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Old 29-12-10, 07:43 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 1st, 2011

Since 2002


































"At one point, 50% of the CD’s produced worldwide had an AOL logo on it." – Jan Brandt

"Journalists need scrutiny and accountability as much as anyone -- especially when, as here, they are shaping public perceptions about a vital story while withholding important information." – Glenn Greenwald



































January 1st, 2011





USA Forced Sweden's Hand on Piracy and Pirate Bay Crackdown
Andrea Petrou

The US has clicked its all powerful fingers at Sweden, having demanded that it close down the Pirate Bay and other similar sites in Wikileak diplomatic cables, or suffer the consequences.

An eagle eyed member of the SomethingAwful forums spotted that the States has been exerting its power and making demands within the IPRED legislation.

The US was allegedly the driving force behind threats to Swedish ISPs in 2008, and it is currently the driving force behind the so-called “step two of the data retention”, presented by the Justice Minister last week.

This legislation will give police access to all and any collected records under Data Retention in the proposed Police Methods Report. Ordinarily, prison sentences of more than two years would have been required to collect IP addresses, but the PMU changes this before the Data Retention is even in place. The aim is to get enough evidence from ISPs to highlight illegal file sharing sites and then close them down.

And if Sweden doesn't comply it suffers.

"Disobeying these points would mean Sweden would be added to the Special 301 list of countries not sufficiently compliant with US trade demands, meaning trade sanctions would be enforced against Sweden," forums user Bisse suggests.

Sweden had a relaxed attitude to file sharing up until 2004 when the US and its various organisations decided to intervene. They've been going after the Pirate Bay and others ever since.

The US wanted to tell Sweden what to do with the Pirate Bay. Back in 2006 John Malcolm of the MPAA sent a letter to the Swedish Government reminding it of plans that had been set out.

Because the MPAA couldn't get authority on its own it encouraged the US Embassy to intervene.

At the time Mr Malcolm wrote: "Clearly the complaints that we filed on behalf of our members in 2004 and 2005 with the police in Stockholm and Gothenburg against the operators of The Pirate Bay have resulted in no action.

"As I am sure you are aware, the American Embassy has sent entreaties to the Swedish government urging it to take action against The Pirate Bay and other organisations oyeratin,a with Sweden that facilitate copyright theft. As we discussed during our meeting, it is certainly not in Sweden's best interests to earn a reputation among other nations and trading partners as a place where utter lawlessness with respect to intellectual property rights is tolerated.

"I would urge you once again to exercise your influence to urge law enforcement authorities in Sweden to take much-needed action against The Pirate Bay."

Although the Government did manage to close the site, it popped up just days later.

But in 2009 the US got its way - when four co-founders of website were found guilty of assisting the distribution of illegal content online by a Swedish court were sentenced to a year in jail and a £2.4m fine.

Charges were brought by a consortium of media, film and music companies led by the International Federation of the Pornographic, sorry Phonographic Industry.

A Stockholm court found the four defendants guilty of making 33 specific files accessible for illegal sharing through The Pirate Bay, which meant they had to pay compensation to 17 different music and media companies including Sony BMG, Universal, EMI, Warner, MGM and 20th Century Fox.

The four then appealed in November this year and as a result three of the defendants had their sentences reduced, but their total fines increased to $6.5 million.
http://www.techeye.net/internet/usa-...-bay-crackdown





Pirate Party Leader Rick Falkvinge Resigns on 5th Anniversary
Ernesto

Five years ago the first Pirate Party was founded in Sweden. In the years that followed the Party shook up the political climate in its home country and the European Parliament where it holds two seats. Now, five years later, founder and chief architect Rickard Falkvinge is stepping down as leader. He will focus on promoting the Pirate position internationally, while Party deputy Anna Troberg will take over the reins.

It has been a long and tumultuous 5 years for the Pirate Party and its leader Rick Falkvinge. Riding on the wave of public protest after Swedish police raided The Pirate Bay’s servers in 2006, the Party soon became a political force to be reckoned with.
The Party gained interest from the mainstream media and at the Swedish general elections in the same year it became the third largest party outside parliament. Inspired by the small successes the Party booked in the first year, Pirate Parties were founded in dozens of other countries as well.

Fast forward three years and the Swedish Pirate Party peaked at over 50,000 members just before the European elections of 2009. In these elections the Pirate Party got more than 7% of the total votes earning them two seats in the European Parliament, a major victory.

Today the Pirate Party looks back on its short history as it celebrates its fifth anniversary. However, this festive day also brings a surprise that nobody saw coming. Rick Falkvinge, Pirate Party icon, founder and leader announced today that he is stepping down as leader. Effective immediately he will be replaced by his deputy, Anna Troberg.

According to Falkvinge, new leadership is what could take the Party to the next level.

“Anna has a cultural background which is precisely what the Pirate Party in Sweden needs at this point,” Falkvinge exclusively told TorrentFreak. “We are well established within the box of technical people, but need to break out of it. To do that, we need a leader who can explain why these issues are important in nontechnical terms. Anna is the perfect fit.”

However, the former Party leader isn’t hanging up his Pirate hat just yet. He stays on as the Party’s chairman while he broadens his scope. Freed from the political shackles, he will continue to fight for the same issues he’s championed for the last five years, but now more internationally oriented than before.

In the coming year Falkvinge intends to work as an ‘international evangelist’ for the Pirate movement and focus on Information Politics. Part of that will include a guest column here on TorrentFreak, as well as a new English-language blog at Falkvinge.net.

Looking back on the last five years it is impressive to see what the ‘Pirate’ movement started by Falkvinge has accomplished. There are now Pirate Parties in forty countries around the world, with city Councillors in Germany, Luxembourg and the Czech Republic and formerly a member in the German Parliament.

It will be interesting to see how the Parties fare in the coming half-decade, where privacy and technology issues are becoming more relevant than ever before. Meanwhile we congratulate Anna Troberg on her new position and wish her all the best. Rick Falkvinge – the man who made Pirates Political – is saluted for a half-decade of hard work as the Swedish Pirate Party leader.
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party...ersary-110101/





Swiss File-Sharing Website Hires US Lobbying Firm

After being named as one of the most infringing websites, RapidShare is headed to the US capital to convince American lawmakers that it is not liable for illegal file-sharing.

RapidShare, an online file-sharing site based in Cham, Switzerland, is under increased international scrutiny for enabling copyright infringement, as earlier this year members of the US Congress named RapidShare one of the top six most infringing websites in the world.

"As you can imagine, we're not very happy about that," said Daniel Raimer, a German attorney and spokesman for RapidShare, in an interview with Deutsche Welle.

Following the US government's crackdown on infringing websites earlier this fall, seizing the domain names of more than 80 websites, RapidShare has found a way to reinvent itself in the American capital.

Just last month, the company hired the Washington, DC-based lobbying firm Dutko to protect its interests abroad. This likely makes it the first such European file-sharing company to lobby American lawmakers.

The company says its has more appointments coming up on Capitol Hill, and remains confident that it will get off the list by early 2011, long before next year's list is published.

RapidShare estimates that copyrighted music and movies make up roughly five percent, or 10,000 of the 400,000 files uploaded every day.

Although the site accepts and hosts every type of file, because the company takes many steps to filter out infringing files before they are posted, Raimer argued that RapidShare is not the type of site the US should be going after.

"We believe that it's unfair that we're being put on the list," he added.

"You can't just take a look at the number of infringing material that you can find on the server. Google has probably millions and millions of links to illegal files. Most people would probably agree that Google is not a bad company."

By international law RapidShare is not liable for what users upload and download, and recent German and American legal cases have upheld this notion. The only thing that is required of RapidShare is to take down infringing files once the copyright holder tells it to.

While lobbying on behalf of foreign companies is nothing new in Washington, it is new for foreign Web companies to do so. An online database of lobbying disclosures reveals that the only other European websites lobbying the US Congress right now are two online gaming sites, PokerStars.net and PartyGaming.com.

US can exert limited power over foreign sites

A new anti-piracy bill making its way through the US Senate could clear the way for the government to seize more infringing domains.

If the law passes, according to Bob Brauneis, professor of copyright law at George Washington University in Washington, DC, it could certainly impact RapidShare, despite the fact that it is not based in the United States.

"Dot-com companies operate around the world, but the company that controls the dot-com domain is in the United States," he told Deutsche Welle.

"Literally they have a computer in some room somewhere and if you flip a switch on that computer than domain name will disappear. The information is still there in Switzerland, but it's not accessible at RapidShare.com because the link between Rapidshare.com and the Swiss computers has been cut.”

The .com registry is maintained within the US and is subject to US law. That means a court order could force the registry to freeze the domain name: Rapidshare.com. It doesn't matter if RapidShare has its headquarters in Switzerland or anywhere else.

While losing a domain name could temporarily impact the company's business, changing to a new name is not a huge inconvenience.

RapidShare could just set up shop as RapidShare.ch, which is the most common suffix for Swiss sites. WikiLeaks, for example, used to have a .com suffix - now anyone can access that site at Wikileaks.ch.

If seizing domains doesn't stop copyright infringement, there is another step, Brauneis added.

"The computers in Switzerland are actually reached through a series of numbers called an internet protocol address, an IP address," he said.

"So everyone can spread around the world what the IP address is on those computers and they can continue to upload and download files, not a problem. And if it turns out that after seizing a bunch of domain names, everyone is just turning to IP addresses - the IP addresses may be next."

And it gets even more complicated from there.

Data re-routing could drive up Internet connection pricing

"People are going to look for alternative ways of having those kind of sites available," said Peter Eckersley, a digital rights advocate with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization based in San Francisco.

However, he cautioned that if sites like this are forced to move offshore, then that may raise the actual cost of Internet connections around the world.

"And the effect that will have is a significant increase in the amount of data that's just moving over international fiber links," he added.

"That will mean we'll need to build more fiberlinks. And it's going to make the cost of running the Internet higher."

Author: Emily Friedman, Washington, DC
Editor: Cyrus Farivar
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,14739421,00.html





Time Warner Cable Won’t Turn in Porn Pirates
Molly McHugh

Time Warner Cable is bent on keeping its customers lawsuit-free as porn distributors try to crack down on illegal file-sharing.

Earlier this year, attorney Evan Stone filed three lawsuits on behalf of porn distributor Larry Flynt Publishing in response to the thousands of users accused of illegally sharing the company’s adult film This Ain’t Avatar XXX. However, Internet service provider Time Warner Cable is making things difficult.

Attorney Evan Stone, who filed the suit, told CNET, “If you’re a pirate in these times, TWC is the ISP to have.” In order for Larry Flynt Publishing to have a case, Stone needs TWC to name names, something the company is hesitant to do. He already knows the defendants’ Internet protocol addresses, but needs the ISP to then offer identities and addresses to match. Stone claims that TWC is only willing to offer up 10 names a month, which he calls “totally unsatisfactory.” At that rate, it would take 33 years to identify the alleged pirates. AT&T and Verizon were also reportedly wary about giving Stone access to customer names.

In an interesting turn, Larry Flynt Publishing decided it isn’t on board with its attorney. The company partners with TWC, and in favor of not rocking the boat, decided to back away from the matter. As a result, Stone will no longer be representing the company.

Despite the fact that he will soon be parting ways with Larry Flynt Publishing, he continues to argue his case, saying that he was able to define that the accused were clearly scheming to illegally share pirated copies of the film. And defending This Ain’t Avatar: XXX from being illegally circulated wasn’t Stone’s only priority. The Dallas Observer points out that prosecuting porn pirates has become the attorney’s crusade. He filed several hundred lawsuits in Dallas Federal Court this fall for various titles that had been illegally downloaded, and that number eventually soared to over 9,000. Originally, Stone seemed to believe his war on the illegal sharing of adult content would be an open and shut case. “Almost everybody that has replied to my letters has replied, ‘Hey you caught me, I’m ready to comply,’” he told the Dallas Observer in the fall in response to the perpetrators he was able to identify. Stone also claimed that porn distributors were on board with the lawsuits because “The adult industry isn’t as worried about bad press. If it’s going to recoup revenue, it’s going to recoup it.”

Stone has recently dropped many names from the case, and some suggest he is extorting alleged file sharers into settling out of court for a few thousand dollars. This yields a moral gray area, Washington-based lawyer Paul Alan Levy explains. “It’s possible that what’s happening here is pure extortion, and it’s possible that what’s happening is just enforcement of the copyright laws. The business model is [to] bring lots of cases, settle them without taking them to trial. We don’t know yet whether these folks are willing to go to trial.”

Regardless of the current state of Stone’s other cases, he isn’t the first attorney to have difficulty working with TWC. Attorney Kenneth Ford found himself in a similar situation with the Internet service provider when he was unable to glean enough names while attempting to launch 22,000 separate cases concerning pirated porn. Last week, a judge threw out all but one case, telling Ford a separate suit would be required for each alleged pirate. Trying to make a case against P2P file sharers is becoming increasingly challenging, and so far, a dead end.

And it isn’t just adult films: TWC persisted against the US Copyright Group when it was facing copyright infringement for the illegal sharing of various indie films and of course, Oscar winner The Hurt Locker. TWC labeled the accusations “nonsense” and responded by saying it receives a vast amount of IP address lookup requests a month, some of which involve emergency and life-threatening situations, and it simply could meet the additional demand.

It seems for the time being that TWC is one ISP that has its users’ backs, and any entity that wants to targets its customers should be ready to wait.
http://www.digitaltrends.com/computi...ates/?news=123





Amazon Censorship Expands
Nom du Keyboard

Recently word leaked out about Amazon removing titles containing fictional incest. Surprisingly that ban didn't extend to the 10 titles of Science Fiction Grand Master Robert A. Heinlein that incorporate various themes of incest and pedophilia. Now, it seems that the censorship is expanding to m/m gay fiction if it contains the magic word "rape" in the title. Just how far is this going to be allowed to proceed in relative silence, and who is pushing these sudden decisions on Amazon's part?
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/12/...orship-Expands





China Says Anti-Pornography Campaign Shut Down 60,000 Websites

Almost 5,000 people were prosecuted for disseminating pornography, China's state news agency said.

China's anti-pornography campaign shut down more than 60,000 pornographic websites this year, with police investigating almost 2,200 criminal cases, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported Thursday.

Wang Chen, director of the Information Office of the State Council, said at a news conference that some 350 million pieces of pornographic and indecent internet content were eliminated, according to the Xinhua report.

The government launched a special campaign a year ago to rid the internet of pornographic and vulgar content, Xinhua reported.

Overall, the campaign included 2,197 criminal cases involving 4,965 people who violated Chinese law by disseminating pornography via the internet or mobile phones, the news agency said. Of those, 58 people received prison sentences exceeding five years, the report said.

Wang said the campaign had helped clean up the internet and would continue.

Xinhua reported that Wang's office has received more than 170,000 tip-offs this year, mostly about online or cellphone-based pornography, with 534 people getting rewards totaling 544,000 yuan (U.S. $81,964) for providing information.

Wang also said that 450 million people in China used the internet, a 20 percent increase over the previous year, according to Xinhua. That means that almost 34 percent of the Chinese population uses the internet, compared to a world average of 30 percent, Wang said at the news conference.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapc...a.pornography/





BotTorrent? Using BitTorrent as a DDoS Tool
Ernesto

A recent talk at the Chaos Communications Congress revealed how BitTorrent swarms can be exploited to take down large websites with relative ease. A vulnerability in the technology behind so called trackerless torrents makes it possible for someone to trick downloaders of popular files into send thousands of requests to a webserver of choice, taking it down as a result. Basically, this turns BitTorrent into a very effective DDoS tool.

BitTorrent is one of the most effective technologies to transfer large digital files to many people at once. Unlike a central server, transfers actually tend to go faster as more people share the same files. This characteristic is one of the reasons why it has evolved into the dominant file-sharing platform in recent years.

Every day millions of people are downloading files via BitTorrent, and in some instances more than 100,000 people are sharing the same file at the same time. These large ‘swarms’ of peers are great for sharing, but they also pose a threat as became apparent at the Chaos Communications Congress (CCC) recently.

In a talk titled “Lying To The Neighbours” it was shown that the DHT technology which powers “trackerless torrents” can be abused to let BitTorrent downloaders effectively DDoS a webserver of choice. DHT’s normal function is to find peers who are downloading the same files, but without communicating with a central BitTorrent tracker. This ensures that downloads can continue even when the central tracker goes offline.

According to the presenter who goes by the name ‘Astro’, Kademlia based DHT can be exploited by a malicious peer to carry out a DDoS attack. If there are enough peers downloading the same file, this could easily take down medium to large websites. The worrying part is that the downloaders who are participating in the DDoS will not be aware of what’s going on.

“The core problem are the random NodeIDs. The address hashing and verification scheme works for scenarios like the old Internet, but becomes almost useless in the big address space of IPv6,” Astro told TorrentFreak in a comment. As a result, any BitTorrent swarm can be abused to target specific websites and potentially take them down.

This and other DHT vulnerabilities are not entirely new concepts for BitTorrent developers. They have been discussed in various places already, but no agreement on how they should be dealt with has yet been reached.

Over the last months DDoS attacks have been in the news regularly, mostly carried out under the flag of Anonymous’ Operation Payback. Initially anti-piracy targets such as the MPAA and RIAA were taken offline, and last month the focus switched to organizations that acted against Wikileaks, including Mastercard and Paypal.

While these attacks required hundreds of people to actively participate and fire up their LOIC application at the same time, the BitTorrent DDoS could take down the same sites from a single computer, using BitTorrent downloads as a ‘botnet’. But, where there’s a problem there’s a solution, and Astro has some pointers for BitTorrent developers.

“Not connecting to privileged ports (< 1024) where most critical services reside," is one ad-hoc solution, but Astro says that since it's a design error, the protocol has to be redefined eventually.

The idea of using BitTorrent as a DDoS tool is not entirely new. In fact, researchers have previously shown that adding a webserver’s IP address as a BitTorrent tracker could result in a similar DDoS. The downside of this method is, however, that it requires a torrent file to become popular, while the DHT method can simply exploit existing torrents that are already being downloaded by thousands of people.

It will be interesting to see if BitTorrent developers are going to act upon the DHT vulnerability in the coming months and come up with a solution to prevent this kind of abuse.
http://torrentfreak.com/bottorrent-u...s-tool-101229/





The Most Popular BitTorrent Searches of 2010
Audrey Watters

Noting that both Google and Bing have released their year-end "top search" lists, TorrentFreak has released its "BitTorrent Zeitgeist 2010," its list of this year's most searched for words and phrases on a top BitTorrent index, KickassTorrents.

It's not a complete picture of all torrents, of course, but KickassTorrents is one of the top 10 torrent sites in terms of visitors, and the searches are probably fairly indicative of what people are searching for on BitTorrent.

Clearly, it's movies. Or at least, searches for movies seem to dominate the zeitgeist. 5 of the top 10 search terms are movie titles. At the top of the list was Inception, with Iron Man 2, Avatar, Despicable Me, and Clash of the Titans also in the top 10. Not surprisingly, these films also showed up on an earlier TorrentFreak list: the most pirated movies of the year. Avatar, it's worth pointing out, has the distinction of being the top grossing film of all time and the most pirated film of the year.

Also among the top 10 search terms: porn and xxx. Windows 7 is the first software-related search term in the list, in 20th place. Despite music industry brouhaha about filesharing, music searches do not rank highly. Eminem is the first music mention, at number 47.

Here's the top 20, but you can find the full list of 100 here:

1. inception
2. iron man 2
3. 2010
4. xxx
5. french
6. avatar
7. dvdrip
8. despicable me
9. porn
10. clash of the titans
11. toy story 3
12. glee
13. salt
14. twilight eclipse
15. dexter
16. the sorcerer's apprentice
17. axxo
18. robin hood
19. prince of persia
20. windows 7

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...es_of_2010.php





Music Is Better Off On BitTorrent, Than With Apple or Big Music
Ernesto

The music industry is changing rapidly. On the one hand there are tens of thousands of artists who use the Internet as a distribution channel and share their music online for free, but on the other side of the spectrum Big Music and Apple are tightening the bolts. We discuss the upside of the Internet and the ‘evil ways’ of the corporate interests with Benn Jordan, one of the first musicians to embrace BitTorrent and turn free music into a business.

The Internet and file-sharing services such as BitTorrent in particular are often blamed to be the downfall of music. However, the reality is that music has never been as loved and vibrant as it is today. The only thing that’s starting to fall apart slowly is the power of the big music labels and other profiteers.

The Big Music (RIAA) labels make their fortunes by promoting and marketing artists who usually only pocket a few percent of album sales. Their control over the distribution channels has given them a great deal of power, but the Internet is taking this monopoly away bit by bit. Today, independent artists and labels can easily reach millions of customers, something unimaginable only a decade ago.

That said, the advancement of the Internet has also brought in new threats. Apple. for example, is taking a big chunk of the revenue music generates online and their growing power is frustrating artists more and more. Musicians are forced to cut up songs because Apple deems them too long, and track listings are shuffled by mistake without an option for the artist to restore his art.

One of the first musicians who revolted publicly against Apple was Benn Jordan aka The Flashbulb, who found his album on iTunes in early 2008 without being aware or paid for it. In a counter move Jordan decided to share all his music on BitTorrent for free, which turned out to be one of the best business decisions he has made in his career.

On Christmas eve, where sharing is on the minds of millions of people, we sit down with Benn to talk about what has happened in the past three years. How did he fare financially? Has his opinion towards Apple or the RIAA labels changed? Where does he think the music industry is heading?

TF: You first published your music for free on BitTorrent nearly three years ago. Could you take us back to that moment and explain why you took this decision?

Jordan: I just figured that if someone was going to upload my new album to these sites, it may as well be me. I can make sure the rip is a good one and I can personalize it with a message. It wasn’t marketing or anything political at first either. Trent Reznor and some other big names released stuff in a similar fashion a few months later and the same crowd applauded, but I felt like it was more about marketing.

TF: How has this decision changed your stance toward “piracy”?

Jordan: It oddly put me in a hot seat for a bit and for a limited time, made me an pseudo expert in a field of study that doesn’t really exist yet. Again, this was all undeserved and weird. Music piracy is still a huge issue and people want answers, but they’re not sure who to ask.

I’m grateful now because it made me think, generally, file trading is just a peephole to a much larger picture. Copyright, in its current state, holds information at ransom for monetary value. While in music it can stifle culture and art, with literature and education it can be nothing more than a weapon of class warfare.

TF: How are you doing financially compared to three years ago? Have you benefited from giving away your music?

Jordan: In this particular case, yes. It expanded the amount of people who pirate my music, therefore it has expanded those who bought CDs, donated to me, or came out to shows. Another interesting thing is that it wound up in some licensing company’s hands that I’ve never worked with before, and got me additional placement in TV/film/etc, which is a good portion of my income.

TF: What are your thoughts on the big labels. Are they good or bad for the majority of artists?

Jordan: I have to be honest. Big labels that aren’t being innovative are little more than delusional laughing stocks at this point. Their numbers get worse and worse, and they push the artists to do dumber and dumber stunts to try and stay on top of things.

The shows and festivals they book are sponsored by 8 different alcoholic beverages and 10 different energy drinks, and they just punish their customers while validating their own demise. I’m not worried about them and neither should you. Its a dozen senior citizens trying to stop a stampede of fresh culture. Good luck boys.

TF: And what about Apple?

Jordan: Apple, love or hate their products, is fucking scary. On one hand, hats off. They’re business and marketing geniuses. On the other hand, they might single handedly be the worst thing that has happened to entertainment media in the last 3 years. The major record industry collapsing should also mean that artists are more free to do what they want.

For example, iTunes completely screwed up the track listing of my last album Arboreal. Their network is so influential that over half of the people who have bought the CD from my label now have botched track titles on their mp3 players. Apple doesn’t have ANY accessible artist support to deal with things like this.

They reject my cover art if I don’t have my name and the title in bold. If I want to sell a 30 minute long track (Louisiana Mourning, for example), they require me to split it up into a bunch of separate tracks. Their distribution system is so unorganized that artists have to pay business like Tunecore upwards of $40 per album (and annual fees) to do Apple’s job for them.

Again, its genius on the business side. But they’ve wedged themselves in so well that now, if I don’t have an album on iTunes (under their insane rules and lack of support), a large portion of my listeners simply won’t know how to put my music on their iPods/iPhones.

I know I sound preachy, but think about it, how is that any better than what existed 15 years ago? I still maintain that I’d rather have my stuff “illegally” downloaded than have to go down that path.

TF: What advise do you have for artists who consider giving away their music?

Jordan: That being a “consideration” is always funny to me. You either release it knowing it will be distributed for free or you keep it locked up on your hard drive. If the last decade has taught us anything, it is that no amount of bitching, threatening, lobbying, suing, or file protecting is going to stop information from being spread to those who want it.

The way I look at it is, if hundreds of thousands of people are downloading my album, I’m contributing to culture and my music will likely outlive me. Money is pretty insignificant in the face of immortality.

TF: What changes in the industry would you like to see in the coming years?

Jordan: It makes me nervous because I feel like we’re at a really big crossroad. We’re facing three big issues at the same time that are eventually going to be connected: Net-neutrality, free speech, and piracy/copyright laws. We need to make a bigger deal about it because we don’t want information to be controlled by an entity that only exists for its investors.

We don’t want a situation where if Amazon refuses to carry a book, nobody will be able to read it. Or if iTunes refuses to carry an unabridged album, nobody will be able to hear it. Most importantly, we don’t want poor people to continue being less educated than wealthy people because of the illusion created that information has a monetary value. News, history, media, and culture is made by everyone, and it is intolerable to me that we allow the messengers to hold it from us at such a high price, whether monetarily or contextually .

Now’s the time to get involved.
http://torrentfreak.com/music-is-bet...-music-101224/





Spotify Is the Coolest Music Service You Can't Use
Neal Pollack

On the first Monday in October, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave a speech to students at Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. The lecture hall—”one of the most vertical auditoriums I’ve ever been in,” Ballmer told the group—was all blond wood and sensible lighting, simultaneously modern and venerable in that distinctly Swedish way. After discussing cloud computing and extolling the joys of playing Xbox volleyball, Ballmer brought out a special guest who was sure to ignite the crowd: Daniel Ek, CEO of the Swedish startup Spotify.

A soft-spoken, balding 27-year-old Swede, Ek took the stage to enthusiastic applause, all but outshining the Microsoft chief. “It’s great to be here, back in Sweden!” he said, sounding every bit the returning rock star. He then made the day’s big announcement: Spotify, the music service he created, would now be available through a new app for Windows phones in Europe.

If you’ve never heard of Ek or his company, you can’t be blamed. Spotify is perhaps the biggest, coolest, greatest piece of software you’re not allowed to use. It’s a stand-alone application that lets users listen to and share any song by any artist instantly and for free. And it’s entirely legal. The service supports itself (and pays for music rights) with advertising and monthly subscriptions that unlock premium features such as the ability to store songs on an iPod, mobile phone, or tablet.

Spotify is an elegant application, by far the simplest, easiest way to listen to digital music. It’s faster and more responsive than iTunes, torrents, or Pandora. And while there have been all-you-can-eat music services like Rhapsody for some time, none of them let you start listening without laying down a credit card. Not surprisingly, Spotify dominates the markets where it’s available. The company estimates that it has more than 10 million users in seven countries, with more than 500,000 paying subscribers. It has fundamentally changed how people listen to music in Europe.

But, thanks to resistant labels and archaic rights systems, Spotify isn’t available in the US. And this isn’t just a problem for American music fans. It’s also a problem for Spotify—the US is the world’s largest music market, bigger than France, Germany, Sweden, Spain, Italy, and the UK combined. Spotfiy’s lack of a US footprint may even be a problem for the music industry, which has struggled to find new ways to capitalize on digital music and finds itself increasingly crushed under the heavy boot of iTunes.
European digital downloads in millions of U.S. dollars.

Ek and his team have been trying to bring Spotify to the US for more than a year now, with little to show for it. Since 2009, the rumors of Spotify’s impending American invasion have fizzled in disappointment every time. For those who’ve followed the effort, Spotify has begun to take on the aura of raw-milk French cheese or certain varieties of Amsterdam flora—a European import that North American connoisseurs just can’t get here. But for its part, Spotify insists that it’s coming to the US, and soon.

Back at the Royal Institute of Technology, Ek gave a short speech about the advantages offered by his software: “People now consume a lot more music by a bigger diversity of artists,” he said. “And the reason they do that is because they no longer discover music from a radio station. They discover music from their friends.” That, he explained, was the key to Spotify’s success and the reason it is important to the music industry. It offers a new, better way to discover music.

Ek signed off by urging his fellow Swedes to “keep sharing music,” and Ballmer stepped back into the spotlight. “I’ve heard a lot about Daniel over the years,” he said. “It’s the first time we’ve met personally. We have a lot to talk about.”

Undoubtedly first on the list was the same question every other North American music fan wants to ask: Where’s my damn Spotify?

Daniel Ek, a self-admitted “early user of Napster,” first became obsessed with digital downloads after the deaths of Napster and Kazaa in the early 2000s. Though he’s not yet 30, Ek has been running tech companies for more than a decade. The first was a web design business he launched in 1997, while still a teenager living in a Stockholm suburb. He later worked as the CTO for Stardoll, a virtual paper-doll site for tween girls; started an advertising company that got purchased by the Internet marketing outfit TradeDoubler; and was part of Tradera, a Swedish auction company, which eBay bought in 2006.

But music downloading was increasingly in the back of his mind. Ek wanted to create a legal service that offered the convenience and immediacy of file-sharing programs like the original Napster. “The reason I started Spotify,” he says, “was not because of my love of music. It was because I saw an opportunity to create something that made it easier for people to do the stuff that they were already doing, but legally.”

Ek discussed his ideas with Ludvig Strigeus, a brilliant developer who is confined to a wheelchair by a rare muscular disease. Strigeus had created uTorrent, a fast, lean, and extremely popular BitTorrent client. Ek soon realized that this was the guy he needed. He and TradeDoubler cofounder Martin Lorentzon teamed up to buy uTorrent, turned around and sold the technology to BitTorrent, and kept Strigeus on as a developer for a new music project.

Ek didn’t know much about the music business. All he knew was technology. So he hired a team of engineers to work with Strigeus and started creating his dream program. Strigeus quickly developed a highly efficient peer-to-peer system that became the heart of Spotify.

With the software complete, Ek finally set out to gain the rights he needed to fill the service with songs. Unlike the US, every European country has a national association of sorts that manages all the rights to broadcast and stream music. In order to earn the privilege of offering digital tracks, a service like Spotify negotiates with these associations—not with individual record labels and copyright holders. Ek didn’t have an easy time of it, but he finally managed to gain rights to stream pretty much any song in Sweden, England, Norway, Italy, Germany, France, and Spain.

Spotify launched in October 2008 and began its European invasion. By the end of 2009, Spotify had more than 6.5 million registered users. By the middle of 2010, the application was such a hit that telecom providers started bundling it with their phones, and manufacturer Sonos included the service in its home-audio systems.

Spotify’s seemingly irresistible appeal stems from the fact that it’s free, at least for the basic service. In addition to letting users listen to any song they want without having to buy it, being free also helps Spotify become a thriving community, è0 la Facebook. Since there’s no impediment to joining, users can share songs and playlists without worrying about who is and isn’t currently a member. To make money, Spotify relies heavily on some portion of users deciding to pay for upgrades—a classic freemium model. Sign up for 5 euros a month and you eliminate ads from the desktop application. A 10-euro subscription allows you to store an unlimited number of tracks on your hard drive or any mobile device, so you can listen even if you don’t have an Internet connection.

It was exactly what music fans had been waiting for, fulfilling the long-sought dream of a “celestial jukebox”—a service that makes every song always available, freely and legally. UK resident Andy Smith, who created Spotibot.com, a web application to help people find new music on Spotify, puts it this way: “Spotify is finally a realization of a much-speculated model of music-as-a-service. I’ve come to think of it almost as a utility. Just as I turn on a tap to get water, I turn on Spotify to get music.”

The company grew rapidly and soon employed 200 people. It moved into fancy new digs in the middle of Stockholm’s trendy Stureplan district and opened equally posh offices in London. To celebrate the company’s second birthday, Spotify threw itself a big party at the KOKO Club in London’s hot Camden section, including a live performance by British rockers the Bees.

Among those drawn to Spotify’s success was Sean Parker, cofounder of Napster and the early president of Facebook—portrayed by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network. Always on the lookout to get in on the hot new thing, Parker contacted Ek about investing, eventually putting an estimated $15 million into the company.

“You get addicted to it,” Parker said of Spotify at a recent tech conference. “You end up building a music library that’s 100 times bigger than anything you’ve ever had, and at that point you have no choice—we’ve got you by the balls. If you want that content on your iPod, you’re going to have to pay for it; if you want that content on your iPhone, you’re going to have to become a subscriber.”

There’s no question that Spotify would be wildly successful in the US. Already there are breathless blogs and fansites dedicated to discussing the service’s US potential. It might even grab a sizable number of music fans “by the balls.” After all, the celestial jukebox—MP3s, Napster, music-on-tap—is an American invention. But there’s one major difference between Europe and the US: In the US, the labels have direct control over interactive rights.

And that’s the core of Spotify’s problem: There’s no simple way to get a license in the US to offer music on demand over the Internet. Unlike radio in the US—which has a legal right to broadcast music as long as a station or network pays a predetermined fee—digital music services have to negotiate for rights with each record label and individual copyright holder. “The labels have control,” says Les Watkins, a senior vice president at Music Reports, a service that administrates interactive rights. “They have the right to say yes or no.”

Sometimes they do say yes. Paid subscription services like Rhapsody have deals in place with all the majors. Three of those major labels actually have an ownership stake in MySpace Music. But when it comes to Spotify, with its insistence on deploying its freemium business model in the States, the labels have shown little interest.

None of the major labels would talk to Wired about Spotify, but several have made their opinions known. “Free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry,” said Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. during a February conference call to discuss his company’s quarterly earnings, “and as far as Warner Music is concerned, it will not be licensed. So, this sort of ‘get all the music you want for free and then maybe we can—with a few bells and whistles—move you to a premium price’ strategy is not the kind of approach to business that we will be supporting in the future.”

Ek finds this point of view extremely shortsighted. He sees Spotify as the best way to turn the industry around. By making it easier to discover music, he says, the market can expand. This will ultimately yield more profits for everyone, even if people are listening to some songs for free. “Do I really believe that in an age where people listen to more music than ever, from a greater diversity of artists, that the real value of music for the entire industry is $17 billion or less?” he says. “No. I believe that we’re actually in a golden age of music consumption. The value should be much, much greater. It should be $50 billion or more.”

It’s easy to see why the labels doubt this. Consider the arithmetic at its crudest: To expand the music industry by $30 billion, Spotify would need 300 million paid users worldwide, tough to pull off when thus far only 5 percent of the service’s members convert to a paid subscription. But to Ek, that math belies a simple truth: The mere fact that people are discovering new artists and songs leads to increased music sales across the board.

There’s evidence that Ek may be right. Since Spotify debuted in Sweden two years ago, digital music sales have doubled, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (though pinpointing how much of this is due to Spotify is tough). Matt Culpin, half of the British electropop duo the Northern Kind, offers an example of why this may be. “There is a paradox,” he explains. “Our first album isn’t on Spotify. Its sales on iTunes have steadily declined since launch, which is to be expected. Our second album was released to Spotify. Its sales have held steadily on iTunes since launch. I can only put this down to its exposure on Spotify.” In other words, giving the music away for free led to more sales.

Even with little sign that the US labels are ready to budge, Spotify has remained doggedly steadfast in its assertion that a deal is imminent. Thanks to the company’s optimism, headlines like “Spotify Planning Late-Summer US Launch” began appearing in July 2009, even though the company hadn’t signed a single licensing deal. At a November 2009 tech forum in Monaco, Ek was forced to admit that it wasn’t going to happen, at least not that year. “The US is a different beast,” he said. “Most people are still not aware of the service or how it works—so we do have to spend time educating the market.”

Then in February 2010 came another round of hope mongering. “We’re in the final stages of setting up,” Ek said. “Yesterday we signed a data center contract, which is huge for us. So, we’re gearing up for a US launch. I can’t say if it’s in one month’s time or two month’s time, but it’s looking pretty good.” Ek gave a keynote speech at the South By Southwest Interactive conference in March, the day before the SXSW music festival, and rumors abounded that he’d announce a US deal. He didn’t, and months passed. Still no Spotify. Frustrated, would-be American Spotify fans took to lampooning the endless stream of promises: “Spotify is now officially the Robbie-Can’t-Break-America-Williams of the music biz,” read one tweet.

While Spotify has so far been able to broadcast only press releases in the US, competing services have begun to emerge. Chief among them is Rdio, a streaming-music service started by Janus Friis and Niklas Zenström, the creators of Skype.

Rdio launched in August, and though it lacks the polish and responsiveness of Spotify, it does have licenses from all four major labels and boasts a catalog of more than 7 million songs. Friis and Zenström, of course, had tried their hand at digital music more than a decade earlier with Kazaa, which the major labels easily squashed. “The irony wasn’t lost on me when I went to get licenses,” Rdio CEO Drew Larner says. “But there wasn’t the pushback expected given the history.”

Rdio users can get unlimited streaming music on their desktop for $5 and on their phone for $10. The business model is remarkably similar to Spotify’s, except for one key aspect: There’s no free option. It’s pay or don’t play, which is undoubtedly the reason Rdio’s been able to get the labels on board.

The fear is that Spotify may eventually have to go this route to crack the US market. And while the stand-alone Spotify application may still be fast and elegant, having only pay offerings would break its most critical and beloved feature, the free basic service. If Spotify were pay-only, Ek’s utopian dream of an infinite postpiracy paradise would essentially become just another subscription-based streaming service.

As late as mid-November, Spotify hadn’t backed down on the claim that it was going to launch in the US, freemium model intact, by the end of the year. The company’s US servers were standing by in Washington, DC, and it had established a US office in Manhattan’s Meatpacking district. Spotify had retained people to do label relations, business development, and ad sales.

Ek himself, however, was hedging. After more than a year of dealing with the US music industry, he knows that launching a new product in the States isn’t easy. “We can’t say it will launch without a shadow of a doubt,” he said. “We’re more sure than we’ve been in the past, but things may still happen.” Or, in this case, not happen.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/12/mf_spotify/all/1





Kindergartens Ordered to Pay Copyright for Songs
Catherine Bolsover and Nancy Isenson

Up until this year, preschools could teach and produce any kind of song they wanted. But now they have to pay for a license if they want children to sing certain songs.

A tightening of copyright rules means kindergartens now have to pay fees to Germany's music licensing agency, GEMA, to use songs that they reproduce and perform. The organization has begun notifying creches and other daycare facilities that if they reproduce music to be sung or performed, they must pay for a license.

"If a preschool wants to make its own copy of certain music - if the words of a song or the musical score is copied - then they need to buy a license," GEMA spokesperson Peter Hempel told Deutsche Welle.

The new rules came into power at the beginning of this year, but have only recently drawn attention as daycare centers have received letters reminding them that they need to sign contracts with GEMA before distributing sheet music to children to sing.

Sheet musicBildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: If copies of music are made, the fee needs to be paidGEMA said that the need for licenses would not have any effect on singing in kindergartens.

"It doesn't cost anything to sing in kindergartens," said Peter Hempel. "If a school does not make any copies of music, then of course they don't need to pay anything."

Traditional songs are copyright-free

The copyright rules only concern the rights for modern songs. Songs written by an author who has been dead for over 70 years are automatically in the public domain.

"For old songs, for traditional folk songs for example, it costs nothing," said Hempel.

Fees start at 56 euros ($74) for 500 copies of a song, a rate charged annually, not per child.

GEMA - the German abbreviation stands for the Society for Musical Performing and Mechanical Reproduction Rights - exists to make sure that the intellectual property of musicians is protected. It is the collection agent for another group, VG MusikEdition, which monitors copyright for musicians and distributes the profits from the licensing fees back to its members.
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,14741186,00.html





Cumulus Makes Another Bid For Citadel
FMQB

Cumulus has confirmed that it did indeed make a play to purchase Citadel Broadcasting last month, as reported by the New York Times earlier this month. The broadcaster said it sent a proposal to Citadel's board of directors, offering to buy the company for $31/share or up to $1 billion in cash.

Citadel's board rejected the deal on December 6, saying it wasn't in the best interest of its shareholders. Cumulus made a second offer yesterday (December 16), reiterating the offering and promising superior value to Citadel's shareholders. Cumulus said the deal values Citadel at approximately $2.1 billion.

Cumulus Chairman/CEO Lew Dickey stated, "This offer continues to represent a superior alternative in value, liquidity and potential growth for the former secured creditors of Citadel who, post-bankruptcy, are now the owners of the company."
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=2059403





The Right's War on Net Neutrality
Joan McCarter

No one, other than the big telcos, seems to be particularly happy with the FCC's Net Neutrality rules, as Chris documented earlier. But it's important to be clear about what it is exactly the Right is doing on this one. It's death panels all over again.

Kevin Drum writes about an e-mail conversation he had with a "conservative reader who is absolutely convinced that this is an effort by Democrats to rid the internet of conservative voices."

Quote:
[T]his is nuts. The whole point of net neutrality is just the opposite: it would continue to allow internet providers to discriminate on the basis of volume but not on content. So if you're a heavy internet user and have a lot of bits streaming through your pipe, they can charge you more. But that's it. They can't charge either content providers or you based on what you say or who you are. It's hard to think of anything that should assuage conservative concerns more. And yet, somehow this has become the latest grand conspiracy theory. It's craziness.
Yes, it's craziness, but it's calculated craziness. Remember back in the early days, under a Republican administration, the coalition supporting Net Neutrality spanned the political spectrum, from the Gun Owners of American and Christian Coalition to the ACLU and all points in between. Republican members of Congress and ConservaDems were opposed, but that was typical--they were protecting the telcos that own them. And now they're doing the same, just as they did in the health care debate, spreading the lie that Net Neutrality is a government take-over of the Internet. ThinkProgress has this video compilation of the "scary government taking over" narrative.

Never mind that true Net Neutrality is the most important protection from any kind of censorship or control of the Internet, and that if anything this ruling by the FCC gives Comcast, AT&T, Verizon et al. far more control than the government over Internet content, particularly on mobile devices.

Like I said, it's healthcare reform all over again, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that the government take-over talking points that have emerged on the Right are coming straight from the telcos, just like the government take-over talking point on the public option came directly from the insurance industry.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/20...Net-Neutrality





Seventh Circuit: Website Operator Does Not Have to Obey Injunction in Defamation Case
Evan Brown

Blockowicz v. Williams, No. 10-1167, (7th Cir. December 27, 2010)

Plaintiffs got an injunction that ordered defendants to remove defamatory content from the web that defendants had posted. When the defendants did not comply with the injunction, plaintiffs asked the court to enforce the injunction against Ripoffreport.com, the website on which some of the defamatory content appeared.

The lower court refused to extend the injunction to cover Ripoffreport. Plaintiffs sought review with the Seventh Circuit. On appeal, the court affirmed the refusal to enforce the injunction.

It held that plaintiffs had failed to show that Ripoffreport was in active concert or participation with the defendants. Absent this collaboration, the website was outside the court’s ability to control.
http://blog.internetcases.com/2010/1...ion-injunctio/





Seller of Counterfeit Video Games Gets 30 Months in Prison

The FBI reported this week that Qiang “Michael” Bi of Powell, Ohio was sentenced to 30 months in prison for selling more than 35,000 illegally copied computer games over the Internet between 2005 and 2009.

Bi, 36 years old, pleaded guilty back in July to one count of mail fraud, one count of copyright infringement, and one count of aggravated identity theft. He was sentenced to six months each for the mail fraud and copyright infringement crimes and an additional 24 months for the aggravated identity theft.

Following his release from prison, the judge ordered Bi to two years of supervised release with twelve months of the supervised release to be spent in home confinement. He was also sentenced to serve 416 months of community service and will be required to make restitution to the companies who created the games. The amount of restitution is yet to be determined. Bi agreed to forfeit $367,669 in cash which represents the proceeds of the crimes. He also agreed to forfeit his interests in his house, a car, and all computer and electronic equipment used to illegally copy and sell the games.

According to a statement of facts read during Bi’s plea hearing, agents executed a search warrant at Bi’s house and found multiple CD duplicators and more than 1,000 printed counterfeit CDs. Some of the CDs were still in the duplicator. During their investigation, agents learned that Bi would buy a single copy of a game, illegally duplicate it and sell the copies on eBay.com and Amazon.com. He also set up a website for customers to download the games they bought. Bi accepted payment through eBay and PayPal accounts in his name and in others’ names.

The games he sold were products from 60 different publishers with the estimated total retail value of the games around $700,000. Bi sold the counterfeit games for around $9.95 each.

Agents and officers with the FBI Cybercrime Task Force, and U.S. Postal Inspectors are credited with the success of the case.
http://www.securityweek.com/seller-c...-months-prison





Hollywood Moves Away From Middlebrow
Brooks Barnes

When negative Twitter commentary seemingly torpedoed the Sacha Baron Cohen film “Brüno” in July 2009, movie executives started talking in solemn tones about the ability of social networking to sway attendance. The era of using marketing to trick consumers into seeing bad movies was drawing to a close.

It was mostly lip service.

As Hollywood plowed into 2010, there was plenty of clinging to the tried and true: humdrum remakes like “The Wolfman” and “The A-Team”; star vehicles like “Killers” with Ashton Kutcher and “The Tourist” with Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp; and shoddy sequels like “Sex and the City 2.” All arrived at theaters with marketing thunder intended to fill multiplexes on opening weekend, no matter the quality of the film. “Sex and the City 2,” for example, had marketed “girls’ night out” premieres and bottomless stacks of merchandise like thong underwear.

But the audience pushed back. One by one, these expensive yet middle-of-the-road pictures delivered disappointing results or flat-out flopped. Meanwhile, gambles on original concepts paid off. “Inception,” a complicated thriller about dream invaders, racked up more than $825 million in global ticket sales; “The Social Network” has so far delivered $192 million, a stellar result for a highbrow drama.

As a result, studios are finally and fully conceding that moviegoers, armed with Facebook and other networking tools and concerned about escalating ticket prices, are holding them to higher standards. The product has to be good.

Cynical cinema buffs will laugh: isn’t Hollywood always blathering on about quality yet churning out dross? Perhaps. And there are always exceptions — how else to account for “Clash of the Titans,” which sold a strong $319 million at the global box office in April despite messy 3-D effects. And as “The Last Airbender” demonstrated, also with $319 million in ticket sales, there may always be room in the summer for a mindless action movie that the critics cannot stand.

Still, the message that the year sent about quality and originality is real enough that studios are tweaking their operating strategies. Sony Pictures Entertainment, the studio behind “The Social Network,” is trying to bet more heavily on new directors with quirkier sensibilities. To reboot its “Spider-Man” franchise, for instance, Sony hired Marc Webb, whose only previous film was the indie comedy “(500) Days of Summer.” The studio has also entrusted a big-screen remake of “21 Jump Street” to Phil Lord and Chris Miller, a pair whose only previous film was the animated “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.”

“We think the future is about filmmakers with original voices,” said Amy Pascal, Sony’s co-chairwoman. “Original is good, and good is commercial.”

At Walt Disney Studios, which has traditionally not worried much about directorial artistry (at least in its live-action films), a new executive team has been busy attaching A-list filmmakers to broad blockbusters. David Fincher, who directed “The Social Network,” is working on an adaptation of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” Guillermo del Toro, the “Pan’s Labyrinth” auteur, is developing a new movie around Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion ride.

The model for Disney is Tim Burton’s arty adaptation of “Alice in Wonderland,” which sold $1.02 billion in tickets in the spring to become the year’s No. 2 release. (The critical darling “Toy Story 3” was an inch ahead with $1.06 billion; “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1,” which is still playing, is third with $831 million.)

“In years past,” said Sean Bailey, Disney’s president for production, “most live-action films seemed like they had to be either one thing or the other: commercial or quality. The industry had little expectation of a film being both. Our view is the opposite.”

The future for 20th Century Fox is largely about James Cameron, who agreed in October to direct two “Avatar” sequels. But Fox is also encouraging producers to find more original material (perhaps talking-animal pictures, like the studio’s money-losing “Marmaduke,” have now been exhausted).

Fox, which remained profitable in 2010 but suffered a string of major disappointments (including the expensive “Gulliver’s Travels,” which sold an anemic $7.2 million over the weekend), is also trying to be more creative with its marketing. Last week, the studio announced the departure of its New York-based co-president of marketing, Pam Levine, as it sought to centralize operations at its Los Angeles headquarters.

“Movie marketing can’t settle for good anymore — it has to be great,” said Dennis Rice, a consultant who has held senior positions at Miramax and Disney, noting that he was not speaking specifically about Fox.

All of this talk about originality and quality is partly a studio response to the closing over the last two years of art-house divisions like Paramount Vantage and Miramax. Because the Oscars depended so heavily on films made by these divisions, there was suddenly a vacuum for the big studios to fill. Sony is in the thick of the Oscar race with “The Social Network,” for instance, while Paramount has both “The Fighter” and “True Grit.”

At its core, the flight to classier blockbusters is also about insecurity: when in doubt, flee to quality. Studios are having a hard time reading what the audience wants. Animation is not as infallible as it has been. Stars are not delivering, as evidenced by “The Tourist” and “How Do You Know,” a Reese Witherspoon film that moviegoers collectively ignored. The sequel strategy still seems to be paying — “Iron Man 2,” “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” — until you notice flops like “Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore.”

North American attendance for 2010 is expected to drop about 4 percent, to 1.28 billion, according to Hollywood.com, which compiles box-office statistics. Revenue is projected to fall less than 1 percent, to $10.5 billion. It has been propped up by a 5 percent increase in the average ticket price, to $7.85, thanks to 3-D.

One of the biggest surprises of the year was “Despicable Me,” the animated movie about a criminal mastermind who has a life-changing encounter with three orphaned girls. An original story and made by Illumination Entertainment for Universal Pictures, it sold $540 million at the global box office, an enormous validation for storytelling that is not derivative.

“I believe there is a long-term danger to moviegoing if familiarity becomes too pervasive in the films we make,” said Chris Meladandri, the founder of Illumination. “The industry has a responsibility to its audience and to itself to make films that allow people to have a sense of discovery in the cinema.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/bu.../27movies.html





Sears and Kmart Launch Movie Download Service
Stan Schroeder

Sears and Kmart have teamed up to offer their customers a movie download service called Alphaline Entertainment.

The service uses Sonic’s RoxioNow platform for content delivery, which makes it quite similar to Best Buy’s CinemaNow (which is based on the same platform). The pricing, too, is very similar, as Alphaline Entertainment offers movie rentals for $3.99 and purchases at $19.99 for new releases.

Sonic and Sears plan a multi-phase rollout, which should eventually make the service available from a variety of connected devices.

Check the service out over at alphaline.roxionow.com; users outside of the U.S. shouldn’t bother as they’ll be greeted with an unsightly error message.
http://mashable.com/2010/12/28/sears...movie-download





Perfecting Animation, via Science
Patricia Cohen

Eitan Grinspun, the director of Columbia University’s Computer Graphics Group, doesn’t quite qualify as hairdresser to the stars. But if you want computer-generated hair (or fur) to look convincingly real when it is twisted, clumped, matted, coiled, soaked, dusty, wind swept, singed — or just about anything else a film director could possibly think to do to it — then Mr. Grinspun is the man to consult.

From a spacious office and workroom on the 10th floor of Columbia’s Schapiro Center in Morningside Heights, Mr. Grinspun and his team of graduate students have helped scientists from Walt Disney Studios, Pixar, Weta Digital and Adobe Systems solve their toughest C.G.I. problems, whether recreating the dab of a bristled paintbrush or getting Rapunzel’s hair in the Disney film “Tangled” to float in an underwater cave.

“There’s not a huge number of people who can do this,” said Alasdair Coull, head of Weta Digital’s software development team. “We’re essentially looking for the best in the world.” Weta has joined with a handful of universities, including a half-dozen or so in California, on C.G.I. — computer-generated imagery — and related projects.

Mr. Coull, who traveled from Wellington, New Zealand, last year to spend a month at Columbia, contacted Mr. Grinspun after reading about his inventions in hair simulation and fur grooming. Let’s just say it is no coincidence that Weta (“Avatar,” “The Lord of the Rings”) is creating the computer-generated brainy apes who take over the world in “Rise of the Apes,” the back story to the classic 1968 movie “Planet of the Apes,” due to be released in 2011, as well as working on Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming version of the adventures of Tintin and his dog, Snowy. On this gray morning, however, Mr. Grinspun, 34, is putting out coffee and pastries for a meeting with Rasmus Tamstorf, a senior research scientist for Disney. As Mr. Grinspun scurries around in his stocking feet, his frame tall and lanky, with a curly mop of dark hair and large eyes that droop at the outer corners, it is easy to imagine him as an animated character: sweet-natured and a little goofy, but whip smart.

What distinguishes his work from that of other computer scientists is that he creates not only beautiful pictures but also beautiful mathematics.

Mr. Grinspun turns on one of the half-dozen or so computer screens in his office to show off the lifelike strands of animated hair that his lab helped create and stares lovingly at the screen. “The mathematics behind this is really gorgeous,” he says.

Mr. Tamstorf uses another word —“principled” — to describe the Columbia group’s approach to problem solving.

What he and others mean when they refer to work as “principled” or “beautiful” is that the images on screen are not the result of a patchwork of technical tricks, but of precise mathematical equations based on the way the world actually looks and operates — in a word, physics. They use what is known as discrete differential geometry, a field so new that the first textbook on the subject was published only two years ago.

“We find equations that describe lots of different kinds of physical systems,” Mr. Grinspun explained, “the shape of a cable on a bridge, a spinning top, cilia.” He started pumping a large, colorful top that he keeps on his desk to illustrate. Those equations are then used to create a violent splash of waves or the layered folds of a skirt.

Predicting and controlling flexible materials and collisions, however, is tricky. Very tricky. With hair, for example, you need to take into account how every one of the 150,000 or so strands on a head interacts with the other strands, gravity, friction, air and so on. Imagine trying to come up with a couple of equations for that.

In general the process of animation involves painstaking trial and error that Mr. Tamstorf at Disney compared to “operating blindfolded.” The animators may get some of it right, but not all of it: a patch of scalp peeks out while a character is running, or a shirt keeps inching up a character’s belly even after he has stopped moving. Sometimes the studio is forced to resort to “brute force” to achieve a desired effect, he said, which could mean calling in Disney’s army of artists to paint over every single image in the film to satisfy the director.

As long as it looked good on the big screen, though, no one cared much how a result was achieved. It was like patching a leaky roof by nailing on a wooden panel, tying down a tarp, taping over a crack, sticking an umbrella in a hole. As long as it kept the water out, no one complained.

“That’s not our philosophy,” Mr. Grinspun said. “We said, ‘Let’s show the world you can have mathematically principled approaches.’ ”

Mr. Grinspun’s crucial idea was to throw out the jury-rigged models instead of trying to improve upon them, as Apple did with its operating system when it abandoned DOS and command prompts. “The programming had to be rethought from the ground up,” he said. Instead of trying to force a system that was designed to simulate straight hair to produce curly hair too, for instance, Mr. Grinspun created a more sophisticated system that could do both.

“We’re like psychoanalysts,” he added. “We try to find what the underlying problem is. You have problems with your mother? Let’s go back and look at your toilet training.”

The uses of discrete differential geometry go far beyond animation. Johns Hopkins Medical Center, for instance, is using Mr. Grinspun’s computer simulations to predict how needles move through human flesh, so that doctors can train to do laparoscopic surgery on virtual bodies instead of the real thing.

The approach was alien to most animators, though, and initially greeted with skepticism. “It was controversial at first,” Mr. Grinspun said, “but the strategy has paid off in the long run.” It significantly cut down the time it took to produce what the director wanted, to minutes from days, and provided better results. “You get more bang for the buck,” Mr. Grinspun said.

Disney did not work much with academics before Mr. Tamstorf’s partnership with Mr. Grinspun began about five years ago. Since then the company has looked more to universities. After Disney acquired Pixar in 2006, it ramped up its academic connections and in 2008 opened two collaborative labs on university campuses, one at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh and the other at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

Mr. Grinspun generally does not sell or license the programming that comes out of his lab. Graduate students get to be interns for three or four months at places like Disney and Weta, where they gain valuable experience, and the team gets unusual and interesting problems to work on.

At the recent meeting Mr. Grinspun asked Mr. Tamstorf to list the technical conundrums he would like the lab to work on. “One of the areas where our current systems are far behind where they need to be is that garments don’t come to rest where they should,” Mr. Tamstorf said. “The character has stopped, but his shirt keeps crawling, crawling, crawling.”

Mr. Grinspun chimed in, “It’s the inability of simulations to stay still.”

Another persistent problem is having certain types of materials keep their general shape even when they’re moved or pushed. In “Tangled” keeping Rapunzel’s puffed sleeves puffed was an impossible task. (Artists ultimately had to draw in the puffs.) “We need better bending models or control,” Mr. Tamstorf said, so that the shape remains stiff but the fabric looks soft.

Mr. Grinspun enjoys working with studios, but he is not tempted to work for one full time, he said. At heart he is an academic. He does like contributing to the artistic enterprise, however.

As he sees it, his work frees the artists from worrying about a puffed sleeve so they can focus on what they do best, like capturing expressive emotion. His reward is different: “As long as you make pretty pictures, you get to keep learning all this math and physics.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/movies/30animate.html





iTunes Slowdowns with Google DNS
Joe Maller

Last night we tried to rent an iTunes movie on our newish Apple TV. Instead of starting right away, the Apple TV said it would be 2+ hours before we could start watching. I’ve got a healthy 15-20Mb/s connection and a clean wire to the Apple TV, so this shouldn’t be happening.

A little bit of research turned up a surprising fix: Don’t use Google DNS.

The iTunes Store has thousands of entrances. Everyone using Google DNS is trying to get in through the same door.

Some anecdotal evidence:

* Apple TV HD Rental Streaming Problem
* Apple TV users report long rental wait times
* Slow iTunes HD download when using Google DNS
* OpenDNS causes slow download for AppleTV
* Slow tv rental download
* Why using Google DNS / OpenDNS is a bad idea

This totally makes sense. iTunes’ video content is delivered by Akamai who has distributed massive datastores around the world so those large files originate from nearby servers and spend less time getting switched around the network. Akamai somehow uses our DNS routing to determine our location. If Google DNS or OpenDNS routes everyone to Akamai the same way, then those Akamai nodes and the pipes leading to them get overwhelmed.

Since most people don’t know what a DNS server is, this problem primarily affects the “tech-vanguard” and those fortunate/unfortunate enough to be inside our circles of helpfulness.

I switched to my ISP’s DNS servers and now HD rentals on Apple TV are ready to watch in 10-20 seconds.

Go figure…

http://joemaller.com/2577/itunes-slo...th-google-dns/





Talking Tech and Building an Empire From Podcasts
Jon Kalish

Balancing on a giant rubber ball in a broadcast studio and control room carved out of a cottage in Petaluma, Calif., Leo Laporte is an unlikely media mogul.

From that little town in California wine country, he runs his empire, a podcasting network, TWIT. For 30 hours each week, he and the other hosts on his network talk about technology — topics like the best e-book reader or how to get rid of a computer virus — for shows that he gives away online.

Nerdy, yes. Silly, no. TWIT gets its name from Mr. Laporte’s flagship podcast, “This Week in Tech,” which is downloaded by a quarter of a million people each week. He produces 22 other technology-focused podcasts that are downloaded five million times a month. He also streams video all day long that captures his podcasting and a weekend radio show on computers, “The Tech Guy,” that reaches 500,000 more people through 140 stations.

“I don’t want to be just a carbon copy of existing media,” said Mr. Laporte, who at 54 is just old enough to remember using carbon paper in typewriters to make duplicates.

Advertisers, especially technology companies, appreciate Mr. Laporte’s reach. Mark McCrery, chief executive of Podtrac, which is based in Washington, and measures podcast audiences and sells advertising, said TWIT’s advertising revenue doubled in each of the last two years and was expected to total $4 million to $5 million for 2010.

Starting at $40 per thousand listeners, TWIT’s ad rates are among the highest in American podcasting and are considerably higher than commercial broadcasting rates, which are typically $5 to $15 per thousand listeners.

Podcasting is an often overlooked corner of the media world. The term is derived from iPod, the Apple media player that can be used to listen to these radiolike programs as well as recorded music. The iTunes store from Apple, where about 75 percent of the audience for podcasts looks for fresh material, contains about 150,000 regular shows featuring has-been and up-and-coming comics and sex talk, as well as mainstream fare like NPR and CNN broadcasts. Edison Research estimates that a quarter of all Americans over the age of 12 have listened to or watched at least one. There are also video podcasts.

Mr. Laporte has shown there is a lot of life in podcasting. Doug Keith, president of Future Research Consulting in Philadelphia, which tracks media companies and publishers, said advertisers were drawn to the network because tech enthusiasts were keen on its content.

In July, Mr. Laporte spent three hours signing hundreds of autographs for members of the so-called TWIT army in Detroit. Some of his fans had him sign their iPads. No wonder then, that $20,000 a month in voluntary contributions comes in from the TWIT Web site, which has a series of “Tip Leo” buttons that set off recurring monthly contributions of $2, $5 and $10.

Mr. Laporte’s first great love was radio. In the late 1970s, he dropped out of Yale to pursue a radio career. He began talking about technology on the radio in 1990. In the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, he appeared on tech-focused television programs, including as an animated character on “The Site,” an MSNBC show devoted to the nascent Internet. Mr. Laporte played an espresso barista named Dev Null and wore a motion capture suit to animate the character he voiced.

Many who listen to or watch his podcasts today remember him from such cable TV shows as “The Screen Savers” and “Call for Help.” And it was a round-table discussion by former staff members from “Screen Savers” that prompted Mr. Laporte to begin “This Week in Tech” in 2005. Mr. Laporte posted a recording of the discussion at a Macworld conference on his blog, not intending it to become a podcast. But it got so many hits, he started posting regularly.

Mr. Laporte, now with a full head of graying hair, has an encyclopedic command of digital technology, and he keeps the show, which consistently reaches the top 200 podcasts list at iTunes, lively with his ability to mimic voices and accents. He frequently does impressions of sitcom and cartoon characters to make a point about network-attached storage devices or bit rates.

“This Week in Tech,” a two-hour show, features journalists and industry insiders talking shop. Some who live in Silicon Valley or San Francisco drive up to Mr. Laporte’s cottage to join him for the Sunday afternoon recordings. Other far-flung participants connect through Skype. A contraption in the TWIT control room known as the Skyposaurus employs four computers to connect Skype video callers.

In the studio, Mr. Laporte’s eyes dart from one computer screen scrolling mile-a-minute chat-room banter to another where he searches Google for answers for guests and listeners, while mixing sound, switching video signals and moderating panel discussions.

But it is the hundreds of hard-core tech fans in the show’s chat rooms that make the podcasts work. They serve as Mr. Laporte’s researchers, fact checkers and Greek chorus.

“If an error is made, the chat room will be all over it,” said John C. Dvorak, a columnist for PC Magazine and a regular on “This Week in Tech.” “This is real-time fact checking. There’s nothing like it.”

During tapings of “This Week in Tech,” as many as 1,500 people are in chat rooms typing away at a furious pace. Fifteen volunteer monitors around the country keep the chat family-friendly. But sometimes the comments can get tough. Although Mr. Laporte is patient with even the most clueless callers, chat room regulars are not as tolerant.

“We’re making comments like, ‘This person needs to have their computer taken away,’ ” said Lillian Banchik, a Long Island surgeon who is known in the chat room as Dr. Mom.

Dr. Banchik, who listens to TWIT programs 20 hours a week, said she once spent an hour in a private chat with someone who helped her solve a problem with her husband’s iMac.

Many other chat room regulars have serious alternative lives, but like to spend time with the show. Amanda W. Peet, a physics professor at the University of Toronto, goes by Kiwi Nerd. Teresa M. Mensing, an associate professor of geology at Ohio State University, uses the handle Darth Emma.

Next year, the TWIT empire is expected to move into a larger building, down the street from its current headquarters. Mr. Laporte plans to start a morning show this spring to compete with drive-time radio broadcasters.

“It’s not as if I had a plan for all this,” Mr. Laporte said. “It just kind of happened. It was almost as if we had this audience that was waiting for the medium to come along.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/te...27podcast.html





O Canada! World’s Most Web Connected Land
Devin Coldewey

According to a recent comScore report, Canada has beaten out the US, the UK, France, and everyone else in the world in various metrics relating to broadband and internet use. While the conspicuous absence of the likes of Sweden, a perennial leader in these categories, fills me with suspicion, the numbers are still fun, and slightly surprising.

One statistic calculated to both please and terrify is that, by comScore’s measurements, just over half the population of Canada is on Facebook. That amounts to about 16 million people — a drop in the bucket with Facebook’s user base — but it’s the proportion that matters. US usage is around 40% by some estimates, which is of course significant, but it’s fun that Canada has passed us up in this race. I’m guessing it has something to do with the weather up there.

The comScore report (not actually provided, so this information is second-hand) also makes mention of some other specific services; internet-enabled TV, in the form of Netflix Streaming, Google TV, and so on, is far less prevalent there. Reuters attributes this to regulation debates, but I think that international licensing agreements are decades behind where they should be. This causes TV, movies, music, even ostensibly public-domain works to be inaccessible in some countries. Canada seems to be passed up whenever I hear about expansions by media distribution companies to to new markets.

Another interesting statistic, and one that strikes me as being rather anachronistic, is that Canadians spend an average of 42 hours per month on the internet. What exactly does “on the internet” mean in this case? I am on the internet upwards of 700 hours per month, depending on the number of days, since I have an always-connected smartphone. The internet is no longer accessed in terms of hours; we don’t log in and log out, or at least very few of us do any more.

While these metrics are certainly fun to think about, there are dozens more that are less conscientiously tracked, and less impressive-sounding. Uptake of next-generation services like cross-platform synchronization of files and calendars would be a good indicator, and smartphone use statistics are also highly relevant. Mapping information use is becoming an incredibly complicated field, and while Canada deserves a measure of glory for winning this little round-up, that glory will succumb quickly to a little scrutiny.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/30/o-c...onnected-land/





Age Gap Narrows on Social Networks
Teddy Wayne

Though people ages 18 to 33 outpace other adults in almost every category of Internet use, their elders are rapidly closing the gap in social networking, according to a Pew report.

Internet users from all age groups increased their use of social networking from December 2008 to May 2010, with use by people 18 to 33 rising to 83 percent, from 67 percent. But those in every generation 45 and older more than doubled their participation. Adults 74 and older who are online quadrupled their social networking presence, and that now stands at 16 percent.

Teenagers, by contrast, cut back on traditional blogging by 50 percent from 2006 to 2009. It is believed that status updates from sites like Facebook and Twitter are replacing the need for standalone blogging platforms. However, every other age group from 34 to 73 had modest rises in blogging.

“Social networking sites also have special appeal to older users because they let those who have medical conditions find and talk to others who have gone through the same thing,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/bu...a/27drill.html





The Significant Decline of Spam

In October Commtouch reported an 18% drop in global spam levels (comparing September and October). This was largely attributed to the closure of Spamit around the end of September. Spamit is the organization allegedly behind a fair percentage of the worlds pharmacy spam.

Analysis of the spam trends to date reveals a further drop in the amounts of spam sent during Q4 2010. December’s daily average was around 30% less than September’s. The average spam level for the quarter was 83% down from 88% in Q3 2010. The beginning of December saw a low of nearly 74%.

The nature of the spam attacks has also clearly changed. The pre-October graph shows large fluctuations in the amounts of spam sent. In Q4 2010 there were generally lower fluctuations – aside from two large outbreaks in mid-October and mid-December.

The large amounts of pre-Christmas spam are something of a tradition, but here too the outbreak was smaller than most of the large outbreaks this year.

Spam levels have decreased in the past only to return to even higher levels within short periods. Don’t pack away your anti-spam just yet.

Commtouch have also included a more detailed view of the Ham graph. As always, weekends are clearly visible as is the Christmas decline. Ever wondered about worker productivity? Tuesday seems to be the day we get the most work done (or at least send the most emails).
http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=10381





Online Impersonation Banned Starting in New Year
Kurtis Alexander

Once just a cruel joke, assuming another person's identity on the Internet and fabricating an e-mail or Facebook account is no longer a laughing matter.

A state law effective Jan. 1, authored by Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, makes online impersonation, when it seeks to harm someone, illegal.

"As a Silicon Valley legislator, I'm nothing but enthusiastic about technology. But the question is, is the technology used wisely and appropriately?" Simitian asked this week. "This e-personation' is one area where some constraint appeared necessary."

Falsely sourced e-mails, tweets and Web posts have become ubiquitous online, and it's not uncommon for someone to create a Facebook or MySpace account in someone else's name. If this is done to "harm, intimidate, threaten or defraud," according to Senate Bill 1411, it will be a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $1,000 fine and a year in jail.

One of the highest profile stories of using false pretenses on the Internet has been the case of Lori Drew. The Missouri mom was accused in a California court, though later acquitted, of setting up a MySpace profile of a fictitious teenage boy to taunt a 13-year-old friend of her daughter. The friend later hung herself.

With social media so new and its legal framework budding, Simitian's office acknowledges that what exactly constitutes criminal e-personation remains to be seen. His law allows district attorneys to prosecute if they think a crime has been committed as well as allows victims to sue.

"The goal here really is to try to change behavior [not test the law in court]," Simitian said.

A primary driver of the new law was a colleague's tale of impersonation.

Carl Guardino, CEO of Silicon Valley Leadership Group, approached Simitian after an e-mail went out falsely in his name, purporting an apology for something "ugly" that he didn't do.

"People who knew me knew it wasn't me. But thousands of people who don't know me received this, too," Guardino explained. "Somebody was out to harm me. I went to the police and they said, Terrible? yes. Scandalous? yes. But there's nothing we can do about it.' "

Simitian's law banning future online impersonation piggybacks on a 19th century California law that prohibits signing documents in another person's name.

"Folks in 1872 obviously didn't face the problems we're dealing with today," Simitian said.

A handful of Internet free-speech advocates initially expressed concerns about Simitian's law. Their chief fear was that such a measure would prevent spoofs or political satire.

The final legislation holds that the person who is impersonated has to be "real" and "credible," meaning there's leeway for parody and Abe Lincoln and Santa Claus can still legally have Twitter accounts.
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/localnews/ci_16970284





Gadgets Bring New Opportunities for Hackers
Ashlee Vance

Researchers at Mocana, a security technology company in San Francisco, recently discovered they could hack into a best-selling Internet-ready HDTV model with unsettling ease.

They found a hole in the software that helps display Web sites on the TV and leveraged that flaw to control information being sent to the television. They could put up a fake screen for a site like Amazon.com and then request credit card billing details for a purchase. They could also monitor data being sent from the TV to sites.

“Consumer electronics makers as a class seem to be rushing to connect all their products to the Internet,” said Adrian Turner, Mocana’s chief executive. “I can tell you for a fact that the design teams at these companies have not put enough thought into security.”

Mocana and firms like it sell technology for protecting devices and often try to publicize potential threats. But the Mocana test also illustrates what security experts have long warned: that the arrival of Internet TVs, smartphones and other popular Web-ready gadgets will usher in a new era of threats by presenting easy targets for hackers.

As these devices become more popular, experts say, consumers can expect to run into familiar scams like credit card number thefts as well as new ones that play off features in the products. And because the devices are relatively new, they do not yet have as much protection as more traditional products, like desktop computers, do.

“When it comes to where the majority of computing horsepower resides, you’re seeing a shift from the desktop to mobile devices and Web-connected products, and inevitably, that will trigger a change in focus within the hacking community,” said K. Scott Morrison, the chief technology officer at Layer 7 Technologies, which helps companies manage their business software and infrastructure. “I really do believe this is the new frontier for the hacking community.”

To combat the threat, security companies have been pushing to develop new protection models. They are promoting items like fingerprint scanners and face recognition on devices, and tools that can disable a device or freeze its data if an attack is reported. But so far, such security measures have largely failed to reach the mainstream.

Enrique Salem, the chief executive at Symantec, which makes antivirus software frequently installed on PCs, said it was unlikely that his company would produce the same kind of software for all of the new products. Such software can require a fair amount of computing muscle, which would put too much burden on devices that lack the oomph and battery life of traditional computers.

And second, the attacks that Symantec and others have seen on the devices are so new that they will require a fresh approach, he said.

“With something like Android, it’s a different type of threat and it functions differently,” Mr. Salem said.

Symantec will focus on fingerprint scanners and other personal identifiers to devices, Mr. Salem said.

The company also hopes to use features in the devices to help with protection. For example, if someone logs in to a computer from Florida, but location-tracking data says that the person’s phone is in Texas, then an application might ask a security question.

Another goal is to let consumers report a possible security problem and get their data locked down or erased remotely until the problem is cleared up. “You want that ability to wipe the data away if a device is lost,” Mr. Salem said.

The chip maker Intel recently bought Symantec’s main security technology rival, McAfee, for $7.7 billion. Intel executives say they plan to build some of McAfee’s technology into future chips that will go into mobile phones and other newer devices.

Cellphones have been connected to the Web for years, but for much of that time, they tended to have tightly controlled, limited software and other constraints that made it difficult for hackers to do much damage. Attackers continued to find easier targets, and a larger pool of potential victims, by going after PCs running Microsoft Windows and other popular Web software.

But these days, smartphones have many more capabilities. And smartphone shipments have hit a critical mass that makes them worth a hacker’s while.

Also, Apple, Google, Nokia and others are in a race to fill their online mobile software stores applications. These companies have review mechanisms that try to catch malicious software, but the volume of new apps coupled with hackers’ wile make it difficult to catch every bad actor.

With Android, in particular, Google has fostered a vibrant and chaotic smartphone platform in which companies of various shapes, sizes and standards have rushed out devices and complementary applications. Unlike Apple, Google does not approve applications one by one.

Instead, it asks software makers to state what phone functions their applications tap into and to present that information to consumers. People can then decide if they are willing to download the application, and they can post online reviews for the software.

A Google spokesman said that the company expected consumers to perform this type of self-policing and added that Google quickly investigated applications that received complaints.

Still, there is a Wild West vibe to the smartphone market these days as smaller, unproven manufacturers have followed the likes of Apple, Nokia and Motorola in making smartphones.

“The good smartphones have been pretty well designed,” said Mr. Morrison of Layer 7 Technologies. “The problem now is the flood of secondary phones that bring interesting diversity and also open up holes for hackers.”

Security companies have issued repeated warnings that hackers have already started to capitalize on the application stores. The companies also caution that and hackers have discovered fake programs that try steal passwords or make expensive phone calls.

Jimmy Shah, a mobile security researcher at McAfee Labs, said the company had run into so-called smishing attacks, a variation on phishing, in which someone is sent a deceptive text message that appears to have come from a bank or a retailer. Often, the message will ask the person to call a customer support line, at which point the attackers try to coax valuable information from the victim.

Mr. Morrison said another concern was that hackers would concentrate on trying to run up people’s phone bills or find ways to tap into the location-tracking services tied to phones.

“It is like a stalker’s dream,” he said.

The flood of Web-enabled devices hitting the market, like the one the Mocana researchers hacked into, may be a more immediate threat.

Mr. Turner of Mocana said the maker of that television had left crucial bits of information about its security credentials and those of third parties in an easy-to-reach spot, meaning that a hacker could infiltrate some of the data exchanged between companies providing commerce services for the TV.

Mocana has notified the TV maker of the issues and has declined to reveal the company’s identity in a bid to thwart hackers. Mr. Turner would say it was one of the five best-selling Web-ready HDTVs.

“The things we found were mistakes that an inexperienced device designer would make when connecting something to the Internet for the first time,” Mr. Turner said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/te...gy/27hack.html





What is Traitorware?
Eva Galperin

Your digital camera may embed metadata into photographs with the camera's serial number or your location. Your printer may be incorporating a secret code on every page it prints which could be used to identify the printer and potentially the person who used it. If Apple puts a particularly creepy patent it has recently applied for into use, you can look forward to a day when your iPhone may record your voice, take a picture of your location, record your heartbeat, and send that information back to the mothership.

This is traitorware: devices that act behind your back to betray your privacy.

Perhaps the most notable example of traitorware was the Sony rootkit. In 2005 Sony BMG produced CD's which clandestinely installed a rootkit onto PC's that provided administrative-level access to the users' computer. The copy-protected music CD’s would surreptitiously install its DRM technology onto PC’s. Ostensibly, Sony was trying prevent consumers from making multiple copies of their CD’s, but the software also rendered the CD incompatible with many CD-ROM players in PC’s, CD players in cars, and DVD players. Additionally, the software left a back door open on all infected PC’s which would give Sony, or any hacker familiar with the rootkit, control over the PC. And if a consumer should have the temerity to find the rootkit and try to remove the offending drivers, the software would execute code designed to disable the CD drive and trash the PC.

Traitorware is sometimes included in products with less obviously malicious intent. Printer dots were added to certain color laser printers as a forensics tool for law enforcement, where it could help authenticate documents or identify forgeries. Apple’s scary-sounding patent for the iPhone is meant to help locate and disable the phone if it is lost of stolen. Don’t let these good intentions fool you—software that hides itself from you while it gives your personal data away to a third party is dangerous and dishonest. As the Sony BMG rootkit demonstrates, it may even leave your device wide open to attacks from third parties.

Traitorware is not some science-fiction vision of the future. It is the present. Indeed, the Sony rootkit dates back to 2005. Apple’s patent application indicates that we are likely to see more traitorware on the horizon. When that happens, EFF will be there to fight it. We believe that your software and devices should not be a tool for gathering your personal data without your explicit consent.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/what-traitorware





Hackers Crack Open Mobile Network

Man using mobile, PA Security researchers have shown how to eavesdrop on any GSM call
BBC

Mobile calls and texts made on any GSM network can be eavesdropped upon using four cheap phones and open source software, say security researchers.

Karsten Nohl and Sylvain Munaut demonstrated their eavesdropping toolkit at the Chaos Computer Club Congress (CCC) in Berlin.

The work builds on earlier research that has found holes in many parts of the most widely used mobile technology.

The pair spent a year putting together the parts of the eavesdropping toolkit.

"Now there's a path from your telephone number to me finding you and listening to your calls," Mr Nohl told BBC News. "The whole way."

He said many of the pieces in the eavesdropping toolkit already existed thanks to work by other security researchers but there was one part the pair had to create themselves.

"The one piece that completed the chain was the ability to record data off the air," he said.

In a demonstration at the CCC, the pair took attendees through all the steps that led from locating a particular phone to seizing its unique ID, then leap-frogging from that to getting hold of data swapped between a handset and a base station as calls are made and texts sent.

Key to grabbing the data from the air were cheap Motorola phones which can have their onboard software swapped for an open source alternative.

"We used the cheap Motorola telephones because a description of their firmware leaked to the internet," he said.

This led to the creation of open source alternative firmware that, he said, has its "filters" removed so it could see all the data being broadcast by a base station.
Bunch of keys, BBC The eavesdropping work builds on earlier work to list GSM encryption keys

This allows attackers to home in on the data they need to eavesdrop, said Mr Nohl. The encryption system that scrambles this data can be defeated using a huge list of encryption keys, called a rainbow table, that Mr Nohl generated in a separate research project.

"Any GSM call is fair game," he said.

GSM is the name of the technology used on the vast majority of mobile phone networks around the world. The GSMA, which represents operators and phone makers, estimates that there are more than five billion GSM mobiles in use around the world.

The GSMA has not responded to requests for comment about the research.

Playing around

Simeon Coney, a spokesman for mobile security firm Adaptive Mobile, said the work looked fairly thorough.

"Especially interesting is how the attack is aimed at a specific target phone, which could lead to malicious interest of high value targets," he added.

"This isn't an attack that is today readily repeatable yet by the anyone unfamiliar with the underlying technology," he said. "However, it does illustrate the manners in which the mobile phone system could be compromised in a focussed attack in less protected markets."

Mr Nohl said that before now commercial equipment that could spy on calls cost upwards of £35,000. The kit demonstrated at the Berlin event cost far less than that, he said. For instance, the Motorola phones used to grab data cost only 10 euros (£9) each.
Despite showing off the entire eavesdropping kit, there were no plans to release all of it for others to use, said Mr Nohl.

However, recreating the missing parts would not be difficult for a tech savvy amateur, he added.

"I expect people to do it for the fun of doing it."

Mr Nohl said the motivation for carrying out the research was to create awareness around the problem and perhaps prompt operators to improve security.

A few simple steps could make it much harder for eavesdroppers, he said.

"Raising their awareness is the most likely outcome, but the technical changes would be better."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12094227





Is Reading Wife's E-mail a Crime? Rochester Hills Man Faces Trial
L. L. BRASIER

A Rochester Hills man faces up to 5 years in prison -- for reading his wife's e-mail.

Oakland County prosecutors, relying on a Michigan statute typically used to prosecute crimes such as identity theft or stealing trade secrets, have charged Leon Walker, 33, with a felony after he logged onto a laptop in the home he shared with his wife, Clara Walker.

Using her password, he accessed her Gmail account and learned she was having an affair. He now is facing a Feb. 7 trial. She filed for divorce, which was finalized earlier this month.

Legal experts say it's the first time the statute has been used in a domestic case, and it might be hard to prove

"It's going to be interesting because there are no clear legal answers here," said Frederick Lane, a Vermont attorney and nationally recognized expert who has published five books on electronic privacy. The fact that the two still were living together, and that Leon Walker had routine access to the computer, may help him, Lane said.

"I would guess there is enough gray area to suggest that she could not have an absolute expectation of privacy," he said.

About 45% of divorce cases involve some snooping -- and gathering -- of e-mail, Facebook and other online material, Lane said. But he added that those are generally used by the warring parties for civil reasons -- not for criminal prosecution.
What do you think?

"It is an indication of how deeply electronic communication is woven into our lives," Lane said.

Leon Walker was Clara Walker's third husband. Her e-mail showed she was having an affair with her second husband, a man who once had been arrested for beating her in front of her small son. Leon Walker, worried that the child might be exposed to domestic violence again, handed the e-mails over to the child's father, Clara Walker's first husband. He promptly filed an emergency motion to obtain custody.

Leon Walker, a computer technician with Oakland County, was arrested in February 2009, after Clara Walker learned he had provided the e-mails to her first husband.

"I was doing what I had to do," Leon Walker told the Free Press in a recent interview. He has been out on bond since shortly after his arrest. "We're talking about putting a child in danger."

Oakland County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper defended her decision to charge Leon Walker.

"The guy is a hacker," Cooper said in a voice mail response to the Free Press last week. "It was password protected, he had wonderful skills, and was highly trained. Then he downloaded them and used them in a very contentious way."

Walker's defense attorney, Leon Weiss, said Cooper is "dead wrong" on the law.

"I've been a defense attorney for 34 years and I've never seen anything like this," he said. "This is a hacking statute, the kind of statute they use if you try to break into a government system or private business for some nefarious purpose. It's to protect against identity fraud, to keep somebody from taking somebody's intellectual property or trade secrets.

"I have to ask: 'Don't the prosecutors have more important things to do with their time?' "

Clara Walker, through her attorney, Michael McCulloch, declined an interview with the Free Press.

In the preliminary exam, Clara Walker testified that although Leon Walker had purchased the laptop for her, it was hers alone and she kept the password a secret.

Leon Walker told the Free Press he routinely used the computer and that she kept all of her passwords in a small book next to the computer.

"It was a family computer," he said. "I did work on it all the time."

A jury ultimately will decide.

Several area defense attorneys were astonished by the filing of the criminal charges.

"What's the difference between that and parents who get on their kids' Facebook accounts?" attorney Deborah McKelvy said. "You're going to have to start prosecuting a whole bunch of parents."
http://www.freep.com/article/2010122...30/1011/NEWS09





Cheaters Find an Adversary in Technology
Trip Gabriel

Mississippi had a problem born of the age of soaring student testing and digital technology. High school students taking the state’s end-of-year exams were using cellphones to text one another the answers.

With more than 100,000 students tested, proctors could not watch everyone — not when some teenagers can text with their phones in their pockets.

So the state called in a company that turns technology against the cheats: it analyzes answer sheets by computer and flags those with so many of the same questions wrong or right that the chances of random agreement are astronomical. Copying is the almost certain explanation.

Since the company, Caveon Test Security, began working for Mississippi in 2006, cheating has declined about 70 percent, said James Mason, director of the State Department of Education’s Office of Student Assessment. “People know that if you cheat there is an extremely high chance you’re going to get caught,” Mr. Mason said.

As tests are increasingly important in education — used to determine graduation, graduate school admission and, the latest, merit pay and tenure for teachers — business has been good for Caveon, a company that uses “data forensics” to catch cheats, billing itself as the only independent test security outfit in the country.

Its clients have included the College Board, the Law School Admission Council and more than a dozen states and big city school districts, among them Florida, Texas, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta — usually when they have been embarrassed by a scandal.

“Every single year I’ve been in testing there has been more cheating than the year before,” said John Fremer, 71, a Caveon co-founder who was once the chief test developer for the SAT.

Exposing cheats using statistical anomalies is more than a century old. James Michael Curley, the so-called rascal king of Massachusetts politics, and an associate were shown to have copied each other’s civil service exams in 1902 because they had 12 identical wrong answers.

Probability science has come a long way since then, and Caveon says its analysis of answer sheets is the most sophisticated to date. In addition to looking for copying, its computers, which occupy an office in American Fork, Utah, and can crunch up to one million records, hunt for illogical patterns, like test-takers who did better on harder questions than easy ones. That can be a sign of advance knowledge of part of a test.

The computers also look for unusually large score gains from a previous test by a student or class. They also count the number of erasures on answer sheets, which in some cases can be evidence that teachers or administrators tampered with a test.

When the anomalies are highly unlikely — their random occurrence, for example, is greater than one in one million — Caveon flags the tests for further investigation by school administrators.

Although its data forensics are esoteric and the company operates in the often-secretive world of testing, Caveon’s methods are not without critics. Walter M. Haney, a professor of education research and measurement at Boston College, said that because the company’s methods for analyzing data had not been published in scholarly literature, they were suspect.

“You just don’t know the accuracy of the methods and the extent they may yield false positives or false negatives,” said Dr. Haney, who in the 1990s pushed the Educational Testing Service, the developer of the SAT, to submit its own formulas for identifying cheats to an external review board.

David Foster, the chief executive of Caveon, said the company had not published its methods because it was too busy serving clients. But the company’s chief statistician is available to explain Caveon’s algorithms to any client who is curious.

Other means that the company uses to stop cheating are not based on statistics.

For the Law School Admission Council, which administers the LSAT four times a year to a total of more than 140,000 people, Caveon patrols the Internet looking for leaked questions on sites it calls “brain dumps,” where students who have just taken an exam discuss it openly.

“There’s all kinds of stuff on the blogs after the test trying to guess which stuff will show up in the future; there’s a whole cottage industry,” said Wendy Margolis, a spokeswoman for the council.

Caveon, which declined to reveal what it charges clients, sends letters to the people who operate those Web sites requiring them to take down the material under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Standardized testing is controversial with some parents and educators, but not to Dr. Fremer, Caveon’s longtime president, who recently gave up managerial duties. He credits testing with helping him escape from a working-class background. The son of a New York City firefighter, he earned a Ph.D. from Columbia in educational psychology and measurement, and then went to work for the Educational Testing Service. He first worked in the verbal aptitude department and later spent seven years leading a major overhaul of the SAT in 1994.

Dr. Fremer has little patience with critics who say standardized tests do not accurately measure academic prowess.

“Fundamentally,” he said, “testing is a way of ascertaining what you know and don’t know and developing ranks, and the critics go right to the ranks. Well, it does rank, but on the basis of knowledge of the subject, and if you think that’s not important, there’s something improper about the way you think.”

More rumpled academic than business type, Dr. Fremer has an air of great confidence and interest in his own ideas. He likes to tell stories, which frequently devolve into lengthy digressions. His home office near Atlantic City is the lair of an eccentric, packed with collections of casino matchbooks (he does not smoke) and empty cigar boxes (he thinks about turning them into pocketbooks).

“At this stage of my life, I’m an icon,” he said without an iota of self-consciousness.

Although it is in Caveon’s interest to dramatize or even inflate the incidence of cheating, the company was criticized this year by a state governor for underestimating it.

Hired to analyze English and math tests from Atlanta students after a state audit identified dozens of schools where cheating might have occurred, Caveon found far fewer problems. It identified a dozen elementary and middle schools at which cheating had probably taken place, but it essentially exonerated 33 others on the state’s list of suspect schools.

Gov. Sonny Perdue criticized that conclusion and appointed his own investigators in August. In an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he accused Caveon of seeking to “confine and constrain the damage” and suggested it was trying to protect its business prospects with other school districts.

Dr. Fremer dismissed that suggestion. Caveon’s data forensics on answer sheets were more sophisticated, he said.

The state had looked at just one metric: the number of times wrong answers had been erased and changed to right ones. The schools it identified as suspect had a statistically higher rate of wrong-to-right erasures than the statewide average. It inferred that adults had tampered with the tests.

Caveon maintains that counting wrong-to-right erasures is only one of several ways to mine answer-sheet data, and it can lead to false accusations. Dr. Fremer said it was common, for example, for students to lose their place in a test and erase a string of answers once they realized the mistake.

“Our analysis was better,” he said. “It was more in-depth. It didn’t inflate small differences and make a lot out of them.”

Caveon’s philosophy is that it is not necessary to ensnare every cheat to reduce cheating over all. Since cheats rarely confess even when confronted with overwhelming evidence, it is better to identify the most egregious cases and ignore the borderline ones.

“Your goal is not to catch a bunch of people and hang them,” Dr. Fremer said. “Your goal is to have fair and valid testing.”

“Prevention is the goal,” he said, as matter-of-fact as Joe Friday. “Detection is a step. We detect and prevent.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/ed...n/28cheat.html





Mozilla Mistakenly Posts File Containing Registered User Data
Mike Lennon

Mozilla Mistakenly Posts File Containing Registered User Data, Including MD5 Hash Passwords, to Public Web Server

Mozilla Mistakenly Posts File Containing Registered User DataMozilla today alerted registered users of its addons.mozilla.org site that it had mistakenly posted a file to a publicly available Web server which contained data from its registered user database including email addresses, first and last names, and an md5 hash representation of user passwords.

The addons.mozilla.org site hosts add-ons to Mozilla software, such as Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, and Sunbird which let users add new features and change the way browsers or applications work.

The organization claims it was notified by a third party who discovered the file on December 17th via its Web bounty program, and after investigating, does not believe the file was downloaded by others outside of Mozilla and the third party who reported the file to Mozilla. In response, Mozilla deleted all user passwords and has asked users to reset their passwords manually and change the password to any other sites which may utilize the same password.

Update: Chris Lyon, Director of Infrastructure Security at Mozilla, shared some additional information via blog post late Monday night (after we published this initial report) and noted that "The database included 44,000 inactive accounts using older, md5-based password hashes. We erased all the md5-passwords, rendering the accounts disabled. All current addons.mozilla.org accounts use a more secure SHA-512 password hash with per-user salts. SHA-512 and per user salts has been the standard storage method of password hashes for all active users since April 9th, 2009."

A copy of the email which Lyon sent to addons.mozilla.org on Monday evening is below:

Quote:
Dear addons.mozilla.org user,

The purpose of this email is to notify you about a possible disclosure of your information which occurred on December 17th. On this date, we were informed by a 3rd party who discovered a file with individual user records on a public portion of one of our servers. We immediately took the file off the server and investigated all downloads. We have identified all the downloads and with the exception of the 3rd party, who reported this issue, the file has been download by only Mozilla staff. This file was placed on this server by mistake and was a partial representation of the users database from addons.mozilla.org. The file included email addresses, first and last names, and an md5 hash representation of your password. The reason we are disclosing this event is because we have removed your existing password from the addons site and are asking you to reset it by going back to the addons site and clicking forgot password. We are also asking you to change your password on other sites in which you use the same password. Since we have effectively erased your password, you don't need to do anything if you do not want to use your account. It is disabled until you perform the password recovery.

We have identified the process which allowed this file to be posted publicly and have taken steps to prevent this in the future. We are also evaluating other processes to ensure your information is safe and secure.

Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact the infrastructure security team directly at infrasec@mozilla.com. If you are having issues resetting your account, please contact amo-admins@mozilla.org. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

Chris Lyon

Director of Infrastructure Security
http://www.securityweek.com/mozilla-...ered-user-data





Delete Older Facebook Apps -- or Risk Everyone's Privacy
Vanessa Dennis

If you have a Facebook page, you've probably added quite a few apps. If you've linked your YouTube account, New York Times account, or just about any mobile app to your Facebook profile, you've also installed their app -- and you're sharing your personal information with those companies. But here's the kicker: older Facebook apps appear to also have an all-you-can-eat buffet of access to your friends' personal data, while newer apps have much more limited access.

This may be old news to some, but a non-scientific survey of some Internet-saavy colleagues indicates that many of us are still using outdated Facebook apps. The developers of these older applications required you to hand over your entire digital identity, and often have access to all of your personal data--including things like marital status, personal photos and videos.

Take for instance, the "Send Cupcakes" app. This app lives in my Facebook account and was installed in 2008. It can access my friends' photos and videos. Would I willingly agree to allow this now that I am both more protective and more aware of privacy issues? No. But apparently back when I couldn't resist spamming my friends with cupcakes, I also told Facebook that it was perfectly fine for "Send Cupcakes" to access all of our private information.

In 2009, Facebook made several highly publicized privacy changes as part of a settlement with the Canadian government. This means newer apps offer much more privacy control for the user.

So in addition to monitoring your profile privacy settings on Facebook, you should also consider deleting older apps and installing newer versions. Here is an example of the data access from an older YouTube app and then the newer YouTube app. Much less personal information is available, and much less is required for the app to work.

The path to delete these apps is a little confusing, but you can follow the instructions below. Most people will find that they signed up for far more than they recall. I know I don't remember wanting to "Send Cupcakes."
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/...s-privacy.html





'Six Crimes a Day' Solved by CCTV, Met Says

CCTV camera in London Police staff need training on digital CCTV technology
BBC

CCTV cameras across London help solve almost six crimes a day, the Metropolitan Police (Met) has said.

Det Ch Insp Mick Neville, who heads the Met's identification unit, said CCTV images were "treated like fingerprints and DNA" by the force.

The number of suspects who were identified using the cameras went up from 1,970 in 2009 to 2,512 this year.

Earlier this month campaign group Big Brother Watch criticised the rise in the number of CCTV cameras.

The group said the cameras were "a ubiquitous feature on Britain's streets".

The number of cameras in Britain has gone up from 21,000 in 1999 to 59,753 in 2010, it added.

The Met said among the 2,512 suspects caught this year, four were suspected murderers, 23 rapists and sex attackers and five wanted gunmen.
'Public confidence'

Mr Neville said: "The key to our success is that images, unidentified images, are treated as a forensic discipline. They are treated like fingerprints and DNA."

But the move from VHS to digital technology was a "double-edged sword", he said.

"We get high-quality images that are easily searchable but they are often not held as long.

"With VHS people held 31 tapes, one for each day of the month, and it did not require specialist officers to get hold of the stuff.

"People are now being confronted by computers and hard drives and told to get those images and it is not as easy."

The rise in the number of criminals caught also raises "public confidence" and counters "bad publicity for CCTV", Mr Neville said.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-12080487





Auditors Question TSA's Use of and Spending on Technology
Dana Hedgpeth

Before there were full-body scanners, there were puffers.

The Transportation Security Administration spent about $30 million on devices that puffed air on travelers to "sniff" them out for explosives residue. Those machines ended up in warehouses, removed from airports, abandoned as impractical.

The massive push to fix airport security in the United States after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, led to a gold rush in technology contracts for an industry that mushroomed almost overnight. Since it was founded in 2001, the TSA has spent roughly $14 billion in more than 20,900 transactions with dozens of contractors.

In addition to beefing up the fleets of X-ray machines and traditional security systems at airports nationwide, about $8 billion also paid for ambitious new technologies. The agency has spent about $800 million on devices to screen bags and passenger items, including shoes, bottled liquids, casts and prostheses. For next year, it wants more than $1.3 billion for airport screening technologies.

But lawmakers, auditors and national security experts question whether the government is too quick to embrace technology as a solution for basic security problems and whether the TSA has been too eager to write checks for unproven products.

"We always want the best, the latest and greatest technology against terrorists, but that's not necessarily the smartest way to spend your money and your efforts," said Kip Hawley, who served as the head of the TSA from 2005 until last year. "We see a technology that looks promising, and the temptation is to run to deploy it before we fully understand how it integrates with the multiple layers we already have in place like using a watch list, training officers at every checkpoint to look for suspicious behavior and using some pat-downs."

Some say the fact that the United States hasn't had another 9/11-level terrorist attack shows that the investment was money well spent.

But government auditors have faulted the TSA and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, for failing to properly test and evaluate technology before spending money on it.

The puffer machines, for example, were an early TSA attempt at improving electronic screening in airport security lines. Designed to dislodge explosive particles by shooting air blasts at passengers, the detectors turned out to be unreliable and expensive to operate. But they were deployed in many airports before the TSA had fully tested them, according to the Government Accountability Office.

The puffers were "deployed even though TSA officials were aware that tests conducted during 2004 and 2005 on earlier [puffer] models suggested they did not demonstrate reliable performance in an airport environment," according to a GAO report from October 2009.

TSA officials told the GAO that they had deployed the puffers to "respond quickly to the threat posed by a suicide bomber" after incidents on Russian airliners in 2004.

The agency stopped buying and deploying the puffer machines to airports in June 2006. The GAO said in its October 2009 report that 116 puffers were in storage. A TSA spokesman said the agency had "since disposed of" the machines or transferred them to other agencies.

Analyzing risk

The government auditors expressed similar concerns that the TSA hasn't done good assessments of the risk, cost benefits or performances of other new technologies for screening at checkpoints.

The GAO has said that the TSA has "not conducted a risk assessment or cost-benefit analysis, or established quantifiable performance measures" on its new technologies. "As a result, TSA does not have assurance that its efforts are focused on the highest priority security needs."

In other cases, equipment to trace explosives and other devices for screening passengers have had technical problems and projected cost overruns, according to a recent GAO report.

The full-body scanners that have made headlines in recent weeks for their revealing images of passengers were tested more thoroughly than the puffer machines before being deployed, the GAO has found. But the auditors faulted the agency for not fully justifying their cost, saying that the agency's plan to double the number of body scanners in coming years will require more personnel to run and maintain them - an expense of as much as $2.4 billion.

"They're adding layers of security and technology, but they need to do a cost-benefit analysis to make sure this is worthwhile," said Steve Lord of the GAO's Homeland Security and Justice team, who has reviewed the TSA's purchases. "They need to look at whether there is other technology to deploy at checkpoints. Are we getting the best technology for the given pot of money? Is there a cheaper way to provide the same level of security through other technology?"

John Huey, an airport security expert, said the TSA's contracts with vendors to buy more equipment and devices often aren't done in a "systematic way."

"TSA has an obsession of finding a single box that will solve all its problems," Huey said. "They've spent and wasted money looking for that one box, and there is no such solution. . . . They respond to congressional mandates and the latest headlines of attempted terrorist attacks without any thought to risk management or separating out the threats in a logical way."

TSA officials disagree. They say there are responsible processes in place to research, develop and fund new technologies for airport security. And they point out that some gee-whiz equipment that vendors have pitched has taken too long to develop or has been too expensive to produce.

"We have to be predictive and acquire the best technology today to address the known threats by being informed of the latest intelligence and be proactive in working on what could be the next threats," said TSA Administrator John Pistole. "It is a tall order."

He said that technology isn't the only security effort underway. The TSA uses a combination of tactics, including terrorist watch lists, intelligence gathering and training security officers, to look for suspicious behavior.

Trial and error

The billions of dollars the TSA has spent on technology has been "a good investment," Pistole said, but he said that developing devices is full of risk. "It is a lot of art with the science. We're always competing for the best technology at the best price. It is just a constantly changing dynamic environment."

After 9/11, there was talk of cargo containers that could withstand explosions, for example, but airport security experts said they never came to fruition, in part because they were too heavy and airlines didn't want to pay for the extra fuel to carry them.

Another much talked-about device, a shoe scanner that would allow passengers to keep their shoes on while going through a checkpoint, has not been fully deployed to airports. Twelve companies are vying to provide shoe scanners to U.S. airports, but the TSA has not chosen one.

Contractors said they were responding to the requests the agency puts out for new ways to prevent terrorists in a world that has an ever-changing threat. Executives at airport security companies say they find that the TSA often buys its screening equipment and technologies to face the most recent threat rather than anticipating what might come next.

"We don't always see a well-defined roadmap of what they want," said Tom Ripp, president of the Security and Detection Systems division of L-3 Communications, a major security contractor.

Part of the problem is that experts disagree about what constitutes an effective airport security system, and policy makers are reluctant to embrace some techniques - such as profiling - that American society finds objectionable.

"Since the introduction of metal detectors in the 1970s, technologies have been bought and cobbled together in a somewhat piecemeal approach," said Tom LaTourrette, a security expert at RAND Corp., a nonprofit research institute.

"No one has been able to provide a satisfactory answer to the question of how to best structure aviation security," he said.

Quick solutions

The rush to improve security and quickly protect the public has also led to some shortcuts in contracting procedures, according to government reports.

A March audit from the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general looked at 29 support service contracts that the TSA had issued to buy new technologies for baggage and passenger screening equipment, worth a total of $662 million. It found that the agency "did not provide adequate management and oversight" on the contracts.

It concluded that the TSA "did not have reasonable assurance that contractors were performing as required, that it contracted for the services it needed, that it received the services it paid for, or that taxpayers were receiving the best value." The TSA said it has made improvements in its contracting process and oversight efforts.

Although big companies have been quick to respond to the new government market for air security, smaller firms - which often are incubators for cutting-edge technologies - say they have faced frustrations. Clint Seward of Acton, Mass., started trying in the late 1980s to sell the government a device about the size of a laptop called a BCT (bottle content tester) that would detect hazardous liquids in bottles and allow people to carry water bottles or sodas on planes.

"We were trying to convince them this made sense, but you couldn't get a consensus to get them to roll it out," Seward said. Then 9/11 happened.

"The day after they said, 'Can you give us a quote for 1,500 of these?' " Seward said. "I'm thinking, 'Sure.' " He did the quote, but he said that the TSA didn't have the money to fund it at first, and then he faced competition on the idea.

"By the time TSA got the money for it, the big guys took over," Seward said. "They realized it was big money to be made with TSA. They pushed their way in."

Last year, the TSA bought 500 bottled-liquid scanners in a $22 million contract with Smiths Detection. It has deployed more than 600 of the scanners to airports nationwide and expects to deploy more next year.

hedgpethd@washpost.com Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...122005599.html





One Tip Enough to Put Name on Watch List
Ellen Nakashima

A year after a Nigerian man allegedly tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner, officials say they have made it easier to add individuals' names to a terrorist watch list and improved the government's ability to thwart an attack in the United States.

The failure to put Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on the watch list last year renewed concerns that the government's system to screen out potential terrorists was flawed. Even though Abdulmutallab's father had told U.S. officials of his son's radicalization in Yemen, government rules dictated that a single-source tip was insufficient to include a person's name on the watch list.

Since then, senior counterterrorism officials say they have altered their criteria so that a single-source tip, as long as it is deemed credible, can lead to a name being placed on the watch list.

The government's master watch list is one of roughly a dozen lists, or databases, used by counterterrorism officials. Officials have periodically adjusted the criteria used to maintain it.

But civil liberties groups argue that the government's new criteria, which went into effect over the summer, have made it even more likely that individuals who pose no threat will be swept up in the nation's security apparatus, leading to potential violations of their privacy and making it difficult for them to travel.

"They are secret lists with no way for people to petition to get off or even to know if they're on," said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.
440,000 on list

Officials insist they have been vigilant about keeping law-abiding people off the master list. The new criteria have led to only modest growth in the list, which stands at 440,000 people, about 5 percent larger than last year. The vast majority are non-U.S. citizens.

"Despite the challenges we face, we have made significant improvements," Michael E. Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said in a speech this month at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "And the result of that is, in my view, that the threat of that most severe, most complicated attack is significantly lower today than it was in 2001."

The master watch list is used to screen people seeking to obtain a visa, cross a U.S. border, or board an airliner in or destined for the United States.

The standard for inclusion on it remains the same as it was before - that a person is "reasonably suspected" to be engaged in terrorism-related activity. But another senior counterterrorism official, who like some others would speak only on the condition of anonymity, said that officials have now "effectively in a broad stroke lowered the bar for inclusion."

Timothy Healy, director of the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center, which maintains the master list, said the new guidelines balance the protection of Americans from terrorist threats with the preservation of civil liberties. He said the watch list today is "more accurate, more agile," providing valuable intelligence to a growing number of partners that include state and local police and foreign governments.

Each day there are 50 to 75 instances in which a law enforcement official or government agent stops someone who a check confirms is on the watch list, a senior official at the Terrorist Screening Center said. Such "positive encounters" can take place at airports, land borders or consular offices, or during traffic stops.

The official recounted an incident two years ago in which a state trooper pulled over a truck driver for a traffic violation.

The driver appeared nervous, was traveling to several states, had three cellphones and plenty of food in his truck, and made several calls during the stop. The trooper was able to confirm through a call to the Terrorist Screening Center that the man was on the watch list. It turned out, the official said, that an FBI case agent had an open al-Qaeda-related investigation on the truck driver.

The names on the watch list are culled from a much larger catch-all database that is housed at the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean and that includes a huge variety of terrorism-related intelligence.

TIDE troubles

From its inception in 2005, the database, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, was plagued by technical difficulties.

In 2008, the counterterrorism center undertook a multimillion-dollar upgrade to streamline and more fully automate the database so that only one record exists per person, no matter how many aliases that person might have.

Those improvements should reduce errors and free up analysts for more pressing tasks, said Vicki Jo McBee, the counterterrorism center's chief information officer.

The new system will also ease the sharing of fingerprints and iris and facial images of people on the watch list among screening agencies, McBee said. And rather than sending data once a night to the Terrorist Screening Center's watch list, which can take hours, the new system should be able to update the list almost instantly as names are entered, McBee said.

Deployment has not been smooth. TIDE 2, as it is called, failed readiness tests and missed a December launch deadline. But now, McBee said, all tests have been passed and the system will be launched in January.

Meanwhile, the National Counterterrorism Center has developed a 70-person pursuit group to investigate "sleeper" terrorism threats, with four teams examining the regional hotbeds in Africa; in Yemen and the Arabian Gulf; in Pakistan and Europe; and in the United States. A fifth picks up the rest of the world.

"We try to look at the unknowns, the terrorists lurking in the dark that you don't know about, like the Abdulmutallabs of the world," said an official familiar with the group.

The teams, which include analysts from the CIA, FBI, Defense Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, might take a tip about a suspect flying to the United States on a certain route, then study travel records to see whether they can find travelers who match the pattern.

They also mine Internet sites for clues, in "a careful, legal way," the official said. For instance, though analysts had not identified Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistan-born Connecticut man, before his May attempt to blow up a car in Times Square, a pursuit team delineated his network of associates in the United States in part by gleaning details from social networking sites, she said.

Much of the pursuit group's work is filtering out irrelevant information.

"We get a huge kick out of" handing a lead to the FBI, the official said. "But . . . the ruling-out is almost as important as the actual finding of leads."

Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...122904172.html





Testing Freedom: Wikileaks and Filesharing
Orion

The phenomenon of Wikileaks and the mass retribution Julian Assange and his organization have recieved from governments throughout the world is indeed unprecedented. It does, however, contain elements of situations that have been created by the anarchic and almost totally free world of the internet.

The parallel of China banning aspects of the internet (many starting with "T") from being viewed by its citizens is best reflected by the move by a recent US Air Force decision to block access from 25 media websites that contain Wikileaks documents:

Quote:
WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US Air Force has blocked its workforce from visiting 25 media websites that published secret diplomatic documents released by WikiLeaks, a spokesman said Wednesday.

The move meant computers used by Air Force employees could not access newsites, including the New York Times, The Guardian and Der Speigel, that have posted the cables online, Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan told AFP.

The Air Force took the action because classified information was posted on those websites, he said.

The decision was taken by the 24th Air Force, which is responsible for cyber warfare and security.
Conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet, in his seminal work The Quest for Community, ties the creation of the modern state to the evolution from militias to organized militaries. If Nisbet's thesis is to be believed, it is most likely within government censorship that the seeds of further attempts at state control of the populace and the media they are exposed to can be seen. The impact of Wikileaks in the long run is what is critical. If Americans are to lose the fairly impressive degree of personal freedom we have grown accustomed to and begin to resemble more in operation the country whose state propaganda I've posted below, it will be when the priorities of national security and the military are put above the principles of freedom of speech and assembly that are foremost in the American Bill of Rights and allegedly our raison d'etre.

Since human beings reason by analogy, I'm going to continue with a completely different parallel here. At the turn of the century, Shawn Fanning was in a similar though far less dangerous seat as Assange is now, as his online file sharing program Napster resulted in the illegal downloading of millions of songs until legal suit by A&M Records and RIAA caused the whole enterprise to fold and declare bankruptcy.

Napster resulted in two different outcomes, one being the proliferation of much more difficult to control filesharing programs such as "torrents," which organizations like the RIAA are still trying to combat. The other outcome was a legitimitized form of music downloading, propelled by Steve Jobs, his iTunes program, the iPod and its various evolutionary gadgets (the iPad, the iPhone, etc.). Even if WikiLeaks were effectively shut down completely and Julian Assange locked up in Guantanamo Bay indefinitely, the genie is still out of the box and a step has been taken from leaked documents being fed directly to journalists, who are too often prudential and conservative, to being leaked directly on to the internet for the daring journalist to find and utilize.

OpenLeaks, an organization that seeks to supplant WikiLeaks, appears to have learned from Assange's missteps and developed a more discrete mode of operation:

Quote:
Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former deputy to WikiLeaks founder and CEO Julian Assange plans to launch a rival site soon called OpenLeaks.

Domscheit-Berg, who accused WikiLeaks of straying from its missions, says that OpenLeaks will be more transparent than WikiLeaks, Reuters reported....

OpenLeaks will not actually publish the documents it receives from anonymous sources, according to Forbes. Instead, the source can specify organizations they would like the information to go to. OpenLeaks will then forward the information.

The site will begin trials early 2011 and turn to bigger media after that.
Great quote from beetlejuice:

Quote:
What's really funny about this is the internet as we know it was developed by the US government exactly for filesharing. And it's this primary function that has both governments and business interest that rely upon the internet for commerce running around having hissy fits...they're fighting aginst the very nature of what the beast was made to perform.
http://dagblog.com/reader-blogs/wiki...lesharing-7838





The Merger of Journalists and Government Officials
Glenn Greenwald

The video of the CNN debate I did last night about WikiLeaks with former Bush Homeland Security Adviser (and CNN contributor) Fran Townsend and CNN anchor Jessica Yellin is posted below. The way it proceeded was quite instructive to me and I want to make four observations about the discussion:

(1) Over the last month, I've done many television and radio segments about WikiLeaks and what always strikes me is how indistinguishable -- identical -- are the political figures and the journalists. There's just no difference in how they think, what their values and priorities are, how completely they've ingested and how eagerly they recite the same anti-WikiLeaks, "Assange = Saddam" script. So absolute is the WikiLeaks-is-Evil bipartisan orthodoxy among the Beltway political and media class (forever cemented by the joint Biden/McConnell decree that Assange is a "high-tech Terrorist,") that you're viewed as being from another planet if you don't spout it. It's the equivalent of questioning Saddam's WMD stockpile in early 2003.

It's not news that establishment journalists identify with, are merged into, serve as spokespeople for, the political class: that's what makes them establishment journalists. But even knowing that, it's just amazing, to me at least, how so many of these "debates" I've done involving one anti-WikiLeaks political figure and one ostensibly "neutral" journalist -- on MSNBC with The Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart and former GOP Congresswoman Susan Molinari, on NPR with The New York Times' John Burns and former Clinton State Department official James Rubin, and last night on CNN with Yellin and Townsend -- entail no daylight at all between the "journalists" and the political figures. They don't even bother any longer with the pretense that they're distinct or play different assigned roles. I'm not complaining here -- Yellin was perfectly fair and gave me ample time -- but merely observing how inseparable are most American journalists from the political officials they "cover."

(2) From the start of the WikiLeaks controversy, the most striking aspect for me has been that the ones who are leading the crusade against the transparency brought about by WikiLeaks -- the ones most enraged about the leaks and the subversion of government secrecy -- have been . . . America's intrepid Watchdog journalists. What illustrates how warped our political and media culture is as potently as that? It just never seems to dawn on them -- even when you explain it -- that the transparency and undermining of the secrecy regime against which they are angrily railing is supposed to be . . . what they do.

What an astounding feat to train a nation's journalist class to despise above all else those who shine a light on what the most powerful factions do in the dark and who expose their corruption and deceit, and to have journalists -- of all people -- lead the way in calling for the head of anyone who exposes the secrets of the powerful. Most ruling classes -- from all eras and all cultures -- could only fantasize about having a journalist class that thinks that way, but most political leaders would have to dismiss that fantasy as too extreme, too implausible, to pursue. After all, how could you ever get journalists -- of all people -- to loathe those who bring about transparency and disclosure of secrets? But, with a few noble exceptions, that's exactly the journalist class we have.

There will always be a soft spot in my heart for Jessica Yellin because of that time when she unwittingly (though still bravely) admitted on air that -- when she worked at MSNBC -- NBC's corporate executives constantly pressured the network's journalists to make their reporting favorable to George Bush and the Iraq War (I say "unwittingly" because she quickly walked back that confession after I and others wrote about it and a controversy ensued). But, as Yellin herself revealed in that moment of rare TV self-exposure, that's the government-subservient corporate culture in which these journalists are trained and molded.

(3) It's extraordinary how -- even a full month into the uproar over the diplomatic cable release -- extreme misinformation still pervades these discussions, usually without challenge. It's understandable that on the first day or in the first week of a controversy, there would be some confusion; but a full month into it, the most basic facts are still being wildly distorted. Thus, there was Fran Townsend spouting the cannot-be-killed lie that WikiLeaks indiscriminately dumped all the cables. And I'm absolutely certain that had I not objected, that absolute falsehood would have been unchallenged by Yellin and allowed to be transmitted to CNN viewers as Truth. The same is true for the casual assertion -- as though it's the clearest, most obvious fact in the world -- that Assange "committed crimes" by publishing classified information or that what he's doing is so obviously different than what investigative journalists routinely do. These are the unchallenged falsehoods transmitted over and over, day after day, to the American viewing audience.

(4) If one thinks about it, there's something quite surreal about sitting there listening to a CNN anchor and her fellow CNN employee angrily proclaim that Julian Assange is a "terrorist" and a "criminal" when the CNN employee doing that is . . . . George W. Bush's Homeland Security and Terrorism adviser. Fran Townsend was a high-level national security official for a President who destroyed another nation with an illegal, lie-fueled military attack that killed well over 100,000 innocent people, created a worldwide torture regime, illegally spied on his own citizens without warrants, disappeared people to CIA "black sites," and erected a due-process-free gulag where scores of knowingly innocent people were put in cages for years. Julian Assange never did any of those things, or anything like them. But it's Assange who is the "terrorist" and the "criminal."

Do you think Jessica Yellin would ever dare speak as scornfully and derisively about George Bush or his top officials as she does about Assange? Of course not. Instead, CNN quickly hires Bush's Homeland Security Adviser who then becomes Yellin's colleague and partner in demonizing Assange as a "terrorist." Or consider the theme that framed last night's segment: Assange is profiting off classified information by writing a book! Beyond the examples I gave, Bob Woodward has become a very rich man by writing book after book filled with classified information about America's wars which his sources were not authorized to give him. Would Yellin ever in a million years dare lash out at Bob Woodward the way she did Assange? To ask the question is to answer it (see here as CNN's legal correspondent Jeffrey Toobin is completely befuddled in the middle of his anti-WikiLeaks rant when asked by a guest, Clay Shirky, to differentiate what Woodward continuously does from what Assange is doing).

They're all petrified to speak ill of Bob Woodward because he's a revered spokesman of the royal court to which they devote their full loyalty. Julian Assange, by contrast, is an actual adversary -- not a pretend one -- of that royal court. And that -- and only that -- is what is driving virtually this entire discourse:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/gl...nnn/index.html





The Worsening Journalistic Disgrace at Wired
Glenn Greenwald

For more than six months, Wired's Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen has possessed -- but refuses to publish -- the key evidence in one of the year's most significant political stories: the arrest of U.S. Army PFC Bradley Manning for allegedly acting as WikiLeaks' source. In late May, Adrian Lamo -- at the same time he was working with the FBI as a government informant against Manning -- gave Poulsen what he purported to be the full chat logs between Manning and Lamo in which the Army Private allegedly confessed to having been the source for the various cables, documents and video that WikiLeaks released throughout this year. In interviews with me in June, both Poulsen and Lamo confirmed that Lamo placed no substantive restrictions on Poulsen with regard to the chat logs: Wired was and remains free to publish the logs in their entirety.

Despite that, on June 10, Wired published what it said was only "about 25 percent" of those logs, excerpts that it hand-picked. For the last six months, Poulsen has not only steadfastly refused to release any further excerpts, but worse, has refused to answer questions about what those logs do and do not contain. This is easily one of the worst journalistic disgraces of the year: it is just inconceivable that someone who claims to be a "journalist" -- or who wants to be regarded as one -- would actively conceal from the public, for months on end, the key evidence in a political story that has generated headlines around the world.

In June, I examined the long, strange and multi-layered relationship between Poulsen and Lamo, and in that piece raised the issue of Wired's severe journalistic malfeasance in withholding these chat logs. But this matter needs to be revisited now for three reasons:

(1) For the last six months, Adrian Lamo has been allowed to run around making increasingly sensationalistic claims about what Manning told him; journalists then prominently print Lamo's assertions, but Poulsen's refusal to release the logs or even verify Lamo's statements prevents anyone from knowing whether Lamo's claims about what Manning said are actually true.

(2) There are new, previously undisclosed facts about the long relationship between Wired/Poulsen and a key figure in Manning's arrest -- facts that Poulsen inexcusably concealed.

(3) Subsequent events gut Poulsen's rationale for concealing the logs and, in some cases, prove that his claims are false.

Much of the new evidence cited here has been found and compiled by Firedoglake in three valuable indices: the key WikiLeaks-Manning articles, a timeline of the key events and the various excerpts of the Manning/Lamo chat logs published by different parties.

* * * * *

Poulsen's concealment of the chat logs is actively blinding journalists and others who have been attempting to learn what Manning did and did not do. By allowing the world to see only the fraction of the Manning-Lamo chats that he chose to release, Poulsen has created a situation in which his long-time "source," Adrian Lamo, is the only source of information for what Manning supposedly said beyond those published exceprts. Journalists thus routinely print Lamo's assertions about Manning's statements even though -- as a result of Poulsen's concealment -- they are unable to verify whether Lamo is telling the truth. Due to Poulsen, Lamo is now the one driving many of the media stories about Manning and WikiLeaks even though Lamo (a) is a convicted felon, (b) was (as Poulsen strangely reported at the time) involuntarily hospitalized for severe psychiatric distress a mere three weeks before his chats with Manning, and (c) cannot keep his story straight about anything from one minute to the next.

To see how odious Poulsen's concealment of this evidence is, consider this December 15 New York Times article by Charlie Savage, which reports that the DOJ is trying to prosecute WikiLeaks based on the theory that Julian Assange "encouraged or even helped" Manning extract the classified information. Savage extensively quotes Lamo claiming that Manning told him all sorts of things about WikiLeaks and Assange that are not found in the portions of the chat logs published by Wired:

Quote:
Among materials prosecutors are studying is an online chat log in which Private Manning is said to claim that he had been directly communicating with Mr. Assange using an encrypted Internet conferencing service as the soldier was downloading government files. Private Manning is also said to have claimed that Mr. Assange gave him access to a dedicated server for uploading some of them to WikiLeaks.

Adrian Lamo, an ex-hacker in whom Private Manning confided and who eventually turned him in, said Private Manning detailed those interactions in instant-message conversations with him.

He said the special server’s purpose was to allow Private Manning’s submissions to “be bumped to the top of the queue for review.” By Mr. Lamo’s account, Private Manning bragged about this “as evidence of his status as the high-profile source for WikiLeaks.”

Wired magazine has published excerpts from logs of online chats between Mr. Lamo and Private Manning. But the sections in which Private Manning is said to detail contacts with Mr. Assange are not among them. Mr. Lamo described them from memory in an interview with the Times, but he said he could not provide the full chat transcript because the F.B.I. had taken his hard drive, on which it was saved. . . .

It has been known that investigators were looking for evidence that one or more people in Boston served as an intermediary between Private Manning and WikiLeaks, although there is no public sign that they have found any evidence supporting that theory. . . .

"At some point, [Manning] became satisfied that he was actually talking to Assange and not some unknown third party posing as Assange, and based on that he began sending in smaller amounts of data from his computer," Mr. Lamo said. "Because of the nature of his Internet connection, he wasn’t able to send large data files easily. He was using a satellite connection, so he was limited until he did an actual physical drop-off when he was back in the United States in January of this year."
Lamo's claim -- that Manning told him that he physically dropped off a disk with classified information to WikiLeaks' "intermediaries" in Boston -- is nowhere to be found in the chat logs released by Poulsen. And while there are a couple of vague references in the chats to Manning's interactions with Assange, there is also little in the released portions about Assange using an "encrypted Internet conferencing service" to talk to Manning or specially creating a "dedicated server" for Manning to use. Yet here is Lamo, on the front page of The New York Times, making these incredibly inflammatory accusations about what Manning supposedly told him -- accusations that could implicate both WikiLeaks and numerous individuals in the Boston area, including MIT students who (due at least in part to Lamo's prior accusations) have been the subject of WikiLeaks-related probes by the FBI.

Whether Manning actually said these things to Lamo could be verified in one minute by "journalist" Kevin Poulsen. He could either say: (1) yes, the chats contain such statements by Manning, and here are the portions where he said these things, or (2) no, the chats contain no such statements by Manning, which means Lamo is either lying or suffers from a very impaired recollection about what Manning said. Poulsen could also provide Lamo -- who claims he is no longer in possession of them -- with a copy of the chat logs (which Lamo gave him) so that journalists quoting Lamo about Manning's statements could see the actual evidence rather than relying on Lamo's claims. Any true "journalist" -- or any person minimally interested in revealing the truth -- would do exactly that in response to Lamo's claims as published by The New York Times.

But manifestly, those descriptions do not apply to Kevin Poulsen. It's been almost two weeks since Savage wrote his story in which he prominently pointed out that Wired has the evidence -- but has not released it -- which would confirm whether Lamo is telling the truth about these vital matters, and Poulsen has said nothing. Moreover, I sent Poulsen an e-mail two days ago -- here -- expressly asking whether or not the chat logs contain what Lamo says they contain about WikiLeaks and Boston-area "intermediaries," and he has ignored the inquiries. This is not the behavior of a journalist seeking to inform the public, but of someone eager, for whatever reasons, to hide the truth.

Making Poulsen's behavior even more inexcusable is that, back in July, Lamo admitted to the New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller that he has "no direct evidence" that anyone helped Manning obtain the classified information:

Quote:
Mr. Lamo acknowledged that he had no direct evidence that Private Manning had help. He said he based his belief on information from people who knew Private Manning, not on his contact with the soldier himself. Asked if Private Manning had ever told him of any WikiLeaks assistance, Mr. Lamo replied, "Not explicitly, no."
But now that Savage is reporting that the DOJ needs to prove that WikiLeaks actively helped Manning, Lamo pops up to make the exact opposite claim: namely, that Manning explicitly told him in these chats that he had help from Assange and from WikiLeaks "intermediaries" in Boston. Critically, as Marcy Wheeler documented, the government -- in its Charging Document against Manning -- has not accused Manning of transmitting the 260,000 diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks because it likely had no evidence that he did so. Nor is there any evidence that WikiLeaks conspired in any way with Manning. All of these critical gaps are now conveniently being filled in for public consumption by Lamo's accusations -- based on assertions about what Manning told him in these chats.

There is one person who could immediately confirm whether Lamo's claims are true: Kevin Poulsen of Wired. Yet he steadfastly refuses to do so. Instead, he is actively concealing the key evidence in this matter -- hiding the truth from the public -- even as that magazine continues to employ him as a senior editor and hold him out as a "journalist." For anyone who cares at all about what actually happened here, it's imperative that as much pressure as possible be applied to Wired to release those chat logs or, at the very least, to release the portions about which Lamo is making public claims or, in the alternative, confirm that they do not exist.

* * * * *

Poulsen's concealment of the key evidence is rendered all the more bizarre by virtue of previously undisclosed facts about Wired's involvement in Manning's arrest. From the start, the strangest aspect of this whole story -- as I detailed back in June and won't repeat here -- has been the notion that one day, out of the blue, Manning suddenly contacted a total stranger over the Internet and, using unsecured chat lines, immediately confessed in detail to crimes that would likely send him to prison for decades.

More strangely still, it wasn't just any total stranger whom Manning contacted, but rather a convicted felon who is notorious in the hacking community for his dishonesty and compulsive self-promotion, and who had just been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital three weeks earlier (notably, Poulsen's May article on Lamo's hospitalization began with this passage: "Last month Adrian Lamo, a man once hunted by the FBI, did something contrary to his nature. He picked up a payphone outside a Northern California supermarket and called the cops" -- of course, a mere three weeks later, Lamo would "call the cops" again, this time to turn informant against Bradley Manning). Add to all of that the central involvement of Lamo's long-time confidant, Poulsen, in exclusively reporting on this story and one has a series of events that are wildly improbable (which doesn't mean it didn't happen that way).

But now there are new facts making all of this stranger still, and it all centers around a man named Mark Rasch. Who is Rasch? He's several things. He's the former chief of the DOJ's Computer Crimes Unit in the 1990s. He's a "regular contributor" to Wired. He's also the General Counsel of "Project Vigilant," the creepy and secretive vigilante group that claims to gather Internet communications and hand them over to the U.S. government. Rasch is also the person who prosecuted Kevin Poulsen back in the mid-1990s and put him in prison for more than three years. As detailed below, Rasch also has a long and varied history with both Poulsen and, to a lesser extent, Lamo. And -- most significantly of all -- Rasch is the person who put Lamo in touch with federal law authorities in order to inform on Manning:

Quote:
A former top U.S. Justice Department prosecutor helped to turn over an alleged Wikileaks source to the FBI and Army intelligence, CNET has learned.

Mark Rasch, previously the head of the Justice Department's computer crime unit who is now in private practice in the Washington, D.C., area, said during a telephone interview that he identified investigators who would want to know that an U.S. Army intelligence analyst in Kuwait may have handed over sensitive documents to the world's most famous document-leaking Web site. . . .

Lamo contacted Chet Uber, a computer security specialist and the founder of a group called Project Vigilant. Uber then contacted Rasch.

"I got a call from Chet saying Adrian has a guy he's been chatting with online who has access to classified cables," Rasch said. "So I found him people in the intelligence community and law enforcement community he could report it to."
Let's consider what this means based just on these facts. First, for the first several weeks after the story of Manning's arrest, it was Wired that was exclusively reporting on the relevant facts by virtue of Poulsen's close relationship with Lamo. Yet at no point -- through today -- have Poulsen or Wired ever bothered to disclose that the person who "helped to turn over [Manning] to the FBI and Army intelligence" is (a) the same person who put Poulsen is prison for several years, (b) a regular contributor to Wired and (c) a long-time associate and source for Poulsen. Just on journalistic grounds, this nondisclosure is extraordinary (Poulsen even wrote a long article about Uber's role in pressuring Lamo to inform to the Government without once mentioning Rasch). As Poulsen was writing about this Manning story all while working closely with Lamo as he served as FBI informant -- and as Poulsen actively conceals the chat logs -- wouldn't you want to know that the person who played such a key role in Manning's arrest was the same person who prosecuted Poulsen and regularly contributes to his magazine?

Then there's the way that these facts make this already-strange story much stranger still. It isn't just that Manning -- when deciding to confess to these crimes over the Internet to a total stranger -- just happened to pick a convicted felon (Lamo) who spent little time in prison given the crimes of which he was convicted. Beyond that, Lamo, at the time Manning contacted him, was working with this group -- Project Vigilant -- whose self-proclaimed mission is to inform federal authorities of crimes taking place over the Internet, and whose general counsel is the former head of the DOJ's Computer Crimes Unit. If that's really what happened, that's some really, really, really bad luck on Manning's part: to randomly choose someone to whom to confess who was not only once under the thumb of DOJ authorities, but who was working at that very moment with a federal-government-connected group and the DOJ's former top computer crimes prosecutor. To describe that as improbable is to understate the case (but again, that doesn't mean it didn't happen: improbable events do sometimes occur).

Beyond all of this, Poulsen has a long history with Rasch even beyond the fact that Rasch prosecuted him. Poulsen's first job when getting out of prison was with Security Focus, the same entity for which Rasch also regularly wrote. Although it was Poulsen who almost always and exclusively wrote about Lamo's exploits, in 2003, Poulsen was unable to do so because he had been subpoenaed by the DOJ in connection with Lamo's prosecution, and it was thus Rasch who took up the slack to write about Lamo for Security Focus. Moreover, Rasch has been a long-time source for Poulsen going back to 1999 and 2001, including when Poulsen was writing about Lamo, and was also Poulsen's source repeatedly for articles he wrote at Wired. Rasch has also been a regular source for Wired's Kim Zetter, who was Poulsen's co-author on the Manning articles (on November 29, an ABC News story on Manning featured Rasch as an "expert" analyzing the accusations without any disclosure of the key role he played in Manning's arrest).

Back in June, WikiLeaks -- citing this comment at BoingBoing -- suggested that Poulsen was not merely a reporter writing about Lamo's informing on Manning, but was an active participant in helping that to happen and was even himself a government informant. Poulsen vehemently denied that both to me (without my even asking) and in an interview he gave to The Columbia Journalism Review. Part of the problem here was Poulsen's own doing: when he first broke the story about Manning's arrest, he not only failed to disclose the fact that he had been speaking to and meeting with Lamo before Manning's arrest (while Lamo cooperated with the government), but actively misled readers about that fact by including this sentence in his first article: "'I wouldn't have done this if lives weren't in danger,' says Lamo, who discussed the details with Wired.com following Manning’s arrest." In fact, Poulsen had extensively spoken with and even met with Lamo before Manning's arrest.

As I wrote back in June and as is still true, there's no evidence to support that specific "informant" accusation against Poulsen. Poulsen has done good journalism in the past in exposing government wrongdoing (while at Wired, he also worked to locate various sex criminals online who were then prosecuted by a local computer crimes unit).

But what is incontrovertibly true is that a Wired contributer -- who just so happens also to be Poulsen's prosecutor and long-time source -- played a key role in putting Lamo in contact with government authorities in order to inform on Manning. Poulsen never mentioned any of that, and -- even once Rasch's role was publicly reported -- never once disclosed his multi-faceted relationship to Rasch in all the times he's written about Manning and WikiLeaks. What's also true is that while many convicted hackers had very rigid restrictions placed on them when leaving prison (Kevin Mitnick, for instance, was originally barred from using the Internet entirely), Poulsen not only quickly began writing online as a journalist about the hacker world, but did so at the very same publication -- Security Focus -- that also repeatedly published articles by his prosecutor, Mark Rasch.

What makes all of this particularly critical is that we still have no real idea how and under what circumstances Manning and Lamo actually began speaking. Lamo repeatedly claimed -- and Poulsen and others repeatedly "reported" -- that those two began speaking when Manning contacted Lamo in a chat. But Lamo told me something much different in the interview I conducted with him in June: that before chatting with him, Manning had sent Lamo several encrypted e-mails which -- Lamo claims -- he was never able to read before turning over to the FBI because he was unable to find his encryption key. Between Lamo's alleged inability to describe these initial e-mails and Poulsen's ongoing refusal to publish the chat logs, the evidence of how Manning and Lamo came to speak and what was said is being actively hidden (and Marcy Wheeler raises several compelling reasons why it seems Lamo was cooperating with government authorities as he spoke to Manning before the time he and Poulsen claim that cooperation began).

* * * * *

When I first wrote back in June about Wired's concealment of these chat logs, the excuses Poulsen gave were quickly proved to be false. Poulsen told me that the only portions of the chats that Wired was concealing were "either Manning discussing personal matters that aren't clearly related to his arrest, or apparently sensitive government information that I'm not throwing up without vetting first." But after that, The Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima quoted from the chat logs and included several parts that (a) Wired had withheld but (b) were not about personal matters or national security secrets; see this analysis here of what was disclosed by the Post, Wired and others. (Nakashima and the Post refuse even to say whether they possess all the chat logs. When I asked Nakashima several months ago, she referred my inquiry to a corporate spokeswoman, who then told me: "We don't discuss the details of our newsgathering." But I focus here on Poulsen because of his central role in these events, his long-standing relationships with the key parties, and the fact that -- unlike the Post, which obviously has nothing to do with journalism -- I actually expect better of Wired).

But even if one back then found Poulsen's rationale persuasive for concealing 75 percent of the chat logs, circumstances have clearly changed. For one, WikiLeaks has now published hundreds of thousands of documents, including almost 2,000 diplomatic cables; thus, at least some of the "sensitive government information" in the chats over which Poulsen was acting as self-anointed Guardian has now presumably been publicly disclosed. More important, Lamo has spent months making all kinds of public claims about what Manning supposedly told him as part of these chats -- claims that are not found in the chat excerpts released by Wired. Those subsequent public statements by Lamo create an obligation for Poulsen either to release the portions of the chats that Lamo is describing or confirm that they do not exist (and thus reveal that his close, long-time "source," Lamo, is lying or significantly misremembering).

Whether by design or effect, Kevin Poulsen and Wired have played a critical role in concealing the truth from the public about the Manning arrest. In doing so, they have actively shielded Poulsen's longtime associate, Adrian Lamo -- as well as government investigators -- from having their claims about Manning's statements scrutinized, and have enabled Lamo to drive much of the reporting of this story by spouting whatever he wants about Manning's statements without any check. This has long ago left the realm of mere journalistic failure and stands as one of the most egregious examples of active truth-hiding by a "journalist" I've ever seen.

UPDATE: Evan Hansen, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired.com, says on Twitter that Poulsen is "on vacation" but that Wired will post a response to this article tomorrow. What they ought to do, at the absolute minimum, is post the portions of the chat logs about which Lamo had made public statements or make clear that they do not exist. And here's Poulsen's response on Twitter, posted just now:

Finally, here's yet another photograph -- taken after this well-noted one with Kevin Mitnick (and posted to Lamo's Facebook page on June 9, 2010, one day before Wired published the chat logs) -- of Pouslen together with his "source," the government informant Adrian Lamo:
http://www.salon.com/print.html?URL=...10/12/27/wired





Putting the Record Straight on the Lamo-Manning Chat Logs
Evan Hansen and Kevin Poulsen

Editor’s note: This is a two-part article, in which Wired.com editor-in-chief Evan Hansen and senior editor Kevin Poulsen respond separately to criticisms of the site’s Wikileaks coverage.


The Case for Privacy

Six months ago, Wired.com senior editor Kevin Poulsen came to me with a whiff of a story. A source he’d known for years claimed he was talking to the FBI about an enlisted soldier in Iraq who had bragged to him in an internet chat of passing hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the secret-spilling site Wikileaks.

It’s probably nothing, Poulsen said. The source in question, an ex-hacker named Adrian Lamo, often sees himself as at the center of important events in need of public attention. But sometimes, Poulsen added, he’s right.

Acknowledging the long shot, Poulsen wanted to drive up to Sacramento, California, to meet Lamo in person and try to get a copy of the alleged chats. I agreed.

What followed was a days-long negotiation of two steps forward, one step back, familiar to investigative reporters whose social networks and reporting skills sometimes put them in touch with skittish sources holding the keys to serious news. The result was our groundbreaking report in June confirming the arrest of Pfc. Bradley Manning on suspicion of passing classified material to Wikileaks, a central thread in what is arguably one of the most important news stories of the year.

Successfully winning trust from people with little to gain and much to lose, while vigorously verifying the facts at hand and maintaining the highest ethical standards, is a balancing act that few reporters ever master completely.

In the five years I’ve worked with Poulsen, I’ve seen him successfully balance these unpredictable forces not once or twice, but literally dozens of times.

He has revealed the inner workings of criminal hacking operations, uncovered sex predators on MySpace and won numerous awards for his dogged efforts. When I think of the what the word “journalism” embodies, I can find no better example.

It’s odd to find myself in the position of writing a defense of someone who should be held up as a model. But it is unfortunately necessary, thanks to the shameless and unjustified personal attacks he’s faced ever since he and Wired.com senior reporter Kim Zetter broke the news of Manning’s arrest.

Armchair critics, apparently unhappy that Manning was arrested, have eagerly second-guessed our motives, dreamed up imaginary conflicts and pounded the table for more information: Why would Manning open himself up to a complete stranger and discuss alleged crimes that could send him to prison for decades? How is it possible that Wired.com just happened to have a connection with the one random individual Manning picked out to confide in, only to send him down for it?

Not one single fact has been brought to light suggesting Wired.com did anything wrong in pursuit of this story. In lieu of that, our critics — notably Glenn Greenwald of Salon, an outspoken Wikileaks defender — have resorted to shocking personal attacks, based almost entirely on conjecture and riddled with errors. (See Poulsen’s separate rebuttal below.)

Tellingly, Greenwald never misses a chance to mention Poulsen’s history as a hacker, events that transpired nearly two decades ago and have absolutely no bearing on the current case. This is nothing more than a despicable smear campaign based on the oldest misdirection in the book: Shoot the messenger.

The bottom line is that Wired.com did not have anything to do with Manning’s arrest. We discovered it and reported it: faithfully, factually and with nuanced appreciation of the ethical issues involved.

Ironically, those ethics are now being pilloried, presumably because they have proven inconvenient for critics intent on discrediting Lamo.

At stake are the chat logs.

We have already published substantial excerpts from the logs, but critics continue to challenge us to reveal all, ostensibly to fact-check some statements that Lamo has made in the press summarizing portions of the logs from memory (his computer hard drive was confiscated, and he no longer has has a copy).

Our position has been and remains that the logs include sensitive personal information with no bearing on Wikileaks, and it would serve no purpose to publish them at this time.

That doesn’t mean we’ll never publish them, but before taking an irrevocable action that could harm an individual’s privacy, we have to weigh that person’s privacy interest against news value and relevance.

This is a standard journalistic balancing test — not one that we invented for Manning. Every experienced reporter of serious purpose recognizes this, and the principal is also embodied in the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics:

“Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance…. Only an overriding public need can justify intrusion into anyone’s privacy. Show good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.”

Even Greenwald believes this … sometimes. When The New York Times ran an entirely appropriate and well reported profile of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange — discussing his personality and his contentious leadership style — Greenwald railed against the newspaper, terming the reporters “Nixonian henchmen.”

Similarly, when Assange complained that journalists were violating his privacy by reporting the details of rape and molestation allegations against him in Sweden, Greenwald agreed, writing: “Simultaneously advocating government transparency and individual privacy isn’t hypocritical or inconsistent; it’s a key for basic liberty.”

With Manning, Greenwald adopts the polar opposite opinions. “Journalists should be about disclosing facts, not protecting anyone.” This dissonance in his views has only grown in the wake of reports that Manning might be offered a plea deal in exchange for testimony against Assange.

To be sure, there’s a legitimate argument to be made for publishing Manning’s chats. The key question (to us): At what point does everything Manning disclosed in confidence become fair game for reporting, no matter how unconnected to his leaking or the court-martial proceeding against him, and regardless of the harm he will suffer? That’s a debate we have had internally at Wired with every major development in the case.

It is not a question, however, that we’re inclined to put to popular referendum. And while we welcome the honest views of other journalists acting in good faith, we now doubt this describes Glenn Greenwald.

At his most reasonable, Greenwald impugns our motives, attacks the character of our staff and carefully selects his facts and sources to misrepresent the truth and generate outrage in his readership.

In his latest screed, “The Worsening Journalistic Disgrace at Wired,” he devotes 12 paragraphs to a misinformed argument centering on a Dec. 15 New York Times story about the possibility that the Justice Department might seek to charge Assange under federal conspiracy law.

The Times story quotes Lamo as saying that Manning described uploading his leaks to Assange via a dedicated file server, and that he communicated with Assange over encrypted chat. The story says those portions of the conversations aren’t included in the excerpts we published.

Based on that, Greenwald claims that Wired’s “concealment” of the chat logs “is actively blinding journalists and others who have been attempting to learn what Manning did and did not do.” (That’s one sentence. He goes on in that vein for quite a while.) But the Times story is incorrect, as we noted on Wired.com the day after it ran. The excerpts we published included passages referencing both the file server and the encrypted chat room.

Nonetheless, once the Times story — and our explanation — was over a week old, Greenwald sent Poulsen an e-mail inquiring about it, and giving him one day to respond to his questions. He sent that e-mail on Christmas Day.

When we didn’t meet the urgent Yuletide deadline he’d imposed on himself to publish a piece about a 10-day-old newspaper article, he wrote in his column that we “ignored the inquiries,” adding: “This is not the behavior of a journalist seeking to inform the public, but of someone eager, for whatever reasons, to hide the truth.”

Separately, the Times story repeated Lamo’s personal theory that Manning passed some information to WikiLeaks by physically handing off disks to friends at MIT. The paper does not claim that Lamo drew that conclusion from his chats with Manning. (Lamo says he got it from “a USG [U.S. government] source close to the case.”) We’ve heard and read that theory before, but have not reported it, for lack of evidence.

Though we didn’t report it ourselves, Greenwald argues that we have a duty to publicly refute the theory. In his world, our consideration, thus far, of Manning’s privacy leaves us with an obligation to chase down every story on Manning, correct any errors, and refute any reporting that we disagree with.

He is, again, wrong. Our obligation is to report the news accurately and fairly. We’re responsible only for what appears on Wired.com. And our record on WikiLeaks and Manning is unblemished.

–Evan Hansen, Editor-in-Chief


A Litany of Errors

On Monday, Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald unleashed a stunning attack on this publication, and me in particular, over our groundbreaking coverage of WikiLeaks and the ongoing prosecution of the man suspected of being the organization’s most important source. Greenwald’s piece is a breathtaking mix of sophistry, hypocrisy and journalistic laziness.

We took the high ground and ignored Greenwald and Salon the first time they pulled this nonsense. Now it’s time to set the record straight.

If you’re just tuning in, Wired.com was the first to report, last June, on the then-secret arrest of Pfc. Bradley Manning. I learned of the arrest from Adrian Lamo, a well-known former hacker on whom I reported extensively from 2000 to 2002. It was Lamo who turned Manning in to the Army and the FBI, after Manning — isolated and despondent — contacted him online and began confiding the most intimate details of his life, including, but by no means limited to, his relationship with WikiLeaks, and the vast databases he claimed to have provided them.

Co-writer Kim Zetter and I followed up the story four days later with a piece examining Manning’s motives. The Washington Post had just run a fine story about Manning’s state-of-mind: At the time of his discussions with Lamo, he’d been through a bad breakup and had other personal conflicts. But I felt — and still do feel — that it’s a mistake to automatically ascribe Manning’s actions to his feeling depressed. (For one thing, his breakup occurred after the leaking.) There’s an implicit political judgment in that conclusion: that leaking is an aberrant act, a symptom of a psychological disorder. Manning expressed clear and rational reasons for doing what he did, whether one agrees with those reasons or not.

So we went into the logs of the chats Manning held with Lamo — which Lamo had provided Wired and The Washington Post — and pieced together a picture of why Manning took his historic actions, based on his own words (“Suspected Wikileaks Source Described Crisis of Conscience Leading to Leaks”). As a sidebar to the article, we published excerpts from those chat logs.

We’ve had several more scoops since then, reporting new information on Manning’s history in the Army, and revealing the internal conflict his alleged disclosures triggered within WikiLeaks.

But those first stories in June either excerpted, quoted or reported on everything of consequence Manning had to say about his leaking. We’ve led the coverage on this story, and we would gain nothing by letting another scoop simmer unreported on our hard drives.

The debate, if it can be described as that, centers on the remainder of Manning’s conversations with Lamo. Greenwald argues that Wired.com has a journalistic obligation to publish the entirety of Manning’s communications. As with other things that Greenwald writes, the truth is the opposite. (See the statement above by Wired’s editor-in-chief.)

Greenwald’s incomplete understanding of basic journalistic standards was first displayed in his earlier piece on this subject, last June, titled “The Strange and Consequential Case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks.” This is where he first claimed that Lamo and I have “long and strange history together.”

That “history” began in 2000, when, while reporting for the computer security news site SecurityFocus.com, I contacted Lamo to use him as an expert on security issues at AOL. I sought him out because he’d been quoted in a similar capacity in a Salon.com article the year before.

Later, Lamo began sharing with me the details of some of his hacking. Lamo was nearly unique among hackers of that period, in that he had no evident fear of discussing his unlawful access, regardless of the inevitable legal consequences. He cracked everyone from Microsoft to Yahoo, and from MCI to Excite@Home. And he freely discussed how he did it, and sometimes helped the victim companies close their security holes afterward.

This came at a time, prior to the passage of California’s SB1386, when companies had no legal obligation to reveal security breaches, and hackers, facing tough criminal sanctions, had a strong disincentive to reveal it themselves. Lamo’s transparency provided an invaluable window on the poor state of computer security.

Using little more than a web browser, he was able to gain sensitive information on critical infrastructure, and private data like Social Security numbers.He changed a news story on Yahoo — at the time the most-trafficked news source on the web — undetected. In the intrusion that finally resulted in his arrest, he cracked The New York Times intranet and added himself to the paper’s internal database of op-ed contributors.

Some people regarded him as a hacker hero — Kevin Spacey narrated a documentary about him. Others argued he was a villain. At his sentencing, Lamo’s prosecutors argued he was responsible for “a great deal of psychological injury” to his victims.

To Greenwald, all this makes Lamo “a low-level, inconsequential hacker.” This conclusion is critical to his thesis that Lamo and I have something more than a source-journalist relationship. Greenwald’s theory is that Lamo’s hacks were not newsworthy. But, this line of thought goes, in exchange for the chance to break the non-news of his intrusions, I reported them — getting Lamo attention among the readers of SecurityFocus.com.

What he fails to report is that those same breaches were also covered by the Associated Press, Reuters, Wired magazine (well before my tenure at Wired.com), cable news networks, every tech news outlet and several national newspapers, and that Lamo spoke freely to all of them.

So when he writes that I had “exclusive, inside information from Lamo,” he is wrong. And when he writes that Lamo had an “insatiable need for self-promotion and media attention, and for the past decade, it has been Poulsen who satisfies that need,” he’s ignoring the fact that my reporting for an obscure computer security news site constituted an almost inconceivably tiny portion of the coverage generated by Lamo’s hacks.

From that bit of sophistry, Greenwald descends into antics that shouldn’t pass muster at any serious news outlet. He bolsters his argument by quoting Jacob Appelbaum as an expert on Lamo. Appelbaum has “known Lamo for years,” he writes, and “Lamo’s ‘only concern’ has always been ‘getting publicity for Adrian.’”

Nowhere in the article does he disclose that Appelbaum — the only third-party source in the piece — is a key WikiLeaks activist: a man who’d shared hotel rooms with Julian Assange, and had already spoken publicly on behalf of the organization. Appelbaum’s key role in the organization has been a published fact since April.

After that glaring omission, Greenwald mischaracterizes my contacts with the companies Lamo hacked. In writing about Lamo’s New York Times hack, Greenwald claims: “When Lamo hacked into the NYT, it was Poulsen who notified the newspaper’s executives on Lamo’s behalf, and then wrote about it afterward.” In truth, I contacted a spokeswoman for the Times, notified her of the intrusion, gave her time to confirm it, and then quoted her in the article.

All of this — embellishment, failing to disclose his prime source’s true affiliation, selective reporting — would be enough to make Greenwald’s opinions on a matter of journalist ethics of little interest to Wired.com. In his new piece, he goes even further.

Nearly half of his article is devoted to a characteristically murky conspiracy theory involving a well-known cybercrime attorney and former Justice Department lawyer named Mark Rasch. Rasch is one of three people that Lamo sought for advice while looking to turn in Bradley Manning.

The blockbuster, stop-the-presses, “incontrovertibly true” disclosure with which Greenwald caps his piece? That Rasch once prosecuted me for hacking the phone company.

Based, apparently, on something he read on a website called GovSecInfo.com, Greenwald announces that “Rasch is also the person who prosecuted Kevin Poulsen back in the mid-1990s and put him in prison for more than three years.” (I served five, actually, and all but two months of it was in pretrial custody, held without bail.) He then attacks me for failing to report on this supposed link. “Just on journalistic grounds, this nondisclosure is extraordinary,” he claims.

“As Poulsen was writing about this Manning story all while working closely with Lamo as he served as FBI informant — and as Poulsen actively conceals the chat logs — wouldn’t you want to know that the person who played such a key role in Manning’s arrest was the same person who prosecuted Poulsen and regularly contributes to his magazine?”

The “regularly contributes to his magazine” part is apparently a reference to this single 2004 opinion piece in Wired magazine. As for the rest? Rasch, who worked for the Justice Department in Washington D.C., left government service in 1991. I had two prosecutors in my phone-hacking case: David Schindler in Los Angeles and Robert Crowe in San Jose, California.

Greenwald, a lawyer, could have learned this in a few seconds on Pacer, the federal court’s public records system. It would have set him back 16 cents, and his article would have been half as long.

There’s more to the conspiracy theory. Greenwald is troubled that, as he put it in his first article, “Despite being convicted of serious hacking felonies, Poulsen was allowed by the U.S. government to become a journalist covering the hacking world for Security Focus News.” He doesn’t cite what authority he believes the government should wield to strip convicted hackers of their First Amendment rights, but I suspect he wouldn’t want it used against Julian “Mendax” Assange, who pleaded guilty to 24 charges of hacking a year after my 1991 arrest.

I could go on — the daily, off-the-record conversations Greenwald had with Assange while penning at least one of his anti-Wired screeds; or the fact that he failed to disclose in the body of his first article that he was personally trying to secure a new attorney for Manning while writing the piece.

But by now it should be clear why we don’t seek Greenwald’s advice on a serious matter of journalistic ethics.

In any event, if you can’t make an argument without resorting to misstatements, attacking the motives of an experienced and dedicated team of reporters, name-calling, bizarre conspiracy theories and ad hominem attacks, then perhaps you don’t have an argument.

–Kevin Poulsen, Senior Editor

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/greenwald/





Response to Wired's Accusations
Glenn Greenwald

As noted above, the principal tactic of Wired.com Editor-in-Chief Evan Hansen and Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen in responding to my criticisms is to hurl a variety of accusations at me as a means of distracting attention from the issue that matters. Between my June article and the one on Sunday, I've now written more than 9,000 words about Wired's role in the Manning/Lamo case. To accuse me of "a breathtaking mix of sophistry, hypocrisy and journalistic laziness," they raise a handful of alleged inaccuracies (a) for which there is ample evidence and (b) which are entirely ancillary to the issues I raised.

I'm going to address each and every one of their accusations in order (their accusations are indented and my responses follow). I realize this is lengthy. But I take the accusations seriously, know that they're false, believe it's incumbent to provide the same accountability and responsiveness I demand of others, and everyone is free to read only those portions which interest them.

Hansen

Quote:
Tellingly, Greenwald never misses a chance to mention Poulsen’s history as a hacker, events that transpired nearly two decades ago and have absolutely no bearing on the current case. This is nothing more than a despicable smear campaign based on the oldest misdirection in the book: Shoot the messenger.
This is all false. I've actually mentioned Poulsen's hacker past very rarely, and every time I did, it was in connection with substantive questions raised about his relationships to key players in these events, including Lamo and Mark Rasch. I don't think Poulsen's credibility is impaired because he was once a hacker or even a felon. I think it's impaired because he is withholding key evidence and pretending that he and Lamo have nothing more than a standard journalist-source relationship.

Quote:
Even Greenwald believes this … sometimes. When The New York Times ran an entirely appropriate and well reported profile of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange — discussing his personality and his contentious leadership style — Greenwald railed against the newspaper, terming the reporters “Nixonian henchmen.”
This claim is designed to accuse me of hypocrisy for simultaneously arguing that Assange should not be subjected to scrutiny while demanding full disclosure of the chats. That accusation is made only by wildly distorting what I wrote in the very piece Hansen cites. My objection to The New York Times smear job on Assange was that by prominently featuring gossipy, personality issues about him on the very day the Iraq War documents were released, the paper distracted attention from what actually mattered: what the documents showed about American behavior in the war (the same reason why Nixon wanted dirt about Ellberg's psychiatric state: to impugn the source of the Pentagon Papers). In fact, I argued the opposite of what Hansen suggests: "None of this is to say that WikiLeaks and Assange shouldn't be subject to scrutiny. Anyone playing a significant role in political life should be, including them."

Moreover, I never argued that Wired should release deeply personal, irrelevant aspects of the chat logs. I argued that they should be much more diligent about making those assessments given that part of what they withheld was not personat at all and, more important, that they should release the portions about which Lamo has made public claims or confirm they do not exist.

Hansen:

Quote:
Similarly, when Assange complained that journalists were violating his privacy by reporting the details of rape and molestation allegations against him in Sweden, Greenwald agreed, writing: “Simultaneously advocating government transparency and individual privacy isn’t hypocritical or inconsistent; it’s a key for basic liberty.”

With Manning, Greenwald adopts the polar opposite opinions. “Journalists should be about disclosing facts, not protecting anyone.” This dissonance in his views has only grown in the wake of reports that Manning might be offered a plea deal in exchange for testimony against Assange.
Hansen again wildly distorted what I wrote by taking a Twitter comment and tearing it out of context. I most certainly never "agreed" that "journalists were violating [Assange's] privacy by reporting the details of rape and molestation allegations against him in Sweden," That's a total fabrication. I don't believe that and never said that. Hansen made that up.

Assange was asked in a BBC interview questions such as "how many women have you slept with?" When Assange refused to answer, many WikiLeaks critics pointed to this as hypocrisy -- oh, see, he doesn't believe in transparency for himself -- and my tweet pointed out the obvious fallacy of that claim: there is nothing inconsistent about demanding transparency for government while insisting upon personal privacy.

Moreover, the question Assange refused to answer -- "how many women have you slept with?" -- is relevant to absolutely nothing of public interest, including the rape accusation. By stark contrast, the information Wired is concealing -- whether Lamo is telling the truth about his various claims -- goes to the heart of one of the most significant political controversies in the world.

Hansen:

Quote:
Nonetheless, once the Times story — and our explanation — was over a week old, Greenwald sent Poulsen an e-mail inquiring about it, and giving him one day to respond to his questions. He sent that e-mail on Christmas Day.

When we didn’t meet the urgent Yuletide deadline he’d imposed on himself to publish a piece about a 10-day-old newspaper article, he wrote in his column that we “ignored the inquiries,” adding: “This is not the behavior of a journalist seeking to inform the public, but of someone eager, for whatever reasons, to hide the truth.”
First, not only did I raise most of these issues six months ago (about which Poulsen says "We took the high ground and ignored Greenwald and Salon"), but I loudly re-raised them on my Twitter feed -- from which Hansen quotes -- on Friday, December 24. See here ("Read the first 6 paragraphs of this article to see how inexcusable it is for Wired not to release the chat logs it has: http://is.gd/jo29s"), here ("Wired Magazine [and the WashPost] possess key evidence on 1 of the year's most important news stories but have concealed it for months") and here ("Fair enough - I mean @KPoulsen: RT @stevesilberman "Do not underestimate the cultural divide between "Wired magazine" and wired.com.").

Second, after trumpeting my intention to raise these issues the day before, I then emailed Poulsen on Saturday morning -- Christmas -- and told him I intended to write about this the following day. When I didn't hear back from him all day Saturday, I waited the entire next day (Sunday) and, in the hopes of getting a reply from Poulsen, still didn't write anything. I only published my piece mid-morning on Monday: two full days after I first emailed Poulsen. Once it was published, Poulsen, despite being "on vacation," certainly responded on Twitter very quickly.

Third, my accusation -- that "this is not the behavior of a journalist seeking to inform the public, but of someone eager, for whatever reasons, to hide the truth" -- was not based exclusively or even primarily on Poulsen's failure to answer my questions; it was based on his six-month-and-counting withholding of key evidence and his failure to confirm or deny all of the serious claims made by his close associate, Adrian Lamo.

Poulsen

Quote:
To Greenwald, all this makes Lamo “a low-level, inconsequential hacker.” This conclusion is critical to his thesis that Lamo and I have something more than a source-journalist relationship. Greenwald’s theory is that Lamo’s hacks were not newsworthy.
That Lamo's skills as a hacker are "critical" to any issue I've raised is just absurd. In speaking to numerous hackers and others in that community, I repeatedly heard the same thing about Lamo: that his hacking exploits were unsophisticated but designed to achieve the only thing he cares about: press attention for himself. That issue is interesting because it suggests what Lamo's motive might have been for turning government informant on Manning -- an opportunity to get his name in the paper -- but it has little or nothing to do with the ethical issues I raised about Wired and Poulsen.

I detailed with multiple links and documentation in my June article exactly what makes this Lamo-Poulsen relationship so strange. Lamo basically used Poulsen as his personal spokesman for years: he'd hack, and then have Poulsen announce it. When Lamo was involuntarily hospitalized, it was Poulsen he called, so that Wired would write about in the light Lamo wanted. This is how Information Week described the relationship all the way back in 2002:

Quote:
To publicize his work, [Lamo] often tapped ex-hacker-turned-journalist Kevin Poulsen as his go-between: Poulsen contacts the hacked company, alerts it to the break-in, offers Lamo's cooperation, then reports the hack on the SecurityFocus Online Web site, where he's a news editor.
Lamo posts smiling, arms-around-each-other pictures with Poulsen on his Facebook page, including one the day before Wired published excerpts of the chat log. Nadim Kobeissi, Lamo's longtime friend, told me that Lamo has long considered Poulsen his friend. This is anything but some objective, arms-length journalist-source relationship.

Poulsen:

Quote:
From that bit of sophistry, Greenwald descends into antics that shouldn’t pass muster at any serious news outlet. He bolsters his argument by quoting Jacob Appelbaum as an expert on Lamo. Appelbaum has "known Lamo for years," he writes, and "Lamo’s ‘only concern’ has always been ‘getting publicity for Adrian'."

Nowhere in the article does he disclose that Appelbaum -- the only third-party source in the piece -- is a key WikiLeaks activist: a man who’d shared hotel rooms with Julian Assange, and had already spoken publicly on behalf of the organization. Appelbaum's key role in the organization has been a published fact since April.
The quote from Appelbaum about Lamo's desire for publicity is (a) something that at least ten other people told me in that period and (b) completely ancillary to any points I raised about Wired. I will readily concede that Appelbaum's association with WikiLeaks should have been disclosed. It wasn't for a simple reason: I wasn't aware of it. Poulsen claims that "Appelbaum's key role in the organization has been a published fact since April" but notably links to no news report saying that (only to Appelbaum's Twitter feed). I was unaware -- and still am -- of any news reports before then identifying him as such. If there were any, I didn't see them.

I quoted Appelbaum because his quote was most usable, but I could easily have quoted at least ten other people with knowledge of Lamo to make this same point. Indeed, in a June email he sent me after I wrote that article -- none of which was off the record: indeed, it was all explicitly on the record at his request -- Wired's own Ryan Singel told me: "Lamo is clearly starved for attention. Often he gets it by coming up with odd leads. Here he decided to become a rat, and then went on to brag about it." That quote would have sufficed just as well as the Appelbaum one. That Lamo is pathologically fixated on self-promotion is an article of faith in the hacker world.

Poulsen:

Quote:
After that glaring omission, Greenwald mischaracterizes my contacts with the companies Lamo hacked. In writing about Lamo’s New York Times hack, Greenwald claims: “When Lamo hacked into the NYT, it was Poulsen who notified the newspaper’s executives on Lamo’s behalf, and then wrote about it afterward.” In truth, I contacted a spokeswoman for the Times, notified her of the intrusion, gave her time to confirm it, and then quoted her in the article.
This is the type of accusation that proves how weak is Poulsen's claim that my articles were filled with a "litany of errors." Read what Poulsen claims I wrote. Then read what he says is the reality. They're the exact same thing. That's one his leading examples of my "errors."

Poulsen:

Quote:
Nearly half of his article is devoted to a characteristically murky conspiracy theory involving a well-known cybercrime attorney and former Justice Department lawyer named Mark Rasch. Rasch is one of three people that Lamo sought for advice while looking to turn in Bradley Manning.

The blockbuster, stop-the-presses, “incontrovertibly true” disclosure with which Greenwald caps his piece? That Rasch once prosecuted me for hacking the phone company.

Based, apparently, on something he read on a website called GovSecInfo.com, Greenwald announces that "Rasch is also the person who prosecuted Kevin Poulsen back in the mid-1990s and put him in prison for more than three years." (I served five, actually, and all but two months of it was in pretrial custody, held without bail.) He then attacks me for failing to report on this supposed link. "Just on journalistic grounds, this nondisclosure is extraordinary," he claims. . . .

Rasch, who worked for the Justice Department in Washington D.C., left government service in 1991. I had two prosecutors in my phone-hacking case: David Schindler in Los Angeles and Robert Crowe in San Jose, California.

Greenwald, a former law professor, could have learned this in a few seconds on Pacer, the federal court’s public records system. It would have set him back 16 cents, and his article would have been half as long.
First, I was never a "law professor" and never claimed to be one. By Poulsen's reasoning, this grave inaccuracy proves how his response is filled with "a breathtaking mix of sophistry, hypocrisy and journalistic laziness."

Second, my statement that Rasch prosecuted Poulsen is based on far more than "something [i] read on a website called GovSecInfo.com." It is true that Rasch's GovSec biography does say that he "investigated and prosecuted the earliest computer crime cases including those of Kevin Poulsen." But so do other sources. From a 2002 article in Information Week: "Lamo could face felony charges, says Mark Rasch, former head of the Justice Department's Computer Crime Unit, who prosecuted Poulsen and Mitnick." Rasch's biography for Secure IT Experts similarly states: "Mark investigated and prosecuted the earliest computer crime cases including those of Kevin Poulsen, Kevin Mitnick and Robert T. Morris."

Beyond those sources, Rasch was the head of the DOJ's Computer Crimes Unit until 1991: the year Poulsen was arrested after several years of being a fugitive and one of the Government's most-wanted hackers. Rasch was probably not the courtroom attorney litigating the case against Poulsen -- it'd be highly unlikely that he would be -- but it's inconceivable that, as head of the Computer Crimes Unit, he wasn't significantly involved in the investigation of and search for Poulsen and his ultimate arrest, which is presumably why these multiple sources contain the claim that Rasch "investigated" and/or "prosecuted Poulsen."

That the same Mark Rasch then proceeded to have numerous interactions over the years with Poulsen -- and then end up as the person who helped direct Lamo to government authorities to inform on Manning -- is absolutely relevant and is something that should be disclosed when Poulsen writes about this case. If, despite these facts, Rasch actually had nothing whatsoever to do with the investigation of Poulsen, then Poulsen should say so, and if it's true, I'll be the first to rescind this disclosure objection. But my statements were well-grounded in these sources and facts.

Poulsen:

Quote:
The “regularly contributes to his magazine” part is apparently a reference to this single 2004 opinion piece [by Rasch] in Wired magazine.
My claim that he was a "regular contributor" to Wired was based on numerous sources, apparently including Rasch himself. From Rasch's biography on the SCIIP Board of Advisers: "He writes a monthly column in Symantec’s Security Focus online magazine . . . and is a regular contributor to Wired magazine." His biography as a guest on The Charlie Rose Show states that he "is a regular contributor to 'Wired' magazine." His own prepared biography makes the same claim ("a regular contributor to Wired Magazine"). If Rasch has nothing to do with Wired other than the single article, then there is obviously no disclosure issue, but it also means that someone has been making false claims about Rasch's relationship to that magazine.

Quote:
I could go on -- the daily, off-the-record conversations Greenwald had with Assange while penning at least one of his anti-Wired screeds; or the fact that he failed to disclose in the body of his first article that he was personally trying to secure a new attorney for Manning while writing the piece.
Poulsen seems to think that it's some sort of secret that I am an active supporter of both WikiLeaks and Manning. Unlike Poulsen, I don't conceal my relationships to subjects or my views of them. That I am a fervent supporter of WikiLeaks and Manning is about the most disclosed fact about me. I've twice encouraged readers to donate money to WikiLeaks, including all the way back in March when few people had heard of the group. I've also encouraged readers to donate to Manning's defense fund right out in the open on my blog. I've made repeatedly clear -- by writing it -- that I consider both of their actions heroic.

Poulsen doesn't provide any citation for his grand discovery that I spoke with Assange while writing my piece in June; that's because he presumably knows that because I said it. I often make clear that I communicate with Assange about WikiLeaks matters (from CNN's introduction of me on Monday night: "Glenn, I'd like to start with you. I know you have spoken to Julian Assange several times"). I don't know where Poulsen gets the idea that my conversations with him were "off-the-record": the reason I didn't quote Assange in my piece on Wired is because he had nothing of relevance to say. Indeed, the only statement of WikiLeaks that I used was its allegation that Poulsen himself acted as government informant -- an accusation I stated in both articles had no evidence to support it.

Honest journalists disclose rather than hide their associations and views. And that's exactly what I've done from the start with both WikiLeaks and Manning.

Finally, we have this:

Quote:
But by now it should be clear why we don’t seek Greenwald’s advice on a serious matter of journalistic ethics.
Over the years, Wired has repeatedly -- and always approvingly -- cited to, quoted from, and otherwise used my work. Its reporters, including Ryan Singel and others, have sent emails with lavish praise. After my first article about Wired in June, Singel emailed me to defend Poulsen and contest my objections but wrote: "I've long been a fan of your work and I'll continue to be."

But now that I've written critically about Wired, I'm suddenly converted into a dishonest, ethics-free, unreliable hack. That's par for the course. That's why so few people in this profession are willing to criticize other media outlets. Journalists react as poorly as anyone to public criticism; it doesn't make you popular to do it; it can terminate career opportunities and relationships; it's certain your credibility will be publicly impugned. But journalists need scrutiny and accountability as much as anyone -- especially when, as here, they are shaping public perceptions about a vital story while withholding important information -- and I'd vastly prefer to be the one to provide it even if it means that the targets of the criticism don't like it and lash out.

Ultimately, what determines one's credibility is not the names you get called or the number of people who get angry when you criticize them. What matters is whether the things you say are well-supported and accurate, to correct them if they're not, and to subject yourself to the same accountability and transparency you demand of others.


UPDATE: Poulsen's claim that Rasch has contributed to Wired only a "single 2004 opinion piece" is false. Here are two at least – here and here -- in addition to the close to 40 times that he has been cited as a source in Wired articles, including -- as I documented in my piece on Sunday -- multiple times by Poulsen and Zetter. That's presumably why he calls himself a "regular contributor" to Wired. And that's all independent of the other forms of interaction over the years Poulsen and Rasch have had. That Poulsen and Wired has this long and varied relationship with the person who put Lamo in touch with federal authorities in order to inform on Manning in certainly something I'd want to know -- and I think the reasonable reader would want to know -- when reading Poulsen write about the Manning case.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/gl...e_1/index.html





Leaked: Cuban Government Fears Bloggers More Than Activists
Curt Hopkins

Without Borders reports that several diplomatic cables that have come out via Wikileaks indicate Cuba is more worried about bloggers than traditional activists.

In a cable from April of last year, Jonathan Farrar, chief of mission of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana agrees with a news op-ed that calls the traditional dissidents "old and out of touch."

"(The articles) might have generated a reform debate among the dissident leaders, but instead they simply focused dissident frustration with the Cuban exile community."

"Younger individuals, like bloggers" and musicians, are much more appealing to the public and are targets of jealousy by the activists.

In a second cable from later that year, Farrar underscores what a terror bloggers have become to the "GOC" (government of Cuba).

"Much more threatening to the regime are our overtures to and complaints of mistreatment of bloggers, a group that frustrates and scares the GOC like no other...The conventional wisdom in Havana is that GOC sees the bloggers as its most serious challenge, and one that it has trouble containing in the way that it has dealt with traditional opposition groups. The 'old guard' dissidents mostly have been isolated from the rest of the island. The GOC doesn't pay much attention to their articles or manifestos because they have no island-wide resonance and limited international heft. For a while, ignoring the bloggers too seemed to work. But the bloggers' mushrooming international popularity and their ability to stay one tech-step ahead of the authorities are causing serious headaches in the regime."

A third cable described the meetings between Cuban bloggers and Deputy U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Bisa Williams in September.

"The bloggers, who partly out of self-preservation do not want to be lumped in with the dissident community, were equally optimistic about the course of events. 'An improvement in relations with the United States is absolutely necessary for democracy to emerge here.'"

The distributed nature of the appeal and actions of bloggers and other cultural rebels are harder for the Cuban government to high-jack. How can the government infiltrate a group of bloggers who rarely meet, and none of whom know all the others, and whose statements are accessible, albeit with difficulty, all over the island and the world? What form the changes bloggers make in the future of Cuba will take is as unknowable as it is thrilling to consider.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives..._than_acti.php





How Much Did It Cost AOL To Send Us Those CDs In The 90s? “A Lot!,” Says Steve Case
MG Siegler

Like most little kids, I used to love getting things in the mail. And in the 1990s, I was lucky enough to get something new every single day. Sadly, 99.9 percent of those were install discs from AOL. If you lived in the United States in the 1990s, you remember these. They started as 3.5-inch floppies and transitioned into CDs. And I’m not exaggerating. I got one just about every single day. You’ve got mail, indeed.

If nothing else, it was ingenious marketing for AOL. While people eventually started bitching about getting spammed by the discs, most of those people probably also installed them at least once and checked out the service. So how much did that cost AOL?

“A lot,” says CEO at the time, Steve Case. Case himself took to Quora recently to answer the question: How much did it cost AOL to distribute all those CDs back in the 1990′s?

Case says that he doesn’t remember the total amount spent on the discs specifically, but says that in the early 1990s, AOL’s goal was to spend 10 percent of lifetime revenue to get a new subscriber. He says that since the average subscriber life was around 25 months, revenue was about $350 off of each of these users. So he guesses they probably spent about $35 per user on things such as these discs.

“As we were able to lower the cost of disks/trial/etc we were able to ramp up marketing. (Plus, we knew Microsoft was coming and it was never going to be easier or cheaper to get market share.) When we went public in 1992 we had less than 200,000 subscribers; a decade later the number was in the 25 million range,” Case recalls.

In other words, the discs worked.

Case also notes that the subscriber growth helped grow AOL from a market cap of $70 million at the time of their IPO to $150 billion when the marger with Time Warner occurred.

I repeat, the discs worked. Well, at least until that merger turned into a nightmare and had to be dissolved. A move which paved the way for the new-look AOL to purchase TechCrunch this year.

Another user on Quora looked over some numbers from the 90s and gave a more specific number for how much AOL spent on those discs: $300 million.

Update: Jan Brandt, AOL’s former Chief Marketing Officer has now weighed in as well:

Quote:
Over $300 million :-) At one point, 50% of the CD’s produced worldwide had an AOL logo on it. We were logging in new subscribers at the rate of one every six seconds
As a side note, it’s great to see people like Case — who is usually pretty candid — answering questions directly on Quora. Humorously, it was SGN founder Shervin Pishevar who actually asked the AOL question in the first place. How do we know? Because he emailed us about it, overjoyed that Case himself responded.

He also sent us the following love note for Quora completely unsolicited:

Quote:
I think it’s very significant that people of influence are starting to flock to Quora as the authoritative place to communicate with the world in long form. Billionaire entrepreneurs like Steve Case (AOL) and Reid Hastings (Netflix) have already left important answers on Quora.

Twitter is the leading place for short form broadcasting and short form blogging. Influential people are busy and don’t have the time to manage blogging on a continual basis and manage that community. Quora is quickly becoming the defacto community for such people to broadcast longer forms communications with the world and have it spread fast.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/27/aol-discs-90s/





AT&T Documentary Takes on Texting-While-Driving
Stan Schroeder

In a proactive public relations move, AT&T is taking the lead on texting-and-driving prevention with an 11-minute documentary on the topic, intended to reach consumers before New Year’s Eve.

The doc, called The Last Text, features stories about people whose lives were adversely affected by texting behind the wheel, including the parents of Mariah West, who died after texting “Where u at?” to a friend.

AT&T is distributing the film to schools, safety organizations and government agencies and on its YouTubeYouTubeYouTube channel. The doc is part of AT&T’s “It Can Wait” TV, print and online campaign, which the company introduced in March. Part of that campaign includes a Facebook appTripHelp Facebook AppTripHelp Facebook App where friends can take a pledge not to text and drive.

AT&T’s not alone in publicizing the risks of texting and driving. Sprint partnered with The Oprah Winfrey Show in May for a program fighting texting and driving. In addition, a video from the Gwent Police Department in Wales also garnered thousands of views on YouTube thanks in part to its graphic depiction of a (dramatized) accident brought on by texting and driving.

Nevertheless, texting behind the wheel appears to be a growing problem. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, 5,500 people were killed last year because of “distracted driving” and the largest proportion of those fatalities were people under 20. A recent survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project showed 26% of teens have texted while driving and 43% have made calls on their cell phones while driving.
http://mashable.com/2010/12/27/att-d...while-driving/





AT&T Expands Wi-Fi Zones in Public Spaces
Peter Svensson

AT&T Inc. is expanding Wi-Fi access for its subscribers in New York and introducing it in San Francisco, adding data capacity in two cities with heavy wireless network use from the iPhone and other devices.

The phone company is to announce Tuesday that it will expand Wi-Fi hot spots in New York's Times Square just ahead of New Year's revelers cramming there for the annual countdown to midnight. It is also deploying its first hot spots in a public, outdoor area of San Francisco, the Embarcadero waterfront district.

For years, AT&T has operated a wide network of hot spots in hotels, airports, Starbucks coffee shops and other indoor locations. The new "hot zones," as AT&T calls them, are different in that they cover public, outdoor spaces are and cluster together many access points to cover a larger area.

The zones provide fast data service for AT&T subscribers and divert traffic from the company's cellular network. Many AT&T smart phones, including the iPhone, connect automatically to AT&T Wi-Fi when it's available.

IPhone users are legion in both New York and San Francisco and tax AT&T's network heavily. The company made it a priority this year to improve wireless service in the two cities.

The Dallas-based company set up a hot zone in Times Square in May, and later in downtown Charlotte, N.C., and Chicago's Wrigleyville neighborhood.

Chief Technology Officer John Donovan said those pilots have been successful, so the company is expanding coverage around Times Square and setting up zones around nearby Rockefeller Center and St. Patrick's Cathedral.

Donovan said the company plans further Wi-Fi expansions, including in sports stadiums.

Wi-Fi is a cost-effective complement to wireless broadband over AT&T's regular, 3G cellular network, Donovan said, but it doesn't replace investment in that technology. The motivation for the zones is to improve the subscriber experience where a lot of people gather, he said.

AT&T's smart-phone and landline broadband subscriber can use the zones for free, and usage doesn't count toward monthly data limits.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101228/...tec_at_t_wi_fi





Wi-Fi Overload at High-Tech Meetings

Last June, Steven Jobs of Apple asked people to turn off laptops and phones because a strained network was interfering with his presentation.
Verne G. Kopytoff

Internet entrepreneurs climb on stage at technology conferences and praise a world in which everyone is perpetually connected to the Web.

But down in the audience, where people are busy typing and transmitting this wisdom, getting a Wi-Fi connection is often downright impossible.

“I’ve been to 50 events where the organizer gets on stage and says, ‘It will work,’ ” said Jason Calacanis, chief executive of Mahalo, a Web search company. “It never does.”

Last month in San Francisco at the Web 2.0 Summit, where about 1,000 people heard such luminaries as Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and Eric E. Schmidt of Google talk about the digital future, the Wi-Fi slowed or stalled at times.

Earlier this year, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, had to ask the audience at his company’s developer conference to turn off their laptops and phones after his introduction of the iPhone 4 was derailed because of an overloaded Wi-Fi network.

And few of Silicon Valley’s technorati seem willing to forget one of the biggest Wi-Fi breakdowns, on the opening day of a conference in 2008 co-hosted by the technology blog TechCrunch. It left much of the audience steaming over the lack of Internet access. The next morning, the organizers — who included Mr. Calacanis — clambered onto the stage to apologize and announce that they had fired the company that installed the Wi-Fi.

Technology conferences are like revival meetings for entrepreneurs, deal makers and the digitally obsessed. Attendees compulsively blog, e-mail, text and send photos and video from their seats.

Some go so far as to watch a webcast of the event on their laptops rather than look up at the real thing right in front of them. Nearly all conferences make free Wi-Fi available to keep the crowd feeling connected and productive.

The problem is that Wi-Fi was never intended for large halls and thousands of people, many of them bristling with an arsenal of laptops, iPhones and iPads. Mr. Calacanis went to the extreme at the Web 2.0 Summit by bringing six devices to get online — a laptop, two smartphones and three wireless routers.

He explained — while writing e-mails on his laptop — that as a chief executive and investor, he needed dependable Internet access at all times. “You’ve still got to work,” Mr. Calacanis said.

Wi-Fi is meant for homes and other small spaces with more modest Internet demands, says Ernie Mariette, founder of Mariette Systems, which installs conference Wi-Fi. “You’re asking a technology to operate beyond its capability.”

Conference organizers and the Wi-Fi specialists they hire often fail to provide enough bandwidth. Many depend on the infrastructure that the hotels or convention centers hosting their events already have in place.

Companies that install Wi-Fi networks sometimes have only a day to set up their equipment in a hall and then test it. They must plan not only for the number of attendees, but also the size and shape of the room, along with how Wi-Fi signals reflect from walls and are absorbed by the audience.

“Every space is different and every crowd is different,” Mr. Mariette said.

What is good enough for a convention of podiatrists is woefully inadequate for Silicon Valley’s connected set.

“I’ve been to health care conferences where no one brings a laptop,” said Ross Mayfield, president of the business software company Socialtext and a technology conference regular.

Technology conferences are an anomaly. Some regulars joke, perhaps accurately, that the events are host to more Internet devices per square foot than anywhere in the world. All too often, the network freezes after becoming overwhelmed with all the nonstop streaming, downloading and social networking.

That was what happened this year at the RailsConf, a software conference in Baltimore, when attendees caused Wi-Fi gridlock by tuning in to a webcast of an unrelated event across the country. Nearly everyone, it turned out, wanted to watch Apple’s live unveiling of the iPhone 4, the very one that fell victim to a Wi-Fi crash.

Adding more Wi-Fi access points does not necessarily fix the problem, Mr. Mariette said. In fact, doing so may make the situation worse by creating more interference.

To avoid Wi-Fi gridlock, conference organizers sometimes ask attendees to turn off electronics they are not using and to refrain from downloading big files. Cooperation is generally mixed, however.

Last year, an attendee at Web 2.0 Expo in New York was so desperate to get online that he offered to pay Oren Michels, chief executive of Mashery, a Web services company, to share his mobile Internet connection. MiFi, as the device is called, enables users to create mini-Internet hot spots using a mobile carrier’s network, not conference Wi-Fi.

“He said, ‘Can I give you 20 bucks for access?’ ” Mr. Michels recalled. “It was just some random person sitting next to me.”

Even if Wi-Fi devices are not connected to the network, they constantly emit signals that create background noise, sometimes until it becomes impossible to get online. IPhones and most BlackBerrys, along with certain laptops, are more susceptible than other devices because they operate on 2.4 GHz, a part of the spectrum that offers only three channels.

The Wi-Fi curse also extends to tech industry press conferences. Google, for instance, once held a press day at its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., during which the Wi-Fi failed for several hours, although it was restored during the event’s final minutes. The flub did not exactly build confidence that Google and its partner, EarthLink, could deliver on their plans — since abandoned — to blanket San Francisco with free Wi-Fi.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/29/te...gy/29wifi.html





For Some Travelers Stranded in Airports, Relief Is in 140 Characters
Kim Severson

Some travelers stranded by the great snowstorm of 2010 discovered a new lifeline for help. When all else fails, Twitter might be the best way to book a seat home.

While the airlines’ reservation lines required hours of waiting — if people could get through at all — savvy travelers were able to book new reservations, get flight information and track lost luggage. And they could complain, too.

Since Monday, nine Delta Air Lines agents with special Twitter training have been rotating shifts to help travelers wired enough to know how to “dm,” or send a direct message. Many other airlines are doing the same as a way to help travelers cut through the confusion of a storm that has grounded thousands of flights this week.

But not all travelers, of course. People who could not send a Twitter message if their life depended on it found themselves with that familiar feeling that often comes with air travel — being left out of yet another inside track to get the best information.

For those in the digital fast lane, however, the online help was a godsend.

Danielle Heming spent five hours Wednesday waiting for a flight from Fort Myers, Fla., back home to New York. Finally, it was canceled.

Facing overwhelmed JetBlue ticketing agents, busy signals on the phone and the possibility that she might not get a seat until New Year’s Day, she remembered that a friend had rebooked her flight almost immediately by sending a Twitter message to the airline.

She got out her iPhone, did a few searches and sent a few messages. Within an hour, she had a seat on another airline and a refund from JetBlue.

“It was a much, much better way to deal with this situation,” said Ms. Heming, 30, a student at New York University. “It was just the perfect example of this crazy, fast-forward techno world.”

Although airlines reported a doubling or tripling of Twitter traffic during the latest storm, the number of travelers who use Twitter is still small. Only about 8 percent of people who go online use Twitter, said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a nonprofit organization that studies the social impact of the Internet.

“This is still the domain of elite activist customers,” Mr. Rainie said.

Of course, an agent with a Twitter account cannot magically make a seat appear. More often than not, the agent’s role is to listen to people complain.

“@DeltaAssist is worthless,” wrote Amy Zopfi, an event services manager in Las Vegas who was stuck for hours in Salt Lake City and sent a stream of complaints to the Delta Twitter account. Delta officials readily admit that they cannot solve everyone’s problems through Twitter or Facebook.

Often, all the people running the accounts could do was apologize.

Sometimes, just connecting with someone at an airline can calm angry passengers.

“What you constantly hear from airline passengers is, ‘Just tell me what’s going on. I can adjust my travel expectations and my personal life if I just know what’s going on,’ ” Mr. Rainie said.

He also said that stranded families were using their gadgets in a team approach to getting answers.

“Mom would be on Twitter, Dad on Facebook, Junior would be searching sites and whoever hit pay dirt first is the way the family would figure out what to do next,” he said.

Even when help is not forthcoming, the airline Twitter accounts serve as a news source. People could share information — and pain.

One woman sent messages noting every song from the 1980s JetBlue played while she was on hold and stranded in the airport in Burbank, Calif. (Terence Trent D’Arby anyone?)

Brian Devinney, who used to work in the travel industry, is stuck in Jacksonville, Fla., until his flight leaves for New York on Sunday. So on Tuesday night he spent three hours offering information to stranded travelers who were using the airline Twitter accounts.

“With Twitter, you have people who were reaching out looking for something, for a community of people stuck in the same situation,” Mr. Devinney said.

Airlines still prefer that travelers use the phone. Arranging itineraries in the limits of a 140-character Twitter message is not always efficient. And many of the people monitoring Twitter sites for airlines are not ticket agents nor do they have a secret stash of seats.

“We consider ourselves an information booth rather than a customer service channel,” said Morgan Johnston, a JetBlue manager of corporate communications. And airlines only have a handful of people working Twitter and thousands working the phones.

But that does not always help. Susan Moffat of Oakland, Calif., spent 48 hours trying to get through to JetBlue this week. She wanted to get back home from a visit to New York. She finally connected and, after holding for an hour, secured a flight back on New Year’s Day. The agent told her she might have gotten a quicker response if she had used Facebook or Twitter.

A casual Facebook user, Ms. Moffat said, it never occurred to her that traditional methods of communicating might not be good enough anymore.

“My question is, in order to book an airline reservation am I going to have to be friends with a company?” she said. “What about a phone call?”

Still, she realizes that might be a very old-school option. “It’s like trying to talk to my kids on e-mail,” she said.

Robbie Brown contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/us/30airlines.html





2011 Will be the Year Android Explodes
Seth Weintraub

Ever-improving networks and a big hardware announcement that will send handset prices plummeting both point to smartphone growth in 2011 that could totally eclipse anything we've seen before.

Smartphones have been growing at an unbelievable clip over the past year but they still account for only around a third of all phones in the US and an even smaller percentage internationally. In developing countries, the price of smartphones, aside from some 'quasi-smart' Nokias (NOK) are out of reach for all but the elite. India and China each have billion plus populations and growing middle classes, but neither country is even at a 10% market penetration of smartphones.

Globally, market intelligence firm IDC counted 269.6 million smartphones sold this year, compared to the 173.5 million units shipped in 2009.

In 2011, we might see half a billion phones sold worldwide. Smartphones will likely blow by traditional computers next year as the way most of the world gains access to the Internet.

Two major factors will drive this, in tandem: Wireless infrastructure is getting better every day, and hardware is getting cheaper. Cheaper hardware will eliminate the need for subsidies and therefore will improve competition between carriers, and spur them to improve their networks. Google (GOOG) Android head Andy Rubin calls this a 'perfect storm' for smartphone adoption.

A closer look at price: In 2010, the cheapest mainstream Smartphone was just below $200 (unsubsidized by a carrier contract-- the way most of the world buys its phones). Some extremely cheap (but feature rich) Chinese brands have recently fallen to around $150. But based on the hardware announcements we're seeing, including one big player in particular that price will be cut in half:

Broadcom (BRCM) last week announced its BCM2157 - Mass-Market 3G HSDPA "Android" Baseband chipset. The platform provides everything a modern smartphone builder needs: a dual core ARM processor, Bluetooth, GPS, support for up to a 5-megapixel camera, support for capacitive HVGA (320x480 like iPhone 3GS) or or WQVGA (~240x400) displays. That's pretty much your current baseline Android smartphone, like the Samsung Intercept.

The chipset will work on AT&T (T) and T-Mobile's 3G networks in the US and on global GSM providers.

It is interesting to note that Broadcom is marketing this hardware specifically at Android OEMs, though theoretically any smartphone OS could be built on top of it. Android is clearly the platform for growth on the low end.

I had a chance to speak with Jim Tran, VP/GM – Handset Line of Business for Broadcom, who was able to elaborate on the details of the new processor and what it meant for the industry. Here are some of Broadcom's bullet points:

* The BCM2157 baseband, since it combines many functions on one chip, is able to run more efficiently, meaning less battery power will be needed than on current basic handsets
* Low-cost, low-power, 65 nm digital CMOS process means the silicon will be cheap
* The dual-core processors will run at 500-800mhz.
* Supports portable Wifi hotspot and Android 2.2 and up

But the kicker is the price. Tran says that phones made from the BCM2157 chipset will retail for under $100 and may dip as low as $75. Those devices should debut in just 3-6 months (and we might hear about them next month at CES).

By this time next year, Broadcom says it will release a follow-up chip that will allow WVGA displays and as much power as today's high-end Smartphones at the same $75-$100 prices. That Nexus S that costs $530 now off contract will cost just a fraction of that in just one year.

Broadcom isn't the only chipmaker taking aim at this new market. There is another chipmaker out of China building the same type of chipset for 3G EVDO Rev. A, the type of network that Sprint and Verizon use. They also say that they can get retail prices below $100.

To be clear, That sub $100 price is not the cost of materials, it is the suggested retail price after the manufacturers (and carriers) have taken their profits.

Those prices will have many feature phone users saddling up with smartphones. And they may open the emerging Asian markets, like India and China, to smartphone customers on a large scale, for the first time ever. That means many more smartphone users and many more Google and Android users, too.

How cheap smartphones change the American cell phone market

Perhaps more importantly, at $100, many first-world shoppers will forgo the subsidized two year contracts and instead choose month to month plans. That price point takes the power away from the carriers. If T-Mobile is having a special and I can just take my AT&T phone over without being hit with early termination fees, the carriers are much more likely to compete for customers.

That, in turn will likely push data prices down. We are already starting to see this happen. Virgin offers a $25/month unlimited data plan off contract. T-Mobile offers a limited $10 date plan off contract. AT&T has tiers that start very low.

Consumers used to feature phone monthly costs of $30/month may even opt to forgo wireless data altogether, instead choosing to use the smartphone's built in Wifi radio to surf near-ubiquitous Wifi in homes, at work and about town. To entice low end smartphone users away from just using Wifi, carriers will have to make affordable data plans.

Cheap smartphones could change the way carriers price contracts here in the U.S.

Whatever the case, if you thought Android going from 30,000 activations a day to 300,000 activations/day was impressive, 2011 might be an even bigger growth year for Android.

Growth targets are just starting to trickle out, but HTC, who make high end Android devices and a few Windows Phone 7 devices expect to triple their 2010 output in 2011. Yet if things play out the way Rubin, Google, Broadcom and HTC hope, even that may wind up being a conservative estimate for Android growth. What's most interesting is that unless Apple (AAPL) has a plan to keep up, their iPhone, once one of the only usable smartphone games in town, may wind up back where most Apple products are slotted-- at the top of the market, affordable only to those willing and able to pay a premium for Steve Jobs' aesthetic sensibilities.
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/12/...roid-explodes/





5 Interesting Facts About Android

Fact 1: Android runs Linux. But it’s not “the Linux.”

Android is not LinuxFor internal usage, Google already maintains its own flavor of Linux to power its systems. A similar kind of fork happened with Android where Google believed that certain features needed to be added to the Linux kernel to make it fit for Android. One such feature is “wake locks“, a mechanism introduced by Google in Linux code to handle power management—Wake locks allow Android applications to request kernel not to go into low-power state. Quite interestingly such changes were “rejected” in the staging area of Linux kernel—effectively requiring Google to remain aloof with its version of “Android Linux”—if we can call it that. More information on Android vs. Linux is available in the linked article (dated 9th Feb)

Fact 2: Android uses Java as a development platform. But it’s not Java ME.

Android is not Java MEUnlike Linux, it’s not a fork of Java ME either (if there could be such a thing). Android provides its own SDK which is based on Java. Except for AWT or Swing, quite a lot of Java SE is supported in this SDK. Limited JSRs (Java Specification Request), however, are implemented in addition to the core Java framework. Android’s support for Open GL, for example, is built similar to JSR 239.

Fact 3: Android runs a VM named Dalvik. But it’s not a Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

Dalvik is not a JVMGoogle built a VM from scratch for Android phone; it is optimized for Android. Instead of running Java byte code, Dalvik runs .dex files. Further, unlike JVMs which are stack-based, Dalvik is a registers-based VM. Trivia: Dalvik is named after a town in Iceland.

After Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, Oracle sued Google over this VM. It’s widely believed that Oracle has shot itself in the foot by filing this lawsuit.

Fact 4: Android was not developed by Google!

Andy Rubin's HomepageAndroid Inc., the company behind Android, was a 22 month old startup when it was acquired by Google in mid 2005. Android was open sourced in October 2008 under Apache’s open source license. Google retained Andy Rubin, the co-founder of Android Inc, as VP Engineering.

Fact5: Android’s runtime includes a SQLite database!

But Android has SQLiteSQLite is a light weight relational database which is built into Android for data storage purpose. Android applications can also make us of this RDBMS.
http://www.androided.me/5-interestin...about-android/





PS3 Dongle ID Key Generator

Well, the master key is out and about now so here’s a convenient little application to generate your dongle id keys.

Straight forward to use.

Linux only – will compile a Windows build if needed.

Originally Posted by readme.txt

p3kg – Xtse

Description
Generates a Dongle ID Key based on the Dongle ID provided.
Usage
./p3kg
Example
./p3kg 0xAABB

Note: must be 2 bytes (4 characters) and prefixed with 0x
I.e. 0x0AA will not work; 0x00AA will.

When I wrote this I hard-coded the revoke list on graf_chokolo’s wiki so credits to him and all of his hard work.

If you want source code, let me know – I’ll make a few changes – tidy it up and post it as well.

Link: http://www.mediafire.com/?e52oddvlmtw8d2j

http://www.ps3hax.net/2010/12/ps3-do...key-generator/





Windows Phone Marketplace App-Security Cracked: Proof-Of-Concept
Daniel Rubino

Disclosure: Well before the publication of this article, WPCentral contacted Microsoft's Brandon Watson directly about the breach and we are cooperating with Microsoft in any way we can. Microsoft may be providing a statement to us addressing this issue, which we will of course post in its entirety if they choose to do so.

Yesterday we reported on a controversial "whitepaper" over at XDA (since pulled) which gleaned publicly available information to outline how the WP7 Marketplace could be cracked. To some, this was new. For others, it was very old. And for others still, it was information that was plain incorrect.

For developers, the weakness in Microsoft's DRM for Windows Phone 7 applications has been well known for quite some time, and there have been calls for Microsoft to address these concerns (see here in their forums).

Since then, a "white hat" developer has provided WPCentral with a proof-of-concept program that can successfully pull any application from the Marketplace, remove the security and deploy to an unlocked Windows Phone with literally a push of a button. Alternatively, you could just save the cracked XAP file to your hard drive. Neither the app nor the methodology is public, and it will NOT be released (please don't ask). It is important to note that this was all done within six hours by one developer.

After the break, you can see a video of the application (called "FreeMarketplace") in action, demonstrating how easy it can be to download any app from the Marketplace. While many will condemn us for "promoting piracy," we respectfully disagree. We have heard many complaints from developers about this weakness for months now and it is their right to know about the flaws in the system. We are confident Microsoft will work hard to implement a stronger DRM system, in part due to this proof-of-concept demonstration.

Tobias, technical adviser for this article, can be contacted via WPCentral
http://www.wpcentral.com/windows-pho...-concept-video





Quickly and Easily Share Large Files with Crate

If you’ve been looking for a file-sharing service to fill dearly departed Drop.io’s shoes, Crate might be the answer.
Rick Broida

Looking for a fast, no-fuss way to share big files with friends or family members? Until recently, your best option was Drop.io.

Alas, the service shut down earlier this month, having been purchased by Facebook for an as-yet-unknown fate.

I've yet to find the perfect replacement, but Crate comes close. Like Drop.io, it gives you a dedicated repository for the files you want to share and a unique URL with which to share them. Instead of "drops," you build "crates."

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

Looking for a fast, no-fuss way to share big files with friends or family members? Until recently, your best option was Drop.io.

Alas, the service shut down earlier this month, having been purchased by Facebook for an as-yet-unknown fate.

I've yet to find the perfect replacement, but Crate comes close. Like Drop.io, it gives you a dedicated repository for the files you want to share and a unique URL with which to share them. Instead of "drops," you build "crates."

It's literally a two-step process. First, you do is drag one or more files to the crate image on the site. Second, when the upload is done, you copy the provided URL and e-mail it to whoever needs the files. Can't get any easier than that.

You don't even have to register, but there's incentive for doing so: unregistered crates expire in 30 minutes, but if you have an account, they last indefinitely.

A free Crate account lets you store up to six crates, each with an individual-file size limit of 50MB and a total space limit of 200MB. A Pro account ($9 monthly) nets you unlimited crates and file sizes, with a storage cap of 2GB.

There are lots of other services that offer big-file sharing, but few match the simplicity of Crate.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/201...are-large.html





The Pogies: Best Tech Ideas of the Year
David Pogue

Welcome to the Sixth Annual Pogie Awards!

Yes, it’s time once again to recognize the best tech ideas of the year. Not the best products — sometimes, a Pogie award-winning feature crops up in a product that, over all, is a turkey. No, these awards go to the best ideas in products, clever twists that make life just a little bit better.

First, however, let’s get a few things straight: These are fake awards. There’s no trophy. There’s no ceremony. There’s no $500-a-plate dinner. It’s just me, quietly making notes all year long. (Every year, a few earnest P.R. people write me to ask about the deadline for submissions. If I had any brains, I’d tell ’em it’s Aug. 15 — and I’d tell ’em about the $300 application fee.)

Here we go. Keep hands and feet inside the tram at all times!

FACE-AWARE ZOOMING (BEST BUY INSIGNIA FRAMES) Like many digital picture frames, Best Buy’s can add an attractive transition effect between slide show photos. It offers the Ken Burns effect as one of the transition styles. With this effect, the photos are constantly in motion, gradually zooming in while cross-fading from one to the next.

The trouble with the Ken Burns effect, of course, is that the computer generally has no clue what part of the photo it’s zooming into. You often wind up with a beautiful, graceful, professional-looking zoom — into your mother’s knees.

Best Buy, however, built in face-recognition software. If it detects a face in a photo, it zooms into that, or from one to the next if there are several. It even removes red-eye on the fly. Tiny details, yes — but smart ones.

IMOVIE MOVIE TRAILERS Plenty of software makes you more productive or more efficient — but Apple’s iMovie ’11 actually makes you laugh. Its new Movie Trailers feature gives you a choice of 15 professional-looking movie trailers: action, documentary, drama, romantic comedy and so on.

Each is a template into which you insert clips from your own home videos; a storyboard screen recommends dropping an action shot here, a group shot there. The software provides the rest, including titles with very Hollywood animated effects, stunning backgrounds and, above all, hilariously on-target movie music, recorded just for iMovie by the London Symphony Orchestra.

Then it spits out a thoroughly convincing movie trailer in the style you chose. It’s amazing to see how scenes from your own mundane life can be transformed with a little help from some epic music and eye-catching credits.

If anything can persuade visitors to sit through your home movies, this is it.

WORD LENS When a reader sent me a video of this iPhone app, I wrote back: “Very funny!” I was convinced that the video was fake.

But it wasn’t. You point the iPhone’s camera at anything written in Spanish — say, a sign, headline or restaurant menu — and you see, on the screen, the English translation.

The crazy mind-blower is that you see the original sign — same angle, color, background material, lighting — with new writing on it! Somehow, the app erases the original text and replaces it with new lettering, in the same type size and spacing, but in English. (Spanish-to-English and English-to-Spanish are each $5. The free version demonstrates the fundamental magic by rewriting the sign’s text sdrawkcab.)

It’s a word for word, literal translation; don’t expect poetry or even perfect grammar. And complicated backgrounds or fonts confuse it. But this is software magic.

WINDOWS PHONE 7 CAMERA BUTTON Microsoft Windows Phone 7 is a rival to the iPhone and Android phones, but with a genuinely fresh, smart design. One example: You can use the phone’s camera even when the phone itself is turned off. Just hold down the shutter button to turn on only the camera “side.” You spend less time fussing, waiting and missing photo ops.

FASTMAC U-SOCKET With every passing month, more gadgets can be recharged from a U.S.B. jack: music players (including iPods), cellphones (including iPhones and Android phones), cameras, GPS units and so on. Which means that to charge them, you typically need a computer that, itself, plugs into a power outlet.



Not anymore. This $20 wall plate includes two regular three-prong power outlets — and two standard U.S.B. jacks. Now you can plug gadgets directly into the wall to recharge, no computer needed.

SAMSUNG TWIN VIEW REMOTE The Samsung 9000 series is a family of shockingly thin, chrome-backed flat LED TV screens. Terrific picture, excellent blacks, 3-D capable, Internet widgets, blah-blah-blah.

But the coolest part is the remote. It’s a responsive, compact color touch-screen remote (about the size of an iPhone) — and it offers Twin View. That’s where the remote’s screen shows whatever the TV is showing. If you take the remote to the kitchen or bathroom with you, you can take a break without missing anything. Or you can surreptitiously monitor what your kids are watching downstairs.

SONY A55 TRANSLUCENT MIRROR In a regular S.L.R. camera (single-lens reflex — those big black pro cameras), light enters the lens, hits a mirror and is bounced up to your eye and, simultaneously, onto a focusing sensor. Unfortunately, when you take the photo, the mirror has to flip out of the way so that the light falls on the image sensor (the “film”). At that point, the camera can’t focus. That’s why most S.L.R.’s can’t change focus during burst-mode shots, or while filming video.

Sony’s A55 camera ($850) solves that problem by using a translucent mirror. It splits light between the focusing sensor and the image sensor. The mirror never moves, so the autofocus never goes blind. The camera can take 10 shots a second, refocusing all the way — no other camera can do that — and change focus as you pan or zoom, gorgeously and cinematically. No wonder this was Popular Photography’s camera of the year.

SAMSUNG PL90 FLIP-OUT U.S.B. When you want to transfer photos from your camera to your computer, you probably hunt for the U.S.B. cable. The masterstroke here: this camera has a flip-out U.S.B. jack, just like the Flip camcorder. So you never need to pack or find a cable or a card reader when you want to transfer pictures; the camera connects right to the computer.

CABLE COMPANY WI-FI ALLIANCES Last year, America’s cable TV companies began installing regionwide wireless Internet hot spots, free for use by their cable Internet customers. Your laptop, phone or Touch is always online when you’re in public places around town. It was supposed to be an irresistible bonus, a freebie that their phone company rivals couldn’t match.

This year, some of them had an even better idea: team up. In New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, for example, Cablevision, Time Warner and Comcast decided to merge their Wi-Fi networks. Now any customer of any one of those companies can enjoy the Wi-Fi hot spots provided by the other two as well — free. Competition makes strange bedfellows, eh?

CHECK DEPOSIT APPS If you rate Pogie nominees by the number of hours, miles and headaches saved, surely this one should walk away with the Pogie Ultimo.

Any customer of Chase Bank (and some customers of USAA, which had the idea first) can deposit a check just by taking a picture of it with an iPhone or Android phone. That’s right: sign the back, use the app to photograph the front and back, type the amount, and tap send.

You’ve just made a fully legitimate deposit; at this point, you can actually rip up the check. No deposit slip, no driving, no A.T.M. envelopes. It’s good technology that benefits the environment, the parking lots and you.

And that, friends, is a beautiful thing.

Happy high-tech new year!
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/te...h/30pogue.html





For Kodachrome Fans, Road Ends at Photo Lab in Kansas
A. G. Sulzberger

An unlikely pilgrimage is under way to Dwayne’s Photo, a small family business that has through luck and persistence become the last processor in the world of Kodachrome, the first successful color film and still the most beloved.

That celebrated 75-year run from mainstream to niche photography is scheduled to come to an end on Thursday when the last processing machine is shut down here to be sold for scrap.

In the last weeks, dozens of visitors and thousands of overnight packages have raced here, transforming this small prairie-bound city not far from the Oklahoma border for a brief time into a center of nostalgia for the days when photographs appeared not in the sterile frame of a computer screen or in a pack of flimsy prints from the local drugstore but in the warm glow of a projector pulling an image from a carousel of vivid slides.

In the span of minutes this week, two such visitors arrived. The first was a railroad worker who had driven from Arkansas to pick up 1,580 rolls of film that he had just paid $15,798 to develop. The second was an artist who had driven directly here after flying from London to Wichita, Kan., on her first trip to the United States to turn in three rolls of film and shoot five more before the processing deadline.

The artist, Aliceson Carter, 42, was incredulous as she watched the railroad worker, Jim DeNike, 53, loading a dozen boxes that contained nearly 50,000 slides into his old maroon Pontiac. He explained that every picture inside was of railroad trains and that he had borrowed money from his father’s retirement account to pay for developing them.

“That’s crazy to me,” Ms. Carter said. Then she snapped a picture of Mr. DeNike on one of her last rolls.

Demanding both to shoot and process, Kodachrome rewarded generations of skilled users with a richness of color and a unique treatment of light that many photographers described as incomparable even as they shifted to digital cameras. “Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day,” Paul Simon sang in his 1973 hit “Kodachrome,” which carried the plea “Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away.”

As news media around the world have heralded Thursday’s end of an era, rolls of the discontinued film that had been hoarded in freezers and tucked away in closets, sometimes for decades, have flooded Dwayne’s Photo, arriving from six continents.

“It’s more than a film, it’s a pop culture icon,” said Todd Gustavson, a curator from the George Eastman House, a photography museum in Rochester in the former residence of the Kodak founder. “If you were in the postwar baby boom, it was the color film, no doubt about it.”

Among the recent visitors was Steve McCurry, a photographer whose work has appeared for decades in National Geographic including his well-known cover portrait, shot in Kodachrome, of a Afghan girl that highlights what he describes as the “sublime quality” of the film. When Kodak stopped producing the film last year, the company gave him the last roll, which he hand-delivered to Parsons. “I wasn’t going to take any chances,” he explained.

At the peak, there were about 25 labs worldwide that processed Kodachrome, but the last Kodak-run facility in the United States closed several years ago, then the one in Japan and then the one in Switzerland. Since then, all that was left has been Dwayne’s Photo. Last year, Kodak stopped producing the chemicals needed to develop the film, providing the business with enough to continue processing through the end of 2010. And last week, right on schedule, the lab opened up the last canister of blue dye.

Kodak declined to comment for this article.

The status of lone survivor is a point of pride for Dwayne Steinle, who remembers being warned more than once by a Kodak representative after he opened the business more than a half-century ago that the area was too sparsely populated for the studio to succeed. It has survived in part because Mr. Steinle and his son Grant focused on lower-volume specialties — like black-and-white and print-to-print developing, and, in the early ’90s, the processing of Kodachrome.

Still, the toll of the widespread switch to digital photography has been painful for Dwayne’s, much as it has for Kodak. In the last decade, the number of employees has been cut to about 60 from 200 and digital sales now account for nearly half of revenue. Most of the staff and even the owners acknowledge that they primarily use digital cameras. “That’s what we see as the future of the business,” said Grant Steinle, who runs the business now.

The passing of Kodachrome has been much noted, from the CBS News program ”Sunday Morning” to The Irish Times, but it is noteworthy in no small part for how long it survived. Created in 1935, Kodachrome was an instant hit as the first film to effectively render color.

Even when it stopped being the default film for chronicling everyday life — thanks in part to the move to prints from slides — it continued to be the film of choice for many hobbyists and medical professionals. Dr. Bharat Nathwani, 65, a Los Angeles pathologist, lamented that he still had 400 unused rolls. “I might hold it, God willing that Kodak sees its lack of wisdom.”

This week, the employees at Dwayne’s worked at a frenetic pace, keeping a processing machine that has typically operated just a few hours a day working around the clock (one of the many notes on the lab wall reads: “I took this to a drugstore and they didn’t even know what it was”).

“We really didn’t expect it to be this crazy,” said Lanie George, who manages the Kodachrome processing department.

One of the toughest decisions was how to deal with the dozens of requests from amateurs and professionals alike to provide the last roll to be processed.

In the end, it was determined that a roll belonging to Dwayne Steinle, the owner, would be last. It took three tries to find a camera that worked. And over the course of the week he fired off shots of his house, his family and downtown Parsons. The last frame is already planned for Thursday, a picture of all the employees standing in front of Dwayne’s wearing shirts with the epitaph: “The best slide and movie film in history is now officially retired. Kodachrome: 1935-2010.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/us/30film.html





Santa Brings Bump Its Biggest Day Of Sharing Ever, Swapping 20 Photos A Second
Jason Kincaid

As every iPhone developer knows, Christmas Day is the busiest day of the year, as millions of people unwrap their shiny new iPhones and promptly go on an app download spree (I’m sure Android sees a similar phenomenon). Which means it isn’t terribly surprising when Bump, a Sequoia-backed startup that makes it easy to share data between phones, says that today is the biggest day of traffic it’s ever had. Then again, the fact that people are currently sharing 20 photos per second is quite impressive.

Bump CEO David Lieb says that Bump’s traffic is currently 2.4 times as high as it was a week ago, and that the service is on pace for 2 million shared items today, with a peak load of 30 items per second (in addition to swapping photos, you can share music, contact information, and calendar events using Bump).

These numbers are especially interesting for one big reason — Lieb says this is the first time the company has disclosed any traffic stats at all. Granted, the data obviously isn’t representative of Bump’s daily average, but it still gives some context about usage of the service.

For those that haven’t used it, Bump lets you quickly swap data between two phones by simply tapping them together (both phones obviously have to be running the Bump application). Bump’s applications have been downloaded 25 million times across the iPhone and Android since the service launched.

Lieb says that even aside from today’s big numbers, Bump usage is on the rise. This has been driven in part by the launch of music sharing in November (which is already the second most-shared type of file, behind photos). And last Saturday the service enabled ‘long-distance connections’, which lets you exchange messages with friends in your address book and from Facebook, without having to actually physically ‘bump’ your phone with them.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/25/san...hotos-a-second


















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