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Old 01-05-13, 06:24 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 4th, '13

Since 2002


































"When we launch in a territory the Bittorrent traffic drops as the Netflix traffic grows." – Ted Sarandos


"I am not a lawyer, but would think that in general Swedish courts do not have jurisdiction over Icelandic companies operating in Iceland." – Marius Olafsson


"When the IFPI investigator was asked about this he acknowledged that the names did not match. He said that the Finnish anti-piracy people and IFPI had collected the information together, but there was also an MPAA executive in the room while the evidence gathering took place." – Herkko Hietanen






































May 4th , 2013




Swedes Ditch Downloads for Illegal Streaming
Oliver Gee

Swedes are turning away from file-sharing sites like The Pirate Bay in favour of "safer" illegal streaming sites for new movies and TV shows, with experts claiming that Swedes would pay for content if a better solution was available.

The change is believed to be part of a long-term shift from downloading sites in favour of live-streaming portals where they are less likely to be caught.

However, experts have explained that just because users aren't downloading a file, it doesn't mean they are not breaking the law too.

Daniel Westman, researcher at the Swedish Law & Informatics Research Institute (Institutet för rättsinformatik) at Stockholm University, explained that without wiretapping, it's tough to know who is performing the streaming and that users are less likely to get caught.

"Users who stream content don't make copies and don't upload content at the same time, but if they're doing it illegally then it is still a problem," he told The Local.

He argued that the problem lies in what he calls the "viewing window" between when a TV show or film is released and when it is available for viewing in Sweden.

"Although it has been a functioning model in the past, internet access and broadband speeds here in Sweden mean that the window just tests people's patience," he said.

While some streaming sites are legal, such as Netflix and HBO, other sites like the new Swefilmer.com are becoming more and more popular among impatient TV fans, especially with blockbuster television shows like Game of Thrones.

In fact, the word "Swefilmer" ranked third in the list of words that had shot up in popular Google search terms in Sweden last year. The second was Netflix.

Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) reported on Monday that the people behind Swefilmer had fought to remain anonymous, with leads to the owners and operators falling dead in Russia, Australia, and the UK.

In terms of a solution, Westman believes that it's just a matter of providing the people with what they want.

"People are willing to pay if they can get what they want when they want it," he told The Local.

"But we need to have both the carrot and the stick. The content needs to be available, easy to access, fast, and reasonably priced. But there will also always be people willing to break the law, no matter how the problem is attacked."
http://www.thelocal.se/47614/20130429/





MPAA Executive Tampered With IFPI Evidence in Internet Piracy Case
Andy

Earlier this month Finland’s largest ever Internet piracy case ended with four men being found guilty of copyright infringement and two being exonerated. The case involved a so-called ‘topsite’ called Angel Falls and had an interesting twist. During the trial it was revealed that evidence gathered by a local anti-piracy group and the IFPI was also handed to a “senior MPAA executive” who tampered with the evidence before handing it to the police.

More than five years ago an investigation was launched into ‘Angel Falls’ a system of servers used by the so-called ‘warez scene’ for storing and distributing copyright content.

Following an undercover investigation, in 2007 rightsholders filed an official complaint and two months later the site was raided by authorities in Oulu, Finland. A total of 15 servers were discovered containing a range of copyrighted material including music, movies, TV shows, video games and software.

Represented by anti-piracy group CIAPC (known locally as TTVK), rightsholders said that the individuals running the Angel Falls topsite had caused damages to their businesses totaling six million euros. The developing copyright case was to be the largest in Finland’s history.

Earlier this month the trial concluded. Four men were found guilty and two were cleared as per our earlier report. However, according to Herkko Hietanen, a defense lawyer in the case from the Turre Legal lawfirm, the case had a somewhat interesting feature.

During the trial an IFPI investigator was called upon as a witness, but during his testimony something unusual came to light.

“After his presentation the defense counsels pointed out how the information shown on the video of his investigations did not match with the printed log files,” Hietanen informs TorrentFreak.

The video, a screencast of the investigation, showed a particular username accessing an Angel Falls FTP server. However, the corresponding text log for the same event showed a completely different username.

“When the IFPI investigator was asked about this he acknowledged that the names did not match. He said that the Finnish anti-piracy people and IFPI had collected the information together, but there was also an MPAA executive in the room while the evidence gathering took place,” Hietanen explains.

The IFPI investigator was then asked to reveal the name of the MPAA executive. He declined, but did offer an explanation for the inconsistencies in the evidence.

In an apparent attempt to hide the identity of one of their spies, the MPAA executive edited the evidence gathered during the session.

“The IFPI investigator handed over the evidence material to the MPAA senior executive who then changed the text file before the anti-piracy organization handed over the evidence to the Finnish police,” Hietanen says.

No one from the MPAA informed the defense that the edits had been made and the tampering was revealed at the worst possible time – during the trial. This resulted in the prosecutor ordering a police investigation into the changes that had been made.

“Police then proceeded by comparing the ‘work copy’ that the IFPI investigator produced with the material that police and the defending counsels had received. Police found out that the material had differences in over 10 files,” Hietanen reveals.

Considering the effort that had gone into the case, the outcome was somewhat of a disappointment. Two men were completely cleared and the four who were found guilty escaped with suspended jail sentences. The six million euros in damages claimed by the rightsholders was reduced to just 45,000 euros.

The fate of the MPAA investigator is unclear, but since his username was revealed in court it seems likely that if he used the same one on other sites, that will no longer be possible.
http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-executi...y-case-130427/





The Pirate Bay Moves to .SX as Prosecutor Files Motion to Seize Domains
Ernesto

Swedish authorities have filed a motion at the District Court of Stockholm on behalf of the entertainment industries, demanding the seizure of two Pirate Bay domain names. In addition to the Swedish-based .se domain the motion also includes the new Icelandic .is TLD. In a rapid response, The Pirate Bay has just switched to a fresh domain, ThePirateBay.sx, registered in the northeastern Caribbean island of Sint Maarten.

Swedish prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad has filed a motion at the District Court of Stockholm, requesting for the seizure of thepiratebay.se, piratebay.se and the new thepiratebay.is domains.

The move comes just a few days after the infamous BitTorrent site switched to the Iceland-based domain, following suspicions that the Swedish authorities would go after the .se domains.

“There is widespread copyright infringement linked to these sites and these domains are used to assist in connection with crime,” Ingblad writes in today’s complaint.

The complaint was filed on behalf of several major movie, music and publishing companies. The Swedish domain registry and the domain registrants, including Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij, are listed as defendants in the case.

The prosecutor did not explain why the authorities are taking action now. The Pirate Bay has been operating from the .se domain name for over a year and could have easily been targeted before.

The Internet Infrastructure Foundation, responsible for operating the .se TLD, says it will consider its options when a court order comes in. The foundation previously noted that domain names are not the source of the problem as they are easily traded in for new ones.

“We believe the problem in this type of situation is not the domain, but rather its contents. The domain name itself is not an accomplice in act of copyright infringement and if thepiratebay.se, for example, were to be shut down, the site would almost certainly reopen under another top-level domain.”

Last week Iceland’s domain registry ISNIC told TorrentFreak that it would not proactively suspend a domain, and that it would only take action when an Icelandic Court asks them to.

“Such an action would require a formal order from an Icelandic court. ISNIC is not responsible for a registrant’s usage of their domains,” ISNIC’s Marius Olafsson told TorrentFreak.

However, in today’s complaint the Swedish prosecutor suggests that the court has jurisdiction over the .is domain because it is registered to Fredrik Neij, who has Swedish nationality.

But in a lightning quick response The Pirate Bay has already switched to a new domain, ThePirateBay.sx. The .sx ccTLD is for Sint Maarten, a tiny island in the northeast Caribbean located 190 miles east of Puerto Rico.

Control of the island, which has just 78,000 residents, is split between France and the Netherlands. Around 41,000 live on the Dutch side and 37,000 on the French. TorrentFreak has contacted the local domain registrar for comment.

Earlier today the news broke that a new criminal investigation into The Pirate Bay is ongoing, with co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm being questioned in prison last week. Whether today’s domain seizure motion is related to this case is unknown.

Even if the court grants the prosecutor’s request it remains to be seen how effective any seizures will be. Time and again the BitTorrent site has responded by relocating to new domains.

Update: After publication ISNIC’s Marius Olafsson informed TorrentFreak that they do not intend to take away Pirate Bay’s domain based on a Swedish court order.

“When and if such an “order” is received by ISNIC we will refer that to our legal council and will of course respond – how remains to be seen. Remember that ISNIC is an Icelandic company operating under Icelandic laws,” Olafsson says.

“I am not a lawyer, but would think that in general Swedish courts do not have jurisdiction over Icelandic companies operating in Iceland. The only thing a Swedish court can do in this case is to order the registrant (who is Swedish) to delete the domain. I fail to see how they can order ISNIC to do anything.”

“ISNIC will legally fight attempts to use the domain name registry system to police/censor the net. We believe that to be ineffective, wrong and dangerous to the stability of the DNS as a whole.”
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-b...omains-130430/





BitTorrent Sync Shuns the Cloud for File-Sharing -- and It's Not Alone
Nancy Gohring

Cloud-based file-sharing like Box and Dropbox are all the rage these days.

But what about workers with limited bandwidth and high security requirements? Some of them are using sync services that don’t have a cloud component – they simply sync among devices, relying primarily on device storage capacity.

BitTorrent became the latest to join the fray by opening up its BitTorrent Sync service to anyone this week. Other vendors already in the game include Syncbox, Tonido, PocketCloud, and GetMeMyFiles.

“Those most enthusiastic [about these products] are those in highly secure or secretive organizations wanting to limit exposure of a document or file to an individual,” said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, research director at 451 Research. “Similarly it appeals to those that have issues with connectivity and bandwidth.”

For example, engineers in the energy field often work in remote locations with limited bandwidth but need access drawings on site, he said. The sync apps can help them share files locally.

Also, businesses that want to control the distribution of files very closely are also using these tools. “By limiting to a device you can ensure that the right version is accessed and is not shared,” he said.

BitTorrent probably isn’t the first organization that businesses would turn to for a file sharing service. But its offering sounds simple and useful.

In a blog post about opening the service to anyone, BitTorrent said that 20,000 people signed up to help test the service since January, indicating solid interest in the concept.

“Since Sync is based on P2P and doesn’t require a pit-stop in the cloud, you can transfer files at the maximum speed supported by your network,” Brett, who leads product management and user experience at BitTorrent, wrote in a blog post.

BitTorrent encrypts file transfers and emphasizes the security of the service since data is never stored on servers in the cloud. Still, when a lot of people think of BitTorrent they think of illegal file sharing so business might be shy to use the offering.

Some of the other offerings range in sophistication. A few, like Tonido, have business versions that use on-premise storage to sync files and allow sharing.

Ultimately, Pelz-Sharpe doesn’t consider these kinds of services to be competitive to Box or Dropbox. Instead, they are “an alternative for a smaller subset of enterprise content that is not considered suitable or optimal for the cloud,” he said.

He couldn’t quantify how many businesses are using these kinds of services but implied it might be more than you might think. “Most enterprises are slower/more reluctant to move to the cloud than the pundits would like us to believe,” he said.
http://www.citeworld.com/cloud/21767...nc-shuns-cloud





DARPA Wants Huge Holy Grail of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

DARPA looking for technology that lets 5,000 wireless nodes connect quickly, securely
Michael Cooney

Even the often far-reaching researchers at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) seems to think this one is a stretch: Develop what's known as mobile ad-hoc wireless technology that lets 1000- 5000 nodes connect simultaneously and securely connect in the field.

For the past 20 years, researchers have unsuccessfully used Internet-based concepts in attempts to significantly scale mobile ad hoc network (MANET), DARPA said. A constraint with current MANETs is they can only scale to around 50 nodes before network services become ineffective. Some believe that with just a little more work on the current approach they can increase the maximum size of the MANET. Others believe that large scale MANETs are impossible.

With that information as a backdrop, the agency today issued an industry-wide Request for Information (RFI) to find out what it will take to finally break through current MANET limitations. DAARPA said while the Internet facilitated far-reaching technical advances, in this technology area the Internet may be the roadblock. The MANET scaling goals will not be satisfied with incremental improvement using existing protocols and concepts. Truly revolutionary ideas will explore new paradigms that allow users to effectively share information unshackled from existing constraints.

"A MANET of a thousand nodes could support an entire battalion without the need for manual network setup, management and maintenance that comes from 'switchboard'-era communications," said Mark Rich, DARPA Program Manager. "This could provide more troops with robust services such as real-time video imagery, enhanced situational awareness and other services that we have not yet imagined."

For this project DARPA wants a clean slate stating that "compatibility with existing networking protocols is not required; it may even be detrimental.

"DARPA asks you to take a new look at the MANET problem, unencumbered by existing protocols. All software from the hardware interface to the applications is open for discussion. Even the desirability of network layers may be debated."

DARPA said it is looking for protocols that take advantage of features of the MANET environment-broadcast radios, high information correlation between peers, duplicity of roles, and many-to-many distribution patterns-and that overcome the difficulties-interference, unreliability, and range limitations. It may also be advantageous to explore the use of protocols that blend MANET operations with the capabilities of mobile, semi-mobile, or transient support platforms being developed by DARPA. With these platforms, broadcast, sector cast, and asymmetric communications may be available and useful.

DARPA says it intends to discuss the MANET concepts at a Novel Methods for Information Sharing in Large-Scale Mobile Ad-hoc Networks Symposium on August 7-8, 2013 at the DARPA Conference Center in Arlington, Virginia.
https://www.networkworld.com/communi...d-hoc-networks





D.C. Insider Tom Wheeler Likely to be Nominated to Head FCC
Joe Flint

A Washington insider with close ties to the media and telecommunications, is expected to be tapped as the next chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

Tom Wheeler, who has headed lobbying associations for both the cable television and mobile phone industries, is the leading candidate to succeed Julius Genachowski as chairman of the regulatory agency, Washington insiders confirm.

Chatter about Wheeler started inside D.C. circles almost immediately after Genachowski announced his intention to step down in March. Last week, the industry publication Broadcasting & Cable reported that the White House was vetting Wheeler.

The White House is expected to announce the nomination of Wheeler, currently a managing director with the private equity firm Core Capital Partners, in the coming days. While Wheeler goes through the confirmation process with Congress, FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn is expected to serve as acting chairman.

Wheeler is a former president of the National Cable Television Assn. and the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Assn. Despite his close ties to industries he will soon regulate, some media watchdogs are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

“As someone who has known Tom for years, I believe that he will be an independent, proactive chairman," said Gigi B. Sohn, president and chief executive of Public Knowledge, adding that she has "no doubt that Tom will have an open door and an open mind, and that ultimately his decisions will be based on what he genuinely believes is best for the public interest, not any particular industry."

Free Press President and Chief Executive Craig Aaron was a little more jaded about the prospect of Wheeler becoming chairman of the FCC.

"The Federal Communications Commission needs a strong leader — someone who will use this powerful position to stand up to industry giants and protect the public interest. On paper, Tom Wheeler does not appear to be that person, having headed not one but two major trade associations," Aaron said.

However, Aaron indicated that Free Press is hopeful that Wheeler and the rest of the FCC will "engage the public and make policies that truly benefit all Americans."
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...,2947524.story





Limiting Bidding On Spectrum Auctions Could be Costly, Study Says

Georgetown paper makes the case that Verizon and AT&T should be allowed to bid in upcoming auctions
Grant Gross

If the U.S. Federal Communications Commission limits the participation of the largest mobile carriers in upcoming spectrum auctions, it could cost the U.S. treasury billions of dollars, according to a study released Tuesday.

The U.S. Department of Justice's Antitrust Division and some digital rights groups have called on the FCC to ensure that small carriers can compete in spectrum auctions scheduled for 2014.

But a policy to restrict the ability of Verizon Wireless and AT&T to bid on the spectrum would drive down the bidding during the auction and leave less money for a nationwide public safety network and the U.S. treasury, said the new paper, from the business-friendly Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. The center has received funding in the past from both Verizon and AT&T, although the two large carriers did not commission this study, said center director John Mayo.

The upcoming spectrum auction would sell spectrum that is voluntarily turned over by U.S. television stations, and the FCC's spectrum rules "have the potential either to significantly boost or significantly hinder the ability of the auction to move spectrum to its most highly valued use," Mayo said.

The auction could raise up to US $31 billion, according to the paper's authors. Using bidding results from past auctions, the authors estimated that completely barring Verizon and AT&T from the so-called incentive auctions could cost $12 billion.

"Those revenues matter," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a co-author of the Georgetown study. "That has implications for public policy."

Even a partial restriction of bids by Verizon and AT&T could have a significant impact on auction revenues, he said.

The study considers scenarios that won't happen, countered Matt Wood, policy director at digital rights group Free Press.

"No one is talking about completely barring AT&T and Verizon from the incentive auction," Wood said in an email. "Sensible people are talking about making sure that more than two companies have a chance at obtaining spectrum. The fact that these duopolists hired economists to parrot the companies' own talking points isn't really that newsworthy."

Restricting the bids of the two largest carriers could also mean a price hike for mobile service because it would mean that carriers who make less efficient use of the spectrum would control it, said Robert Shapiro, a co-author of the Georgetown study. Shapiro estimated that mobile service prices would rise by 9 percent if Verizon and AT&T were excluded from bidding.

This, in turn, would lead to fewer U.S. residents adopting 4G service, costing the U.S. tens of thousands of jobs in the coming years, he said.

The calls to limit the participation of AT&T and Verizon are misplaced, he said. "There is no evidence of any lack of competition in this market," he said.

The study's authors don't believe Verizon and AT&T will be barred from the auction, but the study's "thought experiment" looking at that possibility shows the outer bounds of the economic impact of bidding limits, Shapiro said.
http://www.itworld.com/it-management...tly-study-says





Belgian ISPs Sued for Providing Internet Access Without Paying Copyright Levies

Sabam, the Belgian association of authors, composers and publishers, has sued the country’s three biggest ISPs, saying that they should be paying copyright levies for offering access to copyright protected materials online.

Sabam wants the court to rule that Internet access providers Belgacom, Telenet and Voo should pay 3.4 percent of their turnover in copyright fees, because they profit from offering high speed Internet connections that give users easy access to copyright protected materials, the collecting organization said in a news release Tuesday.

Since 2000, revenue generated from copyright levies imposed on physical media have declined by 54 percent, Sabam said. This “huge loss” has not been compensated by collections from online services like iTunes, YouTube and Spotify, it added.

ISPs over the years have profited from the switch to online media consumption and they have offered unlimited Internet access with very high download speeds in advertising campaigns, Sabam said. “The Internet access providers have never paid copyright levies for this activity. They hide behind their status as intermediary, without taking responsibility for the information transmitted over their networks,” the organization said.

However, the profit derived from Internet subscriptions in part comes from the intensive use of protected repertoire, Sabam said. Therefore the ISPs should start paying levies, it said. Because negotiations showed that the ISPs are not willing to start paying those levies voluntarily, Sabam decided to sue the three biggest Belgian ISPs in the Brussels Court of First Instance on April 12.

Sabam started demanding copyright compensation from ISPs in November 2011.

Belgacom and Telenet did not respond to a request for comment. A Voo spokeswoman reached on Wednesday declined to comment.

The Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) of Belgium did not respond to a request for comment but said in a news release provided to Belgian media that providers do not choose what information passes through their networks and are therefore not liable for the contents of that information.

The license on Internet access proposed by Sabam comes down to a an Internet tax that affects all Internet users, the ISPA said in the statement. Users that don’t use their Internet subscription to download music or movies or do so legally are punished by Sabam’s proposal because they have to pay twice, the ISPA said, adding that Sabam’s claim lacks any legal basis.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/20369...ht-levies.html





BT Unleashes SIP Licensing Troll Army

Small players collateral damage in Google-versus-BT patent drone-war
Richard Chirgwin

VoIP-to-PSTN termination providers and SIP vendors will be watching their inboxes for a lawyer's letter from BT, which has kicked off a taxing licensing program levying a fee on the industry, based on a list of 99 patents.

As noted in Australian telco newsletter Communications Day, the move seems to have caught the VoIP industry by surprise, with SIP Forum chair Richard Shockley saying the move has shocked the industry and is already frightening smaller players.

The British incumbent is offering to allow third parties to use the Session Initiation Protocol under a license agreement published here.

In the license, BT is requesting either $US50,000 or a combination of 0.3 percent of future revenue from affected products, plus 0.3 percent of the last six months' sales for products as “past damages”. It's kindly offering a discount for customers that pay up within six weeks of receiving a BT letter of demand, and there's a premium to $US60,000 and 0.36 percent of revenue for those who hold out.

Targets also have a choice of an annual license fee of $US12,000 or 0.3 percent of the previous 12 months' sales for the product (with similar discounts and penalties offered for moving quickly or slowly as the case may be).

The license looks to The Register to be designed to encourage quick compliance among small companies who probably wouldn't win a court case anyway, since the giants of the networking business are unlikely to comply anytime soon.

It's probably no coincidence that BT and Google have been firing exploding lawyers over each others' parapets since 2011. BT kicked off the tit-for-tat-spat with a filing targeting Android in a 2011 filing in Delaware.

Google's February 2013 response included asserting a patent covering a VoIP gateway between a phone and the Internet.

SIP provides a standard syntax for opening sessions across VoIP gateways. It's vital both to VoIP service operators running PSTN termination, and to the vendors that supply the industry.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04...e_with_google/





Craigslist's Allegations Of "Copyright" Violations Thrown Out
Derek Khanna

Craiglist has been recognized for a failure to innovate and having among the internet’s worst terms of service’s. And instead of innovating, it has chosen to go after new market participants that have wanted to use Craigslist’s data on classified postings.

One of these websites is www.padmapper.com, which was sued for obtaining Craigslist’s data and placing it on a map. This allows for users to more easily aggregate, browse and search all available apartments across various services

Padmapper took a series of data points: cost of apartment, location, size and 1Br-4BR type of information, and allowed for customers to search on that basis. And when customers found what they wanted, they would click and be directed back to Craigslist to read the full posting and complete the transaction – thus potentially generating Craigslist new customers and more satisfied sellers. Seems like a win-win.

In addition to the copyright charge, Craigslist has gone after Padmapper and other websites for violating their terms of service (ToS) and the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act (CFAA). In Craigslist’s ToS they allow for websites like Google and Bing to “scrape” and index their website, but do not allow for other non general indexing websites to do so.

Craigslist has used the threat of copyright infringement as a sledgehammer to scare innovators from competing with Craigslist by using its data. Copyright infringement penalties are stark, so being found liable here would potentially lead to trillions of dollars in damage – yes trillions. The problem is, despite Craigslist using the threat of copyright violation to go after these new companies – they never had copyright to begin with. And today a federal court agreed. In Los Angeles a California federal judge dismissed the copyright claims against Padmapper and other companies.

Craigslist was claiming:

1) That it retained copyright to postings made by its customers; and

2) That taking these data points of cost and location constituted infringement.

By a consensus of legal experts, these claims were vacuous, but they have been successfully used to scare would be competitors. But perhaps Craigslist’s days of using false threats to scare new start-ups is over.

Its claim that it has a copyright to its customers postings is new information to its customers. How would you feel knowing that if you posted your resume on Craigslist that Craigslist now has copyright to your resume?

While customers granted Craigslist a license, they never granted Craigslist their copyright. The license was not an “exclusive license” (other than a small window that isn’t the basis of ongoing litigation). Further, Padmapper and other websites taking these data points is clearly within the limits of Feist and other Supreme Court cases establishing that data points are not copyright-able. In laymen’s terms, Craigslist never had the copyright and taking the data points isn’t infringement.

It’s very good news that these charges were dismissed, hopefully this will discourage Craigslist from going after the next competitor with baseless charges.

But this isn’t the end of the legal issues. Craigslist is still forcefully pursuing on ToS and CFAA. It’s curious that a company that prominently displays opposition to the CFAA and encourages customers to get involved to fix the CFAA, is at the same time suing start-ups for violating the CFAA for precisely the problems for which tech activists have ridiculed the CFAA, and, in particular, its application against Aaron Swartz. That problem being, according to tech activists, the CFAA should not be implicated merely for violating the terms of service of a website – terms that until recently prohibited all minors from accessing Google, that still require you to fill your Facebook with accurate data, or that require your profile on dating websites to be completely accurate. If companies like Craigslist want to be on the right side of fixing this law, then they should practice what they preach.

See here for details on one such campaign on reforming the CFAA.

Going forward, innovators will likely find ways to aggregate and utilize the data without violating the terms of service. The ruling today may have cleared the way for innovators going forward, and hopefully put an end to bad faith and baseless legal threats by Craigslist against competitors. (To be clear, I am not taking a stance on the legality or ethics of scraping from Craigslist, merely observing on the use of a false copyright claim).

Let this be a lesson to tech companies, if you want to copyright user data, you had better make it explicit that you are taking users data and claiming exclusive ownership of that data. And consumers can decide if they want to stay with you, or go to a competitor who will not claim their resume as intellectual property retained by the website.

As the House Judiciary Committee will hold hearings on wholesale revisions to copyright law, it should consider stronger provisions for misusing copyright law for other purposes as displayed here. Using false claims of copyright, for something that a company doesn’t even have copyright ownership of, for the purposes of going after start-ups and competitors should be punishable and discouraged. Copyright law is a giant sledgehammer creating trillions of dollars in liability, if companies are misusing it to shut down competitors, that is something that we can fix and address. So called, “copyright misuse” or “copyfraud” to scare new market participants should be penalized for what it is – a tax on innovation. And Republicans who have spent decades complaining about outrageous tort claims and calling for wholesale tort reform should want a copyright system that strongly protects legitimate copyright holders but ensures that false copyright claims aren’t abused.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/derekkha...ns-thrown-out/





Opera Claims Ex-Employee Took Trade Secrets to Mozilla, Sues Him for $3.4m
Robin Wauters

Norwegian browser maker Opera Software has filed a lawsuit against a former employee and consultant, alleging that the man gave away trade secrets to rival Mozilla. Opera is claiming a whopping 20 million Norwegian Krone, or roughly $3.4 million, in damages.

The person Opera Software is taking to court is Trond Werner Hansen, a designer and musician based in Oslo, Norway. Hansen worked with the software company from 1999 to 2006, and returned as a consultant from 2009 to 2010 at Opera’s request.

He is credited as the driving force behind early browser innovations that first saw the light of day over at Opera Software, including tabbed browsing, speed dial, mouse gestures and integrated search.

Trading secrets?

Opera is now suing him for $3.4 million because they believe Hansen took some of their trade secrets to rival Mozilla, which develops the popular Firefox browser. As evidence, Opera points to a video that features Hansen speaking right after Firefox product design lead Alex Limi.

Hansen worked with Mozilla last year, designing and developing a browser prototype for the iPad, codenamed ‘Junior’.

In the video, Hansen talks about the Junior project, but Opera is apparently mostly irked because Limi shows a number of innovations the Norwegian software company was – or is still – working on.

For the record: we have not yet had the chance to look at the lawsuit documents or discuss the specifics of the allegations and size of the claimed damages with Opera management or its lawyers, but we’ll update this post as soon as we have.

Case confirmed

The news about the lawsuit was first reported by business newspaper Dagens Næringsliv (DN) this morning, but hasn’t yet made it to the publication’s website, despite other local media such as Digi.no jumping on the opportunity to spread the word digitally.

We spoke to Hansen earlier this morning and confirmed with him that the lawsuit is real, however. In fact, it’s so real the man saw himself forced to return to Norway from the United States, where he was hoping to release and promote his first music album, and maybe open up an art gallery.

He wouldn’t make any comments on his history at Opera, but said he and his lawyers are determined to prove that he did nothing wrong.

Opera responded to our request for comment by referring us to their legal counsel, which hasn’t yet gotten back to our repeated request.

Hansen says he’s been stonewalled too; he and his lawyers have yet to engage in a direct conversation with Opera as the case proceeds to trial.

To be continued, no doubt.

Update: Opera’s lawyer, Bing Hodneland Advokatselskap partner Ole E. Tokvam, has given us this statement:

This dispute is pending before the courts, and due to the pending court hearing that will take place late august, Opera chooses not to comment on the case in detail.

Hansen is a former employee and consultant of Opera Software ASA. Opera Software ASA is of the opinion that Hansen, after he left Opera, has acted contrary to his contractual and other legal obligations towards Opera, among other things, the duty of loyalty and his contractual and statutory confidentiality obligations.

Opera Software ASA is an innovative company which has developed software and technology which have proved to be successful internationally. It is only natural that Opera Software ASA acts on any violations in order to protect its interests.

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/0...-him-for-3-4m/





Opera Has Filed a Lawsuit Against Me
Trond Werner Hansen

So my former employer Opera Software has filed a lawsuit against me in Norway for 20 million NOK ($3.4 million), claiming breach of contract and that I must have given Mozilla information that I wasn’t allowed to that has caused severe damage to the company. I strongly disagree with their position and would like to give some background information that will clarify the case a bit and answer some of the many questions I’m getting. However, for now, I will not comment directly on what Opera is claiming in the lawsuit.

I worked at Opera from 1999 to 2006 as the lead designer and developer of the desktop browser, where my most important contributions were tabbed browsing, integrated search, speed dial and mouse gestures. After leaving, and for the next couple of years, I considered developing a new browser that I’ll call GB here. For those that remember the browser market back then, there was at the time no mainstream open source browser for Windows based on the WebKit engine, so there was clearly a market opportunity there. It would also be a good time to start fresh and rethink what a lean and modern browser could be like. GB would be open source, have a unified search and address field, and in general be a very simple and stripped down. In retrospect, some people at Google was obviously having similar thoughts, because they built just that, a lean and clean browser based on WebKit: Chrome.

Another aspect of GB was that it would be a “green browser”. The thinking was that since a browser generates revenue when users search (because search providers pay for such traffic), most of that revenue could go to a green cause of the users choice. Sure, you would have to have a lot of users for it to make an impact, but the model might not have been too crazy, because most applications don’t easily just generate revenue by pure usage, but browsers do, since people do search with them.

GB existed as a concept and ideas, but was never developed, since I chose to focus on other projects. I did in fact meet up with Mozilla, Google and Flock (a first attempt at a social browser) in 2007 to talk about the future of the browser, and it was very tempting to have a go at it, but in the end I chose a different path that year. Needless to say, pursuing to develop the browser would have been a lot of work.

In the summer of 2008, Opera’s founder and CEO at the time, Jon von Tetzchner reaches out and asks if I want to contribute more to Opera. I tell him about GB and propose that we could develop GB as a rebooted and simplified Opera browser. He is very interested, but when we start to talk business, and I tell him that I want no salary and no shares, but 1% of the search revenue as compensation, he says that’s not possible. So there is no deal. In fact, there is never any kind of deal or transfer of ownership of GB concepts to Opera.

In the beginning of 2009, we come to an agreement of me just helping out as a consultant instead, and during 2009 and 2010 some of my design proposals will naturally be based on some of my older GB concepts, since that’s the direction I wanted to take the browser.

The consultancy ends late 2010 when Opera decides not to renew the contract. At that time, very little development progress has actually been made, and I inform the new CEO at the time, Lars Boilesen, that I will most likely pursue to contribute to an open source project like the Mozilla Firefox browser instead, since I think many of my original GB ideas and the direction I wanted to take the browser still has value, and I would like to see the ideas put into code. In a meeting with Lars, he says he understands that, and my intentions are also made clear in an email to him, but he never replies to that email.

Later, I enter a consultancy agreement with Mozilla, and in June 2012, a video is made public which shows me presenting a touch based browser prototype called Junior. This prototype has nothing to do with the lawsuit now filed by Opera. However, in that same video, a Mozilla employee presents among others a feature named Search Tabs, and Opera claims that it proves that I must have told Mozilla trade secrets causing them damages of 20 million NOK. ($3.4 million). I strongly disagree with their position and I believe I have been wrongly accused, and that I can prove my case.
http://trondblog.tumblr.com/post/491...re-has-filed-a





UK.Gov Passes Instagram Act: All Your Pics Belong to Everyone Now

Everyone = Silicon Valley ad platforms tech companies
Andrew Orlowski

Have you ever uploaded a photo to Facebook, Instagram or Flickr?

If so, you'll probably want to read this, because the rules on who can exploit your work have now changed radically, overnight.

Amateur and professional illustrators and photographers alike will find themselves ensnared by the changes, the result of lobbying by Silicon Valley and radical bureaucrats and academics. The changes are enacted in the sprawling Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act which received Royal Assent last week, and it marks a huge shift in power away from citizens and towards large US corporations.

How so? Previously, and in most of the world today, ownership of your creation is automatic, and legally considered to be an individual's property. That's enshrined in the Berne Convention and other international treaties, where it's considered to be a basic human right. What this means in practice is that you can go after somebody who exploits it without your permission - even if pursuing them is cumbersome and expensive.

The UK coalition government's new law reverses this human right. When last year Instagram attempted to do something similar, it met a furious backlash. But the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act has sailed through without most amateurs or semi-professionals even realising the consequences.

The Act contains changes to UK copyright law which permit the commercial exploitation of images where information identifying the owner is missing, so-called "orphan works", by placing the work into what's known as "extended collective licensing" schemes. Since most digital images on the internet today are orphans - the metadata is missing or has been stripped by a large organisation - millions of photographs and illustrations are swept into such schemes.

For the first time anywhere in the world, the Act will permit the widespread commercial exploitation of unidentified work - the user only needs to perform a "diligent search". But since this is likely to come up with a blank, they can proceed with impunity. The Act states that a user of a work can act as if they are the owner of the work (which should be you) if they're given permission to do so by the Secretary of State and are acting as a regulated body.

The Act also fails to prohibit sub-licensing, meaning that once somebody has your work, they can wholesale it. This gives the green light to a new content-scraping industry, an industry that doesn't have to pay the originator a penny. Such is the consequence of "rebalancing copyright", in reality.
What now?

Quite what happens next is not clear, because the Act is merely enabling legislation - the nitty gritty will come in the form of statutory instruments, to be tabled later in the year. Parliament has not voted down a statutory instrument since 1979, so the political process is probably now a formality.

In practice, you'll have two stark choices to prevent being ripped off: remove your work from the internet entirely, or opt-out by registering it. And registration will be on a work-by-work basis.

"People can now use stuff without your permission," explained photo rights campaigner Paul Ellis. "To stop that you have to register your work in a registry - but registering stuff is an activity that costs you time and money. So what was your property by default will only remain yours if you take active steps, and absorb the costs, if it is formally registered to you as the owner."

And right now, Ellis says, there's only one registry, PLUS. Photographers, including David Bailey, condemned the Coalition for rushing through the legislation before other registries - such as the Copyright Hub - could sort themselves out.

"The mass of the public will never realise they've been robbed," thinks Ellis. The radical free-our-information bureaucrats at the Intellectual Property Office had already attempted to smuggle orphan works rules through via the Digital Economy Act in 2010, but were rebuffed. Thanks to a Google-friendly Conservative-led administration, they've now triumphed.

Three other consequences appear possible.

One is a barrage of litigation from UK creators - and overseas owners who find their work Hoovered into extended collective licensing programs. International treaties allow a country to be ostracised and punished. The threat has already been made clear from US writers and photographers, who've promised "a firestorm". Reciprocal royalty arrangements can also be suspended, on the basis of "if you steal our stuff, UK, we won't pay you". In addition, a judicial review, based on the premise that the Act gives Minister unconstitutional power over the disposal of private property, is not out of the question.

Secondly, the disappearance of useful material from the internet is likely to accelerate - the exact opposite of what supporters wish for. We recently highlighted the case of an aerial photographer who's moving work outside the UK, and we've heard of several who are taking their photos away from the web, and into lockers. The internet is poorer without a diverse creative economy - because creators need legal certainty of property rights.

And finally, there's the macroeconomic consequences for the UK economy.

The notorious 'Google Review' chaired by Ian Hargreaves failed to undertake adequate impact assessments, a giveaway that even the most rabid "copyright reformers" recognise there isn't an economic case to be made for taking everyone's stuff and giving it away.

"There's value in works, and if anybody can exploit them except the person who creates them, then value is transferred to the exploiter," explains Ellis. "This is a massive value transfer out of the UK economy to US tech companies."

Where it will remain, he thinks, because UK tech/media companies - should they appear - almost invariably become US-owned.

Copyright "reformers" of course rarely like to talk about such unpleasant matters - and will steer the conversation away from economic consequences as rapidly as possible. Indeed, the they generally talk using Orwellian euphemisms - like "liberalising" or "rebalancing" copyright. It's rarely presented as an individual's ability to go to market being removed. This is what "copyright reform" looks like in practice.

"It's corporate capitalism," says Ellis. "Ideally you want to empower individuals to trade, and keep the proceeds of their trade. The UK has just lost that."

So while the Twitterati and intelligentsia were ranting away about "Big Content", we've just lost the ability to sell our own content. In other words, you've just been royally fucked.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04..._act_landgrab/





Warner Brothers Sued for Unauthorized Use of Nyan Cat and Keyboard Cat

Two memes are 1) registered trademarks and 2) used in a new Scribblenauts game.
Timothy B. Lee

Warner Brothers is facing a federal lawsuit for using two feline-themed Internet memes in a video game without their creators' permission. The authors of "Keyboard Cat" and "Nyan Cat" have sued the media giant arguing that the game Scribblenauts, published by WB Games, infringes their copyrights and trademarks. The game's developer, 5th Cell, is also named in the lawsuit.

Keyboard Cat is a YouTube video uploaded in 2007. It shows a man's cat supposedly playing music on a keyboard. Nyan Cat is featured in an extremely irritating video that was uploaded to YouTube in 2011. As the complaint describes it, Nyan Cat is "a character with a cat's face and a body resembling a horizontal breakfast bar with pink frosting sprinkled with light red dots" that "flies across the screen, leaving a stream of exhaust in the form of a bright rainbow in its wake."

Both videos went viral and racked up tens of millions of downloads. The creators of the memes have both registered for trademark protection. At some point, 5th Cell allegedly added the characters to Scribblenauts, a series of games for the Nintendo DS and other platforms.

The two cat meme creators teamed up to sue Warner Brothers and 5th Cell. "Defendants have used 'Nyan Cat' and 'Keyboard Cat,' even identifying them by name, to promote and market their games, all without plaintiffs' permission and without any compensation to plaintiffs," they charge.

Warner Brothers is charged with both copyright and trademark infringement. The case will be litigated in the Central District of California, which includes Hollywood. We contacted Warner Brothers for comment but have not received a response.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...nternet-memes/





Harper Lee Sues for Copyright of To Kill A Mockingbird
BBC

The author of To Kill A Mockingbird has sued a literary agent she says tricked her into assigning him the copyright on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book.

Harper Lee, 87, says Samuel Pinkus took advantage of her failing hearing and eyesight to transfer the rights and has failed to respond to licence requests.

To Kill A Mockingbird was published in 1960 and is considered a classic. It has sold more than 30 million copies.

Lee is rarely seen in public and declines almost all interview requests.

The novel is the only published book by the author, who lives in Monroeville, Alabama.

'Irrevocable' interest

In the lawsuit, Lee alleges that when her long-time literary agent, Eugene Winick, became ill in 2002, his son-in-law, Mr Pinkus, switched several of Mr Winick's clients to his own company.

Mr Pinkus is alleged to have transferred the rights to secure himself "irrevocable" interest in the income derived from Lee's book.

He also sought to avoid paying legal obligations he owed to his father-in-law's company for royalties, according to the lawsuit.

It is further alleged that Mr Pinkus failed to respond to offers on e-book rights and a request for assistance related to the book's 50th anniversary.

The lawsuit bids the court to assign any rights in the book owned by Mr Pinkus to Lee and asks that she be returned any commission he took from 2007 onwards.

Mr Pinkus did not immediately respond to an email from Reuters news agency seeking comment.

Set in Depression-era, small-town Alabama, To Kill A Mockingbird tells the story of a lawyer who defends a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22409195





U.K. Publishers Hit Book Sales Record for 2012 Amid Digital Growth
Georg Szalai

Spending on printed and digital books rose 4 percent to more than $5.1 billion, with "Fifty Shades of Grey" and "Hunger Games" among the bestsellers.

British publishers brought in their highest-ever annual sales in 2012, with stronger sales for digital formats outweighing a slight decline in printed books.

Overall, spending on printed and digital books rose 4 percent to more than $5.1 billion (£3.3 billion) last year, the Publishers Association said late in the week.

Printed books saw a 1 percent sales drop to $4.5 billion (£2.9 billion), but digital sales jumped 66 percent to $640 million (£411 million).

The Publishers Association didn't mention any specific book titles as drivers of growth, but Nielsen Bookscan previously said that EL James' Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy topped the British chart of retail book sales.

Other big sellers of 2012 included Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games series and JK Rowling's first non-Harry Potter novel, The Casual Vacancy.

Digital formats, including e-books, audiobooks and online book subscriptions, accounted for 12 percent of the total value of sales in 2012, up from 8 percent in 2011 and 5 percent in 2010.

Sales of consumer e-books, which are in the field of mainstream fiction and non-fiction, were up 134 percent to $336 million (£216 million).

Physical sales of fiction books also grew last year, rising 3 percent.

Richard Mollet, CEO of the Publishers Association, said the latest figures show the business opportunities of digital."British publishing is a healthy industry which continues to grow," he said. "The continued increase in digital sales across different disciplines illustrates the shift of readers to e-book reading.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/new...k-sales-451569





The Coming War Against Personal Photography and Video
Lauren Weistein

Are you ready for the imagery war -- the war against personal photography and capturing of video? You'd better be.

The title of this piece actually isn't entirely accurate. In some ways, this war isn't just coming, it's already begun. Forces are lining up on both sides, under the radar for most of us so far, but preparing for action. And right now, if I had to place a bet (cash, not bitcoins, please), I'd reluctantly have to predict the anti-imagery folks have the better chance of winning.

There are many facets to this struggle, and they interact in complicated and sometimes even seemingly contradictory ways. It's largely a battle pitting technology against a range of personal sensibilities -- and politics will be playing an enormous role.

And please note the following well -- if we techies attempt to argue that no significant relevant issues actually exist, if we are perceived to be arrogant in our reactions to the various concerns being expressed, we are likely to be steamrolled by the opposition.

I said there were contradictory forces in play, and man, do I mean it.

In the aftermath of the Boston bombings -- cameras were everywhere there -- which while horrendous and tragic, killed and injured fewer people than just a few days of "routine" gun violence here in the USA, we're hearing the predictable calls for vastly expanded government-operated video surveillance networks, even though virtually every study shows that while these systems may be useful in solving crimes after the fact, they are of little to no use in preventing crime or terrorism in the first place. This has proven true even in cities like London, where there's a camera focused on pretty much every individual pimple on each Londoner's face.

In some cities, like New York, the surveillance-industrial complex has its fangs deeply into government for the big bucks. It's there we heard the Police Commissioner -- just hours ago, really -- claim that "privacy is off the table."

And of course, there's the rise of wearable cameras and microphones by law enforcement, generally bringing praise from people who assume they will reduce police misconduct, but also dangerously ignoring a host of critical questions.

Will officers be able to choose when the video is running? How will the video be protected from tampering? How long will it be archived? Can it be demanded by courts? Divorce lawyers? Insurance companies? Can it be enhanced and used to trigger prosecutions of new crimes, perhaps based on items in private homes captured on video when officers enter? What will be the penalties when clips of these videos, often involving people in personal situations of high drama and embarrassment, often through no fault of their own, leak onto video sharing sites?

All of this and more is the gung-ho, government surveillance side of the equation.

But what about the personal photography and video side? What of individual or corporate use of these technologies in public and private spaces?

Will the same politicians promoting government surveillance in all its glory take a similar stance toward nongovernmental applications?

Writing already on the wall suggests not.

Inklings of the battles to come are already visible, if you know where to look.

The push-backs against Google Street View -- more pronounced outside the USA to date but always simmering in the background -- are one obvious example. Even though this imagery is captured either from public thoroughfares or with explicit permission, this extremely useful service has generated considerable angst, and even though the concerns are way overblown, we can't deny the angst itself is real and of political note.

An ironic side note. People not infrequently send me emails asking if I can tell them how to have their homes removed from Street View. I point them at the established procedure, but I always mention that having a gap in the imagery where your home should be is more likely to attract attention to it than anything else. That never seems to dissuade them, however. We're dealing with emotion, not logic.

Governments -- while ever expanding their own surveillance regimes -- can be extremely antagonistic to personal photography.

Only recently has a broad right for individuals to record police activities in public places been established by courts, and trying to exercise that right can still net you a club across the face and a trip to a cell. Individuals are routinely harassed when taking hobby photos of railroads, or bridges, or storefronts -- or pretty much anything these days, based on asserted (but generally unsupportable) security or privacy grounds.

Anti-paparazzi laws restricting personal photography have begun appearing, as have a variety of laws aimed at the perverted practice of "upskirting" -- both classes of laws often subject to much broader interpretation by overzealous authorities.

Laws have been proposed restricting aerial photography in general, and drone-based video capture in particular (the latter already seeing considerable political traction).

And as an outgrowth of parental concerns (particularly regarding third-party Internet postings of associated still and video photography) there are efforts underway to restrict public photography of children by other than their parents -- in a wide variety of public locales -- a topic with a particularly powerful influence on politicians, we should remember.

Laymen often assume that if you're in a public place, you can legally do pretty much whatever you want in these sorts of contexts.

But that's not always true, and is subject to the whims of our increasingly toxic political environment.

For example, many people believe that you can legally, secretly record conversations in public. But this varies state by state. In California, for example, under most circumstances you cannot legally record a conversation, even in public settings, unless all parties to the conversation agree. This holds true regardless of the recording medium -- anything from an old tape machine to the latest wearable video device.

This holds true in mobile environments like personal cars as well, though governmental regulatory focus in that respect is more likely to be aimed initially at perceived cognitive distraction issues.

At the federal level, there is already a concerted push to tightly regulate both handheld and hands-free devices, with a special emphasis on any devices in the visual field that can be used for texting, display of movies, or pretty much anything else. The irony here is that while one could argue that, for example, a wearable GPS mapping display would be less distracting than glancing over at a dash-mounted screen, the capabilities of these devices to engage in a broad range of other potentially more distracting activities will likely attract the attention of insurance companies and regulators (this is actually already a topic of discussion among both groups).

There is in fact something of a possible worst case scenario that we would be foolish to ignore. While techies and many others will be enamored with and responsible in their use of wearable video/audio gear like Google Glass, the potential exists for this class of technology in mass deployment to trigger significant political and regulatory backlash that could negatively affect other types of photography as well -- everything from expensive cameras to the image capturing capabilities of cellphones.

To understand this risk we must remember that politicians generally take the path of least resistance with the highest "CYA" potential.

While spy-cams and other similar tech have long existed, the widespread availability of wearable gear outside that context (note we're not talking only about Google Glass, but the inevitable cheap knock-offs that will not meet Google standards) could, for example, trigger nervous parents' worst fears.

There will be a significant percentage of the population -- including in stores, restaurants, other businesses, or wherever, who will be concerned that in the restroom, or the gym, or the strategy meeting, or wherever, that they just aren't sure that the guy with the glasses isn't actually recording or streaming at that moment. People who have heard stories of malware accessing webcams without lighting the activity lights may never quite trust such signals again.

One would hope that politeness, common sense, and evolving voluntary social conventions would deal with these issues appropriately, reducing the pressure for governmental involvement.

But again, we're dealing here with emotion more than logic, and emotion makes laws. Bad laws usually, but laws nonetheless. And laws are often written with the minority of people who are bad actors in mind, not the bulk of reasonable folks.

We all still end up having to live with these laws, in any case.

I don't have a "magic wand" solution for this situation.

My gut feeling though is that we'd be making an enormous mistake by appearing arrogant about these matters.

Already, in various venues where enthusiastic supporters of such technology gather, the primary attitude most visibly espoused has been to dismiss those persons expressing concerns about these technologies as being "out of touch" or easily ignored or beneath contempt.

If you really want to have politicians and regulators come down like a ton of bricks not only on this technology, but on other aspects of personal photography as well, then by all means continue with that demeanor.

On the other hand, if you'd prefer a more beneficial outcome all around, I'd strongly urge putting aside any arrogance, and instead working with others to engage politicians and regulators in reasoned, logical discussions that actually address their concerns (whether we personally feel that those concerns are valid or not) in a cooperative way. Otherwise, we're likely setting ourselves up for a big fall.

It would be ironic indeed if in the war against personal photography and video, those of us wanting the maximal possible photographic freedom allowed our own swagger to effectively point our own "weapons" at our own heads.
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001022.html





Panel Seeks to Fine Tech Companies for Noncompliance with Wiretap Orders
Ellen Nakashima

A government task force is preparing legislation that would pressure companies such as Face#book and Google to enable law enforcement officials to intercept online communications as they occur, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the effort.

Driven by FBI concerns that it is unable to tap the Internet communications of terrorists and other criminals, the task force’s proposal would penalize companies that failed to heed wiretap orders — court authorizations for the government to intercept suspects’ communications.

Rather than antagonizing companies whose cooperation they need, federal officials typically back off when a company is resistant, industry and former officials said. But law enforcement officials say the cloak drawn on suspects’ online activities — what the FBI calls the “going dark” problem — means that critical evidence can be missed.

“The importance to us is pretty clear,” Andrew Weissmann, the FBI’s general counsel, said last month at an American Bar Association discussion on legal challenges posed by new technologies. “We don’t have the ability to go to court and say, ‘We need a court order to effectuate the intercept.’ Other countries have that. Most people assume that’s what you’re getting when you go to a court.”

There is currently no way to wiretap some of these communications methods easily, and companies effectively have been able to avoid complying with court orders. While the companies argue that they have no means to facilitate the wiretap, the government, in turn, has no desire to enter into what could be a drawn-out contempt proceeding.

Under the draft proposal, a court could levy a series of escalating fines, starting at tens of thousands of dollars, on firms that fail to comply with wiretap orders, according to persons who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. A company that does not comply with an order within a certain period would face an automatic judicial inquiry, which could lead to fines. After 90 days, fines that remain unpaid would double daily.

Instead of setting rules that dictate how the wiretap capability must be built, the proposal would let companies develop the solutions as long as those solutions yielded the needed data. That flexibility was seen as inevitable by those crafting the proposal, given the range of technology companies that might receive wiretap orders. Smaller companies would be exempt from the fines.

The proposal, however, is likely to encounter resistance, said industry officials and privacy advocates.

“This proposal is a non-starter that would drive innovators overseas and cost American jobs,” said Greg Nojeim, a senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, which focuses on issues of privacy and security. “They might as well call it the Cyber Insecurity and Anti-Employment Act.”

The Obama administration has not yet signed off on the proposal. Justice Department, FBI and White House officials declined to comment. Still, Weissmann said at the ABA discussion that the issue is the bureau’s top legislative priority this year, but he declined to provide details about the proposal.

Increased urgency

The issue of online surveillance has taken on added urgency with the explosion of social media and chat services and the proliferation of different types of online communication. Technology firms are seen as critical sources of information about crime and terrorism suspects.

“Today, if you’re a tech company that’s created a new and popular way to communicate, it’s only a matter of time before the FBI shows up with a court order to read or hear some conversation,” said Michael Sussmann, a former federal prosecutor and a partner at the law firm Perkins Coie’s Washington office who represents technology firms. “If the data can help solve crimes, the government will be interested.”

Some technology companies have developed a wiretap capability for some of their services. But a range of communications companies and services are not required to do so under what is known as CALEA, the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. Among those services are social media networks and the chat features on online gaming sites.

Former officials say the challenge for investigators was exacerbated in 2010, when Google began end-to-end encryption of its e-mail and text messages after its networks were hacked. Facebook followed suit. That made it more difficult for the FBI to intercept e-mail by serving a court order on the Internet service provider, whose pipes would carry the encrypted traffic.

The proposal would make clear that CALEA extends to Internet phone calls conducted between two computer users without going through a central company server — what is sometimes called “peer-to-peer” communication. But the heart of the proposal would add a provision to the 1968 Wiretap Act that would allow a court to levy fines.

Challenges abound

One former senior Justice Department official,?who is not privy to details of the draft proposal, said law enforcement officials are not seeking to expand their surveillance authorities. Rather, said Kenneth L. Wainstein, assistant attorney general for national security from 2006 to 2008, officials are seeking “to make sure their existing authorities can be applied across the full range of communications technologies.”

Proponents say adding an enforcement provision to the 1968 Wiretap Act is a more politically palatable way of achieving that goal than by amending CALEA to redefine what types of companies should be covered. Industry and privacy experts, including some former government officials, are skeptical.

“There will be widespread disagreement over what the law requires,” said Albert Gidari Jr., a partner at Perkins Coie’s flagship Seattle office who represents telecommunications companies. “It takes companies into a court process over issues that don’t belong in court but rather in standards bodies with technical expertise.”

Some experts said a few companies will resist because they believe they might lose customers who have privacy concerns. Google, for instance, prides itself on protecting its search service from law enforcement surveillance, though it might comply in other areas, such as e-mail. And Skype has lost some of its cachet as a secure communications alternative now that it has been bought by Microsoft and is reportedly complying with wiretap orders.

Susan Landau, a former Sun Microsystems distinguished engineer, has argued that wiring in an intercept capability will increase the likelihood that a company’s servers will be hacked. “What you’ve done is created a way for someone to silently go in and activate a wiretap,” she said. Traditional phone communications were susceptible to illicit surveillance as a result of the 1994 law, she said, but the problem “becomes much worse when you move to an Internet or computer-based network.”

Marcus Thomas, former assistant director of the FBI’s Operational Technology Division, said good software coders can create an intercept capability that is secure. “But to do so costs money,” he said, noting the extra time and expertise needed to develop, test and operate such a service.

A huge challenge, officials agree, is how to gain access to peer-to-peer communications. Another challenge is making sense of encrypted communications.

Thomas said officials need to strike a balance between the needs of law enforcement and those of the technology companies.

“You want to give law enforcement the ability to have the data they’re legally entitled to get, at the same time not burdening industry and not opening up security holes,” he said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...f71_story.html





Why FBI and CIA Didn't Connect the Dots
Bruce Schneier

The FBI and the CIA are being criticized for not keeping better track of Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the months before the Boston Marathon bombings. How could they have ignored such a dangerous person? How do we reform the intelligence community to ensure this kind of failure doesn't happen again?

It's an old song by now, one we heard after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and after the Underwear Bomber's failed attack in 2009. The problem is that connecting the dots is a bad metaphor, and focusing on it makes us more likely to implement useless reforms.

Connecting the dots in a coloring book is easy and fun. They're right there on the page, and they're all numbered. All you have to do is move your pencil from one dot to the next, and when you're done, you've drawn a sailboat. Or a tiger. It's so simple that 5-year-olds can do it.

But in real life, the dots can only be numbered after the fact. With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to draw lines from a Russian request for information to a foreign visit to some other piece of information that might have been collected.

Opinion: Agencies often miss warning signs of attacks

In hindsight, we know who the bad guys are. Before the fact, there are an enormous number of potential bad guys.

How many? We don't know. But we know that the no-fly list had 21,000 people on it last year. The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, also known as the watch list, has 700,000 names on it.

We have no idea how many potential "dots" the FBI, CIA, NSA and other agencies collect, but it's easily in the millions. It's easy to work backwards through the data and see all the obvious warning signs. But before a terrorist attack, when there are millions of dots -- some important but the vast majority unimportant -- uncovering plots is a lot harder.

Rather than thinking of intelligence as a simple connect-the-dots picture, think of it as a million unnumbered pictures superimposed on top of each other. Or a random-dot stereogram. Is it a sailboat, a puppy, two guys with pressure-cooker bombs or just an unintelligible mess of dots? You try to figure it out.

It's not a matter of not enough data, either.

Piling more data onto the mix makes it harder, not easier. The best way to think of it is a needle-in-a-haystack problem; the last thing you want to do is increase the amount of hay you have to search through.

The television show "Person of Interest" is fiction, not fact.

There's a name for this sort of logical fallacy: hindsight bias.

First explained by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, it's surprisingly common. Since what actually happened is so obvious once it happens, we overestimate how obvious it was before it happened.

We actually misremember what we once thought, believing that we knew all along that what happened would happen. It's a surprisingly strong tendency, one that has been observed in countless laboratory experiments and real-world examples of behavior. And it's what all the post-Boston-Marathon bombing dot-connectors are doing.

Before we start blaming agencies for failing to stop the Boston bombers, and before we push "intelligence reforms" that will shred civil liberties without making us any safer, we need to stop seeing the past as a bunch of obvious dots that need connecting.

Kahneman, a Nobel prize winner, wisely noted: "Actions that seemed prudent in foresight can look irresponsibly negligent in hindsight." Kahneman calls it "the illusion of understanding," explaining that the past is only so understandable because we have cast it as simple inevitable stories and leave out the rest.

Nassim Taleb, an expert on risk engineering, calls this tendency the "narrative fallacy." We humans are natural storytellers, and the world of stories is much more tidy, predictable and coherent than the real world.

Millions of people behave strangely enough to warrant the FBI's notice, and almost all of them are harmless. It is simply not possible to find every plot beforehand, especially when the perpetrators act alone and on impulse.

We have to accept that there always will be a risk of terrorism, and that when the occasional plot succeeds, it's not necessarily because our law enforcement systems have failed.
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/02/op...ing/index.html





Lady Liberty’s Watching You

I wanted to write about face-recognition software considered for use at the statue. Here’s what happened.
Ryan Gallagher

The Statue of Liberty is getting a facelift, though the changes aren’t only cosmetic. An upgraded "state of the art" security system will help keep Lady Liberty safe when it reopens soon. But what does the system entail, and could it involve a controversial new face-recognition technology that can detect visitors’ ethnicity from a distance? I tried to find out—and a New York surveillance company tried to stop me.

Face recognition was first implemented at the Statue of Liberty in 2002 as part of an attempt to spot suspected terrorists whose mug shots were stored on a federal database. At the time, the initiative was lambasted by the American Civil Liberties Union, which said it was so ineffective that “Osama Bin Laden himself” could easily dodge it.

But the technology has advanced since then: Late last year, trade magazine Police Product Insight reported that a trial of the latest face-recognition software was being planned at the Statue of Liberty for the end of 2012 to “help law enforcement and intelligence agencies spot suspicious activity.” New York surveillance camera contractor Total Recall Corp. was quoted as having told the magazine that it was set for trial at the famed tourist attraction software called FaceVACS, made by German firm Cognitec. FaceVACS, Cognitec boasts in marketing materials, can guess ethnicity based on a person’s skin color, flag suspects on watch lists, estimate the age of a person, detect gender, “track” faces in real time, and help identify suspects if they have tried to evade detection by putting on glasses, growing a beard, or changing their hairstyle. Some versions of face-recognition software used today remain ineffective, as investigators found in the aftermath of the Boston bombings. But Cognitec claims its latest technology has a far higher accuracy rating—and is certainly more advanced than the earlier versions of face-recognition software, like the kind used at the Statue of Liberty back in 2002. (It is not clear whether the face-recognition technology remained in use at the statue after 2002.)

Liberty Island took such a severe battering during Sandy that it has stayed closed to the public ever since—thwarting the prospect of a pilot of the new software. But the statue, which attracts more than 3 million visitors annually according to estimates, is finally due to open again on July 4. In March, Statue of Liberty superintendent Dave Luchsinger told me that plans were underway to install an upgraded surveillance system in time for the reopening. “We are moving forward with the proposal that Total Recall has come up with,” he said, adding that “[new] systems are going in, and I know they are state of the art.” When it came to my questions about face recognition, though, things started to get murky. Was that particular project back on track? “We do work with Cognitec, but right now because of what happened with Sandy it put a lot of different pilots that we are doing on hold,” Peter Millius, Total Recall’s director of business development, said in a phone call. “It’s still months away, and the facial recognition right now is not going to be part of this phase.” Then, he put me hold and came back a few minutes later with a different position—insisting that the face-recognition project had in fact been “vetoed” by the Park Police and adding that I was “not authorized” to write about it.

That was weird, but it soon got weirder. About an hour after I spoke with Total Recall, an email from Cognitec landed in my inbox. It was from the company’s marketing manager, Elke Oberg, who had just one day earlier told me in a phone interview that “yes, they are going to try out our technology there” in response to questions about a face-recognition pilot at the statue. Now, Oberg had sent a letter ordering me to “refrain from publishing any information about the use of face recognition at the Statue of Liberty.” It said that I had “false information,” that the project had been “cancelled,” and that if I wrote about it, there would be “legal action.” Total Recall then separately sent me an almost identical letter—warning me not to write “any information about Total Recall and the Statue of Liberty or the use of face recognition at the Statue of Liberty.” Both companies declined further requests for comment, and Millius at Total Recall even threatened to take legal action against me personally if I continued to “harass” him with additional questions.

Linda Friar, a National Park Service spokeswoman, confirmed that the procurement process for security screening equipment is ongoing, but she refused to comment on whether the camera surveillance system inside the statue was being upgraded on the grounds that it was “sensitive information.” So will there be a trial of new face-recognition software—or did the Park Police “cancel” or “veto” this? It would probably be easier to squeeze blood from a stone than to obtain answers to those questions. “I’m not going to show my hand as far as what security technologies we have,” Greg Norman, Park Police captain at Liberty Island, said in a brief phone interview.

The great irony here, of course, is that this is a story about a statue that stands to represent freedom and democracy in the modern world. Yet at the heart of it are corporations issuing crude threats in an attempt to stifle legitimate journalism—and by extension dictate what citizens can and cannot know about the potential use of contentious surveillance tools used to monitor them as they visit that very statue. Whether Cognitec's ethnicity-detecting face recognition software will eventually implemented at Lady Liberty remains to be seen. What is certain, however, is that the attempt to silence reporting on the mere prospect of it is part of an alarming wider trend to curtail discussion about new security technologies that are (re)shaping society.
http://www.slate.com/articles/techno...cognition.html





Dutch Bill Seeks to Give Law Enforcement Hacking Powers

Dutch law enforcement should be allowed to break into computers outside the Netherlands when necessary, the draft bill said
Loek Essers

The Dutch government today presented a draft bill that aims to give law enforcement the power to hack into computer systems -- including those located in foreign countires -- to do research, gather and copy evidence or block access to certain data.

Law enforcement should be allowed to block access to child pornography, read emails that contain information exchanged between criminals and also be able to place taps on communication, according to a draft bill published Thursday and signed by Ivo Opstelten, the Minister of Security and Justice. Government agents should also be able to engage in activities such as turning on a suspect's phone GPS to track their location, the bill said.

Opstelten announced last October he was planning to craft this bill.

Encryption of electronic data is increasingly becoming a problem for the police if they want to place taps, the draft reads. Services like Gmail and Twitter use standard encryption and many other services like Facebook and Hotmail provide encryption as an option while some smartphones automatically encrypt communication, it said. Moreover, services like Skype, WhatsApp and VPN-services can easily be encrypted.

Right now, the law enforcement agencies do not have the ability to adequately cope with encryption during criminal investigations, and this needs to change, according to the bill.

Another problem is tackling distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that recently have been used to cripple the online services of Dutch banks and DigiD, an identity management platform used by Dutch government agencies. Criminals can use botnets paralyze vital parts of society and law enforcement needs better measures to deal with them, the bill's authors argued.

To disable a botnet it is necessary to access the command and control servers that control the botnet which can be located in a foreign country, according to the bill. The new investigative powers would also allow law enforcement to infiltrate computers or servers located in foreign countries if the location of those computers cannot be determined.

The bill also aims to force suspects who possess child pornography and suspects who are linked to terrorism activities to decrypt files on their computers. Ignoring such a decryption demand can lead to a maximum penalty of three years imprisonment.

Fencing of stolen data would also become punishable in order to prevent the misuse of stolen data that is published on the Internet after a hack or burglary. Publishing stolen data could land offenders in prison for a maximum of one year.

The bill foresees strict safeguards for the use of the new powers such as a the approval of a judge, the certification of software used and keeping logs of the investigation data.

The draft bill immediately drew criticism.

"It is important that the government wants to combat cybercrime but this proposal is rushed: it is unnecessary and creates new security risks for citizens," said Simone Halink of Dutch digital rights organization Bits of Freedom in a blog post on Thursday. The proposal ignores alternatives, she said, adding that the police already has the power to fight online crime but lacks knowledge and manpower to do so efficiently. A better solution would be to increase police manpower instead of increasing their digital investigation powers, she added.

Moreover, the pending Dutch legislation could set an example for other governments which could start an arms race between hacking governments, she said. Governments should be closing security holes, and not leave them open, she said.

Bits of Freedom called on Dutch citizens to reach out to the government and asked the government to reconsider the bill.

At the moment the draft bill is in the consultation phase, meaning parties involved such as the police and other law enforcement as well as citizens and advisory bodies will be able to comment on it, ministry spokesman Wiebe Alkema said. Following that, the bill will be sent to sent to the Council of Ministers after which it will be sent to the Dutch Council of State, an advisory body on legislation. The bill will probably be send to the House of Representatives by the end of the year, he said.
http://www.itworld.com/it-management...hacking-powers





Antivirus Firms "Won't Co-Operate" with PC-Hacking Police
Nicole Kobie

Dutch police are set to get the power to hack people's computers as part of investigations - but antivirus experts say they won't help police reach their targets.

A bill before the Dutch government will give police the power to hack computers, read email and other files, and install spyware, according to the BBC. It would also give police the power to legally hack into overseas servers, if they were part of a denial-of-service attack, for example.

Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, said such requests won't only come from Dutch police, as authorities in other countries will increasingly ask for such powers - not least as most investigations already involve looking through smartphones or PCs.

"This isn't going to go away, it's only going to get more and more important. All countries will be wanting rights and regulations," he told PC Pro. "But the Dutch already had an unusually strong powers for the local police. They seem to be the forerunners in Europe, in how much rights police have to fight crime."

Hypponen said it's understandable why police want such powers, and admitted few would complain if it's used sparingly and only against guilty parties. However, there's no question that innocent people would get caught up in police investigations, making transparency key.

"They should have to have serious enough crimes to even request such strong tools to be used," he said. "And then, they should have to get a judge or court order, and even more importantly, they should afterwards make public how many citizens were hacked, and how many turned out to be guilty or innocent."

The zero-day bounty hunters

That last point is the most important, Hypponen said. "This is the key thing: if the police hack into your systems, the public needs to know," he said, calling for police to disclose what type of crimes the powers are used on, whether the police were successful in their hacking, and whether the targets turned out to be guilty or innocent.

He doesn't see such investigative hacking powers leading to an "arms race" between police and criminals, but between police and all citizens. "There will be guilty citizens and innocent citizens, and they will both be wanting to keep malware away from their computers."

That raises a problem for antivirus firms like his own, with antivirus firms potentially asked to cooperate with authorities to let an attack reach the target. So far, Hypponen hasn't seen a single antivirus vendor cooperate with such a request, and said his own firm wouldn't want to take part. Purely for business reasons, it doesn't make sense to fail to protect customers and let malware through "regardless of the source".

Bounty hunters

Whether police have the skills to successful hack into computers isn't clear, but Hypponen said it wouldn't be ideal for them to outsource such tasks. However, it's likely police would follow the lead of other government agencies - such as intelligence and security - and buy vulnerabilities from third-party firms.

"It’s not just government in this picture," he said. "Many of the exploits being stockpiled are actually being developed by third parties, such as defence contractors or private companies looking for vulnerabilities." And they, of course, have no motivation to hand flaws in software over to the affected companies.

"I don’t like this development in general," he said. "It used to be black and white. If you were breaking into systems, you were the bad guy – you were the evil one. Now, over the past five years, the situation is changing very rapidly, with governments entering the picture."
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/security...hacking-police





Chinese Hackers Infiltrate US Army Database, Compromise Safety Of Thousands Of Dams

Sensitive army website contained vulnerabilities of thousands of dams
Ryan W. Neal

Chinese hackers have infiltrated a sensitive U.S. Army database that contains information about the vulnerabilities of thousands of dams located throughout the United States. The hacking of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ National Inventory of Dams (NID) has raised concerns that information gathered in the attack could help China carry out a cyberattack on the national electrical power grid.

An unauthorized user traced to China hacked the NID database in January but wasn’t discovered until sometime in April.

Pete Pierce, a spokesperson from the Corps of Engineers, confirmed the attack but did not provide specific details.

“The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is aware that access to the National Inventory of Dams (NID), to include sensitive fields of information not generally available to the public, was given to an unauthorized individual in January 2013 who was subsequently determined not to have proper level of access for the information,” Pierce said in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon.

Pierce added that the access was immediately blocked once discovered, and that the NID is looking to bolster security to the database.

There are about 8,100 major dams in the U.S., and the NID has information about all of them, including the number of casualties expected if a dam were to fail.

In addition to causing a major disruption to the national power grid, hackers could access the systems that control a dam’s turbine generators. A computer mistakenly started one in a Russian damn in 2009, killing 75 people and destroying eight of the nine other turbines in the dam.
http://www.ibtimes.com/chinese-hacke...s-dams-1233737





With Florida Project, the Smart Grid Has Arrived

Smart grid technology has been implemented in many places, but Florida’s new deployment is the first full-scale system.
Kevin Bullis

The first comprehensive and large scale smart grid is now operating. The $800 million project, built in Florida, has made power outages shorter and less frequent, and helped some customers save money, according to the utility that operates it.

Smart grids should be far more resilient than conventional grids, which is important for surviving storms, and make it easier to install more intermittent sources of energy like solar power (see “China Tests a Small Smart Electric Grid” and “On the Smart Grid, a Watt Saved Is a Watt Earned”). The Recovery Act of 2009 gave a vital boost to the development of smart grid technology, and the Florida grid was built with $200 million from the U.S. Department of Energy made available through the Recovery Act.

Dozens of utilities are building smart grids—or at least installing some smart grid components, but no one had put together all of the pieces at a large scale. Florida Power & Light’s project incorporates a wide variety of devices for monitoring and controlling every aspect of the grid, not just, say, smart meters in people’s homes.

“What is different is the breadth of what FPL’s done,” says Eric Dresselhuys, executive vice president of global development at Silver Spring Networks, a company that’s setting up smart grids around the world, and installed the network infrastructure for Florida Power & Light (see “Headed into an IPO, Smart Grid Company Struggles for Profit”).

Many utilities are installing smart meters—Pacific Gas & Electric in California has installed twice as many as FPL, for example. But while these are important, the flexibility and resilience that the smart grid promises depends on networking those together with thousands of sensors at key points in the grid— substations, transformers, local distribution lines, and high voltage transmission lines. (A project in Houston is similar in scope, but involves half as many customers, and covers somewhat less of the grid.)

In FPL’s system, devices at all of these places are networked—data jumps from device to device until it reaches a router that sends it back to the utility—and that makes it possible to sense problems before they cause an outage, and to limit the extent and duration of outages that still occur (see “The Challenges of Big Data on the Smart Grid”). The project involved 4.5 million smart meters and over 10,000 other devices on the grid.

The project was completed just last week, so data about the impact of the whole system isn’t available yet. But parts of the smart grid have been operating for a year or more, and there are examples of improved operation. Customers can track their energy usage by the hour using a website that organizes data from smart meters. This helped one customer identify a problem with his air conditioner, says Bryan Olnick, vice president of smart grid solutions at Florida Power & Light, when he saw a jump in electricity consumption compared to the previous year in similar weather.

The meters have also cut the duration of power outages. Often power outages are caused by problems within a home, like a tripped circuit breaker. Instead of dispatching a crew to investigate, which could take hours, it is possible to resolve the issue remotely. That happened 42,000 times last year, reducing the duration of outages by about two hours in each case, Olnick says.

The utility also installed sensors that can continually monitor gases produced by transformers to “determine whether the transformer is healthy, is becoming sick, or is about to experience an outage,” says Mark Hura, global smart grid commercial leader at GE, which makes the sensor.

Ordinarily, utilities only check large transformers once every six months or less, he says. The process involves taking an oil sample and sending it to the lab. In one case this year, the new sensor system identified an ailing transformer in time to prevent a power outage that could have affected 45,000 people. Similar devices allowed the utility to identify 400 ailing neighborhood-level transformers before they failed.

Smart grid technology is having an impact elsewhere. After Hurricane Sandy, sensors helped utility workers in some areas restore power faster than in others. One problem smart grids address is nested power outages—when smaller problems are masked by an outage that hits a large area. In a conventional system, after utility workers fix the larger problem, it can take hours for them to realize that a downed line has cut off power to a small area. With the smart grid, utility workers can ping sensors at smart meters or power lines before they leave an area, identifying these smaller outages.

And smart grid devices are helping utilities identify problems that could otherwise go misdiagnosed for years. In Chicago, for example, new voltage monitors indicated that a neighborhood was getting the wrong voltage, a problem that could wear out appliances. The fix took a few minutes.

As more renewable energy is installed, the smart grid will make it easier for utilities to keep the lights on. Without local sensors, it’s difficult for them to know how much power is coming from solar panels—or how much backup they need to have available in case clouds roll in and that power drops.

But whether the nearly $1 billion investment in smart grid infrastructure will pay for itself remains to be seen. The DOE is preparing reports on the impact of the technology to be published this year and next. Smart grid technology is also raising questions about security, since the networks could offer hackers new targets (see “Hacking the Smart Grid”).
http://www.technologyreview.com/news...d-has-arrived/





Google Glass Jailbroken: Hacker Says Security is Ineffective
Author Joseph McDonnell

It didn’t take long but the high profile Google Glass has already been jailbroken. Infamous Android and iOS hacker Jay Freeman (otherwise known as Saurik) has told the community that he has ‘rooted’ his Google Glass headset.

He published a picture online showing his jailbroken device. He published a detailed online report of how the exploit was achieved. This means other people can copy the procedure to jailbreak theirs if they want. He also highlighted how poor the security on the device is.

ZDNET writer Jason Perlow spoke to Freeman and said “ As Freeman explained to me during a phone interview, although there’s no recording indicator per se, if you are being recorded, it’s readily apparent from video activity being reflected off the wearer’s eye prism that something is going on, particularly if you are in close proximity to the person.

But that can be changed once a Glass headset is rooted. Because Glass is an Android device, runs an ARM-based Linux kernel, and can run Android user space programs and custom libraries, any savvy developer can create code that modifies the default behavior in such a way that recording can occur with no display activity showing in the eye prism whatsoever.

And while the default video recording is 10 seconds, code could also be written that begins and stops recording for as long as needed with a custom gesture or head movement, or even innocuous custom voice commands like: “Boy, I’m tired” to begin, and “Boy, I need coffee” to end it.

You could write and side load an application that polls the camera and takes a still photo every 30 seconds, should you say … want to “case” and thoroughly photodocument a place of business prior to committing a crime, or even engage in corporate espionage. Or simply capture ambient audio from unsuspecting people around you.”
http://www.kitguru.net/channel/josep...s-ineffective/





EFF: Trust Twitter -- But Not Apple or Verizon -- to Protect Your Privacy

Report reveals tech companies that actively protect user information from government scrutiny
Tim Greene

Verizon and MySpace scored a zero out of a possible six stars in a test of how far 18 technology service providers will go to protect user data from government data demands.

Twitter and Internet service provider Sonic.net scored a perfect six in the third annual Electronic Frontier Foundation "Who Has Your Back?" report.

The purpose of the report is to inform the public about how well privacy is protected but also to encourage lagging companies to do better and to be more transparent about the requests for data they receive from government agencies, says EFF Senior Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann.

Apple, AT&T and Yahoo each scored just one star, ranking at the bottom with Verizon and MySpace.

Verizon and MySpace are chronically at the bottom of the heap, the report says. "We remain disappointed by the overall poor showing of ISPs like AT&T and Verizon in our best practice categories," it says.

Dropbox, Google, LinkedIn and SpiderOak all scored five out of six to tie for second place behind Twitter and Sonic.net.

The remaining seven companies that fell somewhere in between are: Amazon (2); Comcast (2); Facebook (3); Foursquare (4); Microsoft (4); Tumblr (3); and WordPress (4).

The companies are measured in six categories and given a star or not. The categories: Requiring warrants before delivering content; telling users about government requests for their data; publishing reports that list agencies that made requests; publishing guidelines they have for responding to government requests; going to court to fight for users privacy; lobbying Congress to establish privacy rights by joining the Digital Due Process coalition .

The report comes down pretty hard on Amazon, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple and AT&T. "Amazon holds huge quantities of information as part of its cloud computing services and retail operations, yet does not promise to inform users when their data is sought by the government, produce annual transparency reports, or publish a law enforcement guide," the report says.

"Facebook has yet to publish a transparency report. Yahoo! has a public record of standing up for user privacy in courts, but it hasn't earned recognition in any of our other categories. Apple and AT&T are members of the Digital Due Process coalition, but don't observe any of the other best practices we're measuring."

In the report Google is singled out as backsliding on whether it notifies users when the government asks to see their data. The company introduced ambiguity into its stance and so lost credit it had been awarded in previous years, the report says.

Google also earned special recognition for challenging a National Security Letter demanding access to user data. A star is awarded "when a company goes above and beyond for its users, as Google did this year," the EFF report says. Microsoft earned similar praise.

Microsoft and Twitter both started publishing transparency reports this year, joining five others, the report notes.

The most strongly supported criteria is publishing the guidelines they use for determining how to respond to government requests. A dozen companies do so, which is up seven from last year.

Tumblr and WordPress were added this year to the list of companies reported on, "but are already making a strong showing," the report says.

The list of companies included in the report has changed over the years. Initially in 2011, EFF chose the largest U.S. social networks, ISPs, and email providers and tossed in Apple and Skype because of the sensitive user data they store. A public vote to add one more company resulted in choosing Dropbox.

Foursquare and Loopt were added last year because they hold location data. This year Loopt was dropped because it has been sold. Similarly Skype was dropped because it was bought by Microsoft.

Also in 2012 EFF added SpiderOak to beef up the number of cloud storage providers.

"There's a lot to celebrate in this report, but also plenty of room for improvement," said EFF Staff Attorney Nate Cardozo in a printed statement. "Service providers hold huge amounts of our personal data, and the government shouldn't be able to fish around in this information without good reason and a court making sure there's no abuse."
https://www.networkworld.com/news/20...cy-269280.html





Spyware Used By Governments Poses as Firefox, and Mozilla is Angry

Mozilla sends cease and desist letter to maker of FinFisher software.
Jon Brodkin

Mozilla has sent a cease-and-desist letter to a company that sells spyware allegedly disguised as the Firefox browser to governments. The action follows a report by Citizen Lab, which identifies 36 countries (including the US) hosting command and control servers for FinFisher, a type of surveillance software. Also known as FinSpy, the software is sold by UK-based Gamma International to governments, which use it in criminal investigations and allegedly for spying on dissidents.

Mozilla revealed yesterday in its blog that it has sent the cease and desist letter to Gamma "demanding that these illegal practices stop immediately." Gamma's software is "designed to trick people into thinking it's Mozilla Firefox," Mozilla noted. (Mozilla declined to provide a copy of the cease and desist letter to Ars.)

The spyware doesn't infect Firefox itself, so a victim's browser isn't at risk. But the spyware "uses our brand and trademarks to lie and mislead as one of its methods for avoiding detection and deletion" and is "used by Gamma’s customers to violate citizens’ human rights and online privacy," Mozilla said. Mozilla continues:

Through the work of the Citizen Lab research team, we believe Gamma’s spyware tries to give users the false impression that, as a program installed on their computer or mobile device, it’s related to Mozilla and Firefox, and is thus trustworthy both technically and in its content. This is accomplished in two ways:

1. When a user examines the installed spyware on his/her machine by viewing its properties, Gamma misrepresents its program as “Firefox.exe” and includes the properties associated with Firefox along with a version number and copyright and trademark claims attributed to “Firefox and Mozilla Developers.”

2. For an expert user who examines the underlying code of the installed spyware, Gamma includes verbatim the assembly manifest from Firefox software.

The Citizen Lab research team has provided us with samples from the following three instances that demonstrate how this misuse of our brand, trademarks and public trust is a designed feature of Gamma’s spyware products and not unique to a single customer’s deployment:

• A spyware attack in Bahrain aimed at pro-democracy activists;
• The recent discovery of Gamma’s spyware apparently in use amidst Malaysia’s upcoming General Elections; and
• A promotional demo produced by Gamma.

Each sample demonstrates the exact same pattern of falsely designating the installed spyware as originating from Mozilla. Gamma’s own brochures and promotional videos tout one of the essential features of its surveillance software is that it can be covertly deployed on the person’s system and remain undetected.


FinFisher doesn't just masquerade as Firefox. The Citizen Lab report says it has also been used to target Malay language speakers by "masquerading as a document discussing Malaysia’s upcoming 2013 General Elections."

The countries where Citizen Lab identified FinFisher command-and-control servers are Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Brunei, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, Estonia, Ethiopia, Germany, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malaysia, Mexico, Mongolia, Netherlands, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Qatar, Romania, Serbia, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, and Vietnam.

We've asked Gamma if the company has a response to Mozilla's cease and desist letter but haven't heard back yet.
http://arstechnica.com/information-t...illa-is-angry/





Who is Tracking You Across the Web? Even the Ad Industry Doesn’t Know

Web tracking has become so widespread that nobody knows who all these companies are or what data they're collecting.
Dan Tynan

Anyone who’s been following the twists and turns of the raging Do Not Track debate knows that both sides are still pretty far apart. Privacy advocates want consumers to have the ability to block all tracking. Period, full stop.

Advertisers claim that without tracking, the “free” Internet as we know it would die. They also claim that, if people could only see how benign data collection is and how it benefits them, they would happily agree to be tracked all the livelong day. (Despite the fact that half a dozen consumer surveys indicate the exact opposite.) This is what advertisers like to call “transparency.”

So let’s take Sears.com as an example. Sears is not a publisher in the traditional sense. Its business model does not rely on advertising. Sears exists to sell people dishwashers – and really, to sell extended warranties on those dishwashers, charged to a Sears credit card with a 24 percent annual interest rate.

But when you visit Sears.com, this is what happens.

This image comes via TrackerMap, a new service being marketed to Web publishers by Evidon. TrackerMap uses data collected by the Ghostery browser tool to display the various entities that take up residence on your computer when you visit a site. Some of these entities just deliver the ads, some record who viewed them, some collect analytics data on Web traffic, and some are behavioral trackers that use cookies to follow you around the Web so they can build profiles of you and your habits. (Often, comically inaccurate ones.)

As you can see from the map, most of these trackers have no direct relationship with Sears. They are brought in by other companies like BrightTag and Rubicon, who in turn bring in their own tracking and analytics friends. It’s like a party on your hard drive, only you haven’t been invited.

(Evidon has a dozen sample tracking maps on its site, some even more complicated than this one. Their man purpose is to show publishers how all these uninvited bits of code slow down page loads, but they’re still fascinating to look at.)

My first question: Who the hell are all these companies? So I randomly picked one of the outlying ones, a tracking company called ToneFuse, and decided to take a closer look.

My first stop was Evidon’s database of tracking companies, which is supposed to offer transparency into the shadowy world of online tracking. Here’s how ToneFuse describes itself:

"ToneFuse is a marketing and monetization company centered around music. Our company caters to marketers and high traffic music properties in a number of ways."

What kind of data does ToneFuse collect? We don’t know, because ToneFuse doesn’t disclose that information. How does it use that information? Undisclosed. Who does it share that data with and how long does it keep it? Also undisclosed. ToneFuse is not a member of any of the self-regulatory groups set up by the online advertising industry. Want to tell ToneFuse to sod off? Sorry Charlie – there’s no opt-out option.

So much for all that transparency the ad industry keeps raving about. Not surprisingly, PrivacyScore gives ToneFuse a total of zero points out of 50.

It gets worse. Turns out ToneFuse has its roots in the ringtone merchant business, and also has dipped its toes in the ever popular lyrics site industry. Neither of those Web categories has what can be called a good reputation. Though I can find no evidence ToneFuse has ever done anything unsavory, at the very least it has not been keeping very good company.

Ki Mae Heussner of AdWeek had this to say about ToneFuse last year:

By pairing information about music preferences (from ToneFuse's ringtone product) with third-party data, the company says it has created 900 audience segments to help brands target consumers across some 100 publishers. The result is a slew of odd, non-intuitive insights. John Lennon fans, for instance, are 101 percent more likely to own pets while Rihanna lovers are 189 percent more likely to be interested in cruises.

In other words, ToneFuse is in the data mining business, along with just about everyone else.

I sent an email to ToneFuse asking what data it collects and what it does with it. I’m still waiting for a response. I also emailed Scott Meyer, CEO of Evidon, asking how consumers could be expected to navigate through a world where even the ad industry’s own watchdogs don’t know who many of these players are.

He wrote back:

I think you have hit on a key point. In this case, ToneFuse's lack of transparency has you as a consumer not feeling as comfortable as you would with another company that discloses more information. That's precisely why Ghostery users, who provide the anonymous, aggregated data that powers Evidon Encompass, typically chose to selectively block companies that are not as forthcoming with this type of information.

In the spirit of transparency, I also asked Evidon to analyze my personal Web site for tracking. What they sent back both surprised and appalled me:

It appears that the social media widget AddThis invited a bunch of its pals over for a kegger on my Web site and didn’t tell me. I quickly uninstalled it and booted all those freeloaders.

Three lessons here:

1. Transparency may sound good in theory, but in practice it’s kind of a nightmare. There’s either too much data to make an informed decision or not enough. It’s not a viable alternative to a true one-click Do Not Track option.

2. When even the ad industry can’t tell you who the trackers are, you know it’s gotten totally out of control.

3. Be careful whom you accuse of being a tracker -- you might be one of them.
http://www.itworld.com/it-management...try-don-t-know





This Is the Most Detailed Picture of the Internet Ever (and Making it Was Very Illegal)
Adam Clark Estes

Why would you need a map of the Internet? The Internet is not like the Grand Canyon. It is not a destination in a voyage that requires so many right turns and so many left turns. The Internet, as the name suggests and many of you already know, is nothing but the sum of decentralized connections between various interconnected computers that are speaking roughly the same language. To map out those connections and visualize the place where I spend so much of my time may not have any clear use, but it intrigues the pants off me.

An anonymous researcher with a lot of time on his hands apparently shares the sentiment. In a newly published research paper, this unnamed data junkie explains how he used some stupid simple hacking techniques to build a 420,000-node botnet that helped him draw the most detailed map of the Internet known to man. Not only does it show where people are logging in, it also shows changes in traffic patterns over time with an impressive amount of precision. This is all possible, of course, because the researcher hacked into nearly half a million computers so that he could ping each one, charting the resulting paths in order to make such a complex and detailed map. Along those lines, the project has as much to do with hacking as it does with mapping.

The resultant map isn't perfect, but it is beautiful. Based on the parameter's of the researcher's study, the map is already on its way to becoming obsolete, since it shows only devices with IPv4 addresses. (The latest standard is IPv6, but IPv4 is still pretty common.) The map is further limited to Linux-based computers with a certain amount of processing power. And finally, because of the parameters of the hack, it shows some amount of bias towards naive users who don't put passwords on their computers.

But on a general, half-a-million-computer level, this is what the Internet looks like in all of its gorgeous motion:

Hacking into 420,000 computers is highly illegal. If said researcher were caught in the United States, he likely be slapped with one violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for every computer breached and face something like 50 consecutive life sentences for the sum total. (I'm being sightly facetious here but only slightly.)

However, these were not sophisticated attacks. The researcher explains in his paper that his so-called "Carna Botnet" (named after the Roman goddess of physical health) targeted only essentially unprotected computers — that is, devices that required only an "admin" log-in and a blank password field or no log-in at all — that he set his code to run as lowest possible priority in the infected device to avoid interference, and also left a note behind explaining to the computers' owners that he'd used their computers for this research. He even left them an email address in case they had any questions about the project.

He's a very curious one, too. Essentially, the researcher explains, he did the giant hack slash map for fun, to see if it could be done. "I did not want to ask myself for the rest of my life how much fun it could have been or if the infrastructure I imagined in my head would have worked as expected," reads his report. "I saw the chance to really work on an Internet scale, command hundred thousands of devices with a click of my mouse, portscan and map the whole Internet in a way nobody had done before, basically have fun with computers and the Internet in a way very few people ever will."

This is what a static map of the botnet itself looks like with concentrations of its 420,000 nodes represented by different colors:

Notice how the computers that the researcher hacked become especially concentrated on China's east coast and virtually non-existent in Africa

The research also serves as another much-needed warning about Internet security. "A lot of devices and services we have seen during our research should never be connected to the public Internet at all. As a rule of thumb, if you believe that 'nobody would connect that to the Internet, really nobody', there are at least 1000 people who did," says the report. "Whenever you think 'that shouldn't be on the Internet but will probably be found a few times' it's there a few hundred thousand times. Like half a million printers, or a Million Webcams, or devices that have root as a root password."

It's entirely unclear if anybody will actually pursue this anonymous hacker for violating however many laws he violated. But data scientists are excited about the results regardless. "This is a great study which underlines the fact that once again exploitable weak links are abundant and ripe for compromise, even on embedded or industrial systems," cyber security professional Mark Bower told The Register. Mark Schloesser, security researcher at Rapid7, told the paper, "The actual research itself is noteworthy in that it is the most comprehensive Internet-wide scan." Schloesser added, "I'd like to see more projects of this kind, conducted legally, and sharing information about the real state of play on the internet.

Because at the end of the day, there's a fair amount of debate over what the real state of play on the Internet looks like. Some say it's a map of connections, others say it's a Tootsie Roll Pop made up of layer upon layer of activity. In an essay for The Baffler that we also published on Motherboard, Christine Smallwood described these various metaphors. She half-joked that the Internet is like a hot tub because it's "shared with friends and strangers, whose warm water swirls around you, lulling you into complacency while silently transmitting disease." How scary but true.

No matter how you like to picture the Internet or what you think it looks like, though, it's pretty safe to say that these visualizations will only become more complex. With cheap smartphones taking off in Africa and $20 tablets popping up in India, the world is becoming more connected by the minute. So in a few years' time that confetti-colored map of the world above will look less like chart of privilege and more like an acid trip of progress.
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/thi...-internet-ever





Cellphone Thefts Grow, But the Industry Looks the Other Way
Brian X. Chen and Malia Wollan

When a teenage boy snatched the iPhone out of Rose Cha’s hand at a bus stop in the Bronx in March, she reported the theft to her carrier and to the police — just as she had done two other times when she was the victim of cellphone theft. Again, the police said they could not help her.

Ms. Cha’s phone was entered in a new nationwide database for stolen cellphones, which tracks a phone’s unique identifying number to prevent it from being activated, theoretically discouraging thefts. But police officials say the database has not helped stanch the ever-rising numbers of phone thefts, in part because many stolen phones end up overseas, out of the database’s reach, and in part because the identifiers are easily modified.

Some law enforcement authorities, though, say there is a bigger issue — that carriers and handset makers have little incentive to fix the problem.

“The carriers are not innocent in this whole game. They are making profit off this,” said Cathy L. Lanier, chief of the police department of the District of Columbia, where a record 1,829 cellphones were taken in robberies last year.

George Gascón, San Francisco’s district attorney, says handset makers like Apple should be exploring new technologies that could help prevent theft. In March, he said, he met with an Apple executive, Michael Foulkes, who handles its government relations, to discuss how the company could improve its antitheft technology. But he left the meeting, he said, with no promise that Apple was working to do so.

He added, “Unlike other types of crimes, this is a crime that could be easily fixed with a technological solution.”

Apple declined to comment.

The cellphone market is hugely lucrative, with the sale of handsets bringing in $69 billion in the United States last year, according to IDC, the research firm. Yet, thefts of smartphones keep increasing, and victims keep replacing them.

In San Francisco last year, nearly half of all robberies involved a cellphone, up from 36 percent the year before; in Washington, cellphones were taken in 42 percent of robberies, a record. In New York, theft of iPhones and iPads last year accounted for 14 percent of all crimes.

Some compare the epidemic of phone theft to car theft, which was a rampant problem more than a decade ago until auto manufacturers improved antitheft technology.

“If you look at auto theft, it has really plummeted in this country because technology has advanced so much and the manufacturers recognize the importance of it,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit group focused on improving police techniques. “The cellphone industry has for the most part been in denial. For whatever reasons, it has been slow to move.”

Carriers say they have faith in the database, which they created with police departments across the country. They also say they are taking independent steps as well to address the problem. Verizon, for instance, says it has its own stolen phone database, making it impossible for devices reported as stolen to be reactivated on its network.

“We do care very deeply about this,” said Jason Young, T-Mobile’s vice president of product management. “If you’ve ever lost a phone or had one stolen, it’s a scary thing, it’s a painful thing and it’s a costly thing.”

Apple provides some assistance in locating lost or stolen phones with its free software, Find My iPhone, which can find a missing iPhone or remotely erase its data. But the service does not work once the phone is turned off or disconnected from the Internet. To locate an iPhone, an Apple customer can log in to iCloud.com with a Web browser and see a map of its approximate location, and can then hit a button to erase its information.

Google does not include any software in its Android operating system to help people locate a missing phone, although some third-party Android apps offer the feature. Mr. Gascón of San Francisco said that was not enough. “What I’m talking about is creating a kill switch so that when the phone gets reported stolen, it can be rendered inoperable in any configuration or carrier,” he said.

Some security experts say such solutions are possible. One is software to prevent a phone from working after it is reported stolen, said Kevin Mahaffey, chief technology officer of Lookout, a mobile security firm. There would be ways to work around that, he said, but if companies made it time-consuming and expensive to reactivate a stolen cellphone, then people would stop stealing them so much.

Representative Eliot Engel, Democrat of New York, has proposed a legislative solution. A week ago, he introduced legislation that would make it illegal to modify a phone’s identifier, among other preventive measures. In Britain, it is illegal already.

In San Francisco, the resale market for stolen phones is thriving, with a new iPhone netting a thief $400 to $500 in cash, said Edward Santos Jr., a police lieutenant who investigates robberies. The starting price of a new iPhone 5, without a contract, is $650.

Often, stolen phones are moved to a house or storage facility where middlemen erase the phone’s memory, Mr. Santos said. Clearing a phone makes it difficult for the police to prove a phone was stolen and to return it to its owner.

In at least one case, Mr. Santos said, people suspected of stealing phones were found to be hacking the phones’ unique identifying code, known as an International Mobile Station Equipment Identity, essentially erasing all digital evidence that the phone was stolen. This also makes it possible to reactivate a stolen phone, even after it has been entered into the database. Mr. Santos said he suspected that this kind of modification was widespread.

Some industry experts say consumers should have the right to modify their phones’ identification features to avoid being tracked.

The right to change the identification is a “pro-privacy measure,” said Seth Schoen, a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a technology-oriented civil liberties group in San Francisco.

In the last six months, San Francisco police have broken up more than half a dozen large-scale stolen electronics operations, uncovering thousands of stolen smartphones as well as laptops in houses and storage units across the Bay Area. In one raid in November, the police found stolen electronics valued at $500,000. The people accused of stealing them told the police they sold their entire inventory every two weeks through flea markets in Oakland, Calif., and by shipping the phones overseas.

Recent cellphone theft cases in San Francisco suggest that many end up as far away as Mexico, Vietnam and China.

The international reach, huge profits and technological expertise of these black market operators suggest possible ties to larger organized crime networks, Mr. Santos said.

“It could be just a bunch of small groups, but these guys are very well organized, very tech savvy, well trained and well funded,” he said. “I think it is just a matter of time before we find the mother lode, a warehouse that is just stacked to the ceiling with smartphones.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/t...other-way.html





Chat With Me: The Failure Trap for Chat Apps
Rob 'CmdrTaco' Malda

Chat apps messaging has finally overtaken short message service (SMS), according to research firm Informa. But app proliferation prevents the simplest of Internet applications from achieving true success.

A woman uses her smartphone in central London, Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2012. (AP Photo/Sang Tan)

Obviously e-mail takes all the credit as the killer app of the early Internet. But its faster little brother, chat, was always right there too. After all, chat can be real-time, and better parallels a real conversation. I’ve had chat windows open on my desktops for as long as I’ve had multitasking. As I write this, I’m in chat rooms with people in numerous time zones.

Of course, the telecommunications companies jumped on the bandwagon early and deployed SMS. It was the perfect application for the pre-smartphone era: a hundred bytes can convey volumes of information to a device that lives in your pocket. And, without a real keyboard, very few people ever wanted more anyway. Not to mention, these tiny, discrete messages can be billed easily—and excessively.

The volume of SMS messages rose into the billions, coupled to complicated billing plans that really annoyed Internet chat users who expected to idly chit chat with small groups. When smartphones appeared, users started to expect to communicate at speeds inconceivable in the era of the thumbs. This was great for the telecommunications companies—until people started installing chat apps.

It took only a few years, but these chat apps have finally overtaken SMS.

WhatsApp is the most popular, but everyone wants in on chat. Facebook, Google and Apple all have chat applications scattered over their platforms. And don’t get me started on Twitter.

The problem of course is that these systems are annoyingly incompatible with each other. My phone can buzz with chat notifications from 3 different apps at any moment. My desktop has even more scattered across browser tabs and standalone apps.

No single app wraps them conveniently together. And the mega corporations aren’t really motivated to work together anyway: Ovum, reports the BBC, estimated billions of dollars in revenue were lost as users migrated from text messages to chat apps. But there are still billions of dollars to be made by owning the ecosystem that people use to communicate the most.

There are standards available, such as XMPP, and different vendors have tried committing to them. But it has always been half hearted: when Facebook released Jabber compatibility for its chat application years ago, it did so without encryption—a move that could be considered recklessly irresponsible for what might be our most sensitive communication.

The high prices of SMS and lack of APIs drove the world away from SMS into a ludicrously fragmented world of incompatible apps—a world where the user suffers.

I’d be willing to chat with you about it, but it would be easier to e-mail, because every e-mail you send is delivered to my mail client. They all talk using SMTP. It isn’t sexy. It isn’t controlled. But you know if you send it, I’ll get it. And at the end of the day, that matters more.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...for-chat-apps/





Google Makes It Easier To Turn Its Chromebooks Into Public Internet Kiosks
Frederic Lardinois

Google always said that its Chromebooks were “for sharing,” but even though they always had a guest mode, they weren’t necessarily set up to be used as public Internet kiosks. Today, Google is changing that with the launch of the new and imaginatively named “Managed Public Sessions” feature. Google says this new feature, which lets you turn your Chrome OS device into an Internet kiosk, “delivers a highly customizable experience for both customers and employees without requiring a login.”

With this new mode, the Chromebook team believes, Chromebooks and Chromeboxes will become more viable options for stores that want to set up kiosks to allow customers to buy out-of-stock items, give employees the option to update inventory from the manufacturing floor or give hotels another option for their business centers.

By default, all public session data is deleted after a user logs out.

CrOS MPS startup

Admins, Google says, will be able to easily manage these devices from the usual web-based Chrome OS management console. Google just recently updated the management console and now gives administrators the option to manage all of the details of a Chrome OS install, including the homepage, which sites to block and other details.

Google has been testing this mode with a number of organizations, including Dillards, the Multnomah County Library in Oregon and the Hyatt Regency San Francisco.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/30/goo...ternet-kiosks/





After Sandy's Destruction, Verizon Switches to All-Wireless Service in Mantoloking
David P. Willis

Devastated and wiped out by superstorm Sandy, Verizon has no plans to rebuild its copper-line telephone network in Mantoloking.

Instead, Verizon says Mantoloking is the first town in New Jersey, and one of the few areas in the country, to have a new service called Verizon Voice Link. Essentially, it connects your home’s wired and cordless telephones to the Verizon Wireless network.

The company actively is marketing the service and has signed up about 30 customers so far.

“Our technicians connect Voice Link into the telephone lines in your home, allowing you to use your home telephones to make and receive calls just like you did before,” reads a mailer being sent to area residents.

How does it work? A Verizon technician installs a small box with an antenna in your home. It plugs into an electrical socket and a telephone jack, which powers all the telephone jacks in the house. The device also accepts AA batteries or has a rechargeable battery pack if there is a power outage. Three AA batteries provide 36 hours of standby time.

Rather than go out over telephone lines, calls are made over Verizon Wireless.

The service includes unlimited nationwide calling and emergency 911 service. Other features such as Caller ID and voice mail also are available.

Installation is free and the prices are set at or below what the customer was paying previously, Verizon said.

“It acts just like a regular phone,” said Tom Maguire, Verizon’s senior vice president of national operations. “There’s a dial tone. It has 911 capability, so if you dial 911 the emergency services guys are going to know exactly where you are.”

Voice Link is a product of Verizon’s attempts to replace its traditional telephone service over copper lines in places where the network is deteriorating, whether from water seeping into lines or other damage. It is used in areas where there are no fiber-optic lines, another alternative for telephone service.

“Now we’re finding that we’re able to go into areas like Mantoloking down the block here where the copper infrastructure was wiped out,” Maguire said Thursday outside of a Verizon mobile sales center on Route 35 in Bay Head. “If we have plain dial-tone customers, we can now leverage this technology that we were working on anyway to serve the customers.”
http://www.app.com/article/20130503/...ce-Mantoloking





Ofcom Begins Investigation Into BT's Superfast Broadband

UK telecoms regulator Ofcom has launched a probe into whether BT Group is abusing its dominant position when pricing its superfast broadband, following a complaint by smaller rival TalkTalk Telecom Group.

Ofcom said it was in the early stages of an investigation into BT.

BT, the biggest fixed-line operator in the country, allows rival operators to take its superfast fiber product on a wholesale basis at the same fee at which it sells it to its own retail arm, BT Retail.

TalkTalk has complained that there is not a large enough gap between the wholesale price and the rate at which BT sells the product to retail customers, squeezing margins for competitors.

"BT is disappointed that Ofcom has opened the case despite the lack of any evidence. We are confident there is no case to answer," BT said in an emailed statement.

(Reporting by Kate Holton, Paul Sandle and Richa Naidu; Editing by Rodney Joyce)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...9400UI20130501





Cisco Jumps on Gigabit Internet Craze with New Wireless Offerings

Summary: With AT&T and Google (among others) warming up for a gigabit Internet war, Cisco is jumping in the fray with some new products to support the speedy connections.
Rachel King

The words "gigabit Internet" are becoming fairly common these days with buzz surrounding Google Fiber — much to the ire of some wireless providers nationwide scrambling to compete.

In the meantime, Cisco is getting involved with some new 802.11ac wireless networking solutions, falling in line with the communications giant's evolving strategies around WLAN and the "Internet of Everything."

See also: Google Fiber speeds up with new destination: Provo, Utah | Google confirms Austin as next Fiber city | AT&T plots $14 billion network build out; Sprint nabs spectrum

To better comprehend what the 802.11ac standard offers, Cisco described that this means network speeds that can "download significant amounts of Web content and run streaming video simultaneously."

Imitating the patterns we've already seen with the consumerization of IT, Cisco predicted that as smartphones and laptops will soon be built to support gigabit Wi-Fi, employees will expect the same kind of speedy network support — especially for data-intensive apps like HD streaming video and Web conferencing.

Thus, aimed at the enterprise set, Cisco's new 802.11ac portfolio includes a module that supports Wi-Fi speeds up to 1.3Gbps. That access point, the 802.11ac Wave 1 Module for the Cisco Aironet 3600 Series, is available now and shipping to select customers.

Cisco estimated that early adopters will be looking to deploy .11ac in the very near future based on observing its own customer base already using these solutions in beta with their upgrades.
http://www.zdnet.com/cisco-jumps-on-...gs-7000014594/





Craving Wi-Fi, Preferably Free and Really Fast
By Susan Stellin

TRAVELERS hitting the road with their mobile electronic devices have three questions about staying connected away from home: will there be Wi-Fi, how much will it cost and how well will it work?

Hotels, airports and airlines are struggling to keep up with customers streaming movies on their tablets and hosting online meetings on their laptops, with varying degrees of success. While hoteliers and airport authorities have been fighting the bandwidth battle for years, airlines are still installing Wi-Fi on many aircraft and are already confronting challenges.

Travelers who want Wi-Fi in the air cannot always tell if a plane will have Internet service when they book their tickets. Prices for service are still evolving, and the quality of the connection does not come close to matching what most people are used to on the ground.

“No matter what the system is, none of them right now are showing the ability to keep up with passenger demand,” said Mary Kirby, editor in chief of Airline Passenger Experience magazine. “I’ve heard complaints about every single system.”

Acknowledging the technical hurdles involved in delivering Internet service to a plane traveling 500 miles an hour, Ms. Kirby said airlines and their connectivity partners needed to better manage passenger expectations.

“It’s time for the industry to say, ‘Here’s reasonably what you can expect, and it’s not an at-home experience,’ ” she said. “A passenger should expect to be able to use social media and check e-mail. But you’re not going to be able to send e-mails with really big files, and you’re not going to be able to stream video.”

A new Web site, Routehappy.com, is helping travelers find out if a flight has Wi-Fi — information many airlines do not reveal until after a ticket is booked. Routehappy lets travelers search for flights on a particular route, like New York to San Francisco, then sort the results based on various “happiness factors,” including whether the flight offers Wi-Fi.

For a weekday in mid-April, Routehappy calculated that 24 percent of domestic flights offered Wi-Fi, 56 percent did not and 20 percent might. John Walton, Routehappy’s director of data, says the “maybe” category reflects the fact that airlines are busy installing this technology, so it is not always possible to determine weeks in advance if a flight will have it or how well it will work.

“You never know how many other people are going to be using Wi-Fi at the same time,” Mr. Walton said.

Airlines and Wi-Fi providers say typical demand is 5 to 10 percent of passengers, but use is often higher on longer flights. On Virgin America, which offers Wi-Fi on all its planes, 20 percent of passengers typically log on, said Abby Lunardini, a company spokeswoman, and more than a third use Wi-Fi on transcontinental routes.

Most carriers use an air-to-ground system provided by Gogo, which relies on a network of ground-based cellular towers to communicate with aircraft flying across the United States. Gogo’s system can deliver Internet speeds of 3.1 to 9.8 megabits per second, usually much slower than a typical home connection.

Looking to address these speed limitations, Gogo and other Wi-Fi providers are moving toward satellite-based systems capable of delivering faster Internet service. Satellite systems also work over the ocean, enabling carriers to offer Wi-Fi on international flights.

American Airlines has international Wi-Fi on its Boeing 777-300ER aircraft, which fly between Dallas or New York and London, and between New York and São Paulo, Brazil. United Airlines also offers Wi-Fi service on some international flights but does not specify which routes.

Delta is considered a leader on the Wi-Fi front in the United States, providing Internet service on more than 800 aircraft, including many regional jets. American has about 450 Wi-Fi-equipped planes, Southwest Airlines more than 400 and United 50. JetBlue plans to introduce a satellite-based Internet service this year, promising faster speeds than its competitors offer — and at least basic Wi-Fi free.

The cost of in-flight Wi-Fi is still all over the map, as carriers figure out what customers are willing to pay. Southwest has taken a simple approach, charging $8 for a daylong Wi-Fi pass; other airlines charge fees based on the length of the flight, the connection time and the device. It can cost just $2 to connect with a smartphone for 30 minutes, or $4.95 to $21.95 a flight for a laptop.

“What we’re seeing is a reluctance to pay,” said Ms. Kirby of Airline Passenger Experience magazine, “which is quite fascinating because these systems cost a lot of money on aircraft.”

Airports and hotels are confronting a similar situation. Of the 10 busiest airports in the United States, those in Los Angeles, Dallas/Fort Worth, Denver, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Charlotte, N.C., offer at least some free Wi-Fi service.

But the trade-off can be overloaded networks that frustrate passengers, which is why Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport — the busiest in the United States — is upgrading its infrastructure before switching to free Wi-Fi this year.

“Our system wasn’t built to accommodate the number of customers we expect to have with the free Wi-Fi,” said Myrna White, a spokeswoman for the airport, which dropped its Wi-Fi fee to $4.95 a day last fall.

Recognizing the challenge airports and other public locations face, the Federal Communications Commission is working to increase the amount of unlicensed spectrum available for Wi-Fi, which is how passengers at a busy terminal connect to the airport’s broadband service.

“What we have proposed is to provide more space on the airwaves to accommodate the growth of Wi-Fi,” said Julius P. Knapp, chief of the F.C.C.’s office of engineering and technology. “That translates to faster data speeds and reduced congestion.”

Free Wi-Fi, at least for basic Internet service, is also becoming the norm at hotels, particularly at less expensive ones. According to the American Hotel and Lodging Association, 23 percent of hotels in the United States charge for in-room Internet access. This week, the hospitality site HotelChatter.com released its annual Wi-Fi report, finding that two-thirds of hotels offered free Internet access, at least in the lobby. Luxury hotels are still more likely to charge than midrange or budget hotels.

Mark G. Johnson, HotelChatter’s founder, said guests’ top complaints were hotels that charged a separate Internet fee for each device, like a tablet and a laptop, and those that offered inadequate support when the network was having problems.

“What I’m hearing more is that people at the front desk almost throw their hands in the air,” Mr. Johnson said. “They may give you back your money, but they can’t help you.”

Some travelers bring their own backup Wi-Fi, in case the hotel’s Internet service is spotty.

David J. Danto, a consultant with Dimension Data, says he travels with a portable MiFi hot spot from Sprint, which he uses if a hotel’s Wi-Fi service is slow. Although he says he does not mind paying for Wi-Fi if it works well, he has little patience for hotels that blame network outages on high demand.

“If everybody flushes the toilet at the same time, you wouldn’t want the building to come down,” Mr. Danto said. “I’m not sure why they wouldn’t design the Internet service the same way.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/b...ity-wi-fi.html





In-Room Entertainment Turns Away From TV
Jane L. Levere

LEN MARKIDAN, a 26-year-old marketing consultant based in San Francisco, is the type of business traveler who forced LodgeNet, the hotel guest-room entertainment provider, to file recently for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Mr. Markidan, who spends 40 percent of his time traveling on business and is an elite participant in the Hilton and Hyatt loyalty programs, takes his MacBook Pro and iPad with him on the road and watches all television programs by streaming them on his laptop, using a portable router to extend the Wi-Fi signal in his hotel room.

“For a lot of people my age and a lot of people in general, the way we consume entertainment at home is changing,” he said. “I no longer have a cable subscription — the way I watch entertainment at home is the same way I watch it on the road. I have a Hulu subscription, Amazon Prime and Netflix.”

Guest-room entertainment “is not an amenity that will drive my decision to stay at a hotel,” he said, adding, “I’m a lot more concerned with loyalty program perks.”

James Lingle of Highlands Ranch, Colo., a consultant to hotel companies and guest-room entertainment service providers like LodgeNet’s competitor iBahn, observed: “If you look back, typically the first thing a guest would do when they walked into the door of a hotel room would be to turn on the TV. Now people bring their entertainment with them, tablet-based devices like an iPad, accounts and memberships like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu Plus, and they want to be able to use them.”

LodgeNet’s decline directly reflects these changes. According to its bankruptcy filing, the number of hotel rooms it served globally dropped to 1.5 million in 2011 from 2 million in 2009. It provided guest-room entertainment services to most major hotel chains, usually by installing and maintaining free televisions and offering video-on-demand entertainment, for which it and the hotels received fees. LodgeNet’s sales in 2011 were $421.3 million, a 21 percent drop from a high of $533.9 million in 2008.

Colony Capital, a real estate and hotel investment firm in Los Angeles, led a group that invested $70 million in a controlling interest in LodgeNet, based in Sioux Falls, S.D., and brought in a management team of former Starwood, Fairmont and Hilton executives. LodgeNet, which emerged from bankruptcy in late March, also signed an agreement with DirecTV to jointly offer entertainment to hotels and hospitals.

The revamped LodgeNet faces strong competition from companies including Swisscom Hospitality Services, based in Geneva; iBahn, based in Salt Lake City; Guest-Tek, of Calgary, Alberta; and Roomlinx, based in Broomfield, Colo. All are developing systems that let travelers consume entertainment the way Mr. Markidan does — via the Internet, frequently through subscriptions they already have and use at home, either through Wi-Fi or a direct cable connection between their laptop or tablet and the guest-room television set.

Different types of hotels have different policies regarding Internet access. Many less expensive hotels offer it free, while more expensive ones often charge for it. What’s expected to happen next, speaking broadly, is that using the Internet for e-mail will be free, while many hotels will charge for uses requiring a lot of bandwidth, like downloading or streaming videos, with the cost tied to the amount of bandwidth required.

“We will give customers more short-form content at very attractive prices, affinity packages of sports channels, just-missed TV, video games, as well as movies currently in theaters,” said Michael Ribero, Lodgenet’s new chief executive. “We want to give them the opportunity to watch what they want, even if it’s through Netflix and Amazon Prime.” He said LodgeNet will no longer provide television equipment in hotel guest rooms in exchange for video-on-demand fees. Instead, DirecTV will offer hotel owners lease financing for TVs, freeing capital that LodgeNet can invest in product and service improvements.

C. Scott Hansen, director of guest technology for Marriott International, said his company’s objective over the next several years was to connect every guest-room TV to the Internet. Marriott International also plans to limit the number of TV channels its brands offer to a targeted, all-high-definition lineup and to augment these with Internet-based, streaming content, via services like Netflix and YouTube.

Bandwidth capacity at many Marriott International hotels will need to be increased to support these services, an expense Mr. Hansen said would be offset by guests’ purchases of Internet access, commissions paid by services like Netflix for signing up new members and advertising revenue from companies that could use the TV or guest’s laptop or tablet screen for messages.

Josh Weiss, vice president of brand and guest technology for Hilton Worldwide, said his company offered a broad range of short, low-price TV programs, similar to those available from Netflix or iTunes, in many hotels, provided by LodgeNet and others. This content costs $2 to $5, far less than a full-length movie. Hilton Worldwide also offers a free, DirecTV service similar to DirecTV’s residential service at over 150 hotels across most of its brands and plans to expand this service this year.

Mike Blake, chief information officer of Commune Hotels and Resorts, said the company was considering keeping track of guests’ channel preferences, which would automatically come up whenever a guest turned on the TV in the hotel room. He said this service, which guests could opt in for, should be available by the fourth quarter of this year. Other new services under consideration include the ability to customize music playlists for guests and to stream personal photos on guest room TVs.

Apple TV in hotel rooms at the Aloft Cupertino, a Starwood hotel, lets guests play video and music and display photos from any Apple device on their television set. Starwood is evaluating offering this system and additional entertainment options at other Aloft and Starwood hotels.

CitizenM, a Dutch chain of what it calls “affordable luxury” hotels — now all in Europe, with two slated to open in Manhattan this year and next — provides a Samsung tablet in each guest room, with technology from Swisscom that provides a music library and free video-on-demand TV and also controls the blinds, lighting and temperature.

The 85-year-old Peninsula Hong Kong this month will finish installation of a guest-room entertainment system that Ingvar Herland, Peninsula Hotels’ general manager of research and technology, said costs $10,000 to $25,000 a room. This proprietary system features fully customizable bedside and desk tablets preset in a choice of five languages, with six more to follow this year. The tablet allows the guest to order room, concierge and housekeeping services, and to control lighting, curtains, the temperature and privacy options. It also provides — via a flat-screen, Blu-ray, LED television — terrestrial programming, 90 international television channels, 450 Internet radio stations, free HD and 3-D movies, as well as free international voice-over-Internet protocol telephone calls.

Mr. Herland said the new system would be offered at the Peninsula Paris, opening next year, and would eventually replace existing systems at other Peninsula hotels.

Travelers should not expect a proliferation of new services like the Peninsula’s, said Bjorn Hanson, divisional dean of the Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management at New York University.

He said that although hotels in the United States this year were expected to spend a record percentage of profits on capital expenditures — like entertainment systems — profits per room also were expected to remain well below their 2006 peak. Companies offering new systems “that are expensive for hotel owners are doing so at a challenging time,” he said, adding that many hotel owners would consider premium cable service as an alternative.

One vanishing option is sex-related entertainment. Omni banned such programs in 1999, citing its support of “pro-family issues,” while Marriott International stopped offering it last year. “If you want it, you can access it online on your own,” said Mr. Hansen of Marriott.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/b...ing-media.html





Hulu Says Number of Paid Subscribers Has Doubled
Brian Stelter

Hulu, the online video Web site that has both free and paid services, said Tuesday that it had doubled its number of paying subscribers in the last year, to four million.

The announcement comes at an uncertain time for Hulu, as two of its owners, the Walt Disney Company and News Corporation, weigh whether to sell the company. Last month, the founding chief executive of Hulu, Jason Kilar, stepped down; one of his top lieutenants, Andy Forssell, is now the acting chief executive.

Hulu was not expected to say anything new about its ownership structure at a Tuesday morning event for advertisers in New York. The event, part of the Digital Content NewFronts this week, was set up to promote several original series that will premiere on Hulu this year.

Among the shows that will be distributed exclusively by Hulu are “Quick Draw,'’ a comedic Western set in 1870s Kansas, and “The Awesomes,” an animated series about superheroes from the minds of the “Saturday Night Live” star Seth Meyers and the “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” producer Michael Shoemaker. They are the third wave of original shows for the service, and the most ambitious to date. The first wave, in 2011, was led by the Morgan Spurlock documentary series “A Day In The Life;” the second, in 2012, included a political sitcom called “Battleground” and a travelogue by Richard Linklater called “Up to Speed.”

That said, Hulu’s most popular shows remain those that it licenses from their owners and from other media companies. Hulu says it has more than 470 such partners and more than 70,000 full television episodes on its free and paid services combined.

Content costs are rising as the online television marketplace becomes more competitive; last week, Yahoo snapped up the exclusive rights to old clips from “Saturday Night Live,” something that Hulu used to feature on its own site.

In this crowded environment, commissioning shows is one way to stand out. Hulu has been in the news this week because it is one of only two places to watch “All My Children” and “One Life to Live,” the canceled ABC soap operas that were resurrected online by a production company, Prospect Park. The other outlet for the shows is Apple’s iTunes store.

Along with “The Awesomes” and “Quick Draw,” Hulu’s other two original series this year are “Behind the Mask,” a documentary series about sports mascots, and “The Wrong Mans,” a drama about two innocent men tied up in a criminal conspiracy. “The Wrong Mans” is a coproduction of the BBC and Hulu.

At the advertiser event on Tuesday, Hulu will also promote a number of shows that have been televised in other countries, but are exclusive to Hulu in the United States. They include an animated series from Canada called “Mother Up!” as well as “Prisoners of War,” an Israeli drama that inspired Showtime’s “Homeland.”

The company will also describe several ideas for original shows that are “brand contingent,” meaning they will be made only if advertisers sign up to support them. One of these ideas involves the chef Mario Batali in conversation with celebrities; another is a performance series to be hosted by Carson Daly.

In addition to announcing that its paid service, Hulu Plus, had topped four million subscribers for the first time, up from two million in the previous year, Hulu said it had reached a new revenue record in the first quarter, but did not specify what that record was. In 2012, according to the company, it earned $695 million in revenue, up from approximately $420 million in 2011.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/b...ars-total.html





Netflix Losing Almost 1,800 Titles From its Streaming Library
Bryan Bishop

Netflix may have more original programming coming in the months ahead, but the company is also going to be losing quite a few titles as well. According to InstantWatcher, a site that catalogs the comings and goings of Netflix's streaming catalog, the service will be saying farewell to 1,794 different titles in May. That number includes 15 seasons of South Park, old horror movies like Audrey Rose, and James Bond classics like Dr. No and Goldfinger. According to Slate, the drop comes because several licensing deals Netflix has in place with studios like MGM, Warner Bros., and Universal are expiring.

While it has been posited that the titles were disappearing because they were heading to the Warner Instant Archive streaming service, that appears to not be the case. Warner Instant took to Twitter today to emphasize that not only does it not carry titles from MGM or Universal — its catalog is Warner Bros.-only — but that the titles disappearing from Netflix wouldn't be coming over to Warner Instant Archive right away in the first place.

Of course, while the drop in titles may seem alarming, that churn is something longtime Netflix users are more than familiar with. The company lost a big bulk of high-profile titles when its deal with Starz expired in 2012, and of course for every Adaptation that's on the chopping block this month there's also a Barb Wire. That will be of little consolation to those that sit down to watch a movie only to find out that it's disappeared, however. If you'd like to see the full list of expiring films — and find out when they'll be going — you can check out InstantWatcher's full list.

Update: A representative from Netflix contacted us to share the company's thinking on the removal, and its broader content strategy, saying that the goal of the company is to be an “expert programmer” rather than a "broad distributor" of programming. The full statement is below.

The vast majority of the titles that expire on Wednesday are older features that were aggregated by Epix. We recently added many great, more recent titles such as ParaNorman (Universal), Hunger Games (Epix), Safe (Epix) and Bachelorette (Weinstein). Tomorrow we will also add MI:2, among many other titles.

Netflix is a dynamic service, we constantly update the TV shows and movies that are available to our members. We will add more than 500 titles May 1, but we also have titles expiring, this ebb and flow happens all the time.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/30/42...rting-tomorrow





Netflix's Ted Sarandos Talks Arrested Development, 4K and Reviving Old Shows

Ted Sarandos has a long and storied career in telling you what to watch. He started out working in a video shop – where he says he was the original recommendation algorithm pointing out choices to regulars. Now, he's Netflix's Chief Content Officer, overseeing the video streaming service's venture into original programming with the likes of House of Cards and the new series of Arrested Development (starting on May 26th).

We caught up with him to chat about reviving old series, battling piracy and whether the UK and US versions of Netflix will ever offer the same content.

House-of-Cards-Netflix

Will we ever have parity between the UK and US versions of Netflix?
The window of time between US broadcast and international availability is a gap and a problem everywhere. My goal is to make licensing much more global so the service has more global availability. All our original stuff is available on all our international sites and we’re moving more towards ubiquitous global licencing. It’ll take years, unfortunately – but that’s what we’re steering towards.

What are you doing to combat piracy?
One of the things is we get ISPs to publicise their connection speeds – and when we launch in a territory the Bittorrent traffic drops as the Netflix traffic grows. So I think people do want a great experience and they want access – people are mostly honest. The best way to combat piracy isn’t legislatively or criminally but by giving good options. One of the side effects of growth of content is an expectation to have access to it. You can’t use the internet as a marketing vehicle and then not as a delivery vehicle.

Are we going to get more than one season of new Arrested Development?
Hopefully! It was very difficult logistically with a cast full of movie stars. They all had full-time jobs when we were making this season – Tony Hale of Veep, Jason Bateman was directing a film, Michael Cera was starring in a movie in Chile, Portia de Rossi was on an NBC pilot, Will Arnett was on weekly show Up All Night. We were constantly bringing everyone in and out. Now every episode is crafted around an individual character. Mitch Horowitz has made it so ridiculously fun and complicated – every episode intertwines with all the other ones. So a complete throwaway line is the punch line to something three episodes ago. So it was completely crafted for the Netflix viewers who could watch a bunch in a row.

Arrested Development creator Ron Howard has also been circling Stephen King’s The Dark Tower – any chance Netflix could pick it up?
I spoke to Ron about it, actually. The last time we talked about it the thing was being kicked about HBO – but it’s no longer there. Once Arrested Development gets through we’ll keep talking about it.

We did a feature about shows that Netflix could revive. So, as a fan, would you consider bringing back Twin Peaks?
Absolutely!

Jericho?
It was on the bubble. I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t get an email or a personal hand-written letter about that show.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
That’s one that’ll come up on everyone’s list. She’s a great character. If it was my property I’d do infrequent movies. There’s not enough kick-ass female characters like that.

Firefly?
It’s kind of been done, with Serenity, but yeah as a series. Let me give you one broad statement about these recovery shows. In almost every case the cult around the show gets more intense and smaller as time goes by. Arrested Development was the rarest of birds in that the audience of the show grew larger than the original broadcast audience because people came to discover it years after it was cancelled. The Firefly fan is still the Firefly fan from when it was on TV and there’s fewer of them and they’re more passionate every year. Whereas with Arrested Development we’re going to be serving a multiple of the original audience. Any of the other shows we could bring back would be a fraction of the original audience.

When can we expect to see Netflix roll out 3D internationally?
The connection isn’t good enough yet so there’s not enough users who’d be able to experience it to put a lot of energy into it yet.

What about 4K?
It’ll be super interesting to see how it evolves, it’s super early and the pricing is obviously in the very early curve. If it evolves as a streaming only format it’ll be very interesting.
http://www.stuff.tv/news/apps-and-ga...d-reviving-old





Time Warner Cable CEO Wants to Slim Cable Bundles, Eyes Aereo’s Technology
Cecilia Kang

Time Warner Cable’s chief executive said his company may consider capturing television content from public airwaves and delivering them to customers over an Internet connection, a practice that has shaken the entertainment industry.

The idea was pioneered by a Web start-up called Aereo, whose business model sparked lawsuits from all of the nation’s broadcasters, including NBC, CBS, Fox and ABC. Their complaints in courts have failed.

The entry of Time Warner Cable into Aereo’s space would be a game changer, with broad implications for how television is created and delivered to households. Unlike Aereo, which serves only two markets, Time Warner is the country’s second-largest cable company and has broad influence over how TV content is delivered into millions of living rooms.

“What Aereo is doing to bring broadcast signals to its customers is interesting,” Time Warner Cable chief executive Glenn Britt said in an interview. “If it is found legal, we could conceivably use similar technology.”

Part of Britt’s interest in Aereo stems from his belief that the traditional model of television — in which broadcasters bundle together hundreds of channels and force cable companies to buy and distribute them to consumers as a package — is under siege.

Fed up by monthly bills that typically reach more than $100, millions of consumers have canceled their cable service and turned to Internet video where they can buy shows one at a time or pay a very low monthly subscription fee. But a major gap of the online content is that it is does not offer live programming, such as sports and local news.

Aereo fills that void, offering everything that appears on CBS, NBC, Fox, ABC, PBS and about two dozen other channels. For less than $10 a month, its customers can see the latest episodes of “Dancing With the Stars” or “NCIS” — and save those shows on digital recorders. Aereo said it is expanding its service to 22 metropolitan regions across the country, including the Washington area, this summer.

Time Warner Cable’s interest in Aereo’s technology is preliminary, Britt said. The cable giant, which serves 12 million video customers in 29 states, does not have concrete plans but is simply watching the legal battle closely.

That fight has gone in Aereo’s favor. Two judges have ruled that Aereo’s model is legal. Last month, the nation’s broadcasters asked a New York federal district court for a full review of their case.

If the courts continue to rule in Aereo’s favor, some broadcasters said they would simply take their shows off public airwaves and make them available only to cable subscribers. On Wednesday, CBS chief executive Les Moonves joined Fox and Univision in threatening to take this step.

“It’s illegal,” Moonves said of Aereo at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, according to Bloomberg News. “They’re taking our signal and charging people for it.”

But Britt argued the current way most consumers pay for their cable television must change. In the interview, he joined a growing chorus of frustrated cable companies, including Verizon and Cablevision, that have been publicly blaming media companies for the unwieldy cable bundle.

Cable companies have said the technology in set-top boxes can track what consumers are watching most. So they should be able to buy cheaper and smaller packages of channels according to those interests.

“The structure needs more flexibility,” Britt said. A customer should not be required to pay for less popular channels such as VH1 Honors to get Nick Jr. and MTV. “There are fellow citizens who are struggling financially and can’t afford large programming packages. We want the ability to offer those customers smaller, more affordable packages.”

For Britt, the remarks are a departure. His business was once a part of a media conglomerate that included powerful assets such as HBO and Warner Bros. films. In 2009, the company broke off its cable and Internet business into an independent concern.

Britt said Washington should have a role in changing the TV industry. Federal officials need to repeal arcane regulations that date back two decades and check whether there has been a concentration of power among content firms, he said.

Media firms, however, have argued that their ability to create high-quality programming depends on the cable bundling model to mitigate the risks of trying out new shows. The Food Network, Bravo and AMC were all subsidized by more popular channels before they became cable channel hits, analysts say.

A broadcasting trade group said Time Warner and other cable firms share some of the blame for the high consumer bills.

“Forgive me Glenn Britt’s hypocrisy over rising cable rates. Time Warner Cable owns regional sports channels that charge viewers as much as $5 per subscriber per month,” said Dennis Wharton, an executive vice president at the National Association of Broadcasters. “The notion that Time Warner Cable has suddenly become ‘pro-consumer’ is laughable.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...f44_story.html





Sirius XM Reports Income and Subscriber Growth
Ben Sisario

The satellite radio provider Sirius XM Radio on Tuesday reported continued growth for its first quarter and announced that its interim chief executive, James E. Meyer, was taking over the position permanently.

The company said revenue rose 12 percent, $897 million, from the period a year earlier, but came in lower than the $906 million analysts had predicted.

Net income increased 15 percent, to $124 million, while earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization — adjusted to eliminate some charges including the effect of the 2008 merger between Sirius and XM — were $262 million, up 26 percent from the first quarter of 2012.

Sirius XM earned 2 cents a share, one cent less than analysts had predicted.

The company’s subscriber growth continued to be a bright spot, even after a rare price increase last year. It was the first time Sirius has ever raised the subscription rate; XM had done it once before. Sirius XM gained 453,000 subscribers in the quarter, bringing its total to 24.4 million. Over the last two years its subscriber ranks have grown 19 percent.

“Sirius XM’s first-quarter results show a continuation of our trend of strong, profitable growth,” Mr. Meyer said in a statement.

One concern for investors, however, is an uptick in the company’s “churn” rate, a measurement of its subscriber turnover. In recent years, that number had been gradually reduced to 1.9 percent, but in the most recent quarter it was back up to 2.0 percent.
Mr. Meyer, who had been Sirius’s president of sales and operations since 2004, was named interim chief executive in December after the departure of Mel Karmazin. He was appointed to the post permanently in a separate announcement on Tuesday by Gregory B. Maffei, who took over as the company’s chairman of the board on April 10.

Mr. Maffei is the president and chief executive of Liberty Media, which since 2009 had been Sirius XM’s largest investor and took over the company last year by acquiring a majority of its shares.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/b...er-growth.html





The Company That's Buying Up All the Key Pieces of the Online-News Ecosystem

Betaworks has its tentacles in nearly every part of how stories are made, read, and measured.
Robinson Meyer

In the past couple years, an ecology of sorts has come into being among online news sites. It's the blogosphere metastized, maybe, or merged with the money of traditional media.

A web writer, or a newspaper reporter, or a far-afield staff writer finishes a story and files it into their content management system. She tweets it from her personal Twitter; her publication tweets it too. It drops into the topmost spot of the homepage.

And then it begins. Other journalists fall upon it, read it, maybe like it. News consumers find it too. They post it to Twitter. If they're really gung-ho about it, they share it on Facebook, where it accretes likes and trickles down News Feeds. They email it to friends.

Meanwhile, probably somewhere in a coastal city, in the mothership, editors flit between the articles they're writing and the metrics for the whole site. Time to check how that story is doing. So they open Chartbeat, which shows in real-time, splashed across animated pastel dashboards, how many folks are looking at a web page now, or Bit.ly, which tells them how many people have clicked a certain link on Twitter, how that compares to an hour ago, what they're doing with the link after they click it.

And oh, how this hypothetical story is doing! Enough people on Twitter share it that it catches the algorithmic notice of an aggregator, like Digg. Other readers (on a lunch break?) see it there, but don't have time to get through it, so they save it to a Read Later service, like Pocket or Instapaper. Hours later, staring at a phone or a tablet, crammed onto a subway car or recumbent in a living room, they finish it, decide whether to tweet it or excerpt it to Tumblr. They sleep.

The nighttime algorithms awake. By the next morning, if that story was one of the top five links shared that day on their feed, they may receive (in my case, at least) a morning daily digest email from Digg or Twitter. Here's What Everyone Was Talking About Yesterday, it says. Here's What You May Have Missed.

In that open-plan office, meanwhile, those same urban coastal editors squint at the logs, trying to gauge how the story did overnight, what they could've done to make it do better, if they can still do anything to juice it in the morning flurry. And, from semi-cubicles up and down seaboards, they've already begun posting the day's new articles, some of them linking back to that piece from yesterday.

This is the cycle. From a CMS to Twitter to Facebook to aggregator to analytics to Twitter to email then back to the CMS -- and, the whole time, penetrating, delighting, merging with the minds of readers and writers. This is the life of newsy hypertext in 2013, the sequence we've built by accretion.

And -- as of last week -- a big chunk of it is now owned by one company. Last week, the New York-based Betaworks announced it had acquired the first read-it-later service, Instapaper, from its founder and developer, Marco Arment. According to his blog post, Arment concieved and executed the purchase in a day; fans of the service (I count myself one) celebrated (or at least tweeted celebratory things), for recently Arment's development of Instapaper seemed to have stalled.

But with Instapaper's acquisition, Betaworks stuck a hand in another part of the hypertext ecosystem. Think back to our hypothetical, article-beginning story.

• Any link in any tweet from a news organization was probably shortened to something cute and custom -- and the market leader there is Bit.ly, owned by Betaworks.
• Even before that, the publication might use a tool to figure out when it should post stories on Twitter -- a tool sold by a company like Social Flow, which is owned by Betaworks.
• Littorally-proximate journalists will likely use a real-time analytics dashboard -- like Chartbeat, a Betaworks product.
• The leading social news aggregator of the moment is Digg, which--yes--Betaworks purchased and remade last summer.

And when someone saves a story for later, they're likely to use the oldest product in that space, the product which has advertised on the Howard Stern Show and given itself away as Starbucks's free app of the week: Instapaper.

Indeed, the only part of the cycle where Betaworks doesn't now have a product is the reading stage, the Newsblurs and Flipboards of the world, where power consumers keep up with their blogs sans Twitter -- but Betaworks plans to debut an RSS reader after Google shutters its Reader this summer.

Which means that by this summer, almost every link in our textual, digital news chain will rely on or connect to a Betaworks product. That makes sense for a company based in the world's information capital, for a company whose investors include the New York Times.

And it probably makes sense for readers. Centralization brings simplicity and synergy. Digg has no ads right now; in the TechCrunch article about its acquisition, Instapaper's new bosses seemed particularly pleased by its profitability. For those of us who sometimes exlclaim, with bookfuturist James Bridle, "the Internet is the greatest work of literature I've ever read," Betaworks has become a terribly fun company to watch. (A fun company? In tech? Is it 2009?!) It seems to be a terrific home for Instapaper. May it stay stable enough, and solvent enough, to remain so.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...system/275357/





New York Times Tops USA Today to Become No. 2 U.S. Paper
Edmund Lee

The New York Times (NYT) posted an 18 percent gain in daily circulation, vaulting it past USA Today as the second-largest U.S. newspaper, according to figures released today by the Alliance for Audited Media.

The Times’ average daily circulation rose to 1.87 million in the six-month period ending March 31, the alliance said in a statement. News Corp. (NWSA)’s Wall Street Journal remained the No. 1 paper in the U.S., with its circulation climbing 12 percent to 2.38 million. The Gannett Co.-owned USA Today dropped to third after daily readership slipped 7.9 percent to 1.67 million.

Daily readership of U.S. newspapers altogether declined 0.7 percent in the six-month period from a year earlier while Sunday editions, which draw the most advertising dollars, were down 1.4 percent, according to the AAM. Even so, more people are reading news online, which accounts for 19 percent of total circulation, compared with 14 percent last year.

The New York Times has seen a surge in online subscribers since the company instituted a so-called paywall in 2011, prompting readers to pay for online access. The AAM’s daily circulation figures include people who read the paper on a range of devices, including Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)’s Kindle.

“These gains can largely be attributed to the continuing popularity of the Times’ digital subscription packages,” New York Times Co. said in a separate statement.

Double Counting

The company also is being helped by relatively new reporting rules at the AAM that let publishers count subscribers multiple times if they read a paper on different devices. For instance, a person who accesses the Times on a personal computer, a smartphone and a tablet in a single day would be counted as three readers. While the Times’ digital readership stands at 1.13 million, the publisher only had 676,000 paying online subscribers as of the end of March.

Times Co. shares fell 0.1 percent to $8.86 at the New York close. They have climbed 3.9 percent this year, compared with a 12 percent gain for the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.

The company announced plans last week to create more digital products and services, aiming to make up for tumbling advertising sales. The new offerings, such as a lower-priced online packages and specialized subscriptions that focus on areas such as politics and technology, will be rolled out in late 2013 or early 2014.

The publisher is targeting potential customers “numbering in the many hundreds of thousands,” Chief Executive Officer Mark Thompson said in an interview at the time.

The Times’ current pricing plans range from $15 to $35 a month, depending on how many devices the reader plans to use.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-0...tion-gain.html





Newspapers Need to Stop Lying to Themselves — and to Advertisers — About Their Circulation
Mathew Ingram

A trade group says that newspapers like the New York Times have seen large increases in circulation, but that’s partly because they are allowed to count their readers multiple times. The industry needs to do better.

There has been much hue and cry about the New York Times passing USA Today in circulation to become the second-largest newspaper in the United States, thanks in part to a boost from the NYT’s digital susbcription plan, which reportedly boosted circulation to almost 2 million daily readers. These numbers are notoriously dodgy, however — and if anything, they have gotten worse instead of better with the arrival of online measurement and new digital devices.

The real bottom line is that until newspapers start coming clean about their readership — both to themselves and to their advertisers — they are going to continue to miss the forest for the trees.

The latest circulation gains for the NYT and others came courtesy of the Alliance for Audited Media (formerly known as the Audit Bureau of Circulations), an industry group composed of advertising agencies and publishers. The group noted that the numbers are not really comparable to the previous year’s results for a number of reasons, including the fact that some newspapers have launched new subscription formats, stopped printing every day and so on.
Counting readers multiple times

As Edmund Lee at Bloomberg points out, the AAM survey — which is somewhat ironically locked behind a paywall — also allows publishers to count their readers multiple times, according to rules adopted recently by the group. In other words, newspapers can count someone who reads the newspaper in print, on the web and on their Kindle as three separate readers. But doesn’t this inflate their readership numbers unreasonably? It sure does. The bottom line is that no one really knows what the “real” readership numbers are for newspapers.

@mathewi @BGrueskin It's not *unduplicated* audience. Doesn't strike me as any more phony-baloney than "passalong" readership numbers.—
Scott Klein (@kleinmatic) May 01, 2013


Some argue this has always been the case with newspapers, which is true: publishers have routinely engaged in all kinds of shady tricks to boost their circulation — including special discounts for bulk purchases by hotels and airlines and other giveaways, and even dumping large quantities into ravines or pulping them after printing. On top of that, many papers have inflated their readership numbers for years by claiming that each copy gets read by as many as five people, an estimate that borders on the ridiculous.

Newspapers need to come clean

This defence boils down to: “Newspapers have always done this, and no one believes these numbers anyway, so what difference does it make?” A pretty weak defense, you might argue — and you would be right.

@mathewi @BGrueskin That’s harder than it looks. We can’t even come up with web metrics we all agree on.—
Scott Klein (@kleinmatic) May 01, 2013


The other line of defence is that online measurement is also chaotic and confusing at best, and that since websites can’t even agree on whose numbers are correct, why should newspapers be any different? It’s true that measurement of online traffic is murky, with providers like comScore often giving wildly inaccurate estimates when compared with a site’s internal numbers. But this is a little like saying newspapers don’t have to tell the truth because no one else does either.

If newspapers are competing with online publishers and digital-native content companies for both readers and advertising, which they clearly are, then they have to be better than their competition — being just as inaccurate is hardly helping their cause. And they should be spending a lot more time on trying to measure real engagement (repeat visits, time spent, etc.) than on simplistic and flawed vanity metrics like raw circulation numbers. That is a mug’s game.
http://paidcontent.org/2013/05/01/ne...r-circulation/





If Koch Brothers Buy LA Times, Half of Staff May Quit
Kathleen Miles

At a Los Angeles Times in-house awards ceremony a week ago, columnist Steve Lopez addressed the elephant in the room.

Speaking to the entire staff, he said, "Raise your hand if you would quit if the paper was bought by Austin Beutner's group." No one raised their hands.

"Raise you hand if you would quit if the paper was bought by Rupert Murdoch." A few people raised their hands.

Facing the elephant trunk-on, "Raise your hand if you would quit if the paper was bought by the Koch brothers." About half the staff raised their hands.

Recent owner of the LA Times, Sam Zell, has been painted as the devil incarnate for slashing the editorial staff and for his vulgar demeanor.

But at least, editorially, he's stayed out of the reporters' business. There hasn't been propaganda reporting, and there aren't topics that are off-limits to the staff, according to a few Times reporters. The editorial page, definitely leaning left but not afraid, for example, to chastise unions, hasn't changed much since Zell bought the Tribune Co., owner of the newspaper and eight others, in 2007.

That may not be the case under the paper's future leadership, even if the group favored by the staff and readers takes over.

As Tribune Co. emerges from a four-year bankruptcy, the predominantly Democratic city is quivering at the rumor that libertarian billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch may be interested in buying the LA Times. The brothers are believed to be the only group prepared to buy all eight Tribune papers, including the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel and Hartford Courant, as a package -- how Tribune would like to sell them.

The ownership that most Angelenos seem to favor is a coalition of LA billionaires who have expressed interest, led by former Democratic mayoral candidate Austin Beutner and including prominent Democratic donor Eli Broad.

Many say local ownership is preferable because there's more accountability and involvement. Local owners know and care about the city. Because they live here, they're concerned and accessible. They won't tarnish the paper, because they have local reputations to uphold. It would restore the family feel that the paper had for more than 60 years under the founding leadership of the Chandler family.

However, local ownership can have a dark side. Until the 1960s, the Chandlers used the Times to promote real estate development and Republican ideals. Similarly, when local real estate investor Doug Manchester bought the San Diego Union Tribune in 2011, he turned it into a platform for local business interests. To the dread of most Angelenos, Manchester has expressed interest in buying the LA Times, though he's not considered a frontrunner.

Beutner and Broad have friends, political interests, and business and philanthropic investments across the city. And it's hard to imagine that this wouldn't influence the paper's editorial content.

For example: If Broad was an owner, would he have let the Times run its expose targeting then-Getty CEO Barry Munitz for abusing his expense account? The piece reported the two of them taking international vacations together, at least one on Broad's yacht. The story led to Munitz's resignation.

Perhaps Broad would have let the story run for the sake of the reputation of the paper. Maybe he would have deferred to other friends-of-Eli who wanted Munitz out. Then again, Broad, LA's most generous philanthropist, is a notorious meddler who isn't afraid to piss people off to get his way.

As major players in the city, the names Beutner and Broad regularly appear in the paper. Even if the owners don't interfere, their presence would be in the consciousness of the newsroom. Would reporters, editors and the publisher have the guts to report and run a negative story involving one of their owners? Doubtful.

The fact that Beutner's group would be an oligarchy rather than a monarchy may provide some checks and balances -- even thought Beutner and Broad both tilt left, politically. Their only hope so far of becoming a bipartisan group is Andrew Cherng, founder of the Panda Express and the only Republican reportedly interested in joining the group.

Perhaps one brave Times reporter would go public with a story killed by the new owners. She would lose her job, and it would be written about in The New York Times. And, it would pressure the LA Times owners to be more objective. But many of the people working at the Times support a family or are still developing their careers and can't afford to lose their jobs -- especially in a town with few job opportunities for newspaper journalists.

If half the staff quit under Koch ownership, that would leave half as many people likely to stand up to the owners -- probably the half that would be more likely to do so. Not to mention, it would be a tremendous loss of talented journalists who have built a wealth of LA knowledge and relationships over years of experience.

It is likely that the Beutner coalition sees an LA Times purchase not just as a business investment, but as a local vanity project and perhaps an occasional outlet for their own interests. That's generally how it goes with newspaper owners.

That may not be wonderful, but it's far better that than what the Koch brothers would likely turn the Times into -- namely, a national bullhorn for conservative causes like lowering taxes and lessening regulation. At a conservative conference in Aspen, Colo., three years ago, the brothers said their 10-year political plan includes using the media to advocate for smaller government.

Whichever owner wins out, change is coming, and LA readers and journalists need to be paying attention. The LA Times largely decides what is LA news. The opening segment of LA's public radio programs, such as AirTalk and Which Way, LA, is generally a story on page one of the Times that day. All LA news outlets follow and cover at least some of what the Times reports.

So if the agenda at the Times changes, the agenda at the other LA news outlets will change -- unless those news outlets are watching carefully. LA has to worry more about the stories that the Times stops covering than stories that are covered with a bias.
An example of how bias can take the form of lack of coverage is Fox News' scant coverage of the national gun control debate. When President Barack Obama gave his moving speech chastising Congress for failing to pass background checks, Fox cut away to a panel discussion on the liberal media bias before the president had even finished his first sentence.

It seems the rationale is that the more silence there is on gun control, the greater the likelihood that status quo will continue. So the silence is what we have to listen for.

All LA journalists, including those at the Times, will need to research the friends and interests of the paper's new owners and make sure they don't get special treatment. If Times reporters hit a wall, will other LA journalists step up to report on those topics?

That must include pre-emptive, entrepreneurial stories, not just reactive stories. It must mean digging for what's broken but ignored, what's going on behind the press releases and City Council or County Supervisors' meetings. It must mean holding politicians accountable for what they said six months ago.

It means following up once the excitement has died down. For example, with the cop-killer Chris Dorner, LA had a few days of a Batman-like adventure story. It's the kind of stuff a lot of journalists live for. But they have to also live for the follow up. LAPD Chief Charlie Beck promised to openly investigate whether Dorner really was unlawfully fired or not. That was the time for LA journalists to investigate racial discrimination within the LAPD. Just this week, the Times reported that Dorner prompted dozens of fired cops to challenge their firings.

Impactful coverage calls for many reporters putting in many hours of hard work. Unfortunately, LA -- the second-largest city in the U.S. -- is far from overpopulated with working journalists. No LA newsroom is close to even half the size of the Times' 500-person editorial staff, reduced as it is from its peak a decade ago. At HuffPost LA, there are a whopping three of us.

One thing sure to happen if the Koch brothers take over the paper is a conservative agenda on the editorial page. As other newspapers have cut back on editorials and endorsements, the Times is now often the only LA news outlet that issues endorsements on political candidates and on ballot measures and initiatives. This is particularly crucial in California, where even the most educated voter is left clueless and confused -- or worse, tricked -- after reading the state propositions put on the ballot by Californians who simply gathered enough signatures to push a private agenda.

If the Times' editorial page is filled with the Koch brothers' libertarian opinions, other journalists in LA will need to step up and voice opposing views.

In an age when the Internet is buzzing with far-left and far-right screamers blogging opinion as fact, it is invaluable to have trusted, vetted journalists research both sides of key public issues and then publish carefully considered opinions. This is especially true given the "he said, she said" nature of most news, leaving out discernment of truth from the lies that both he and she may have been peddling.

Great content is produced on independent news sites, and the Internet's influence on print media will only continue to grow. But let's be real. Other forms of journalism aren't ready to replace great newspapers.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathle...b_3180391.html
















Until next week,

- js.



















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