Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 29th, '12

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002

"We don’t want to drift into a world in which our own possessions are riddled with computer chips acting in the interests of others — watching us, controlling us, and possibly snitching on us." – Jay Stanley


"DO NOT PAY THE RANSOM." – Jeet Morparia



































December 29th, 2012




Porn Trolling Firm Dogged by Identity Theft Allegations

Prenda Law stonewalls on claim that it named man CEO without his permission.
Timothy B. Lee

Prenda Law, the ethically challenged law firm that specializes in mass pornographic copyright lawsuits, is facing growing pressure to answer questions about allegations of identity theft. Last week, we reported on a Minnesota federal court filing by Alan Cooper, a former caretaker for Prenda's John Steele. Cooper has accused Prenda of naming him as the CEO, without his knowledge or consent, of two shell companies that have been filing mass copyright lawsuits around the country.

News of Cooper's allegations has begun to spread to lawyers defending Internet subscribers elsewhere in the country. On Monday, California attorney Morgan Pietz filed a notice informing a California federal court of Prenda's alleged ethical lapses elsewhere in the country. He also enclosed a copy of e-mail correspondence with Prenda attorney Brett Gibbs, who seemed desperate to avoid answering questions about the allegations.

Prenda's stonewalling technique seems unlikely to succeed. If Cooper's accusations were false, Prenda could easily settle the issue by furnishing information about the identity of the Alan Cooper who runs the shell companies AF Holdings and Ingenuity 13. But refusing to answer the questions will only encourage more defendants around the country to raise the issue. And there are a lot of defendants. One count found dozens of cases with one of the firms as plaintiffs. Sooner or later, one or more judges will take an interest in Cooper's allegations and force Prenda to produce documents confirming or refuting them.

"Systemic fraud"

"The facts explained by Mr. Cooper’s attorney, and particularly when read in conjunction with the Florida hearing transcript, suggest possible systemic fraud, perjury, lack of standing, undisclosed financial interests, and improper fee splitting," Pietz told the Central District Court of California in his Monday court filing.

The Florida hearing transcript Pietz references is one we covered two weeks ago, in which a Florida federal judge discovered there were no lawyers willing to admit to being affiliated with the plaintiff, Sunlust Pictures. Prenda claimed, implausibly, that it had nothing to do with the case.

"The Florida hearing transcript provides further evidence of what appears to be a pattern whereby Prenda Law is attempting to defraud the Courts across the country by falsely holding out former/current personal acquaintances of John Steele as the purported principals of the plaintiff entities that Prenda Law represents in its national copyright infringement campaign," Pietz wrote. "In other words, the Florida hearing transcript provides yet further evidentiary support for the same kind of deeply troubling circumstances that have been raised by Alan Cooper of Minnesota."

Pietz also enclosed a copy of an e-mail exchange he had with Gibbs. Prenda had told the court that it had a copy of "Alan Cooper's" signature on file. In a December 3 e-mail, Pietz asked Gibbs to furnish a copy of that signature in order to see if it matched the signature of the Alan Cooper who lives in Minnesota.

Pietz also wanted to know who Gibbs's client was. Officially, Gibbs represents "AF Holdings" and "Ingenuity 13," but it's not clear who is actually running these offshore shell companies. So Pietz asked a simple question: when Gibbs "talks to his client," who does he actually talk to? Is his name Alan Cooper?

In an e-mail response the same day, Gibbs completely ignored Pietz's questions. "I do not like playing childish and manipulative games. So I will not be drawn into this baseless banter, wasting everyone's time and money," Gibbs wrote.

Pietz and Gibbs spoke on the phone on Friday, December 7. In that conversation, Gibbs confirmed that he wasn't going to provide any information about who runs AF Holdings and Ingenuity 13. In a follow-up e-mail, Gibbs accused Pietz of being verbally abusive. "You were swearing at me and being extremely hostile to me on phone, and I frankly had other things of import to accomplish on my schedule—the conversation was ten minutes long and the abuse I was subjected to was uncalled for," Gibbs wrote. (Pietz denies he so much as raised his voice during the call.)

Gibbs made it clear he wasn't about to clear up the Alan Cooper controversy, calling Cooper's letter "a conspiracy theory letter with no factual basis." Gibbs continued: "As I told you over the phone, when you asked 'Is there another Alan Cooper?,' I said, 'I am sure there are hundreds of Alan Coopers in this world.' If your question had been framed more pointedly, and not so vague, maybe I could have provided you with a specific answer."

Of course, there's nothing vague or hard to answer about Pietz's questions. Either Prenda used the identity of Steele's former assistant as the CEO of its shell companies, or there's another man named Alan Cooper who runs those companies. By playing dumb, Gibbs might buy himself some time, but it's hard to imagine the court, or anyone else, will be fooled.

Pietz wants all the cases involving Ingenuity 13 in the California Central District transferred to the jurisdiction of Judge Otis Wright, who is already hearing cases involving AF Holdings. Pietz hopes that Judge Wright will carefully consider the allegations of misconduct against Prenda before continuing with the cases.

We contacted Gibbs by e-mail yesterday seeking comment for this story, but have not received a response.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...t-allegations/





How Porn Copyright Lawyer John Steele Has Made A 'Few Million Dollars' Pursuing (Sometimes Innocent) 'Porn Pirates'
Kashmir Hill

Attorney John Steele is currently suing approximately 20,000 Internet users.

The rather long list of “People Most Hated By The Internet” — that guy who sued the Oatmeal, RIAA, Hunter Moore, Julia Allison, Violentacrez… — would be incomplete were it not to include John Steele. Steele is a lawyer who has partnered with the pornography industry to go after “pirates” who download their XXX films without paying for them. He has filed over 350 of these suits, and says he is currently suing approximately 20,000 people.

The tactic is similar to the one employed by the recording industry years ago to sue people who were amassing huge music libraries through peer-to-peer sharing rather than buying CDs. But where RIAA wanted to scare people out of illegal downloads by getting massive, scary judgments in highly publicized cases against individual Napster users, Steele and the lawyers like him are content to get relatively small settlements from individuals who pay up quietly to avoid being linked by name in public court filings for allegedly watching a film such as “Illegal Ass 2.”

“I’m considered the original copyright troll,” says John Steele, almost proudly. “At least my wife loves me. When I read about myself on the Internet, I think, ‘Who is this jerk?’”

Unless you're Sasha Grey, you probably don't want your name publicly linked with this movie.

Attorneys like Steele identify allegedly guilty parties by monitoring file-sharing on BitTorrent (an increasingly surveilled place) and capturing the IP addresses of people sharing movies made by their porn producing clients. They then name the IP addresses as John Does in a copyright infringement lawsuit, and get a judge to force an ISP to reveal the paying customers behind the IP addresses. They sometimes sue hundreds of people at a time this way. Those people then get a letter from the lawyer informing them that they’re accused of downloading a particular movie and that they have the opportunity to pay a settlement (usually around $3,000) to make the legal matter go away, or risk being taken to court. Steele’s tactics are controversial, and have inspired a huge online backlash with critical stories from Ars Technica, TechDirt, and specialized sites such as DieTrollDie. Those who believe that everything should be free online are especially vocal.

Buzzfeed did a rather long piece laying out why Steele’s suits inspire such criticism. To boil it down to two reasons:

ONE: The paying customer behind the IP address may not be the person who downloaded “Tranny Donkey Porn From Mars.” A judge overseeing a lawsuit in New York against 176 John Does accused of downloading “My Little Panties 2” expressed concerns after the lawyer representing Digital Sin in the suit “estimated that 30% of the names turned over by ISPs are not those of individuals who actually downloaded or shared copyrighted material. Counsel stated that the true offender is often the ‘teenaged son … or the boyfriend if it’s a lady.’ Alternatively, the perpetrator might turn out to be a neighbor in an apartment building that uses shared IP addresses or a dormitory that uses shared wireless networks,” wrote Judge Alison Nathan, in an order giving the John Does and the ISPs 60 days to try to quash the subpoena.

“Just because wrong person arrested for murder doesn’t mean murder shouldn’t be a crime,” quips Steele. “We assess the situation and try to get the facts. There’s certain fact patterns that suggest it’s not the right person.”

He doesn’t elaborate on what fact patterns suggest the person they’re suing isn’t a porn lover but says most of their targets tend to be “20 to 40-something males.”

Still Steele says even if the person isn’t the porn perp, he thinks the person still plays a role in the crime. “Don’t let people commit criminal acts on your network,” he says. “If you lend your gun to someone who commits a crime, you’re responsible.” (Ed. Note: Probably not in a court of law though.)

TWO: Some criticize the suits as a perversion of the justice system, and some of the judges asked to force ISPs to turn over the information are expressing discomfort about being asked to do so. “[T]he potential for abuse is very high. The infringed work is a pornographic film. To save himself from embarrassment, even if he is not the infringer, the subscriber will very likely pay the settlement price,” wrote Judge Otis Wright in a California case against 10 John Does accused of illegally downloading “Blonde Ambition.” Critics say that the lawyers bringing these suits have no plan to take them to trial, but simply want to get identifying information for alleged copyright infringers and then shame them into paying a few thousand dollars to make the problem go away – whether they did the downloading or not. “The Court will not idly watch what is essentially an extortion scheme, for a case that plaintiff has no intention of bringing to trial,” wrote Wright in a June order that asked Cox Communications to out John Doe 1 to porn company Malibu Media, but said that Malibu needed to sue the rest of its John Does individually (making the mass outing and settlement request process much harder and more expensive, as they can’t sue hundreds of people at one time).

Steele, who was previously a family law attorney handling divorce cases before discovering the exciting world of porn copyright law, says his firm, Steele Hansmeier, was one of the first to partner with the porn industry and start filing these suits; he filed his first porn case in 2010. He claims to have come up with the idea of pursuing people for illegal downloads while in law school at the University of Minnesota (from which he graduated in 2006).

“When we were in law school, we could look at the router and see people ripping movies and songs. We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could find a way to identify these people and go after them?’” he says. “Adult entertainment companies were only ones that would work with us.”

Now there are many lawyers and porn companies – who have been struggling in the age of free salacious Internet content — seeking to make profits this way. Hundreds of these cases have made or are making their way through court systems around the country, and tens of thousands John Does have been sued. (Surprise! Lots of people watch porn on the Internet.) Steele says he files 20 lawsuits a month, and would like to increase this to 300.

“[Copyrighted porn being downloaded for free] is a huge problem,” says Steele. “I think we’ve made a difference. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have made so many people so mad.”

“Critics say we never actually file suit against people, just get their information, then pressure them to settle. But we’re prepared to fight if you don’t want to settle,” says Steele. In the “early stages,” they didn’t do this, but Steele says they are now willing to name names and take these cases to trial, bringing to bear other evidence, gathered from inspecting the accused’s computer and hard drive and interviewing friends and family about their porn habits. “We collect quite a bit of info about the Does.”

He points the finger at “other attorneys” who are abusing the process to get John Does to pay up without due process, whether they’re guilty of illegal porn consumption or not.

“Almost everyone who has not settled, we have sued,” says Steele. “There’s a backlog right now.”

Steele has never taken one of his John Does to court though he says he relishes the opportunity for a trial. “If I have judgments in my hands, wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing to show everyone to make other people settle?” he says.

I asked Steele, who works with approximately two dozen “adult entertainment clients” how many of these cases he has settled. He says a “fair number” would be 5,000.

These firms generally ask people to settle by paying them $3,000. Doing the math, I suggest Steele has made $15 million settling these suits.

“Maybe a little less. We don’t track the amount we’ve recovered. More than a few million,” he says, declining to offer exact numbers. “We’ve done reductions based on people’s situations. We decided we’re not going after people in the military or active service.”

There is trouble on the horizon, though. As mentioned before, some judges have expressed skepticism about these suits and are trying to make it harder for lawyers to file them en masse against hundreds of John Does.

Steele expresses annoyance at this: “When we sue 100 Does, we don’t always get 100 names. Sometimes, it just ends up being 40 people,” he says. “In one case, 27 ‘Doe’ IP addresses all belonged to one person.”

“When one side trying to find procedural loopholes, it speaks to the strength of their case,” he continues.

Steele’s other problem is that ISPs are starting to push back against complying with these subpoenas. In Chicago, Comcast intervened in a case that involved some of its subscribers saying that porn company AF Holdings was abusing the legal system “to shake down the Doe defendants,” getting their identifying information in order to embarrass and harass them into paying a settlement. In that case, the judge quashed the subpoenas.

“Comcast has objected to 30 or 40 of our subpoenas. Couple they’ve won and couple where they’ve lost. We have great relationships with many ISPS, but not with Comcast,” says Steele. “It’s a business decision for them. They don’t want to lose their clients. But if you step into shoes of your subscribers, you become responsible. Comcast is sheltering people so they can make money.”

In August, Prenda Law, another firm that pursues these types of case, filed a lawsuit in Illinois against AT&T, Comcast Cable Communications and their corporate executives “for aiding hackers targeting adult content” by refusing to turn over identifying information in these suits.

“It’s really simple,” says Steele. “We caught someone stealing.”

Some of those accused of stealing porn movies are starting to fight back. In addition to creating online forums with instructions as to how to fight these suits, some innocent parties have sued porn companies and their lawyers in return. Earlier this year, California woman Liuxia Wong sued Hard Drive Productions (represented by John Steele) for trying to extort her, accusing her of illegally downloading “Amateur Allure Jen” and requesting $3,4000 from her to settle the suit. She and her husband had an open Wi-Fi network and said they had no idea who might have downloaded the movie. Steele settled the suit for an undisclosed amount.

“We’re very comfortable with who came out ahead in the case,” he says. “The way it ended caused us no pain.”

Other possible roadblocks: This summer, a class action lawsuit popped up in Kentucky accusing a bunch of porn companies of racketeering, fraud and defamation for their attempts to get people to pay for illegal downloads. Steele says he’s unconcerned. Eight state attorney generals have called him about extortion claims. “Once I explain, they’re reassured,” he says.

This fall, various ISPS announced plans to collaborate in a deal negotiated by copyright holders and the Obama administration: a “six strikes” program in which ISPs will issue warnings to their customers when they see them infringing on copyrights. I ask Steele if he’s worried that will effectively stop illegal downloads (and thus negate the need for porn companies to go after downloaders in court, making him unnecessary).

“I doubt the effectiveness of this,” he says. “Little pop-up windows? I don’t see the downside of getting caught. If consumer groups agree with it, can’t be that bad.”

Steele says part of the problem is the culture of the Internet: people thinking content is and should be free there. “Eighteen-year-olds call us [after receiving settlement letters], confused,” he says. “They don’t know they’re doing anything wrong.”

Asked about the criticism inherent in shaming people into paying settlements by threatening to associate them with dirty movies they’ve watched, Steele is unapologetic.

“People don’t like to get caught doing anything wrong,” he says. “They should be embarrassed about the stealing.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirh...-porn-pirates/





United States and Russia Establish Joint Action Plan to Combat Piracy
Justin Rubio

The United States and Russia have established an agreement to work together to fight intellectual property violations. As specified in the Intellectual Rights Protection Action Plan, Russia has agreed to shut down infringing websites, and pump more money into law enforcement, including physical raids to destroy infringing pirated content — methods of enforcement that are already present in the United States. The agreement also states that Russia will establish a law that will determine ISP liability in cases involving infringement (though it's not clear what kind of "safe harbor" provisions, if any, will be given to Russia's ISPs).

The US hails the agreement, as it should — it focuses on actions Russia can take to extend US copyright protection abroad. "This step is particularly important in light of Russia's recent membership in the World Trade Organization and the application of the WTO agreement between us," US ambassador Ron Kirk said in a statement. "Russia has made commendable progress in improving its regime, and the Action Plan signals a commitment to maintain that momentum to address IPR priorities."

The US and Russia will share best practices to strengthen enforcement efforts, and Russia may even adapt the US' looming Copyright Alert System: a tactic to combat piracy in which internet service providers send illegal downloaders a series of warnings, referred to as "graduated response." The Intellectual Property Rights Action Plan also states that both countries will meet regularly to work on the shared goal of content protection and enforcement.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/22/3...ts-action-plan





China to Crack Down on "Malicious" Trademark Registrations

China plans to change the law to crackdown on "malicious" trademark registrations, state media said on Monday, after a series of cases in which well-know international brands and individuals have had their names or copyright misused.

Foreign governments, including the United States, have for years urged China to take a stronger stand against intellectual property rights violations on products ranging from medicines to software to DVD movies.

Basketball legend Michael Jordan is one of the latest to accuse a company of using his name without permission, and French luxury group Hermes International SCA (HRMS.PA) and Apple Inc (AAPL.O) have faced trademark problems too.

The proposed amendment will offer protection to major international brands, giving copyright owners the right to ban others from registering their trademarks or from using similar ones, even if such trademarks are not registered, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

"The draft is intended to curb the malicious registration of trademarks," Xinhua said.

The country's legislature - which performs a largely rubber stamp role - will discuss the amendment this week, it said, without saying when the new rules could be put in place or providing other details.

The move comes after basketball star Michael Jordan filed a lawsuit in China in February against a Chinese sportswear company, accusing the firm of unauthorized use of his name.

The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame recipient and former Chicago Bulls star said that Qiaodan Sports, a company located in the southern Fujian province, had built its business around his Chinese name "Qiaodan" and jersey number without his permission.

The lawsuit has yet to go to trial, Chinese media have reported.

France's Hermes International SCA (HRMS.PA) has also had problems in China with its trademark, and in July Apple Inc (AAPL.O) agreed to pay $60 million to Proview Technology (Shenzhen) to end a protracted legal dispute over the iPad trademark in China.

China has insisted it is serious about tackling intellectual property violations.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Andrew Osborn)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8BN0A820121224





Producers of ‘Minecraft: The Story of Mojang’ Offer the Film Free of Charge on The Pirate Bay
Emil Protalinski

2 Player Productions, the producers of Minecraft: The Story of Mojang, on Saturday uploaded the documentary to The Pirate Bay. The news comes as a surprise move after an announcement earlier this week that the film is premiering today for free on Xbox Live to Gold subscribers in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, the UK, and the US.

Now anyone can get it for free, legally, and without having to worry about what the download contains. The 2.51GB .mov file comes straight from the source.

2 Player Productions’ reasoning for putting it up on The Pirate Bay is as follows:

We wanted to come here first because we knew the movie would end up here eventually, and the best thing to do seemed to be opening a dialogue. Torrents and piracy are a way of life and it probably won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. There are many people that want to punish you for that, but we have a more realistic outlook on things.

We’ve been there. We’ve all needed to do it at some point. Maybe you don’t have the money. Maybe you want to try before you buy. Maybe you’re pissed at us for premiering the movie on Xbox Live. These are all fine reasons. But if you feel that piracy is, in Gabe Newell’s words, “a service problem,” please consider that we are selling DRM free digital downloads that you can watch in whatever manner you please.

To support the producers, you can buy the $8 DRM-free digital download of the movie at TheMinecraftMovie.com or the $20 DVD from FanGamer.net. In case you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the documentary’s trailer:
http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/12/...he-pirate-bay/





The Music Industry Dropped DRM Years Ago. So Why Does it Persist on e-Books?

Experts say it may have to do with the size of the two markets, for one thing.
Cyrus Farivar

So maybe you were lucky enough to get an e-reader for the holidays. In fact, maybe you’re reading this article on one right now! Maybe you’re cozying up to your fire and you’re considering what e-book you want to download to get through these dark winter days.

But you’re an Ars reader, and you actually know (and care!) what DRM stands for. After all, we’ve been covering digital rights management for years, ever since it was a contentious issue in the music industry. You may recall that Amazon itself led the charge against Cupertino, challenging iTunes with cheaper downloads and a lack of DRM. But Amazon's lead in the fight against music DRM was a business decision rather than an ideological stance. You may remember our story from late October 2012, detailing how to strip DRM off of Amazon Kindle purchases as a means of backing up your titles and preventing Amazon from deleting your entire library on a whim.

And that leaves this question: where’s the DRM outrage over e-books? Or put another way, why doesn’t Amazon care about eliminating DRM for books, when it did for music?

For many industry watchers, it comes down to the fact that generally speaking, most people own more individual pieces of music than they do individual books—the American digital music market is still much bigger than the digital book market.

From a cultural standpoint, people want to put music on more devices than they do e-books, and some will want to remix that music. Aside from zombie crossover fanfic, few outside the ivory tower are interested in remixing the written word.

“Most people don’t care about the ethics of DRM or about the finer points of copyright policy,” Aram Sinnreich, a Media Studies professor at Rutgers University, told Ars. “What people care about, is being able to do what they want with the stuff that they think they have.”

But as some smaller publishing houses begin to abandon DRM entirely and users get frustrated with the difficulties in lending e-books, some wonder if this culture may begin to change in 2013.

The "wrong end of the stick" ?

There are authors and anti-DRM advocates who for years have been preaching the gospel of digital liberation of e-books.

That includes Cory Doctorow, who succinctly noted in Publisher’s Weekly earlier this year: “People buy DRM e-books because they have no choice, or because they don’t care about it, or because they don’t know it’s there.”

Doctorow, a well-known science fiction author and the co-founder of Boing Boing, has practiced what he preaches for years. Not only are his books available DRM-free, but they’re also available to download for free.

When Ars asked Doctorow why he thought there wasn’t the same degree of outrage, he dismissed it.

“I think you've got the wrong end of the stick,” he e-mailed. “There is widespread, years-long approbation over e-book DRM.”

While that may be true for the Cory Doctorows of the world, that certainly isn’t true for big-time publishers, for mainstream readers, or for other e-book vendors that are on the scale of Amazon.

A rather cozy birdcage

Perhaps most importantly, Amazon has headed off DRM concerns by making a Kindle book reading application for pretty much every platform imaginable. That way, you can download a Kindle book and read it on your Android, your iPad, or whatever else just as easily as you would on a bona fide Kindle reader. (Amazon did not respond to Ars’ repeated requests for comment.)

“Kudos to Amazon for designing it in such a way that consumers would be comfortable,” Sinnreich quipped.

Whether the company has intended it or not, most consumers are blissfully unaware of the realities of DRM because any Kindle book can be read on just about every device. But in fact, it wasn't very long ago that Amazon was at the forefront of this battle against sharing restrictions when it came to music.

"Our MP3-only strategy means all the music that customers buy on Amazon is always DRM-free and plays on any device," said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in a statement in 2007.

Likely due to pressure from consumers and from Amazon, one record label after another began to agree to drop DRM on iTunes. By early 2009, DRM was formally, finally, dead—with all the labels on board.

Vampire-themed Jane Austen books aside, who remixes books, anyway?

Part of the lack of outrage, experts say, can be explained simply by the smaller market.

According to the NPD Group, digital-music revenue in the United States, not including streaming services, amounted to $2.1 billion in 2011. By comparison, e-books spending is vastly smaller, with some estimates placing the total revenue from them at just $21.5 million in the same year. (That's on the low side, though; other estimates place revenue at nearly $1 billion.)

Part of the reason may be impulse purchasing—it’s a lot easier to spontaneously buy an MP3 at $0.99 rather than an e-book at $9.99! But that isn't the only explanation that's been offered. “Maybe it's the low status of books in general,” Alissa Quart, the editor-at-large at The Atavist, “Book buyers don't get to get as outraged as music fans.”

Similarly, we’re all more likely to want to re-listen to older songs multiple times—and consequently, put them on multiple devices—than books, which tend to get read once and kept on a bookshelf (digital or analog.)

“You tend to re-visit old music more than old books,” said Parker Higgins, an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Some of that is the maturity of the ecosystem.”

Another possible explanation over the lack of outrage is that within music, not only is the market larger, but there’s more of a tradition of turning the original work (a song) into a derivative work, like a remix.

“When iTunes was introduced no one was thinking: ‘When I buy this, can I cut it up into ringtones?’” Higgins added. “They weren't thinking, ‘Can I set this to a rhythm game and play fake guitar to this?’ Because people love music, there's avenues for that remix. With books, especially with e-books, books as codecs aren't a very remixable form. People don't really know to do anything with them except start at the beginning and read to the end.”

He added that it may take awhile before authors and other developers come up with new applications that can take advantage of an open, DRM-less e-book.

“For example, a music player that matches sentiment through textual analysis—that would be possible with a [public domain e-book], but not be possible with a Kindle book,” Higgins said.

Quart, who is also author of the forthcoming book, The Republic of Outsiders, agreed, saying that even the biggest literary fans generally don’t do much besides read or perhaps quote other works that they like.

“There's not really a culture of remix amongst book readers,” she said. “There's a literary culture of appropriation and interesting fair use but I don't think a lot of readers have that relationship to it.”

Looking to the Cloud

However, one element of books versus music that experts say may even drive a cultural change in the publishing industry is the idea of borrowing books.

One of the major elements that drove the death of DRM was the ability to put music tracks in any format, in any device. Similarly, some speculate that it will take more time for enough e-book owners who want to share their favorite reads and be frustrated at that experience.

Currently, Amazon only allows lending of e-books of certain titles, and that can only be done once. The Barnes & Noble Nook has a similar lending policy—iBooks is even worse, as it doesn't have a lending feature to speak of.

"That's a farce—that's not what borrowing a book is," Higgins noted.

But borrowing may become a moot point if e-books start to be re-imaged as a service, rather than a product. If the music industry is any indication, then perhaps the publishing industry will start moving towards all-you-can-eat, cloud-based services. Few services like that, on a massive scale, exist here in the US.

However, a young Madrid-based startup may represent the future. 24Symbols is trying to become the Spotify of e-books.

"I want to watch a movie? Why download it when I can just go to a place like Hulu or Netflix and see it streamed?" Justo Hidalgo, co-founder of 24symbols, told German broadcaster Deutsche Welle last year. "So we believe that's something that's starting to happen in the book industry. I mean, we know that because many people read on-screen and many people read without needing to own the content that they have, so that's what we call like the change, or the shift from the book as a product to book as a service.”
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012...st-on-e-books/





Hollywood Studios Caught Pirating Movies on BitTorrent
Ernesto

BitTorrent is used by millions of people every day, including people who work at major Hollywood studios. Those who are said to be suffering the most from online piracy are no stranger to sharing copyrighted files themselves. New data reveals that employees at Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., Disney, Sony Pictures and 20th Century Fox are openly pirating movies, games and other forms of entertainment while at work.

While Christmas is a time for sharing there are certain files that some people believe should be excluded from that experience.

For more than a decade the MPAA has waged war against “thieves” who dare to share their movies online. Online piracy is costing the creative industries billions of dollars in lost revenue, they say.

The Hollywood group is therefore one of the main facilitators of the “six strikes” copyright alerts plan that will begin in the coming year. The main goal of this plan is to educate members of the public about piracy, and point them to legal sources.

However, new data uncovered by TorrentFreak shows that the MPAA might want to start in-house, as plenty of copyrighted material is being shared by employees of major Hollywood studios. With help from BitTorrent monitoring company Scaneye we found that BitTorrent piracy is rampant in Hollywood.

Let’s take a look at some of the files these Hollywood studios are sharing, starting with Paramount Pictures. Keep in mind that what we show here is just a small fraction of the files that are actually being shared. It’s the tip of the iceberg.

Static IP-addresses registered to Paramount were associated (e.g.) with the downloading of a wide variety of content as can be seen below. The indie production Battle Force was one of the movies shared, as well as the Lionsgate film The Hunger Games. And what about Happy Feet, a movie distributed by competitor Warner Bros?

Paramount Pictures

At Warner Bros. BitTorrent is also used by many employees. Here there appears to be a particular interest in adult entertainment. The Expendables 2 is also among the titles that were downloaded via Warner Bros. IP-addresses. This is not without risk, as the makers of the movie are known to sue alleged BitTorrent downloaders.

Warner Bros.

Moving on, we see that Sony Picture employees are sharing games, TV-shows and movies at work. The list below includes 20th Century Fox’s Ice Age: Continental Drift, and an episode of Top Chef.

Sony Pictures

20th Century Fox employees appear to be sharing the least out of all studios we checked. We only found three titles: the independent film Jeff, Who Lives at Home, an episode of 90210 and the Ubisoft game Hollywood Squares.

20th Century Fox

Disney is the last studio we checked out, and even at this mighty copyright icon employees are carelessly sharing files on BitTorrent. Fast and Furious 6, for example, and the TV-shows Person of Interest and Downton Abbey.

Walt Disney

The above is no surprise of course. Last year the now defunct website YouHaveDownloaded already revealed that BitTorrent is used at virtually every company.

That said, it never hurts to point out that Hollywood isn’t without ‘sin’ when it comes to piracy. The MPAA and others lobby very hard for anti-piracy measures, but can’t even stop piracy in the offices of their own member studios.

Finally, we want to point out that we also “caught” BitTorrent Inc. sharing several files on BitTorrent. Interestingly enough, these files were all legally distributed with permission from the makers.
https://torrentfreak.com/hollywood-s...orrent-121225/





Google Removed 50 Million “Pirate” Search Results This Year
Ernesto

Over the past year copyright holders have asked Google to remove 51,395,353 links to infringing webpages, a dramatic surge compared to previous years. The search giant is currently processing half a million “infringing” links per day, and this number is increasing week after week. At the same time, Hollywood and the major record labels want Google to increase its anti-piracy efforts.

googleIn common with many other websites on the Internet Google has an obligation to remove infringing content upon receiving a valid DMCA request from copyright holders.

To give the public insight into the scope and nature of this process, Google started to publish all takedown requests online in their Transparency Report.

Since then, the number of URLs Google is being asked to remove has grown rapidly. Last week Google received takedown requests for a record-breaking 3,502,345 URLs, which is 15 times more than the amount received in January.

Google doesn’t report yearly figures, but we added up all the weekly reports and found that in 2012 Google was asked to remove 51,395,353 links to infringing webpages. Nearly all of these webpages are no longer showing up in Google’s search results.

The data further reveals the RIAA is the most active sender. The music group asked Google to remove links to 7,816,766 allegedly infringing webpages this year.

Looking at the websites that Google received the most takedown notices for, we see that the file-hosting search engine FilesTube tops the rankings with 2,273,280 links. While this is certainly a significant number, it’s less than one percent of all FilesTube pages indexed by Google.

Google was further asked to remove 554,613 links to The Pirate Bay, which puts the most notorious BitTorrent site in 16th place.

While copyright holders are entitled to protect their content, the avalanche of takedown requests also has a downside. Not all of the requests are correct and this quite regularly leads to the takedown of legitimate content.

Google itself also raised concerns about this worrying trend.

“As policymakers evaluate how effective copyright laws are, they need to consider the collateral impact copyright regulation has on the flow of information online,” Google’s Legal Director Fred Von Lohmann said earlier this month.

For their part, the MPAA uses the data to point out how much pirated content they have to deal with online. The Hollywood group sees Google as one of the main facilitators of copyright infringement.

“There is a staggering amount of copyright infringement taking place every day online and much of it is facilitated by Google, as their own data shows,” the MPAA noted a few weeks ago.

“We couldn’t agree more with Google that this data shows that our current system is not working – for creators, or for Google. But we can’t lose sight of the fact that it also confirms the important role that Google has to play in helping curb the theft of creative works while protecting an Internet that works for everyone,” the Hollywood group added.

MPAA’s comments are shared by other copyright holders, who all want Google to step up its anti-piracy efforts.

Last year a behind-closed-doors meeting revealed that the copyright industry is pushing Google to completely de-list popular file-sharing sites such as The Pirate Bay, and give higher ranking to authorized sites.

Thus far Google has not de-listed any websites, but in August the search engine did start downgrading “pirate” sites for which they receive a relatively many DMCA takedown notices. Whether this has a significant effect on the availability of pirated content is unknown.

It will be interesting to see how much the number of DMCA notices increases in the coming year, and if Google announces more anti-piracy changes.
https://torrentfreak.com/google-remo...s-year-121228/





Google's Music Matching Reportedly Replacing Explicit Songs with Clean Versions
Chris Welch

Some users of Google Music's new scan-and-match functionality, recently rolled out in the US, are complaining of problems when it comes to explicit content in their library. Explicit songs are reportedly being replaced with "clean" versions sans offensive language during the matching process. Oddly enough, other people are seeing the exact opposite scenario: clean content is instead being swapped with the original, explicit source material in the cloud — a potential concern for parents. If this problem sounds familiar, that's because Apple experienced precisely the same issue soon after it debuted iTunes Match. Whether this challenge is simply inherent to music matching services or something else is at play remains unclear. We've reached out to Google for comment on the matter and will update this story if the company responds.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/24/3...clean-versions





3D Printed Record



amandaghassaei

In an effort to boldly 3D print where no man or woman has 3D printed before, I've created a technique for converting digital audio files into 3D printable 33rpm records and printed some functional prototypes over the weekend. These records play on regular turntables, with regular needles, at regular speeds, just like any vinyl record. Though the audio output from these records has a sampling rate of 11kHz (a quarter of typical mp3 audio) and 5-6bit resolution (mp3 audio is 16 bit), it is still easily recognizable, check out the video above to hear what it sounds like.

This past year I've been focusing a lot of my energy on audio projects, specifically, I've been experimenting with using relatively simple tools and techniques and very little memory to approximate and recreate audio signals. A great example is my Arduino Vocal Effects Box, where I used an Arduino to perform realtime pitch-bending on an incoming audio signal. Through these projects, I've learned that audio is a very resilient medium, it can take a fair amount of abuse (in the form of distortion and compression) while still maintaining most of the integrity of the original sound. You have to push it pretty far before it becomes completely unintelligible. The key here is that as long as you loosely approximate the overall shape of the original signal, your brain will probably be able to decipher it.

This project was my first experiment extending this idea beyond electronics. I printed these records on a UV-cured resin printer called the Objet Connex500. This printer has incredibly high resolution: 600dpi in the x and y axes and 16 microns in the z axis, some of the highest resolution possible with 3D printing at the moment. Despite all this precision, the Objet still at least an order of magnitude or two away from the resolution of a real vinyl record. My hope with this project was that despite the lack of vinyl-quality precision, I would still be able to produce something recognizable by approximating the groove shape as accurately as possible with the tools I had.

In this Instructable, I'll demonstrate how I developed a workflow that can convert any audio file, of virtually any format, into a 3D model of a record. This is far too complex a task to perform with traditional drafting-style CAD techniques, so I wrote an program to do this conversion automatically. It works by importing raw audio data, performing some calculations to generate the geometry of a record, and eventually exporting this geometry straight to the STL file format (used by all 3D printers). Most of the heavy lifting is done by Processing, an open source environment that's often used for coding interactive graphics applications. To get Processing to export to STL, I used the ModelBuilder Library written by Marius Watz (if you are into Arduino/Processing and 3D printing I highly recommend checking this out, it works great).

I've uploaded some of my complete record models to the 123D gallery as well as the Pirate Bay. Check Step 6 for a complete listing of what's there and what I plan on posting. Alternatively, you can go to Step 7 to download my code and learn how to make your own printable records from any audio file you like.

Special thanks to Randy Sarafan, Steve Delaire, Arthur Harsuvanakit, Phil Seaton, and Audrey Love for their help with this project.

Step 1
How Does a Record Work?
The basic mechanism of a record player is very simple. The record player moves a record at a constant rotational speed (usually 33.3 or 45 rpm) and a needle (also called a stylus) moves along a long spiral groove cut into the record's surface. As the record spins, the needle hits tiny bumps in the groove and vibrates both vertically and laterally to produce audio signals. I won't get into the specifics of how the needle extracts data from the record, but it is really interesting and there's a great demo of it here.

The record player and record cutter were originally invented by Edison in 1877. In those days Edison did not have the same kind of precise machinery that we have now; the grooves on the first records were much larger than those on modern microgroove records and, subsequently, the audio signals were much noisier. This is a similar situation that I found myself in when starting this project. Despite the high precision of the Objet machines, the resolution is nowhere near vinyl quality. Before i was sure if any of this would work, I kept reminding myself of the early days of record manufacturing. Although I wasn't able to find the exact specs of Edison's first record, I'd imagine that the resolution I was working with couldn't have been too far off.

To give you an idea of the resolution of a real record, check out the images above. Fig 1 was made by branku62 at vinylengine.com, it shows the profile dimensions of a standard microgrove mono groove, this is what you would find on a modern mono 33 or 45 (stereo grooves are actually cut a bit smaller). In the diagram 1 mil = 1/1000", which is about 25um. Microgroove records require a stylus with a 0.7 to 1.0 mil radius tip, the tip makes contact with the groove at E in fig 1, a width of about 1.4 mil. The total depth of the groove is around 1.1 mil.

Fig 2 is from Ron Geesin and Mark Berresford's website, it shows the groove depths of the older 78's. These records were much more coarse than microgroove records, both the needle and grooves were about 3x as large in every dimension. Fig 2 shows the groove depth for 78's was somewhere between 2.2 and 3.6 mil. The stylus radius was around 2.7 mil.

Step 2
Printer Specs
Here at Instructables HQ, we have access to Autodesk's fleet of Objet Connex 500 printers. These printers use UV light to cure resin layer by layer until a complete model is produced. They are very different from the extrusion printers you may have seen or used before (MakerBot, RepRap, Up!, etc), not only can they print out of many types of materials (ranging from flexible rubbery material to hard polymer), but they are also extremely precise. In the x and y axes they have 600dpi resolution (that's about 42microns), and in the z axis they have a resolution of 16microns.

Before I started printing anything, I used these numbers to calculate the resolution I'd be able to achieve. First I wanted to make sure that I would be able to get a good sampling rate on my audio. Sampling rate is the amount of samples per second in a song. Usually the sampling rate is 44.1kHz (or 44,100 samples a second). When the sampling rate drops below about 40kHz the higher frequencies of a song start losing their detail, but depending on the song you can go down to 10kHz sampling rate without too much of a problem.

To calculate the sampling rate of the 3D printed record I used the following relationship:

sampling frequency = (resolution per inch)*(inches per revolution)*(revolutions per second)
in order to maximize the sampling frequency, I want all of these numbers (res/inch, inch/rev, rev/sec) to be as high as possible

First I'll start with revolutions per second. Record players typically play at two different speeds: 33.3 and 45rpm. (Some record players also have a 78rpm speed, but this is less common and only used for very old records). I wanted to use the lower 33.3RPM speed in order to make this more like a real 12" record (45 RPM is only used for 7" records, and 33RPM for the full sized 12") and so that I could fit more audio onto each side of the disc.

revolutions per second = (revolutions per minute)/(seconds per minute)
revolutions per second at 33 rpm = 33.3/60 = 0.55

Next is inches per revolution, this number depends on the circumference of the disk where the needle is hitting it. The largest sized records are 12" in diameter (30cm). According to the RIAA standards, the outermost groove of a 12" record falls at a radius of 5.75" and the innermost groove falls at about 2.25". I'll use these numbers to determine the range of sampling rates I can achieve at 33RPM. The circumference (the distance in inches traveled by the needle during one revolution of the record) is calculated as follows:

inches per revolution = 2*pi*(radius of needle)
max inches per revolution = 2*pi*5.75 =~ 36
min inches per revolution = 2*pi*2.35 =~ 15

I already know that the resolution per inch of the 3D printer is 600 (600 dpi in the x and y axes). So combining this all I get:

sampling frequency = (resolution per inch)*(inches per revolution)*(revolutions per second)
max sampling frequency at 33 rpm = 600*36*0.55 =~ 12000 = 12kHz
min sampling frequency at 33 rpm = 600*15*0.55 =~ 4900 = 4.9kHz

This is a pretty good starting point. If I scale this to 45rpm instead of 33 the sampling rate becomes:

max sampling frequency at 45 rpm = 600*36*0.75 =~ 16000 = 16kHz
min sampling frequency at 45 rpm = 600*15*0.75 =~ 6700 = 6.7kHz

I'll keep this option in mind in case sampling rate becomes an issue. The other piece of information that I needed was the bit depth I'd be able to achieve with the Objet printer. Bit depth is the resolution of the audio data. Most audio these days in 16 bit, meaning each sample can have one of 65536 (2^16) possible values. 8 bit audio has only 256 (2^8) steps of resolution and still sounds pretty close to the original. Even going down to 3 and 4 bit sounds recognizable. (I should note here that the music commonly referred to as "8-bit" like the music in early Nintendo games is actually 1 bit resolution, it's called 8 bit because it was first made with 8 bit computers, not with 8 bit resolution).

Since the z axis is the most precise axis on the Objet printer, I wanted to print my record so that the needle vibrates vertically in the groove to trace out the audio wave to maximize my bit depth. The following equation calculates the vertical distance that the needle will move as it traces the a wave of a given bit depth:

vertical displacement of needle = (2^bit depth)*(precision of z axis)
where the precision of the z axis is 16micron. I used this to calculate the following table:

bit depth vertical displacement steps of resolution

2 64um 4
3 128um 8
4 256um 16
5 512um 32
6 1.024mm 64
7 2.048mm 128
8 4.096mm 256

The bolded rows in the table are the numbers that I wanted to shoot for with this project. A vertical amplitude of 64-512um is an order of magnitude (~10x) larger than the amplitude of a vinyl record groove, but I felt like I'd probably be able to get away with it and still maintain a reasonable bit depth.

Step 3
First Tests
First I prepared some test files to print to get an idea of what is possible with the printer and optimize the dimensions of the grooves. These record files have circular grooves on them containing sine waves of various frequencies, amplitudes, groove depths, groove widths, and beveled groove edges. (When I say that the groove "contained" a sine wave, I mean the bottom of the groves moves up and down in a sinusoidal pattern around the record). I generated all of these files in Processing using the ModelBuilder library to export straight to STL.

TEST ONE:

My first test record had 72 grooves on it, screen shots of the model are shown in figs 2 through 6 I tested two frequencies of sine waves:

1000 cycles per revolution = 555Hz at 33RPM
500 cycles per revolution = 277Hz at 33RPM

I tested a few different amplitudes, depths, and groove widths for these frequencies and gave each groove a constant bevel size of 2px on each side (you can see in fig 5 how the edges of the groove flare outward). I printed the record in Objet's Vero Clear material, this material is a fairly hard, clear resin. I printed the file with the "smooth" setting to prevent any support material from being deposited in the grooves. Unfortunately, when I was ready to make this print we were having some problems with power in our shop, so I had to use another Objet machine that was not set up for high resolution printing; the best I could do was 300DPI X/Y resolution with 30um Z steps. This is half the resolution that each of these axes is capable of, meaning the print came out at (1/2)3, or 1/8th resolution overall. The results are shown in the video below (the grooves were not deep enough to keep the needle inside, so I had to hold in it place with my hand). The record was also a little big for my record player, I decreased the diameter of my STL file to 11.8" in later versions.

In this video you can hear a periodic frequency sweep on top of the steady sine wave (best heard w headphones). This sweeping sound is caused by the needle moving over the thousands of tiny parallel bumps in the print caused by adjacent print-heads on the Objet machine. This noise is unavoidable, but increasing the strength of the signal will help to make it less noticeable.

The Processing sketch that generated this record is given below:

//sine tests
//by Amanda Ghassaei
//Dec 2012
//http://www.instructables.com/id/3D-Printed-Record/

/*
* This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
* it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
* the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or
* (at your option) any later version.
*/



import processing.opengl.*;
import unlekker.util.*;
import unlekker.modelbuilder.*;
import ec.util.*;

UVertexList recordPerimeterUpper,recordPerimeterLower,recordHoleUpper,re cordHoleLower;//storage for perimeter and center hole of record
UVertexList lastEdge;//storage for conecting one groove to the next
UGeometry geo;//storage for stl geometry

//variables
float theta;//angle variable
float thetaIter = 10000;//how many values of theta per cycle
float radius;//variable to calculate radius of grooves
int diameter = 12;//diameter of record in inches
float innerHole = 0.286;//diameter of center hole in inches
float innerRad = 2.35;//radius of innermost groove in inches
float outerRad = 5.75;//radius of outermost groove in inches
float grooveSpacing = 20;//pixel spacing of grooves
float bevel = 2;//pixel width of groove bevel

//record parameters
float recordHeight = 0.08;//height of record in inches
int recordBottom = 0;//height of bottom of record

//parameters to test
float amplitude[] = {2,4,8};//in units of 16 micron steps (remember this is the amplitude of the sine wave, the total vert displacement will be twice this)
int frequency[] = {1000,500,0};//cycles per rotation
float depth[] = {0.5,1,0};//how many 16 microns steps below the surface of the record to print the uppermost point of the groove
float grooveWidth[] = {1,2,3};//in 600dpi pixels

float incrNum = TWO_PI/thetaIter;//calculcate inrementation amount

int grooveNum = 0;//variable for keeping track of how long this will take

void setup() {//everything that executes in this sketch is contained in the setup()

geo = new UGeometry();//place to store geometery of verticies

setUpVariables();//convert units, initialize etc
setUpRecordShape();//draw basic shape of record
drawGrooves();//draw in grooves

geo.writeSTL(this, "test.stl");//write stl file from geomtery

}

void setUpVariables(){

//convert everything to inches
float micronsPerInch = 25400;//scalingfactor
float dpi = 600;
byte micronsPerLayer = 16;//microns per vertical print layer

grooveSpacing /= dpi;
bevel /= dpi;
for(byte i=0;i<3;i++){
amplitude[i] = amplitude[i]*micronsPerLayer/micronsPerInch;
depth[i] = depth[i]*micronsPerLayer/micronsPerInch;
grooveWidth[i] /= dpi;
}

}

void setUpRecordShape(){

//set up storage
recordPerimeterUpper = new UVertexList();
recordPerimeterLower = new UVertexList();
recordHoleUpper = new UVertexList();
recordHoleLower = new UVertexList();

//get verticies
for(theta=0;theta<TWO_PI;theta+=incrNum){
//outer edge of record
float perimeterX = diameter/2+diameter/2*cos(theta);
float perimeterY = diameter/2+diameter/2*sin(theta);
recordPerimeterUpper.add(perimeterX,perimeterY,recordHeight) ;
recordPerimeterLower.add(perimeterX,perimeterY,recordBottom) ;
//center hole
float centerHoleX = diameter/2+innerHole/2*cos(theta);
float centerHoleY = diameter/2+innerHole/2*sin(theta);
recordHoleUpper.add(centerHoleX,centerHoleY,recordHeight);
recordHoleLower.add(centerHoleX,centerHoleY,recordBottom);
}

//close vertex lists (closed loops)
recordPerimeterUpper.close();
recordPerimeterLower.close();
recordHoleUpper.close();
recordHoleLower.close();

//connect verticies
geo.quadStrip(recordHoleUpper,recordHoleLower);
geo.quadStrip(recordHoleLower,recordPerimeterLower);
geo.quadStrip(recordPerimeterLower,recordPerimeterUpper);

//to start, outer edge of record is the last egde we need to connect to with the outmost groove
lastEdge = new UVertexList();
lastEdge.add(recordPerimeterUpper);

println("record drawn, starting grooves");
grooveNum = 0;//variable for keeping track of how much longer this will take

}

void drawGrooves(){

UVertexList grooveOuterUpper,grooveOuterLower,grooveInnerUpper,grooveInn erLower;//groove verticies

//set up storage
grooveOuterUpper = new UVertexList();
grooveOuterLower = new UVertexList();
grooveInnerUpper = new UVertexList();
grooveInnerLower = new UVertexList();

//DRAW GROOVES
radius = outerRad;//outermost radius (at 5.75") to start
for(byte frequencyIndex=0;frequencyIndex<2;frequencyIndex++){
for(byte amplitudeIndex=0;amplitudeIndex<3;amplitudeIndex++){
for(byte grooveDepthIndex=0;grooveDepthIndex<2;grooveDepthIndex++){
for(byte grooveWidthIndex=0;grooveWidthIndex<3;grooveWidthIndex++){
for(byte copies=0;copies<2;copies++){

//clear lists
grooveOuterUpper.reset();
grooveOuterLower.reset();
grooveInnerUpper.reset();
grooveInnerLower.reset();

for(theta=0;theta<TWO_PI;theta+=incrNum){//for theta between 0 and 2pi

float sineTheta = sin(theta);
float cosineTheta = cos(theta);

//calculate height of groove
float grooveHeight = recordHeight-depth[grooveDepthIndex]-amplitude[amplitudeIndex]+amplitude[amplitudeIndex]*sin(theta*frequency[frequencyIndex]);

grooveOuterUpper.add((diameter/2+(radius+bevel)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius+bevel)*sineTheta),recordHeight);
grooveOuterLower.add((diameter/2+radius*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+radius*sineTheta),grooveHeight);
grooveInnerLower.add((diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth[grooveWidthIndex])*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth[grooveWidthIndex])*sineTheta),grooveHeight);
grooveInnerUpper.add((diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth[grooveWidthIndex]-bevel)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth[grooveWidthIndex]-bevel)*sineTheta),recordHeight);

}

//close vertex lists (closed loops)
grooveOuterUpper.close();
grooveOuterLower.close();
grooveInnerUpper.close();
grooveInnerLower.close();

//connect verticies
geo.quadStrip(lastEdge,grooveOuterUpper);
geo.quadStrip(grooveOuterUpper,grooveOuterLower);
geo.quadStrip(grooveOuterLower,grooveInnerLower);
geo.quadStrip(grooveInnerLower,grooveInnerUpper);

//set new last edge
lastEdge.reset();//clear old data
lastEdge.add(grooveInnerUpper);

radius -= grooveSpacing+grooveWidth[grooveWidthIndex];//set next radius

//tell me how much longer
grooveNum++;
print(grooveNum);
println(" of 72 grooves drawn");
}
radius -= 2*grooveSpacing;//extra spacing
}
radius -= 2*grooveSpacing;//extra spacing
}
radius -= 2*grooveSpacing;//extra spacing
}
radius -= 2*grooveSpacing;//extra spacing
}

geo.quadStrip(lastEdge,recordHoleUpper);//close remaining space between last groove and center hole

}


TEST TWO:

In my next test I made a record with 108 grooves, still sine waves, but this time I made the grooves deeper, increase the bevel of each groove to equal half the amplitude of the sine wave, and tried out three different frequencies: 555hz, 277hz, and 139hz (1000, 500, and 250 cycles per revolution at 33.3rpm). I also tested different amplitudes (4, 8 and 16 steps), groove depths (2, and 3 steps below the top of the record), and groove widths (1, 2 and 3 pixels). Since our shop came back online, I switched printers and started printing with Objet's Vero White material, which is similar to Vero Clear in texture, but (as you might image) is a translucent white color. This time I was finally able to print with the full 16 micron and 600 dpi resolution of the printer. Here is a video of the results:

TEST THREE:

In my third test I increased the resolution of my stl file to test out some higher frequency sine waves. I used 22000 points per revolution to draw out the sine waves (as opposed to 10000 in my previous tests), this puts me at about the max resolution I can get with 600dpi (calculated in the last step). I tested three frequencies: 1110hz, 832hz, and 694hz (2000, 1500, and 1250 cycles per revolution at 33.3rpm). I also tested different amplitudes (12 and 16 steps) and groove widths (2 and 3 px). Here is the video:

RESULTS:

At the end of all these tests I learned a few things about 3d printing records with the Objet:

Groove Depth min of 48um below top of record - I found that grooves that kept the waveform at a minimum of 48um (or 3 16 micron steps) below the top of the record kept the needle in place while being played. This was true for all the frequencies I tested.

Groove Width 2px - At lower frequencies I found that the 2px grooves were much less noisy than the 1px, but I didn't hear too much of a difference between 2 and 3px. However, when I tested again with the higher frequencies (2000 cycles/rev) I could hear much more noise on the 3px groove than the 2px.

Frequency Range - at 22000 points per revolution, I easily achieved the upper limit of the human vocal range (about 1.1kHz). Theoretically I should be able to reproduce frequencies equal to half my sampling rate. With a sampling rate of 12kHz (calculated in the last step), the highest frequency I can theoretically achieve is 6kHz. I suspect that the movement of the liquid resin during the curing process will prevent me from actually achieving these frequencies, but if I can just get into the 2kHz range it will still sound reasonably good. Based on the tests I've run so far, I think this is possible.

Dimensions - Although it seems like a 12" record should measure 12" in diameter, I found that printing at 12" made the record slightly too large for my record player. I decreased the diameter down to 11.8" and it worked great.

Max file size of ~300MB - Although Processing is capable of producing much larger files, the Objet Software that runs the printers seems to only handle about 300MB of data at a time. It's possible that increased RAM might bring this up to 500mb, but this still does not give me a lot of room to work with. Although this is plenty for normal CAD purposes, I found out that I would have to be very efficient with the way I packed data onto the STL for the final version of my Processing sketch. One problem with my current sketch is that is has a constant angular sampling rate, this means that the same amount of data is used to describe a groove on the outer edge of the record and a groove near the center of the record. Since the groove at the center of the record is much smaller it would a higher resolution than the outer groove, unfortunately, this extra precision goes to waste because the printer has constant DPI across the entire surface of the record. Eventually, I hope to decrease the angular sampling rate of the inner grooves to save storage space and pack as much audio into the STL file as possible.
sine test 1.pde.zip2 KB

Step 4
Extracting Audio Data with Python
Processing has a library for dealing with audio called Minim, it is included with the more recent versions of Processing IDE. Unfortunately, this library is set up for real time audio applications and does not appear give you an easy way of extracting all the data from an audio file at once (it makes you load it in small buffers piece by piece). Since I could not find an easy way to load my wav files into Processing directly (although I'm sure this must be possible), I've been importing stereo audio in the wav format into Python using the wav library, adding the left and right channels together, centering the data around zero, and exporting the resulting array of int's (separated by commas) to a txt file. Here is my wav to txt Python script (I'm running this in Python 2.5.4):

#Wav to Txt
#by Amanda Ghassaei
#http://www.instructables.com/member/amandaghassaei/

## * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
## * it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
## * the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or
## * (at your option) any later version.

#this code unpacks and repacks data from:
#16 bit stereo wav file at 44100hz sampling rate
#and saves it as a txt file

import wave
import math
import struct

bitDepth = 8#target bitDepth
frate = 44100#target frame rate

fileName = "audio.wav"#file to be imported (change this)

#read file and get data
w = wave.open(fileName, 'r')
numframes = w.getnframes()

frame = w.readframes(numframes)#w.getnframes()

frameInt = map(ord, list(frame))#turn into array

#separate left and right channels and merge bytes
frameOneChannel = [0]*numframes#initialize list of one channel of wave
for i in range(numframes):
frameOneChannel[i] = frameInt[4*i+1]*2**8+frameInt[4*i]#separate channels and store one channel in new list
if frameOneChannel[i] > 2**15:
frameOneChannel[i] = (frameOneChannel[i]-2**16)
elif frameOneChannel[i] == 2**15:
frameOneChannel[i] = 0
else:
frameOneChannel[i] = frameOneChannel[i]

#convert to string
audioStr = ''
for i in range(numframes):
audioStr += str(frameOneChannel[i])
audioStr += ","#separate elements with comma

fileName = fileName[:-3]#remove .wav extension
text_file = open(fileName+"txt", "w")
text_file.write("%s"%audioStr)
text_file.close()

Once I create a text file, I can import the data into Processing and convert it into an STL. I would like to streamline my code so that audio files (wav/mp3) can be loaded directly into Processing, but I have not found a solution yet, any suggestions would be appreciated!
IMG_1663.JPG
comp.jpg
Step 5
Initial Audio Tests (featuring The Pixies)
Finally, it was time to start printing real audio! I felt inspired by a Pixies track I'd been listening to earlier in the day, so all my initial audio tests were done with the first 30 seconds of The Pixies' "Debaser."

In the first test I used the same parameters that I'd had luck with in the sine wave tests:

amplitude: 16 x 16 micron z axis steps
groove width: 2px
groove depth: 3 x 16 micron z axis steps
sampling rate: 11,025hz (one quarter of normal mp3 sampling rate)
groove spacing: 20 pixels (at 600 dpi)

My processing code is below. The code is heavily commented, but here's the overall gist:
An audio file is basically a list of numbers that plot a waveform over time. The data that I pulled from Python in the last step is just that, the list of data points in the audio file. Essentially what I did in this Processing sketch was use this data to set the depth of a long, spiral groove on the record's surface. Later when the needle passes over this groove, its tip will follow this path and actually trace out the original waveform stored in the audio data.

//txt to stl conversion - 3d printable record
//by Amanda Ghassaei
//Dec 2012
//http://www.instructables.com/id/3D-Printed-Record/

/*
* This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
* it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
* the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or
* (at your option) any later version.
*/


import processing.opengl.*;
import unlekker.util.*;
import unlekker.modelbuilder.*;
import ec.util.*;

String filename = "debaser.txt";

UVertexList recordPerimeterUpper,recordPerimeterLower,recordHoleUpper,re cordHoleLower;//storage for perimeter and center hole of record
UVertexList lastEdge;//storage for conecting one groove to the next
UGeometry geo;//storage for stl geometry

//parameters
float samplingRate = 44100;//(44.1hz audio)
float rpm = 33.3;//rev per min
float secPerMin = 60;//seconds per minute
float rateDivisor = 4;//how much we are downsampling by
float theta;//angle variable
float thetaIter = (samplingRate*secPerMin)/(rateDivisor*rpm);//how many values of theta per cycle
float radius;//variable to calculate radius of grooves
float diameter = 11.8;//diameter of record in inches
float innerHole = 0.286;//diameter of center hole in inches
float innerRad = 2.35;//radius of innermost groove in inches
float outerRad = 5.75;//radius of outermost groove in inches
float grooveSpacing = 20;//pixel spacing of grooves

//record parameters
float recordHeight = 0.04;//height of record in inches
int recordBottom = 0;//height of bottom of record

//variable parameters
float amplitude = 24;//amplitude of signal (in 16 micron steps)
float bevel = 0.5;//bevelled groove edge
float grooveWidth = 3;//in 600dpi pixels
float depth = 6;//measured in 16 microns steps, depth of tops of wave in groove from uppermost surface of record

float incrNum = TWO_PI/thetaIter;//calculcate angular incrementation amount

int grooveNum = 0;//variable for keeping track of how long this will take
int totalSampleNum;

void setup(){

geo = new UGeometry();//place to store geometery of verticies

setUpVariables();//convert units, initialize etc
setUpRecordShape();//draw basic shape of record
drawGrooves(processAudioData());//draw in grooves

geo.writeSTL(this, filename + ".stl");//write stl file from geomtery

exit();
}

float[] processAudioData(){

//get data out of txt file
String rawData[] = loadStrings(filename);
String rawDataString = rawData[0];
float audioData[] = float(split(rawDataString,','));//separated by commas

//normalize audio data to given bitdepth
//first find max val
float maxval = 0;
for(int i=0;i<audioData.length;i++){
if (abs(audioData[i])>maxval){
maxval = abs(audioData[i]);
}
}
//normalize amplitude to max val
for(int i=0;i<audioData.length;i++){
audioData[i]*=amplitude/maxval;
}

return audioData;
}

void setUpVariables(){

//convert everything to inches
float micronsPerInch = 25400;//scalingfactor
float dpi = 600;
byte micronsPerLayer = 16;//microns per vertical print layer

grooveSpacing /= dpi;
amplitude = amplitude*micronsPerLayer/micronsPerInch;
depth = depth*micronsPerLayer/micronsPerInch;
grooveWidth /= dpi;

}

void setUpRecordShape(){

//set up storage
recordPerimeterUpper = new UVertexList();
recordPerimeterLower = new UVertexList();
recordHoleUpper = new UVertexList();
recordHoleLower = new UVertexList();

//get verticies
for(theta=0;theta<TWO_PI;theta+=incrNum){
//outer edge of record
float perimeterX = diameter/2+diameter/2*cos(theta);
float perimeterY = diameter/2+diameter/2*sin(theta);
recordPerimeterUpper.add(perimeterX,perimeterY,recordHeight) ;
recordPerimeterLower.add(perimeterX,perimeterY,recordBottom) ;
//center hole
float centerHoleX = diameter/2+innerHole/2*cos(theta);
float centerHoleY = diameter/2+innerHole/2*sin(theta);
recordHoleUpper.add(centerHoleX,centerHoleY,recordHeight);
recordHoleLower.add(centerHoleX,centerHoleY,recordBottom);
}

//close vertex lists (closed loops)
recordPerimeterUpper.close();
recordPerimeterLower.close();
recordHoleUpper.close();
recordHoleLower.close();

//connect verticies
geo.quadStrip(recordHoleUpper,recordHoleLower);
geo.quadStrip(recordHoleLower,recordPerimeterLower);
geo.quadStrip(recordPerimeterLower,recordPerimeterUpper);

//to start, outer edge of record is the last egde we need to connect to with the outmost groove
lastEdge = new UVertexList();
lastEdge.add(recordPerimeterUpper);

println("record drawn, starting grooves");
grooveNum = 0;//variable for keeping track of how much longer this will take

}

void drawGrooves(float[] audioData){

UVertexList grooveOuterUpper,grooveOuterLower,grooveInnerUpper,grooveInn erLower;//groove verticies
UVertexList stop1,stop2;//storage for very beginning and end of sprial groove

//set up storage
grooveOuterUpper = new UVertexList();
grooveOuterLower = new UVertexList();
grooveInnerUpper = new UVertexList();
grooveInnerLower = new UVertexList();
stop1 = new UVertexList();
stop2 = new UVertexList();

//DRAW GROOVES
radius = outerRad;//outermost radius (at 5.75") to start
float radIncr = (grooveSpacing+grooveWidth)/thetaIter;//calculate radial incrementtion amount
int samplenum = 0;
int totalgroovenum = int(audioData.length/(rateDivisor*thetaIter));

//first draw starting cap
theta = 0;
float sineTheta = sin(theta);
float cosineTheta = cos(theta);
//calculate height of groove
float grooveHeight = recordHeight-depth-amplitude+audioData[int(rateDivisor*samplenum)];
stop1.add((diameter/2+(radius+amplitude*bevel)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius+amplitude*bevel)*sineTheta),recordHeight);//outerupper
stop2.add((diameter/2+radius*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+radius*sineTheta),grooveHeight);//outerlower
stop2.add((diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth)*sineTheta),grooveHeight);//innerlower
stop1.add((diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth-amplitude*bevel)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth-amplitude*bevel)*sineTheta),recordHeight);//innerupper
//draw triangles
geo.quadStrip(stop1,stop2);

//then spiral groove
while (radius>innerRad && rateDivisor*samplenum<(audioData.length-rateDivisor*thetaIter+1)){//while we still have audio to write and we have not reached the innermost groove

//clear lists
grooveOuterUpper.reset();
grooveOuterLower.reset();
grooveInnerUpper.reset();
grooveInnerLower.reset();

for(theta=0;theta<TWO_PI;theta+=incrNum){//for theta between 0 and 2pi

sineTheta = sin(theta);
cosineTheta = cos(theta);

//calculate height of groove
grooveHeight = recordHeight-depth-amplitude+audioData[int(rateDivisor*samplenum)];
samplenum++;//increment sample num

grooveOuterUpper.add((diameter/2+(radius+amplitude*bevel)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius+amplitude*bevel)*sineTheta),recordHeight);
grooveOuterLower.add((diameter/2+radius*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+radius*sineTheta),grooveHeight);
grooveInnerLower.add((diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth)*sineTheta),grooveHeight);
grooveInnerUpper.add((diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth-amplitude*bevel)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth-amplitude*bevel)*sineTheta),recordHeight);

radius -= radIncr;

}

//add last value to grooves to complete one full rev
theta = 0;
sineTheta = sin(theta);
cosineTheta = cos(theta);

//calculate height of groove
grooveHeight = recordHeight-depth-amplitude+audioData[int(rateDivisor*samplenum)];

grooveOuterUpper.add((diameter/2+(radius+amplitude*bevel)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius+amplitude*bevel)*sineTheta),recordHeight);
grooveOuterLower.add((diameter/2+radius*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+radius*sineTheta),grooveHeight);
grooveInnerLower.add((diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth)*sineTheta),grooveHeight);
grooveInnerUpper.add((diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth-amplitude*bevel)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth-amplitude*bevel)*sineTheta),recordHeight);

//connect verticies
geo.quadStrip(lastEdge,grooveOuterUpper);
geo.quadStrip(grooveOuterUpper,grooveOuterLower);
geo.quadStrip(grooveOuterLower,grooveInnerLower);
geo.quadStrip(grooveInnerLower,grooveInnerUpper);

//set new last edge
lastEdge.reset();//clear old data
lastEdge.add(grooveInnerUpper);

//complete beginning cap if necessary
if (grooveNum==1){
//clear stop2
stop2.reset();
stop2.add(diameter/2+diameter/2*cosineTheta,diameter/2+diameter/2*sineTheta,recordHeight);//outer perimeter[0]
stop2.add((diameter/2+(radius+amplitude*bevel)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius+amplitude*bevel)*sineTheta),recordHeight);//outer groove edge [2pi]
//draw triangles
geo.quadStrip(stop1,stop2);
}

//tell me how much longer
grooveNum++;
print(grooveNum);
print(" of ");
print(totalgroovenum);
println(" grooves drawn");
}

//draw end cap of spiral groove
stop1.reset();
stop2.reset();
stop1.add((diameter/2+(radius+amplitude*bevel)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius+amplitude*bevel)*sineTheta),recordHeight);//outeruppter
stop2.add((diameter/2+radius*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+radius*sineTheta),grooveHeight);//outerlower
stop2.add((diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth)*sineTheta),grooveHeight);//innerlower
stop1.add((diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth-amplitude*bevel)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth-amplitude*bevel)*sineTheta),recordHeight);//innerupper
//draw triangles
geo.quadStrip(stop1,stop2);
stop2.reset();
stop2.add(grooveInnerUpper.first());//innerupper[0]
stop2.add(diameter/2+innerHole/2*cosineTheta,diameter/2+innerHole/2*sineTheta,recordHeight);//innerhole[0]
//draw triangles
geo.quadStrip(stop1,stop2);

geo.quadStrip(lastEdge,recordHoleUpper);//close remaining space between last groove and center hole

}

and here is the result:

Success! You can clearly hear The Pixies coming through, but the signal to noise ratio is not great. In my next test I amplified the original audio signal a little bit before sending it to my Processing sketch. This way some of the louder drum sections would get slightly clipped and allow the overall amplitude of the normalized signal to get a little larger. Here's what that sounds like:

Signal to noise is getting better, I added a little more audio to this file so that you can start to hear Frank Black's vocals coming in. Next I increased the amplitude of the signal to see if I could get a better signal out. In my sine tests I thought that an amplitude of 16 was plenty loud, but not so large that it caused excessive distortion in the signal. Since the Pixies signal is not always spanning the full amplitude allowed by my program I increased the amplitude of the algorithm (most of the time the waveform is hovering around half of its peak amplitude, only the drums are able to kick the signal up to full amplitude). This may cause some extra distortion on the drum beats, but since drums are already pretty noisy I was ok with that. Here's the result of amplitude 32:

Signal to noise is better, but there is quite a bit of distortion. I decreased the amplitude to 24 next:

This sounds a lot better. Good signal to noise without too much distortion. Next I made a slight edit to my code to minimize the amount of data packed into the stl file. In the previous examples I created some space between grooves, basically a flat surface parallel to the top of the record. In the code below I removed this space and used the last upper edge of the previous groove as the upper edge of the next groove. The difference in the model is shown in fig 2.

//txt to stl conversion - 3d printable record
//by Amanda Ghassaei
//Dec 2012
//http://www.instructables.com/id/3D-Printed-Record/

/*
* This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
* it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
* the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or
* (at your option) any later version.
*/


import processing.opengl.*;
import unlekker.util.*;
import unlekker.modelbuilder.*;
import ec.util.*;

String filename = "bluemonday.txt";

UVertexList recordPerimeterUpper,recordPerimeterLower,recordHoleUpper,re cordHoleLower;//storage for perimeter and center hole of record
UVertexList lastEdge;//storage for conecting one groove to the next
UGeometry geo;//storage for stl geometry

//parameters
float samplingRate = 44100;//(44.1khz audio)
float rpm = 33.3;//rev per min
float secPerMin = 60;//seconds per minute
float rateDivisor = 4;//how much we are downsampling by
float theta;//angle variable
float thetaIter = (samplingRate*secPerMin)/(rateDivisor*rpm);//how many values of theta per cycle
float radius;//variable to calculate radius of grooves
float diameter = 11.8;//diameter of record in inches
float innerHole = 0.286;//diameter of center hole in inches
float innerRad = 2.35;//radius of innermost groove in inches
float outerRad = 5.75;//radius of outermost groove in inches

//record parameters
float recordHeight = 0.04;//height of record in inches
int recordBottom = 0;//height of bottom of record

//variable parameters
float amplitude = 24;//amplitude of signal (in 16 micron steps)
float bevel = 0.5;//bevelled groove edge
float grooveWidth = 2;//in 600dpi pixels
float depth = 6;//measured in 16 microns steps, depth of tops of wave in groove from uppermost surface of record

float incrNum = TWO_PI/thetaIter;//calculcate angular incrementation amount

int grooveNum = 0;//variable for keeping track of how long this will take
int totalSampleNum;

void setup(){

geo = new UGeometry();//place to store geometery of verticies

setUpVariables();//convert units, initialize etc
setUpRecordShape();//draw basic shape of record
drawGrooves(processAudioData());//draw in grooves

geo.writeSTL(this, filename + ".stl");//write stl file from geomtery

exit();
}

float[] processAudioData(){

//get data out of txt file
String rawData[] = loadStrings(filename);
String rawDataString = rawData[0];
float audioData[] = float(split(rawDataString,','));//separated by commas

//normalize audio data to given bitdepth
//first find max val
float maxval = 0;
for(int i=0;i<audioData.length;i++){
if (abs(audioData[i])>maxval){
maxval = abs(audioData[i]);
}
}
//normalize amplitude to max val
for(int i=0;i<audioData.length;i++){
audioData[i]*=amplitude/maxval;
}

return audioData;
}

void setUpVariables(){

//convert everything to inches
float micronsPerInch = 25400;//scalingfactor
float dpi = 600;
byte micronsPerLayer = 16;//microns per vertical print layer

amplitude = amplitude*micronsPerLayer/micronsPerInch;
depth = depth*micronsPerLayer/micronsPerInch;
grooveWidth /= dpi;

}

void setUpRecordShape(){

//set up storage
recordPerimeterUpper = new UVertexList();
recordPerimeterLower = new UVertexList();
recordHoleUpper = new UVertexList();
recordHoleLower = new UVertexList();

//get verticies
for(theta=0;theta<TWO_PI;theta+=incrNum){
//outer edge of record
float perimeterX = diameter/2+diameter/2*cos(theta);
float perimeterY = diameter/2+diameter/2*sin(theta);
recordPerimeterUpper.add(perimeterX,perimeterY,recordHeight) ;
recordPerimeterLower.add(perimeterX,perimeterY,recordBottom) ;
//center hole
float centerHoleX = diameter/2+innerHole/2*cos(theta);
float centerHoleY = diameter/2+innerHole/2*sin(theta);
recordHoleUpper.add(centerHoleX,centerHoleY,recordHeight);
recordHoleLower.add(centerHoleX,centerHoleY,recordBottom);
}

//close vertex lists (closed loops)
recordPerimeterUpper.close();
recordPerimeterLower.close();
recordHoleUpper.close();
recordHoleLower.close();

//connect verticies
geo.quadStrip(recordHoleUpper,recordHoleLower);
geo.quadStrip(recordHoleLower,recordPerimeterLower);
geo.quadStrip(recordPerimeterLower,recordPerimeterUpper);

//to start, outer edge of record is the last egde we need to connect to with the outmost groove
lastEdge = new UVertexList();
lastEdge.add(recordPerimeterUpper);

println("record drawn, starting grooves");
grooveNum = 0;//variable for keeping track of how much longer this will take

}

void drawGrooves(float[] audioData){

UVertexList grooveOuterUpper,grooveOuterLower,grooveInnerUpper,grooveInn erLower;//groove verticies
UVertexList stop1,stop2;//storage for very beginning and end of sprial groove

//set up storage
grooveOuterUpper = new UVertexList();
grooveOuterLower = new UVertexList();
grooveInnerUpper = new UVertexList();
grooveInnerLower = new UVertexList();
stop1 = new UVertexList();
stop2 = new UVertexList();

//DRAW GROOVES
radius = outerRad;//outermost radius (at 5.75") to start
float radIncr = (grooveWidth+2*bevel*amplitude)/thetaIter;//calculate radial incrementation amount
int samplenum = 0;
int totalgroovenum = int(audioData.length/(rateDivisor*thetaIter));

//first draw starting cap
theta = 0;
float sineTheta = sin(theta);
float cosineTheta = cos(theta);
//calculate height of groove
float grooveHeight = recordHeight-depth-amplitude+audioData[int(rateDivisor*samplenum)];
stop1.add((diameter/2+(radius+amplitude*bevel)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius+amplitude*bevel)*sineTheta),recordHeight);//outerupper
stop2.add((diameter/2+radius*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+radius*sineTheta),grooveHeight);//outerlower
stop2.add((diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth)*sineTheta),grooveHeight);//innerlower
stop1.add((diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth-amplitude*bevel)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth-amplitude*bevel)*sineTheta),recordHeight);//innerupper
//draw triangles
geo.quadStrip(stop1,stop2);

//then spiral groove
while (radius>innerRad && rateDivisor*samplenum<(audioData.length-rateDivisor*thetaIter+1)){//while we still have audio to write and we have not reached the innermost groove

//clear lists
grooveOuterUpper.reset();
grooveOuterLower.reset();
grooveInnerUpper.reset();
grooveInnerLower.reset();

for(theta=0;theta<TWO_PI;theta+=incrNum){//for theta between 0 and 2pi

sineTheta = sin(theta);
cosineTheta = cos(theta);

//calculate height of groove
grooveHeight = recordHeight-depth-amplitude+audioData[int(rateDivisor*samplenum)];
samplenum++;//increment sample num

if (grooveNum==0){
grooveOuterUpper.add((diameter/2+(radius+amplitude*bevel)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius+amplitude*bevel)*sineTheta),recordHeight);
}
grooveOuterLower.add((diameter/2+radius*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+radius*sineTheta),grooveHeight);
grooveInnerLower.add((diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth)*sineTheta),grooveHeight);
grooveInnerUpper.add((diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth-amplitude*bevel)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth-amplitude*bevel)*sineTheta),recordHeight);

radius -= radIncr;

}

//add last value to grooves to complete one full rev
theta = 0;
sineTheta = sin(theta);
cosineTheta = cos(theta);

//calculate height of groove
grooveHeight = recordHeight-depth-amplitude+audioData[int(rateDivisor*samplenum)];

if (grooveNum==0){
grooveOuterUpper.add(grooveInnerUpper.first());//grooveOuterUpper.add((diameter/2+(radius+amplitude*bevel)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius+amplitude*bevel)*sineTheta),recordHeight);
}
grooveOuterLower.add((diameter/2+radius*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+radius*sineTheta),grooveHeight);
grooveInnerLower.add((diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth)*sineTheta),grooveHeight);
grooveInnerUpper.add((diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth-amplitude*bevel)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth-amplitude*bevel)*sineTheta),recordHeight);

//connect verticies
if (grooveNum==0){//if joining a roove to the edge of the record
geo.quadStrip(lastEdge,grooveOuterUpper);
geo.quadStrip(grooveOuterUpper,grooveOuterLower);
}
else{//if joining a groove to another groove
geo.quadStrip(lastEdge,grooveOuterLower);
}
geo.quadStrip(grooveOuterLower,grooveInnerLower);
geo.quadStrip(grooveInnerLower,grooveInnerUpper);

//set new last edge
lastEdge.reset();//clear old data
lastEdge.add(grooveInnerUpper);

//complete beginning cap if necessary
if (grooveNum==0){
//clear stop2
stop2.reset();
stop2.add(diameter/2+diameter/2*cosineTheta,diameter/2+diameter/2*sineTheta,recordHeight);//outer perimeter[0]
stop2.add((diameter/2+(radius+amplitude*bevel)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius+amplitude*bevel)*sineTheta),recordHeight);//outer groove edge [2pi]
//draw triangles
geo.quadStrip(stop1,stop2);
}

//tell me how much longer
grooveNum++;
print(grooveNum);
print(" of ");
print(totalgroovenum);
println(" grooves drawn");
}

//draw end cap of spiral groove
stop1.reset();
stop2.reset();
stop1.add((diameter/2+(radius+amplitude*bevel)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius+amplitude*bevel)*sineTheta),recordHeight);//outeruppter
stop2.add((diameter/2+radius*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+radius*sineTheta),grooveHeight);//outerlower
stop2.add((diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth)*sineTheta),grooveHeight);//innerlower
stop1.add((diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth-amplitude*bevel)*cosineTheta),(diameter/2+(radius-grooveWidth-amplitude*bevel)*sineTheta),recordHeight);//innerupper
//draw triangles
geo.quadStrip(stop1,stop2);
stop2.reset();
stop2.add(lastEdge.last());//innerupper[0]
stop2.add(diameter/2+innerHole/2*cosineTheta,diameter/2+innerHole/2*sineTheta,recordHeight);//innerhole[0]
//draw triangles
geo.quadStrip(stop1,stop2);

geo.quadStrip(lastEdge,recordHoleUpper);//close remaining space between last groove and center hole

}


And here's what it sounds like:

I was really happy with the way this came out, this is the code I used moving forward.

Step 6
Records
After nearly a week of printing, frantically running around downtown SF, and generally fighting with technology, I've got some reasonably good sounding audio to share with you:

Download the Blue Monday single here. Side a is Blue Monday in its nearly 8 minute entirety, I had to cheat a little and extend the grooves into the space where the label should go to pull this off, and side b is a remix of Blue Monday called The Beach, just like the original release.

You'll notice that all of these prints are only about a minute long- this was due to some issues I was having with file size and RAM. I'm currently working on troubleshooting these problems, but at the moment the largest file I can print out is about 250MB, or a little over a minute of audio. Each size has the potential to fit about 6 minutes of audio, this amounts to a file containing about 1.5GB of data.

Some of these files are up on The Pirate Bay for anyone to look at. (Pirate Bay recently introduced a new section on their site called Physibles, it's a huge database of downloadable physical objects. Many of them are ready for 3D printing or other forms of digital fabrication.) Many of the files were so large that I had to down-sample even farther, to 9kHz audio. I'm still not done generating all the files I would like to make, it takes a bit of time to process and handle such large amounts of data, so things are moving along relatively slowly. Here is the list of what I want to get done in the next week, I should at least get a few more of these done by the end of the day today. Orange links have already been put up. Check back for updates, and if you download any of these, please seed them!

Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon (4 discs, 7 sides)
Aphex Twin - Richard D James Album
Nine Inch Nails - Pretty Hate Machine
Daft Punk - Homework
David Bowie - the Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
Beck - Midnight Vultures
New Order - Blue Monday Single (1 disc, 2 sides)
Pixies - Doolittle
Radiohead - Kid A
Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures
Nirvana - Nevermind
White Stripes - Fell in Love with a Girl (1 disc, 1 side)
Fever Ray - Fever Ray
Beach House - Devotion

I made all these files at half the thickness of a regular record. That way, if you ever find a way to print them, you can glue two of them together to make a double sided record.

Step 7
Make Your Own Records
You can convert your own audio files into 3D STL models in ten easy steps:

1. Download Processing.

2. Download the ModelBuilder library for Processing. I used version 0007a03.

3. Unzip the Modelbuilder library .zip and copy the folder inside called "modelbuilder". Unzip the processing .zip and go to Processing>modes>java>libraries and paste the "modelbuilder" folder in the "libraries" folder.

4. Download Python 2.5.4.

5. Download Audacity.

6. Download the zip file below called "RecordGenerator". Unzip this and open the folder.

7. Open an audio file of your choice with Audacity. Use Effect>Amplify to amplify the signal as much as you can without noticeable effects of clipping (you will be able to get away with some clipping, and remember this is not crystal clear audio anyway). Make sure there is 2 sec of blank audio at the end of the track so that nothing gets clipped. Keep the audio under 6 min. File>Export this file and save it in the "RecordGenerator" folder as a wav file.

8. Open the Python file called "wavtotxt". Copy the file name of the file you just saved in the line:

fileName = "your_file_name_here.wav"

Hit Run>RunModule, after a minute or two you will have a .txt file saved in the RecordGenerator folder.

9. Open the Processing Sketch. In File>Preferences check the box that says "increase the maximum available memory to" and write in the amount of available ram on your computer. I've found that my laptop with 4GB RAM can handle audio files up to 1.5 min long. For longer files you will need to use a computer with 12-16GB of RAM. If Processing starts and then gets stuck or crashes, it is a RAM issue and you will need to move to a machine with more RAM.

10. Change the name of the import file in the Processing sketch to your txt file name:

String filename = "your_file_name_here.txt";

Close all other programs running on your computer and run the Processing sketch Sketch>Run. After a few seconds you will see "record drawn, starting grooves" appear at the bottom of the Processing window. After some more time you will get updates on the status of the sketch: "3 of 85 grooves drawn". Eventually Processing will tell you that it is writing your STL file and when it is done it will say "Closing 'name_of_your_file.stl' and tell you haw many faces are in the file. You can find the finished file in the RecordGenerator folder.

Once you've made them, post them! I've been posting mine on the 123D gallery and the Pirate Bay. Enjoy, and let me know if you have questions or need help getting this to work. I've tested this process in both Windows (64 bit) and Mac OS, though I'd imagine it will work for Linux as well.

RecordGenerator.zip3 KB

Step 8
Future Work
We're currently trying to upgrade our computer setup so that we will be able to print out files larger than 250MB. Eventually I'd like to actually print physical copies of some of the files that I posted in the last step. I'm also interested in hearing how the resolution difference between the outer and inner grooves of the record (explained in step 2) manifest themselves in the audio output.

Soon I'd also like to experiment with some more creative applications of this technology. For example, printing out a record with many adjacent closed loops of ~2second looping samples. This way you could set your needle down in one groove and listen to a loop repeat over and over, then tap the needle to the side to switch to another loop. Assuming all the the loops have a similar time signature, you could turn this record into a cool, interactive sample mixer.

I'm currently working on another project that takes audio data and outputs a vector cutting path in the shape of a record (pictured above). I'm planning on cutting this record with a laser cutter on acrylic. Unfortunately, we've been having some trouble with our lasers recently, but I hope to get the project up in the first few weeks of January, as I have most of the code done. I'm excited about this project because it has the potential to be a lot more useful to ordinary(ish) people. The vector files are much easier and faster to generate, and the whole process uses cheaper materials and tools that a decent amount of people have access to these days. I still haven't done enough testing to say how it will compare to my 3D printed record, but I'm fairly confident it will work.
http://www.instructables.com/id/3D-Printed-Record/





Mad Science and Pop Hits
Jon Pareles, Ben Ratliff and Jon Caramanica

FOR pop 2012 was a year of rewired consensus. A year in which Taylor Swift finally accepted her pop-star birthright, waved casually at country and then bravely entered dubstep. A year in which the critic-consensus R&B star was Frank Ocean, who spent most of the year spilling out feelings and then averting his eyes. A year in which Carly Rae Jepsen suffocated the mainstream and then evaporated. A year in which Psy, a B-list Korean pop star, unleashed a video (and song) that became the first to surpass one billion views on YouTube, redefining virality in pop along the way.

The most reliable movement in pop this year was the basic mistrust of the old model. Radio has ceded much of its advantage to the Internet, and new stars like the rapper Kendrick Lamar established themselves by ignoring the usual playbook and let the old generation of tastemakers play catch up. In this conversation excerpted from the year-end edition of the Popcast of The New York Times, the critics Jon Pareles, Ben Ratliff and Jon Caramanica discuss the year’s biggest pop trends and those that will be reshaping the genre for years to come.

BEN RATLIFF We were talking about Tumblrs last year — sort of little online boutiques that don’t sell you things but shape your taste. Now this year something’s been proven: Pop performers can become truly famous by building their careers themselves online, maybe more efficiently and faster than a major company can help them to do.

JON CARAMANICA Especially if a major company is secretly helping them to do it: 2012 was probably the year when you started to see people who were birthed of the Internet, in about as true a sense as you can, become equally successful in a hard-dollars sense as people who have been birthed from of a major label.

RATLIFF Give us an example.

CARAMANICA A couple of things jump out at me this year. One, you look at the first-week sales numbers of someone like Kendrick Lamar, who had an independent album that was digital only and is now on [the major-label] Interscope, but basically has no major radio hits, even if he is well-liked by mainstream hip-hop. He comes out and sells about 240,000 in his first week. A couple weeks later Rihanna comes out — not her first album and at the height of her pop fame — and sells a few thousand less than Kendrick did.

RATLIFF It’s incredible.

CARAMANICA If I worked at Def Jam [Rihanna’s label], and I’m looking at those numbers, and I had just flown a bunch of journalists around the world to make sure that my pop star had a tremendous amount of presence, and she can’t even sell as many records as a guy who basically can’t crack the Top 20 in the Billboard R&B/hip-hop song chart, I’m really stressed. I think another good example is Lana Del Rey. This starts in 2011 with Lana Del Rey as an Internet thing, and then there’s an Internet backlash, and then there’s an Internet backlash to the backlash. And yet when she comes out [with “Born to Die,” her major-label debut], she not only does respectable numbers, she is someone whom people, for better or worse, took as seriously as any number of pop stars who were born inside the major-label system this year.

JON PARELES Well, what is the mechanism? I think what’s going on is that audiences like to find music on their own. You’re having so much stuff thrown at you, like you have Rihanna just blasted at you from all directions, and you think: “Wait a minute, I want something that’s mine. I want something that I’m curious about, where my curiosity hasn’t been smothered by the barrage of marketing.”

RATLIFF That’s the new authenticity. You found it by yourself or with a few of your friends online.

CARAMANICA Right, but when it turns out that a few of your friends are actually as many people as enjoy Rihanna, that says a lot of things about trends that maybe were there all along, but there wasn’t a frictionless way to serve that kind of interest. And now with the speed with which Internet things are turning into real-life things, it’s not going to make a lot of sense for a label to spend $1 million in development upfront on a pop star who may or may not succeed when you can find someone with a tremendous following online, put a little bit of cash in at that end, and then get the cream off the top.

RATLIFF How about the new ways that audiences are grown around so-called roots music? How is that different now?

PARELES In one way it’s the very old troubadour model. It’s, “Let’s go on the road and get them crowd by crowd.” But now there’s also the viral side of it, where a newly converted fan thinks: “Wow, I’m cool. I heard a banjo. I’m different. And I’m going to tell all my friends how much hearing an actual banjo as opposed to a synthesizer moved me.”

RATLIFF When we say the roots thing, that’s shorthand for Mumford & Sons ——

CARAMANICA Lumineers ——

PARELES Of Monsters and Men.

CARAMANICA These sort of anthemic folk and post-folk bands, if that makes sense. If you look at trends and hipster culture, ahem, in the last 5 to 10 years, there’s this move toward the handcrafted, there’s this move toward the rural and the folk in terms of everything from fashion to food. And I wonder if this isn’t just a pop representation of the mainstreaming of those ideas in a way that’s much more accessible.

PARELES You know, you can’t get an “I won’t Auto-Tune” pledge out of any of these bands. They’re going to use every tool they have at their disposal. They’re not afraid of synthesizers. They’re not afraid of composing with a drum machine. They also like the sound of those banjos and acoustic guitars, but they’re not purist anymore. No one’s a purist. Authentic, handcrafted and small batch is a cult of modesty. But with a band like Mumford the songs sound huge. That huge sound is anthemic, and that huge sound is a big crowd singalong. It’s a giant, communal, rock experience.

RATLIFF Absolutely everybody loves anthems, right? They cut across all styles.

CARAMANICA Yes, if you look at dance music in the last year or two, this is an entire movement premised upon the love of anthems and hopeful for the continued love of anthems. Not a lot of it has felt particularly vital or fresh, but certainly it’s premised upon volume in all senses of the word.

One thing that happened that I wouldn’t have anticipated two years ago is the B.P.M.’s [beats per minute] going up in pop music and the infiltration of dance-music ideas and structures and textures into American pop. This isn’t really something that Americans have ever really capitulated to, even though in Europe and Asia this is super par for the course. At this point you’ve got Ne-Yo making dance records. You have the career of Flo Rida, which is premised upon this very dance-minded version of hip-hop.

PARELES But is that merely a fashion moment? Is 128 beats per minute the haircut du jour? Is the idea simply: “This is selling. I can get a hit out of this?” Or is it something more heartfelt, like suddenly this has clicked into sync with my metabolism and these are the beats per minute I want to be rapping over?

There’s this mad scientist aspect to pop. There’s always the fear that someone is going to find the absolute formula, the certain rhythm that is going to lock into the heartbeat of the universe and forever be the sound of pop. And this year you may have thought that the combination of a certain number of beats per minute, a certain simplified beat, and an Auto-Tuned vocal was suddenly physiologically latching onto people’s brains the way mouse skeletons and cat teeth are the same proportions.

[Laughter]

CARAMANICA Mouse skeletons and cat teeth! Wow, so next level! We’d better start talking about Turkish music or something.

RATLIFF Do you think there are new ways that people with business interests in electronic dance music can make the moment last forever, or at least for another six months?

PARELES Formulas last for a while, until you get sick of them. There were mullet haircuts once.

RATLIFF Kesha wants to see them again.

[Laughter]

CARAMANICA She’ll come to your house and give you one, if you want.

RATLIFF Did you have any major revelations this year? Moments when you felt like something crystallized for you?

PARELES I went to some of the big — to use an antique expression — raves, Electric Daisy Carnival and Electric Zoo. And at both of them something suddenly struck me like a subwoofer in the gut. This is the electronic dance music that has evolved since disco.

But when you think about ’70s disco, it was funk. And it was Latin. And it was syncopated. And it was African-American, and it pulled in a lot of crazy stuff. This year the beat that was socking me over the head at the headlining sets was about as un-Afro-American as you could get. It was a march. A march straight out of Europe, straight out of a factory. It’s really simple, and you don’t have to worry about where to put your limbs, because you know how to march. This simplification unifies audiences — that’s what marches are for — but there’s less room to pick your polyrhythm and do your own kind of dance.

CARAMANICA I think everyone is correct to be excited about the increased presence of dance music and the increased vitality of dance music, but I think most people who spend some time listening to it are being very careful about who they’re anointing or what songs they’re anointing, because a lot of it is very samey. On a structural level a lot of people are doing similar things, and a few are doing things better. But that’s just like any other pop genre.

PARELES Well, this is why I like dubstep, because dubstep is, at its best, the banana peel under the marching beat. It’s wobbly. It’s downright vandalistic. You’re having this nice regimented buildup, and then, wham, the bass sort of pulls the floor out from under you. And that surprise is a good thing.

RATLIFF Caramanica, did you have a moment?

CARAMANICA Yeah. I was lucky enough to see two or three really big K-pop shows.

PARELES Straight out of Korea.

CARAMANICA Very true. And it’s funny, because I feel like a lot of people in the music press and the music industry really agonize over the state of American pop. They’re like: How are we going to make pop stars now? It’s so much work. And we’ve got to throw them in with nine different writers, we’ve got to get them four stylists, make sure the hair’s right, and the this, and the that. And how did we get new pop stars like Carly Rae Jepsen and One Direction this year? We imported them from Canada. We imported them from England. We’re importing them because we can’t figure out how to make them ourselves. Talk about outsourcing industries.

But what’s happening in Korea is they have figured it out. You spend a few days online watching K-pop videos — Psy’s “Gangnam Style” only scratches the surface — and you realize that we are not in charge anymore. You may say some of the music is lifeless or soulless, the ballads are treacly, the music is derivative of American innovations, and a lot of that may be true, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t sui generis stuff happening. And watching someone like BigBang, you think, oh, pop is fine.

RATLIFF I have a reaction, if not necessarily a big thought. One of my moments was at the Coachella Festival, when the famous hologram of Tupac Shakur appeared. Through digital animatronics, they were even able to have him speak to the audience. People felt rooted to the spot, blinded by this thing. Rihanna, or her hologram, tweeted about it as if it were a great historical event. But later that nonmusical moment was all anybody wanted to talk about from that festival.

I worried for music. I started to feel that many of us would rather not bother with music, given a choice. Maybe it’s too much work. I know this was a postmodern moment — the thing about the simulacrum being just as important as the real. But can I be, like, counterintuitive to the counterintuitive for a moment and just say: Ugh, come on! What is really there? There’s nothing there!

PARELES How is this different from the concert I covered [long ago] where Elvis’s face and vocals were projected on a screen over his old band playing live?

CARAMANICA How is this different from the Rolling Stones’ tour?

RATLIFF O.K. And how is this different from the duet that Hank Williams Jr. did with his dead father? We can say: “Oh, yes, Baudrillard! Boy, we’re smart!” And we can also say, “No, we’re stupid.”

PARELES There’s pop for you in a nutshell.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/a...nce-music.html





Hollywood Rebounds at the Box Office
Brooks Barnes

Some blockbuster new characters — Katniss Everdeen, Ted the foul-mouthed bear — joined some familiar ones (Batman, Bond, Baggins) to deliver a lift to moviegoing in North America in 2012, increasing attendance by 5.6 percent after two years of declines.

Projections show that about 1.36 billion people will see films this year, compared with 1.29 billion in 2011. Ticket revenue at North American theaters is projected to jump by 6 percent, to $10.8 billion, according to Paul Dergarabedian, a box-office analyst for Hollywood.com. What really matters, however, is that Hollywood achieved the increase without raising prices.

The anticipated lift in attendance, which factors in crowds for two big movies that are to open on Christmas Day, “Django Unchained” and “Les Misérables,” would be the industry’s biggest yearly increase since 2002. Lately, studios and publicly traded theater chains like Regal Entertainment suffered drops in annual attendance, forcing them to prop up revenue by charging more for admission and concessions.

“I really believe that momentum from weekend to weekend is crucial — that was fun, let’s come back — and we had sustained periods of that this year,” said Greg Foster, chairman of Imax Filmed Entertainment. Imax’s domestic ticket revenue will end the year up 50 percent, he said, the result of popular movies and an increasing reliance on Imax by studios as a way to differentiate releases.

Hollywood’s upswing is particularly notable because it comes despite a poor summer season, a period from the first full weekend in May to Labor Day when studios typically record 40 percent of their annual revenue. Summer ticket revenue dropped 3 percent and attendance hit a 19-year low. The July theater shootings in a Colorado theater kept some people home, but a lot of films were simply mediocre.

Why did Adam Shankman’s adaptation of “Rock of Ages” sputter? “It was a bad movie,” David Geffen said at an industry gathering in July. “And it’s unusual when a bad movie succeeds.”

Still, how Americans respond to movies became less important to studios in 2012. Look no further than “Ice Age: Continental Drift,” from 20th Century Fox, to understand why. North American ticket sales for “Continental Drift,” the fourth installment in the animated series, totaled $161 million, a 24 percent decline from “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs” in 2009, after adjusting for inflation.

Then why is Fox thrilled with its performance and developing ideas for a fifth chapter? Because “Continental Drift” took in $714 million overseas, including $68 million in China alone. “This is a turning-point year for the relationship between China and Hollywood,” said Phil Contrino, editor of Boxoffice.com. “It’s becoming very clear how important China is to the worldwide gross of a film.”

Movies are a cyclical business in which a couple of hits (or misses) can whipsaw results. To that end, analysts emphasize that 2012 benefited greatly from just two films: “The Hunger Games” in March and “Skyfall” in November.

Backed by an effective social media marketing campaign, Lionsgate’s “Hunger Games” blew past robust expectations to become the No. 3 movie of the year, taking in about $408 million domestically, and producing a global total of $686.5 million.

(“The Avengers,” from Disney’s Marvel Studios, was by far the No. 1 movie, taking in $623.4 million in North America, for a global total of $1.51 billion — while “The Dark Knight Rises,” from Warner Brothers, was second, taking in $448.1 million, for a global total of $1.08 billion.)

“Skyfall,” from Sony and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, demonstrated how an aging franchise can be reinvigorated if new installments are actually worth seeing. “Skyfall,” which earned glowing reviews, has so far taken in $280 million in North America and $694.3 million overseas, making it one of the best-performing James Bond movies on record, even when adjusting for inflation.

It was a particularly lucrative year for Lions Gate Entertainment, which includes both the Lionsgate and Summit banners. Along with “The Hunger Games,” the company had “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2,” which has so far generated $783 million in global ticket sales. According to Rentrak, a company that tracks box office data, Lions Gate, a small movie company that leapt forward with its acquisition of Summit Entertainment, will end the year as North America’s fifth-largest distributor as measured by ticket sales, surpassing 20th Century Fox and Paramount.

MGM roared back to life after years of fiscal turmoil, including bankruptcy. Aside from “Skyfall,” MGM benefited from “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” a coproduction with Warner’s New Line Cinema unit that was No. 1 over the weekend, taking in an estimated $36.7 million, for a new domestic total of $149.9 million, according to Hollywood.com.

But most movie companies had a mixed year.

In a display of marketing strength, nine of Sony’s movies were No. 1 at the box office. Sony also successfully reintroduced its most important franchise with “The Amazing Spider-Man,” taking in $752.2 million worldwide. Still, high costs for movies like “Men in Black III” and flops like “Total Recall” ate into profitability.

Disney found a blockbuster new franchise with “The Avengers,” but also took a $200 million write-down for the big-budget science-fiction epic “John Carter.”

Similarly, Universal Pictures had steep losses from its costly “Battleship” but found new franchises in the raunchy “Ted,” which sold $502 million in tickets worldwide, and “Snow White and the Huntsman,” which took in nearly $400 million.

Family movies, which have been Hollywood’s most reliable genre of recent years, showed some troubling weakness. DreamWorks Animation scored a big hit with “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted,” which took in a global total of $742.1 million, but the company suffered a rare dud in “Rise of the Guardians,” which has so far taken in a relatively paltry $222.6 million worldwide.

Pixar’s “Brave,” Sony’s “Hotel Transylvania” and “Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax,” from Universal, were all strong. But Disney’s black and white film “Frankenweenie” flopped. And an independently produced movie, “The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure,” was one of the biggest box-office disappointments of all time, costing about $55 million to make and market and taking in a grand total of $1.1 million.

Families are also balking at paying for higher-price 3-D tickets, in part because the glasses do not fit little faces, analysts say. This year, studios released 28 major films in 3-D, down from 34 last year, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com.

How did movie stars and elite directors fare in 2012?

Johnny Depp took a beating in the disappointing “Dark Shadows,” as did that film’s director, Tim Burton, who was also behind “Frankenweenie.” It was another year, another dud for Julia Roberts, who starred in the lackluster “Mirror Mirror.” And Taylor Kitsch, poised for stardom after his success in the television series “Friday Night Lights,” appeared in three failed movies in a five-month stretch: “John Carter,” “Battleship” and the smaller “Savages.”

Still, Hollywood had a good year overall in the star department — at least if you count the minting of new ones. Channing Tatum’s fame skyrocketed because of hits like “21 Jump Street” and “The Vow,” both from Sony, and Warner’s “Magic Mike.” Jennifer Lawrence’s career spiked with “The Hunger Games” and an Oscar-contending performance in “Silver Linings Playbook.” And Jeremy Renner successfully took over Universal’s “Bourne” franchise from Matt Damon. (Mr. Renner also appeared in “The Avengers.”)

Benjamin Carlson, president of Fizziology, a company that monitors social media to advise movie studios, noted that “it doesn’t always take a big name to get audiences talking.” Little movies like Fox’s “Chronicle,” which cost $12 million to make and took in $126.6 million worldwide, benefited from early online chatter.

“Sometimes,” Mr. Carlson said, “success comes from creating something that audiences respond to and previewing it early and often.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/b...ox-office.html





VLC for Windows 8 Reaches $65,000 Funding Goal on Kickstarter with Five Days to Spare
Emil Protalinski

A Metro version of VLC, the popular free and open-source media player, is coming to Windows 8. On Sunday, the VideoLAN organization reached its funding goal on Kickstarter for its Windows 8-specific app. There are also plans to port it afterwards to Windows Phone 8.

The project has now been funded by over 2,500 backers, who have pledged more than the £40,000 ($65,000) goal. Yet there are still five days left, meaning the project could hit £45,000 or may be even £50,000 ($81,000).

As part of the news, VideoLAN released an update “for backers only:”

We contacted the non-profit organization to find out what was inside. VLC developer Felix Paul Kühne got back to us promptly to say that “the update in question is only about thanks to our backers, that we are enormously proud to have passed the goal because of them and that we are going to share more ideas we’d like to reach within this project shortly.” While he revealed some of the ideas to us, he isn’t yet ready to announce them on Kickstarter, but likely will next Saturday when the Kickstarter project closes.

VLC’s Windows 7 version will naturally run on Windows 8, but not on Windows RT. The goal of the project is to “take our existing code, which already works on Windows 8′s ‘desktop mode’, and make it run on WinRT, the ‘Metro’ interface” according to the Kickstarter page. When the project reached the 70 percent funding mark, the team shared two mockups for the app.

Here’s the pitch:

Similar to the desktop version of VLC media player, you will be able to play all files, all your discs and all your network streams. All of that in a native, beautiful and easy-to-use interface.

In contrast to the built-in media player, VLC for Windows 8 we intend to add support for DVDs and VCDs out-of-the box as well as unencrypted Blu-Rays. All the features known from our current releases will be retained like a full fledged equalizer, video filters and superior support for subtitles.

We will pursue a fully-compliant app for submission to the Windows Store in order to reach as many users as possible, and to provide a consistent installation and update experience.

For more technical details, check out the following blog post, VLC For Win8: building the new compatibility layer. We will keep you updated as VLC makes its way to Windows 8.

Update at 7:30PM EST: VideoLAN has announced a few additional features, which it will be working on “full-time after the initial release is done and as long as money is left:”

• Camera input support — This allows you to record anything your connected cameras can see and to stream it live where ever you like.
• DLNA client and server integration — Play media stored on DLNA capable servers on your Windows RT tablet or Windows Phone — Stream everything VLC can play on your tablet or Windows 8 PC to your DLNA capable devices (Xbox, …).
• Integration with locally attached devices for media playback and synchronization.
• Smartglass support.

http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/12/2...days-to-spare/





Why Everybody Wants a Slice of Raspberry Pi
Nick Glass, CNN

• The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that costs little more than a textbook
• Originally designed to encourage school children to learn programming skills
• The mini-PC now hugely popular with DIY geeks, who have used it to power their own creations

In a world where computers are increasingly powerful and are concealed within ever more glossy slabs of aluminum, the Raspberry Pi (RPi) offers surprising proof for the virtue of moderation.

Resembling little more than a credit card-sized scrap of exposed circuit board, the RPi is a fully programmable PC that runs a free, open-source Linux operating system, plugs into any TV, can power 3D graphics, connects to the Internet and, with a little ingenuity, be used to create your own personalized robot slave.

The computer's miniature frame is crowded with two USB ports, an SD card slot, an Ethernet connection and microchip in the middle -- all powered by a universal USB mobile charger.

Not only is it the world's smallest personal computer but, perhaps most importantly of all, at just $25 the RPi is also the world's cheapest.

Eben Upton, the UK-based University of Cambridge professor and inventor behind the wallet-friendly PC, says he set out to create a computer so affordable that every child in Britain could have one.

With its rough-around-the-edges aesthetic, however, he didn't expect it to catch on very fast and, in the early days of development, set a sales target of 10,000 units within his lifetime.

But when the RPi launched in February of this year, demand far outran supply, and all 10,000 sold out immediately -- crashing the distributing websites in the process.

It turned out there was a voracious appetite -- particularly among a growing class of DIY geeks -- for a cheap, easily-programmable, open-source piece of hardware that would allow them to let their imaginations run wild.

The RPi has since be used to power everything from home-made jukeboxes to baby monitors to miniature near-space crafts and digital weather-stations.

Now, far exceeding it's inventor's original estimates, the RPi is set to sell as a million units within its first year of availability.

In a revealing interview with CNN, Upton tells all about why everyone wants a slice of Raspberry Pi.

CNN: What inspired you to invent the Raspberry Pi?

Eben Upton: A group of us here at the University of Cambridge were involved in trying to find 17, 18-year-olds to come and study computer science and what we found every year was a reduction in the numbers.

We went from 500 people in the 1990s applying for our 80 places, down to under 250 and, worse than that, the sorts of things those children knew how to do when they came in the door were much less impressive.

Really Raspberry Pi is an attempt to try and reboot some of that 1980s computer industry feel that had been responsible for giving us this stream of very talented students.

CNN: What in your view are the Pi's most distinguishing qualities?

EU: I think we really have to say the big, distinct feature about Raspberry Pi is the cost. This is a device that comes in two variants, one that cost $25 and one that costs $35.

These are designed to be the same price as a textbook; they're designed to be cheap enough that a child can buy on with their pocket money. They're designed to be cheap enough that you could equip a whole classroom for under a $1000. So, really the cheapness.

Almost everything you can do with a Raspberry Pi, you can do with a conventional PC, but you'd be doing it at 10 times the cost.

CNN: Did you have any idea what kind of response you'd get?

EU: Absolutely not, I think the response has been staggering. Even a year ago we were thinking of this shifting 10,000 units over a lifetime.

All we wanted was a few hundred more students -- or for the students we were getting to have had a little more experience when they came to the door.

CNN: What was your own reaction when you heard how many you'd sold on the first day?

EU: Terror, I guess. When you've scaled everything for a particular size and then you discover you have this enormous spike of demand, then you're always going to wonder if you can fill it. And there were big queues, there were back orders for months after that as we and our partners worked very hard to try and scale out production.

CNN: You set out to sell primarily to schools for use by children in class, who's it actually being bought by?

EU: Until September, it was being bought almost entirely by people like me -- technically literate adults who wanted to use it to do interesting projects. You know this is something you can plug your television into and play videos on; it's got stuff you can use to control a robot. For people like me this is gold dust.

From September onwards we've started to see a swing round towards what we were hoping for, which is educational engagement -- individual children buying them and schools buying classroom sets of them.

CNN: Any other surprise takers?

EU: We're also starting to see some industrial applications. We're seeing people who have been buying $300 industrial computers saying "hang on a second, why am I buying this special purpose computer when I can buy one of these. It does the same thing, it runs units. My software engineers can be very comfortable with it, why don't I just switch over to these?"

Another really interesting one that I should have anticipated was of course the developing world. These make very good entry-level productivity computers for the developing world, so we're starting to see an interest there as well.

CNN: How are you able to sell it so cheaply?

EU: One of things that allows us to hit our very low price point is that we have a very high level of integration -- there's just not that much stuff on the board. All of the main features are integrated onto the chip in the middle. It's our central processor and also our graphic processor that drives the display and does some of our peripheral functions, so that's the main chip.

CNN: Do you remember the first time you took it into a school and what kind of reaction you got?

EU: We were really surprised by the reaction we got. School kids today are used to their tablets and their mobile phones, so we thought we were going to have to put into a shiny box.

But one of the biggest reactions from the children was because they could actually see it and point to it and tell what the different bits do. Normally you don't get to see the green stuff and they really love that, there's been such a positive response.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/21/tech/i...ton/index.html





MK802 II Mini PC Now Costs as Much as Raspberry Pi Model B. Let’s Compare Them!
cnxsoft

MK802 mini PC quickly went viral as it launched in May 2012 for $74 US, and since then many Chinese manufacturers have jumped into the market bringing both new faster devices, and the price down. AllWinner A10s, a low cost version of AllWinner A10 used in MK802, was also launched specifically for this market to bring costs even lower. Today, I’ve been informed an HDMI TV dongle based on AllWinner A10s that sells for $36.55 on Tinydeal.com which is a very good price, but decided to check on Aliexpress to look for comparable deals, and found one shop selling MK802 II for $34.91 including shipping via China Post, which makes it cheaper than the Raspberry Pi model B selling for $35 excluding shipping.

Both products target 2 different markets, as MK802 is oriented to the consumer market, and Raspberry Pi targets the educational market, but in practice, it appears people may use the device for similar purpose, for example as a media player or a platform for tinkering with Linux.

Since both products have the same price, and software support & availability have improved since their launch, I’ve just created a side-by-side comparison below.

MK802 II Raspberry Pi Model B
SoC AllWinner A10
CPU: Cortex A8 @ 1.5GHz
GPU: Mali-400 Broadcom BCM2835
CPU: ARM11 @ 700MHz (OC: 1 GHz)
GPU: Videocore IV
RAM 1 GB 512 MB
Storage 4GB NAND Flash + microSD slot SD card slot
USB 1x USB 2.0 Host + 2x USB OTG
(One USB OTG is reserved for power) 2x USB 2.0 Host ports
Ethernet N/A (via USB dongle only) 10/100 Mbit
Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n N/A (via USB dongle only)
Video Output HDMI HDMI and Composite
Audio Output HDMI HDMI and 3.5mm stereo out jack
Expansion Headers N/A Yes. Provide access to GPIO, I2C, SPI, etc…
DSI (for LCD display) and CSI-2 (for camera) interfaces are also available
Size 9.7 x 2.8 x 1.2cm 8.56 x 5.6 x 2.1cm (Board only)
Casing Yes No (Cases can be ordered separately)
Included Accessories HDMI Cable
USB Cable
OTG Cable
User Manual N/A
Video Codecs (HW) H.264, MPEG 1/2/4, VC-1, VP8, and AVS H.264 only.
MPEG-2 and VC1 can be added by purchasing corresponding licenses
Linux Support Good.
Stable bootloader and kernel, with SD images provided by the community, but no official distro support Very good.
Several distributions are available for the platform, and Debian is officially supported (Raspbian)
Android Support Very good.
Android 4.0 ICS Poor (for now)
Android 2.3 without GPU acceleration
Android 4.0 in progress
Community Support No official community support, but several (seller) sites provides forums for MK802 such as miniand, and sunxi-linux.org community works on AllWinner Linux development in the open. Very large community via Raspberry Pi Forums.

If you just look at the hardware specs, there’s no comparison, and MK802 II provides much better value than the Raspberry Pi with a much faster CPU, more RAM, internal storage and more. Only the GPU processing power may be subject to debate, but I don’t really have data to make a proper comparison. So if you just want to run the device as a media player for example, I’d just go with MK802 II since you’ll get a smoother experience and more video codecs are supported. The only caveat is that you’ll have to use Android (and see the status bar during video playback), as although Linux video support is available, it’s not ready for prime time, and never will.

However, the Raspberry Pi is still a better solution for several use cases:

• Hardware “hacking” – You need to make use of the “GPIO” headers to control external devices.
• Connection to old TV – The Raspberry Pi has a composite video output which allows it to be connected to older TV lacking HDMI
• Beginners – If you’re not familiar with Linux, using AllWinner A10 devices may prove challenging, and it’s much easier with the Raspberry Pi thanks to official Linux distributions, and the Raspberry Pi community.

http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/12/...-compare-them/





Ransomware Scammers Push Panic Button with Bogus Claims

No sign that newest cyber extortion racket wipes Windows PCs' hard drives, says Symantec
Gregg Keizer

Cyber extortionists shilling "ransomware" have upped the ante by pushing users' panic buttons with claims that their malware will wipe hard drives, a security firm said Monday.

The claim is bogus, said Symantec, and is simply a ploy by scammers preying on people's fears.

"This is an attempt to extort money from computer users by taking advantage of human weakness when under panic and pressure," wrote Symantec researcher Jeet Morparia in a Dec. 24 blog post.

Ransomware is a long-standing label for malware that, once on a personal computer, cripples the machine or encrypts its files, then displays a ransom note that demands payment to restore control to the owner. The technique, flatly called "an extortion racket" by Symantec last month, has been in use for at least six years. Until relatively recently, it was rare and ineffective and seen mostly in Eastern Europe.

The new ransomware variant, which Symantec identified as "Trojan.Ransomlock.G" but is called "Reveton" by other antivirus vendors, claims that any move to circumvent the lockdown will trigger disaster.

"An attempt to unlock the computer by yourself will lead to the full formatting of the operating system. All the files, videos, photos, documents on your computer will be deleted," the on-screen message reads.

Not true, said Morparia, who added that Symantec's analysis found no disk wiping capability in the malware's code. More importantly, Symantec was able to remove Ransomlock.G and unlock the machine without any formatting taking place or files deleted.

The new version also featured other changes, Morparia said, including a $100 price hike, from $200 to $300, to "unlock" the PC, and a fake deadline of 48 hours shown by an on-screen countdown timer.

Symantec credited a blogger nicknamed "Kafeine" for reporting the purported wiping skills of the ransomware. In turn, Kafeine tipped a hat to another security company, Trend Micro, for finding the variant on Dec. 10.

Ransomlock poses as a message from law enforcement, and adapts to its victims' locales: For example, U.S. users see a message supposedly from the Department of Justice's FBI, while German users see one allegedly from the Bundesamt für Polizei, Germany's federal police.

The messages claim that the user has violated one or more laws. Those posing as from the FBI, for instance, listed child pornography, copyright and software licensing laws, and alleged that the victim has been monitored -- including via the computer's built-in webcam -- viewing child pornography.

In November, Symantec released a report describing the rapid expansion of ransomware into Western markets from its Eastern European origins, and the millions criminals have reaped from their scams.

Morparia urged victims not to give in to the extortionists -- "DO NOT PAY THE RANSOM," he wrote, figuratively shouting with uppercase characters -- and instead told them to remove the malware. Symantec provides a free tool, Norton Power Eraser, that seeks out and destroys ransomware and other forms of "scareware," like fake antivirus software.
https://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...h_bogus_claims





How Anybody Can Secretly Save Your Snapchat Videos Forever

The videos you send through Snapchat and Poke are supposed to disappear in 10 seconds or less. Except a security flaw makes it easy to save them forever — without the sender ever knowing.
Katie Notopoulos

The entire allure of Snapchat is that a photo or video sent through the service completely disappears after a few seconds; it's even quickly deleted off of the company's servers. And its ephemeral nature means it’s great for sending silly and unflattering images or videos of yourself that you'd otherwise never send. Or sexting. On the heels of Snapchat’s popularity, Facebook recently introduced a “Poke” app that functions almost identically.

But it turns out there's a straightforward way to save videos sent with either service, breaking part of their promise: Both Snapchat and Poke locally store copies of videos sent to users, which are easily accessible with a free iPhone file browser. Here's how it works:
Receive a video in Snapchat or Poke. Don't open it!
Receive a video in&nbsp;Snapchat or Poke. Don't open it!

Just tap to load it. Again, don't open it.

Plug your iPhone into your computer, and open up an iPhone file browser like iFunBox.

Navigate to the Snapchat folder. Open up the folder called "tmp." For Facebook's Poke, videos are stored a little deeper in the app's files, in library/caches/fbstore/mediacard. Copy the videos to your computer. Critically, Snapchat's videos remain in this folder even after they're viewed; Poke videos appear to be deleted as soon as they're viewed. Photos don't show up, at least not in any place we checked.

For Poke, there are a few more folders you have to open to get your videos:

Look at the all videos you've received, over and over and over again.

While screenshots of photos and videos can be taken in both Poke and Snapchat, the sender is alerted if the recipient takes one — but the sender has no such warning if their videos are copied.

When I asked Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel if Snapchat is aware of this exploit and plans on fixing it, he said, “The people who most enjoy using Snapchat are those who embrace the spirit and intent of the service. There will always be ways to reverse engineer technology products — but that spoils the fun!” (Ed. note: I'd point out that using a free iPhone file browser that doesn't even require jailbreaking is hardly "reverse engineering.") Snapchat recently patched a much more obvious exploit in Android that saved unwatched videos in the phone's gallery application. Facebook has not responded to a request for comment as of publication time.

Of course, the average user of Snapchat or Poke isn't going to use this method to save videos. However, users should be aware that their data on services like Snapchat and Poke isn't as private as they think it might be. And a few motivated users will certainly take advantage of the loophole that'll let them save the kind of videos that were never intended to last more than a few seconds.

Update: Facebook tells BuzzFeed FWD: "Thanks for reaching out, and we are addressing this issue now. We should have a fix pushed shortly.

Keep in mind, not only does Snapchat have similar issues but also, similar to screenshots, for the time being cached video files can be captured while using Poke before the receiver views the file."

The company also provided this statement:

Poke is a fun and easy way to communicate with your friends and is not designed to be a secure messaging system. While Pokes disappear after they are read, there are still ways that people can potentially save them. For example, you could take a screenshot of a photo, in which case the sender is notified. People could also take a photo of a photo you sent them, or a video of a video, with another camera. Because of this, people should think about what they are sending and share responsibly.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopou...napchat-videos





China May Require Real Name Registration for Internet Access

China may require internet users to register with their real names when signing up to network providers, state media said on Tuesday, extending a policy already in force with microblogs in a bid to curb what officials call rumors and vulgarity.

A law being discussed this week would mean people would have to present their government-issued identity cards when signing contracts for fixed line and mobile internet access, state-run newspapers said.

"The law should escort the development of the internet to protect people's interest," Communist Party mouthpiece the People's Daily said in a front page commentary, echoing similar calls carried in state media over the past week.

"Only that way can our internet be healthier, more cultured and safer."

Many users say the restrictions are clearly aimed at further muzzling the often scathing, raucous - and perhaps most significantly, anonymous - online chatter in a country where the Internet offers a rare opportunity for open debate.

It could also prevent people from exposing corruption online if they fear retribution from officials, said some users.

It was unclear how the rules would be different from existing regulations as state media has provided only vague details and in practice customers have long had to present identity papers when signing contracts with internet providers.

Earlier this year, the government began forcing users of Sina Corp's wildly successful Weibo microblogging platform to register their real names.

The government says such a system is needed to prevent people making malicious and anonymous accusations online and that many other countries already have such rules.

"It would also be the biggest step backwards since 1989," wrote one indignant Weibo user, in apparent reference to the 1989 pro-democracy protests bloodily suppressed by the army.

Chinese internet users have long had to cope with extensive censorship, especially over politically sensitive topics like human rights, and popular foreign sites Facebook, Twitter and Google-owned YouTube are blocked.

Despite periodic calls for political reform, the ruling Communist Party has shown no sign of loosening its grip on power and brooks no dissent to its authority.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard and Huang Yan; Editing by Michael Perry)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8BO01320121225





2012 in Review: How Blasphemy Laws Are Stifling Free Expression Worldwide
Jillian C. York

As the year draws to a close, EFF is looking back at the major trends influencing digital rights in 2012 and discussing where we are in the fight for free expression, innovation, fair use, and privacy. Click here to read other blog posts in this series.

As a recent Pew Forum study reveals, blasphemy laws are widespread, with laws penalizing blasphemy, apostasy, or defamation of religion (including religious "hate speech") present in 94 countries. While in most countries, laws criminalizing certain types of speech apply to the Internet, some countries have recently crafted specific laws to ban or criminalize online expressions of blasphemy. Still others have cracked down on online speech using existing laws. Here's a roundup of some of the worst offenders in 2012:

Saudi Arabia

It should come as no surprise that ultra-conservative Saudi Arabia is strict on speech, but this year the country outdid itself when it extradited Hamza Kashgari, a young journalist who had penned an earnest letter to the Muslim prophet on Twitter, from Malaysia. A few months later, the country began mulling over new laws to “combat the criticism of the basic tenets of Islamic sharia” online.

Kuwait

In nearby Kuwait, the Information Minister announced in May plans to pass new laws regulating the use of social networking sites amidst growing tensions between the country's Shi'a majority and Sunni minority. The proposal came after writer Mohammad al-Mulaifi was detained for "insulting the Muslim Shi'ite majority" on Twitter.

Bangladesh

In March, a Bangladesh court blocked access to five Facebook pages deemed to be blasphemous to Islam, while also demanding that content hosts and creators be brought to justice over "uploading indecent materials." The court order also stated, chillingly, a desire to find ways of easily facilitating future blockages of websites and pages.

Bangladesh was also among several countries that blocked access to the 'Innocence of Muslims' video on YouTube.

Tunisia

In Tunisia, where activists have fought hard to keep the Internet open, two young men were arrested in April for posting cartoons of the Muslim prophet and sentenced to seven years' imprisonment. One is serving his sentence, while the other fled to Europe.

Greece

The embattled European country arrested a Facebook user for blasphemy in October after he created a page satirizing a famous Greek Orthodox monk, a worrying development in a country where the Internet has otherwise been traditionally free.

Afghanistan, Iran, Russia, Singapore, Pakistan

Along with Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia, these countries blocked access (either by issuing a court order to Google or by force) to the 'Innocence of Muslims' video on YouTube, with some blocking YouTube altogether.

YouTube

A dishonorable mention goes to YouTube, which blocked access to the controversial 'Innocence of Muslims' video in Egypt and Libya without government prompting. The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, a group based in Egypt, condemned YouTube's decision.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/1...sion-worldwide





Congress, at Last Minute, Drops Requirement to Obtain Warrant to Monitor Email
Noel Brinkerhoff

The federal government will continue to access Americans’ emails without a warrant, after the U.S. Senate dropped a key amendment to legislation now headed to the White House for approval.

Last month, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved an amendment attached to the Video Privacy Protection Act Amendments Act (which deals with publishing users’ Netflix information on Facebook pages) that would have required federal law enforcement to obtain a warrant before monitoring email or other data stored remotely (i.e., the cloud).

The Senate was set to approve the video privacy bill along with the email amendment, which would have applied to a different law, the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act. But then senators decided for reasons unknown to drop the amendment.

Currently, the government can collect emails and other cloud data without a warrant as long as the content has been stored on a third-party server for 180 days or more. Federal agents need only demonstrate that they have “reasonable grounds to believe” the information would be useful in an investigation.
http://www.allgov.com/news/top-stori...25?news=846578





Why We Should All Care About Today's Senate Vote on the FISA Amendments Act, the Warrantless Domestic Spying Bill
Trevor Timm

Today is an incredibly important vote for the future of your digital privacy, but some in Congress are hoping you won’t find out.

Finally, after weeks of delay, the Senate will start debate on the dangerous FISA Amendments Act at 10 am Eastern and vote on its re-authorization by the end of the day. The FISA Amendments Act is the broad domestic spying bill passed in 2008 in the wake of the warrantless wiretapping scandal. It expires at the end of the year and some in Congress wanted to re-authorize it without a minute of debate.

The good news is—thanks for your phone calls, emails, and tweets—Congress will now be forced to debate it, which means, we can affect its outcome. In case you forget just how dangerous the FISA Amendments Act is to your privacy, here’s how we described it last week:

The FISA Amendments Act continues to be controversial; key portions of it were challenged in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court this term. In brief, the law allows the government to get secret FISA court orders—orders that do not require probable cause like regular warrants—for any emails or phone calls going to and from overseas. The communications only have to deal with "foreign intelligence information," a broad term that can mean virtually anything. And one secret FISA order can be issued against groups or categories of people—potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of Americans at once.

Any Senator who wants to stay true to the Constitution should vote no on its re-authorization, but in the alternative, there are four common sense amendments up for debate tomorrow that would go a long-way in curbing the law’s worst abuses.

The Wyden Oversight and Transparency Amendments

Sen. Ron Wyden, one of the most ardent defenders of civil liberties in the Senate, has been asking the NSA for months for information on how the FISA Amendments Act has impacted Americans.

The NSA has so far refused, yet, as the New York Times reported in 2009, we know the NSA was still intercepting domestic communications in a “significant and systematic” way. We also know the secret FISA court ruled, on at least one occasion, that the government had violated the Fourth Amendment when conducting surveillance under the FAA. Yet the NSA has rather unbelievably claimed releasing the number of Americans whose privacy has been violated would violate those same Americans’ privacy.

Ron Wyden’s amendment would force the NSA to come clean and give a general estimate of how many Americans have been affected by this unconstitutional bill, and finally give us information Americans deserve.

In addition, another Wyden amendment would clarify that the acquisition of American communications is prohibited without a warrant. Sen. Wyden has accused the government of conducting “backdoor searches,” whereby the government collects communications of foreign individuals talking to Americans, but later goes back into the government’s database of intercepted communications and reviews the Americans' comunications. Sen. Wyden hopes this clarification to the law will help guard against further intrusive spying on American communications.

The Rand Paul Fourth Amendment Amendment

Republican Senator Rand Paul has commendably been one of the few voices unequivocally denouncing the FISA Amendments Act as a violation of the Fourth Amendment. To that end, Sen. Paul will be introducing “the Fourth Amendment Protection Act” which will re-iterate that all US communications, whether sought by US intelligence agencies like the NSA or any government agency, are protected against unwarranted searches and seizures—even if they are held by third party email providers like Google. You can read Sen. Paul's amendment here.

The Merkley FISA Court Amendment

Both in 2010 and 2011, Obama administration officials promised to work to declassify secret FISA court opinions that contained “important rulings of law.” These opinions would shed light on whether and how Americans’ communications have been illegally spied on. Since then, the administration has refused to declassify a single opinion, even though the administration admitted in July that the FISA court ruled that collection done under the FAA had violated the Fourth Amendment rights of an unknown number of Americans on at least one occasion.

Starting with the precept that “secret law is inconsistent with democratic governance,” Sen. Jeff Merkley’s amendment would force the government to release any FISA court opinions that contain significant interpretations of the FISA Amendments Act so the American public can know how it may or may not be used against them.

The Leahy Sunset Amendment

About the only good part in the original FISA Amendments Act was the provision that stated it would expire after four years so Congress could fully debate its use and abuse before reauthorizing, if reauthorization was even necessary. Unfortunately, Congress has been resisting the debate, and the new bill would extend the FAA for five more years. That means the law would not sunset again until President Obama is out of office. Senator Leahy’s amendment would shorten the law’s length to three years. While any extension of a law that results in unconstitional spying is unacceptable, the shorter the re-authorization, the better.

Please use Free Press' call-in tool to talk to your Senator's office on the phone or use EFF's action center to email your Senators. Tell them to vote for these privacy-friendly amendments and to vote no on warrantless domestic spying.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/1...tless-domestic





Senate Approves Warrantless Electronic Spy Powers
David Kravets

Whistleblower Mark Klein provided this photo of a secret room in a San Francisco AT&T switching center, which he claimed housed data-mining equipment that enables the government to spy on electronic communications.

The Senate on Friday reauthorized for five years broad electronic eavesdropping powers that legalized and expanded the President George W. Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program.

The FISA Amendments Act, which was expiring Monday at midnight, allows the government to electronically eavesdrop on Americans’ phone calls and e-mails without a probable-cause warrant so long as one of the parties to the communication is believed outside the United States. The communications may be intercepted “to acquire foreign intelligence information.”

The House approved the measure in September. President Barack Obama, who said the spy powers were a national security priority, is expected to quickly sign the package before the law Congress codified in 2008 expires in the coming days. Over the past two days, the Senate debated and voted down a handful of amendments in what was seen as largely political theater to get Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) to lift a procedural hold on the FISA Amendments Act legislation that barred lawmakers from voting on the package.

In the end, the identical package the House passed 301-118 swept through the Senate on a 73-23 vote.

The American Civil Liberties Union immediately blasted the vote.

“The Bush administration’s program of warrantless wiretapping, once considered a radical threat to the Fourth Amendment, has become institutionalized for another five years,” said Michelle Richardson, the ACLU’s legislative counsel.

Amendments senators refused to enact included extending the measure for just three years, another one requiring the government to account for how many times Americans’ communications have been intercepted, and one by Wyden prohibiting U.S. spy agencies from reviewing the communications of Americans ensnared in the program.

“The amendment I fought to include would have helped bring the constitutional principles of security and liberty back into balance and intend to work with my colleagues to see that the liberties of individual Americans are maintained,” Wyden said immediately after the vote.

The legislation does not require the government to identify the target or facility to be monitored. It can begin surveillance a week before making the request, and the surveillance can continue during the appeals process if, in a rare case, the secret FISA court rejects the surveillance application. The court’s rulings are not public.

The government has also interpreted the law to mean that as long as the real target is al-Qaeda, the government can wiretap purely domestic e-mails and phone calls without getting a warrant from a judge. That’s according to David Kris, a former top anti-terrorism attorney at the Justice Department.

In short, Kris said the FISA Amendments Act gives the government nearly carte blanche spying powers.

Kris, who headed the Justice Department’s National Security Division between 2009 and 20011, writes in the revised 2012 edition of National Security Investigations and Prosecutions:

For example, an authorization targeting ‘al Qaeda’ — which is a non-U.S. person located abroad—could allow the government to wiretap any telephone that it believes will yield information from or about al Qaeda, either because the telephone is registered to a person whom the government believes is affiliated with al Qaeda, or because the government believes that the person communicates with others who are affiliated with al Qaeda, regardless of the location of the telephone.

The National Security Agency told lawmakers that it would be a violation of Americans’ privacy to disclose how the measure is being used in practice.

After Obama signs the legislation Friday, the spy powers won’t expire until December 31, 2017.

The law is the subject of a Supreme Court challenge. The Obama administration argues that the American Civil Liberties Union and a host of other groups suing don’t have the legal standing to even bring a challenge.

A federal judge agreed, ruling the ACLU, Amnesty International, Global Fund for Women, Global Rights, Human Rights Watch, International Criminal Defence Attorneys Association, The Nation magazine, PEN American Center, Service Employees International Union and other plaintiffs did not have standing to bring the case because they could not demonstrate that they were subject to the warrantless eavesdropping.

The groups appealed to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that they often work with overseas dissidents who might be targets of the National Security Agency program. Instead of speaking with those people on the phone or through e-mails, the groups asserted that they have had to make expensive overseas trips in a bid to maintain attorney-client confidentiality. The plaintiffs, some of them journalists, also claim the 2008 legislation chills their speech, and violates their Fourth Amendment privacy rights.

Without ruling on the merits of the case, the appeals court agreed with the plaintiffs last year that they have ample reason to fear the surveillance program, and thus have legal standing to pursue their claim.

The case, argued last month, is pending an opinion from the Supreme Court.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...sa-amendments/





Thanks Congress, But We Need Privacy Laws, Not Banal Social Sharing
John Paul Titlow

Great news! The U.S. Congress just sent a bill to President Obama's desk that will make it easier to tell your Facebook friends what you're watching on Netflix. Now when that kid you haven't spoken to since 10th grade chemistry watches the new season of Arrested Development, you'll be the first to know about it. Such is the result of the "frictionless sharing" revolution Facebook promised us.

But there's another aspect to this news. A provision in the new law that would have required the feds to get a warrant before snooping through your Gmail account was silently yanked at the last minute.

Meet The Video Privacy Protection Act Amendments Act

The Video Privacy Protection Act Amendments Act reverses an anachronistic side effect of the original 1988 law, which prevented Netflix from launching the same type of "frictionless sharing" feature that Spotify and other digital media companies teamed up with Facebook to enable in 2011.

It's frustrating when laws written decades ago have unexpected effects on technology and services whose existence was inconceivable when the laws were drafted. In that sense, it's a good thing that the law was updated to enable these new companies to do this new thing that is unrelated to what the original law was trying to regulate.

But frictionless sharing is a meaningless sideshow compared to the much bigger issue of privacy - especially privacy for cloud-hosted documents and data. And Congress is getting the balance completely backwards.

What's With Gutting Those Privacy Protections?

The word "privacy" shows up right in the name of the Video Privacy Protection Act Amendments Act. But by scrapping the warrant requirement in the new amendments, Congress has dealt a very unfortunate blow to digital privacy.

The ease with which authorities can access information about citizens via mobile providers and Internet companies is outrageous.

There's a reason that a protection against "unreasonable searches and seizures" was baked into the founding document of our society. Back then, a search meant whatever somebody was carrying in their pockets, or whatever they kept inside their home or workplace. Today, to search my house, the government would need a warrant. But that's not necessarily the case for my email and data hosted on cloud-hosted service. If anything, privacy protections for personal documents and data stored in the cloud should be even more stringent than what is required to search your home or person. But they're not.

Congress had a chance to fix that - but it punted.

It's great that tech companies can get their way in Washington. Quite often, that will lead to more innovation and a more level playing field. In many cases, the benefits will trickle down to consumers, whose interests are often parallel with those of tech companies. But that's not always the case. And it's not the case here.

Frictionless Sharing Is Useless For Consumers

In fact, even apart from the epic fail on the privacy issue, there's little benefit for real people in The Video Privacy Protection Act Amendments Act. Frictionless sharing was supposed to become a major trend after Facebook rolled out a bunch of integrations with media content providers at its F8 developers conference in 2011. Thank goodness it didn't.

This type of sharing makes total sense for the companies involved. Facebook nabs an even meatier slice of our fractured attention spans and services like Spotify and Rdio see a spike in users as millions of new people are exposed to their branding and invited to consume their content via the biggest social network on the planet.

Facebook users, on the other hand, were not enamored with the feature, which throws up a stream of everything they listen to and read, but only from sources that partner with Facebook. It presumes that my friends give a damn if I happen to be on a Radiohead binge, compared to sharing a single song and explaining why it's meaningful to me. They don't.

The implementation of frictonlessly shared news is even more egregious. When I clicked on a headline that bubbled up via a publisher's "social reader" Facebook app, instead of being taken to the article (the way links have worked since the Internet was invented), I was instead prompted to install the publisher's Facebook app. Then Facebook redesigned the implementation and publishers saw their traffic land squarely in the toilet. On December 14, the Guardian discontinued its frictionless Facebook app. Good riddance.

Pretty soon, this pointless functionality will work with Netflix too. Oh joy!

And meanwhile, the government can continue to read through your Web-based email without a warrant.
http://readwrite.com/2012/12/26/than...social-sharing





The Cost of Netflix’s Political Win: $1 Million in Lobbying Over Two Years and its Own PAC
Alex Wilhelm

Netflix has a win under its belt heading into 2013: its users will soon be able to share their video viewing history through social channels. A small feature one might think, but the company has been fighting for the capability for most of the year.

At issue was the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), which banned the sharing of a person’s video rental history without written consent. Once the President signs off on a new bill that has surged through the chambers of Congress, Netflix users will be able to digitally say yea, and thus share their viewing habits on Facebook as they might broadcast their current Spotify favorites.

For a more granular look at how Congress finally pulled the law together, Talking Points Memo has the piece of record.

The change to the VPPA has been Netflix’s “top lobbying priority in Washington,” said The Hill in July. Netflix has spent more than $1,000,000 lobbying in 2011 and 2012. However, the company’s political activities are in fact broader than a lobbying spend: Netflix has its own Political Action Committee (PAC).

FLIXPAC, the catchily named political vehicle, was formed earlier this year. However, the PAC has been all but silent since its formation. TNW was unable to uncover any record of recent activity. Despite that opacity, we do have a key statement from the time of its formation as to what the PAC was designed to work on:

FLIXPAC was NOT set up to support SOPA/PIPA. Instead, we engage on issues like net neutrality, bandwidth caps, UBB and VPPA.

The statements concerning SOPA date the sentence. Among the listed goals, work on VPPA has been accomplished. Netflix’s PAC will therefore, presumably, focus on net neutrality and bandwidth caps moving forward. Those are not small goals, and place the firm directly opposed to Verizon in its legal agenda. Comcast is also an opponent.

TNW assumes that as the PAC’s listed goals included updating the VPPA, it took part in its parent company’s efforts on the measure.

It’s key to realize that Netflix has managed not a coup, but a somewhat standard political maneuver: it spent, and got through Congress what it wanted. There were more players involved, and the company was not alone in its goals, but between its PAC and lobbying efforts, the company won.

Technology is now a political realm. Increasingly large spends by technology firms on political efforts – sometimes on opposite sides – and the newly formed Internet Association underscore the simple fact that policy is now a key part technological operations.

TNW expects this trend to continue, and strengthen. Technology firms: prepare your wallets.
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/1...sdfp-politics/





Feds Requiring ‘Black Boxes’ in All Motor Vehicles
David Kravets

Federal regulators are proposing that new automobiles sold in the United States after September 2014 come equipped with black boxes, so-called “event data recorders” that chronicle everything from how fast a vehicle was traveling, the number of passengers and even a car’s location.

While many automakers have voluntarily installed the devices already, the National Transportation Safety Agency wants to hear your comments by February 11 on its proposal mandating them in all vehicles. Congress has empowered the agency to set motor-vehicle-safety rules.

Clearly, regulators’ intentions are about safety, as the devices would trigger — for about 30 seconds — during so-called “events” such as during sudden breaking, acceleration, swerving or other types of driving that might lead to an accident. The data, which can either be downloaded remotely or by a physical connection, depending upon a vehicle’s model, is to be used by manufacturers and regulators “primarily for the purpose of post-crash assessment of vehicle safety system performance,” according to an announcement in the Federal Register.

But privacy advocates are raising the alarm bells, and want the agency to require data safeguards, including demands that data be anonymized, and to prohibit the marketing of it.

“You should not think of this as being an opportunity to sell data to auto-insurance companies for risk evaluation. That’s a real possibility. Data is valuable,” said Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Submit your comments to the National Transportation Safety Agency here. Your comments are a public record.

Australian researcher David Warren invented the black box in 1953 to record airline cockpit noise and instruments during flight to help investigators solve crash mysteries. It was only a matter of time before they would be required in motor vehicles.

The vehicle black boxes — which are either tiny standalone devices or part of a vehicle’s computer system — are to record speed, engine throttle, breaking, ignition, safety belt usage, the number of passengers, airbag deployment, and among other things time of the recording and sometimes a passenger’s location, depending on a vehicle’s model.

According to NTSA, as the National Traffic Safety Agency is known, the “event data recorders” will be ”used to improve crash and defect investigation and crash data collection quality to assist safety researchers, vehicle manufacturers, and the agency to understand vehicle crashes better and more precisely. Additionally, vehicle manufacturers are able to utilize EDR data in improving vehicle designs and developing more effective vehicle safety countermeasures. EDR data can also be used by Advanced Automatic Crash Notification (AACN) systems to aid emergency response teams in assessing the severity of a crash and estimating the probability of serious injury before they reach the site of the crash.”

Still, questions remain about the black boxes and data. Among them, how long should a black box retain event data, who owns the data, can a motorist turn off the black box and can the authorities get the data without a warrant.

For the moment, it’s the Wild West, with few guidelines.

“You have all of these entities that can collect and use this data without any bounds on how this data can be used,” Coney said.

Just 13 states have some regulations about the black boxes. Many of them demand the manufacture disclose the existence of the black box and some require a motorists’ consent for the black-box data to be viewed by others.

Clearly, the black boxes tell a story.

Timothy Murray, the Massachusetts Lt. governor, claimed he was traveling within the speed limit and wearing his seatbelt after he crashed a state vehicle last year. The black box in the Crown Victoria captured data that Murray was going 100 mph without a seatbelt.

How the government finalizes rules about the black boxes might set scary precedent for other technologies, according to Jay Stanley, an American Civil Liberties Union policy analyst.

“Will devices serve the consumer/owner, or some other powerful interest such as the government or big companies?” he asked. “We don’t want to drift into a world in which our own possessions are riddled with computer chips acting in the interests of others — watching us, controlling us, and possibly snitching on us.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...boxes-privacy/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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[theknife]

got my raspberry pi a couple of weeks ago...it's been fun to play with, in spite of the fact that i have to research everything to do anything.