Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 2nd, '11

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"We basically settled the case for their attorney fees. I felt that was sort of an acknowledgement on their part that they don’t have the damages they claimed." – Archie Robinson


"It’s a bummer that they did this, but we expected it." – Ali Davar



































April 9th, 2011





Tor Project Wins Award for Role in Middle East Revolutions
Jolie O'Dell

The Tor Project has been recognized by the Free Software Foundation for its role in the protests and revolutions around North Africa and the Middle East.

This software, which allows for safe and anonymous web browsing, was given the FSF’s Award for Projects of Social Benefit. The award is intended to highlight “a project that intentionally and significantly benefits society through collaboration to accomplish an important social task.”

Without question, enabling the Internet’s role in political revolution has been an important social task, and one that the Tor Project has explicitly supported. In its section on activist users, Tor reps state that anonymous browsing is essential for reporting abuses of power and organizing protests, especially from behind government-sponsored firewalls and ISP blocks.

“Using free software,” the FSF writes, “Tor has enabled roughly 36 million people around the world to experience freedom of access and expression on the Internet while keeping them in control of their privacy and anonymity. Its network has proved pivotal in dissident movements in both Iran and more recently Egypt.”

In Iran, political dissent before, during and after the 2009 election caused a firestorm on Twitter and Facebook; as a result, the government began censoring many apps and sites. The Tor Project allowed users to bypass the blocks and access the web apps they needed to continue to organize.

And in Egypt and other countries in North Africa and the Middle East, a couple months of steady political unrest has been punctuated by periods of site-specific blocks and even total Internet blackouts. Once again, Tor was instrumental for continuing to allow many users to access the web, where they communicated internally and externally and rallied for change.

Andrew Lewman, executive director of the Tor Project, was present to accept the award from the FSF and its founder and president Richard M. Stallman during a March 19 ceremony.

Previous winners of this award include such notable FOSS projects as the Internet Archive, Creative Commons and Wikipedia.
http://mashable.com/2011/04/02/tor-free-software-award/





BitTorrent Case Judge Is a Former RIAA Lobbyist and Pirate Chaser
Ernesto

Less than a week after her investiture ceremony, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell laid down a landmark verdict that will make it easy for copyright holders to send cash demands to people they suspect of copyright infringement. Many people called the decision into doubt, and the revelation that Judge Howell previously worked as an RIAA lobbyist and as the Managing Director of a pirate-chasing outfit hints at a conflict of interest.

Last week, the freshly appointed U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell gave copyright holders carte blanche to continue their profitable settlement schemes. This verdict weakens the position of thousands of alleged BitTorrent users, some of whom may be completely innocent.

Despite opposition from ISPs and consumer rights groups who described the tactics as “extortion,” Howell decided in favor of the copyright holders. An extremely unfortunate precedent to say the least, and this is confirmed by lawyer Robert Cashman who represents several defendants in similar cases.

“I believe the judge is giving the plaintiff attorneys the benefit of the doubt on all accounts, which is unfortunate because she is turning a blind eye to the abuses defendants are suffering with threats and harassment while plaintiff attorneys attempt to scare them into a settlement,” Cashman told TorrentFreak.

The big question is why Judge Howell came to this conclusion. Although we can’t see inside her mind, looking at her career before she was appointed as a judge a few months ago may give us some insight.

Howell’s resume immediately reveals that she is no stranger to copyright law. As General Counsel of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary she helped with the drafting of several prominent intellectual property protection laws, including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Deterrence Act and the No Electronic Theft Act.

The above clearly indicates that Howell is familiar with protecting the interests of copyright holders, but there is more. Until 2009 she also held the position of Executive Managing Director and General Counsel at Stroz Friedberg, a consulting firm that specializes in the management of digital crimes.

Among other areas of expertise, Stroz Friedberg is very familiar with the technology required to hunt down file sharers. Next month the firm is hosting a lecture titled “The Power of Digital Forensics in Intellectual Property Cases” in which they explain how “specialized forensic processes” can help to find “infringing copies of protected music.”

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that Judge Howell’s former employee may directly benefit from her decision to allow the mass-infringement lawsuits to continue. And that’s not all.

In recent years Stroz Friedberg has lobbied extensively in Washington on behalf of the RIAA. This consulting job earned the company more than half a million dollars. And yes, one of the leading lobbyists on record was Beryl Howell, who was paid $415,000 between 2004 and 2008.

Although judges are deemed to be objective, the above is troubling information which at the least hints at a slight bias in judgement. This is fueled by the fact that less than a week after her investiture ceremony as a judge, Howell opened the door for copyright holders to send out settlements to tens of thousands of alleged file-sharers without first having evidence against them tested in court.

As a lobbyist there was only so much Howell could do, but as a U.S. District Court Judge she can really make a difference it seems.

In layman’s terms her ruling means that copyright holders can easily request the personal details of people who have allegedly downloaded copyrighted works on BitTorrent. With this decision in hand the copyright holders have all they need. After all, the intention of these lawsuits was never to take the defendants to court, but to send them settlement letters to resolve the issue for a few thousand dollars.

Whether this represents fair practice is not for us but a judge to decide – U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell in this case.

We’re no lawyers at TorrentFreak, but if we see the information as presented above we can’t help but feel that there might be a conflict of interest here. At the least, some might consider that spending years defending the rights of major copyright holders has the potential to slightly blur one’s objectivity.
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-c...chaser-110328/





Chris Dodd Memorizing Bogus MPAA Talking Points; Says File Sharing Ruins Community Bonding
Mike Masnick

Well, it's been a little over a week since Chris Dodd embraced the fact that he was a liar concerning his post-Senate career, and embraced this by misrepresenting the biggest issues facing the movie industry. In that week, he's apparently been reading from the MPAA "book of propaganda" and is getting better at it. In a speech to theater owners, he's tied together so many falsehoods that someone might actually believe some of them! I've embedded the whole speech below -- it's really a piece of work -- but let's dig into a few sections.

Let’s begin with perhaps the single biggest threat we face as an industry: movie theft. At the outset, I want you to know that I recognize and appreciate that NATO members are on the front lines every day when it comes to preventing camcording. Further, I want you to know that the member studios of the MPAA deeply appreciate the efforts you make every day to stop the hemorrhaging of movie theft in your theaters.

Let's begin with perhaps the single biggest lie: that copyright infringement is "theft." It's not. Stop saying it is. It makes you look like a dishonest fool, who is in no way capable of actually helping the movie industry adapt to the changing marketplace. As for the "camcording" threat, the MPAA still loves to talk this up, but still ignores the fact that the real issue is industry insiders leaking movies themselves...

Nearly 2.5 million people work in our film industry. The success of the movie and TV business doesn’t just benefit the names on theater marquees. It also affects all the names in the closing credits and so many more –middle class folks, working hard behind the scenes to provide for their families, saving for college and retirement. And since movies and TV shows are now being made in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, movie theft harms middle class families and small businesses all across the country.

Those who steal movies and TV shows, or who knowingly support those who do, don’t see the faces of the camera assistant, seamstresses, electricians, construction workers, drivers, and small business owners and their employees who are among the thousands essential to movie making. They don’t see the teenager working their first job taking tickets at the local theater, or the video rental store employees working hard to support their families.

Yeah, this has become a favorite trope of the industry lately. About all those poor key grips suffering from movie infringement. Of course, this is also a lie. File sharing has no direct impact on those people at all. They don't make any royalties on films. They were paid (not particularly well by the MPAA studios, mind you) for the job that they did, and move on to the next job. Where they suffer is when the MPAA and its member studios fail to embrace smarter business models, such that they have trouble financing new movies. But, as we've seen, the box office continues to do well, and indie filmmakers who are embracing new models are doing increasingly well. Perhaps the issue is that the MPAA should be helping filmmakers understand and embrace new models.

But I guess that's just outside of Dodd's realm of expertise.

We must continue to work together, pushing for stronger laws to protect intellectual property and more meaningful enforcement of those laws. We must also educate parents and students and everyone else about the real world impact of movie theft on jobs and on local tax revenues, and on our ability to make the kinds of movies and TV shows people wish to see.

Fascinating that he claims this in the weeks after two separate, well respected research organizations both pointed to tons of evidence that stronger enforcement doesn't work. Nice work, Chris, you're parroting the failed policies of your predecessors, rather than showing any form of leadership.

After three decades in Congress, I have some idea how to attract the attention of a Congressman or Senator. When you return to your states, invite your local governor, state legislator, congressman and senator to your theater and fill it with those who work with you along with video store employees and their families. Tell them about the importance of these issues to you and to your communities. If you become that educator, you will leave a lasting and indelible impression on those who will make decisions about your future.

In other words, show them a good time, since the logic behind our positions makes no sense at all. However, if we entertain them for free, perhaps they'll feel indebted to give us protectionist, anti-competitive, anti-innovation policies that will help us ring a few extra dollars out of consumers, rather than innovating to add more value.

What I’m about to say isn’t quantifiable in economic terms. I can’t put a dollar figure on it for you. I can’t give you an unemployment number or some other gripping statistic – but as I stand before you this morning one week into this job, I want you to know that it is as important as all data you will have thrown at you during CinemaCon. Our lives are getting more and more complicated. We are increasingly connected to the world by the power of emerging technologies, but at the same time we seem to be increasingly disconnected from each other by the same technology and stream of information and distractions.

And yet, in the midst of all of this, if you drop by a movie theater in America or anywhere around the world on a Friday or Saturday night you will see neighborhoods coming together. You will see people turning off their phones and BlackBerrys. You will see families and friends settling in for two hours in a darkened theater. And even though everyone’s eyes are on the screen, it is somehow still a communal experience – unlike any other. The value of that shared experience crosses economic, political and even generational boundaries.

Going to the movies together as a community has stitched together the fabric of American society in a way that few other institutions ever have or could, providing a nation of incredible diversity with a common cultural vocabulary and a common understanding of ourselves. What’s at stake as we face these challenges is nothing short of the preservation and renewal of this quintessentially American communal tradition.

If I'm reading this correctly, he's basically debunking the entire first part of his speech. The thing is, that "shared experience" is the same thing we've been talking about on Techdirt for ages. It's why the movie industry shouldn't fear file sharing. It should be working towards improving and enhancing that shared experience, because that kind of shared experience can't be pirated.

I find it hilarious that Dodd appears to be suggesting that if the MPAA doesn't get stricter enforcement laws, people will suddenly stop wanting to come together as a community to share such experiences. Does anyone take this kind of thing seriously?
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...-bonding.shtml





Copyright Troll Righthaven's Epic Blunder: a Lawsuit Targeting Ars
Nate Anderson

Not content with just suing sources, small out-of-state nonprofits, bloggers who get 20 hits per day, and other massive copyright pirates, newspaper litigation firm Righthaven this week trained its guns on Ars Technica. The company filed a federal lawsuit against one of our freelance writers over a post (about Righthaven) that appeared on the site back in December—only to dismiss it this morning.

Why was the case ever brought? It was (cough) a "clerical mistake."

"Meet my little friend"

The Las Vegas Review Journal helped to launch Righthaven, a separate Las Vegas company that for the last year has sued mostly bloggers, nonprofits, and news outlets for alleged copyright violations of newspaper stories. Some of the suits have merit; many are absurd. Righthaven has secured some settlements, but it's more notable for getting judges to rule that even publishing the complete text of news stories can be fair use.

When the suits started last year, aggravated readers objected to the whole sordid operation, and they expressed that anger to writers at the Review Journal. Columnist Vin Suprymowicz wrote in response:

I don't think I will miss you. I have a far lower opinion of thieves than you appear to have. In fact, watching them copy my columns while interpolating their own content and pretending it's mine, watching them throw small merchants on the verge of bankruptcy by switching price tags and otherwise stealing merchandise below cost, I hate them with a passion. Lawsuits? They should have their godd**ned hands cut off and nailed to the wall of City Hall.

The paper's publisher, Sherman Frederick, likewise warned readers: "I'm asking you nicely once again—don't steal our content. Or, I promise you, you will meet my little friend called Righthaven."

Well, we met him—he lives under a bridge near the edge of town, he has knobby skin and a greenish hue, and he's not actually friendly.
1 out of 200 ain't bad!

This week, Righthaven filed a federal lawsuit (PDF) against Eriq Gardner for a freelance piece he wrote for us back in December. That article, "Copyright troll Righthaven sues for control of Drudge Report domain," described how Righthaven had expanded its work to include suing for papers like the Denver Post, and how it was pursuing The Drudge Report for using a Post photo of a TSA airport pat-down. In recompense for that offense, Righthaven made the astonishing request to be given control of the Drudge Report domain name.

In our article, we reproduced the pat-down photo in question. It wasn't a copy of the original image. No, our reproduction came from Righthaven's own court filing against The Drudge Report. It was a grainy black-and-white image from the court documents, which in turn had copied the image from Drudge, which in turn had (allegedly) copied it from the Post.

US copyright law allows certain "fair uses" of copyrighted material without consent of the rightsholder; such uses explicitly include "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research." Making a final determination relies on a "four-factor test":

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

We strongly believe that the use is fair—indeed, that it is almost a paradigmatic case of fair use. A grainy black-and-white copy of a color photo, used to illustrate a news account about said photo, is the reason we have fair use. I had thought I was immune to feelings of surprise after covering these sorts of legal battles for years, but it turns out I still have the capacity to feel shock. The reaction around the Ars newsroom—and from our legal counsel—was absolute bafflement.

And instead of suing Ars Technica directly, Righthaven bizarrely sued freelancer Eriq Gardner, who regularly writes on legal matters for The Hollywood Reporter and who has covered Righthaven for some time. The post in question is the only one Gardner has ever written for Ars.

The result is that we had a New York writer being sued by a Nevada company over a Colorado photo published by a New York-based website. Righthaven claimed "willful" infringement and requested statutory damages, which can reach as high as $150,000 per infringement. In addition, they wanted their legal fees covered. And they wanted "pre- and post-judgment interest."

So, after getting the green light from Condé Nast's legal team, I gave Righthaven a call to find out just what was going on here. After waiting on hold for a while, I was put through to Steven Ganim and Shawn Mangano, lawyers for Righthaven, who immediately volunteered the information that the lawsuit had been "dismissed with prejudice" this morning after it "came to our attention" that Gardner was a reporter.

This raised huge, obvious questions. Among them: isn't this the sort of thing one looks into before filing federal lawsuits that request tens of thousands of dollars in damages from journalists reporting on your company?

Confusion

Mangano explained that there had been "confusion" about the exhibits on the complaint. Righthaven has actually sued 25 or 30 people over the same photo recently, and in reviewing all of the documentation on these cases, they determined there was "an internal error" or a "clerical mistake" of some kind that led the reviewers to proceed with the Ars Technica case. The nature of this exhibit "error" remains opaque; I checked the official complaint Righthaven filed with the court, and the exhibits attached to it do in fact show the Ars Technica story with the correct photo. No exhibit confusion was evident.

Mangano said that Righthaven does review all cases before filing them, and he said that the company's track record was great. "We strive for accuracy," he said. "This is the first time in 200+ lawsuits that we have voluntarily dismissed with prejudice."

He offered no apology, though he did chuckle at the absurdity of it all. Ha. What's a little litigation among friends?

And Righthaven is a friend to journalists, it turns out. "We took immediate corrective action" after learning that Righthaven had just sued a reporter, said Mangano. He added that, since reporters make use of copyright and tend to know a good deal about fair use, "It's somewhat counterintuitive to sue a reporter for copyright infringement!"

Which, of course, it is.

Bottom line, in Mangano's view: Righthaven's internal processes are great, one small error was made when filing a big batch of similar cases, and it has been corrected. No harm, no foul.

There's reason for doubt about these incredibly accurate internal processes. Righthaven can't even dismiss cases properly, noting in today's filing that this was a "VOLUNTARY DISMISSAL OF ACTION WITHOUT PREJUDICE" even as the text of the filing read "VOLUNTARY DISMISSAL OF ACTION WITH PREJUDICE." (Dismissing a case with prejudice means it cannot be refiled.)

As this piece was being published, Righthaven refiled the dismissal motion, this time getting it correct.

It's easy to blame Righthaven for this farce—and, let's be clear, we absolutely do—but no one forced venerable papers like the Denver Post to walk this road. Newspapers have been hard hit recently; it's easy to see why these might cling to anything that might keep them from plunging over the cliff, but this work with Righthaven embarrasses their brands, their missions, and their long history. It's beneath them. We hope they find a better path back to profitability.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...geting-ars.ars





N. Ind. Builder Sues Weis Over Copyright Charge
AP

A lawsuit alleges former Notre Dame football coach Charlie Weis, his wife and a homebuilder violated copyright laws in constructing a house for developmentally disabled adults for a charity started by the couple.

Garden Homes by E.L. filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in South Bend on March 18 alleging that Charlie and Maura Weis and Rans Custom Homes violated copyright laws in building a third home at the Hannah and Friends Farm. Garden Homes, which is based in South Bend, contends it designed and built the first two homes on the 30-acre facility and obtained copyrights for those designs.

Garden Homes alleges the Weises intentionally violated copyright laws by giving Rans its design plans and directing it to make alterations to avoid the appearance of a copyright violation.

Weis, now the offensive coordinator at Florida, declined comment, school spokesman Steve McClain said. Jeffrey Stesiak, a lawyer for the Weises, also declined comment, saying he was reviewing the lawsuit.

Charlie and Maura Weis told the South Bend Tribune in a story published Tuesday that they found it "incomprehensible" that a builder would sue another builder who is building a home for people with special needs. They also said they found it peculiar that the lawsuit was filed against them personally rather than their charity.

A message seeking comment was left Tuesday by The Associated Press for Ryan Rans of Custom Homes. He told the South Bend Tribune the lawsuit is without merit.

Garden Homes contends it helped develop the land and built the main lodge for the farm. Plans called for the site to have 16 homes for developmentally disabled adults. Garden Homes designed and built the first two homes, the lawsuit says. Garden Homes contends its plans were used for the new construction, for the electrical and other contract bids and for the overall exterior and interior designs for the third house.

Weis was fired in 2009 after five seasons as Notre Dame coach, posting a 35-27 record. He was the offensive coordinator for the Kansas City Chiefs last season before taking the job at Florida.

The Weis family started Hannah and Friends to try to improve the quality of life for those with special needs. Their 15-year-old daughter Hannah has global development delay, a form of mental retardation.
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/201...t-Lawsuit.html





When Media Giants Attack! Cease-and-Desist Letter to News Reader Zite Claims All Kinds of Copyright Damage
Kara Swisher

A panoply of big media giants sent a cease-and-desist letter today to Zite, the Apple iPad news reader app.

The Washington Post, AP, Gannett, Getty, Time, Dow Jones and many other media organizations were part of the action, which you can read all about below.

Zite bills itself as a “personalized iPad magazine that gets smarter as you use it.”

Not smart enough, it seems, to avoid copyright complaints from the content creators the app sucks in.

“The Zite application is plainly unlawful,” said the letter to Zite CEO Ali Davar, noting all kinds of copyright violations.

In a phone interview with BoomTown this afternoon, Davar said Zite would comply with the letter by shifting the content from its “reading” mode to a Web one, which points to publisher sites.

“It’s a bummer that they did this, but we expected it,” he said.

In a comment (below), he also wrote:

“Zite’s goal is to work with publishers, not to be antagonistic. The few publishers that have contacted us regarding the reading mode view we have complied with their requests and simply switched over to web view. We’re talking to publishers right now to find a win-win for them monetarily and to at the same time preserve the great user experience.”

For now, it’s lose-lose, and the letter is a dramatic shot across the bow of all the many news readers now hitting the market in the wake of the popularity of the Apple iPad tablet.

The social media-focused Flipboard and the news-oriented Pulse are two others, both of which have claimed they are working with publishers.

But Pulse wrangled with the New York Times over misuse of its RSS feeds and copyright issues, which has since been settled.

Zite showed up earlier this month, a product of a machine learning technology start-up called Worio, which is based in Vancouver, Canada.

The aggregator of personalized content, which has $2 million in angel funding, gets its cues from a user’s interests.

According to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal: “Zite originally came from research at the University of British Columbia’s Laboratory for Computational Intelligence and received unspecified funding from Canada’s National Research Council and PRECARN in 2007.”
http://kara.allthingsd.com/20110330/...s-reader-zite/





Danish Supreme Court Sets High Bar For Evidence In File Sharing Cases
Mike Masnick

One of the complaints that many have made concerning various file sharing lawsuits is how rightsholders too often rely on highly questionable or weak evidence. Over in Denmark, where efforts against file sharing by record labels and the IFPI have been aggressive, the Supreme Court has now deemed weak evidence insufficient for such cases. The case involved a guy who was accused of sharing 13,000 tracks. The court eventually decided he should pay $1,900 -- significantly less than what the record labels requested. The main reason for the lower dollar amount was the limited quality of the evidence by the "anti-piracy" group Antipiratgruppen:

APG used techniques which scraped the index of the files said to be being made available by the defendant and then linked them back to his IP address, a method which has been acceptable in the past. But while the Court accepted that some sharing had occurred due to the defendant’s confession, it wasn’t satisfied that the index was an accurate representation of the files physically present on the defendant’s computer.

Nice to see some courts recognizing that just having an IP address is not enough evidence on its own.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...ng-cases.shtml





Sabam Also Oversees Truckers

Truck drivers in their cabin listening to the radio, are therefore a contribution to Sabam mandatory. The copyright society considers the cab of the truck because as a workplace.

"Kink ready nonsense", says MP Maggie De Block. "The truckers have the radio not so much for the music needed, or for their safety. So is it illogical that they pay for. "

Enterprise Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne gives it partly right: the radio is essential for truckers. Moreover, such an intimate cabin space.

Sabam angry response. "We have presided over by Minister Van Quickenborne Unisono the agreement concluded with industry, which provides that all companies for the music in the workplace pay a contribution depending on the number of staff. Those with less than nine of them are even exempt, "said spokesman Thierry Dachelet.

Whether those personnel now in a truck sitting in an office or a studio, makes no real difference.

There are exceptions, such as the social sector. "I do not exclude that we also consider arguments from the transport sector, but there is certainly nothing about," says Dachelet.

Their radios that truckers need for their security, Dachelet is no argument: they listen to the music by now.
http://translate.google.com/translat...lid%3D1937V2RP





Eminem Lawsuit May Raise Pay for Older Artists
Ben Sisario

The most closely watched lawsuit in the music industry asks this question: how much should a song on iTunes or another digital music service be worth to the performer?

The artist at the center of the suit is Eminem, but some of the biggest beneficiaries of the case may be thousands of older artists who have not released an album in decades.

Four years ago, the producers who discovered Eminem sued his record label, the Universal Music Group, over the way royalties are computed for digital music, which boils down to whether an individual song sold online should be considered a license or a sale. The difference is far from academic because, as with most artists, Eminem’s contract stipulates that he gets 50 percent of the royalties for a license but only 12 percent for a sale.

“As of now it’s worth $17 million or $20 million, but on a future accounting basis, five or 10 years from now, it could easily be a $40 million to $50 million issue,” said Joel Martin, the manager of F.B.T. Productions in Detroit, which first signed Eminem and continues to collect royalties on his music. (Marshall Mathers himself, who performs as Eminem, was not a party to the suit, although he stands to earn millions from it.)

The suit reached its apparent end last week when the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal, letting stand a lower court’s decision that digital music should be treated as a license. Lawyers and music executives say that few younger artists are likely to be affected by the decision because since the early 2000s record companies have revised most of their contracts to include digital sales among an artist’s record royalties. Eminem’s first contract was signed in 1995.

Many older artists, however, whose contracts predate digital music and have not been renegotiated, stand to profit significantly from the decision.

“This is life-changing,” said Joyce Moore, the wife of Sam Moore of Sam & Dave, the duo that had hits in the 1960s like “Soul Man.” “If we were being paid a nickel a download, as opposed to 35 cents — that’s a huge amount of money for a guy that is on a fixed income or has to run up and down the road at 75 years old.”

The lawsuit argued that record companies’ arrangements with digital retailers resembled a license more than it did a sale of a CD or record because, among other reasons, the labels furnished the seller with a single master recording that it then duplicated for customers.

“Unlike physical sales, where the record company manufactures each disc and has incremental costs, when they license to iTunes, all they do is turn over one master,” said Richard S. Busch, a lawyer for F.B.T. and Mr. Martin’s company, Em2M. “It’s only fair that the artist should receive 50 percent of the receipts.”

A federal jury ruled in favor of Universal in 2009, but that decision was overturned on appeal last year. The label petitioned to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case.

Universal said the implications of the decision were limited.

“The case has always been about one agreement with very unique language,” the company said in a statement. “As it has been made clear during this case, the ruling has no bearing on any other recording agreement and does not create any legal precedent.”

Although current hits get more attention, older music still represents a huge portion of overall music sales, and over time durable hits can rack up significant sales. Last year there were 648.5 million downloads of “catalog” singles in the United States, meaning songs more than 18 months old, compared with 523 million for current tracks, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Fred Wilhelms, a lawyer in Nashville who specializes in collecting royalties for musicians, said that sales of older music had provided the labels with steady income at low cost.

“The labels make tens of millions of dollars a year from the deep catalog without paying a penny in promotion costs,” said Mr. Wilhelms, who estimates that the Eminem ruling might apply to tens of thousands of artists. “Anybody who ended their recording career before 1978, and probably before 1992, is in the decision,” he added.

Royalty rates vary, but today most acts get 10 to 15 percent of their music’s net sales, minus packaging and other deductions, lawyers say. In the 1970s and before, the rates were often even lower. But for decades, licenses of music — to movies, television or other third parties — gave artists a 50 percent share, without the same deductions, on the principle that a third party was bearing the relevant costs.

Jason M. Schultz, an assistant professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, who helped write a friend of the court brief on behalf of the Motown Alumni Association — a group that represents Motown acts but is not associated with the label — said that recording contracts made in the early days of digital music reflected the labels’ failure to recognize that technology’s potential.

“The record companies would strike these deals with artists in a way that favored them,” Mr. Schultz said. “But when the digital revolution came around, those contracts ended up favoring artists. The record companies guessed wrong.”

Although sales of digital music around the world now represent 29 percent of record companies’ revenue, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the Eminem case, and several others like it, stem from the mid-2000s, when the potential value of digital music was first becoming clear. According to court papers, the Eminem case had its origins in an audit of accounting records that F.B.T. and the rapper conducted in 2005, two years after Apple opened the iTunes store.

In separate cases, the Allman Brothers have sued Universal and Sony BMG Music Entertainment over similar contractual issues. The Sony case, filed in 2006, was expanded to a class-action suit, and earlier this month the parties informed the judge in the case that they had “reached an agreement in principle.” (The Allman Brothers and Cheap Trick, which joined the case, both settled their claims.) The Allmans’ suit against Universal, filed in 2008, is still pending.

For million-selling acts like Eminem and the Allman Brothers, the stakes are high. But plenty of other artists stand to gain from the decision as well.

“For people who had a single hit, who couldn’t afford to chase $100 in owed royalties,” Mr. Wilhelms said, “they are now looking at a couple thousand. It’s worth a couple phone calls and an angry letter or two.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/b.../28eminem.html





Living Legend Tries to Make a Living
Ben Sisario

Aside from musicians, record collectors and D.J.’s, the name Clyde Stubblefield does not make many ears perk up. But no matter who you are, you probably know his drumming.

If you’ve heard Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise” or “Fight the Power,” you know his drumming. If you’ve heard LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out,” or any number of songs by Prince, the Beastie Boys, N.W.A., Run-D.M.C., Sinead O’Connor or even Kenny G., you definitely know his drumming, even though Mr. Stubblefield wasn’t in the studio for the recording of any of them.

That is because he was the featured player on “Funky Drummer,” a 1970 single by James Brown whose 20-second drum solo has become, by most counts, the most sampled of all beats. It’s been used hundreds of times, becoming part of hip-hop’s DNA, and in the late 1980s and early ’90s it was the go-to sample for anyone looking to borrow some of hip-hop’s sass (hence Kenny G.).

Yet Mr. Stubblefield’s name almost fell through the cracks of history. The early rappers almost never gave credit or paid for the sample, and if they did, acknowledgement (and any royalties) went to Brown, who is listed as the songwriter.

“All my life I’ve been wondering about my money,” Mr. Stubblefield, now 67 and still drumming, says with a chuckle.

A new project tries to capture at least some royalties for him. Mr. Stubblefield was interviewed for “Copyright Criminals,” a documentary by Benjamin Franzen and Kembrew McLeod about the gray areas of music copyright law, and for a special “Funky Drummer Edition” DVD of the film released on Tuesday, Mr. Stubblefield recorded a set of ready-to-sample beats. By filling out a basic licensing form, anyone willing to pay royalties of 15 percent on any commercial sales — and give credit — can borrow the sound of one of the architects of modern percussion.

“There have been faster, and there have been stronger, but Clyde Stubblefield has a marksman’s left hand unlike any drummer in the 20th century,” said Ahmir Thompson, a k a Questlove of the Roots, who was to play “Fight the Power” with him and Public Enemy’s Chuck D. on NBC’s “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” on Tuesday. “It is he who defined funk music.”

Born in Chattanooga, Tenn., Mr. Stubblefield was first inspired by the industrial rhythms of the factories and trains around him, and he got his start playing with regional bands. One day in 1965 Brown saw him at a club in Macon, Ga., and hired him on the spot. Through 1971 Mr. Stubblefield was one of Brown’s principal drummers, and on songs like “Cold Sweat” and “Mother Popcorn” he perfected a light-touch style filled with the off-kilter syncopations sometimes called ghost notes.

“His softest notes defined a generation,” Mr. Thompson added.

“We just played what we wanted to play on a song,” Mr. Stubblefield said in a telephone interview last week, referring to himself and his fellow Brown drummer John Starks, better known as Jabo. (Brown died in 2006.) “We just put down what we think it should be. Nobody directs me.”

You might expect Mr. Stubblefield, who has appeared on some of the greatest drum recordings in history, to have gone on to fame, or at least to a lucrative career playing sessions. But for the last 40 years he has happily remained in Madison, Wis., playing gigs there with his own group and, since the early 1990s, playing on the public radio show “Michael Feldman’s Whad’Ya Know?”

Alan Leeds, whose time as Brown’s tour director overlapped with Mr. Stubblefield’s period in the band, remembers him as a gifted but not terribly ambitious musician. “He was a fun guy,” Mr. Leeds said. “But if one guy was going to be late for the sound check, it was Clyde.”

The technology and conventions of sampling — isolating a musical snippet from one recording and reusing it for another — also kept him from greater recognition. “Funky Drummer” didn’t appear on an album until 1986, when it was on “In the Jungle Groove,” a Brown collection that was heavily picked over by the new generation of sampler-producers.

The lack of recognition has bothered Mr. Stubblefield more than the lack of royalties, he said, although that stings too.

“People use my drum patterns on a lot of these songs,” he said. “They never gave me credit, never paid me. It didn’t bug me or disturb me, but I think it’s disrespectful not to pay people for what they use.”

In 2002 Mr. Stubblefield had a tumor in his kidney removed, and now he suffers from end-stage renal disease. He qualifies for Medicare but has no additional health insurance.

The “Funky Drummer Edition” of “Copyright Criminals” includes Mr. Stubblefield’s beats both on vinyl and as electronic files, and in addition to any licensing, he also gets a small royalty from the DVD, said Mr. McLeod, an associate professor of communications at the University of Iowa. As in his days with Brown, Mr. Stubblefield was also paid a fee for the recording session.

“Breaks” albums with ready-made beats are nothing new in hip-hop. By his reckoning, Mr. Stubblefield has done four or five such collections, but not all of those have paid him his royalties either.

“They sent us royalty papers, but no checks,” he said of one such album made for a Japanese company.

For Mr. Stubblefield, lack of credit is not only an issue with D.J.’s and producers sampling his beats. It was also a bone of contention with Brown, who was famous for running a tight ship — he fined his musicians for missing a beat or having scuffed shoes — and also for not giving his musicians more credit.

“A lot of people should have gotten a lot of credit from James Brown,” Mr. Stubblefield said, “but he only talked about himself. He may call your name on a song or something, but that’s it.”

This raises the question of whether Mr. Stubblefield is himself violating any of Brown’s copyrights by recording beats in the style of those original recordings in Brown’s band. Mr. McLeod dismissed that suggestion, saying that the beats are not identical, and that the original copyright registration forms for Brown’s songs mention melody and lyrics but not rhythm.

And besides, Mr. McLeod added, what you’re getting is simply a great drummer doing his thing.

“This differs from buying a sample pack for GarageBand,” he said, referring to Apple’s home-recording program, “because you know that what you are listening to and what you are sampling is the genius labor of this incredible musician. It’s Clyde Stubblefield.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/30/a...royalties.html





Napster Boss Set to Buy Metallica’s Record Label

Billionaire Sean Parker considers bid for Warner Music Group, the outfit which destroyed his music website after Ulrich spearheaded action
Martin Kielty

Metallica’s record label could soon be owned by the man who founded Napster, the website destroyed after Lars Ulrich and co went into battle against it.

In 2000 the thrash giants launched legal action against Sean Parker’s online service, the first major player in the MP3 download market. The case was settled out of court but involved banning 300,000 people from using Napster, a move which annoyed many of Metallica’s fans. Ulrich later admitted it was a badly-advised episode in his life, and he wishes he’d dealt with the situation differently.

Warner Music Group continued the legal battle and Napster was finally shut down in 2002. But Parker became a billionaire as part of the team which made Facebook successful – and is now poised to make a bid for the ailing record label, which is currently seeking offers over $2.5bn.

The 31-year-old is in talks with investors Ron Burkle and Doug Teitelbaum about becoming a member of a consortium deal. He’s also an adviser to the Spotify online music service, which has been unable to reach a deal with WMG to use its music catalogue.

Four other parties are believed to be interested in buying the label, which may also be attempting to buy EMI before its own sale. Details are expected to be revealed before the end of April.

Meanwhile, Metallica have warned fans to beware of a company which has announced it will produce 3D TV and DVD releases of the band.

Front Row Networks yesterday announced: “We have achieved the first step in acquiring the 2D footage and conversion technology. Once we have secured all distribution rights we will generate revenues for us and the artist.

But the band say: “Metallica owns and controls its recorded performances and Creeping Death Music owns the vast majority of any music embodied in Metallica Recordings. Pretty much any legitimate business would have contacted us to see how Metallica felt about it. Maybe these guys just forgot.”
http://rocknewsdesk.com/world-news/n...rd-label/1034/





Cheap Beatles Songs = $1 Million Legal Bill
Peter Kafka

A couple years ago, we learned that you can’t take music from the major labels and sell copies of it on your own Web site without a license. Today we learned what happens if you try: A $950,000 penalty.

That’s what BlueBeat.com is paying EMI Music and its subsidiaries for selling unauthorized copies of the label’s music, including some 67,000 Beatles songs back in 2009.

At the time, BlueBeat had argued it had the rights to do so because it was using “psycho-acoustic simulation” to make the recordings, which it sold for a quarter a piece. But the courts have ruled that this theory was just as ridiculous as you think it is.

BlueBeat’s lawyer Archie Robinson tells the Associated Press, presumably with a straight face, that his client did just fine in the end:

“We basically settled the case for their attorney fees,” Robinson said. “I felt that was sort of an acknowledgement on their part that they don’t have the damages they claimed.”

To sum up: The only place on the Web where you can legally get the Beatles is Apple’s iTunes, which still has exclusive rights to the band’s catalog. Or, of course, on, Google’s YouTube:
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/2011...on-legal-bill/





Amazon to Offer Service for Remote Access to Music

Amazon.com Inc is introducing an online service to allow customers to store their music files remotely and access them through their smartphones and computers in a move aimed at drawing music buyers from rivals such as Apple Inc's iTunes.

Amazon's Cloud Service, announced on Tuesday, will allow customers to tap its company's Web servers instead of local hard drives -- a type of technology generically known as "cloud computing."

In a statement, Amazon's vice president of movies and music Bill Carr said the service would spare users from having to save their music files on multiple players and move those files around.

The company said customers would initially get 5 gigabytes of free storage. The cost for additional storage will be $1 per gigabyte, according to Amazon's website. A customer can get an upgrade to 20 gigabytes with the purchase of any album in MP3 format bought from Amazon.

But new music purchases from Amazon saved directly to the cloud service will not count against any storage quota.

The service's concept is to allow users to listen to music from any of their computers or phones regardless of where they bought their files.

Music files can be saved in either the MP3 format or AAC, which is the standard used by Apple's iTunes service.

Amazon is also offering "Cloud Player," which will allow music fans to listen to, download and make playlists on any Web browser as well as any application using Google's Android operating system.

(Reporting by Phil Wahba in New York; additional reporting by Sakthi Prasad in Bangalore, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...72S13H20110329





Amazon Faces Backlash Over "Music Locker" Service
Phil Wahba and Paul Thomasch

A new Amazon.com Inc service that lets customers store songs and play them on a variety of phones and computers is facing a backlash from the music industry that could ignite a legal battle.

Amazon's Cloud Drive, announced on Tuesday, allows customers to store about 1,000 songs on the company's Web servers for free instead of their own hard drives and play them over an Internet connection directly from Web browsers and on phones running Google Inc's Android software.

Sony Music, home to artists such as Shakira and Kings of Leon, was upset by Amazon's decision to launch the service without new licenses for music streaming, said spokeswoman Liz Young.

"We hope that they'll reach a new license deal," Young said, "but we're keeping all of our legal options open."

Amazon beat rivals Google and Apple Inc into the market for such "music locker" services, which are meant to appeal to consumers frustrated by the complexities of storing their favorite songs at work, home and on their smartphones. Apple and Google were expected to launch their services at the end of last year.

Shares of Amazon rose 3.1 percent to close at $174.62 on Nasdaq.

Music labels were informed of the plans last week. Only later did Amazon address the issue of negotiating licenses, one source close to the discussions said.

That executive called the move "somewhat stunning" and noted that some within the media industry said the service might be illegal.

"I've never seen a company of their size make an announcement, launch a service and simultaneously say they're trying to get licenses," said the executive, who requested anonymity because the discussions were not public.

In 2007, EMI sued MP3tunes, which offered a similar service. Consumers are allowed to store music files on their own computers, but it is unclear whether they have that right when they use remote storage services offered by cloud computing.

"The labels have engaged in a legal terror campaign over the last 10 years using litigation to try and slow technology progress," MP3tunes founder Michael Robertson said of the music industry's latest reaction to Amazon's plans. MP3tunes is based in San Diego.

Amazon's service is part of its plan to be a bigger player in the digital content business and reduce its reliance on the sales of CDs and books.

"They don't have leadership in digital formats," said BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis. "The next big race is locker services -- that's what we want."

Gillis said he expected Google to introduce a remote music storage service in May and for Apple to follow suit in June.

Although Amazon's service lets users listen to music from most computers or phones regardless of where they bought the song, it will not work on Apple's iPhones or have an "app" on that company's devices.

Amazon said customers would initially get 5 gigabytes of free storage, enough for about 1,250 songs or 2,000 photographs. They can buy 20 gigabytes for $20 a year.

Alternatively, a customer can get an upgrade to 20 gigabytes of free storage with the purchase of any MP3 format album from Amazon. New music purchases from Amazon saved directly to the cloud service will not count against any storage quota.

Users can save music files in MP3 as well as the AAC format, which is the standard for Apple's iTunes service.

Amazon is also offering Cloud Player, which allows users to listen to music, download tracks and make playlists.

On Nasdaq, Google rose 1.1 percent to $581.73, and Apple fell 0.2 percent to $350.96.

(Additional reporting by Yinka Adegoke and Kenneth Li in New York and Sakthi Prasad in Bangalore; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick, Lisa Von Ahn and Richard Chang)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...72S13H20110329





Amazon on Cloud Player: We Don't Need No Stinkin' Licenses
Jacqui Cheng

"Cloud Player is an application that lets customers manage and play their own music. It's like any number of existing media management applications. We do not need a license to make Cloud Player available."

That's Amazon spokesperson Cat Griffin's response to questions over whether the company's new music storage and playback services require licenses from the record companies to operate. Amazon seems to insist that since users are uploading and playing back their own music, the original download licenses still apply and no new licenses are necessary—a seemingly logical conclusion that the record industry disagrees with.

Amazon launched Cloud Drive and Cloud Player on Tuesday morning, offering US-based Amazon customers 5GB of online storage to use for whatever they please. If they buy an album from Amazon MP3, however, they get 20GB of storage for the year, and all Amazon MP3 purchases are automatically synced to the user's Cloud Drive without counting against the quota. Users could then use the Cloud Player Android or Web app to stream the music to any compatible device or browser, even if the files themselves had not been synced there.

We wondered aloud how Amazon managed to strike such an impressive licensing deal with the record labels, given the fact that Apple seems to still be working out the details for its own digital locker service. It turns out that Amazon hasn't struck a deal, and seems to be hoping that the record companies will be the ones to blink.

"[W]e do not need a license to store music in Cloud Drive," Griffin added in an e-mail to Ars. "The functionality of saving MP3s to Cloud Drive is the same as if a customer were to save their music to an external hard drive or even iTunes."

That's certainly not what the music industry seems to think, though—at least in regards to Cloud Player. In an interview with Reuters, Sony Music spokesperson Liz Young said the company hoped for a license deal but that it was keeping its "legal options open." That doesn't sound particularly good for Amazon.

Another unnamed record company executive called the cloud services "somewhat stunning," adding that Amazon dropped the bomb on the music industry last week. Only then did Amazon allegedly begin to address licensing issues before going ahead with the launches—licenses or not. "I've never seen a company of their size make an announcement, launch a service and simultaneously say they're trying to get licenses," the anonymous exec said.

The non-Sony members of the Big Four labels—EMI, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music—didn't respond to our requests for comment by publication time, so it's unclear whether Amazon managed to secure any rights before launching Cloud Drive and Cloud Player. Based on Amazon's comments, though, it certainly sounds like the answer is no. The company has seemingly decided to call the music industry's bluff that new licenses are necessary when users stream their own music, and we're sure this won't be the last we hear of it.
http://arstechnica.com/media/news/20...n-licenses.ars





The Cloud Will Be Your Hard Drive, Despite The Record Labels’ Greed
MG Siegler

Amazon’s move into the cloud music storage and streaming game is nothing if not controversial. I love it. They’ve seemingly looked at what companies like Apple and Google have been dealing with for months, if not years, and just said “screw it, let’s just do it.”

Ballsy. Brilliant. Wonderful.

Of course, the service itself seems kind of “meh”. But I’m more than happy to take “meh” over nothing at all — which is exactly what the other big players have given us. It has been all empty promises (Google) and endless whispers (Apple). Amazon actually did it. And they deserve credit.

And now comes the legal game.

CNET’s Greg Sandoval has a great rundown of what exactly is going on following Amazon’s maneuver. MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka has a good follow-up on what comes next. And our own Robin Wauters looked at things from the perspective of the competitors. The basic gist? The labels are trying to figure out what action to take — if any — against Amazon for doing this without their permission. Of these, Sony seems the most annoyed and likely to act. But can they really do anything?

Amazon’s stated position seems to be “no”. Their basic argument is that when a customer buys a piece of content (be it music, movie, or something else), they own it. It should not matter if it resides on the hard drive in their computer or in space they lease from the cloud.

To that, I say: amen.

Of course, the actual situation is much more murky. It’s always been a bit of a gray area as to whether or not you actually “own” a piece of music when you buy it. This is because the labels have done a great job over the years negotiating comical terms of usage that you agree to without even realizing it. And that may include the ability to store your music on a remote server and stream it. That’s what this is all about, after all.

Further, as both Sandoval and Kafka point out, this may be more of a move by Amazon to simply get the ball rolling. The argument here is that Amazon could change things down the road as necessary. This may just be version one of their cloud offering, and it could be that version two does require some licensing agreements with the labels. Again, this is a very savvy move by Amazon.

But the fundamental issue here remains: should storage in the cloud that you pay for really be different from your local hard drive? Think about that for a second. It’s actually pretty ridiculous that people think it should be different.

Currently, if you buy a song on iTunes or Amazon or elsewhere, you’re free to play that song as often as you wish on your machine. You’re also free to burn it onto a CD or transfer it to an MP3 player. I’m just not sure how moving it to the cloud is any different.

The streaming aspect may seem to be an issue as that does require a different license. But this isn’t the same as listening to streaming music via a subscription service. Again, you’re supposed to “own” this music.

And going forward, we’re only going to see more and more of our content stored in the cloud. Services like Gmail took us one step, Google Docs took us another, now Dropbox, MobileMe, and Chrome OS are taking us the rest of the way. This is the future.

Of course, there’s an easy answer as to why the labels think the cloud is different from your hard drive: greed. As in, these guys are greedy and see dollar signs at every corner. It’s sad, really — and it speaks to the current state of the industry.

Here’s to hoping that Amazon sticks to their guns and continues calling the record labels on their ridiculous bluff with regard to music in the cloud. I don’t care what the fine print on the terms say, if you bought a song, you should be able to store it where you choose and play it back where you want.

Unless the labels would prefer that we not buy music in the first place…
http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/30/amazon-cloud-music/





Boston College Tells Students That Using A Wireless Router Is A Sign Of Copyright Infringement
Mike Masnick

Copyright lawyer Ray Dowd points out that Boston College is telling students that simply using a wireless router is a sign of copyright infringement. Take a look at the image below:

The page lists out a variety of other things that are a lot more likely (but not definitely) to involve infringing -- such as using file sharing networks to share copyrighted songs, or emailing songs around. But using a wireless router? As Dowd discusses, the three federal court rulings involving copyright that mention wireless routers, all use it as a defense against infringement, because it highlights how someone else may have used the connection.

So why is Boston College telling students that simply using a wireless router is a sign of infringement?
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireles...ingement.shtml





Dispute Over Time Warner Cable’s Streaming to iPad Bursts Into the Open
Brian Stelter

Companies like Time Warner Cable and Cablevision buy the rights to beam channels to customers’ television sets. But do those rights extend to iPads?

That question has divided the television industry in recent weeks, ever since Time Warner Cable started streaming several dozen TV channels to customers’ iPads. Immediately, channel owners like Viacom and Scripps Networks seized on the streaming capability as a contract violation — in part because they want cable companies to pay them more for the privilege to stream.

Legal threats were made last week, and the dispute was brought into public view on Monday when Time Warner Cable introduced a Web campaign that promoted “more freedom to watch on more screens” and asked, “Why do some TV networks want to take it away?” The television industry is, in effect, joining book publishers in being unsettled by the iPad and the new era of tablets. There is little doubt that people will be watching more TV on tablets in the future. (Imagine a son watching “SpongeBob SquarePants” on an iPad while his father watches basketball on the big-screen TV.)

What is undetermined is whether people will be watching through an application provided by their cable company, an individual channel’s app, or through a paid service like Netflix.

To stream programs from Time Warner Cable, customers download an iPad app through the Apple iTunes store, log in to verify their account, and choose from a selection of live channels like CNN and Comedy Central. The iPad app only works inside the home, and only for customers who receive both television and Internet from the operator.

Other cable television operators say they are coming out with their own streaming apps soon. Cablevision’s app could come out this week.

But some channel owners say that companies like Time Warner Cable should be consulting with them more closely before introducing new products. “Portability is a different business proposition,” said an executive at one of the major channel owners, suggesting that there should be a premium paid for the ability to take a TV show into bed or into the bathtub. One commercial for Time Warner Cable’s app actually shows a person watching TV on a tablet while taking a bath.

The executive said Time Warner Cable should have “worked out the business issues” with channel owners before coming out with the app. The chief issue is counting the audience: another executive said there had been a “stampede” of channel owners asking the Nielsen Company to include iPad streaming in its ratings of programs.

The channel executives spoke only on condition of anonymity because their parent companies had refused to comment on the dispute.

But Scripps, the owner of HGTV and the Food Network, said earlier this month that it “has not granted iPad video streaming rights to any distributor and is actively addressing any misunderstandings on this issue.”

Melinda Witmer, an executive vice president at Time Warner Cable, said in an interview last week that she thought the current dispute was “fundamentally about money and leverage,” not about the language of contracts. “I already bought these rights,” she said.

Ms. Witmer compared the complaints of channel owners to a person who waves a gun around and winds up shooting themselves in the foot. For distributors that depend on monthly subscription checks from customers, new products like iPad apps are ways to keep the payments coming — and that revenue, of course, is ultimately shared with the channel owners.

Some channel executives said Viacom, the owner of MTV, VH1 and other channels, is taking the most aggressive stance against the streaming app. One of the complaints is that the app now includes only a portion of all the channels that are available through the traditional set-top box. Time Warner Cable is offering 32 channels for the iPad.

Cablevision is expected to change that. Its app will transplant every existing channel and video-on-demand option to the iPad, literally making it into a TV set. The company declined to comment Monday.

Verizon and Comcast have said that they were also working on streaming apps for iPads. But for now, the Time Warner Cable skirmish may make other cable companies or distributors think twice about replicating TV on tablets. Comcast, for instance, has not added live streaming to its iPad app, and has shown no sign of doing so until the current disagreement is resolved. Comcast is the nation’s largest cable company; Time Warner Cable is No. 2.

The cable distributors have trod very lightly into an area that will most likely prompt even more fighting with channel owners: out-of-home viewing by customers.

Not every channel owner is arguing against the streaming notion, however. Time Warner, which was separated from Time Warner Cable two years ago, is comfortable with the current app, and its recent contract renegotiation with Comcast specifically included tablet streaming rights.

Ms. Witmer of Time Warner Cable said she thought some of the resistance by channel owners stemmed from a lack of understanding of the technology. “In fairness, truthfully, to all the executives in this industry that are trying to run businesses that are part of this ecosystem, it is exhausting — exhausting — keeping up with everything that is changing rapidly,” she said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/b...ia/29ipad.html





Google Picks Kansas City, Kan., for Its Fast Network
AP

After seeing Facebook pleas and flash mobs, and even cities temporarily renaming themselves “Google,” the search engine giant said on Wednesday that it had chosen Kansas City, Kan., as the first place that will get its ultra-fast broadband network.

Google announced that the city would be the inaugural site for its “Fiber for Communities” program, which it says will be able to deliver Internet access more than 100 times faster than the home broadband connections provided by phone and cable companies across the country.

The company envisions systems that will let consumers download a high-definition, full-length feature film in less than five minutes, allow rural health clinics to send 3-D medical images over the Internet and let students collaborate with classmates around the world while watching live 3-D video of a university lecture.

Google’s service will provide Internet connections of one gigabit per second to as many as 500,000 people. It will be offered in early 2012 while the company looks at other cities.

More than 1,100 cities made bids to become a site for the company’s fiber optic network.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/t...broadband.html





As Regulators Weigh AT&T Bid, a Look at Wireless Markets Abroad
Jenna Wortham and Kevin J. O’Brien

For Americans, complaining about big cellphone bills that seem to only get bigger is standard practice. But they may actually be getting a pretty good deal — globally speaking.

While cellphone customers in the United States tend to pay more every month than consumers in other developed countries, they get more for their money in terms of voice and data use.

For example, Americans pay an average of 4 cents for a minute of talk time, while Canadians and the British pay more than twice that, according to recent data from Merrill Lynch and Bank of America. In Japan, where the top three wireless carriers control 97 percent of the market, locals pay 22 cents a minute.

“Pricing is what sets the U.S. apart from the rest of the world,” said Sam Paltridge, an analyst at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. “Americans spend less than average on communications.”

The question for regulators in Washington is how AT&T’s $39 billion bid to buy T-Mobile might change that. Analysts and industry experts worry that the deal could hurt consumers, in particular by eliminating T-Mobile’s low-cost phone plans. Some are urging regulators to block the acquisition, which would leave two major companies, AT&T and Verizon, with nearly 80 percent of the wireless market, followed by the much smaller Sprint. AT&T has said the merger will benefit consumers, in part by improving network quality and reach.

As they consider the deal, regulators may look abroad to see how competition affects wireless markets. With only three major network operators, the market in the United States would function similarly to some European markets, like France, which also has three operators, said J. Scott Marcus, the former chief technology officer at the telecommunications company GTE and former Internet policy adviser at the Federal Communications Commission.

“It will definitely become an oligopoly market,” Mr. Marcus said. “That will be less good than what one had before, but not awful.”

Of course, using other countries as a guide to how consolidation may play out is tricky, because every market is shaped by local cultural and business factors.

In Japan, for example, the average amount that consumers spend on data is the highest in the developed world — but not because of a lack of competition in the mobile industry. Japanese cellphone owners like to do a lot of browsing on their cellphones, and they are prepared to pay for that, said Steven Hartley, an analyst at Ovum, a research firm in London. Mr. Hartley said over 40 percent of mobile operators’ revenue in Japan comes from data services, compared with 25 percent in the United States.

Americans tend to talk nearly twice as much as people in most other developed countries, which led to the popularity of bigger buckets of voice minutes. And plans that offer nationwide calling with no roaming fees have also kept prices low. In Europe, which in theory is one market but is actually divided into many smaller national markets, roaming charges are a frequent and bothersome reality.

Europeans and Asians were quicker than Americans to embrace so-called prepaid phone service, in which customers do not have a contract and pay for chunks of voice minutes and data capacity as they go. This means phone owners are generally not tied to a single wireless company and have more flexibility to switch among services. Some even carry around multiple SIM cards, the fingernail-size chips that activate a cellphone for use, and decide which one to install based on which offers the cheapest rate for the country they are calling or visiting. For example, someone living in Spain who often visits family in France might purchase SIM cards for wireless services in both countries.

And phone customers outside the United States tend to have more handset choices, since cellphones are less likely to be “locked” for use with one particular carrier. But they have fewer opportunities to upgrade cheaply, because carriers are less likely to offer a free or discounted phone to those who commit to a one- or two-year contract.

Some of that is beginning to change, said Chris Jones, an analyst at Canalys. “Smartphones are beginning to get more popular in the U.K., so more people are buying smartphones and the contracts that come with them,” he said. Even so, those contracts can cost around £30 or £35 a month, or $48 to $56, and they do not include data, he said.

In general, the breadth of options in Europe has not yet led to significantly cheaper service, said Roger Entner, an analyst at Recon Analytics in Dedham, Mass. “It only drives down prices if competitors are willing to compete on price,” he said. “The market is more or less equally divided up, so there isn’t the same hypercompetitiveness that we have in the U.S.”

Heike Troue, the director of a public policy institute in Berlin, said that she was satisfied with the range of mobile choices available there. An iPhone 4 owner, she pays T-Mobile 90 euros a month, or $127, for her all-inclusive contract, which provides 1,000 calling minutes, three gigabytes of data transfers and 1,500 text messages. Since she signed up for the plan last November, she has never hit those limits. “One can only talk so much,” Ms. Troue said.

At times, high costs abroad have prompted lawmakers and regulators to step in. European and British telecom companies are bowing to such pressure by lowering or planning to lower termination fees — the fees that the caller’s carrier must pay to the recipient’s carrier. The goal is to give carriers more flexibility to compete by selling more generous packages with larger chunks of talk time, text allotments and cheaper data services.

European regulators have also ordered that limits be placed on roaming charges for calling and texting, and are working on a similar limit on data roaming charges.

In South Korea, the government has put pressure on the three major carriers — SK Telecom, KT and LG Telecom — to cut rates on text messages and calls, and it also limits the amount of subsidies the companies can offer on new phones.

Regulators in the United States could require AT&T to make some concessions for the T-Mobile deal to be approved, like giving up wireless spectrum in some cities. The review by the Justice Department and the F.C.C. could take several months, and analysts say it could be a year before the full effect of the deal is clear. Some analysts say that the combined company might actually lower prices to better compete with Verizon. But others warn of side effects.

Mr. Paltridge of the O.E.C.D said that the overall consequence of combining AT&T and T-Mobile might be broader than most consumers think. For example, it would leave only one American carrier using GSM, the world’s most common cellular standard. That means AT&T could raise rates for Americans using their phones overseas and for foreigners visiting the United States.

“If the two merged, there would be an international angle to the competition issue,” he said.

Bettina Wassener and Sei Chong contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/30/t...y/30phone.html





AT&T Lobbyist Faces Beltway Test in T-Mobile Deal
Edward Wyatt

IN this covetous town, the delicacies of the Georgetown Cupcake shop stand alone as symbols of wish fulfillment — heaping swirls of luscious confection atop rich, creamy pastry.

Therefore: Operation Cupcake. As the Federal Communications Commission debated final rules last December on how Internet service providers should manage their traffic, AT&T delivered 1,500 of these opulent desserts to the F.C.C.’s headquarters here.

Like many other big corporations, AT&T annually blankets power brokers with token holiday gifts, but the cupcake campaign was notable for its military precision. A three-page spreadsheet, stamped “AT&T Proprietary (Internal Use Only),” detailed how the desserts were to be deployed to each of the 63 commission offices: four dozen were assigned to the enforcement bureau, 10 dozen to the wireless divisions, 12 cupcakes to each of four commissioners, and 18 to the chairman, and so on.

As it turns out, AT&T had begun its $39 billion courting of T-Mobile about the same time. The resulting deal, announced a week ago, would transform the industry if approved. It would narrow the field of major wireless providers to three and vault AT&T into the No. 1 spot, ahead of Verizon; consumer advocates say the combination will lead to higher prices.

As interested parties lobby for and against the merger, one person will be pulling at the levers of power more often and with more influence than anyone else, according to both friends and foes: AT&T’s chief lobbyist, James W. Cicconi. A master strategist, Mr. Cicconi (pronounced si-CONE-ee) internalizes the art of regulatory and legislative war — and Operation Cupcake is but one of the efforts to come out of his shop.

Tutored by James A. Baker III in the ways of politics in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, Mr. Cicconi, 58, plays hardball — literally, as a pitcher in an adult baseball league, flinging fastballs toward batters more than a decade younger.

His roots are in Texas, and he never forgets the lesson of the Alamo: the Texans lost. Other battles have different lessons for him. He once took his staff on an overnight retreat to Gettysburg, Pa., where it toured Cemetery Ridge and Little Round Top and absorbed lessons on battlefield tactics.

In 13 years at AT&T, Mr. Cicconi has helped guide the company through roughly a dozen mergers, large and small, and he has made his share of enemies in Washington. As a testament to his power, however, few of them will criticize him on the record.

“He’s smart, he’s savvy, he’s strategic,” says Gigi B. Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a media and consumer advocacy group that has often wrestled with him. “I don’t think there’s a lobbyist in town who I disagree with more on the issues, but I have the utmost respect and admiration for the way he does his job. He’s always thinking three steps ahead of the competition.”

MR. CICCONI, senior executive vice president for external and legislative affairs, is not alone, of course, in spreading AT&T’s corporate message. Five other executives rate a similar rank, and four more are group presidents or chief executives, all under AT&T’s chairman and C.E.O., Randall L. Stephenson.

Nor is Mr. Cicconi’s lobbying effort a one-man show. He oversees a division that spent $115 million on lobbying over the last six years, putting it among the top five corporate spenders in the country, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks lobbying and campaign spending.

AT&T employs an army of outside lobbyists, including at least six prominent former members of Congress, including the former Senate majority leader Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican, and former Senator John Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat.

Over the last two decades, AT&T employees and its political action committees have pumped more campaign contributions into federal politics than any other American corporation, the Center for Responsive Politics reports. In the last election cycle, AT&T contributions found their way to 390 representatives and 70 senators.

“They are a behemoth,” says Dave Levinthal, editor of Opensecrets.org, the center’s online lobbying database. “When you have dozens of former federal officials doing your bidding in Washington with a detailed knowledge of how Washington works, it is exponentially easier to grease the skids of government.”

As Congress discusses the merger, Republicans and Democrats will duel over the balance of market forces and regulatory intervention. The White House will strive to balance the president’s campaign promises to get tough on antitrust issues while trying to prove he is not anti-business.

In advocating for the T-Mobile merger, AT&T and Mr. Cicconi have their work cut out for them. The Justice Department’s antitrust unit will aim to determine whether the deal will substantially limit consumers’ choices. After the merger, AT&T and Verizon would together control nearly 80 percent of the cellular market, with Sprint a distant third.

(Verizon declined to comment on Mr. Cicconi or on AT&T’s deal to acquire T-Mobile.)

And the F.C.C., which along with Justice must approve the merger, wants to reapportion the scarce broadcast wavelengths on which wireless broadband operates. The T-mobile deal would result in fewer potential bidders in its airwave auctions.

Still, “it seems hard for me to believe that a $40 billion deal like this would be pushing forward if somebody like Jim Cicconi didn’t feel that they had it in the bag already,” says Craig Aaron, managing director of Free Press, a nonprofit group that often advocates for consumers on media and telecommunications issues.

MR. CICCONI is technically not a lobbyist; as a corporate executive, he is not required to register as one. And, he said in an interview, he does not consider himself particularly powerful in the telecommunications business.

He allows that he does his best “to represent the shareholders of AT&T, and we’ve got a very talented group of people here who help us do that.” Certainly the company has won its share of battles, but “we’ve had our share of things where we come up short,” he says.

Consumer and public interest groups, however, say AT&T is formidable in its ability to mobilize platoons of letter writers and members of Congress to support its aims.

They point to the fall of 2009, when the recently installed F.C.C. chairman, Julius Genachowski, proposed regulations that would restrict how companies that offer Internet connections to consumers manage their networks.

Shortly after Mr. Genachowski made the proposal, the F.C.C. received more than 400 letters in three days opposing the plan. They came from small-business owners, state and federal legislators and a significant number of organizations representing African-American, Hispanic and other minority groups.

Among the letters was one signed by 72 Democratic members of Congress who urged Mr. Genachowski “to carefully consider the full range of potential consequences” of his proposal.

“These letters were from groups that had never weighed in on these issues before,” Mr. Aaron says. He called the effort an “Astroturf,” or fake grass-roots, campaign. AT&T declined to comment on that assertion.

The F.C.C. in December approved a set of regulations that generally prevent Internet service providers from blocking or slowing one form of content in favor of another, but AT&T won some concessions. Those regulations are being challenged in court by Verizon and others.

Presumably, the F.C.C. will be receiving plenty of letters in support of the T-Mobile acquisition, too. The deal is of huge strategic importance in that it would give AT&T the rights to additional bands of wireless spectrum on which wireless broadband and mobile phones operate.

The agency has authority over those licenses and must determine whether their transfer is in the public interest. The agency has usually approved mergers of wireless carriers, but often requires them to give up licenses in markets where there would be little competition among carriers. Most likely, those would be in smaller markets.

AT&T officials have said that while the company believes that no such divestitures are necessary, it is prepared to consider the commission’s recommendations. That seems to indicate that the company is willing to do what it takes to get the deal done. Its interest is primarily in securing T-Mobile’s licenses in cities, where wireless broadband traffic is heaviest and where AT&T has had the most trouble keeping up with demand from iPhone users.

Officials at the F.C.C. bristle at the notion that AT&T’s lobbying prowess will carry any special weight there or give it extra access to the chairman.

“This proposed transaction raises significant issues,” said an F.C.C. official, who requested anonymity because the agency is not commenting publicly on the merger before making a decision. “We are gearing up to conduct a very intensive review.”

That AT&T is undergoing such diligent antitrust scrutiny is odd in some ways, given the company’s origins. In 1984, as a result of a landmark antitrust lawsuit, American Telephone & Telegraph broke itself up into seven regional Bell operating companies and a much smaller AT&T, which provided long-distance service.

For much of the 1990s, AT&T fought on the same side as consumer advocates against the regional Bell companies, trying to end their control of local telephone service. One of those companies, SBC Communications, formerly Southwestern Bell, bought AT&T in 2005.

By that time, SBC had already built a large cellphone business, mainly through acquisitions, a trend that accelerated after it acquired AT&T and adopted the historic company name. Now, although AT&T still provides local and long-distance wired telephone service, it considers its primary business to be wireless service.

Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who has worked on telecommunications issues in Congress for 35 years, said Mr. Cicconi and AT&T are formidable, both as opponents and when all of them work on the same side.

“He has done a very good job in representing AT&T as it was reconstituted,” Mr. Markey said. “He has been able to move AT&T to a middle ground on some issues,” including recent F.C.C. Internet regulations. “That is to his credit, because it has created some good will.”

DELICIOUS cupcakes create good will, of course, something that Mr. Cicconi recognizes.

After Public Knowledge posted the company’s cupcake battle plans online, AT&T sent the organization its own box of goodies.

“We try not to take ourselves too seriously or to make any permanent enemies over any one argument,” Mr. Cicconi said. “There are some people who like me and some who don’t. That’s the price of trying to be effective.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/b...s/27phone.html





Cellphone Radiation May Alter Your Brain. Let’s Talk.
Kate Murphy

IN a culture where people cradle their cellphones next to their heads with the same constancy and affection that toddlers hold their security blankets, it was unsettling last month when a study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association indicated that doing so could alter brain activity.

The report said it was unclear whether the changes in the brain — an increase in glucose metabolism after using the phone for less than an hour — had any negative health or behavioral effects. But it has many people wondering what they can do to protect themselves short of (gasp) using a landline.

“Cellphones are fantastic and have done much to increase productivity,” said Dr. Nora Volkow, the lead investigator of the study and director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health. “I’d never tell people to stop using them entirely.”

Yet, in light of her findings, she advises users to keep cellphones at a distance by putting them on speaker mode or using a wired headset whenever possible. The next best option is a wireless Bluetooth headset or earpiece, which emit radiation at far lower levels. If a headset isn’t feasible, holding your phone just slightly away from your ear can make a big difference; the intensity of radiation diminishes sharply with distance. “Every millimeter counts,” said Louis Slesin, editor of Microwave News, an online newsletter covering health and safety issues related to exposure to electromagnetic radiation.

So crushing your cellphone into your ear to hear better in a crowded bar is probably a bad idea. Go outside if you have to take or make a call. And you might not want to put your cellphone in your breast or pants pocket either, because that also puts it right up against your body. Carry it in a purse or briefcase or get a nonmetallic belt clip that orients it away from your body.

Some studies have suggested a link between cellphone use and cancer, lower bone density and infertility in men. But other studies show no effect at all. Given the mixed messages and continuing research, Robert Kenny, a Federal Communications Commission spokesman, said in an e-mail, “As always, we will continue to study this issue and coordinate with our federal partners going forward.”

The phone used in Dr. Volkow’s study was a Samsung Knack, model SCH-U310, a flip phone that was in wide use when she began planning her experiments two and half years ago. But today’s ubiquitous smartphones emit even more radiation as they transmit more, and more complex, data.

You can get an idea of the relative amounts of radiation various cellphone models emit by looking at their SAR, or Specific Absorption Rate. This number indicates how much radiation is absorbed by the body when using the handset at maximum power. A cellphone cannot be sold in the United States unless a F.C.C.-approved laboratory says its SAR is below 1.6 watts per kilogram. In Europe, the maximum is 2 watts per kilogram.

The SAR number is not displayed when you compare cellphones at your local wireless store, and trying to find it in the fine print of your user manual is an exercise in frustration. The F.C.C. maintains that SAR values “do not provide sufficient information” to reliably compare cellphone radiation emissions because certain phones might rarely operate at maximum power. Still, the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit organization, has a comprehensive list of the SAR values for most cellphones available from major carriers on its Web site. (For instance, the Apple iPhone 4 is listed at 1.17 watts per kilogram, the Motorola Droid at 1.5 and the LG Quantum at 0.35.)

But more important than looking for a low-SAR phone is how you use it. Many cellphones emit the most radiation when they initially establish contact with the cell tower, making their “digital handshake.” To reduce exposure it’s best to wait until after your call has been connected to put your cellphone next to your ear.

During the ensuing conversation, it’s advisable to tilt the phone away from your ear when you are talking and only bring it in close to your ear when you are listening. That bit of teeter-totter works because the emission of radiation is “significantly less when a cellphone is receiving signals than when it is transmitting,” said Lin Zhong, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University in Houston.

Moreover, your cellphone emits less when you are stationary because when you are moving rapidly — say, in a car or train — it must repeatedly issue little bursts of radiation to make digital handshakes with different towers as it moves in and out of range. (More cause to hang up when you buckle up.)

Want another reason to complain about your carrier’s poor coverage? Any situation where your cellphone has a weak signal indicates it has to work harder and thus will emit more radiation. “Fewer bars means more radiation,” said Om Gandhi, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Inside buildings and elevators, in rural areas, the Grand Canyon — these are not good places to make a call if you’re trying to reduce your exposure to radiation.

Of course, parents using their iPhones to pacify cranky kids might want to reconsider rattles. Children’s developing brains and tissues are thought to be most vulnerable to cellphone radiation. Health authorities in Britain, France, Germany and Russia have all issued warnings against allowing small children to use cellphones for extended periods, if at all.

There are cellphone attachments that purport to shield users from radiation, and most are “hoaxes,” said Mr. Gandhi. Beware of pendants that sellers claim snatch radiation from the air. Pong Research offers a cellphone case for iPhones and BlackBerrys that it says has been shown by an F.C.C.-approved testing lab to redirect radiation from the phone’s antenna away from the head.

While the manufacturer says it reduces radiation more than 60 percent, some electrical engineering experts question whether the case may have the opposite effect at orientations where your head is in the way of the cell tower because your phone may have to increase its transmission strength somewhat to compensate for the redirected signal. The company disputes this. Nevertheless, the net effect of using the device throughout the course of the day may be a reduction in total exposure.

Texting, instead of talking, might be safer. “The whole trend toward texting instead of talking on cellphones is probably a good thing,” said Mr. Slesin at Microwave News.

That is, if you don’t rest your cellphone against your body while typing out your message.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/t.../31basics.html





HTC ThunderBolt Outselling iPhone 4 at Verizon Wireless Stores, Analyst Claims
Zach Epstein

BTIG Research analyst Walter Piecyk says HTC’s latest beastly smartphone for Verizon Wireless is going toe to toe with the iPhone 4, and is even outselling Apple’s iPhone at many Verizon Wireless store locations.

Piecyk and his team made calls to 150 different Verizon Wireless stores across 22 major U.S. cities, asking which device was selling better.

According to the analyst’s report, 61% of stores said the two devices were selling at about the same rate, 11% said the iPhone 4 was selling faster and 28% said they were selling more ThunderBolt smartphones than iPhones.

This anecdotal evidence suggests a solid launch for Verizon Wireless, and it further supports recent data that large-screen smartphones are continuing to grow in popularity. We reviewed the HTC ThunderBolt recently and called it the fastest cell phone we’ve ever tested.
http://www.bgr.com/2011/03/31/htc-th...nalyst-claims/





Did Microsoft Leave Hotmail Open for Dictators?
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

On Friday, March 25th, Jillian C. York, a writer for Al Jazeera English, claimed on her personal blog that a Syrian Hotmail could not turn on (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) on Hotmail and, “he was … blocked from turning on the ‘use HTTPS automatically’ setting.” Eva Galperin, a Electronic Frontier Foundation staffer followed up, and found that the “always-use-HTTPS option in Hotmail for users in more than a dozen countries, including Bahrain, Morocco, Algeria, Syria, Sudan, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Congo, Myanmar, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, had been turned off.” This meant anyone using Hotmail in these countries could have their e-mail read by their government-controlled ISPs.

Since then, Microsoft, on one of its technical help sites, has denied that it had deliberately disabled HTTPS for some of its users. The statement reads: “We are aware of an issue that impacted some Hotmail users trying to enable HTTPs. That issue has now been resolved. Account security is a top priority for Hotmail and our support for HTTPS is worldwide - we do not intentionally limit support by region or geography and this issue was not restricted to any specific region of the world. We apologize for any inconvenience to our customers that this may have caused.”

Inconvenience? The wrong e-mail being read by the powers that be in some of these countries could lead to a one way trip to the closest firing squad.

To the best I can tell, from checking Microsoft support groups, there were no reports of wide-spread HTTPS outages. On the other hand, even now, the vast majority of people are blissfully unaware of the danger of their e-mail or social network messages being intercepted by either governments or just snoopy people using tools like Firesheep. Smart users, no matter where you may live, should adopt secure Internet options to keep their online activities private. Most people though, I’m sorry to say, never even pay attention to whether they’re protected or not.

Hotmail at least has an HTTPS option. However, secured Hotmail works only on the Hotmail Windows Live Web site. You can’t use HTTPS security with Hotmail if you access it through Microsoft Outlook Connector, Windows Live Mail, or Windows Live for Windows Mobile and Nokia.

That still better than many other popular communication Web sites which still don’t offer their users any option. To the best of my knowledge, only Google’s Gmail, of the major online mail services, offers HTTPS security by default.

Secure protocol or not, though, a government can still play games with a user’s e-mail. Google recently accused the Chinese government of interfering with Gmail service.

The problem with Hotmail security may not lie entirely with Microsoft. Earlier this week, I was told by a source in Syria that he was unable to use HTTPS to link to any Web site. Some of Syria citizens are now demonstrating against its decades-old dictatorship It could as no surprise if Syria’s government is trying to keep a closer eyes on would-be dissents while not making Egypt former government’s strategic mistake of turning off the Internet.

I’ve checked in with both Arbor Networks and Renesys, two companies that provide high-end Internet services and track international Internet issues, to see what they knew about Syria, or other countries, blocking HTTPS use. Neither though have gotten back to me in time for this report.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking...-dictators/874





U.S. Develops "Panic Button" for Democracy Activists
Andrew Quinn

Some day soon, when pro-democracy campaigners have their cellphones confiscated by police, they'll be able to hit the "panic button" -- a special app that will both wipe out the phone's address book and emit emergency alerts to other activists.

The panic button is one of the new technologies the U.S. State Department is promoting to equip pro-democracy activists in countries ranging from the Middle East to China with the tools to fight back against repressive governments.

"We've been trying to keep below the radar on this, because a lot of the people we are working with are operating in very sensitive environments," said Michael Posner, assistant U.S. secretary of state for human rights and labor.

The U.S. technology initiative is part of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's push to expand Internet freedoms, pointing out the crucial role that on-line resources such as Twitter and Facebook have had in fueling pro-democracy movements in Iran, Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere.

The United States had budgeted some $50 million since 2008 to promote new technologies for social activists, focusing both on "circumvention" technology to help them work around government-imposed firewalls and on new strategies to protect their own communications and data from government intrusion.

"We're working with a group of technology providers, giving small grants," Posner told reporters.

"We're operating like venture capitalists. We are looking for the most innovative people who are going to tailor their technology and their expertise to the particular community of people we're trying to protect."

The United States first began to publicly leverage new Internet technologies in 2009, when it asked Twitter to delay a planned upgrade that would have cut service to Iranians who were organizing mass protests over disputed elections.

Since then it has viewed new media technologies as a key part of its global strategy, facing off with China over censorship of Google results and launching its own Twitter feeds in Arabic, Farsi and Hindi.

Some U.S. lawmakers have criticized the department for not doing enough to promote the new technology, but Posner said it was building momentum as new initiatives are rolled out.

"We're now going full speed ahead to get the money out the door," he said.

Cat-And-Mouse

Posner said the United States has helped fund development of about a dozen new circumvention technologies now being rolled out, and that more would follow as activists play an increasingly complex game of cat-and-mouse with censors.

He said that the experience of pro-democracy protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square in February underscored the centrality of cellphones to modern grassroots political movements. The United States, he said, was working on new devices like the "panic button" and secure text message services to protect both data and databases.

"The world is full of ... governments and other authorities who are capable of breaking into that system," Posner said. "A lot of activists don't know what their options are. They don't have access to technology."

The United States has funded training for some 5,000 activists around the world on the new technologies -- and some sessions have turned up unnerving surprises.

At a recent training session in Beirut, experts examined the computer of a Tunisian activist and discovered it was infected with "key-logging" software that could communicate what he was typing -- presumably to security agents.

"They started to go around and look at what was on the other peoples' computers. A guy from Syria had 100 viruses in his machine ... this is the tip of the iceberg," he said.

Posner conceded that the U.S. move to develop these new technologies carried some risks.

Secure on-line tools useful for underground pro-democracy activists might also be useful for drug cartels or terrorist cells, raising new law enforcement and national security issues that need to be resolved, he said.

"The fact is al Qaeda probably has their own way of gathering some of these technologies," Posner said. "The goal here is to protect people who are, in a peaceful manner, working for human rights and working to have a more open debate."

(Editing by Vicki Allen)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...72O6DH20110325





BA Jihadist Relied On Jesus-Era Encryption
Team Register

An IT worker from British Airways jailed for 30 years for terrorism offences used encryption techniques that pre-date the birth of Jesus.

Rajib Karim, 31, from Newcastle, was found guilty of attempting to use his job at BA to plot a terrorist attack at the behest of Yemen-based radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsular.

Sentencing him at Woolwich Crown Court last week, Justice Calvert-Smith described Karim as a "committed jihadist" who responded "enthusiastically" towards plans to smuggle a bomb onto a plane or damage BA's IT systems.

Justice Calvert-Smith praised police for being able to decipher incriminating documents under "five or more layers of protection", the Daily Telegraph reports.

However, claims by the prosecution that the coding and encryption systems were the most sophisticated ever seen in use were overstated – by more than 2,000 years.

Woolwich Crown Court was told that Bangladeshi Islamic activists who were in touch with Karim had rejected the use of common modern systems such as PGP or TrueCrypt in favour of a system which used Excel transposition tables, which they had invented themselves.

But the underlying code system they used predated Excel by two millennia. The single-letter substitution cipher they used was invented by the ancient Greeks and had been used and described by Julius Caesar in 55BC.

Karim, an IT specialist, had used PGP, but for storage only.

Despite urging by the Yemen-based al Qaida leader Anwar Al Anlaki, Karim also rejected the use of a sophisticated code program called "Mujhaddin Secrets", which implements all the AES candidate cyphers, "because 'kaffirs', or non-believers, know about it so it must be less secure".

The majority of the communications that formed the basis of the case against Karim, which claimed to warn of a possible terrorist plot in the making, were exchanged using the Excel spreadsheet technique, according to the prosecution.

Writer Duncan Campbell, who acted as an expert witness for the defence during the trial, said: "Tough communication interception laws [RIPA] were passed in the UK 10 years ago on the basis that they were needed to fight terrorism. Ludicrous articles were published then about the alleged sophistication of their methods.

"The case just dealt with shows where we have got to in the real world. The level of cryptography they used was not even up to the standards of cryptology and cryptography in the Middle Ages, although they made it look pretty using Excel."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03...al_sentencing/





A Shabby Crusade in Wisconsin

The latest technique used by conservatives to silence liberal academics is to demand copies of e-mails and other documents. Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli of Virginia tried it last year with a climate-change scientist, and now the Wisconsin Republican Party is doing it to a distinguished historian who dared to criticize the state’s new union-busting law. These demands not only abuse academic freedom, but make the instigators look like petty and medieval inquisitors.

The historian, William Cronon, is the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas research professor of history, geography and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin, and was recently elected president of the American Historical Association. Earlier this month, he was asked to write an Op-Ed article for The Times on the historical context of Gov. Scott Walker’s effort to strip public-employee unions of bargaining rights. While researching the subject, he posted on his blog several critical observations about the powerful network of conservatives working to undermine union rights and disenfranchise Democratic voters in many states.

In particular, he pointed to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group backed by business interests that circulates draft legislation in every state capital, much of it similar to the Wisconsin law, and all of it unmatched by the left. Two days later, the state Republican Party filed a freedom-of-information request with the university, demanding all of his e-mails containing the words “Republican,” “Scott Walker,” “union,” “rally,” and other such incendiary terms. (The Op-Ed article appeared five days after that.)

The party refuses to say why it wants the messages; Mr. Cronon believes it is hoping to find that he is supporting the recall of Republican state senators, which would be against university policy and which he denies. This is a clear attempt to punish a critic and make other academics think twice before using the freedom of the American university to conduct legitimate research.

Professors are not just ordinary state employees. As J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a conservative federal judge on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, noted in a similar case, state university faculty members are “employed professionally to test ideas and propose solutions, to deepen knowledge and refresh perspectives.” A political fishing expedition through a professor’s files would make it substantially harder to conduct research and communicate openly with colleagues. And it makes the Republican Party appear both vengeful and ridiculous.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/opinion/28mon3.html





Paul Baran, Internet Pioneer, Dies at 84
Katie Hafner

Paul Baran, an engineer who helped create the technical underpinnings for the Arpanet, the government-sponsored precursor to today’s Internet, died Saturday night at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 84.

The cause was complications from lung cancer, said his son, David.

In the early 1960s, while working at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif., Mr. Baran outlined the fundamentals for packaging data into discrete bundles, which he called “message blocks.” The bundles are then sent on various paths around a network and reassembled at their destination. Such a plan is known as “packet switching.”

Mr. Baran’s idea was to build a distributed communications network, less vulnerable to attack or disruption than conventional networks. In a series of technical papers published in the 1960s he suggested that networks be designed with redundant routes so that if a particular path failed or was destroyed, messages could still be delivered through another.

Mr. Baran’s invention was so far ahead of its time that in the mid-1960s, when he approached AT&T with the idea to build his proposed network, the company insisted it would not work and refused.

“Paul wasn’t afraid to go in directions counter to what everyone else thought was the right or only thing to do,” said Vinton Cerf, a vice president at Google who was a colleague and longtime friend of Mr. Baran’s. “AT&T repeatedly said his idea wouldn’t work, and wouldn’t participate in the Arpanet project,” he said.

In 1969, the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency built the Arpanet, a network that used Mr. Baran’s ideas, and those of others. The Arpanet was eventually replaced by the Internet, and packet switching still lies at the heart of the network’s internal workings.

Paul Baran was born on April 29, 1926, in Grodno, Poland. His parents moved to the United States in 1928, and Mr. Baran grew up in Philadelphia. His father was a grocer, and as a boy, Paul delivered orders to customers in a small red wagon.

He attended the Drexel Institute of Technology, which later became Drexel University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1949. He took his first job at the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in Philadelphia, testing parts of radio tubes for an early commercial computer, the Univac. In 1955, he married Evelyn Murphy, and they moved to Los Angeles, where Mr. Baran took a job at Hughes Aircraft working on radar data processing systems. He enrolled in night classes at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Mr. Baran received a master’s degree in engineering from U.C.L.A. in 1959. Gerald Estrin, who was Mr. Baran’s adviser, said Mr. Baran was the first student he ever had who actually went to the Patent Office in Washington to investigate whether his master’s work, on character recognition, was patentable.

“From that day on, my expectations of him changed,” Dr. Estrin said. “He wasn’t just a serious student, but a young man who was looking to have an effect on the world.”

In 1959, Mr. Baran left Hughes to join RAND’s computer science department. He quickly developed an interest in the survivability of communications systems in the event of a nuclear attack, and spent the next several years at RAND working on a series of 13 papers — two of them classified — under contract to the Air Force, titled, “On Distributed Communications.”

About the same time that Mr. Baran had his idea, similar plans for creating such networks were percolating in the computing community. Donald Davies of the British National Physical Laboratory, working a continent away, had a similar idea for dividing digital messages into chunks he called packets.

“In the golden era of the early 1960s, these ideas were in the air,” said Leonard Kleinrock, a computer scientist at U.C.L.A. who was working on similar networking systems in the 1960s.

Mr. Baran left RAND in 1968 to co-found the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit research group specializing in long-range forecasting.

Mr. Baran was also an entrepreneur. He started seven companies, five of which eventually went public.

In recent years, the origins of the Internet have been subject to claims and counterclaims of precedence, and Mr. Baran was an outspoken proponent of distributing credit widely.

“The Internet is really the work of a thousand people,” he said in an interview in 2001.

“The process of technological developments is like building a cathedral,” he said in an interview in 1990. “Over the course of several hundred years, new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundations, each saying, ‘I built a cathedral.’

“Next month another block is placed atop the previous one. Then comes along an historian who asks, ‘Well, who built the cathedral?’ Peter added some stones here, and Paul added a few more. If you are not careful you can con yourself into believing that you did the most important part. But the reality is that each contribution has to follow onto previous work. Everything is tied to everything else.”

Mr. Baran’s wife, Evelyn, died in 2007. In addition to his son, David, of Atherton, Calif., he is survived by three grandchildren; and his companion of recent years, Ruth Rothman.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/t...y/28baran.html





Nokia Wants a Standard for In-Car Telematics
Stephen Williams

While Terminal Mode may sound like a death-ray setting in a bad science-fiction novel, its aims are far less dastardly. It is the name of a unified standard that would connect drivers and their smartphones to the swirling proliferation of in-car infotainment systems.

The idea was introduced about a year ago by Nokia, the mobile-device manufacturer, to be an open-standard technology that would eliminate the confusion and inefficiency of multiple, incompatible telematics systems. Such a standard, Nokia argued, would also make in-car components that control calling, texting, music and navigation content more universally intuitive to use.

The concept took a step forward earlier this month, when Daimler, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Toyota and Volkswagen signed up to the Car Connectivity Consortium. The membership also includes the electronics companies LG and Samsung, Alpine and its charter member, Nokia.

Because the standard is open to other developers, the hope among these brands is that additional manufacturers, like Apple or Sony, will jump in the game. By committing to a standard, the consortium could devise a solution that would do away with automakers’ lengthy telematics production cycles as well.

“Vehicles are evolving to be a ‘living space,’ with cutting-edge technology applied,” said Seung Hoon Lee of LG Electronics in a press release. “But the life-cycle of built-in car A.V. systems is difficult to match with such fast-moving trends and developments.”

In Terminal Mode, a car’s dashboard monitor would display a standardized graphic interface. The phone would connect to the car’s system through a variety of methods, including USB, Bluetooth and wireless networks.

There are hurdles ahead. Without Apple or Google on board, the consortium is unable to reach the widest market possible. Also, while the standard ostensibly seeks to simplify the interface, it must by convincingly nondistracting or less distracting than current systems.

At any rate, the group says that it plans to release initial specs within the next few months and that several consortium members will offer commercial products supporting Terminal Mode later this year.
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2011...elematics/?hpw





How to Work Around the New York Times’ 20-Article-per-Month Paywall
Kevin Purdy

The New York Times launches its digital subscription packages today at 2 p.m. Eastern time.. That means web visitors can normally read 20 articles free each month, while users of NYT mobile apps can access just the "Top News" section, before needing a complicated subscription. But there are work-arounds and ways to move beyond "normally" and read the paper of record for free.

Shouldn't important news, gathered by professionals, sometimes at the risk of their very lives, be paid for? Yes, it should, and web-based advertising on its own, generated for masses of free readers, isn't quite enough to fund the paper's efforts at the moment. But many of us may never need paywall article work-arounds at the rate of 20 articles per month, and those that do may only need it for one or two important reads.

And the general consensus and hope among many on the web is that the Times' model will be simplified, so that, given the choice between using a minor annoyance to access an article and paying a minor, not annoying subscription plan, those who find themselves hitting "the wall" each month will choose the latter. In the meantime, there are work-arounds that the Times is aware of, but chooses not to affect its paywall structure.

Note: Generally, if you're a fan of using the Times' apps on your iPad, iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, or Kindle device, you'll need to start using the web-based Times to read articles for free, using the same recommendations we're outlining for full browsers here. There's no easy tweak to work around a proprietary product that's no longer free—though the simplest and cheapest way to get access to the Times on your device is (sadly) a "Weekender" paper subscription.

The Bookmarklet: NYTClean

This one's easy and universal, even if it requires one extra click for every article you hit on the web. Head to this page on the Euri.ca Blog, click and hold on the "NYTClean" link in the middle of the page, and drag it up to your bookmarks toolbar. Whenever you arrive at a "stopper" page on the New York Times' web site, asking you to subscribe, hit that "NYTClean" bookmark in your toolbar, and you'll be redirected to a free version of the page. It's a small bit of web scripting and URL tweaking, and it works.

The User Script: NY Times Paywall

How to Work Around the New York Times' 20-Article-per-Month Paywall>Want to automate the process of sending yourself to the exact same page you're being asked to subscribe to before reading? Install the NY Times Paywall user script from UserScripts.org. If you're using Firefox, install Greasemonkey, then click the "Install" button on that script page. If you're using Chrome, go ahead and just click "Install" as well. Safari users can install Greasekit to manage user scripts, and Opera users have manual means of installing user scripts. We haven't fiddled with IE 9, but the Trixie add-on has previously worked with Internet Explorer to allow user script installation.

The Manual Solution: Using Twitter Feeds (Even If You Don't Use Twitter)

Like the Wall Street Journal, the Times is giving considerable leeway to readers arriving from a link obtained through a search, a blog, or a social media service like Twitter or Facebook, with the idea of holding onto surges of traffic coming from fast-spreading stories. So if you're in need of a quick fix, go ahead and type "new york times elizabeth taylor" into Google or another search engine to find the Times' obituary for the screen queen, for example.

But the Times may put limits on certain search engines, while they seem more enthusiastic about their Twitter presence. Luckily, Twitter users can subscribe to any of more than 250 Twitter accounts the Times offers, covering almost every section, notable writer, blog, and other content. If you don't use Twitter, you can still benefit from the Times' love of social media.

Click over to any Times Twitter feed, and the page will contain an RSS feed. Some browsers pick up the feed automatically and give you a subscription option; others, like Chrome, might require an extension. In any case, you can copy the page URL—http://twitter.com/#!/thelede, for example—and paste it into the "Add Subscription" section of an RSS reader like Google Reader. Some browsers also feature built-in feed readers you can utilize to keep a folder of "Live Bookmarks" updated. And if a nerdy RSS reader is not your thing, either, note that many social-smart apps like Flipboard for iPad or Pulse for Android can import Google Readers' RSS feeds, Times-via-Twitter-work-arounds and all, and make them into a kind of reverse-engineered magazine.
http://lifehacker.com/#!5786272/how-...rticle-paywall





For $1,000, Site Lets Celebrities Say It Ain’t So
Sarah Lyall

Imagine you are a well-known person aggrieved by how you are portrayed on the Internet: the slapdash Wikipedia entry; the unflattering gossip item; the endlessly repeated story about how you cheated on your spouse when in point of fact you were blamelessly resuscitating a platonic friend who was choking on an olive.

Suing is too stressful and quixotic. Besides, it’s the Internet: how can anyone erase the inerasable? But courtesy of a new Web site called ICorrect, people who feel unhappy about “obvious misinterpretations, misinformation and what some might call total lies,” in the words of the site’s founder, Sir David Tang, can now attempt to set the record straight.

“The superhighway is jampacked with stops where at every place you’ll have mud thrown at you,” said Sir David, 56, a businessman, socialite and celebrity friend extraordinaire who is best known for founding the department store chain Shanghai Tang. “Can you afford to have it all stick and not try to clean it up?”

People concerned about their reputations can use the site to post as many corrections as they want, for $1,000 a year. Luckily, browsing through the posts is free.

Here is the actor Stephen Fry, rebutting a report that he dislikes Catholics. Here is the businessman Richard Caring, noting that he did not rudely fail to turn up at an important luncheon (it was a misunderstanding).

Meanwhile, Cherie Blair, wife of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, did not appear at a party wearing the same dress as the actress Hayden Panettiere; did not go shooting with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s son; and never declared that a burqa “is no more a threat than a nun’s habit.”

Sienna Miller would like to make it clear that she is not on Twitter. Tommy Hilfiger never said that he did not want black people to wear his clothes. And, despite what you may have heard, Viscount and Viscountess Linley were not sulking in a maritally discordant way after a recent wedding (they were, the viscount writes, “just waiting for our car”).

ICorrect went live this month and has about 35 founding members, or correctors, as they are called, plucked mostly from the pages of Sir David’s very thick book of contacts. Anyone can join, with payment and proof that he is who he claims to be; the site does not post items from nonmembers.

Sir David said that the site, apparently helped by a positive Twitter message from Mr. Fry, had 225,000 hits its first weekend. “It’s minimally designed to make sure that even the most stupid person can work it and understand it,” he said.

Although Sir David admits that it has been “quite a path to persuade people to join,” he has high hopes that someday ICorrect will be the world clearinghouse for corrections. “It’s my fervent desire to have NGO’s and big corporations like BP,” he said.

The new venture has been greeted with some skepticism in the British media world, in part because some people thought at first that it was a joke, and in part because many journalistic commentators are not naturally sympathetic to offended celebrities.

“As images of human desolation were beamed into our homes this week,” wrote Brian Reade in the Daily Mirror tabloid, referring to the Japanese tsunami, “rich and famous people were hunched over laptops alerting us to the grotesque injuries caused to their reputations.”

Stephen Pritchard, the ombudsman at The Observer of London, which has an actual corrections column, said in an interview that people who joined ICorrect risked drawing unnecessary attention to the very items they wished would go away. Also, he added, who is to say whether their corrections are in fact themselves correct, rather than fake alternatives they wish were true?

That is not the point. “We’re not here to police it or prove the veracity of what you post,” Sir David explained, “although we do make sure you don’t commit crimes by defaming people or inciting others to violence.”

The beauty of the site, he said, is that it allows the offending items to be viewed next to the offended person’s response, so that even lazy Internet users will be exposed to both sides of any given story.

”A lot of people simply look up Google and press a finger and lift whatever is in front of them,” Sir David said.

For example, he added, “If you say that Henry Kissinger bombed Cambodia illegally, you will have to do a bit of research before you find where he defends himself. But if he joins the site, he can say, ‘This was my reason, and it’s more fully explained on pages 85 and 86 of my autobiography.’ ”

Meanwhile, Mrs. Blair, who became a popular target for tabloid tales when her husband was prime minister, said that in a country where some newspapers made little effort to “get the basic facts of a story right,” the site was a welcome antidote.

”Anything which allows people publicly to correct factual inaccuracies in stories about them is a good idea,” she said in an e-mail message.

Of course. But on the other hand, one of ICorrect’s members is Bianca Jagger, and all you can do in reading her entries is sit back in dismay as the myths fall.

No, Ms. Jagger says, she did not go out with Pierre Trudeau, the former prime minister of Canada. No, Billy Joel’s song “Big Shot,” about a woman riding in a limousine with “the Dom Perignon in your hand and the spoon up your nose,” is not based on a bad date he had with her.

She also addresses the business about herself, the horse and Studio 54, revealing that, unfortunately, it was not as exciting as everyone thought.

As one visitor to the site, Laura LaRue, said on Twitter: “ICorrect is making me a little sad. Bianca Jagger did not ride a white horse half-naked in Studio 54. Sometimes a lie is more fun?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/w...8icorrect.html





The New Grave Robbers
Ray D. Madoff

CAN a wild wig and a bushy mustache be packaged and called an Albert Einstein costume? According to Hebrew University of Jerusalem and its American marketing agent, the answer is no — at least not without permission. The university says that when it inherited Einstein’s estate, the bequest included ownership of Einstein’s very identity, giving it exclusive legal control over who could use Einstein’s name and image, and at what cost.

Einstein is not the only example. While we might think of people like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., George Patton, Rosa Parks, Frank Lloyd Wright and Babe Ruth as part of our cultural heritage, available for all to use, the identities of each of them, and thousands more, are claimed as private property, usable only with permission and for a fee.

This phenomenon is fairly recent — and it’s getting out of control. For most of this country’s history, a person’s identity was not something that could be owned. While the unauthorized use of someone’s name or image was sometimes barred as an invasion of privacy, the right belonged to that person alone and could not be assigned to others. It was not until 1953, in a case involving baseball players licensing their images for use on baseball cards, that American law first constructed identity as a property interest that could be sold or licensed. This interest became known as the right of publicity.

Today the right of publicity clearly allows people to control the commercial use of their names and images during their lives. What happens after death is much murkier.

Throughout much of the world, the right of publicity ends at death, after which a person’s identity becomes generally available for public use. In the United States, however, this issue is governed by state laws, which have taken a remarkably varied approach. In New York, the right of publicity terminates at death; other states provide that the right of publicity survives death for limited terms. But in Tennessee (whose laws govern the use of Elvis Presley’s image, since he died there), Washington (home of a company that purports to own Jimi Hendrix’s right of publicity) and Indiana (where CMG Worldwide, which manages the identities of hundreds of dead people, is based), control over the identities of the dead has been secured for terms ranging from 100 years to, potentially, eternity.

In a case involving Marilyn Monroe, the California Legislature even created a retroactive right of publicity, establishing new private property interests in the identities of the long dead. (It didn’t work, because a court later found that Monroe was a resident of New York when she died. Her identity remains in the public domain.) This so-called descendible right of publicity has created a new kind of business: corporations that acquire and market dead people. So Rosa Parks sells Chevy trucks and Albert Einstein peddles everything from baby products to Apple computers. (And who knows how Elizabeth Taylor might be put to work now that she has gone to the other side?)

But say you wanted to write a play about a chance meeting between these two historic figures. Could you? While the play itself may be protected by the First Amendment, that doesn’t mean that the companies that manage Parks and Einstein might not attempt to assert control. Hebrew University has aggressively defended Einstein’s image, even blocking its use on a book called “Everything’s Relative.” And don’t expect to sell programs, posters, T-shirts or the other paraphernalia that might support your play without getting approval and paying whatever fee the owners of Parks’s and Einstein’s rights of publicity demand.

Contrary to what the owners of these identities claim, a right of publicity that continues after death does little to protect the reputations of the deceased. American law, unlike that in much of Europe, explicitly and uniformly provides that reputational protections — including libel and slander and the right of privacy — all end at death. The expansion of the right of publicity does nothing to change this.

Instead, it has afforded riches to the heirs of the dead and the companies that represent them. Einstein’s estate has generated $76 million in the last five years. But the dead themselves — particularly those who would have preferred to avoid being marketed as a commodity — may not be so well served.

While people can provide for the postmortem exploitation of their identities, there is no legal mechanism by which they can prevent it. It is a basic tenet of wills law that a person cannot order the destruction of a valuable property interest. Therefore, if Parks had written in her will that she did not want her identity to be marketed, there is a good chance that a court would not enforce those wishes.

The economic value of a dead celebrity’s image imposes another cost as well. Namely, rights of publicity, like all other property interests, are subject to estate taxes at their highest market value. This means that even if heirs choose not to market a person’s identity (perhaps to protect their loved one’s dignity), they nonetheless must pay taxes on the right. In some cases, that could compel heirs to market their loved ones’ identity in order to pay the taxes associated with it. Paradoxically, the values would likely be highest for those individuals who most coveted their privacy while alive (think J. D. Salinger).

The patchwork approach of state laws has resulted in uncertainty regarding what is, and isn’t, privately owned under the right of publicity. There has been considerable litigation in recent years over such questions as these: What happens when the right of publicity bumps up against First Amendment rights? How do we determine which state’s law applies to a particular decedent? And how far can states go in creating and controlling these rights? (Just last month, Washington State’s right of publicity was found by a federal court to be unconstitutionally broad.) Yet, because these are issues of state law, the litigation has not brought clarity on a national level.

Congress should step in and enact a federal right of publicity. In doing so, it should establish clear First Amendment protections and set forth a relatively short term for the right of publicity to survive death (perhaps 10 years). Most important, the law should provide a mechanism that allows people to opt out of marketing their identities after death. After all, sometimes the dead should be allowed to simply rest in peace.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/o.../28madoff.html





Lawyers Seek To Block Twitter Data Handover
Matthew Broersma

Twitter’s lawyers are trying to block US authorities from accessing personal data as part of a WikiLeaks probe

Lawyers on Friday asked a US judge to overturn a ruling from earlier this month, forcing Twitter to hand over account details to the US Department of Justice, in a case related to the US federal government’s ongoing investigation of Wikileaks.

The appeal (PDF) seeks to overturn a ruling that would give the US government access to Twitter account details for three users who had contact with Wikileaks. The government also wants Twitter to provide information on Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and on Bradley Manning, a US Army private charged with providing data to Wikileaks.

Private information

Twitter is being asked to provide account information such as mailing addresses and session logs to the government.

In the Friday appeal, lawyers representing the Twitter account holders said the request violates US federal law, threatens the clients’ right to privacy and intrudes upon their freedom of association.

The three users, American computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum; Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of the Icelandic parliament; and Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch computer programmer, are supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The ACLU and the EFF argue that the order would require Twitter to divulge all direct messages, even those unrelated to WikiLeaks. It “has a chilling effect not only on the parties’ speech and association rights, but on the rights of Twitter users in general,” the organisations said in a joint statement.

The brief also renewed a request that the court unseal documents filed by the Department of Justice in the case.

Judge Theresa Buchanan earlier rejected arguments that the disclosure invades privacy, saying that the users had already made their user information public via Twitter.

Twitter limited the data to cover the period of 15 November 2009 to 1 June 2010.

The civil rights groups argued that the court’s order will give the government overly broad access to users’ private information.

“Our privacy in our Internet communications should not be so easily sacrificed,” said the EFF in a statement earlier this month.

The ruling could have implications that go far beyond the current Wikileaks case, according to EFF legal director Cindy Cohn.

“With so much of our digital private information being held by third parties – whether in the cloud or on social networking sites like Twitter – the government can track your every move and statement without you ever having a chance to protect yourself,” Cohn stated earlier this month.

Ongoing investigation

As part of the US government’s investigation into WikiLeaks, a court ordered Twitter, in mid-December, to give details of accounts owned by supporters of the whistle-blower site. Twitter has protested against the subpoena and informed the individuals whose account information has been requested, while raising the possibility that other social networking players have received similar orders.

The US Department of Justice obtained a subpoena for the micro-blogging site on 14 December, requesting records going back to 1 November 2009, that are “relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.”

The recent WikiLeaks controversy began when the site started publishing a trove of US diplomatic cables in late November. The release of the documents has touched off months of debate and prompted WikiLeaks supporters and opponents alike to air their differences with denial-of-service attacks while businesses such as PayPal cut ties with the whistle-blower site.

In December, Assange was arrested in the UK on charges of sexual assault originating in Sweden. He is currently awaiting the result of his extradition appeal.

In a statement, WikiLeaks has reportedly said that some of the people named in the subpoena were key figures in helping WikiLeaks make public US military videos of a 2007 airstrike that killed Iraqi civilians.
http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/la...handover-24953





Deciphering Old Texts, One Woozy, Curvy Word at a Time
Guy Gugliotta

In the old days, anybody interested in seeing a Mets game during a trip to New York would have to call the team, or write away, or wait to get to the city and visit the box office. No more. Now, all it takes is to find an online ticket distributor. Sign in, click “Mets,” pick the date and pay.

But before taking the money, the Web site might first present the reader with two sets of wavy, distorted letters and ask for a transcription. These things are called Captchas, and only humans can read them. Captchas ensure that robots do not hack secure Web sites.

What Web readers do not know, however, is that they have also been enlisted in a project to transform an old book, magazine, newspaper or pamphlet into an accurate, searchable and easily sortable computer text file.

One of the wavy words quite likely came from a digitized image from an old, musty text, and while the original page has already been scanned into an online database, the scanning programs made a lot of mistakes. Mets fans and other Web site users are correcting them. Buy a ticket to the ballgame, help preserve history.

The set of software tools that accomplishes this feat is called reCaptcha and was developed by a team of researchers led by Luis von Ahn, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University.

Its pilot project was to clean up the digitized archive of The New York Times. Today it has become the principal method used by Google to authenticate text in Google Books, its vast project to digitize and disseminate rare and out-of-print texts on the Internet.

Digitization is normally a three-stage process: create a photographic image of the text, also known as a bitmap; encode the text in a compact, easily handled and searchable form using optical character recognition software, commonly called O.C.R.; and, finally, correct the mistakes.

Today’s technology makes the first two steps relatively straightforward. The third, however, can be extremely difficult. For vintage 19th-century texts in English, O.C.R. programs mess up or miss 10 percent to 30 percent of the words. Only humans can fix the errors. The standard method, called key and verify, uses two transcribers to type the text independently and compares the results. This is time-consuming and extremely expensive.

But in 2006, Dr. von Ahn’s team figured out a way around this obstacle. The ubiquitous Captchas, familiar to even the most casual Web user, were the perfect tools. Captchas, short for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart,” are impossible for machines to decipher, but easy for humans. (The test is named for the British computer pioneer Alan Turing.)

Dr. von Ahn’s group estimated that humans around the world decode at least 200 million Captchas per day, at 10 seconds per Captcha. This works out to about 500,000 hours per day — a lot of applied brainpower being spent on what Dr. von Ahn regards as a fundamentally mindless exercise.

“So we asked, ‘Can we do something useful with this time?’ ” Dr. von Ahn recalled in a telephone interview. Instead of making Captchas out of random words printed in a woozy way, why not ask Web users to translate problem words from archival texts?

By Dr. von Ahn’s estimate, reCaptcha is being used by 70 percent to 90 percent of Web sites that have Captchas — including Ticketmaster, Facebook and local bank branches.

Google bought Dr. von Ahn’s start-up in 2009 — he will not say how much it paid — and put it to work on Google Books. He says “several million” words are being translated every day.

The Times, published since 1851, had already optically transcribed its archive when it contacted Dr. von Ahn. Robert Larson, the company’s vice president for search products, said the paper had “looked at various ways” to edit the text, “but Luis’s method was faster and cheaper.”

Page images, particularly those printed before 1900, are loaded with smudges, stains, watermarks and crooked type, all of which give O.C.R.’s the fits. To fix the errors, Dr. von Ahn uses a number of programs, which when applied in the proper sequence magically transform troubled passages into easy-to-read prose.

The first step is done in-house. Two different O.C.R. programs scan the photographic image. Both will make mistakes, but not necessarily the same mistakes.

ReCaptcha flags as “suspicious” any word that is deciphered differently by the two programs or that does not appear in an English dictionary. The dictionary catches words that are misspelled the same way by both O.C.R.’s. Other programs examine the words on either side of the suspect word and make another guess based on that analysis.

Then each suspicious word is turned into a Captcha. It is crucial to understand that the Captcha is a distorted version of the word as printed in the original photographic image. It is not made from the O.C.R.’s imagined translation, which is often unintelligible. The unknown word is then paired with a second Captcha word whose correct translation is already known. This is the “control.”

Several Web users seeking entry to secure sites are then given both words and asked to decipher them separately.

A correct answer for the control word proves that the user is a human and not a machine. Answers for the unknown word are compared with the O.C.R. guesses and the context analysis. If the system is satisfied that the answer is correct, then the game is over.

Dr. von Ahn acknowledged that some words cannot be transcribed, usually because the original text is torn or damaged in some other way. If enough users fail to identify an unknown, the word is deemed to be indecipherable and is marked as such.

ReCaptcha also fails badly on cursive, Dr. von Ahn said, adding that “nobody reads handwriting anymore.” And reCaptcha so far translates only English words, even though many reCaptcha Web sites have overseas clients whose users are not necessarily English speakers.

With all these constraints, reCaptcha nevertheless achieves an accuracy rate above 99 percent, which compares favorably with professional human transcribers. And Dr. von Ahn is convinced that performance will improve with experience, of which there will be no shortage.

“We’ll be going for a long time,” he said. “There’s a lot of printed material out there.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/s...recaptcha.html





Netflix Lowers Data Usage By 2/3 For Members In Canada

This is Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer, to tell our members in Canada that starting today, watching movies and TV shows streaming from Netflix will use 2/3 less data on average, with minimal impact to video quality.

Now Canadians can watch 30 hours of streaming from Netflix in a month that will consume only 9 GBytes of data, well below most data caps.

We made these changes because many Canadian Internet service providers unfortunately enforce monthly caps on the total amount of data consumed.

In the past, viewing 30 hours of Netflix could consume as much as 70 GBytes, if it was all in HD, and typically about 30 GBytes. While there is some lessening of picture quality with these new settings, the experience continues to be great. If any member wants to change back to higher data usage and video quality, they can do so on the Manage Video Quality page, found under Your Account.

We will continue to test and innovate to improve the Netflix experience without high data use.

Neil

http://blog.netflix.com/2011/03/netf...by-23-for.html





How To Disable Or Fake Your Location In Firefox, Internet Explorer & Chrome
Dave Drager

fake your location ipModern browsers including Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer now include “geolocation” services based in the browser. What this does is attempt to locate you based on your IP, wi-fi or network location. It is used for several reasons, including adding a location to your tweets or Facebook updates, or to locate you on a map. You might want to hide or fake this location IP due to privacy concerns, and it isn’t too terribly hard to do so.

What Is Geolocation?

Geolocation is a technology that locates your position on the planet and ties it into your web browser (or other application). A couple of services work to provide location services in your web browser. One is a Google service that looks at your IP and connected network information and matches it up to known locations, Microsoft runs another similar service. Apple uses the internal service CoreLocation to locate you across a variety of services. Geolocation has a lot of useful applications, but it also has some serious privacy implications.

Turning Off Geolocation

Turning off the location features in either browser is fairly easy. When you are first given the chance to allow or deny location in Firefox, you can disable it right from that menu. If you have already allowed it, go to the configuration settings by typing about:config in your browser window. Find the setting geo.enabled and double click it to set it to “false.”

In Google Chrome, the settings are in -> Options -> Under The Hood -> Content Settings -> Location:

Set the option “Do not allow any site to track my physical location” to disable geolocation in Chrome.

In Internet Explorer 9 you can also disable location services. Go into Internet options -> Privacy. Select “Never allow websites to track your physical location.”

Faking Your Location

The easiest browser to fake your location in is Firefox. In fact, there is a browser extension that does just that called Geolocater (sic).

Download and install Geolocater and restart your browser. To configure it, you must go into the “Tools” menu, so right click at the top of your browser and enable the file menu to gain access to configuration.

When you launch it, you must add a new location and include the name to save it. Search or browse to the location you wish to set, enter the name in the box on the right, and then click the button that looks like a kite with a check mark to save it.

Next time you go to a website that has geolocation enabled, you will be able to change which location you want to send to them and then “Share” to fake your location.

There is another alternative that works both in Firefox and Chrome, but you will need to do some editing of files to make it happen.

The way these geolocation services work is by requesting a file from Google which then responds with your location in JSON format. To fake this in Firefox, you can create a file on your computer with this text:

{"location":{"latitude":48.861426,2.338929,"longitude":2.338 929, "accuracy":20.0}}

You can find this location by locating it in Google Maps or any other maps program that supports Latitude and Longitude. Google maps generates a link that looks like the following:

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=4...,0.027874&z=16

In this case the first number is the latitude and the second the longitude.

You can place this in a plain text file on your computer, then update the Firefox setting in about:config named geo.wifi.uri to the location on your computer. In Windows, it will look something like this:

file:///C:/Users/Username/Documents/location.txt

Make sure if there are any spaces in the directory to replace them with %20 for proper encoding. Restart Firefox and your location will show the updated information.

Location Is Disabled – But You Can Still Be Tracked

Even though location services have been disabled or faked, a great deal of information about where you are located is sent just by using the Internet. Your IP address can narrow your location down to your country and maybe even the city you are located in. Just be aware that unless you use a VPN, your location can still be tracked based on that information.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/disable...plorer-chrome/





Samsung Installs Keylogger On its Laptop Computers
M. E. Kabay and Mohamed Hassan

Mohamed Hassan, MSIA, CISSP, CISA graduated from the Master of Science in Information Assurance (MSIA) program from Norwich University in 2009. As usual, it is a pleasure to collaborate with an alumnus on interesting articles – and in this case, his research is startling. Everything that follows is Mr Hassan's own work with minor edits.

* * *

In the fall of 2005, the security and computer world was abuzz with what was at the time dubbed as the "Sony BMG rootkit Fiasco." Sony BMG used a rootkit, computer program that performs a specific function and hides its files from the regular user, to monitor computer user behavior and limit how music CDs were copied and played on one's computer.

The issue was not about the extent Sony BMG had gone to protect its music CD, but more about the manner in which it accomplished its business objective. Following the wide publication of this security incident, there was torrent of bad press for Sony BMG; its earlier denial of the presence of the rootkit on its music CDs did not help. There were class-action lawsuits as well as state and federal investigations, one of which was spearheaded by the United States Federal Trade commission (FTC).

Sony BMG settled the federal lawsuit with the FTC without admitting guilt. However, given the number of CDs it was ordered to replace and the agreed upon compensation of up to $150 per computer owner it had to pay to consumers whose computers may have been damaged as a result of attempts to remove the rootkit, the $575 million payout for the incident was far more expensive than any return on investment Sony BMG may have received by preventing the potential consumer from copying, illegal distribution or sharing of the music CDs.

Some in the computer security industry had hoped that the criminality of the act that Sony BMG had engaged in together with the huge business costs associated with the settling of the case with consumers and federal authorities would act as a deterrent to any company which might want to monitor computer usage. Others, including Mark Russinovich, the developer and blogger who first discovered the rootkit, were not so sure. In fact Mr. Russinovich warned that "Consumers don't have any kind of assurance that other companies are not going to do the same kind of thing (as Sony)" (Borland, 2005).

How right has Mr. Russinovich been!

While setting up a new Samsung computer laptop with model number R525 in early February 2011, I came across an issue that mirrored what Sony BMG did six years ago. After the initial set up of the laptop, I installed licensed commercial security software and then ran a full system scan before installing any other software. The scan found two instances of a commercial keylogger called StarLogger installed on the brand new laptop. Files associated with the keylogger were found in a c:\windows\SL directory.

According to a Starlogger description, StarLogger records every keystroke made on your computer on every window, even on password protected boxes.

This key logger is completely undetectable and starts up whenever your computer starts up. See everything being typed: emails, messages, documents, web pages, usernames, passwords, and more. StarLogger can email its results at specified intervals to any email address undetected so you don't even have to be at the computer your[sic] are monitoring to get the information. The screen capture images can also be attached automatically to the emails as well as automatically deleted.

After an in-depth analysis of the laptop, my conclusion was that this software was installed by the manufacturer, Samsung. I removed the keylogger software, cleaned up the laptop, and continued using the computer. However, after experiencing problems with the video display driver, I returned that laptop to the store where I bought it and bought a higher Samsung model (R540) from another store.

Again, after the initial set up of the laptop, I found the same StarLogger software in the c:\windows\SL folder of the new laptop. The findings are false-positive proof since I have used the tool that discovered it for six years now and I am yet to see it misidentify an item throughout the years. The fact that on both models the same files were found in the same location supported the suspicion that the hardware manufacturer, Samsung, must know about this software on its brand-new laptops.

[Mich Kabay adds:]

Research online brought up a discussion of "Samsung rootkit" from May 2010 in which contributors reported a freeze on rootkit scans of Samsung laptop computers. However, no one seems to have reported a StarLogger installation as far as we have been able to determine using Web search engines.

In the next article, Mr Hassan discusses how Samsung responded to his discovery.

* * *

Mohamed Hassan, MSIA, CISSP, CISA is the founder of NetSec Consulting Corp, a firm that specializes in information security consulting services. He is a senior IT Security consultant and an adjunct professor of Information Systems in the School of Business at the University of Phoenix.
http://www.networkworld.com/newslett...32811sec2.html





Samsung Denies Preinstalling Spyware
Emma Woollacott

Samsung has denied reports that it's been shipping PCs with key-logging software preinstalled.

Mohamed Hassan of security firm NetSec Consulting says he discovered the StarLogger software on two different Samsung laptops. When he called the company, he says, he was told by a supervisor that it was there to "monitor the performance of the machine and to find out how it is being used."

Writing in Network World, Hassan concluded: "Samsung's conduct may be illegal; even if it is eventually ruled legal by the courts, the issue has legal, ethical, and privacy implications for both the businesses and individuals who may purchase and use Samsung laptops. Samsung could also be liable should the vast amount of information collected through StarLogger fall into the wrong hands."

But Samsung says it's now looked into the matter properly, and the software simply isn't there.

"The statements that Samsung installs keylogger on R525 and R540 laptop computers are false," it says in a statement.

"Our findings indicate that the person mentioned in the article used a security program called VIPRE that mistook a folder created by Microsoft’s Live Application for a key logging software, during a virus scan."

It says the confusion arose because VIPRE mistook Microsoft's Live Application multi-language support folder - labeled 'SL' folder - for the StarLogger keylogging software. Depending on the language, explains the company, under C:\windows folders 'SL' simply stands for Slovene, in the same way as 'EN' for English.

All this still leaves the question open as to why the supervisor told Hassan that the key-logging software was preinstalled in the first place. Customers may be reassured to hear that their every movement isn't in fact being recorded - but they may not be equally impressed by Samsung sales staff's knowledge of their own products.
http://www.tgdaily.com/security-feat...alling-spyware





Massive SQL Injection Attack Compromises 380,000 URLs

A massive SQL injection attack campaign has been spotted by Websense researchers, and the number of unique URLs affected by it has risen from 28,000 when first detected yesterday, to 380,000 when the researchers last checked.

The injected script redirects users that have landed on the various infected pages to the domain in the script, which then redirects them further to a website simulating an anti-malware check and peddling a rogue AV solution.

Both sites are currently offline, say the researchers, but the attackers have started using other domains for redirection, and will likely keep changing them up.

The researchers also noted that some iTunes URLs have been injected with the script, but that Apple has done a good job in securing the site against this kind of attacks.

"The way iTunes works is that it downloads RSS/XML feeds from the publisher to update the podcast and list of available episodes. We believe that these RSS/XML feeds have been compromised with the injected code. The good thing is that iTunes encodes the script tags, which means that the script doesn't execute on the user's computer," they explained.
http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=10833





Malicious Web Attack Hits a Million Site Addresses

More than one million website addresses have been compromised by a sophisticated hacking attack that injects code into sites that link to a fraudulent software sales operation.

The mass attack has managed to inject malicious code into websites' links by gaining access to the servers running the databases that power the Internet, according to the technology security company that discovered it.

Websense, which first found evidence of the attack earlier this week, has called it 'LizaMoon,' after the name of the site the malicious code first directed its researchers to.

On that site and others, users are shown a warning from 'Windows Stability Center' -- posing as a Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) security product -- that there are problems with their computer and are urged to pay for software to fix it.

Microsoft has no product of that name. The company did not immediately have a comment on the attack.

Websense said some Web addresses related to Apple Inc's (AAPL.O) iTunes service were compromised. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

(Reporting by Bill Rigby; editing by Andre Grenon)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7307CC20110401





Ma Bell Stifled Innovation, AT&T May Do the Same

AT&T recently announced it plans to acquire T-Mobile to create the largest wireless network in the US. If the deal is allowed to be completed, it will create only three major players in the industry with Verizon being a close second and Sprint being a distant third.

Sprint, along with consumer rights groups, have already cried foul. They argue that AT&T’s proposed acquisition will stifle competition and innovation.

To get an idea of what AT&T may do, it helps to look at Ma Bell, the predecessor of AT&T. From 1877 to 1984, Ma Bell had a monopoly in the US telephone industry. During this time, it stifled innovation.

According to Tim Wu, professor at Columbia Law School and author of The Master Switch, Ma Bell suppressed the technology of the magnetic recording tape.

In 1934, a scientist for the company named Clarence Hickman built a voice answering machine that could record a caller’s audio message on a magnetic tape. Ma Bell thought the ability to record voice would cause businesspeople to shun the telephone for fear of having their conversations recorded.

It would "change the whole nature of telephone conversations" and "render the telephone much less satisfactory and useful in the vast majority of cases in which it is employed,” according to an internal note from Ma Bell.

After coming to this conclusion, Ma Bell shut down all research in magnetic recording tapes, concealed Hickman’s research, and actively discouraged the use and development of this technology by others.

Of course, Ma Bell’s fears were entirely unrealistic. Its suppression of the magnetic recording technology, however, is no small matter.

This technology gave rise to cassette tapes, video tapes, and eventually computer disks. It was an early foundation of the information technology revolution. Had Ma Bell not suppressed Hickman’s research, the IT revolution may have occurred decades earlier.

Why did Ma Bell act in such an extreme manner? It did so because it was a monopoly.

Monopolies are extremely profitable at the expense of all other stakeholders; they have a strong incentive to keep things just the way they are.

One of their biggest fears is disruptive technologies and they go to all lengths to suppress them.

Conversely, an industry with many small players is the complete opposite. These companies are fighting for survival. They’re hungry, insecure, and thirsty for ways to gain an edge. They love disruptive technologies; they’re always looking to pioneer and be the first-mover in new, hot trends.

T-Mobile, the acquisition target of AT&T, was that hungry, small player in the wireless network industry; it came up with creative customer plans and took chances on new phones.

Casey Chan of Gizmodo pointed out that T-Mobile was the first carrier to take Google’s Android to the mass market. If the US wireless network industry were a monopoly, the Android may have been suppressed.

After all, if the monopoly wireless network was doing fine with the iPhone and BlackBerry, there is absolutely no reason for it to take a chance on a third unproven Smartphone system.

The stifling of the Android may not have far-reaching implications for humanity. If AT&T merges with T-Mobile and stifles innovations in customer service, service plans, and unproven phones, the damage may be confined to its customers.

However, AT&T will do real damage to humanity if it decides to stifle a revolutionary technology.

Corporations, in 2011, as in 1934, will not hesitate to shut down a technology if their profitability is threatened by it. The old school music industry and print newspapers were devastated by the Internet. If they can control the Internet, they would shut it down.

Examples of modern companies stifling technology they can control is hard to prove because they obviously hide such acts; it took sixty years for a historian to dig up Hickman’s story.

Centuries of capitalism have proven that competition unlocks innovation and advancements. If AT&T were allowed to acquire T-Mobile, it would create an oligopoly in the US wireless network industry. It won’t be as bad as a monopoly like Ma Bell, but it certainly won’t be a very competitive industry.
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/1278...ile-merger.htm





Censorware Vendors Can Stop Mid-East Dealings
Bennett Haselton

The Wall Street Journal published an article Monday listing the Western-made Internet censoring programs used by several Middle Eastern governments, in countries that filter what their citizens can access on the Web. Like a similar 2011 report from the OpenNet Initiative, hopefully this listing will shine a spotlight on the problem, and make it easier for human rights groups to call for these companies to stop aiding censorious governments.

However, I wish that the article had quoted someone giving a rebuttal to the several companies which claimed, "Once the customer buys the product, we have no control over it," as stated variously Netsweeper, Blue Coat, and McAfee (which makes Smartfilter). For a product that relies on continuous updates provided by the software company, this claim, of course, is nonsense. Unfortunately, the claim seems to go unchallenged so often, that there's a risk that it will start to affect policy -- people may believe that we can't regulate how American censorware is used by repressive countries, so we shouldn't even try.

Some background: When a customer buys a standard network filtering program like Websense, SmartFilter, or Blue Coat, the product comes with a built-in list of websites to be blocked by the software. (The customer can select or de-select categories of sites to be blocked, like "pornography" or "gambling".) The purchase of the software typically comes with a year or two of free updates to the blocked-site list. The software vendors employs a combination of human reviewers and (more often) automated crawlers to scour the Web looking for new sites that fall into their categories, and add these sites to their database. Customers who are within their subscription period can download periodic updates to this blocked-site list. After a customer's initial free subscription period runs out, they can opt to continue purchasing updates to the database. If they don't, then the product will continue to work, but the blocked-site list will be frozen (except for any new sites that the customer finds on their own and adds manually to their own blocked-site list).

Once the blocked-site list is frozen, the filtering product becomes ineffective against any user making a serious effort to get around it. This is because there are many mailing lists like mine that mail out new proxy sites every week (a proxy site is a site which contains a form that allows the user to access third-party Web sites indirectly, usually to circumvent Internet blocking). And as long as the user can access at least one unblocked proxy site, they can access any other blocked site by going through the proxy. So when a censorious regime stops updating their blocked-site list, the product becomes ineffective almost immediately. (For that, I suppose, the blocking companies should be grateful to us proxy site makers, since we make it necessary for their customers to keep renewing their blocked-site subscriptions year after year.)

So, even if one were to accept the (highly dubious) claim that the software vendors didn't realize what was going on when a foreign government approached them to buy their software, once they realize that their software is being used to violate the rights of the country's people, they can easily stop providing updates to that customer. This can be done by either (a) blocking the IP addresses that the customer uses to download the updates, or (b) blocking any further updates using that customer's license key. (Each installation of a blocking program like Websense comes with a license key unique to that customer, and the program has to submit the license key to the download server in order to download the latest update to the blocked-site list. If the customer's subscription runs out or gets cancelled, no more updates.)

This is roughly the situation that exists in Iran. The Iranian government claims to use McAfee's Smartfilter to filter Internet access for their citizens, despite McAfee's claim that they don't sell to Iran because of the embargo. But the evidence suggests that while Iran may have once acquired Smartfilter along with a copy of their filter list that was current at the time, they're not getting regular updates to the blocked-site list. From corresponding with Iranians and testing the filter through a server located inside Iran, I've found that most of the proxy sites we mail out never get blocked at all in Iran, even as they eventually get blocked in countries like Bahrain and Kuwait that are using Smartfilter with a subscription to the blocked-site database. The proxy sites we mail out that do get blocked in Iran are usually blocked a few days later than they are in Bahrain and Kuwait. This suggests that the Iranian censors are finding and blocking new proxy sites by ad hoc methods, and that they're not as effective at it as American censorware companies. So the Iranian situation proves two points: that Western blocking companies really can prevent a foreign government from using their products (well, duh), and that this restriction actually works, in the sense of making the country's filter less effective.

So when a McAfee spokesman told the WSJ reporters, "You can add additional websites to the block list; obviously what an individual customer would do with a product once they acquire it is beyond our control," that's true only in the most literal sense. Yes, Bahrain can add human rights web pages to their list of sites blocked by Smartfilter, and McAfee can't stop them, but the effectiveness of this block depends on the Bahrani censors using Smartfilter to block new proxy sites as well, which McAfee continues to aid them in doing, as a matter of choice.

Websense, incidentally, announced in 2009 -- in response to an earlier ONI report describing how their software was used to censor Internet access in Yemen -- that they would stop providing censoring software to the Yemeni government. But ONI's current report claims that the Yemeni government continued to use Websense into 2011, and Websense declined to comment. Maybe the Yemeni government was using Websense with a "frozen blocked-site list" -- but the ONI report includes at least one instance where a site that was un-blocked by Websense (the opennet.net domain itself!) became un-blocked in Yemen shortly afterwards. So maybe Websense just lied about canceling the Yemenis' license.

Could some censorious country like Yemen continue using the Websense filter -- with a continuously updated blocked-site list -- even after Websense truly tried to cut them off? Possibly, but it would probably be more trouble than it's worth. Yemen would have to set up a shell company outside of their own borders, with an overseas bank account, in order to purchase the software. Then after Yemen had installed Websense on their servers, they would have to download the updates indirectly by going through an anonymizing proxy set up in some other country as well. And if Websense ever found out which of their customers was a shell company used by the Yemeni government, they could cut off that customer's license, and the Yemeni censors would have to start all over again. It's probably safe to say that most Middle Eastern countries wouldn't find this worth the trouble. (After all, Iran could do everything I've just described, but apparently they haven't; they still seem to be using Smartfilter with an outdated copy of the blocked-site list, and adding new proxy sites to their blacklist manually.)

So far, proposals to ban American censorware companies from selling to foreign governments have not gotten off the ground -- and now with several Middle Eastern countries using or looking at Netsweeper, we'd have to get Canada on board as well. But at the very least, let's start calling out censorware companies on the canard that "We just sell the software and have no way of controlling who uses it." The companies know that foreign governments are using it to censor their own people, and they can cut them off as customers any time they want to; they just don't.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/03/...-East-Dealings





For Activists, Tips on Safe Use of Social Media
Austin Considine

FROM Cairo to Madison, Wis., much has been made about the positive role technology has played in helping galvanize and organize populist movements.

The downside? Like the dreaded telescreen in George Orwell’s “1984,” technologies like the Internet and cellphones are proving just as useful for spying as they are for communicating, making the choice to hit “call” or “send” an increasingly risky one.

But several groups of free information advocates have emerged to help educate the latest generation of activists. To that end, one such group, Access, just released its guide to maintaining online and mobile phone security, with versions in Arabic and English.

Brett Solomon, the executive director of Access, said that the guide was created in part from recognition that people often lose sight of security concerns amid the collective euphoria that can accompany swift, large-scale democratization movements like the ones in Egypt and Tunisia. “The eye gets focused on the goal and not the process,” he said, “and during that time, they put their own personal security and their network security at risk.”

But it’s not just the fog of enthusiasm that renders people vulnerable; it’s lack of experience. “There’s actually a whole new group of people who have emerged from being citizens to becoming activists, some of them reluctantly,” Mr. Solomon said. “They’re not necessarily aware of the dangers that are associated with being active online.”

Those dangers have become increasingly apparent in recent months.

Facebook accounts were hacked in Tunisia. In Egypt, authorities shut down the Internet and cellphones, and employed technology that turned mobile phones into furtive listening devices, according to the guide.

The Access guide provides tips for keeping communications safer in such a climate. It recommends Gmail, for example, because it uses a secure connection by default, known as HTTPS, like at banking Web sites; Hotmail provides HTTPS as an option, and Facebook began offering it in January. The guide also explains how to disguise browsing histories and how to gain access to banned sites.

Security isn’t just a concern in Middle East autocracies, or for would-be revolutionaries. Mobile phone surveillance, for example, is tough to escape for cellphone users anywhere, said Ethan Zuckerman, senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, and a founder of Global Voices, a worldwide group of bloggers and interpreters that has produced similarly themed guides.

Mr. Zuckerman regularly advises Access, as do Chris Hughes, one of Facebook’s founders; the rock musician Peter Gabriel, and the MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser.

“In general, most users aren’t aware of the extent to which mobile phones can be monitored by telcos in cooperation with governments,” Mr. Zuckerman said, referring to telecommunications companies.

“If the guide reminds people that mobile phones are inherently insecure and that we’re trading off privacy and convenience in using the devices, it would be a useful outcome from the work,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/f...03noticed.html





Attacking and Defending the Tor Network
Dennis Fisher

The Tor Project has become a vital mechanism for privacy advocates, human rights activists, journalists and others in sensitive positions to evade online censorship and persecution. And while the governments interested in limiting user access to the Internet and controlling content have had some recent success in preventing the use of the anonymity network, Tor members have been working on new methods for circumventing those restrictions.

In a talk at the USENIX LEET workshop here Tuesday, Nick Mathewson of the Tor Project discussed the group's recent challenges in responding to suppression efforts by governments in Egypt, China and elsewhere. What the Tor members have learned in these recent incidents is that while governments are becoming more up front about their willingness to shut off Internet access altogether or censor content, users are also becoming more resourceful.
However, while Tor offers users a high level of anonymity and privacy when used correctly, there are a number of ways that its protections can be circumvented both intentionally and unintentionally.

"It's hard to get people not to use things incorrectly," Mathewson said. "There are lots of applications that can trivially circumvent the proxy settings."

Mathewson said that the group is working on methods for alleviating the problems that national-level restrictions cause for Tor users. One method involves moving to a modular transport method in order to get around some of the throttling that ISPs perform on encrypted traffic in order to make Tor usage more difficult.

Tor is designed as a series of nodes around the world that enables users to route their Internet traffic through random hops on the way to its ultimate destination as a way of protecting privacy. But, as Mathewson and other speakers at the workshop pointed out, this method is not foolproof and can be weakened in a number of ways. Traffic from Tor users to nodes on the Tor network and between nodes is encrypted. However the traffic between the Tor exit node and the terminus point of the user's request is in the clear.

Researchers and attackers and have devised ways in the past to attack the network, often through traffic analysis of one type or another or by attacking an exit node. In a separate talk at LEET, Stevens LeBlond of INRIA in France presented research on methods for tracing Tor users back to their IP address. One of the attacks, which LeBlond and his co-authors titled "Bad Apple," used an exit node that the researchers controlled in order to trace the streams of data sent by users of BitTorrent over Tor back to their IP addresses.

"P2P apps on Tor kill privacy and a significant amount of Tor traffic can be traced with application level attacks," LeBlond said. Mathewson acknowledged in his talk earlier in the day that there are well-known issues with using BitTorrent and other P2P applications over Tor.

Mathewson stressed that although Tor members constantly are working on improvements for the service and new methods for helping users, it's a difficult process.

"We can't solve Internet security on our own with ten people," he said.
https://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/a...network-032911





Newzbin Using TOR to Circumvent UK P2P File Sharing Block

Newzbin2 plan ahead by offering TOR - a work around to web blocking planned by UK ISP's.
Brian Houston

Following the news that UK ISPs could be forced to block P2P file sharing sites, Newzbin2 has made some changes to ensure they remain online and accessible should such a block come into practice.

Turning to TOR technology to provide users with anonymity Newzbin2 said "Tor is an anonymity service used by people to protect their communications from surveillance of powerful and malign states but also companies and ISPs.....you can use Tor just like many ordinary people in oppressive free-speech hating regimes like Burma, China, Iran or the UK."

"By running a hidden service we make the MPA’s attempt to knock our name off the web entirely futile: all you need is the bundle and you’re good to go at this address: http://sc3njt2i2j4fvqa3.onion/"

Anyone can use TOR by installing the TOR Browser Bundle. It is cross platform working on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
http://www.unitethecows.com/content/...ing-block.html





BT Has a Plan to Beat Illegal Filesharing

Not-for-profit music download service is a bold move aimed at weaning customers off piracy
Josh Halliday

BT has kindly agreed to help out its chums in the creative industries with a not-for-profit music download service designed to wean its customers off illegal filesharing.

The move is yet another sign that Ed Vaizey, the communications minister, has been banging heads together at his high-powered meetings between rights holders and internet service providers.

According to a leaked Invitation to Tender document, BT's music download service would be available to its 5.5 million broadband users across the UK. BT says it will unveil the product "in the near future", while talks are thought to be ongoing with major music labels such as Universal Music and EMI.

Although BT has promised to forgo a profit on the service for the first six to nine months – meaning it will be free to access for its customers – the ISP will introduce charging after that time.

Exactly what that subscription model will look like is currently subject to much hair pulling, though a few lessons can be learned from past and present digital music hits and misses.

The move brings to mind BSkyB's ill-fated foray into music with Sky Songs, which was put out of its misery in December after about a year. Loved by music execs but loathed by the fans, BT would do well to steer clear of a purely subscription-based offering.

That would leave BT Beats – for that's what we shall christen it for the time being – using a freemium model, as pioneered by the Anglo-Swedish streaming service Spotify. With 1 million paying customers in Europe – representing a significant 15% of its almost 6 million music fans – Spotify is the king of new music models.

Why Spotify has not been sat alongside Universal, Sony, EMI and Warner at Vaizey's roundtables is anyone's guess. But that doesn't mean that Daniel Ek's music service hasn't been flirting with ISPs even further behind the scenes.

From what we understand, Spotify has been in talks with major ISPs, not just Virgin Media, about potential partnerships. If ISPs were to go where Sky has failed, they would presumably prefer to partner with the $1bn-valued start-up, whose loyal customer base continues to grow, than to go head to head with a rival service. We all know what happens when you do that.

While Vaizey's behind the scenes tenacity may be winning a fig leaf or two for the music industry, BT and TalkTalk continue to fight the very same rights holders in the high court.

Monday is expected to be the final day of the Digital Economy Act's judicial review, though no verdict is expected for another five to six weeks.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...esharing-music





ASA: CD Ripper “Incites” Law Breaking
Barry Collins

God bless the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). This fearless defender of everything that’s right, moral and upstanding has allowed ISPs to advertise fantasy headline speeds and limited “unlimited” packages for donkey’s years, but when it comes to the really big issues, it’s not afraid to wield the big stick.

The latest victim of the ASA’s wrath is 3GA Ltd, the company that makes the Brennan JB7 – “a CD player with a hard disk that stores up to 5,000 CDs”.

The adverts for the Brennan highlight the convenience of ripping your entire CD collection to the device – much like we’ve all been doing for years on our PCs, iPods and other MP3 players.

However, somebody with nothing better to do with their life (or, more likely, one of Brennan’s competitors) complained that the “ad incited consumers to break the law, because it was illegal to copy music without permission from the copyright owner”.

This is, of course, technically correct: format shifting is indeed illegal in the UK, despite companies such as Apple making hundreds of millions of pounds by tacitly encouraging people to do just that.

But this isn’t Apple – it’s 3GA Ltd, a small company that likely doesn’t have a legal department nor a multi-million marketing machine to fight its battles. And despite the fact that (to the best of my knowledge) nobody’s ever been prosecuted for format shifting, the ASA has decided to take offence to advertising this everyday practice.

“We considered the overall impression of the ad was such that it encouraged consumers and businesses to copy CDs, vinyl and cassettes,” the ASA adjudication states. “In the absence of prominent explanation, we concluded that the ad misleadingly implied it was acceptable to copy CDs, vinyl and cassettes without the permission of the copyright owner. We also considered that the ad encouraged people to use the advertised product in this way and that, therefore, it incited consumers to break the law.”

We can all sleep a little easier in our beds tonight, safe in the knowledge this dangerous outlaw has been dealt with.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2011/03...-law-breaking/





Android Trojan Warns You to Stop Being a 'Pirate'

Disguised as the Walk and Text app
Asavin Wattanajantra

AN ANDROID TROJAN is disguised as an app on filesharing websites, and when downloaded it gives you a telling off about downloading 'pirated' software.

Android.Walkinwat presents itself as a version of Walk and Text, which you can buy legally from the Android Market. But this version (1.3.7) is fake, and is found on several famous - or infamous depending on your point of view - filesharing websites.

Insecurity firm Symantec said that if you run the app on your smartphone, you are presented with a dialog box that gives the appearance that the app is being compromised or cracked. What it's actually doing is sending private data like your name, IMEI and phone number back to an external server.

It will then send out an SMS message to all your contacts saying, "Hey, just downloaded a pirated app off the Internet, Walk and Text for Android. I'm stupid and cheap, it cost only one buck. Don't steal like I did!"

The app then finishes up by leaving a final message saying, "We really hope you learned something from this. Check your phone bill. Oh, and don't forget to buy the app from the Market." It then offers you a link where you can buy Walk and Text legally.

Considering that the app accesses your private data and you don't know where it's going, this should be considered as a threat. Then again, you could make an argument that the dodgy app sends a message to anybody who sticks it on their phone that downloading anything from untrusted sources isn't the wisest thing to do.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...ns-stop-pirate





Did Limewire Shutdown Increase Music Sales?
Mike Masnick

Last week, we had a post following the report from NPD suggesting that file sharing in the US had dropped off significantly due to the Limewire shutdown. While there are some serious questions about NPD's methodology, we assumed that it was at least mostly accurate, and then asked if there had been a corresponding increase in music sales. After all, despite what you hear from the RIAA/MPAA, the end game should be about business being stronger, not about "reducing piracy." And if "reducing piracy" doesn't end up with more sales, then what good does it do, really?

In the comments to that article, commenter artistrights pointed to a report from Soundscan that music sales had been up for five straight weeks, and separately to another report claiming that Taylor Swift's album sold well after Limewire shut down, selling a million albums in its first week of availability.

I think this is worth exploring, because I've been asking for some actual empirical evidence and we have some. If it's really true that reducing piracy leads to greater sales, that would surprise me, but it would be good to know. If it turns out that reducing piracy leads to more revenue than could have been made otherwise (such as by embracing file sharing) then that would likely cause me to change my opinion on the best strategy for the RIAA to take in this fight. As for the Taylor Swift example, I don't think that proves much of anything, frankly. Throughout the file sharing era, there have been a bunch of releases that sold over a million copies in their first week. In fact, prior to Napster, there had been only two such releases. The rest all came post-Napster. So I'm not sure we can really learn too much about that. Big hit albums still sell. I'm not sure that's got anything to do with Limewire.

As for the other link to sales being up for a five week period, that's definitely worth noting, though, it does not correspond to the same quarter that the NPD study covered. NPD looked at Q4 of 2010. The link above is talking about February and March of 2011. Now, it's entirely possible there's a lag, and people who stopped using Limewire did nothing for 3 months and then suddenly started buying. Perhaps that's the case. If anyone has more info on what was actually selling during these past five weeks, that would help us dig a bit deeper into this information. Some might also point out that SoundScan is not the most trustworthy source of data on music sales -- but it wouldn't surprise me if it were accurate "enough" for the type of music that people used Limewire for, so I wouldn't write it off just because it's Soundscan.

I'm not yet convinced that these two data points are necessarily connected, but it is certainly worth noting the recent bump, and it would be great if folks here were able to dig in a bit deeper and see if we can unpack the reasons for the bump in music sales over the past few weeks.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...ic-sales.shtml





But Where Are We Going to Download Free Music?

Peer-to-peer music sharing is on the decline, now that the popular file-sharing service LimeWire has been shut down, a recent report said.

Last fall, the federal court ordered LimeWire to stop allowing people to download its software. The music industry had also sued the service for $75 trillion in damages for copyright infringement. Really? Is that Miley Cyrus tune worth that much? The judge called the request absurd.

Music file-sharing hit a peak in late 2007, when 28 million people downloaded music through a P2P service during the fourth quarter of 2007, NPD said in a report. Three years later, that's down to 16 million people. The average number of tracks downloaded per person also dropped from 35 to 18.

Of course, as many point out, there are more and more legal alternatives for online music now, from Apple's iTunes to Oakland's Pandora. Then again, the report suggested that some hardcore peer-to-peer users may move on to other file-sharing services such as Frostwire and Bittorrent.
http://blog.seattlepi.com/techchron/...ad-free-music/















Until next week,

- js.



















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