Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 10th, '12

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"The age of voodoo is over." – Dan Lyons


"Not having hot water is one thing. But not having a phone? Forget about it." – Kartik Sankar



































November 10th, 2012




Why Nate Silver Won, And Why It Matters
Dan Lyons

Political pundits, mostly Republican, went into a frenzy when Nate Silver, a New York Times pollster and stats blogger, predicted that Barack Obama would win reelection.

But Silver was right and the pundits were wrong - and the impact of this goes way beyond politics.

Silver won because, um, science. As ReadWrite's own Dan Rowinski noted, Silver's methodology is all based on data. He "takes deep data sets and applies logical analytical methods" to them. It's all just numbers.

Silver runs a blog called FiveThirtyEight, which is licensed by the Times. In 2008 he called the presidential election with incredible accuracy, getting 49 out of 50 states right. But this year he rolled a perfect score, 50 out of 50, even nailing the margins in many cases. His uncanny accuracy on this year's election represents what Rowinski calls a victory of "logic over punditry."

In fact it's bigger than that. Bear in mind that before turning his attention to politics in 2007 and 2008, Silver was using computer models to make predictions about baseball. What does it mean when some punk kid baseball nerd can just wade into politics and start kicking butt on all these long-time "experts" who have spent their entire lives covering politics?

It means something big is happening.

Man Versus Machine

This is about the triumph of machines and software over gut instinct.

The age of voodoo is over. The era of talking about something as a "dark art" is done. In a world with big computers and big data, there are no dark arts.

And thank God for that. One by one, computers and the people who know how to use them are knocking off these crazy notions about gut instinct and intuition that humans like to cling to. For far too long we've applied this kind of fuzzy thinking to everything, from silly stuff like sports to important stuff like medicine.

Someday, and I hope it's soon, we will enter the age of intelligent machines, when true artificial intellgence becomes a reality, and when we look back on the late 20th and early 21st century it will seem medieval in its simplicity and reliance on superstition.

What most amazes me is the backlash and freak-out that occurs every time some "dark art" gets knocked over in a particular domain. Watch Moneyball (or read the book) and you'll see the old guard (in that case, baseball scouts) grow furious as they realize that computers can do their job better than they can. (Of course it's not computers; it's people who know how to use computers.)

We saw the same thing when IBM's Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997. We saw it when Watson beat humans at Jeopardy.

It's happening in advertising, which used to be a dark art but is increasingly a computer-driven numbers game. It's also happening in my business, the news media, prompting the same kind of furor as happened with the baseball scouts in Moneyball.

Who wants to believe that machines can tell us which stories to write, or which stories people want to read? Who wants to believe that machines can actually write stories? But they do. Forbes, my former home, started running computer-generated stories earlier this year.

Backlash

Each time this happens, there's always lots of sputtering and outrage. When you strip away the rhetoric, at the core is always the same fear - that machines will take away jobs from humans. Baseball scouts want to keep working. So do journalists and chess masters.

So do pundits, but after this election it's getting harder to see what role they should play.

Why listen to Joe Scarborough and his crew on MSNBC's Morning Joe show bloviate about who's going to win and why, when Nate Silver and his computers can just give you the correct answer?

Scarborough bet Silver $2,000 on the outcome of the election after accusing Silver of being an "ideologue" who was predicting an Obama win simply because that's what Silver wanted to happen.

Scarborough has lost a lot more than the two grand. He's lost his reason for being, and he has taken a lot of others down with him.

Scarborough, not Siliver, turns out to be the wishful-thinking ideologue. Nate Silver and his computers may not put Scarborough and his ilk out of business - there's loads of airtime to fill, and windbags are still needed for that.

But Silver has exposed those guys for what they are, which is propagandists and entertainers.

And that's fine. We still need entertainers. Computers haven't learned to do that yet.

For now, anyway.
http://readwrite.com/2012/11/07/why-...why-it-matters





The Obama Campaign’s Technology Is a Force Multiplier
Steve Lohr

Technology doesn’t win political campaigns, but it certainly is a weapon — a force multiplier, in military terms.

Both sides in the presidential contest mined click-stream data as never before to target messages to potential voters. But a real edge for the Obama campaign was in its use of online and mobile technology to support its much-praised ground game, finding potential supporters and urging them to vote, either in person or by phone, according to two senior members of the Obama technology team, Michael Slaby, chief integration and innovation officer for the Obama campaign, and Harper Reed, chief technology officer for the Obama campaign.

A program called “Dashboard,” for example, allowed volunteers to join a local field team and get assignments remotely. The Web application — viewable on smartphones or tablets — showed the location of field workers, neighborhoods to be canvassed, and blocks where help was needed. “It allowed people to join a neighborhood team without ever going to a central office,” said Mr. Slaby.

Another ground-game program was a tool for telephone canvassing from people’s homes instead of having to travel to a campaign office and work from a telephone bank. The call tool was a Web program that let people sign up to make calls and receive a list of phone numbers, names and a script to use, noted Mr. Reed.

Often, the profiles of volunteer callers and the lists they received were matched. So the callers were people with similar life experiences to those being called, and thus more likely to be persuasive. Here is a YouTube video of a 91-year-old World War II veteran, who joined the Obama phone corps.

In 2008, there were some remote callers in the Obama campaign. But this year, there were ten times as many, Mr. Slaby said.

The sheer scale of the online outreach and data collection dwarfed the effort four years ago. For example, the Barack Obama Facebook site had 33 million “likes,” compared with 2 million for the previous campaign. A Facebook like, Mr. Slaby noted, is the “just the first rung on a ladder of engagement” but it is a starting point.

Another truly important change was in the technology itself. “Cloud computing barely existed in 2008,” Mr. Slaby said.

This time, the Obama campaign’s data center was mainly Amazon Web Services, the leading supplier of cloud services. The campaign’s engineers built about 200 different programs that ran on the Amazon service including Dashboard, the remote calling tool, the campaign Web site, donation processing and data analytics applications.

Using mainly open-source software and the Amazon service, the Obama campaign could inexpensively write and tailor its own programs instead of using off-the-shelf commercial software.

“It let us attack and engineer our own approach to problems, and build solutions for an environment that moves so rapidly you can’t plan,” Mr. Slaby said. “It made a huge difference this time.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/1...ce-multiplier/





Inside Team Romney's Whale of an IT Meltdown

Orca, the Romney campaign's "killer" app, skips beta and pays the price.
Sean Gallagher

It was supposed to be a "killer app," but a system deployed to volunteers by Mitt Romney's presidential campaign may have done more harm to Romney's chances on Election Day—largely because of a failure to follow basic best practices for IT projects.

Called "Orca," the effort was supposed to give the Romney campaign its own analytics on what was happening at polling places and to help the campaign direct get-out-the-vote efforts in the key battleground states of Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Colorado.

Instead, volunteers couldn't get the system to work from the field in many states—in some cases because they had been given the wrong login information. The system crashed repeatedly. At one point, the network connection to the Romney campaign's headquarters went down because Internet provider Comcast reportedly thought the traffic was caused by a denial of service attack.

As one Orca user described it to Ars, the entire episode was a "huge clusterfuck." Here's how it happened.

Develop in haste, repent at leisure

The Romney campaign put a lot of stock in Orca, giving PBS NewsHour an advance look at the operation on November 5. But according to volunteers who saw and used the system, it was hardly a model of stability, having been developed in just seven months on a lightning schedule following the Republican primary elections. Orca had been conceived by two men—Romney's Director of Voter Contact Dan Centinello and the campaign's Political Director Rich Beeson. It was named in honor of the killer whale as an allusion to the Obama campaign's own voter identification program, code-named Narwhal; orcas are the top predator of narwhals, Romney campaign staffers explained, and they were preparing to outshine the Democratic voter turnout effort.

As Romney's Communications Director Gail Gitcho put it in the PBS piece, "The Obama campaign likes to brag about their ground operation, but it's nothing compared to this."

To build Orca, the Romney campaign turned to Microsoft and an unnamed application consulting firm. The goal was to put a mobile application in the hands of 37,000 volunteers in swing states, who would station themselves at the polls and track the arrival of known Romney supporters. The information would be monitored by more than 800 volunteers back at Romney's Boston Garden campaign headquarters via a Web-based management console, and it would be used to push out more calls throughout the day to pro-Romney voters who hadn't yet shown up at the polls. A backup voice response system would allow local poll volunteers to call in information from the field if they couldn't access the Web.

But Orca turned out to be toothless, thanks to a series of deployment blunders and network and system failures. While the system was stress-tested using automated testing tools, users received little or no advance training on the system. Crucially, there was no dry run to test how Orca would perform over the public Internet.

Part of the issue was Orca's architecture. While 11 backend database servers had been provisioned for the system—probably running on virtual machines—the "mobile" piece of Orca was a Web application supported by a single Web server and a single application server. Rather than a set of servers in the cloud, "I believe all the servers were in Boston at the Garden or a data center nearby," wrote Hans Dittuobo, a Romney volunteer at Boston Garden, to Ars by e-mail.

Throughout the day, the Orca Web page was repeatedly inaccessible. It remains unclear whether the issue was server load or a lack of available bandwidth, but the result was the same: Orca had not been tested under real-world conditions and repeatedly failed when it was needed the most.

All tell, no show

Before Election Day, volunteer training at Boston headquarters amounted to a series of 90-minute conference calls with Centinello. Users had no hands-on with the Orca application itself, which wasn't turned on until 6:00 AM on Election Day.

"We asked if our laptops needed to be WiFi capable," Dittuobo told Ars. "Dan Centinello went into how the Garden had just finished expansion of its wireless network and that yes, WiFi was required. I was concerned about hacking, jamming the signal, etc...Then we were told that we would not be using WiFi but using Ethernet connections."

Field volunteers also got briefed via conference calls, and they too had no hands-on with the application in advance of Election Day. There was a great deal of confusion among some volunteers in the days leading up to the election as they searched Android and Apple app stores for the Orca application, not knowing it was a Web app.

John Ekdahl, Jr., a Web developer and Romney volunteer, recounted on the Ace of Spades HQ blog that these preparatory calls were "more of the slick marketing speech type than helpful training sessions. I had some serious questions—things like 'Has this been stress tested?', 'Is there redundancy in place?', and 'What steps have been taken to combat a coordinated DDOS attack or the like?', among others. These types of questions were brushed aside (truth be told, they never took one of my questions). They assured us that the system had been relentlessly tested and would be a tremendous success."

In a final training call on November 3, field volunteers were told to expect "packets" shortly containing the information they needed to use Orca. Those packets, which showed up in some volunteers' e-mail inboxes as late as November 5, turned out to be PDF files—huge PDF files which contained instructions on how to use the app and voter rolls for the voting precincts each volunteer would be working. After discovering the PDFs in his e-mail inbox at 10:00 PM on Election Eve, Ekdahl said that "I sat down and cursed, as I would have to print 60+ pages of instructions and voter rolls on my home printer. They expected 75 to 80-year old veteran volunteers to print out 60+ pages on their home computers? The night before election day?"

Invalid passwords, crashing servers

When the Romney campaign finally brought up Orca, the "killer whale" was not ready to perform. Some field volunteers couldn't even report to their posts, because the campaign hadn't told them they first needed to pick up poll watcher credentials from one of Romney's local "victory centers." Others couldn't connect to the Orca site because they entered the URL for the site without the https:// prefix; instead of being redirected to the secure site, they were confronted with a blank page, Ekdahl said.

And for many of those who managed to get to their polling places and who called up the website on their phones, there was another, insurmountable hurdle—their passwords didn't work and attempts to reset passwords through the site also failed. As for the voice-powered backup system, it failed too as many poll watchers received the wrong personal identification numbers needed to access the system. Joel Pollak of Briebart reported that hundreds of volunteers in Colorado and North Carolina couldn't use either the Web-based or the voice-based Orca systems; it wasn't until 6:00 PM on Election Day that the team running Orca admitted they had issued the wrong PIN codes and passwords to everyone in those states, and they reset them. Even then, some volunteers still couldn’t login.

In Boston, things weren't much better. Some of the VoIP phones set up for volunteers were misconfigured. And as volunteers tried to help people in the field get into the system, they ran into similar problems themselves. "I tried to login to the field website," Dittuobo told me, "but none of the user names and passwords worked, though the person next to me could get in. We had zero access to Iowa, Colorado, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Seems like the only state that was working was Florida."

As the Web traffic from volunteers attempting to connect to Orca mounted, the system crashed repeatedly because of bandwidth constraints. At one point the network connection to the campaign's data center went down—apparently because the ISP shut it off. "They told us Comcast thought it was a denial of service attack and shut it down," Dittuobu recounted. "(Centinello) was giddy about it," he added—presumably because he thought that so much traffic was sign of heavy system use.

Flying blind

As the day wore on and information still failed to flow in from the field, the Romney campaign was flying blind. Instead of using Orca's vaunted analytics to steer their course, Centinello and the rest of Romney's team had no solid data on how to target late voters, other than what they heard from the media. Meanwhile, volunteers like Ekdahl could do nothing but vote themselves and go home.

This sort of failure is why there's a trend in application testing (particularly in the development of public-facing applications) away from focusing on testing application infrastructure performance and toward focusing on user experience. Automated testing rigs can tell if software components are up to the task of handling expected loads, but they can't show what the system's performance will look like to the end user. And whatever testing environment Romney's campaign team and IT consultants used, it wasn't one that mimicked the conditions of Election Day. As a result, Orca's launch on Election Day was essentially a beta test of the software—not something most IT organizations would do in such a high-stakes environment.

IT projects are easy scapegoats for organizational failures. There's no way to know if Romney could have made up the margins in Ohio if Orca had worked. But the catastrophic failure of the system, purchased at large expense, squandered the campaign's most valuable resource—people—and was symptomatic of a much bigger leadership problem.

"The end result," Ekdahl wrote, "was that 30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help. The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of [get out the vote] efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters). Wrap your head around that."

Republican campaigners will undoubtedly try to wrap their heads around it for some time to come.
http://arstechnica.com/information-t...n-it-meltdown/





Pandora Media Sues Ascap Seeking Lower Songwriter Fees
Don Jeffrey

Pandora Media Inc. (P), the biggest Internet radio service, sued the organization representing songwriters and composers to seek lower license fees for playing their songs.

Pandora, which is also lobbying the U.S. Congress for lower royalties on recordings, today asked a federal court in New York to set “reasonable” license fees from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers through 2015.

Pandora is seeking a blanket licensing fee that would cover all songs represented by the 435,000-member group. The radio service has said the current fees prevent profitability. Ascap and Pandora reached an “experimental” fee agreement in 2005 that lasted until 2010. Terms of their current arrangement weren’t disclosed in the filing.

“The license rates and other material terms of the 2005 license agreement were presented to Pandora by Ascap as being effectively non-negotiable,” the company said in court papers. Pandora said the “experimental license agreement” it reached in 2005 for Internet sites and services “was ill-suited and not reasonable.”

The Oakland, California-based company, which offers programming to subscribers based on their musical preferences, held an initial public offering last year and says it has 150 million registered users in the U.S.

Court Jurisdiction

Pandora and Ascap were unable agree on licensing fees after more than a year of talks, Pandora said. The U.S. District Court in New York has jurisdiction over rate-setting if the parties can’t come to terms.

Ascap declined to comment on the suit, Lauren Iossa, a spokeswoman for the New York-based organization, said in an e- mail. Ascap represents the music of artists including Beyonce, Alan Jackson, George Gershwin and Duke Ellington.

This year Ascap negotiated a fee agreement with the Radio Music Licensing Committee, which represents large broadcasters such as CC Media Holdings Inc. (CCMO)’s Clear Channel. They will pay 1.7 percent of gross revenue minus deductions based on advertising commissions.

Pandora said in its lawsuit that Ascap refused to offer it the same terms. Clear Channel operates the iHeartRadio Internet service, a direct competitor to Pandora.

Pandora also claims that it’s entitled to lower rates because some large music publishers have announced they are withdrawing new media rights from Ascap and negotiating licensing fees directly with Web radio services.

Radio Rates

U.S. lawmakers in September introduced the Internet Radio Fairness Act of 2012, which if enacted would require music royalty rates for Web broadcasters to be comparable to what satellite radio and cable companies pay. Sirius XM Radio Inc. (SIRI) is the leading satellite radio company.

“Royalty rates for different formats of digital radio are astonishingly unequal,” Tim Westergren, Pandora’s co-founder, said in a statement in September. “Last year Pandora paid roughly 50 percent of its total revenue in royalties, more than six times the percentage paid by SiriusXM.”

For the six months that ended July 31, Pandora reported that its net loss increased to $25.6 million from $8.57 million a year earlier, while revenue rose 54 percent to $182 million.

Pandora rose 12 cents to $8.37 at 4:15 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares declined 18 percent this year before today.

The case is Pandora Media Inc. v. American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, 1:12-cv-08035, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-1...iter-fees.html





EU Finally Realizes The Public Is Watching CETA: Softens Criminal Provisions For Copyright Infringement
Leigh Beadon

Last month, through all of the secrecy shrouding the Canada-EU Trade Agreement (CETA), it was revealed that the treaty called for the same criminal copyright sanctions that European citizens widely rejected when those same sanctions showed up in ACTA. This was just as people feared, and those who noticed were furious that the EU would try to quietly undo the public's ACTA victory so quickly and brazenly. Of course, the reaction to CETA is so far nowhere near the critical mass that led to the ACTA protests — but it looks like the negotiators are afraid of recent history repeating, and may just have gotten the message that they can't do whatever they want behind the public's back. TechCentral reports (found via The 1709 Blog) that more recent CETA documents reveal a weakening of the ACTA-like criminal provisions. There has even been some stance-softening from pro-ACTA powerhouse Karel De Gucht:

...according to documents from the Cyprus Presidency of the EU seen by IDG News Service, the CETA text has been greatly watered down in order to avoid a similar outcome [to ACTA]. The intellectual property protection chapter is now understood to say that countries "may" provide for criminal procedures and penalties.

Even European Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht, who pushed hard for the ACTA agreement, admits that changes must be made. "Since the negative vote of the European Parliament on ACTA, we have been changing the language obviously," he said in an interview with Vieuws.eu. "We should have no illusions, there are still a number of difficult issues to tackle."

Interestingly, though, there is still a strong push for CETA to include criminal sanctions for video recording in movie theaters... championed by Canadian negotiators. We've had a specific criminal law against recording a movie without permission of the theater owner in Canada since 2007 — a law that, like many of Canada's anti-piracy efforts, was primarily the result of U.S lobbying. This is typical of U.S. tactics when it comes to intellectual property law: push your closest friends and neighbors to adopt the strictest laws possible, then put pressure on international negotiations to export those laws around the globe and enshrine them as the norm. Thankfully, these latest leaked negotiation documents suggest that the EU is against Canada's proposal.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...ingement.shtml





What Does 4G Mean for Illegal File Sharing?

The arrival of 4G in the UK marketplace has financial ramifications for content-makers
Martin Rigby

The launch of Everything Everywhere's 4G service in the UK has provided a pretext for some anti-piracy campaigners to raise the spectre of increased illegal file sharing as a result of the new network's much improved data transfer rates. In reality, this is more about frustration with the government's slowness in implementing the provisions of the Digital Economy Act than any real threat of widespread illegal file-sharing over 4G networks.

In a press release last month, the Federation Against Software Theft argued that the introduction of 4G networks (as well as wider availability of public Wi-Fi) justifies widening the scope of legal obligations placed on internet service providers to include mobile network operators. These obligations, aimed at inhibiting illegal sharing of copyrighted material and created by the 2010 Digital Economy Act, include sending warning letters to those suspected of illegal sharing, as well as logging the activities of repeat offenders. The press release also complained about foot-dragging by the government over implementing the original obligations to be placed on the fixed-line ISPs.

It's interesting to note that none of the music industry trade bodies including the BPI, representing the major labels, and a tireless campaigner against music piracy, has so far joined Fast in raising the alarm over the introduction of 4G networks. Maybe this is because common sense suggests that widespread use of 4G networks for the illegal sharing of large video or music files remains improbable.

In an excellent piece of analysis on mobile data pricing in Mobile Europe last month, Chris Goswami points out that mobile network operators are unlikely to offer widespread access to "all-you-can-eat" (AYCE) data plans. They are simply too expensive to support – a consumer with an AYCE data plan and a subscription to a music or movie streaming service could easily get through 10s of GB of data in a month. Goswami concludes that AYCE plans are a limited but important part of a mobile tariff mix designed to acquire and retain certain categories of mobile subscribers and will never be rolled out to the majority of consumers, scotching the suggestion that they'll be a substitute for fixed-line broadband. And, far from offering an AYCE tariff, EE's recently announced 4G data plans range from £36pm for 500MB to £56pm for 8GB – unaffordable for many consumers, especially teenagers.

Moreover, at a more practical level, mobile networks across much of the UK, 3G or 4G, are frequently too unreliable for the high volume data transfer needed for music and video files.

All of which said, copyright can be threatened when consumers are frustrated in doing what they want at a reasonable price, especially on mobile. For instance, the majority of streaming music services, whose main revenue source is monthly subscriptions, offer ad-supported free access to their music catalogues as part of a "freemium" business model (ie offering an initially free but limited service to encourage upgrade to a premium, paid-for service). But this isn't available on mobile devices, the primary means by which younger consumers access the internet. (In the US, teenagers tripled their usage of mobile data over the course of 2011, far ahead of the growth in usage by other age groups.)

Most teenagers are not likely to opt for a subscription streaming service, at an annual cost of £120 in the UK, nor are they likely to download tracks to own, which remains expensive on a per-track basis (typically 79p) for casual listening – leaving them little option but to resort to file sharing. This creates a clear gap in the market, which a number of different businesses have tried to fill, including Nokia's Comes With Music and Beyond Oblivion (a start-up backed by News Corp among other investors), with its ill-fated (or ill-executed) attempt to persuade handset makers to pay for the music that consumers would listen to over the life of a device.

However, maybe it's the mobile industry itself that holds the key to solving the frustration of how to offer easy access to affordable music on mobile. A frustration articulated by Francis Keeling, Universal Music's global head of digital business, at The Great Escape music conference in 2011 when he asked: "Why hasn't anyone come up with a worthwhile model for monetising music based on micropayments?" The implication is clear – if the mobile industry could expand to reach whole new segments of the market through pre-pay (or pay-as-you-go) access to mobile telephony, why can't something similar be done to make music available to all mobile consumers – ie access to an unlimited personal jukebox, affordable for anyone and paid for via mobile phone?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media-netw...l-file-sharing





Music Pirates Find Download Tools On Microsoft's Windows Phone 8
Mark Hachman

As on Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, a number of apps allowing users to download free and copyrighted music have cropped up on Microsoft's Windows Phone.

Windows Phone apps including Audiotica, Music And Ringtones Downloader and Sky Music all allow users to download music - including, it should be said, legally available tunes as well as copyrighted files. But while some apps put up obstacles that make downloading difficult, both Audiotica and an app called Amazing Music make it as easy as the numerous MP3 downloading apps that appear on the Google Play app store for Android.

Of course, these apps could strip potential revenue away from Microsoft's own recently launched Xbox Music Service, which allows both free music streaming and a la carte purchases. But Microsoft also must approve each app before it's published, meaning that Amazing Music and others have Microsoft's blessing, of a sort.

Piracy Lives!

What most online users know, however, is that music piracy is alive and well.

In 2010, a court ordered Lime Wire LLC to disconnect the Limewire peer-to-peer service from the Gnutella network, effectively killing the service. But a number of alternatives still exist, and the methods of peer-to-peer file sharing have gone far beyond sharing individual songs, as Napster did many years ago. These days, sites like The Pirate Bay offer collections like the top 1,000 songs of the last 30 years, in addition to pirated movies and software.

On the Web, trying to stop pirated music and movies is like trying to stop the flow of illegal drugs: Some get caught, more go free. From 2002 or so on, BitTorrent replaced Napster as the peer-to-peer file sharing architecture of choice; research house NPD reports that only 37% of music acquired by U.S. consumers in 2009 was paid for. One in four Internet users accesses an unlicensed service, the IPFI/Nielsen said in January 2012, even though digital music revenues, worldwide, climbed 8% to $5.2 billion. A proposed copyright alert system to issue a sort of “six strikes” policy against American copyright infringers based on ISP notifications will begin rolling out soon, a Center for Copyright Information spokeswoman said in an email, but even the final strike will not include termination of a user’s Internet service.

The exchange for pirating individual songs, meanwhile, has moved to smartphones. Apps on all three mobile platforms offer the possibility of downloading copyrighted music without paying for it. That's even though all three app stores prohibit it. Apple’s app approval process is thought to be the most stringent of the three, but Microsoft also has an active approval process. A Windows Phone app must not violate rule 3.7 of Microsoft’ content policy for Windows Phone: “Unauthorized use of another entity’s intellectual property, including but not limited to: software, music, art, and other copyrighted, trademarked or patented materials or trade secrets.”

Microsoft did not reply to a request for comment.

Legal Alternatives

That doesn’t mean that users can use these apps only to download copyrighted music. Virtually all of the app descriptions make sure to state that users can download "100% legal music" in the public domain. The loophole lends some legitimacy to the software, just as BitTorrent can be used to download legal Linux distributions. But for those who want it, copyrighted music is easily available, as shown in the screenshots for Music Collector, an iOS app that promises to let users "download any music you want.” The images show copyrighted songs from Katy Perry and Britney Spears, among others.

Music-download apps have existed on Google Android for years, allowing users to type in a song or artist and download songs directly to their phone. Because users can’t selectively listen to individual song selections on their phones from licensed services such as MOG, Slacker or Spotify (they typically have to pay $9.99 per month for the privilege) the music download apps have developed their own market niche.

On Windows, the relative dearth of music downloader apps means fewer choices for music freeloaders. Music And Ringtones Downloader and Sky Music put up obstacles to downloading copyrighted material, forcing users to work through a Web page or a list of servers to manually approve and “friend.” (The Audiotica app didn’t generate any results on my first use, although it seemed to work normally on subsequent attempts.)

Amazing Music offered one-stop shopping - downloading music straight to the phone. On its “copyright” page, Amazing Music notes that it doesn’t store any links to content, and all are “provided from internet” via a “searching engine.” The app asks that all “cached” (read: downloaded) data be removed from the phone within 24 hours, and specified that the app doesn’t download the music to other other devices. And then there’s this final nugget: “Note: All of the contents in this application only can be used in China.”

Of course, simply eliminating these app won’t stop the downloading or the creation of new alternatives. A year ago, I wrote about Google’s problem with music downloading via Android. I highlighted one app, named MP3 Music Download Pro. Today there are three identically named apps on Google Play.
http://readwrite.com/2012/11/06/musi...indows-phone-8





I Almost Feel Obligated to Pirate Office for Mac
Rys Sommefeldt

As an owner of a legitimate license Office for Mac 2008, I’ve become frustrated with it enough in recent times to enrol in a trial copy of Office for Mac 2011. My main motivation for trying 2011 has largely been file format related, to get better interchange with other applications. I’m also searching for some usability and user experience parity with the suite on Windows, which I use heavily at work.

The trial ran out a couple of days ago, so obviously Microsoft have been spamming me trying to get me to buy it, including a lovely trio of emails sent at the same time, all eschewing the benefits of ponying up for the license key. The middle email of the trio contained an attractive price, so I clicked to see what bits of the suite were included for the money, and that’s when it all fell apart.

To sign up for the trial you need a Microsoft account populated with everything they need to contact you by phone, email and post. They know unequivocally from two of those pieces of information that I’m a resident of the fine sovereign state of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, flying spaghetti monster save the Queen.

So when the “Get It Now” button in the email takes me to a Microsoft UK page that says, “We’re sorry. The site you are attempting to access is restricted in your region.”, I feel almost morally justified in pirating it due to their complete inability to do that very simple thing of selling me a license key for a reasonable sum of money.

It’s not the first time either! This time they know exactly what I’m interested in and know how to market it to me accurately, yet they still can’t bring themselves to take my money in a sane, orderly fashion.

Ultimately, as a programmer who makes money writing software, I can’t justify a position where I’m using theirs illegitimately. That said, a general situation where people pirate ones and zeroes because it’s easier than paying for them, even when they actively want to pay, is incredibly understandable if it goes anywhere near as badly as my experience with Office for Mac.
http://rys.sommefeldt.com/2012/10/01...e-for-mac.html





Flat World Knowledge to Drop Free Access to Textbooks
Jennifer Howard

Sometimes free costs too much. As of January 1, 2013, Flat World Knowledge, which used to describe itself as the world’s largest publisher of free and open textbooks online, will no longer offer content at no charge.

Cost partly motivated the decision, according to Jeff Shelstad, the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer. “We’ve got to be smart with the limited capital that we have” if the company is to survive 10 years from now, he said.

There’s also “an element of fairness” behind the move, Mr. Shelstad said. Some institutional partners have been paying as much as $20 to $25 per student for access to Flat World content, while other partners pay far less. The goal is to even things out while remaining affordable, according to Mr. Shelstad. “We have anchored ourselves around affordability, and we are still there with this move,” he said.

The company’s model allows instructors to customize textbooks and students to pick different packages of content—textbooks in different formats, related study guides, and so on—depending on what they want. The only thing that will change is that there will be no free option, Mr. Shelstad said. “We’re still a great, affordable solution that gives you control of content,” he added.

Flat World has recently begun to explore the possibilities of so-called MOOC’s, or massive open online courses. This fall, it agreed to provide access to a textbook for a free, introductory course in solid-state chemistry offered by edX, the joint Harvard-MIT online-education venture.

Mr. Shelstad doesn’t expect the lack of free options to hamper the company’s ability to work with edX and other providers of free online education. “I don’t see any reason why we won’t continue to partner with MOOC’s,” Mr. Shelstad said. “I’m not sure this will have much impact on that at all.”

Flat World has talked to some 200 of its institutional members about the change, the chief executive said. “I would say that 190 have more or less said, ‘Not a problem,’” he told The Chronicle. “Of course, we have some who are really committed to the open license.”

Flat World authors, meanwhile, “are almost 100 percent in agreement with this move,” he said.

“Campus Marketplace,” the newsletter of the Association of College Stores, first reported Flat World’s decision to drop its free option. “A number of our members work with Flat World Knowledge or have its adoptions on their campus, so this will likely be of interest to multiple folks in the industry,” Mark Nelson, the association’s vice president and chief information officer, told the newsletter.
https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcam...extbooks/40780





Judge Denies Move to Ban Ad-Skipping DVR

Court Dishes it to Murdoch's Fox
Tony Smith

US satellite broadcaster Dish Networks can continue providing its subscribers with a DVR capable of automatically skipping adverts, a US District Court judge has ruled.

Judge Dolly Gee in the Central District of California court this week refused News International’s Fox Broadcasting subsidiary a preliminary injunction to prevent Dish shipping its Hopper Whole-Home DVR to punters.

Push a button on the set-top box’s remote control and it’ll automatically bypass ads during playback, but only when the content is viewed more than a day after broadcast. The Hopper will record primetime shows and save them for up to eight days.

In a statement, Dish’s legal chief, R Stanton Dodge, said the ruling was a “victory for common sense and customer choice”.

Fox said it was “disappointed” with the ruling, but promised to appeal against it.

In any case, the company’s legal action against Dish continues. Fox maintains that Dish’s ad-skipping system, called AutoHop, not only breaches its content supply contract with Dish but that it also amounts to copyright infringement.

Indeed, Fox said it was pleased that the judge had accepted that allegation, despite denying the preliminary injunction against Dish.

Judge Gee’s ruling has yet to be made public, and we only have the statements from Dish and Fox as pointers to its content.

Fox launched its action against Dish in May 2012. So did ABC, NBC Universal and CBS. All three are no doubt worried about a potential loss of advertising revenue. Why will advertisers be willing to pay so much for primetime ad slots if a large number of viewers can simply bypass them?

For its part, Dish says its system is protected by 1980s judgements that home video cassette recorder makers are not liable when the devices’ users infringe copyright by recording shows off the air. It has also counter-sued the plaintiffs, alleging they conspired against it.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11..._skipping_dvr/





How New Yorkers Adjusted to Sudden Smartphone Withdrawal
Jenna Wortham

While Hurricane Sandy left hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers without electricity or heat, the loss of one utility left some especially bewildered: cellphone service.

“Not having hot water is one thing,” said Kartik Sankar, 29, a technology consultant who lives in the East Village. “But not having a phone? Forget about it.”

With only sporadic access to text messaging, Facebook or even landline phone calls, Mr. Sankar and others like him in Manhattan’s no-power zone quickly cobbled together more primitive systems for passing along information and arranging when and where to meet, so they could take comfort in each other’s company in the dark.

On the scale of hardships suffered in the storm and its aftermath, these were more like minor annoyances. But the experience of being suddenly smartphoneless caused some to realize just how dependent on the technology they had become.

A sign outside of Wicked Willy's on Bleecker Street invites people inside to charge their devices.Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times A sign outside of Wicked Willy’s on Bleecker Street invites people inside to charge their devices.

“The lack of information was unnerving,” said Tay McEvers, 27, a television producer, who was celebrating the return of power with Mr. Sankar and other friends at Niagara Bar in the East Village on Friday night. “You would hear that the water wasn’t safe to drink or that the lights were going to come back at 4 and have no way to verify it.”

Another friend, Christy Claxton, 30, who lives on the Bowery and works in digital marketing, talked about adjusting to a life that was like something out of a time before cellphones made connections far more fluid.

“You had to make plans and stick to them,” Ms. Claxton said. “It felt so old-school, like we were back in 1998.”

With the power out, people gathered in the few bars that were still serving beer, albeit warm and occasionally flat. These became more than watering holes; they were crucial spots where neighborhood residents could exchange bits of news and information gleaned from others and picked up on trips beyond the dark zone.

The lack of connectivity led to a lot of missed connections.

“On Halloween night, we thought everyone was going to be at one bar, but when we showed up no one was there,” said Steve Juh, 32, who lives on the Lower East Side and works in finance. “They left a note with the bartender telling us where they were, but we didn’t get it.”

On a stretch of Bleecker Street in the West Village that was still draped in darkness on Friday night, local residents — and a few disaster tourists — gathered at Wicked Willy’s, a sports bar that siphoned power from a generator and offered free charging stations and landline phone calls to patrons.

Joshua Diem, 21, a student at New York University who was at the bar, said that during the storm he left the city to take care of his ailing grandmother in Connecticut. They were without power for most of the week. He said he felt as if he had missed nothing in his time offline.

“I’ve been texting with my ex all night,” Mr. Diem said. “I kind of regret that, to be honest.”

For some, regaining cell service as the power came back on was bittersweet. Although they were relieved to be reconnected with their families and friends and to begin edging toward normalcy, they said that the brief break from their hyperconnected lives turned out to be welcome.

Amelia Erwitt, 32, and her husband, Kamil Kaluza, 36, who live in the West Village, said they enjoyed life offline — waking up with the sun, exploring their neighborhood, checking in on friends, cooking by flashlight and going to bed soon after sundown. They got their news from a battery-powered radio and checked e-mail by walking two blocks to a spot in front of a nearby deli that somehow offered a cellular connection. They would wave their phones in the air until they felt them buzzing with messages and alerts.

Sometimes news updates came from unusual sources. “I stood on line for a payphone for 30 minutes to call my dad,” Ms. Erwitt said. “And the man in front of me was a tourist from France, and after calling home to check in, he hung up, turned around and said, ‘I just heard, from Paris, that we’re getting power back in three days.’”

“We haven’t left each other in five days because we’re afraid of not being able to find each other again,” she added. “Without cell service, who knows if we would?”

Both were not terribly eager for the return of electricity. Their block, as of late Friday, was still one of the ones without power, although all around were streets humming with bright lights and boisterous people.

“It feels like the light is closing in on us,” Mr. Kaluza said.

Mr. Juh also admitted to mixed feelings. “It’s strange, how in the end you feel like a prisoner to your device,” he said. “It’s the one thing you wanted to work, more than anything.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/1...ne-withdrawal/





'Dark' Motive: FBI Seeks Signs of Carrier Roadblocks to Surveillance

The agency wants tougher wiretap laws, and in its "Going Dark" campaign it's enlisted Homeland Security for examples of how companies like Comcast, Cricket, and T-Mobile are standing in the way.
Declan McCullagh

The FBI has tried to bolster its case for expanded Internet surveillance powers by gathering finger-pointing examples of how communications companies have stymied government agencies, CNET has learned.

An internal Homeland Security report shows that a working group convened by an FBI office in Chantilly, Va. requested details about "investigations have been negatively impacted" by companies' delays, partial compliance, or inability to comply with police surveillance requests.

One of the claims in that report: A police arm of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which conducts investigations into immigration, drug, computer, and copyright crimes, reported that no-contract wireless provider Cricket Communications had "hindered" an investigation because "system technical issues" interfered with a wiretap and location tracking. Cricket, a subsidiary of Leap Wireless, has approximately 6 million subscribers.

The "noncompliance incident report" says that:

On almost a daily basis, we experienced technical issues with our target line serviced by Cricket Communications. These problems included daily occurrences of intercepted communications that were missing either data or content. We had numerous instances of calls received where direction and/or digits were not provided by the service provider. Also, for approximately four months the office attempted to obtain a usable cellsite mapping template for target location data. Several Cricket employees were notified of the problem multiple times over a four month time period. No satisfactory resolution was ever provided by Cricket.

Greg Lund, a spokesman for Cricket, told CNET today that "we review all incoming legal requests to determine what information is requested and whether disclosure of that information is lawfully permitted pursuant to the type of request submitted." If disclosure is legally permitted, he said, Cricket turns over the data, but "if not, we deny the request."

The information collection is part of the FBI's controversial effort, known internally as "Going Dark," aimed in part at convincing Congress to rewrite federal wiretapping law to require Internet companies including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to build in back doors for government surveillance. CNET reported in May that the FBI has asked tech companies not to oppose the plan.

Homeland Security's response said its agents had encountered problems when interacting with some mobile and broadband companies -- including Comcast, MetroPCS, and T-Mobile -- though none of the delays or glitches were reported to have derailed a criminal investigation. Other delays appear to be due to disagreements that companies had with Homeland Security's interpretation of the law.

"On a regular basis, the government is unable to obtain communications and related data, even when authorized by a court to do so," the FBI's then-general counsel, Valerie Caproni, told a House of Representatives committee last year.

The request from the FBI's Law Enforcement Executive Forum, a surveillance-focused working group the bureau created in 2001, aims to buttress law enforcement's request for surveillance authority by identifying obstacles posed by current law. It also asks for examples of companies that are not complying with a 1994 law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, which applies to phone companies and broadband providers, but not social-networking Web sites and e-mail and instant messaging providers.

The Homeland Security report, made public this afternoon, was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is enmeshed in a lawsuit against the FBI after many of the documents it requested were withheld. CNET reported last week that a federal judge ruled that the government did not adequately respond to EFF's request.

In an unusual twist, Homeland Security provided the partially redacted report to the EFF under open government laws -- but then turned around and demanded the document's return, which the EFF refused to do.

A spokesman for the FBI declined to comment on the documents.

In another example from the report, Homeland Security reported that a suspect in an immigration case "was not located" due to SouthernLINC Wireless not permitting agents to access the target's cell phone location in real time because of the request's wording. SouthernLINC, which has about 4.5 million subscribers, would only turn over location data that was one hour old.

That dispute echoes, on a micro scale, a broader dispute about warrantless location tracking that has played out in the courts -- including oral arguments before a federal appeals court last month -- and in the U.S. Congress. James Baker, the associate deputy attorney general, has told Congress that requiring warrants before police could obtain location data from mobile providers would hinder "the government's ability to obtain important information in investigations of serious crimes."

Homeland Security's Honolulu office reported "delays as long as three to four months" in receiving responses to subpoenas sent to T-Mobile and Cricket, and its Phoenix office said that a "significant number" of targets were using Mexican Nextel phones. Homeland Security also complained that Comcast was slow in responding to a "customs summons" because agents asked for "connection records" without specifying Internet Protocol addresses assigned to customers.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57...-surveillance/





EFF Sues to Block New California Internet Sex-Offender Law
David Kravets

Immediately following the passage of a California proposition that would dramatically curtail the online, First Amendment rights of registered sex offenders, two civil rights groups filed a lawsuit to block parts of the overwhelmingly approved measure.

Proposition 35, which passed with 81 percent of the vote Tuesday, would require that anyone who is a registered sex offender — including people with misdemeanor offenses such as indecent exposure and whose offenses were not related to activity on the internet — would have to turn over to law enforcement a list of all identifiers they use online as well as a list of service providers they use.

The Californians Against Sexual Exploitation Act would force sex offenders to fork over to law enforcement their e-mail addresses, user and screen names, or any other identifier they used for instant messaging, for social networking sites or at online forums and in internet chat rooms.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed their suit (.pdf) on behalf of two registered sex offenders, say that although the measure is vaguely worded, in practice it likely means that registered sex offenders would have to provide user and screen names that they use for participation in online political discussion groups, forums about medical conditions, and even the comment sections of online newspapers and blogs.

“Requiring people to give up their right to speak freely and anonymously about civic matters is unconstitutional, and restrictions like this damage robust discussion and debate on important and controversial topics,” says Hanni Fakhoury, an EFF attorney. “When the government starts gathering online profiles for one class of people, we all need to worry about the precedent it sets.”

The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco federal court, is demanding that a judge immediately block the measure’s internet-reporting provisions. No hearing has been set.

Michael Risher, an ACLU attorney, said Californians should be concerned that even though the bill only affects registered sex offenders now, the law creates a slippery slope for the same requirements to be applied to others.

He points, for example, to a California DNA-collection law that has expanded dramatically beyond the people it first targeted. Initially, the law required only those convicted of sex offenses and serious felonies to provide authorities with a DNA sample to be included in a state and federal database. But in 2004, this expanded to anyone convicted of a felony, and in 2009, to anyone simply arrested for a felony.

While voters might have passed the measure because they don’t care about the rights of sex offenders, Risher says, “The ability to speak freely and even anonymously is crucial for free speech to remain free for all of us.”

The measure would currently affect some 73,000 sex offenders registered in California, but the law also requires those convicted of human trafficking to register as sex offenders, thus widening the pool of people affected.

Those who breach the new requirements could be found in violation of their post-prison supervision requirements or in breach of sex-offender registration laws that require offenders to provide authorities with their residential address whenever they move. Sex offenders must turn over their online information to the law enforcement agency where they are registered, but those agencies may share the data with the California Department of Justice.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...-restrictions/





Judge Blocks California's New Ban on Anonymity for Sex Offenders

"Human trafficking" proposal was supported by 81 percent of voters Tuesday.
Timothy B. Lee

On Tuesday, voters in California overwhelmingly approved Proposition 35, which ratcheted up penalties for those convicted of sex crimes, including human trafficking. The proposition included a provision requiring registered sex offenders to disclose to law enforcement all of their Internet connections and online identities.

On Wednesday, two of the 73,900 registered sex offenders in the state who would be affected by the law filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of these provisions. The two plaintiffs argued that forcing them to expose their online identities would violate their First Amendment right to speak anonymously. Their appeal is supported by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Late on Wednesday, Judge Thelton Henderson granted a temporary restraining order barring the law from going into effect until he had time to consider the plaintiffs' constitutional arguments.

The two plaintiffs filed their lawsuit anonymously. One is a 75-year-old Alameda resident who committed a crime in 1986 that did not involve computers or the Internet. For more than a decade, he "operated two websites that provided sex offenders with information about registration requirements and recovery resources." It "provided an anonymous online forum for sex offenders to discuss their recovery with other sex offenders."

The second plaintiff was convicted of two offenses in 1993—again having nothing to do with the Internet. He "anonymously maintains [a] blog that discusses matters of public concern." He has fled the state to avoid being subject to the Internet-related provisions of Proposition 35.

Both plaintiffs argue that their ability to express themselves candidly online would be undermined if they were compelled to disclose their online identities to law enforcement. They contend that the proposition approved by California voters on Tuesday is "overbroad because it criminalizes constitutionally protected anonymous speech but is not narrowly tailored because it restricts far too much anonymous speech by too many speakers, and allows the information to be used for too many purposes." That, they argue, violates the First Amendment because sex offenders could be prevented from engaging in anonymous online communication "even if it pertains to news, politics, and professional activity, and could not possibly be used to commit a crime."

Additionally, they argue that the law is "impossibly vague" because it leaves it unclear whether it applies to, for example, "connecting to a wireless network at a coffee shop or hotel, renting a car equipped with an Internet-connected navigation system, creating an account on a new service with the same user name as that used on a different service, or buying something from an online retailer that allows customer reviews, such as Amazon.com." The ACLU points out that the First Amendment requires restrictions on speech to be clearly defined.

Most importantly, the plaintiffs contend that the proposition "violates registrants’ associational rights by potentially compelling disclosure of their participation in online forums organized by political and other groups and by compelling disclosure of the identity of other registrants with whom they discuss political issues."

"The Court finds that Plaintiffs have raised serious questions about whether the challenged sections of [Proposition 35] violate their First Amendment right to free speech and other constitutional rights," wrote Judge Henderson in his Wednesday order. He put the measure on hold while the plaintiffs and the State of California prepare their arguments about its constitutionality.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...sex-offenders/





Conroy Abandons Mandatory ISP Filtering

Tells ISPs to filter child abuse material using INTERPOL block list.
Ry Crozier

The Federal Government has formally abandoned plans to introduce legislation for mandatory ISP filtering, closing a dark chapter in politics concerning Australia's internet.

Instead, internet service providers will be directed by the Government and the Australian Federal Police to block "child abuse websites" that feature on an INTERPOL block list.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said in a statement that "Australia's largest ISPs have been issued notices requiring them to block these illegal sites in accordance with their obligations under the Telecommunications Act 1997".

"The Australian Federal Police will now begin issuing notices to smaller ISPs and will work closely to assist them in meeting their obligation under Australian law and prevent their services being used for illegal activities," Conroy said.

"Given this successful outcome, the Government has no need to proceed with mandatory filtering legislation."

Conroy unveiled plans for a mandatory internet filter plan in May 2008 as part of Labor's $125.8 million Cybersafety Plan.

The internet filter proposal outraged Australia's internet community, sparking a round of protests.

A live pilot of ISP filtering in 2009 provided further ammunition to the Government to pursue the mandatory filter proposal.

Following the release of the pilot results, Conroy fleshed out the Government's plans, saying that he aimed to "introduce legislative amendments to the Broadcasting Services Act to require all ISPs to block [Refused Classification]-rated material hosted on overseas servers."

Pursual of the proposal led to a fresh wave of grassroots activism, including more protests and DDoS attacks levelled against Government internet properties.

Conroy formally put the filter proposal on hold in July 2010, pending the outcome of a review of Australia's guidelines for content classification.

The announcement coincided with Telstra, Optus and iPrimus agreeing to voluntarily filter out a list of child abuse URLs, using a blocklist to be maintained by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

In November 2010, strategy papers revealed that the introduction of mandatory ISP filtering legislation had been deferred until at least the second half of 2013.

Outwardly, Conroy maintained he had not abandoned the proposal entirely, and that it was still a key part of Labor policy.

He denied an internal reshuffle in June 2011 was the result of the Government scaling back its plans for mandatory filtering.

But the same month, the Internet Industry Association revealed plans to make the blocking of child abuse material against an INTERPOL blocklist part of a voluntary code applicable to all Australian ISPs.

The move sidelined ACMA's plan to maintain its own local blocklist. It also superseded the voluntary filter plan announced by Conroy in July 2010 that was to have used the ACMA list. ISPs had not actioned that plan anyway, in part due to the ongoing threat posed by internet hacktivists.

Telstra, Optus and CyberOne opted to voluntarily filter internet services using the INTERPOL list, which is locally maintained by the Australian Federal Police.

In March this year, the classification review recommended that ISPs be obliged to block a narrowly defined scope of 'prohibited' content on websites.

Conroy indicated initial acceptance of the review's key recommendations in May. The move indicated a further softenining in the Government's approach to mandatory internet filtering.

He said at the time that discussions were underway with "key stakeholders" before a final decision on mandatory filtering was taken.

Today's announcement sees the controversial proposal finally abandoned.

"I welcome the support of Australia's major ISPs and the Internet Industry Association for taking these steps," Conroy said.

"This means that more than 90 percent of Australians using internet services will have child abuse material blocked by their ISP.

"The Gillard Government takes the safety of children seriously and believes that there is never a place for child sexual abuse material in our society.

"There is also widespread community support for blocking access to child abuse material."
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/322333...filtering.aspx





Experts Warn of Zero-Day Exploit for Adobe Reader
Brian Krebs

Software vendor Adobe says it is investigating claims that instructions for exploiting a previously unknown critical security hole in the latest versions of its widely-used PDF Reader software are being sold in the cybercriminal underground.

The finding comes from malware analysts at Moscow-based forensics firm Group-IB, who say they’ve discovered that a new exploit capable of compromising the security of computers running Adobe X and XI (Adobe Reader 10 and 11) is being sold in the underground for up to $50,000. This is significant because — beginning with Reader X– Adobe introduced a “sandbox” feature aimed at blocking the exploitation of previously unidentified security holes in its software, and so far that protection has held its ground.

But according to Andrey Komarov, Group-IB’s head of international projects, this vulnerability allows attackers to sidestep Reader’s sandbox protection. Komarov said the finding is significant because “in the past there was no documented method of how to bypass” Adobe Reader X’s sandbox to run code of the attacker’s choice on the target’s computer. The Russian firm produced the following video which they say demonstrates a sanitized version of the attack.

The exploit does have some limitations, Komarov said. For example, it can’t be fully executed until the user closes his Web browser (or Reader). And so far, they have only seen the attack work against Microsoft Windows installations of Adobe Reader.

Adobe spokeswoman Wiebke Lips said the company was not contacted by Group-IB, and is unable to verify their claims, given the limited amount of information currently available.

“Adobe will reach out to Group-IB,” Lips said. “But without additional details, there is nothing we can do, unfortunately— beyond continuing to monitor the threat landscape and working with our partners in the security community, as always.”

Group-IB says the vulnerability is included in a new, custom version of the Blackhole Exploit Kit, a malicious software framework sold in the underground that is designed to be stitched into hacked Web sites and deploy malware via exploits such as this one.

For now, the research firm said, the Adobe Reader exploit is being distributed only in “small circles of the underground.” Contacted via instant message, the author of the Black Hole exploit kit said today that he also had confirmed the existence of a private Adobe Reader exploit that was being sold in closed circles. He noted that although his kit currently does not include the exploit, he is hoping to acquire it and add it soon.

If that happens, it may not be long before this becomes a much bigger problem; Blackhole is by far the most prevalent exploit kit in use today. At any rate, consumers should realize that there are several PDF reader option apart from Adobe’s, including Foxit, PDF-Xchange Viewer, Nitro PDF and Sumatra PDF.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2012/11/...-adobe-reader/





Teenage Hacker ‘Cosmo the God’ Sentenced by California Court
Mat Honan

The 15-year-old UG Nazi hacker known as Cosmo* or Cosmo the God was sentenced in juvenile court on Wednesday in Long Beach, California. According to Cosmo, he pleaded guilty to multiple felonies in exchange for a probation, encompassing all the charges brought against him, which included charges based on credit card fraud, identity theft, bomb threats, and online impersonation.

Over the course of 2012, Cosmo and his group UG Nazi took part in many of the highest-profile hacking incidents of the year. UG Nazi, which began as a politicized group that opposed SOPA, took down a bevy of websites this year, including those for NASDAQ, CIA.gov, and UFC.com. It redirected 4Chan’s DNS to point to its own Twitter feed. Cosmo pioneered social-engineering techniques that allowed him to gain access to user accounts at Amazon, PayPal, and a slew of other companies. He was arrested in June, as a part of a multi-state FBI sting.

Representatives from both the Long Beach district attorney and public defenders offices refused to comment on the case, given Cosmo’s status as a juvenile. However, according to Cosmo, the terms of the plea place him on probation until his 21st birthday. During that time, he cannot use the internet without prior consent from his parole officer. Nor will he be allowed to use the Internet in an unsupervised manner, or for any purposes other than education-related ones. He is required to hand over all of his account logins and passwords. He must disclose in writing any devices that he has access to that have the capability to connect to a network. He is prohibited from having contact with any members or associates of UG Nazi or Anonymous, along with a specified list of other individuals. He had to forfeit all the computers and other items seized in the raid on his home. Also, according to Cosmo, violating any of these terms will result in a three-year prison term.

The probationary period lasting until age 21 is standard, but other terms were more surprising.

“Ostensibly they could have locked him up for three years straight and then released him on juvenile parole,” Jay Leiderman, a Los Angeles attorney who has represented alleged members of Anonymous and LulzSec, told Wired. “But to keep someone off the Internet for six years — that one term seems unduly harsh. You’re talking about a really bright, gifted kid in terms of all things Internet. And at some point after getting on the right path he could do some really good things. I feel that monitored Internet access for six years is a bit on the hefty side. It could sideline his whole life–his career path, his art, his skills. At some level it’s like taking away Mozart’s piano.”

*Editor’s note: Wired is not disclosing Cosmo’s name due to his status as a minor.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/...ifornia-court/





Microsoft's Big Hidden Windows 8 Feature: Built-In Advertising
Rob Williams

Despite the fact that I've been using Windows 8 for the past three weeks, I somehow managed to overlook a rather stark feature in the OS: ads. No, we're not talking about ads cluttering up the desktop or login screen (thankfully), but rather ads that can be found inside of some Modern UI apps that Windows ships with. That includes Finance, Weather, Travel, News and so forth. Is it a problem? Let's tackle this from a couple of different angles.

The Modern UI (Metro) interface of Windows 8 essentially delivers a mobile experience on whatever device it's used on, be it a desktop, notebook or tablet. On previous mobile platforms, such as iOS and Android, seeing ads inside of free apps hasn't been uncommon. It's a way for the developer to get paid while allowing the user to have the app for free. That's where the first big difference comes in. While people can expect ads in a free app, no one expects ads in a piece of software that they just paid good money for. I actually can't think of another immediate example where a piece of paid software shows ads.

But there are other angles to look at this from. People subscribe to cable, and see ads. However, the difference there is that's a recurring subscription, and it could be assumed that without ads, cable fees would be much higher. Then there's the fact that the apps inside of the Modern UI are all Internet-capable, so in a sense, they all act like their own customized browser. We're used to seeing ads on websites, so is this really that different? It's hard to say, but again, as free services, that's to be expected.

The answer of just how wrong Microsoft is to cram advertisements in its commercial software will differ from person to person, I'm sure. Me, I'm not too bothered, but I can totally relate to anyone who is. From all I can tell, none of the ads are intrusive, and I appreciate that. As for them being in paid software, that doesn't bother me either because of that above fact. However, I am bothered by other aspects.

The biggest mistake here on Microsoft's behalf is that no one is made aware of these ads until they happen to stumble on them. No one is going to expect ads to be loaded in their paid-for OS, so a notification of that at first boot would be appreciated. Further, no one is given the option to disable them (though I'm sure it'd take little more than an editing of the hosts file). Finally, there's also the fact that these ads haven't decreased the price of the OS, else that'd be a point Microsoft would no doubt flaunt.

We can't talk about the inclusion of ads and not mention the "T" word: tracking. I haven't been able to find any information on whether or not Microsoft's tracking the ads you are clicking on, but if that is indeed the case, we'll find out soon enough. Unlike Windows 7 and earlier, your entire Windows 8 account is tied to an e-mail account, so it would be rather easy for Microsoft to track things on a personal level - much like how Google does with its search engine, e-mail and so forth. This alone gives good reason to be concerned.
http://hothardware.com/News/Microsof...n-Advertising/





Copyright Industry Madness Takes Six Years To Catch Up With The Worst Satire Of It
Rick Falkvinge

Six years ago, a satire site wrote a story about how the copyright industry wanted more money if you invited friends to watch a movie in your living room. This notion has now been patented in new technology: automated headcounts coming to a living room near you, to enable new forms of restrictions. Apparently, the copyright industry takes six years to catch up with the very worst satire of it.

In November 2006, a site named BBSpot wrote a story about how the MPAA lobbied for home theater regulations, arguing that a home theater in your living room allows your friends to not buy their own DVD:

“Just because you buy a DVD to watch at home doesn’t give you the right to invite friends over to watch it too. That’s a violation of copyright and denies us the revenue that would be generated from DVD sales to your friends,” said [MPAA spokesman] Glickman.

At the time, this was a hilarious satire of the greed and creepy pushiness of the copyright industry. It felt like the famous “20 minutes into the future” – meaning just around the corner. Turns out that was right on the money; Microsoft has now filed for a patent monopoly where their Kinect device counts how many people are watching a movie, and prevents the movie from being played if too many people are watching it.

Yes, you read that right.

Mashable writes;

Microsoft has filed a patent for a technology that would let Kinect detect how many people are consuming content at a given time [...] would monitor how many people are in the room when a game or piece of entertainment is being displayed and “take remedial action” if the number of user-views licensed is exceeded, according to the patent application.

So be careful when you write satire about the madness and delusions of the copyright industry (and that certainly isn’t hard – more often than not, ordinary journalism will do fine). Either tread very carefully, or start a little stopwatch the next time you publish satire about what that parasitic, shameless industry will think of next.

My prediction would be on connecting face recognition to this, so that the license-purchasing person has to be verifiably present in the living room for a particular movie to play using the copyright industry’s methods. (In the meantime, assorted Asian companies sell media players that play MKV files straight off a file share without any of this bullshit.)

UPDATE: As pointed out in comment 7, this satire article six years ago may actually count as so-called prior art, invalidating Microsoft’s patent monopoly filed six years after it. In this specific case, that’s not necessarily a good thing, though.
http://falkvinge.net/2012/11/10/copy...-satire-of-it/





How Much Would You Pay to Never See an Online Ad Again?
Christopher Mims and Gideon Lichfield

Imagine a $120 box that sits between your cable modem (the box that brings the internet into your house) and your wireless router (the thing that fills your house with wifi) and blocks every kind of ad that can be delivered over the internet. No more ads on your laptop, tablet or smartphone. No more ads on webpages, in music streams, in front of videos, or on mobile apps.

That’s the goal of AdTrap, a device that is already in the working prototype stage. If you want to get your hands on one, you can pre-order it now by supporting the project on the crowd-funding site Kickstarter. If AdTrap’s three Palo Alto, California-based creators can get enough pledges by December 8—$150,000 worth—they’ll start shipping the device.

AdTrap is basically a small computer running the Linux operating system, programmed to recognize and block every sort of ad its creators could identify. Many people already have ad blockers on our web browsers, but AdTrap’s combination of simplicity and comprehensiveness are reasons it could take off. (As of this writing, AdTrap has less than $20,000 in pledges on Kickstarter.)

AdTrap is “open and very hackable,” which means that it could be updated to block new kinds of advertisements. It also promises to block the user tracking that many internet advertisements engage in. Advertisers will hate that, of course, and so will the websites that depend on them. (Quartz might not do very well if everyone had an AdTrap.) The website Cult of Mac, which posted a little plug for AdTrap, also posted a little plea, asking any of its readers who buy an AdTrap to add Cult of Mac to their device’s list of sites whose ads will not be blocked.

It seems unlikely that all but the most dedicated and conscientious internet user would take the time to create such a “whitelist”. But Cult of Mac can probably breathe easy, because it’s also unclear that a majority of its readers would fork out $120 for an ad-blocker. Unless the processing power needed to display them actually slows your device down, ads quickly become mere background noise for many people.

Still, there is a subset of internet purists who both care deeply about their privacy and hate ads with a passion, and maybe that group is big enough to make this into a nice little business. Since AdTrap is currently being crowd-funded, the usual caveats apply: Kickstarter is not a store, and pledging money for a project doesn’t guarantee that it’s going to deliver on all of its promises, or even that it will ever be delivered. At the time of this writing, ten hours after being launched, it had raised just over 10% of its goal—respectable, but not yet a guarantee of success.
http://qz.com/26155/how-much-would-y...line-ad-again/





How the Internet Economy Works: Guns, Butter and Bandwidth
Stacey Higginbotham

The internet is made of thousands of networks, and a complex web of economic considerations has developed to support the free flow of information. How bandwidth is “manufactured” and then allocated is far more complex than how a packet gets from here to there.

Most people know certain things about the Internet. They know that cables run under the sea, that wires come into your homes, and that modems carry the digital signals to your devices.

But they’ve probably never heard of Internet Exchange Points, and that’s where the magic of the Internet really happens.

Internet Exchange Points (aka IXPs) are the manufacturing floor of the Internet — that is where bandwidth is created and deployed. And bandwidth is just like water and oil and other economic goods: If your country has a lot of it, prices fall; if it doesn’t have a surplus, prices go up. And that has a big impact on the web companies that buy bandwidth.

The Netherlands, for example, is a large net-exporter of Internet bandwidth, using only half of what it produces domestically. That means that large companies like Disney, Google and Netflix can buy ports there at rates that are significantly lower than in some other places and that have dropped by 50 percent in the last year. But where there isn’t an Internet Exchange Point and competition can’t flourish, prices remain high. That’s what you see in places like Mexico. More on that below.

Though Internet Exchange Points are a key building block of the Internet economy, you’d never guess it from where they’re located. They don’t remotely resemble other temples of commerce. You don’t see people standing in them yelling at each other, like you would at a stock exchange. Instead, they can be located inside a beat-up building near a railroad track. Sometimes there’s not a single human being in the vicinity.

A report I covered earlier from the OECD lays out in awesomely clear detail why Internet exchange points are so essential for every geography that values the Internet. They not only facilitate the creation of bandwidth, they lower the cost of transit/bandwidth for businesses and consumers and help create redundant networks and limit or diminish the power of monopoly telecommunications providers.

The report does a great job of explaining exactly how the internet economy functions. Not the creation of web sites and services (although the report does delve into the creation rationale for “the cloud”) but bandwidth is created and then used. It explains why certain places have higher Internet transit costs and why it makes sense for different Internet Service Providers to essentially exchange traffic. It offers a compelling look at how important competition among network providers is to keeping the internet cheap.

From the report:

Internet exchange points (IXPs) are the source of nearly all Internet bandwidth. A country that lacks IXPs must import Internet bandwidth from other countries that do possess them. Like factories and farms, they are a primary means of producing a commodity that‘s potentially quite expensive to import.

As a general rule, the cost of telecommunication services is the product of the speed of the service multiplied by the distance covered (i.e. speed x distance = cost). The further afield you go for your bandwidth, the more expensive, and slower, it will be. Thus it‘s always preferable to use a local IXP, to one that‘s further away.

As a result, IXPs proliferate in areas where Internet service providers, users, and policy makers are well-informed on matters of telecommunication economics. A corollary is that a region which has many functioning IXPs and produces more bandwidth than it consumes can export bandwidth to other regions at a profit.

This formula of cost as a matter of speed and distance is important to understand why peering relationships are so important. Not only does a provider not have to build a network that covers every user in the world, but it can exchange traffic with other providers that also don’t want to build out networks. And because most of the peering is done via handshake agreements with no money changing hands, the operational costs of sending traffic are pushed as low as the network owner can get them.

It doesn’t mean the providers don’t pay any costs, but that the multiple providers essentially are building quid pro quo relationships so everyone doesn’t need to build out a network to cover every single person who wants to be on the internet. And while some traffic may be slightly imbalanced for some providers, it keeps prices low for end users, which means they consume more bandwidth, which is good for the whole ecosystem. Here’s what those peering relationships look like in chart form:

Sometimes this utopian vision doesn’t take place.

Mexico offers an example of what happens when there’s little competition, either from another bandwidth manufacturing entity or from the existence of an IXP that can help offload traffic for many providers. As the chart below shows, you get disproportionately high prices for regional transit, which can then be passed on to consumers. For example, in parts of Africa, consumers and businesses paid higher transit prices, but the construction of more submarine cables and an Internet Exchange point has helped lower costs.

From the report:

Mexico continues to lag, being by far the largest nation in the world, and the only OECD member country, to continue without any domestic Internet exchange capacity. Mexico‘s traffic continues to be exchanged largely on the East Coast of the United States, and to a lesser degree in the exchanges of its Latin American neighbours and European trading partners.

This is a consequence of the near-universal dominance of Mexico‘s incumbent, Telmex. This situation may be on the brink of reform, as COFETEL, the Mexican regulator, has opened access to competitive long-haul circuits, has licensed a second national carrier, and is investigating the establishment of an IXP. The lack of domestic traffic exchange has had a dramatically visible effect on Mexican transit pricing, relative to other economies of similar size and development:

Outside of regions that don’t have an IXP, there are other threats to this model of how the Internet currently works and regulates itself, namely regulations at the global or national level that might clog the free-market nature of these exchanges. Interestingly this report makes a good case that even actions taken by large ISPs or backbone providers to restrict who they peer with doesn’t cause very much economic harm to the Internet as a whole. It shows how many of those choosy providers are bypassed by those they refuse to peer with and those rejected peers find another network.

Given how important broadband and Internet access is becoming to our lives and economies, the report provided a lot of good data and good news.
http://gigaom.com/2012/11/01/how-the...and-bandwidth/





Broadband '2,000 Times' Faster Aim of Bangor Scientists
George Herd

Broadband speeds that are 2,000 times faster without a massive hike in costs?

"Yes" say a team of UK researchers, who believe they are on the way to cracking how to cram more data down optic fibres - without breaking the bank.

The scientists at Bangor University in north Wales have already managed to pump 20 gigabits of data every second - enough to download a full HD movie in 10 seconds.

They are now working on a three-year project to make it commercially viable.

On a simple level, current fibre optic networks work by taking digital data, the zeros and ones that make up computer codes and digital information, and turn it into pulses of light.

Optic limitations

But as the length of a fibre optic cable increases, and the amount of data being pumped is also stepped up, errors can start to creep in.

The effect is known as dispersion.

At the moment, ways at tackling that problem have looked at measures such as increasing the physical number of fibre optic strands in cables, increasing the number of lasers coding and decoding the digital data, and signal amplification technologies.

"The trouble is, that can all cost a lot of money," said Dr Roger Giddings, one of the team running the Ocean project in north Wales.

"So the focus for the Ocean project is really to find out if we can do it in a cost-effective way, and is it a viable way of doing it in a commercial setting?"

The researchers have taken a very different approach to the problem, by tweaking some well-understood technology that is already being used in wireless networks and digital broadcasting.

It is known as the mouthful that is called: Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing, or OOFDM.

'Unique' approach

In Bangor, the process takes raw digital data, converts it to a series of physical electrical waves, and then into an optical signal that a laser can pump down a cable.

The breakthrough is that the team have managed to design the electronic kit that can both code and decode these optical signals on the fly.

"There are probably less than 10 groups in the world who have been looking at this sort of problem," said Dr Giddings.

"But we are the only group who has got this end-to-end system.

"This is the only system that we know of in the world that we can demonstrate working in real-time - with a real-time transceiver and a real-time receiver."

Not only has the team managed to run data through optic fibres at 20Gbps, they are confident of hitting speeds later of about 40Gbps.

Real-world speeds

So how does that play in the current real world of broadband connections?

Across the world, a handful of cities are now offering 1Gbps connections, such as Kansas in the US, which is part of a pilot by the internet giant Google.

The fastest speed offered to the UK public is a 1.5Gbps broadband connection trialled by Virgin Media in east London.

But in reality, according to the ISPreview website, in October the fastest average download speeds actually available in Britain stood at 33.4Mbps - just 0.17% of the speed of the theoretical a 20Gbps connection.

So the challenge now for the Bangor researchers is to turn the laboratory bench technology into an electronics module that could find its way into current fibre networks - at the right price.

But the scientists are not on their own - they have the help of world renowned industry partners.

Onboard in the Ocean project are microchip experts Fujitsu Semiconductors Europe; the developers of the MPEG video format, Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute; optic fibre innovators Finisar Israel; and VPIsystems, one of the world leaders in network data analysis.

"We hope to a have a working module at the end of the three-year project, and we are one year into it at the moment" said Dr Giddings.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-20183914

















Until next week,

- js.



















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