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Old 20-06-12, 08:50 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 23rd, '12

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"The Retina MacBook is the least repairable laptop we’ve ever taken apart. The design pattern has serious consequences not only for consumers and the environment, but also for the tech industry as a whole." – Kyle Wiens


"Destroying ACTA would give us some breathing space by creating a political symbol of global importance: the Internet, in all its diversity, winning a global political battle against some of the most powerful industries and governments." – Jeremie Zimmermann



































June 23rd, 2012




David Lowery Blasts NPR Intern On File-Sharing
Michael Nelson

On Monday, June 16, NPR All Songs Considered intern Emily White published an essay in which she admitted that, while she boasted an iTunes library comprising some 11,000 songs, she had only purchased 15 CDs in her lifetime. In her 517-word story, White claimed that only a small fraction of her library came via piracy (“from a stint in the 5th grade with the file-sharing program Kazaa”). The 21-year-old called herself “an avid music listener, concertgoer, and college radio DJ [whose] world is music-centric.” Most of her library, she says, came from the type of personal sharing that might be considered the 2005 equivalent of home-taping:

“I’ve swapped hundreds of mix CDs with friends. My senior prom date took my iPod home once and returned it to me with 15 gigs of Big Star,The Velvet Underground and Yo La Tengo … I spent hours sitting on the floor of my college radio station, ripping music onto my laptop.”

In all, a pretty innocuous tale — 11,000 songs is a kinda puny collection; the 160 GB iPod Classic can store 40,000 songs, according to Apple (although YMMV if you care about things like “sound quality”). In conclusion, White suggested that she wasn’t happy with the current distribution models, and she hoped to see something better emerge: “What I want is one massive Spotify-like catalog of music that will sync to my phone and various home entertainment devices. With this new universal database, everyone would have convenient access to everything that has ever been recorded, and performance royalties would be distributed based on play counts.”

The piece struck a nerve with former Cracker/Camper Van Beethoven frontman David Lowery, who responded to White yesterday with a 3,300-word missive that grapples with White’s confessions as well as many issues never explicitly raised by White. Lowery’s targets are varied. He addresses the (supposedly prevalent?) notion that file-sharers justify their practices by claiming they’re not hurting artists but faceless record labels. He writes off Spotify as being an untenable alternative to purchasing music (“It is not a fair system”) and he crunches some numbers, concluding that White owes $2,139.50 to the artists whose music she has obtained sans payment.

Lowery makes a couple points that wilt under analysis (the idea that listeners of White’s generation are “willing” to pay for Internet access but unwilling to pay for music — as if there were a free alternative to paying for Internet access) and he never really addresses the extremely essential question of divining the point at which listeners should shell out their hard-earned cash (before listening to any music? After listening to a given album five times? Two times?). But for all its weaknesses, his essay is essential reading: passionate, eloquent and urgent. Read it here.
http://stereogum.com/1069672/david-l...-sharing/news/





File Sharing and the Greek Crisis
Petros Petridis

According to the major copyright industry groups, Greece has among the highest rates of “piracy” in the European Union. The Business Software Alliance recently put this number at 61% of the software market—exceeded only by Romania and Bulgaria. The IFPI listed Greece in its top ten ‘priority countries’ for music piracy in 2006. The US Trade Representative’s office has kept Greece on its “Watchlist” of badly behaving countries since 2008.

It is easy to see file sharing through the lens of the larger Greek crisis—as part of the wider breakdown and circumvention of formal institutions. But the file sharing story in Greece is both simpler and more complicated than that.

Simpler because, as in other high-piracy countries, there are powerful economic factors at work: low salaries and high prices have been drivers of Greek file sharing for over a decade. The explosion of unemployment and broad-based salary cuts since 2008 sharpened this logic, pushing more Greeks toward ‘free’ alternatives.

And more complicated because file sharing is not reducible to economics. File sharing—and P2P networks in particular—are part of a much larger emergent culture of creativity and innovation, encompassing both new cultural goods and new techniques of production. This culture has Greek variations but also plays out on a much larger global stage.

My work—which involved interviews with file sharers as part of a dissertation in Social Anthropology—has focused on the strong non-economic undercurrent to participation in file sharing networks, ranging from the greater sense of agency and freedom they provided in an expanding cultural universe to their role as a perceived alternative to the ongoing Greek delegitimation of most social and political institutions. Freedom of expression, freedom to communicate, access to knowledge and information, excitement at the rediscovery and “rebirth” of old and rare works… All have figured as important motives for engagement with P2P networks. So too do perceptions of the lack of formal infrastructure and institutions for supporting cultural creativity; the successive shrinking of the welfare state; and the ongoing political crisis, shaped by scandals, nepotism and patronage relations. Within this context, P2P networks represent a form of self-organization and reconfiguration of social life outside established channels that has proved both valuable and—for some—inspirational in the context of the larger Greek crisis.

For some Greek youth, especially, the growth of P2P networks in Greece crystallized aspects of their broader social and political disaffection. Since 2008, P2P culture has merged with wider forms of political and sociocultural critique from all sides of the political spectrum. During the riots of December 2008, a popular Greek P2P tracker published a manifesto in which envisioned a full spectrum of social demands, from the development of alternative sources of energy; to free education, health care and public transportation; to the abolition of the anti-riot police units used to suppress protests; to the “copyleft of all spiritual and informative material.”

P2P networks have played a part in the growth of an alternative public sphere because they are—in an important sense—not new. Rather, they are the current platforms for social and sharing networks that date back at least a decade. Greek file sharing chat rooms (on Soul Seek) and hubs (mainly via the DC++ client) emerged in the early 2000s. The “big bang” of Greek P2P use took place in the middle of the decade with the establishment of the first Greek BitTorrent trackers—just in time for the larger meltdown of trust in state institutions.

Several groups and individuals played central roles in cultivating the connections between P2P use and wider forms of political protest. In 2006, the Underground Free University of Athens (ufu.gr) offered a class called “Viruses, P2P Networks and Digital Disobedience”. Open access and an accompanying critique of the copyright system began to circulate widely in this period—fueled in part by Greek government decisions to limit access to the new digital archive of the public television channel, ERT (www.ert-archives.gr). The ERT archive allowed streaming but not downloading (without a separate license)—thereby cutting the archive off from the emerging grassroots audio-visual culture built on transformative use. For many critics, the model amounted to asking Greek citizens to pay a second time for use of public material. It was also a signal that Greece would be a conservative player in digital media policy, continuing to privilege broadcast models and state gatekeepers. Greek P2P networks grew, in part, through opposition to this statist approach to Greek audio-visual culture.

Local Networks

Although Greeks participate widely in international P2P networks, there are many Greek P2P communities organized around Greek language trackers. While many young Greeks are comfortable with dominant English-language P2P networks, Greek language P2P sites lowered this barrier further and proved very popular. They also attracted members of the Greek diaspora looking for means to connect to Greek communities and, especially, to Greek-language media, which usually lacks international distribution. The majority of these sites operate as private trackers, requiring registration and (at least in principle) the maintenance of upload to download ratios that ensure broad-based participation in the network. Several of these sites operate through donations and in some cases (e.g. the now-defunct Gamato.info) sale of merchandise like t-shirts. The scope of these practices is a sensitive issue in the Greek (and wider international) P2P community. Some trackers maintain a strict non-commercial ethos while others—especially those large enough to require substantial infrastructure—adopt a variety of policies and strategies to maintain operations, from donations to advertising. As elsewhere, the latter strategies make networks more vulnerable to enforcement.

Moral Rights

Like other European implementations of the Berne Convention on Copyright, Greek copyright law (2121/93) recognizes two sets of intellectual rights: rights of economic exploitation and moral rights, the latter of which privilege the connection between the author and the work. In my interviews, file sharers routinely discounted the value of economic rights for digital works. They rejected the equivalence of copying and theft and the argument that copying displaces sales. And they asserted the general injustice of high media prices.

Moral rights, in contrast, were highly valued by file sharers and are widely protected within file sharing networks. In private trackers, it is taken for granted that an uploaded archive must be accompanied by detailed metadata, including authors’ names, the production company, the release date, links to trailers via YouTube, Vimeo or other similar platforms, snapshots, and so on. In many cases, these descriptions are more thorough than other sources of information on the Web, such as the IMDB for film.

These moral rights extend to the acts of preparation and circulation of copied materials. Uploaders are regarded as authors of the digitized versions, with authorship derived from the cost, skill, and risk associated with making high-quality new materials available. Competition between groups results in rapid improvements in audio and video quality and—especially—subtitling.

Enforcement

As in many other small linguistic communities, subtitling is one of the primary activities of Greek P2P networks. Subtitling has a long history in Greece. With the exception of some soap operas and anime, almost no foreign media is dubbed. Everything is subtitled.

P2P networks began to specialize in this area because of the chronic weaknesses of official subtitling. It is famously slow, has limited repertoire, and is sometimes of low quality. All of these problems proved to be addressable by dedicated amateurs. Because this role was largely confined to Greek groups, operating in Greece, subtitling also became one of the first targets of Greek enforcement. In 2008, the EPOE (The Society for the Protection of Audiovisual Works) began to target Greek subtitling sites—initially through warning letters and other extrajudicial measures. Although several of them shut down when faced with these threats (greeksubs.com, subs4you.gr, greektvsubs.gr, subtitles.gr), the effect was temporary, and most soon returned online.

The EPOE actions marked the beginning of a shift in strategy. Previously, the intellectual property societies had focused mostly on anti-piracy education promoted through spots and trailers. These spots were localizations of the messaging strategies of international anti-piracy groups, and engaged in familiar rhetoric such as equating downloading with the theft of a car or handbag. As the economic crisis worsened and the government declared the state of emergency (known as the Crisis), implementation of this strategy shifted into higher gear.

In December 2009, Greek-fun.com, a forum that was offering links to file-hosting services was taken down by the Greek Cyber Crime Unit and two individuals (alleged administrators) were arrested. EPOE claimed that the forum had 285,000 registered members and 14,000 links to audio-visual works, which they claimed had been downloaded 200,000 times. (They estimated that 5,550 of these belonged to EPOE’s members and that these had been downloaded 90,000 times).

Total losses were estimated at 1,800,000 euros, or 9 euros per download! Three months later, Gamato.info, the most popular Greek tracker (according to official announcements, it had 850,000 accounts and 16,000,000 (!) daily visits) was also permanently shut down. Six people (moderators, administrators, VIPs) were arrested. Twenty-nine hard discs and 604 DVDs were confiscated from their houses.

The first arrests for file sharing in Greece were followed by demonstrations organized by Gamato.info users, with requests for the immediate release of the accused individuals and the re-opening of the network. Members of the “Cinematic Team of Topographers and Agronomists of Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki” handed out flyers with the statement “Thieves remove. Pirates copy.” Other participants talked to the mass media. For the first time, the mass media jumped into the debate, almost always to fuel the moral panic around file sharing.

After a second police raid in early 2011, several other trackers, forums and online streaming sites closed down, including Greek-tracker.com, steki.gr (one individual arrested), and thegreekz.com (five people were arrested and receipts for 230,000 euros, allegedly earned by commercial banners ads, were confiscated).

But the most notable enforcement cases in 2011 were the targeting of two index sites (not P2P trackers) that provided links to YouTube, the official web sites of Greek TV networks, and other sites that provide information about movies (not the movies themselves). The collecting society AEPI (Hellenic Society for the Protection of Intellectual Property, www.aepi.gr) charged that these sites made intellectual works of its members publicly accessible through hyperlinks—something that was both undeniably true and undeniably legal. The owner of tainies.org was also arrested, while the owner of livemovies.gr went on to sue AEPI. The move was widely viewed as an ignorant power grab—an effort to make linking even to legal sources part of a permission regime. Mostly what it accomplished was to make AEPI seem greedy, corrupt, and totally out of touch.

It is also in this context that awareness of and vocal opposition to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) began to emerge. The Digital Liberation Network of Greece (dln.gr) and other groups launched efforts to raise awareness about ACTA—starting basically from zero. An important moment, in this context, was the hacking attack on the Ministry of Justice by a Greek branch of Anonymous, in early 2012. In a video posted on the Ministry of Justice site during the hack, ACTA was associated with a wider socio-political critique of austerity measures, failing democracy, constitutional circumvention, the expansion of social controls, and the erosion of privacy. In the same period, demonstrations in several cities against ACTA were organized by the recently formed Pirate Party of Greece.

Nonetheless, the agreement was signed by the Greek government through rushed and opaque procedures. There was no public information or dialogue. To the best of my knowledge, no politicians, official TV networks and other mainstream media ever mentioned ACTA. Nor was there any indication of deliberation or study of the agreement by those who signed it. This is not a huge surprise in a country where legislators can publicly admit to not reading the “Memorandum”—the enormously controversial document that implemented the worst of the austerity measures. But it contributed to a credibility gap around ACTA that began to attract public attention and opposition.

Spring 2012 has seen a further ramping up of enforcement efforts. Greekddl.com, a forum that linked heavily to Megaupload was taken down (in the wake of the Megaupload take down, this was probably no coincidence). Two people were arrested (one of them a well-known Greek book editor). According to some articles, the greekddl.com was providing links to online casinos and enjoying percentages from the profits.

By all evidence, money-making sites remain the main target of anti-piracy organizations, reflecting the greater responsibilities of the state in regard to the criminal sanctions applicable in cases of “commercial-scale” copyright infringement. Police and enforcement groups regularly emphasize the scale of donations, advertising revenues, and of course traffic numbers. Many of these claims strain credulity. Gamato.info was alleged to have 16,000,000 daily visits in 2010–an impressive number in a country of eleven million! All the usual concerns about rights holder group transparency and loss claims also apply here. AEPI has a poor record of management and transparency with respect to its own membership and collection practices, and should not be given the benefit of the doubt in its claims. There is no official explanation of how AEPI calculates losses, though by all appearances the numbers reflect discredited assumptions about direct substitution of pirated copies for ticket prices or sales. There is no public information about the alleged profits, such as the receipts for 230,000 euros allegedly earned by banners advertisements. Instead, a pattern of enforcement has emerged: startling accusations, a police raid, arrests, confiscation, manipulated and partial information about the findings, and an emphasis on illicit gains.

Although it is difficult to convince Greeks that downloading resembles car theft, it is relatively easy to connect rights holder claims about file sharing losses to the larger rhetoric surrounding the crisis—especially via assertions that organizers of these sites are getting rich while others are starving, and that the public sector loses money through tax evasion.

As with the war on terror or the war on drugs in the US, this piggybacking of IP enforcement on broader social crises is dangerous and counterproductive. In the case of Greece, it is a true suckers’ game: strengthening IP enforcement increases the outflow of royalty and licensing payments to foreign rights holders. The worsening economic situation, in turn, amplifies file sharing. There are tragic ironies here: the internal devaluation strategy championed by European leaders like Olli Rehn envisions reducing Greece to an economic level comparable to Bulgaria or Romania—the only two countries in the EU with higher piracy rates. The “free” media culture that has emerged in the past decade has some resemblance to the wider crisis of formal institutions in Greece, but it is not the same crisis and does not have the same solutions. Above all, it should not be used as an excuse to divert scarce resources to propping up declining media models. There is no money in it.
http://infojustice.org/archives/26364





Proposed Japanese Law Could Throw Downloaders in Jail
Daniel Feit

Don’t copy that Keroppi. You might go to jail.

Unauthorized downloads of copyrighted material and creating backup copies of a DVD or Blu-ray disc could soon carry criminal penalties in Japan if proposed amendments to the nation’s copyright code become law.

Violators could spend up to two years in prison or pay as much as two million yen (about $25,400) in fines, CNET Japan said last week.

“Allowing illegal downloads to exist as they do now will harm the growth of the Internet,” Lower House member Hakubun Shimomura said in support of strengthening the copyright law, as quoted by Internet Watch.

In the U.S., downloading pirated media is a civil offense, not criminal — you can be sued for damages, but not locked up. Distributing copyrighted material without authorization can lead to criminal charges, but not downloading.

“The illegal flow of material is a problem, but rather than strengthening the penalties, we should bolster the deletion of illegally uploaded content,” Lower House member Takeshi Miyamoto said in opposition of the proposed amendments. He was the only member to speak out against the matter on the House floor. The amendments were approved with support from three major political parties.

If approved by the upper house, the new law could be enforceable at the beginning of next year.

Downloading copyrighted material such as music, movies, or video games is already illegal in Japan thanks to a 2009 amendment to the law. However, that ban carries little weight due to a lack of penalties.

The situation is similar to the 2009 ban of “majikon” devices that allow users to play copied software on a Nintendo DS game machine. Without any punitive requirements, the devices remained widely available on street corners in Japanese electronic districts as well as on the web.

It was only after a 2011 amendment to that law that an arrest was made: A 39-year-old man accused of selling majikon on the internet was arrested at the end of May. He allegedly sold the devices to three people between February 14 and March 9 of this year for a combined 7,200 yen ($91), according to the Aichi Prefectural Police Department, as reported by IT Media.

While the anti-download measure is an enhancement of existing prohibitions, a ban on copying or ripping discs to a hard drive would be brand new for Japan. The proposed would outlaw any software program or device that allowed users to circumvent encoded copyright protection on the disc, as well as the act of copying of said disc.

Media that does not include copy protection, such as most compact discs, would not be included in the ban.

Should these new amendments pass into law, it would be illegal in Japan to make any copies of any movies or games, illegal to upload the data, illegal to download the data, illegal to sell copies of the data and well as illegal to sell a device that enables playback of the copied data. All of these actions would carry stiff penalties.
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/0...wnloading-law/





Canadian Bill C-11 Passes Commons, Allowing for U.S.-Style Copyright Law
Tori Floyd

After months of review, it looks like the Harper government's copyright reform bill will likely become law before Parliament's summer recess.

Bill C-11 passed a final vote at third reading on Monday night, bringing Canadians one step closer to SOPA-like regulation of their media consumption. According to the CBC, the bill was immediately introduced to the Senate after passing the vote, and will likely be sped through the Senate review process, meaning it stands a good chance of becoming law in the coming month.

Regular readers of The Right Click are likely quite familiar with what the copyright bill will mean to Canadians: Bill C-11 would allow rights holders to include 'digital locks' on their content, which includes music, video, e-books and software. Users can make copies for personal backups, but all other duplication could result in fines for doing so.

The movie, music and software industries were quick to thank the Harper government for how quickly they have moved on the bill, while other groups have remained cautious of the bill. Library groups, educators, consumer associations and thousands of Canadians have expressed concern over these digital locks, and what it will mean for the distribution of content.

Much like how the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) led to widespread opposition from both Americans and numerous websites, the reaction against Bill C-11 by Canadians has been overwhelmingly negative.

As Michael Geist, a University of Ottawa professor who has been one of the most outspoken individuals on Bill C-11, said in a recent blog post, many who spoke out against the copyright act's digital locks are likely feeling ignored by the government. Geist suggests, however, that the fight by many Canadians against strict copyright provisions has still had a profound impact. While the digital locks will still be in place, Canadians won't be subjected to website blocking, three strikes systems, or notice-and-takedown measures that other countries have adopted. Revisions of the bill have also included better fair dealing and public performance legislation than what a predecessor to Bill C-11 had back in 2006.

While the fight against Bill C-11 is likely at an end, it certainly won't be the last we hear from Canadians who oppose these new copyright laws. Keep reading The Right Click for more information on this legislation.
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/right...202034271.html





Congressional Staffer Says SOPA Protests 'Poisoned The Well', Failure To Pass Puts Internet At Risk
Mike Masnick

Yikes. About a month ago, we wrote about some comments by Congressional staffer Stephanie Moore, the "Democrat's chief counsel on the House Judiciary Committee," in which she still couldn't come to grips with the fact that the public rose up against SOPA -- insisting that it must have been some nefarious "misinformation" campaign. We went through, in a fair amount of detail, how the misinformation was coming from her. It appears that Moore has decided to go even further down this path and express her general distaste for the public. During a panel discussion at the American Constitution Society's 2012 National Convention, covered by BNA, Moore was a panelist and apparently decided to totally mock the public and make the ridiculous claim that the failure to pass SOPA puts the internet at risk:

“Netizens poisoned the well, and as a result the reliability of the internet is at risk,” Moore said

Think about that for a second. That entire sentence is so incredibly insulting. Millions of people spoke out against bad legislation. The public spoke out, and Moore is so against the basic concept of democracy that she has to claim that millions of people expressing their political opinion is "poisoning the well." And how in the hell is "the reliability of the internet at risk" because Congress failed to pass a horrifically bad piece of legislation aimed at censoring sites one industry didn't like? Please.

The report goes on to a bunch of additional insulting comments from Moore towards the public, including the claim that "We don't know what the numbers mean," regarding the number of people who contacted Congress on January 18th. Here, I'll help you out: it means that a very large segment of the American population realized you were trying to push through a bad bill as a favor to some big Hollywood donors, and they didn't like it. What was so hard to understand about that?

On the same panel was lawyer Steve Metalitz, who represents a number of entertainment industry interests, and whom many people have suggested has had a major hand in the creation of SOPA/PIPA/ACTA and other such proposals. He also had some ridiculous things to say, including supporting the idea that DNS blocking was no problem. His reasoning? Lots of other countries censor the internet, why shouldn't the US? I'm not kidding:

“Most countries in the world already have this option at their disposal to deal with this problem,” Metalitz said during the ACS discussion. “If site blocking broke the internet, then the internet would already be broken.”

Metalitz is wrong. Either his misinformed or he's lying. Even SOPA supporters admitted that there are only thirteen countries that enable DNS blocking. That's not "most." Oh, and the thirteen? China, Iran, United Arab Emirates, Armenia, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, Burma (Myanmar), Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. This is not a list that we should want the US to be added to. And he's being disingenuous in saying that "the internet would already be broken." No one claimed that the internet as a whole would stop working if you put DNS blocking in place. But every single competent security technology expert pointed out that it would have significant negative impact on how important security systems would work. Hell, even Comcast (owner of NBC Universal -- the main corporate backer of SOPA) admitted that DNS blocking was incompatible with important DNS security technologies.

Who do we trust? A lawyer with zero computer security/networking knowledge, or pretty much every security expert around? Sorry, but I vote with the experts.

According to the report, Metalitz and Moore then teamed up to misrepresent the free speech concerns that people had about SOPA. They did so by insisting there were no such concerns and that the First Amendment and copyright law could not be in conflict:

Similarly, Metalitz said that the opposition's argument that “copyright means censorship is simply untrue.” He added, “I understand that in debates like this there is going to be over simplification, but this is a dangerous one for those that care about free expression.”

Moore agreed that the free speech concerns were misplaced. “The First Amendment argument is not appropriate in this context,” Moore said. “The First Amendment is part of copyright. They are not in tension.”


Thankfully, it sounds like there was strong pushback in the audience from folks like professor Lateef Mtima, but really, both Moore and Metalitz are once again being totally disingenuous. No one said that copyright itself means censorship. They said that overly broad copyright laws can and are used for censorship. This is not a hypothetical. We've already seen how Russia specifically used copyright law to stifle political speech from opponents. And right here in the US, we have the unfortunate story of the federal government censoring popular hip hop blogs for over a year by falsely accusing them of copyright infringement, shutting them down, and then denying them their day in court.

Frankly, both Moore and Metalitz owe those blog owners an apology. But, of course, no one involved in that situation has ever apologized. Much better to just flat out deny that copyright could ever be used for censorship. Here in the real world, that's called being in denial. You can't deny facts, but both Moore and Metalitz seem to have spent this entire panel doing exactly that.

Either way, given their roles in supporting SOPA and their refusal to understand the concerns against it, it seems likely that we haven't seen the last of horrible, dangerous legislation and international trade agreements from people like Moore and Metalitz.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...net-risk.shtml





ACTA Rejected by Committee in Crucial Blow Before Final EU Parliament Vote

The International Trade Committee (INTA) of the European Parliament recommends rejecting ACTA.

The committee rejected the controversial legislation 19 votes to 12. This is the fourth and final committee to deliver its report on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and will likely affect the European Parliament’s vote early July.

MEP Marietje Schaake, a member of the INTA committee, shares her satisfaction about the vote on the “undesirable treaty.”

“With this vote my committee has given an important advice to the plenary vote in two weeks. The EU should reject ACTA,” says Schaake, who has opposed ACTA since the beginning.

“ACTA contains some troublesome provisions for policy areas such as internet freedom and access to medicines. By regulating several policy areas in one document, ACTA enforces laws in an undesirable and dangerous way,” she adds.

“The way is now paved for a quick and total rejection of ACTA by the European Parliament! With a political symbol of such a global scale, the way will be open for copyright to be reformed in a positive way, in order to encourage our cultural practices instead of blindly repressing them,”
concludes Jeremie Zimmermann, co-founder and spokesperson of the citizen advocacy group La Quadrature du Net told RT.

ACTA is aimed at protecting copyright in many industries from software engineering to agriculture. Critics say the national governments would have to make a draconian attack on online privacy to implement provisions of the treaty on their soil.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement has been in development since 2007. The purpose of the international document has been establishing international standards for intellectual property rights and creating a global framework for targeting counterfeit goods on the Internet.

ACTA supporters claim the treaty is the only way to respond to pirated copyright and global trade of counterfeit goods. Their opponents insist ACTA is an act of war, that would create a new governing body outside the existing World Trade Organization and United Nations.

In February, the EU suspended efforts to ratify the ACTA treaty due to a wave of protests from human rights activists and Internet users. Thousands rallied across the EU over the amount of power ACTA would give global corporations.

"Destroying ACTA would give us some breathing space by creating a political symbol of global importance: the Internet, in all its diversity, winning a global political battle against some of the most powerful industries and governments," Jeremie Zimmermann told RT.
https://rt.com/news/acta-committee-final-vote-365/





BT Blocks Pirate Bay, But File Sharing Site Offers Solution 'Within Minutes'
Alistair Charlton

BT has become the last major broadband provider in the UK to block access to controversial file sharing website, The Pirate Bay.

Going one step further than Virgin Media, Sky, TalkTalk and others, BT has also blocked its users from visiting the new IP addresses added by The Pirate Bay in recent weeks.

BT has banned its subscribers from accessing thepiratebay.se and thepiratebay.org as well as the two new IP addresses and any user attempting to access the file sharing website - specialising in copyrighted films and music - will see the message: "Error - site blocked".

But this extra step was to no avail, as the website almost immediately added a set of new IP addresses directing BT users to proxy websites that can circumnavigate the block.

Soon after the block came into place a spokesperson for the UK Pirate Party - a political group that is in favour of The Pirate Bay - told the BBC that more proxy sites had been made available "within minutes".

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According to TorrentFreak, the most visited Pirate Bay proxy in the UK is already among the top 600 most popular websites in the country, and is expected to gain even more traffic now BT's block to the original site is in place.

The spokesperson said that 10 percent of traffic to The Pirate Bay's proxy sites is now coming from BT customers, while 30 percent is from Virgin Media users, 15 percent from Sky, six percent from TalkTalk and three percent from O2.

Sky Broadband become the third UK internet provider to block The Pirate Bay at the start of June, blocking some four million subscribers. Acknowledging that it is affected by piracy, the TV provider said: "We have invested billions of pounds in high-quality entertainment for our customers because we know how much our customers value it.

"It's therefore important that companies like ours do what they can, alongside the government and the rest of the media and technology industries, to help protect their copyright."

Public interest due to media attention about the block is partly responsible for an increase in traffic to the Pirate Party's site, the spokesperson said.

"This increased traffic isn't just about The Pirate Bay; it seems that the proxy has sparked an interest in the Pirate Party itself, and we are seeing significant uptick in membership and people navigating the rest of the site. "The volume of emails and phone calls into the party has also increased markedly," he added.

"Blocks on Pirate Bay have effectively short-circuited the democratic process. Our internet policy is not being run by our elected representatives, it is being dictated by the music industry."
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/35...pirate-bay.htm





Indian ISPs Unblock BitTorrent Sites After Appeal
Ernesto

Millions of Indians can today breathe a sigh of relief. They are once again able to access their favorite file-sharing sites, including The Pirate Bay and Torrentz.eu, after a consortium of ISPs appealed a broad censorship order. The Madras High Court specified an earlier decision and ruled that Internet providers no longer have to block entire websites to prevent a single movie from being shared online.

Last month millions of Indians were shaken up by what appeared to be a mass anti-piracy action from the Government.

Many of the country’s leading Internet providers had blocked access to a wide range of file-sharing and streaming sites including Torrentz.eu, The Pirate Bay and Vimeo.

It turned out that the ISPs in question were responding to a so-called “John Doe” court order under which they had to prevent users from sharing the movie Dhammu. Responding to this request, many ISPs saw no other option than to block a wide range of sites in their entirety.

The court order wasn’t targeted at a specific site or ISP and gave the copyright holder carte blanche to demand broad blockades. The ISPs were seen as the bad guys by subscribers and “Anonymous” groups, but had no other option than to comply.

Behind the scenes, however, a consortium of Internet providers decided to appeal the broad court order. These ISPs felt they were being “wrongfully vilified on the Internet” and argued that the broad blockades also prevented the public from accessing many legitimate files.

The Madras High Court sided with the ISPs and ruled that the copyright holder can’t demand broad takedowns. The Indian news site Medianama has a copy of the order which specifically states that the copyright holder has to list the infringing URL, instead of demanding the shutoff of an entire website.

“The order of interim injunction dated 25/04/2012 is hereby clarified that the interim injunction is granted only in respect of a particular URL where the infringing movie is kept and not in respect of the entire website. Further, the applicant is directed to inform about the particulars of URL where the interim movie is kept within 48 hours.”

The order came in late last week, and in the days that followed millions of Indians regained access to their favorite file-sharing sites.

While the copyright holders are bound to be disappointed by the new restrictions, the new order prevents needless and broad censorship of legitimate files. To protect the rights of one movie, tens of thousands of independent artists saw their work being blocked, which can’t be good.

The first John Doe order targeted at file-sharing sites was issued last summer, followed by a handful of others. Whether the Madras High Court ruling is the end of the catch-all John Doe orders has yet to be seen, but it’s clear that ISPs are now prepared to put up a fight.
https://torrentfreak.com/indian-isps...appeal-120620/





Denmark Kills File-Sharing Warnings, Launches Legal Services Initiative
enigmax

After seriously considering sending out “3 strikes” warning letters to file-sharers, today Denmark will officially announce the abandoning of the idea. Instead, the government and rightsholders will focus on the ‘Pirate Package’ initiative which will boost the development of legal services. In addition to many positive elements, the initiative also includes a mechanism to smooth the way towards easier website blocking.

After years of deliberations, today Denmark’s government will officially announce its new strategy for dealing with the issue of unauthorized file-sharing online.

Although pushed for heavily by rightsholders, the so-called “letter model” in which errant internet subscribers are sent a series of warnings informing them that their habits are illegal, is now officially off the table.

According to a Ministry of Culture document seen by TorrentFreak, the government will today announce its “Pirate Package”, an anti-piracy initiative that moves the emphasis away from punishing end users and towards the development and creation of better legal offerings. It consists of a number of components.

The first is the ‘Innovation Forum’ which will provide a platform for “dialog and innovation” for those looking to create and develop digital business models in various creative fields.

“The ambition is that the innovation forum will help to create a foundation for future collaboration across industries and backgrounds with the common goal to ensure that consumers have equal and easy access to as much creative content as possible,” the government writes.

The common theme raised in a number of the initiative’s components is the education of consumers. The Ministry of Culture says it will team up with the telecoms industry, rightsholders and the Consumer Council to launch a joint awareness project later this year to inform consumers which services are legal and which are not.

Additionally, the Ministry believes that one of the problems with the consumption of infringing music and movies is that the public does not understand its “significance and consequences.” It appears that rightsholders will step in to educate the masses on this issue.

“Rightsholders have stated that they will take the initiative to create an information task force that will pro-actively target and communicate with Internet users on relevant sites and forums,” the Ministry writes.

The rightsholders will reportedly seek to change Internet users’ attitudes by various methods, including contacting and initiating dialog with individuals on file-sharing sites “who upload and use illegal material.”

Another effort in the education of consumers will relate to securing existing open WiFi networks and having manufacturers build automatic technical solutions into hardware of the future.

On the ISPs end, outgoing customer bills will include notices warning users to secure their connections and stressing the importance of choosing legal media consumption offers over pirate networks.

The Ministry document also notes that there will be increased effort to remove infringing material from the Internet but perhaps a more controversial element of the Pirate Package relates to the ISP-level blocking of websites such as The Pirate Bay. The initiative hopes to pave the way for a smoother blocking process.

According to the Ministry, Denmark’s ISPs and rightsholders have reached an agreement on censoring sites which will be formalized into a written Code of Conduct.

In practice what this means is that if rightsholders want a site blocked they will only have to take legal action against a single ISP. Once a court decides the outcome (to block or not to block) that ISP agrees to be bound by “the final decision of the court.” Whether this means they agree not to launch an appeal as many ISPs have done in the past remains unclear.

“This is an automated process where the rights holders need only contact one organization / one telephone company, which will then make sure to communicate this decision to the other telcos,” the Ministry writes.

While rightsholders will be pleased at the formalization of the site-blocking procedures, they will be universally unhappy at the lack of any kind of end-user punishment, such as the provisions currently available in France or those forthcoming in watered-down form in the US.

However, opponents of 3 strikes-style regimes are cautiously happy with the outcome.

“We are all very happy that the letter model has been pronounced dead by the Ministry of Culture. It is a huge victory for the internet and for the users,” says Troels Møller, co-founder of Internet-political think tank and digital rights group Bitbureauet.

“The anti-piracy outfits and copyright organizations didn’t get their way this time. I think it’s a brave decision by the politicians,” Møller told TorrentFreak.

“It is a good idea to focus on operating legal services in ways that ensure users actually want to use them, and to facilitate forums to work out new business models.”

Early indications are that rightsholders still want more, with suggestions that they will now lobby for the police to become more active in pursuing uploaders of copyright material.
https://torrentfreak.com/denmark-kil...iative-120620/





Comcast Wins Protest Against “Shake Down” of BitTorrent Pirates
Ernesto

A big win for Comcast and its subscribers in a federal court in Illinois.

Comcast successfully defended its subscribers from being harassed by so-called copyright trolls.

Two weeks ago we first reported that Comcast was no longer complying to court ordered subpoenas where the ISP is asked to give up personal information of alleged BitTorrent pirates.

Instead of handing over subscriber info, Comcast asked the court to quash the subpoenas.

Among other things, the ISP argued that the court doesn’t have jurisdiction over all defendants, because many don’t live in the district in which they are being sued. The company also argues that the copyright holders have no grounds to join this many defendants in one lawsuit.

The real kicker, however, came with the third argument. Here, Comcast accused the copyright holders of a copyright shakedown, exploiting the court to coerce defendants into paying settlements.

“Plaintiffs should not be allowed to profit from unfair litigation tactics whereby they use the offices of the Court as an inexpensive means to gain Doe defendants’ personal information and coerce ‘settlements’ from them,” Comcast’s lawyers wrote.

“It is evident in these cases – and the multitude of cases filed by plaintiffs and other pornographers represented by their counsel – that plaintiffs have no interest in actually litigating their claims against the Doe defendants, but simply seek to use the Court and its subpoena powers to obtain sufficient information to shake down the Doe defendants.”

Comcast cited several previous cases to back up their claims and pointed out that federal rules require courts to deny discovery “to protect a party or person from annoyance, embarrassment, oppression, or undue burden or expense.”

These arguments were successful because the judge quashed the subpoenas for the Comcast subscribers and dismissed the cases in question.
https://torrentfreak.com/comcast-win...irates-120622/





'Censorship Creep': Pirate Bay Block Will Affect One-Third of U.K.

Nearly 10 years ago, "Cleanfeed" was designed to protect the British public from child abuse imagery. A decade later, the same system is used to enforce ISP blocks on sites like The Pirate Bay. How did the U.K. fall into "censorship creep"?
Zack Whittaker

Nearly five years ago, the U.K. flipped the Web censorship switch. Most U.K. residents didn't even notice. Designed by telecommunications giant British Telecom (BT), "Cleanfeed" was used to filter out child abuse imagery, and it did so with great success.

Users would not see a notice or a startling warning about the content they had inadvertently accessed or had tried to reach. The page just wouldn't load.

In 2007, Home Office minister Vernon Coaker ordered all U.K. ISPs to subscribe to Cleanfeed to prevent access to scenes of sexual abuse and "criminally obscene" content.

And then things began to change.

The U.K.'s antipiracy legislation, the Digital Economy Act, was brought into law by a tiny minority of parliamentary representatives in 2010. In all fairness, it was only a matter of time.

But a series of delays means the law has yet to swing into full effect. Its "three-strikes" system, designed to inform copyright infringers that repeated acts would lead to Internet disconnections, has been put on ice until 2014.

The United States followed in the U.K.'s footsteps with the Stop Online Piracy Act, also known as SOPA. In a similar fashion to the Digital Economy Act, it would allow copyright holders to seek court injunctions against Web sites that "enable or facilitate copyright infringement."

On January 18, no more than three months after the bill was introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives, the Web went dark for a day in protest. Dozens of prominent Web sites temporarily shut down or displayed public protests in response to the 'censorship' bill. SOPA was shelved two days later.

The "enabling" of the U.K.'s Digital Economy Act was not quick enough for copyright holders, like the music and film industry. Enough was enough, and they brought a case to court.

In April 2011, the High Court in London ruled BT must block access to file-sharing site Newzbin2 at ISP level -- using none other than the Cleanfeed system. It was widely seen as a "test case" building up to forcing bigger file-sharing sites off the British Web.

BT did not appeal the decision, leading to a damaging legal precedent under U.K. law. From the moment of that ruling, any individual or organization could bring a separate case against any other online property.

And so it began.

Almost exactly a year later, six of the U.K.'s largest broadband providers were told by the same High Court to impose a block on their customers from accessing magnet-link sharing site The Pirate Bay.

The numbers breakdown shows how many people are affected as a percentage of the wider U.K. population, but perhaps more worryingly, how many are affected when compared with the overall number of U.K. broadband users.

Virgin Media was the first ISP to block its 4.3 million customers from accessing The Pirate Bay, on May 2, only days after the ruling. A week later, Orange Broadband's 713,000 customers found their access was cut off. On May 30, Sky Broadband imposed a block for its 3.8 million customers.

O2 Broadband was next, on June 7. Despite not being named in the judgement, Be Broadband customers were also hit by the block because Be was bought by O2 in 2006 for 50 million pounds ($27.2 million).

An O2 representative said its total subscribers base -- of both O2 and Be users -- stands at 617,000 customers.

TalkTalk's 4.1 million customers were next. It was the most recent -- and most rebellious -- in how it blocked its customers from accessing The Pirate Bay.

In a daring stunt, it was the only ISP to tell its users when they attempted to access the site that the British Phonographic Industry, the British record industry's trade association that brought the case to the High Court in the first place, was to blame for the block.

All named ISPs bar one have imposed blocks. BT's 6.3 million customers have not yet been blocked from accessing the "pirate" Web site. The telecommunications and broadband company -- the largest in the U.K. -- has been given more time to consider its options.

However, the High Court told ISPs to block certain IP addresses, Web site addresses, and domain names. The Pirate Bay was quick to change its Web site IP address -- circumventing the block completely -- and many other Web sites offered proxies to allow access to the site.

And here's the kicker: at no point were U.K. citizens barred from circumventing the blocks to access the "pirate" Web site.

By the time all the blocks are in place, the total tally could reach as many as 20 million users, which amounts to about a third of the U.K. population.

But the effect of the widespread block is far more concentrated.

The six ISPs forced to block access to The Pirate Bay serve more than 92 percent of the U.K.'s broadband customers. The figures are a bit sketchy and haven't been updated by Ofcom, the U.K. communications regulator, since the third-quarter of 2011.

Ofcom said there are more than 20 million residential and small business lines in the country as of February. We're now in June, and the figure would have risen slightly. It's fair to say that the very vast majority of U.K. broadband users will find their Web freedom restricted as a result of the High Court ruling.

One has to hand it to the BPI. It brought a highly sophisticated, targeted court case against U.K. broadband customers.

After all, it seems it was the ordinary broadband user who was in the BPI's crosshairs, not The Pirate Bay itself.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-574...-third-of-u.k/





Google Reports 'Alarming' Rise in Censorship by Governments

Search engine company has said there has been a troubling increase in requests to remove political content from the internet
Dominic Rushe

Over six months Google complied with 47% of requests for content removal and 65% of court orders. Photograph: Jonathan Hordle/Rex Features

There has been an alarming rise in the number of times governments attempted to censor the internet in last six months, according to a report from Google.

Since the search engine last published its bi-annual transparency report, it said it had seen a troubling increase in requests to remove political content. Many of these requests came from western democracies not typically associated with censorship.

It said Spanish regulators asked Google to remove 270 links to blogs and newspaper articles critical of public figures. It did not comply. In Poland, it was asked to remove an article critical of the Polish agency for enterprise development and eight other results that linked to the article. Again, the company did not comply.

Google was asked by Canadian officials to remove a YouTube video of a citizen urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet. It refused.

Thai authorities asked Google to remove 149 YouTube videos for allegedly insulting the monarchy, a violation of Thailand's lèse-majesté law. The company complied with 70% of the requests.

Pakistan asked Google to remove six YouTube videos that satirised its army and senior politicians. Google refused.

UK police asked the company to remove five YouTube accounts for allegedly promoting terrorism. Google agreed. In the US most requests related to alleged harassment of people on YouTube. The authorities asked for 187 pieces to be removed. Google complied with 42% of them.

In a blog post, Dorothy Chou, Google's senior policy analyst, wrote: "Unfortunately, what we've seen over the past couple years has been troubling, and today is no different. When we started releasing this data, in 2010, we noticed that government agencies from different countries would sometimes ask us to remove political content that our users had posted on our services. We hoped this was an aberration. But now we know it's not.

"This is the fifth data set that we've released. Just like every other time, we've been asked to take down political speech. It's alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect – western democracies not typically associated with censorship."

Over the six months covered by the latest report, Google complied with an average of 65% of court orders, as opposed to 47% of more informal requests.

Last month Google announced it was receiving more than one million requests a month from copyright owners seeking to pull their content from the company's search results.

Fred von Lohmann, Google's senior copyright counsel, said copyright infringement was the main reason Google had removed links from search terms.

He said the company had received a total of 3.3m requests for removals on copyright grounds last year, and was on course to quadruple that number this year. The company complied with 97% of requests.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...ise-censorship





Clip.dj. Clipped Along with YouTube-MP3
Richard Menta

There is a ton of music on YouTube ranging from professionally produced major label videos to home grown live performances to simple clips of rotating out of print 45s. Naturally, many people want to capture some of this music on their iPod so they can listen to it without the need of a nearby WiFi signal. As is the way of the Internet, solutions appeared and conversion sites sprung up to free the audio from its tether.

TorrentFreak alerted us this morning that Google has decided to bring the hammer down on such sites. According to TorrentFreak Google launched its assault with a letter to YouTube-MP3.org, a site that pulls in 1.3 visitors every day by Google's estimation. From the article:

In a letter dated June 8 sent to the site owner ‘Philip’ and shared with TorrentFreak, Associate Product Counsel at YouTube Harris Cohen makes the company’s position clear. Citing the ToS for YouTube’s API, Cohen insists that offering any kind of service that allows YouTube content to be downloaded (as opposed to simply streamed) is prohibited. Furthermore, Cohen underlines the fact that to “separate, isolate, or modify the audio or video components of any YouTube audiovisual content made available through the YouTube API” is forbidden, as is externally storing copies of YouTube content. Continuing to violate these restrictions, Cohen warns, may result in “legal consequences” for YouTube-mp3. The site has been given seven days to comply.

Phillip told TorrentFreak that he contacted Google to discuss the matter. Google responded by blocking all of YouTube-MP3.org's servers from accessing YouTube.

A few days before Google's letter to YouTube-MP3.org, Digital Music News ran an article following the dramatic growth of another YouTube conversion site Clip.dj. "Just like so many circumvention tools before it", noted Digital Music News, "But this one is downright simple-stupid to use, and it's growing really, really fast".

Well, it was growing. After reading the TorrentFreak article visited the Clip.dj site to see if there was anything that might hint that they received a letter. I strongly suspect they did given the note posted on the home page. "We're sorry to announce this, but Clip.dj has shut its service down for good".

An update on the TorrentFreak article states that they were informed that Google may be targeting other similar services, further validating the notion that Clip.dj was clipped by Google.

We'll keep you updated if other sites are targeted.
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2012/Clip.html





RIAA to CNET: Follow Google, Nix Video-to-MP3 Conversions

Days after Google blocked a site that converts songs from YouTube music videos into MP3s, the RIAA again asks CNET to remove conversion software from Download.com.
Greg Sandoval

The Recording Industry Association of America wants to put an end to software and services that enable people to rip songs from music videos.

Two days after YouTube-MP3.org, a site that converts songs from music videos into MP3 files, was blocked from accessing YouTube, the RIAA has asked CNET to remove software from Download.com that performs a similar function. CNET, which is owned by CBS, is the publisher of this news site.

The RIAA, the trade group representing the four largest record companies, began pressuring Google to start cracking down on the MP3-conversion services about a year ago, according to music industry sources. That's about the same time the trade group says it began appealing to Download.com to do the same.

"More than a year ago we asked Download.com to remove applications that are used to steal our members' content," the RIAA said in a statement. "Download.com continues to ignore our requests and many of these applications are still being promoted on the site. Download.com is profiting from this infringement through advertisements and other ways it derives revenue when people use the site to download these applications."

The RIAA focused its criticism on software found at Download.com called YouTubeDownloader. The software's description at Download.com reads:

"YouTube Downloader is a popular, free program that enables you to download and convert online videos...for later viewing on your desktop or mobile device. It can convert files to MOV, MP4, 3GP, WMV, AVI, or MP3. The name 'YouTube Downloader' is terribly misleading because the program, in fact, downloads a whole lot more than just YouTube videos. On the developer's site, you can find an extensive list of additional supported sites including Facebook and Vimeo."

The RIAA noted that the software has more than 108 million downloads and Download.com editors gave it 4 1/2 out of 5 stars. The organization also pointed out that there are many other similar applications available at the site, "which can be used to steal content from CBS, which owns Download.com."

CNET declined to respond to the RIAA but what I've learned from poking around internally is this: CNET's policy is that Download.com is not in any position to determine whether a piece of software is legal or not, or whether it can be used for illegal activity. As I understand it, plenty of the software at issue has significant non-infringing uses. As for removing illegal software, CNET has a record of doing that. When the RIAA made a request to pull LimeWire, the once popular file-sharing software, CNET managers declined until a federal district judge ruled in 2010 that the service indeed violated copyright law.

A colleague pointed out that this is the same position taken by Google regarding search results. Google may have banned YouTube-MP3.org from accessing YouTube, but key in the words "YouTube" and "conversion" and a link to YouTube-MP3.org is the first thing you see.

YouTubeDownloader and YouTube-MP3.org are just a small sample of the software and services performing these conversions that also offer non-infringing uses. The big question is whether a company like CNET can be held responsible when someone misuses the software.

Mark Litvack, a former director for the antipiracy division of the Motion Picture Association of America, said he doubts very much whether the RIAA wants to sue CNET and also that he didn't know of any cases in which a third-party provider was sued for distributing ripping software. "I don't see any need for CNET to change its policy."

Eric Goldman wasn't as confident that CNET is in a good position. Goldman, an associate professor of law at Santa Clara University School of Law, and director of the school's High Tech Law Institute, said that the law here is "murky" and that the first thing that would need to be decided is whether the conversion software offered by Download.com is illegal. Goldman said that copyright owners are casting a wide net at those they hold responsible for violations.

"We're seeing copyright owners going after people who use tools to infringe," Goldman said. "We're seeing them go after people who provide the tools and then the people who provide support for the tools. We're seeing people several steps away from actual infringers accused of infringement."

He said that if the content on Download.com was user-generated and not editorially controlled, it would be a cinch. The service would be protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and CNET could not be held liable for any copyright violations committed by users. He said one area that could prove troublesome for CNET is the anti-circumvention rules. It is illegal to circumvent copy protection schemes on copyrighted material.

"The dilemma is whether converting a YouTube video into an MP3 is a circumvention of someone's technological protection measures," Goldman said. "If it is, then the toolmaker is almost certainly liable and those that provide support could be held liable as well."

Goldman finished by saying he thinks the rules "stink" and there is a need for much more clarity.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-574...3-conversions/





Listening Equipment 'Will Record Conversations' at Canadian Airports: CBSA
Ian MacLeod

Airports and border crossings across Canada are being wired with high-definition cameras and microphones that can eavesdrop on travellers' conversations, according to the Canada Border Services Agency.

A CBSA statement said that audio-video monitoring and recording is already in place at unidentified CBSA sites at airports and border points of entry as part of an effort to enhance "border integrity, infrastructure and asset security and health and safety."

As part of the work, the agency is introducing audio-monitoring equipment as well.

"It is important to note that even though audio technology is installed, no audio is recorded at this time. It will become functional at a later date," CBSA spokesman Chris Kealey said in a written statement.

But whenever that occurs, the technology, "will record conversations," the agency said in a separate statement in response to questions from the Ottawa Citizen.

At Ottawa's airport, signs will be posted referring passersby to a "privacy notice" that will be posted on the CBSA website once the equipment is activated, and to a separate help line explaining how the recordings will be used, stored, disclosed and retained.

Already, though, the union representing about 45 CBSA employees at the airport is concerned personal workplace conversations and remarks could be captured and become part of employees' official record, Jean-Pierre Fortin, national president of the Custom and Immigration Union, said Friday. He added that the union only learned of the audio-recording development this week, after reporters began making inquiries.

The recording equipment may also be linked to a federal initiative to help CBSA combat organized crime and internal smuggling conspiracies at big Canadian airports.

A 2008 RCMP report said at least 58 crime groups were believed active at major airports, typically by corrupting airport employees or placing criminal associates in airport jobs to move narcotics and other contraband to and from planes.

The Customs Act was amended in 2009 to allow for the creation of "customs controlled areas" within airports, starting with those in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, followed by Ottawa and other international Canadian aerodromes.

A crucial aspect of the change are proposed regulations giving border services officers expanded powers to question, examine and search airport workers and travellers, both domestic and international, within the designated areas.

The controlled areas at Ottawa's Macdonald-Cartier International Airport include the areas surrounding aircraft that have arrived in or are about to leave Canada; the primary inspection area where all travellers must report to a border services officer; the secondary inspection area where border services officers conduct further examinations of travellers and goods; as well as certain holding and departure areas at the airport.

The Treasury Board requires government departments to conduct a "privacy impact assessment" before establishing any new or substantially modified program or activity involving personal information. The assessment is then reviewed by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.

The office this week said it is reviewing a CBSA privacy assessment for the customs controlled areas.

But, "we have not received a privacy impact assessment regarding audio-video monitoring at the Ottawa airport," said spokeswoman Valerie Lawton. "If the CBSA were to introduce audio-video monitoring, our office would expect a full privacy impact assessment, which we would review and make (non-binding) recommendations as necessary to protect privacy."

An official with the Ottawa International Airport Authority had no comment on the CBSA installations, saying the two organizations are distinct and separate.
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/trave...642/story.html





FBI & DEA Warn That IPv6 May Be Too Damn Anonymous
Mike Masnick

IPv6 has been around for quite some time at this point, but as we get closer and closer to moving the internet over to the system, it appears that American and Canadian law enforcement has just noticed that it's not as easy to identify and track users, and they're frantically raising concerns.

FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Royal Canadian Mounted Police officials have told industry representatives that IPv6 traceability is necessary to identify people suspected of crimes. The FBI has even suggested that a new law may be necessary if the private sector doesn't do enough voluntarily.

The issue has more to do with record-keeping than technology. As Declan McCullagh explains at the link above:

ARIN and the other regional registries maintain public Whois databases for IP addresses, meaning that if you type in 64.30.224.118, you can see that it's registered to CNET's publisher. ARIN tries to ensure that Internet providers keep their segments of the Whois database updated, and because it's been handing out IPv4 addresses blocks every few months, it currently enjoys enough leverage to insist on it.

But for IPv6, ARIN will be handing out much larger Internet address blocks only every 10 to 15 years, meaning it loses much of its ability to convince Internet providers to keep their Whois entries up-to-date. That means it may take law enforcement agencies -- presumably armed with court orders -- longer to trace an IPv6 address such as 2001:4860:4860::8888 back to an Internet service provider's customer.


Of course, some might see that as a feature, not a bug. Either way, I would imagine that most service providers will bend over backwards to make sure that law enforcement can, in fact, track people down if necessary. Too many service providers fold when the feds come knocking seeking information on people already. As long as this is presented as a way to protect children or stop terrorists or whatever the favorite of the day is, it seems likely that ISPs will get things in order themselves.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...nonymous.shtml





NSA: It Would Violate Your Privacy to Say if We Spied on You
Spencer Ackerman

The surveillance experts at the National Security Agency won’t tell two powerful United States Senators how many Americans have had their communications picked up by the agency as part of its sweeping new counterterrorism powers. The reason: it would violate your privacy to say so.

That claim comes in a short letter sent Monday to civil libertarian Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. The two members of the Senate’s intelligence oversight committee asked the NSA a simple question last month: under the broad powers granted in 2008′s expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, how many persons inside the United States have been spied upon by the NSA?

The query bounced around the intelligence bureaucracy until it reached I. Charles McCullough, the Inspector General of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the nominal head of the 16 U.S. spy agencies. In a letter acquired by Danger Room, McCullough told the senators that the NSA inspector general “and NSA leadership agreed that an IG review of the sort suggested would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons,” McCullough wrote.

“All that Senator Udall and I are asking for is a ballpark estimate of how many Americans have been monitored under this law, and it is disappointing that the Inspectors General cannot provide it,” Wyden told Danger Room on Monday. “If no one will even estimate how many Americans have had their communications collected under this law then it is all the more important that Congress act to close the ‘back door searches’ loophole, to keep the government from searching for Americans’ phone calls and emails without a warrant.”

What’s more, McCullough argued, giving such a figure of how many Americans were spied on was “beyond the capacity” of the NSA’s in-house watchdog — and to rectify it would require “imped[ing]” the very spy missions that concern Wyden and Udall. “I defer to [the NSA inspector general's] conclusion that obtaining such an estimate was beyond the capacity of his office and dedicating sufficient additional resources would likely impede the NSA’s mission,” McCullough wrote.

The changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 2008 — which President Obama, then in the Senate, voted for — relaxed the standards under which communications with foreigners that passed through the United States could be collected by the spy agency. The NSA, for instance, no longer requires probable cause to intercept a person’s phone calls, text messages or emails within the United States as long as one party to the communications is “reasonably” believed to be outside the United States.

The FISA Amendments Act of 2008, as it’s known, legalized an expansive effort under the Bush administration that authorized NSA surveillance on persons inside the United States without a warrant in cases of suspicion of connections to terrorism. As my colleague David Kravets has reported, Wyden has attempted to slow a renewal of the 2008 surveillance authorities making its way through Congress. The House Judiciary Committee is expected to address the FISA Amendments Act on Tuesday, as the 2008 law expires this year.

Longtime intelligence watchers found the stonewalling of an “entirely legitimate oversight question” to be “disappointing and unsatisfactory,” as Steve Aftergood, a secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists told Danger Room.

“If the FISA Amendments Act is not susceptible to oversight in this way,” Aftergood said, “it should be repealed, not renewed.”

Even though McCullough said the spy agencies wouldn’t tell the senators how many Americans have been spied upon under the new authorities, he told them he “firmly believe[s] that oversight of intelligence collection is a proper function of an Inspector General. I will continue to work with you and the [Senate intelligence] Committee to identify ways we can enhance our ability to conduct effective oversight.”
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/06/nsa-spied/





Sweden Links with US in 'Net-Activist Alliance'

Sweden and the United States are in talks to create a common fund to support internet activists as part of a developing alliance between the two countries.

The Swedish foreign minister and US Secretary of State have both emphasized the importance of internet freedom.

The two countries are currently working on a number of initiatives to support internet activists involved in pro-democracy movements around the world.

According to Bildt, Sweden and the United States plan to put forward a proposal in the United Nations calling for the protection of freedom of speech on the internet.

"We're now working with a broader group around this, countries like Brazil, Nigeria, Turkey, and Tunisia. It's important that it's not only we and the Americans who are supporting this," Bildt told the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper.

Bildt explained that the proposal means that freedom of speech guarantees in article 19 of the UN declaration of human rights would also be applied to the internet.

Another initiative spearheaded by Sweden and the United States, as well as the Netherlands, calls for the creation of a fund to support net activists in undemocratic countries.

"Yes, we're discussing that. Both we, the Americans, and the Dutch already have such activities and now the question is how much we can coordinate things," said Bildt.

According to DN, the US and the Netherlands have promised to contribute to such a fund, while Sweden plans to contribute once the exact shape of the fund becomes clearer.

An increasing amount of Sweden's foreign aid budget has been devoted to supporting net activists in recent years through initiatives designed to foster democracy and free.

The 2012 budget includes an allocation of 215 million kronor ($30.7 million) to such efforts, up from 150 million kronor the year before, DN reports.

The funds are generally channeled through Swedish aid agency SIDA to train activists on encrypting their communications, among other programmes.

Bildt told DN he hopes the resolution will be presented at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva before the summer.
http://www.thelocal.se/41474/20120615/





Julian Assange Seeking Asylum in Ecuadorian Embassy in London

WikiLeaks founder walked into the embassy and asked for asylum under the United Nations human rights declaration
Beatrice Woolf

The WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has sought political asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, sparking a new crisis in the tortured history of his extradition to Sweden.

Assange walked into the embassy in Knightsbridge and asked for asylum under the UN human rights declaration. He said: "I can confirm I arrived at the Ecuadorian Embassy and sought diplomatic sanctuary and political asylum.

"This application has been passed to the ministry of foreign affairs in the capital Quito. I am grateful to the Ecuadorian ambassador and the government of Ecuador for considering my application."

The dramatic move follows a long-running legal bid by the whistleblower to halt his extradition to Sweden, where he faces sex crime allegations. Assange is currently on £240,000 police bail, and had been living with friends, a number of whom put together the bail payment.

An embassy statement said: "This afternoon Mr Julian Assange arrived at the Ecuadorian Embassy seeking political asylum from the Ecuadorian government. We have immediately passed his application on to the relevant department in Quito. While the department assesses Mr Assange's application, Mr Assange will remain at the embassy, under the protection of the Ecuadorian government."

"The decision to consider Mr Assange's application for protective asylum should in no way be interpreted as Ecuador interfering in the judicial processes of either the United Kingdom or Sweden."

Ecuador's foreign minister Ricardo Patino also confirmed that the Australian had taken refuge at its embassy and that the country's government was weighing up the request. He said Assange had written to president Rafael Correa saying he was being persecuted and seeking asylum.

Assange, he said, had argued that "the authorities in his country will not defend his minimum guarantees in front of any government or ignore the obligation to protect a politically persecuted citizen".

He added that Assange had said he could not return to Australia as it would not block his extradition to "a foreign country that applies the death penalty for the crime of espionage and sedition", a reference to the United States.

WikiLeaks was behind the release of 250,000 secret US embassy cables which were leaked to the Guardian in 2011 and caused acute embarrassment to the US by revealing secretly-held attitudes of the country's global embassy staff.

The WikiLeaks founder has been in custody and on bail in the UK since autumn 2010. His bail conditions have varied over that time but for most of it they stipulated that he must stay at a country house in Suffolk owned by Vaughan Smith, the founder of the Frontline club in west London, report to police daily and wear an electronic tag. Public figures who rallied to his cause included John Pilger, Jemima Khan and film-maker Ken Loach.

A message was posted on the WikiLeaks Twitter account, saying: "ALERT: Julian Assange has requested political asylum and is under the protection of the Ecuadorian embassy in London."

A message posted on the WikiLeaks Twitter account pointed out that Assange had been offered protection by Ecuador's leftist government as far back as November 2010. Deputy Foreign Minister Kintto Lucas said then that the country was open to giving him residence without any conditions. Last April, Ecuador announced the expulsion of US ambassador Heather Hodges, apparently in response to a 2009 diplomatic cable divulged by WikiLeaks in which the envoy accused the country's newly retired police chief of corruption.

The Swedish authorities want Assange to answer accusations of raping a woman and sexually molesting and coercing another in Stockholm in August 2010 while on a visit to give a lecture.

The UK Supreme Court decided on 30 May that Assange's extradition was lawful and could go ahead, but he was given time to consider the judgment. The 40-year-old says the sex was consensual and the allegations are politically motivated.

Last week the supreme court reaffirmed its rejection of Assange's appeal against his extradition, turning down an 11th hour request to reopen the case.

In a brief statement, the court said the application was "without merit and it is dismissed."

The supreme court case revolved around the question of whether a prosecutor constituted a "judicial authority" as the European arrest warrant specifies.

The court found by a majority of five to two against Assange, saying that the warrant was valid.

In its statement declining to reopen the case, the court said it had agreed unanimously that extradition proceedings should not begin for another two weeks.

Assange's marathon legal battle has played out in the glare of worldwide publicity and his court appearances have previously attracted a range of celebrity supporters and members of the public who back him.

He had been given until June 28th to lodge an appeal against the UK court decisions at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. His lawyers were believed to be considering their next move. Some legal commentators have doubted whether Assange would have strong grounds to take his appeal to the ECHR in Strasbourg. He may have decided on his dramatic switch in tactics having been discouraged about his chances of success in Europe's highest court.

The Ministry of Justice said that responsibility for handling his extradition rested with the Serious Organised crime Agency (SOCA) which deals with European Arrest Warrant requests. SOCA did not immediately reply to calls.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012...asylum-ecuador





Hacked Companies Fight Back with Controversial Steps
Joseph Menn

Frustrated by their inability to stop sophisticated hacking attacks or use the law to punish their assailants, an increasing number of U.S. companies are taking retaliatory action.

Known in the cyber security industry as "active defense" or "strike-back" technology, the reprisals range from modest steps to distract and delay a hacker to more controversial measures. Security experts say they even know of some cases where companies have taken action that could violate laws in the United States or other countries, such as hiring contractors to hack the assailant's own systems.

In the past, companies that have been attacked have mostly focused on repairing the damage to their computer networks and shoring them up to prevent future breaches.

But as prevention is increasingly difficult in an era when malicious software is widely available on the Internet for anyone wanting to cause mischief, security experts say companies are growing more aggressive in going after cyber criminals.

"Not only do we put out the fire, but we also look for the arsonist," said Shawn Henry, the former head of cybercrime investigations at the FBI who in April joined new cyber security company CrowdStrike, which aims to provide clients with a menu of active responses.

Once a company detects a network breach, rather than expel the intruder immediately, it can waste the hacker's time and resources by appearing to grant access to tempting material that proves impossible to extract. Companies can also allow intruders to make off with bogus files or "beacons" that reveal information about the thieves' own machines, experts say.

Henry and CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovich do not recommend that companies try to breach their opponent's computers, but they say the private sector does need to fight back more boldly against cyber espionage.

It is commonplace for law firms to have their emails read during negotiations for ventures in China, Alperovich told the Reuters Global Media and Technology Summit. That has given the other side tremendous leverage because they know the Western client company's strategy, including the most they would be willing to pay for a certain stake.

But if a company knows its lawyers will be hacked, it can plant false information and get the upper hand.

"Deception plays an enormous role," Alperovich said.

FIGHTING BACK

Other security experts say a more aggressive posture is unlikely to have a significant impact in the near term in the overall fight against cybercriminals and Internet espionage. Veteran government and private officials warn that much of the activity is too risky to make sense, citing the chances for escalation and collateral damage.

"There is no business case for it and no possible positive outcome," said John Pescatore, a National Security Agency and Secret Service veteran who leads research firm Gartner's Internet security practice.

Nevertheless, the movement shows the deep anger and sense of futility among security professionals, many of whom feel that a bad situation is getting worse, endangering not only their companies but the national economy.

"There's nothing you can do" to keep determined and well-financed hackers out, said Rodney Joffe, senior technologist at Internet infrastructure company Neustar Inc and an advisor to the White House on cyber security.

Joffe recently looked at 168 of the largest 500 U.S. companies by revenue and found evidence in Neustar forensic logs that 162 of them owned machines that at some point had been transmitting data out to hackers.

Frustration by security professionals is not new. Some privately admitted to rooting for Lulz Security last year during that hacking group's unprecedented spree of public crimes, when it broke into and embarrassed Sony Corp, an FBI affiliate and others with routine hacking techniques [ID:nL2E8E6EDO]. They said the resulting media coverage finally caught the attention of CEOs and legislators, although tougher cyber security laws have yet to pass Congress.

Although some strike-backs have occurred quietly in the past, Facebook popularized going on offense, said Jeff Moss, founder of the influential Black Hat security conferences and an advisor to the Department of Homeland Security.

In January, Facebook Inc named some of the Russian players behind the malicious "Koobface" software that spread through spam on various social networks, earning the gang an estimated $2 million.

INDUSTRY FAILURES

The security industry's shortcomings were underscored most recently by the discovery of the Flame spying virus in the Middle East.

Mikko Hypponen, the well-regarded chief research officer at Finland's F-Secure Oyj, told the Reuters Summit his company had a sample of Flame in 2010 and classified it as clean and later missed another virus called Duqu that was suspected of being backed by Western governments.

"These are examples how we are failing" as an industry, Hypponen said. "Consumer-grade antivirus you buy from the store does not work too well trying to detect stuff created by the nation-states with nation-state budgets."

Because some national governments are suspected in attacks on private Western companies, it is natural that some of the victims want to join their own governments to fight back.

"It's time to have the debate about what the actions would be for the private sector," former NSA director Kenneth Minihan said at the RSA security conference held earlier this year in San Francisco.

In April, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told the San Jose Mercury News that officials had been contemplating authorizing even "proactive" private-entity attacks, although there has been little follow-up comment.

Many large security providers no longer preach that keeping the enemy out is paramount. Instead, they adopt the more recent line taken by the Pentagon, which is to assume that hackers have gotten inside and will again.

The mainstream advice now is to focus on trying to detect suspicious activity as quickly as possible in order to shut it down.

Hitting back with force is only the most colorful of possible responses after that. More common alternatives include deep analysis of what data has been sent out and attempts to learn whether the recipients were competitors, criminals who might try to resell it, or national governments, who might be inclined to share it with local industry.

Some experts also say executives should identify their most prized intellectual property and keep it off of networked computers and consider evasive action - such as having 100 versions of a critical digitized blueprint and only one that is genuine, with the right one never identified in emails.

"There is a reason that people fly halfway around the world to have a one-hour meeting," Joffe said of intelligence agencies.

(Reporting by Joseph Menn in San Francisco, Editing by Tiffany Wu)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...85G07S20120617





Exclusive: Online Bank-Theft Software Grows More Sophisticated
Joseph Menn

Two of the most pervasive and dangerous types of software for stealing money from bank accounts have been improved and can now transfer money out automatically, without a hacker's supervision, researchers said.

The latest variants of the widespread SpyEye and Zeus programs have already stolen as much as 13,000 euros ($16,487) at a time from a single account and are in the early stages of deployment, according to investigators at Trend Micro Inc, a Japan-based security company that has many banks as customers.

Trend Micro Vice President Tom Kellerman told Reuters that his company's researchers had seen the new attacks on a dozen financial institutions in Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy. That is troubling because European banks generally have greater technology defenses than those in the United States, and Kellerman said it is "inevitable" that the variants will cross the Atlantic.

The new code has the potential to dramatically escalate the amount being stolen from accounts and a years-old arms race between the banks and criminal groups that are often based in Eastern Europe.

"This has tremendous implications," especially as Americans move toward banking by phone, said Kellerman. "This attack toolkit ushers in a new era of bank heists."

Like other security companies, Trend Micro profits by selling software and services to institutions and consumers worried about online spying and account takeovers.

Though written and controlled by different groups, SpyEye and Zeus share the ability to be installed on computers that visit malicious websites or legitimate pages that have been compromised by hackers. Both programs are sold in the burgeoning underground hacking economy, where they can be customized or improved with additional modules like those just discovered.

The programs already have used a technique called "web injection" to generate new entry fields when victims log on to any number of banks or other sensitive websites. Instead of seeing a bank ask for an account number and password, for example, a victimized user sees requests for both of those and an ATM card number. Everything typed in then gets whisked off to the hacker, who later signs in and transfers money to an accomplice's account.

Those transfers can be time-consuming, and the hacker has to think about how much can be sent out at once without drawing attention. Multiple, smaller transfers are preferable but take more time.

For the past year or more, some variants have also captured one-time passwords sent from the banks by text messages to client cell phones as an added security measure. But in those cases, a hacker had to be online within 30 or 60 seconds in order to use the one-time password.

The new software allows the criminal to siphon money out while he sleeps. It could significantly increase the number of hacked accounts and the speed with which they are drained.

Brett Stone-Gross, a senior security researcher with Dell Inc unit Dell SecureWorks, said thieves "will be able to extract more money" with automation.

But he also said the landscape might not be transformed by the development, because the main limiting factor for crime groups is the number of accomplices, known as money mules, that they can hire to accept transfers from victim accounts. Automation will not lessen the need for mules, Stone-Gross said.

BASED IN EASTERN EUROPE

Trend Micro spoke online with sellers of the automated transfer modules who were based in Russia, Ukraine and Romania, where arrests and prosecutions are rare. Kellerman said the new software costs between $300 and $4,000 on top of the basic thieving tools, with customized jobs costing still more.

So far, the company has seen it run only on top of Microsoft Corp's Windows operating system, which is by far the most common for personal computers.

Banks generally make individuals whole for such losses if they are detected quickly. But recent versions of SpyEye and Zeus can present fake account balances to individual bank customers, so they might not realize their savings are being drained until too late.

Kellerman recommended that banks move more toward "out-of-band" authentication, such as direct phone calls to confirm online transfers.

In the United States, financial regulators last June also called for such checks and urged banks to explore newer technologies to combat Internet fraudsters.

(Reporting by Joseph Menn in San Francisco; Editing by Gary Hill)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...85H0D920120618





(USA) Here is the Accenture Software ...
Bev Harris

This is an installation kit which contains the software; it also has the installation instructions, and a text file explaining how to set it up on a standalone machine if you aren't on a network.

This voter registration and voter history system has been widely criticized -- in Colorado, where it reportedly assigned voters who are Republicans as Democrats, and vice versa, and in Tennessee where it has been proven to lose voter histories.

Now you can examine it yourself.

The MS Access files contain quite a bit of source code. This set is circa 2004.

The file is quite large, so allow a LONG time for it to download.

(due to heavy traffic causing server slowdown here, for now, use this:
http://burnbit.com/torrent/204972/ESM_2_0_8_23_04_zip
323,592 KB

Also perhaps of interest is this set of notes:

http://www.bbvdocs.org/Accenture/Accenture_Wrap_up.zip
2305 KB

Note that one of the service items reveals that it was tripling votes for "random" voters in the 2004 primary. Files I have obtained show that it doubled or tripled votes in the 2008 primary, and also in the May 2010 and Aug 2010 primaries in Tennessee. However: It is not random. It only appears to be random when voters are sorted by fields other than precinct/voter ID. In fact, it is doubling and tripling recorded votes in white Republican suburbs.

Now you can examine some of the logic (or lack of) in the programs yourself.
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/mess...659/82111.html





PGP Founder, Navy SEALs Uncloak Encrypted Comms Biz

Claim total security for phone, text, email, and more
Iain Thomson

Phil Zimmermann and some of the original PGP team have joined up with former US Navy SEALs to build an encrypted communications platform that should be proof against any surveillance.

The company, called Silent Circle, will launch later this year, when $20 a month will buy you encrypted email, text messages, phone calls, and videoconferencing in a package that looks to be strong enough to have the NSA seriously worried. Zimmermann says that surveillance by the state and others has increased vastly over the last few years, and privacy improvement are again needed.

"At the very least I want people, as part of their right in a free society to be able to communicate securely," he said in a promotional video (below). "I should be able to whisper in your ear, even if your ear is a thousand miles away."

The Silent Circle package comes with downloadable applications for smartphones and computers that allows secure communication with other users. A member of the team told El Reg that the encryption architecture was "very, very good," with some of the code coming as a result of seven years of research by team members.

Zimmerman has brought in former partner Jon Callas as cofounder (although Callas remains CTO of Entrust), along with a number of other engineering staff from PGP. Zimmermann was recently one of the original inductees into the Internet Society's hall of fame for his work in bringing encryption to the masses through PGP.

The other two cofounders are former members of the US Navy's Sea, Air, and Land (SEAL) unit: Vic Hyder and Mike Janke. Both run physical security businesses, and Janke is a privacy advocate and the author of the motivational book "Take Control". Janke also reportedly has had 312 stitches, 17 broken bones, two blown-out knees and a crocodile bite scar.

PGP is the world's most popular encryption system, in a large part because it's free. But there's a service element to this that needs to be paid for, and since the whole idea is to collect as little information as possible about the user, the company can't get funding from advertising. At this price level, Silent Circle will be pitching its business at the enterprise market, particularly those traveling abroad, as well as the security-conscious at home.

While software can handle most of the work, there still needs to be a small backend of servers to handle traffic. The company surveyed the state of privacy laws around the world and found that the top three choices were Switzerland, Iceland, and Canada, so they went for the one within driving distance.

Silent Circle has recently come out of stealth mode ahead of the launch later this year and is offering a few lucky punters a chance to try out the private beta. We would imagine that a lot of people hope to try it out will have .gov or .mil associations.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06...ommunications/





Track the Trackers with Collusion: Interview with Mozilla's Ryan Merkley

Even by using privacy add-ons and telling sites not to track you, tracking that builds behavior profiles is out of control. Collusion is an add-on that will help you visualize that tracking. It was introduced by Gary Kovacs, CEO of Mozilla, during a TED talk titled Tracking the Trackers. Here is an interview with Ryan Merkley, Chief Operating Officer for the Mozilla Foundation, about Collusion, being tracked online and privacy.
By Ms. Smith

There are many flavors of privacy add-ons for different browsers, but to get the global tracking "big picture," if you haven't already then you really need to try out Collusion. The "interactive, real-time visualization of entities that track your behavior" when you are surfing says a lot. After the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) struck out at Microsoft for turning on Do Not Track (DNT) by default in IE10, I scoffed at DAA's statement about advertisers supporting and enforcing the "appropriate standards for collecting and using web viewing data" through "strong self-regulation." Try out Collusion and you'll see how laughable that statement seems to be. Here's the demo as well as the add-on for Firefox or for Chrome.

Gary Kovacs, the CEO of Mozilla, gave a fantastic TED talk about "Tracking the trackers" and showed off Collusion to the audience. By now more than 1.6 million people have watched Kovacs' TED talk, so if you haven't then please do watch the video.

Among the eye-opening statements, Kovacs said, "Privacy is not an option, and it shouldn't be the price we accept for just getting on the Internet. Our voices matter and our actions matter even more." After you download and install Collusion in Firefox, you can "see who is tracking you across the Web and following you through the digital woods," Kovacs stated. "Going forward, all of our voices need to be heard. Because what we don't know can actually hurt us. Because the memory of the Internet is forever. We are being watched. It's now time for us to watch the watchers."

I've been using Collusion for some time now and it is jaw-dropping to watch all the sites that still stalk us across the web even with DNT and privacy add-ons.

The Collusion page states: "The Ford Foundation is supporting Mozilla to develop the Collusion add-on so it will enable users to not only see who is tracking them across the Web, but also to turn that tracking off when they want to." Recently I had an opportunity to ask Matt Thompson, Chief Storyteller & Communications Director for the Mozilla Foundation, and Ryan Merkley, Chief Operating Officer for the Mozilla Foundation, some questions.

Interview with Mozilla Foundation Chief Operating Officer Ryan Merkley:

I wanted to clarify that each of the preferences, like enabling Firefox Privacy "Tell websites I do not want to be tracked" and all the various privacy add-ons are stopping more of the tracking that builds behavior profiles than if I were using nothing?

Merkley: Privacy add-ons are one way to block trackers. The "Do Not Track" setting adds information to your browser that tells sites you don't want to be tracked. Your tracking information is still sent, but sites that respect Do Not Track do not use it.

When the browser is restarted with no history, cookies or anything, does the behavior profile tracking start over again? Or does it build from storage somewhere? If I do not reset Collusion, then the same places that were tracking are still there and continue to grow. It's horrifying and infuriating.

Merkley: If you reset Collusion, your session data is gone. All your tracking data is stored on your computer -- we don't host any of it.

What do you recommend please to advise readers how to best protect their privacy?

Merkley: The most important thing for readers is to be informed about tracking and privacy. Collusion shows some tracking information, but you can also check out the information provided by the services you use. How are they using your data? Can you delete it? Can you take it out if you want to? These are good questions to ask, and being informed so you can make good choices is the first step.

Can we turn tracking completely off, or is that what Do Not Track me does? (There's still a lot of tracking!)

Merkley: Collusion doesn't turn tracking off, but future versions will offer some blocking as an option. Do Not Track sends information to all trackers that you don't want to be tracked.

"Through our work with the Ford Foundation, we'll be building outreach campaigns to help people understand online data tracking - both the benefits and the issues - so they can make their own choices about how they want to be tracked (or choose not to be tracked at all)." Have you begun the campaigns?

Merkley: Our campaigns have not yet begun. We'll be continuing our work with Ford over the balance of the year.

Meanwhile, I'll be showing you various different privacy add-ons from time to time.
https://www.networkworld.com/communi...s-ryan-merkley





Capitalists Who Fear Change
Jeffrey Tucker

Digital technology is reinventing our whole world, in service of you and me. It’s free enterprise on steroids. It’s bypassing the gatekeepers and empowering each of us to invent our own civilization for ourselves, according to our own specifications.

The promise of the future is nothing short of spectacular — provided that those who lack the imagination to see the potential here don’t get their way. Sadly but predictably, some of the biggest barriers to a bright future are capitalists themselves who fear the future.

A good example is the current hysteria over 3-dimensional printing. This technology has moved with incredible speed from the realm of science fiction to the real world, seemingly in a matter of months. You can get such printers today for as low as $400. These printers allow objects to be transported digitally, and literally printed into existence right before your very eyes.

It’s like a miracle! It could change everything we think we know about the transport of physical objects. Rather than sending crates and boats around the world, in the future we will only send lightweight digits. The potential for bypassing monopolies and entrenched interests is spectacular

But here is what Andrew Myers reported in Wired Magazine last week:

Last winter, Thomas Valenty bought a MakerBot — an inexpensive 3-D printer that lets you quickly create plastic objects. His brother had some Imperial Guards from the tabletop game Warhammer, so Valenty decided to design a couple of his own Warhammer-style figurines: a two-legged war mecha and a tank.

He tweaked the designs for a week until he was happy. “I put a lot of work into them,” he says. Then he posted the files for free downloading on Thingiverse, a site that lets you share instructions for printing 3-D objects. Soon other fans were outputting their own copies.

Until the lawyers showed up.

Games Workshop, the UK-based firm that makes Warhammer, noticed Valenty’s work and sent Thingiverse a takedown notice, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Thingiverse removed the files, and Valenty suddenly became an unwilling combatant in the next digital war: the fight over copying physical objects.


There we have it. The American Chamber of Commerce — the supposed defender of free enterprise — is in a meltdown panic, determined to either crush 3-D printing in its crib or, at least, to make sure it doesn’t grow past its toddler period.

In the 1940s, Joseph Schumpeter said that the capitalists would ultimately destroy capitalism by insisting that their existing profitability models perpetuate themselves in the face of change. He said that the capitalist class would eventually lose its taste for innovation and insist on government rules that brought it to an end, in the interest of protecting business elites.

An example: when music and books starting going digital, there was a outcry. How will authors and musicians survive this onslaught?

The truth is that there was no onslaught. It was a windfall for consumers that turned into the greatest boon for music and literature ever. Today we see how this is working, and not only working but there are more authors and musicians making money today than ever before. My best example: the Laissez Faire Club.

The methods could never have been anticipated in advance. Some give away their content and sell their performances. Some have found interesting new methods of distributing content behind pay walls that are affordable and convenient. Authors are starting to self publish through fantastic numbers of venues.

I’ve been touring museums lately, and I’ve begun to realize something important about the long process of technological improvement. Through our long history of improvement, every upgrade and every shift from old to new inspired panic. The biggest panic typically comes from the producers themselves who resent the way the market process destabilizes their business model.

It was said that the radio would end live performance. No one would learn music anymore. Everything would be performed one time, and recorded for all time, and that would be the end.

Of course that didn’t happen. Then there was another panic when records came out, on the belief that this would destroy radio. Then tapes were next and everyone predicted doom for recorded music since music could be so easily duplicated (“Home Taping is Killing Music”). It was the same with digital music: surely this would be the death of all music!

And think back to the mass ownership of books in the 19th century. Many people predicted that these would destroy new authors because people would just buy books by old authors that were cheap and affordable. New authors would starve and no one would write anymore.

There is a pattern here. Every new technology that becomes profitable causes people to scream about the plight of existing producers. Then it turns out over time that the sector itself thrives as never before but in ways that no one really expected.

The great secret of the market economy is that it embodies a long-run tendency to dissipate profits under existing production and distribution methods. This is how competition works. This is how competition not only inspires improvement but makes it unavoidable. And this is one reason that so many capitalists hate capitalism.

The process goes like this. The new thing comes along and it earns high profits. Then the copycats come along and do the same thing cheaper and better, robbing the first producer of the monopoly status. Profits eventually fall to zero and then something even better has to come along to attract new business, earn new profits, elicit new copycats, and the whole thing starts all over again.

I’ve never understood why leftists complain about profits going to capitalists. In a vibrant market economy, profits are the temporary exception to the rule. They accrue only to the most innovative and efficient firms, the ones that serve the consumer best, and the gains are never permanent. As soon as the company loses its edge, entrepreneurial profit vanishes.

Under free market competition, writes Ludwig von Mises, the trajectory of existing production and distribution models is always to reduce profits to zero. For those who want to hang on to profits, there can be no rest. New and improved must be an everyday experience. There must be a ceaseless striving to serve consumers in ways that are ever more excellent.

This is why business is always running to government for protection. Kill this crazy new technology! Stop these imports! Raise the costs on the competition! Give us a patent so that we can clobber the other guys! Impose antitrust law! Protect me with a copyright! Regulate the newcomers out of existence! Give us a bailout!

Aside from this, there is a public fear of the new. Otherwise, people would not find the self-interested protests of the existing establishment to be persuasive.

Here is a striking fact about the human mind: we have great difficulty imagining solutions that have yet to present themselves. It doesn’t matter how often the market resolves seemingly intractable problems, we still can’t become accustomed to this reality. Our minds think in terms of existing conditions, and then we predict all kinds of doom. We too often fail to consistently expect the unexpected.

This poses a serious problem for the market economy, which is all about the ability of the system to inspire discovery of new ideas and new solutions to prevailing the problems. The problems posed by change are obvious enough; but the solutions are “crowd sourced” and emerge from places, people, and institutions that cannot be seen in advance.

Capitalism is not for wimps who don’t want to improve. If you want guaranteed profits for the few rather than prosperity and abundance for the many, socialism and fascism really are better systems.

The push to stop market progress won’t work in the end, of course. Technology eventually mows down its forces of resistance. The mercantilists can only delay but never finally suppress the human longing for a better life.
http://lfb.org/today/capitalists-who-fear-change/





Microsoft Surface Just Made the MacBook Air and the iPad Look Obsolete
Jesus Diaz

Microsoft has guts. It's what you get when you're the underdog; either that or you curl into a RIM and die. Microsoft is the underdog because no matter how many hundreds of millions of people use its software, the cool and the future belong to Apple. Or belonged. After yesterday's Surface event—assuming they don't fumble the execution—Gates' children may have found the weapon to stop the heirs of Jobs and turn the tide. Or at least make things exciting for everyone again.

That weapon is Microsoft Surface. And it is beautiful. Beautiful and functional and simple and honest. Surface just bumped the MacBook Air and the iPad to the back seat, and it did so by hewing tightly to everything that Apple's Jonny Ive holds dear, according to the Ten Principles of his Jedi design master, Dieter Rams:

Good design principles for both hardware and software

• Good design is innovative
Surface uses a new manufacturing process—VaporMg—that reduces its weigh while keeping it strong. That process also allows for a built-in kickstand, which is invisible when using the product in tablet mode. It may seem obvious, but it's innovative and enables its laptop mode easily. The same happens with the use of the cover as a keyboard—with its own design breakthroughs. And again with the combination of multi-touch and pressure sensitive pen technology in the Pro model. This is something that you can't find built in any tablet or computer today.

The software user experience is also innovative. It's not just an evolution of the Palm, or a Newton springboard. Metro's live tiles offer information in real time without having to launch apps. It allows for multitasking with split screens. It was created from scratch for touch but it also works with a physical keyboard and trackpad. Metro is, without a doubt, the most innovative user experience both on Earth and on the USS Enterprise.

• Good design makes a product useful
The touchscreen, the case keyboard and the built-in stand, together with the powerful Ivy Bridge brains in the Pro version, make Surface more useful than both tablets and ultrabooks. Surface adapts to your usage at any time, on the sofa or on your desk. In fact, it's the first morphing computer that actually makes sense.

This, too, extends to the software. Again, the live tiles, the multitasking, and Surface's ability to run full professional programs like Photoshop all open the scope of a computing device that can both entertain you and work for you at the same time.

• Good design is aesthetic
Surface is definitely aesthetic. This thing is beautiful when it's turned off—like the iPad and MacBook Air—and when it's turned on. Simple and sleek minimalism. The software has exactly the same attributes.

Everyone who has seen and touched it thinks the Surface itself is gorgeous. Metro is perfect for it: colorful, simple, without the horrible artifice of skeuomorphism omnipresent in OS X and iOS.

• Good design helps us to understand a product
Surface's hardware and software is self-explanatory. Three seconds with the product and you know how to transform it from tablet to ultrabook. Boot it and you will be able to fully understand Metro immediately, discovering its more advanced features quickly.

• Good design is unobtrusive
With Surface, there's nothing to get in your way. Hardware-wise, it's a tablet designed to be held, with angles that are comfortable in your hands. Microsoft claims that in ultrabook mode, the keyboard is better than any other keyboard—although the fact that they wouldn't let anyone touch it may belie that sentiment. But the keyboard is undeniably unobtrusive, disappearing every time you cover your tablet's display. And the built-in trackpad allows you to edit any part of a document without having to lift your hands off the keyboard. Fast. It's certainly more elegant than Apple's wireless accessory solutions.

Again, the same happens with Metro. It never gets on the way of the most important thing: your information.

• Good design is honest
Devoid of artifice, Surface and Metro are both designed to serve their respective functions. There's no gratuitious eye candy. Every curve, every part and notch in the hardware, is there to make its mission possible. In Metro, even the smallest animations have been designed to convey a meaning. Nothing is there just for fun. Unlike iOS and OS X, there are no artificial skins, no leather, no trying to fake real objects that are already obsolete in the real world.

• Good design is durable
Microsoft stressed that the VaporMg process is extremely durable. I assume the screen glass is Gorilla-ish, like everything else in the market. And the keyboard appears solidly built, too. Metro is also durable: it will stand the test of time because it doesn't use outdated visual metaphors. It's just transparent to the user, all information, no adornment. iOS feels dated next to it. Metro's user experience is one that I see going well into this century, for as long as we use touch screens.

• Good design is consequent to the last detail
Clearly, the philosophy of Surface is united across hardware and software. Everything responds to the same values. Every detail is part of a single idea and responds to all these principles.

This is where Apple fails. The hardware is consequent to the last detail. But the user experience is not consistent with the principles established in the hardware. Objectively and comparatively, it's a mess. Ive's designs are tainted by Forstall's leather.

• Good design is concerned with the environment
We don't have details about manufacturing, so I can't judge this one.

• Good design is as little design as possible
Both Microsoft and Apple's hardware follow this rule strictly. But Microsoft out-Apples Apple by taking this principle to the user experience too, as I explained above.

The design in Metro is as minimal as it can get, as opposed to the land of fake surfaces and shiny knobs in iOS or OS X. Information is God in the Metro universe, and every graphic element is there to show it in the clearest way possible. Or, said in a different way, there are no frivolous graphical elements to get in the way.

Excited? You should be

If Microsoft doesn't fumble the execution—which means that the price and the battery life should be competitive with Apple's offerings, and that keyboard lives up to its billing—it has a real chance of stopping the seemingly unstoppable Apple empire. Or at least slowing it down.

If it fulfills its promise, if Microsoft Surface Pro is $800 or $900 and can pull six or seven hours of battery life, then things will change. It's going to be hard, since they don't have the app ecosystem yet, but that will come eventually. Microsoft has the user base, the developer base, and the deep pockets to make sure of that.

The only thing Microsoft was missing until yesterday just was a better platform. Now all the pieces are in place for a well-fought war, just like the good old days.

Come this fall, you will have two choices: 1) Get a MacBook Air for work and an iPad for play or 2) Get a beautifully designed, ultra-fast tablet with a sleek touch interface that can also be a full computer with the power of an ultrabook.

The iPad started a new era in computing but, for all its undeniable hardware innovation and beauty, it carries a legacy. It's a truly useful and fun color Newton on gorgeous, zippy hardware. And the MacBook Air is perhaps the perfect ultrabook, the pinnacle of Apple's laptop evolution. But, sadly, it runs an OS X/iOS Frankenlion. And it represents the end of an era, not the future. Both are extremely good and successful products but, when you look at them as a complete package of hardware and software, they fail to pass the stringent 10 Principles test advanced by Rams.

But Surface doesn't. It is new from the ground up. It's a coherent product that can be a tablet like the iPad and an ultrabook like the MacBook Air. A new product that merges the old and the new into something that seems to work quite nicely.

No, it's not the Second Coming of the Jesustabletbook. And yes, Apple will respond (I hope!) in kind. But Surface could be the first device to fulfill the promise of the New Computing Era ushered in by the iPad.

This is going to be fun.
http://gizmodo.com/5919521





The New MacBook Pro: Unfixable, Unhackable, Untenable

This week, Apple delivered the highly anticipated MacBook Pro with Retina Display — and the tech world is buzzing. I took one apart yesterday because I run iFixit, a team responsible for high-resolution teardowns of new products and DIY repair guides. We disassemble and analyze new electronic gizmos so you don’t have to — kind of like an internet version of Consumer Reports.
Kyle Wiens

The Retina MacBook is the least repairable laptop we’ve ever taken apart: Unlike the previous model, the display is fused to the glass, which means replacing the LCD requires buying an expensive display assembly. The RAM is now soldered to the logic board — making future memory upgrades impossible. And the battery is glued to the case, requiring customers to mail their laptop to Apple every so often for a $200 replacement. The design may well be comprised of “highly recyclable aluminum and glass” — but my friends in the electronics recycling industry tell me they have no way of recycling aluminum that has glass glued to it like Apple did with both this machine and the recent iPad.

The design pattern has serious consequences not only for consumers and the environment, but also for the tech industry as a whole.

The Retina MacBook is the least repairable laptop we’ve ever taken apart.

Four years ago, Apple performed a market experiment. They released the super thin, but non-upgradeable, MacBook Air in addition to their two existing, easily upgradeable notebooks: the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. Apple’s laptops had evolved over two decades of experience into impressively robust, rugged, and long-lasting computers. Apple learned a lot from the failings of the past: the exploding batteries of the PowerBook 5300, the flaky hinges of the PowerBook G4 Titanium, the difficult-to-access hard drive in the iBook.

Apple’s portable lineup was a triumph — for consumers and for Apple itself. IT professionals the world over love working on the MacBook. I’ve disassembled a few of them myself, and I can attest that they are almost as easy to repair as they are to use.

The 2008 Air went in a new direction entirely: It sacrificed performance and upgradeability in exchange for a thinner design. Its RAM is soldered to the logic board (as in the Retina MacBook Pro), so upgrading it means replacing the entire expensive logic board. And like all laptops, the Air has a built-in consumable. The MacBook Air’s battery was rated to last just 300 charges when it was introduced. But unlike laptops before it, replacing the Air’s battery required specialized tools and removing some 19 screws.

When Apple dropped the MacBook Air to $999 in 2010 to match the price point of the MacBook, they gave users a clear choice: the thin, light, and un-upgradeable MacBook Air or the heavier, longer lasting, more rugged, and more powerful MacBook. Same price, two very different products. At the time, I wasn’t very happy with the non-upgradeable RAM on the MacBook Air, but I respected that Apple had given their users a choice. It was up to us: Did we want a machine that would be stuck with 2GB of RAM forever? Would we support laptops that required replacement every year or two as applications required more memory and batteries atrophied?

Apple has presented the market with a choice. They have two professional laptops: one that is serviceable and upgradeable, and one that is not.

Consumers overwhelmingly voted yes, and the Air grew to take 40 percent of Apple’s notebook sales by the end of 2010.

The success of the non-upgradeable Air empowered Apple to release the even-less-serviceable iPad two years later: The battery was glued into the case. And again, we voted with our wallets and purchased the device despite its built-in death clock. In the next iteration of the iPad, the glass was fused to the frame.

Once again, with another product announcement, Apple has presented the market with a choice. They have two professional laptops: one that is serviceable and upgradeable, and one that is not. They’re not exactly equivalent products — one is less expensive and supports expandable storage, and the other has a cutting-edge display, fixed storage capacity, and a premium price tag — but they don’t have the same name just to cause confusion. Rather, Apple is asking users to define the future of the MacBook Pro.

Apple isn’t fundamentally against upgradeability and accessibility. The current Mac Mini has compelling finger slots that practically beg people to open it. When Steve Jobs released the “open-minded” Power Mac G3 with a door that opened from the side, the audience oohed and aahed. Apple products have historically retained their value quite well, in part due to third-party repair manuals, but also due to a number of very modular, very upgradeable designs.

Even the MacBook Pro was originally touted as an accessible, repairable machine — at Macworld in 2009, Steve Jobs said, “Our pro customers want accessibility: [...] to add memory, to add cards, to add drives.” That’s part of what I love about my MacBook Pro. I’ve upgraded my RAM, and I even replaced my optical drive with an 80GB SSD.

We have consistently voted for hardware that’s thinner rather than upgradeable. But we have to draw a line in the sand somewhere.

On the other hand, Apple has consistently introduced thinner, lighter products. They learn from experience. They react to their customers. They’re very adept at presenting us with what we want. And they give us options from time to time and allow product sales to determine their future designs.

We have consistently voted for hardware that’s thinner rather than upgradeable. But we have to draw a line in the sand somewhere. Our purchasing decisions are telling Apple that we’re happy to buy computers and watch them die on schedule. When we choose a short-lived laptop over a more robust model that’s a quarter of an inch thicker, what does that say about our values?

Every time we buy a locked down product containing a non-replaceable battery with a finite cycle count, we’re voicing our opinion on how long our things should last. But is it an informed decision? When you buy something, how often do you really step back and ask how long it should last? If we want long-lasting products that retain their value, we have to support products that do so.

Today, we choose. If we choose the Retina display over the existing MacBook Pro, the next generation of Mac laptops will likely be less repairable still. When that happens, we won’t be able to blame Apple. We’ll have to blame ourselves.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/...retina-displa/





Apple's iPad Costs You $1.36 Per Year to Charge

The figure is based on owners fully charging the tablet every other day, according to the Electric Power Research Institute.
Don Reisinger

Apple's iPad costs precious little for you to charge it each year, according to a new study.

The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) conducted a study recently to see how much the iPad costs in electricity if users fully charge it every other day. The research agency, which is funded by electric power companies, found that the iPad will cost owners $1.36 a year, thanks to its consumption of just 12 kWh of electricity each year.

The EPRI assumed that there are now 67 million iPads in the world and applied the average energy use to each device to arrive at a total of 590 gigawatt hours of overall usage. In the event the number of iPads worldwide triples over the next two years, the energy required to power the devices would equal two 250-megawatt power plants operating at 50 percent utilization, according to EPRI. A quadrupling in sales would require three plants.

The crux of EPRI's findings, however, rests in the impact the iPad might be having on overall usage. Although it's consuming power, more and more people are using the device for gaming, video consumption, and Web browsing, effectively taking the power load away from higher-consuming products.

"These results raise important questions about how the shifting reliance from desktop to laptop to mobile devices will change energy use and electricity requirements for the information age," Mark McGranaghan, vice president of power delivery and utilization at EPRI, said in a statement. "At less than a penny per charge these findings bring new meaning to the adage, 'A penny for your thoughts.'"

EPRI stopped short of saying that devices like the iPad and other tablets will help conserve power, since it's hard to predict consumer actions. However, the organization did note that laptops consume about 72.3 kWh of electricity each year, costing folks $8.31. A 42-inch plasma television consumes an average of 258 kWh each year.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57458653-37/apples-ipad-costs-you-$1.36-per-year-to-charge/





FCC May Take Up Issue of Cell Phone Radiation
Julie Steenhuysen and Jasmin Melvin

The head of the Federal Communications Commission is asking for a review of the agency's stance on radiofrequency energy emitted from cell phones amid lingering concerns that the devices may cause brain tumors.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski on Friday circulated a proposal to his fellow commissioners calling for a formal inquiry into the mobile phone emissions standards set in 1996.

The proposal would need to be approved by a majority of the FCC's five commissioners before the agency could release it for public comment. If it is approved, the agency would consider changing its testing procedures and seek input on the need to either strengthen or ease the current standards.

The agency would also look into whether emission standards should be different for devices used by children, an FCC spokesman said on Saturday.

The spokesman stressed that the agency continues to believe there is no evidence tying cancer, headaches, dizziness, memory loss or other health problems to mobile phones.

But the inquiry would seek any scientific evidence that could warrant changes to the emissions standards.

The number of mobile phones has risen sharply since the early 1980s, with nearly 5 billion handsets in use today, prompting lengthy debate about their potential link to the main types of brain tumor, glioma and meningioma.

In May 2011 the World Health Organization added cell phone radiation to a list of possible carcinogens, putting it in the same category as lead, chloroform and coffee, and said more study is needed.

Unlike ionizing radiation such as that from gamma rays, radon and X-rays, which can break chemical bonds in the body and are known to cause cancer, radiofrequency devices such as cell phones and microwaves emit radiofrequency energy, a form of non-ionizing radiation.

According to the National Cancer Institute, there is no consistent evidence that non-ionizing radiation increases the risk of cancer.

STUDIES POINT AWAY FROM LINK

What these devices do produce is energy in the form of heat, and the concern is that frequent use of cell phones held up to the ear can change brain cell activity, as some studies have suggested.

What is not yet clear is whether this causes harm, which is why the WHO and other health bodies have called for further study.

But since the WHO's announcement, scientific evidence has increasingly pointed away from a link between mobile phone use and brain tumors, according to a panel of the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection.

Last October a study by Danish researchers involving more than 350,000 people concluded that mobile phones do not increase the risk of cancer, concurring with other studies that have reached similar conclusions.

And a study last July looking at children and adolescents aged 7 to 19 concluded that those who used mobile phones were at no greater risk of developing brain cancer than those who did not use the devices.

The FCC in 1996 established a limit on emissions and a safe level of human exposure. Mobile phones are tested and must be within this limit before they are granted FCC approval to be marketed in the United States.

FCC spokeswoman Tammy Sun said that the existing guidelines do not pose any harm or risk to cell phone users, adding that the United States "has the most conservative emissions standards in the world."

"Our action today is a routine review of our standards," Sun said in a statement.

The FCC does not set health policy, relying instead on input from the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Health and Human Services and other agencies.

"We hope and expect that other federal agencies and organizations with whom we work on this issue will participate in the process," Sun said.

Demand for wireless devices like Apple Inc's iPhone and Google Inc's suite of Android-powered smartphones has surged in recent years, with some consumers opting to forgo landline service altogether.

According to a study by Cisco Systems Inc, the number of mobile devices connected to the Internet is expected to exceed the number of people on Earth in four years' time.

For people who are concerned about the effects of radiofrequency energy from cell phones, the FDA and FCC suggest they have shorter conversations on them and use a hands-free device, which places more distance between the phone and the user's head.

(Reporting By Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago and Jasmin Melvin in Washington; Editing by Xavier Briand)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...85F0LH20120616





Meet the Group Trying to Make AT&T Very Un-AT&T-Like

The telecommunications giant has a reputation of moving at a plodding pace, but a deeper look inside the company shows a place where innovative ideas flourish.
Roger Cheng

Just a short bicycle ride from Stanford University, there's a work space befitting any hip startup.

Squat, teardrop-shaped chairs and short, lime-green swivel chairs sit atop a colorful checkered carpet, across which a small dog casually pitter-patters. Lining the sparse ceiling are rows of florescent lights, wooden beams, and large ventilation tubes, adding an industrial-chic ambiance. On one side lies a sliding divider made up of strands of cable lines strung closely next to each other, while the other side features a movable row of hanging chains, creating a flexible space that can be manipulated as needed.

Aside from a corner filled with a few developers quietly typing away at their computers, it's fairly empty in the middle of the afternoon. For most folks who work here, the afternoon is still early; people tend to flock in at unusual times, and all-nighters are a common routine. A week later, the place will be crammed with nearly 200 developers participating in a Facebook hackathon.

The office, a stone's throw from the humble beginnings of startups such as Flipboard, is a magnet for venture capitalists and developers -- Marc Andreessen is a familiar face. But it's no pre-IPO startup. It's AT&T's application foundry, where the company has created a place and provided the resources for local developers to work on small projects with the potential to change the multibillion-dollar telecommunications giant.

What AT&T has been doing over the past few years is jump-starting a culture of innovation within the company. AT&T, far removed from its roots as a pioneer in communications technology, has spent the last few years bringing back some of that fearlessness in experimenting with new projects -- crucial at a time when all the tech heavy-hitters have shown a willingness to try new things.

At the heart of AT&T's innovation drive is its technology council, responsible for the creation of the foundry and several other key projects within the company. It's a handpicked brain trust that's helped the company shed some of the bad habits of a large corporation.

"We take on problems that (AT&T) inherently wasn't going to address well because of our size," John Donovan, senior executive vice president of technology and networks for AT&T, said in an interview with CNET.

The technology council is antithetical to the popular perception that AT&T is a slow and lumbering company unable to get even its cell phone reception issues under control. The group has been able to spark a legion of ideas through a massive crowd-sourcing effort; opened the company up to building more relationships with the startup community; and, yes, even helped to improve the network. Equally important, it's redefined the meaning of speed within the company, and bolstered a willingness to experiment, even if it means failure.

"What it does is provide an organized channel to use the ingenuity of AT&T's employees to bring these ideas quicker to use," said Roger Entner, a consultant with Recon Analytics who follows telecommunications companies.

A change of pace

AT&T's willingness to look outside for help on projects is a change from its original preference to develop new services and products in-house, relying on its once formidable AT&T Labs business. Under Ma Bell, it had a massive research and development arm in what is now the Lucent part of Alcatel-Lucent.

AT&T has poured money into the new initiatives started by Donovan. The company doesn't break out its investment in this area, or in research and development, but it's a drop in the bucket relative to the roughly $20 billion it spends on capital expenditures each year. Still, the foundry has become a vital component of the R&D budget, Donovan said.

"We take on problems that (AT&T) inherently wasn't going to address well because of our size." --John Donovan, senior executive vice president of technology and networks for AT&T

AT&T isn't innovating for innovation's sake -- at stake is its identity. If the company doesn't stay in the cutting-edge game, it'll lose its relevancy in a world filled with Apples, Googles, and Facebooks. Worse yet, it risks relegating itself to a dumb-pipe, or a basic connection over which all the lucrative services and applications ride, and which AT&T doesn't get to take part in.

What started as a gradual break from its rigid structure as a traditional phone company has transformed into an intense effort to stay toe-to-toe with the most nimble companies in Silicon Valley.

The push comes as competitors such as Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel have similarly abandoned the notion of closing off their businesses, and more closely work with startups and companies they previously would have seen as threats, such as Google and Apple. AT&T's exclusive access to the iPhone, for instance, drove Verizon to embrace Google and heavily push Android smartphones.

AT&T certainly isn't without its share of issues, and its reputation for moving slowly is often justified. The company, for instance, took its time addressing the network problems that cropped up in the early years of the iPhone, wrecking its public image for years. Like the other carriers, it's slow to provide the latest software updates to Android smartphones.

That doesn't discount the early bets AT&T made with initiatives such as its U-Verse Internet-based television service, which suffered through many hiccups in the early years. It was also the first to move into a tiered data pricing structure for wireless plans, which created a lower-cost option for first-time smartphone buyers even as it irked hardcore subscribers who spent a lot of time -- and downloaded a lot of data -- on their mobile devices.

That innovation has fueled its most recent -- and somewhat head-scratching -- move into the home security and automation business.

The smartest minds in one (virtual) room

One of the first things Donovan did when he joined AT&T in 2008 as chief technology officer was to ask the managers in the company to point out the brightest individuals "who weren't afraid to speak the truth." He wanted to bring together a group of people answerable only to him for the purposes of shining a spotlight on the blind spots within the company.

As much as AT&T has loosened up over the years, it's fundamentally still a company in which suits are regularly worn, employees still use courtesy titles, and a strict chain of command is still observed. So it was an understandably nerve-racking experience for the first 16 people who were chosen to meet and serve with the newly hired executive.

Their fears were assuaged the first time they sat down with Donovan. "In the first few meetings, we were sweating bullets until we realized it was John, not Mr. Donovan," said Adam Hersh, who helps commercialize new projects and ventures for AT&T, and was an original member of the tech council.

Donovan talked with them about their ideas, suggestions, and complaints. The first session lasted five hours, with the new boss running through every point they had brought up, challenging them and asking several rapid-fire questions. It wasn't the typical company meeting.

The big brains come from all facets of AT&T's technology divisions, including research, labs, engineering, mobility, and intellectual property, and they brought their own unique perspectives. Their responsibilities on the council come on top of their regular duties.

"It's above and beyond your normal job," said Sanjay Macwan, vice president of technology and innovation for AT&T and another original member who now leads the council.

The council members meet at least twice a week. What started as a series of phone conference calls has evolved into regular telepresence calls, and face-to-face meetings every time the members find themselves in the same city. Donovan, who was promoted to his current role in charge of technology and network operations, still meets with the council alongside new Chief Technology Officer Krish Prabhu every six to eight weeks.

The council is seen as a springboard for one's career inside AT&T. Hersh, for instance, worked in network planning and engineering when he was chosen to participate on the council but was promoted to help usher in new projects after his tenure in the group ended. Macwan used to run security and mobility and was promoted to work more actively with the startup community and lead the council.

Council members are rotated in and out to keep the ideas fresh. For every position that's open, there will be 30 to 40 inquiries from interested employees, Macwan said.

"It's a privileged group to be a part of," he said.

The tech council at AT&T isn't entirely unique. Ericsson, for instance, has a similar organization within its company, according to Chief Marketing Officer Arun Bhikshesvaran. But AT&T executives believe that no other company has as dedicated a group devoted solely to coming up with new ideas and projects.

The appeal of serving on the tech council isn't just the implications for one's career; it's also the opportunity to drive some big changes at the company. In its short time, the technology council has been responsible for some major changes and initiatives at AT&T.

In search of TIPs

Donovan liked the idea of drawing on the massive resources within AT&T, so one of the first major projects that emerged out of the technology council was the innovation pipeline, or TIP, a crowd-sourcing machine designed to get more employees involved with change at the company.

What started with a handful of people contributing has grown into a massive internal social network constantly coming up with ideas, providing feedback, and deciding whether those ideas should move on to get funding.

The crowd-source mechanism isn't new. Daimler Chrysler, for instance, has a similar program in place. But there are few as large as what AT&T has managed to put together.

"We're democratizing the idea. It stands on merit alone." --Sanjay Macwan, vice president of technology and innovation for AT&T

While it started with just the technology group, TIP has been expanded to include every employee of the company. The program has roughly 138,000 AT&T employees involved in some capacity, with 11,000 "founders" who take ownership of an idea, help foster it, make suggestions, or bat down ones that aren't ready for prime time.

There isn't a shortage of suggestions. In fact, 19,000 different ones have been submitted since the program started three years ago, Donovan said. Each quarter, the crowd determines the 10 best suggestions to be presented at a fast-pitch session, where the technology council chooses three for funding from AT&T's internal angel funding mechanism.

Employees who see their projects get implemented are rewarded with trophies, executive recognition, and bonuses.

In one quarter, an intern managed to win the crowd's support, and ultimately get an investment from AT&T, while a senior executive's pitch got batted down by the TIP users.

"We're democratizing the idea," Macwan said. "It stands on merit alone."

Still, there are no penalties for getting a suggestion rejected. Even for the projects that get funded, the company embraces the concept of a fast-fail model; a project has about three months to prove itself before the company shuts it down and moves on. Executives say projects under this program move three times as quickly as the normal AT&T process.

"We're absolutely willing to fail," Macwan said.

The foundry project

The internal fast-pitch model developed through TIP was the basis for a broader set of speed-dating sessions that Donovan wanted to bring to AT&T that would allow it to tap into talent outside of the company.

But rather than just holding a series of meetings, Donovan and the tech council opted for the more ambitious idea of building innovation centers around the world. These weren't extensions of AT&T's Labs unit; they were places where outsiders could come with ideas that could benefit AT&T, and get support, resources, and a base of operation for their work.

AT&T started with its first foundry in Plano, Texas, before moving on to Ra'anana, Israel, and then Palo Alto, Calif. Texas dealt largely with enterprise ideas, Palo Alto with consumer, and Israel with network infrastructure, although ideas and concepts were shared throughout the three facilities.

These offices often lack the polish or scope of the corporate headquarters. The main room of the Palo Alto foundry, for instance, has the decidedly politically incorrect moniker "French Laundry," a 19th century reference to exclusionary white-run laundry businesses and a callback to the space's previous life as a Laundromat. Curiously, it has nothing to do with the exclusive restaurant of the same name in Napa Valley, Calif., which is a favorite haunt of the Silicon Valley elite.

AT&T employees at the foundry embrace the ironic undertone of the name, given the current inclusive nature of the workspace. Networking events and casual social mixers, for example, are regularly held there.

It's a place that brings together people with different technical, business, and creative perspectives without the formal titles and bureaucracy, said Mark Negal, executive director of the foundry program in Palo Alto.

"Our goal is to accelerate work on new services," he said.

Projects at the foundry move three times as fast as initiatives taken on elsewhere at AT&T.

In Israel, Hersh and his colleagues didn't even wait for the facility to be built to do their first fast-pitch session with local startups; he held the initial one on the squash court that eventually became the company's foundry.

When Donovan started at AT&T, he contacted the various major venture capitalists, such as Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, and Stanford, and met with many startups. With the three foundries in place, he had formal locations to entertain pitches and provide support and resources to the startups that the VCs trotted in.

The company is an active participant in Silicon Valley, said Jim Goetz, a partner at Sequoia. That's a dramatic change from a few years ago.

"Before, you had to fly down to San Antonio or Dallas to visit them, and there were few individuals there who could make decisions without a committee," Goetz said.

Beyond funding new ideas, AT&T has also used the foundry to marry up TIP ideas with third-party developers. An AT&T employee came up with the idea of a smartphone with dual identities -- one for work and another for personal use -- that were kept separate from each other, allowing individuals to make personal calls and e-mail and send text messages to friends and family members without jeopardizing sensitive corporate secrets.

Through a fast-pitch session in Palo Alto last year, AT&T found a company called Enterproid, which developed a similar-sounding app called Divide. The ideas were combined and AT&T unveiled its Toggle service at last year's CTIA Enterprise & Applications conference.

Of course, the ideas don't always pan out. Toggle, for instance, hasn't really caught on with businesses, and critics pointed out some of the limitations and hassles that come from running two separate and distinct profiles on a phone, as well as its initial Android-only access. AT&T yesterday relaunched Toggle for iOS with a new partner, and is working on a version for PCs and Macs.

Still, there are other examples of potential projects, including a connected telemetric device that monitors how fast a car is moving, can deliver "report cards" to parents of young drivers, and is something AT&T is working to bring to market. Others include the release of an application programming interface tool for use with HTML5 Web apps, which was unveiled in January at the company's developer summit in conjunction with the Consumer Electronics Show.

Within AT&T, the foundry concept has become synonymous with speed and how the broader company should be operating.

"'We're going to foundry it,' has become a common expression," Donovan said regarding projects that require tight deadlines.

Earned startup cred

AT&T's foundry initiative in Palo Alto has paid off beyond bringing more innovation in-house. The company's early push to reach out to the startup community has resulted in a lot of credibility and goodwill in the Silicon Valley community.

"If you look at the actual program and level of success, there's no comparison," Goetz said. "The AT&T folks are more visible here in the Valley."

AT&T isn't the only one moving into Silicon Valley, with other carriers such as Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile USA, as well as international telcos such as Vodafone also planting roots in the region. But AT&T got there first with Donovan laying down the groundwork roughly four years ago.

Generally, it's difficult to get any kind of feedback or follow-up comments from a carrier. But AT&T is easier to work with, responds quickly, and has really improved its outreach program for startups, Goetz said.

"The lines between companies tend to blur as people focus on accomplishing a goal," Nagel said.

AT&T's credibility means it typically gets first dibs on the local talent, particularly as more carriers attempt to emulate its model.

"It's refreshing," he said. "The Valley is often word of mouth. AT&T has real mojo and interest from the best developers."

Jon Auerbach, a general partner at Charles River Ventures, puts AT&T and Verizon on par when it comes to work with startups. He did note that AT&T's work in this area has dramatically improved over the past few years, something he attributes to Donovan's presence.

"John understood the importance of startups," Auerbach said. "Before John came, "AT&T was more bureaucratic."

Prior to Donovan joining AT&T, Auerbach had ranked the company last in terms of innovation and willingness to work with others.

Tapping outside talent

Beyond the foundries, AT&T has been aggressive with its fast-pitch and speed-dating sessions, meeting with companies all around the world. One of the meetings held early last year at its Israel foundry is expected to yield better network performance for AT&T.

When Intucell CEO Rani Wellingstein made his pitch to Donovan directly, he didn't expect AT&T to embrace his company as quickly as it did.

"We were shocked at the speed in which AT&T decided to move and got their act together," Wellingstein told CNET.

Intucell developed a technology that allows mobile operators to fine-tune and adjust their network in real-time based on traffic and potential congestion. Carriers previously would have to look at the data after several weeks and make a decision on whether to invest in more equipment. Intucell's technology meant a more responsive network that delivered a better level of voice and data service.

Wellingstein previously worked at NKO, a pioneer in Internet-protocol phone technology that was acquired by ECI Telecom in 1998. At ECI, he worked with phone product development and dealt with the carriers in North America.

So for a startup like Intucell, he knew the typical route would have been to go after smaller carriers looking to tinker with new technology, before moving on to the big wigs. But after meeting with Donovan in January and getting technically validated in the following few weeks, Intucell had a contract for national coverage signed by November and its initial deployment in December.

"It has to be a record in this industry," Wellingstein said.

AT&T's quick move allowed it to adopt Intucell's technology first in the United States. Wellingstein said he is in discussions with other carriers, including ones in the U.S., and none have moved this quick.

All based on a meeting that lasted less than 10 minutes.

"There is the stereotype that innovation goes to die at big companies," Entner said. "In some cases, that's certainly true. But not in all cases."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-574...-un-at-t-like/





New Songza iPad App Curates Music to Suit Your Mood
Natasha Baker

Need an energizing playlist of songs for your morning workout or perhaps one that will improve your focus at the office later in the day? A new iPad app streams music tailored to your current situation and mood.

Songza, a Internet radio service since 2007, launched its iPad app earlier this month following success with iPhone and web apps. It aims to help people find the perfect playlist for what they're doing at the moment - whether it's unwinding after a hectic week, reading the morning newspaper or hosting a cocktail party.

"We're trying to make the world's greatest collection of amazing playlists and long-form listening experiences", said Elias Roman, co-founder of Songza, a web radio company based out of Long Island City, New York.

The app's core feature is its "concierge service" that suggests situations or activities in which a user might be involved based on several factors such as day of the week, time of day, the device being used and previous behavior that the app learns over time.

For example, if it's a Saturday morning, Songza might suggest music for cooking breakfast or songs to help the user fall asleep again. If it's a weekday evening, the app might suggest music for working out or commuting home from work.

"We change the situations, filters and playlists based on things we start to learn about you," said co-founder Peter Asbill.

Upon selecting a situation, the app screens for genre, decade and mood, and for each filter, it provides three different playlists, created and curated by a team of critics, journalists, DJs, musicians and ethnomusicologists.

"The idea is (to) get people to just three playlists really quickly that they're going to love and are going to be perfect for whatever situation they're in and whatever type of music they love," explained Asbill.

The app, which aims to please many different types of users, includes more than 100,000 playlists, encompassing 18 million songs.

Despite competition from music streaming services such as Pandora, Spotify and iHeartRadio, Roman said Songza has seen its user base grow 50 percent monthly since they introduced the music concierge feature to their iPhone and web apps in March.

Asbill attributes the success to their focus on designing for mobile devices first. Within five days of its June launch, the iPad app was downloaded more than 700,000 times.

Last week, analyst Richard Greenfield of BTIG Research, providers of institutional brokerage and fund services, warned that investors in Internet music company Pandora Media Inc should be wary in the face of Songza's rapid growth.

"In many ways Songza's simplicity and focus on mobile life, reminds us of what drove Instagram's success, as consumer web activity shifts far faster than expected from computers to mobile devices," Greenfield said in his report.

Greenfield, however, said that one of Pandora's greatest strengths is its first mover advantage - that is, it was the first to build a brand in Internet radio and is also the first to enter the car.

The Songza app is free and available for all iOS devices and on the web in the United States only. The app is available for Android devices but does not yet include the music concierge feature.

(Editing By Bob Tourtellotte and Bill Trott)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...85H0FG20120618





Amazon's Music Cloud is Licensed by All Top Labels

Update: The retailer has the licensing it needs to offer a scan-and-match feature similar to Apple's iCloud.
Greg Sandoval

Amazon's cloud music service is fully licensed by the top-four record labels, numerous sources have told CNET.

The labels and Amazon aren't talking, but my sources say Amazon is expected to roll out new features for the company's cloud-music offering in the United States sometime in July.

We reported on Tuesday that Amazon had wrapped up cloud deals with Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and EMI, and was in negotiations with Warner Music Group. Information is coming in now that Warner Music Group was actually among the first to sign.

The ways in which the licenses will change Amazon's Cloud Drive or Cloud Player are still unclear, but sources said one feature Amazon will likely offer is Scan and Match.

When Amazon launched its cloud music service last year, the retailer required users to upload each of their individual song files to the company's servers. For people with a lot of music, this was a hassle. Amazon now has the rights to scan each user's hard drive to see what songs they possess. Then the merchant can just give users to access to copies of the songs stored on Amazon's library. They're listening to the same song but not their own song files.

To distribute a song this way required a license because to do otherwise is a copyright violation, the labels have argued.

Apple was first among the big music stores to roll out a licensed match feature. Storing songs purchased from iTunes is free, but to store music obtained elsewhere costs $25 annually. Amazon is expected to offer a free as well as paid version of its cloud, which will work on Android as well as iOS devices, industry insiders said.

A year ago, the licensing issue threatened to create a rift between some of the big music stores and top record companies. When Amazon launched without licenses, label executives were saying that they didn't concede that Amazon's store was legal. They said much the same last November, when Google's cloud was launched without licenses.

Now, Google is the only service among the big three without a licensed service. The company remains in negotiations, but there's no telling when a settlement will be reached.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-574...ll-top-labels/





Universal Music and Major Publishing Group Reach Agreement Over Vevo, YouTube Royalties
Ed Christman

The milestone deal, which covers North America and is retroactive to 2008, institutes a new model that allows songwriters and music publishers to share in revenues for music clips played online.

Less than a week after the National Music Publishers' Association annual meeting, when president and CEO David Israelite said the organization was chasing the major labels to pay indie music publishers for videos streamed on VEVO and Youtube, the NMPA has announced its first deal with a major, the Universal Music

The NMPA termed the agreement, which covers North America, a groundbreaking model licensing deal because it will allow songwriters and music publishers to share in revenue from music videos. Up until now, while Youtube and VEVO were making money on their ad-supported services, indie music publishers had not shared in that revenue because the major labels long considered videos as promotional tools and never paid for licensing the songs used in the videos. But as it became a growing revenue stream, indie publishers began to grumble that the major labels paid the major publishing companies but none of the independent music publishers.

"We're all navigating through a rapidly changing business environment and NMPA's job is to ensure that the rights of every songwriter and music publisher are protected," Israelite said in a statement. "This is a model example of how record labels along with songwriters and music publishers can move forward together to ensure that the licensing process is more effective and efficient, and that all creators are fairly compensated."

As one of the owners behind VEVO, it's key that UMG was the first major to sign a deal with the NMPA. NMPA music publishers who chose to participate will grant the rights necessary for the synchronization of their musical works with music videos, and, in return, will receive royalties from these videos based on a percentage of UMG's receipts.

"Music videos have become an important part of the music business ecosystem," Israelite added. "The agreement announced today is an important first step in resolving industry-wide music video issues."

While specific terms of the deal have yet to be disclosed, sources say that the agreement calls for publishers to receive 15% of advertising revenues generated by music videos. Moreover, the deal is retroactive back to 2008, but for the first two years, through 2009, the agreed upon rate is 10% of revenue, with the 15% kicking in with revenue generated by music videos in 2010.

"Music videos have become an important part of the music business ecosystem," Israelite added. "The agreement announced today is an important first step in resolving industry-wide music video issues."

In addition to music video, the deal also covers concert footage, backstage videos and artist interviews, according to sources.

Also, the agreement provides songwriters and music publishers compensation for additional UMG product offerings including ringtones, dual disc, multi-session audio and locked content products, according to the announcement, with additional details expected to be announced on the websites of the Harry Fox Agency and NMPA in the coming weeks. HFA will serve as administrator for the deal between NMPA and UMG.

As for the other majors, "we have raised the issue with [them] and will now turn our attention to pursuing similar agreements," Israelite said.

"We intend to enforce our rights."
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/new...yalties-339274





Young Listeners Opting to Stream, Not Own Music
Jareen Imam

For Camille Kim, music is life.

On a typical day, the Emory University student spends hours on her laptop, scouring the Internet for the latest music. She uses a site that aggregates music recommendations from blogs to discover new artists and songs, streams them online and then shares her finds with her friends through a Facebook group.

But she rarely buys songs or albums.

"If I really love an artist and I want to support them, I will buy their music," said Kim, 21. "You can find [music] on the radio and TV, but those songs are chosen for you. The Internet allows you to find your own music. It's more personal."

Young listeners like Kim represent a looming sea change for the music industry, which has been in upheaval since the Napster era of the late 1990s. Five years ago, music consumers had to choose between buying a CD or downloading the album. Nowadays, thanks to the rise of music-streaming services like Pandora and Spotify, that choice is becoming whether to download music or just stream it online.

Interviews with college-age music fans suggest that more and more are choosing to stream music instead of downloading it. After all, why pay for music when you can summon almost any song you want, at any time, for free?

And the growth of music apps, online radio channels, and music-streaming platforms raise an even larger question: Do we really need to 'own' music anymore?

"The last time I bought a CD was probably in middle school, and I can't even remember what it was," said Sean Wilson, 21, of Atlanta, Georgia. "Ninety percent of my friends stream music. To be honest, I haven't seen someone use iTunes in a really long time."

In five years, Wilson believes "streaming will be the norm. It's more practical and more convenient than buying music and uploading it onto something. And the best part is, it's free."

Pandora, Spotify and 8tracks

The popularity of listening to music online can be directly linked to the emergence of music-streaming sites like Spotify, Pandora and The Hype Machine, which have grown substantially in the past year. These and numerous other sites now offer people the ability to listen to music without paying.

And they're changing the way people consume music, says Paul Resnikoff, publisher and editor-in-chief of Digital Music News.

"We are already seeing a trend on the aggregate with the lack of music ownership," said Resnikoff, who believes the difference between a download and a stream is starting to blur. "If I can get that Katy Perry song anywhere and anytime, what is the difference?"

Streaming sites are a big step away from the familiar Apple iTunes business model, which allows users to download a song or album and then upload it to an iPod, iPhone or other portable device.

Spotify offers users a database of more than 16 million songs for free, although the service limits how many hours of music a user can stream in a month without a paid subscription. Users can pull up any song in Spotify's database, or create custom playlists. The site launched in 2008 in Europe but didn't become available in the United States until last year. It now claims to have more than 20 million active users.

Pandora acts like an online radio station, streaming free music 24 hours a day in a mix that users can customize, using Pandora's algorithms based on their tastes. Unlike Spotify, members cannot request specific songs, however. Pandora now claims more than 150 million users in the United States alone.

Pandora's application has been among the most-downloaded free apps for iPhones and iPads, demonstrating that streaming is becoming a mainstream way to listen to music on portable devices. Pandora is now available on more than 400 connected devices, the company says.

Then there is 8tracks, an online radio station that offers a more social music experience for its users. Named one of the top 50 best websites by Time magazine last year, 8tracks provides its listeners with free music hand-selected by other site users known as "DJs."

"The programming is crafted by people rather than an algorithm," said David Porter, CEO and founder of the site, which has seen a drastic increase in users.

8tracks users can upload tracks from their personal collection or use music from Sound Cloud, a site that emphasizes artists from independent labels. Although relatively new, 8tracks already has 5 million active users, Porter said.

"If you want a song on demand, YouTube is the place to go, but if you want to discover music you would go to Pandora or 8tracks," he said. Like Spotify and other services, 8tracks also offers a mobile app that allows users to stream music free to their phones.

Owning music "a lot of work'

Apple's iTunes is still the world's most popular music vendor, with more than 225 million accounts. One reason streaming music is catching on is the rise of online or mobile apps built on large music providers, such as Apple, that have already secured copyrights on songs, says Eliot Van Buskirk, editor and chief of Evolver.fm, an independent music publication

"You can now build apps on top of apps, and everything is legal and no one is getting sued. In terms of music fans, it is a bit confusing because there are so many options," he said. "I think downloading came from a time when our mp3 players didn't have Wi-Fi connections and our computers did not connect that fast."

But Van Buskirk also suggests another reason for streaming, not acquiring music. It's liberating.

"There is a certain relief with not having to own music. It is a lot of work," he said. "So the challenge is how to still feel like you are building a [music] collection."

Portability of music is another big issue for many consumers. Recent Georgia Institute of Technology graduate McCall King, 23, says she needs her music accessible all the time.

"If I could reliably stream music for free to all of my portable devices I would use streaming sites exclusively," she told CNN.

King says she prefers streaming because it allows her to access a large variety of music.

"I discovered She and Him, Zoey Deschanel's band before she was ridiculously famous, and I never would have sought it out on my own," she said.

Porter says the way people own music is transforming. He believes the cloud model is where the state of music is heading, and for many people ownership is not essential.

"I think ownership is access, you don't have to have music on your local hard drive to own it," he said.

Electronic Dance Music: How bedroom beat boys remixed the industry

Old media sticks around

If you listen to some young people, you might think that few people in the future will ever want to own music. But Peter DiCola, professor of economics and law at Northwestern University, disagrees.

DiCola believes that music consumers' transition to a full streaming model will be a lot slower than people think.

"Old media sticks around," he said. "FM radio is still around, and just because tech is new doesn't mean it is better in all dimensions." He cited vehicles as one area where streaming music will be slow to gain a foothold.

"Think of Napster," he said. "When it came out people were saying the record labels would disappear, but they didn't."

There is more to owning music than simply the convenience that digital media provides. Some consumers still want to own a physical memento by an artist they love, whether it's a CD with artwork and liner notes or just a few lines of digital ones and zeroes on their smart phone.

Maybe that's why sales of vinyl records have been on the upswing in recent years. Resnikoff says this is because the need to own music is also influenced by human psychology.

"The music fan never ceases to surprise me," he said. "If you told me five years ago there would be a boom in the sale of vinyl records I would have laughed. But people are buying them, and I think there are some people that will continue to buy music [and not just stream it]."
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/06/15/te...ing/index.html





Royalties From Digital Radio Start to Add Up
Ben Sisario

After more than a decade, the royalties for Internet radio and other digital music streams are finally starting to add up.

On Monday, SoundExchange, a nonprofit group that processes payments for online streams, will announce that it has paid $1 billion to artists and record companies since its founding in 2000, and that this year its quarterly payments exceeded $100 million.

The payments reflect the growing popularity of digital music as well as new ways for the record industry to make money as sales continue to fall.

“The way the industry is going, it is about multiple revenue streams, not just one,” Michael Huppe, SoundExchange’s president, said in an interview.

SoundExchange collects money from Sirius XM Radio, Pandora and other forms of Internet radio. For most labels and performing artists, this is the only money their recordings earn for radio play, since terrestrial radio pays only songwriters and music publishers. (“On-demand” digital services like Spotify and Rhapsody, which let users choose exactly what songs to listen to, generally pay record companies directly.)

Royalties were minimal in SoundExchange’s early days — for the year that ended in March 2004, it collected only $15.6 million — and while they have grown, they remain a relatively small part in the overall picture of music royalties. Last year, SoundExchange paid out $292 million, while in 2010 Ascap and B.M.I. paid songwriters and publishers a total of $1.64 billion, according to their annual reports.

But SoundExchange’s contribution is starting to make a difference. Jagjaguwar Records, for example, whose acts include Bon Iver and Dinosaur Jr., has made $95,000 from SoundExchange since 2007, according to its founder, Darius Van Arman, who called the service “an increasingly vital source of revenue.” He spoke in testimony last week before the United States Copyright Royalty Board, a panel of judges in Washington that sets the rates.

The billion-dollar milestone also gives some positive publicity to SoundExchange, which has been criticized for being slow to pay everyone who is owed royalties. At the end of 2010, the last date for which audited accounts are available, SoundExchange was holding $132 million, for artists who have not registered or because of complications like bad or missing data about which songs the services have played.

It also faces a challenge in the emerging trend of direct licenses between record companies and digital services. Sirius, which says it paid $200 million in recording performance royalties last year, is suing SoundExchange over its efforts to make those deals, and recently the radio giant Clear Channel Communications announced a direct deal with Big Machine, Taylor Swift’s label. Those and other deals could result in a diminished role for SoundExchange.

Mr. Huppe declined to comment on the Sirius suit but said SoundExchange’s success demonstrated its value to the music industry.

“We don’t feel particularly under assault right now,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/18/b...to-add-up.html





Sneak Peek: This is Kim Dotcom’s New Megabox Service
Janko Roettgers

MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom may have had most of his assets seized as part of his indictment for criminal copyright infringement in January, but that apparently hasn’t stopped him from working on his next venture. Dotcom gave a first peak at Megabox, which is supposed to become a kind of cloud music service, on Twitter Wednesday, sharing a photo of what looks like a mobile app. Check out the photo below:

He teased the new service with the following words:

“The major Record Labels thought Megabox is dead. Artists rejoice. It is coming and it will unchain you.”

The photo seems to show a website that advertises an Android app, which in turn promises “unlimited space for all your music.” The app seems to offer a music player, search, a shop and some kind of social component, and states that unlimited music uploads will be free.

Dotcom’s team was working on Megabox before the shut-down of MegaUpload, but details of the new service remained scarce. Dotcom has said that it will allow artists to sell their music directly to consumers while also earning money from free downloads. This was supposedly being facilitated through MegaKey, an adware service that swapped ads on third-party websites for MegaUpload’s own display advertising. It’s unclear whether this ad swapping scheme will still be part of the upcoming Megabox service.
http://gigaom.com/2012/06/21/megaupl...ox-kim-dotcom/





Netflix Quietly Smothers 3rd Party App Ecosystem

On Friday afternoon, Netflix published a blog post announcing a breaking change to their API, and dedicated a small paragraph to the fact that their API terms of use had been updated. On a technical level, these changes will cripple many apps currently integrating with Netflix, but the legal changes may be even more significant. Netflix customers should be aware of not only the upcoming changes to any 3rd party apps they might use, but what this says about Netflix as a business.

You can find the announcement on their developer blog. What they are announcing is that from September 15th you will no longer be able to export your viewing history and associated ratings through their API. All API endpoints that expose rental history, and other parts of the API that tangentially supply that information will be removed. All they’ve said regarding motivation for that change is that they are changing their API so that it “is aligned with our broader objectives”. It appears Netflix considers what films you’ve watched and what you thought of them as their data, not yours.

More significant are the changes to the API terms of use, softly mentioned in the post as: “The Terms of Use has been updated […]. To view the revised Terms of Use, go to http://developer.netflix.com/page/Api_terms_of_use.” Checking the latest version against the google cache, we noticed several significant additions under section 1.9

Under the new terms, the following are no longer allowed:

• distribute Content to any third party other than directly to end users through your own Application;
• charge, directly or indirectly, any fee (including any unique, specific, or premium charges) for access to the Content or your integration of the APIs in your Application, or use the APIs to build an enterprise application (e.g., that you distribute to other companies);
• use or display Titles in an Application for search and discovery of content linking to competing services;
• use or display Title Metadata in an Application unless it is used solely to facilitate or enable the search and discovery of Netflix services. For example, if your Application enables users to search for the availability of a movie or TV show from Netflix as well as from other services, you may only display Title Metadata in association with the availability of the movie or TV show from Netflix, not the other services;

The first implication of these additions: if you decide you just want to create a “Netflix” app, and add significant value on top of the Netflix service, you cannot charge your users for that value. You can do something positive for Netflix, but not for yourself. There is no incentive for you to build something useful for Netflix customers, and if you’ve already built your app, you have three months left.

The second implication of these additions: if you want to play with Netflix, you must close your eyes and pretend that no other online streaming services exist, or might have films your users want to see. We know that a lot of our users are Netflix customers, but we also understand that they don’t only use Netflix. So we integrated with Netflix to help people find the best films to watch in whichever way best suits them. We think that’s of mutual benefit to Netflix and our users.

This looks to us like a play to keep users from moving their viewing history onto competing services, and to stop their users from seeing gaps in their content library that may be available for purchase elsewhere. While this might be in their short term interest, in the longer term, making it harder for people who want to spend money watching films legally online cannot be a good business decision.

In an industry as fragmented and combative as online streaming, the consumer’s experience is, sadly, often the first to be compromised.
http://goodfil.ms/blog/posts/2012/06...app-ecosystem/





Time Warner Cable Patents Method for Disabling Fast-Forward Function on DVRs
Steve Donohue

The patent, which lists Time Warner Cable principal architect Charles Hasek as the inventor, details how the nation's second largest cable MSO may be able prevent viewers from skipping TV commercials contained in programs stored on physical DVRs it deploys in subscriber homes, network-based DVRs and even recording devices subscribers purchase at retail outlets.

"The ability to prevent trick mode functionality may be important for a number of reasons. Advertisers may not be willing to pay as much to place advertisements if they know that users may fast forward through the advertisement and thus not receive the desired sales message. Content providers may not be willing to grant rights in their content, or may want to charge more, if trick modes are permitted," Time Warner Cable writes in the patent, which was issued by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office on May 15.

The technology contained in the patent performs the opposite function of the Hopper multiroom DVR that Dish Network (Nasdaq: DISH) recently launched. Rather than prevent subscribers from skipping ads, Dish developed a technique for automatically removing all commercials contained in primetime programming from the Big Four broadcast networks.

While Time Warner Cable has developed technology that could prevent subscribers from skipping ads in programs stored on a DVR, it's unlikely that it will disable trick modes any time soon. Disabling the fast-forward function on a DVR would likely spark a backlash from subscribers, and make it more difficult for Time Warner Cable to compete with DirecTV (Nasdaq: DTV), Verizon (NYSE: VZ) and other multichannel providers that distribute DVRs that allow subscribers to skip commercials.

But Time Warner Cable has already begun to disable the fast-forward function in some of the digital cable products that it offers to subscribers, including its "Look Back" and "Start Over" features. The patent refers to Look Back, a service that allows Time Warner's digital cable subscribers that forget to record a program on a DVR to access the program within three days of its premiere date. The Look Back feature is available in programming from networks owned by Discovery Communications, A&E Networks, NBC Universal, Showtime and Food Network.

Time Warner Cable originally filed the application for the patent, titled "prevention of trick modes during digital video recorder (DVR) and network digital video recorder (NDVR) content," in February 2007. While Time Warner Cable hasn't yet launched a network-based DVR similar to the Optimum DVR that is marketed by Cablevision (NYSE: CVC), its Look Back feature performs many of the same functions as a network DVR.

Time Warner Cable spokesman Justin Venech said the MSO hasn't announced plans to launch a network DVR. The company hasn't yet responded to questions regarding the patent that it was issued last month.

Time Warner Cable notes in the patent that it may be difficult for cable operators to prevent commercial skipping on DVRs that aren't controlled by the operator, but the MSO offers a technique for preventing viewers from skipping commercials in cable programing they record on other devices.

"By utilizing, for example, digital embedded cue-tones for advertisement insertion, a device in the network … could use these points (i.e., the cue-tones) to selectively remove I-Frames/IDR-Frames to prevent trick modes during ads (or other portions) but not from the program being watched. Thus, consumers can be substantially prevented from skipping, fast forwarding and rewinding through video that the provider would like the consumer to view, such as advertisements, specific carriage agreement requirements, etc.," Time Warner Cable wrote in the patent.

The penchant viewers with DVRs have for skipping ads has prompted other multichannel providers to look at ways to preserve advertising placed in TV programs. Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA) recently submitted a patent application that details how it could deliver alternative commercials to subscribers that hit the fast-forward button on their remotes to skip ads.
http://www.fiercecable.com/story/tim...vrs/2012-06-19





U.S. Regains Supercomputing Crown, Bests China, Japan

New IBM water cooled systems, which use warm or hot water, dominate top 10 of Top500 supercomputer list
Patrick Thibodeau

The U.S., once again, is home to the world's most powerful supercomputer after being knocked off the list by China two years ago and Japan last year.

The top computer, an IBM system at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is capable of 16.32 sustained petaflops, according to the Top 500 list, a global, twice a year ranking, released Monday.

This system, named Sequoia, has more than 1.57 million compute cores and relies on architecture and parallelism, and not Moore's Law, to achieve its speeds.

"We're at the point where the processors themselves aren't really getting any faster," said Michael Papka, Argonne National Laboratory deputy associate director for computing, environment and life sciences.

The Argonne lab installed a similar IBM system, which ranks third on the new Top 500 list. "Moore's Law is generally slowing down and we're doing it (getting faster speeds) by parallelism," Papka said.

U.S. high performance computing technology dominates the world market. IBM systems claimed five of the top ten spots in the list, and 213 systems out the 500.

Hewlett-Packard is number two, with 141 systems on the list. Nearly 75% of the systems on this list run Intel processors, and 13% use AMD chips.

Despite the continuing strength of U.S. vendors globally, when China's supercomputer took the top position in June, 2010, it seemed to hit a national nerve.

President Barack Obama mentioned China's top ranked supercomputer in two separate speeches, including his State of the Union address last year.

Steven Chu, the U.S. DOE secretary and a Nobel Prize winner in physics, warned that America's innovation leadership was at risk.

The latest Top 500 list will not change concerns about competitive threats to U.S. technological leadership.

Just this weekend, China launched its fourth manned space mission, sending its first woman into space. The U.S. ended its space shuttle program last year. China is also is developing its own processors to reduce its dependency on Western components.

But the U.S., for now, is leading the world in supercomputers.

The top system marks the first time that IBM has introduced water cooling in its supercomputers. The third place system, Mira, which is also a BlueGene system, also uses water cooling to help remove heat generated by more than 786,000 compute cores.

The Sequoia is more than double the number of compute cores of the second system on the list, Japan's K computer, which had been ranked first at 10.51 petaflops.

Along with the most first and third most powerful computer, IBM also has fourth place with a German system built for the Leibniz-Rechenzentrum computer center for Munich's universities. Two other BlueGene/Q systems, one for Italy and another for Germany, occupy seventh and eighth spots on the list.

The most striking thing about the list, said Jack Dongarra, a professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee and one of the people behind the Top 500 program, is that more than half of the machines on this list aren't deployed in research, academic settings or by government. "More than half are used by industry," he said.

"Industry gets it," said Dongarra. "These machines are important; they can provide some competitive advantage," he said.

The Europeans, in particular, are moving aggressively to build out supercomputing capability, despite all the troubles their economies are facing.

"The Europeans weren't keeping pace," said Dongarra, "and today we see resurgence (in Europe) in high performance computing."

All the European machines on the top 10 are new, said Dongarra.

IBM BlueGene/Q systems dominate the top system. The company is building systems that do not rely on accelerators and instead use its Power processors and its own interconnects, all assembled in a homogenous architecture, said David Turek, the vice president of exascale computing at IBM.

"These machines have been designed and built to solve really difficult science problems across a wide range of disciplines," said Turek.

The proof of that is in the variety of uses the IBM machines have been pegged for, which include nuclear research, earthquake prediction, life sciences, and industrial design.

Turek said architecture, rather than the brute force of processing power, is what's most important.

"The classic trick of waiting for Moore's Law to come along and help you out really doesn't exist anymore," said Turek.

The systems in the Top 500 are running processors somewhere between 2GHz and 3GHz, which is where speeds were eight to nine years ago, said Turek. "It tells you that it is parallelism and system design and architecture that carry the day here," he said.

The Mira machine at Argonne replaces a 500 teraflop system, Intrepid, which has 163,840 cores versus Mira, with 786,432 cores.

Mira is approximately 20 times faster than Intrepid and will reach 10 petaflops, or 10 quadrillion floating-point operations per second. Its chips are 16 cores versus the four cores on Intrepid.

It has 48 racks which weigh approximately two tons each. Sequoia has 96 racks. This is Argonne's first water cooled supercomputer. The transition to water was a new thing for the lab, especially for people who got into computing after the 1980s when water cooling was widely used in mainframes, said Argonne's Papka.

The water cooling has contributed to a five times more efficiency than the Intrepid machine, said Papka. Putting in the water cooling system has made the machine room "look more like a submarine," he said.

There are sensors throughout the system that monitor water pressure and any changes can trigger a shutdown, said Papka.

The system is still being tested and will begin running science later this year with it fully open to its users in 2013.

The system will be used for a wide range of scientific inquiry, and proposals for compute time will face a peer review, similar to a scientific journal. Argonne is a on a four-year upgrade cycle. It will upgrade again in the 2016-17 time period, and Papka hopes the next system is something in the range of 200 petaflops.

An exascale system - 1,000 more times powerful than a petaflop - may arrive by 2020, said Papka.
https://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...ts_China_Japan





The Guy Continues to Mess With The Oatmeal

Last week, I mentioned the fact that Matthew Inman, author of the hugely popular humor site The Oatmeal, had been threatened by a lawyer for a site called FunnyJunk.com after Inman dared to complain that FunnyJunk had copied and reposted many of his original cartoons without giving him any credit. The site's attorney, Charles Carreon, wrote Inman a nasty letter claiming that Inman's charges were false, and threatening to sue for defamation unless Inman immediately paid him $20,000.

He really should have known better.

Inman did not pay him $20,000. Instead, he posted the nastygram on The Oatmeal, after annotating it with some hilariously illustrated responses, and declared that rather than paying Carreon/FunnyJunk $20,000, he would try to raise that much money, send Carreon a picture of it and then donate it to charity instead. At the time I posted about this (June 12), Inman had already raised $120,414. As of today (June 17), it was up to $176,960.

Ken at Popehat.com has also been following this story. As I've mentioned before, Ken is not someone you want taking an interest in your conduct if you are a censorious asshat. According to Carreon, who has given interviews to Forbes and MSNBC, he has been flooded with critical emails and subjected to hacking attempts as a result of his letter to Inman. Or, as he sees it, as a result of Inman's disclosure of his letter. Apparently, Carreon accuses Inman of instigating all this, of which, so far as I know, there is no evidence at all, and has been threatening to sue him for that.

As Ken wrote in his post on Friday, this is a bogus threat, partly because the First Amendment protects speech—even speech that advocates violence—unless it is "intended to create, and likely to create, a clear and present danger of imminent lawless action." See Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969). (This is one reason it is so plainly unconstitutional to prosecute people for mere speech supposedly offering "material support" to terrorist groups, but I digress.) So, while those who are harassing and/or hacking Carreon probably are breaking the law—so don't do that—Inman certainly was not doing that by complaining publicly about Carreon's behavior, or making fun of him, or even by drawing a cartoon showing a fictional version of Carreon's mom having sex with a bear. As Ken wrote, if just writing about bad behavior could make you liable for something a third party may be inspired to do without your knowledge, then the worse the behavior was, the less would be written about it, and so the more protection it would effectively get.

A much more detailed analysis of the underlying issues (defamation, Lanham Act, etc.) was provided by Inman's lawyer, Venkat Balasubramani, in this response letter he wrote to Carreon on Thursday. It is worth reading for several reasons, if you are interested either in the law or in how to write a firm but totally professional letter that is pretty much free of legalese. He patiently explains why there is no merit to the claims, doesn't make any angry threats, but simply states that his client will not be bullied. He reminds Carreon that "the Internet does not like censorship and does not react kindly to it," something that Carreon should know by now if he didn't already. "At the end of the day," he concludes, "a lawsuit against The Oatmeal in this situation is just a really bad idea."

And so of course Carreon filed one on Friday.

The complaint is apparently not available yet on PACER, but my Courthouse News Service report said it was filed, and the court's feed of newly filed cases confirms that.

A really bad idea

According to the summary provided by CNS, and again I stress I haven't seen the actual complaint yet, Carreon has sued for "trademark infringement and incitement to cyber-vandalism," and he has not only sued Inman but also the website through which he has been raising money for charity (IndieGogo.com) and the charities to which Inman has pledged the money. Yes, he is apparently also suing the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society. The summary says Inman's request for donations "purports to raise money" for these organizations, "but was really designed to revile plaintiff and his client, FunnyJunk.com .…" (As you can divine from that, Carreon is representing himself here.) Looking forward to seeing the complaint for many reasons, but especially to find out how the charities are supposedly to blame for any of this.

Additional commentary by Ken here. We compared notes on this, and have offered to help if any of the defendants need it. They may not need legal help, but you can also help by donating, either through the IndieGoGo site or directly to the charities involved. Again, do NOT "help" by harassing or hacking anybody. Just support the good guys.

More to come, we promise, as soon as we get ahold of the complaint.
http://www.loweringthebar.net/2012/0...e-oatmeal.html





Doubling Down: FunnyJunk Lawyer to Subpoena Ars, Twitter

Charles Carreon's plan to expose a Twitter imposter, and why it matters.
Nate Anderson

Charles Carreon, the lawyer now suing webcomic creator Matthew Inman for things like incitement to "cyber-vandalism," isn't messing around with his lawsuit—he really does intend to nail everyone involved, from Inman to Twitter imposters to "cyber-vandals" to online fundraising sites. After filing a lawsuit targeting 100 anonymous Internet "Does" (among others), Carreon has announced that he plans to unmask at least one of them and name the person in his complaint, even if it means subpoenas to Twitter and Ars Technica.

While the case has quickly taken on aspects of the farcical—its main charge at this point involves a bizarre interpretation of "commercial fundraising," of all things—Carreon appears deeply serious. And that's a problem, because the broad nature of the complaint could, if successful, exert a strong negative pressure on those who might be tempted to complain publicly about the bad behavior of others.

The power of a tweet

The saga began with a recent letter from Carreon to Inman, creator of "The Oatmeal," on behalf of Carreon's client FunnyJunk, a user-generated comedy site. Carreon said that Inman had defamed his client during a spat in 2011, and he requested a $20,000 check.

On June 14, after Inman publicized the letter and began an online fundraiser for charity, someone opened a new (and fake) Twitter account called @Charles_Carreon. This account immediately began "defending" Carreon while actually making him look bad, tweeting things like "You sir, are a dumbass. I am doing what any sane individual would do."

Carreon was not pleased. "I am offering a reward of $500 for the provable identity of the impersonator," he tweeted, and then demanded that the imposter "cease impersonating me and disclose your true identity. I am reporting your act of criminal impersonation now."

The next day, June 15, Carreon sent a letter to Twitter providing his credentials and asking for the bogus account to be removed. Twitter quickly suspended it.

Carreon has a trademark on his own name, when used for legal services, so when he sued Matthew Inman, donation collection site Indiegogo, the National Wildlife Federation, and the American Cancer Society later that day, he also targeted "Doe 1"—the person behind the fake Twitter account—for trademark infringement. (Carreon's suit was in his own name, not on behalf of his client FunnyJunk.)

As to who the person was, Carreon had some ideas: it was someone "incited by Inman, or in the alternative and on information and belief, Inman himself."

The bogus tweets had harmed his business, Carreon told the court.

The fake tweets from @Charles_Carreon were abrasive and provoking to other Twitter users, and engendered immediate negative responses, having the effect of intensifying public hostility toward Plaintiff, and causing him irreparable harm in the marketplace for legal services.

Plaintiff makes it a practice to engage in tempered speech even on matters of heated debate, and does not sling insults like "dumbass" and "idiot."


On June 18, a user named "Modelista" registered on Ars Technica and left a comment in one of our stories on the case. "I ran that Twitter account," he said. "It was suspended after the real Charles Carreon faxed over his ID to Twitter." Modelista said that he had opened a second parody account instead, one that made clear it was satirical.

Modelista also denied that he was Inman. "I am just an ordinary citizen of the Internet," he wrote.

To unmask the person, Carreon would need to have either Twitter or Ars reveal whatever information they had on the account, which would likely require a subpoena (Ars Technica does not voluntarily reveal identifying information, including IP address, of our readers). But was Carreon really willing to go the mat over a one-day Twitter impersonator who used words like "dumbass"? He said he was.

Asked on Twitter whether he really intended to "drag Ars Technica & Twitter into this," Carreon has now responded: "Of course I will: Doe 1 in the Complaint becomes named defendant after Twitter and Ars Technica answer subpoena."

Ars Technica has not received any legal communication about the matter; Carreon has yet to respond to our request for comment.

I asked Modelista why he had created the account. Replying by e-mail, he told me that the account had merely been set up to satirize Carreon, not to actually impersonate him, and that Modelista's new mock account therefore makes clear it is parodic.

"It became clear to me at one point that I could not keep up with Charles," Modelista wrote. "His comments to the press were more damaging to his reputation than any Twitter parody account could ever be. You cannot mock someone who has such a low regard for his own reputation. Before the @Charles_Carreon account was suspended, I was simply linking to his interviews. Satire was not necessary at that point as Charles was providing it."

He also claimed that a subpoena would be a waste of time. "I don't live in the United States nor do I plan on visiting anytime in the future," he added. "If Charles can somehow get a court order to all of the proxy servers I used, he may be able to find me here in my comfy home in Sweden."

Tempered speech

Carreon tells both the court and his followers on Twitter that he avoids name calling and prefers "tempered speech." In an interview last Friday with a blogger from Rambling Beach Cat, Carreon doubled down on the point about the importance of speaking respectfully.

"It might not have seemed very dehumanizing when Walt Disney made Japanese people look silly with buck teeth and big glasses who could not pronounce their 'R's or their 'L's," he said. "But it was dehumanizing, and the purpose was to direct evil intentions against them, which ultimately resulted in the only nuclear holocaust that ever occurred in the history of humanity. I don't think Truman would have ever done that if we hadn't so dehumanized the enemy. When you dehumanize someone, that is the first step to inciting people."

And back on June 15, when the situation was still escalating, Carreon did make a stab at appeasing his critics.

"Peace Offering to the Net!" he tweeted and offered a free download of his own book, The Sex.com Chronicles (Carreon was the lawyer who helped recover the famous domain name years ago).

A banner on the site welcomes the "people of the Internet" and concludes: "May we all together make this world a place of peace and happiness." Not a bad idea—though it looks a distant prospect only five days later.

But Carreon's concerns for even-handed speech don't seem to apply as strictly to the American Buddha website, which appears to be run by Carreon and his wife Tara. On the site, Carreon writes and sings a capella songs about "President Evil" (Bush) whose plan is to "Depend on the stupids / And call darkness light." The site also includes mocking images of a topless Condoleeza Rice on a can of "T--s and Rice" soup, along with a Carreon-penned song in which George W. Bush lusts after "The fruit juice flowing slowly, slowly, slowly / Down the bronze of your bombshells."

There are also Carreon's calls to "waterboard [Fed chairman Ben] Bernanke": "Strap him to a board, put a towel over his face and start pouring. He will merely experience a sensation like drowning, and will be none the worse for wear. Then we'll tilt him up, let him get a gasp of air and demand some straight answers: Where did all the money go? Is it in Iraq?"

Not that Inman is any stranger to over-the-top rhetoric (his initial response to Carreon included a crude image of Carreon's purported mother seducing a Kodiak bear). He initially tweeted "It's interesting to watch a man with his dick in a hornet's nest try to solve the problem by tossing his balls in as well." Lately, his tone has moderated; a new blog post asks readers to "stop harassing Carreon. Be lawful and civil in your interactions with him."

To Carreon, he added: "My advice: take a few weeks off, stop saying crazy shit to journalists, and come back when you've calmed down. Write an apology to whomever you feel is appropriate, or just don't write anything ever again."

The chill

Why does any of this matter? Because of the chilling effect a successful lawsuit could have on Internet complaints, especially those that involve legal disputes. If Matthew Inman became an illegal "commercial fundraiser" by trying to raise money as he did, and if he illegally "incited" his readers through his commentary and images, and if even the charities themselves can be drawn into this mess through no action of their own—then what happens to others in a similar situation who attempt similar tactics?

Knowing they are at legal risk for their attempts to mock and expose threats they do not agree are fair ones, they may stay silent instead.

As one of the legal bloggers at Popehat put it as part of a devastating nuclear attack on Carreon's legal reasoning in the case:

The implications of Mr. Carreon's argument–which will be demolished by apt First Amendment case citations in due course—are frightening. Mr. Carreon cannot cite a single thing Mr. Inman said to incite or encourage anyone to take any illegal action against Mr. Carreon. Instead, Mr. Carreon's argument seems to be that Mr. Inman committed actionable incitement not by calling for action, but merely by criticizing, ridiculing, and reviling Mr. Carreon. No First Amendment cases support such a proposition.

The implications of Mr. Carreon's argument reveal its fatuity. Mr. Carreon's argument necessarily means that the more popular or listened-to a speaker is, the less they can say, for fear that an audience will be "incited" to do something illegal against whomever they are criticizing. Mr. Carreon's argument necessarily means that the more contemptible a person's behavior is, the less that others can criticize it, for fear of "incitement." It's a deeply unprincipled position, because the category of "critical speech that might cause someone to do something wrong" is infinitely malleable and can be used to attack almost any criticism one doesn't like.


What happened?

For Carreon, who has long made a stand on First Amendment freedom of speech principles, the entire avenue of attack here is hard for his colleagues to fathom. Try to shut down money to charity? Make incitement claims against Inman? Sue random Twitter imposters who operated for a couple of days?

Marc Randazza, the lawyer whose firm played a key role in bringing down Righthaven, knows Carreon—and can't understand what's come over the man.

"Charles wrote what I thought was one of the most ill-considered demand letters ever sent out on a lawyer’s letterhead," Randazza wrote on his blog this week. After The Oatmeal's response to Carreon's "unsupportable legal position," Carreon sued and "just made himself a meme—and not in a good way," Randazza added.

"This will not end well for him. I just want to say that I tried. I really tried to get him to come to his senses. I tried really, really hard."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...a-ars-twitter/





Verifying Ages Online Is a Daunting Task, Even for Experts
Nicole Perlroth


An 11-year-old using Facebook. The company does not permit children younger than 13 to have accounts,
but it acknowledges that many do and is testing ways to let them join. Photo: Paul Sakuma/Associated Press


Just how hard can it be to verify the age of a person online?

After all, privacy experts have been complaining for years about how much advertisers know about people who use the Internet.

The answer, it turns out, is very hard. Despite attempts by privacy advocates, academics, law enforcement officials, technologists and advertisers to determine a person’s age on the Internet, the reality is that, online, it is extremely difficult to tell whether someone is an 11-year-old girl or a 45-year-old man.

The question arose last week after Skout, a mobile social networking app, discovered that, within two weeks, three adults had masqueraded as teenagers in its forum for 13- to 17-year-olds. In three separate incidents, they contacted children and, the police say, sexually assaulted them.

In response, Skout suspended its app for minors, appointed a task force of security specialists to investigate and find solutions and said it would not resume the service until it could find a better way to vet users’ ages online.

Skout said it had vetted its users ages through Facebook, which officially prohibits members under 13, but has acknowledged that children find ways to enter. Facebook said recently that it was experimenting with age verification tools that would allow people younger than 13 to join.

The resounding response from those who have studied age verification technologies, and, in some cases, put them in place, has been: good luck.

The problem is that everyone — not only sex offenders — has an incentive to lie. Children want to enter Web sites and forums where their older peers are.

The methods the pornography industry uses to confirm online identities of its customers, like credit cards and drivers licenses, cannot be used to identify minors, because the absence of those things does not necessarily mean the person is a child. Federal privacy laws also make it illegal for Web companies to knowingly collect personally identifiable information about children younger than 13.

And on social networks, where people can expect a degree of anonymity, the task of verifying someone’s age is even more difficult. In most cases, all it takes is an e-mail address to set up an account, and children can lie about their ages.

A serious effort to evaluate age verification technologies was made in 2008. At that time, when Facebook was one-ninth its current size, child safety advocates and law enforcement officials expressed concern about sexual predators pursuing children on Myspace, then a Facebook rival. An Internet Safety Technical Task Force was convened, and experts from academia and Web companies set to work examining various ways of verifying ages and sequestering children and adults online.

The task force met with 40 companies that said they had solved the problem. They included an ultrasound device maker that scanned users’ fingers to determine their age; a vendor that asked users for voice responses to questions so a team of voice analysts could listen for an “intent to deceive”; and a company that traveled from school to school persuading educators and parents to submit children’s personal information — sex, address, school, birth date — to an online database that would be accessible to Internet companies.

The first two ideas do not appear to have made it past the demonstration stage. The third lost momentum after privacy advocates questioned whether it was intended to protect children from predators, or sell them out to advertisers.

Four years later, members of that task force sound, at best, deflated.

“I began to learn that age verification technologies would not address any of the major safety issues we identified,” said Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft and co-director of the task force.

An informal survey of major figures in the artificial intelligence industry revealed that little, if any, research is being done on age verification. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the technology financing arm of the Pentagon that has initiated many Silicon Valley wonders, said it was not pursuing any research on age verification. Microsoft, which has done some of the more ambitious research in identity management, is more focused on hiding users’ identities online than on exposing them.

“There has been very little progress, which is astonishing given recent incidents,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut and a major advocate for age verification dating from his days as his state’s attorney general. “You would think, if we can put a man on the moon, we could verify whether someone on the Internet is 13,” he said.

“You never want to say never, but age verification has serious conceptual difficulties,” said Oren Etzioni, an artificial intelligence specialist and computer scientist at the University of Washington who has founded several technology companies. The problem, Dr. Etzioni and others say, is that the available options — establishing a national identity database, tracking users’ behavior or knowing the data on a person’s phone that might suggest an age group — are considered violations of privacy.

“Unlike Germany and South Korea, we don’t have a national ID system because we don’t like the idea of a big government database knowing everything about us from birth to death,” said Stephen Balkam, chief executive of the Family Online Safety Institute, a nonprofit group. “So we muddle through, using a variety of methods to discern how old people are, but they’re not exactly foolproof.”

A few start-ups are, again, experimenting with new technologies that could help verify ages online. Jumio Inc., in Linz, Austria, developed a technology that turns the Web camera on a personal computer or smartphone into a credit card or identification card reader and lets merchants scan ID’s online.

But technologists who have put age verification technologies in place say there is always a way to outsmart the system and that such technologies are, at best, a deterrent.

“Companies do age verification because they know they’re supposed to, but everybody knows it doesn’t really work,” said Hemanshu Nigam, the former chief security officer at Myspace who now runs SSP Blue, an online security consultancy. “The truth is, there is no silver bullet.”

The consensus is that the most effective solution for now is not the technologies, but good old-fashioned education and parental vigilance.

“Sequestering age levels will never be the solution online — it’s hard enough to do it in the so-called real world — and there will always be a work-around,” said Anne Collier, who served on the 2008 task force and runs NetFamilyNews. “Really, the single most important thing we can do is to educate parents and young people about what is happening online.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/18/t...r-experts.html





Apple Patents Technique That Uses Cloned 'Doppelgangers' To Protect Your Privacy
Andy Greenberg

In January of 1984, Apple’s most famous television ad promised to smash Big Brother. Twenty-eight years later, a strange new patent seems to show that the company has finally gotten back to its roots.

On Tuesday Apple received a patent for what it describes as a system that clones Internet users, gives them multiple digital identities, and uses phony attributes of those clones to “pollute” tracking systems with false leads that protect the real user’s privacy from “Big Brother”–or what the author of the patent describes as the “Little Brothers” of automated network surveillance.

In the convoluted language of patents, Apple describes a “principal”–a user–whose real activities are mixed up with those of a collection of clones generated to perform other, confusing actions and hide the real user from surveillance. ”A cloned identity is created for a principal,” reads the patent, which was first spotted by Patently Apple. “Areas of interest are assigned to the cloned identity, where a number of the areas of interest are divergent from true interests of the principal. One or more actions are automatically processed in response to the assigned areas of interest. The actions appear to network eavesdroppers to be associated with the principal and not with the cloned identity.”

The clever idea presented is that users not try to hide their private information, interests and actions from Google, Facebook or the NSA. Instead, they simply flood the network with false data connected to convincing alter egos until the eavesdropper can’t tell the difference.

“The more the cloning agent appears to be a legitimate and an autonomous entity over the network that acts in a consistent manner, the more difficult it will be for eavesdroppers to detect the subterfuge. Therefore, the cloning agent is designed to exhibit characteristics in manners expected by users or human network resources,” reads the patent. “Data collection is not prevented; rather, it is encouraged for the cloned identity and intentionally populated with divergent information that pollutes legitimate information gathered about the principal.”

There’s no guarantee that Apple will develop any real product that implements the idea. But even the language in the patent itself reads like a privacy manifesto–not the usual corporate Apple-speak.

Users are growing uncomfortable with the amount of information marketers possess today about them and many feel it is an invasion of their privacy even if the marketing is currently considered to be lawful. Moreover, even legitimate and lawful enterprises that collect confidential information about a user runs the risk of having an intruder penetrate their databases and acquiring the information for subsequent unlawful purposes.

Concerns about the government and its knowledge about its citizenry is often referred to in a derogatory sense as actions of “Big Brother” who is omnipresent and gathering information to use to its advantage when needed. The electronic age has given rise to what is now known as thousands of “Little Brothers,” who perform Internet surveillance by collecting information to form electronic profiles about a user not through human eyes or through the lens of a camera but through data collection.


Ideology aside, the techniques that Apple’s describing aren’t strictly new. Anonymizing tools like the browser plug-in Abine already allow users to switch between created identities to throw off tracking, says Ashkan Soltani, a privacy researcher who worked with the Wall Street Journal on its “What They Know” series on advertising and surveillance. But it may be a sign that Apple has taken notice of privacy as an opportunity–potentially a weapon it can use in its competition with Google and other advertising-focused firms.

“Other companies have historically let you selectively reveal different sets of cookies, different authentication tokens, or even dynamically generate burner email addresses, with a different type of identity associated with each of them,” says Soltani. ”It’s not totally novel stuff. But it’s interesting to see that Apple might be doing something around this.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygree...-your-privacy/





In Defense Of Emily White (The NPR Intern)
Emily White (the co-founder of Whitesmith Entertainment & Readymade Records)

This morning I was scrolling through my Twitter feed and happened to click on a post by Josh Jackson that stated “David Lowery Responds to NPR Music Intern who doesn’t pay for music.” I clicked on the article and was shocked to see my name in the headline. But then I realized, the article was referring to a student who tweeted at me a few months ago saying “Oh the woes of having THE most common English name.”

I haven’t met this young lady, but when she did tweet at me in April, I was instantly impressed at what her online presence suggested. Or maybe it was more déjà vu than anything as here was a college student who shared my exact name and seemed to be kicking butt at her internships, living and breathing music the way I did as an intern (and hopefully still do).

EW2 (or ‘Emily White too’ as one of my interns referred to her today) is the General Manager of the radio station at American University, where she is a Senior. Her Twitter feed from this month alone has her spreading the word as a true music maven on the artists she’s digging from Dan Deacon on Stereogum to Fleetwood Mac on Last FM, while simultaneously seeming to be very interested in music supervision. As the world found out today, she is also an intern for NPR Music.

EW2 wrote a great blog post! I wish everyone would read it before attacking her. And I know that many people didn’t read it since I was bombarded with e-mails today asking if I wrote the post, which clearly states that she is a college student. I’m 29 and of course one can go to college at any age, but I graduated from Northeastern’s Music Business program in 2005.

In the post, EW2 talks about how her boss recently moved his entire music library into the cloud (as have I, just like I’ve been moving my businesses into the cloud, making it easily internally accessible to our multi-city team). EW2 doesn’t think any of this is weird, it’s completely the norm to her. Just like when I shipped my massive CD collection home as soon as I digitized it if for any reason other than that I moved apartments quite frequently as a young person and lugging a large physical music collection around was almost impossible. Some music addicts pore over vinyl, others consume as much music digitally as possible because we can’t not (I’m the latter). To each their own.

EW2 states “As monumental a role as musicians and albums have played in my life, I've never invested money in them aside from concert tickets and t-shirts.” As an artist manager, THANK YOU, EW2 for supporting musicians by buying most likely thousands of dollars of concert tickets and merchandise throughout your 21 years. A good portion of those funds do indeed go directly to the musicians you love so much, give or take a promoter profit and venue cut, depending on the size of the show you are attending. And I’m glad that you and your family have bonded deeply over music as much as my Mom and Dad White did with me, who were, delighted when I went totally digital as they were thrilled to inherit my massive CD collection. Until, I showed my Dad Spotify, which he happily paid for almost immediately and is obsessed with re-discovering some of his favorite artists from the 60’s, particularly the obscure ones that streaming platforms’ recommendation sections suggest. And how cool is your High School prom date? No one ever told me about Big Star growing up and despite being involved with various Big Star tribute events over the last few years, unfortunately, I was in the dark about their amazing music until Alex’s death.

I grew up obsessively organizing my CD’s as a teenager. And later, ripped them all, then obsessively organizing my digital collection (including Cracker!). And now I’m so happy to have my internal and external hard drive space freed up again now that not only is everything in the cloud, but should disaster happen with a physical hard drive, as EW2 states, streaming legally through Spotify (or Rdio!) will replace the library almost immediately.

I loved Cracker in middle school. I’m listening to them on Spotify as we speak. And I’m sorry that when David was coming up, his only option was to sign his rights away to a corporation who would later make deals on legal streaming platforms that he has no say on. It’s interesting to me that while my Twitter feed and Inbox was blowing up today with people telling me about the precocious NPR intern who I share a name with, I was busy in a meeting with Urge Overkill and their new publisher. In the meeting Eddie “King” Roeser, who comes from the same major-label dominant era of the 90’s as David, was incredibly positive about the opportunities available to him now. Was touring with Nirvana in the 90’s awesome for Urge? Of course it was! But now Eddie realizes he can record anytime he wants and that his relationship with folks like his publisher is more important than ever. In addition, when we re-launched Urge 2.0 in 2010, the band was able to retain their rights for the first time in their career and assemble a hand-picked industry team instead of getting assigned a group of folks in which we can hope that in the best case scenario, a majority of the people involved dig the band. I was fascinated listening to Eddie in the meeting today say that he used to have to do a deal just to record music. Now he can record a world-class album at home and is looking for partners who are experts in spreading his music as well as monetizing it in 2012 and beyond.

One of the many things I love about the modern music age, is that we have an infinite amount of choices on how we enjoy and experience music. No one is preventing you from listening to music on vinyl. No one is preventing the average consumer from listening to crappy quality MP3’s on earbuds. No one is preventing the Rob Zombie fan in the NPR blog comments from marveling in Rob’s gorgeous album artwork packaging. And no one is preventing Scott Stapp from playing multiple nights at The Beacon Theatre this year, so please EW2, don’t let anyone lecturing you in the comments get you down. Again, to each their own! More music than ever in history is being consumed, which is good for artists, our industry (believe it or not, whether you’re benefiting directly or not) as well as for society.

To put this in perspective, think about a parallel industry that you might not feel as emotional about. I love physical books. I cannot imagine reading one on an iPad or Kindle, mostly because the thought of staring at a screen at the end of the day to me is the opposite of unwinding and losing myself in a book. But I'm not going to fight technology, trying to convince an entire consumer base or industry otherwise. And again, no one is stopping me from buying traditional / physical books. Just like I could care less if someone is reading a novel on a mobile device next to me on the subway.

So let's embrace EW2 for filling us in on the point of view of a 21-year-old music freak in 2012 and how she listens to music.

I know that Bob Boilen has responded, coming to EW2’s defense. Which also means I hope that EW2 is not bumming tonight. It was her honesty about how her generation (+29 year old me and now my 60 year old father) consumes music that rattled the industry today. EW2: Don’t let them get you down as I found your post inspiring and I hope it never causes you to fear speaking your mind, or even better, encourages you to always voice your thoughts. Congrats young Emily White, what a great experience this is for you personally and professionally. I look forward to hearing more thoughts on your generation as your life, career, and music fandom evolves.

Which is why EW2 will probably get her wish shortly as she says, “What I want is one massive Spotify-like catalog of music that will sync to my phone and various home entertainment devices. With this new universal database, everyone would have convenient access to everything that has ever been recorded and performance royalties would be distributed based on play counts (hopefully with more money going back to the artist than the present model). All I require is the ability to listen to what I want, when I want and how I want it. Is that too much to ask?”

No, it’s not. And I’m sorry that it often takes companies and rights holders literally years to catch up with technology, what music fans / consumers want, as well as with reality.

So Miss Emily White, I admire you. I would be honored if you considered coming to intern for us (though we don't want to poach you from your sweet NPR gig). Please consider me a resource if you ever need anything. Don’t let any of this get you down. I would love to introduce you to my music supervisor and publisher colleagues as I think that could be a great career route for you, if I’m correct in my observation of your fascination with the field. Having a music collection of 11,000 songs is an amazing start. Music supervision / synch pitching is also an area that is often my artists’ number one revenue stream and is crucial to not only spreading the word on their music, but reaping financial benefits of PRS royalties, increased (often direct-to-artist) sales (!), and straight up income as all of my artists own their latest releases’ master rights. You called it like you see it and I hope you always speak your mind, without worrying or caring what others think. Thanks for being such an amazing music fan and continuing to devote your life to spreading the music you love far and wide. Please keep doing what you do and maybe I'll be lucky enough to see you tweet about or play one of our artists on your radio station(s), continuing to spread the word on music you dig far and wide, to the benefit of the artists and fans.

Love,
(Slightly older) Emily White


http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2012/...6767adfe56970b
















Until next week,

- js.



















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