Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 22nd, '12

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002

"White kids love sexting." – Gregory Ferenstein



































December 22nd, 2012




London 'Crime Unit' to Target Downloaders as Part of UK Copyright and Patent Initiatives
Bryan Bishop

Vince Cable, the United Kingdom's Business Secretary, announced a set of new intellectual property initiatives yesterday aimed at improving the way IP is approved and protected in the UK. Speaking at The Big Innovation Centre in London, Cable outlined several different measures, including a sped-up patent processing service that can deliver patents in just three months — it currently can take years — as well as informational campaigns aimed at younger individuals that are more likely to engage in pirating copyrighted material. Cable also said that a special crime unit, aimed specifically at illegal downloaders, would be created in partnership with the City of London police.

The changes come in response to a report issued in May that assessed the state of intellectual property in the country, which suggested a wide range of changes in an effort to solve existing problems and improve the economy. According to Cable, the new initiatives he outlined will go into effect in 2013.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/18/3...pyright-patent





UK Consumers Given More Copyright Freedom
Veena Mapara

Changes to create greater freedom to use copyright works such as computer games, paintings, photographs, films, books, and music, while protecting the interests of authors and right owners, were announced today by Business Secretary Vince Cable. These form part of the Government’s response to creating a modern, robust and flexible copyright framework.

New measures include provisions to allow copying of works for individuals’ own personal use, parody and for the purposes of quotation. They allow people to use copyright works for a variety of valuable purposes without permission from the copyright owners. They will also bring up to date existing exceptions for education, research and the preservation of materials.

The Government has consulted extensively on these proposals, through the process of the Hargreaves Review, a formal consultation and numerous discussions with stakeholders and industry representatives. It has considered all responses very carefully, which have helped develop and refine the proposals including the balance between exceptions and licensing, before finalising these measures.

Business Secretary, Vince Cable said:

“Making the intellectual property framework fit for the 21st century is not only common sense but good business sense. Bringing the law into line with ordinary people’s reasonable expectations will boost respect for copyright, on which our creative industries rely.

“We feel we have struck the right balance between improving the way consumers benefit from copyright works they have legitimately paid for, boosting business opportunities and protecting the rights of creators.”

In his review of intellectual property and growth, Professor Hargreaves made the case for the UK making greater use of these exceptions, which are allowed under EU law. In response to a consultation earlier this year, the Government will make changes to:

• Private copying - to permit people to copy digital content they have bought onto any medium or device that they own, but strictly for their own personal use such as transferring their music collection or eBooks to their tablet, phone or to a private cloud;

• Education - to simplify copyright licensing for the education sector and make it easier for teachers to use copyright materials on interactive whiteboards and similar technology in classrooms and provide access to copyright works over secure networks to support the growing demand for distance learning handouts for students;

• Quotation and news reporting - to create a more general permission for quotation of copyright works for any purpose, as long as the use of a particular quotation is “fair dealing” and its source is acknowledged;

• Parody, caricature and pastiche - to allow limited copying on a fair dealing basis which would allow genuine parody, but prohibit copying disguised as parody;

• Research and private study - to allow sound recordings, films and broadcasts to be copied for non-commercial research and private study purposes without permission from the copyright holder. This includes both user copying and library copying;

• Data analytics for non-commercial research - to allow non-commercial researchers to use computers to study published research results and other data without copyright law interfering;

• Access for people with disabilities - to allow people with disabilities the right to obtain copyright works in accessible formats where a suitable one is not already on the market;

• Archiving and preservation - to allow museums, galleries, libraries and archives to preserve any type of copyright work that is in their permanent collection which cannot readily be replaced; and

• Public administration - to widen existing exceptions to enable more public bodies to share proactively third party information online, which would reflect the existing position in relation to the use of paper copies.

These changes could contribute at least £500m to the UK economy over 10 years, and perhaps much more from reduced costs, increased competition and by making copyright works more valuable.

In addition the Government will introduce a new, non-statutory system for clarifying areas where there is confusion or misunderstanding on the scope and application of copyright law. Copyright notices will issued by the Intellectual Property Office. These notices are intended to clarify, but not make new law.
http://news.bis.gov.uk/Press-Release...dom-68542.aspx





Lofgren Looks to Slow Down Domain Name Seizures
Gautham Nagesh

At the start of this year, protesters helped derail the Stop Online Piracy Act, which would have strengthened the Justice Department’s ability to shut down websites violating copyright laws. Lofgren is set to introduce legislation to address the concerns of such protesters.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., turned to the online community on Reddit last month for help with legislation she is drafting to try to slow down the government’s seizure of website domains accused of copyright infringement.

Many of the social news site’s notoriously outspoken users were grateful for the opportunity to weigh in again on the issue of domain name seizures. Earlier this year, Reddit helped rally opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act, legislation aimed at strengthening the Justice Department’s ability to shut down foreign websites that violate U.S. copyright laws. The resulting protests on sites including Wikipedia and Google made “SOPA” a household term.

“People are meant to be innocent until proven guilty,” Reddit user Tipaa said to Lofgren. “Taking a website down or seizing a domain name should be a last resort, opposed to a standardized knee-jerk reaction.”

Lofgren, a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee who represents a Silicon Valley district, is not the first politician to engage with Reddit. But she might be the lawmaker whose views hew closest to the site’s users. She frequently takes the side of Internet activists and Web companies against content creators and government agencies that enforce copyright laws.

Most of the people commenting on her Reddit post were united in opposition to “Operation In Our Sites,” the ongoing effort by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to identify and shut down domains that are accused of online piracy or copyright violations. Lofgren agrees with their stance, and she is one of only 41 members of Congress who voted against the PRO-IP Act of 2008 that authorized the seizures.

“There are some who argue, and I think there are reasonable arguments to be made, that the way Operation In Our Sites is being operated now violates the constitutional constraints,” the California Democrat told CQ Roll Call in an interview last week. “We ought to have clear standards so we know the Constitution is being adhered to.”

Under Operation In Our Sites, ICE has seized 1,630 domains, 684 of which have been forfeited to the government. The 2008 law authorizing the program was the result of a lobbying effort by content creators — including Hollywood and others in the entertainment industry and software companies — who wanted more- aggressive online copyright enforcement. They argue that piracy costs American companies billions of dollars in revenue a year and results in thousands of lost jobs.

“Because intellectual property is a valuable asset to both the inventor and American economy as a whole, Congress must ensure that IP enforcement is made a top priority for this and future administrations,” House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said at the time of the bill’s overwhelming passage.

But since widespread protests derailed SOPA in January, advocates of more-aggressive action against online piracy have become noticeably quiet, presumably concerned about another grass-roots backlash. The PRO-IP Act was sponsored by many of the same lawmakers on the Judiciary Committee who backed SOPA, including Smith and incoming chairman Robert W. Goodlatte, R-Va. Smith’s office had no comment for this article, while Goodlatte’s office did not respond to queries.

Before SOPA, content creators rarely experienced much opposition to their calls for expanded online enforcement. Content creators have struck a more conciliatory tone recently, with Christopher J. Dodd, the former Connecticut senator who now serves as president of the Motion Picture Association of America, calling for greater cooperation between Hollywood and Silicon Valley at a conference this month.

“Hollywood and Silicon Valley have more in common than most people realize, or are willing to acknowledge. Not only does Hollywood work closely with Silicon Valley to create and promote films, Hollywood film and television creators are tech companies,” Dodd said. “It’s time to reject the binary framing of the issues. The future isn’t about choosing between protecting free speech or intellectual property — it’s about protecting both.”

Lofgren concedes that charting a new direction on copyright policy is an uphill battle. But she is wading in nonetheless, with a draft legislative proposal that seeks to add some judicial oversight to the process currently used to seize domains. She wants to require the government to provide notice and an opportunity for website operators to defend themselves before seizing or redirecting their domain names.

“The thinking is, obviously it’s not going to pass anytime soon,” she said. “But it’s a marker out there. And if we can get some Republican co-sponsors and if we have something that is clearly rooted in the Constitution, maybe we can make some progress.”

The consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, which helped rally opposition to SOPA, has opposed expanding online copyright enforcement. Sherwin Siy, the group’s vice president for legal affairs, said seizing a domain is “not like you’re sticking a padlock on a warehouse. A domain is more than just a place where goods are stored. It’s a hub for speech.

“Physical goods can be held in escrow or in a warehouse and they won’t necessarily decay or degrade,” Siy added. “If you seize a site, you’re shutting it down. You’re stopping a process, as opposed to sequestering something physical that can be restored.”
Lofgren points to the hip-hop blog Dajaz1 and the Spanish sports site Rojadirecta, which were both seized by ICE only to be restored after much legal wrangling, as evidence that the current process doesn’t provide site owners adequate recourse.

“It’s absurd. This is America, you don’t do stuff like that,” Lofgren said regarding the seizure of Dajaz1, which stayed offline for almost a year. “The fact that the case was ultimately dropped itself says something about the merits of the case. But that you could do the whole thing in secret without any judicial review should make people very uncomfortable.”
http://www.rollcall.com/news/lofgren...-220071-1.html





ACTA Gets Final Stake Through Heart as EC Drops Court Referral

Summary: The European Union is certain not to see an ACTA revival, ever, after the Commission dropped an ECJ referral aimed at establishing the dead agreement's legality.
David Meyer

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement can no longer come back from the grave in Europe, after the European Commission dropped its bid to have the copyright treaty's legality confirmed by the union's top court.

Parliamentarians roundly rejected ACTA back in July. They had many reasons for doing so, primarily the large physical demonstrations taking place across the continent against it. Many criticised the behind-closed-doors nature of the treaty's formulation, and complained when leaked drafts revealed wording that could, among other things, criminalise bloggers who put copyrighted images into posts.

However, before the European Parliament had its say, the Trade Commission referred ACTA to the European Court of Justice (ECJ), so the court could rule on its legality. This was ostensibly to clear the air, but critics called out the Commission for trying to stall a vote it knew it would lose.

After the parliamentary rejection, trade commissioner Karel De Gucht maintained that the ECJ examination should still go ahead. He even went so far as to say that he would consider reintroducing ACTA if it was given the all-clear.

That is now not going to happen, as the Commission has dropped its referral.

"I welcome this news from the Commission today," Socialists & Democrats (S&D) MEP David Martin said in a statement on Wednesday. "The EU cannot be party to an agreement without European Parliament ratification. MEPs overwhelmingly rejected ACTA in July and I am pleased that the Commission has acknowledged this is the end of the road for ACTA in the EU thanks to the Parliament."

Outside the EU, none of the ACTA signatories have ratified it, with the sole exception of Japan. The US, which was alongside Japan the driving force for the treaty in the first place, is yet to take that step — although, with Barack Obama having secured his second term, this may yet happen.

The Australian government seems set on ratification. At least six of the signatories need to ratify ACTA if it is to come into force anywhere. Sadly for those who favour the agreement, the withdrawal of the EU and its 27 member states means there are only eight signatories left.

ZDNet has asked the Commission for comment, but had no reply as yet.
http://www.zdnet.com/acta-gets-final...070/?s_cid=458





Music Firms in Bid to Block Free File-Share Website
Tim Healy

FOUR music companies are seeking court orders to block Irish internet users from accessing the free file-sharing website Pirate Bay and related websites.

About 200,000 Irish users access the Pirate Bay site monthly, the Commercial Court heard. The companies have brought the case against five internet service providers (ISPs) to get them to block or disable access to the sites by their subscribers.

The case will involve the first court examination of new copyright legislation introduced in February.

The action is by EMI, Sony, Warner Music and Universal against UPC, Imagine, Vodafone, Digiweb and Hutchison 3G Ltd. All the defendants consented to fast-tracking the case in the Commercial Court.

EMI chairman Willie Kavanagh, who is also chairman of the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA), said the Pirate Bay website operated as "a vast directory of what is overwhelmingly copyright material".

But he said: "Internet users are taking this material and making it available for download, copying and onward distribution."

An expert had estimated the minimum advertising revenue of the Pirate Bay website at between $20.5m (€15.5m) to $36m (€27m).

Mr Justice Peter Kelly said it appeared the defendant companies were "innocent parties" seeking to achieve a constructive end to the litigation.

He said the best approach may be to have experts for the sides get together to work out a way forward.
http://www.independent.ie/national-n...e-3330519.html





OZ ISP Pulls Out of Copyright Plot: “It’s Not Our Job to Play Online Police”

iiNet withdraws from proposed notice-notice trial scheme
Steve Dalby

Outdated content delivery models were back in the headlines this week as news outlets reported on iiNet’s decision to decline to participate in a trial being considered in round table talks on copyright issues.

These talks have been going on for a few years, originally kicked off by Communications Alliance, other ISPs and various rights holders, more recently also involving Federal government agencies and consumer representatives.

We’ve continued to participate in these talks, even after the landmark High Court ruling in April, when the High Court firstly, unanimously dismissed the claim that iiNet was authorising copyright infringement by its customers and secondly, made it clear we had no obligation to the rights holders to harass our customers.

While we appreciate the efforts of the Attorney General’s Department (AGD) to draw the parties together and thank the AGD, Communications Alliance and the other companies who have persisted with the discussions, the time has come for us to make it clear that we won’t participate in a notice-notice trial on which the talks now focus. Here’s why.

A broken record

The conversation has failed to move on. The rights holders are still insisting ISP’s should perform work on their behalf instead of addressing what we have always said is the root cause of the infringements – the limited accessibility to desirable content and the discriminatory and high cost of content in Australia. Infringements are a symptom – access is the problem.

Data retention proposals

iiNet won’t support any scheme that forces ISPs to retain data in order to allow for the tracking of customer behaviour and the status of any alleged infringements against them.

Collecting and retaining additional customer data at this level is inappropriate, expensive and most importantly, not our responsibility.

It’s not iiNet’s job to play online police

We’ve been over this before. The High Court spoke loud and clear in their verdict when they ruled categorically that ISPs have no obligation to protect the rights of third parties, and we’re not prepared to harass our customers when the industry has no clear obligation to do so.

It’s time to find a new way

We believe that timely, affordable access to legitimate content is the best option for reducing unauthorised sharing.

iiNet has repeatedly and publicly called on the studios and content owners to enter into commercial discussions for the digital distribution of their desirable content.

To quote MM from the iiTrial: “The law as it stands has given clarity; this whole idea that people will wait 12-18 months; consumers are just not buying it. You’ve got to address what is now a broken model from last century.”

Hollywood, you know where we are

Allow me to re-state, for the record that iiNet has always maintained that it’s not OK to download or share movies and stuff via peer-to-peer networks, like torrents. As we said after this year’s High Court decision, iiNet does not condone piracy; we just didn’t agree with the studios that it was our job to do their work for them.

We’re still holding out for a commercial solution that will work for ISPs, the rights holders and our customers and that improves the supply of legitimate content but it’s clear that this is not going to be the outcome of the current talks.

It’s time to change the tune.
http://blog.iinet.net.au/iinet-withd...notice-scheme/





Israeli Bill to Block Access to Gambling & Child Porn Websites
Jonathan Klinger

0. Israel is to attempt, again, to pass a bill that authorizes police officers to issue warrants to Internet service providers to block or restrict access to specific websites involved either in gambling, child pornography or copyright infringement. The bill itself proposes that such administrative procedures shall be clandestine and that court decisions shall be made ex-parte, where some of the court’s ruling will not be even disclosed to the owner of the website, and the court may hear and use inadmissible evidence.

In my opinion, one of the saddest things in a democracy is that powers with authority can change the rules after the game commenced. This is story with blocking of gambling sites, an experiment which began around 2010.

Fortunately, after a lot of hard work by the Israeli Internet Society, The District Court of Tel-Aviv quashed the block and ruled that the police had no authority to order Internet service providers to block access to certain sites or IP addresses (decision now on appeal, see the Hebrew original ruling at AA 45606-10-10 ISOC N. Shachar Ayalon).

However, Israel is famous for presenting bills that bypass constitutional rulings, and now wants to reassert this authority, without limitation, by presenting a new bill: The Bill for Restricting Uses for Preventing Crimes (Amendment – Restriction of Access to a Website and various revisions),2012 , (Google Translation).

1. You can read a bit more about the bill at Oded Yaron’s article at Haaretz.com (behind a paywall). In general, the bill’s purpose is to circumvent the relevant court ruling and allow the police to block websites. In the district court ruling, the police’s authority to shut down gambling houses cannot apply to websites. However, the bill’s current wishes seem to be broader:

Had a certified police officer reasonable grounds for suspecting that the website is used to commit an offense specified in the Second Schedule [gambling, child pornography or copyright infringement - jk], and that there are reasonable grounds for concern that the website will continue to be used for committing a crime unless access is restricted, he may issue a warrant for Internet Service Providers to limit the access to that Web site; a warrant under this section may be issued even if the website also contains activity which is considered legal [or legitimate - jk] provided that the illegitimate activity is the main purpose of the website.

Now, as befits any modern legislation, justice it made but us not seen. Article 3 of the bill discusses execution of additional warrants, where everything shall be made ex-parte:

“material relating to the request to extend the validity of an administrative restriction or information based on which such request and any other material provided subject of the application process will be made to the judge only; material will be marked and returned to the police officer or authorized claimant (in this section the applicant) after examining “

But it’s not just that material will be ex-parte; in some cases, the ruling itself may be withheld from the appellant. “The court shall notify the owner or occupier and the police officer on its decision under this section, and it may determine that the decision, or parts of it, shall be confidential“.

2. This means Israeli that citizens may find themselves in a situation where they are subject to a warrant which is confidential. In such case, They will not be able to challenge such an order, because the grounds for the decision will unlisted . Sounds interesting? Well, I remind you that when we discussed that Communication Metadata Law, which allows police to receive GPS data on phone and Internet subscribers and records of their phone calls, everything was made in confidential decisions (with no further judicial review on them). Therefore, do not know how the law is implemented, how these requests really served illegally, and how judicial review works.

3. The bill itself is absurd if you understand the Internet: everybody knows that no matter what order blocking a given Web site, its validity is about as much as an order of Police fires in summer temperature does not exceed 25 degrees Celsius (or if you’re in the US, that it won’t snow on Christmas). I mean, okay, ISPs will restrict users from browsing, but that’s not actually something that works (proxy servers et all).

4. But of course there’s the issue of the slippery slope. The original act, which is to be amended by the bill, gave a judge the authority to issue a warrant under careful review; however, the bill conveys this authority to a police officers.

5. What about additional uses? Well, in order to pass the bill, the police began with abhorrent offenses considered: child pornography and gambling. Clearly, no one will oppose the authority to block such websites if he’s not a pedophile or a gambler. Well, not really. That’s why the phrase “Second Schedule” is used to described to offenses that are subject to this authority, in fact the bill asserts a short list of offenses, where the minister of justice can always add additional offenses. Once the bill is passed, no one can be certain that no additional offenses will enter there.

6. The real danger here is practice: in the same week where we discovered that the military police apparently investigated a blogger which was exposed using the metadata act without respecting his journalistic immunity and confidentiality of sources, and on the same week as the non-democratic nations want to rule the internet through the ITU convention, Israel decides to publish this bill. And why? because Israel deems it ok to gamble all your money is the state lottery, but not right when you give money to foreign websites.
http://2jk.org/english/?p=341





Pirate Party Blinks: Closes Proxy After BPI Pressure

BPI intimidates the Pirate Party UK into submission
Max Smolaks

On Monday evening, the Pirate Party UK (PPUK) took down its Pirate Bay proxy server, after being threatened with legal action by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) group.

The BPI represents music copyright holders and its members include such giants as the Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group. After the political organisation refused to shut down the proxy voluntarily, the BPI sent out six letters addressed to the individual members of the Pirate Party.

Pirate Party can’t fight the system

In April, the High Court ordered five major British ISPs to block access to the Pirate Bay, on the grounds it facilitated copyright infringement. The decision came after the BPI failed to negotiate voluntary blocking.

However, by July, the amount of peer-to-peer traffic returned to its pre-ban levels, thanks in part to the proxy servers that allowed to circumvent the block, run by organisations like PPUK.

Earlier, the Pirate Party had said that taking the proxy down was not “something it can agree to”, and promised to fight the BPI. It even launched a fundraising campaign, in order to put together a legal team that would be capable of keeping the server online. According to the leader of the party Loz Kaye, it is unclear whether hosting a gateway to a blocked website goes against UK law.

However, on Monday evening, fundraising efforts were stopped and the proxy disappeared. According to TorrentFreak, Pirate Party members refused to provide any comment on the issue, after being instructed to do so by their solicitors.

“The Pirate Party UK will be issuing a statement here with our press releases regarding the Pirate Bay Proxy and this fundraising effort as soon as we are able,” says a banner on the organisation’s website.

We will update this story as soon as we hear from the Pirate Party.
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news...y-proxy-102324





Pirate Bay Censorship Backfires as New Proxies Bloom
Ernesto

After legal threats from the music industry the UK Pirate Party saw no other option than to shut down their Pirate Bay proxy service. However, as is usually the case with censorship, the Internet has found a way to route around it. Responding to the UK situation Pirate parties in Argentina and Luxembourg have decided to start fresh Pirate Bay proxies.

As reported earlier, the UK Pirate Party has taken the difficult decision to shut down their Pirate Bay proxy service.

Music industry group BPI threatened legal action against six members of the party, who would each have to risk bankruptcy to fight for their ideals. Understandably, the party chose to fight another day.

The BPI claimed that justice has been served, but a few days later they can put the Champagne back in the fridge.

Pirate parties in Argentina and Luxembourg have been closely following their colleagues in the UK and as result have decided to spring into action. The parties have now started their own Pirate Bay proxies (ARG / LUX), sending a clear message to the copyright lobby.

“Due to pressure from lobbyists, politicians all over Europe are incited to expand the censorship infrastructure to prevent freedom of expression, the right to information and the free exchange of culture. With our proxy, we help to circumvent the Internet censorship of European countries,” Luxembourg Pirate Party President Sven Clement says.

The Argentinian Pirate Party is sending a similar message, and invites those who can’t access The Pirate Bay due to blockades to use their proxy.

“We wish the UK Pirate Party best of luck in their continued fight for free access to culture and knowledge. We have put up our own Pirate Bay proxy which is accessible from anywhere in the world, including the UK and other places where it has been censored.”

The above shows that for every proxy site that’s taken down, one or more new ones are likely to appear. It’s a game of whack-a-mole that will be very difficult for the copyright lobby to win.

Those who really want to download torrents will find a way to access The Pirate Bay or one of the many alternatives. Presently there are hundreds of active Pirate Bay proxies.

As John Gilmore once said: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

Proof of the ineffectiveness of Pirate Bay blockades was previously highlighted by several Dutch and UK Internet providers, who claimed that BitTorrent traffic didn’t decline after the blockades were implemented.
https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-...-bloom-121222/





Pirate Party Presses Charges Against Banks For WikiLeaks Blockade
Rick Falkvinge

Today, the Swedish Pirate Party filed formal charges against Swedish banks for their discrimination against WikiLeaks, which has been systematically denied donations by payment providers since 2010.

Numerous payment service providers, including Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal, have blocked donations to WikiLeaks and other legal operations since 2010. Banks have been a part of the network of these service providers, which means that the banks actively participate in stopping donations without legitimate grounds. The Swedish Pirate Party says that this behavior is unacceptable and cause for grave concern, and has filed charges against the Swedish banks in question to try this behavior in court.

The charges were filed earlier today with the Swedish Finansinspektionen, the authority which oversees bank licenses and abuse of position. This follows an earlier initiative from the Pirate Party to regulate credit card companies on the European level in order to deny them the ability to determine who gets to trade and who doesn’t.

“The blockade is a serious threat against the freedoms of opinion and expression”, says the Pirate Party’s Erik Lönroth, who has been preparing the formal charges. “It must not be up to the individual payment provider to determine which organizations are eligible for donations. At the same time, these charges will bring clarity as to whether the bank regulations of today are sufficient, or if regulations need to be tightened to protect freedom of expression.”

It’s not just WikiLeaks that has been hurt by the randomness of the payment service providers. Swedish entrepreneurs such as sex toy shops and horror movie stores have also been denied payment services arbitrarily, which has effectively been a death sentence for the fully-legal companies.

Johan Terfelt, who oversees the Finansinspektionen unit for payment providers, confirms that the authority has received the filed charges, writes the Dagens Nyheter:

“We will now investigate what has happened and evaluate the reasons, if any, for us to intervene”, Terfelt tells the Dagens Nyheter. He also states there’s no room at all for arbitrary randomness, and gives a careful hint at a possible outcome: “The law states, that if there aren’t legal grounds to deny a payment service, then it must be processed.”
http://falkvinge.net/2012/12/17/pira...eaks-blockade/





Daniel Ellsberg and Free Speech Advocates Create Fund to Stop WikiLeaks-Style Payment Blockades
Andy Greenberg

When Visa, Mastercard, Paypal and others abruptly cut off all payments to the secret-spilling site WikiLeaks last year, they offered a lesson in how financial giants can use their purse strings to choke controversial media. Now Daniel Ellsberg and a group of digital liberties advocates hope to prevent that kind of financial blockade on information from ever occurring again.

On Monday, Ellsberg and a group of staffers from the digital-rights-focused Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) plan to announce the creation of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, an independent organization aimed at raising money and channeling it to the sort of edgy media groups that might suffer from a WikiLeaks-style embargo–including WikiLeaks itself.

“We’re trying to crowd-fund the right to know,” says John Perry Barlow, the co-founder of the EFF, a former Grateful Dead lyricist and free speech advocate who will serve on the board of the Foundation. “This isn’t just a way to support WikiLeaks. It’s a way to support a principle… We feel there will be more groups like WikiLeaks, and we want to inspire them as quickly as possible, because there’s a lot the public needs to know.”

On the Foundation’s website, any user will be able to make a donation through an encrypted form, specifying which organization under the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s umbrella will receive the funds. By mixing groups together under its banner, the Foundation hopes to make it more difficult for funding to be cut off to any one of them, and to also offer donors a way to make a contribution to a controversial group like WikiLeaks without publicly revealing that they’ve done so.

Barlow and fellow EFF staffers reached out to Daniel Ellsberg more than a year ago with the idea of creating that financial proxy for media groups and donors, and the Ellsberg immediately offered his support.

“A lot of people would rightly be hesitant to go on record sending money to WikiLeaks because they think they could be questioned, blacklisted or prosecuted,” says Ellsberg, citing politicians like Joe Biden and Sarah Palin that have compared WikiLeaks at times to a terrorist organization. “With this the individual will have his or her anonymity preserved. It’s like WikiLeaks itself. WikiLeaks facilitated anonymous leaking. This is to facilitate anonymous donations.”

Initially, the Freedom of the Press Foundation will funnel donations to four groups: WikiLeaks, the investigative journalism outfits Muckrock and the National Security Archives, and the citizen journalism group UpTake. But the group’s executive director Trevor Timm says more organizations will be added over time. “Ultimately we’d like to have ten organizations that have anonymous submissions systems, and ten organizations lik Muckrock and ten like Pro Publica, for instance,” he says. “There’s no magic bullet for solving the problem of government secrecy, so we want to tackle it with death by a thousand cuts.”

Ellsberg and Barlow aren’t the only big names involved with the group: Its board will also include Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, Boing Boing editor Xeni Jardin, and MacArthur-award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras.

WikiLeaks has been suffering financially for nearly two years since Visa, MasterCard, Bank of America, PayPal, and Western Union all stopped processing payments to the group in response to its announcement that it would release a quarter million secret State Department cables. Assange has said that 95% of the group’s funding dried up as a result, and it has yet to publish documents with the same impact as those it released in 2010, or even to rebuild its anonymous submissions system that went offline late that year.

Despite finding a workaround to receive funds through the French non-profit Fund for the Defense of Net Neutrality in July, the group has continued to struggle to raise cash. In October it added an interstitial fundraising page to the site when users click on any of its leaked documents, a move that many saw as a “paywall” that fundamentally contradicted its idea of free information.

Ellsberg says he hopes the Foundation can put WikiLeaks back on its feet. “We’re definitely trying to resuscitate WikiLeaks, and I think WikiLeaks will be back in action,” says Ellsberg.

But he says it’s just as important to foster the movement of newborn leak sites that seemed to promise a revitalized transparency movement in 2011–but have largely flopped. “We’re also emphasizing that we’d like other organizations to furnish the same kind of capability, and that’s more likely to happen when they won’t be strangled at birth,” Ellsberg says.

He points to other WikiLeaks-like groups on his radar including the Iceland-based Associated Whistleblower’s Press, and the German group OpenLeaks. The latter was founded by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former collaborator with Assange who eventually left the group with several other WikiLeakers and became one of Assange’s most bitter rivals. But even OpenLeaks has yet to publish any material and even seems to have taken its website offline.

“Let a thousand flowers bloom,” says Ellsberg. “They’d be a candidate for help on this too, whether Julian Assange likes it or not.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygree...ent-blockades/





Swedish Video App Could Help Regime Critics
Ann Törnkvist

Sweden-based researchers have helped develop a peer-to-peer video transfer app, which can help regime critics when governments switch off the internet to quell dissent.

"The idea was the video data can come from mobile phone users themselves instead of via servers," Raul Jimenez, researcher at Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), told The Local about the new Tribler Mobile concept.

"So for example, with YouTube the videos are on a server controlled by Google."

That can pose problems when commercial companies feel forced to compromise freedom of speech in order to enter and operate in new markets.

"The infrastructure belongs to a company, then the company can decide what is appropriate," Jimenez said.

"That is not what we are used to in democracies, we are used to the public square where you are free to say whatever you want because freedom of speech laws protect you," Jimenez said.

The app is free and has already been put into use. It was developed alongside Delft University of Technology and Inria.

But apart from helping to avoid censorship, the new peer-to-peer technology can also be put into use where there is no access to the internet at all, which happened in Egypt in 2011 and is currently happening in Syria.

Using Near Field Communication (NFC), mobile phone users can simply transfer video files using Bluetooth technology. It allows the video to be spread from user to user until someone has a chance to upload it for the rest of the world to see.

But Jimenez recommends using encryption technology, as the new app does not protect users from being monitored by the security services or other actors.

"It is true that if you want to use these tools in a country which a totalitarian regime you need a bit more security, and that’s what we are working on for the future," he told The Local.
http://www.thelocal.se/45140/20121218/





China Tightens 'Great Firewall' Internet Control with New Technology

Companies and individuals affected by new system thought to 'learn, discover and block' encrypted communications
Charles Arthur

The Chinese government has introduced new technology to tighten controls on internet visibility within the country. Photograph: Stringer Shanghai/Reuters

China appears to be tightening its control of internet services that are able to burrow secretly through what is known as the "Great Firewall", which prevents citizens there from reading some overseas content.

Both companies and individuals are being hit by the new technology deployed by the Chinese government to control what people read inside the country.

A number of companies providing "virtual private network" (VPN) services to users in China say the new system is able to "learn, discover and block" the encrypted communications methods used by a number of different VPN systems.

China Unicom, one of the biggest telecoms providers in the country, is now killing connections where a VPN is detected, according to one company with a number of users in China.

VPNs encrypt internet communications between two points so that even if the data being passed is tapped, it cannot be read. A VPN connection from inside China to outside it also mean that the user's internet connection effectively starts outside the "Great Firewall" – in theory giving access to the vast range of information and sites that the Chinese government blocks. That includes many western newspaper sites as well as resources such as Twitter, Facebook and Google.

Users in China suspected in May 2011 that the government there was trying to disrupt VPN use, and now VPN providers have begun to notice the effects.

Astrill, a VPN provider for users inside and outside China, has emailed its users to warn them that the "Great Firewall" system is blocking at least four of the common protocols used by VPNs, which means that they don't function. "This GFW update makes a lot of harm to business in China," the email says. "We believe [the] China censorship minister is a smart man … and this blockage will be removed and things will go back to normal."

But the company added that trying to stay ahead of the censors is a "cat-and-mouse game" – although it is working on a new system that it hopes will let it stay ahead of the detection system.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...ternet-control





Police Dept. to Use Internet to Try to Stop Mass Shootings
Michael Wilson

Top intelligence officials in the New York Police Department met on Thursday to examine ways to search the Internet to identify potential “deranged” gunmen before they strike, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said.

“The techniques would include cyber-searches of language that mass-casualty shooters have used in e-mails and Internet postings,” Mr. Kelly said in a statement. “The goal would be to identify the shooter in cyberspace, engage him there and intervene, possibly using an undercover to get close, and take him into custody or otherwise disrupt his plans.”

The meeting came almost a week after a gunman killed 26 people, 20 of them children, inside Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

There are plans to send officers to Newtown and to scenes of other mass shootings to collect information, Paul. J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, said.

Mr. Browne said the potential tactics included creating an algorithm that would search online “for terms used by active shooters in the past that may be an indicator of future intentions.”

Mr. Kelly said the technique was similar to those being used to spot terrorists’ chatter online. The new searches would target “apolitical or deranged killers before they become active shooters,” he said.

The meeting’s participants included David Cohen, who leads the department’s intelligence division, and senior members of the department.

“Active shooters can cause multiple deaths in seconds, regardless of police training or how deft the police response,” Mr. Kelly said. “For that reason, the N.Y.P.D. is examining ways, through intelligence, to try to identify potential active shooters before they strike.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/21/n...shootings.html





Tor: An Anonymous, And Controversial, Way to Web-Surf
Geoffrey A. Fowler

For more than four years, William Weber has helped run a free service called Tor that makes Web surfing anonymous for anyone.

Then on Nov. 28, the police showed up at the 20-year-old's home in Graz, Austria, and accused him of distributing child pornography. He says the authorities confiscated his computers, and he now awaits formal charges that could lead to jail time.

Mr. Weber says the porn isn't his. But it might have come through his computers as the unavoidable cost of serving as a volunteer for the fast-growing Tor network. "Sure it's bad" that Tor can be used by criminals, he says, but "there is nothing I or the Tor Project can do."

His experience underscores the challenges facing the Tor Project Inc., a 10-year-old Walpole, Mass., nonprofit that is hoping to take anonymous Web surfing mainstream. The network depends on volunteers such as Mr. Weber whose computers help reroute and conceal Internet traffic.

Created in part to hide the online activity of dissidents in countries such as Iran and China that censor the Internet, Tor has seen its popularity grow in the U.S. and Europe amid concerns about online privacy. In the past year, use of the free software nearly doubled to about 600,000 people every day, the group says.

"Ten years ago, no one had this concept of privacy," says Andrew Lewman, Tor's executive director. "But with the [former General David] Petraeus scandal and cellphones recording your location, now this doesn't seem so far-fetched anymore." Today, some 14% of Tor's traffic connects from the U.S.; people living in Internet-censoring countries are now Tor's second-largest user base.

American users include Andrew Whitacre, 32, who works in the comparative media studies department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He set the Tor software to run automatically on his home computer after learning about it from colleagues. "I can't be confident that I know everything out there that might do my computer or contacts harm," he says.

Tor gets about 80% of its $2 million annual budget from branches of the U.S. government that support free speech and scientific research, with the rest coming from the Swedish government and other groups.

To grow further, Tor must convince more volunteers to sign on to extend its network. That is because Tor, which began in 1996 as a project of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory called Onion Routing, routes a user's Internet data between a series of random volunteer "node" computers.

This process makes it virtually impossible to trace the data request back to the original user. From the outside, it looks like the data request came from the last node on the chain, such as the one Mr. Weber was running.

Today, Tor has enough volunteer nodes—some 3,200—to allow the network to handle two million daily users. But to sustain millions more users and keep traffic from slowing down, Mr. Lewman says it needs 10,000 nodes.

Tor is developing hardware that volunteers could buy and plug into their home Internet connections to automatically become nodes. For people uncomfortable about running their own nodes with illegal activity on the network, Tor offers a program to sponsor a larger one that is operated by someone and serves as the final, and riskiest, node in the chain.

Tor is "a challenge for law enforcement," says John Shehan, executive director of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in Alexandria, Va. It is being used regularly to trade sexually exploitative images of children, he says, but there is little Tor's creators can do about it.

A spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which polices child pornography, declined to comment.

Services such as Tor "provide lifesaving privacy and security for people who otherwise could face extreme reprisal from their governments," says Andre Mendes, director of technology, services and innovation at the U.S. government's International Broadcasting Bureau, which has given $2.5 million to Tor since 2006.

Tor's Mr. Lewman says the organization has received subpoenas, but hasn't ended up in court because it doesn't actually store any data that could be of use. "We spend a lot of time talking to various law enforcement agencies," he says, adding that some police use Tor themselves for undercover work.

Marcia Hofmann, senior staff attorney at digital-liberties group and Tor partner Electronic Frontier Foundation, says Tor volunteers are likely protected by U.S. law, but it hasn't been tested in court. "At the end of the day, a Tor is a neutral tool," she says, noting that Internet service and telephone providers aren't held accountable for how criminals use their networks.

Still, she recommends Tor volunteers with the largest exit nodes set up their servers at third-party server facilities rather than their homes or offices, if only to prevent authorities from temporarily seizing computers that they are using for other purposes.

In San Francisco, members of a nonprofit hacker workspace called Noisebridge decided a year ago to spend about $800 per month to run a node of their own. "We really care about freedom of expression," says Andy Isaacson, 35, one of the group's founders.

Initially, some of Noisebridge's members were concerned about potential legal challenges. So the group decided to host its node at a commercial server facility in Los Angeles instead of their San Francisco office. Still, they field queries from law-enforcement officials about three times a month, and twice have had officers show up at their San Francisco office.

To deal with these situations, Mr. Isaacson says Noisebridge keeps handouts about Tor near its front door to hand out to any police who show up. "We haven't had any really bad interactions," he says. "But it is always uncomfortable to have them stop by."
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/...zExNDcyWj.html





Trip Report, October FBI Conference
arma

In October I attended an FBI conference, as part of my work to try to keep Tor on good relations with law enforcement. My first goal is to remind them of all the good uses of Tor, so if they ever find themselves lobbying to outlaw anonymity online, they'll understand what they're giving up. The second goal is to make sure they understand what Tor is and how it works, so if they encounter it in their investigations they'll hassle our exit relay operators less. (Here's a great way that one FBI person explained it to me: "I've got 10 leads, and 48 hours before this case doesn't matter anymore. If you can help me understand which leads *not* to follow, I can do my job better.") My third goal is to help them be able to use Tor correctly for their own jobs — remember that diversity of users is part of what makes Tor safe for everybody to use.

Overall, we've been doing a pretty good job at teaching US-based law enforcement about Tor. At the end of the conference, one of the FBI agents took me aside and asked "surely you have *some* sort of way of tracking your users?" When I pointed at various of his FBI colleagues in the room who had told me they use Tor every day for their work, and asked if he'd be comfortable if we had a way of tracing *them*, I think he got it.

I met a nice man from the DEA who worked on the "Farmer's Market" bust. This was in the news a lot back in April, where apparently some people were selling drugs online, and using a Tor hidden service for their website. At the time I thought the news stories could be summarized simply as "idiot drug sellers accept paypal payments, get busted." It turns out they were pretty smart about how to accept paypal payments — they just had random Americans receive the paypal payments, take a cut, and then turn them into a Panama-based digital currency, and the Panama company didn't want to help trace where the money went. The better summary for the news stories should actually have been "idiot drug sellers use hushmail, get busted." Way before they switched to a Tor hidden service, the two main people used Hushmail to communicate. After a subpoena (and apparently a lot of patience since Canada still isn't quite the same as the US), Hushmail rolled over and gave up copies of all the emails. Many more details here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/89690597/W...ment-Filed-045

I should still note that Tor doesn't introduce any magic new silver bullet that causes criminals to be uncatchable when before they weren't. The Farmer's Market people ran their webserver in some other foreign country before they switched to a Tor hidden service, and just the fact that the country didn't want to cooperate in busting them was enough to make that a dead end. Jurisdictional arbitrage is alive and well in the world.
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tri...fbi-conference





Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal
Ryan Gallagher

When a former senior White House official describes a nationwide surveillance effort as “breathtaking,” you know civil liberties activists are preparing for a fight.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that the little-known National Counterterrorism Center, based in an unmarked building in McLean, Va., has been granted sweeping new authority to store and monitor massive datasets about innocent Americans.

After internal wrangling over privacy and civil liberties issues, the Justice Department reportedly signed off on controversial new guidelines earlier this year. The guidelines allow the NCTC, for the first time, to keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years, using “predictive pattern-matching,” to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior. The data the counterterrorism center has access to, according to the Journal, includes “entire government databases—flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others.”

Notably, the Journal reports that these changes also allow databases about U.S. civilians to be handed over to foreign governments for analysis, presumably so that they too can attempt to determine future criminal actions. The Department of Homeland Security’s former chief privacy officer said that it represents a “sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public.”

The snooping effort, which officials say is subject to “rigorous oversight,” is reminiscent of the so-called Total Information Awareness initiative, dreamt up in the aftermath of 9/11 by the Pentagon’s research unit DARPA. The aim of the TIA initiative was essentially to create a kind of ubiquitous pre-crime surveillance regime monitoring public and private databases. It was largely defunded in 2003, after civil liberties concerns. However, other similar efforts have continued, such as through the work of the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence-gathering “Fusion Centers.” Most recently, Fusion Centers were subjected to scathing criticism from congressional investigators, who found that they were accumulating masses of data about “suspicious” activity that was not of any use. The intelligence being swept up, the investigators found, was “oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections.”

Such sweeping surveillance efforts pose difficulties for the authorities because they can end up drowning in data, attempting to find a needle in a haystack, in the process deeming innocent people suspicious. As the Journal’s Julia Angwin notes, the risk is that “innocent behavior gets misunderstood—say, a man buying chemicals (for a child's science fair) and a timer (for the sprinkler) sets off false alarms.” The U.S. government clearly feels far-reaching surveillance initiatives are necessary to help detect potential future terror attacks. But ultimately, in a democracy, the decision should surely rest in the hands of the American public. It is a question of balance: How much liberty should be sacrificed in the name of security? The revelations about the NCTC’s activities may be about to rekindle that debate.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_te...uncovered.html





Security Researcher Compromises Cisco VoIP Phones With Vulnerability

Grad student demonstrates how phones can be turned into listening devices by attackers
Brian Prince

A researcher has demonstrated how Cisco Voice-over-IP (VoIP) phones can be hijacked and turned into listening devices.

At the Amphion Forum this month, Columbia University grad student Ang Cui demonstrated how networked printers and phones can be abused by attackers. The forum, held in San Francisco, is produced by Mocana, which makes security software for non-PC devices that connect to the Internet.

"The attack I demonstrated is caused by the multiple vulnerabilities within the syscall interface of the CNU [Cisco Native Unix] kernel," Cui tells Dark Reading. "It is caused by the lack of input validation at the syscall interface, which allows arbitrary modification of kernel memory from userland, as well as arbitrary code execution within the kernel. This, in turn, allows the attacker to become root, gain control over the DSP [Digital Signal Processor], buttons, and LEDs on the phone. The attack I demonstrated patches the existing kernel and DSP in order to carry out stealthy mic exfiltration."

As part of the demonstration, Cui inserted and removed a small external circuit board from the phone's Ethernet port -- a move he asserted could be accomplished by someone left alone inside a corporate office for a few seconds. He then used his own smartphone to capture every word spoken near the VoIP phone, even though it was still "on-hook."

By patching the VoIP phone's software with his own code, he was able to turn the Off-Hook Switch into what he refers to as a "funtenna."

The issue can be exploited remotely as well, explains Cui, where a likely method of exploiting the kernel is by using an arbitrary execution bug on the phone's surface.

"Typically, exploitation of a nonprivileged process will give the attacker limited access to the phone," he says. "But in this case, any arbitrary code execution bug can be used to exploit the vulnerable syscalls, giving the attacker kernel-level access. I've identified several third-party libraries within the Cisco phone that have known exploitable vulnerabilities."

"The exploitability of these vulnerable third-party libraries will be discussed at 29C3 [29th Chaos Communication Congress]," he says.

In response to his findings, Cisco says that workarounds and a software patch are available to address the issue, and that successful exploitation requires physical access to the device serial port or a combination of remote authentication privileges and nondefault settings.

"The company maintains a very open relationship with the security community, and we view this as vital to helping protect our customers’ networks," the company said in a statement, adding that "a formal release note for customers was issued on November 2nd (bug id: CSCuc83860)."

"As for mitigation, I encourage everyone to patch to the latest [not publicly] available firmware ASAP," Cui says. "I looked today and found that the firmware images are not available for download. I believe it is still only available upon request through TAC.

"At the end of the day, I'd like to see actual mechanical switches that control the various input/output devices on IP phones," he adds. "Looking past this specific vulnerability, I believe there is a real need for actual host-based defense on embedded systems. The Software Symbiote technology developed at Columbia University is designed to protect embedded devices against this kind of attack."

The vulnerability Cui demonstrated was based on work he did during the past year on ‘Project Gunman v2’, where a laser printer firmware update could be compromised with additional -- and potentially malicious -- code. The compromised printer could then be used to launch other attacks on the internal network.

"The VoIP phone vulnerability demonstrated at the Amphion Forum was a stark reminder of the need to address the device security mess," says Kurt Stammberger, vice president of market development at Mocana and chair of the Amphion Forum, in a statement. "The sad fact is that most devices connected to corporate networks, like printers and VoIP phones, are almost totally unsecured."
http://www.darkreading.com/threat-in...erability.html





Judge OKs Warrantless Cell-Site Data in Landmark Privacy Case
David Kravets

Federal prosecutors may introduce cell-site data obtained without a warrant in the retrial of a District of Columbia drug dealer who was the subject of one of the Supreme Court’s biggest electronic privacy decisions in decades.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle of the District of Columbia is a victory for prosecutors who are shifting their focus to warrantless cell-tower locational tracking of suspects in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling that law enforcement should acquire probable-cause warrants from judges to affix GPS devices to vehicles. Just after the high court’s January decision, the FBI pulled the plug on 3,000 GPS tracking devices.

Huvelle’s ruling came as part of pretrial proceedings in the prosecution of Antoine Jones, the previously convicted drug dealer whose conviction and life sentence was reversed by the Supreme Court, which found the government’s placement of a GPS tracker on his vehicle was an illegal search.

Until the Supreme Court ruled in Jones’ case, the lower courts were mixed on whether the police could secretly affix a GPS device on a suspect’s car without a warrant. And despite Huvelle’s ruling, the lower courts are still divided about whether a probable-cause warrant is required to obtain cell-site data.

Lawyers for Jones maintain that the authorities should have obtained a probable-cause warrant for the data, saying the government “seeks to do with cell site data what it cannot do with the suppressed GPS data.”

But Huvelle sidestepped the Fourth Amendment argument and declined to analyze whether the Supreme Court’s ruling in Jones’ case has any bearing on whether cell-site data can be used without a warrant.

Instead, she focused on a doctrine called the “good-faith exemption,” in which evidence is not suppressed if the authorities were following the law at the time. The data in Jones’ case was coughed up in 2005, well before the Supreme Court’s ruling on GPS.

“The court, however, need not resolve this vexing question of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, since it concludes that the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule applies,” she wrote.

Monday’s decision was first reported by Mike Scarcella of The Blog of Legal Times.

With that, prosecutors are legally in the clear to use Jones’ phone location records without a warrant. Among other things, the government wants to use the records to chronicle where Jones was when he made and received about four months’ worth of mobile phone calls in 2005. The records show each call the defendant made or received, the date and time of calls, the telephone numbers involved, the cell tower to which the phone users connected at the beginning and/or end of the call, and the duration of the call.

The authorities only had to show that such information was “relevant” to an investigation to get a judge to authorize Cingular to turn them over. No probable cause was needed.

According to the authorities’ application to a judge for the data:

“Knowing the location of the trafficker when such telephone calls are made will assist law enforcement in discovering the location of the premises in which the trafficker maintains his supply narcotics, paraphernalia used in narcotics trafficking such as cutting and packaging materials, and other evident of illegal narcotics trafficking, including records and financial information,” the government wrote in 2005, when requesting Jones’ cell-site data.

That data was not introduced at trial, as the authorities used the GPS data instead.

Even so, the Obama administration claimed that the high court’s GPS decision was “wholly inapplicable” when it comes to cell-site data.

The administration noted that the high court said the physical act of affixing a GPS device to a vehicle amounts to a search and generally requires a warrant. “But when the government merely compels a third-party service provider to produce routine business records in its custody,” the government wrote, “no physical intrusion occurs, and the rule in Jones is therefore wholly inapplicable.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ell-site-data/





European Data Retention Rule Could Violate Fundamental E.U. Law, Austrian Court Says

Storing people's telecoms data for law enforcement purposes might violate E.U. law, an Austrian court said
Loek Essers

The European Union's data retention law could breach fundamental E.U. law because its requirements result in an invasion of citizens' privacy, according to the Constitutional Court of Austria, which has asked the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to determine the directive's validity.

The data retention rules require countries to store vast amounts of people's telecommunication information for law enforcement purposes, including data about phone calls, text messages and email as well as location data. But the Austrian court questions whether the storage of this data is in line with the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.

So far, the Austrian state of Carinthia, an employee of a telecommunications company and more than 11,000 individuals have turned to the Austrian constitutional court with questions about the constitutionality of the Data Retention Directive, the court said in a news release on Tuesday.

Protection of personal data is guaranteed by the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the European Convention of Human Rights as well as the Austrian constitution, the court said. When the court is asked to determine whether a regulation is constitutional, it must use the Charter as an assessment tool, it added.

The primary problem with the data retention law is that it almost exclusively affects people in whom government or law enforcement have no prior interest. But authorities use the data for investigations and are informed about people's personal lives, the court said, and there is a risk that the data can be abused.

"We doubt that the E.U. Data Retention Directive is really compatible with the rights that are guaranteed by the E.U. Charter of Fundamental Rights," Gerhart Holzinger, president of the Constitutional Court of Austria said in a statement.

While the ECJ deals with these questions, the current court proceedings in Austria will be suspended, the court said. But the data retention law will remain in force, as the court sees no reason to temporarily suspend the law, it added.

Meanwhile, the Irish High Court has also asked the ECJ to rule on whether the Data Retention Directive respects the rights of the user. That request stems from a case brought by Digital Rights Ireland against the Minister for Communications in which the group argued that forcing telecoms companies to retain information about how customers use their services breaches individual rights to privacy.

German lawmakers said last year they doubted the validity of the directive because the law takes disproportionate measures to fight crime. Despite increases in data retention, the rate of solved crimes has risen only slightly, they said at the time.
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/tech...an-court-says/





Microsoft Has Been Watching, and It Says You’re Getting Used to Windows 8

Data collected from some users of the operating system suggest people are adjusting well to the radical departure from previous designs, says the company.
Tom Simonite

Why It Matters

The success of Microsoft’s redesigned operating system, Windows 8, will shape the experience of millions of computer users and the fate of the $226 billion company.

New era: Windows 8 is designed to be operated by touch as well as with a mouse and keyboard.

Despite some of the more scathing reviews of Windows 8, ordinary users are getting along with it just fine, according to Julie Larson-Green, the Microsoft executive who leads Windows product development. Data collected automatically from some Windows users, she says, show they are adjusting to some of the new operating system’s controversial features without problems.

“So far we’re seeing very encouraging things,” Larson-Green says of the large volume of data that Microsoft receives every day from people using Windows 8 who have chosen to join the company’s “customer experience improvement program.” All users are invited to enroll in that program when they first log into the new operating system. If they do so, anonymized information about how they are using the operating system is sent to Microsoft. Referring to complaints from some quarters, Larson-Green says: “Even with the rumblings, we feel confident that it’s a moment in time more than an actual problem.”

Windows 8 is a radical departure from previous versions of the operating system now used by around 1.3 billion people. Instead of the Start button and menu in use since 1995, it features a “Start screen,” a colorful display of tiles that function as shortcuts to programs and also display notifications—an environment optimized for touch computing. There are also two versions of many software programs—one for the regular desktop interface and one for the new tile-oriented one.

Although some new users will struggle to figure out these features, Larson-Green says that 90 percent of them need just one session to discover the two that are most crucial to the interface design. Those are the Start screen and “Charms,” a menu that offers shortcuts to be summoned by a mouse or finger gestures.

The data collected by Microsoft also show that people are becoming more familiar with the new features over time, says Larson-Green. She previously led a redesign of the Microsoft Office interface that, in 2007, replaced text-based menus with a more visual “ribbon interface,” an initially controversial change that is now widely accepted as an example of good design. “Two days to two weeks is what we used to say in Office, and it’s similar in Windows 8,” she says.

The findings suggest that even those who initially stick to the parts of Windows 8 that resemble previous Windows desktops eventually loosen up, says Larson-Green: “There’s a cutover point, around six weeks in, where you start using the new things more than the things you’re familiar with.” She adds that the lack of tutorials or detailed instructions on how to adjust to Windows 8—something that has attracted complaints—is a deliberate choice. Tests have shown that although people find tutorials “comforting,” they don’t retain much information from them, she says, making them a waste of time.

Larson-Green’s claims diverge dramatically with the opinions of many technology journalists and bloggers. They also run counter to the results of a small research study conducted by the influential usability consultant Jakob Nielsen, who asked 12 people to spend an hour with Windows 8. On the basis of their experience and his own expertise, he concluded that it offers “disappointing usability to both novice and power users.”

Nielsen says that Larson-Green’s indicators may not capture the real problem with Windows 8. “It sounds plausible that people can learn to use Windows 8 to a level where they aren’t constantly stumped after two weeks,” he says. “The real question is whether they will then have reached a higher level of productivity than they had before.”

Nielsen thinks that even once Windows 8’s features become familiar, the operating system still asks more of users than previous versions did: they must remember how to operate both a familiar desktop environment and the new Start screen and related apps, which function very differently. The upshot, he says, is that home users may be tempted to switch to an alternative, such as an Apple computer, while workers will simply achieve less. “My estimate is that power users will not have higher productivity with Windows 8 than they did with Windows 7,” he says. “I fear that they will have lower productivity.”

Elizabeth Mynatt, director of the Institute for People and Technology at Georgia Tech and a researcher in human-computer interaction, says that one of the most important measures of usability in a new computing interface is how people progress over time from their first impression—something Nielsen and other independent reviewers have not yet measured.

“We look to see that people are going to stumble forward rather than end up going down the wrong track,” she says. “None of that will come out in a ‘Wow, this looks different’ review.” Making crucial features “invisible” by hiding them beneath slick design is a common pitfall that prevents progress, she adds.

Larson-Green’s data suggest that Microsoft has at least managed to make features such as the Start screen and Charms visible to most people. But as Nielsen points out, that doesn’t mean everyone will find the work involved in discovering and mastering them worth it.

The real question, Nielsen says, is “how long it takes them to make up for the two weeks spent on that initial learning curve.”
http://www.technologyreview.com/news...-to-windows-8/





Hollywood Hacker Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison
Anthony McCartney

A federal judge sentenced a hacker to 10 years in prison on Monday after he broke into the personal online accounts of Scarlett Johansson, Christina Aguilera and other women and posted revealing photos and other material on the Internet.

U.S. District Judge S. James Otero sentenced Christopher Chaney after hearing from a tearful Johansson in a videotaped statement.

The case included the revelation that nude photos taken by Johansson of herself and meant for her then-husband Ryan Reynolds were leaked online.

"I have been truly humiliated and embarrassed," Johansson said. "I find Christopher Chaney's actions to be perverted and reprehensible."

Prosecutors said Chaney, 35, of Jacksonville, Fla., also targeted two women he knew, sending nude pictures of one former co-worker to her father. The judge noted the damage to the women was in some ways worse than what Chaney's celebrity victims endured.

The women, identified in court filings only by initials, wrote in letters to Otero that their lives have been irreparably damaged by Chaney's actions. One has anxiety and panic attacks; the other is depressed and paranoid. Both said Chaney was calculated, cruel and creepy.

"It's hard to fathom the mindset of a person who would accomplish all of this," Otero said. "These types of crimes are as pernicious and serious as physical stalking."

Prosecutors were seeking six years imprisonment, but Otero said he was concerned that Chaney would not be able to control his behavior and had shown a "callous disregard" for his actions.

Chaney, who could have faced a maximum sentence of 60 years under the law, apologized in court but denied that he had sent naked photos of women he knew to their relatives.

"I don't know what else to say other than I'm sorry," Chaney said. "I could be sentenced to never use a computer again and I wouldn't care."

Chaney previously pleaded guilty to counts that included wiretapping and unauthorized access to a computer.

Actress and singer Renee Olstead said in court Monday that she attempted to kill herself after Chaney leaked nude photos of her. She said she had never before considered suicide.

"I just really hope this doesn't happen to someone else," she said, crying. "You can lose everything because of the actions of a stranger."

Chaney looked up at her a few times as she spoke but kept his head low for most of Olstead's statement.

Chaney will be placed on three years of supervised probation when he is released and will have to notify officials of his online accounts. But the judge feared that wouldn't be enough and said he wished he could sentence Chaney to lifetime supervision.

The accounts of the cybervictims served as a cautionary tale for people — even major celebrities — who snap personal, sometimes revealing photos.

Aguilera said in a statement issued days before the sentencing that although she knows that she's often in the limelight, Chaney took from her some of the private moments she shares with friends.

"That feeling of security can never be given back and there is no compensation that can restore the feeling one has from such a large invasion of privacy," Aguilera said.

Prosecutors said Chaney illegally accessed the email accounts of more than 50 people in the entertainment industry between November 2010 and October 2011. Aguilera, Mila Kunis and Johansson agreed to have their identities made public with the hope the move would provide awareness about online intrusion.

Some of Aguilera's photos appeared online after Chaney sent an email from the account of her stylist, Simone Harouche, to Aguilera asking the singer for scantily clad photographs, prosecutors said.

Chaney was arrested in October 2011 as part of a yearlong investigation of celebrity hacking that authorities dubbed "Operation Hackerazzi." Chaney's computer hard drive contained numerous private celebrity photos and a document that compiled their extensive personal data, according to a search warrant.

He continued to pursue his victims after the FBI seized his computer, a factor Otero said warranted a harsher penalty.

___

Associated Press Writer Greg Risling contributed to this report.
http://www.newstimes.com/business/te...on-4123251.php





Sex Offender Behind Anti-Paedophile Site

The man behind a paedophile name-and-shame website that publishes details of mostly foreign-born sex offenders has himself been jailed for sexually exploiting a minor, according to Swedish media reports.

"So? What's the problem? You're not allowed to atone your sins, is that what you mean?" the 48-year-old told the AFtonbladet newspaper when confronted with the information.

The site he runs targets mostly foreign-born sex offenders.

An investigative journalism group, Researchgruppen, decided to look closer at the site, which the anti-fascism magazine Expo has called among the nastiest of all websites popular with sympathizers of the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrat party.

The group revealed that the 48-year-old had been jailed for sexually exploiting a minor and had also been convicted of sexually assaulting several children.

The attacks took place when the man babysat and when he worked at a middle-school.

The verdict stated that the victims had suffered anxiety and had to go to therapy for many years after the assaults.

The man is also convicted of possessing child pornography, vandalism, and violent assault. His rap sheet stretches all the way up to 2010.

His colleagues on the site do not have clean slates either.

A 42-year-old associate, who runs the name-and-shame site's finances, has over half a million kronor in debt. He has previously been convicted of account fraud.

The site's webmaster, meanwhile, has been convicted of drunk driving.

And one of its most active contributors is known to police for smuggling alcohol into Sweden from Germany.

Part of the site's "business model", the journalists revealed, is to take payment from the people whose names and faces appear on the site and want the information removed.

"So what? If that's what we are up to, that what we're up to, we do what the hell we want. We're the ones putting our time and money into this, aren't we?" the 48-year-old told Aftonbladet.

He did not deny that posts were removed after payment, but neither did he confirm it.

He did say, however, that taking such payment would not qualify as blackmail as the site never actively demanded money from anyone.
http://www.thelocal.se/45220/20121221/





Teenage Sexting Is Becoming The Norm
Gregory Ferenstein

“Under most existing laws, if our findings were extrapolated nationally, several million teens could be prosecuted for child pornography,” explains a new study on teen sexting, which finds that a whopping 28% of teenagers text fully-nude pictures of themselves. We took a deep dive into the much reported Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine article, and found some weird insights into a 21st century trend that is quickly becoming the norm among teenagers.

1. White kids love sexting. More than any other demographic (Hispanic, African American, and Asian), white students reported sexting in the highest percentage (35%), nearly double that of Asians (19). African Americans were a somewhat distant second at 27%, followed by Hispanics (21%), and Asians.

2. “Several million” teens could be held liable for child pornography, as some states do not define inappropriate sexual behavior as only between an adult and a minor. The prevalence of sexting has put some experts in the awkward position of pressing for laxer child pornography laws, so that curious teenagers aren’t branded as pedophiles.

3. If you find sexting pics sent from your kid’s phone, there’s a strong possibility that he or she is sexually active. 77% of girls and 82% of boys who had reported sending a sext were also no longer virgins.

4. Gender stereotypes hold true with new technology: boys are bothered by being asked to sext much less than girls. Nearly all girls (~95%) were at least a “little bothered” by sexting requests and roughly 30% were bothered “a great deal.” Yet, nearly half of all boys didn’t mind “at all”, and less than 5% were bothered a great deal. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

5. The suburbs aren’t safe from the trend either: socio-economic status had virtually no effect on whether teens sexted. Parents with a high school diploma or less were only 2% more likely to have sexting teens compared to those with at least some college.

As sexting moves closer to becoming the norm, it begs the question of whether sexting will be seen as deviant to the next generation, just as out-of-wedlock sexual relations became the norm for previous generations. Until such time, sexting still poses distressing risks for teens whose pictures end up in the wrong hands, and suffer dangerous psychological damage from their cruel peers. In other words, talk to your kids about responsible use of technology.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/06/tee...ming-the-norm/





Facebook Said To Have Sexting App In The Works
Adam Popescu

Guess who just might be the newest addition to the sexting community? Facebook. That's right, the nearly 9-year old company is growing up. Big time.

The house that Mark Zuckerberg built is reportedly set to launch a new standalone app aimed at competing with Snapchat, a disposable photo and video chat service best known for... well... sexting.

Technically, the service is about creating private, “self-destructable” picture and video messages that users can send and choose the amount of time that the photo will be available for viewing. After the allotted time, the content deletes itself from the sender’s and receiver’s phone, and from Snapchat's server. Like it never happened. You can imagine the appeal to those who want to send "cheeky" images.

Details for the release are still sketchy (Facebook's official response to ReadWrite's inquiry was: "We're not going to comment on rumor and speculation."). But we do know that Snapchat boasts a community that sends 50 million photos per day, and Facebook is likely betting its users, 1 billion people, who upload about 300 million photos a day, want to play. Although this app would a stand-alone product, operating like Facebook's Instagram app, the coming service would be able to draw from a huge user base.
What's Coming?

Ben Tao, chief executive of adult crowd-funding site Offbeatr, and digital marketplace Extra Lunch Money, says there is a huge market for sexting. But he's not sure people will look to Facebook for it.

"If people can do this for free and know that those messages and pictures are never stored, even more people will use it," he said. "However, given Facebook's privacy reputation I doubt [it will] be able to convince the majority of users that these messages and photos are deleted like they are on SnapChat. When people think of 'sexting,' people think of SnapChat. They don't think Facebook."

But Kelly Lux, a social media strategist at Syracuse University's iSchool, thinks the app could be big, and used for more innocent purposes than sending NSFW content. "My view is that Facebook is going to jump on whatever bandwagon is hot at the moment and see if something sticks," Lux said.

Lux doesn't think the forthcoming app will be as big as Instagram because of the fleeting nature of its content. She also cautions that the promise of impermanence of photos and videos could lead to bad choices on the part of users. Even though the photos themselves would be automatically deleted, fast-fingered recipients or uploaders could still take screenshots or save those photos.

"I think this idea sets a bad precedent for young people who still have not heeded the wisdom of 'what happens on the Internet, stays on the internet,'" Lux warned. "There are permanent digital footprints from their connected activities."

The app is supposed to launch before the end of the year. That's two weeks away.
http://readwrite.com/2012/12/17/face...p-in-the-works





Instagram Says it Now Has the Right to Sell Your Photos

In its first big policy shift since Facebook bought the photo-sharing site, Instagram claims the right to sell users' photos without payment or notification. Oh, and there's no way to opt out.
Declan McCullagh

Instagram said today that it has the perpetual right to sell users' photographs without payment or notification, a dramatic policy shift that quickly sparked a public outcry.

The new intellectual property policy, which takes effect on January 16, comes three months after Facebook completed its acquisition of the popular photo-sharing site. Unless Instagram users delete their accounts before the January deadline, they cannot opt out.

Under the new policy, Facebook claims the perpetual right to license all public Instagram photos to companies or any other organization, including for advertising purposes, which would effectively transform the Web site into the world's largest stock photo agency. One irked Twitter user quipped that "Instagram is now the new iStockPhoto, except they won't have to pay you anything to use your images."

"It's asking people to agree to unspecified future commercial use of their photos," says Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "That makes it challenging for someone to give informed consent to that deal."

That means that a hotel in Hawaii, for instance, could write a check to Facebook to license photos taken at its resort and use them on its Web site, in TV ads, in glossy brochures, and so on -- without paying any money to the Instagram user who took the photo. The language would include not only photos of picturesque sunsets on Waikiki, but also images of young children frolicking on the beach, a result that parents might not expect, and which could trigger state privacy laws.

Facebook did not respond to repeated queries from CNET this afternoon. We'll update the article if we receive a response.

Another policy pitfall: If Instagram users continue to upload photos after January 16, 2013, and subsequently delete their account after the deadline, they may have granted Facebook an irrevocable right to sell those images in perpetuity. There's no obvious language that says deleting an account terminates Facebook's rights, EFF's Opsahl said.

Facebook's new rights to sell Instagram users' photos come from two additions to its terms of use policy. One section deletes the current phrase "limited license" and, by inserting the words "transferable" and "sub-licensable," allows Facebook to license users' photos to any other organization.

A second section allows Facebook to charge money. It says that "a business or other entity may pay us to display your... photos... in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you." That language does not exist in the current terms of use.

Google's policy, by contrast, is far narrower and does not permit the company to sell photographs uploaded through Picasa or Google+. Its policy generally tracks the soon-to-be-replaced Instagram policy by saying: "The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our services." Yahoo's policies service for Flickr are similar, saying the company can use the images "solely for the purpose for which such content was submitted or made available."

Reginald Braithwaite, an author and software developer, posted a tongue-in-cheek "translation" of the new Instagram policy today: "You are not our customers, you are the cattle we drive to market and auction off to the highest bidder. Enjoy your feed and keep producing the milk."

One Instagram user dubbed the policy change "Instagram's suicide note." The PopPhoto.com photography site summarized the situation by saying: "The service itself is still a fun one, but that's a lot of red marks that have shown up over the past couple weeks. Many shooters -- even the casual ones -- probably aren't that excited to have a giant corporation out there selling their photos without being paid or even notified about it."

Another unusual addition to Instagram's new policy appears to immunize it from liability, such as class action lawsuits, if it makes supposedly private photos public. The language stresses, twice in the same paragraph, that "we will not be liable for any use or disclosure of content" and "Instagram will not be liable for any use or disclosure of any content you provide."

Yet another addition says "you acknowledge that we may not always identify paid services, sponsored content, or commercial communications as such." That appears to conflict with the Federal Trade Commission's guidelines that say advertisements should be listed as advertisements.

Such sweeping intellectual property language has been invoked before: In 1999, Yahoo claimed all rights to Geocities using language strikingly similar to Facebook's wording today, including the "non-exclusive and fully sublicensable right" to do what it wanted with its users' text and photos. But in the face of widespread protest -- and competitors advertising that their own products were free from such Draconian terms -- Yahoo backed down about a week later.

It's true, of course, that Facebook may not intend to monetize the photos taken by Instagram users, and that lawyers often draft overly broad language to permit future business opportunities that may never arise. But on the other hand, there's no obvious language that would prohibit Facebook from taking those steps, and the company's silence in the face of questions today hasn't helped.

EFF's Opsahl says the new policy runs afoul of his group's voluntary best practices for social networks. He added: "Hopefully at some point we'll get greater clarity from Facebook and Instagram."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57...l-your-photos/

Editor: Instagram now says it’s all a big misunderstanding and has “no intention” of selling pics – Jack.





House Vote Updates Bork-Era Video Rental Privacy Law
Pete Kasperowicz

The House approved a bill Tuesday that would make it easier for people to share their favorite movie and television show rentals online.

By voice vote, members approved H.R. 6671, which would allow video rental companies to get online consent from their customers in order to share their rental preferences on the Internet. It would relax current law — the Video Privacy Protection Act — that now prevents any sharing of information related to video rental history without written consent.

The VPPA was passed in 1988 after a list of videos rented by Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork were published, which led to quick demands for greater privacy. But in light of new technological developments over the last few decades, companies like Netflix have said the law makes it hard for people to voluntarily share their rental choices with friends online.

Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), who sponsored the bill, said allowing customers to approve sharing their rental lists online is a reasonable step in light of the speed at which people want to share this information.

"With today's technology, consumers can quickly and efficiently access video programming through a variety of platforms, including through Internet protocol-based video services, all without leaving their homes," he said. "This bill updates the VPPA to allow videotape service providers to facilitate the sharing on social media networks of the movies watched or recommended by users."

Goodlatte stressed that the bill still provides for privacy for people who want it, and gives them complete control over whether their information will be shared.

The bill is similar to legislation the House approved last year, H.R. 2471, but it includes two changes suggested by the Senate. First, it requires video rental companies to give consumers a "clear and conspicuous" option to withdraw their consent to share their rental choices at all times.

Secondly, it requires that a consumer's consent to share information expires after 24 months, unless the consumer again chooses to "opt in."

Republicans and Democrats alike said they support the bill, and welcomed the cooperation with the Senate. Passage in the House sends it to the upper chamber, which could consider it in the coming weeks.
http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-actio...al-privacy-law





German Privacy Regulator Orders Facebook to End its Real Name Policy

Facebook said it would vigorously fight the order
Loek Essers

A German privacy regulator ordered Facebook to stop enforcing its real name policy because it violates a German law that gives users the right to use nicknames online.

Facebook refused to permit the use of pseudonyms on its platform as required by the German Telemedia Act, Thilo Weichert, privacy commissioner and head of the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ULD) Schleswig-Holstein said on Monday. The ULD issued a decree forcing Facebook to start allowing pseudonyms immediately, he said.

"This decree is binding," said Weichert, who added that it is unacceptable that a U.S. portal like Facebook keeps violating German data protection law. To ensure users' rights and comply with data protection law in general, the real name obligation must be immediately abandoned by Facebook, the ULD said.

The orders were issued on Friday against Facebook USA and Facebook Ireland, which is responsible for all Facebook's activities outside of the U.S. and Canada.

Facebook has always had a real-name policy. Users should use their name as listed on their credit card or student ID, so people know who they are connecting with, Facebook states in its name policy. Any accounts set up under fake names will be removed from the site when discovered in order to keep the community safe, according to Facebook.

While the ULD can only enforce its mandate on behalf of Facebook users in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, the order could be adopted by other German data protection authorities, Weichert said. "We informed our colleagues and most of the supervising authorities agree with us," he said.

However, similar orders weren't issued in the other states because the ULD's order is being used as a pilot case, Weichert said.

The social network has two weeks to object to the order in court, or it could also decide to simply comply, he said. However, Weichert expects Facebook to fight the decree.

"We believe the orders are without merit, a waste of German taxpayers' money and we will fight it vigorously," a Facebook spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. It is the role of individual services to determine their own policies about anonymity within the governing law, she added. Facebook's real name policy complies with European data protection principles and Irish law, according to the social network.
http://www.itworld.com/security/3283...al-name-policy





*IMPORTANT NEWS!* Facebooks Legal Team Have Told Me I Am Banned from Facebook Because of F.B. Purity

*VERY IMPORTANT NEWS!* Facebooks legal department have informed me, the developer of the F.B. Purity browser extension, that I am *banned* from using Facebook. This effectively means I will no longer be able to work on the F.B. Purity project any more. I am assuming the F.B. Purity fan page will also be shutdown when they commence the ban. They have not said when the ban will start, but it could happen at any time.

They say the reasons for the ban are:

“Facebook’s terms specifically prohibit interference with the way Facebook is rendered to its users” and that the extension doesnt connect via their “API”, which they say is the approved method for interacting with Facebook’s services.

F.B. Purity does not directly access facebook’s services anyway, it is a browser extension, and by definition, it “extends” the browsers functionality, therefore it is actually the web browser itself that is accessing Facebook, and web browsers do not need an API key or license to access Facebook’s services, as Facebook is designed to run in a web browser.

If a Facebook user chooses to download and use the F.B. Purity extension, it is entirely their own choice, I am not forcing them to download it and use it. Once they’ve installed it, F.B Purity gives the user options for customizing their own view of Facebook, which they can enable or disable to their own liking. If Facebook gave their users options to turn off the most annoying features of their user interface, then a product like F.B. Purity would not be necessary at all. The success and popularity of the extension, is a sure fire sign that something is not right with Facebooks design in the first place.

Perhaps instead of punishing me by disabling my account, and initiating legal proceedings against me, they should instead take heed of the discontent of the Facebook users, and offer them a browsing experience that won’t get them searching out third party methods for switching off the sites most hated and annoying features.

They are also trying to go back on the agreement that i could name my product “Fluff Busting Purity aka F.B. Purity” which was agreed upon with Facebook’s Domain Manager, the last time they threatened me with legal action. They are now saying I need to stop using FB in the name of the product and in the domain name.

For a start, Facebook do not have a worldwide claim on the 2 consecutive letters FB. There are over 64 different trademarks that have the consecutive letters FB in them that are not owned by Facebook, so how can they claim total rights to those two letters? And to try and claim that “F.B” (short for Fluff Busting) is violating their trademark, is rubbish as in trademark terms it is completely distinct from “FB”.

Facebook should be thanking me for helping them to retain their users, who if they had not found this extension would have abandoned the site a long time ago.

In order to stay up to date on future FBP news, after they have banned me, you can:

1) Keep an eye on the F.B. Purity website’s news page: fbpurity.com/news.htm

2) Subscribe to the F.B. Purity News mailing list: is.gd/fbpmail

3) Follow F.B. Purity on Twitter: twitter.com/fbpurity

4) Add F.B. Purity on Google+: gplus.to/fbpurity

It looks like this could be the end of the road for F.B. Purity, well at least Facebook hopes it is…
http://www.fbpurity.com/news/importa...of-f-b-purity/





Government ‘Ignores Parents’ And Presses On With Default Porn Blocking

David Cameron reverses decision issued by Department of Education last week
Tom Brewster

The government appears to have backtracked on plans not to demand default porn blocking, which would automatically prevent access to websites containing explicit material, outraging rights campaigners.

Late last week, the Department for Education released findings from a consultation it held with parents and other interested parties, in which it said a light touch approach would be taken and no default blocking would be implemented.

The consultation response said there was “no great appetite among parents for the introduction of default filtering of the internet by their ISP”. However, there was “marginally more support” for default filtering at the network level, when compared to other protective measures.
Potty porn blocking?

But in the Daily Mail today, Prime Minister David Cameron outlined how automatic porn blocking will be enforced. He has also employed MP Claire Perry, who has been campaigning for the default filtering throughout the year, as adviser on preventing the sexualisation of children.

Perry has even been put in charge of implementing a new web filtering system, which will require computers to check the age of the person setting the controls.

There was no information on how machines would be able to detect whether that person was lying about their age. One of the biggest criticisms of automatic blocking has been that children are at least as tech savvy as their parents and will be able to circumvent filters.

The NSPCC has even backed an opt-in system, although it welcomes moves to protect children more.

But despite all the technical issues, the cost on ISPs, and the potential for perfectly legitimate sites to be blocked, Cameron appears to be ignoring the Department for Education’s report and cracking on with default blocking. “A silent attack on innocence is under way in our country today and I am determined that we fight it with all we’ve got,” Cameron said.

“No other Government has taken such radical steps before. And once all this is in place, Britain will have the most robust internet child protection measures of any country in the world – bar none.”

Ministers are now thought to be pushing ISPs to produce detailed plans on how they will implement default blocks by February.

Whilst default blocking won’t be done at the network level directly, Cameron wants a system where parents are asked, when starting up a computer for the first time, whether they have children in the house. If they answer yes, they will be automatically prompted to set up a filter.

If parents click through without going into detail, blocks on pornography and self-harm will remain up. This means the system will be opt-out, rather than opt-in.

That means, somewhere within ISPs, a preconfigured filter will have to be established, which requires the user to turn it off, or leave it on. It may not be blanket blocking, but the blacklist within ISPs could be deemed as a network-level filter.

“As near as damn it, we have got what we want and most campaigners are quite happy. The industry has, with a few notable exceptions, been quite slow but there is now good momentum. It will be my job to make sure it all gets implemented,” added Perry.

She said adults who sign mobile contracts for their children should be given the chance to set up porn blocking.

BT said it had no further statement other than what it said earlier this week. “We welcome the government’s consultation on this important matter,” a spokesperson said. “We look forward to working through UKCCIS (the UK Council for Child Internet Safety) on taking forward the approach advocated by government in its response.”

Nick Pickles, director of privacy and civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, told TechWeekEurope the new proposals hinted at a more complex system for parents to deal with, rather than a simpler solution.

“This policy becomes more chaotic by the day. The details in the Daily Mail article suggest a mix of device and network filtering that would actually make it much more complex for parents to protect their children, while imposing a significant burden on internet businesses without any meaningful consultation,” he added.

“Quite why such an intervention has happened nearly a week after the Department for Education published government policy on this issue is unclear, but it will concern anyone who wants policy made about critical national infrastructure to be carefully considered with a wide range of stakeholders rather than the narrow interests of certain newspapers being the overriding concern.”

The Department of Education had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news...eversal-102414





Report: Data Caps Just a "Cash Cow" for Internet Providers

Caps have remained steady evan as costs of delivering data have plunged.
Nate Anderson

Why do so many Americans now live with Internet data caps—and what are these caps doing to the future of broadband? Those are the questions posed by a new paper from the New America Foundation, which wants to shake up the lethargy that has descended over the data caps debate by pointing out just how odd the caps truly are. "Internet service and mobile providers appear to be one of the few industries that seek to discourage their customers from consuming more of their product," write the paper's authors. "The reason for this counterintuitive business model is that in the noncompetitive US marketplace, it is highly profitable."

The arguments presented here aren't novel, but they do act as a fine summation of the anti-cap position (and the report is only 13 pages, making it a quick read). First up, the paper questions the very existence of data caps, which are now imposed by most major wireline and wireless Internet providers in the US, by noting that monthly limits have little to do with moment-to-moment congestion. While Internet providers like Comcast realize this and have taken steps to address actual congestion, many of them still impose monthly limits to stop "excessive use" of data.

The truly curious thing about the entire debate has been the way in which caps have mostly remained steady for years, even as the price of delivering data has plunged. For example, paying for transit capacity at a New York Internet exchange costs 50 percent less now than it did just one year ago, and many major ISPs aren't paying at all to exchange data thanks to peering. So why don't prices seem to fall? When I have asked this question in the past, ISPs have responded with a variety of answers, but one of the most popular is that the costs to move data are in fact dirt cheap, but the labor needed to build and maintain the network is not, and such operating expenses are not one-time, but ongoing.

The authors of the new paper contend that all explanations are more or less hand-waving designed to disguise the fact that Internet providers are now raking in huge—in some cases, record—profit margins, without even the expense of building new networks. (Apart from Verizon FiOS and Google Fiber, most cable and DSL operators in the US still offer service over upgraded versions of networks they built and paid for long ago.) While Internet users have to endure a ceaseless litany of complaints about a "spectrum crunch" and an "exaflood" of data from which ISPs are suffering, most wireline ISPs are actually investing less money in their network as a percentage of revenue, and wireless operators like AT&T and Verizon are seeing huge growth in their average revenue per user (ARPU) numbers after phasing out unlimited data plans—which means money out of your pocket. In the view of the New America authors, this revenue growth is precisely the point of data caps.

New America

The concern here isn't just that Americans will spend too much for Internet access, but that they will also find themselves deterred from using hot new services thanks to concerns about data usage. Such limits could encourage users to adopt ISP's own unlimited services for telephone and television, for instance, rather than those services delivered over the Internet. "Over the longer term," was how it 2011 Credit Suisse presentation put it, "consumption based billing could reduce the attractiveness of over-the-top video options (e.g., Netflix and Hulu)." Critics have long speculated that this was in fact the ISP plan all along.

In a competitive market, how can Internet providers get away with holding prices steady even as their own costs drop? The New America report provides a simple answer: the market is not actually competitive, either in wireline (where most people have one or two good choices, and often just one truly high-speed choice) or in wireless (where AT&T and Verizon dominate, and where their customer "churn" rate is below one percent). Caps are "a strategy for ISPs to increase their revenue per user," says the report. "The trend is driven in large part by a woefully uncompetitive market that allows the nation's largest providers to generate enormous profits, as well as enable them to protect their legacy business models from new services and innovators."

One has only to look at an ISP like France's Free to see what an innovative Internet competitor looks like; unfortunately, things have gotten so bad in the US that cities like Chicago, Seattle, and Chattanooga have opted to build their own fiber networks to get the job done, while companies like Google are trying to prod existing ISPs into greater efficiency and higher speeds by building select fiber networks of their own—an implicit counter-argument to all the "we need data caps and have to charge high prices" doom and gloom that one hears from most ISPs.

Anecdotally, Ars staffers report almost no issues with wireline data caps, though the far more draconian mobile caps create regular problems. As mobile devices play ever-larger roles in our personal and work lives, the situation becomes more troubling, as does the fact that the wireline data caps are generally not being upped yearly and will cause increasing problems, especially for families.

But what to do about the situation? Ah, well, that's always the problem. The New America authors do have some ideas, including more regulation of "special access" lines and lowering the barriers to switching wireless carriers, but these aren't the sorts of things like to bring about, in the short term, the competitive wonderland that the authors envision.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012...net-providers/





Senator Introduces Bill to Regulate Data Caps

Metering allowed only for congestion control; discriminatory data caps banned.
Timothy B. Lee

Earlier this week we covered a new white paper from the New America Foundation arguing the recent proliferation of data caps instituted by broadband providers are designed to maximize revenue rather than minimize congestion. The issue caught the attention of Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who introduced legislation to regulate the use of data caps on Thursday.

"Data caps create challenges for consumers and run the risk of undermining innovation in the digital economy if they are imposed bluntly and not designed to truly manage network congestion," Wyden said in an e-mail statement.

Wyden hopes to address three issues with his proposal. First, he wants to increase the amount and accuracy of information provided to consumers. His bill empowers the Federal Communications Commission to regulate ISPs' methods for measuring bandwidth usage with an eye to improving their accuracy. And it requires ISPs to provide their customers with realtime tools for tracking their usage and comparing them with the ISP's established caps.

Second, the bill requires that any data caps employed by ISPs function to "reasonably limit network congestion without unnecessarily restricting Internet use." According to a statement released with the legislation, "some data caps are so blunt that they may work to discourage Internet use even when doing so has no bearing on network congestion."

The most ambitious part of the legislation is a kind of network neutrality rule. It requires that any data cap (which is defined to include metering schemes) not be used to "provide preferential treatment of data that is based on the source or content of the data." That would ban a practice that is frequently mentioned by advocates of network neutrality regulation: the creation of a paid "fast lane." For example, earlier this year critics charged that Comcast's practice of not counting traffic generated by its own video streaming app for the Xbox violated network neutrality. Comcast has since suspended enforcement of its data caps, but if Wyden's bill passes, the cable giant could be forced to scrap the XBox exemption altogether.

"Future innovation will undoubtedly require consumers to use more and more data—data caps should not impede this innovation and the jobs it creates," Wyden said. "This bill is intended to help consumers manage their data more effectively and ensure that data caps are used only to serve the legitimate purpose of addressing congestion."

The legislation enjoys the support of Public Knowledge, a liberal advocacy group that has long criticized the use of data caps. "Data caps create an artificial scarcity in the broadband market that limits consumer choice and hinders the creation of new competitive content online," said the organization's Christopher Lewis. "Public Knowledge supports Sen. Wyden's effort to provide consumers with transparency on their data usage and to ensure that these caps do not limit innovative products and uses on the Internet."

"Discredited economic thinking"

But Ryan Radia of the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute was less enthusiastic about Wyden's proposal. He believes that data caps can serve useful purposes beyond congestion control. "Setting prices based on demand, rather than on unit cost, is a beneficial business practice that's commonplace in network industries," he told Ars by e-mail.

He drew an analogy to the airline industry. "While the cost of filling an empty plane seat at the last minute is minimal, airlines often charge extra for such seats, due to last-minute flyers' higher willingness to pay." In this way, he said, metered broadband can promote fairness by encouraging "voracious Internet users to pay more than lighter users." In his view, the Wyden proposal "amounts to a price control based on discredited economic thinking."

Radia's colleague Fred Campbell agreed, and he argued that "bandwidth-hungry video advertisements" contributed to network congestion. "If Senator Wyden wants to promote consumer control over data usage, he should start with a law governing the practices of search engines, websites, and application providers," he told us by email.

Radia's view is likely to be well-represented in Congress. Last year, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) pledged to oppose network neutrality regulations. The Republicans who control the House of Representatives may be similarly skeptical of Wyden's proposal.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...ate-data-caps/





It's Clear Verizon Is Blocking Google Wallet Anti-Competitively

Google Wallet delayed to give Isis development time
Karl Bode

Verizon has been trying to justify their blocking of Google Wallet on Verizon phones, insisting the app is blocked because Google Wallet uses the "secure element" on devices to store a user's Google ID. In response to complaints filed with the FCC, Verizon insists the unending blockade has nothing to do with the fact Verizon (in conjunction with AT&T and T-Mobile) is working on their own competing mobile payment platform named Isis.

That's obviously not true, and more than a few technology websites have noticed that Verizon's simply acting anti-competively by delaying Google Wallet just long enough to help their Isis platform catch up in development (even if it appears few are using it and many participating retailers have never heard of it).

With Google Wallet on permanent vacation and Verizon lawyers playing faux-technical patty cake with the FCC, lo and behold Verizon's Isis Mobile Wallet app arrived this week, and is able to use the secure element with no problem or approval delay whatsoever:

In the screenshots above, taken directly from the Isis Mobile Wallet app on a Verizon Galaxy S3, you can see mentions of the previously talked about “secure element.” In fact, the phone requirements for the app speak of this “secure element” as a “dedicated component in your phone” used to store payment cards and everything else needed to properly run a mobile payment app with NFC. Basically, that’s everything that they said was bad about Google Wallet, and that if Google removed this requirement, that its app could be used on Verizon phones.

For those who've been around this kind of behavior from Verizon is nothing new. You'll recall that initially Verizon blocked Google Maps from having access to their phones' GPS hardware, in order to give their own navigation software (and its monthly fee) a leg up. Verizon ultimately backed off after enough people realized Verizon was simply being an obnoxious ass, but it's clear that this kind of behavior is simply in Verizon's (and AT&T's) nature as duopolist gatekeepers.

You have to assume that Verizon will also cave here as this story gains traction, but by then Verizon's goal of delaying Google Wallet just long enough to give Isis a leg up will have already gained traction. One irony of course is that in conjunction with Verizon, Google worked to gut meaningful network neutrality rules that would have prevented this very thing from happening on wireless networks.
https://secure.dslreports.com/showne...itively-122513





Mahout, There It Is! Open Source Algorithms Remake Overstock.com
Cade Metz

Judd Bagley set out to build a web app that would serve up a never-ending stream of news stories tailored to your particular tastes. And he did. It’s called MyCurrent. But in creating this clever little app, Bagley also pushed online retailer Overstock.com away from the $2-million-a-year service it was using to generate product recommendations for web shoppers, and onto a system that did the same thing for free — and did it better.

Bagley is a software developer with Overstock’s fledgling O Labs, a mini-research-and-development operation tucked into the fifth floor of the company’s Salt Lake City headquarters, just outside the office of CEO Patrick Byrne. O Labs was founded to incubate projects that can push the company in new directions, and MyCurrent was the first of the lot. A personal news reader may seem like an odd thing to emerge from an online retailer, but that’s largely the point. And in the end, the project pumped new life into the company’s primary retail operation.

In building MyCurrent, Bagley and his O Labs cohorts stumbled onto an open source software project known as Mahout. Founded in 2009, Mahout provides the world with a set of freely available machine learning algorithms — algorithms that give computing systems at least a modicum of artificial intelligence, letting them adjust their behavior according to what’s happened in the past. Inside O Labs, the idea was to use Mahout as a means of examining the news stories you’ve enjoyed in the past and then selecting stories you’re likely to enjoy, well, right now.

Mahout worked well — so well that Overstock decided it could be used to generate the product recommendations for users on its main website. The company was using a commercial recommendation system from a company called Rich Relevance, but a few months ago, says Saum Noursalehi, who oversees O Labs, it replaced this system with an engine based on Mahout and a sister platform known as Hadoop, a hugely popular open source system that uses a sea of ordinary computer servers to process massive amounts of data.

The tale highlights the benefit of a blue-sky R&D operation. Overstock was founded in 1997 and went public in 2004, and Byrne — the company’s swashbuckling chief exec — created O Labs about a year ago to feed a bit more of the entrepreneurial ethos back into the company. “We’re saving $2 million a year with Mahout, and that never would have happened if not for the sort of experimental stuff we’re doing in the labs,” says Bagley. “We’re discovering things that can then have benefit across the company.”

But it also shows how Hadoop and related open source tools continue to evolve and push even further across the web and into businesses. Mahout — which was specifically built for use with Hadoop — is little more than 3 years old, and it has already attracted the attention of several big-name web operations, including not only Overstock, but AOL, Foursquare, Yahoo, Twitter, and even Amazon.

Originally bootstrapped by Yahoo and Facebook, Hadoop mimics two sweeping software platforms that Google built to underpin its search engine. It’s widely used across the web, and now it’s pushing into other businesses as well, thanks in part of Hadoop-minded software startups such as Cloudera and MapR. It can be used to analyze data, but it can also crunch massive amounts of data for use in live applications — such as the Overstock recommendations service.

Hadoop has also spawned a wide range of sister projects, including Hbase, a database for storing particularly large amounts of information; Hive, a means of querying data crunched by Hadoop; Zookeeper, a means of synchronizing Hadoop and other platforms across a large cluster of servers; and, yes, Mahout, one of the newer projects. Hadoop is named after a yellow stuffed elephant that belonged to the son of the project’s founder, Doug Cutting, and the Mahout moniker plays off this bit of trivia. In India, a mahout is someone who rides an elephant.

According to Ted Dunning — a MapR engineer who works on the Mahout project — the project has been adopted by “dozens” of sites to help drive user recommendations, including Amazon, one of the companies that pioneered such recommendations more than a decade ago. It’s unclear how Amazon is using Mahout, but according to a job listing on LinkedIn, it has been used by the team that oversees Amazon’s “Personalization Platform” — i.e., the software platform used to personalize content across the site.

But Dunning is quick to point out that Mahout is still a young project. And it’s important to realize that it is merely a library of algorithms — something you use to build larger applications. “It’s not a product. It’s not a package. It’s not a service,” he says. “Batteries are not included. And you will find rough corners. Various aspects of Mahout are better or worse in terms of code maturity. Some parts are literally student projects — and are really bad. Others parts are absolutely production quality.”

So, even though Overstock is saving $2 million a year in dropping its commercial recommendations tool, its switch to Mahout did involve development costs. But Overstock’s Saum Noursalehi tells us that the company built its system on its own — without paid help from the likes of MapR or Cloudera. The team that runs the project spans about six developers and a product manager.

According to Noursalehi, Hadoop logs everything that any Overstock customer does on the site, and then it feeds this data into a system based on Mahout. The Mahout library includes hundreds of algorithms, and Overstock is in the process of A/B testing many of these to determine which work the best. It’s also starting to “cluster” recommendations, creating groups of people who are likely to respond to certain types of recommendations.

“You might find the people living in certain zip codes are high-income people,” Noursalehi says, “and their recommendations might be slightly different than those we provide to people in other regions.” Similarly, the company is looking to create clusters around members of its loyalty program or its most active customers.

In other words, Overstock is behaving like an online retail operation. The difference is that it’s generating these online recommendations with open source algorithms.
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/12/mahout/





SSD Prices Continue to Plunge

Cost-per-gigabyte is down more than 300% in three years
Lucas Mearian

Computerworld - Since 2010, solid state drive (SSD) prices have plummeted 300% since 2010, this year reaching what researchers call the magic price point of $1-per-gigabyte of capacity.

After dropping 20% in the second quarter of 2012 alone, SSD prices fell another 10% in the second half of the year, according to data from IHS iSupply.

The better deals for SSDs are now around 80- to 90-cents-per-gigabyte of capacity, though some sale prices have been even lower, according to Ryan Chien, an IHS SSD and storage analyst.

Oversupply of NAND flash memory is primarily behind the price drops over the past couple of years, but manufacturing is now more in line with demand and prices have begun to stabilize, Chien said.

Last year, SSD prices dropped 23%, according to commerce tracking site Dynamite Data.

Dynamite Data said it has monitored the price, rebate and stock status of more than 600 individual SSDs at hundreds of e-commerce merchants over the past three years. In August, it noted in a blog post that SSDs had finally broken the "magic" $1-per-gigabyte price point, proclaiming it "the new normal."

The average commodity SSD price was $3 per gigabyte in 2010, when capacities were rarely above 128GB.

"We first saw low-budget SSDs hit the $1 mark in April, with heavy mail-in-rebates," Kristopher Kubicki, chief architect at Dynamite Data, wrote in the blog post. "However, the industry has been very consistent and extremely fast in its direction. The bigger and newer players pushed the bottom quartile [price] from $1.5/GB to $1/GB in just four months!

"We're currently experiencing the fastest decline in SSD prices in three years," he added. "If history has anything to say, we will now see prices per drive stabilize and the size of the drives substantially grow over the next few years."

Storage and memory tracking site DRAMeXchange reported similar SSD price drops. As of November, it said SSD prices were down 24% from the beginning of 2012. At the same time, hard disk drive prices have remained "inflated" -- about 47% higher than they were prior to the 2011 Thai floods.

"Despite hard drive prices remaining high -- coupled with the continual decline of SSD prices -- the per-GB price of the largest capacity SSDs (300-600GB) are currently nine times more expensive than 500GB notebook hard disk drives," said DRAMeXchange analyst Jessica Chang.

SSDs today are far more reliable, have greater endurance and perform better (in some cases, two to three times better) than in 2009.

There are also new SSD categories. For example, hybrid drives combine NAND flash cache memory with a spinning disk in a hard-drive form factor. In addition, in adherence to Intel's new ultrabook computer specifications, manufacturers are beginning to produce laptops with two drive slots, one for a hard drive and the other for a low-capacity cache SSD that works with hard drives to speed up boot and application load times.

Even with the dramatic price drops, SSDs as aftermarket PC upgrades are still seen as niche purchases. "Though HDDs and DRAM are not sexy, they do far more aftermarket business than SSDs," IHS' Chien said.

When it comes to companies making and shipping consumer-grade SSDs through channel partners, Intel and Samsung continue to lead the market in the No. 1 and No. 2 spots, respectively. They are followed by OCZ, Micron (Crucial) and Kingston, according to Chien.

As for those shipping SSDs to system manufacturers of PCs, laptops and arrays, the top players are Samsung, Toshiba, Intel, Micron, and Sandisk. Shipments to equipment manufacturers will remain the dominant market for SSDs, Chien said.

"Samsung hadn't really been a big aftermarket SSD player until its 830 SSD came out; a combination of aggressive pricing and improved drive performance has catapulted it near the top fairly quickly," Chien said. "Intel drives are dependable, but not as fast; OCZ products have always struggled with reliability and the recent shakeups have not helped."
https://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...inue_to_plunge

















Until next week,

- js.



















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