Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 26th, '12

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"The number of people who take part in file-sharing on a daily basis has actually risen slightly, from 18 percent in September 2009 to 20 percent in January 2012." – Andy Chalk


"Oracle came in this thinking it was going to win billions, now it will probably walk away losing millions in legal fees." – Colleen Chien



































May 26th, 2012




Supreme Court Lets Stand $675,000 File-Sharing Verdict
David Kravets

The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a $675,000 file-sharing damages award that a jury levied against a college student for making 30 music tracks available on a peer-to-peer network.

Without comment, the high court, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Stephen Breyer not participating, declined an appeal brought by former Boston college student Joel Tenenbaum. His petition claimed that Congress did not intend “unrestrained discretionary jury damage awards against individual citizens for copyright infringement.”

The case before the justices, the second file-sharing case the high court has rejected in the Recording Industry Association of America’s now-defunct litigation campaign against individuals, concerned a decision by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The appellate court had reversed a federal trial judge who slashed the award as “unconstitutionally excessive.” U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner of Boston reduced the verdict to $67,500, or $2,250 for each of the 30 tracks defendant Tenenbaum unlawfully downloaded and shared on Kazaa, a once popular popular file-sharing, peer-to-peer service. The 1st Circuit reinstated the award last year.

It was the nation’s second RIAA file-sharing case against an individual to ever reach a jury.

The Obama administration argued in support of the original award, and said the trial judge went too far when addressing the constitutionality of the Copyright Act’s damages provisions. The act allows damages of up to $150,000 a track.

The appeals court agreed with the government, and said the judge should have considered reducing the jury’s verdict under what is known as “remittitur.” That is a little-used power beholden to judges, and they assert it without considering the constitutional basis of the original award.

“The district court should first have considered the non-constitutional issue of remittitur, which may have obviated any constitutional due process issue and attendant issues,” the appeals court wrote last year. “Had the court ordered remittitur of a particular amount, Sony would have then had a choice. It could have accepted the reduced award. Or, it could have rejected the remittitur, in which case a new trial would have ensued.”

If any of that sounds familiar, the same thing happened in the nation’s first jury trial against a file sharer, Jammie Thomas-Rasset. That case has morphed into a Groundhog Day of sorts for the same reason. After a third trial in that case, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis of Minnesota slashed a jury award from $1.5 million to $54,000 for sharing 24 songs on Kazaa.

The jury’s award was “so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportionate to the offense and obviously unreasonable,” the trial judge wrote in that case. That decision is on appeal.

In either case, the RIAA maintains that judges do not have the power to reduce damages awards in Copyright Act cases at all.

Monday’s outcome does not address the question of how the legal process would ever end if a judge repeatedly reduced the award on remittitur and the plaintiff refused to accept it. That would mean endless trials, a concept not lost on Tenenbaum’s lawyer, Harvard legal scholar Charles Nesson. He urged the justices to review the case to avoid an “endless litigation rathole.”

The RIAA had sued thousands of individuals for file sharing. Most defendants have settled out of court for a few thousand dollars.

Only two such cases have gone to trial, and now in both, monstrous jury verdicts were reduced by the presiding judges for the same reasons.

The significance of Monday’s action by the Supreme Court, however, appears to be minimal in the music-sharing context. The RIAA has abandoned its litigation campaign and instead is working with internet service providers to warn file sharers or kick them off the internet if they repeatedly engage in online copyright infringement.

But whether judges ultimately have the authority to reduce damages awards in Copyright Act cases, even those not involving music, remains unknown. The Supreme Court on Monday declined to answer that question.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...-file-sharing/





US “Six Strikes” Anti-Piracy Scheme Delayed
Ernesto

Soon the file-sharing habits of millions of BitTorrent users in the United States will be monitored as part of an agreement between the MPAA, RIAA, and all the major ISPs. Those caught sharing copyright works will receive several warning messages and will be punished if they continue to infringe. However, it now appears that the much-discussed July start date will have to wait until later in the year as the parties involved may fail to meet the provisional deadline.

throttleIn the coming months the Center for Copyright Information (CCI) will start to track down ‘pirates’ as part of an agreement all major U.S. Internet providers struck with the MPAA and RIAA.

The parties agreed on a system through which copyright infringers are warned that their behavior is unacceptable. After six warnings ISPs may then take a variety of repressive measures, which include slowing down offenders’ connections and temporary disconnections.

The plan was announced under the name ‘Copyright Alerts‘ in July last year and the first ISPs were expected to send out the first warnings before the end of 2011. But this deadline passed silently and as things stand now it looks like the July 1, 2012 deadline is not going to be met by all ISPs either.

TorrentFreak asked the CCI about the upcoming target date, and their response suggests that things may take longer than expected.

“The dates mentioned in the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) are not hard deadlines but were intended to keep us on track to have the Copyright Alert System up and running as quickly as possible and in the most consumer friendly manner possible,” a spokesperson told us.

“We do not intend to launch until we are confident that the program is consumer friendly and able to be implemented in a manner consistent with all of the goals of the MOU. We expect our implementation to begin later this year.”

In other words, it’s taking more time than expected. That said, the CCI did inform us that they have finally selected a third-party company that will be responsible for monitoring BitTorrent swarms. However, the name of the firm remains a secret for now.

“The technology partner we have identified and begun working with is an independent and impartial expert and we expect to have an announcement about the independent expert shortly,” TorrentFreak was told.

As described in the agreement, this independent “technology partner” will first be tested by yet another independent expert to see if their data collection methods stand up to scrutiny. This is a possible reason for the “delay” but there are many more.

At their end the internet providers all have to create a system that allows them to keep track of the warnings. To ensure the privacy of subscribers, this database of alleged pirates is not stored centrally.

Hoping to find out more about what type of punishments ISPs have planned and their views on the agreement, we contacted several of them.

Verizon was quick to respond but didn’t want to provide any details on the planned punishments. The ISP did say that they believe the voluntary agreement is the right solution for the piracy problem.

“Verizon has always said that copyright infringement is wrong and through this voluntary consumer friendly system, we believe we can educate our consumers and offer them access to legal alternatives,” the company told TorrentFreak.

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

Other Internet providers contacted by TorrentFreak, including Comcast and AT&T, did not respond to repeated inquiries about the BitTorrent crackdown.

The CCI, however, ensured TorrentFreak that none of the ISPs has plans to terminate the accounts of subscribers. Temporary disconnections remain as one of the possible punishments. Which measures the various ISPs will choose remains a mystery for now. We’ll publish more on this and other details of the scheme in the near future.
https://torrentfreak.com/us-six-stri...elayed-120518/





Greek Court Orders ISP Blocks on Filesharing Websites
Rhian Jones

A Greek court has ordered the country’s ISPs to start censoring sites that allegedly infringe copyright, following in the footsteps of other courts around Europe.

The blockades were requested by music rights organisations against two specific sites and join blockades of controversial BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay in many countries including both the Netherlands and the UK, TorrentFreak reports.

The Athens First Instance Court has handed down a ruling which orders the country’s ISPs to begin censoring a pair of sites the music industry says are infringing their copyrights on a grand scale.

The first site to be censored is Ellinadiko.com, a music sharing forum, and the second is Music-Bazaar.com, a Russian operated and hosted webstore selling MP3s at low prices.

The blocks will be initiated in two ways. ISPs will have to tamper with their DNS records so that subscribers trying to access the sites will be redirected elsewhere and the IP addresses for the sites will be filtered out.

But according to discussion on Greek file-sharing forums, the IP addresses listed in the court order are no longer in use by either site, having been changed a while ago.

Following similar actions taken by the Dutch and UK Pirate parties, the Greek Pirate Party are indicating that they are “ready to implement any lawful technological measure to ensure freedom of communication, speech and exchange ideas online and in society.”
http://www.musicweek.com/story.asp?s...de=1049653&c=1





Undercover MPAA Agents Expose Alleged Movie Pirates
Ernesto

A British couple are facing imprisonment after an MPAA sting operation revealed they were the owners of streaming links site SurfTheChannel. Aside from the use of an undercover agent who gained access to the defendants’ house under false pretenses, the case also involves an unprecedented involvement of the US authorities with a UK court case, in which a defendant in the US was offered a deal after agreeing to cooperate and testify in a trial overseas.

For years the US movie industry has tried to bring streaming links site SurfTheChannel.com to its knees.

After a chain of events that reads like a Hollywood blockbuster script, the case is now on trial with husband and wife team Anton and Kelly Vickerman as the defendants.

As is often the case, the investigation into the alleged pirate site was not started by the police, but by Hollywood. In 2008 and working closely with the MPAA, the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) hired former Dutch policeman Pascal Hetzschold to try and make contact with SurfTheChannel’s owner.

Using the cover “Roger Van Veen,” Hetzschold pretended to represent a venture capitalist who was interested in the site. After a few emails back forth, SurfTheChannel operator “Anton” agreed to meet with him in London.

During that meeting Anton opened up about the site according to Hetzschold. He allegedly explained that the site made $50,000 in revenue each month from an average of 400,000 visitors per day. Anton also admitted that he founded the site which he ran in collaboration with two other people.

After the meeting was over the two parted company. Or at least, that’s what Anton was led to believe. In reality, Hetzschold tailed the SurfTheChannel owner a distance of nearly 250 miles back to his home in Gateshead where he lived with his wife Kelly.

Now that the MPAA and FACT knew where the couple lived, they were ready to carry out the second part of their plan. In preparation for a possible police raid on the premises, they sent over private investigator Paul Varley as a prospective house buyer. Once he had gained access to the family home Varley took a series of pictures, with a special interest in computer equipment.

The MPAA/FACT undercover operation eventually resulted in a raid on the Vickerman’s home. During the raid it became apparent how closely the Hollywood group had been working together with the authorities. Not only were Hollywood representatives taking part in the questioning, they also brought along investigators who were allowed to examine the equipment.

After looking into the case for a few months, UK authorities decided not to start a criminal prosecution. However, that wasn’t the end of the SurfTheChannel case.

Determined to hold the site’s operators responsible for linking to third party streaming sites, the MPAA focused on a programmer from the United States. After teaming up with the US authorities, a criminal investigation was started against Boston resident Brendan DeBeasi in 2011.

DeBeasi had been hired to maintain and code for SurfTheChannel, for which he was paid the sum of $9,850. For his collaboration with the streaming links site he was charged with conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, facing up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

However, DeBeasi wasn’t convicted in the United States. Instead, he worked out a deal with the authorities who agreed to dismiss the copyright infringement charge in exchange for a testimony in the UK Vickerman trial. In addition, the programmer agreed to pay the MPAA the $9,850 he made from his work at SurfTheChannel.

In other words, the US authorities agreed to drop copyright charges in the US in exchange for a testimony in a UK fraud case, which to our knowledge is unprecedented.

Possibly because of this fresh witness, the criminal prosecution against the Vickerman couple was started after all. In what Hollywood describes as the largest copyright related fraud case in UK history, their trial started last week at Newcastle Crown Court.

During the court hearings some of the above details were brought up, as the Sunday Times reports.

Prosecutor David Groome argued that SurfTheChannel facilitated mass copyright infringement resulting in massive losses for the movie industry. Defense lawyer David Walbank on the other hand noted that the site’s servers were located in Sweden, which means that the site might have not operated illegally under UK law.

The case is expected to last a month but which way it will go is hard to predict. Both are charged with two counts of conspiracy to defraud and pleaded not guilty.

In 2010, linking website TV-Links was deemed to be a ‘mere conduit’ of information and its admins were acquitted. From a functional viewpoint this site was similar to SurfTheChannel.

However, the TV-Links case was conducted on a question of copyright and the charges against the SurfTheChannel operators are for fraud. Nevertheless, a similar approach failed when tested against the former operator of OiNK, Alan Ellis.

Another interesting angle comes from the case against the operators of BitTorrent tracker FileSoup. They had their case dismissed last year after the court concluded that the criminal investigation was built on evidence solely provided by industry groups. As the cloak-and-dagger behavior detailed above illustrates, there can be little doubt that Hollywood was deeply involved in the criminal investigation against SurfTheChannel.
https://torrentfreak.com/undercover-...irates-120521/





Music Pirates Will Be Unmasked, Despite Band’s Protests
enigmax

Despite protests from the band All Shall Perish, the identities of 80 alleged file-sharers of their music are set to be handed over to a Panama-based copyright troll. The manager of the band says he is shocked and angry that the troll had obtained the copyrights to All Shall Perish’s music and has ordered the band’s German-based label to call off the dogs. “The band, their attorney and myself have and will continue to take any steps to protect fans, yes, even those who file trade,” he told us.

As reported last month, a lawsuit filed April 20th in the US District Court For The Middle District of Florida is targeting fans of American metal band All Shall Perish (ASP).

Two issues made this case stand out. One, this is the first time sharers of music have been sued since the RIAA ended its infamous campaign. Two, the suing of All Shall Perish’s fans is being done without the band’s permission. Indeed, the band’s label, Nuclear Blast, didn’t even tell ASP that they’d signed over the band’s copyrights to Panama-based World Digital Rights so that they could sue.

TorrentFreak has kept in touch with ASP manager Ryan Downey who has been hoping that the lawsuit would be withdrawn. However, we discovered that World Digital Rights have persisted with their lawsuit and earlier this month were granted permission from Judge Sheri Polster Chappell to obtain the identities of 80 alleged file-sharers from US ISPs.

We informed Downey of the development and he and the band’s lawyer went away to see what could be done.

“The band’s attorney made it clear to the licensing people [at Nuclear Blast Records] that the band wanted no part in lawsuits against fans. The industry is changing, illegal downloading is troublesome for bands and of course, for record labels, but whatever the solution will be – streaming, subscription, Kickstarter, new ways of looking at it entirely, whatever comes about – the band and I are in agreement (as is their lawyer) that SUING MUSIC FANS SURE ISN’T IT,” Downey told TorrentFreak.

But of course, when this story broke last month Nuclear Blast were already aware that the band didn’t support suing fans yet either couldn’t or wouldn’t stop World Digital Rights persisting with the lawsuit. Clearly the band’s protests needed underlining.

“The licensing folks at Nuclear Blast in Germany took all of this to mean we wanted them to prevent World Digital Rights from pursuing any new actions / claims. I don’t know how we could have been more clear, but, we emphasized again, after receiving your email and being made aware of these new developments, that what we were saying all along was DISMISS ANY AND ALL LAWSUITS AGAINST ALL SHALL PERISH FANS,” Downey told us.

Then this week there appeared to be a breakthrough.

“We were informed [Wednesday] by Nuclear Blast that they would tell World Digital to dismiss all of this. Furthermore, we have pressed (yet again) to ensure the copyright registration returns to the band as owners of all recordings, as nobody else had the right to register the band’s copyrights as World Digital seems to have either done or attempted at some point.”

But while Downey has answered questions and been very responsive, the same cannot be said about Nuclear Blast. Request for comment sent to several members of staff, from those in the licensing department to the label owner, were not responded to.

That said, the silence is not unexpected. While Downey has gone out of his way to be unfailingly polite when speaking to us about Nuclear Blast, using terms such as “hard working”, “passionate”, “communicative” and “supportive”, it’s impossible to overlook the fact that someone there transferred the band’s copyrights to a troll without even having the courtesy to mention it. And that troll continued with the lawsuit despite knowing the band were against it.

The best outcome now is that the whole thing goes away, but it’s still possible that World Digital Rights will persist and people will get settlement demands through the mail. If that happens, recipients will have someone to turn to.

“The band, their attorney and myself have and will continue to take any steps to protect their fans, yes, even those who file trade,” Downey told us. “The band would prefer that their fans legally purchase, stream or otherwise enjoy their music. But they definitely have not, will not and do not wish to sue their fans.”
https://torrentfreak.com/music-pirat...otests-120520/





Judge Seals Identity Information Disclosed by Verizon Prior to Subpoena Return Date in Malibu Media v Does 1-13

You may recall that recently it was revealed, in Malibu Media v. Does 1-13, that Verizon had turned over the identities of its subscribers to the plaintiff's counsel five (5) days PRIOR to the subpoena return date, and three (3) days prior to the Court's order staying enforcement of the subpoena, thus preventing the court from ruling on the pending motion prior to disclosure.

Plaintiff's lawyer, instead of immediately advising the Court, waited ten (10) days, and then calmly made what he called a "motion for clarification" asking for permission to go ahead and use the information.

The Court, far from granting him such permission, has instead explicitly denied him the right to use that information, and ordered him to turn the information over to the Court in an envelope to be sealed by the Court, and to destroy any and all copies in his possession:

Order sealing information voluntarily disclosed by Verizon prior to return date of subpoena and prior to ruling on motion to quash
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...formation.html





Pirate Bay Simplifies Circumvention of ISP Blockades
Ernesto

In their ongoing effort to circumvent the court mandated blockades in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy, The Pirate Bay has added a new website. The site in question is operating from a new IP-address which makes it available directly to blocked subscribers. In addition, the new site is optimized to work with proxies in case the IP-address is blocked in the future.

pirate bayWithin a few days, five of the largest UK Internet providers will all have to censor The Pirate Bay. Virgin and Orange have already implemented the block and the rest must follow before the end of May.

The music companies who asked for the blockade hope it will decrease piracy significantly, but it is doubtful whether this wish will come true.

Already we’ve seen a massive increase in traffic to proxy-websites from the UK, and this is only expected to increase during the coming days. In addition, The Pirate Bay team isn’t sitting still either. They’ve now rolled out a new site which circumvents the UK measures before they’ve even started.

In most countries where The Pirate Bay is blocked it’s done by a domain and IP-address filter. But, since TPB added a new IP-address at 194.71.107.80, blocked subscribers can access the site again without problems. At least for now that is, since in some cases the copyright holders have the power to add new domains and addresses upon request.

The Pirate Bay team is no stranger to this. However, circumventing the blockades directly is not the main reason the IP-address was added. Regular users of TPB will notice that the site hosted on the new address is slightly different from the standard site.

The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that the new site is setup to guarantee maximum compatibility with the many proxy sites that are out there.

“It is made so the people who setup proxies can use the new IP-address instead of coming up with complicated rewrites for static content and stuff. Instead of pointing their proxies to thepiratebay.se they should point it to that IP-address,” we were told.

Aside from making it easier to setup a proxy, the new page is also optimized for proxies in other ways. It will only show links to magnet files for example, and the login, register, comment and upload functions are disabled for security reasons.

So, even if the new IP-address is added to the various blocklists, the new site still functions as a basis for proxy sites.

The above once again shows that it’s virtually impossible to completely prevent people from accessing The Pirate Bay. There are simply too many options for people to route around the block. From visiting a proxy, to simply adding a few lines to their “hosts” file to access the site directly.

It appears that the only working option to stop people from accessing the site is to DDoS it into oblivion. But then again, that’s not really sustainable.
https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-...ckades-120522/





File-Sharing Habits Unhindered by Criminal Crackdown
Andy Chalk

A lot of people just don't see anything wrong with casual copyright infringement.

Generally speaking, most people conform to the dictates of the law because the law proscribes bad behavior: don't kill, don't steal, don't set stuff on fire if it doesn't belong to you, that sort of thing. But the effort to lump file-sharing into the "thou shalt not" pile through the imposition of new laws and harsh criminal penalties is proving to be a tougher sell, particularly among younger people.

The Cybernorms research project at the Lund University in Sweden has found that after a "moderate drop" in the rate of piracy among Swedes aged 15 to 25 in 2009 following the implementation of the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive, rates have stayed relatively flat at around 60 percent. The reason, according to researcher Marcin de Kaminski, is that young people don't actually see anything wrong with piracy.

"As a part of our research regarding cybernorms we try to understand and describe informal social control," he said. "Our results show that young people feel no pressure from neighbors, friends, relatives, teachers etc. to refrain from file sharing. A higher degree of pressure or social control would most possibly have a clear impact on habits and practices regarding file sharing."

The number of people who take part in file-sharing on a daily basis has actually risen slightly, from 18 percent in September 2009 to 20 percent in January 2012, and the biggest effect of the criminalization crackdown appears to be a rise in the use of anonymizing services: over the same period, the number of people using virtual private networks to mask their activities has risen by 40 percent.

"Without support for repressive efforts in social norms the effects tend to result in a feeling of increased risk or danger - rather than [the activity being repressed] actually being considered wrong," Kaminski added.

Laws can change, in other words, but until attitudes fall in line, not much else will.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news...inal-Crackdown





Half Of PC Users Are Pirates, Says Study

One in four UK computer users have installed unlicensed software, says BSA
Max Smolaks

Over half of PC users worldwide have admitted to using pirate software last year, according to a study by the trade group Business Software Alliance (BSA).

BSA’s ninth annual Global Software Piracy Study has shown a sharp increase in software piracy, especially among emerging economies. In the UK, more than one in four programs users installed in 2011 were unlicensed.

Flying the Jolly Roger

In a survey of around 15,000 computer users from a total of 33 countries around the world, 57 percent admitted to using pirated software, up from 42 percent the year before. The BSA estimates that the global annual cost of software piracy has reached $63.4 billion (£40b).

UK is firmly below the global average, with just 27 percent of computer users admitting they have acquired software illegally last year. This translates into an approximate £1.2 billion loss by the software industry.

According to the study, young men are much more likely to use unlicensed software than any other demographic. 28 percent of professed software pirates in the UK are under 34 years old, and 79 percent are male.

“As the UK enters a double-dip recession, it has never been more important to protect the creative industry’s intellectual property and its vital contribution to the economy. However, to do so we need to fundamentally change the way we view and acquire software,” says Julian Swan, director of compliance marketing at BSA EMEA.

The study discovered that more than three quarters (77 percent) of UK PC users surveyed do not think the risk of getting caught is an effective deterrent to software piracy.

According to the UK law, the maximum amount of damages the software developers can claim is equivalent to the cost of the software license. The BSA is calling for a stronger damages law, including double damages, to stop the increase in illegal software use.

The study has also found that computer users in emerging markets are more likely to use pirated software than in mature ones – 68 percent against 24 percent respectively.

By its sheer scale, China has the most troubling piracy problem. Its illegal software market was worth nearly £5.5 billion in 2011 versus a legal market of less than £1.7 billion.
Walking the plank

According to BSA, on average only 20 percent of software pirates consider current enforcement measures a sufficient deterrent to their activities.

“It is clear that the fight against software piracy is far from over. Although emerging markets are of the greatest concern, the problem is still persisting in mature markets, in which one in four admit to using pirated software. One of the more troubling issues is that business decision makers purchase some legitimate copies but then turn a blind eye to further (illegal) installations for new users, locations and devices,” said Robin Fry, commercial services partner at DAC Beachcroft.

“Although, the legal framework currently in place in the UK generally serves the software industry well, readily accessible enforcement could be improved. As an organisation we endeavour to assist our members in protecting their products and take to task those who illicitly seek to exploit them. However, the existing legislative process can be unduly wieldy – so much so that many businesses, and enforcement agencies, are put off,” commented Julian Heathcote Hobbins, general counsel at Federation Against Software Theft.

“It is all very well having the IP rights in place, but unless we can improve the practical enforcement measures, the effectiveness of the laws will be blunted,” he added.

We should note that the previous BSA reports have been criticised by some members of the industry as “propaganda”.

BSA has recently exercised its power by working out a settlement worth £10,000 with the Blackpool-based company George Morrison over its illegal use of Microsoft and Autodesk products.
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news...ys-study-78879





BitTorrent Traffic Booms Due to “Licensing Challenges”
Ernesto

In the U.S., BitTorrent’s share of total Internet traffic is falling sharply and the aggregate share of all P2P sharing applications is now at an all-time low of 12.7 percent. In other parts of the world, however, this trend is noticeably absent. In Europe and the Asia-Pacific region BitTorrent continues to surge. In part this difference can be explained by the lack of legal alternatives.

Over the years we have been following various reports on Internet traffic changes, specifically in relation to BitTorrent. One of the emerging trends is BitTorrent and P2P traffic as a whole losing its share of total Internet traffic, in the U.S. at least.

This downward spiral is confirmed by a recent Sandvine report which reveals that BitTorrent traffic is now responsible for 11.3% of all U.S. Internet traffic during peak hours, compared to 17.3% last year. Although these numbers don’t take into account that absolute traffic has increased, it’s clear that there’s little to no growth in BitTorrent use.

However, this decline appears to be unique to the U.S. When we look at other regions a different pattern can be observed.

In Europe for example, BitTorrent traffic still accounts for 20.32% of all Internet traffic during peak hours, while eDonkey adds another 9.39% to the P2P total. During the last 18 months the share of P2P traffic nearly quadrupled, and this increase is even larger in absolute traffic.

According to Sandvine, the absence of legal alternatives is one of the reasons for these high P2P traffic shares.

“We see higher levels of P2P filesharing than in many other regions, at least partially due to geographical licensing challenges that restrict the availability of legitimate Real-Time Entertainment services.”

A similar trend is visible in the Asia-Pacific region where BitTorrent now accounts for nearly half of all upstream traffic and 27.19% of the aggregate Internet traffic during peak hours. The P2P streaming service PPStream and the Chinese file-sharing client Thunder add another 6.36% and 4.62% to the P2P total.

So, while BitTorrent traffic is stabilizing in the U.S. as its share of Internet traffic drops, the P2P protocol is still hugely popular in other parts of the world.

Sandvine’s suggestion that a lack of legal alternatives is one of the explanations for this seems plausible. As we reported earlier this week, the latest episodes of series such as Game of Thrones are widely pirated on BitTorrent in countries such as Australia and the Netherlands due to airing delays.

In the U.S. on the other hand, the availability of legal content has flourished in recent years. To illustrate this, Sandvine reports that one-third (32.9%) of all downstream traffic during peak hours is now generated by Netflix subscribers. In addition, Hulu has doubled its share in the last year to 1.8%.

The above seems to suggest that due to these alternatives, people are less inclined to pirate.

The MPAA is slowly starting to realize that consumers are not all out to steal content, they simply want to consume.

“I believe it’s critical to find solutions to the challenges facing both these consumers and the people who create the content. Because at the end of the day, this discussion is about consumers and by consumers who love TV shows and movies. They want to be able to access them quickly and safely online,” the MPAA’s Marc Miller wrote yesterday.

True words, but Miller continues with a classic misunderstanding. “No business in the world can compete with ‘free’,” he notes.

As it turns out, the entertainment industry can definitely compete with free, up to a certain point. The crucial part is to remove all the artificial barriers. Release delays for TV and movies drive people towards BitTorrent piracy, just as DRM is an incentive to pirate rather than a deterrent.

The challenge for the entertainment industry in the years to come is not to invent ways to stop piracy but to make it less attractive, by ensuring that consumers get timely access to the content they want independent of their location, and on demand.
https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-...lenges-120524/





Business Matters: Pre-release File Sharing Helps Album Sales, Says a Study. So Why Not Replicate This Legally?
Glenn Peoples

File sharing albums before their release dates reinforces popularity and helps sales, according to a study of BitTorrent traffic by Robert G. Hammond, an assistant professor at North Carolina State University. It's a conclusion that clashes with the music industry's position on file sharing, but there could be some potential.

The study's main finding is an album made available in file-sharing networks a month earlier would sell an additional 60 units. "This increase is sales is small relative to other factors that have been found to affect album sales," Hammond writes.

But not all artists get the same benefit. The positive affect on sales impacts only established, popular artists, not new and relatively unpopular artists. The affect is double for artists who have had an album sell at least 100,000 units and double for artists who have released more than three albums than for newer artists. Hammond keeps these small gains in perspective by acknowledging the far larger effects of promotional efforts such as radio and the benefit of a win or appearance on the annual Grammy Awards.

"File-sharing proponents commonly argue that file sharing democratizes music consumption by 'leveling the playing field' for new/small artists relative to established/popular artists, by allowing artists to have their work heard by a wider audience, lessening the advantage held by established/popular artists in terms of promotional and other support," writes Hammond. "My results suggest that the opposite is happening, which is consistent with evidence on file-sharing behavior."

The study looked only at pre-release albums, not albums after their street dates or individual tracks. Hammond's data source was "the largest network within the BitTorrent protocol" and the largest private (invitation-only) tracker specializing in sound recordings (over 565,000 albums from about 441,000 artists). The study followed 1,095 albums by 1,075 artists from May 2010 to January 2011. The four major label groups released about 37% of the albums in the study. Independent albums distributed by the majors accounted for 22.4% of the albums.

One area of concern with the study is the geographic representation of purchases. The study compares Nielsen SoundScan data to the file-sharing activity of 148,465 people from various countries - including about 80,000 Americans and 11,000 Canadians. However, sales data by Nielsen SoundScan cover only purchases made within the United States (and some of its territories) and Canada. In other words, the purchasing activity of tens of thousands of file sharers does not appear to be represented. Hammond's conclusions might not have changed if only U.S.-based file sharing was tracked, but it's surprising the paper does not even mention this obvious data mismatch or explain if and how it was overcome.

The study's findings may make the music industry at large uncomfortable -- the official line is still that file sharing hurts sales -- and is sure to contribute to the ongoing discussion about the music industry's efforts to stamp out illegal sharing. News of the study spurred the blog TorrentFreak to declare "BitTorrent piracy can act as promotion." If only it were that easy.

The problem in believing piracy helps sales is deciding where to draw the line between legal and illegal. Even if a person or label embraced file sharing for the sake of an individual artist, the larger industry couldn't possibly embrace it. A legal marketplace is important. Implicit in the study is the fact that both buyers and sellers are required in order for pre-release file sharing to have a positive impact on album sales. Without iTunes, Amazon and Best Buy, file-sharers would be just file sharers rather than purchasers. If you carry out the "file sharing should be legal" argument to its logical conclusion, today's retailers will be tomorrow's file-sharing services that integrate with their respective cloud storage services. But to maintain a marketplace, copyright law needs to be enforced enough to keep sellers selling and buyers buying.

But labels can use legal options to try to duplicate the positive impact of pre-release file sharing. For example, many artists offer full or partial album streams before street date at their own web sites or through third parties such as NPR. Some bands -- Coldplay is one that comes to mind -- have opted to release songs on YouTube before street date in order to drive pre-order sales. Subscriptions services are sometimes given albums ahead of street date -- this could become far more commonplace if labels see a corresponding improvement in sales. These are fairly recent developments that have not been studied by economists, but they offer promise without putting the music industry in a position of choosing between legal and illegal promotional vehicles.

Some file sharing will exist in spite of the industry's efforts to stop it (which now includes the participation of Internet service providers in the U.S.). Some of that illegal activity may even help sales of individual albums, as this study suggests. If the industry really wanted to fight file sharing, it would look into better ways to get music to fans before albums' release dates.
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/indus...07125352.story





Illegal File-Sharing Opens North Korea to World
Jeremy Hsu

North Korea's dictatorship has blocked its people from learning about the outside world for more than 60 years. But the wall of propaganda has begun to crack as North Koreans use real-life social networks to illegally share South Korean TV dramas and pop music on everything from DVDs to USB sticks.

Without open Internet access, North Koreans share South Korean dramas or "K-Pop" songs on physical devices with family, friends or trusted acquaintances, according to a U.S. report issued on May 9. Such illegal file-sharing has had a huge impact beyond entertainment — North Korean defectors say it has forced the North Korean regime to abandon some propaganda claims about the outside world.

"I was told when I was young that South Koreans are very poor, but the South Korean dramas proved that just isn't the case," according to a 31-year-old male defector.

The InterMedia report commissioned by the U.S. State Department looked at surveys of hundreds of North Korean defectors who fled to South Korea through China. It found that North Koreans — especially the elite — often get the help of Chinese merchants to smuggle in South Korean TV dramas on DVDs, or USBs and MP3 players filled with K-Pop music. Some people in North Korea's border provinces illegally access foreign TV channels or radio broadcasts.

Talk on the social network

Many North Koreans leverage the power of their real-life social networks to watch South Korean dramas. A majority of defectors watched the TV dramas with family or trusted friends, rather than alone. Most defectors also reported borrowing or buying the South Korean DVDs from family or friends, rather than buying a DVD on the black market.

The South Korean TV shows about family dramas or love triangles have indirectly shown North Koreans how poor their own lives look by comparison (democratic South Korea ranks as the 15th largest economy in the world). The North Korean government has been forced to give up telling its citizens that South Korea is economically worse off than North Korea, according to the report.

North Koreans can legally own TVs, DVD players, radios, mp3 players and USB sticks, and so it's difficult for the North Korean government to control how such technologies are used. A small number of North Koreans also use illegal Chinese cellphones capable of calling outside North Korea — a way of confirming what they see in the TV dramas."Everyone thinks highly of South Korea," according to a 57-year-old male defector.

"They know that China is well off, but that South Korea is even more developed. I became sure of this after asking my relatives and cousins in China whether or not what I had seen and heard in South Korean dramas were true; they said it was."

Illegal music-sharing runs wild

Young North Koreans have also begun following South Korean K-Pop music trends by using legally owned MP3 players — devices meant for listening to language or school lessons. Most defectors who had used an MP3 player said they used it to listen to K-Pop songs. Some reported buying MP3 players from Chinese merchants that were preloaded with such South Korean music.

"About 70-80 percent of people that have MP3/4 players are young people," according to a 44-year-old male defector. "When you do a crackdown of MP3/4 players among high school and university students, you see that 100 percent of them have South Korean music."

Such illegal file-sharing of South Korean TV shows or pop music carries harsh penalties under North Korean law — punishments that far exceed anything given out by Western courts for illegal online file-sharing. But even the repressive North Korean government has been unable to clamp down on its people's desire for outside entertainment and news.

Fewer North Koreans report on neighbors for such illegal activities than ever before, according to the report. Even North Korean officials take bribes to turn a blind eye or use illegal media content themselves.

"No matter how many people die, the sensational popularity doesn't die," said a 25-year-old male defector. "That is the power of culture."
http://www.livescience.com/20494-fil...rth-korea.html





Facebook File Sharing Could Be a Security Nightmare

Facebook has started a trial of a new file-sharing feature where Facebook users can share files in a low-security environment. Facebook file sharing could be problematic not only for the policing of pirated or copyrighted material, but also because it opens the door to a whole new way for File:Computer-globe.svgcyber criminals to infect unsuspecting users.

According to a recent article in InfoWorld, the new feature will be available to Facebook Groups, allowing members of the group to easily share and disseminate files among fellow members. At present, the only restrictions on the feature are the exclusion of music and executable files from the sharing feature, which isn't really much of a restriction at all, as video files, PDF, and Word documents can all contain pirated or copyrighted material, or worse--viruses or malware.

While this new feature will irk file-sharing providers like Dropbox, who provide a similar service to individuals and businesses alike, the implications are more sinister than adding a new competitor into the file-sharing arena.

There are no real security measures in place for the Facebook file-sharing platform, none that might be found on other enterprise file-sharing providers that at a minimum have password protection, and typically many other security protocols in place to protect users from fraudulent or unauthorized user access.

Not only are there only two flimsy restrictions on file types, but Facebook won't be policing the files shared with this feature. On top of this, Facebook Groups are easy to access and anyone can create a fraudulent account and join groups willy-nilly; users are even able to sign their friends up to groups without consent.

While this has an impact for home users, particularly as Facebook is a trusted domain and endusers are not always security savvy, there is also an impact on businesses and particularly organizations that have users who access Facebook.

For IT managers, it opens up a minefield of security issues, especially if their organization operates a Facebook Group, as any file is potentially an infected file. Employees also regularly access Facebook during their lunch breaks and this increases the risk further. IT managers can prohibit employees from using Facebook on company devices. However, with the growing BYOD trend, devices are becoming increasingly difficult for IT managers to control. The issue is particularly problematic for midsize businesses, as the BYOD trend is anticipated to be biggest with smaller businesses due to the associated cost savings.

The lack of security responsibility shown by BYOD users, as discussed by Midsize Insider, should have smaller IT managers concerned about the risk of BYOD policies, as there are more and more ways, such as the new Facebook file-sharing capabilites, for business networks to be compromised.

While many businesses incorporate Facebook and other social networking sites into their business and IT management strategies, with the new file-sharing features rolling out progressively, there is also a need for security considerations to be worked into these strategies as well as employee education on the risks of sharing files in insecure environments like Facebook.
http://midsizeinsider.com/en-us/arti...d-be-a-securit





Senator Admits: SOPA "Really Did Pose Some Risk to the Internet"

A SOPA/PIPA backer recognizes some bits of the bills went too far.
Nate Anderson

Backers of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate companion, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), have been railing against the bill's critics ever since the legislation plunged to a fiery death earlier this year. The unprecedented online protest by Google, Reddit, Wikipedia, Ars Technica, Wired, and others was, the backers say, largely about misleading the public.

But not every backer got the message. As PIPA co-sponsor Senator Chris Coons admitted today, SOPA "really did pose some risk to the Internet."

Change in tone?

Back in January, MPAA boss Chris Dodd raged against his critics:

It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and use their services. It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today. It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests.

A so-called "blackout" is yet another gimmick, albeit a dangerous one, designed to punish elected and administration officials who are working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals.

This became a common theme after the protests; that "misinformation," some of it organized, had doomed some very sensible bills. Recently, though, as the sting of defeat wears off and rightsholders plan their way forward, the tone has changed a bit.

"Google chose wisely by making Hollywood the enemy," Dodd told Variety last week, which sounds like more of the same "corporate pawns" rhetoric. But he added, "We're going to have to be more subtle and consumer-oriented. We're on the wrong track if we describe this as thievery."

This could mean plenty of things—from "we genuinely need to make sure citizens are on board with this, and we'll stop using hyperbole to describe real problems" to "we'll show subtlety by sneaking these bills into trade agreements and parceling them out into bits and pieces of legislation that's harder to oppose." We'll see. But still: the quotes above could be progress of a sort.

The RIAA was likewise unhappy with the outcome of the SOPA fight, but the most recent entry on its blog is called "Cooperation is King."

It is not "content vs. technology," nor is it "past vs. future." It is an understanding of the interdependence between technology and content whose future will ultimately thrive or wither together. But the questions we are asked often is: how do we move toward that dynamic future? In the current political environment, is it realistic to advance any meaningful progress on measures to help the legal marketplace for music?

(Still, the "cooperation" touted in the piece involves private companies like Visa and MasterCard cutting off payments to "rogue" sites, or the new "six strikes" process that Internet providers in the US will largely adopt later this year. "Cooperation" doesn't yet appear to involve any real efforts at engaging actual Internet communities and users.)

Today, PIPA co-sponsor Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) admitted that the legislative approach considered by Congress had gotten the balance wrong. One of his sons woke him up and asked "why I wanted to break the Internet and why Justin Bieber thought I should go to jail," Coons said, as reported by The Hill.

"That was my first warning that we were not communicating effectively," Coons added, but he went on the admit that the issues involved more than "communications." Some bits of the more radical SOPA, in particular, "overreached" and "really did pose some risk to the Internet."

SOPA is certain to return, in some form. Clearly, it will be toned down to make passage more likely—but will SOPA 2.0 just be more rightsholder-drafted legislation covered with band-aids, or will it truly emerge from a collaborative, good-faith negotiating and hearings process that involves not just other giant corporations but citizens and critics, too? The answer to that question will show just how serious everyone is about "cooperation" and about not avoiding "risks to the Internet."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...-the-internet/





Megaupload’s Kim Dotcom Refuses to Give Up Passwords
Ernesto

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is demanding access to 135 computers and hard drives that were seized from his home in January, so the data can be used for his defense. Until then, he refuses to give up passwords to encrypted data stored on the machines. Dotcom’s legal team is challenging the legality of the search warrants at the High Court in Auckland and is accusing the US Government of an unfair fight.

Megaupload continues its legal battle, both in the US and New Zealand.

This week Dotcom and his legal team were at Auckland’s High Court to request a judicial review of the legality of the search warrants that were used to raid his Coatesville mansion in January.

During the hearing Dotcom’s lawyer Paul Davison demanded access to the data stored on the 135 computers and hard drives that were taken into custody.

The lawyer argued that the data is needed to mount a proper defense. Not only to fight the extradition, but also to show that “excessive police action’ was used during the raid. The raid was captured by CCTV data which is stored on the computers in question.

The FBI, however, is objecting to the data handover because some of the files are encrypted. Megaupload’s founder is refusing to hand over the passwords to these files before he’s guaranteed access to the data himself, supervised by the court if needed.

During the hearing Dotcom and his legal team also learned that the data stored on the computers has already been sent to the U.S. authorities. Previously the court had offered assurances that this would not happen without prior warning.

Davison responded to these revelations by saying that the process was “off the rails” and that the rights of Megaupload’s founder have been “subverted”.

Talking to Radio New Zealand, Dotcom’s lawyer Ira Rothken suggests foul play, and alleges that the U.S. Government is trying to get valuable evidence out of New Zealand to obstruct a successful defense.

“Our concerns are that the United States will have New Zealand take all the data and all the hard drives that have been confiscated and remove them from the New Zealand jurisdiction, essentially making it so the New Zealand judiciary cannot exercise New Zealand’s views, New Zealand’s values in fairness and due process, and bring it all over to the United States so that it cannot be used in the extradition hearing.”

The hearings had an emotional affect on the Megaupload founder. When his lawyer recalled how Dotcom was “ripped from his family” in January in a raid which may not have been legitimate, he had to wipe tears from his eyes.

Outside the court Dotcom commented on his emotional reaction.

“It’s just remembering what happened to us which I think was unfair and over the top. It just got to me. I’m just a human being, you know?” he told reporters.

Now that the hearings are over it is up to Judge Winkelmann to decide whether Megaupload’s founder can have access to his personal data, and to decide on the possible judicial review into the legality of the search warrants.

Meanwhile, the U.S. criminal case has gone relatively silent.

Dotcom told TorrentFreak that his legal team is working hard on a reply to the indictment where the “Mega Conspiracy” is accused of engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement.

Whether Megaupload will have to defend itself in the U.S. is still uncertain though. Last month Judge O’Grady informed the FBI that a trial in the United States may never happen because it is impossible to serve a foreign company with criminal charges.
https://torrentfreak.com/megauploads...swords-120523/





Judge In Grooveshark Lawsuit Orders Blog To 'Preserve' Logs That Had Already Been Deleted
Mike Masnick

Earlier this month, we noted a problematic attempt by Grooveshark's parent company, Escape Media, to subpoena information on an anonymous commenter on the blog site Digital Music News. As we noted at the time, Universal Music had referenced that comment in its lawsuit against Grooveshark. It seemed bizarre to reference an anonymous comment, especially one that seemed like pure hearsay (it made claims about things Grooveshark employees had done). In the lawsuit between UMG and Grooveshark it seemed completely pointless (and, indeed, Grooveshark has been arguing as much in that particular lawsuit). Yet, at the same time, Grooveshark subpoenaed DMN in an attempt to find out who posted that comment. DMN resisted the subpoena, noting that it discards and overwrites its log files every few days anyway, and these files had been long gone already. It also pointed to California's shield law for journalists and the basic First Amendment protections for anonymous speech.

Unfortunately, the judge has ruled against Digital Music News, and ordered it to produce the information. The judge has indicated that he will not require this information during the appeal that DMN's lawyer indicated they would file... but did require "preservation" of the evidence during that time. Beyond the shield law and First Amendment issues raised here (we'll get to those), this raises a very, very troubling proposition for any website that regularly overwrites its log files. Escape Media had argued that even if DMN overwrote the log files, it should be required to hand over the information on the subpoena just in case the overwritten data was still available and could be recovered.

So, what do you do in this situation? Under the judge's order to "preserve" data that has already been deleted, what is a site to do? Do they have to immediately stop using their existing hardware and set up an entire clone -- hanging onto all of the original hardware for who knows how long, just in case a forensics expert can find a tiny piece of (useless for this case anyway) data that has been overwritten probably a hundred times already? That seems crazy. Paul Levy, from Public Citizen, who is representing DMN on this issue, highlighted many of the issues in his blog post about this:

The imposition of data preservation requirements on a journalist who is not a party to the litigation raises questions apart from the merits of the order. Journalists need to be able to discard data when they no longer have any of their own use for it. Yes, “the public has a claim to every man’s evidence,” but don’t members of the public who are not involved in litigation have the right to discard information despite the fact that it might turn out to be useful evidence for somebody else’s case? Does the public have a claim to heroic efforts on every man’s part? Shouldn’t there be higher standards for subpoenas demanding intrusive searches for discarded data in the hands of third parties?

The problem is compounded when it is a journalist that has been subpoenaed. To what extent does society have any entitlement to make journalists in particular take heroic measures, such as searching the nooks and crannies of their computer equipment for fragments of discarded data? The judge was sensitive to the fact that our client here is a journalist, telling Escape Media that he was not prepared to allow it to make any general search of Digital Music News’ computers. But an issue that we may have to pursue on appeal is whether a journalist should ever have to undertake such drastic preservation efforts in aid of a lawsuit in which he is not involved, particularly given the relative unlikelihood that fragments of identifying data remain on his computers somewhere.

Indeed, the problem is broader than just journalists. Companies often keep log files with respect to server visits (and hosted comments), but there is little business justification for keeping those logs forever; so generally speaking they are discarded after a period of time (EFF's best practices recommendations are worth a look in this regard). Does the mere act of discarding log files set a company up for the possibility of a demand for forensic examination of the underlying servers, in the hope that some fragment of the data might be recovered? In this regard, the trial court's order has chilling implications for other California companies, even beyond the issue of journalists.

Issues of how to preserve the data remain to be decided. This is not like just leaving one of your file cabinets untouched for a period of time; it is not even as easy as making sure you don't delete any of your email. Preserving the web site while creating a copy of the underlying servers is a complicated process, requiring the services of a forensic specialist, and the cost could be substantial. The estimates that we have been given are well into the five figures; but even the cost of several thousand dollars would be an enormous imposition on this small company.

It really is quite a difficult issue, and if the ruling stands, could become a massive headache for any company in California.

Separately, we should not ignore the First Amendment and shield law issues. DMN is not a party in this case, and it's not even clear why this information is needed. Escape/Grooveshark can and should point out that the information contained in the comment is pure hearsay so it shouldn't have to deal with it in the original case. The company has not filed a defamation claim against the commenter and does not appear to have met the high bar required to unveil an anonymous commenter anyway. This is a pretty big concern for any journalist or blogger out there. Being dragged into a third party dispute because someone comments on your site can represent a pretty big problem for a lot of smaller sites.

While Grooveshark's legal fight against the major labels certainly raises some interesting copyright questions, it's disappointing to see them going down this path and potentially creating serious problems not just for Digital Music News, but tons of journalists and websites.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...-deleted.shtml





Jury Deals Big Blow to Oracle in Android Case Versus Google
Dan Levine

Google Inc's Android mobile platform has not infringed Oracle Corp's patents, a California jury decided, putting an indefinite hold on Oracle's quest for damages in a fight between the two Silicon Valley giants over smartphone technology.

In a case that examined whether computer language that connects programs and operating systems can be copyrighted, Oracle claimed Google's Android tramples on its intellectual property rights to the Java programming language.

Google argued it did not violate Oracle's patents and that Oracle cannot copyright certain parts of Java, an "open-source" or publicly available software language.

In addition to finding for Google on patents, the jury foreman told reporters that the final vote on a key copyright issue earlier in the case had heavily favored Google.

David Sunshine, a New York-based intellectual property lawyer who advises hedge funds, said the outcome of the Google trial was humbling for Oracle, which had it won, could have gained handsome payouts given the growing market for Android devices.

"It's a huge blow," Sunshine said.

For Oracle and its aggressive CEO Larry Ellison, the trial against Google over Java was the first of several scheduled this year against large competitors. Another trial is set to begin next week between Oracle and Hewlett-Packard Co over the Itanium microprocessor.

The verdict was delivered on Wednesday in a San Francisco federal court.

Oracle spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger said the company would continue to defend and uphold Java's unique functionality.

"Oracle presented overwhelming evidence at trial that Google knew it would fragment and damage Java," she said.

Attorneys for Oracle looked grim after the verdict, while Google lawyers smiled and shook hands. Google general counsel Kent Walker said the company felt it was important to send a message by taking the case to trial.

"We didn't want to back down when we felt the facts were on our side," Walker said in an interview with Reuters.

Although the jury found earlier that Oracle had proven copyright infringement for parts of Java, it could not unanimously agree on whether Google could fairly use that material.

Without a finding against Google on the fair use question, Oracle cannot recover damages on the bulk of its copyright claims. And U.S. District Judge William Alsup has not yet decided on several legal issues that could determine how a potential retrial on copyright would unfold, if at all.

Jury foreman Greg Thompson, 52, said that at times he was the only holdout for Oracle on that fair use copyright question. When the jury finally declared itself deadlocked, the final vote count was 9-3 in favor of Google, Thompson said.

According to Thompson, a retirement plan specialist, one of the other jurors used a food analogy to describe Oracle's evidence.

"He said he was waiting for the steak, and all he got was the parsley," Thompson said, adding that in his opinion, Google's arguments in favor of open software collaboration swayed more tech savvy jurors.

All the other jurors filed past reporters outside the courtroom and declined to comment.

Walker said he was briefing a group of Google engineers about the company's legal issues when news of the verdict came in. "There was a real round of applause," he said.

While Oracle is seeking about $1 billion in copyright damages, the patent damages in play were much lower.

In the event it lost on patent liability, Google offered to pay Oracle roughly $2.8 million in damages on the two patents remaining in the case, covering the period through 2011, according to a filing made jointly by the companies before trial.

For future damages, Google proposed paying Oracle 0.5 percent of Android revenue on one patent until it expires this December and 0.015 percent on a second patent until it expires in April 2018. Oracle rejected the proposal.

During trial, Judge Alsup revealed that Android generated roughly $97.7 million in revenue during the first quarter of 2010.

Shares in Oracle closed 1.2 percent higher at $26.68. Google stock was up 1.4 percent at $609.46.

Colleen Chien, a professor at Santa Clara Law in Silicon Valley, said the result shows the risks of IP litigation.

"Oracle came in this thinking it was going to win billions, now it will probably walk away losing millions in legal fees," Chien said.

The case in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, is Oracle America, Inc v. Google Inc, 10-3561.

(Reporting by Dan Levine; Editing by Gary Hill, Richard Chang and Edwina Gibbs)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...84M18K20120524





Google Will Keep Android Free and Open for at Least Five Years
Nathan Ingraham

According to the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and the Associated Press, Google had to agree to keep Android free and available for anyone to use for at least the next five years in order to gain China's approval to purchase Motorola Mobility. There's no more information given on the exact reason for this request, but it seems likely that it was included to allay fears that Google would give Motorola preferential treatment compared to other Android manufacturers. This stipulation removes the possibility of Google closing off Android to other OEMs — though it's worth noting that Google has never given any indication that it was considering such a move.

Of course, Android isn't technically the property of Google — it was created and developed by the Open Handset Alliance, of which Google is a member. While it's obviously the biggest contributor, Google probably couldn't just close off Android from other manufacturers without a bit of a fight. It's also worth noting that Chinese carriers and manufacturers often put forked and heavily customized versions of Android on their devices — this deal keeps Google building and developing the basis for their customizations.

While the deal has yet to close, it appears that this stipulation won't slow things down at all. A Google spokesperson said that "our stance since we agreed to acquire Motorola has not changed, and we look forward to closing the deal," while a Motorola spokesperson said that "we are pleased that the deal has received approval in all jurisdictions and we expect to close early next week." Google's strategy of keeping Android free and open to all has served it well over the last few years, so it doesn't surprise us to hear it plans to continue on that path.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/19/30...ina-regulation





Google Takes Down 1.2 Million Search Links a Month Over Piracy, Copyright Issues
Jeff John Roberts

Google today released a new picture of the millions of links it scrubs from its search results in response to requests from Microsoft, movie studios and other content owners. In a reflection of the evolving nature of anti-piracy enforcement, the company revealed that it takes down 250,000 search links each week over copyright concerns, a figure that exceeds the total number it removed in all of 2009.

The data arrived today as a new section in Google’s Transparency Report, a set of findings that show how governments — and now private actors — are removing pages from the internet.

Google’s senior copyright counsel, Fred von Lohmann, stressed in an interview that the vast majority of the takedown requests are legitimate and come in response to sites offering unauthorized copies of software, entertainment or pornography.

Here is a screenshot from the Transparency Report that shows who is ordering the take downs and which websites most commonly host unauthorized content:

The screenshot also shows how the number of copyright requests is growing exponentially. Google did not say whether this spike is the result of an increase in piracy or instead is due to more sophisticated tools that make it easier for rights owners to detect when their content has been misappropriated. Google says it’s processing requests faster than ever and that its average response time to a takedown demand is now 11 hours.

The figures are sure to add grist to the debate about the prevalence and the reasons for online piracy. Content producers have long complained that internet companies don’t do enough to remove infringing material. On the other hand, journalists and civil libertarians have argued that copyright owners have been too aggressive in their enforcement tactics.

In a blog post on the findings, Google cites an example in which ”a major entertainment company” demanded the removal of a search result that linked to a review of a TV show despite the fact no copyright infringement had occurred. When sites are removed, Google places a notice in its search results and also forwards the information to Chilling Effects, a website run by the EFF and major universities that reports on activities that chill free speech.

But von Lohman added that requests like the one by the entertainment company are often simple errors rather than an attempt to repress criticism. He noted that Google complies with 97 percent of all requests using a combination of human and algorithmic reviews, and that the data is a validation of the current DMCA copyright regime in which internet companies are not liable for the actions of bad actors so long as they comply with notices by rights owners.

The new copyright elements of the Transparency Report may also help Google and other technology companies head off fresh attempts by Hollywood to pass legislation like the failed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

von Lohmann didn’t elaborate on Google’s strategic reasons for releasing the information but did say it will allow policy makers to “consider the data” when evaluating copyright law.
http://gigaom.com/2012/05/24/google-...yright-issues/





Odd That Microsoft Demands Google Take Down Links That Remain In Bing
Mike Masnick

We just wrote about Google's very cool, new copyright transparency tool, which lets you dig into the details of all the search takedowns that Google gets. As people start to play around with the site, some interesting things are coming to light. Lots of people noticed that the number one copyright holder requesting takedowns from Google search was... Microsoft. While some have suggested this is an attempt by a competitor to worsen Google's search rankings, that's difficult to believe for a variety of reasons. If Microsoft were issuing bogus takedowns, that would certainly come to light pretty quickly.

However, what is interesting is that you can use the new system to play around and notice that Microsoft doesn't always seem to take down from its search engine, Bing, the same links that it orders Google to takedown. As we noted in our original post, there's been plenty of talk suggesting that Google isn't fast enough in taking down things upon DMCA request, but the company claims that they average less than 11 hours -- and considering that they're processing over 1 million takedowns per month (and are checking them by hand), that's pretty impressive. How long does it take Microsoft to take content down?

Well, you would think that if Microsoft is sending a takedown notice to Google to remove a site from its search engine, that it's almost certainly letting Bing know to remove it too, right? Why wouldn't it. But if you do some digging, you can find sites that Microsoft has ordered taken down from Google, but which are still available via Bing. Here's just one example. If you look through Google's transparency report, there's a specific search takedown request that was filed on May 11, so not too long ago. You can see the full ChillingEffects notice here as well. The takedown was sent, on behalf of Microsoft, by a company called Marketly, who appears to send a large number of takedowns, according to the Google data. In this case, Marketly had sent a takedown to Google demanding the removal of a bunch of URLs from its index concerning a variety of XBox 360 games, including DiRT 2. The 20th URL listed goes to a page on TorrentRoom.

Now, if you take that URL and put it into Google and Bing, you get two very different responses. First, there's Google:

Okay. As per the takedown, clearly Google has removed that URL from its index. Now how about Microsoft:

Whoops! There it is. Now, it seems pretty reasonable to assume that if Marketly is sending a takedown to Google to get such a link taken out of its search engine, on behalf of Microsoft, that it quite likely is issuing the same kind of takedown to Microsoft's Bing (hell, you'd perhaps think that Microsoft could just pull the link without a takedown). And yet... the site, which Microsoft supposedly wants to disappear, is gone from Google, but found easily on Bing.

This would suggest that, either Marketly and Microsoft decide to leave up certain infringing content on Microsoft's own search engine while taking it down from Google... or that Microsoft certainly isn't that fast at doing removals. And yet, why don't we hear the people who always bitch about Google complaining about Microsoft?

Of course, the data is also revealing some other interesting "issues" with Microsoft's takedowns. Kurt Opsahl, for example, noticed that Microsoft sent Google a takedown, you can view here, which claims that previous takedown notices, also from Microsoft, are in fact, infringing. This one was also sent by "Marketly" and suggests that they don't do much research to make sure the sites are legitimately infringing before issuing takedowns.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...ain-bing.shtml





An Open Letter to Jay Leno About Stealing My Video and Then Getting It Removed From YouTube
Brian Kamerer

Dear Jay Leno,

First off, my intention is not to fight you on this. You have more cars than I have dollars, and so I know I don’t stand a chance legally, and on top of that, I don’t really understand how legal stuff works. But the truth is you kind of fucked up my shit and I need to talk to you about it.

In 2007 my good friend Travis Irvine was running for mayor of his home town, Bexley, Ohio. He asked for help making him a funny campaign commercial. So together, me and my pal Travis composed, performed and recorded an original campaign jingle onto my four track (we did, not you). Then, I directed and shot a silly music video for that song featuring Travis strolling about his town, looking patriotic, friendly and mayoral. Remember that video?

I think you might, because in 2009 Travis called me about it. He was in a frenzy and needed to know if I’d seen your show that night, which of course I had not. You see, Travis had received a call from a high school friend who claimed to have seen Travis on The Jay Leno Show. So the next day, we both watched your show on the internet, and sure enough our video was in a piece at the end. I remember it was at the end because I had to watch the whole show to find it and boy that is a long show, it felt like I was watching forever. How long was your show, like three hours? During the bit you played five stupid local campaign commercials and one of those commercials was the video I was telling you about earlier. After you played our video on national television, you said something like, “I love that song!” as the audience cheered in approval. So thank you for that. It was nice of you.

Anyway, it was a good laugh for Travis and I, but we forgot all about it a few weeks later. End of story, right? Apparently not, Mr. Leno.

I’ll have you know that I was searching for our said video on YouTube, and it turns out that the video has been blocked. Blocked by you! Isn’t that fucked up?

Your company NBC just up and blocked our video and claimed that we are copyright infringers! But we are not! We made it! And this is the video that you said you loved! Now, if you try to watch our video (and again this is the video that had nothing to do with you until you used it in your show without asking) on YouTube it’s just a big black sign that basically says, “the makers of this video stole this video from NBC, so you can’t watch it!” Jay, what in the hell is going on here?

Look, maybe I’m overreacting, and I hope I am. I should let you know, that some of my friends have tried to talk me down and explain copyright laws and YouTube, but I just don’t care. It’s not even about that specific video being blocked, I mean, I’m in the process of uploading that shit on Funny or Die right now. It’s not about that. It’s about you, Jay Leno.

I think I know how this all went down. And in order to help me make my point to you, I’ve written a script, because I want to speak your language. Just imagine this is a sketch on your show. You will play the part of you. Have an intern read the other part:


The Story of Jay Fucking Over Brian and Travis

Written and copyrighted by Brian Kamerer (not Jay Leno or NBC)

INT. WRITERS ROOM

You (Jay Leno) walk into a room filled with writers.

JAY LENO

Writers! Find me some funny video on the internets.

WRITER

Ok, we found this funny music video/campaign commercial, should we take it and play it on your TV show?

JAY LENO

Yes.

WRITER

Should I get in touch with the guys who made it on YouTube or something, and tell them we are going to play it?

JAY LENO

No, of course not.

WRITER

Really? It would be super easy, I could just click here and tell them when the video will air?

JAY LENO

Don’t you dare contact those two boys. Why would two aspiring comedians who made a funny video be interested in their own network television debut? What are they going to do, tell their Moms and their friends that they are going to be on NBC’s The Jay Leno Show? Who cares? Fuck those guys.

The writer shrugs and does his cold dead job for Mr. Leno. Cut to three years later. You, Jay Leno, walk back into the writer’s room.

JAY LENO

Hey remember those loser kids, we played their bit once, remember those guys? Let’s get em.

WRITER

What? Who? Why?

JAY LENO

Those guys, we took their video about three years ago and played it, I loved that song, remember?

WRITER

Oh yeah, sure, I remember those guys. So, what is it you want to do to them?

JAY LENO

I want to have the boys at NBC say that we own the video, so that if they try to watch their video on YouTube, they won’t be able to, and it will look like they stole the video, like Carlos Mencia!

WRITER

Or we could just leave those two nice boys alone. After all, you loved that song, remember?

JAY LENO

You’re fired! Secretary! Get me someone who has the balls to frame these two unknown assholes, so that eventually their work will be blocked on YouTube! And I need fifty more classic cars!

THE END

Jay, I don’t think you’re actually that bad of a guy. According to my friend, you might have been a slightly racist comedian back in the 80s, but I won’t hold it against you because it seems that all comedians were racist and homophobic in the 80s. Let’s just say that my friend is wrong and ignore all that and assume you’re the cool, laid-back, car-nut everyman that I want you to be. So put yourself in my shoes. Or put me in your shoes. Just for a moment, imagine that I did this to you.

Imagine that I am some sort of sexy-Girl-with-the-Dragon-Tattoo-hacker. Now imagine that I’m watching NBC and I use crazy awesome recording gear to make a pirate recording of your opening monologue. Then imagine I take ABC hostage Die-Hard-style and broadcast your monologue on ABC to trillions of people and I manage to steal all of the advertising money, because I’m just that slick. Also, imagine that after all that nonsense, I use my hacker powers to somehow manipulate the internet so that every time people search you on YouTube, a screen comes up saying, “Jay Leno is a Copyright infringer. He steals from Brian.”

Wouldn’t that be fucked up? I mean, I would have to be like a fucking mixture between a criminal and a witch to pull off something like that. And yet you did all of this to me without a problem. Are you a hacker-witch? What I’m trying to say here is that if I did what you did, I would go to jail. You did it, and then probably bought a new sports car!

Jay, I humbly ask you to please stop calling me a thief on YouTube. It’s not true, and I don’t want the YouTube community to think I’m a jerk. And I know you’re reading this going, “Brian, you don’t understand! It’s not me, it’s just some NBC internet robot that scans YouTube videos and then compares the videos to the vast NBC library and just blocks the YouTube videos that match up, because the robot assumes the video has been stolen. Besides, you don’t own anything on YouTube! Don’t be mad at me, funny man Jay Leno! I liked your video! It’s the robot’s fault. The robot fucked up.”

Don’t hide behind NBC on this one, dude. And don’t blame YouTube. And forget about the robots. I’m not talking to the robot now. I’m talking to you, Jay Leno. Where does the buck stop on The Jay Leno Show, if not with Jay Leno himself? The buck stops with you Jay.

Jay, please apologize for using our video without asking, and then getting our video blocked and publicly calling me and my friend Travis thieves. I’m sure you would like to talk this through with us on your television show, but I’d rather meet somewhere more objective. My first choice would be to discuss this with you on the People’s Court. I had hoped arbitration would not be necessary, but I fear we are opening that door. Hope to hear back from you soon!

Love,

Brian Kamerer

http://splitsider.com/2012/05/an-ope...-from-youtube/





'Avengers' Sinks 'Battleship" to Remain No. 1
David Germain

"The Avengers" continues to muscle out everything else Hollywood throws at it, easily sinking naval rival "Battleship" and other new releases.

With $55.1 million domestically, Disney's superhero sensation remained No. 1 for a third-straight weekend and took in more than the three big newcomers combined. Overseas, "The Avengers" added an additional $56 million.

The film is approaching the $1.2 billion mark worldwide, totaling $457.1 million domestically and $723.3 million internationally.

"'The Avengers' is dominating the marketplace so profoundly that the newcomers are having a tough time breaking in now," said Paul Dergarabedian, analyst for box-office tracker Hollywood.com.

Universal's "Battleship" opened a distant No. 2 with $25.4 million domestically, well below industry expectations.

But the board-game adaptation starring Liam Neeson, Taylor Kitsch and Rihanna already has grossed $226.8 million overseas since launching in April, giving it a worldwide total of $252.1 million.

"I would be glad to be No. 2 if we opened to a better number. But given the presence of an absolute juggernaut in the marketplace, there's nothing you can do," said Nikki Rocco, head of distribution for Universal. "Not to have a shot at being No. 1 this weekend is disappointing. But it's a challenge with 'Avengers' out there."

Sacha Baron Cohen's comedy "The Dictator," in which he plays a tyrannical third-world leader, debuted in third-place with $17.4 million for the weekend. Since opening Wednesday, the Paramount release has taken in $24.5 million.

"The Dictator" opened with $30.3 million in 29 overseas markets, giving it a worldwide haul of $54.8 million.

Paramount executives said they were happy with that start, but even a movie aiming for laughs had some trouble making in-roads against "The Avengers."

"This is a full-out comedy, very different than 'Avengers.' But when you've got a movie that big, it just absolutely sucks up the marketplace," said Anthony Marcoly, head of international distribution for Paramount. "But it's also good for the entire business. Hopefully, those that see 'Avengers' will go, 'Hey, I want to see another movie,' and hopefully, they'll think of our movie as a next choice."

Johnny Depp and Tim Burton's vampire romp "Dark Shadows," which opened in second-place a week earlier, slipped to No. 4 with $12.8 million. The Warner Bros. release lifted its domestic total to $50.9 million, a weak result compared to the previous Depp-Burton blockbusters "Alice in Wonderland" and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."

Lionsgate's pregnancy comedy "What to Expect When You're Expecting," featuring Cameron Diaz and Jennifer Lopez, premiered at No. 5 with $10.5 million.

"The Avengers" and the newcomers were unable to maintain Hollywood's sizzling start to the summer season. Overall domestic revenues totaled $144 million, down 14 percent from the same weekend last year, when "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides" opened with $90.2 million, according to Hollywood.com.

At $1.18 billion worldwide, "The Avengers" climbed to the No. 4 spot on the all-time charts, trailing only "Avatar" ($2.8 billion), "Titanic" ($2.2 billion) and "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2" ($1.3 billion).

Domestically, "The Avengers" at $457.1 million is No. 6 all-time but will quickly pass "Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace" ($474.5 million) and the original "Star Wars" ($460.9 million) to take the No. 4 spot.

"Avatar" is No. 1 domestically at $760.5 million, followed by "Titanic" at $658.5 million and "The Dark Knight" at $533.3 million.

Factoring in today's higher admission prices, many older movies sold more tickets than "The Avengers," which also has a price advantage because of the extra few dollars it costs to see the 3-D version.

But the Marvel Comics superhero ensemble has proved an overwhelming lure, drawing in all audience segments and packing in some fans who are seeing it over and over.

"It's a contagious thing that gets not just them back, but their friends back to see it again," said Dave Hollis, head of distribution for Disney. "I'm always happy to see a friendly competition among friends to see who can see the movie the most times."

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Hollywood.com. Where available, latest international numbers are also included. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.

1. "The Avengers," $55.1 million ($56 million international).

2. "Battleship," $25.4 million ($6.5 million international).

3. "The Dictator," $17.4 million ($30.3 million international).

4. "Dark Shadows," $12.8 million ($30.4 million international).

5. "What to Expect When You're Expecting," $10.5 million.

6. "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel," $3.3 million ($1.8 million international).

7. "The Hunger Games," $3 million ($1.5 million international).

8. "Think Like a Man," $2.7 million.

9. "The Lucky One," $1.8 million ($2.7 million international).

10. "The Pirates! Band of Misfits," $1.5 million.

___

Estimated weekend ticket sales at international theaters (excluding the U.S. and Canada) for films distributed overseas by Hollywood studios, according to Rentrak:

1. "The Avengers," $56 million.

2. "Dark Shadows," $30.4 million.

3. "The Dictator," $30.3 million.

4. "American Reunion," $10.2 million.

5. "Battleship," $6.5 million.

6. "All About My Wife," $3.7 million.

7. "Do-nui Mat," $3.5 million.

8. "The Lucky One," $2.7 million.

9. "Rust and Bone," $2.2 million.

10. "The Vow," $2 million.

___

Online:

http://www.hollywood.com

http://www.rentrak.com

___

Universal and Focus are owned by NBC Universal, a unit of Comcast Corp.; Sony, Columbia, Sony Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Classics are units of Sony Corp.; Paramount is owned by Viacom Inc.; Disney, Pixar and Marvel are owned by The Walt Disney Co.; Miramax is owned by Filmyard Holdings LLC; 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight are owned by News Corp.; Warner Bros. and New Line are units of Time Warner Inc.; MGM is owned by a group of former creditors including Highland Capital, Anchorage Advisors and Carl Icahn; Lionsgate is owned by Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.; IFC is owned by AMC Networks Inc.; Rogue is owned by Relativity Media LLC.
http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...-1-3572137.php





Stop. Snap. Move. Repeat for, Oh, 10 or 20 Years.
Robert Ito

FOR the last seven years, John Frame has been working on a film in his home in Wrightwood, Calif. Its cast includes a cockeyed skeleton, a bespectacled monkey and a horned man sporting a cloak adorned with eyeballs. Mr. Frame made all of the characters himself out of wood and found objects, built the sets, even composed the score. When he discovered that his characters were going “wherever they wanted to go,” he let them. For the first four years of the project, he worked completely alone, driven by what may have been a muse or “daemons,” he’s unsure which; not even his closest friends and colleagues knew what he was up to.

Mr. Frame is part of an underground group of stop-motion artists in Southern California who labor in the shadows of the major studios. Long the center of studio-backed stop-motion animation made by artists like Ray Harryhausen and Art Clokey, the area is now home to scores of solo practitioners more interested in creating highly personal art pieces than commercial works. This year looks to be a strong one for stop-motion features, with big-budget releases including Sony Pictures’ “The Pirates! Band of Misfits,” Laika’s “Paranorman” and Disney’s Tim Burton film “Frankenweenie.”

Unlike the creators of those movies, Mr. Frame and his colleagues work alone or with the smallest of crews, creating makeshift studios in their homes. On a typical day, Mr. Frame can film from 1 to 10 seconds of footage, shooting frame by frame: he shoots one, moves a figure’s arm a millimeter or so, shoots another, and so on.

“Most of the stop-mo animators I know are solo animators,” said John Ikuma, editor of the online quarterly Stop Motion Magazine, out of Culver City, Calif. While filming a documentary about Los Angeles’s “garage animators,” Mr. Ikuma found artists working in bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens and on rooftops. Julianne Eckert filmed much of “Goodnight Molly,” her three-minute film, in her rental’s tiny walk-in closet; Michael Granberry, founder of Red Hatchet Films, has produced more than 50 stop-motion pieces in his 538-square-foot Hollywood apartment.

The stop-motion bug bit Mr. Frame in 2005. A sculptor for 25 years, he had called it quits after a long artistic drought. But just two days into his self-imposed retirement, he found himself jolted awake in the middle of the night, with visions of a world unlike any he had seen before. He began jotting down everything he saw: characters with personalities and histories, intricate set designs, snippets of dialogue, action sequences.

“By the end of the day I had about 70 or 80 pages of the stuff,” he said recently at his home in Wrightwood, a secluded town nestled in the northeastern corner of the Angeles National Forest.

Convinced that his sculptures could be brought to life through stop motion, Mr. Frame read every book on the technique he could find. To make his puppets, he went on eBay and bought 19th-century handblown glass doll’s eyes excavated from landfills in Germany. He grew a small verdant field of wheat grass in a spare bedroom for a time-lapse sequence; the score was composed by Mr. Frame in an upstairs room.

The film addresses universal themes of mortality, grief and loss through the smallest of moments: a tiny skeleton pirouettes and blows kisses to an audience of two; a mole-faced man discovers a pair of child’s crutches in the middle of an overgrown field. To date, Mr. Frame has 12 1/2 minutes of footage, the first part of what he said he hoped would be a feature-length collection of animated vignettes.

Mr. Frame often works 12- to 14-hour days on the film and sometimes returns to his studio to hang out with his creations after his wife goes to bed. “I developed a kind of fondness for them,” he said, “almost like pets or something.”

Shelley Noble, a graphic designer and first-time filmmaker, is equally fond of the assorted bugs and beasties that inhabit Halfland, a fantastical forest world she created in her South Los Angeles loft. Built to one-third scale, the stop-motion set — complete with an insect band, a bamboo grove and a frog with watchworks in its translucent belly — occupies about a quarter of her 4,000-square-foot home. To create it, she used tree branches knocked down in a windstorm, paper fished out of the Dumpster of a nearby clothing factory and scrap pieces of wood from local lumberyards.

In 1992, Ms. Noble read a cover story in The New York Times Magazine about Julie Taymor, the director and puppeteer. Ms. Noble wanted to be a part of this world, she said, despite having no art background. A cold call to Ms. Taymor — along with pleas and offers to sweep her workshop floors — led to involvement on three Taymor theater productions, on which, Ms. Noble said, she learned the “fine, traditional art” of mold making, a method used to create both static and stop-motion puppets.

Inspired by the release of Tim Burton’s “Nightmare Before Christmas” and armed with her newfound puppetmaking skills, Ms. Noble began working on her short “Halfland” in 1993. “I tell people it’s a 20-year project,” she said, “because 21 would be nuts.”

When completed, it will consist of 12 vignettes, each a minute or so long: a snail slithering home, hats falling on a cat’s head, bugs having a party. “Sometimes I’ll walk by and go, ‘Wow, there’s a freakin’ storybook in my house,’ ” she said.

Unlike Ms. Noble, the director Greg Jardin used a single material, jelly beans — 288,000 of them — to make a video for the singer Kina Grannis’s single “In Your Arms.”

After persuading Jelly Belly to donate the beans, Mr. Jardin constructed a set in a bedroom of his West Hollywood condo. The video — which includes a snowfall sequence, exploding fireworks and floating penguins — would have been tough enough to animate with just the candies. But Mr. Jardin wanted Ms. Grannis to be stop-motion animated, too, not green-screened, and to interact with the moving beans. She was shot a single frame at a time lying on a sheet of plexiglass a foot and a half above a jelly bean “sandbox.”

From inception to completion, the three-and-a-half minute video took 22 months to create. Released in November, the video quickly went viral; to date, it has garnered more than 6.5 million hits on YouTube.

None of these filmmakers are in it for the money, since for the most part there is little to be had. Mr. Jardin made “In Your Arms” free, his $5,000 budget going for equipment and food. Mr. Frame sells DVDs that include his 12-minute short and a making-of featurette, but these can also be viewed on his Web site free. He’s now financing the next stage of his production through online donations and speaking gigs.

So, a rational person might ask, why go through all the months and years of time and trouble? It’s certainly not for the sheer joy of the process. Mr. Frame, whose film and several of his puppets are currently on display at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, described stop-motion animation as “oftentimes just torture”; Mr. Jardin found much of his shoot “super tedious.”

For these artists, what keeps them going is the possibility of creating works of art without being beholden to anybody’s else’s vision or meddling.

“If you look at the closing credits of ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ or ‘Coraline,’ it’s acres of names, and for obvious reasons,” Mr. Frame said. “Those are big productions, with big production values and big budgets. That’s not what I’m doing. And I realized early on that that isn’t where I aspire to go.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/m...-halfland.html





Older Faces on Screen Draw an Overlooked Crowd
Brooks Barnes

Wait. Stop. Older people will go to the movies if we give them something to watch besides superheroes and special effects?

Surprise: “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” a gentle comedic drama about disparate British retirees who decamp to India, has so far taken in $88.8 million at the global box office. With about $9.3 million in ticket sales in North America since opening in limited release on May 4, “Marigold Hotel” is now the year’s top-selling specialty movie, passing another solid performer, “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.”

Fox Searchlight, the mini-studio behind “Marigold Hotel,” is so encouraged by ticket sales that it is racing the film into more cities. Featuring an ensemble cast anchored by Judi Dench and Maggie Smith (both 77), the film will play about 1,230 locations over Memorial Day weekend, one of the busiest moviegoing periods of the year, up from 354 last weekend. Box Office Analyst, a forecaster in Kansas City, Mo., said “Marigold Hotel” could play into July and take in $30 million or more in North America by the end of its run.

“It’s supply and demand,” said Doug Stone, the company’s president. “There’s just very little out there that appeals to older people. It’s not like they’re going to rush out to see ‘Chernobyl Diaries.’ ”

The robust reception of “Marigold Hotel” by audiences — critical reaction has been strong but not euphoric — validates Searchlight’s dual business strategies. The studio, part of News Corporation’s 20th Century Fox, spotted a generally overlooked audience (older adults) and went after it. The movie is also a prime example of Searchlight’s overall operating philosophy to aim narrowly, which, when successful, allows the studio to spend small and collect big.

“We felt that this was a great story, but we were also very conscious of the fact that there is a large and underserved older audience out there,” said Stephen Gilula, a Searchlight president. “The response, which is far beyond our expectations, once again shows that there is a very diverse moviegoing audience.”

“Marigold Hotel,” directed by John Madden (“Shakespeare in Love”), stands out for another reason. Amid a sea of superheroes (“The Amazing Spider-Man”), alien invasions (“Battleship”) and animation (“Madagascar 3”), there is a severe shortage of reality-based storytelling at the movies. Real people in real situations has become an unlikely attention grabber.

“There’s a big audience, and not just an older one, that is hungry for something that isn’t fantasy,” Mr. Gilula said.

Hollywood has been slower than almost any other industry to market to older people, partly because the 50-and-older crowd tends to avoid opening weekends and doesn’t buy a lot of popcorn. It also has traditionally gone to the movies far less frequently. Moviegoers under 50 (an age range that includes about 67 percent of the United States) bought 77 percent of the tickets last year, compared with 23 percent for those over 50 (33 percent of the population), according to the Motion Picture Association of America.

Younger audiences are more willing to sit through the sequels and remakes the movie studios like to churn out to reduce risk. “If you’re in your 40s or 50s or beyond, you’ve seen a lot of movies in your lifetime and want something that you haven’t seen before,” Mr. Stone said.

But frequent moviegoers — defined by the industry as people who buy tickets once a month or more — were older in 2011 than in the previous year, according to a recent report by the motion picture association. About 20.2 million adults ages 25 and older fit that category last year, a 9 percent increase over 2010. In comparison, about 14.8 million people ages 2 to 24 were frequent moviegoers last year, an 11 percent decline from the previous year.

Hollywood is also starting to realize that the first of 78 million baby boomers are hitting retirement age with some entertainment time to fill and a love affair with movies. So while movie marketers stand on their heads trying to spark positive chatter for films on social networks and blogs, they are also increasingly thinking about word of mouth among retirees, at least for certain films.

Disney and DreamWorks Studios, for instance, held special “War Horse” screenings last year in retirement communities as a part of an outreach program. Searchlight initially focused on retiree hot spots like Arizona and Florida for its “Marigold Hotel” campaign. Some theaters in those areas saw higher ticket sales for Ms. Dench, Ms. Smith and their castmates — Tom Wilkinson, 64, Bill Nighy, 62, Penelope Wilton, 65 — than for “Marvel’s The Avengers.”

“People may be surprised in Hollywood, but the popularity of this film is no mystery to us,” said Laura Resnick, manager at the Plaza Frontenac Cinema, an upscale theater in suburban St. Louis. “When there is a story being told on the screen, people respond.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/24/m...ked-crowd.html





Eugene Polley, Inventor of TV Remote, Dies at 96
Carla K. Johnson

Couch potatoes everywhere can pause and thank Eugene Polley for hours of feet-up channel surfing. His invention, the first wireless TV remote, began as a luxury, but with the introduction of hundreds of channels and viewing technologies it has become a necessity.

Just ask anyone who's lost a remote.

Polley died of natural causes Sunday at a suburban Chicago hospital, said Zenith Electronics spokesman John Taylor. The former Zenith engineer was 96.

In 1955, if you wanted to switch TV channels from "Arthur Godfrey" to "Father Knows Best," you got up from your chair, walked across the room and turned a knob. Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.

Or you could buy a new Zenith television with Flash-Matic tuning. The TV came with a green ray gun-shaped contraption with a red trigger. The advertising promised "TV miracles." The "flash tuner" was "Absolutely harmless to humans!" Most intriguing of all: "You can even shut off annoying commercials while the picture remains on the screen."

Polley was proud of his invention even late in life, Taylor said. He showed visitors at his assisted-living apartment his original Flash-Matic and how it had evolved into the technology of today. "He was a proud owner of a flat-screen TV and modern remote," Taylor said. "He always kept his original remote control with him."

Polley's Flash-Matic pointed a beam of light at photo cells in the corners of the television screen. Each corner activated a different function, turning the picture and sound off and on, and changing the channels.

Chicago native Polley and fellow Zenith engineer Robert Adler were honored in 1997 with an Emmy for their work in pioneering TV remotes. In 2009, he received the Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award from the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers.

Beyond keeping TV viewers pinned to their chairs, Polley's invention unchained technology from mechanical knobs and levers, opening vast possibilities, said Richard Doherty, CEO of suburban New York-based technology assessment and market research company Envisioneering.

"Without his idea you might not have gotten to the Internet," Doherty said. "It allowed you to go beyond the physical dial. It set the pace for dozens for follow-on inventions that go beyond the physical."

During his 47-year career as an engineer, Polley earned 18 U.S. patents. At Zenith, he worked his way up from the stockroom, according to a biography from Lincolnshire, Ill.-based LG Electronics, which owns Zenith. Polley also worked on radar advances for the U.S. Department of Defense during World War II. He helped develop the push-button radio for automobiles and the video disk, a forerunner of today's DVD.

Polley's invention made life easier — perhaps too easy — for a generation of children.

"In my house, the remote control was named Rick," said Doherty. "'Rick, change it to Channel 7. Rick, change it to Channel 2. Rick, go back to the ballgame.' It kept me fitter as a kid."
http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...#photo-2970131





Time Warner Cable Head Sides With TV Networks Over Ad-Erasing Technology
Brian Stelter

The head of one of the country’s biggest cable companies voiced his disapproval of the Dish Network’s ad-erasing technology on Monday, aligning himself with television networks that are trying to squash the technology, called Auto Hop.

Glenn Britt, the chief executive of Time Warner Cable, said Monday that something like Auto Hop could damage the existing ecosystem of television programming and distribution, which depends in part on advertising revenues and in part on subscriber revenues.

“I don’t think we want to destroy one of those revenue streams,” Mr. Britt said at a cable industry conference here.

Translation: don’t expect Time Warner Cable to make something like Auto Hop available to its customers anytime soon.

The Dish Network announced Auto Hop earlier this month as a free add-on for customers who have Dish’s most up-to-date digital video recorder. The service automatically skips the ads on most of the prime time shows on network television. Customers can already skip such ads on their own, but Auto Hop makes it much easier to do so.

The networks quickly criticized the feature and started contemplating ways to stop it. But Dish’s rivals in TV distribution like Time Warner Cable haven’t been as quick to comment. Theoretically, other distributors could make similar technology available to customers.

Mr. Britt said that if such ad-skipping became more prevalent, the reduction in ad revenue would be made up through higher subscriber fees or a lower total amount of production of television.

Speaking on the same panel as Mr. Britt, David Zaslav, the chief executive of one such producer, Discovery Communications, also warned of higher subscriber fees if services like Auto Hop were to spread. He suggested that the chief executive of Dish, Charles W. Ergen, was trying to get the industry’s attention by coming out with the feature.

But Mr. Ergen “needs us,” Mr. Zaslav said, meaning programming, adding, “If there isn’t going to be advertising, then there needs to be a lot higher subscriber fees.”

The third person on the panel, the AOL chief Tim Armstrong, seemed to suggest a third way: “more engaging advertising.” Internet companies are trying new forms of advertising, he said, and maybe TV companies need to try more of that, too.
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.co...ng-technology/





Dish, TV Networks Take Fight Over Ad Zapper to Judges
Liana B. Baker and Jonathan Stempel

A legal battle erupted between DISH Network and some of the major broadcast networks Thursday as the two sides traded lawsuits over the satellite distribution company's "Hopper" DVR, which threatens to bring down the television business model by allowing viewers to skip over commercials entirely.

Dish Network Corp asked a Manhattan federal judge to declare that its "Auto Hop" feature does not infringe any copyright owned by the four major U.S. television networks: Walt Disney Co's ABC, CBS Corp's CBS, News Corp's Fox and Comcast Corp's NBC.

CBS, Fox and NBC, meanwhile, are filing their own lawsuits to stop Dish from transmitting their programs in a way that lets viewers watch them without commercial interruptions. ABC's plans were not immediately clear.

With 14 million subscribers, Dish is the second-largest satellite TV provider in the United States behind DirecTV.

TV networks are upset that Dish, led by billionaire chairman Charles Ergen, would introduce the "Auto Hop" feature that may well please viewers, but would undermine the networks' key source of revenue: advertising.

Dish introduced a high-definition DVR called the Hopper earlier this year and declined to say on Thursday how many of its subscribers are using the new device that contains the ad zapper.

It added Auto Hop on May 10 and began advertising the product just as the networks were conducting their crucial "up-fronts," where they tout their pr programming for the next season to their own advertisers. TV ad spending is estimated to reach more than $200 billion globally in the next five years.

Brean Murray analyst Todd Mitchell said Dish is embroiled in this latest dispute because it is sick of paying high programming fees and wants to negotiate better deals with broadcasters.

"This is about programming costs," Murray said. "Dish is saying, if you want to charge me up to the wazoo, we will disable commercials. But if you charge us less, we can disable the feature."

Ergen has consistently provoked programmers, most recently threatening to drop AMC Networks from its systems and criticizing it for devaluing its content by putting its shows on Netflix. Ergen once publicized the home number of Mel Karmazin, then-CEO of Viacom, during another tussle over fees.

In its complaint, Dish maintained that the Auto Hop lets viewers fast-forward through but not delete commercials, and said the feature does not alter the broadcast signal.

The feature does not affect cable programming, and requires viewers to wait until 1 a.m. on the morning after a show airs before they can skip over commercials.

Dish also said other companies offer products with similar features, citing Microsoft Corp's offering of a commercial-skipping feature as an add-on to its Windows Media Center.

Dish's senior vice president of programming Dave Shull said in an interview that Dish hopes to resolve the matter with networks and that the ad skipping feature "is not nearly as detrimental as they fear."

Fox, in its lawsuit filed in a California federal court, countered that Dish has only "narrow permission" to retransmit its broadcast signals, and should not sell a product that lets it trumpet "commercial-free TV" without permission. It also seeks compensatory and other damages.

Scott Goggin, a Fox spokesman, said Dish's launch of an ad zapper reflects a "clear goal of violating copyrights and destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem," requiring a swift response.

The Dish lawsuit is: Dish Network LLC v. American Broadcasting Cos et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 12-04155. The networks' lawsuits include: Fox Broadcasting Co et al v. Dish Network LLC et al, U.S. District Court, Central District of California; and NBC Studios LLC et al v. Dish Network Corp in the same court.

(Reporting By Liana B. Baker in New York and Jonathan Stempel in Toronto; Editing by Carol Bishopric and Leslie Gevirtz)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...84N1KX20120524





If Video Sites Could Act Like Cable Companies
Brian Stelter

Most consumers have no idea what an M.V.P.D. is, but they mail a check to one every month. What they call Comcast or Time Warner Cable or DirecTV, the government calls a “multichannel video programming distributor,” or M.V.P.D. for short.

When that mouthful of a phrase was coined decades ago, it was pretty easy to identify what was a multichannel distributor — any cable or satellite company — and just as important, what wasn’t. But the Internet is changing that — so profoundly, in fact, that the Federal Communications Commission is now rethinking even the definition of the word “channel.”

In a public comment period that ends in the coming weeks, the commission is asking whether the rules of multichannel distributors — like the right to carry certain popular channels and the responsibility to carry some less popular ones — should apply to new online distributors like Hulu and YouTube. If it decides that they should, then more companies could stream TV shows to computers and smartphones, hastening an industrywide shift to the Internet.

“We recognize it’s going to have very, very broad implications,” said Austin Schlick, the F.C.C. general counsel, at a cable industry conference here on Tuesday.

Many companies are urging the F.C.C. to move carefully, citing the pace of change in the media industry. The Internet has already changed what it means to publish, mail and copy — dictionaries certainly haven’t been able to keep up.

“We’re barely into the second inning of how video distribution will ultimately work,” said Will Richmond, the editor of VideoNuze, an online publication that covers the industry. “Broadband delivery is leveling the playing field for new, deep-pocketed, over-the-top entrants to disrupt the traditional pay-TV model.”

Going “over the top” means atop the Internet infrastructure provided by companies like Comcast. “Somebody’s going to come over the top” and sell a package of cable channels via the Internet at some point, David M. Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery Communications, predicted at the conference on Monday. He did not name any names, but Apple, Google, Sony and Intel, among others, have all at least considered such an offering.

Those companies could theoretically give consumers new ways to buy bundles of programming, breaking open the cable model — though an incumbent cable or telecommunications company would most likely still need to provide Internet access.

A change to the definition of multichannel distributor could make it easier for the companies to acquire programming, analysts say — which may explain why the incumbents have opposed any such change.

This notion was tested a few years ago when a Christian media company called Sky Angel tried to add Mr. Zaslav’s Discovery Channel to the lineup of family-friendly channels that it sells over the Internet. Discovery did not want to sell, but if Sky Angel were legally deemed a multichannel distributor, it would have had to, under current rules.

The F.C.C. staff initially sided with Discovery, but Sky Angel persisted and this spring, the commission decided to ask for input. That is when the panel asked for input: in this day and age, how should we be defining “M.V.P.D.” and “channel,” anyway?

Suddenly, television executives and public interest lobbyists were doubling as lexicographers. “If the F.C.C. comes out the right way on this, it would make it possible for online services like Sky Angel to easily carry popular cable channels and broadcast TV,” said John Bergmayer, a staff lawyer for the public interest group Public Knowledge. “Video distribution could become much more diverse — Sky Angel is a Christian service, after all, and there’s no reason different groups shouldn’t be able to buy TV services tailored to their needs.”

Mr. Bergmayer said Public Knowledge wanted the F.C.C. policies to enable more competition and “demonstrate that new entrants are welcome to try to reach viewers.”

Major distributors like Comcast and Time Warner Cable want the definition of M.V.P.D. to remain rather narrow, to include only those who provide the transmission path for programming, like themselves.

Some broadcasters, however, want the definition to be broadened to include online video sites, because then the sites would be subject to the same rules as cable operators, called retransmission consent, and would have to pay fees for their station signals. A number of online TV start-ups, including the Barry Diller-backed Aereo, are trying to sidestep these rules.

Jack Perry of Syncbak, which helps stations simulcast their signals on the Web, said his company would be able to grow more rapidly if the F.C.C. adopted a “21st-century definition of M.V.P.D.’s.”

“The impact could be huge,” he said. Still other stakeholders, including trade groups that represent giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Netflix, have said that the F.C.C. should take more time before deciding.

In one of many such letters to the F.C.C., the Motion Picture Association of America cautioned that “even small changes to video programming regulations can have a far-reaching impact.”

All this over a four-letter abbreviation — proof that every step toward online TV will be done with care.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/23/b...companies.html





Presidential Panel Urges More Flexible Use of Spectrum
John Markoff

A just-completed report from a presidential advisory committee urges President Obama to adopt new computer technologies to make better use of a huge swath of the radio spectrum now controlled by federal agencies.

The shift, which could be accomplished by presidential signature — and without Congressional involvement — would relieve spectrum congestion caused by the popularity of smartphones, and generate far more revenue for the federal government than auctioning spectrum to wireless carriers, according to the authors of the report.

Making better use of the spectrum for cellphones would allow for more services, more competition and possibly lower prices for consumers using cellphone data services.

The new plan, which calls on the government to electronically rent or lease spectrum for periods of time as short as seconds using newly available computerized radio technologies, was presented publicly Friday to a meeting of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, or PCAST.

The authors of the report included Eric E. Schmidt, the chairman of Google, Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer and Silicon Valley venture capitalists Mark P. Gorenberg and David E. Liddle, among others. The report is scheduled to be presented to the president in June after final editing.

The idea of using computer-based technologies to increase spectrum capacity is catching on rapidly in the United States and overseas. Twice this month in speeches before cellular and cable companies Julius Genachowski, the Federal Communications Commission chairman, has called on industry to embrace spectrum-sharing technologies to make room for the wireless data explosion.

The report is a response to a 2010 memorandum by President Obama calling on federal agencies to find ways to clear 500 megahertz of spectrum to make way for the growth of new wireless services during the next decade. He believes freeing the spectrum will promote economic growth.

The authors cite a recent European study that found that freeing 400 megahertz of radio spectrum to be shared using new technologies would be equivalent to an economic financial stimulus of 800 billion euros.

According to Mr. Gorenberg, who presented the report on Friday before the committee, the amount of wireless data that has been transmitted by the growing legions of smartphones and wirelessly connected tablets has doubled every year for the last four years. He said that there would be as many as 50 billion devices transmitting and receiving wireless data by 2020, leading many in the wireless industry to forecast a spectrum crisis.

However, he said that the committee’s authors believed that agile radio technologies that make it possible for computerized radio systems to share spectrum on a vastly more efficient basis would make it possible to move from an era of scarcity to one of abundance. The central point of the report is that while there is no new spectrum available, new technologies can vastly increase the capacity of existing spectrum.

The report concludes that the radio spectrum could be used as much as 40,000 times as efficiently as it is currently and the committee recommends an approach that could increase capacity 1,000 fold, Mr. Gorenberg said. “We’re living with spectrum that is of a policy that was really set in motion by technology of 100 years ago,” he said. “That’s led to a fragmentation of the spectrum that has led to inefficiency and artificial scarcity.”

Except for several unlicensed frequencies established by the Federal Communications Commission that gave rise to data services like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, today much of the radio spectrum is licensed to both commercial users and government agencies who have no incentive to use the spectrum they control efficiently, he said.

The new radio technology was pioneered during the late 1990s and is described as “cognitive” or “agile” radio. Such computer-controlled radios inside a cellphone can rapidly switch the frequencies they broadcast and receive on based on an arbitrary set of rules. One analogy to describe the technology might be a freeway system, in which individual vehicles could quickly switch lanes or drive more closely together.

The report, which is titled “Realizing the Full Potential of Government-Held Spectrum to Spur Economic Growth,” calls for a tiered system in which different users would have different priority, possibly based on whether they were a government user, a user who was prepared to pay more for a higher quality-of-service,” or a casual user who might be assigned the lowest priority and pay the lowest rate. Unlike today’s unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum, which can be used freely, the newly available spectrum would require devices “register” in a database that would then control the terms of their access to the spectrum.

“One of the reasons we think we will see this dramatic economic expansion around radio-based systems in the future is that we can have a dramatic lowering of the apparent cost of gaining access and that will be facilitated by the registration system,” Mr. Mundie said.

The report also calls on the president to create a “synthetic” currency that could be used to entice federal agencies into offering more spectrum to the system. “The agencies don’t have an incentive to move forward,” he said. “We think a carrot approach is a much better approach.” The proposed system would in effect increase an agency’s budget if it was willing to give up, or share its spectrum.

In response to questions after his presentation, Mr. Gorenberg said that foreign competitors were already aware of the potential economic value of the new radio technologies and that the United States was in a contest to develop systems quickly.

“I think this is a worldwide race,” he said. “There are people looking at this everywhere. This is something that is very important to the U.S. to lead here to have our vendors out front so they can export their products overseas.”

He warned that if the United States failed competitively, the nation would likely see a repeat of the situation in the early 1990s when advanced digital cellular standards were created first in Europe.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/26/t...-spectrum.html





Cable Companies Expand Free Wi-Fi

Five of the nation's largest cable companies are partnering to allow their subscribers free access to each others' Wi-Fi hot spots in cities across the U.S.
Marguerite Reardon

The nation's biggest cable operators are banding together to offer free Wi-Fi access to their broadband customers in more than 50,000 hotspots around the country.

On Monday, Bright House Networks, Cablevision, Comcast, Cox Communications, and Time Warner Cable announced on the first day of the Cable Show here that they'd enable each other's broadband customers to access their metro Wi-Fi hot spots. The companies are calling the new network "CableWiFi," so that subscribers will be able to find the hot spots when they're roaming outside their own cable territory.

In early 2010, Cablevision, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable began allowing their subscribers to roam onto each other's Wi-Fi networks in New York City, Long Island, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Connecticut. And Bright House Networks and Cablevision have already launched CableWiFi alongside their branded WiFi networks around New York City and in central Florida earlier this month.

The CableWifi network will be added to each of the participating cable companies' services in the coming months. This means that Cablevision customers from Long Island will be able to access Time Warner's Wi-Fi networks in Los Angeles, and vice versa.

The way it will work is that customers of any of these cable companies can look for the CableWiFi network and through a simple sign-on process connect using the same credentials as when accessing their own providers' Wi-Fi networks. Once subscribers have signed on once to any of the "CableWiFi" networks, they will be able to automatically authenticate onto any other CableWiFi network, the companies said in a press release.

In total, the cable operators have deployed more than 50,000 Wi-Fi hot spots located in the New York City metro area, Los Angeles, Tampa, Orlando, and Philadelphia. All of the participating cable operators say they plan to continue deploying Wi-Fi hotspots into more cities. The networks are deployed both indoors and outdoors where people congregate. This includes train stations, cafes, malls, arenas, restaurants, parks and beaches.

Cable's troubled history with wireless
Cable operators have been making a big push to deploy Wi-Fi over the past couple of years. They say the service, which is offered for free to its broadband subscribers, is a nice value-added service.

But Wi-Fi isn't the only wireless strategy that these companies have tried. These companies formed a joint venture several years ago to bid on wireless spectrum in the Federal Communications Commission's Advanced Wireless Spectrum auction in 2006. The joint venture known as Spectrum Co. ended up buying more than 20MHz of wireless spectrum. Cox Communications was the only company that ever tried to do something with the wireless spectrum.

Using spectrum it bought in the AWS spectrum auction, as well as additional spectrum it had from the 700MHz auction in 2008, Cox tried to build a regional cellular network of its own. The plan was that the company would bundle wireless service along with its broadband service. But the network barely got off the ground before Cox realized it was too expensive and too difficult to compete in the wireless market against bigger players, such as AT&T and Verizon Wireless.

In November 2011, Cox finally pulled the plug on building its own cellular network.

Cox is now trying to sell its AWS wireless spectrum to Verizon Wireless. And it's also looking for buyers of its 700MHz spectrum.

The rest of the cable companies in Spectrum Co. also plan to sell their AWS spectrum to Verizon Wireless. The deal valued at around $3.6 billion would be one of the largest transfers of wireless licenses without the outright purchase of a company. The FCC is taking a close look at the deal. And several companies, particularly smaller wireless carriers, oppose the sale. These smaller wireless providers believe that Verizon already has plenty of wireless spectrum they are not using.

Some experts had hoped the cable companies would hold onto their spectrum and deploy a network, introducing another major wireless competitor in the market. But instead, the companies don't want to own and operate their own networks. Instead, as part of the deal with Verizon, they will get to the option to resell Verizon's cellular and wireless broadband service to their customers. So if the deal goes through, they will get their branded "quadruple play."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-574...nd-free-wi-fi/





Partnership to Bring Ultrahigh-Speed Internet to Six Communities
John Markoff

A start-up company plans to announce Wednesday that it has raised $200 million to deliver ultrahigh-speed Internet service in six communities surrounding research universities around the country.

The company, Gigabit Squared, will work with Gig.U, an alliance of public and private universities that want to build islands of superfast networks to foster economic development and to promote services like education, health care and scientific research in the communities.

The six communities have not been named. Gigabit Squared, based in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, is in negotiations with its first university and says it will make announcements about timing and participation later this year.

Mark Ansboury, the company’s president and co-founder, said the investment in high-speed wired networks was needed because American telephone and cable companies had shifted their focus to wireless systems, which are convenient but much slower.

“The big carriers built their fiber-to-the-home systems, but we have really seen them pull back in recent years,” he said.

He noted that the United States was falling behind other nations that have moved aggressively to build high-speed Internet infrastructures. It ranked 13th in average connection speed in a survey last year by the network service provider Akamai; the world leader was South Korea, followed by Japan, Hong Kong, the Netherlands and Latvia.

The world’s fastest city was Daegu, South Korea, at 21.8 megabits per second, followed by five other South Korean cities and eight cities in Japan.

Boston, with an average bandwidth of 8.4 megabits, was fastest in the United States but ranked just 51st on the Akamai list.

The United States has not always trailed in broadband speeds. In 1996, @Home, an Internet service provider started by a number of cable companies, charged $40 a month for download speeds up to 5 megabits.

“A decade and a half later we’ve basically doubled our download speeds and we charge roughly the same,” said Milo Medin, the designer of the @Home network service. Today he is vice president of access services at Google, where he is leading an effort to demonstrate the value of ultrahigh-speed networking.

Last year Google selected Kansas City, Mo., to build a prototype for speeds of at least a gigabit — 1,000 megabits per second. The company originally said it would offer the service in the first half of this year, but the date has slipped and Mr. Medin said the details would be announced soon.

Google has already deployed a small demonstration network in homes next to the Stanford campus.

“When our first user was installed, the first thing they did was test the speed of the network and then they downloaded a movie from Apple’s iTunes service,” Mr. Medin said. The service said the movie would take about two and a half hours to download, but it took five minutes.

Gigabit Squared described the next generation of Internet service as two gigabits — about 2,000 megabits per second, roughly 71 times the speed of a standard cable modem.

Still, there is some debate about the value of ultrahigh-speed networking. Most Internet engineers agree that very few applications require such high speeds, except in specialized areas like scientific research and remote medical technology. But proponents argue that the same thing was true in the period between dial-up Internet service and today’s higher-speed links.

“If you treat the communications space as entering into an era of abundance rather than scarcity,” said Reed Hundt, a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, “you can imagine very different use cases.”

Only by deploying next generation networks will it be possible to determine whether services like advanced online education systems and remote medical diagnosis and health care are really the wave of the future.

Gig.U is the brainchild of Blair Levin, former director of the government’s 2010 National Broadband Plan, which originally called for high-speed network islands around military bases. Mr. Levin later settled on university communities as a better starting base for future Internet services.

Even though major communications firms are not pushing toward higher speeds, there are pilot efforts at gigabit networking in several states, including Tennessee, Louisiana and California.

For example, Sonic.net, a regional Internet service provider based in Northern California, is offering gigabit networks to homes on several blocks in Sebastopol, north of San Francisco.

The service is $59.95 a month, said Dane Jasper, Sonic.net’s chief executive, who added, “It’s the fastest and cheapest broadband in America — although it’s admittedly a small footprint.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/23/t...mmunities.html





VoIP Provider Files Net Neutrality Complaint With FCC
Grant Gross

A Florida VoIP carrier has filed a net neutrality complaint against a Georgia utility and broadband provider, after the utility accused the VoIP firm of theft of service for using its network to deliver voice service without paying for it.

L2Networks filed the net neutrality complaint with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission Tuesday, the first formal complaint since the FCC passed net neutrality rules in December 2010. L2Networks' filing comes after the telecommunications manager for the City of Albany Water, Gas & Light Commission, a municipal utility in Georgia, filed a theft-of-service complaint with the Dougherty County Police Department in Albany earlier this year.

Albany Water's assertion that the VoIP (voice over IP) provider should be paying for access to its fiber-optic network violates the FCC's net neutrality rules barring broadband network providers from selectively discriminating against Web-based content and service, L2Networks said in a press release. If the FCC allows Albany Water's attempt to collect payments from L2Networks to move forward, other broadband network operators may be emboldened to seek money from popular Web-based services such as Google, Facebook and Netflix, L2Networks said.

The case could lead to an "irreversible ripple effect along with the creation of various legal challenges across nearly every national content and application provider," L2Networks CEO Kraig Beahn said in a press release. "We are deeply concerned that the alleged claim could potentially change the landscape of the national Internet marketplace as residential and commercial consumers see it today."

The two companies had a business relationship dating back to 2007 that soured in 2011, Beahn said in an email. L2Networks has a "mountain" of documentation related to anticompetitive practices by Albany Water, he said.

"The real issue is the possibility that nearly any ISP can file a theft-of-service complaint if they feel another competitive application service provider intrudes upon their territory or simply wishes to remove such competition from the local marketplace," he added.

Officials with Albany Water did not respond to two email messages and a voice mail message seeking comment on L2Networks' FCC complaint. A spokesman with the Dougherty County Police Department confirmed that Albany Water has filed a theft-of-service complaint and said an investigation is ongoing.

L2Networks, which provides voice and broadband service to about 2,250 business customers in southwestern Georgia, also filed a complaint against Albany Water with the Georgia Public Service Commission in March. The Georgia complaint also accuses Albany Water of temporarily locking L2Networks employees out of a network building leased from Albany Water while there were equipment problems inside the facility.

L2Networks purchases ethernet transport from Albany Water in order to serve its voice and Internet customers, Beahn said. The theft-of-service complaint stems from a single customer that uses L2Networks VoIP service over Albany Water's broadband service, he said. L2Networks also provides IP transit services to Albany Water, he said.
https://www.pcworld.com/businesscent..._with_fcc.html





Analysis: Hard-up Telcos Get Stingy with Mobile Give-Aways
Leila Abboud

Save up now for that new iPhone: the era of free or cut-price phones when signing a new mobile phone contract may be soon be over in Europe.

Telecom companies, facing a profit squeeze from fierce competition and regulatory pressures, are taking the knife to the generous subsidies that allow new mobile customers to get the latest smartphones on the cheap.

Two of Europe's biggest telecom operators, Vodafone and Telefonica, are using Spain as a testing ground for this big change in their business model, while in France a new ultra-low cost mobile player Iliad won clients with a no-subsidy approach.

It's a gamble that could boost telcos' bottom lines but could also lose them customers in recession-hit Europe. And it is likely to hurt mobile phone makers if people hold back from buying the latest smartphone, which at 600 euros-plus often costs more than a flat screen television.

In Europe, telecoms companies' spending on phones more than doubled to 13 billion euros ($16.36 billion) last year, meaning more was spent on phones than on upgrading mobile networks, according to Bernstein Research. Globally, phone subsidies climbed more than 40 percent from 2009 to 2011 to reach $48.5 billion.

"There is a sense of uneasiness about very heavy subsidies and a realization that they are not good for the industry," said Telecom Italia Chief Executive Franco Bernabe at a conference.

Vodafone Chief Executive Vittorio Colao said that operators could now scale back their spending since consumers were addicted to smartphones. "There are now very good Android smartphones available with mid-to-low end pricing, so there is much less need today to heavily subsidize handsets to just fuel data growth," he said on an investor call.

Traditionally, mobile operators buy phones in bulk from manufacturers like Apple or Nokia and then offer them for free or a low upfront cost to customers when they sign a new one or two-year contract.

Although they usually recoup the subsidy during the contract, some firms are concerned that the approach saps profits, especially as the cost of smartphones creeps up and tech-savvy consumers expect upgrades every year.

In Spain, where one in four people are unemployed, market leader Telefonica dropped subsidized mobiles for new customers in March and offered payment plans instead so they can buy them themselves. Vodafone soon followed suit.

Both say they will focus their marketing dollars instead on keeping their customers they already have.

In France, new mobile player Iliad launched its 'Free Mobile' service in mid-January with no phone subsidies whatsoever and rapidly attracted 2.6 million customers, prompting all of its larger rivals to match the model despite initially deriding it.

The marketing chief of Vivendi's SFR Frank Cadoret predicted up to 30 percent of the French would soon buy mobile services this way.

U.S. phone companies, including AT&T and Verizon, are watching developments in Europe closely. They are managing to prosper from the smartphone boom because of better pricing power, and have so far adopted less dramatic measures like delaying phone upgrades and imposing fees of $30 when people get a new mobile.

Sprint Chief Executive Daniel Hesse told Reuters that it was too early to tell whether further measures would be needed. "Obviously the subsidies we pay have been going up, up, up... carriers have to take actions."

Cutting mobile subsidies is not without risk, analysts say, and it's far from certain it will become the norm. They have helped lock-in customers via long-term contracts. Eliminating them means people can leave when they want.

There is always the risk that some companies will stick with subsidies to entice customers. In Spain, third-place player France Telecom is playing the spoiler to Vodafone and Telefonica by keeping subsidies to boost market share.

And by severing the link between the phone and service, telecom operators are also opening the door for smartphone makers to bypass them to market.

"The single biggest card the operators have to play in negotiations with smartphone makers especially Apple is that they control distribution of the phones," said Thomas Wehmeier, telecom analyst at consultancy Informa.

"If they stop subsidizing them, more phone makers could just start selling to customers directly and operators will have even less bargaining power."

Apple already does this discreetly in its U.S. and U.K. stores in partnership with Barclays, offering 6 to 12-month financing for iPhones. Retailers could also jump into the fray. Tesco ran a full-page ad in a London newspaper to tout its financing plans to customers buying iPads.

Apple, Samsung Hit

But the shift could also hurt phone makers, especially Apple and Samsung, which make the most expensive smartphones.

Asian brokerage CLSA estimates that 42 percent of Apple's revenue last year came from telecom companies' mobile subsidies.

Nokia, trying to make a comeback in smartphones, will need marketing and distribution support from telecoms companies if its new Lumia phones are ever to rival the iPhone.

People also might trade down to cheaper models, such as the emerging crop of Chinese-made Android smartphones that cost $150-300 instead of $600-800 for an Apple or Samsung. Or they might just keep the one they have for longer, depressing sales.

In France, phone sales are set to fall from 24 million last year to less than 20 million this year due to Free Mobile's effect, said an executive who declined to be named.

In a worst case scenario where all operators kill subsidies, some $24 billion would be wiped out of the mobile phone market, said Pierre Ferragu, analyst at Bernstein Research.

"We don't think that is likely to happen though," said Ferragu. "Operators in Europe aren't getting rid of subsidies but just offloading them to partner banks via financing plans, so we think consumer behavior won't be affected too much."

Experiments

How it all plays out will depend on how consumers react and how telecom operators position themselves in each market.

In France, 25 year-old Natalie Reynaud says she recently bought her own iPhone 4S and signed up for Free Mobile. "I like that I can switch operators freely and not be tied into a long contract," she said, adding that mobile subsidies offered by France Telecom or SFR didn't tempt her. Reynaud also passed up a consumer loan offered by Free Mobile in partnership with a local bank because she didn't want to pay interest.

France's established firms, France Telecom, SFR, and Bouygues Telecom plan to keep subsidies for their mainstream business as a way to attract clients.

"People have finally realized that premium smartphones cost the same price as a television! Few people want to lay out that sum at the beginning of their contracts," said Olivier Roussat, who heads Bouygues Telecom.

But he admits firms will probably have to cut subsidies over time. "If the French market heads to average monthly bill around 20 or 30 euros a month, it's obvious that we won't be able to subsidies mobiles."

In Spain, it's too early to tell how the three-month old subsidy shift will evolve. In the first quarter, which included only March under the new policy, Telefonica lost 170,000 mobile subscribers, Vodafone lost 90,000, while France Telecom gained 130,000 subscribers.

José María Álvarez-Pallete López, who heads Telefonica's European businesses, told investors that the company knew it would lose customers initially but felt this was the right thing to do to keep its most valuable subscribers and improve profits.

"We think this is a change that is needed at a sector level," he said.

A Bernstein analysis predicted that Telefonica and Vodafone could potentially add 25 percent to operating profit in Spain.

But a sales clerk at a Phone House store in Madrid said that she had seen more customers opting for Orange since Vodafone and Telefonica got rid of subsidies. "People are in a hurry to pick up the iPhone from Orange, because they are afraid that Orange will also cut the subsidies in a near future," she said.

($1 = 0.7947 euros)

(Reporting by Leila Abboud, Robert Hetz in Madrid, Sinead Carew in New York, and Kate Holton in London. Editing by Jane Merriman)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...84O0DS20120525





How Canada's Telecom Companies Have Secretly Supported Internet Surveillance Legislation
Michael Geist

Canada's proposed Internet surveillance was back in the news last week after speculation grew that government intends to keep the bill in legislative limbo until it dies on the order paper. Public Safety Minister Vic Toews denied the reports, maintaining that Bill C-30 will still be sent to committee for further study.

Since its introduction in mid-February, the privacy and law enforcement communities have continued to express their views on the bill, but Canada's telecom service providers, which include the major telecom carriers and Internet service providers, have remained strangely silent. The silence is surprising given the enormous implications of the bill for the privacy of their customers and the possibility of millions of dollars in new surveillance equipment costs, active cooperation with law enforcement, and employee background checks.

While some attribute the Internet surveillance silence to an attempt to avoid picking sides in the high stakes privacy and security battle, documents obtained under the Access to Information Act offer a different, more troubling explanation. My weekly technology law column notes (Toronto Star version, homepage version) in the months leading up to the introduction Bill C-30, Canada's telecom companies worked actively with government officials to identify key issues and to develop a secret Industry - Government Collaborative Forum on Lawful Access.

The secret working group includes virtually all the major telecom and cable companies, whose representatives have been granted Government of Canada Secret level security clearance and signed non-disclosure agreements. The group is led by Bell Canada on the industry side and Public Safety for the government.

The inaugural meeting, held just three weeks before Bill C-30 was introduced, included invitations to eleven companies (Bell Canada, Cogeco, Eagle, MTS Allstream, Quebecor, Research In Motion, Rogers, Sasktel, Telus, Vidéotron, and Wind Mobile) along with two industry associations (the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association and the Canadian Network Operators Consortium).

The secret working group is designed to create an open channel for discussion between telecom providers and government. As the uproar over Bill C-30 was generating front-page news across the country, Bell reached out to government to indicate that "it was working its way through C-30 with great interest" and expressed desire for a meeting to discuss disclosure of subscriber information. A few weeks later, it sent another request seeking details on equipment obligations to assist in its costing exercises.

Months before the January 2012 meeting, officials worked with the telecom companies to identify many concerns and provide guidance on the government's intent on Internet surveillance regulations, information that has never been publicly released.

For example, a December 2011 draft list of lawful access issues features questions about surveillance of social networks, cloud computing facilities, and Wi-Fi networks. The telecom companies raise many questions about compensation, such as "a formula for adequate compensation" for the disclosure of subscriber information as well as payment for testing surveillance capabilities and providing surveillance assistance.

At a September 2011 meeting that included Bell Canada, Cogeco, RIM, Telus, Rogers, Microsoft, and the Information Technology Association of Canada, government officials provided a lawful access regulations policy document that offered guidance on plans for extensive regulations that will ultimately accompany the Internet surveillance legislation.

The 17-page document indicates that providers will be required to disclose certain subscriber information without a warrant within 48 hours and within 30 minutes in exceptional circumstances. Interceptions of communications may also need to be established within 30 minutes of a request with capabilities that include simultaneous interceptions for five law enforcement agencies.

The close cooperation between the government and telecom providers has created a two-tier approach to Internet surveillance policy, granting privileged access and information for telecom providers. Meanwhile, privacy and civil society groups, opposition MPs, and millions of interested Canadians are kept in the dark about the full extent of the government's plans. The public has already indicated its opposition to the bill. The secrecy and backroom industry talks associated with Bill C-30 provides yet another reason to hit the reset button.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6505/135/





FBI Quietly Forms Secretive Net-Surveillance Unit

CNET has learned that the FBI has formed a Domestic Communications Assistance Center, which is tasked with developing new electronic surveillance technologies, including intercepting Internet, wireless, and VoIP communications.
Declan McCullagh

The FBI has recently formed a secretive surveillance unit with an ambitious goal: to invent technology that will let police more readily eavesdrop on Internet and wireless communications.

The establishment of the Quantico, Va.-based unit, which is also staffed by agents from the U.S. Marshals Service and the Drug Enforcement Agency, is a response to technological developments that FBI officials believe outpace law enforcement's ability to listen in on private communications.

While the FBI has been tight-lipped about the creation of its Domestic Communications Assistance Center, or DCAC -- it declined to respond to requests made two days ago about who's running it, for instance -- CNET has pieced together information about its operations through interviews and a review of internal government documents.

DCAC's mandate is broad, covering everything from trying to intercept and decode Skype conversations to building custom wiretap hardware or analyzing the gigabytes of data that a wireless provider or social network might turn over in response to a court order. It's also designed to serve as a kind of surveillance help desk for state, local, and other federal police.

The center represents the technological component of the bureau's "Going Dark" Internet wiretapping push, which was allocated $54 million by a Senate committee last month. The legal component is no less important: as CNET reported on May 4, the FBI wants Internet companies not to oppose a proposed law that would require social-networks and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail to build in backdoors for government surveillance.

During an appearance last year on Capitol Hill, then-FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni referred in passing, without elaboration, to "individually tailored" surveillance solutions and "very sophisticated criminals." Caproni said that new laws targeting social networks and voice over Internet Protocol conversations were required because "individually tailored solutions have to be the exception and not the rule."

Caproni was referring to the DCAC's charge of creating customized surveillance technologies aimed at a specific individual or company, according to a person familiar with the FBI's efforts in this area.

An FBI job announcement for the DCAC that had an application deadline of May 2 provides additional details. It asks applicants to list their experience with "electronic surveillance standards" including PacketCable (used in cable modems); QChat (used in push-to-talk mobile phones); and T1.678 (VoIP communications). One required skill for the position, which pays up to $136,771 a year, is evaluating "electronic surveillance solutions" for "emerging" technologies.

"We would expect that capabilities like CIPAV would be an example" of what the DCAC will create, says Steve Bock, president of Colorado-based Subsentio, referring to the FBI's remotely-installed spyware that it has used to identify extortionists, database-deleting hackers, child molesters, and hitmen.

Bock, whose company helps companies comply with the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) and has consulted for the Justice Department, says he anticipates "that Internet and wireless will be two key focus areas" for the DCAC. VoIP will be a third, he says.

For its part, the FBI responded to queries this week with a statement about the center, which it also refers to as the National Domestic Communications Assistance Center (even Caproni has used both names interchangeably), saying:

The NDCAC will have the functionality to leverage the research and development efforts of federal, state, and local law enforcement with respect to electronic surveillance capabilities and facilitate the sharing of technology among law enforcement agencies. Technical personnel from other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies will be able to obtain advice and guidance if they have difficulty in attempting to implement lawful electronic surveillance court orders.

It is important to point out that the NDCAC will not be responsible for the actual execution of any electronic surveillance court orders and will not have any direct operational or investigative role in investigations. It will provide the technical knowledge and referrals in response to law enforcement's requests for technical assistance.

Here's the full text of the FBI's statement in a Google+ post.

One person familiar with the FBI's procedures told CNET that the DCAC is in the process of being launched but is not yet operational. A public Justice Department document, however, refers to the DCAC as "recently established."

"They're doing the best they can to avoid being transparent"

The FBI has disclosed little information about the DCAC, and what has been previously made public about the center was primarily through budget requests sent to congressional committees. The DCAC doesn't even have a Web page.

"The big question for me is why there isn't more transparency about what's going on?" asks Jennifer Lynch, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group in San Francisco. "We should know more about the program and what the FBI is doing. Which carriers they're working with -- which carriers they're having problems with. They're doing the best they can to avoid being transparent."

The DCAC concept dates back at least four years. FBI director Robert Mueller was briefed on it in early 2008, internal FBI documents show. In January 2008, Charles Smith, a supervisory special agent and section chief in the FBI's Operational Technology Division, sent e-mail to other division officials asking for proposals for the DCAC's budget.

When it comes to developing new surveillance technologies, Quantico is the U.S. government's equivalent of a Silicon Valley incubator. In addition to housing the FBI's Operational Technological Division, which boasts of developing the "latest and greatest investigative technologies to catch terrorists and criminals" and took the lead in creating the DCAC, it's also home to the FBI's Engineering Research Facility, the DEA's Office of Investigative Technology, and the U.S. Marshals' Technical Operations Group. In 2008, Wired.com reported that the FBI has "direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier's systems" through a high-speed DS-3 link to Quantico.

The Senate appropriations committee said in a report last month that, for electronic surveillance capabilities, it authorizes "$54,178,000, which is equal to both the request and the fiscal year 2012 enacted level. These funds will support the Domestic Communications Assistance Center, providing for increased coordination regarding lawful electronic surveillance amongst the law enforcement community and with the communications industry." (It's unclear whether all of those funds will go to the DCAC.)

In trying to convince Congress to spend taxpayers' dollars on the DCAC, the FBI has received help from local law enforcement agencies that like the idea of electronic surveillance aid. A Justice Department funding request for the 2013 fiscal year predicts DCAC will "facilitate the sharing of solutions and know-how among federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies" and will be welcomed by telecommunications companies who "prefer to standardize and centralize electronic surveillance."

A 2010 resolution from the International Association of Chiefs of Police -- a reliable FBI ally on these topics -- requests that "Congress and the White House support the National Domestic Communications Assistance Center Business Plan."

The FBI has also had help from the Drug Enforcement Administration, which last year requested $1.5 million to fund eight additional DCAC positions. DEA administrator Michele Leonhart has said the funds will go to "develop these new electronic surveillance capabilities." The DEA did not respond to CNET's request for comment.

An intriguing hint of where the DCAC might collaborate with the National Security Agency appeared in author James Bamford's article in the April issue of Wired magazine. Bamford said, citing an unidentified senior NSA official, that the agency has "made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems" -- an obstacle that law enforcement has encountered in investigations.

Eventually, the FBI may be forced to lift the cloak of secrecy that has surrounded the DCAC's creation. On May 2, a House of Representatives committee directed the bureau to disclose "participation by other agencies and the accomplishments of the center to date" three months after the legislation is enacted.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-574...eillance-unit/





FCC Urged to Revoke Fox News' License
David McNew

A watchdog group in Washington is telling the Federal Communication Commission that the hacking scandal plaguing Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. is enough reason to revoke the media mogul’s broadcasting license in the States.

The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sent a letter to the FCC this week demanding that the federal agency that oversees America’s airwaves suspend the more than two dozen licenses issued to News Corp. that permits them to publish content to Fox affiliates from coast-to-coast. Citing a recent review by Great Britain’s House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, CREW insists that the condemnation out of the UK is enough reason to come down on News Corp. state-side.

“Under US law, broadcast frequencies may be used only by people of good ‘character,’ who will serve ‘the public interest,’ and speak with ‘candor’,” reads the press release issued on Monday from CREW’s DC office. “Significant character deficiencies may warrant disqualification from holding a license.”

CREW calls into question particular remarks made overseas last month regarding the flawed policies that have almost caused the collapse of the News Corp. empire. Since being linked to an in-depth phone hacking scandal in the UK, not only was Murdoch forced to fold his New of the World periodical but a handful of top-ranking employees under his massive media empire have been forced to resign from their high-paying positions. After going before investigators in the UK last month, Murdoch’s reign over American media may be at risk over remarks made about the News Corp. owner.

Not only did the UK Committee come to a consensus that both Rupert and Hames Murdoch ignored illicit activity within the ranks of News. Corp, but the investigators deemed the CEO’s testimony “barely credible.”

Additionally, the Committee concluded that Murdoch was “not a fit person to exercise stewardship of a major international company.”

“The Commons Committee report concluded Rupert Murdoch ‘did not take steps to become fully informed about phone hacking’ committed by News International journalists and ‘turned a blind eye and exhibited willful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications,’” explains CREW this week. “Similarly, the committee found that James Murdoch exhibited a ‘lack of curiosity…willful ignorance even,’ regarding the hacking crisis”.

“The House of Commons report makes clear that both Rupert and James Murdoch were complicit in New Corp.’s illegal activities. If the Murdochs don’t meet the British standards of character test, it is hard to see how they can meet the American standard,” adds CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan.

CREW also says that, based on evidence uncovered as early as last summer, the watchdog group asked the United States Congress to consider opening an investigation on News Corp. last summer.

“Based on emerging evidence that News Corp. had engaged in extensive and illegal phone hacking, CREW previously sent a letter to the House and Senate Commerce Committees in July 2011 requesting congressional hearings on this matter.”

In the last 12 months, both the US Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have considered News Corp’s role in illicit behavior in America. Now after the probe overseas, CREW is asking the FCC to revoke 27 separate licenses issued to Fox channels in the US.

“News Corp. has a pattern of outrageous and illegal conduct, including bribery, wire fraud, computer, and phone hacking,” adds Sloan.“If the FCC won’t act to revoke Fox’s broadcast licenses, Congress should immediately hold hearings. Retaining U.S. broadcast licenses is a privilege, not a right.”
https://rt.com/usa/news/fcc-corp-fox-murdoch-459/





RSA SecurID Software Token Cloning: a New How-To

The attack bypasses protections built in RSA's 2-factor authentication system.
Dan Goodin

A researcher has devised a method that attackers with control over a victim's computer can use to clone the secret software token that RSA's SecurID uses to generate one-time passwords.

The technique, described on Thursday by a senior security analyst at a firm called SensePost, has important implications for the safekeeping of the tokens. An estimated 40 million people use these to access confidential data belonging to government agencies, military contractors, and corporations. Scrutiny of the widely used two-factor authentication system has grown since last year, when RSA revealed that intruders on its networks stole sensitive SecurID information that could be used to reduce its security. Defense contractor Lockheed Martin later confirmed that a separate attack on its systems was aided by the theft of the RSA data.

Last week's blog post by SensePost's Behrang Fouladi demonstrated another way determined attackers could in certain cases circumvent protections built into SecurID. By reverse engineering software used to manage the cryptographic software tokens on computers running Microsoft's Windows operating system, he found that the secret "seed" was easy for people with control over the machines to deduce and copy. He provided step-by-step instructions for others to follow in order to demonstrate how easy it is to create clones that mimic verbatim the output of a targeted SecurID token.

"When the above has been performed, you should have successfully cloned the victim's software token and if they run the SecurID software token program on your computer, it will generate the exact same random numbers that are displayed on the victim's token," Fouladi wrote.

He arrived at that conclusion by reverse engineering the Windows software that allows SecurID users to make one-time passwords appear on their PCs, rather than on match-case-sized hardware tokens RSA provides. The cryptographic seed values at the heart of the SecurID system make it mathematically infeasible for others to predict the output that changes every 90 seconds or so, but only if the values remain secret.

RSA spokesman Kevin Kempskie told Ars: "It's not uncommon for a large software company like ours to see security researchers demonstrate theoretical attacks on a product. We have a really experienced product security team and we take these things very seriously and we're going to have them take a closer look at it."

Fouladi discovered that the RSA seed value is easy to obtain by anyone with access to a computer that's lost, stolen, or has been compromised with a backdoor trojan. By reading chunks of data returned by a proprietary Microsoft security interface known as the data protection application programming interface (DPAPI), an attacker can deduce the value. Even when an optional copy protection known as a token binding is in place, it can be bypassed because the required serial number is determined by a combination of the host name and current user's Windows security identifier stored on the computer.

He told Ars that smartphones that are lost or stolen might be susceptible to similar attacks, although he stressed he has no reason to believe that the values can be remotely retrieved from smartphones infected with malware as long as the devices haven't been jailbroken or rooted.

"Should people stop using the SecurID software tokens?" he wrote in an e-mail. "It depends. It is dependent on the probability of the device being stolen or malicious applications installed from a dubious source. Personally, for high-risk situations, for example government agency laptops for staff that travel and frequently have to connect back to secure networks, using the token, I wouldn't recommend it."

Fouladi noted that both RSA and its customers have been targeted by highly motivated hackers, so attack scenarios in which PCs are infected or stolen aren't unrealistic. He suggested the sensitive RSA data should be managed by a industry-wide specification known as the TPM, or trusted platform module.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2012...loning-attack/





New York Legislation Would Ban Anonymous Online Speech
David Kravets

Did you hear the one about the New York state lawmakers who forgot about the First Amendment in the name of combating cyberbullying and “baseless political attacks”?

Proposed legislation in both chambers would require New York-based websites, such as blogs and newspapers, to “remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post.”

No votes on the measures have been taken. But unless the First Amendment is repealed, they stand no chance of surviving any constitutional scrutiny even if they were approved.

Republican Assemblyman Jim Conte said the legislation would cut down on “mean-spirited and baseless political attacks” and “turns the spotlight on cyberbullies by forcing them to reveal their identity.”

Had the internet been around in the late 1700s, perhaps the anonymously written Federalist Papers would have to be taken down unless Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay revealed themselves.

“This statute would essentially destroy the ability to speak anonymously online on sites in New York,” said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney with the Center for Democracy and Technology. He added that the legislation provides a “heckler’s veto to anybody who disagrees with or doesn’t like what an anonymous poster said.”

Sen. Thomas O’Mara, a Republican who is also sponsoring the measure, said it would “help lend some accountability to the internet age.”

A cynic, however, might see an attempt by lawmakers to prop up Facebook’s falling stock price via an implicit endorsement of the Facebook model of identity on the internet.

The Senate and Assembly measures, which are identical, cover messages on social networks, blogs, message boards or “any other discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages.”

The bills also demand those sites to have a contact number or e-mail address posted for “such removal requests, clearly visible in any sections where comments are posted.”

Oddly, the bill has no identification requirement for those who request the takedown of anonymous content.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ne-speech-ban/





Kaspersky Calls For Cyber-Weapons Convention

Cyber-weapons are cheap, democracy is dying, and social media is dangerous – the dark prophecy of Eugene Kaspersky
Max Smolaks

World governments need a cyber-weapons convention like those for chemical and nuclear arms, warned Eugene Kaspersky during his opening keynote speech at the CeBIT Australia conference that started in Sydney today.

He also highlighted social media manipulation as an emerging security threat, and predicted that democracy will be dead in two decades, unless citizens are provided with safe mechanisms to vote online, reports Australian website ITwire.

Scaremongering

Kaspersky Lab, headquartered in Moscow, is the largest developer of cyber-security and threat management solutions in Europe. The company’s products and technologies provide protection for over 300 million users and more than 200,000 corporate clients worldwide. The charismatic founder of the company Eugene has become a notable spokesman for the IT security industry, recently lashing out against free antivirus vendors and Apple’s iOS.

In his speech, Kaspersky mentioned the Stuxnet worm as an example of a cyber-weapon that was capable of damaging physical infrastructure. He said these modern weapons were “a thousand times cheaper” to develop than conventional bombs or missiles, and as such, were even more dangerous.

An even scarier prospect would be for someone to develop cyber-weapons with unintended bugs, which could wreak more havoc than planned. “Cyber weapons are the most dangerous innovation this century,” said Kaspersky.

Countries like China, Russia, the UK, the US and Japan are currently spearheading cyber-weapon development. Another round of cyber war games between US and China is scheduled to run sometime this month.

Kaspersky also warned CeBIT delegates that unless young citizens were provided with safe and reliable ways to vote online, democracy as we know it could be dead within 20 years. He predicted that in time, younger people would stop going to physical polling booths, which, in the absence of an alternative voting method, could lead to a political crisis.

Kaspersky also highlighted social media manipulation as one of the most challenging issues with regard to future Internet security. “If the wrong people have a good strategy (for social media manipulation) it will be dangerous for…global security,” he said.

According to Kaspersky, there were two choices before governments – either a free, but dangerous Internet, or a policed version, which would at least be safe. “I’m afraid I have no scenario in between,” he concluded.
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news...-weapons-79136





WATCH: This Is How Easy It is For Thieves To Steal Everything In Your Wallet
Mandi Woodruff

The idea that you could be pick-pocketed without anyone actually picking your pocket at all is frightening enough. But seeing it in action is a whole different story.

Providence's NBC 10 took an identity theft expert to the streets to show consumers how easy it is. He slipped an RFID card scanner (you can find them on eBay for as little as 50 bucks) into an iPad case and went to town.

The worst part is there's virtually no way to protect yourself from scanners other than investing in a special wallet or credit card sleeves that block them. They can read straight through handbags and coat pockets.

It's another reason credit lenders are pushing for more EMV microchip-powered cards. Unlike a regular RFID card which stores all your info on a magnetic strip, EMV cards can't be scanned.

Check out the video below to see how easy card theft can be (our hats go off to the guy who found a DIY way to prevent theft – wrapping his cards up in aluminum foil).
http://www.businessinsider.com/watch...-wallet-2012-5





Bredolab Botnet Author Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison in Armenia

He was found guilty of using the botnet to launch multiple DDoS attacks
Lucian Constantin

The creator of the Bredolab malware received a four-year prison sentence in Armenia on Monday for using his botnet to launch DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks that damaged multiple computer systems owned by private individuals and organizations.

G. Avanesov was sentenced by the Court of First Instance of Armenia's Arabkir and Kanaker-Zeytun administrative districts for offenses under Part 3 of the Article 253 of the country's Criminal Code -- intentionally causing damage to a computer system with severe consequences, the Office of Armenia's Prosecutor General said.

According to local media reports, G. Avanesov's full name is Georgy Avanesov, sometimes spelled as Georgi Avanesov, and he is a 27-year-old Russian citizen of Armenian descent.

Avanesov was arrested in October 2010 at Zvartnots airport in Yerevan, Armenia, a day after the Dutch High Tech Crime Unit disrupted the Bredolab botnet and seized 143 servers that were used to control it.

The Bredolab botnet was primarily used to send spam emails and launch DDoS attacks. The Dutch authorities estimated that over 30 million computers had been infected with the malware.

During pretrial questioning, Avanesov reportedly admitted having created the Bredolab malware, but claimed that he passed it on to an unknown individual without knowledge of the latter's criminal intentions, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) said.

Avanesov was also initially charged with altering information stored on a computer system through means of unauthorized access, stealing computer data, creating hacking software with the intention of selling it and distributing malicious software.

However, all of those charges were dropped because of a decree of "General Amnesty on the Occasion of the 20th Anniversary of the Independence Declaration of the Republic of Armenia" that was adopted by Armenia's National Assembly on May 26, 2011, the Prosecutor's General Office said.

One of the attacks that Avanesov was found guilty of instrumenting took place on Oct. 1, 2010, and targeted a Russian telecommunication company called Macomnet.

Avanesov instructed 25 percent of his botnet to hit a Macomnet IP address, which resulted in damage to the company's networking equipment and service downtime for around 192 of its customers, the Prosecutor's General Office said.

Avanesov is the first person to be jailed in Armenia for offenses related to cyber crime, RFE/RL said.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/arti...rison_armenia/





New Jersey Mayor, Son, Arrested on Charges They Nuked Recall Website

The father and son used a low tech hack—password recovery—to take down the site.
Dan Goodin

The mayor of a small New Jersey hamlet has been arrested, along with his son, on federal charges that they shut down a website advocating the mayor's recall after breaking into the online accounts of political foes.

According to federal officials, Felix Roque, the 55-year-old mayor of West New York, New Jersey, and his son, Joseph Roque, 22, were arrested early Thursday morning by FBI agents. In February, the pair planned and executed the silencing of www.recallroque.com by gaining unauthorized access to the GoDaddy account used to control the domain name. An FBI special agent filed documents with these allegations in a New Jersey federal court. The father-and-son team also obtained e-mails and messages sent among opponents after gaining unauthorized access to e-mail and Facebook accounts.

"I have always treated you with respect and courtesy, but I have copies of everything sent to the website and communications with names," Mayor Roque wrote in an e-mail to one of the opponents, whose identity had remained unknown to the Roques until they gained illegal access to the accounts. "Remember, I am in the Army with many friends."

Hacking for amateurs

According to the account of FBI Special Agent Ignace Ertilus, Felix and Joseph Roque took a keen interest in the recall site as early as February. In an attempt to learn the identity of the person behind the site, the younger Roque set up an e-mail account under a fictitious name and contacted an address listed on the website. He offered some "very good leads" if the person would agree to meet him. When the requests were repeatedly rebuffed, Joseph Rogue allegedly tried another route. He pointed his browser to Google and typed the search strings "hacking a Go Daddy Site," "recallroque log-in," and "html hacking tutorial."

He eventually figured out how to reset the e-mail account that was used to register recallroque.com domain with GoDaddy, according to Ertilus. On February 8 at 4:49 pm, after gaining control of the GoDaddy account, he allegedly cancelled the domain name. This caused the recall website to go dark. Records of calls sent to and received by the cellphones of the two Roques indicated the two were in frequent contact during the eight hours when the son took over the accounts, Ertilus alleged.

Following the shutdown, Mayor Roque used the messages retrieved from the compromised accounts to identify the people who ran and supported it. On February 9, he used his iPhone to call the Hudson County (New Jersey) government official, identified in the criminal complaint as Victim 1, who had anonymously established the recall website. The older Roque then claimed to have proof that the official was involved with the site.

"Mayor Roque stated that he, the Mayor, had a friend in high levels of government who had shut the Recall Website down," the complaint alleged. "According to Victim 1, Mayor Roque stated that everyone would pay for getting involved against him."

The complaint was unsealed Thursday morning. It's the latest reminder that even in a world of sophisticated hacks and James Bond-style espionage malware, the most effective attacks often rely on trickery that is considerably more low-tech. Account takeovers affecting then-vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, celebrity Xbox gamers, and ISP Comcast have all been pulled off by exploiting weaknesses in the way Yahoo, Microsoft, and other services go about resetting passwords reported as forgotten. To combat the practice, Google, Facebook, and a variety of other companies have begun using one-time passwords sent to cell phones or other "out-of-band" devices when performing sensitive account changes such as password resets.

The Roques are both charged with three counts of intentionally accessing computers without authorization or intentionally causing damage to a protected computer. They are scheduled to appear in court on Thursday afternoon. They have not yet entered a plea in the case. West New York is located about seven miles west of Manhattan and has a population of about 50,000, according to US census data. Ironically, Mayor Roque reportedly came to office after leading a successful recall against the previous mayor, Sal Vega. A press release from the US attorney's office in New Jersey is here.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2012...ecall-website/





Protecting State Secrets as Intellectual Property: A Strategy for Prosecuting WikiLeaks

James Freedman

Stanford Law School

Stanford Journal of International Law Vol. 48, No. 1, p. 185, 2012

Abstract:
Criminal statutes generally deployed against those who leak classified government documents — such as the Espionage Act of 1917 — are ill-equipped to go after third-party international distribution organizations like WikiLeaks. One potential tool that could be used to prosecute WikiLeaks is copyright law. The use of copyright law in this context is rarely mentioned, and when it is, the approach is largely derided by experts, who decry it as contrary to the purposes of copyright. Using copyright to protect state secrets, however, particularly if done through suit in a foreign court, escapes a number of the impediments to a WikiLeaks prosecution, such as the limited scope of narrowly tailored U.S. criminal statutes or the need to apply U.S. law extraterritorially and extradite defendants. Admittedly, using copyright law for these purposes presents its own set of problems, perhaps most intractable under U.S. law, but still significant in the case of suits brought in a foreign court under foreign law. This Note will explore these difficulties, such as the government works issue, potential fair use or fair dealing defenses, as well as various non-legal obstacles to success, eventually reaching the conclusion that prosecuting WikiLeaks internationally for copyright violations is potentially more viable than any of the methods of criminal prosecution heretofore explored publicly by government attorneys and legal scholars.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...act_id=2042692





ANONYMOUS - Monday Mail Mayhem

Greetings world,
We are Anonymous.
Today we are releaseing 1.7GB of data that used to belong to the United States Bureau of Justice, until now.
Within the booty you may find lots of shiny things such as internal emails, and the entire database dump.
We Lulzed as they took the website down after being owned, clearly showing they were scared of what inevitably happened.

We do not stand for any government or parties, we stand for freedom of people, freedom of speech and freedom of information.
We are releasing data to spread information, to allow the people to be heard and to know the corruption in their government. We are releasing it to end the corruption that exists, and truly make those who are being oppressed free.
The price we pay very often is our own freedom. The price governments pay is the exposure of their corruption and the truth being revealed, for the truth will set us free in the end.
So once more we call on you. Hackers, activists, and freedom fighters; join us in our struggle against these corporate

Download:
https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/7287...eau_of_Justice
http://anonnews.org/press/item/1521/





Anonymous Hacks RCom Servers, Warns Govt Against Web Censorship
TNN

Users connected to web through RCom could not access websites like Twitter and Facebook today after hackers belonging to Anonymous allegedly hacked company's servers.

NEW DELHI: Users connected to the web through the network provided by Reliance Communications (RCom) could not access popular websites like Twitter and Facebook on Saturday morning after hackers allegedly belonging to a group called Anonymous hacked the company's servers. When users typed www.twitter.com or www.facebook.com in the browser they were redirected to a page put up by the hackers that warned Indian government and internet service providers "not to mess with free speech and lesser with Anonymous".

Several hours after TOI sought RCom's version of the events, the company came up with a vague statement: "We have investigated the matter and confirm that all RCOM servers and websites are intact and have required preventive measures in place for intrusion."

On Friday, the hackers had released a list of websites and weblinks that were allegedly blocked on RCom network even though there was no legal mandate to do so.

Anonymous, a loosely-knit hacker collective, has been in the news for the last two years for high-profile attacks on government websites across the world to protest what it perceives as web censorship.

In the message to web users, the hackers said, "People We for 1 entire week attacked government websites, run by your money and no one in your government cared, then we decided to hit the Rich guys in the entertainment and IPL and Reliance and your government sprang into action. Shame on this government."

Last week the Anonymous hackers had attacked tens of Indian government websites, including the Supreme Court website, when several ISPs in the country blocked some file-sharing websites after an order against piracy by Madras High Court. These hackers were using a Twitter handle (opindia_revenge) to communicate with the world. However, after some time the account was suspended.

The hackers said that Twitter suspended the account after a request from the Indian government. "We tried to do a slow, non violent protest and government decided to cover out mouths we will not sit idle while our freedom is take away. When we started to speak truth, the government of India forced our online twitter account @Opindia_revenge to be suspended," noted the message on Saturday.

"We give you 24Hours at maximum to give our twitter account back and apologize... Give @OpIndia_Revenge BACK," the hackers said in the message. Now, they are allegedly using @Opindia_back on Twitter.

On Friday, the hackers had held a virtual press conference in an internet relay chat room. Apart from releasing the block list allegedly maintained by RCom, they also called people to protest against web censorship in the real world on June 9 by wearing Guy Fawkes masks.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/t...w/13526067.cms





Hackers Set June 9 Deadline to Unblock Sites
Mihir Patkar

Hacking ISP (internet service provider) Reliance Communications in the latest edition of its web attacks, Anonymous OpIndia set an ultimatum to the government to unblock all file-sharing websites as well as any other website that might have been restricted by ISPs and the government. The group has set up a Facebook page titled 'Occupy India #protest for internet freedom (File Sharing Websites Blocked)', which calls for a physical protest next month.

Speaking to TOI, Anonymous said, "June 9 is the deadline for the government to unblock the sites - all of them. If they will not do it, they will be badly hit by us. A lot of defacements of government websites will happen. Many physical protests will take place."

Dr Gulshan Rai, director general at Computer Emergency Response Team India (CERT-In), said, "The government is not involved in the blocking of websites. It was an order issued by the courts and the government has had no part in it."

Responding to the ultimatum, he said, "I deplore the threats issued by the hackers and the attacks carried out by them on IT infrastructure over the past weeks. We will protect all the government websites from any hacker attacks, as we have done in the past."

On Friday night and Saturday, Reliance users trying to access popular websites were redirected to a protest message. "When we started to speak the truth, the government of India forced our online Twitter account @Opindia_revenge to be suspended," it said, going on to attack private organizations, the government, opposition parties as well as and the media. However, it also had links to redirect users to the site they were trying to access.

Releasing admin logs from servers they hacked, Anonymous OpIndia alleged that Reliance had blocked certain web pages, including the Facebook pages of staff protesting against Air India.

"We have investigated the matter and confirm that all servers and websites are intact and have required preventive measures in place for intrusions," said a Reliance Communications spokesperson.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/i...w/13542072.cms





60TB Disk Drives Could be a Reality in 2016

Hard disk drive industry will continue to grow despite SSD encroachment
Lucas Mearian

The maximum areal densities of hard disk drives are expected to more than double by 2016, according to an IHS iSuppli storage space market report published Monday.

While the data may not be new -- hard drive company Seagate has also predicted a doubling of drive density -- IHS iSuppli has confirmed what the vendor community already knew.

IHS iSuppli said the increase in densities should bode well for the continued sales of hard drives in data-intensive applications such as video and audio systems, the market research firm stated.

Leading the way for greater disk density will be technologies such as heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), which Seagate patented in 2006. Seagate has already said it will be able to produce a 60TB 3.5-in. hard drive by 2016. Laptop drives could reach 10TB to 20TB in the same time frame, IHS iSuppli stated.

According to IHS iSuppli, areal densities are projected to climb to a maximum 1,800 Gbits per square inch per platter by 2016, up from 744 Gbits per square inch in 2011. Areal density equals bit density, or bits of information per inch of a track multiplied by tracks per inch on a drive platter.

From 2011 to 2016, the five-year compound annual growth rate for HDD areal densities will be equivalent to 19%, IHS iSuppli wrote in its report.

This year, hard drive areal densities are estimated to reach 780Gbits per square inch per platter, and then rise to 900Gbits per square inch next year.

"The rise in areal density will pave the way for continued growth of the [hard disk drive] industry," said Fang Zhang, an analyst for storage systems at IHS.

Zhang noted that despite technical limitations associated with today's leading technology for writing to a drive - perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) - other technologies such as HAMR will continue to drive up capacity.

Prior to HAMR, the most significant breakthrough in drive density was (PMR), which Seagate and Hitachi use in their drives today.

PMR technology is also expected to allow companies to reach the one terabyte per square inch milestone in the next few years, but that will also mark the technology's upper limits, Seagate and others have said.

"In particular, growth opportunities will lie in applications associated with mass enterprise storage requirements, gaming, and in digital video recorders (DVRs) where massive capacity is required to store high-definition video," Zhang said.

Seagate began shipping today's highest areal density disk in September 2011. That drive, designed for desktop apps, boasted 4TB of capacity in a 3.5-in form factor. The drive had five platters with 625 Gbits per square inch, or the equivalent to more than 1TB of capacity per platter.
https://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...eality_in_2016





The Collapse of Moore’s Law: Physicist Says It’s Already Happening
Matt Peckham

Moore’s Law is finally breaking down, according to theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. He’s talking about the so-called law that says the number of transistors that can be fit on a computer chip will double every two years, resulting in periodic increases in computing power.

According to Kaku:

…in about ten years or so, we will see the collapse of Moore’s Law. In fact, already, already we see a slowing down of Moore’s Law. Computer power simply cannot maintain its rapid exponential rise using standard silicon technology. Intel Corporation has admitted this.

It’s true. At the International Supercomputing Conference 2011 last June, Intel architecture group VP Kirk Skaugen said something about Moore’s Law not being sufficient, by itself, for the company to ramp up to exascale performance by 2018. But he went on to tout Intel’s tri-gate technology (the company’s so-called “3D” processors) as the solution, which Skaugen claimed translates to “no more end of life for Moore’s Law.”

Moore’s Law, introduced by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in a 1965 paper, was never a law in any scientific sense — it’s always been more a rule of thumb (that, and “Moore’s Rule” sounds so much less authoritative). And as others have pointed out, given Intel’s dominance in the chip industry for much of the period in which Moore’s Law has applied (or appeared to), there’s a self-fulfilling prophecy angle in which the dominant industry player sets the pace for its own benefit.

Moore also clarified in a 2003 interview that the idea of computer power doubling every 18 months — sometimes mistaken as the basis of Moore’s Law — was advanced by Intel’s David House. While such performance gains could be achieved by Moore’s prediction that transistor counts would double every two years, House apparently calculated that transistors would get faster as well, resulting in computing performance doubling every 18 months (in a later 2005 interview, Moore admitted “we’re doing a little better than [24 months]“).

Despite Intel’s recent advances with tri-gate processors, Kaku argues the company has merely prolonged the inevitable: the law’s collapse due to heat and leakage issues.

“So there is an ultimate limit set by the laws of thermal dynamics and set by the laws of quantum mechanics as to how much computing power you can do with silicon,” says Kaku, noting “That’s the reason why the age of silicon will eventually come to a close,” and arguing that Moore’s Law could “flatten out completely” by 2022.

Where do we go once Gordon Moore’s axiom runs out of steam? Kaku hypothesizes several options: protein computers, DNA computers, optical computers, quantum computers and molecular computers. And then he makes a bet:

If I were to put money on the table I would say that in the next ten years as Moore’s Law slows down, we will tweak it. We will tweak it with three-dimensional chips, maybe optical chips, tweak it with known technology pushing the limits, squeezing what we can.

Kaku then invokes parallelism as another stop-gap measure, a concept that’s been around for decades, but assuming the exponential requirements for processing power hold, “Sooner or later even three-dimensional chips, even parallel processing, will be exhausted and we’ll have to go to the post-silicon era,” says Kaku.

How would a molecular computer work? Imagine molecules in the shape of a valve, says Kaku.

You turn the valve one way and the electricity stops through that molecule. You turn it the other way and electricity flows through that molecule just like a pipe and a valve because that’s what a transistor is, a switch, except this switch is molecular rather than a switch made out of piping.

But molecular computing has mass production issues because — surprise! — molecules are teeny-tiny. Why in the world, then, would Kaku invoke even smaller particle-based computers as a viable alternative?

Because quantum computing could produce the “ultimate computer.” Kaku doesn’t explain why, but I’ll summarize: Digital computers set bits to either “0″ or “1,” but in a quantum computer, the bits can be “0″ and “1,” at the same time, allowing for incredibly fast calculations according to a principle called “superposition.” The problem, and you knew there’d be one, is something called “decoherence.” Kaku explains:

Let’s say I have two atoms and they vibrate in unison. If I have two atoms and they vibrate in unison I can shine a light wave and flip one over and do a calculation, but they have to first start vibrating in unison. Eventually an airplane goes over. Eventually a child walks in front of your apparatus. Eventually somebody coughs and then all of the sudden they’re no longer in synchronization. It gets contaminated by disturbances from the outside world. Once you lose the coherence, the computer is useless.

Given that, Kaku says that when Moore’s Law finally collapses by the end of the next decade, we’ll “simply tweak [it] a bit with chip-like computers in three dimensions.” Beyond that, he says “we may have to go to molecular computers and perhaps late in the 21st century quantum computers.”
http://techland.time.com/2012/05/01/...ady-happening/





Printed Books Existed Nearly 600 Years Before Gutenberg’s Bible
Annalee Newitz

It is a little-known but undisputed historical fact that Johannes Gutenberg did not invent the printing press. Though the Gutenberg Bible was certainly the first mass produced printed work, it was hardly the first printed book — nor was it even the first made using movable type. Chinese and Korean inventors had been producing printed books for centuries before Gutenberg was born.

One of the truisms of Western history is that a German guy named Gutenberg invented the printing press, changing the course of civilization forever. There is no doubt that Gutenberg's printing press was a novel technology. But to say that he invented the printing press is like saying Steve Jobs or Bill Gates invented the computer. He certainly made it a commercially available device, but Gutenberg's role was as a popularizer and entrepreneur. As a technology, the printing press has its origins in Asia, where it existed for centuries before making its way to the West. Gutenberg's real genius was in adapting the technology for a Western market, capitalizing on a few quirks of the Roman alphabet to bring printed books to the mainstream.

What is a "Printed Book"?

Though we can claim printed books existed since the first letters were pressed into clay from stone carvings, generally historians call woodblocks, or woodcuts, the first printing mechanism. The printer would carve letters and pictures into a flat block of wood, ink the wood, and then transfer the images to cloth or paper by pressing the wood against it. If you've ever used a rubber stamp, it's the same idea — except using wood instead of rubber. Woodblock printing might be painstaking, but once you had your carved wood, you could print several copies of each page from it before the wood was no longer usable. Plus, you would be guaranteed that every copy of the book would be exactly the same, unlike books copied by scribes who often made mistakes or introduced weird jokes into the text.

There are examples of woodblock printing going back almost 1800 years, but the earliest woodblock-printed paper book that we can reliably date is the Chinese book, Diamond Sutra (pictured above), created in 868. You can see it on display now at the British Library. Even after hundreds of years, the book's lettering and illustrations are crisp and clear.

The Movable Type Revolution

After centuries of woodblock printing, a humble man named Bi Sheng invented movable type in the 1000s. Movable type is a system where each character (or letter, if you're in a Western context) is carved or cast into a separate piece of material. These characters are then arranged on a block, inked, and pressed against paper. The characters can be rearranged as much as you like and reused — hence, the term "movable type."

We don't have any examples of the books he produced, but we do have a remarkable description of the mechanism he invented, from a contemporary of Bi's named Shen Kua:

During the reign of Chingli, [1041–1048] Bi Sheng, a man of unofficial position, made movable type. His method was as follows: he took sticky clay and cut in it characters as thin as the edge of a coin. Each character formed, as it were, a single type. He baked them in the fire to make them hard. He had previously prepared an iron plate and he had covered his plate with a mixture of pine resin, wax, and paper ashes. When he wished to print, he took an iron frame and set it on the iron plate. In this he placed the types, set close together. When the frame was full, the whole made one solid block of type. He then placed it near the fire to warm it. When the paste [at the back] was slightly melted, he took a smooth board and pressed it over the surface, so that the block of type became as even as a whetstone.

For each character there were several types, and for certain common characters there were twenty or more types each, in order to be prepared for the repetition of characters on the same page. When the characters were not in use he had them arranged with paper labels, one label for each rhyme-group, and kept them in wooden cases.

Over 350 years before Gutenberg was even born, the Chinese were experimenting with the technology that the German would later turn into a publishing empire.

Printed books existed nearly 600 years before Gutenberg's Bible Perhaps the best-known example of Chinese movable type printed books is Wang Zhen's Book of Agriculture, printed in 1313. Wang improved on Bi's device by using wooden moveable type (and possibly bronze) to set part of his book. Not only is the book remarkable for how it was printed, but also for being one of the most comprehensive records of Chinese science during the 14th century. Wang describes movable type in this book, noting that printers were also experimenting with tin for use in movable type devices.

Then, in 1377, we have evidence that a Korean monk named Baegun invented metal moveable type technology to produce the Jikiji (pictured), a book that collected pieces of Zen wisdom from great Buddhist teachers. With metal movable type, each character or letter would be cast as a separate metal piece, and then reused.

Gutenberg's True Innovation

It's not known whether Gutenberg was aware of Baegun's movable type innovations, or Wang's techniques, but his printing press certainly duplicated their movable type technologies. Given that there was a lively trade between East and West during this period in history, it's very possible that he had seen printing presses from Asia or heard about them.

Regardless of Gutenberg's inspiration, movable type was a natural technology for Western languages, because you'd only need a few dozen cast pieces to represent all our letters, plus some numbers and punctuation. In Chinese, movable type printers would need hundreds, or even thousands, of characters. So it would have been far easier for Gutenberg to streamline the printing press than it would have been for his Chinese and Korean counterparts.

Gutenberg cast his letters in metal, the way Baegun had, and added to his machine a screw-type press to stamp the inked letters against the paper. The press was hand-operated, and each piece of paper had to be placed in it one at a time. Still, the device was mechanized enough to make it cheap and efficient for Gutenberg to print books for the masses. As I said earlier, it's probably best to think of Gutenberg's printing press in relation to previous ones the same way we think of the desktop PC in relation to mainframes. He managed to change the world with an already-existing technology by turning it into something that anybody could buy and use.

As many bitter scientists have learned, history often credits innovations to the people who made them popular, rather than the people who actually dreamed them up. Gutenberg was no exception. He changed the world by manufacturing printing presses, not by inventing them.
http://io9.com/5910249/printed-books...tenbergs-bible





Texting Drivers Take Eyes Off Road 5 Seconds On Average: Study

More than 5,000 people die each year as a result of being distracted while driving, and a new study indicates that teens and cell phones make for the most volatile combination.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that of all drivers under age 20 involved in fatal crashes, 16 percent were distracted -- the highest proportion of any age group.

Among the various distractions, ranging from talking with passengers to adjusting the radio, texting while driving was particularly perilous. A 2009 study focusing on drivers of larger vehicles and trucks concluded that texting raised the risk of a crash by 23 times compared with nondistracted driving.

"Shockingly, texting drivers took their eyes off the road for each text an average of 4.6 seconds -- which at 55 mph, means they were driving the length of a football field without looking," said David Hosansky, author of CQ Researcher's "Distracted Driving: Should Driver Texting and Cellphone Use Be Banned?" report.

Even talking proved to be dangerous.

"Experts ... say that talking on a cellphone while driving is far more distracting than talking with an adult passenger because it consumes additional cognitive resources, including creating a mental picture of the person on the other end of the conversation," according to Hosansky. "Although some people may think they can safely talk and drive, researchers who observe people in driving simulators as well as in actual cars on the road find that a cellphone conversation will invariably intrude on a driver's attentiveness."

A Harris poll last year found that 59 percent of adult drivers admitted to talking on a handheld cellphone while behind the wheel, and 37 percent said they engaged in texting.

Ten states and the District of Columbia have banned handheld phone use by all drivers, and other states prohibit cellphone use by young drivers and school-bus drivers.

Yet, Hosansky wrote: "[T]he distractions don't stop with cellphones. Carmakers are adding new technologies to the dashboard, such as Web browsers and GPS units. Carmakers say that such technologies are designed very carefully for safety, but safety advocates worry that they are creating even more hazardous driving conditions.''
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/3430...oad-5s-avg.htm





NJ Judge: Texter Not Liable for Driver's Car Crash
Andrew Duffelmeyer

A woman who texted her boyfriend while he was driving cannot be held liable for a car crash he caused while responding, seriously injuring a motorcycling couple, a judge ruled Friday in what is believed to be the first case of its kind in the country.

A lawyer for the injured couple argued that text messages from Shannon Colonna to Kyle Best played a role in the September 2009 wreck in Mine Hill. But Colonna's lawyer argued she had no control over when or how Best would read and respond to the message.

State Superior Court Judge David Rand sided with Colonna's lawyer, dismissing claims against the woman in a lawsuit filed by crash victims David and Linda Kubert, who are also suing Best. David Kubert had his left leg torn off above the knee, while his wife eventually had her left leg amputated.

Stephen Weinstein, the Kuberts' attorney, has argued that Colonna should have known Best was driving and texting her at the time. He argued that while Colonna was not physically present at the wreck, she was "electronically present," and he asked for a jury to decide Colonna's liability in the case.

But Colonna testified at a deposition she didn't know whether Best was driving at the time.

Best has pleaded guilty to distracted driving, admitting he was using his cellphone and acknowledging a series of text messages he exchanged with Colonna around the time of the accident; the content of the messages is unknown. Records show Best responded to a text from Colonna seconds before dialing 911.

Best was ordered to speak to 14 high schools about the dangers of texting and driving and had to pay about $775 in fines, but his driver's license was not suspended.

Lawyers for Best and Colonna declined to comment after the hearing, and neither couple was in court.

Weinstein said Friday the Kuberts are disappointed with the decision and an appeal will be filed, but the couple is hopeful the attention the case has drawn will lead to change.

"Even though the case against Shannon Colonna has been dismissed, they are gratified that if by bringing the case they have accomplished the goal of making people think before they text, whether while driving or while the recipient is driving," he said.

Rand said it's reasonable for text message senders to assume the recipients will behave responsibly, and he also noted drivers are bombarded with many forms of distraction, whether they be text messages, notifications from smartphones, GPS devices or signs along the road.

"Were I to extend this duty to this case, in my judgment, any form of distraction could potentially serve as the basis of a liability case," Rand said.

But Rand stressed his decision shouldn't be read as minimizing the need for attentiveness while driving, and he said Americans have become "almost addicted" to wireless communication.

"That is the reality of today's world," he said.

Weinstein hopes for proceedings to move forward within the next several months.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...2D71.DTL&tsp=1





gTar: The First Guitar That Anybody Can Play

A Technology project in Santa Clara, CA

"If you're ever picked up a guitar for the first time and tried to play a favorite song, you know how discouraging it can be. The gTar completely changes that."

-Drew Houston, Dropbox founder/CEO

There's nothing like the thrill of playing a real musical instrument. Unfortunately for most, learning can be a frustrating and time-consuming experience. That's why we built the gTar.

The gTar is a fully digital guitar that makes it easy for anybody to play music, regardless of experience. All you have to do is dock your iPhone in the body, load up the gTar app, and an array of interactive LEDs along the fretboard will show you how to play.

You may be asking yourself what it means for a guitar to be "digital." While most guitars have pickups to amplify the sound of vibrating strings, the gTar has none - instead, we've designed the gTar with sensors that detect exactly what you're playing in real-time and relay each note to your iPhone, which then produces the actual sound. This makes it possible for us to do all kinds of exciting things, so let's get into it!

Start With Songs You Already Love

The free gTar app comes bundled with a library of songs that you can start playing right away. We're adding more every week and we'd love to hear your suggestions. Also, if you've been itching to play a specific song check out the Song Selection reward tier where we will work with you to get a song of your choosing on to the platform. One of the things that's so exciting about the gTar is the ability to incorporate different sounds outside of the guitar. So if you want to play a song with a big, warm synth or a booming grand piano, it's all possible with the gTar.

Stop Learning, Just Play

We think that everybody should be able to have fun playing music, regardless of how long they've been playing or how much time they have to practice. That's why we built an intuitive feature called SmartPlay, which mutes out incorrect notes as you play and nudges you along as you play through difficult songs.

Most Guitars Only Have One Level of Difficulty. We Have Three.

If you've never played the guitar before, start with Easy, where you only need to play the open strings. This gives you the chance to start playing your favorite songs right away while getting a hands on feel for the strings. SmartPlay is in effect here, so if you accidentally hit the wrong string, you won't hear anything.

When you've graduated from Easy, you can move up to Medium and start playing the frets and strings at the same time. Don't worry though, Smart Play is still in effect, so you can continue to play without the fear of messing up.

When you've mastered a song and want to take it to the next level, try playing in Hard. Here, the gTar will continue to display the correct notes, but allows you to play whatever you want. SmartPlay stops working here, so every note you play will ring out.

Go Further

Since the gTar is powered by the iPhone, it can sound however you want. Try playing around in Free Play, where you can choose from a variety of guitar models, keyboards, synths, or even drums. Free Play also provides an expression pad for tweaking sound effects (chorus, echo, reverb, and distortion) and a panel that gives you full control of the LEDs.

Where Does the Money Go?

Over the last year, we've taken our completed hardware design to China where we've been working with an amazing manufacturing team in Shenzhen that have helped us take the gTar from a schematic to a finished product. The gTars in the photos/video you see are all working, fully functional prototypes.

We've already invested in the tooling and have lined up our supply chain. We now need your help to fund the initial batch of production units. After the campaign ends, we expect it to take 2-3 months to produce, assemble, and ship your finished gTars.

More specifically your contribution will help us fund the following:

- Custom Guitar Body Manufacturing
- Volume Component Ordering (sensors, processors)
- Production Assembly
- Production Quality Assurance and Testing

Here's our team assembling the first pilot units. Due to the complexity of the gTar's assembly, we've had to iterate through more than 10 prototypes - these pilot units were built to ensure that our manufacturing processes would work at scale.

The Story of the gTar

Incident began out of a personal need for a guitar that could plug into the computer to compose music digitally. When the first functional prototypes started coming together, we were inspired by innovative musical instruments like the Monome and decided to try adding LEDs to the fretboard. We started to see how fun and easy it was for someone with no musical background to interact with the bright, colorful lights and we knew we had something worth pursuing.

Developers/Hackers

The gTar grew out of a series of hacks and we're very excited to see what the rest of you do to tweak and customize yours. We plan to offer an SDK in the future, so if you're interested in building apps for the gTar, shoot us an e-mail (dev@incidenttech.com). The gTar is also USB-MIDI compliant, so if you're interested in hacking the gTar to create/perform music, we'll be releasing some tutorials and hacks soon!

Specs

Size: 35"L x 13" W x 1.75" D
Connections: USB, 1/4" Line Out, SmartPick
Power: Internal 5000 mAh Li-Ion Battery, Charging via. USB

In the Box

- Padded Backpack Gig Bag
- Guitar Strap
- USB Charger (1A 5V)
- USB Cable
- Two Sets of Replacement Strings
- Three SmartPicks
- Line-out Headphone Adapter
iPhone not included

FAQ

Does the gTar need to be tuned?
Since the gTar is entirely digital, it doesn't care whether the strings are in tune or not. Keeping reasonable tension on the strings will improve the performance and sensitivity of the gTar.

Where does the gTar get power from?
The gTar has an internal battery that lasts between 6 to 8 hours on a full charge. To both power and charge the gTar, you can use the included USB charger or plug the gTar into any standard USB dock on a computer or charger of equivalent power.

What phones will be supported? Currently we plan to support the iPhone 4/4S. We hope to support other devices in the future.

How do I get the gTar app? The gTar app will be available for free in the App Store before we ship the gTar. It is already been built and approved.

Will this teach me how to play on a "normal" guitar? The strings and fret layout of the gTar has been designed to be virtually identical to that of a traditional guitar, playing it will teach you the same fundamentals that you would need to play on a traditional guitar.

How do Song Selections work? If you've selected any of the reward tiers that offer you a Song Selection, we will work with you to integrate a song of your choosing into the app. Since some things (like licensing restrictions) are out of our hands, we can't guarantee that we'll be able to include your first choice. However, we'll work with you to find something you like and will enjoy playing on the gTar.

Can I integrate the gTar into an existing guitar?
The gTar is a completely redesigned solution that cannot be retrofitted onto a traditional guitar. If you are a guitar manufacturer that is interested in integrating our technology into your designs, please contact us directly.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...ybody-can-play





Listening to Loud Music Linked With Pot Use, Unsafe Sex, Study Says
Karen Kaplan

Warning: Music may be hazardous to your health.

It’s not just your hearing that’s at risk, according to a study out Monday in the June issue of the journal Pediatrics. Teens and young adults who listen to digital music players with ear buds are almost twice as likely as non-listeners to smoke pot, the study says. And those who attend concerts or frequent dance clubs are nearly six times as likely as homebodies to go on a binge-drinking bender.

These findings are based on survey results collected from 944 low-income students at two vocational schools in the Netherlands. The students ranged in age from 15 to 25, with an average age of 18. The study authors, public health experts in Rotterdam, focused on these kids because risky health behaviors are more common in this cohort, they wrote.

Risky music-listening behavior was defined as listening to music at 89 dBA for at least an hour per day, based on a report from the European Commission’s Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks. (dBA is short for decibel A-weighting, a measure of environmental noise.) That music exposure can cause noise-induced hearing loss, or NIHL; people with this condition often have “increased feelings of isolation, depression, loneliness, anger, and fear,” according to the study.

But that’s not where the health risks end. The researchers found that compared with young adults who listened to music responsibly, those who put themselves at risk with digital music players were:

* 1.99 times more likely to say they had used cannabis in the last four weeks;

* 1.19 times more likely to smoke cigarettes daily; and

* 1.10 times more likely to have sex without using a condom every time.

In addition, compared with the students with safe music-listening practices, those who put themselves at risk by attending noisy concerts and clubs were:

* 5.94 times more likely to have consumed five or more alcoholic drinks in a row at some point in the last four weeks;

* 2.03 times more likely to have sex without using a condom every time; and

* 1.12 times more likely to smoke cigarettes every day.

Interestingly, those who listened to too-loud live music were 43% less likely to report cannabis use in the last four weeks.

The researchers don’t say that loud music caused these students to graduate to other risky behaviors, only that there was a strong correlation between them. That could be useful for public health officials to know so they could design practical interventions, such as handing out condoms along with earplugs at concert venues, or by printing messages about alcohol abuse on concert ticket stubs, they suggested.

With regard to digital music players, the researchers noted that “music sounds better with cannabis use” and noted that manufacturers “should be encouraged to create a safer listening environments” by creating players that produce high-quality sound at lower dBA levels.

You can read the study online here.
http://www.courant.com/health/booste...0,315029.story





The Urge to Sext Naked Self-Portraits Is Primal
Ogi Ogas

Over the past two years, more photographs of bare-naked celebrity anatomy have been leaked to the public eye than over the previous two centuries: Scarlett Johansson snapping a blurry self-portrait while sprawled on her bed, Vanessa Hudgens posing for a cellphone in a bracelet and a smile, Congressman Wiener touting a Blackberry and a mirror in the House Members Gym, Jessica Alba, Christina Aguilera, Miley Cyrus, Ron Artest, Charlize Theron, Chris Brown, Bret Favre, Rihanna, Pete Wentz, Ke$ha, and dozens more.

This flood of celebrity skin has prompted folks to wonder, ‘Why are so many famous people exhibitionists?’ The source of all this au naturel flaunting lies not in the culture of fame, but in the design of our sexual brains. In fact, research has unveiled two distinct explanations: Female exhibitionism appears to be primarily cortical, while male exhibitionism is mainly subcortical.

“The desire of the man is for the woman,” Madame de Stael famously penned, “The desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.” Being the center of sexual attention is a fundamental female turn-on dramatized in women’s fantasies, female-authored erotica, and in the cross-cultural gush of sultry self-portraits.

Studies have found that more than half of women’s sexual fantasies reflect the desire to be sexually irresistible. In one academic survey, 47 percent of women reported the fantasy of seeing themselves as a striptease dancer, harem girl, or other performer. Fifty percent fantasized about delighting many men.

“Being desired is very arousing to women,” observes clinical psychologist Marta Meana, president of the Society for Sex Therapy and Research. “An increasing body of data is indicating that the way women feel about themselves may be very important to their experience of sexual desire and subjective arousal, possibly even outweighing the impact of their partners’ view of them.”

The desire to be desired drives young women’s willingness to enter wet T-shirt contests and flash what their mama gave them at Mardi Gras. Whereas male exhibitionism is considered a psychiatric disorder and sometimes a crime, female exhibitionism is rarely considered a social problem. Just the opposite: It’s exploited commercially. Multi-millionaire Joe Francis built his Girls Gone Wild empire by taping college girls stripping down for his no-budget camera crew. How does he persuade young women to disrobe? He offers them a T-Shirt and a chance to be ogled by millions of men.

“Look I’m human, & just like every girl in this world, I admire my body so i take pics,” wrote singer Teyana Taylor after her graphic self-portraits were leaked. International data supports Taylor’s contention that the female exhibitionist urge is universal. In Brazil, Japan, Ghana, and the USA, well-trafficked websites offer galleries of tens of thousands of racy amateur self-portraits surreptitiously downloaded from women’s private MySpace or Facebook accounts or maliciously provided by ex-boyfriends. It’s not just celebrities who share intimate imagery.

Though men are so eager to gaze upon women’s candid phones they’re willing to risk jail time by hacking cellphones, pictures of men’s private parts usually come to public attention when a recipient is offended; German Olympian Ariane Friedrich, for example, outed a man on Facebook for sending her a photograph of his manhood. These pickle shots tend to elicit protests and consternation. Men do not question why Scarlett Johansson or Jessica Alba might want to sext bare skin to a guy. But women everywhere ask, ‘What are men thinking when they send us photos of their junk?’ The answer is that men may not be thinking at all; they may be compelled by an unconscious, evolutionary urge inherited from our primate ancestors.

Male monkeys and apes routinely display their penises to females to indicate sexual interest. Primatologist Frans de Waal writes in Peacemaking Among Primates:

Since bonobos can sheath their penis, nothing is visible most of the time. When the organ does appear, however, it is not only impressive in size, but its bright pink color makes it stand out against the dark fur. Males invite others by presenting with legs wide apart and back arched, often flicking the penis up and down — a powerful signal.

Men do not share women’s desire to be desired. Instead, they emulate their bonobo brethren: The internet is saturated with penis self-portraits from every nation on Earth. At any given moment, one in four cameras on the webcam network ChatRoulette are aimed at a penis. On the adult networking site Fantasti.cc, 36 percent of men use an image of a penis as their avatar; only 5 percent of women use a vagina. On Reddit’s heterosexual Gone Wild forum in 2010, where users were free to post uncensored pictures of themselves, 35 percent of images self-posted by men consisted of penises.

Anyone who has seen a koteka, the elaborate two-foot-long penis cap worn by men in Papua New Guinea, can easily believe that men have inherited our hominid cousins’ exhibitionist urge regarding the penis. In fact, male exhibitionism has long been understood by clinical psychologists as a non-dangerous compulsion: Men who flash their organ to strangers rarely seek contact afterward, instead describing a powerful sense of relief from the display alone. Of course, the yawn is also a powerful biological compulsion, but as we learned in grade school it’s always preferable to cover your mouth.

Though hordes of men pay to peruse amateur photography depicting the anatomy of ladies, not a single website collects cash from ladies interested in surveying amateur photography of phalluses. It is this marked gender difference in interest that reveals the dichotomous evolutionary pressures shaping male and female exhibitionism: Women feel the conscious desire to catch the universally attentive male eye, but since women’s erotic attention is rarely ensnared by a penis, the male exhibitionist urge is comparatively vestigial.

There are profitable penis sites, however. They boast an engaged clientele who view male sexting as neither troubling nor distasteful and reveal the universality of male sexual circuitry. Who appreciates leaked shots of The Game‘s well-endowed Hosea Chanchez with the same enthusiasm heterosexual guys show for leaked shots of Mad Men‘s well-endowed Christina Hendricks? Gay men.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...naked-sexting/





The Facebook Illusion
Ross Douthat

THERE were two grand illusions about the American economy in the first decade of the 21st century. One was the idea that housing prices were no longer tethered to normal economic trends, and instead would just keep going up and up. The second was the idea that in the age of Web 2.0, we were well on our way to figuring out how to make lots and lots of money on the Internet.

The first idea collapsed along with housing prices and the stock market in 2007 and 2008. But the Web 2.0 illusion survived long enough to cost credulous investors a small fortune last week, in Facebook’s disaster of an initial public offering.

I will confess to taking a certain amount of dyspeptic pleasure from Facebook’s hard landing, which had Bloomberg Businessweek declaring the I.P.O. “the biggest flop of the decade” after five days of trading. Of all the major hubs of Internet-era excitement, Mark Zuckerberg’s social networking site has always struck me as one of the most noxious, dependent for its success on the darker aspects of online life: the zeal for constant self-fashioning and self-promotion, the pursuit of virtual forms of “community” and “friendship” that bear only a passing resemblance to the genuine article, and the relentless diminution of the private sphere in the quest for advertising dollars.

But even readers who love Facebook, or at least cannot imagine life without it, should see its stock market failure as a sign of the commercial limits of the Internet. As The New Yorker’s John Cassidy pointed out in one of the more perceptive prelaunch pieces, the problem is not that Facebook doesn’t make money. It’s that it doesn’t make that much money, and doesn’t have an obvious way to make that much more of it, because (like so many online concerns) it hasn’t figured out how to effectively monetize its million upon millions of users. The result is a company that’s successful, certainly, but whose balance sheet is much less impressive than its ubiquitous online presence would suggest.

This “huge reach, limited profitability” problem is characteristic of the digital economy as a whole. As the George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen wrote in his 2011 e-book, “The Great Stagnation,” the Internet is a wonder when it comes to generating “cheap fun.” But because “so many of its products are free,” and because so much of a typical Web company’s work is “performed more or less automatically by the software and the servers,” the online world is rather less impressive when it comes to generating job growth.

It’s telling, in this regard, that the companies most often cited as digital-era successes, Apple and Amazon, both have business models that are firmly rooted in the production and delivery of nonvirtual goods. Apple’s core competency is building better and more beautiful appliances; Amazon’s is delivering everything from appliances to DVDs to diapers more swiftly and cheaply to your door.

By contrast, the more purely digital a company’s product, the fewer jobs it tends to create and the fewer dollars it can earn per user — a reality that journalists have become all too familiar with these last 10 years, and that Facebook’s investors collided with last week. There are exceptions to this rule, but not all that many: even pornography, long one of the Internet’s biggest moneymakers, has become steadily less profitable as amateur sites and videos have proliferated and the “professionals” have lost their monopoly on smut.

The German philosopher Josef Pieper wrote a book in 1952 entitled “Leisure: The Basis of Culture.” Pieper would no doubt be underwhelmed by the kind of culture that flourishes online, but leisure is clearly the basis of the Internet. From the lowbrow to the highbrow, LOLcats to Wikipedia, vast amounts of Internet content are created by people with no expectation of remuneration. The “new economy,” in this sense, isn’t always even a commercial economy at all. Instead, as Slate’s Matthew Yglesias has suggested, it’s a kind of hobbyist’s paradise, one that’s subsidized by surpluses from the old economy it was supposed to gradually replace.

A glance at the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ most recent unemployment numbers bears this reality out. Despite nearly two decades of dot-com enthusiasm, the information sector is still quite small relative to other sectors of the economy; it currently has one of the nation’s higher unemployment rates; and it’s one of the few sectors where unemployment has actually risen over the last year.

None of this makes the Internet any less revolutionary. But it’s created a cultural revolution more than an economic one. Twitter is not the Ford Motor Company; Google is not General Electric. And except when he sells our eyeballs to advertisers for a pittance, we won’t all be working for Mark Zuckerberg someday.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/o...-illusion.html





How to Destroy the Internet
Scott White

Remember when Anonymous threatened to destroy the entire internet? We laughed, and ultimately their words were just hacker hubris. But it got us thinking—could someone actually destroy the Internet?

We did some digging, and guess what: With enough effort, the entire thing can be shattered. Physically. Completely. Here's how to kill the net.

Before we destroy mankind's greatest, vastest machine, let's get something polite out of the way: don't. Destroying the Internet's core infrastructure would constitute the greatest act of global terrorism in history and/or a declaration of war against every sovereign nation in existence—to say nothing of the danger it would put both you and others in. This is a thought exercise.

So put on your thought exercise caps and come with us on a journey across the world. Let's figure out how this could possibly be done. Let's figure out exactly what it would take, what cords to rip—because the Internet under attack is an oft-invoked idea. What would true defeat really mean? What would the web's downfall even look like? Where would it happen? Core parts of the Internet have been (digitally) assaulted before—and there's no reason to believe it won't happen again.

The first step on this trip is mental. We need to begin by no longer treating the Internet like a ghost. It's made of more metal, plastic, and fiber than you can fathom—and it's spread across the whole world, a monster machine that hugs the entire globe. So we hunted down the web's physical foundation, across land and sea, to pinpoint exactly what you'd need to take out. Hypothetically. It turns out, Anonymous' threat isn't insane—just the way they talked about doing it. You can't destroy a signal while using it; the Internet's destruction requires analog violence, not some beefed up DDoS strike.

We always think of threats agains the Internet as cyberwarfare or some abstraction, virtual to the point of meaningless. But this is mostly bluster and software-mongering. The enormous, invisible truth of the Internet is that it's enormously strong. There's no main switch, no self-destruct button, no wire to be snipped for an easy blackout. The Internet, through a mix of chaotic serendipity and brilliant planning, is redundant to the point of near invincibility. Like a fiber optic hydra, you can hack off great expanses of it, and the thing will keep chugging. It's smart—almost self—sustaining, able to repair and reroute its paths from one continent and country to another, making up detours on the fly. This happens from time to time. Alan Mauldin, an expert with Internet infrastructure analysis firm TeleGeography, rattles off a few recent instances:

In February, two of the three cables serving East Africa were cut in the Red Sea. It impaired connectivity for some customers in a few Eastern African countries, but most folks were smart enough to have capacity on multiple cables on both coasts. There have been many cases of multiple cables damaged in the Med., Red Sea, and South China Sea in the past 5 to 6 years. The Japanese tsunami last year damaged a lot of cables - yet, the Internet connectivity to Japan was relatively unaffected due to multiple restoration options.

The internet: tsunami proof.

But for all its durability, the Internet isn't immortal. It's strong because it was built to be strong. And because it was built, like you'd build a monument or bench, it can be destroyed. Just like every other physical thing on the planet. We think of it as a crystal cloud, an inexorable force of the cosmos that runs on its own, as susceptible to destruction as gravity. But let's get one thing straight: With enough effort, you could destroy the internet as thoroughly as a tree chopped straight through. The thousand-headed beast can be decapitated in full, not just hindering it, but slaying it. You just need to know where to start slicing.

Cut the Cables

Forget wireless. The Internet exists because of hundreds of thousands of miles of thick, old fashioned cables. Hundreds upon hundreds of undersea, intercontinental cable lines, cross-crossing around the world, are what put your tweets onto a monitor in Pakistan. As mentioned, the cables are wired to back each other up—when one fails, another picks up the slack. But hey—what if you snipped them all?

The Internet is a network of networks. The laptops in your house, the desktops in your office, a server farm in Moscow—they're all wrangled together by these byzantine cable connections. Kill the connections, and the networks can't speak across oceans. The Internet is instantly fractured.

Here is every single internet cable in the world.

Don't take TeleGeography's word for it—they're aggregating data given out freely. Feel free to ask the FCC, which mandates a (publicly available) license for every single cable that touches our shores. These servers, like much of the internet's vulnerable innards, are an "open secret," explains Andrew Blum, author of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet. Here's the latest list from their end:

01 SCL Chart 12 31 10 05 02 11.final

The cables, as with anything underwater, come straight out of the water, often just lying atop a beach like this one.

They're sometimes disguised or partially buried. But sometimes they're just lying out on the sand like an abandoned boogie board. "They're supposed to be buried," explains Blum. "But often the ocean has its way." For those times when the cable still remains below the beach, you can use an industrial line tracer like this one to find the right spot. Dig ‘er up, and then go to town.

We asked the burly crew at Best Made, crafter of damn-fine axes, what they'd recommend for cutting through the Internet's backbone, and how much elbow grease it'd take. Naturally, they recommend using an axe:

Looking at the make up of the cable and it's diameter, I'd say a half dozen swings maybe less, provided they're accurately placed and the cable is held securely on a sturdy surface. The toughest part of the cable would most likely be the polycarbonate sleeve, everything else I think would succumb to the axe fairly readily.

Although the exact location of many of the cables and their onshore landing stations are kept a secret by private corporate owners, many aren't—in fact, they're found on popular beaches and bustling towns.

Here are two cable spots that, according to TeleGeography, would be the most devastating if destroyed. Striking a node like this would only result in slowdowns and setbacks, not total annihilation. Sites from across the ocean would be immediately inaccessible—many others would be so slow as to be unusable. The internet still runs—confusedly and very slowly—but this is a good start.

Take the cable laid across Mastic Beach, in the Long Island residential mega-zone of Brookhaven. Its cable coordinates are online for the world to see.

So too are the cable link at a beach in Manahawkin, NJ.

And Tuckerton, NJ.

Sites like these link America's eastern seaboard with western Europe, and serve as some of the most dense, crucial infrastructure points in the world. Get these out of the way, and you've made a good dent into the Internet's guts. Global finance is now over, leading to an instant worldwide financial collapse—sorry. Skype is broken, as is every other means of talking between continents over the Internet. You can't email your friends abroad. You can't order Barbour coat from the UK. Tweets from the Middle East are stuck there.

The other most crippling attacks would be executed as follows, using the list of towns and beaches above:

Singapore
Egypt (both on the Med and Red Sea)
SW United Kingdom
Tokyo
Hong Kong
South Florida
Marseilles
Sicily
Mumbai
Chennai

The Internet is now no longer global—every continent and island is, well, an island. The best most basic part of the Internet is scooting data anywhere around the globe in an instant. That's over now.

Ruin the Root Servers

"Google.com" is a crutch. Typing in a domain name actually translates an obscure numerical identifier, the IP address: 74.125.228.37. And there's no way you're going to remember 74.125.228.37, along with tens upon tens of other such numbers for every site you visit each day. This is how a network of machines is usable by us puny, finite humans.

Compare: "Hey, check out Twitter.com!"
Versus: "Hey, check out 199.59.148.10!"
You get the point.

There are 13 servers, labeled only by a single letter, backed up hundreds of times over, that are responsible for decoding _________.com (and .net, and .org, etc) before serving up the corresponding IP address. Knock these machines offline, and the alphabet isn't part of the internet anymore; if you want to navigate what's left of the web, you better have a pad and pencil, or an extremely good memory.

So how would one find and destroy these servers? Like the cables that feed (well, fed) them, the servers are also an open secret. In order for them to be any use at all, they have to be absolutely transparent—the web is worthless unless it's a free orgy of interoperability. And the best way to make sure everyone gets theirs is to just make the details of the root servers—and their locations—public. It just takes the tiniest amount of digging.

Let's say we want to obliterate the "K" servers, operated by a company called RIPE NCC. Go to its website, and from there it's as simple as scrolling across a Google Map. Oh, here's a server located in Miami. Click on it—it's located in the NAP of the Americas data complex, which a simple Google search will point out is located at 50 NE 9th St, Miami, Florida. You can take the 6 bus straight there. But if you're going to wipe the place out, be prepared for security—these places are guarded like Nazi bunkers to make sure nobody enters without a damn good reason.

The M server array, operated by the WIDE Project, has a location in Seoul. Their website will show you the way—here's a Google Street View pic to make things simple.

Security tends to be around the clock, but not always—and it's mainly to keep strangers from wandering inside and pushing the wrong button. Destroying the building that houses these servers would be the same as blowing up any other building that doesn't contain the vital brain shards of the Internet.

Repeat this process for every other server array—you can find a master list here.

Destroy the Data Centers

What have we accomplished so far? With all the cables cut, the Internet is landlocked, broken up into a handful of tiny Internets that can't talk to one another. Messages can't be sent around the world anymore. Hell, Japan is completely isolated. After demolishing the root servers, web addresses are reduced to incomprehensible code numbers. The destruction of the Internet is ready for its coup de grâce: Blow up the boxes that hook what's left together.

Data centers are unassuming buildings filled with servers that host the websites we browse, the emails we read, and the vault of lo-res Facebook photos you racked up all through college. They're enormous, often windowless structures that aren't designed for people. They're houses for computers, not flesh—they're often dark most of the time—to keep them cool, and because computers don't mind working without lights on. But they're vital to the people who want to sprint through the web, allowing your ISP to link up with the rest of the internet. Some of these centers in particular are mega-hubs, "public internet exchanges," open bazaars of ISPs from every corner of the globe converging on one floor of one building. All of the lines hitting one point. Remember that axe? Yeah.

New York City's 60 Hudson Street facility, owned by a company called TELX, is a global destination—what Times Square is to glass-eyed tourists, an internet Babylon:

On the 9th floor of 60 Hudson, a 15,000 square foot facility known as the Meet-Me-Room is the convergence point of multiple layers of local, national and global fiber optic cables. This is where each carrier's server, storage, and networking equipment resides as well as arrays of optical, coaxial or copper terminations which allows the carrier's "colocation units" to connect to other networks through a series of connection panels. This physical hub of the Internet, essentially a gigantic Ethernet switch, is powered by a 10,000 Amp DC power plant.

Wreck this floor, or even the building itself, and the entire region's connection starts crawling—the performance of the Internet around the world would take a hit. Not only that—websites themselves are erased. Companies use these data centers to outsource their storage, meaning every photo or song you've ever uploaded, for example, could vanish once you start wrecking wall after wall of servers. If your ISP plugs in at one of these junctions, you might lose your home access altogether—severed at the source.

There are centers like 60 Hudson sprinkled across the globe, and eradicating the gear inside each would cripple the web stretching in every direction outward.

With all this gone, the web is all but dead. If you wanted to be thorough, the rest of the planet's less important data centers can all be pinpointed and blown to hell.

Now data is entirely frozen. Nothing can get anywhere, because all the roads, bridges, and traffic lights are in ruin. All that's left of the Internet is your office intranet, or the file-swapping in your dorm. The tiny shreds. There are nets, but none of them are inter.

Congratulations, you're the world's biggest asshole.

But remember, to do this, you would've just completed the single most complex, sweeping act of destruction in human history. But with anything less, the Internet would still be kicking.

And that's what makes it so impossibly damn strong. Nobody will ever be able to pull off thousands of attacks around the entire planet at once, with one coordinated blast and chop. Unless you had a team of tens of thousands to strike everywhere at the exact same time, repairs would outpace destruction—this isn't a job for a lone wolf. Short of a thermonuclear apocalypse—which would lead to some bigger problems than Facebook downtime—we just can't damage so much stuff spread so widely. We just built it too well.
http://gizmodo.com/5912383/how-to-destroy-the-internet

















Until next week,

- js.



















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