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Old 02-01-13, 11:21 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 5th, 2013

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"It looks like file sharers may finally have some validation to their views. US box office takings hit record levels in 2012, with US cinemas generating a whopping US$10.7 billion from people paying to watch movies at the theatre."



































January 5th, 2013




Surprise! Digital Music Just Had Its Best Week Ever
John Paul Titlow

After more than a decade of hand-wringing over the music industry's tumultuous decline, there's a glimmer of hope. Last week, more people paid for digital music than during any week-long period in history, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

In the week ending December 30, 55.74 million digital songs were purchased. The week following Christmas is typically a prosperous time for digital media and mobile platforms, as gadgets and gift cards are exchanged during the holidays. This year's spike was the biggest since the same week in 2008, when consumers bought 47.73 million songs.

These new numbers show that, when given a way to easily and conveniently do so, many, many people will pay for digital music. In this case, the growth appears to have been fueled by the exchange of holiday gift cards to services like iTunes and Amazon.

Digital Music Challenges Remain

Things started looking up in 2011. That's when IFPI reported that the industry saw its first year-over-year growth in music sales since it started tracking the business in 2004. That growth was only a measly 1.4%, but it sure beat the 13% decline seen in 2010. As 2012 unfolded, the outlook for digital music sales continued to brighten.

But although the bleeding appears to have stopped, the music industry remains a long way from recapturing its former prosperity. From 1999 to 2009, music industry revenues imploded by 56%. Even with the more recent promising trends, nobody expects the music business to return to its heyday any time soon.

Contrary to popular perception, though, compared to other traditional media industries disrupted by the Internet, music has fared relatively well in the digital age. According to the IFPI (which, somewhat ironically, stands for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) 32% of music industry revenue came from digital in 2011 (a number most expect to have increased in 2012). For newspapers, that number is closer to 5%. The digital transition for book publishers is similarly slow and precarious.

Why Digital Music Is Growing

So why is music growing? Services like iTunes have been aggressive about expanding globally. The biggest digital music services more than doubled their global reach in 2011, with iTunes alone launching in 16 Latin American countries.

The proliferation of connected music devices have also helped drive music revenues. As consumers snatch up millions of smartphones and tablets, many are heading straight for the digital storefronts of Google, Apple and Amazon to load them up with their favorite songs. Meanwhile, streaming music services like Spotify, Rdio and Deezer (which is aiming for a U.S. launch in 2013) are also exploding, with mobile access being the key selling point for their premium subscriptions. While it's perfectly feasible to pirate the latest albums and load them onto your tablet or phone, it's finally becoming easier to just type in a credit card number.

The global fight against piracy also appears to have had an effect. Draconian anti-piracy laws like SOPA and PIPA may have failed in the U.S. Congress, but other initiatives have succeeded in driving down piracy. For one, Google has grown more accommodating to copyright owners, nixing piracy-related terms from auto-suggested search terms and making DMCA takedown requests easier (some would say too easy).

There's also early evidence that the availability of legitimate music services can help reduce the rate of piracy. Sweden saw a 25% drop in illegal filesharing after the public launch of Spotify, according to one study. There are now 500 legitimate music services available worldwide, according to the IFPI. As streaming services and MP3 marketplaces expand across the globe, it shouldn't be surprising that people feel less inclined to download music without paying for it.
A Smaller Industry, But A More Level Playing Field

The music industry may never return to what it looked like 15 years ago. But maybe that's okay. Today's playing field is far more level and the tools to create and distribute music are cheaper and easier to use than ever before. Artists still face major challenges, but the Internet has loosened the grip of the record labels and opened up new possibilities in terms of financing the creation of music projects - including crowdfunding and selling music directly to fans via platforms like Bandcamp or via digital distribution platforms like TuneCore and CDBaby.

Maybe the Internet isn't killing the music industry after all. Sure, the Net upended the old business model and irreversibly changed how music gets distributed to consumers. But clearly all is not lost.
http://readwrite.com/2013/01/04/digi...best-week-ever





Why this Silence About The Pirate Bay as a Distributor of Culture?
Kristina Svartholm

In October we published an article which gave Internet users the opportunity to contact Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm during his detention in Sweden. Support has been overwhelming and from all corners of the world. In a guest post today by Gottfrid’s mother Kristina Svartholm, we look at the content of some of those letters and ask why The Pirate Bay’s contribution to the distribution of culture is so often overlooked.

As many readers of TorrentFreak already know, I have received hundreds and hundreds of e-mails from people all around the world who wanted to send their greetings to my son Gottfrid, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay. The support and encouragement they express is overwhelming.

Many of these e-mails provide a different picture than the common one of what The Pirate Bay’s operations can mean. They come from all kinds of people. Here is one example, a quote from a mail sent by a man in Canada:

“I’m a musician. I work hard to create my music and while I´m certainly not wealthy or famous, it´s made me very happy to have my music shared with other people. Stories, songs, books, and films are meant to be shared.”

There are many people, especially older women, who have explained how The Pirate Bay has helped them out of their solitude by offering them entertainment that they could not otherwise afford. Others tell of how The Pirate Bay helps them to discover new artists that they would otherwise not have known of, like the American who adds:

“… I seek their licensed material and purchase it as often as I can.”

Many e-mails focus on access to culture in a broader sense. Young people in Saudi Arabia, for example, write that cinemas, concerts or theaters are not available to them in their own country, but that they have now received access thanks to The Pirate Bay.

From other countries, people write about how they can take part in things they would never be able to afford because of their restricted living conditions. Someone wrote that The Pirate Bay has blurred the line between the rich and the poor as to the opportunities to cultural participation.

Another example is an e-mail from Romania in which a person expresses his gratitude for the future that The Pirate Bay has opened for the younger generation in his country. It is now possible for everyone to take part of Western culture and knowledge, which the country was excluded from for such a long time:

“….If you hadn’t existed we would have been 20 years back in time from where we are now, because we would never have had the money to buy all that culture. Now, thanks to you we have great musicians, great architects, advertising companies winning prizes all over the world, great engineers working all over the world, film makers and most important, normal young people with a greater view over history and the world, thus enabling them to have a better and dignified life.”

Students in poor countries like Ghana and Colombia write about how they have gained access to educational materials, which they would never have had otherwise.

A student in Argentina tells about how she could continue her studies thanks to The Pirate Bay. A mother in the United States says that she was able to arrange home schooling for her children.

A teacher in Georgia tells about how he was able to produce English teaching materials for his students, which would otherwise have been impossible.

A father in an African country expresses gratefulness for the opportunities that The Pirate Bay has opened for his son to further studies. And so on.

This list of e-mails of this kind could be made much, much longer.

Last but not least I would like to mention e-mails that come from countries like Egypt, Iran and Iraq. Many people, young and old, are thankful for the fight for a free Internet, the struggle that is so closely associated with The Pirate Bay and what it represents.

I think it is about time that this perspective on The Pirate Bay gets highlighted. One must keep in mind that there is much to obtain from the site also for those who do not want to violate any copyright rules. If creators and other people representing cultural institutions want to suppress access to culture and knowledge and to free speech without considering this perspective, I think all of us are in trouble.
https://torrentfreak.com/why-this-si...ulture-121230/





US Box Office Surge Shines Spotlight on File Sharing
Pat Pilcher

If one issue stood out for its ability to create debate amongst techies during 2012, it'd have to be the whole file sharing/copyright infringement issue. Debate was often as furious as it was vocal. On one side were the music and movie business who argued that downloading movies and music people was destroying their industries. File sharers on the other hand argued that this was ill informed rhetoric and so the debate raged on throughout 2012.

Taken to its logical extreme, the movie and music industry argument goes that if artists are unable to make money, they'll soon stop performing. Off the back of this, the entertainment industry would then eventually collapse, leaving people with nothing to watch or listen to. File sharers however argue otherwise, saying that Hollywood needs a new business model if it is to stay relevant in the digital age and that Hollywood/the music industry isn't likely to go broke any time soon.

Now it looks like file sharers may finally have some validation to their views with news from the website, Box Office Mojo, who show that US box office takings hit record levels in 2012, with US cinemas generating a whopping US$10.7 billion from people paying to watch movies at the theatre.

These figures highlight a pretty major flaw in the movie and music industries arguments around going broke from file sharing. Making matters even more interesting, the US figures are also backed up by international box office takings which grew just under three times over, from US$8.1 billion in 2001 to US$22.4 billion in 2011. Funnily enough, this time period also happened to be when peer to peer file-sharing really took off.

Clearly something doesn't add up, and a question begs to be asked: Why are people downloading and yet still buying movie tickets to see movies that they've already downloaded?

One answer may revolve around quality. Downloaded movies can range from barely watchable movies recorded on camcorders smuggled into cinemas through to higher quality "ripped" copies from DVD or Blu-Ray media. Additionally, watching a movie can involve a convoluted set up consisting of a PC, games console or dedicated media streaming device. These can be fiddly to configure or maintain, and more often than not lack the support for the multitude of video file formats used by file sharers.

Regardless, the simple fact remains that many people are going to a cinema to see a movie - even if they've already downloaded the movie. This has also been borne out of several academic studies which throw this trend into sharp relief (one study from the Munich School of Management and Copenhagen Business School, titled "Piracy and Movie Revenues: Evidence from Megaupload" even shows that the closure of the Megaupload service negatively impacted US movie ticket sales).

So are file sharing advocates who argue that peer to peer file sharing promotes cinema and DVD sales actually right? Unfortunately the answer is probably more complex than a casual once-over of the issue would have the casual observer believe.

Whilst file sharers argue that pirated movies merely act as a teaser for downloaders, things never stand still in tech and as such are changing rapidly. Higher quality HD and Dolby Digital capable video formats have the potential to drive greater availability of higher quality downloaded content. Could this in turn see less downloaders at the cinema?

Regardless, the file sharing ball is now in the court of the music and movie industry, who need to embrace the digital age instead of fighting it. Be it the complex task of adopting a new business model that encourages legit downloadable/streamed video (how about New Zealand Netflix?) or a collection of smaller, more simpler tasks such as getting rid of the ridiculous "viewing windows" that TV networks operate (which for example saw the end of the third season of Downton Abbey airing in the UK just as it began in the US much to the delight of downloaders).

This might be a big ask, but the fact remains that history is littered with the wreckage of those that chose to ignore the juggernaut of technological innovation. The movie and music industry does this at its own peril.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology...ectid=10857031





A Small-Town Theater Campaign's Larger Projections

Three childhood friends in Oakhurst, Calif., believe they've developed a subscription plan that could save not only the local Met Cinema but other struggling small-town theaters across the country.
Diana Marcum

Once in a while, Hollywood comes through this gateway to Yosemite National Park. People still talk about the time Ron Howard accidentally left one of his children (briefly) in a doughnut shop.

But Oakhurst's main connection to the movies has been the local Met Cinema, scene of countless first dates and family outings. When the Met closed abruptly in November — "Skyfall Coming Soon" still up on the marquee — it meant that those living in this mountain town and neighboring communities would have to drive at least 70 miles to Fresno to see James Bond on the big screen.

Now for the plot twist:

Three childhood friends believe they've developed a subscription plan that could save not only the Met but also struggling small-town theaters across the country.

The deadline to find out if they can make it work here is Dec. 31. If enough people enroll, the trio will be able to sign a lease and reopen the movie house. If not, the landlord plans to look for other tenants.

James Nelson, 30, a life coach who defines his specialty as "figuring out how to make the impossible possible," was driving back from a wealth-training seminar when his wife told him about the theater going under.

Nelson promptly turned to Matt Sconce, 31, a local church youth leader and filmmaker who got his start by winning an "American Idol" music video contest in 2004. (Sconce also works as a magician, selling DVDs of trick instruction to help supplement the family income.)

The pair then called Keith Walker, 32, a San Francisco software engineer for Klout, which ranks people according to their social media influence. Walker got in his car and started driving.

Soon the three were clustered around a computer — just like when they were kids and built a robot that was so amazing none of the adults believed it was their work.

"It felt exactly like the old days," Walker said. "Except we're taller."

They ran models of Nelson's subscription-based theater idea, showing that to break even they would need 3,000 people, or 15% of the mountain communities, to sign up. For $19.95 per month, a member would be able to see each movie one time and buy individual tickets for friends. Non-members could buy a $16 day pass.

While researching the theater business, Nelson learned that studios are transitioning to digital distribution. Thousands of independent theaters that couldn't afford equipment upgrades have closed over the last 10 years, according to industry experts. Hundreds of others — which, like the Met, still show print films — remain on the brink. The subscription business model could pay for the new equipment.

"We realized this could be our big idea, the one we've been waiting for," Nelson said. "Saving small-town movies."

Walker asked for a leave of absence to work on the project. When it was turned down, he quit his job.

Sconce began marketing the Be a Met Hero program, including dressing his two children as superheroes and having them hold signs along the highway.

"We like to be a little corny," Nelson said.

"We don't 'like to be.' We just are," Sconce corrected.

"Yes," Walker agreed. "We have no choice."

The tricky part of the membership-model calculation is that box-office totals are based on ticket sales, and distribution deals for a movie include a percentage of each ticket sold. But Met members would scan magnetic cards to record attendance totals for each film.

In the end, the success of the venture may come down to whether major studios are willing to negotiate contracts without traditional tickets being sold. But first, success depends on signing up members.

Sconce, Nelson and Walker have spoken to the local rotary clubs. They performed Handel's "Hallelujah" chorus while pitching their idea at the Yosemite High Winter Concert at Bass Lake. And Walker was a hit at the Sierra Springs Village Mobile Home Park's Christmas party.

"He was adorable. So gung-ho," said Cindy Karr, 65. "Everybody was in favor and signed up. It's important to get out and see new releases."

In the first two days of the campaign, 500 people joined, many of them affixing "I'm a Met Hero" stickers to their car bumpers. At last count, 2,633 had committed. No one will be charged unless the plan is a go.

Before the Met went dark last month, moviegoers tended to come early to chat with neighbors, hush up during the show and hang out in the popcorn-scented lobby afterward to critique what they'd seen.

That's what makes movie night in small towns something to be saved, Walker said.

"There's something magical about experiencing a movie with a bunch of other people," he said. "Your couch and a movie theater are not the same thing."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...,6750234.story





Disney Freaks Out Over Patents That May Mean It Can't Keep 3Ding Old Movies
Mike Masnick

While lots of folks have been declaring the 3D movie obsession dead for a while now, the studios still love 3D movies. In this age where they're looking for ways to create formulaic premium experiences that get people to go out to the theaters, they seem to have jumped on the 3D bandwagon full force. Of course, as with all things Hollywood embraces too strongly, that's now leading to backlash, mainly because rather than do it well and where it makes sense, the big studios are basically just looking to add 3D to whatever they can and hope people will pay the premium. It's a short term strategy, but Hollywood execs aren't exactly known for their long term outlooks.

That said, Disney -- the poster company for supporting extreme copyright monopolies -- has apparently discovered a form of intellectual monopoly that it doesn't like so much: patents. Last week it filed an emergency motion to try to insert itself into the sale of some patents that cover the 3Difying of old films, from a company, Digital Domain Media Group (DDMG), that went bankrupt. The patents were sold to a company called RealID, and that seems to scare Disney. The link above to The Hollywood Reporter has the details of the back and forth over the dispute, in which it appears that Disney had an option to get a full license to the patents, but for reasons that suggest someone was asleep at the wheel, the company did not officially exercise that option. Now it wants to block the sale unless it can get a guarantee that it won't get sued.

There's got to be some amount of irony to see copyright maximalist Disney suddenly running into issues over the possibility that patents might block it from doing something it wants to do.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...d-movies.shtml





Illegal File-Sharer Gets Hit with 5-Year Prison Sentence

A U.S. judge gives the leader of the IMAGiNE file-sharing group a record prison term for camcording movies in the theater and distributing them on the Web.
Dara Kerr

Convicted file-sharer Jeramiah Perkins has been handed the longest prison sentence even given in a U.S. file-sharing lawsuit: five years.

The 40-year-old man from Portsmouth, Va., was given the sentence today by U.S. District Judge Arenda Wright Allen, according to Wired. During his lawsuit, Perkins pled guilty to conspiracy to commit copyright infringement by file-sharing movies, music, games, and more on the Internet.

Perkins -- a.k.a. Butch Perkins, Stash, and theestas -- is said to have been the head of a group that went to theaters, camcorded the movies, recorded the audio, synched the files, and then distributed the product on the Internet. The group, known as IMAGiNE, became one of the most prolific piracy release groups in the world between 2009 and 2011, according to Wired.

"The conspirators informally identified themselves as the IMAGiNE Group and sought, among other things, to be the premier group to first release to the Internet copies of new motion pictures only showing in movie theaters," IMAGiNE's indictment reads. "It was further a part of the conspiracy to use computer software to digitally refine and to edit the video and audio portions of a motion picture and to combine or synchronize the two components into audiovisual movie files."

One of the goals of the group was to make movies available before the public release of DVDs, according to the indictment. IMAGiNE rented servers in France, Canada, and the U.S. and hosted several Web sites, such as "unleashthe.net." The Web sites included member profiles, a torrent tracker, discussion forums, a message board, news, and rules. The group got money through donations and payments from people downloading the copyrighted works. Among the movies known to have been pirated by IMAGiNE were, "Friends With Benefits," "Captain America: The First Avenger," and "Avatar."

U.S. courts have become considerably more strict in recent file-sharing cases. In November, illegal file-sharer Kywan Fisher was handed a whopping $1.5 million fine -- the largest BitTorrent damages award ever -- for sharing 10 movies on a file-sharing site. And the well-known case of Jammie Thomas, who was found liable for sharing 24 copyrighted songs on the Web, recently announced that she is taking her case to the Supreme Court because of the "crippling statutory damages" awarded by an appeals court.

Five members of Perkins cohort also pled guilty and have been handed prison sentences for being involved in IMAGiNE. According to Wired, co-defendant Gregory Cherwonik received 40 months, Sean Lovelady was given 23 months, Willie Lambert got 30 months, and the fifth defendant is scheduled to be sentenced in March.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-575...ison-sentence/





Pirated iOS App Store Installous Shutters

A major source for pirated versions of iOS apps went down for good today, but it's not the end of the world for those with jailbroken iDevices.
Christopher MacManus

A wee bit of bad news for Apple's jailbreak community right on the eve of the New Year: Installous, a major portal for pirated paid apps from Apple's App Store, won't be around anymore.

Development team Hackulous today announced the closure of Installous on their official Web site. As of today, the pirated app store no longer works, and only

For many years, Installous offered complete access to thousands of paid iOS apps for free for anyone with a jailbroken iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Think of it as being able to walk into a fancy department store, steal anything you want, and never get caught.

In my personal experiences with the app, I could often download the latest iOS applications and games for free from a variety of sources within mere seconds. After downloading, you could then install the app on your iDevice as if you purchased it from Apple's App Store. Additionally, during its prime, it wasn't unrealistic to expect expensive App Store apps hitting Installous mere hours after release.

Hackulous composed a short swan song on its Web site titled "Goodnight, sweet prince" about the closure of the pirate app store:

We are very sad to announce that Hackulous is shutting down. After many years, our community has become stagnant and our forums are a bit of a ghost town. It has become difficult to keep them online and well-moderated, despite the devotion of our staff. We're incredibly thankful for the support we've had over the years and hope that new, greater communities blossom out of our absence.

It seems odd for Installous to close on its own for such simplistic reasons, considering its large user base and a possible moderate revenue stream from built-in ads. Regardless of the reason for Installous shuttering, Apple can't breathe easy just yet -- hackers can still download pirated apps quite easily through a number of methods and outlets (such as Appcake on Cydia).
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-...lous-shutters/





New Services Bypass Apple DRM to Allow Pirated iOS App Installs Without Jailbreaking on iPhone, iPad

Late last year, the closure of the uber-popular Installous marked the end of a promiscuous era in iOS app piracy. Now, several new services are on the rise that are filling the gap and offering easy installation of pirated apps, even on devices that have not been jailbroken.

Updated with statement from Zeusmos’ developer below.

The two that have risen to the forefront are Zeusmos and Kuaiyong. While the former has been around for a few months, it has gained significant steam since the exit of Installous. The latter has appeared seemingly from nowhere over the past couple of weeks.

Both of these services are dangerous for app developers because they offer simple, one-tap installs of pirated apps and do not require that devices have been jailbroken in order to do so. This is an enormous problem, as it opens up the arena for their use from the relatively small fraction of users with jailbroken devices — as was the case with Installous — to any unscrupulous users of iPhones and iPads.

If you’re looking to steal apps from developers — lets not kid ourselves about what’s happening here — it is now easier than ever to do so.

Zeusmos is a service offered for free on jailbroken devices as well as for a fee on devices that have not been jailbroken — yes, that’s right, it’s charging users to download pirated apps. It charges this fee for a ‘cloud plan’ to install ‘cracked’ apps and to provide users with a license and provisioning profile that allows them to install these pirated apps. The 15-year-0ld creator of Zeusmos, offers it as a way to ‘try before you buy‘. But also seems unapologetic about the nature of what the app does: enable piracy.

There appears to be a connection between Zeusmos and the reseller of developer testing slots UDIDRegistrations.com. Selling developer device testing slots is something explicitly forbidden by Apple, which has been cracking down on these resellers for the past several months.

Here’s how the site’s FAQ describes the young developer’s two products including Zeusmos and the Mac-only InstaSign:

Both InstaSign and Zeusmos are applications that allow you to install cracked applications on your iDevice without jailbreaking. InstaSign requires a Mac as it signs iPAs on your computer. Zeusmos requires no computer at all as it signs iPAs directly on to the device (like Installous for jailbroken iDevices) Because of this, both Mac and Windows users can use Zeusmos.

It’s unclear exactly how Zeusmos achieves its goal, but judging from the pricing and the correlation between UDIDRegistrations, it appears to utilize a developer licensing certificate to install ‘cracked’ apps which have had their DRM (copy protection) stripped.

In addition to users installing cracked apps themselves, the tool allows them to ‘share’ them with their ‘friends’ who are other Zeusmos users by email or even a link on Twitter.

The Chinese site Kuaiyong is also offering a similar service: allowing you to install apps for free, from your device, without paying for them. But it goes about it in a different way and is completely free.

There are two components to the tool, one which allows for installation of apps directly from your iOS device and the other which is a desktop application that allows install over a cabled connection. Once you use either, iTunes syncing ceases to work, but that hasn’t proved to be too much of a deterrent.

The apps appear to have been purchased under an Apple enterprise license, which allows for installation to multiple devices. There could also be a bundle of smaller developer accounts being used, which max out at 100 ‘slots’. They are then being re-distributed to other users through the two tools. There are some indications, however, that the issues go further than a single enterprise license.

We’ve been in contact with developers who have provided us with logs showing pirated installs of their apps. Some of the logs are showing thousands of users installing the ‘same’ copy of the app. Not the same app, mind you, but the exact same copy. This indicates that the same exact copy is being distributed with the same set of (encrypted) credentials.

The apps being installed via Kuaiyong may be utilizing bulk enterprise licensing, where the ones distributed by Zeusmos (or other copycat services, which are already springing up) are showing a variety of IDs, each of which is being installed multiple times.

So we’ve got two things going on. Services like Zeusmos have figured out how to ease the process of purchasing a developer slot and using its certificate to install ‘cracked’ apps, which are widely available on the internet. And ones like Kuaiyong are somehow bypassing Apple’s licensing rules to redistribute the same copy of an app over and over.

Security researcher Stefan Esser has been speculating about the Kuaiyong service on Twitter, noting that it could be an excellent way for them to distribute malware to iOS devices. Though the apps themselves are limited in what they can access due to sandboxing, specialized malware could be developed for certain popular apps that collected information and logged activity on your device. And there’s a strong likelihood that whatever they’re doing is using illegally obtained licenses at the least, and credit-card fraud at the worst.

The end result is the same in any case: people with a low moral threshold are cheating developers out of money and, in the case of Twitter apps, permanently removing a chunk of their possible revenue.

Drawing attention to these apps and services presents somewhat of an ethical quandary. By writing about them, we will no doubt draw more attention to them and therefore more acts of piracy from people who simply don’t care. But, hopefully, we will also see action taken by Apple to curtail these habits.

Make no mistake, these products are already being used widely, with thousands of stolen apps in the last few weeks alone. Twitter searches present endless results for people sharing information about them and looking for help in getting the hacked sites to work.

And these two are just a couple among a dozen high-profile options for users looking to steal apps. The seedy underbelly is there, and ignoring it doesn’t do anyone any favors.

We have reached out to Apple on the issue, but due to the holiday, there will likely be a delay before any reply is forthcoming.

Update: The developer of the Zuesmos application responded to our request for more information. He says that his intent was never to encourage piracy of apps. Though the marketing copy of the service’s website leaves that open to interpretation. In a statement, he says that there will be changes made to the application to remove the ability to share apps via links or repositories of apps:

The intent of Zeusmos will be to SOLELY code sign applications. We will not be supporting or encouraging any form of piracy through the link providers or even via search (although they were based off the iTunes API).

The intents [sic] as I have stated [was] to allow open development for developers. Recently I’ve had the time to add this feature into Zeusmos called the “Exclusive Apps” section where developers who got their application rejected in the App Store were able to post their application on here for free and share their application to a large audience of users. Such applications even included Grooveshark and many others.


He says that the purpose of Zeusmos was to allow for developers to code-sign apps for distribution as betas or to audiences outside the App Store. “I wanted this thing originally to be self-sutainable. Most of my applications are mostly free otherwise speaking, such as CarrierEditor…my latest release.”

He also says that the next version of Zeusmos will be ‘harshly discouraged’ from installing or downloading apps unless they’ve made it or own it. If such changes are made, it would certainly help to curtail some of the rampant sharing of apps via links and repositories of links, but it would not prevent the installation of cracked apps on un-jailbroken devices.
http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/01/...e-app-pirates/





Confessions of a Book Pirate
C. Max Magee

For several years, it seemed as though the book industry was getting a reprieve. As the music industry was ravaged by file sharing, and the film and TV industry were increasingly targeted by downloaders, book piracy was but a quaint cul de sac in the vast file sharing ecology. The tide, however, may be changing. Ereaders have become mainstream, making reading ebooks palatable to many more readers. Meanwhile, technology for scanning physical books and breaking the DRM on ebooks has continued to advance.

A recent study by Attributor, a firm that specializes in monitoring content online, came to some spectacular conclusions, including the headline claim that book piracy costs the industry nearly $3 billion, or over 10% of total revenue. Of all the conclusions in the Attributor study, this one seemed the most outlandish, and the study itself might be met with some skepticism since Attributor is in the business of charging companies to protect their content from the threat of piracy.

Nonetheless, the study, which monitored 913 titles on several popular file hosting sites, did point to a level of activity that suggested illegal downloading of books was becoming more than just a niche pastime. Even if the various extrapolations that led to the $3-billion figure are easy to poke holes in, Attributor still directly counted 3.2 million downloaded books.

For some, however, the study may inspire more questions than answers. Who are the people downloading these books? How are they doing it and where is it happening? And, perhaps most critical for the publishing industry, why are people deciding to download books and why now? I decided to find out, and after a few hours of searching – stalled by a number dead links and password protected sites – I found, on an online forum focused on sharing books via BitTorrent, someone willing to talk.

He lives in the Midwest, he’s in his mid-30s and is a computer programmer by trade. By some measures, he’s the publishing industry’s ideal customer, an avid reader who buys dozens of books a year and enthusiastically recommends his favorites to friends. But he’s also uploaded hundreds of books to file sharing sites and he’s downloaded thousands. We discussed his file sharing activity over the course of a weekend, via email, and in his answers lie a critical challenge facing the publishing industry: how to quash the emerging piracy threat without alienating their most enthusiastic customers. As is typical of anonymous online communities, he has a peculiar handle: “The Real Caterpillar.” This is what he told me:

The Millions: How active are you. How many books have you uploaded or downloaded?

The Real Caterpillar: In the past month, I have uploaded approximately 50 books to the torrent site where you contacted me. I am much less active then I once was. I used to scan many books, but in the past two years I have only done a few. Between 2002-2005 I created around 200 ebooks by scanning the physical copy, OCRing and proofing the output, and uploading them to USENET. I generally only upload content that I have scanned, with some exceptions. I have been out of the book scene for a while, concentrating on rare and out of print movies instead of books because it is much easier to rip a movie from VHS or DVD than to scan and proof a book.

I have downloaded a couple thousand ebooks via USENET and private torrent sites.

TM: Do you typically see scanned physical books or ebooks where the DRM has been broken?

TRC: Most of what I have seen is scanned physical books. Stephen King’s Under the Dome was the first DRM-broken book I downloaded knowingly.

TM: Why have you gone this route as opposed to using a library or buying books? Do you consider this “stealing” or is it a gray area?

TRC: I own around 1,600 physical books, maybe a third of which were bought new, the rest used. I buy many hardcovers in a given year and generally purchase more books than I end up reading, so I have not chosen to collect electronic books as opposed to paper books but in addition to them. My electronic library has about a 50% crossover with my physical library, so that I can read the book on my electronic reader, “loan” the book without endangering my physical copy, or eventually rid myself of the paper copy if it is a book I do not have strong feelings about.

I do not buy DRM’d ebooks that are priced at more than a few dollars, but would pay up to $10 for a clean file if it was a new release.

I do not pretend that uploading or downloading unpurchased electronic books is morally correct, but I do think it is more of a grey area than some of your readers may. Perhaps this will change as the Kindle and other e-ink readers make electronic books more convenient, but the Baen Free Library is an interesting experiment that proves that at least in that case, their business was actually enhanced by giving away their product free. That is probably not a business model that will work for everyone, but what is shows is that as a company they have their ear to the ground and are willing to think in new directions and take chances instead of putting their fingers in their ears, closing their eyes, and railing against their customers, as the music industry is doing. The world is changing and business models have to change with it.

Three additional points:

1) With digital copies, what is “stolen” is not as clear as with physical copies. With physical copies, you can assign a cost to the physical product, and each unit costs x dollars to create. Therefore, if the product is stolen, it is easy to say that an object was stolen that was worth x dollars. With digital copies, it is more difficult to assign cost. The initial file costs x dollars to create, but you can make a million copies of that file for no cost. Therefore, it is hard to assign a specific value to a digital copy of a work except as it relates to lost sales.

2) Just because someone downloads a file, it does not mean they would have bought the product I think this is the key fact that many people in the music industry ignore – a download does not translate to a lost sale. I own hundreds of paper copies of books I have e-copies of, many of which were bought after downloading the e-copy. In other cases I have downloaded books I would never have purchased, simply because they were recommended or sounded interesting.

3) Just because someone downloads a file, it doesn’t mean they will read it. I realize that buying a book doesn’t mean someone is going to read it either, but clicking a link and paying $10-$30 is very different – many more people will download a book and not read it than buy a book and not read it.

In truth, I think it is clear that morally, the act of pirating a product is, in fact, the moral equivalent of stealing… although that nagging question of what the person who has been stolen from is missing still lingers. Realistically and financially, however, I feel the impact of e-piracy is overrated, at least in terms of ebooks.

TM: How easy is it to go online and find a book you’re looking for? How long does it take to download and how much technical expertise is required?

TRC: I have specific tastes, so it is usually not very easy to find specifically what I am looking for. The dearth of material I was interested in is what prompted me to scan in the past, in order to share some of my favorite, less popular authors with as many people as possible. It does not take much time to download once something you want has been found, however, and little technical experience is required.

Since books are generally very small files, they can be downloaded in minutes. You can then convert the file using one of many applications, for instance Mobipocket Creator, to PRC or another format that works with your reader. You can then plug your Kindle into your computer and copy the file over. The entire process typically takes 5-10 minutes.

BitTorrent technology is easy to install and use, and just about anyone can install the basic software needed and begin downloading their first torrent in less than an hour. However, discovering and gaining access to private torrent sites (invite only) can take a lot of time – and of course, that is where the good stuff is. Public sites (no account needed) and semi-private sites (sites that require an account, but usually have open enrollment) have a limited selection, but are easily accessible and anyone with basic computer skills can find and download very popular novels.

Usenet is an older technology, and is considered a safer place to pirate files. For older users like me who were around at the beginning of the internet it seems very simple, but to newer computer users it may seem unnecessarily complex, and more expensive because you need an account separate from your regular internet connection to access it.

TM: Once you’ve downloaded a book, what format is it in and how do you read it? On you computer? Printed out?

TRC: My preferred format for distribution is RTF because it holds metadata such as italics, boldfaces, and special characters that TXT does not, is easily converted to other formats using Word, cannot contain a virus, and is an open format that will be readable forever. Other popular formats are DOC, HTML, PDF, LIT (Microsoft Reader), PRC (Palm), MOBI (Palm), CBR (rar’d image files) – and there is a new format with each new reader that is released. Most formats can be converted to your preferred format with enough ingenuity or the
correct software.

To read, I convert to PRC and load the books onto my Kindle. Before I got that, I read on my Palm or laptop.

TM: How long does it take you to scan a physical book?

TRC: The scanning process takes about 1 hour per 100 scans. Mass market paperbacks can be scanned two pages at a time flat on the scanner bed, while large trades and hardcovers usually need to be scanned one page at a time. I’m sure that some of the more hardcore scanners disassemble the book and run it through an automatic feeder or something, but I prefer the manual approach because I’d like to save the book, and don’t want to invest in the tools. Usually I can scan a book while watching a movie or two.

Once scanned, the output needs to be OCR’d – this is a fairly quick process using a tool like ABBYY FineReader.

The final step is the longest and most grueling. I’ve spent anywhere from 5 to 40 hours proofing the OCR output, depending on the size of the book and the quality of type in the original. This can be done in your OCR tool side-by-side with the scan of the original image or separately in your final output type (RTF, DOC, HTML, etc.). If there are few errors on the first few pages of text my preference is to proof in RTF, otherwise I do the proof within Finereader itself.

TM: What types of books do you look for? What is generally available? Is any fiction or popular non-fiction available?

TRC: I restrict my downloads to books I will likely read – this includes some popular novels, literary novels, and general non-fiction such as humor, biography, science, sociology, etc. Unlike DVD rips, the newest releases are not typically available two weeks before the product is released, if at all. I’m assuming that this is due to the smaller devoted audience books have, as well as the increased difficulty of sharing a book.

TM: Do you have a sense of where these books are coming from and who is putting them online?

TRC: I assume they are primarily produced by individuals like me – bibliophiles who want to share their favorite books with others. They likely own hundreds of books, and when asked what their favorite book is look at you like you are crazy before rattling of 10-15 authors, and then emailing you later with several more. The next time you see them, they have a bag of 5-10 books for you to borrow.

I’m sure that there are others – the compulsive collectors who download and re-share without ever reading one, the habitual pirates who want to be the first to upload a new release, and people with some other weird agenda that only they understand.

TM: Is it your sense that a lot of people are out there looking to get books this way? Or is it just a tiny group?

TRC: I would say that there is a small unaffiliated “group” of people responsible for sourcing the material.

Also, keep in mind that everything I’m saying applies mostly to fiction and general-interest non-fiction.

Textbook, programming and technical manuals are all over the place and its very easy to obtain almost anything you want. I assume there are more sources for that material, and that their high price is a larger factor in people deciding to pirate them. Similarly, there are many communities creating comic, graphic novel and magazine content of whom I am only vaguely aware.

TM: Do you worry at all about getting in trouble for scanning and uploading ebooks?

TRC: A little, but the books I do are typically not bestsellers and are rarely new. I figure I have a bit of a buffer if trouble comes down because the Stephen King or Nora Roberts or “whoever the latest bestseller is” scanners would be the ones to get hit first. I’ve done a lot of out-of-print stuff, and when it is not out of print it’s books by authors like John Barth – someone who no longer sells very well, I imagine.

I’ve debated doing some newer authors and books, but I would need to protect myself better and resolve the moral dilemma of actually causing noticeable financial harm to the author whose work I love enough to spend so much time working on getting a nice e-copy if I were to do so.

TM: What changes in the ebook industry would inspire you to stop participating in ebook file sharing?

TRC: This is a tough question. I guess if every book was available in electronic format with no DRM for reasonable prices ($10 max for new/bestseller/omnibus, scaling downwards for popularity and value) it just wouldn’t be worth the time, effort, and risk to find, download, convert and load the book when the same thing could be accomplished with a single click on your Kindle. Even in this situation, I would probably still grab a book if I stumbled across the file and thought it might interest me – or if I wanted to check it out before buying a paper copy.

I was impressed by the Indie filmmakers of the movie “Ink” – when their movie leaked before the DVD was released, they put a donation button on their site doubleedgefilms.com. I donated even though I haven’t watched the movie yet, just because of their thoughtfulness and sincerity. This didn’t seem to work for King’s “The Plant“, but I think that had a lot to do with the lack of reading technology at the time. I would like to see the experiment tried again by someone like Eggers or Murakami – someone with a very devoted fanbase.

Perhaps if readers were more confident that the majority of the money went to the author, people would feel more guilty about depriving the author of payment. I think most of the filesharing community feels that the record industry is a vestigal organ that will slowly fall off and die – I don’t know to what extent that feeling would extend to publishing houses since they are to some extent a different animal. In the end, I think that regular people will never feel very guilty “stealing” from a faceless corporation, or to a lesser extent, a multi-millionaire like King.

One thing that will definitely not change anyone’s mind or inspire them to stop are polemics from people like Mark Helprin and Harlan Ellison – attitudes like that ensure that all of their works are available online all of the time.

- January, 2010

http://www.themillions.com/2010/01/c...ok-pirate.html





Why 2012 Was the Year of the E-Single
Laura Hazard Owen

E-singles — stories somewhere between 5,000 and 30,000 words, usually nonfiction, and sold as inexpensive ebooks — are the format for our time. Here’s why.

In January 2012, Evan Ratliff, the CEO of Brooklyn publishing platform Atavist, semi-jokingly described e-singles as “[replicating] journalism’s extraordinary challenges in an entirely new place.” A little under a year later, publishers of all types are looking to e-singles to give them a boost in a digital era.

This weekend I sat on my in-laws’ living room couch and read “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek,” a longform story in the New York Times , on my iPad. “Snow Fall” marks the launch of a new publishing effort at the Times. The paper is partnering with Byliner, the e-singles startup run by former magazine folk and based in San Francisco, to publish around a dozen e-singles in 2013. (Working definition of e-single: A story somewhere between 5,000 and 30,000 words — shorter than most books, longer than most magazine articles — usually nonfiction, and sold as an inexpensive ebook.) Byliner is selling an expanded version of “Snow Fall,” for $2.99, at digital bookstores.

The Times partnership is the latest in a string of such deals for Byliner. The company also recently launched an experimental subscription program and a partnership with Esquire.

Meanwhile, Atavist is pushing ahead with in-app subscriptions. And Atavist has a bunch of money coming in from Barry Diller and Scott Rudin, who are working with the company to launch their own publisher, Brightline, which will focus on e-singles and other works.

Amazon’s U.S. Kindle Singles store now contains 283 singles. In February, I reported that the company had sold two million Kindle Singles; as of September, that number was up to 3.5 million, and Amazon just expanded the program to the U.K., where it will include new entries by bestselling British authors as well as most of the American Kindle Singles. Many Byliner Originals are available through Kindle Singles, and they’ll be crossing the Atlantic for the first time with the program’s U.K. expansion.

How are e-singles actually selling? Several of them hit the New York Times ebook bestseller list this year. A few of Amazon’s Kindle Singles authors have done quite well. That’s a lot for an individual, but not so much for a company. E-singles are cheap, a couple bucks a pop, so they are not likely to drive major revenue for publishers: With most Kindle Singles priced at $1.99, that’s only $7 million or so — and Amazon only takes 30 percent of it, making the revenue basically a rounding error. Smaller companies have it tougher: How Byliner makes money is something of a mystery. Atavist has a two-pronged business model, and the profitable part is selling its app platform to other publishers. The ebooks themselves could become more profitable with the launch of Brightside, but that hasn’t been the case yet.

Still, I love this format. Here’s why:

E-singles are a true digital-native format

They don’t cannibalize other formats. It’s nearly impossible to find a magazine that will run a 10,000-word story these days (much less a magazine that will run your 10,000-word story — even if you’re a professional journalist). Many of these stories simply would not have been published in print, and that’s not because they’re not good enough. They just weren’t quite a fit for magazine or book publishers. Now the projects can come to light, and journalists who might once abandoned these stories because they weren’t sure how to pitch them can make a little money off them.
They may not drive a lot of revenue, but they’re also cheap to produce

Newspapers and magazines and individual authors can afford to experiment with these; if they already have the work done, why not try to sell it? That’s what the Minneapolis Star-Tribune did with “In the Footsteps of Little Crow,” which ran in the paper as a six-part series and was also released as an e-single for $2.99. It hit the NYT ebook bestseller list at #13, and the iBookstore’s history list at #8.

They’re the format for our time

Their rise has correlated with the rise of read-it-later services like Pocket and Instapaper, which allow users to save web content to consume later, at their leisure. E-singles fit perfectly with the curl-up-with-your-iPad phenomenon. They’re long enough that you don’t blow through them in ten minutes, but most can be read in under an hour.

What changes in 2013?

The number of gatekeepers

Anyone can publish a short ebook, but if you want it to be a Kindle Single — in a separate section of the Kindle Store, with extra marketing and promotional support from Amazon, and with a 70 percent royalty even on a work priced under $2.99 — you’ll have to submit it to the Kindle Singles editor. Most of the authors seeing success with this format are working either with Kindle Singles, or with a company like Byliner or Atavist. You can go it on your own, but your single may get lost in the shuffle.

That could change next year as other digital bookstores pay more attention to the format. Apple has a separate section of the iBookstore for shorter reads. Barnes & Noble launched Nook Snaps, a so-far unimpressive answer to Kindle Singles. Those efforts can give shorter works a promotional push. We could also see more companies, or individual authors, do a Kickstarter campaign to fund either a line of e-singles or just a single work. That’s what Matter did.

The digital-only part

Byliner just signed a deal with Ingram to distribute its titles in print. “We increasingly hear from our readers and writers that they would like our stories available in print as well as digital form,” Byliner CEO John Tayman said. That’s great as long as the price stays very low — ideally the print price should match the ebook price — and nobody tries to make print a big part of their business model. Otherwise, e-singles really will be replicating journalism’s extraordinary challenges in the same old place (paper), with not much upside.

The cost proposition, maybe

The NYT’s “Snow Fall” feature cost a lot to pull off, and people are already arguing that while the NYT could do it most other outlets won’t be able to afford it. But if you’re a newspaper already paying a journalist to do a story that will run in parts in the paper, there is no reason not to bundle it together and publish it (or publish it with a few extra components) and sell it separately. Of course, lots of outlets can’t afford to pay journalists to carry out that type of research in the first place, no matter where it eventually runs.

That’s been a problem for a long time now, though, and the best part of e-singles is that they’re not tied to any single old media company. They’re not a digital replica of anything so much as they are a format unto themselves.
http://paidcontent.org/2012/12/24/wh...-the-e-single/





2012: The Year Irish Newspapers Tried to Destroy the Web
Simon McGarr

This is not a joke.

I have started with that clarification, because as you read this you will find yourself asking “Is this some kind of a joke?” I thought I would be helpful and put the answer right up at the start, so you can refer back to it as often as you require.

This year the Irish newspaper industry asserted, first tentatively and then without any equivocation, that links -just bare links like this one- belonged to them. They said that they had the right to be paid to be linked to. They said they had the right to set the rates for those links, as they had set rates in the past for other forms of licensing of their intellectual property. And then they started a campaign to lobby for unauthorised linking to be outlawed.

These assertions were not merely academic positions. The Newspaper Industry (all these newspapers) had its agent write out demanding money. They wrote to Women’s Aid, (amongst others) who became our clients when they received letters, emails and phone calls asserting that they needed to buy a licence because they had linked to articles in newspapers carrying positive stories about their fundraising efforts.

These are the prices for linking they were supplied with:

1 – 5 €300.00
6 – 10 €500.00
11 – 15 €700.00
16 – 25 €950.00
26 – 50 €1,350.00
50 + Negotiable

They were quite clear in their demands. They told Women’s Aid “a licence is required to link directly to an online article even without uploading any of the content directly onto your own website.”

Recap: The Newspapers’ agent demanded an annual payment from a women’s domestic violence charity because they said they owned copyright in a link to the newspapers’ public website.

This isn’t the case of a collection agent going rogue.

The National Newspapers of Ireland is the representative body for Irish Newspaper Publishers. The 15 member titles in the NNI are

Irish Independent
Irish Examiner
The Irish Times
Irish Daily Star
Evening Herald
The Sunday Independent
Sunday World
The Sunday Business Post
Irish Mail on Sunday
Irish Farmers Journal
Irish Daily Mail
Irish Daily Mirror
Irish Sun
Irish Sunday Mirror
The Sunday Times
Irish Sun Sunday

In their submission to the Copyright Review Committee in July 2012 those 15 newspapers asserted baldly

“It is the view of NNI that a link to copyright material does constitute infringement of copyright”. (Section 7 National Newspapers of Ireland Further Submission to the Copyright Review Committee)

Women’s Aid received their demand from Newspaper Licensing Ireland Ltd (NLI), a collection agent for the Newspaper publishers. Here’s what that agent has to say about the status of links to newspaper websites:

“It is the view of NLI that a link to copyright material does constitute infringement of copyright”
(Page 5, Newspaper Licensing Ireland Ltd Further Submission to the Copyright Review Committee)


The National Newspapers of Ireland describes the relationship with NLI like this:

Newspaper Licensing Ireland Ltd (NLI) is a dedicated collecting society that represents the copyright interests of Irish national and regional newspaper publications, including National Newspapers of Ireland.

The National Newspapers of Ireland and Newspaper Licensing Ireland both have the same address; Clyde Lodge, 15 Clyde Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4.

Given this congruence, it is unrealistic to treat Newspaper Licensing Ireland’s demands and assertions as something separate or distinct from the demands of the Newspaper industry itself.

Every one of those 15 newspaper titles- and all the regional titles who are members of Newspaper Licensing Ireland- have endorsed the proposition that they have rights over links to their websites. Furthermore they want an explicit change in the law to back up their demands for money if you link to their websites.

Here’s what the NNI say:

“NNI proposes that, in fact, any amendment to the existing copyright legislation with regard to deep-linking should specifically provide that deep-linking to content protected by copyright…is unlawful.”
(Section 7 National Newspapers of Ireland Further Submission to the Copyright Review Committee)


Here’s a test. Ask any of the Editors of any of those newspapers listed above the following question. “Do you accept that people have the right to link to any page on your website?” Ask them online, or at a public meeting, perhaps. They will hotly respond by answering a question they haven’t been asked. They will say that they have always given people permission to link to their websites, when asked.

Here’s the NLI’s protest:

“on every occasion that NLI has been approached by a third party seeking to licence a form of copying or transmission not covered by any of our existing standard licences, we have sought to find a solution to that company’s requirement.”
(Page 1, Newspaper Licensing Ireland Further Submission to the Copyright Review Committee)


Here’s the Editor of IrishTimes.com, Hugh Linehan:

@tupp_ed @devore I regularly receive queries from people who want to link to us. I have yet to refuse.

— Hugh Linehan (@hlinehan) May 30, 2012


Both the above statements are worded to maintain the position that linking to newspaper websites is within the grace and favour of newspapers to grant- or by implication to refuse. And, by further implication, to charge for if they so wish. You can see the kind of prices they’re thinking of, above.

None of this has received any coverage in any newspaper for sale in Ireland. Not a drop of ink has been used to report on the print media’s lobbying to have their assertion of copyright over links written into legislation, in any Irish newspaper.

You can read about this story in the New York Observer,on Techcrunch, on Techdirt or, if you prefer not to look to the international press you can turn to Michael McDowell’s news source of choice Broadsheet.ie. But, apparently, it isn’t a story for Irish newspapers.

The web is built on links. Links are what has made it so powerful and so threatening to established institutions of power.

Here’s Tim Berners-Lee, writing on Links and Law Myths in April 1997 under the heading Myth One

Myth: A normal link is an incitement to copy the linked document which infringes copyright.

The ability to refer to a document (or a person or any thing else) is in general a fundamental right of free speech to the same extent that speech is free. Making the reference with a hypertext link is more efficient but changes nothing else.

I received a mail message asking for “permission” to link to our site. I refused as I insisted that permission was not needed.

There is no need to have to ask before making a link to another site.


In 2012, Irish newspapers- The Irish Times, The Irish Independent and all the others- are trying to make this myth a reality here.

This is not the story of a rogue agent. This is the story of a rogue industry.
http://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2012/...stroy-the-web/





Hearst Claims 800,000 Digital Subscribers, the 'Highest in the Industry'
Todd Wasserman

Hearst Corp., publisher of Cosmopolitan, Elle and Road & Track among other titles, now has 800,000 paying digital subscribers, according to President David Carey.

Carey included the stat in a letter to employees at the company. The figure refers to monthly subscribers across all titles and via iPads, Nooks, Kindle Fires and Android devices for the end of 2012. Carey claims the figure is "the highest in the industry" and that more than 80% of those subscribers are new to Hearst.

Conde Nast, one of Hearst's biggest rivals, has not released its own figures for 2012. The company claimed 242,000 digital subscribers in August 2011. Later on that year, Conde said its digital subscriptions had jumped 268% a few weeks after Apple released its Newsstand app for iOS in early October 2011. Conde reps could not be reached for comment.

Other industry rivals including Time Inc. and Meredith haven't released their digital subscription figures. The New York Times claimed 592,000 digital subscribers in October 2012.

Among the other highlights in Carey's letter:

• The number of unique visitors to Hearst's websites grew more than 30% in 2012.

• Hearst's titles claim 7.7 million Facebook fans, 4.7 million Twitter followers and 5.5 million Pinterest followers. The number one brand on Pinterest is Hearst's Harper's Bazaar.

• Cosmopolitan doubled its digital edit team staff in December.

https://mashable.com/2013/01/02/hear...l-subscribers/





RCA's Upcoming Mobile TV Tablet Features Two Tuners for Live Television Broadcasts
Justin Rubio

RCA has announced that it will be launching a Mobile TV Tablet with a pair of tuners for those who want to watch live television on the go. Priced at $299 and set for release in the spring, the Android-powered Mobile TV Tablet features an 8-inch display with a 1024 x 768 resolution, a Cortex A5 1GHz processor, and 1GB of RAM, as well as an over-the-air tuner and a Dyle TV-compatible mobile TV tuner. Dyle TV allows users to view live television content from major stations over-the-air, and is currently only available through Metro PCS' Samsung Galaxy S Lightray 4G and iPads or iPhones that are paired with the Elgato EyeTV Mobile TV Tuner attachment. Viewers will also have access to on-screen program information and closed captioning, but unfortunately the device doesn't have DVR capabilities, despite its 8GB of on-board storage. RCA claims that the tablet's battery can last up to 10 hours when web browsing, but only four hours in mobile TV mode.

Although there are plenty of choices for watching shows or movies on Android devices, the biggest advantage with the Mobile TV Tablet is that, since all broadcasts are transmitted over-the-air, data coverage and usage are of no concern. On the downside, the channel selection through both the standard tuner and Dyle TV are very limited — in San Francisco, Dyle TV only offers five channels, including Fox, NBC, and Telemundo. Additionally, while the standard tuner and its telesopic antenna may have access to more stations, it can only be utilized when the device is stationary, so viewers travelling in a vehicle are stuck with Dyle TV's offerings. Still, if live television broadcasts are important to you, there aren't many other options besides RCA's upcoming tablet.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/4/383...ith-two-tuners





Disruptions: The Real Hazards of E-Devices on Planes
Nick Bilton

Over the last year, flying with phones and other devices has become increasingly dangerous.

In September, a passenger was arrested in El Paso after refusing to turn off his cellphone as the plane was landing. In October, a man in Chicago was arrested because he used his iPad during takeoff. In November, half a dozen police cars raced across the tarmac at La Guardia Airport in New York, surrounding a plane as if there were a terrorist on board. They arrested a 30-year-old man who had also refused to turn off his phone while on the runway.

Who is to blame in these episodes? You can’t solely pin it on the passengers. Some of the responsibility falls on the Federal Aviation Administration, for continuing to uphold a rule that is based on the unproven idea that a phone or tablet can interfere with the operation of a plane.

These conflicts have been going on for several years. In 2010, a 68-year-old man punched a teenager because he didn’t turn off his phone. Lt. Kent Lipple of the Boise Police Department in Idaho, who arrested the puncher, said the man “felt he was protecting the entire plane and its occupants.” And let’s not forget Alec Baldwin, who was kicked off an American Airlines plane in 2011 for playing Words With Friends online while parked at the gate.

Dealing with the F.A.A. on this topic is like arguing with a stubborn teenager. The agency has no proof that electronic devices can harm a plane’s avionics, but it still perpetuates such claims, spreading irrational fear among millions of fliers.

A year ago, when I first asked Les Dorr, a spokesman for the F.A.A., why the rule existed, he said the agency was being cautious because there was no proof that device use was completely safe. He also said it was because passengers needed to pay attention during takeoff.

When I asked why I can read a printed book but not a digital one, the agency changed its reasoning. I was told by another F.A.A. representative that it was because an iPad or Kindle could put out enough electromagnetic emissions to disrupt the flight. Yet a few weeks later, the F.A.A. proudly announced that pilots could now use iPads in the cockpit instead of paper flight manuals.

The F.A.A. then told me that “two iPads are very different than 200.” But experts at EMT Labs, an independent testing facility in Mountain View, Calif., say there is no difference in radio output between two iPads and 200. “Electromagnetic energy doesn’t add up like that,” said Kevin Bothmann, the EMT Labs testing manager.

It’s not a matter of a flying device hitting another passenger, either. Kindles weigh less than six ounces; Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs weighs 2.1 pounds in hardcover. I’d rather be hit in the head by an iPad Mini than a 650-page book.

In October, after months of pressure from the public and the news media, the F.A.A. finally said it would begin a review of its policies on electronic devices in all phases of flight, including takeoff and landing. But the agency does not have a set time frame for announcing its findings.

An F.A.A. spokeswoman told me last week that the agency was preparing to move to the next phase of its work in this area, and would appoint members to a rule-making committee that will begin meeting in January.

The F.A.A. should check out an annual report issued by NASA that compiles cases involving electronic devices on planes. None of those episodes have produced scientific evidence that a device can harm a plane’s operation. Reports of such interference have been purely speculation by pilots about the cause of a problem.

Other government agencies and elected officials are finally getting involved.

This December, Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, sent a letter to the F.A.A. telling the agency that it had a responsibility to “enable greater use of tablets, e-readers and other portable devices” during flights, as they empower people and allow “both large and small businesses to be more productive and efficient, helping drive economic growth and boost U.S. competitiveness.”

A week later, Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, also sent a letter to the F.A.A. noting that the public was “growing increasingly skeptical of prohibitions” on devices on airplanes. She warned that she was “prepared to pursue legislative solutions should progress be made too slowly.”

If progress is slow, there will eventually be an episode on a plane in which someone is seriously harmed as a result of a device being on during takeoff. But it won’t be because the device is interfering with the plane’s systems. Instead, it will be because one passenger harms another, believing they are protecting the plane from a Kindle, which produces fewer electromagnetic emissions than a calculator.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/1...nes-dangerous/





Silencing the Smartphone
Tanya Mohn

Resolutions to change behavior are common at this time of year, but they usually involve exercising more or smoking less. Now, some companies are adopting policies aimed at weaning employees from their electronic devices.

Atos, an international information technology company, plans to phase out all e-mails among employees by the end of 2013 and rely instead on other forms of communication. And starting in the new year, employees at Daimler, the German automaker, can have incoming e-mail automatically deleted during vacations so they do not return to a flooded in-box. An automatic message tells the sender which person is temporarily dealing with the employee’s e-mail.

No one is expected to be on call at all hours of the day and night, and “switching off” after work is important, “even if you are on a business trip,” said Sabrina Schrimpf, a Daimler spokeswoman, referring to the company’s recently released report, “Balanced! — Reconciling Employees’ Work and Private Lives.”

Disconnecting can be more challenging for business travelers who frequently work across time zones.

And there is a ripple effect, said Leslie A. Perlow, a professor of leadership at Harvard Business School and the author of “Sleeping With Your Smartphone.” “These guys fly in the middle of the night and send e-mails back to colleagues” who wait up, ready to respond.

A study conducted last spring by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project found that while mobile phones were valued as a way to stay productive, there were downsides to being available at all times. The nationwide survey of 2,254 adults found that 44 percent of cellphone owners had slept with their phone next to their bed and that 67 percent had experienced “phantom rings,” checking their phone even when it was not ringing or vibrating. Still, the proportion of cellphone owners who said they “could live without it” has gone up, to 37 percent from 29 percent in 2006.

Sam Chapman, chief executive of Empower Public Relations in Chicago, said he used to feel phantom vibrations and frequently read and sent e-mail on his BlackBerry in the middle of the night. He slept poorly, did not feel refreshed in the morning and considered himself addicted. “I wanted to make sure that what happened to me didn’t happen to my employees,” he said.

So Mr. Chapman adopted what he called a BlackBerry blackout policy. He and his staff of about 20 turn off their BlackBerrys from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. on weekdays and completely on weekends for all work-related use, with rare exceptions. “When I’m well rested, I show up to work ready to go,” he said.

He maintains that regimen while traveling, and said the policy had increased company productivity.

Professor Perlow agreed that companies could improve their bottom line by encouraging employees to disconnect at times. “Being constantly on actually undermines productivity,” she said.

But it is not always easy. In early 2012, when Michelle Barry, Mark Jacobsen and a third partner created Centric Brand Anthropology, a Seattle-based company that advises clients on brand strategy, design and culture management, they gave serious thought to the issue.

“A huge priority for us was to have a good balance between work-life,” said Mr. Jacobsen, Centric’s vice president and creative director. “Yet we have found that very difficult to do while working with large multinational clients,” which often require international travel and constant availability.

Being a start-up compounded those challenges. “Just because you can e-mail at 2 a.m., doesn’t mean it’s a good thing,” he said.

Centric encourages employees to prepare a week before a trip, designating a colleague as backup, informing clients about their travel plans, and trying to avoid deadlines immediately after they return. Employees are also encouraged to take spouses or partners on longer assignments and to build in downtime, said Ms. Barry, the company’s president and chief executive. When traveling, she said, “I make a commitment to myself not to stay up all night answering e-mails.”

Experts say there is no firm data for how many companies have policies restricting the use of electronic devices outside the office. “The companies I know actively encourage workers to stay connected after hours and on weekends,” said Dennis J. Garritan, a managing partner of the private equity firm Palmer Hill Capital and an adjunct professor at Harvard Business School.

“It’s positioned as a win-win,” he said: employees remain aware of what’s going on and feel less overwhelmed when they return to the office, and the company benefits because employees remain productive.

Wayne Rivers, president of the Family Business Institute, a consulting firm in Raleigh, N.C., said many companies “value employees who answer their phones at 1 in the morning.” In most cases, it is left up to each worker “to exercise the discipline necessary to avoid exhaustion and burnout.”

Christopher R. Bennett, senior transport specialist for the World Bank, who spent about five months traveling for work in 2012, refused to accept a BlackBerry several years ago. “There is a reason they are called ‘CrackBerries,’ ” Mr. Bennett said, “What I have observed from my colleagues who have BlackBerrys is that because of the pressures of work, especially as we deal with different time zones, they are continually checking and responding to e-mails. At home. At dinner. At the gym. On weekends. Since I have such an addictive personality, I didn’t want it.”

Stuart Fisher, head of the personal and work stress counseling unit for the World Bank, said in an e-mail that while the bank did not have a policy restricting the use of electronic devices outside of work and had not found it to be a problem, it viewed the issue in the broader context of promoting a healthy work-life balance. Devoting “sufficient time to themselves is imperative,” he said.

He added, though, that in a global organization, “ready access to staff is critically important, not just to ensure the success of the various missions and projects, but also for accountability purposes as our staff members travel to remote, austere and potentially hazardous environments.”

Sherry Turkle, a professor of the social studies of science and technology at M.I.T. and author of “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other,” said she thought more companies would adopt similar policies. “I’m optimistic, because I think that everybody is feeling the pinch,” she said. Employees are too busy using devices to have the conversations that matter and are necessary to get business done.

“I don’t use the metaphor of addiction,” said Ms. Turkle, who is also a psychologist. “We’re not going to give it up. We shouldn’t give it up. It’s more like food, and being on a digital diet. The questions we should ask are, ‘What are the healthy choices?’ ”
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/b...artphones.html





802.11ac: Cisco, Aerohive Offer Forecasts
Lee H. Badman

With the 802.11ac standard expected to ratify in 2013, early product releases are heating up. With any new wireless technology comes confusion, so I went to a couple of heavy hitters in the industry to get their take on what we should all know about the coming of 11ac.

Chris Spain currently serves as VP of product marketing at Cisco Systems. Andrew vonNagy is a senior Wi-Fi architect with Aerohive Networks. I use and support gear from both companies. Though Spain and vonNagy come from different places on the WLAN vendor spectrum, both sing similar songs when it comes to 11ac. Each provided a slew of input on my questions, which I have condensed for brevity.

Q. What will 11ac mean on day one, and down the road, to the SMB and enterprise spaces?

Spain: There won't be a lot of 11ac clients in the beginning, and both clients and infrastructure are needed to fully leverage the anticipated benefits of 11ac. The new standard will be evolutionary, with two waves involved. Out of the gate, the increases in performance over 11n will not be tremendously impressive. The second wave--which will require a hardware refresh--gets far more interesting.

vonNagy: First-generation 802.11ac products will achieve up to 1.3 Gbps through the use of three spatial streams, 80-MHz-wide channels (double the largest 40 MHz channel width with 802.11n), and use of better hardware components that allow higher levels of modulation and encoding (up to 256-QAM). Whether we will actually see 802.11ac products capable of 6.9 Gbps is dependent on hardware enhancements on both the access point and client that are not certain.

Both Spain and vonNagy agree that among the biggest benefits of 11ac are that more mobile clients will move to the 5-GHz spectrum where 11ac lives, and that faster data transfers should mean longer client battery life.

Q. Should existing wireless environments be in a hurry to go to 11ac?

vonNagy: Enterprises that have deployed the latest-generation 802.11n equipment pervasively throughout their network can be confident in the investment they have made; first-generation 802.11ac only offers incremental benefits over 802.11n. First-generation 802.11ac products will be of greater interest to enterprises that are purchasing a greenfield WLAN deployment, growing an existing WLAN deployment with additional APs, or running older WLAN equipment. Enterprises that were early adopters of 802.11n may see greater appeal in moving to first-generation 802.11ac because their existing 802.11n equipment has already been depreciated over a number of years and they have received their return on investment. In addition, 802.11ac can offer a substantial upgrade in performance to 600 Mbps over two spatial stream 802.11n (300 Mbps), allowing the enterprise to increase performance, capacity and services offered over the WLAN.

Spain: It depends where in the lifecycle of your current WLAN you are. Fresh 11n deployments should be good for another three years or so until 11ac becomes compelling, but those still running a/b/g environments should perhaps consider 11ac over 11n. Also, if you have specific client types where increased battery life is of particular concern, this could be a driver for migration to 11ac. You also may have targeted areas in the WLAN where 11ac makes sense for a particular reason that doesn't necessarily dictate moving the entire enterprise to the new standard.

Q. Where do you see 11ac being over/under-hyped?

Spain: Speed sells, and 11ac is faster than 11n, so naturally we'll hear a lot about that. But just having a new wireless gigabit on-ramp isn't the end of the story. What's not being talked about enough is that 11ac clients will free up more 2.4-GHz space for clients that can't upgrade, and that advanced features like multiuser MIMO will provide wireless performance that is more switch-like compared to the shared media nature of 11n.

vonNagy: Most of the current discussion on 802.11ac focuses on large bandwidth improvements that will not be available for several years. The short-term improvements are of bigger benefit in small WLAN deployments, such as SMB and consumer homes, where only a single Wi-Fi AP will be able to take advantage of much wider channels.

One major short-term benefit of 802.11ac not being discussed as much as it deserves is the dramatic ability for enterprise WLANs to serve mobile devices in greater quantity with better performance. This is due to the mandatory support of 5-GHz frequency bands by all 802.11ac-compliant equipment. Today, enterprise WLANs struggle to provide the capacity required to support the influx of mobile devices. Once mobile device manufacturers begin deploying 802.11ac-capable devices, existing 802.11n and new 802.11ac WLAN deployments will be able to provide significantly better services to mobile devices.

Q: Beyond replacing access points, how will 11ac affect business environments?

vonNagy: Enterprises in multitenant buildings or in dense urban areas will likely see increased utilization of the 5-GHz spectrum bands, which could cause greater levels of interference and degrade WLAN performance. This is of significant concern if enterprises deploy 802.11ac equipment with 80-MHz wide channels, without recognizing the impact to neighboring businesses. 802.11ac also threatens to accelerate the utilization of 5-GHz spectrum bands by a large majority of enterprises. This could be a double-edged sword, providing the promise of increases performance for individual organizations, while simultaneously congesting the once interference-free 5-GHz bands. This may expose the need for more unlicensed spectrum sooner than anticipated. The timing is impeccable, as the FCC and Congress are currently devising rules for spectrum auctions in 2013 and 2014 of the 600-MHz TV white spaces and spectrum-sharing plans in the federal 3,550-to-3,650-MHz band. This would provide additional unlicensed spectrum for general use.

Spain: The notion of a faster on-ramp for wireless devices brings up interesting possibilities. At some point you have to talk about controllers and such, and how all parts of the network evolve, but 11ac has particularly interesting implications in the branch setting. Where you may not choose to use Flex Connect now [formerly called HREAP, Cisco's wireless system for branch and remote offices], having wireless clients pushing gigabit speeds at the far end changes how you think about the merits of backhauling all client traffic to your central site.

Thanks to Spain and vonNagy for participating. As 11ac continues to creep up on us, I'll speak with other industry leaders and sharing their thoughts here.
http://www.networkcomputing.com/wire...asts/240145337





Tech Giants Brace for More Scrutiny From Regulators
Somini Sengupta

Silicon Valley lobbied hard in Washington in 2012, and despite some friction with regulators, fared fairly well. In 2013, though, government scrutiny is likely to grow. And with this scrutiny will come even greater efforts by the tech industry to press its case in the nation’s capital and overseas.

In 2012, among other victories, the industry staved off calls for federal consumer privacy legislation and successfully pushed for a revamp of an obscure law that had placed strict privacy protections on Americans’ video rental records. It also helped achieve a stalemate on a proposed global effort to let Web users limit behavioral tracking online, using Do Not Track browser settings.

But this year is likely to put that issue in the spotlight again, and bring intense negotiations between industry and consumer rights groups over whether and how to allow consumers to limit tracking.

Congress is likely to revisit online security legislation — meant to safeguard critical infrastructure from attack — that failed last year. And a looming question for Web giants will be who takes the reins of the Federal Trade Commission, the industry’s main regulator, this year. David C. Vladeck, the director of the commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, has resigned, and there have been suggestions that its chairman, Jon Leibowitz, would step down.

The agency is investigating Google over possible antitrust violations and will subject Facebook to audits of its privacy policy for the next 20 years. Its next steps could serve as a bellwether of how aggressively the commission will take on Web companies in the second Obama administration.

“Now that the election is over, Silicon Valley companies each are thinking through their strategy for the second Obama administration,” said Peter Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University and a former White House privacy official. “The F.T.C. will have a new Democratic chairman. A priority for tech companies will be to discern the new chair’s own priorities.”

In early 2012, an unusual burst of lobbying by tech companies helped defeat antipiracy bills, which had been backed by the entertainment industry. Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Google feared that the bills would force them to police the Internet.

At the end of the year, Silicon Valley also got its way when the Obama administration stood up against a proposed global treaty that would have given government authorities greater control over the Web.

The key to the industry’s successes in 2012 was simple: it expanded its footprint in Washington just as Washington began to pay closer attention to how technology companies affect consumers. “Privacy and security became top-tier important policy issues in Washington in 2012,” said David A. Hoffman, director of security policy and global privacy officer at Intel.

“Industry has realized it is important to be engaged,” he continued, “to make sure government stakeholders are fully informed and educated about the role that new technology plays and to make sure any action taken doesn’t unnecessarily burden the innovation economy while still protecting individual trust in new technology.”

At the end of 2012, tech companies were on track to have spent record amounts on lobbying for the year. In the first three quarters, they spent close to $100 million, which meant that they were likely to surpass the $127 million they spent on lobbying in 2011, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based nonpartisan group that tracks corporate spending. Even the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz hired a lobbyist in Washington: Adrian Fenty, a former mayor of the city.

Technology executives and investors also made generous contributions in the 2012 presidential race, luring both President Obama and Mitt Romney to Northern California for fund-raisers and nudging them to speak out on issues like immigration overhaul and lower tax rates.

In a blog post in November, the center said Silicon Valley’s lobbying expenditures have ballooned in recent years, even as spending by other industries has fallen.

Facebook more than doubled its lobbying outlay in the year, reporting close to $2.6 million through the third quarter of 2012. Google spent more than any other company in the industry, doling out more than $13 million in the same period and more than double its nearest competitor, Microsoft, which spent just over $5.6 million in the same period.

Among Google’s advocates on Capitol Hill is a former Republican congresswoman, Susan Molinari, who heads Google’s office in Washington.

Google has particular reason to be engaged. It faces a wide-reaching antitrust investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, just as Microsoft did a decade ago. At issue is whether Google’s search engine results favor Google products over its rivals’.

Although the agency was ready to settle that case before the holidays, without harsh remedies, late last month it shelved the inquiry and put stronger penalties back in play. A resolution is expected in January.

The commission has already fined Google on a separate matter. In 2012, the company paid $22.5 million to settle charges that it had bypassed privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser to track users and serve them targeted advertisements.

Facebook has vastly expanded its Washington presence in recent years. It has set up a political action committee, hired a stable of seasoned, well-connected insiders from both parties and offered tips to lawmakers in an effort to make its site indispensable to politicians seeking re-election.

Facebook scored a win on Capitol Hill in late 2012 when it nudged Congress to amend a 1988 law, the Video Privacy Protection Act, that had protected the privacy of Americans’ video rental records. Facebook and its partner, Netflix, the video streaming service, advocated for changes in the law so that movies watched on Netflix could be shared on Facebook. That kind of data can be valuable for behavioral advertising, a principal source of revenue for Web services like Facebook.

The company also attracted increased scrutiny from the F.T.C. The agency negotiated a consent order with Facebook to settle charges that it had engaged in “unfair and deceptive practices” when changes in its settings revealed personal information that Facebook users had regarded to be private. As part of the settlement, Facebook agreed to audits of its privacy policies for 20 years.

Facebook faced renewed public outcry last month when its subsidiary, Instagram, proposed to deploy users’ pictures to serve targeted advertisements. The company has backtracked on that proposal, but the outcry, say consumer privacy advocates, is an indication of public sentiment.

“Yes, the industry managed to hold off privacy legislation this year,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “But if the end-of-year protests over the Facebook and Instagram changes are any indication, users will be pressing for better privacy protections in the next Congress.”

Silicon Valley’s lobbying efforts are also likely to expand across the Atlantic in 2013. Both Facebook and Google have faced off with European regulators over privacy issues. Now, the European Parliament is weighing an overhaul of data protection laws that apply across the Continent.

One of the proposed changes requires Web companies to ask European Union citizens for their explicit consent before collecting personal data for targeted Web advertising. Web companies vigorously oppose that and other proposals.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/02/t...-scrutiny.html





New Frontier for Topics in Science: Social Media
Mary Ann Giordano

The largest and most sophisticated rover landed safely on Mars and the world’s most famous Moon visitor died, but the space event that most captured the public’s imagination in 2012 involved a journey to Earth.

On Oct. 14, YouTube counted 52 million streams of the Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner’s supersonic, record-breaking jump from a balloon 24 miles above the New Mexico desert. YouTube called it “one of the most-viewed live events ever,” and it landed at No. 10 on the video-sharing site’s year-end trending list — the first time a science-related subject made the list, a YouTube spokeswoman said. (Google listed the leap as No. 7 in its Zeitgeist 2012 of trending events.)

And it was far from the only science story to go viral. To put it in 140 characters or less, social media and science found each other in 2012.

In surprising numbers, people posted, viewed and searched for science-related topics last year — sharing news from space and undersea, commenting on new discoveries and uploading photos and video in a full-out embrace of the ability to communicate with thousands of others about global subjects in real time.

The first Twitter message on Aug. 5 from @MarsCuriosity, NASA’s official rover handle — “Gale Crater I Am in You!!!” — was retweeted more than 72,000 times. Photos of the space shuttle Endeavour flying over the West Coast, on its way to its final resting place, ricocheted across the planet. And the director James Cameron’s claim to have sent the “deepest tweet” — from the Mariana Trench, about seven miles below the surface of the Pacific — was rated one of Twitter’s “moments of serendipity and just plain awesomeness” (though it was actually sent by a friend above water). Four science-related events made that list, with the Mars landing at No. 1.In an age of despair over math and science acuity, it appears that what was once considered uninteresting or unfathomable has become cool and exciting.

People now feel that “if they’re not paying attention, they’re missing out on something,” said Kevin Allocca, the trends manager for YouTube.

The rover in particular has picked up followers and likes at amazing speed and volume, though it is the fourth landing of an American space exploration vehicle on the planet.

“We went from 120,000 on Aug. 4 to over 800,000 followers on landing night,” Veronica McGregor, the media relations and social media manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said of its Twitter account. “And then we hit a million really quickly.”

Two months after the landing, the mission was averaging about 30,000 Twitter mentions a month. The Facebook page for NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity is heading toward a half-million likes, and the hashtag #Curiosity was the fifth most used on Google Plus in 2012.

The trend is, in some ways, self-fulfilling. Social media platforms are growing in popularity. There is also more online content, which is becoming more accessible, entertaining and engaging, Mr. Allocca said. Science subjects are also universal, more likely to attract global audiences. And people who are interested in science and technology tend to be especially comfortable with seeking and sharing information in digital ways.

Still, an epidemic of science geekiness seems to have broken out.

On Facebook, Mr. Baumgartner’s jump ranked higher than Mitt Romney’s announcement of Representative Paul D. Ryanof Wisconsin as his running mate, according to the Talk Meter, a tool that compares chatter on the social site with baseline conversation.

On the Google Zeitgeist 2012 list, “Stratosphere jump” follows “Presidential debate” (No. 6) but surpasses “Penn State scandal” (No. 8) and “Trayvon Martin shooting” (No. 9). “Hurricane Sandy” is No. 1.

NASA (which now has about 1.6 million likes on Facebook) has also become more sophisticated and assertive about doling out information piece by piece to sustain interest. The strategy plays into the strengths of social platforms, which allow users to dip in and out of streams of news and information at their convenience.

NASA’s “Seven Minutes of Terror” video on YouTube, about the difficulties of landing the rover, attracted two million views. And a satirical video made independently of NASA, “We’re NASA and We Know It” — to the tune of “I’m Sexy and I Know It” (chorus: “Crane lower that rover”) — has gotten close to 2.7 million views.

There are also more ways for followers to engage in events: helping to name the rover, or picking up a Curiosity Explorer badge on Foursquare for checking in at a NASA visitor center, science museum or planetarium. Ms. McGregor said that NASA, in turn, was paying attention to what its fans want. It was learning that with so many followers just starting to connect with the whole space thing, the agency needs to provide more basic information.

Earthlings have long had a fascination with the unknown. But social media experts say people can now feel as if they are part of the adventure. They can watch events live, then incorporate the developments in their “timelines.” They can follow science — and not have to worry about taking the final exam.

A recent LiveScience article, “Why We’re Mad for Mars,” tries to explain the renewed popularity of Mars. The answer is simple, noted a commenter, Jerry. “People are explorers,” he wrote. “That is all the article needed to say.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/s...ial-media.html





Police on New Trail in Instagram Riot Case

Police in Gothenburg, Sweden have shifted their investigation from the 17-year-old girl who was believed to be behind December’s Instagram riot after linking an IP address to a new suspect.

The investigation into the girl who was thought to be behind the Instagram account created to name and shame “teen sluts” is now headed in a new direction, with police concluding the 17-year-old girl is innocent.

While the investigation into the girl remains formally open, everyone investigating the case understands the teen had nothing to do with the account and officers are now looking to arrest a new suspect, according to the Göteborgs-Posten newspaper (GP).

“The situation remains unchanged,” explained prosecutor Annika Boman to GP in reference to the criminal suspicions against the teen.

“We’re still waiting on the results of the forensic investigation.”

On the last Tuesday before Christmas, high school students assembled outside the Plusgynmasiet high school in Gothenburg in an attempt to find the owner of the anonymous Instagram account.

The protests quickly turned into vandalism and saw the 27 arrests of what police called "rabble rousers", with the chaotic scenes continuing into the next day.

The 17-year-old former suspect has since kept a low profile, moving to a secret location with her family after receiving continued threats, wrote GP.

She took to her blog on Friday after her innocence was announced in Swedish media.

“I want to say thanks to everyone who has been on my side and who didn’t suspect me from day one because they knew I wasn’t the person who did it and everyone who trusted me when I said I was innocent.”

Now, police are working to bring in the new suspect – who is not the same person who came forward to the Aftonbladet newspaper in the same week as the drama, according to GP.

Meanwhile, local police have been kept busy with the charges of violence and assault that occurred during the two-day riots.
http://www.thelocal.se/45420/20130104/





Girl Allegedly Drugs Parents to Get Around Internet Curfew

A young Rocklin, CA girl and her friend are facing some serious charges after allegedly slipping her parents a mickey because she felt their Internet curfew was unfair.

According to Lt. Lon Milka with the Rocklin Police Department, the daughter secretly put her friend's prescription sleeping medicine into her parents' milkshakes. The parents detected a strange taste after drinking about a quarter of the spiked beverages, but they had consumed enough for the drugs to take effect. Both passed out within an hour, allowing the girl and her friend to use the Internet freely after her 10 p.m. curfew.

"They woke up about one in the morning, they had hangover like symptoms and they felt really groggy, had a headache, went back to sleep," Milka said. "They felt the same way the next morning so they felt something was strange."

The parents felt the incident was so strange that they went to a Rocklin police station and bought a Drug Test Kit, which parents often buy to make sure their children aren't using drugs. In this case, however, they used the test for themselves.

After the parents got the results, they brought their daughter to the police station.

When the situation was discussed, the daughter and her friend, were arrested and booked into Placer County Juvenile Hall on charges of willfully mingling a pharmaceutical into food and conspiracy.

Jonathan Mumm contributed to this report
http://www.news10.net/news/article/2...ternet-curfew-





Colleges Help Students Scrub Online Footprints
Carolyn Thompson

Samantha Grossman wasn't always thrilled with the impression that emerged when people Googled her name.

"It wasn't anything too horrible," she said. "I just have a common name. There would be pictures, college partying pictures, that weren't of me, things I wouldn't want associated with me."

So before she graduated from Syracuse University last spring, the school provided her with a tool that allowed her to put her best Web foot forward. Now when people Google her, they go straight to a positive image — professional photo, cum laude degree and credentials — that she credits with helping her land a digital advertising job in New York.

"I wanted to make sure people would find the actual me and not these other people," she said.

Syracuse, Rochester and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore are among the universities that offer such online tools to their students free of charge, realizing ill-considered Web profiles of drunken frat parties, prank videos and worse can doom graduates to a lifetime of unemployment — even if the pages are somebody else's with the same name.

It's a growing trend based on studies showing that most employers Google prospective hires and nearly all of them won't bother to go past the first page of results. The online tools don't eliminate the embarrassing material; they just put the graduate's most flattering, professional profile front and center.

"These students have been comfortable with the intimate details of their lives on display since birth," said Lisa Severy, president-elect of the National Career Development Association and director of career services at the University of Colorado-Boulder, which does not offer the service.

"The first item on our 'five things to do before you graduate' list is 'clean up your online profile,'" she said. "We call it the grandma test — if you don't want her to see it, you probably don't want an employer to, either."

After initially supplying BrandYourself accounts to graduating seniors, Syracuse University this year struck a deal with the company — begun by a trio of alumni — to offer accounts to all of its undergraduate and graduate students and alumni at no additional charge. About 25,000 people have access to it so far.

"It's becoming more and more important for students to be aware of and able to manage their online presence, to be able to have strong, positive things come up on the Internet when someone seeks them out," said Mike Cahill, Syracuse's career services director.

Online reputation repair companies have been around for at least a couple of years, often charging hundreds or thousands of dollars a year to arrange for good results on search engine result pages. BrandYourself, which normally charges $10 a month for an account, launched two years ago as a less expensive, do-it-yourself alternative after co-founder Pete Kistler ran into a problem with his own name.

"He couldn't get an internship because he was getting mistaken for a drug dealer with the same name," said co-founder Patrick Ambron. "He couldn't even get calls back and found out that was the problem."

An April survey of 2,000 hiring managers from CareerBuilder found nearly two in five companies use social networking sites to research job candidates, and 11 percent said they planned to start. A third of the hiring managers who said they research candidates reported finding something like a provocative photo or evidence of drinking or drug use that cost the candidate a job.

"We want our students and alumni actively involved in shaping their online presence," said Johns Hopkins Career Center Director Mark Presnell. Students are encouraged to promote positive, professional content that's easily found by employers, he said.

BrandYourself works by analyzing search terms in a user's online profile to determine, for example, that a LinkedIn account might rank 25th on Google searches of the user's name. The program then suggests ways to boost that ranking. The software also provides alerts when an unidentified result appears on a user's first page or if any links rise or fall significantly in rank.

Nati Katz, a public relations strategist, views his presence online as a kind of virtual storefront that he began carefully tending while in graduate school at Syracuse.

Google his name and up pops his LinkedIn page with a listing of the jobs he's held in digital media and the "500+ connections" badge of honor. His Facebook account is adorned with Katz smiling over an elegant Thanksgiving dinner table. There are a couple of professional profiles and his Tumblr link, one after another on the first page of results and all highlighting his professional experience.

Before his 2011 graduation, he took the university up on its offer of the BrandYourself account and said it gave him a leg up with potential employers and internship supervisors.

"Fortunately, I didn't have to deal with anything negative under my profile," said Katz, who used the reputation website BrandYourself.com while pursuing dual degrees in public relations and international affairs. "What I was trying to form was really a nice, clean, neat page, very professional."
http://news.yahoo.com/colleges-help-...184052483.html





China Polices Online Identity, Creates Marketing Gold Mine
Brian Proffitt

Last week's news that China is planning to restrict the use of true anonymity for its Internet denizens sent collective shudders throughout the human rights community - and may have piqued the interest of Western corporations seeing a huge sales and marketing opportunity.

No one with any sort of soul could have been happy about the news on Friday that the Chinese government would be requiring Internet users to provide their real names to Internet service providers, apparently the latest in another round of crack-downs to push down pesky opinions against a government that continues to crack down on citizens.

Open Is Hard

China is something that I continue to watch with interest. Having watched the zenith and the fall of the old Soviet Union, I have the layman's sense that China is holding on hard because they know full well what happens when restrictions are eased. The Soviet experiment in glasnost made that abundantly clear.

Thirty years after the glasnost policies helped widen the cracks in the Soviet political foundation, China is facing a similar problem. It wants to lock down control of its citizens, but it desperately wants to be a player on the global stage. The problem is, the economy of the world is increasingly dependent on technology and the Internet, something that reeks of openness and transparency. There are differences, of course: the Soviet Union tried glasnost from within, and China is trying to deal with openness from without, but the end result may be the same.

Most China pundits also see this particular round of regulations as a short-term solution to the growing problem of exposed scandals within their government; scandals getting back to the Chinese public at-large through the Internet, who have in turn been commenting on the events with increased vigor. It is expected that requiring real names to be collected by Chinese ISPs, regardless of whether a pseudonym is used online, will put the kibosh on such commentary and more.

Who Else Could Benefit

While we get to watch China pull yet-another smack down on freedom of expression, the cynical side of me also has to wonder is outside corporations might not see these newly strengthened policies as an opportunity. When I first read the news coming across the wire last week, my very first thought was that China's announcement sounded just like Google Plus' identity policies.

I'm not sure Google would appreciate their identity policy being equated with China's, but if you sign up for Google Plus or other Google services, somewhere along the line you're going to have to tell them your true identity - or take great lengths to fake Google out. We can argue the merits of this, but for now if you want to swim in Google's pool, this is the price of admission. We're told it's to keep things civil, but knowing the Internet habits of one Brian Proffitt and what he might like to buy could be worth a lot of money, too.

Looking at the policies for Google, Facebook and other social platforms where identity is the real currency to be sold to advertisers and marketers, how could any such vendor be able to resist an entire nation of identified Internet users? The opportunities would be huge.

To its apparent credit, the Chinese government seems to have already anticipated this issue. When the new rules were announced, strong admonishments were issued for any Internet service provider that might care to start selling this valuable information.

Given its value, one wonders how long this professed practice of protecting Chinese identities will last. It should not surprise anyone to see new policies in the future where China will partner with "friendly" multinationals to allow the sale and trade of identity information for marketing and advertising. It'll either be the Chinese government alone, or a revenue-share plan with the private ISPs to make the deal work for both sides, but it's bound to happen. Corporations have no souls, after all.

History has shown that the Chinese government is no less interested in generating revenue than any other political entity, and if such revenue generation were to come at the expense of monetizing its citizens' identities, well, what are they going to do? Complain?
http://readwrite.com/2012/12/31/chin...ting-gold-mine





Revealed: How the FBI Coordinated the Crackdown on Occupy

New documents prove what was once dismissed as paranoid fantasy: totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent
Naomi Wolf

It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall – so mystifying at the time – was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves –was coordinated with the big banks themselves.

The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, in a groundbreaking scoop that should once more shame major US media outlets (why are nonprofits now some of the only entities in America left breaking major civil liberties news?), filed this request. The document – reproduced here in an easily searchable format – shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council. And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens.

The documents, released after long delay in the week between Christmas and New Year, show a nationwide meta-plot unfolding in city after city in an Orwellian world: six American universities are sites where campus police funneled information about students involved with OWS to the FBI, with the administrations' knowledge (p51); banks sat down with FBI officials to pool information about OWS protesters harvested by private security; plans to crush Occupy events, planned for a month down the road, were made by the FBI – and offered to the representatives of the same organizations that the protests would target; and even threats of the assassination of OWS leaders by sniper fire – by whom? Where? – now remain redacted and undisclosed to those American citizens in danger, contrary to standard FBI practice to inform the person concerned when there is a threat against a political leader (p61).

As Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the PCJF, put it, the documents show that from the start, the FBI – though it acknowledges Occupy movement as being, in fact, a peaceful organization – nonetheless designated OWS repeatedly as a "terrorist threat":

"FBI documents just obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) … reveal that from its inception, the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a potential criminal and terrorist threat … The PCJF has obtained heavily redacted documents showing that FBI offices and agents around the country were in high gear conducting surveillance against the movement even as early as August 2011, a month prior to the establishment of the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park and other Occupy actions around the country."

Verheyden-Hilliard points out the close partnering of banks, the New York Stock Exchange and at least one local Federal Reserve with the FBI and DHS, and calls it "police-statism":

"This production [of documents], which we believe is just the tip of the iceberg, is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI's surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement … These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America."

The documents show stunning range: in Denver, Colorado, that branch of the FBI and a "Bank Fraud Working Group" met in November 2011 – during the Occupy protests – to surveil the group. The Federal Reserve of Richmond, Virginia had its own private security surveilling Occupy Tampa and Tampa Veterans for Peace and passing privately-collected information on activists back to the Richmond FBI, which, in turn, categorized OWS activities under its "domestic terrorism" unit. The Anchorage, Alaska "terrorism task force" was watching Occupy Anchorage. The Jackson, Michigan "joint terrorism task force" was issuing a "counterterrorism preparedness alert" about the ill-organized grandmas and college sophomores in Occupy there. Also in Jackson, Michigan, the FBI and the "Bank Security Group" – multiple private banks – met to discuss the reaction to "National Bad Bank Sit-in Day" (the response was violent, as you may recall). The Virginia FBI sent that state's Occupy members' details to the Virginia terrorism fusion center. The Memphis FBI tracked OWS under its "joint terrorism task force" aegis, too. And so on, for over 100 pages.

Jason Leopold, at Truthout.org, who has sought similar documents for more than a year, reported that the FBI falsely asserted in response to his own FOIA requests that no documents related to its infiltration of Occupy Wall Street existed at all. But the release may be strategic: if you are an Occupy activist and see how your information is being sent to terrorism task forces and fusion centers, not to mention the "longterm plans" of some redacted group to shoot you, this document is quite the deterrent.

There is a new twist: the merger of the private sector, DHS and the FBI means that any of us can become WikiLeaks, a point that Julian Assange was trying to make in explaining the argument behind his recent book. The fusion of the tracking of money and the suppression of dissent means that a huge area of vulnerability in civil society – people's income streams and financial records – is now firmly in the hands of the banks, which are, in turn, now in the business of tracking your dissent.

Remember that only 10% of the money donated to WikiLeaks can be processed – because of financial sector and DHS-sponsored targeting of PayPal data. With this merger, that crushing of one's personal or business financial freedom can happen to any of us. How messy, criminalizing and prosecuting dissent. How simple, by contrast, just to label an entity a "terrorist organization" and choke off, disrupt or indict its sources of financing.

Why the huge push for counterterrorism "fusion centers", the DHS militarizing of police departments, and so on? It was never really about "the terrorists". It was not even about civil unrest. It was always about this moment, when vast crimes might be uncovered by citizens – it was always, that is to say, meant to be about you.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...ackdown-occupy





The TSA Wants to be Everywhere in 2013 - Here's Why We Shouldn't Let It
Christopher Elliott

When the Minnesota Vikings faced off against the Green Bay Packers last weekend in Minneapolis, the big story wasn't that the Vikings defeated the Pack to secure a wildcard berth.

It was, strangely, the TSA.

That's right, the agency assigned to protect America's transportation systems was patrolling the Metrodome. Nathan Hansen, a North St. Paul, Minn., attorney, snapped a few photos of the agents before the game, and broadcast them on Twitter.

"I don't think any federal law enforcement agency needs anything to do with a football game," he told me yesterday.

Turns out the TSA goes to NFL games and political conventions and all kinds of places that have little or nothing to do with air travel. It even has a special division called VIPR -- an unfortunate acronym for Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response team -- that conducts these searches.

Few people know that $105 million of their taxpayer dollars are going to fund 37 VIPR teams in 2012, whose purpose is to "augment" the security of any mode of transportation. They don't realize that these VIPR teams can show up virtually anytime, anywhere and without warning, subjecting you to a search of your vehicle or person.

That's not a fringe observation, by the way. Even the most mainstream news outlets have reported on the problems of these random checkpoints. And it's being observed by mainstream news personalities, not just consumer advocates with a long list of grievances from their constituents.

But almost no one noticed when the Department of Homeland Security signaled its intent to broaden the scope of its off-airport searches even more in 2013. Buried deep in the Federal Register in late November was a notice that could dramatically shift the focus of transportation security. It involves the government's efforts to "establish the current state of security gaps and implemented countermeasures throughout the highway mode of transportation" through the Highway Baseline Assessment for Security Enhancement (BASE) program.

As far as I can tell, TSA is just asking questions at this point. "Data and results collected through the Highway BASE program will inform TSA's policy and program initiatives and allow TSA to provide focused resources and tools to enhance the overall security posture within the surface transportation community," it says in the filing.

But they wouldn't be wasting our money asking such questions unless they planned to aggressively expand VIPR at some point in the near future. And that means TSA agents at NFL games, in subways, and at the port won't be the exception anymore -- they will be the rule.

Still, some will argue, what's wrong with that? After all, VIPR teams were formed in response to the 2004 Madrid train bombings, and shouldn't we play it safe?

VIPR may be limited to a few men and women in uniform with dogs, patrolling a sold-out stadium or convention center for now. But it's not hard to imagine the next step, to a permanent presence with full-body scans and pat-downs. It's a scene straight out of a dystopian novel, and a direct affront to the Fourth Amendment values we take for granted in the United States.

On another level, there's this: The TSA was created mainly to safeguard our airports from another 9/11 attack. Being scanned or interrogated by an airport screener at a ballgame makes about as much sense as getting pulled over for speeding by a National Guardsman rattling down the Interstate in an Abrams tank. You would pull over for him, sure -- but you would also have a lot of questions.

If VIPR teams are somehow more effective than the highway patrol or the local police at stopping terrorists -- and I'm open to that possibility -- then the Department of Homeland Security should show us that evidence. In the absence of that, we're left to assume that the VIPR agents have the requisite 120 hours of training required of other agents, and that they are little more than warm bodies that will deter petty criminals from running cigarettes across a state line.

As we start 2013, the TSA is asking the wrong questions. Instead of being a solution in search of a problem, it should be trying to slim down, get smarter about the way it screens airline passengers, and leaving the rest to the well-trained professionals they will never be able to replace.

If we don't say something about the TSA's uncontrollable spread into almost every aspect of the American travel experience, we could one day soon find ourselves answering to someone in a paramilitary blue uniform whenever we set foot outside our door.

That's not the America you want to live in, is it?
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/a...ouldn-t-let-it





Why Congress's Digital Archive For Text Messages Is Such A Bad Idea
Adam Popescu

Text me. Wait, don't. Not anything too private anyway.

That's because if a new proposal is approved by the Senate, each and every SMS message you send will be stored in a digital archive by your phone provider. Why, you ask? It's all in the name of law enforcement being able to using your messages as evidence to catch bad guys and solve cases. And it's also a government-sponsored privacy nightmare come to reality.

If passed, the proposal would be the first major update to the 27-year-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), and the latest in a string of blatant challenges to the Fourth Amendment, which (up until recently... we're looking at you, FISA) served to protect citizens' rights and information, unless law enforcement was granted a court-issued warrant.

But if this SMS-retention requirement makes it into law, the nearly 2.3 trillion text messages America's 321.7 million wireless subscribers send in a year would all become the property of the Federal government, stored in a repository for 2 years.

Why This Is A Very Bad Idea

This is a very big change to the ECPA, which currently does not have any express directives to store and track customers' personal data, beyond court-ordered warrants and the need for providing a service. While the repository of texts could theoretically help solve some criminal cases, the technology and manpower required to sift through all of those messages, the need to significantly enhance storage facilities and data centers, and the exposure of the private business and personal communication of millions of people is a very high price to pay.

This isn't the first time law enforcement has asked for more power in electronic searches, and the subject of data retention has been sparking ongoing battles with the Justice Department.

In 2011, Marc Rotenberg, the president and executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), testified in Congress on a similar issue, a bill seeking to obtain and archive peoples' communications in order to protect children from Internet pornographers. In that testimony, Rotenberg reminded Congress that the problem with data retention is that it directly challenges "a central purpose of the Fourth Amendment: To ensure that the investigative powers of the government are directed toward those who have actually committed a crime or maybe planning a crime."

Storing everyone's messages seems directly counter to that principle.

Plus, when customers break service agreements, it's the job of telecom companies to inform the government about those transgressions - meaning that storing all messages as a general policy was not needed. "Even apart from an actual investigation, communications service providers already have authority to bring to the attention of law enforcement online activities that may raise significant concerns," Rotenberg said.

In his report, Rotenberg also cited a January 2010 report by the FBI, wherein its own Office of the Inspector General raised concerns over obtaining records without judicial oversight.

What's Next?

Lines in the sand are being drawn: On one side are investigative agencies and law enforcement, on the other side are privacy advocates like the ACLU and presumably the telecom companies themselves. Most major telecom providers, with the exception of Verizon and Virgin Mobile, do not store text message content. (Here are the data retention policies of the top five U.S. cell phone providers.)

Unanswered questions include whether or not the requirement to store communications will include encrypted messages services like Blackberry's BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) and social media chat and texting services.

Michael Hussey, the chief executive and founder of the people-focused search company Peek You, worries that this proposal could lead to a slew of regulations governing multiple methods of communication.

"I’d like to know what this means for encrypted services such as BBM," Hussey asked. "Such regulations will likely push more communications to other mobile communication channels: Instant messaging, BBM, IRC, chat rooms, Facebook, etc..I don’t see how that is technically possible on an open Internet, but it would likely have support amongst the biggest players in the industry, who could use that sort of regulation to create cost barriers to entry to new forms of Internet communication."

Who Is Going to Pay?

With literally billions of texts sent a day, storing all this data is going to cost a pretty penny.

George Otte, the founder and president of Geeks On Site, a computer repair and support company specializing in remote online service, says the move won't be cheap, and because of those costs, people will end up having to shell out more cash for their communications services. "From a data storage perspective, providers will be forced to increase costs in order to comply with the law, which ultimately gets passed to the consumer," Otte explained.

Basically, users will have to pay extra for the privilege of giving access to their texts to government agencies.

The 113th United States Congress takes session for the first time today, January 3, 2013. And while there is a host of hot-button issues on the table, this one is likely to start boiling if and when it makes it to the Senate floor.
http://readwrite.com/2013/01/03/why-...uch-a-bad-idea





Outmaneuvered at Their Own Game, Antivirus Makers Struggle to Adapt
Nicole Perlroth

The antivirus industry has a dirty little secret: its products are often not very good at stopping viruses.

Consumers and businesses spend billions of dollars every year on antivirus software. But these programs rarely, if ever, block freshly minted computer viruses, experts say, because the virus creators move too quickly. That is prompting start-ups and other companies to get creative about new approaches to computer security.

“The bad guys are always trying to be a step ahead,” said Matthew D. Howard, a venture capitalist at Norwest Venture Partners who previously set up the security strategy at Cisco Systems. “And it doesn’t take a lot to be a step ahead.”

Computer viruses used to be the domain of digital mischief makers. But in the mid-2000s, when criminals discovered that malicious software could be profitable, the number of new viruses began to grow exponentially.

In 2000, there were fewer than a million new strains of malware, most of them the work of amateurs. By 2010, there were 49 million new strains, according to AV-Test, a German research institute that tests antivirus products.

The antivirus industry has grown as well, but experts say it is falling behind. By the time its products are able to block new viruses, it is often too late. The bad guys have already had their fun, siphoning out a company’s trade secrets, erasing data or emptying a consumer’s bank account.

A new study by Imperva, a data security firm in Redwood City, Calif., and students from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is the latest confirmation of this. Amichai Shulman, Imperva’s chief technology officer, and a group of researchers collected and analyzed 82 new computer viruses and put them up against more than 40 antivirus products, made by top companies like Microsoft, Symantec, McAfee and Kaspersky Lab. They found that the initial detection rate was less than 5 percent.

On average, it took almost a month for antivirus products to update their detection mechanisms and spot the new viruses. And two of the products with the best detection rates — Avast and Emsisoft — are available free; users are encouraged to pay for additional features. This despite the fact that consumers and businesses spent a combined $7.4 billion on antivirus software last year — nearly half of the $17.7 billion spent on security software in 2011, according to Gartner.

“Existing methodologies we’ve been protecting ourselves with have lost their efficacy,” said Ted Schlein, a security-focused investment partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “This study is just another indicator of that. But the whole concept of detecting what is bad is a broken concept.”

Part of the problem is that antivirus products are inherently reactive. Just as medical researchers have to study a virus before they can create a vaccine, antivirus makers must capture a computer virus, take it apart and identify its “signature” — unique signs in its code — before they can write a program that removes it.

That process can take as little as a few hours or as long as several years. In May, researchers at Kaspersky Lab discovered Flame, a complex piece of malware that had been stealing data from computers for an estimated five years.

Mikko H. Hypponen, chief researcher at F-Secure, called Flame “a spectacular failure” for the antivirus industry. “We really should have been able to do better,” he wrote in an essay for Wired.com after Flame’s discovery. “But we didn’t. We were out of our league in our own game.”

Symantec and McAfee, which built their businesses on antivirus products, have begun to acknowledge their limitations and to try new approaches. The word “antivirus” does not appear once on their home pages. Symantec rebranded its popular antivirus packages: its consumer product is now called Norton Internet Security, and its corporate offering is now Symantec Endpoint Protection.

“Nobody is saying antivirus is enough,” said Kevin Haley, Symantec’s director of security response. Mr. Haley said Symantec’s antivirus products included a handful of new technologies, like behavior-based blocking, which looks at some 30 characteristics of a file, including when it was created and where else it has been installed, before allowing it to run. “In over two-thirds of cases, malware is detected by one of these other technologies,” he said.

Imperva, which sponsored the antivirus study, has a horse in this race. Its Web application and data security software are part of a wave of products that look at security in a new way. Instead of simply blocking what is bad, as antivirus programs and perimeter firewalls are designed to do, Imperva monitors access to servers, databases and files for suspicious activity.

The day companies unplug their antivirus software is still far off, but entrepreneurs and investors are betting that the old tools will become relics.

“The game has changed from the attacker’s standpoint,” said Phil Hochmuth, a Web security analyst at the research firm International Data Corporation. “The traditional signature-based method of detecting malware is not keeping up.”

Investors are backing a new crop of start-ups that turn the whole notion of security on its head. If it is no longer possible to block everything that is bad, the thinking goes, then the security companies of the future will be the ones whose software can spot unusual behavior and clean up systems once they have been breached.

The hottest security start-ups today are companies like Bit9, Bromium, FireEye and Seculert that monitor Internet traffic, and companies like Mandiant and CrowdStrike that have expertise in cleaning up after an attack.

Bit9, which received more than $70 million in financing from top venture firms like Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, uses an approach known as whitelisting, allowing only traffic that the system knows is innocuous.

McAfee acquired Solidcore, a whitelisting start-up, in 2009, and Symantec’s products now include its Insight technology, which is similar in that it does not let any unknown files run on a machine.

McAfee’s former chief executive, David G. DeWalt, was rumored to be a contender for the top job at Intel, which acquired McAfee in 2010. Instead, he joined FireEye, a start-up with a system that isolates a company’s applications in virtual containers, then looks for suspicious activity in a sort of digital petri dish before deciding whether to let traffic through.

The company has received more than $35 million in financing from Norwest, Sequoia Capital and In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, among others.

Seculert, an Israeli start-up, approaches the problem somewhat differently. It looks at where threats are coming from — the command and control centers used to coordinate attacks — to give governments and businesses an early warning system.

As the number of prominent online attacks rises, analysts and venture capitalists are betting that corporate spending patterns will change.

“Technologies that once were only used by very sensitive industries like finance are moving into the mainstream,” Mr. Hochmuth said. “Very soon, if you are not running these technologies and you’re a security professional, your colleagues and counterparts will start to look at you funny.”

Companies have started working from the assumption that they will be hacked, Mr. Hochmuth said, and that when they are, they will need top-notch cleanup crews.

Mandiant, which specializes in data forensics and responding to breaches, has received $70 million from Kleiner Perkins and One Equity Partners, JPMorgan Chase’s private investment arm.

Two McAfee executives, George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch, left to start CrowdStrike, a start-up that offers a similar forensics service. Less than a year later, they have already raised $26 million from Warburg Pincus.

If and when antivirus makers are able to fortify desktop computers, chances are the criminals will have already moved on to smartphones.

In October, the F.B.I. warned that a number of malicious apps were compromising Android devices. And in July, Kaspersky Lab discovered the first malicious app in Apple’s app store. The Defense Department has called for companies and universities to find ways to protect mobile devices from malware. McAfee, Symantec and others are working on solutions, and Lookout, a start-up whose products scan apps for malware and viruses, recently raised funding that valued it at a billion dollars.

“The bad guys are getting worse,” Mr. Howard of Norwest said. “Antivirus helps filter down the problem, but the next big security company will be the one that offers a comprehensive solution.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/t...fectively.html





Write Gambling Software, Go to Prison
Kim Zetter

In a criminal case sure to make programmers nervous, a software maker who licenses a program used by online casinos and bookmakers overseas is being charged with promoting gambling in New York because authorities say his software was used by others for illegal betting in that state.

New York authorities say that about $2.3 million that Robert Stuart and his company, Extension Software, received in cash and money orders for licensing his software constitutes direct proceeds of illegal, U.S.-based bookmaking operations.

“These defendants abetted large-scale illegal gambling in the U.S. and abroad,” said District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. in a press release in October when Stuart was charged. “In doing so, they gave bettors an easy way to place illegal wagers, and created an appetite for further unlawful activity.”

But Stuart, who has been charged along with his wife and brother-in-law with one felony count for promoting gambling in New York through their software firm, says that his company sells the software only to entities outside the U.S. and that he’s not aware of anyone using it in the U.S. or using it to take illegal bets in the U.S. He also says the software doesn’t place bets, it simply provides online gambling sites with the infrastructure to select and display which sporting events they want to offer for betting and also stores the bets.

“It’s overreaching where they’re going after a software developer who sells the software with a legal license, and yet we’re still being prosecuted on how it’s being used,” Stuart says. He notes that authorities have not told him yet who exactly he’s accused of aiding and abetting.

A hearing in the case is scheduled to be held in New York on Jan. 8.

The prosecution of a commercial programmer for crimes committed by people who used his software would set a dangerous precedent for other software makers who might be held liable for how their legally licensed software is used, says Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties for the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University.

“It’s scary for software distributors, if someone happens to use their software for illegal activity,” she says. “If you know what people could use it for, and didn’t prevent it, did you take enough steps? What level of knowledge you need to have and all of that is not as clear as it should be [under current laws].”

Stuart asserts that New York authorities only came after him because they wanted to use him as a conduit to uncover illegal gambling operations in that state. He says the New York district attorney’s office tried to strong-arm him into a plea agreement that would have had him hacking into the systems of his software clients in order to obtain the usernames and passwords of gamblers and their bookmakers to help authorities gather evidence of illegal gambling.

Although Stuart initially agreed to the terms of the plea, he later recanted because he said he was uncomfortable being used as a pawn to secretly collect information on his customers. He claims authorities are charging him now in retaliation for refusing to cooperate with them.

Under plea agreement discussions that were never finalized by a judge, and that occurred in February 2011 before Stuart was charged with any crime, Stuart says New York authorities pressed him to install a backdoor in his software and distribute it to clients so the data of gamblers and bookmakers could be retrieved.

Stuart showed Wired a plea agreement signed by former Manhattan Assistant District Attorney James Meadows, which stated that he would plead guilty to second- and fourth-degree money laundering charges and assist the DA’s investigations by, among other things, “aiding in the design of software used to obtain records, usernames, passwords, and other information stored on websites using” his company’s software.

Stuart says authorities specifically told him that they would not use the backdoor themselves but that he would be expected to access the servers of online casinos and others who used his software overseas in order to retrieve the information of gamblers and bookmakers on their behalf.

“They made it clear that they would do nothing. I was expected to do everything, to modify the system to allow myself to get in to get the information they wanted,” he says. “Their whole intention was for me to retrieve information from those databases that were located in foreign countries…. They were going to use me to get to the clients…. But I’m not a hacker, I’m a software developer.”

While it’s not unusual for suspects to become informants and work undercover with authorities to gather evidence against others, pressuring a software vendor to backdoor his own software and then sneak into his customers’ systems is an “outlandish” law enforcement tactic, says Granick, and would make him criminally liable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act unless authorities obtained a court order in the U.S. and also obtained all of the relevant legal permissions in the countries where his customers operate.

“Sending something to backdoor people’s systems and to steal customer data would violate the CFAA and would without a doubt be crimes in any country in Europe, particularly any that are signatories to the Cybercrime Treaty,” she says. “Many of these people will not be Americans, and it’s not unlawful for them to gamble, but [authorities] are taking their usernames and passwords. Someone needs to be investigated, but I’m not sure it’s [Stuart]…. If I were his lawyers, I’d be investigating to see where they got the idea that this was okay.”

Although Daniel R. Alonso, chief assistant in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, was reluctant to discuss the terms of the confidential plea agreement or how his office planned to implement them, he insisted there was nothing unlawful about what was proposed.

“The provision you have questioned is perfectly consistent with the obligations of all law enforcement officials to follow state and federal law to secure evidence of criminal conduct,” Alonso said in an e-mail statement. “The staff of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office involved in this case, both prosecutors and investigators, have behaved ethically and consistent with their obligation to seek justice in every case.”

The case began in February 2011, when Stuart says he and his wife got the Kim Dotcom treatment after about 30 local Arizona law enforcement agents wearing SWAT gear and camouflage dress — some of them with bushes attached to their shoulders to blend into the woods around his house — descended on his home and threatened to send him and his wife to prison for 35 years if he didn’t cooperate.

The search warrant used in the raid said Stuart and his wife were engaged in money laundering, operating an illegal enterprise and engaging in the promotion of gambling. Stuart has tried to obtain a copy of the affidavit used to get the search warrant, but it’s currently sealed.

The conversation for the plea agreement occurred the day after the raid, when Stuart says he was still traumatized by the experience and had only rent-a-lawyers, hired quickly over the internet, to represent him. The lawyers urged him to cooperate and agree to the terms.

Although he signed the plea agreement, Stuart says he changed his mind after he had time to reflect on what authorities were asking him to do.

“We demanded that we would accept no plea, not even for a parking ticket, because we have done nothing wrong,” he says.

Some 18 months passed before he and his wife and brother-in-law were indicted this last October. By then, all of the allegations in the search warrant were gone except for a single count charge for first degree promotion of gambling.

According to New York authorities, Stuart and his employees “knowingly advanced and profited from unlawful gambling activity by engaging in bookmaking to the extent that they received and accepted in any one day more than five bets totaling more than five thousand dollars.”

Stuart isn’t actually accused of making or taking bets, however, just creating the software that allowed other people to do so. The New York district attorney’s office says his software was used to make illegal bets in that state between Sept. 2008 and June 2011.

Stuart’s company, formerly based in Arizona but now based out of Nevada, created and supports online gaming software called Action Sportsbook International, which he has been licensing to clients for a little more than a dozen years. The software provides online sports bookers and casinos with the infrastructure to run operations for betting on horse-racing and a variety of sporting events, such as professional and college football and basketball games and soccer.

Clients pay quarterly to license the software at rates that vary between $6,000 and $45,000 per quarter.

“We deliver our software and help set it up and we make sure it’s being used in places where it is legal to be used,” Stuart says. The software, however, is designed to be used in a time-shared environment where clients can place it on a server and sub-license it to casinos and other sports bookers. “We have very few clients that are actually in the gambling business themselves. In some cases they’re directly taking the bets, but it’s more likely that it’s people who provide gambling services to others, to agents or casinos.”

Stuart says his company is not involved in the sub-licensing and doesn’t know who his clients’ clients are. He thinks some of his clients may have rented the software to others who misused it.

At the time of the raid, Stuart had about 20 clients, all of them outside the U.S. in Costa Rica, Panama, Australia, Jamaica, the UK, the Dominican Republic and elsewhere. Now he’s down to 10 clients.

“This has had a real devastating effect on the business,” he says. “Any time you’re indicted, people are going to question.”

Granick says authorities may have a tough time proving their case since they will have to show that Stuart or his employees knew that their software was being used for illegal gambling by residents in New York and did nothing to stop this.

“They can’t prove that merely from the distribution of the software itself,” she says. “They need additional information to show he knew and intended the unlawful activity. You would have to prove that through emails or statements he made that show that he knew the money was coming from someone he knew shouldn’t be gambling and was approving it.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...-software/all/





Report Links Google, Yahoo to Internet Piracy Sites

They're among the top advertising networks that support major music, film and TV piracy sites, according to a new analysis that USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab hopes will help companies avoid exploitative websites.
Dawn C. Chmielewski

Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., two Internet companies that have long cultivated relationships in Hollywood, are nevertheless placing ads on sites that feature pirated movies, TV shows and music, a new report says.

USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab ranked Google and Yahoo among the top 10 advertising networks that support major piracy sites around the world, based on the lab's analysis of online ads that receive the most copyright infringement notices.

Google took issue with the report's findings, calling its conclusion "mistaken." Yahoo did not respond to requests seeking comment.

The report is the first installment of a monthly update that Innovation Lab Director Jonathan Taplin hopes major brands will use to inform their decisions about online ad spending and steer dollars away from sites that exploit film, television and music.

"Whenever we talk to a brand about the fact that their ads are all over the pirate sites, they're like, 'Oh, how did that happen?'" Taplin said. "We thought it would be easier if they knew what ad networks were putting ads on pirate sites — so they could avoid them."

Annenberg's Innovation Lab used as its starting point Google's Transparency Report, which lists the Internet sites receiving the most notices from studios, trade associations and software and game publishers to remove copyrighted works. Whenever an ad appears on one of these leading pirate sites, the lab uses software to obtain the name of the ad network.

The list of ad networks includes Openx, a Pasadena company that was backed by AOL Ventures and describes itself as a leader in digital and mobile ad technology; Google and its advertising platform, DoubleClick; Yahoo and its ad exchange, Right Media; and Quantcast, a San Francisco firm that also places ads on sites owned by such major media companies as NBCUniversal and Viacom.

"To the extent [the study] suggests that Google ads are a major source of funds for major pirate sites, we believe it is mistaken," a Google spokesperson said. "Over the past several years, we've taken a leadership role in this fight. The complexity of online advertising has led some to conclude, incorrectly, that the mere presence of any Google code on a site means financial support from Google."

Taplin has been an outspoken opponent of Internet piracy since the early 2000s, when he witnessed the toll Internet piracy took on his friend Levon Helm — whom Taplin had befriended in 1969, after graduating from Princeton and going to work as the Band's tour manager.

The late singer and drummer had been able to live off the record royalties from his music until the advent of pirate sites such as LimeWire and Pirate Bay, Taplin said. But in recent years, despite suffering from throat cancer, Helm was forced to go back on the road to pay his medical bills. Some nights he couldn't sing more than a single song.

The file-sharing sites were making money selling advertising to fans of the same music, stolen and uploaded to the sites.

"All musicians know ... why their incomes have plummeted," Taplin said. "Everyone knows piracy has destroyed the music business."

The failure in Congress of the Hollywood-backed Stop Online Piracy Act, amid protests of censorship, prompted Taplin to attack the financial underpinnings of piracy. Advertising provides about 86% of the financing for file-sharing sites that feature illegally distributed content, according to a report funded by Google and the Performing Rights Society for Music in Britain.

Brands — particularly those seeking relationships with recording artists to convey a hip image to young music fans — need to be more vigilant about their advertising, said Chris Castle, a music and technology lawyer based in Austin, Texas.

"If you look at IsoHunt right now ... you'll see advertising from the top brands in the world," said Castle, referring to a search engine that allows users to find pirated music, movies, games and TV shows online. "These brands are just perpetuating the people who are stealing from [the artist], and making them rich."

Jeans maker Levi's took swift action when Taplin presented evidence that the clothing company's ads had appeared on file-sharing sites.

"When our ads were running unbeknownst to us on these pirate sites, we had a serious problem with that," said Gareth Hornberger, senior manager of global digital marketing for Levi's. "We reached out to our global ad agency of record, OMD, and immediately had them remove them.... We made a point, moving forward, that we really need to take steps to avoid having these problems again."

Jean Prewitt, president and chief executive of the Independent Film & Television Alliance, said bringing the brands and ad networks into the conversation about Internet piracy is an important step in repairing the damage caused by illegal online distribution.

"When you start to look at this ad revenue, somebody is making money off this — and it's not kids in basements," Prewitt said. "This is an industry that is commercializing the content, but not in any way that contributes to creating that content."
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...,2960606.story





What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2013?

Under the law that existed until 1978 … Works from 1956

Works that could have entered the public domain on January 1, 2013

The films Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, The Best Things in Life Are Free, Forbidden Planet, The Ten Commandments, and Around the World in 80 Days, the stories 101 Dalmatians and The Minority Report, classic Elvis Presley songs, and more …

The Best Things in Life are NOT Free

Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s death, and corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years – an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. Under those laws, works published in 1956 would enter the public domain on January 1, 2013, where they would be “free as the air to common use.” Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2052.1 And no published works will enter our public domain until 2019. (The law in the EU is different – thousands of works from authors who died in 1942 are entering their public domain on January 1.) Even more shockingly, the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that Congress can take back works from the public domain. Could Shakespeare, Plato, or Mozart be pulled back into copyright? The Supreme Court gave no reason to think that they could not be.

A Copyrighted History of the English-Speaking Peoples

What books would be entering the public domain if we had the pre-1978 copyright laws? You might recognize some of the titles below.

• Winston Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Volume I and Volume II
• Philip K. Dick, Minority Report
• Ian Fleming, Diamonds are Forever
• Fred Gibson, Old Yeller
• Billie Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues
• Alan Lerner, My Fair Lady
• Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night
• John Osborne, Look Back in Anger
• Dodie Smith, 101 Dalmatians

You would be free to translate these books into other languages, create Braille or audio versions for visually impaired readers (if you think that publishers wouldn’t object to this, you would be wrong), or adapt them for film. You could read them online or buy cheaper print editions, because others were free to republish them. (Empirical studies have shown that public domain books are less expensive, available in more editions, and more likely to be in print.) Imagine a digital Library of Alexandria containing all of the world’s books from 1956 and earlier, where, thanks to technology, you can search, link, index, annotate, copy and paste. Not so fast … instead of seeing these works enter the public domain in 2013, we will have to wait until 2052.

The same is true for some of the great periodicals from 1956. These include the first issue of MAD magazine with Alfred E. Neuman prominently featured on the cover, as well as the debut issues of New Scientist, teen magazines such as Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club Magazine, and the short-lived science fiction magazines Satellite, Science Fiction Adventures, and Super Science Fiction.

Around the World in 34,699* Days

Think about the movies from 1956 that would have become available this year. Fans could share clips with friends or incorporate them into fantastic homages. (There are certainly some good candidates.) Local theaters could show the full features. Libraries and archivists would be free to digitize and preserve them. Indeed, movies such as Forbidden Planet (based on Shakespeare's The Tempest), Around the World in 80 Days (based on the Jules Verne novel of the same name), and Moby Dick (based on the Melville classic) depended on underlying works that were in the public domain. Here are a few of the movies that we won’t see in the public domain for another 39 years.

• Around the World in 80 Days
• The Best Things in Life are Free
• Forbidden Planet
• Godzilla, King of the Monsters!
• It Conquered the World
• The King and I
• The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956 remake by Alfred Hitchcock of his 1934 British film)
• Moby Dick
• The Searchers (1956 film version with John Wayne from Alan Le May’s 1954 novel)
• The Ten Commandments (1956 version by Cecil B. DeMille, who also directed a similar film in 1923)

These films are famous, so we’re not likely to lose them entirely – the true tragedy is that of forgotten films that are literally disintegrating while preservationists wait for their copyright terms to expire.

Let the Good Times Roll … in 2052

What 1956 music could you have used without fear of a lawsuit? If you wanted to find guitar tabs or sheet music and freely record your own version of some of the influential music of the 1950s, January 1, 2013, might have been a booming day for you under earlier copyright laws – Let the Good Times Roll, Roll Over Beethoven, Who Do You Love, Long Tall Sally, Fever, and In the Still of the Night would all be available. You could score a short film with I Walk The Line and Que Sera, Sera. Or you could stage your own performances of some of Elvis Presley’s hits: Heartbreak Hotel, Don't Be Cruel, Love Me Tender (written to the tune of the Civil War song "Aura Lea"). Today, these songs remain copyrighted until 2052.2
1956 Science – research on Artificial Intelligence, the effects of LSD on “normals,” and the origin of cancer cells – still behind paywalls

1956 was an exciting year for science – it marked the publication of seminal research in the nascent fields of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. But you have to pay to see articles such as Allen Newell & Herbert Simon, “The Logic Theory Machine–A Complex Information Processing System” and Noam Chomsky, “Three Models for the Description of Language” in IRE Transactions on Information Theory, or George Miller’s “The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information” in Psychological Review.

What about discoveries reported 56 years ago in major scientific journals such as Science, Nature, or JAMA? You can’t read them unless you pay or subscribe – see, for example, Dr. Otto Warburg’s “On the Origin of Cancer Cells” (Science), Australian researcher Wesley Whitten’s report about in vitro development of a mouse ova to blastocyst stage (Nature), or 1950s LSD research “Model Psychoses Induced by LSD-25 in Normals” (the JAMA network). The same is true for other noteworthy developments from 1956, such as Kenneth Boulding’s “General Systems Theory – the Skeleton of Science,” Dr. Denham Harman’s “Aging: a theory based on free radical and radiation chemistry,” and the inaugural volume of the Journal of Psychosomatic Research.

Sometimes articles are available, but out of altruism or renewed interest, not entitlement to a scientific public domain. A prescient article on climate change by Gilbert N. Plass, “Carbon Dioxide and the Climate” is available only for payment in pdf form but because of its continuing relevance was reprinted for free in html.

While these articles are not freely available from their publishers, some are made available by third parties, many of whom might be amazed to find that these works are still copyrighted. But relying on third parties to post copyrighted research doesn’t provide reliable access – postings can be difficult to find or taken down, links can get broken, and would-be posters may be deterred by the risk of a lawsuit.

Under the pre-1978 copyright term, all of this history would be free to scholars, students, and enthusiasts. Now, to get these articles from the publisher, you need a credit card or institutional subscription. And the institutional access that many top scientists enjoy is itself not a stable solution – even institutions such as Harvard are considering canceling their subscriptions because they can no longer afford the escalating prices of major journal subscriptions.

Not all scientific publishers work under this kind of copyright scheme. “Open Access” scientific publications, like those of the Public Library of Science, are under Creative Commons attribution licenses, meaning that they can be copied freely from the day they are published.

Works from … 1984

Most of the works highlighted here are famous – that is why we included them. And if that fame meant that the work was still being exploited commercially 28 years after its publication, the rights holders would probably renew the copyright. (This is true for many of the works featured on this page, though even the shorter copyright term exceeds the commercial lifespan of a surprising percentage of successful works.) But we know from the Copyright Office that 85% of authors did not renew their copyrights (for books, the number is even higher – 93% did not renew), since most works exhaust their commercial value very quickly.

Under the law that existed until 1978 … Up to 85% of all copyrighted works from 1984 might have been entering the public domain on January 1, 2013.

That means that all these examples from 1956 are only the tip of the iceberg. If the pre-1978 law were still in effect, we could have seen 85% of the works created in 1984 enter the public domain on January 1, 2013. Imagine what that would mean to our archives, our libraries, our schools and our culture. Such works could be digitized, preserved, and made available for education, for research, for future creators. Instead, they will remain under copyright for decades to come, perhaps even into the next century.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the current copyright term is that in most cases, the cultural harm is not offset by any benefit to an author or rights holder. Unlike the famous works highlighted here, the vast majority of works from 1956 do not retain commercial value.3 This means that no one is benefiting from continued copyright, while the works remain both commercially unavailable and culturally off limits. The public loses the possibility of meaningful access for no good reason.

You can read more about the current costs associated with orphan works – works that are still presumably under copyright, but with no identifiable copyright holder – here and here. Importantly, the US Copyright Office has renewed its efforts to find solutions to the orphan works problem – comments on “the current state of play for orphan works” are due on February 4, 2013.
web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2013/pre-1976

















Until next week,

- js.



















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