney. Does the NSA have capacity to find out who those parties are by monitoring, by the content of their email?

No. In the United States, we’d have to go through an FBI process, a warrant to get that and serve it to somebody to actually get it…

But you do have the capability of doing that.

Not in the United States.

Not without a warrant.

No no, we don’t have the technical insights in the United States. In other words, you have to have something to intercept or some way of doing that either by going to a service provider with a wrrant or you have to be collecting in that area. We’re not authorized to that nor do we have the equipment in the United States to collect that kind of information.

I see. Thank you.

Does that make sense?

Yes it does. General, an article in Wired Magazine reported this month that a whistleblower formerly employed by the NSA has stated NSA signals intercepts include “eavesdropping on domestic phone calls and inspection of domestic emails.” Is that true?
No, not in that context. The question that, what he’s trying to raise is, are we gathering that information the United States. No, that is not correct.

The author of the Wired magazine article, his name is James Bashford, [sic] he writes that NSA has software that “searches U.S. sources for target addresses, locations, countries and phone numbers as well as watchlisted names, keywords, and phrases in email. Any communication that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the million or so people on the agency watchlists are automatically copied or recorded and then transmitted to the NSA.” Is this true?

No, it’s not. And that’s from James Bashford? [sic]

Yes. Does the NSA routinely intercept American citizens’ emails?

No.

Does the NSA intercept Americans’ cell phone conversations?

No.

Google searches?

No.

Text messages?

No.

Amazon.com orders?

No.

Bank records?

No.

What judicial consent is required for NSA to intercept communications and information involving American citizens?

Within the United States, that would be the FBI lead. If it were a foreign actor in the United States, the FBI would still have to lead. It could work that with NSA or other intelligence agencies as authorized. But to conduct that kind of collection in the United States it would have to go through a court order, and the court would have to authorize it. We’re not authorized to do it, nor do we do it.

Unfortunately, Johnson’s questions aren’t as tough as they might seem. He starts off by focusing only on emails from an American within U.S. borders to an American within U.S. borders, while the debate over domestic wiretapping has long included the hairier question of those abroad communicating with Americans at home. In Bamford’s piece, for instance, he quotes an ex-NSA employee who worked in an NSA facility in Georgia and listened in to conversations between American journalists abroad and their families at home, describing “incredibly intimate, personal conversations.”

Several years ago, when I interviewed Eric Lichtblau, one of the New York Times reporters who broke the warrantless wiretapping story in 2005, he told me that the shift to digital communications is only making the boundary between domestic and foreign spying hazier. “With these newer technologies, as with [voice over Internet protocol], you don’t know physically where a person is located when they receive or send a message. That creates all sorts of headaches in determining what laws apply, and that’s one reason the [Bush] administration is trying to get rid of the distinction altogether.” By assuming that the communications in question started and ended in the U.S., Johnson let Alexander skirt the problem of how that distinction is now defined.

But on other points, Alexander’s denials run directly counter to Bamford’s story. Bamford interviewed Bill Binney, an ex-NSA scientist who says that the NSA’s Stellar Wind program eavesdropped on both domestic phone calls and emails, and specifically gained access to millions of billion records from AT&T and Verizon. Binney described rooms dotting the country’s communication’s infrastructure that house equipment used for intrusive deep pack inspection. He described a program designed by a Boeing subsidiary that monitors U.S. communications for names, numbers and addresses, just as Johnson quoted. “Anybody you want, route it to a recorder,” Binney told Bamford. “If your number’s in there? Routed and recorded.”

Don’t expect a more detailed response from the NSA to Bamford’s story. The fact that Alexander doesn’t even know how to pronounce the name of the journalist who has written three definitive books on his agency’s history demonstrates how little accountability NSA feels to its critics. Instead, the agency’s parallel realities–one described from its official sources and another by the whistleblowers emerging from behind its classified walls–will likely keep diverging.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygree...ional-hearing/





Using Virtual Worlds to ‘Soft Control’ People’s Movements in the Real One
Sarah Ostman

Eighty-eight percent of Americans now own a cell phone, forming a massive network that offers scientists a wealth of information and an infinite number of new applications. With the help of these phone users — and their devices’ cameras, audio recorders, and other features — researchers envision endless possibilities for gathering huge amounts of data, from services that collect user data to monitor noise pollution and air quality to applications that build maps from people’s cell phone snapshots.

Today, user data provides some opportunities; for example, researchers can use Flickr photos to compile 3-D virtual representations of various landmarks. But even opportunities like these have limits, as researchers are limited to using only photos that people choose to take and share. This creates a significant imbalance: Some geographic areas and landmarks have thousands of Flickr photos, while others have none.

“Take the Lincoln Memorial, for example,” said Fabian Bustamante, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the McCormick School of Engineering. “Flickr has thousands of photos of the front of the Lincoln Memorial. But who takes a picture of the back? Very few people.”

This has led researchers to ask the questions: How can we get mobile users to break out of their patterns, visit less frequented areas, and collect the data we need?

Researchers can’t force mobile users to behave in a certain way, but researchers at Northwestern University have found that they may be able to nudge them in the right direction by using incentives that are already part of their regular mobile routine.

“We can rely on good luck to get the data that we need," Bustamante said, "or we can ‘soft control’ users with gaming or social network incentives to drive them where we want them."

In the paper, “Crowd (Soft) Control: Moving beyond the Opportunistic,” Bustamante and his group designed a way to “soft control” people’s movements by tapping into games or social networking applications. For example, a game might offer extra points if a player visits a certain location in the real world, or it might send a player to a certain location in a virtual scavenger hunt.

To test crowd soft control, the researchers created Android games, including one called Ghost Hunter in which a player chases ghosts around his neighborhood and “zaps” them through an augmented reality display on his phone. In actuality, the player’s zapping motion snaps a photo of the spot where the ghost is supposedly located.

Unlike a regular “augmented reality game,” where the ghosts might be placed randomly, in Ghost Hunter the researchers are able to manipulate where the ghosts are placed; while some are placed in frequently traveled areas, others are located in out-of-the-way, rarely photographed locations.

The game was tested on Northwestern students, who were told only that they were testing a new game. They were not informed which ghosts were placed randomly and which were placed for research purposes.

“We wanted to know if we could get the players to go out of their way to get points in the Ghost Hunter game,” Bustamante said. “Every time they zapped a ghost, they were taking a photograph of Northwestern’s campus. We wanted to see if we could get more varied photographs by ‘soft controlling’ the players’ movements.”

The participants were willing to travel well out of their regular paths to capture the ghosts, the researchers found. For example, researchers were able to collect photos of Northwestern’s Charles Deering Library from numerous angles and directions — a far broader range of data than the random sampling found on Flickr, where photographs overwhelmingly capture the front of the library.

“Playing the game seemed to be a good enough vehicle to get people to go to these places,” said John P. Rula, a McCormick graduate student and the lead author of the paper.

If this technology were implemented on a larger scale, users would need to be notified that their data was being collected for research purposes, Bustamante said.

“Obviously users need to know where their data is going,” he said, “and we take every measure to protect user privacy.”

The paper was presented in February at the Thirteenth Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile).
http://www.mccormick.northwestern.ed...icle_1066.html





Employers Ask Job Seekers for Facebook Passwords
Manuel Valdes and Shannon McFarland

When Justin Bassett interviewed for a new job, he expected the usual questions about experience and references. So he was astonished when the interviewer asked for something else: his Facebook username and password.

Bassett, a New York City statistician, had just finished answering a few character questions when the interviewer turned to her computer to search for his Facebook page. But she couldn't see his private profile. She turned back and asked him to hand over his login information.

Bassett refused and withdrew his application, saying he didn't want to work for a company that would seek such personal information. But as the job market steadily improves, other job candidates are confronting the same question from prospective employers, and some of them cannot afford to say no.

In their efforts to vet applicants, some companies and government agencies are going beyond merely glancing at a person's social networking profiles and instead asking to log in as the user to have a look around.

"It's akin to requiring someone's house keys," said Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and former federal prosecutor who calls it "an egregious privacy violation."

Questions have been raised about the legality of the practice, which is also the focus of proposed legislation in Illinois and Maryland that would forbid public agencies from asking for access to social networks.

Since the rise of social networking, it has become common for managers to review publically available Facebook profiles, Twitter accounts and other sites to learn more about job candidates. But many users, especially on Facebook, have their profiles set to private, making them available only to selected people or certain networks.

Companies that don't ask for passwords have taken other steps — such as asking applicants to friend human resource managers or to log in to a company computer during an interview. Once employed, some workers have been required to sign non-disparagement agreements that ban them from talking negatively about an employer on social media.

Asking for a candidate's password is more prevalent among public agencies, especially those seeking to fill law enforcement positions such as police officers or 911 dispatchers.

Back in 2010, Robert Collins was returning to his job as a correctional officer at the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services after taking a leave following his mother's death. During a reinstatement interview, he was asked for his login and password, purportedly so the agency could check for any gang affiliations. He was stunned by the request but complied.

"I needed my job to feed my family. I had to," he recalled.

After the ACLU complained about the practice, the agency amended its policy, asking instead for job applicants to log in during interviews.

"To me, that's still invasive. I can appreciate the desire to learn more about the applicant, but it's still a violation of people's personal privacy," said Collins, whose case inspired Maryland's legislation.

Until last year, the city of Bozeman, Mont., had a long-standing policy of asking job applicants for passwords to their email addresses, social-networking websites and other online accounts.

And since 2006, the McLean County, Ill., sheriff's office has been one of several Illinois sheriff's departments that ask applicants to sign into social media sites to be screened.

Chief Deputy Rusty Thomas defended the practice, saying applicants have a right to refuse. But no one has ever done so. Thomas said that "speaks well of the people we have apply."

When asked what sort of material would jeopardize job prospects, Thomas said "it depends on the situation" but could include "inappropriate pictures or relationships with people who are underage, illegal behavior."

In Spotsylvania County, Va., the sheriff's department asks applicants to friend background investigators for jobs at the 911 dispatch center and for law enforcement positions.

"In the past, we've talked to friends and neighbors, but a lot of times we found that applicants interact more through social media sites than they do with real friends," said Capt. Mike Harvey. "Their virtual friends will know more about them than a person living 30 yards away from them."

Harvey said investigators look for any "derogatory" behavior that could damage the agency's reputation.

E. Chandlee Bryan, a career coach and co-author of the book "The Twitter Job Search Guide," said job seekers should always be aware of what's on their social media sites and assume someone is going to look at it.

Bryan said she is troubled by companies asking for logins, but she feels it's not a violation if an employer asks to see a Facebook profile through a friend request. And she's not troubled by non-disparagement agreements.

"I think that when you work for a company, they are essentially supporting you in exchange for your work. I think if you're dissatisfied, you should go to them and not on a social media site," she said.

More companies are also using third-party applications to scour Facebook profiles, Bryan said. One app called BeKnown can sometimes access personal profiles, short of wall messages, if a job seeker allows it.

Sears is one of the companies using apps. An applicant has the option of logging into the Sears job site through Facebook by allowing a third-party application to draw information from the profile, such as friend lists.

Sears Holdings Inc. spokeswoman Kim Freely said using a Facebook profile to apply allows Sears to be updated on the applicant's work history.

The company assumes "that people keep their social profiles updated to the minute, which allows us to consider them for other jobs in the future or for ones that they may not realize are available currently," she said.

Facebook declined to comment except for issuing a brief statement declaring that the site forbids "anyone from soliciting the login information or accessing an account belonging to someone else."

Giving out Facebook login information also violates the social network's terms of service. But those terms have questionable legal weight, and experts say the legality of asking for such information remains murky.

The Department of Justice regards it as a federal crime to enter a social networking site in violation of the terms of service, but during recent congressional testimony, the agency said such violations would not be prosecuted.

Lori Andrews, a law professor at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law specializing in Internet privacy, is concerned about the pressure placed on applicants, even if they voluntarily provide access to social sites.

"Volunteering is coercion if you need a job," Andrews said.

Twitter did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

In New York, Bassett considered himself lucky that he was able to turn down the consulting gig at a lobbying firm.

"I think asking for account login credentials is regressive," he said. "If you need to put food on the table for your three kids, you can't afford to stand up for your belief."

___

McFarland reported from Springfield, Ill.
http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...ds-3419602.php





Is Your New HDTV Watching You?

Samsung’s 2012 top-of-the-line plasmas and LED HDTVs offer new features never before available within a television including a built-in, internally wired HD camera, twin microphones, face tracking and speech recognition. While these features give you unprecedented control over an HDTV, the devices themselves, more similar than ever to a personal computer, may allow hackers or even Samsung to see and hear you and your family, and collect extremely personal data.

While Web cameras and Internet connectivity are not new to HDTVs, their complete integration is, and it’s the always connected camera and microphones, combined with the option of third-party apps (not to mention Samsung’s own software) gives us cause for concern regarding the privacy of TV buyers and their friends and families.

Samsung has not released a privacy policy clarifying what data it is collecting and sharing with regard to the new TV sets. And while there is no current evidence of any particular security hole or untoward behavior by Samsung’s app partners, Samsung has only stated that it “assumes no responsibility, and shall not be liable” in the event that a product or service is not “appropriate.”

Samsung demoed these features to the press earlier this month. The camera and microphones are built into the top if the screen bezel in the 2012 8000-series plasmas and are permanently attached to the top of the 7500- and 8000ES-series LED TVs.

A Samsung representative showed how, once set up and connected to the Internet, these models will automatically talk to the Samsung cloud and enable viewers to use new and exciting apps.

These Samsung TVs locate and make note of registered viewers via sophisticated face recognition software. This means if you tell the TV whose faces belong to which users in your family, it personalizes the experience to each recognized family member. If you have friends over, it could log these faces as well.

In addition, the TV listens and responds to specific voice commands. To use the feature, the microphone is active. What concerns us is the integration of both an active camera and microphone. A Samsung representative tells us you can deactivate the voice feature; however this is done via software, not a hard switch like the one you use to turn a room light on or off.

And unlike other TVs, which have cameras and microphones as add-on accessories connected by a single, easily removable USB cable, you can’t just unplug these sensors.

During our demo, unless the face recognition learning feature was activated, there was no indication as to whether the camera (such as a red light) and audio mics are on. And as far as the microphone is concerned the is no way to physically disconnect it or be assured it is not picking up your voice when you don’t intend it to do so.

Samsung does provide the ability to manually reposition the TV’s camera away from viewers. The LED TV models allow you to manually point it upward, facing the ceiling; the plasma’s camera can be re-aimed to capture objects in the rear of the TV according a Samsung spokesperson.

Privacy concerns

We began to wonder exactly what data Samsung collects from its new “eyes and ears” and how it and other companies intend use it, which raises the following questions:

* Can Samsung or Samsung-authorized companies watch you watching your Samsung TV?

* Do the televisions send a user ID or the TV’s serial number to the Samsung cloud whenever it has an Internet connection?

* Does Samsung cross reference a user ID or facial scan to your warranty registration information, such as name, address etc.?

* Can a person or company listen to you, at will, via the microphone and Internet connection?

* Does Samsung’s cloud store all this information? How secure is this extremely personal data?

* Can a hacker intercept this data or view you via the built in camera?

* Can a third-party app program do any of the above?

* Exactly what information does the TV send to Samsung or other parties?

* Does Samsung intend to sell data collected by its Smart TV owners, such as who, what and when one is viewing?

Companies desiring to provide highly targeted advertisements to you via the TV screen or external marketing would find this data extremely valuable. “Hey, you look a little tired, how about some Ambien? I’m seeing a little grey, have you tried Grecian Formula? Joe, it looks like you packed on a few pounds recently, here’s information from Weight Watchers. Hey kids, you look bored, look at these TOYS!”

So what, if any, privacy does Samsung promise by way of a stated policy?

Weeks have passed since we formally requested answers to these questions from Samsung asking what if any privacy assurances Samsung provides. To date no privacy statement has been furnished to HD Guru or end users. The first models with these features arrived on dealer’s shelves over two weeks ago. All that we’ve been told is that when connecting to the Internet, the TVs first connect to the Samsung cloud, and from there, they connect to the various streaming video services and other apps for activation.

Samsung induces its new Smart TV owners to register online by offering a free three-month extension of the TV’s warranty. This would couple user names and addresses to their TV serial numbers, if the company so desired.

Want to read the owner’s manual for your new Samsung TV? This is accomplished by download, as Samsung stopped including printed owner’s manuals at least two years ago. However, before you may download the manual, you must first agree to the following online statement:

Samsung assumes no responsibility, and shall not be liable, in connection with whether any such products or services will be appropriate, functional or supported for the Samsung products or services available in your country.

We asked Samsung to define “appropriate” but to date have not received a response. We will update readers with a response or a privacy statement if and when Samsung chooses to provide one.

Security threats

Don’t assume a TV is an un-hackable island!

Samsung does not disclose what operating system is within its TVs, therefore we cannot confirm if it is Android and/or any other that might have a prior history of hacking.

It has been widely reported Android phones have been hacked allowing outside control of phones, via third party apps.

Countless companies have had their networks hacked, causing thousands of customers’ personal data to be released to the world. If this were to happen to Samsung it is theoretically possible hackers could gain access to names, addresses — and images of the faces of entire families.

The TV has a built-in Facebook app. Can the TV make the next connection and access your Facebook account and match other viewers to their Facebook pictures for even more personal data?

A Samsung representative said the company is working on apps that will allow its Smart TV owners to turn their televisions into a silent home-security system by allowing remote viewing on a smartphone or tablet via the TV’s built-in camera. This ability makes us ask, “Who else could gain access this video feed?”

There are security systems that go over the Internet, however, many are encrypted. Is any Samsung’s data encrypted? The company doesn’t say. Generally security companies let customers know when their data is encrypted, as it is a selling point.

In addition, the Samsung HDTVs come with an external infrared blaster that allows users to control a cable or satellite box via voice, gesture or the Samsung remote. We ask: does the TV send this information over to Samsung’s cloud as well? Does Samsung now know what other equipment you have, when you’re home to use it, what channel you’re viewing and when?

The models with this unprecedented feature set are the 2012 8000 series plasmas PN51E8000, PN60E8000, PN64E8000 and LED models UN46ES7500, UN50ES7500, UN55ES7500, UN46ES8000, UN55ES8000, UN60ES8000 and UN65ES8000. Many of these models are now at dealers with the rest scheduled to ship within the next few weeks.

With so many questions raised and no answers provided, HD Guru recommends you weigh the possibilities and decide whether or not you care about its unknown personal privacy risks before purchasing one of these HDTVs.
http://hdguru.com/is-your-new-hdtv-watching-you/7643/





Microsoft Gives Cops Tools to Detect Child Porn

The software giant, along with a Swedish technology company, is providing photo-identification technology free of charge to law enforcement to help detect and thwart child abuse.
Jay Greene

Microsoft is giving law enforcement PhotoDNA, a digital tool that sifts through massive amounts of online images to help identify instances of child pornography and rescue victims.

The software giant announced this morning that it, along with NetClean, a Swedish maker of technology to combat the spread of child porn, will give away the image-matching software to help law enforcement agencies detect new images of child abuse online. That then helps those agencies focus their efforts on tracking down abusers.

"By arming law enforcement with this powerful technology, our goal is to help expedite investigations, limit officer exposure to the corrosive effects of viewing child rape images, and strengthen law enforcement's ability to quickly identify and rescue victims and get child abusers off the street," Bill Harmon, associate general counsel in Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit wrote in a blog post.

Child pornography is one of those rare crimes where perpetrators often post evidence of their illegal acts online. But the vast quantity of images circulating on the Web makes finding specific photos of child abuse a huge challenge.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children has reviewed more than 65 million images and videos of child sexual exploitation reported by law enforcement since 2002. The group says 10 percent of those images now are of infants and toddlers.

Last May, Microsoft shared its PhotoDNA technology with Facebook to help it prevent child porn from circulating through the social network.

Microsoft developed PhotoDNA with Dartmouth College in 2009. The technology creates something of a digital fingerprint, a unique identifier for digital images. PhotoDNA cannot identify individuals in photos. But by creating that unique mathematical representation of a photo itself, law enforcement can then match one photo to another.

That, in turn, helps investigators determine if a specific photo is new, as opposed to being an older shot that's being recirculated. Understanding which photos are new helps law enforcement focus their efforts and zero in on child abuse perpetrators. The tool also helps law enforcement detect images that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57...ct-child-porn/





Verizon Study Confirms 2011 Was The Year Of Anonymous, With 100 Million Users' Data Breached By Hacktivists
Andy Greenberg

Anonymous may have had a rough 2012 so far, with dozens of its most active members arrested and one of its leaders and organizers revealed as a government informant. But a quick look at the stats shows that in terms of pure information mayhem, 2011 was its most effective year yet.

On Thursday, Verizon released its annual Data Breach Investigations Report, [PDF here] the largest study of its kind, and one that delves into data from hundreds of the company’s breach responses, along with those performed by law enforcement agencies including the U.S. Secret Service as well as Australian, Dutch, U.K. and Irish police. The result of this year’s study is clear enough: In 2011, hacktivists made their presence felt in the world of information security more than ever before, and by some measures even more than the financial criminals who usually dominate data breach statistics.

Of the 855 breach incidents from the last year that Verizon’s security team analyzed, three percent were attributed to “hacktivists.” That may seem like a small proportion, but Verizon’s director of security research Wade Baker says it’s giant compared to the same category in previous studies, which barely created a blip on Verizon’s radar last year and accounted for less than one percent of incidents. Narrow the field of victims to only large organizations, which hackers within Anonymous and its splinters target for maximum exposure, and the number of hacktivist incidents rises to 25%.

But the real impact of last year’s radical hacktivism can be seen in the numbers of actual compromised records–each one representing data attached to an individual. Of the 177 million records stolen by hackers over the last year, 100 million were taken by hacktivists. The stats don’t even include common hacktivist techniques like website takedowns with denial of service attacks or defacements, instead focusing only on actual data theft.

Of those data-stealing hacktivist attacks, the vast majority were the work of Anonymous or one of the movement’s subgroups, says Bryan Sartin, vice president of Verizon’s RISK security group. “At least three out of four were Anonymous, where a group like LulzSec or a message saying ‘We are Legion’ claimed credit.”

Certainly hacktivism isn’t a new phenomenon. The report attributes the term to the Cult of the Dead Cow hacker group from the late 1990s. But Verizon’s analysts write that hackers previously limited their attacks to defacements and website takedowns, not mass data theft. ”Data theft as a tool of hacktivism was one of the most damaging things they could do,” says Baker. “And they were very successful at it.”

Verizon doesn’t break its numbers down into specific incidents, but the exploits of Anonymous, and specifically its submovements like LulzSec and Antisec over the last year certainly seem to have produced enough breaches to account for Verizon’s figures. LulzSec, for instance, went on a rampage last spring that began with its dump of 73,000 names of contestants on the U.K. television show the X-Factor and followed up with hacks of Sony, a handful of video game companies, porn sites, and defense contractors. Each attack led to releases of tens or hundreds of thousands of users’ information, and one package the group released of random stolen leftovers was thought to contain around 750,000 users’ data.

Verizon’s Baker notes that the hacktivist attacks the study analyzed show a lower number of skilled attacks on targets that produced a higher volume of stolen data when compared to the tactics of typical financially-motivated cybercriminals. Baker says profit-motivated hackers were far more likely in 2011 to attack small firms such as the franchises of retail corporations, reproducing their low-volume thefts again and again. That finding echoes the results of another report released by the security firm Trustwave earlier this year, which stated that one third of the breaches it investigated targeted franchises.

Because hacktivists were targeting larger organizations and seeking publicity rather than silent, profitable theft from easy targets, they used some tactics that Verizon says it had rarely seen before: DNS tunneling, for instance, which exploits a target’s servers that convert IP addresses to domain names as an entrypoint into its networks, or denial of service attacks that served as a distraction while the attackers simultaneously penetrated another part of the network. In close to 75% of cases, hacktivist targets were warned ahead of time that they would face an attack, a tactic that rarely if ever is used by financially-motivated hackers.

“They definitely demonstrated different modes, and in many cases a lot more sophistication,” Baker says.

The full study contains more data and trends in the last year’s hacking incidents, and is definitely worth checking out. I’ve embedded the full report below.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygree...y-hacktivists/





Police to Cruise Streets for Unsecured Wi-Fi
Ben Grubb

The Queensland Police fraud squad will be the first in Australia to go on "wardriving" missions to help residents protect their wireless internet networks.

The State Crime Operations Command's Fraud and Corporate Crime Group first touted the wardriving project in 2009, in which police will detect unsecured wireless networks in homes and businesses that are prime targets for cyber criminals.

The project was officially launched yesterday to coincide with National Consumer Fraud Week.

Officers in the Hi Tech Crime Investigation Unit on wardriving missions will drive the streets of Brisbane with a laptop computer, looking for unsecured Wi-Fi networks.

Residents and businesses owners in targeted areas will then be mailed information about how to effectively secure their connection.

Police will return to the area some time later to check whether residents have taken heed of the warning.

Security expert Paul Ducklin, of Sophos, said he liked the idea.

"It's fun, low cost, low impact, and will help to raise awareness of just how public unencrypted Wi-Fi really is," he said.

"For the cops to take the time to give you a low-key personal security hint which might save you some cyberagony in the future - what's not to like about it?"

Detective Inspector Bruce van der Graaf, head of the NSW Police Computer Crimes Unit, has previously said he was watching the Queensland Police operation with interest.

"Apart from notifying people that their wireless is unsecure I don't know what else would be achieved by it but if their trial is fruitful we'd always participate in something that works," he said in 2009.

To critics of the operation, who may believe police could better spend their time seeking out drug dealers and outlaw bikies, Queensland Police Detective Superintendent Brian Hay said the issue was just as important as any other.

"We have known of people whose Wi-Fi has been hacked and used to commit data theft, stalking and other serious crimes such as downloading child exploitation material," he said.

"I would think it's very important to save mum and dad or grandma and grandpa from becoming suspects in a serious crime or possibly losing their life savings, having their identity stolen or losing the kids' inheritance."

Superintendent Hay said police would not drive every street of the city, but rather target selected areas from time to time.

"This is mainly about raising awareness of the issue," he said.

"Unprotected or unsecured wireless networks are easy to infiltrate and hack.

"Criminals can then either take over the connection and commit fraud online or steal the personal details of the owner. This is definitely the next step in identity fraud."

Superintendent Hay said Wi-Fi users without a secure network "may as well put their bank account details, password and personal details on a billboard on the side of the highway".

His greatest concern is "open" wireless connections, otherwise referred to as access points.

"An open or unprotected connection or point allows anyone to use your internet, monitor your activity or steal your identity information," he said.

Also of great concern is Wired Equivalent Privacy encryption, an older form of security which offers limited protection, Superintendent Hay said.

"Having WEP encryption is like using a close screen door as your sole means of security at home," he said.

He recommended using WiFi Protected Access 2 as an adequate means of protection.

"We are encouraging the public not to sit back and wait ... check your connection and make sure it's protected tonight," he said.
http://www.theage.com.au/technology/...322-1vmof.html





Comics Are Now Selling Laughs by the Download
Dave Itzkoff

Stand-up comedians of a certain era knew they had arrived when Johnny Carson invited them to a desk-side seat on “The Tonight Show.” A generation later, the gold standard was getting a solo comedy special on HBO. But in the Internet era, the yardstick for success has been redefined.

A handful of top-tier performers have begun producing stand-up specials on their own, posting them online and selling them directly through their personal Web sites, eliminating the editorial control of broadcasters and the perceived taint of corporate endorsements.

While this straight-to-the-Internet strategy is far from ubiquitous in stand-up, it is already having a profound impact on the comedy landscape, enabling online content providers and individual artists to take more turf from television networks and empowering comedians to be as candid (and as explicit) as they want in their material.

“It’s a very rare thing, where you answer to no one at all as a comedian,” said Aziz Ansari, a stand-up comic and actor who released his first online performance special on Tuesday. “Now you can even put it out the way you want.”

The turning point arrived in December, when the comedian Louis C. K. released a stand-up special, “Live at the Beacon Theater,” that was sold only as a $5 download, without electronic copy protection, from his Web site.

Louis C. K., who stars in the FX series “Louie” and has performed in comedy specials on HBO, Showtime and Epix, said that he was seeking minimal outside interference and maximum ease for his audience.

“I don’t have to go, ‘Here’s this product,’ to whatever company,” Louis C. K. said, “and then cringe and shrug and apologize to my fans for whatever words are being removed, whatever ads they’re having to watch, whatever marketing is being lobbed on.”

The experiment worked: produced at a cost of $250,000, “Live at the Beacon Theater” sold more than 220,000 downloads and grossed over $1.1 million — enough for Louis C. K. to give $250,000 in bonuses to his crew and donate a further $280,000 to charities.
Other comedians following Louis C. K.’s online trail say that they have been contemplating Internet-only projects for several months.

Jim Gaffigan, an actor and stand-up comedian, said he began seeking new platforms for his material after a routine he performed about McDonald’s was partly edited out of a 2010 Comedy Central benefit special.

Mr. Gaffigan said he considered many commercial routes, including licensing; selling a new stand-up performance to an online content provider like Netflix, Amazon or YouTube; or making it available free to viewers who watched a block of commercials first.
But Mr. Gaffigan said he was able to turn down unfavorable deals and corporate ties after Louis C. K. upended “the perception of selling something on your Web site as being kind of icky.”

He added: “My manager was like, ‘You’re not going to sell it on your Web site like that.’ And I’m like, ‘Why wouldn’t I?’ ”

Instead, Mr. Gaffigan will release his next special — with his McDonald’s routine intact — on April 11 for a $5 fee, with $1 from each sale going to charity.

For the comedians taking their material directly to the Internet, the decision is as much a reflection of a desire to serve online-savvy audiences as it is a lack of other options.

Pay-cable channels like HBO and Showtime, comedians say, are too focused on scripted programming, while on basic cable, Comedy Central offers specials to nearly everyone, with little quality control and licensing deals that are not lucrative.

“I don’t get any money from the specials that air on Comedy Central,” said Mr. Ansari, who also stars on the NBC comedy “Parks and Recreation.” “I haven’t seen any checks from the DVDs, CDs. If I just put it out in a traditional way, I wouldn’t have made any money, so why don’t I do it this way?” Comedy Central said Mr. Ansari had been paid a six-figure advance and continues to receive residuals on his last televised special.

Kent Alterman, Comedy Central’s head of original programming and production, said that the number of stand-up specials it shows was “in service to our audience and our business,” and that only “a very rarefied community of comedians” commanded followings large enough to make Internet-only programs viable. Many performers — even those with a large fan base — would still go to Comedy Central for “the marketing muscle that we have and the enormous exposure they get,” he said.

(One case in point is Louis C. K., who released his Grammy Award-winning comedy album, “Hilarious,” on Comedy Central Records.)

HBO says it still seeks top-tier performers for specials but is mindful of a glut of comedy on television, while Showtime’s entertainment president, David Nevins, said, “It’s fair to say Showtime needs to renew our focus on it.”

The Internet has been happy to capitalize on content that television has neglected. Last month Yahoo! offered a free live performance by the HBO host Bill Maher (one that ended with Mr. Maher’s donating $1 million to the pro-Obama SuperPAC Priorities USA). Yahoo! said this special has generated more than 2 million streams and that it hopes to add more such shows, seeing stand-ups as an inexpensive but powerful way to build brand identification with viewers.

“Musicians can have personas,” said Erin McPherson, who is Yahoo’s head of video programming and originals, “but comics are themselves, and their fans relate to them almost as friends. They have that intimate, one-on-one connection.”

Mark Greenberg, a former Showtime and HBO executive who is now the president and chief executive of Epix, a cable and online network that focuses on movies and live events, said that programmers’ interest in stand-up was partly demographic: comedians bring more male viewers and especially desirable younger viewers, whom programmers can’t afford to ignore “unless your attitude is that you’re going to be retired in 10 years and you don’t care,” he said.

Still, Mr. Greenberg was skeptical that other comedians would be able to duplicate the online sales results that Louis C. K. enjoyed.

“There’s no bigger report card than pay-per-view,” Mr. Greenberg said. “The first person that does 30,000 buys instead of 200,000, that person’s going to sit there and say, ‘Why did I fail?’ And it’s going to affect them as an asset.”

Not every comedian sees the Internet as the salvation of the stand-up special. Patton Oswalt, a comic who often appears in film and television roles, said that by being transparent about their production budgets, Louis C. K. and other Web pioneers had taught him a lesson he could apply to future televised specials.

But Mr. Oswalt, whose last special was jointly paid for by Showtime and Comedy Central, said that if he did an online-only special it would be “when I’m ready — I’m not going to do that model because it’s the fashion right now.”

Louis C. K. said his next special might not follow the Internet model. “I think there’s huge potential,” he said, “but potential means there might be nothing.”

And Mr. Gaffigan said he was not staking his entire career on his Web experiment, predicting he could still license his new performance to Comedy Central if it flopped online.

“It’s a gamble with the crops,” he said. “This is one harvest. You’re going to use some piece of equipment that could make it twice as productive.”

That said, Mr. Gaffigan would still prefer success to failure. “Just to be clear,” he said, “I have four children, and they’re very young, and I have a woman who gets pregnant looking at babies.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/21/a...o-the-web.html





Seagate Hits 1 Terabit Per Square Inch, 60TB Hard Drives on Their Way
Sebastian Anthony

Seagate has demonstrated the first terabit-per-square-inch hard drive, almost doubling the areal density found in modern hard drives. Initially this will result in 6TB 3.5-inch desktop drives and 2TB 2.5-inch laptop drives, but eventually Seagate is promising up to 60TB and 20TB respectively.

To achieve such a huge leap in density, Seagate had to use a technology called heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). Basically, the main issue that governs hard drive density is the size of each magnetic “bit.” These can only be made so small until the magnetism of nearby bits affects them. With HAMR, “high density” magnetic compounds that can withstand further miniaturization are used. The only problem is that these materials, such as iron platinum alloy or a sprinkling of table salt (really), are more stubborn when it comes to writing data — but if you heat it first, that problem goes away.

HAMR, which was originally demonstrated by Fujitsu in 2006, adds a laser to the hard drive head. The head seeks as normal, but whenever it wants to write a bit the laser turns on (pictured below). Reading data is done in the conventional way. Just so you understand how small the magnetic bits are in a HAMR drive, one terabit per square inch equates to two million bits per linear inch; in other words, each site is just 12.7 nanometers long — or about a dozen atoms.

In theory, HAMR should allow for areal densities up to 10 terabits per square inch (magnetic bits just 1nm long!), and thus desktop hard drives in the 60TB range. Meanwhile, conventional perpendicular recording is expected to hit one terabit in the next few years, but the roadmap to greater densities isn’t very clear. There is no word on the cost of HAMR drives, or whether the addition of a laser will significantly increase power consumption.

The biggest winner from larger hard drives, of course, is cloud storage and computing — but then again, the other angle is that you’ll have so much local storage that the cloud seems a bit pointless, especially when we all have 100Mbps internet connections. But then again, with the unstoppable surge of smartphones and tablets and flash memory, do mechanical hard drives really have a future in consumer electronics?
http://www.extremetech.com/computing...s-on-their-way





In-Stat: Apple to be Top Mobile Processor Company
Agam Shah

Apple is an iconic consumer electronics company with a string of massively successful products, but it could also become the world's largest mobile processor company by the end of the year, according to a study due to be released by In-Stat later this week.

Apple was the world's second largest mobile processor company behind Intel in 2011, benefitting from growing smartphone and tablet shipments and a meltdown in the PC market, according to In-Stat. If that trend holds and Apple's iPhone and iPad shipments continue to grow at an unprecedented pace, Apple will likely overtake Intel as the world's largest mobile processor company by the end of this year.

Apple does not have a large gap to overcome. The company last year shipped about 176 million processors in devices such as the iPad and iPhone, representing a 13.5 percent market share. Intel took the top spot with 181 million processors shipping in mobile products such as laptops, a 13.9 percent market share.

"Apple's continued success of the iPhone and iPad, as well as the stronger growth rates of the smartphone and tablet markets than PCs" will help catch up to Intel, said Jim McGregor , chief technology strategist at In-Stat and author of the report.

Apple designs chips with ARM processors, which are found in most smartphones and tablets today. Intel's processors are used in some tablets, and the chip maker has virtually no presence in the smartphone market. Intel hopes to fight ARM's domination with a low-power Atom chip code-named Medfield, which will be used in tablets and also in handsets from Lenovo, Motorola, and ZTE later this year.

The study also accounts for mobile processors in portable media players such as Apple's iPod Touch, handheld gaming devices from Nintendo and Sony, and e-readers. However, the study does not count processors in desktops and servers, a market dominated by x86 processors from Intel.

But as mobile devices grow, the emergence of Apple as a processor company will matter even more to a company like Intel, which is struggling to establish a presence in the smartphone and tablet market, McGregor said. The smartphone and tablet shipments are already outpacing servers and PCs combined in units shipped, and the gap will grow even greater in the coming years, McGregor said.

Earlier this week, Apple CEO Tim Cook said it was only a matter of time before the tablet market surpassed the PC market in size, citing research firm Gartner's projection of tablet shipments reaching 325 million by 2015.

Apple serves a captive audience by using its A4, A5 and A5X mobile processors in its own devices, but that should worry Intel especially if Apple starts using its own processors in the MacBook Air laptop and other devices, McGregor said.

Mac computers currently use Intel chips, and the companies share a delicate relationship as partners and competitors. Apple's switch to homegrown technology in Macs could hurt Intel's chip shipments, McGregor said. There are rumors of Apple switching over to homegrown chips based on ARM in the MacBook Air at some point [2], though analysts say the possibility is remote in the near term due to technical and performance issues on ARM.

But Intel is taking protective action by pouring millions of dollars in the development of ultrabooks, which are thin-and-light Windows laptops that PC makers are pitching as an alternative to the MacBook Air.

"Why do you think Intel is putting so much into ultrabooks? It is not only to compete against tablets, but to offer competition to Apple, which could switch to the company's own products eventually," McGregor said.

Apple has also provided a boost to the ARM camp, which is also looking to challenge Intel in the PC space. Microsoft's upcoming Windows 8 OS will work on the x86 and ARM architecture, and companies like Qualcomm are looking to introduce ARM-based PCs as an alternative to Intel-based PCs.

"The more successful Apple is, the more credibility it adds to the entire ARM camp and the more competitive the ARM camp becomes as a whole," McGregor said.

ARM is on the rise as x86 declines in the mobile processor market, according to the In-Stat study. Following Intel and Apple in 2011 mobile processor shipments were Texas Instruments, Qualcomm and Samsung, which are all ARM licensees, while x86 chip designer Advanced Micro Devices took sixth place.

But questions remain on whether ARM processors will match Intel's Core processors on performance, McGregor said. Microsoft's Windows 8 seems to run better on tablets as opposed to PCs which could help ARM, but ultrabooks with Intel chips will look more like convertible tablets in the future, McGregor said. There are also driver and application compatibility issues facing Windows 8 on ARM.

But the impact of Apple as a mobile processor company will be felt as long as the iPad and iPhone shipments grow, McGregor said.

"It will interesting to see how things play out over the next few years, but it will be the consumers that ultimately decide the fates of the companies and technologies involved," McGregor said.
https://www.infoworld.com/d/computer...company-189079





HP Pounds Another Nail In The PC's Coffin
Fredric Paul

Remember when computers were cool and printers were boring peripherals? Well, these days there seems to be fewer and fewer differences between the two devices.

At least HP seems to think so. Reports are circulating today that the hardware giant plans to combine its not-all-that-profitable PC division (you know, the one the company's last CEO wanted to spin off) with its high-margin, market-leading printer operation.

According to the reports, HP CEO Meg Whitman plans to combine the Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) with the Personal Systems Group (PSG) under the current head of the PSG Todd Bradley. The longtime head of the IPG, Vyomesh (VJ) Joshi, would leave the company. Together, the two groups amassed sales of $65 billion last year, more than half of HP's total, with a combined profit of $6.3 billion.

This is clearly a big deal for HP, radically simplifying and reworking the company's structure. But it's also a bellwether of the continued devaluation of the personal computer amidst the rise of smartphones, tablets, and cloud computing.

There's nothing wrong with trying to cut costs by combining units that serve a similar customer base. And I'm sure HP means no disrespect to the PC. It's just that once upon a time, PCs were considered innovative, even sexy devices. Many people eagerly awaited the new models promising faster speeds and new capabilities.

Those days are gone. In today's brave new world, the generic PC is just as much of a commodity as an inkjet printer, only without the saving grace of overpriced ink to boost profits. There's little to separate one offering from another. With a couple of exceptions, it's increasingly difficult to separate one company's products from the competitor's.

Heck, there are more differences and innovation among printers these days. At least they look different from one another. (And, of course, printers face their own challenges as people increasingly view their images and documents on screens of all sizes instead of printing them out.)

I experienced the demise of the PC as a center of innovation firsthand just last week when I bought an inexpensive HP laptop for use here at ReadWriteWeb. While it does its job perfectly well at half the cost of a MacBook Pro, it's earned me nothing but snickers from my new colleagues.

That is not a good sign for HP or other "generic" PC makers. We're getting perilously close to the point where buying a new PC -- or a new printer -- is about the same as getting a new blender. Combining HP's printer and PC divisions isn't going to delay that day.
https://www.readwriteweb.com/enterpr...ail-in-the.php





Film Buyers Fooled by Sony's 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' DVD Joke



Sony Pictures have designed their 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' DVD to look like a pirate copy of the film, much to the horror of DVD renters.
Florence Waters

The DVD of the American remake of 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' will hit American shelves this week, but those who have got hold of the disk early have had a shock.

The disk has been sent out to shops in its box as a blank home-burned DVD with the title carelessly hand-written in a black permanent marker.

One commenter posted on the film forum MidWest Tape this week: "I almost had a fit and retuned this to Redbox", referring to the American rental service.

Redbox have had to post a warning message to renters in response to the confusion on their website:

"NOTE TO RENTERS: The handwritten look on the disc of this movie is legitimate and is intended to look like a burned DVD."

Sony Pictures have confirmed that they designed the DVD themselves, to reflect the hacker theme of the movie, and perhaps also to highlight the growing problem of pirate copying.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a remake of a 2009 Swedish film based on the feted novel by Stieg Larsson. The film stars Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara and is out on DVD in the UK on 23 April.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/f...-DVD-joke.html

















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