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Old 10-04-13, 08:21 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 13th, '13

Since 2002


































"Read this if you want to stay out of jail." – Cory Doctorow


"Thatcher was unflinching and vicious in her attacks. There was a sense she was conducting a war on certain sections of society. She referred to the miners as 'the enemy within.' This just was not the way politicians talk about their citizens. (Current UK Prime Minister) David Cameron does not do that; Tories before Thatcher did not do that. That aspect enraged people because they felt she was treating them with rhetorical and political violence. That encouraged them to respond with their own violence." – Dorian Lynskey


"How would you feel if your neighbour went over and bought a commercial observation drone that they can launch from their backyard. It just flies over your house all day. How would you feel about it?" – Eric Schmidt


"New Microsoft operating systems usually boost PC sales, but the lukewarm reception for Windows 8 will likely mean an even greater drop in the market this year." – Jay Chou


"I won in the 'Bad Lottery,' I didn't do anything, but now I have to get a lawyer and fight this." – Emily Orlando






































April 13th, 2013




Oh Look, The Number Of People Employed In The Movie And Music Recording Business Just Hit An All Time High
Andy

The common refrain coming out of the MPAA and RIAA over the past few years has really focused on "jobs, jobs, jobs!" This is a message that often works with Congress. If you can convince Congress that "jobs" are at risk, they go scrambling to protect those jobs, even if the economy would be much better off with obsolete jobs going away, and better jobs taking their place.

That said, the MPAA and RIAA have a long history of making up ridiculous claims about the number of people employed in their industries, as well as the number of supposed "lost jobs." So it's rather noteworthy to see that the good folks over at ZeroHedge have pointed out that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), jobs in the motion picture and sound recording industries hit an all time high in December.

Funny that. I thought that they were losing jobs like crazy, and that without SOPA those jobs would just keep disappearing. Hmm...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...ime-high.shtml





Pirate Party Crowd-Sources File-Sharing Fine Settlements
Andy

Anyone obtaining and sharing files on the Internet should be aware of the risk that someone, somewhere, might consider their behavior to constitute a breach of their rights. If people are eventually held to account, painful monetary fines can be the outcome. However, a new initiative by the youth division of the Swedish Pirate Party aims to soften the blow for those unlucky enough to get caught by paying their copyright infringement fines.

As the pastime of file-sharing attracts more and more followers, questions are asked not only about the technical issues involved, but also the legal aspects.

Questions such as where to find the best sites and how to speed up downloads are increasingly matched by queries on how to stay anonymous and keep the right side of the law.

Using a VPN or similar tool is a route taken by many individuals who wish to fly under the radar but a new scheme just launched by Ung Pirat, the youth division of the Swedish Pirate Party, aims to solve the problem via a different route.

“The laws governing your use of the Internet are changing all the time. It is difficult to always keep up to date on what has changed,” their company Sharing is Caring explains.

“There are a plethora of different licenses for images, text and music that regulate what you can do with the material. Often it is not clear what rules apply. Often the rules are pretty stupid.”

To help remove some of the uncertainty, Sharing is Caring has just launched an organization called K-Kassan (K-Checkout) which will help clear up the mess for those caught sharing files.

“Our organization pays fines that people get for non-commercial file-sharing over peer-to-peer protocols,” Sharing is Caring told TorrentFreak.

“The Internet is hard to navigate when you try to stay legal. The rules are advanced and very unclear,” they add. “Can people stream stuff legally? Can people tell the legal from the illegal stuff on The Pirate Bay? What happens if people’s kids download illegal stuff?”

The way it works sounds fairly straightforward. File-sharers seeking protection will sign up to the scheme and contribute around $39 each to a central fund to be called on in the event that a member is targeted.

“This amount goes to the collective account along with the starting capital we have, and every time a member gets a fine for file sharing, we fund 100% of the fine,” we were informed.

Sharing is Caring say that with the scheme they hope to offer reassurance to file-sharers.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty about these questions in society. So instead of forcing people to live in fear, they can now join our organization, and they won’t have to worry about making mistakes that end up in fines,” they conclude.

The scheme is certainly food for thought. Despite the increase in Swedish file-sharing cases in recent years the odds of being held to account for copyright infringement are statistically still very low indeed. That being said, new cases are appearing every month and could be set to rise.

However, it’s worth mentioning that in most recent cases involving a guilty verdict, on top of fines there has been some other element to file-sharers’ punishments, such as suspended sentences. Additionally, while this scheme covers the payment of fines, it does not yet cover rightholder damages claims.

On the flip side the membership fee is quite low, on a par with the cost of a value for money VPN service. Also, the shared interest element of the project may enhance the sense of community for those involved in the scheme and could potentially cause it to develop into a hub offering help and advice for file-sharers on a larger scale.

Only time will tell what users will come to rely on. Technology, insurance, or good old fashioned luck.
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party...ements-130413/





Estacada Woman Among 371 Oregonians Accused of Illegally Downloading Steven Seagal Movie
Laura Gunderson

At noon Tuesday, join consumer reporter Laura Gunderson for a live chat about copyrights, illegal downloads and consumer protections.
Emily Orlando taught English at Clackamas Community College for 26 years, and each term she'd cover the legal and ethical issues of plagiarizing or otherwise using others' work without giving payment or attribution.

So the 64-year-old was surprised when she received a stern letter last month from a Salem lawyer accusing her of illegally downloading a bloody Steven Seagal movie through an online file sharing program. She was given two weeks to pay $7,500, the lawyer for Voltage Pictures threatened, or she could face a judgment of as much as $150,000.

But Orlando says she's never streamed a movie or seen "Maximum Conviction," and hadn't heard of BitTorrent before the letter.

Carl Crowell, whose tiny firm represents Voltage, would not comment on the case. Since February, he's filed nine similar cases in federal court in the state, naming nearly 1,000 defendants.

Orlando is among 371 named as "Does" in the largest of the suits. Based on the activity in other parts of the country, Oregon can expect dozens more suits involving thousands of Oregonians who use BitTorrent, for which users must sign up and actively save to their computers.

Nationwide, around 250,000 "Does" have been named in such cases, according to Julie Samuels of the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that lobbies and litigates for digital free-speech and consumer issues.

Plaintiff lawyers build these cases by identifying Internet protocol, or IP, addresses associated with movies downloaded to BitTorrent. They then subpoena service providers to hand over names of those customers and send letters such as the one Orlando received.

Consumer and copyright lawyers criticize the strategy because, they contend, it's meant to scare consumers into costly settlements to avoid the far greater cost of litigation. They liken it to a reverse class-action in which hundreds of defendants are named. That allows plaintiffs pay a singlefiling fee -- typically a few hundred dollars -- as opposed to filing and paying for hundreds of individual suits.

The lawsuits, they say, also leave a ripple of more damaging effects -- defendants being identified through a less-than-reliable mechanism, consumer data being released to third parties and an overwhelmed federal court system.

"It's terrifying, it's legal extortion," said Orlando, who'd never heard of BitTorrent before the letter.

"I won in the 'Bad Lottery,'" she said, "I didn't do anything, but now I have to get a lawyer and fight this."

Cases multiply

Court battles have raged in the past decade on how content should be used and shared online. Imagine those cases as eagles clashing high overhead seeking to balance the rights of creators and users.

To continue the metaphor, critics say, these cases are pigeons picking at the scraps.

BitTorrent-related copyright infringement cases began popping up in earnest two years ago in the Midwest and California. Early on, most had accused defendants of downloading porn. In those cases, defendants received notice that if they didn't pay around $2,000, then they'd be named in federal cases.

Similar cases nationwide

Cases filed by so-called copyright trolls have multiplied in earnest over the past two years. Read about the highlights playing out in other states.
"People understood their name would be out there in a public record that's probably going to stay on Google for a long, long time whether they'd done anything or not," said Kenan Farrell, a copyright lawyer based in Indianapolis who tracks such cases there and in Oregon. "There were very descriptive titles that people didn't want their names associated with, and they'd pay the $2,000."

As firms found success in reaching settlements, the number of cases grew and spread geographically and across movie titles.

Among the nine suits filed in Oregon, Crowell has three on behalf of Elf-Man, a company associated with a movie by the same name that came out last year. In "Elf-Man," Jason "Wee Man" Acuña plays an elf who discovers that he is a budding superhero. Crowell has filed four on behalf of Voltage Pictures, which is associated with last year's "Maximum Conviction,"

"It went straight to video, it was a terrible picture," said Kelly Rupp, a Wilsonville-based copyright attorney who now represents Orlando. "This movie is worth $12.99 on Amazon. But these cases don't seek that. If all 371 'John Does' on this lawsuit ultimately pay $3,000 or $2,000, they're shaking down Oregon residents for more than a million dollars."

She has spoken with people identified in the suit who may be inclined to settle because they think paying a lawyer would only ratchet up their costs. Others try to defend themselves, swamping federal courts -- much less user-friendly than small claims -- with ill-conceived filings.

Still others ignore it all together. In at least one case, however, a judge in Indiana issued a default judgment against a no-show defendant for the maximum copyright penalty of $150,000.

Rupp and a colleague aim to gather multiple defendants to share costs and fight the plaintiff move to include them in a single lawsuit.

Defendants vary

A handful of judges have thrown out similar cases in other states saying large groups of defendants -- 5,011 in one case -- didn't have enough in common to be lumped together.

Orlando, for instance, has never used BitTorrent. When she and her husband watch movies, they order them through Blockbuster or turn to one of the many channels on their Dish Network system. She believes her name popped up on Crowell's search because of the small Internet provider that serves her rural Estacada community.

Reliance Connects of Estacada uses dynamic addresses, meaning the addresses aren't necessarily attached solely to one modem. Orlando says she was told the company distributes IP addresses among customers as they log on and that it can't track exactly who had what number when. Still, Orlando was frustrated to discover the company gave out her name and contact information when it was subpoenaed by Crowell.

Larger providers, such as Comcast, only change IP addresses occasionally in areas where many more homes or apartments are regularly added. And it has entire departments that track exactly which modems are attached at any given moment to a particular IP address.

Defenses to these copyright lawsuits run the gamut. Anyone who doesn't use a password to protect their wireless Internet runs the risk of a neighbor using their IP address to download movies illegally. Renters may be relying on an IP address used by someone who once lived there. Another defendant named in the Voltage case is in a senior care center, which has close to 100 people accessing its Wi-Fi, Rupp said.

In many cases, a child or grandchild is doing the actual downloading. But those held responsible contend that being asked to pay so much more than the actual price of the movie is egregious.

A number of consumer groups and copyright lawyers are keeping track on the Oregon cases to see how judges here will lean.

"Copyright law is intended to promote science and useful arts and the question is whether this (strategy) promotes that," said Leonard DuBoff, of the DuBoff Law Group in Southwest Portland. "This is federal court and I would guess that the average person on the street is going to be intimidated by this and try to do whatever they can to make it go away.

"It's going to be pretty frightening and that's why they're doing it."
http://www.oregonlive.com/business/i...d_of_ille.html





Adult films 'Downloaded in Vatican City': Porn Files 'Shared in Headquarters of Catholic Church'

List of files to have been shared in the tiny city-state within Rome released
Includes 'female and transsexual porn', it has been claimed

Amanda Williams

Porn has been downloaded and shared in Vatican City, the headquarters of the Catholic Church, it has today been claimed.

A list of so called torrent files to have been shared in the tiny city-state within Rome, which houses around 800 people, including the Pope, has been uncovered.

And it reportedly includes female and transsexual porn.

Torrenting is a form of file sharing, which has become popular with fans of illegal downloads because it is harder for authorities to crack down on.

The X-rated activity was uncovered by website Torrent Freak, the New York Post reports.

The blog, which is dedicated to file-sharing news, unearthed the download history from an IP address inside the Pope's city of residence. It is not clear to whom it belongs.

It said while download levels in Vatican City were very low because of its small size, a number of films and TV programmes had been shared.

It said: 'But just when the whole exercise was beginning to fall a bit flat, we spotted some downloads to get pulses racing.
A list of so called torrent files to have been shared in the tiny city-state within Rome, which houses around 800 people, including the Pope, has been uncovered

A list of so called torrent files to have been shared in the tiny city-state within Rome, which houses around 800 people, including the Pope, has been uncovered

'It seems that while Vatican dwellers aren’t all that interested in Hollywood movies, they do enjoy adult related celluloid.'

Transsexual porn star Tiffany Starr, and female star Sheena Shaw, are believed to have starred in an XXX-rated video downloaded by someone in Vatican City according to a list on the site.

Someone also downloaded American TV shows such as NBC's Chicago Fire, ABC's The Neighbors and FX's spy drama The Americans.

Reverend Debra Haffner of the Religious Institute told The Huffington Post she was 'not surprised' at the Vatican City findings.

She added over email: 'I'm not surprised learning that anyone looks at erotica on the Internet.'

She also pointed to a 2012 survey by Religious Institute.

It found that 'one in five clergy reported intentionally visiting a sexually explicit website in the past six months.'

But 16 percent of those asked replied that they 'preferred not to answer the question about their personal use of these sites.'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...Church-HQ.html





HearSay

The HearSay P2P File Sharer; a response to The Copyright Alert System, as well as several other internet regulation attempts. The goal of this project is to prove the viability of semi-anonymous and confidential file sharing. Consists of several proofs of concepts such as the formation of ad-hoc mix networks and routing throughout them while maintaining anonymity and semantic security.

However, lets be honest with ourselves for a second. Don't use this to fight an oppressive regime. I can not (and will not try) to 'prove' its security, and I have no idea how this system will perform under high stress or in large clusters. All of this code is simply the product of basic cryptographic research and application.
https://gist.github.com/Bren2010/5332107





New Pirate Bay Greenland Domains (About to be) Seized
Andy

In anticipation of having their Swedish domain name seized, this week the crew of The Pirate Bay took evasive action. In the early hours of Tuesday morning they switched to two Greenland-based domains, but already the plan is starting to unravel. The telecoms company in charge of the .GL TLD says it will now block the domains after deciding they will be used illegally.

Sweden has long been associated with The Pirate Bay.

The site was founded by Swedes, operated by Swedes, not to mention hosted and proxied by Swedish companies, activists and the local Pirate Party.

Under increasing pressure those links were strained by political and legal red tape to the point where the site’s only visible connection with Sweden was its .SE domain.

This week even that connection was placed into history when fears over the long-term viability and possible seizure of the domain led the site to choose an alternative.

Over the course of Monday night and Tuesday morning, ThePirateBay.se became ThePirateBay.gl, with the new TLD denoting Greenland, a huge country with a tiny population of just 57,000 people. But now, less than 48 hours later, the latest plan to bring domain stability to The Pirate Bay already requires a Plan B.

Exact timing is unclear, but very soon the site will lose use of both its .GL domains after Tele-Post, the company responsible for .GL registrations, said it would not allow them to be put to “illegal” use.

“Tele-Post has today decided to block access to two domains operated by file-sharing network The Pirate Bay,” the company said in a statement received by TorrentFreak.

Those domains are ThePirateBay.gl and PirateBay.gl.

“We observed Tuesday that the domains had been activated and therefore immediately contacted our lawyer,” the company added.

The announcement was short on detail but at the moment Tele-Post seem set to justify their decision based on an earlier Danish Supreme Court ruling that rendered The Pirate Bay an illegal site. Greenland is a self-governing province of Denmark.

Currently The Pirate Bay’s .GL domains remain operational but the site is redirecting to its .SE domain, at least for the time being.

A Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak earlier this week that they have plenty of domain names in reserve. With that in mind, it wouldn’t be a huge surprise if the torrent site makes another domain switch in the near future.

Update: Queries to the .GL domain registry now confirm that both the domains in question have been officially suspended.
http://torrentfreak.com/new-pirate-b...seized-130410/





Saga #12 Banned by Apple

Latest issue banned for small depiction of gay sex.
Joey Esposito

It's not the first time this has happened and it probably won't be the last, but following up Apple's ban of Image Comics' Sex #1 on Comixology's iOS app, Apple is now prohibiting sale of Saga #12. Why? According to writer Brian K. Vaughan, for two "postage stamp-sized" depictions of gay sex.

From BKV's press release:

Annoying press release thing: APPLE vs. SAGA #12

As has hopefully been clear from the first page of our first issue, SAGA is a series for the proverbial “mature reader.” Unfortunately, because of two postage stamp-sized images of gay sex, Apple is banning tomorrow’s SAGA #12 from being sold through any iOS apps. This is a drag, especially because our book has featured what I would consider much more graphic imagery in the past, but there you go. Fiona and I could always edit the images in question, but everything we put into the book is there to advance our story, not (just) to shock or titillate, so we’re not changing s**t.

Apologies to everyone who reads our series on iPads or iPhones, but here are your alternatives for Wednesday:

1) Head over to you friendly neighborhood comics shop and pick up a physical copy of our issue that you can have and hold forever.

2) While you’re at it, don’t forget to support the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which helps protect retailers who are brave enough to carry work that some in their communities might consider offensive. You can find signed copies of Saga at the CBLDF site right now.

3) Download the issue directly through sites like https://comics.imagecomics.com or on your non-Apple smartphone or tablet.

4) If all else fails, you might be able to find SAGA #12 in Apple’s iBookstore, which apparently sometimes allows more adult material to be sold than through its apps. Crazy, right?

Anyway, special thanks to Eric Stephenson and everyone at Image for supporting our decision, and for always being so supportive of creators. Sorry again to readers for the inconvenience, but I hope everyone will be able to find an issue that Fiona and I are particularly proud of. And after you do, please check out PanelSyndicate.com, the new digital comics site I own with artist Marcos Martin, which remains 100% uncensored by corporate overlords.

Your pal,

Brian


So, you can buy Saga #12 through the Comixology web store and then sync it to your iPad/iPhone (or buy it through a non-Apple device), or you can purchase it on Apple's own iBookstore, which has a different set of guidelines.

Though graphic material is indeed prohibited as per Apple's guidelines, as Vaughan points out, Saga and other titles have done far worse than what's shown in Saga #12. Let alone the amount of extreme violence that's found in most mature-readers comics.
http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/04/...anned-by-apple





Bump for iPhone Loses the Ability to Share iTunes Tracks Between Devices
Mike Beasley

The popular peer-to-peer file sharing app Bump was updated to version 3.5.8 today, and according to the change notes one of the features has been removed. Apparently at Apple’s request, the developers have disabled the ability to share music from your iTunes library to another Bump user or your computer.

New in 3.5.8:
+ Bug fixes and performance improvements.
+ We’re sorry, but we are no longer permitted access to iTunes audio files on the device. Removing access to iTunes audio files in the file sharing section.


If you want to keep this feature, be sure to save a copy of the old version of the app in case you accidentally update. You can just drag the Bump icon out of the Apps section of your iTunes library and drop it in a folder to keep it there. If you ever accidentally update to the new version, you can just delete the app from your phone and iTunes library, then drag the old version into iTunes and reinstall it on your device from there.

If you’re jailbroken and want to avoid an accidental update, the free tweak Update Hider can hide the update from the App Store entirely.
http://9to5mac.com/2013/04/11/bump-l...tween-devices/





Ali's Power Hour Freedom Victory Tour

I have an album and live concert that double as a drinking game. At my concerts, I perform my 60 original one-minute songs and every time I change the music, the audience cheers and takes a shot of beer together. It's based on the game called a "Power Hour". And it's seriously friggin' awesome. Like, really. For reals. (I have an unbiased opinion.)

3 years ago, a guy named Steve Roose trademarked the term "Power Hour" and went on a rampage to stop people from playing the game. He bullied a ton of people and got Power Hours taken off of YouTube, websites and software taken down and had my album removed from Amazon. This was absolute BS. (Troof.)

There are a lot of a**hat trademark bullies out there and this guy was exceptionally a**hat-y. I couldn't sit back and let him push people around. He was just trying to harm others so he could make more money with his own lame DVD. (Again, I have an unbiased opinion of said lameness.) So I took Steve to court.

Then suck happened. I ended up having to spend 3 years fighting him and $30,000 in legal fees! Steve freaking spent NONE! Once I was so far in the battle, I wasn't about to give up (aka wuss out, aka become a namby-pamby pushover loserface) but I had no way of forecasting when it would end. For the whole trial period, Steve succeeded in presenting a terrible case (which was great... and expected of a**hats) but he also succeeded in repeatedly and purposefully prolonging everything in order to drain my money. GAH!! @&%$*#&% (That was me being incredibly frustrated.)

Well after all that obnoxiousness... the court has just announced the verdict [Drumroll... Also, grab a beer]

I WON! WE WON! THE NATION WINS! Power hour is free! I'm absolutely thrilled it's all over and Steve can no longer claim to own the game. Yayyyyyyyy!!! [Crack open beer]

Now that I've worked so hard to free Power Hours for everyone, I want to celebrate! Specifically, I want to celebrate with YOU by taking my show on tour!

Let's make a global party! Support my campaign so I can bring my Power Hour to you!... a Victory Tour to send a big "up yours" to trademark bully a**hats! :)

(If you want more hilarious details on how the whole 3 years unfolded, go check out my story: How I stuck it to The Man while simultaneously chugging a beer)

You can bring me to your town

When you make a pledge, you also get to vote on what city you want my tour to hit. My tour will go where there's the most excitement to bring me there! It's going to cost me about $2k per city for travel, stay and expenses. (I need some help after I spent all my stupid money on that stupid lawsuit.) I have a goal to hit 20 cities. If I raise less, I'll have to take cities out of the tour :( If I exceed my goal, I'll add more cities! POSSIBLY EVEN GLOBAL!

(Note: When you contribute, I'll add you to the map below based on your shipping address!)

Please encourage your friends to also support me so you'll have a better chance that I'll come to you! This tour could be more stops, it could be less. Help me make it more!

If I'm fortunate enough to raise a ridiculous amount over my goal, I have plans to bring a full band with me, go to cities outside the US, get a tour bus, lighting, maybe some pyrotechnics and turn the show into an even bigger extravaganza! I'll certainly flesh out this awesomeness if it starts looking like a reality. So support me, tell your friends and then stay tuned!
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/al...m-victory-tour





BitTorrent Taps A Bigger Role For Books In Its Content Push
Ingrid Lunden

Last year, author Tim Ferriss turned to BitTorrent to market his newest book, the Four-Hour Chef, when the biggest bookseller in the U.S., Barnes & Noble, refused to stock the Amazon-published title. Ferriss’ campaign proved a success, with the book selling 250,000 copies on the back of some 2 million promotional content bundles — chapters of the book and supplementary materials — downloaded on BitTorrent. Now BitTorrent is banking on that success to try to get more authors on to its site.

Playing on its former reputation as a place to pick up illegally distributed content, BitTorrent today published an informal how-to guide for authors, encouraging them to “hack publishing” and market their books like startups, complete with “iterative release schedule and spreadable, targeted content.”

While BitTorrent does not intend to be a publisher or distributor of books itself, it sees a role in helping authors break down their work to promote their main product in a different way. It suggests that chapters should be thought of as tracks from an album.

“This book-as-album strategy gives authors like Ferriss a significant advantage. Releasing chapters as singles creates a continuous news cycle during pre-launch promotion. It effectively creates radio play; increasing the chances that you’ll get heard with sample content. At the same time, it provides the flexibility to micro-target: using different chapters to reach and activate different readers.”

It’s also a sign of how authors are increasingly taking a bigger role in general in promoting their work in a digital content world.

BitTorrent’s focus on authors is part of a multi-year mission at the company become a go-to place for legit content creators to host and distribute legit work. A good amount of effort has been put into areas like video and music. A deal with DJ Shadow last year pioneered a revenue-sharing model, in which free DJ Shadow music content came bundled with other products inserted by paying marketers, part of a content package the company offers called the BitTorrent Bundle. Along with that, it has launched a file-storage and sending service called SoShare, geared at extra-large, media-rich files, to help those in the creative community better collaborate.

And books have also played a role. Matt Mason, BitTorrent’s VP of marketing, notes that a partnership with the Internet Archive, has “over 1 million legal and licensed books available.”

Most people out there don’t have the profile of Tim Ferriss, who had already made a name for himself with two previous books, Four-Hour Workweek and Four-Hour Body, before moving on to the Four-Hour Chef. BitTorrent notes that Ferriss released the first chapter of his book, along with 680MB of behind-the-scenes content on BitTorrent, using six promotions over 60 days (yes this sounds a little like a fad diet). This content, BitTorrent says, was downloaded over 2 million times. As a result of that, 293,936 clicked on to the book’s trailer YouTube; 327,555 clicked on to the author’s website — making BitTorrent its biggest traffic generator; and 880,009 clicked on to the book’s Amazon page: 880,009, resulting in 250,000 copies of the book itself getting sold.

You can argue that his success on BitTorrent was more due to Ferriss’ earlier fame than the BitTorrent distribution model. But for those willing to rethink how to market their books, it could be an easy enough investment to make anyway: Matt Mason, VP of marketing for BitTorrent, points out to TechCrunch that all of the Bundles that BitTorrent has piloted to take have been a “zero cost” to the content creators.

Indeed, it seems that, for now, the main purpose of growing the population of content creators on the site is to grow BitTorrent’s scale and profile more than direct revenue sources. BitTorrent itself is not necessarily interested in taking on a bigger content producing role for itself in the process. ”BitTorrent is not the publisher or distributor,” says Mason. “[But] the publishing industry has changed. Launching a book today is much like being your own startup. BitTorrent’s role, specifically the role of the BitTorrent Bundle, is to offer a new tool for content creators to engage with a mass audience. The BitTorrent Bundle hands the power of a torrent over to the content creators.”
http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/04/bit...-content-push/





Teacher Knows if You’ve Done the E-Reading
David Streitfeld

Several Texas A&M professors know something that generations of teachers could only hope to guess: whether students are reading their textbooks.

They know when students are skipping pages, failing to highlight significant passages, not bothering to take notes — or simply not opening the book at all.

“It’s Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent,” said Tracy Hurley, the dean of the school of business.

The faculty members here are neither clairvoyant nor peering over shoulders. They, along with colleagues at eight other colleges, are testing technology from a Silicon Valley start-up, CourseSmart, that allows them to track their students’ progress with digital textbooks.

Major publishers in higher education have already been collecting data from millions of students who use their digital materials. But CourseSmart goes further by individually packaging for each professor information on all the students in a class — a bold effort that is already beginning to affect how teachers present material and how students respond to it, even as critics question how well it measures learning. The plan is to introduce the program broadly this fall.

Adrian Guardia, a Texas A&M instructor in management, took notice the other day of a student who was apparently doing well. His quiz grades were solid, and so was what CourseSmart calls his “engagement index.” But Mr. Guardia also saw something else: that the student had opened his textbook only once.

“It was one of those aha moments,” said Mr. Guardia, who is tracking 70 students in three classes. “Are you really learning if you only open the book the night before the test? I knew I had to reach out to him to discuss his studying habits.”

Students do not see their engagement indexes unless a professor shows them, but they know the books are watching them. For a few, merely hearing the number is a shock. Charles Tejeda got a C on the last quiz, but the real revelation that he is struggling was a low CourseSmart index.

“They caught me,” said Mr. Tejeda, 43. He has two jobs and three children, and can study only late at night. “Maybe I need to focus more,” he said.

CourseSmart is owned by Pearson, McGraw-Hill and other major publishers, which see an opportunity to cement their dominance in digital textbooks by offering administrators and faculty a constant stream of data about how students are doing.

In the old days, teachers knew if students understood the course from the expressions on their faces. Now some classes, including one of Mr. Guardia’s, are entirely virtual. Engagement information could give the colleges early warning about which students might flunk out, while more broadly letting teachers know if the whole class is falling behind.

Eventually, the data will flow back to the publishers, to help prepare new editions.

Academic and popular publishers, as well as some authors, have dreamed for years of such feedback to direct sales and editorial efforts more efficiently. Amazon and Barnes & Noble are presumed to be collecting a trove of data from readers, although they decline to say what, if anything, they will do with it.

The predigital era, when writers wrote and publishers published without a clue, is seen as an amazingly ignorant time. “Before this, the publisher never knew if Chapter 3 was even looked at,” said Sean Devine, CourseSmart’s chief executive.

More than 3.5 million students and educators use CourseSmart textbooks and are already generating reams of data about Chapter 3. Among the colleges experimenting this semester are Clemson, Central Carolina Technical College and Stony Brook University, as well as Texas A&M-San Antonio, a new offshoot.

Texas A&M has one of the highest four-year graduation rates in the state, but only half the students make it out in that time. “If CourseSmart offers to hook it up to every class, we wouldn’t decline,” said Dr. Hurley, the dean.

At a recent session here of a management training class, Mr. Guardia addressed how to intervene efficiently with underperformers. The students watched a video of a print shop manager chewing out an employee without knowing the circumstances. The moral: The manager needed better data.

Then Mr. Guardia discussed with his students the analytics of their own reading, which he had e-mailed to them. The students suggested that once again better information was needed. Several said their score was being minimized because they took notes on paper.

Others complained there were software bugs, a response Mr. Guardia has heard before. The student who was cramming at the last minute said, for example, that he had opened the textbook several times, not just once. Perhaps these are the digital equivalent of “the dog ate my homework.” CourseSmart said it knew of no problems with its software.

The start-up said its surveys indicated few privacy concerns among students or colleges, and this was borne out by the class. “Big Brother,” said one student, but that was a joke, and everyone snickered. Being watched is a fundamental part of the world they live in.

“Amazon has such a footprint on me,” said Carol Johnson, 51, who works in the tech industry. “It knows more than my mother.”

Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, is more apprehensive. He believes analytics are important in the classroom, but they must be based on high-quality data.

The CourseSmart system has other potential problems; students could easily game the highlighting or note-taking functions. Or a student might improve his score by leaving his textbook open and doing something else.

“The possibilities of harm are tremendous if teachers are naïve enough to think these scores mean anything for the vast majority of students,” Professor Dede said.

CourseSmart says the data it collects now is a beginning. “We’ll ultimately show how the student traverses the book,” Mr. Devine said. “There’s a correlation and causality between engagement and success.”

There is also correlation, the students are learning, between perception and success.

Hillary Torres, a senior, is a good student with a low engagement index, probably because she is taking notes into a computer file not being tracked. This could be a problem; she is a member of the Society for Human Resource Management, whose local chapter is advised by Mr. Guardia. “If he looks and sees, ‘Hillary is not really reading as much as I thought,’ does that give him a negative image of me?” she wondered. “His opinion really matters. Maybe I need to change my study habits.”

After two months of using the system, Mr. Guardia is coming to some conclusions of his own. His students generally are scoring well on quizzes and assignments. In the old days, that might have reassured him. But their engagement indexes are low.

“Maybe the course is too easy and I need to challenge them a bit more,” Mr. Guardia said. “Or maybe the textbooks are not as good as I thought.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/t...-teachers.html





Deeper Data Dive Finds $5.5 Billion in Uncounted Newspaper Industry Revenue
Rick Edmonds

Years of negative reports on ad revenue losses could leave the newspaper industry muttering, “I demand a recount.” The Newspaper Association of America has just completed such an exercise and found some solid gains that have been overlooked previously in its own measurements.

New statistics released Monday produced these findings:

• Circulation revenue was up 5 percent year-to-year in 2012. That is the result of new digital-only subscriptions and the higher prices being charged for print-only and print-plus-digital bundles. Paid print circulation volume continued to fall during the year, but that was more than made up for by the higher rates.

• “Other” revenues from a variety of related businesses rose 8 percent for the year, led by digital marketing services up 91 percent over 2011.

• These new revenue streams, together with niche publishing, weeklies and direct mail, not previously measured by NAA, accounted for $5.5 billion in 2012 revenues.

• So the industry’s total revenue for the year was just $38.6 billion, compared to roughly $33 billion if ad revenue ($22.5 billion) and circulation revenue ($10.5 billion) were the only activities counted.

• Though ad revenue fell 6 percent for the year, total industry revenue was off only 2 percent in 2012 compared to 2011.

The new statistics are based on a survey of 17 companies, representing about 40 percent of industry circulation and 50 percent of revenues. Because this is a different and slightly larger group of companies reporting results, there are small discrepancies with NAA’s previous estimates of advertising and circulation.

The more comprehensive measures also yields a new picture of an increasingly diversified income stream. NAA estimates that print advertising now accounts only for 46 percent of total revenue. Circulation makes up 27 percent, digital advertising 11 percent, new revenue sources 8 percent and niche and direct marketing 8 percent.

(Here’s an alternative visualization from Mirko Lorenz.)

The big growth areas — digital marketing services and circulation revenues — are likely to continue their momentum through 2013. Many prominent companies like Gannett and McClatchy switched to digital paywalls and print-plus-digital bundles midyear in 2012. They will gain more revenue by having those plans in place for the full year in 2013. Other companies like Scripps and the Washington Post are just starting digital subscriptions this year.

Some of the revenue activities are so new that companies themselves have not been measuring them separately. For example only nine of the 17 reported figures for digital agency and marketing consulting services in which newspapers provide guidance to local businesses in developing their web and mobile presence and using social media. Only seven of the 17 reported event marketing as a separate revenue category and three reported commissions on direct sales through e-commerce.

On the other hand, the report takes in other revenue activities that have been developed gradually over the last decade and were flat or slightly down for the year: commercial printing, distribution of national newspapers and other material, niche publication, direct mail and related weeklies.

These statistics did not seek to measure other enterprises owned by some of the larger companies or any international operations.

Some other findings of note:

• Mobile ad revenue doubled in 2012 but still accounts for less than 1 percent of total industry revenue.

• Digital ad revenues, which increased 4 percent for the year while print continued to fall, now comprises 17 percent of ad revenue.

• In digital advertising there is wide variance in results among individual companies. The NAA reports:

At the low end, one company saw pure-play advertising (i.e. from digital-only clients) account for just 1% of digital ad revenue. At the high end, one company now derives 67% of its digital advertising revenue from pure play—a sign that management strategy and market are important factors here…

The difference in year-over-year performance in digital advertising was also significant. Of the 17 companies reporting digital advertising, one saw a double-digit drop in digital ad revenue in 2012 while another saw a gain of 33%. That variation, too, suggests that different approaches and markets can have substantially different impact on the bottom line.


In the interest of full disclosure, I need to say that I was among the instigators for this broader measure of the industry’s revenues. A year ago my colleagues and the Pew Research Center and I gave prominent play in the State of the News Media report to the statistic that the ratio of print as losses to digital ad gains in 2011 was 10 to 1. It got even worse last year, at 16 to 1.

But there were already signs that the industry had been growing some newer activities and that a full measure of “other” would provide a less gloomy balance of revenue gains and losses. Pew’s Tom Rosenstiel moved to become executive director of the NAA’s American Press Institute at the start of this year In that position, he also oversees the association research and statistics and asked companies for the more detailed and comprehensive revenue data.

These measures are new enough that the results may be slightly less exact than the traditional categories that NAA has measured for decades. On the plus side, they establish a new baseline against which gains and losses in year to come can be identified.
I have earlier noted that as the industry responds to investor demands for stabilizing and growing revenues, the next question may be the profitability of these activities compared to its still shrinking base of print advertising. An extra dollar of print advertising is nearly pure profit, while the new digital subscriptions are expensive to market. Commercial printing is highly competitive and operates on tight margins.

Still, today’s results show the industry doing considerably better than the doomsters say, with at least a chance to turn total revenues positive this year or in 2014. That will not happen, however, if the shift from print advertising to an array of digital marketing options accelerates.
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/2...ustry-revenue/





Sponsors Now Pay for Online Articles, Not Just Ads
Tanzina Vega

Articles in a series on Mashable.com called “What’s Inside” looked for all the world like the hundreds of other articles on the digital media site. But journalistically, they were something very different.

The articles, about technology topics in a wide variety of products, including modems and the Hubble Space Telescope, were paid for by Snapdragon, a brand of processor chip made by Qualcomm, and the sponsor of the series. Most were even written by Mashable editorial employees.

An article on Google Glass technology was shared almost 2,000 times on social media, indicating that readers may not have cared, or known, if it was journalism or sponsored content, although the series was identified as such.

Advertisers and publishers have many names for this new form of marketing — including branded content, sponsored content and native advertising. Regardless of the name, the strategy of having advertisers sponsor or create content that looks like traditional editorial content has become increasingly common as publishers try to create more sources of revenue.

Calculating what advertisers spend on such content industrywide is difficult because of the many ways the content is defined and sold. A banner ad on one home page may be comparable in price with a similar banner ad on a different site, but a series of customized articles on one Web site and a series of social media posts on another are harder to compare.

Well-known online publications like The Huffington Post, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed and Business Insider all use some form of branded content. A result is a media universe where it is increasingly difficult for readers to tell editorial content from advertising.

“Brands are everywhere, and brands have now leaked into what has been traditionally the editorial space,” said David Hallerman an analyst at eMarketer, “not just the content but the look and feel of the content.”

The Huffington Post has struck partnerships with brands like Johnson & Johnson and Cisco Systems to sponsor a topic, like women and children or the impact of technology, for Web pages that pair content written by the brand and content written by Huffington Post reporters independently.

Business Insider now offers sponsored slide shows beside its editorial content. The Atlantic recently apologized after running a branded feature written in support of the Church of Scientology.

Publishers are largely being driven to support the use of sponsored content because of fewer people clicking on banner ads, the abundance of advertising space and other factors make it more difficult to make money from traditional online advertising. As advertising technology becomes more sophisticated, ads can be bought and sold at cheaper rates across the Web. Often they are ignored by the very customers advertisers are trying to reach.

“There was a period where newspapers had monopolies, and they made money,” said Jonah Peretti, the co-founder and chief executive of BuzzFeed at a digital advertising conference in February. “Now what we are faced with is a very different industry that has shifted, and we need to elevate advertising.”

One of the biggest users of sponsored content, BuzzFeed is well known for its reliance on quirky articles like “20 Baby Animals Say Hello to Spring” and “This Is the Greatest Sports GIF of 2013.” Brands like Dunkin’ Donuts and General Electric have contributed their versions of BuzzFeed content with articles like “10 Lifechanging Ways to Make Your Day More Efficient” and “18 People Who Will Not Be Stopped.”

Forbes has worked with about two dozen brands in its two-year venture into branded content. Articles written by FedEx employees for the site have focused on small businesses. Other articles have competed for space on the most-e-mailed list for the site. Michael S. Perlis, the president and chief executive of Forbes Media, said the brands are never allowed to make a direct pitch to consumers in their articles.

“It is, in fact, content,” Mr. Perlis said. “It’s not advertising. Its about big issues that relate to thought leadership.”

Newspapers for years have run special sections to appeal to advertisers, and almost all of the publishers running branded content say they abide by the traditional church-and-state separation — news on one side of the wall, advertising on the other. But the sponsored content runs beside the editorial on many sites and is almost indistinguishable. The content can be ranked on the sites and shared on social media just like any other article.

The Mashable staff said that, despite having a sponsor, the articles they write are editorial content. “These are not advertorials,” said Lance Ulanoff, the editor in chief at Mashable. “I know what an advertorial is. These are pure editorial.”

The “What’s Inside” articles are surrounded by ads for Snapdragon. To the right of the articles are modules where readers can “like” the Snapdragon page or read Twitter posts from the brand. A paragraph telling readers that the section is being “presented” by Qualcomm Snapdragon processors also explains how the Snapdragon technology allows users to “seamlessly switch from app to app, enjoy breathtaking download speeds, and you’ll most likely run out of juice before your battery does.”

Stacy Martinet, the chief marketing officer at Mashable, said brands want to be aligned with a specific theme, in this case sophisticated technology. And that readers want articles about it.

“Mashable is working with brands to write content that aligns with our audience and what they want and aligns with the brand’s value,” said Ms. Martinet, who has worked for The New York Times. Some of that content has been in the most-read articles, she said.

The sponsorships also let the company finance longer form articles, said Lauren Drell, a campaigns editor at Mashable. “Because we treat this very much like editorial they don’t feel like they are shilling for a brand,” she said of the reporters. “They actually get excited about the content because it’s something that they want to do in the day to day but they can’t do it.” Mashable’s journalists write on average five to eight short articles a day for the site. The price for a sponsored series can run close to six figures.

In their articles, the writers are not allowed to write about the brand specifically, or any of its competitors, Ms. Martinet said. Brands that want too much say over the content by, for example, putting their product in an article, will be turned down, she said.

Pete Pachal, a technology editor at Mashable who wrote the Google Glass piece in the Snapdragon series, said the writers have no contact with the series sponsors. “There’s always people with conspiracy theories,” he said, responding to a question about whether editorial staff should write articles in sponsored series. “The article isn’t even about the brands or what their products are, so you’re not even entering that territory.”

Not everyone agrees. “I am aghast at this,” said Andrew Sullivan, a writer and the former editor of The New Republic and blogger for The Daily Beast. Readers do not pay attention to the names of people who write articles, he said. “Your average reader isn’t interested in that. They don’t realize they are being fed corporate propaganda.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/b...-just-ads.html





Roger Ebert as a Builder of an Empire
David Carr

At journalism conferences and online, media strivers talk over and over about becoming their own brand, hoping that some magical combination of tweets, video spots, appearances and, yes, even actual written articles, will help their name come to mean something.

Since Roger Ebert’s death on Thursday, many wonderful things have been said about his writing gifts at The Chicago Sun-Times, critical skills that led to a Pulitzer Prize in 1975, the first given for movie criticism. We can stipulate all of that, but let’s also remember that a big part of what he left behind was a remarkable template for how a lone journalist can become something much more.

Mr. Ebert was, in retrospect, a very modern figure. Long before the media world became cluttered with search optimization consultants, social media experts and brand-management gurus, Mr. Ebert used all available technologies and platforms to advance both his love of film and his own professional interests.

He clearly loved newspapers, but he wasn’t a weepy nostalgist either. He was an early adopter on the Web, with a CompuServe account he was very proud of, and unlike so many of his ink-splattered brethren, he grabbed new gadgets with both hands.

But it wasn’t just a grasp of technology that made him a figure worthy of consideration and emulation.

Though he was viewed as a movie critic with the soul of a poet, he also had killer business instincts. A journalist since the 1960s, he not only survived endless tumult in the craft, he thrived by embracing new opportunity and expanding his franchise at every turn.

Just as Jay-Z is more than a musician, Roger Ebert was much more than a guy who wrote about movies. He was a newspaper writer, a television personality, a public speaker, a book author, an event impresario and a Web publisher. And through his Web site, RogerEbert.com, he is still with us even though he is gone, demonstrating the kind of stickiness and durability that media brands crave.

Mr. Ebert’s credentials demonstrate that everything new under the sun started somewhere. He began working as a film critic at The Sun-Times in 1967. He was prolific and memorable, in part because he perfected the high-low split — the thinking man’s regular guy — while much of the rest of the growing world of movie criticism was huffing its own fumes. Mr. Ebert saw the power of syndication early on, negotiating rights to his written work and appearing in 200 newspapers and then repurposing the reviews for best-selling film guides.

In 1975, he formed a long-running television partnership with Gene Siskel, his rival at The Chicago Tribune, coming up with an on-air vaudeville act arguing about movies for a local public television station. The pair proceeded to turn their teeny little show into a national juggernaut.

In making the leap to television, they demonstrated that two rather unremarkable-looking newspaper hacks could make for good content, in part because they spoke their minds and crossed swords frequently. And their binary aesthetic — thumbs up, thumbs down — not only snatched back criticism from the rarefied confines of elite critics, it democratized the practice, neatly predicting an era of Facebook “likes” right down to the use of the thumb. (No dummies when it came to the business end, they trademarked the phrase “two thumbs up,” declaring legal dominion over the concept they helped popularize.)

In 1982 they left public television and cut a deal with The Tribune Company, which was getting into the TV syndication business, that not only paid them well but cut them in on 25 percent of the profits. Mr. Ebert once jotted down some of that math on a napkin to show a local television personality in Chicago how syndication could make her very well known, and perhaps, wealthy. Oprah Winfrey took that advice to the bank.

Together, Siskel and Ebert became the most famous and well compensated film writers in history by using television to spread the word. Carson, Letterman, they were all happy to have Mr. Ebert and Mr. Siskel stop by to brandish their thumbs on the late-night couch.

They continued to roll, signing on with Disney in 1986 and changing the name of their show — which had been “Sneak Previews” and then “At the Movies” — to “Siskel and Ebert and the Movies.” A year later it was shortened again to just “Siskel and Ebert,” because everyone know what their names meant by then.

Mr. Siskel was the more business-minded of the pair, and Mr. Ebert wisely allowed his frenemy and their agent to cut the deals for their show. But Mr. Ebert was hardly a dummy when it came to business, and in some respects he was a visionary.

He used technology to reiterate and reinvent time and again. When illness wiped out his voice, he took to the Web, developing a manic and persistent presence on RogerEbert.com, and when it became clear that no surgical remedy could restore his voice, he used a synthesizer to continue his life as an impresario and showman. At a time when media companies are scratching their heads about how to successfully stage special events, he was 15 years deep into Ebertfest, his personally curated movie festival in Champaign, Ill.

His footprint extended beyond the come-and-go world of print and television. He wrote two dozen books, including one about computer viruses and another about meals that could be made in a rice cooker. He wrote several scripts, including most notoriously “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.”

Though his voice was gone, his typing seemed only to increase. In 2012, he wrote more than 300 reviews, the most of his career in one year. And after reluctantly joining Twitter in October 2009, he took over the joint, issuing over 30,000 posts on his way to amassing some 840,000 followers.

On the day before his death, he filed yet again to his blog, announcing a “leave of presence” that was thick with self-assignments.

“For now, I am throwing myself into Ebert Digital and the redesigned, highly interactive and searchable Rogerebert.com,” he said. “You’ll learn more about its exciting new features on April 9 when the site is launched.”

For writers and media companies looking for yet more ways to adjust to the digital tide, Mr. Ebert demonstrated that it is much easier to surf a wave enthusiastically than to crankily swim against it. Great writing, constant reinvention and an excitement about what comes next seem to have done the trick for him. And besides, typing your way off this mortal coil is not a bad way to go.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/b...e-builder.html





Tech Upstarts Threaten TV Broadcast Model
Liana B. Baker and Ronald Grover

Two fledgling technologies could dramatically reshape the $60 billion-a-year television broadcast industry as they challenge the business model that has helped keep broadcasters on the lucrative end of the media spectrum.

On April 1, a U.S. appeals court rejected a petition by the major broadcasters including Comcast's NBC, News Corp's FOX, Disney's ABC and CBS, to stop a service called Aereo, which offers a cut-rate TV subscription for consumers by capturing broadcast signals over thousands of antennas at one time.

It was the second time in recent months that TV broadcasters failed to block a new technology that undercuts revenue they generate for their television shows.

In November, a California court struck down Fox's request to ban Dish Network's ad-eliminating video recording device called the Hopper.

The two services strike at the heart of the TV broadcast model, whose future will be up for debate at the National Association of Broadcasters show, which 90,000 people were expected to attend in Las Vegas this week.

The most touted feature of the Hopper makes TV commercials disappear completely when watching recorded prime-time broadcast television, unlike prior DVRs and other devices that require the viewer to fast forward through ads.

Aereo could cut the numbers of people who need or want a more expensive cable video subscription, which would eat into the $3 billion in so-called "retransmission fees" that research firm SNL Kagan says broadcasters get from cable and satellite systems, based on the number of their subscribers.

The threat so far is limited. The number of people using Aereo - backed by media heavyweight Barry Diller, who launched the Fox network in 1986 - is miniscule compared to the number of pay TV customers in the United States. Dish's Hopper is a more mainstream device that Dish's 14 million subscribers have access to.

But broadcasters fear the services will continue to expand, cutting into their viewing audience and advertising revenue.

Even though courts have made preliminary decisions in favor of Dish and Aereo, both cases are still in the early stages and those decisions could ultimately be reversed.

FORCING CHANGE

A favorable outcome for Aereo and the Hopper in court would push TV operators to dramatically reshape themselves. It could even force them to trade in their broadcast towers and become cable channels alongside networks such as Bravo, AMC and ESPN, says Garth Ancier, who has been the top TV programmer at Fox, NBC and the WB networks.

"They won't have a choice," Ancier said. "When someone attacks your business, sometimes you do something radical."

Some of the top four major networks have been considering just such a move for months, and the emergence of the two technology threats could accelerate their decisions, according to Ancier.

That would keep the broadcasters' signals away from Aereo and their ads free from the Hopper, which for now only zaps broadcast ads in recorded television.

The downside? Broadcasters would have to turn their backs on the 11.1 million homes that Nielsen estimates still receives their TV signals from rabbit ears and rooftop antennas and do not have cable subscriptions.

Spokesmen for Fox, CBS, NBC and ABC declined to comment on their plans. Last week, following the Aereo ruling, Fox said "the court has ruled that it is OK to steal copyrighted material and retransmit it without compensation."

All the broadcasters also said they plan to keep fighting Aereo and said they were confident that the rights of content owners would be protected.

NEW VIEWING HABITS

Both the Hopper and Aereo take advantage of changes in how TV viewers get their shows. Increasing numbers are "binge watching," or tuning into libraries of recorded episodes on their DVRs or on the Internet. As many as 5 million homes now "cut the cord" and get their TV shows from sources such as streaming on the Internet or watching DVDs or game consoles, according to a March 11 Nielsen study.

For now, the number of people using either the Hopper or Aereo is small but growing.

The Hopper is the free DVR for new Dish customers and is the focus of Dish's current ad campaigns. Dish has 14 million customers, making it one of the biggest U.S. pay TV companies behind Comcast and DirecTV, the company says.

Aereo has never revealed its subscriber numbers but it is expanding quickly. In February, Aereo said it was available to 19 million people, mostly in the New York area, and it embarked on an outdoor advertising campaign. It plans to expand to 22 other cities this year including major markets such as Chicago and Houston.

Even before Aereo and the Hopper appeared, the percentage of viewers who watch TV from the traditional networks was crashing, down from 69 percent in 1993 to 42 percent today in February, according to Nielsen.

A further jolt to the broadcasters' dwindling audience would empower advertisers, who last year spent $27 billion on broadcasting commercials, to negotiate tougher on price hikes and could take some of that money elsewhere.

Just as troubling for the broadcasters, if ratings continue to decline, the TV networks will have smaller captive audience to whom they can promote their new programming slate, which would likely accelerate the downward cycle.

"It's like the music business," said BTIG media analyst Rich Greenfield. "They decline and decline and one day the bottom falls out."

The networks might fight back. CBS Chief Executive Leslie Moonves told an investor conference last fall that he may pull CBS off the Dish's system, depriving the service's subscribers of NFL football and "CSI" if the satellite operator continued to promote the Hopper's commercial skipping feature.

On March 26, CBS said it acquired a 50 percent stake in the cable channel TVGN, formerly the TV Guide Network, adding a cable channel that would be safe from Aereo.

TVGN and its fellow cable channels are so far safe from the Hopper. Dish's chairman Charlie Ergen said in February that Dish does not yet have the technology to zap commercials on cable and the company has not announced any intention to do so.

Broadcasters still hope to cut off both services by persuading the courts that they violate copyright laws and breach contracts.

For now, Aero and the Hopper will only get more popular as the cases wind their way through court, said intellectual property attorney Andrew Goldstein, a partner with the Chicago firm of Freeborn & Peters.

"It will be hard to put that genie back in the bottle," Goldstein said.

(Reporting By Liana B. Baker in New York and Ronald Grover in Los Angeles; Editing by Frances Kerry and Doina Chiacu)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...9360E220130407





News Corp. Threatens to Pull Fox Off the Airwaves If Aereo Wins

Goodbye, free TV?
Peter Kafka

News Corp. COO Chase Carey says his conglomerate is considering moving programming from its Fox broadcast network, which viewers can receive over the air, for free, to its pay cable networks.

Carey floated the idea during a speech at TV industry conference today, in response to a recent court ruling that gave startup Aereo the go-ahead, at least temporarily, to show programming from Fox and other broadcasters on its Web TV service, without paying for the shows.

Here’s the money quote, via Variety:

“If we can’t have our rights properly protected through legal and governmental solutions, we will pursue business solution. One solution would be to take the network and make it a subscription service. We’re not going to sit idly by and let people steal our content.”

If Carey and News Corp. (which also owns this Web site) follow through on the move, it would be a dramatic response to Aereo, which irks the broadcasters because it threatens billions of dollars in “retransmission” revenue.

The broadcasters get that money from pay TV operators, who pay for the right to carry network programming even though it’s available for free to anyone with antenna.

Moving programming to cable networks, which you can’t get unless you pay a subscription fee, would theoretically protect the value of that programming. But it would presumably come at a cost to Fox, as it would lose access to the 10 percent or so of American TV viewers who don’t have a pay TV subscription.

Given that Aereo and the broadcasters are still duking this out in court, and that Aereo has a small subscriber base at best — for now, it’s only available in the New York area, although the company has a big rollout planned this year — you can probably file this under “sword-rattling aimed at regulators” more than “things Fox actually intends to do”.

But it’s still a fascinating public response. Here’s more, via a News Corp. PR statement:

“”News Corporation has a long-standing commitment to the broadcast television business, and to delivering the highest-quality entertainment, sports and news programming to our viewers on a localized basis. We are committed to broadcasting under a business model where programmers receive fair compensation from parties that want to redistribute our product while continuing to make our product available for free to individual consumers that want to access our signal.

“We believe that Aereo is pirating our broadcast signal. We will continue to aggressively pursue our rights in the courts, as well as pursue all relevant political avenues, and we believe we will prevail.

“That said, we won’t just sit idle and allow our content to be actively stolen. It is clear that the broadcast business needs a dual revenue stream from both ad and subscription to be viable. We simply cannot provide the type of quality sports, news, and entertainment content that we do from an ad supported only business model. We have no choice but to develop business solutions that ensure we continue to remain in the driver’s seat of our own destiny. One option could be converting the FOX broadcast network to a pay channel, which we would do in collaboration with both our content partners and affiliates.”

And here’s an interview I conducted with Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia in February’s D: Dive into Media conference, where he showed off the service and talked about its long-term programming plans.
http://allthingsd.com/20130408/news-...if-aereo-wins/





Broadcasters Circle Wagons Against a TV Streaming Upstart
Brian Stelter

When Chase Carey, Rupert Murdoch’s top deputy at News Corporation, told broadcasters on Monday about his contingency plan to turn the Fox network into something available only on cable, he knew policy makers would be listening, too. But a few of them were busy that day, meeting with Chet Kanojia, the very man who had provoked Mr. Carey’s stark warning.

Mr. Kanojia had come to Washington to sell lawmakers and reporters on the virtues of his upstart service, Aereo, which scoops up the free signals of local television stations and streams them to the phones and computers of paying subscribers. Because Aereo cuts off the stations from the retransmission fees that they have grown to depend on, they are determined to shut down the service — even, the station owners say, if they have to take their signals off the airwaves to do so.

Mr. Carey’s suggestion was dismissed by some as a hollow threat intended to scare the courts — which have ruled twice in favor of Aereo so far — and perhaps prod Congressional action. It is, at best, a far-fetched outcome. But it revealed a lot about the state of broadcasting, which appears increasingly antiquated in an age when wireless companies like AT&T and Verizon — instead of TV stations — are snapping up spectrum and using it to deliver Internet services like Aereo.

The networks aren’t just concerned about Aereo, which has a tiny following, but about copycats. “It’s Aereo today, but it could be something else tomorrow,” said Robin Flynn, a senior analyst at SNL Kagan.

For several decades companies that were lucky enough to own licenses for local TV stations thrived on advertising revenue alone, and because there was relatively little competition they enjoyed huge audiences and profit margins to match.

As cable and then the Internet introduced new competitors, station owners began to rely on a second revenue source, the so-called retransmission fees that come from the cable and satellite operators that pick up their signals and repackage them for subscribers. Now that they’ve had a taste of these fees, the stations aren’t willing — or able, they say — to go back to the old model of advertising alone.

SNL Kagan estimates that station owners took in $2.36 billion in retransmission fees from subscribers last year. (Some of that money is pocketed by owners, while a portion is paid to the network that the station is affiliated with, like Fox or CBS. Each of the networks also owns some stations outright.)

The research firm projects the fee revenues to hit $6 billion by 2018. The trend lines for broadcasters are similar to those in the newspaper business — subscribers are paying a bigger and bigger piece of the overall cost of content creation.

That’s why the stations are doing battle with Aereo, because it doesn’t pay any fees, the same way antenna users do not. News Corporation, the Walt Disney Company, Comcast, the CBS Corporation and Univision, all of which own stations in New York, sued Aereo shortly after the service was announced last year, accusing it of copyright infringement. But the media giants failed to win a preliminary injunction against the service last summer, and their appeals were rejected last week in a 2-to-1 decision in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York.

Aereo’s success in court could embolden cable and satellite providers to do their own end-runs around retransmission fees. So now the station owners are plotting their next moves.

“We won’t just sit idle and allow our content to be actively stolen,” Mr. Carey said after speaking on stage at the National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas. “It is clear that the broadcast business needs a dual revenue stream from both ad and subscription to be viable.” If the revenue from retransmission fees starts to erode, he said, “one option could be converting the Fox broadcast network to a pay channel”

“It sounds like an idle threat,” said John Bergmayer, a senior staff lawyer for Public Knowledge, a public interest group in Washington. Mr. Bergmayer called Mr. Carey’s comments “probably just part of an opening gambit to Congress,” noting that the broadcasters could press for a change to copyright law that would effectively choke Aereo out of existence.

Mr. Carey’s comments also seemed meant to reassure affiliates. “He made clear that moving to a cable network isn’t their preference,” Ms. Flynn said.

The head of the board that represents Fox-affiliated stations said Tuesday that it backed Mr. Carey, and suggested that the stations could start broadcasting two flavors, a light version over the airwaves that would be without hit sports and entertainment programming, and a fuller version for subscribers to cable and satellite providers that pay the necessary fees.

On Monday night, the chairman of Univision, Haim Saban, became the first rival to back Mr. Carey publicly, saying that his network, the largest Spanish-language broadcaster in the country, would also consider converting to a cable channel. Representatives for NBC, which is owned by Comcast, and ABC, which is owned by Disney, declined to comment on Tuesday. But Steve Burke, the chief executive of NBCUniversal, expressed his support for Mr. Carey’s point of view privately, according to a person who insisted on anonymity.

Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of CBS, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday that he “wholeheartedly supported what Chase said.”

CBS has already had some exploratory talks with cable operators about taking its local station signals off the air. “For now, we’re talking about the New York-Connecticut area,” Mr. Moonves said, because that’s the only area where Aereo now operates. He emphasized that he does not want to go down that path, and said, “Frankly, we don’t think it will get to that point.”

Aereo has said that it plans to expand to nearly two dozen cities this year. (Not to the West Coast, however; a district court has halted an Aereo-like service there, so that is risky territory for the time being.)

Lost amid all this saber-rattling is the sobering fact that millions of Americans receive television via only antennas, and would be cut off if the television industry moves toward a pay model. As Bill Reyner, the owner of the Fox station in Rapid City, S.D., said to The Associated Press on Tuesday, “The real loser in all of this are those that can’t afford pay TV.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/b...he-wagons.html





Hours After Google Announces Google Fiber In Austin, AT&T Pretends It, Too, Will Build A 1 Gigabit Network There
Mike Masnick

As you've probably heard, this morning Google confirmed the rumors that Austin, Texas would be the second city in which Google Fiber is rolled out. Google still appears to be treating this as an experiment, rolling it out in just a few areas, but it's still worth watching what happens. For example, within hours of Google making the announcement, AT&T rushed out a somewhat hilarious press release insisting that it, too, would build a 1 gigabit fiber network in Austin. No one actually believes this is true. What you're seeing is a bit of gamesmanship, but which reveals something interesting. First up, AT&T is clearly using this to complain about the deal terms by which Google got the rights of way in Austin. Google, famously, got Kansas City to kick in all sorts of concessions that made it extra favorable for Google to build its network there. No doubt, the city of Austin offered similar benefits to Google to be city number two. And, so, within AT&T's press release, there's this little tidbit:

Today, AT&T announced that in conjunction with its previously announced Project VIP expansion of broadband access, it is prepared to build an advanced fiber optic infrastructure in Austin, Texas, capable of delivering speeds up to 1 gigabit per second. AT&T's expanded fiber plans in Austin anticipate it will be granted the same terms and conditions as Google on issues such as geographic scope of offerings, rights of way, permitting, state licenses and any investment incentives.

In other words, sure, sure we'll build a 1 gigabit fiber network. Just give us the same favorable terms you gave Google. Basically, AT&T's announcement has little to do with actually offering a competing service, but much more about calling attention to the favorable terms that cities are giving Google to get Google Fiber. Now, this is something that deserves reasonable scrutiny. Some are quite understandably concerned that it's not right if Google gets extra-favorable terms. But, let's look at the real history here. Municipalities have been giving AT&T and other incumbents incredibly favorable deals for years, and AT&T has tended to return the favor by providing the bare minimum in quality of service to its broadband customers, while focusing most of its efforts on trying to block any hint of competition from showing up.

Google, on the other hand, seems to be using these incentives to offer a much higher level of service, and the early reviews from Kansas City have been fantastic. In short, both companies have been able to squeeze concessions and favorable deals out of the cities in question. One of them pocketed the cash and gave customers the bare minimum. The other focused on providing a truly impressive level of service.

The other oddity in all of this is just how much this press release makes AT&T look bad. Beyond the petty "hey, give us what Google got" statement, this press release more or less confirms exactly the message that AT&T has been trying to deny for years: that when there's real competition, then AT&T will invest in making a better service. Without the competition, AT&T is happy to provide crappy service. But within hours of real competition showing up, it suddenly claims it'll offer a better level of service? Is that really the message it wants to send? If I'm any city, state or federal government in the US at this point, I look at today's announcement and say, "well, AT&T just admitted that they'll offer better service if there's real competition, so how do we make sure there's real competition?" Given how hard AT&T has fought back against real competition in the broadband space for the past decade, it's not clear this is the message AT&T really should be spreading.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...rk-there.shtml





Bubble or No, This Virtual Currency Is a Lot of Coin in Any Realm
Noam Cohen

WHEN he was a Yale Law School student, Reuben Grinberg wrote one of the first academic papers about Bitcoin, a novel virtual currency that uses sophisticated cryptography to validate and secure transactions that exist only online.

Bitbills are physical representations of the virtual currency known as bitcoins.

When Mr. Grinberg, now a lawyer in the financial institutions group of the Manhattan law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell, first learned about bitcoins, they were selling for 10 cents. Now, after the latest price surge that began in January, the cost of a bitcoin on an exchange that converts them to dollars is something like $140, and the collective value of all bitcoins has passed a billion dollars.

That is a lot of coin in any form, and the billion-dollar milestone has turned the once-obscure online currency into a media sensation. Had Mr. Grinberg invested just $100 back then, today his investment would be worth ...

Ah, but that way madness lies. “People are buying bitcoins because the price is going up,” he said in an interview. “That is the classic indicator of a bubble.”

The question of whether the increase represents real value or is simply evidence of a bubble is at the heart of the current media frenzy. Bitcoin began in January 2009, a project introduced by a programmer or group of programmers who worked under the name Satoshi Nakamoto.

The project represented a breakthrough in using software code to authenticate and protect transactions without resorting to a centralized bank or government treasury. In that way, Bitcoin became a peer-to-peer system. That comes in pretty handy for people who do not want their transactions monitored.

In conversations about the project with scholars who study it, the word that comes up as often as “bubble” is “genius.”

For one thing, though bitcoins are software code, you can’t simply copy them like a music file. The process of creating the coins — “mining” them in the project’s allusion to something tangible like gold or silver — involves computer work that, crucially, verifies Bitcoin transactions.

“It is the most successful digital currency already right now,” said Nicolas Christin, the associate director of the Information Networking Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. “Even if bitcoins become worth nothing, it has succeeded more than any academic proposals for a digital currency,” he said in an interview from Okinawa, Japan, where he was attending a conference on financial cryptography that included a number of papers on bitcoins.

People buy the coins for cold hard cash on exchanges. Completing those purchases, as well as cashing out, typically involves re-entering the world of traditional financial transactions, with fees and loss of anonymity.

But Bitcoin’s managers say the currency has proved so secure that despite the fact that exchanges and virtual wallets, where people keep their bitcoins, have been hacked, the coins themselves have not been forged.

So why the sudden run-up in value? Some point to the recent crisis over Cypriot banks, which made a currency beyond the control of governments more tempting. And as with a run-up in anything tradable — tulip bulbs, dot-com shares — there is also the hypnotic logic that says the price went up today, so that means it will go up tomorrow.

Some observers and investors also make the case that bitcoins are in fact undervalued. Their argument goes like this. The total value of the world’s economic activity is enormous. There are certain transactions that are ideal for bitcoins because the currency is relatively anonymous and does not need to be processed by a financial organization or a government.

If bitcoins become the dominant currency in some small niche of the world economy — that is, those people who do not want their transactions easily tracked or who want to send money back home from abroad — then they will become quite valuable indeed. This outcome has been neatly summarized by the financial blogger Felix Salmon as making bitcoins an “uncomfortable combination of commodity and currency.”

The price increase becomes a question of supply and demand. Unlike other currencies that can adjust the money supply depending on economic conditions, bitcoins have a supply that is fixed. The amount of new coins that can be minted was plotted at the outset with a finite number of coins at the end, roughly 21 million in the next century. Today, the rate is 25 new coins every 10 minutes; for the first four years, it was twice as many, 50 every 10 minutes.

The slowdown in the rate new coins are added, which was programmed into bitcoins, may also help account for the spike in prices.

So far, excluding investors and day traders, the main use of the currency appears to be illicit activity. There are the online gambling sites that use bitcoins. And the anonymous online marketplace Silk Road, which accepts only bitcoins, is “overwhelmingly used as a market for controlled substances and narcotics,” according to a paper on Silk Road written by Mr. Christin of Carnegie Mellon.

He used clues on the site, including buyer feedback reports, to calculate how much and what kind of business was being transacted. His conclusion, as of July 2012, was that $1.2 million in business was carried out each month, much of it for buying small amounts of narcotics that were delivered by mail. “We did see it was growing,” he said of the total value of the trades. “It pretty much doubled in the six months I followed it.”

Excluding the traders, he said, “Silk Road probably represents a sizable amount of bitcoin exchanges, but not more than half.”

Supporters of the Bitcoin project acknowledge these statistics but argue that it can still thrive as a mainstream currency.

“I think when you talk about Silk Road, you are talking about the first early adopter market — there is no other solution that works,” said Gavin Andresen, chief scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, a nonprofit organization that manages the project. When the currency evolves to be more useful and better known, he said, it will be used for more mundane transactions.

Even the idea that it is experiencing a bubble — and Mr. Andresen said in an interview by phone from Amherst, Mass., “I think it definitely is a frenzy” — is for the best. “Eventually the media gets bored and moves on to the next thing,” he said, “and what is left behind is a whole new wave of people interested.” And, he says, a much lower price for bitcoins.

As evidence of mainstream interest, Mr. Andresen pointed to the Bitcoin 2013 conference in San Jose, Calif., next month, which is attracting entrepreneurs with Silicon Valley venture capital backing. The list of panelists is heavy with start-up executives, but includes some activists — including representatives from the Web site Antiwar.com and the Electronic Frontier Foundation — who see a currency outside of government regulation as crucial to financing projects that criticize the authorities.

Mr. Andresen is not a mere bystander to the fluctuations in bitcoin prices. As an employee of the Bitcoin Foundation, after working as volunteer on the software, he is paid in bitcoins, with the rate set every three months. In 2013, his salary in terms of dollars has increased more than tenfold.

Starting in April, however, the foundation has decided that, because of those fluctuations, his bitcoin salary would be adjusted each month, he said. Still, that alone makes this bubble different than many in the past: the creators are not looking to get their money and make a quick exit. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/b...eal-worth.html





Taping of Farm Cruelty Is Becoming the Crime

Several states have placed restrictions on undercover investigations into cruelty.
Richard A. Oppel Jr.

On one covert video, farm workers illegally burn the ankles of Tennessee walking horses with chemicals. Another captures workers in Wyoming punching and kicking pigs and flinging piglets into the air. And at one of the country’s largest egg suppliers, a video shows hens caged alongside rotting bird corpses, while workers burn and snap off the beaks of young chicks.

Each video — all shot in the last two years by undercover animal rights activists — drew a swift response: Federal prosecutors in Tennessee charged the horse trainer and other workers, who have pleaded guilty, with violating the Horse Protection Act. Local authorities in Wyoming charged nine farm employees with cruelty to animals. And the egg supplier, which operates in Iowa and other states, lost one of its biggest customers, McDonald’s, which said the video played a part in its decision.

But a dozen or so state legislatures have had a different reaction: They proposed or enacted bills that would make it illegal to covertly videotape livestock farms, or apply for a job at one without disclosing ties to animal rights groups. They have also drafted measures to require such videos to be given to the authorities almost immediately, which activists say would thwart any meaningful undercover investigation of large factory farms.

Critics call them “Ag-Gag” bills.

Some of the legislation appears inspired by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a business advocacy group with hundreds of state representatives from farm states as members. The group creates model bills, drafted by lobbyists and lawmakers, that in the past have included such things as “stand your ground” gun laws and tighter voter identification rules.

One of the group’s model bills, “The Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act,” prohibits filming or taking pictures on livestock farms to “defame the facility or its owner.” Violators would be placed on a “terrorist registry.”

Officials from the group did not respond to a request for comment.

Animal rights activists say they have not seen legislation that would require them to register as terrorists, but they say other measures — including laws passed last year in Iowa, Utah and Missouri — make it nearly impossible to produce similar undercover exposés. Some groups say that they have curtailed activism in those states.

“It definitely has had a chilling effect on our ability to conduct undercover investigations,” said Vandhana Bala, general counsel for Mercy for Animals, which has shot many videos, including the egg-farm investigation in 2011. (McDonald’s said that video showed “disturbing and completely unacceptable” behavior, but that none of the online clips were from the Iowa farm that supplied its eggs. Ms. Bala, though, said that some video showing bird carcasses in cages did come from that facility.)

The American Farm Bureau Federation, which lobbies for the agricultural and meat industries, criticized the mistreatment seen on some videos. But the group cautions that some methods represent best practices endorsed by animal-care experts.

The videos may seem troubling to someone unfamiliar with farming, said Kelli Ludlum, the group’s director of Congressional relations, but they can be like seeing open-heart surgery for the first time.

“They could be performing a perfect procedure, but you would consider it abhorrent that they were cutting a person open,” she said.

In coming weeks, Indiana and Tennessee are expected to vote on similar measures, while states from California to Pennsylvania continue to debate them.

Opponents have scored some recent victories, as a handful of bills have died, including those in New Mexico and New Hampshire. In Wyoming, the legislation stalled after loud opposition from animal rights advocates, including Bob Barker, former host of “The Price is Right.”

In Indiana, an expansive bill became one of the most controversial of the state legislative session, drawing heated opposition from labor groups and the state press association, which said the measure violated the First Amendment.

After numerous constitutional objections, the bill was redrafted and will be unveiled Monday, said Greg Steuerwald, a Republican state representative and chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

The new bill would require job applicants to disclose material information or face criminal penalties, a provision that opponents say would prevent undercover operatives from obtaining employment. And employees who do something beyond the scope of their jobs could be charged with criminal trespass.

An employee who took a video on a livestock farm with his phone and gave it to someone else would “probably” run afoul of the proposed law, Mr. Steuerwald said. The bill will apply not just to farms, but to all employers, he added.

Nancy J. Guyott, the president of the Indiana chapter of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said she feared that the legislation would punish whistle-blowers.

Nationally, animal rights advocates fear that they will lose a valuable tool that fills the void of what they say is weak or nonexistent regulation.

Livestock companies say that their businesses have suffered financially from unfair videos that are less about protecting animals than persuading consumers to stop eating meat.

Don Lehe, a Republican state representative from a rural district in Indiana, said online videos can cast farmers in a false light and give them little opportunity to correct the record.

“That property owner is essentially guilty before they had the chance to address the issue,” Mr. Lehe said.

As for whistle-blowers, advocates for the meat industry say that they are protected from prosecution by provisions in some bills that give them 24 to 48 hours to turn over videos to legal authorities.

“If an abuse has occurred and they have evidence of it, why are they holding on to it?” said Dale Moore, executive director of public policy for the American Farm Bureau Federation.

But animal rights groups say investigations take months to complete.

Undercover workers cannot document a pattern of abuse, gather enough evidence to force a government investigation and determine whether managers condone the abuse within one to two days, said Matt Dominguez, who works on farm animal protection at the Humane Society of the United States.

“Instead of working to prevent future abuses, the factory farms want to silence them,” he said. “What they really want is for the whistle to be blown on the whistle-blower.”

The Humane Society was responsible for a number of undercover investigations, including the videos of the Wyoming pig farm and the Tennessee walking horses.

Video shot in 2011 showed workers dripping caustic chemicals onto the horses’ ankles and clasping metal chains onto the injured tissue. This illegal and excruciating technique, known as “soring,” forces the horse to thrust its front legs forward after every painful step to exaggerate the distinctive high-stepping gait favored by breeders. The video also showed a worker hitting a horse in the head with a large piece of wood.

The Humane Society first voluntarily turned over the video to law enforcement. By the time the video was publicly disclosed, federal prosecutors had filed charges. A week later, they announced guilty pleas from the horse trainer and other workers.

Prosecutors later credited the Humane Society with prompting the federal investigation and establishing “evidence instrumental to the case.”

That aid to prosecutors shows the importance of lengthy undercover investigations that would be prevented by laws requiring video to be turned over within one or two days, Mr. Dominguez said.

“At the first sign of animal cruelty, we’d have to pull our investigator out, and we wouldn’t be able to build a case that leads to charges.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/u...the-crime.html





Is Someone Recording This? It’s Harder to Find Out

Commercial recording devices with wires have largely been replaced by miniature equipment.
Wendy Ruderman

The undercover F.B.I. agent, posing as a businessman, was recording the conversation with a device secreted someplace close enough to capture the politician’s words, but obscure enough to remain undetected.

“I run the Queens County Republican Party. Nobody else runs the party,” the politician, Vincent Tabone, says, according to a criminal complaint unsealed last week.

Then, Mr. Tabone, 46, a baby-faced veteran of local and state politics, appeared to grow cautious. Just before accepting a $25,000 bribe, he patted down the agent, ostensibly to check for a recording device, federal prosecutors allege in the complaint.

The moment was reminiscent of the 1970s and ’80s, when undercover agents recorded conversations with mobsters using a bulky tape recorder strapped around their waists, and wires — connected to a microphone — secured to their chests with an adhesive. Today, in an age when technology has gone wireless, the phrase “wearing a wire” is a largely allegorical term of art.

“In the old days, they would say, ‘Let me pat you down for a wire’ and boom, everybody would just open their shirt and say, ‘I’m not wearing a wire,’ ” a retired undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, Joaquin Garcia, said in a telephone interview on Friday. “Now there is no need to wear a wire. It’s become extinct. It’s all gone digital. But what are you going to say, ‘I’m wearing digital,’ instead of ‘I’m wearing a wire’? It’s just become part of the parlance of law enforcement.”

Technological advances aside, the methods have remained the same, with federal agents and undercover officers using covert recording equipment to ensnare would-be criminals, sometimes with the help of a well-placed informer or cooperating witness.

“Technology has made it so easy to plant a device that is much less detectable,” Richard B. Zabel, deputy United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in an interview last week. “Yes, people are conscious of being recorded, but as you’ve seen, in some cases they are not able to find the recorder anyway.”

Nowadays, recording equipment is miniaturized. “Your options have increased a lot because the devices are a lot smaller,” Mr. Zabel said. “They can really hide them now in buttons, in pens, at the point of a pen, in a cuff link or the edge of a tie clip.”
And frisking an undercover agent for a wire, as Mr. Tabone allegedly did, can be as fruitless as finding a pay phone and “dropping a dime” to call the police.

“That is sort of an antiquated way to look for a device,” Mr. Zabel said.

Federal prosecutors have charged Mr. Tabone, vice chairman of the Queens Republican Party, with bribery and wire fraud for allegedly taking cash in exchange for using his influence to secure a ballot spot for State Senator Malcolm A. Smith, a Democrat, in the Republican primary for mayor. Mr. Smith, along with a Republican city councilman, Daniel J. Halloran III, and a Republican Party leader from the Bronx, Joseph J. Savino, were also charged. The criminal case was built, in large part, on secret recordings.

It was the first of two instances last week where federal prosecutors unsealed a criminal complaint against New York political leaders, using their own words against them.

On Thursday, two days after the corruption case centered on Mr. Smith’s mayoral aspirations became public, the United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, announced new charges in an unrelated bribery case. In that case, cooperating witnesses, including Assemblyman Nelson L. Castro, who has since resigned, wore devices to record conversations that led to the arrest of Eric A. Stevenson, a Democratic state assemblyman who was accused of accepting more than $22,000 in bribes to help developers open adult day care centers in his district in the South Bronx.

In one recording, officials said, Mr. Stevenson invokes previous scandals in Albany and openly worries about being taped. “Be careful of those things, man, the recorders and all those things,” Mr. Stevenson says to a cooperating witness, according to the criminal complaint.

Mr. Zabel and other federal officials declined to reveal exactly how the recordings in the two recent cases were made. “We don’t want people to know what we can do, but we don’t mind people thinking that we can do all kinds of things,” an F.B.I. spokesman, James Margolin, said last week.

As for the recordings of Mr. Tabone and other suspects in the two cases, Mr. Margolin said, “I presume that it wasn’t the kind of devices that we used in the 1980s,” similar to the one depicted in movies like “Prince of the City,” the 1981 film starring Jerry Orbach and Treat Williams, who plays a New York City narcotics detective who wears a wire to expose police corruption.

During the cold war era, the surveillance device of choice among law enforcement was the Nagra, a Swiss-made portable tape recorder. The first model was about the size of a shoe box and weighed more than 10 pounds. The recorder was battery-powered and used reel-to-reel tape, an important feature because it moved slowly and could record hours of conversation. The recorder could be secreted inside an elastic band or pouch that sat low on a person’s waist, just above the groin. Microphone heads, attached to a right and left wire, were typically threaded up a person’s chest or back and secured near the collarbone with industrial-strength tape.

“When you pulled them off, all the hair came off our chest,” said Robert K. Wittman, a retired senior F.B.I. investigator and founder of the agency’s National Art Crime Team. “There used to be a lot of recordings that ended with ‘Aaahhhhh,’ when you ripped the wires off. It was almost like getting a body wax.”

There were other drawbacks. The boxy, intricate contraption was difficult to conceal in the summertime, and the batteries generated heat — not enough to burn a person’s flesh, but plenty warm enough to cause excessive perspiration.

“Think about it. It’s a machine that sticks to your body. It’s running all the time. You’ve got sweat going on,” recalled Mr. Garcia, known as Jack, who is perhaps best known for infiltrating the Gambino crime family while assuming the persona of “Jack Falcone,” a jewel thief and drug dealer from Miami. “It does malfunction. It has happened to me quite a few times.”

As bad as malfunctions were, having the hidden recording devices discovered were of far greater concern.

“They would casually come up and put their hand on your back or front to check you for a wire,” said Joseph Pollini, a retired lieutenant commander who worked as an undercover narcotics officer with the Police Department from 1969 to 1977. “Once they found a wire, you were dead.”

“You had to have the ability to talk your way out of it and stop the person from tossing you or touching you,” said Mr. Pollini, who recalled unleashing homophobic slurs, with expletives, as a tactic to prevent drug dealers from searching him. “I used to slip the recorder down my pants because drug dealers aren’t going to touch your private parts.”

In more dangerous situations, undercover officers and agents had the option to wear a transmitter, which broadcast the conversation in real time to a nearby location, like an unmarked van, where a backup team listened in. The transmitters of old, however, required the team to be nearby, no more than a block or so away, to pick up the conversation.

Today, eavesdropping equipment is sophisticated enough to record high-definition video and sound, and stream it live to a remote computer. Devices no bigger than a pen cap can be slipped into a coat pocket and easily record through the person’s clothing, said Bob Leonard, a retired police officer and founder of the Spy Store, which sells a quarter-sized item called the “Super Mini Covert Wireless Camera” and recording devices disguised as a calculator, cigarette carton or cordless phone.

“Short of having the person stripped down naked, it’s almost impossible to detect,” Mr. Pollini said.

And not even then.

Carlos Matos, a Democratic Party leader from Philadelphia, recalled in an interview last week how he grew suspicious that a construction contractor was recording their conversation as the two men stood talking inside the garage of Mr. Matos’s home on the Jersey Shore.

“There was something about the guy that made me feel uncomfortable and I felt like I was being set up,” Mr. Matos said. “I told him to strip and said, ‘Yo, nothing personal here, brother, but I want to see if you are wearing a wire.’ ”

Mr. Matos said he surveyed the contractor’s almost-nude body, even inspecting his groin area. “I didn’t tell him to bend over and cough but I thought maybe he had it underneath his privates,” he said. “I was looking for wires and a box.”

But Mr. Matos said he did not ask the contractor to remove his shoes.

“Little did I know that I was way, way behind on the technology being used out there,” he said.

Mr. Matos, who pleaded guilty to bribery in a federal corruption investigation that entangled three former Atlantic City council members, was released from prison in 2010 after serving three years.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/n...ws-tinier.html





Secrets of FBI Smartphone Surveillance Tool Revealed in Court Fight
Kim Zetter

A legal fight over the government’s use of a secret surveillance tool has provided new insight into how the controversial tool works and the extent to which Verizon Wireless aided federal agents in using it to track a suspect.

Court documents in a case involving accused identity thief Daniel David Rigmaiden describe how the wireless provider reached out remotely to reprogram an air card the suspect was using in order to make it communicate with the government’s surveillance tool so that he could be located.

Rigmaiden, who is accused of being the ringleader of a $4 million tax fraud operation, asserts in court documents that in July 2008 Verizon surreptitiously reprogrammed his air card to make it respond to incoming voice calls from the FBI and also reconfigured it so that it would connect to a fake cell site, or stingray, that the FBI was using to track his location.

Air cards are devices that plug into a computer and use the wireless cellular networks of phone providers to connect the computer to the internet. The devices are not phones and therefore don’t have the ability to receive incoming calls, but in this case Rigmaiden asserts that Verizon reconfigured his air card to respond to surreptitious voice calls from a landline controlled by the FBI.

The FBI calls, which contacted the air card silently in the background, operated as pings to force the air card into revealing its location.

In order to do this, Verizon reprogrammed the device so that when an incoming voice call arrived, the card would disconnect from any legitimate cell tower to which it was already connected, and send real-time cell-site location data to Verizon, which forwarded the data to the FBI. This allowed the FBI to position its stingray in the neighborhood where Rigmaiden resided. The stingray then “broadcast a very strong signal” to force the air card into connecting to it, instead of reconnecting to a legitimate cell tower, so that agents could then triangulate signals coming from the air card and zoom-in on Rigmaiden’s location.

To make sure the air card connected to the FBI’s simulator, Rigmaiden says that Verizon altered his air card’s Preferred Roaming List so that it would accept the FBI’s stingray as a legitimate cell site and not a rogue site, and also changed a data table on the air card designating the priority of cell sites so that the FBI’s fake site was at the top of the list.

Rigmaiden makes the assertions in a 369-page document he filed in support of a motion to suppress evidence gathered through the stingray. Rigmaiden collected information about how the stingray worked from documents obtained from the government, as well as from records obtained through FOIA requests filed by civil liberties groups and from open-source literature.

During a hearing in a U.S. District Court in Arizona on March 28 to discuss the motion, the government did not dispute Rigmaiden’s assertions about Verizon’s activities.

The actions described by Rigmaiden are much more intrusive than previously known information about how the government uses stingrays, which are generally employed for tracking cell phones and are widely used in drug and other criminal investigations.

The government has long asserted that it doesn’t need to obtain a probable-cause warrant to use the devices because they don’t collect the content of phone calls and text messages and operate like pen-registers and trap-and-traces, collecting the equivalent of header information.

The government has conceded, however, that it needed a warrant in his case alone — because the stingray reached into his apartment remotely to locate the air card — and that the activities performed by Verizon and the FBI to locate Rigmaiden were all authorized by a court order signed by a magistrate.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, who have filed an amicus brief in support of Rigmaiden’s motion, maintain that the order does not qualify as a warrant and that the government withheld crucial information from the magistrate — such as identifying that the tracking device they planned to use was a stingray and that its use involved intrusive measures — thus preventing the court from properly fulfilling its oversight function.

“It shows you just how crazy the technology is, and [supports] all the more the need to explain to the court what they are doing,” says EFF Staff Attorney Hanni Fakhoury. “This is more than just [saying to Verizon] give us some records that you have sitting on your server. This is reconfiguring and changing the characteristics of the [suspect's] property, without informing the judge what’s going on.”

The secretive technology, generically known as a stingray or IMSI catcher, allows law enforcement agents to spoof a legitimate cell tower in order to trick nearby mobile phones and other wireless communication devices like air cards into connecting to the stingray instead of a phone carrier’s legitimate tower.

When devices connect, stingrays can see and record their unique ID numbers and traffic data, as well as information that points to the device’s location.

By moving the stingray around and gathering the wireless device’s signal strength from various locations in a neighborhood, authorities can pinpoint where the device is being used with much more precision than they can get through data obtained from a mobile network provider’s fixed tower location.

Use of the spy technology goes back at least 20 years. In a 2009 Utah case, an FBI agent described using a cell site emulator more than 300 times over a decade and indicated that they were used on a daily basis by U.S, Marshals, the Secret Service and other federal agencies.

The FBI used a similar device to track former hacker Kevin Mitnick in 1994, though the version used in that case was much more primitive and passive.

A 1996 Wired story about the Mitnick case called the device a Triggerfish and described it as “a technician’s device normally used for testing cell phones.” According to the story, the Triggerfish was “a rectangular box of electronics about a half a meter high controlled by a PowerBook” that was essentially “a five-channel receiver, able to monitor both sides of a conversation simultaneously.” The crude technology was hauled around in a station wagon and van. A black coaxial cable was strung out of the vehicle’s window to connect the Triggerfish to a direction-finding antenna on the vehicle’s roof, which had four antenna prongs that reached 30 centimeters into the sky.

The technology has become much sleeker and less obtrusive since then, but still operates under the same principles.

In Rigmaiden’s case, agents apparently used two devices made by a Florida-based company called Harris. One was the company’s StingRay system, which is designed to work from a vehicle driven around a neighborhood to narrow a suspect’s location to a building. Once agents tracked the signals from Rigmaiden’s air card to the Domicilio Apartments complex in Santa Clara, California, they apparently used another device made by Harris called the KingFish — a handheld system that allowed them to walk through the complex and zero-in on Rigmaiden’s air card in apartment 1122.

Although a number of companies make stingrays, including Verint, View Systems, Altron, NeoSoft, MMI, Ability, and Meganet, the Harris line of cell site emulators are the only ones that are compatible with CDMA2000-based devices. Others can track GSM/UMTS-based communications, but the Harris emulators can track CDMA2000, GSM and iDEN devices, as well as UMTS. The Harris StingRay and KingFish devices can also support three different communication standards simultaneously, without having to be reconfigured.

Rigmaiden was arrested in 2008 on charges that he was the mastermind behind an operation that involved stealing more than $4 million in refunds from the IRS by filing fraudulent tax returns. He and others are accused of using numerous fake IDs to open internet and phone accounts and using more than 175 different IP addresses around the United States to file the fake returns, which were often filed in bulk as if through an automated process. Rigmaiden has been charged with 35 counts of wire fraud, 35 counts of identify theft, one count of unauthorized computer access and two counts of mail fraud.

The surveillance of Rigmaiden began in June 2008 when agents served Verizon with a grand jury subpoena asking for data on three IP addresses that were allegedly used to electronically file some of the fraudulent tax returns. Verizon reported back that the three IP addresses were linked to an air card account registered in the name of Travis Rupard — an identity that Rigmaiden allegedly stole. The air card was identified as a UTStarcom PC5740 device that was assigned a San Francisco Bay Area phone number.

A court order was then submitted to Verizon Wireless requiring the company to provide historical cell site data on the account for the previous 30 days to determine what cell towers the air card had contacted and determine its general location. Verizon responded by supplying the government with information that included the latitude and longitude coordinates for five cell sites in San Jose and Santa Clara cities, in the heart of Silicon Valley.

In July, the government served Verizon Wireless with another court order directing the company to assist the FBI in the use and monitoring of a mobile tracking device to locate an unidentified suspect. The order directed Verizon Wireless to provide the FBI with any “technical assistance needed to ascertain the physical location of the [air card]….”

The government has fought hard to suppress information about how it uses stingrays, but in his motion to suppress, Rigmaiden lays out in great detail how the surveillance occurred and the nature of the technical assistance Verizon provided the FBI.

On the morning of July 14, 2008, FBI Agent Killigrew created a cell tower range chart/map consisting of a street map, plotted Verizon Wireless cell site sectors belonging to cell site Nos. 268, 139, and 279, and a triangulated aircard location signature estimate represented by a shaded area. On the chart/map, the total land area collectively covered by cell site Nos. 268, 139, and 279 is approximately 105,789,264 ft2. FBI Agent Killigrew used triangulation techniques and location signature techniques to eliminate 93.9% of that 105,789,264 ft2 area resulting in the location estimate being reduced to 6,412,224 ft2 represented by the shaded area. The shaded area on the cell tower range chart covers the location of apartment No. 1122 at the Domicilio apartment complex.

On July 15, agents with the FBI, IRS and US Postal Service flew to San Jose to triangulate Rigmaiden’s location using the stingray. They worked with technical agents from the San Francisco FBI’s Wireless Intercept and Tracking Team to conduct the real-time tracking.

According to Rigmaiden, the agents drove around the cell site areas gathering information about signal range and radio frequencies for each cell site sector. “The radio frequency information was needed so that the FBI technical agents could properly configure their StingRay and KingFish for use in cell site emulator mode,” Rigmaiden writes. “By referencing a list of all the radio frequencies already in use, the FBI was able to choose an unused frequency for use by its emulated cellular network that would not interfere with the various FCC licensed cellular networks already operating in the noted area.”

The next day, Verizon Wireless surreptitiously reprogrammed Rigmaiden’s air card so that it would recognize the FBI’s stingray as a legitimate cell site and connect to it “prior to attempting connections with actual Verizon Wireless cell sites.” The FBI needed Verizon to reprogram the device because it otherwise was configured to reject rogue, unauthorized cell sites, Rigmaiden notes.

On July 16, the FBI placed 32 voice calls to the air card between 11am and 5pm. Each time the air card was notified that a call was coming in, it dropped its data connection and went into idle mode. At the same time, it sent real-time cell site location information to Verizon, which forwarded the information to the FBI’s DCS-3000 servers, part of the elaborate digital collection system the FBI operates for wiretapping and pen-registers and trap-and-traces. From the FBI’s servers, the location data was transmitted wirelessly through a VPN to the FBI’s technical agents “lurking in the streets of Santa Clara” with the StingRay.

At this point, the StingRay took over and began to broadcast its signal to force the air card — and any other wireless devices in the area — to connect to it, so that agents could zoom-in on Rigmaiden’s location.

“Because the defendant attempted to keep his aircard continuously connected to the Internet, the FBI only had a very short window of time to force the aircard to handoff its signal to the StingRay after each surreptitious voice call [and] the FBI needed to repeatedly call the aircard in order to repeatedly boot it offline over the six hours of surreptitious phone calls,” Rigmaiden writes. “Each few minute window of time that followed each denial-of-service attack (i.e., surreptitious phone call) was used by the FBI to move its StingRay, while in cell site emulator mode, to various positions until it was close enough to the aircard to force an Idle State Route Update (i.e., handoff).”

Rigmaiden maintains that once the connection was made, the StingRay wrote data to the air card to extend the connection and also began to “interrogate” the air card to get it to broadcast its location. The FBI used the Harris AmberJack antenna to deliver highly-directional precision signals to the device, and moved the StingRay around to various locations in order to triangulate the precise location of the air card inside the Domicilio Apartments complex.

According to Rigmaiden, agents also transmitted Reverse Power Control bits to his air card to get it to transmit its signals at “a higher power than it would have normally transmitted if it were accessing cellular service through an actual Verizon Wireless cell site.”

Once agents had tracked the device to the Domicilio Apartments complex, they switched out the StingRay for the handheld KingFish device to locate Rigmaiden’s apartment within the complex.

Around 1am on July 17, an FBI agent sent a text message to another FBI agent stating, “[w]e are down to an apt complex….” By 2:42 am, one of the FBI technical agents sent a text message to someone stating that they had “[f]ound the card” and that agents were “working on a plan for arrest.”

Agents still didn’t know who was in the apartment — since Rigmaiden had used an assumed identity to lease the unit — but they were able to stake out the apartment complex and engage in more traditional investigative techniques to gather more intelligence about who lived in unit 1122. On August 3, while the apartment was still under surveillance, Rigmaiden left the unit. Agents followed him a short distance until Rigmaiden caught on that he was being followed. After a brief foot chase, he was arrested.

Rigmaiden and the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation have argued that the government did not obtain a legitimate warrant to conduct the intrusive surveillance through the stingray. They say it’s indicative of how the government has used stingrays in other cases without proper disclosure to judges about how they work, and have asked the court to suppress evidence gathered through the use of the device.

U.S. District Court Judge David Campbell is expected to rule on the motion to suppress within a few weeks.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...n-aircard/all/





Idaho Restricts Drone Use by Police Agencies Amid Privacy Concerns
Laura Zuckerman

Idaho's Republican governor signed a law on Thursday that restricts use of drone aircraft by police and other public agencies as the use of pilotless aircraft inside U.S. borders is increasing. The measure aims to protect privacy rights.

In approving the law, which requires law enforcement to obtain warrants to collect evidence using drones in most cases, Idaho becomes the second U.S. state after Virginia to restrict uses of pilotless aircraft over privacy concerns.

"We're trying to prevent high-tech window-peeping," Idaho Senate Assistant Majority Leader Chuck Winder, sponsor of the measure in the Republican-led Idaho legislature, told Reuters earlier this year as the bill was pending in the legislature.

Current federal regulations sharply limit the number and types of drones that can fly in American airspace to just a few dozen law enforcement agencies, including one in Idaho, public agencies including the Department of Homeland Security and universities for scientific research.

But unmanned aircraft are expected to be widely permitted in coming years, raising fears about misuse of miniature devices that can carry cameras which capture video and still images by day and by night.

Lawmakers in Idaho and more than a dozen states this year introduced legislation to safeguard privacy in the face of an emerging market the unmanned aerial vehicle industry forecasts will drive $89 billion in worldwide expenditures over the next decade.

The measure Idaho Governor C.L. "Butch" Otter signed into law on Thursday requires police to obtain warrants to use drones to collect evidence about suspected criminal activity unless it involves illegal drugs or unless the unmanned aircraft is being used for public emergencies or search-and-rescue missions.

The Idaho bill, approved last week by the state Senate and the state House of Representatives, also bans authorities, or anyone else, from using drones to conduct surveillance on people or their property, including agricultural operations, without written consent.

Idaho's Republican governor couldn't be immediately reached for comment.

Americans are most familiar with drones because of the use of armed, unmanned aircraft by the United States for counter terrorism operations against Islamist militants in countries like Pakistan and Yemen.

The majority of unarmed drones expected to operate in U.S. airspace when restrictions are rolled back by the Federal Aviation Administration in 2015 weigh less than 55 pounds and fly below 400 feet, according to a September report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

Cash-strapped law enforcement agencies see small drones, which cost as little as $30,000, as money-saving, low-manpower tools that could locate illegal marijuana farms, seek missing children and track dangerous fugitives.

Yet worries about widespread snooping persist. In February, privacy concerns prompted the Virginia legislature to put a hold on drone use for two years, and grounded a plan by Seattle police to deploy two camera-equipped drones.

Civil uses for drones would likely emerge first after 2015, while a commercial market would develop more slowly as airspace issues are resolved, the GAO report shows. Possible uses include pipeline inspection, crop dusting and traffic monitoring.

The FAA's goal is to eventually allow, to the greatest extent possible, routine drone operations in U.S. airspace.

(Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Todd Eastham)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...93B03S20130412





Google Chief Urges Action to Regulate Mini-Drones
BBC

The influential head of Google, Eric Schmidt, has called for civilian drone technology to be regulated, warning about privacy and security concerns.

Cheap miniature versions of the unmanned aircraft used by militaries could fall into the wrong hands, he told the UK's Guardian newspaper.

Quarrelling neighbours, he suggested, might end up buzzing each other with private surveillance drones.

He also warned of the risk of terrorists using the new technology.

Mr Schmidt is believed to have close relations with US President Barack Obama, whom he advises on matters of science and technology.

"You're having a dispute with your neighbour," he told The Guardian in an interview printed on Saturday.

"How would you feel if your neighbour went over and bought a commercial observation drone that they can launch from their backyard. It just flies over your house all day. How would you feel about it?"

Warning of mini-drones' potential as a terrorist weapon, he said: "I'm not going to pass judgment on whether armies should exist, but I would prefer to not spread and democratise the ability to fight war to every single human being."

"It's got to be regulated... It's one thing for governments, who have some legitimacy in what they're doing, but have other people doing it... it's not going to happen."

Small drones, such as flying cameras, are already available worldwide, and non-military surveillance were recently introduced to track poachers in the remote Indian state of Assam.

The US and Israel have led the way in recent years in using drones as weapons of war as well as for surveillance.

America's Federal Aviation Administration is currently exploring how commercial drones, or unmanned aircraft systems, can be safely introduced into US airspace.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22134898





The Freedom From Information Act

The U.S. government needs to takes transparency more seriously.
Thomas Claburn

In June 2007, I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to learn more about the basis for Google's complaint that Microsoft's implementation of desktop search in Windows Vista violated the terms of its 2002 antitrust consent agreement.

In September 2011, I was notified that material relevant to my request would be provided, with a $15 fee to cover copying costs. I sent the check the following month and it was cashed in November 2011. It then took more than a year of hectoring the Department of Justice and the intercession of the Office of Government Information Services to actually get the "responsive materials." The documents arrived in late March.

After six years, the truth can finally be told. What follows is an excerpt from an email sent by Kulpreet Rana, Google's director of intellectual property, to Justice Department attorney Aaron Hoag, dated Oct. 4, 2006.

Thanking Hoag for taking the time to meet the previous week, Rana wrote, "During that meeting, you raised a few questions that we wanted to follow-up on. Rather than waiting to get all of the answers, I wanted to get back to you on some of the more pressing issues...probably the most important of which is REDACTED."

This goes on for an entire page. It's a gray box of nothing.

On the next page, Rana's letter concludes, "I hope this is helpful and am happy to answer any follow-up questions you might have about the issue. ..."

The dozens of email messages provided in response to my FOIA request look just like this: Page after page of gray where text should be. Only the email addresses, the signatures and the legal and social boilerplate have been left intact.

The Justice Department's response makes a mockery of the Freedom of Information Act. I'm reminded of a line in the song Know Your Rights, by The Clash: "You have the right to free speech, as long as you're not dumb enough to actually try it."

You're free to have all the information you want, provided it's not informative. No wonder Wikileaks provoked an immune response from the U.S. At a time when consumers just won't stop sharing information and companies just won't stop collecting it, our government has all the privacy it requires to limit inquiry.

Last December, a study published by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) found that the number of lawsuits to obtain documents sought through FOIA requests increased during President Obama's first term compared to last term of President Bush. This is particularly noteworthy because President Obama began his first term promising greater support for open government.

In January 2009, President Obama issued a memo that begins, "A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency. As Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, 'sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.' In our democracy, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which encourages accountability through transparency, is the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open Government. At the heart of that commitment is the idea that accountability is in the interest of the Government and the citizenry alike."

The Department of Justice is accountable to the public. If Google enlists a public entity to investigate whether Microsoft's search implementation in Windows Vista violated Microsoft's antitrust settlement, the public deserves to know substance of Google's complaint and the specifics of the way the government is enforcing antitrust law.

I'm aware that there are statutory exemptions to FOIA that allow the government to withhold certain information. But when the information that is released has no substance, what's the point of releasing it at all?

There are nine types of exemptions. Information may be withheld for reasons of national security; to protect internal personnel records; to protect information specifically exempted from disclosure by statute; to protect trade secrets; to protect internal government communication that would not be available by law; to protect privacy; to protect on-going law enforcement proceedings; to protect matters related to reports for regulators of financial institutions; and to protect geological information such as maps and wells.

I'm not arguing FOIA exemptions should be eliminated entirely. Rather they should be applied much more sparingly. Together, FOIA exemptions should form fig leaves rather than burkas. Redact the names if necessary but save the substance.

Here's another email revealed by my FOIA request, from Harry Saal, a member of thetc.org, The Technical Committee, a group formed to monitor Microsoft's compliance with its antitrust settlement (and forbidden from discussing deliberations with the press). Saal's email is to Skip Stritter, another thetc.org member, with others cc'd.

"Skip: your Thursday email stated:"

REDACTED

"To which GeneB replied:"

REDACTED

"Skip Stritter wrote:"

REDACTED

That's not information. It's routing data.

The Justice Department's response to my FOIA request reads as follows: "Enclosed are 174 pages of documents responsive to your request. Sixty pages are released in their entirety. Certain portions of the remaining 114 pages reflect confidential business information; Antitrust Division attorney work product and the deliberative process of Division personnel; and information the disclosure of which could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy. ..."

The letter goes on to detail why 406 other pages of relevant documents are being withheld in their entirety. And that's to say nothing of 357 pages of printed court documents from U.S. vs. Microsoft sent to me separately, as a courtesy. So much for the paperless office.

You might think that among the 114 partial pages and 60 full pages of material, there might be something that sheds light on Google's objections to search in Windows Vista.

But you'd be wrong. The pages that the Justice Department saw fit to release include news articles from the New York Times, Reuters and other publications about Google's complaint. The entirety of the "responsive material" either has been available to anyone with an Internet connection for years or consists of names, salutations, thank yous and nothing else. Google's complaint itself, which I've sought from Google and been denied, which is mentioned in the released documents, remains a mystery.

We know the result of Microsoft's agreement with the Department of Justice, announced June 19, 2007, to resolve Google's complaint. Microsoft promised: to provide a way for users and original equipment manufacturers to select the default desktop search program in Windows Vista; to ensure that Windows launches the default desktop search program whenever Windows launches a top-level window to accept search queries; and to affirm Vista's search index will run in the background and cede computing resources to other applications (rather than running concurrently with Google Desktop Search and slowing things down). But beyond that details are sketchy.

A 10-page letter, dated June 1, 2007, from Google's chief legal officer David Drummond to then U.S. Assistant Attorney General Thomas O. Barnett, reads thus: "Dear Assistant Attorney General Barnett: Thank you for meeting with us last week to discuss REACTED." The remainder of the first page is a gray box, followed by nine more pages graced with gray rectangular redaction overlays.

Arguably, none of this matters. Microsoft is struggling to remain relevant in the mobile era. Google's search business is doing just fine. Let it be water under the bridge.

But the dwindling relevance of Windows Vista argues for greater disclosure, not continued stonewalling. If a six-year-old technical conflict between Microsoft and Google is truly inconsequential, that's a good reason for the details to receive public scrutiny.

And this isn't just about ancient history. The application of antitrust law remains hugely important to technology companies, as can be seen from Google's recent close-call with the Federal Trade Commission. One of the reasons I want to understand the substance of Google's complaint is to see how the company's arguments might apply to more current technical disputes and to determine why the Justice Department initially wanted to reject Google's complaint and then accepted it later on.

Microsoft was forced to make changes in Windows Vista to accommodate third-party search products. Companies and individuals deserve to know more about the conditions for government-mandated interoperability, given the technical and contractual ways in which Apple, Google and other companies lock competitors out or tilt the playing field.

This matters because the Freedom of Information Act is subverted when compliance is indistinguishable from non-compliance.

If the government's interpretation of FOIA is that it can release blank pages to meet with its legal obligations, journalism is diminished and pushed towards the Wikileaks model. There has to be more to public accountability than government-authorized leaks, whistleblowers who risk prosecution and data the government fumbles into public view through incompetence. The government needs to release real information when it agrees to do so, or to refuse and face a court challenge if disclosure is deemed impermissible.
http://www.informationweek.com/gover...-act/240152471





WikiLeaks' 'Kissinger Cables' is Largest Release Ever With Over 1.7 Million Diplomatic Records
Sam Byford

WikiLeaks has returned with its largest ever release of formerly confidential information. The "Kissinger Cables" include over 1.7 million diplomatic records from 1973 to 1976, of which 205,901 are connected to controversial US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. In total, the release is around 700 million words long, and contains what WikiLeaks describes as "significant revelations about US involvements with fascist dictatorships, particularly in Latin America, under Franco's Spain (including about the Spanish royal family) and in Greece under the regime of the Colonels." However, rather than receiving leaked information from a source, for this release WikiLeaks has created a searchable database of public records.

WikiLeaks says that although the files should have been reviewed for declassification after 25 years, the government has repeatedly attempted to reclassify them; furthermore, there are no diplomatic records from later than 1976 available. In order to make the earlier documents accessible, WikiLeaks obtained all the files from the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) and collated them into a single, searchable database.

The Kissinger Cables form the largest part of WikiLeaks' Public Library of US Diplomacy (PlusD), which also launches today and stores a total of two million records for perusal. While the release won't be as explosive as previous leaks on still-classified events such as the Iraq war, WikiLeaks' aim is to make government documents easier to access for the public. "The US administration cannot be trusted to maintain the history of its interactions with the world," said founder Julian Assange. "Fortunately, an organisation with an unbroken record in resisting censorship attempts now has a copy."
http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/8/419...launches-plusd





WikiLeaks' 'PLUS D' Aims To Digitize America's Secret Diplomatic History
Andy Greenberg

Not so long ago, WikiLeaks represented the world’s most radical group of investigative journalists. Lately, Julian Assange‘s organization has been acting more like radical librarians.

On Sunday night, WikiLeaks announced the Public Library of United States Diplomacy, (PLUS D) an effort to digitize both secret and formerly secret documents from U.S. diplomatic history. The group has started with a searchable archive that includes the 250,000 leaked State Department memos it had previously titled Cablegate and added to them 1.7 million files from the State Department during the 1973 to 1976 tenure of Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State. In total, the archive includes about a billion words.

“The collection covers US involvements in, and diplomatic or intelligence reporting on, every country on earth,” WikiLeaks describes the documents on its website. “It is the single most significant body of geopolitical material ever published.”

The largely historical project represents a marked change for WikiLeaks, which until now has primarily focused on publishing leaked secret material with contemporary news value. The 1970s State Department files WikiLeaks has included in PLUS D were already declassified, and most of them were previously available in the databases of the National Archives and Records Agency.

But Kristinn Hrafnsson, a spokesperson for WikiLeaks, said in a phone interview that the group hasn’t strayed from its mission. “These are hidden treasures, and very hard for the general public to get access to,” he says. “One form of secrecy is complexity. That’s the reason why we decided to merge these files with our existing cables and put a lot of effort into making a user-friendly and accessible database.”

WikiLeaks spent months converting the nearly 2 million NARA files from PDF documents to text files, correcting typographic errors and adding metadata to make the files more easily searchable. Aside from having been stored in a difficult-to-access format by NARA, WikiLeaks notes that many of the files were corrupted by technical errors made the U.S. State Department, leaving weeks- and months-long gaps in the data in places. All Top Secret declassified documents were excluded, too, because no digital versions of them were made available.

PLUS D isn’t the first release from WikiLeaks to show the group’s increasing historic focus. Its last publication was the Detainee Policies, a collection of standard operating procedure manuals from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay from 2002 to 2004.

The shift towards older documents may be a result in part of WikiLeaks’ lack of an anonymous submission system since late 2010. Since then, the majority of WikiLeaks’ new material, such as emails stolen from the private intelligence firm Stratfor and from the Syrian government, has reportedly been given to WikiLeaks by the hacker group Anonymous.

WikiLeaks’ Hrafnsson emphasized PLUS D’s importance regardless of the fact that the material wasn’t leaked to WikiLeaks. ” Our projects are varied,” he says. “ This is a public service that should have been in the hands of the government.”

Hrafnsson noted that the U.S. government has in some cases attempted to reclassify documents, and WikiLeaks’ press release refers to a 2006 study by the U.S. National Security Archives that found that 55,000 pages of declassified documents had later been made secret again. “In many ways,” Hrafnsson added, “the government can’t be trusted with its own archives.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygree...matic-history/





Sleaze-Raking French Website Has Political Elite Quaking
Emmanuel Jarry and Alexandria Sage

A fledgling investigative website has made its mark as the top French media exposing government sleaze, with its coup against a minister leaving national newspapers playing catch-up and other politicians quaking.

After a late-2000s debut uncovering alleged graft led to the career downfall of a conservative minister, Mediapart has toppled a second minister, this time in the Socialist government, showing it has no allegiance to left or right.

Its disclosure that the man in charge of public finances had an undeclared Swiss bank account until mid-March has created the biggest sleaze scandal of President Francois Hollande's 11-month-old Socialist government.

Edwy Plenel, a longtime investigative reporter who founded Mediapart in 2008, said on Tuesday a shake-up had been long overdue in a political establishment used to newspapers turning a blind eye to peccadillos.

Unlike in Britain, where tabloids rake over the private lives of public figures hunting for the slightest lapse, extra-marital affairs and minor corruption often stays under the radar in France due to a long tradition of media respecting privacy.

"For too long there has been a tradition of 'journalism of government'. One that takes its legitimacy from those in power and which has forgotten that it is in the service of the people, of the law and citizens' right to know," Plenel said.

The erstwhile budget minister, Jerome Cahuzac, is now under investigation for allegedly laundering proceeds of tax fraud and Hollande is scrabbling to stem the scandal, rushing through a new law on moral standards in public life and promising to publish ministers' assets by next week.

Traditional print media were sceptical of a Mediapart report first run in December and repeatedly denied by Cahuzac, but last week Cahuzac owned up to the bank account and said he had been caught "in a spiral of lies".

MAKING PROFIT

Showing off his newsroom of some 30 reporters in a discreet backstreet in eastern Paris, Plenel told Reuters with a smile that the Cahuzac affair could just be the start of the story.

"We should be able to publish information that stirs things up," he added.

Mediapart caused a storm in conservative Nicolas Sarkozy's government with a 2010 report saying his UMP party had enjoyed illegal funding from billionaire heiress Liliane Bettencourt.

Sarkozy's labor minister Eric Woerth, also UMP treasurer and a former budget minister in the same government, lost his job in a reshuffle and was later placed under formal investigation for illicit party financing.

Sarkozy is now under investigation himself in the affair. Both Sarkozy and Woerth say they have done no wrong.

Mediapart aside, most investigative reporting in France is done by the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaine, second only to the puppet news show Les Guignols in terms of irreverance.

The highbrow Le Monde dug into the Bettencourt scandal after Mediapart broke the story, but the conservative Le Figaro and the left-wing Liberation have mostly tended to avoid ruffling feathers on their respective sides of the political spectrum.

"In France, unlike the Anglo-Saxon tradition, we don't have a real tradition of investigative journalism. We're surprised when journalists investigate," said Christian Delporte, a professor of media history at the University of Versailles.

Liberation sought to play catch up this week, reporting that Mediapart was looking into whether Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius also had a Swiss account, but Fabius flatly denied he did and Plenel said the story bemused him.

Mediapart is also standing out by turning a profit from its 65,000 online subscriptions while newspapers struggle with falling readership. It broke even in 2010 and posted a 700,000 euro profit in 2012 on turnover of 6 million. Plenel said 1,000 people were signing up each day since the Cahuzac story.

The Canard Enchaine, wafer-thin yet jam-packed with political gossip and satire, also makes money.

Delporte said a thirst for more ruthless reporting in today's world of social media would only increase.

"For years politicians have had a certain arrogance vis-a-vis society but now it will be a lot more difficult," he said.

(Writing by Catherine Bremer; Editing by Mark John and Alison Williams)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...9380XM20130409





Shodan: The Scariest Search Engine on the Internet
David Goldman

"When people don't see stuff on Google, they think no one can find it. That's not true."

That's according to John Matherly, creator of Shodan, the scariest search engine on the Internet.

Unlike Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), which crawls the Web looking for websites, Shodan navigates the Internet's back channels. It's a kind of "dark" Google, looking for the servers, webcams, printers, routers and all the other stuff that is connected to and makes up the Internet. (Shodan's site was slow to load Monday following the publication of this story.)

Shodan runs 24/7 and collects information on about 500 million connected devices and services each month.

It's stunning what can be found with a simple search on Shodan. Countless traffic lights, security cameras, home automation devices and heating systems are connected to the Internet and easy to spot.

Shodan searchers have found control systems for a water park, a gas station, a hotel wine cooler and a crematorium. Cybersecurity researchers have even located command and control systems for nuclear power plants and a particle-accelerating cyclotron by using Shodan.

What's really noteworthy about Shodan's ability to find all of this -- and what makes Shodan so scary -- is that very few of those devices have any kind of security built into them.

"You can log into just about half of the Internet with a default password," said HD Moore, chief security officer of Rapid 7, who operates a private version of a Shodan-like database for his own research purposes. "It's a massive security failure."

A quick search for "default password" reveals countless printers, servers and system control devices that use "admin" as their user name and "1234" as their password. Many more connected systems require no credentials at all -- all you need is a Web browser to connect to them.

In a talk given at last year's Defcon cybersecurity conference, independent security penetration tester Dan Tentler demonstrated how he used Shodan to find control systems for evaporative coolers, pressurized water heaters, and garage doors.

He found a car wash that could be turned on and off and a hockey rink in Denmark that could be defrosted with a click of a button. A city's entire traffic control system was connected to the Internet and could be put into "test mode" with a single command entry. And he also found a control system for a hydroelectric plant in France with two turbines generating 3 megawatts each.

Scary stuff, if it got into the wrong hands.

"You could really do some serious damage with this," Tentler said, in an understatement.

So why are all these devices connected with few safeguards? Some things that are designed to be connected to the Internet, such as door locks that can be controlled with your iPhone, are generally believed to be hard to find. Security is an afterthought.

A bigger issue is that many of these devices shouldn't even be online at all. Companies will often buy systems that can enable them to control, say, a heating system with a computer. How do they connect the computer to the heating system? Rather than connect them directly, many IT departments just plug them both into a Web server, inadvertently sharing them with the rest of the world.

"Of course there's no security on these things," said Matherly, "They don't belong on the Internet in the first place."

The good news is that Shodan is almost exclusively used for good.

Matherly, who completed Shodan more than three years ago as a pet project, has limited searches to just 10 results without an account, and 50 with an account. If you want to see everything Shodan has to offer, Matherly requires more information about what you're hoping to achieve -- and a payment.

Penetration testers, security professionals, academic researchers and law enforcement agencies are the primary users of Shodan. Bad actors may use it as a starting point, Matherly admits. But he added that cybercriminals typically have access to botnets -- large collections of infected computers -- that are able to achieve the same task without detection.

To date, most cyberattacks have focused on stealing money and intellectual property. Bad guys haven't yet tried to do harm by blowing up a building or killing the traffic lights in a city.

Security professionals are hoping to avoid that scenario by spotting these unsecured, connected devices and services using Shodan, and alerting those operating them that they're vulnerable. In the meantime, there are too many terrifying things connected to the Internet with no security to speak of just waiting to be attacked.
http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/08/tech...curity/shodan/





The Rise of Everyday Hackers

Veracode released its annual State of Software Security Report, which includes research on software vulnerability trends as well as predictions on how these flaws could be exploited if left unaddressed and what this may mean for organizations’ security professionals.

Research suggests there will be a rise in everyday hackers. A simple Google search for “SQL injection hack” provides 1.74 million results, including videos with explicit instructions on how to exploit SQL injection vulnerabilities.

The ready availability of this information makes it possible for less technically skilled hackers to take advantage of this common flaw.

Although SQL injection flaws are easy to identify and fix, Veracode found that 32 percent of web applications are still affected by SQL injection vulnerabilities. As a result, as many as 30 percent of breaches in 2013 will be from SQL injection attacks.

“Despite significant improvements in awareness of the importance of securing software, we are not seeing the dramatic decreases in exploitable coding flaws that should be expected,” said Chris Eng, vice president of research, Veracode.

“For each customer, development team or application that has become more secure, there are an equal number that have not. Veracode’s 2013 State of Software Security Research Report provides organizations with ways to reduce the success of potential attacks on company infrastructure by understanding the threat to the application layer and outlines the implications of these trends if organizations continue on their current paths,” Eng added.

The research also concluded that the leading cause of security breaches and data loss for organizations is insecure software. The report found that 70 percent of software failed to comply with enterprise security policies on their first submission for security testing.

This indicates that though there have been improvements in organizations fixing flaws within their existing applications, the demand for rapid development means new vulnerabilities are constantly being introduced into their software portfolio.

“The amount of risk an organization accepts should be a strategic business decision – not the aftermath of a particular development project,” said Chris Wysopal, co-founder and CTO, Veracode. “The time for organizations to act is now. My hope is that readers will use this research to estimate their current application risk, and then consider how they can act to improve the security posture of their organization by addressing the applications that are currently in development and/or production.”

Veracode also predicts:

Average CISO tenure will continue to decline.
A decrease in job satisfaction/higher turn-over for security professionals.
Default encryption, not ”opt-in” will become the norm for mobile applications.

The complete report is available here (registration required).
https://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=14713





Hitting Back At Hackers: Why "Strikeback" Is Doomed To Fail
Corey Nachreiner

Guest author Corey Nachreiner, CISSP, is director of security strategy for WatchGuard Technologies.

Between agenda-pushing hacktivists, money-grubbing cyber criminals, and — more recently — belligerent nation states, there is no shortage of attackers breaking into networks, stealing trade secrets and generally wreaking havoc throughout IT infrastructure.

Even the U.S. government has noticed, with the latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) warning that the country is the target of a major cyber espionage campaign from China. In fact, network penetrations have become so commonplace that President Obama recently signed a cyber-security executive order in hopes of fortifying our defenses, and encouraging the government and critical private sector organizations to share intelligence.

Considering this deluge of aggressive and costly security breaches, it’s no wonder that some people are getting frustrated enough to contemplate striking back directly against our attackers. While giving cyber criminals a taste of their own medicine certainly sounds appealing, most forms of so-called "Strikeback" have no place in private business.

What Is Strikeback?

The idea of launching a counter attacks against cyber criminals is not new. Security geeks at information security conferences have been discussing counter-hacking and proactive defense for years.

After all, many in the cyber security community are just as capable of breaching systems as the enemy (if not more so). In fact, the “black hats” often leverage tools and code created by “white hat” security professionals. Lately, though, this idea of striking back against attackers has shifted from lighthearted fantasy to potentially disturbing reality - some that security companies have even begun offering strikeback solutions.

There are different ways companies have started approaching strikeback initiatives. They have loosely evolved into three general categories:

Legal Strikeback: This is the least offensive form of strikeback. It’s where organizations, in cooperation with the authorities, gather as much intelligence as possible about attackers — typically by following the money trail — and then use any legal maneuvering possible to try and prosecute attackers.

Passive Strikeback: This is essentially cyber entrapment. An organization installs a sacrificial system, baited with booby trapped files or Trojan-laced information an attacker might desire.

Active Strikeback: In this approach, an organization identifies an IP address from which the attack appears to be coming, and launches a direct counterattack.

What’s Wrong With Strikeback?

Unfortunately, direct strikeback measures have huge inherent risks:.

Targeting: The biggest problem with strikeback is that the Internet provides anonymity, making it very hard to know who’s really behind an attack. It's all too likely that strikebacks could impact innocent victims. For example, attackers have started to purposely plant false flags into their code, suggesting it came from another organization in order to sabotage that company.

Geography: Another key issue is that Internet crimes tend to pass through many geographies and legal jurisdictions. Domestic strikebacks invite potential legal problems, but cross-border actions have even wider ramifications.

Legal: Additionally, most strikeback activity is illegal. It is against the law for the average person to track down and punish a burglar who ransacked a house, and the same principles hold true for cybercrimes. If an organization uses a booby trapped document to install a Trojan on the attacker’s network, it is technically breaking the same type of computer fraud and abuse laws that the attacker broke to steal information in the first place.

Revenge: When it comes down to it, strikeback is simply revenge. If a network has already been breached, striking back against the attacker typically doesn’t recover stolen data or repair damage that has already been done. It's almost always better to pursue legal investigations and prosecutions through the proper channels.

Strikeback simply doesn’t belong in private business. It offers no real advantages to most organizations, and it carries serious risks that far outweigh the short-lived satisfaction of revenge. Instead, companies should focus their security strategies on well-implemented, carefully monitored, multi-layer defenses designed to keep cyber criminals from breaching their networks in the first place.
http://readwrite.com/2013/04/09/hitt...doomed-to-fail





Hackers Could Start Abusing Electric Car Chargers to Cripple the Grid, Researcher Says

If we don't start securing systems today, it will become a problem in 10 years, the researcher said
Loek Essers

Hackers could use vulnerable charging stations to prevent the charging of electric vehicles in a certain area, or possibly even use the vulnerabilities to cripple parts of the electricity grid, a security researcher said during the Hack in the Box conference in Amsterdam on Thursday.

While electric cars and EV charging systems are still in their infancy, they could become a more common way to travel within the next 10 years. If that happens, it is important that the charging systems popping up in cities around the world are secure in order to prevent attackers from accessing and tempering with them, said Ofer Shezaf, product manager security solutions at HP ArcSight. At the moment, they are not secure at all, he said.

"Essentially a charging station is a computer on the street," Shezaf said. "And it is not just a computer on the street but it is also a network on the street."

Users want their cars to charge as quickly as possible but not all electric cars can be charged at once because the providers of charging stations have to take the local and regional circuit capacity in mind, said Shezaf. "Therefore we need smart charging," he said.

But installing smart charging systems means that the charging stations on the street need to be connected, so the amount of energy is distributed in such a way that electricity grids are not overloaded, he said. But when charging stations are connected, multiple charging stations can be abused if an hacker can access them, Shezaf said.

The easiest way is to physically access the charging stations. "There are systems on the street and it is very easy to access the computer," Shezaf said. "When you get to the equipment, reverse engineering it is actually a lot easier than you think."

Hackers could take apart the systems to determine components and analyze and debug the firmware, he said. By doing this they can potentially spot convenient eavesdropping points and get encryption keys, Shezaf said, who added that he based his research on public sources, and in most cases on documentation from vendors' websites.

Charging stations can be configured by opening them, placing a manual electric DIP switch to configuration mode, connecting an Ethernet cross cable and firing up a browser to get access to the configuration environment, he said. In at least one type of charging station this kind of access doesn't require any authentication, Shezaf found. "You go and open the box with a key and that is the last security measure you meet," he said.

Some charging stations are also connected using RS-485 short-range communications networks used for inexpensive local networking, Shezaf said. Those connections have a very low bandwidth and high latency, are commonly used and have no inherent security, he added.

And while it all depends on the application, bandwidth and latency limits of the RS-485 networks makes eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle attacks simple, according to Shezaf, who described several other potential vulnerabilities during his presentation.

Using these methods, hackers could start influencing charge planning or influence and stop charges, he said. If no electric car can charge for a day when 30 percent of all cars in a country are electric, this could become problematic, he said. "If someone can prevent charging for everyone in a small area you have a major influence on life. In a larger area it might be a really really big problem," Shezaf said.

"If somebody finds a way to confuse the smart car charging system, the denial of service can not only hit charging cars, but also the electricity system," he said.

While risks may be small today, it is time to start securing charging systems, Shezaf said. There should be more standardization in the charging sector, preferably using open standards, he said. But basically "we just have to pay more attention and spend more money," he said, adding that at the moment too little of both is happening.

"We shouldn't be relaxing now. The issues will become real when electric cars become real. If we don't start today it won't be secure in 10 years," he said.
https://www.networkworld.com/news/20...ic-268644.html





South Korea Probe Says North Behind Cyber Attack: Report
AFP

An official investigation into a major cyber attack on South Korean banks and broadcasters last month has determined North Korea's military intelligence agency was responsible, officials said Wednesday.

The probe into access records and the malicious codes used in the attack pointed to the North's military Reconnaissance General Bureau as the source, the Korea Internet and Security Agency (KISA) said.

"It was a premeditated, well-planned cyber attack by North Korea", a KISA spokesman said.

"We've collected a lot of evidence to determine the North's Reconnaissance General Bureau led the attack, which had been prepared for at least eight months," he said.

A joint team of civilian and government experts traced the origin to six personal computers used in North Korea.

In order to spread malware in target computers, the hackers went through 49 different places in 10 countries including South Korea, the investigation found. The North had used 22 of the places in past attacks.

The March 20 attack completely shut down the networks of TV broadcasters KBS, MBC and YTN, and halted financial services and crippled operations at three banks -- Shinhan, NongHyup and Jeju.

It employed malware that can wipe the contents of a computer's hard disk as well as drives connected to the infected computer.

About 48,700 machines including PCs, automatic teller machines and server computers were damaged, KISA said.

The attack came days after North Korea had accused South Korea and the United States of being behind a "persistent and intensive" hacking assault that temporarily took a number of its official websites offline.

It also coincided with heightened military tensions on the Korean peninsula, following Pyongyang's nuclear test in February.
https://www.securityweek.com/south-k...-attack-report





Exclusive: Homeland Security Deputy to Quit; Defended Civilian Internet Role
Joseph Menn

The second-ranking official at the Department of Homeland Security said she will resign shortly, ending four years as a champion of a civilian-controlled Internet.

In an exclusive interview with Reuters, Jane Holl Lute, the sole deputy secretary at Homeland Security, said on Monday she would give notice this week and leave to pursue a role in international Internet affairs.

Lute said that she was leaving with the department on a strong footing in Internet matters, with its central role cemented by an executive order on cybersecurity issued by President Barack Obama in February.

The order directs the civilian Department of Homeland Security to steer improvements in protections for private industry, instead of giving the lead to the military's National Security Agency.

The preeminence of Homeland Security in patrolling the Internet is a big change from when Lute arrived there.

"The national narrative on cyber has evolved," she said. "It's not a war zone, and we certainly cannot manage it as if were a war zone. We're not going to manage it as if it were an intelligence program or one big law-enforcement operation."

The participation of the military and intelligence agencies in monitoring the Internet has not been definitively resolved.

The House of Representatives Intelligence Committee plans to consider a bill on Wednesday that critics say would allow direct sharing of company data with the NSA.

Lute's planned exit follows the recent retirement of deputy under secretary for cybersecurity Mark Weatherford and others with expertise.

"Jane Lute was a relentless voice of clarity in helping to define the proper purpose and role of government in securing the Internet," said Google executive Vint Cerf, a founder of the Internet and co-author of the core protocols for Internet transmission.

"DHS can take advantage of some extraordinary talent at NSA, but it's wise for us to keep that under civilian management. That's the way our Constitution says it's supposed to work."

Lute came to the department under Secretary Janet Napolitano from the United Nations, where she served as an assistant secretary-general supporting peacekeeping missions. She worked at the National Security Council under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and before that in signals intelligence in the U.S. Army.

Colleagues said her military background helped her stand up against defense officials, including NSA Director Keith Alexander, as they pushed for a greater role.

Speaking privately, these colleagues recalled a meeting in 2011 about expanding a Pentagon pilot program for sharing classified threat information among defense contractors and federal agencies. Lute would not allow it to be expanded unless Homeland Security took control, aides said, and ultimately she prevailed.

"We needed to find a way to share information with the private sector" while preserving civil liberties, Lute said.

Obama's executive order creates similar networks between the government and critical industries beyond defense, and the Department of Homeland Security again is in charge.

Lute's supporters outside the government said they hoped her successor at the department also would make fighting for the agency's role in the Internet a priority.

The 200,000-employee department also is responsible for customs enforcement, immigration services, emergency management and transportation safety.

Lute said countries around the world are still grappling with how the Internet should be treated. Though the Pentagon once spoke of cyberspace as a domain to be "dominated," its language is more muted now.

She said Homeland Security needs to attract and retain more highly skilled security experts. Its recruitment efforts have lagged behind those at the NSA, which has more cachet and a stronger reputation for technical ability.

And she said it was "incomprehensible" that Congress has not yet passed broad legislation that would do more on cybersecurity than Obama's executive order. Recent Senate bills would give companies legal protection for sharing threat data with each other and with DHS.

"We want to build the most secure cyber-economy on Earth," Lute said. "We know what we need to do for that to happen, and the inability of legislation to pass to this point is inexplicable."

Lute said she was encouraged by some movement in the Congress in the past few months and is now more optimistic that a law would pass this year.

(Reporting by Joseph Menn in San Francisco; editing by Christopher Wilson)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...9380DL20130409





Today, We Save the Internet (Again): Fix the CFAA!

Read this if you want to stay out of jail.
Cory Doctorow

When my friend Aaron Swartz committed suicide in January, he'd been the subject of a DoJ press-release stating that the Federal prosecutors who had indicted him were planning on imprisoning him for 25 years for violating the terms of service of a site that hosted academic journals. Aaron had downloaded millions of articles from that website, but that wasn't the problem. He was licensed to read all the articles they hosted. The problem was, the way he downloaded the articles violated the terms and conditions of the service. And bizarrely -- even though the website didn't want to press the matter -- the DoJ decided that this was an imprisonable felony, under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which makes it a crime to "exceed your authorization" on any online service.

The DoJ reasoned that if the law said that doing anything "unauthorized" was a crime, and if the long, gnarly hairball of legalese that no one reads before clicking "I agree" set out what you were allowed to do, then violations of that "agreement" were a felony.

Aaron's death galvanized some Congresscritters to do something about this oversight. The ancient CFAA predated the widespread use of terms of service in everyday activities like hanging out with your friends, reading the newspaper, getting an education or signing up for a dating service. Congress did not intend to create a situation where companies that provided services could put any unreasonable condition they wanted into an "agreement" you might never see ("By using this website, you accept all terms and conditions") and then ask the DoJ to put people in prison for decades if they violated them.

The reform to CFAA was welcome and long overdue. But the DoJ has asked some members of the House Judiciary Committee to make it worse.

Under the amendments, which might be voted on as early as April 10, violating terms of service could be defined as racketeering -- so that you could be prosecuted as though your violation of terms of service made you into a mobster.

They also add "conspiring" to violate terms of service to the list of offenses that are a felony under the CFAA. So you can be thrown in jail just for talking about ways to violate terms of service.

The amendments also make it a felony to obtain information that you are entitled to obtain, if you do so in a way that violates terms of service. My wife and I share some online accounts, including our "family" airmiles account with British Airways, which we both contribute to and use, but only my wife can see the details of them (she signed up for the service, so it's linked to her login). We're both entitled to see those details, but poor service design makes it impossible to do this without sharing a login and password. No problem, except that BA's terms of service forbid this. So looking up my own airmiles, which I earned, and which I'm entitled to see and use, would be a felony under these amendments because I was looking at them in a way that violates BA's terms.

The amendments also include increased powers for seizure of property, which will enable the Feds to take away the assets you might use to defend yourself against a CFAA claim.

This is a trainwreck. It will allow the DoJ to put every single American Internet user in prison at their discretion, because we all violate terms of service every day. For example, Seventeen magazine's terms of service forbid you from visiting its website if you're under eighteen (!), and that means that its 4.5 million underage readers would all be felons under the CFAA, and liable to decades in prison.

The fact that Congress is contemplating this is a testament to its awful authoritarian venality. The fact that they're doing it as part of a reform triggered by Aaron's death is a fucking travesty.

Aaron helped design the widgets that put through 8,000,000 phone calls to Congress about the awfulness of SOPA and killed legislation that everyone on the inside considered unstoppable. Now, Demand Progress -- the group Aaron helped found -- has got another "Tell Congress" widget, which we've embedded for today. You can (and should) embed it too. You can get your own at FixTheCFAA.com, along with a cute tool to put your social media profile photo behind bars and let your friends know what's going on.

Today, we save the Internet. Again.

Demand Justice for Aaron Swartz

http://boingboing.net/2013/04/08/tod...nternet-a.html





‘Secretbook’ Lets You Encode Hidden Messages in Your Facebook Pics
Robert Beckhusen

Facebook is a place where you can share pictures of cute animals and fun activities. Now there’s a browser extension that lets you encode those images with secret, hard-to-detect messages.

That’s the idea behind Secretbook, a browser extension released this week by 21-year-old Oxford University computer science student and former Google intern Owen-Campbell Moore. With the extension, anyone — you, your sister, a terrorist — could share messages hidden in JPEG images uploaded to Facebook without the prying eyes of the company, the government or anyone else noticing or figuring out what the messages say. The only way to unlock them is through a password you create.

“The goal of this research was to demonstrate that JPEG steganography can be performed on social media where it has previously been impossible,” Campbell-Moore tells Danger Room. He says he spent about two months spread out over the last year working on the extension as a research project for the university.

The extension is only available for the Google Chrome browser — Campbell-Moore cites its developer tools and popularity — and the messages are restricted to 140 characters. Less certain is what Facebook thinks; a spokesman declined to comment. But it’s still the first time anyone’s managed to figure out how to automate digital steganography — the practice of concealing messages inside computer files — through Facebook, the world’s biggest social media platform. Unlike cryptography, which uses ciphertext to encrypt messages, steganographic messages are simply hidden where no one would think to look.

For an image, that could be a bunch of pixels or electronic 1s and 0s. In Facebook’s case, they can be hidden among the tons of images uploaded to the site daily.

It wasn’t easy developing the extension. “Many tools for steganography in JPEGs have existed in the past although they have always required that the images are transmitted exactly as they are,” Campbell-Moore says.

This could be a single pixel changed to a different color, and then repeated over several images, spelling out a message — which you can’t see, unless you have the translation key, and know which pixel to look for. But when you upload an image to Facebook, the image is automatically recompressed, which can lower the image quality. If you’ve encoded a secret message in the image, Facebook will garble it. Facebook competitor Google+ doesn’t do this, so you can share encoded messages there without needing an app for it.

So Campbell-Moore replicated Facebook’s recompression algorithm, available in a draft research paper. When encoding a message into an image, the extension automatically compresses the image, as Facebook would. Then it makes lots of “very slight” changes to add redundancy. “This minimizes the amount of change it will undergo when they do recompress it, keeping the damage to the secret message low,” he says.

“Conceptually, imagine storing the message ten times, each in different sections of the photo before it is uploaded and recompressed,” Campbell-Moore adds. “The algorithm can then piece the original message back together correctly, despite each copy stored in the image being slightly damaged.”

Secretbook has to be subtle. It uses Google Chrome’s web extension platform, since Facebook’s in-house apps publicly list their users — which would defeat the purpose of a secrecy tool. Since the extension runs through a web browser without a server connection, the users can’t be detected by network analysis. It’s also hard for Facebook to block or remove permissions, as the extension doesn’t rely on a Facebook API key.

Steganography tools can benefit terrorists as much as they can protect privacy. Campbell-Moore believes steganography certainly can be used by terrorists in a general sense — but terrorists may avoid his method as it’s not entirely foolproof. Since the images contain a large number of changes, someone looking for them could conceivably write an algorithm that tracks down manipulated images. That could limit the extension to “hobbyists and researchers,” he says, rather than militants, or maybe not.

“A researcher could certainly build a simple system for detecting which images have secret messages hidden in them although they would first require access to all 300+ million photos being uploaded to Facebook every day,” Campbell-Moore says. “Which I suspect even the NSA doesn’t currently have, and performing detection on that scale would be very difficult.”

Another problem he encountered: correcting his algorithms so they don’t inadvertently cause changes to the plain areas of some images — which can make the encoded messages easier to detect. Think of a picture of a dog running through grass beneath a cloudless sky. Much better to encode the message in the grass and fur, where there’s a lot of complexity, than a much less complex sky.

Campbell-Moore claims to have solved this, after theorizing that difficulties sorting out the complex regions of an image from the less-complex was a major obstacle for why social media steganographic tools hadn’t come out sooner. If he’s right, get those puppy close-ups ready. There are messages to conceal within them.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/04/secretbook/





Facebook’s ‘Phone’ Is Another Triumph of Mediocrity
Mat Honan

Mark Zuckerberg poses with HTC CEO Peter Chou (left) and AT&T President & CEO Ralph de la Vega after today’s grand unveiling. Photo: Alex Washburn/Wired

Maybe you were hoping for something radically new and different from a Facebook phone. If so, Zuck just broke your heart. But so what. Facebook never does anything new. New doesn’t matter in the blue. What matters is this: What Mark Zuckerberg announced today runs software called Facebook Home that makes it easier for people to spend more time with Facebook. And that’s all he really needed to pull off.

In fact, the long rumored Facebook phone turned out not to be a phone at all. Or even a new OS or a fork of the Android operating system like Amazon’s Kindle Fire. It’s something more than an application, and slightly less than an operating system. As Wired.com editor Mark McClusky described it, Facebook Home is an “apperating system.” The genius of the Facebook phone is that the company made a phone without making a phone at all. It’s not overly ambitious. It’s not a big bet. And that’s why it may have such a huge payoff.

Over the past few days, lots of pundits have been asking who this is for. Facebook gave us an answer today: It’s for people who don’t care about a rich, full experience on the Internet, yet love Facebook. People who want to run apps, but are overwhelmed by them. People who want to connect with friends and family, but want it to be super easy to do so. For many people, Facebook is the Internet, just as AOL was before it. And just as Facebook is the best way for them to experience the Internet in a browser, Facebook Home is going to be the best way for those people to experience the Internet on a phone.

The product that Facebook chose to roll this out on, the HTC First, is at best a mid-tier device. But that’s OK. Thinking about it in the context of, say, chamfers or pixel density misses the point. This isn’t a product rollout designed for someone who cares about processor speeds. Hell, this isn’t a rollout designed for someone who knows what a processor is. Facebook simply needed to show something that makes it easy to connect, consume and share more content with your friends. It did that. That dive-into Facebook home screen is the only thing that matters — you don’t even have to unlock your screen to dig into social. So who cares if Facebook Home makes its debut on mediocre hardware? Certainly not the people who made Facebook a hit.

Facebook itself is a triumph of mediocrity. It’s not the best communications platform; that’s Twitter or WordPress. It’s not the best photo sharing app; that’s Instagram or Flickr or maybe even Snapchat. It’s certainly not the best app platform, the best address book or the best messaging service. Likewise, it’s so easy to hate on Facebook for privacy policies, or the annoying ads, or for constantly rearranging things, or the things your crazy uncle posts there or, well, hell — take your pick. But Facebook is really, really good at connecting people. And that means it can be just OK at everything else.

Like Facebook, your phone, at its most basic level, is designed to connect you with other people and deliver information. Like Facebook, it is a messaging system that also has applications. The first phone with Facebook Home doesn’t need to amaze. It just has to work. It just needs to prove that it’s good enough at letting you upload pictures of your kid, and good enough at letting your dad easily see pictures of his grandson, and good enough at reminding you that it’s Sam’s birthday and, hey, do you want to say happy birthday? “Happy Birthday, Sam!”

Facebook Home, as Zuckerberg says, is built around people, not apps. Chat Heads personalize your conversations with constant visual reminders of who you are talking to. Updates from friends just magically appear on your lock screen. New messages trickle in while you read the news of the day. It’s your friendly companion, right on your lock screen. As long as it excels at connecting you with other people, and has a clean straightforward design that’s easy to use, it wins. I mean, look at how well that’s worked out for Facebook itself.

And most importantly, this thing is flexible. You can install it yourself, which means Facebook Home will run on at first a few, and then lots and lots of Android handsets. And there are an enormous and growing number of Android handsets out there, with more all the time.

Android is already the world’s most dominant mobile OS. In the coming year there are going to be hundreds of millions of Android handsets sold, many for next to nothing in the developing world. At $100, the HTC First with Facebook Home is going to tempt a lot of people who love Facebook (AKA: the Easier Internet). The HTC First may be the first Android handset to come with Facebook Home loaded, but it certainly won’t be the last. Before long, you can bet you’ll be able to pick up a handset with Facebook Home pre-installed for free with a two year contract. (And while this is just a hunch, I suspect there is a strong correlation between people who want a “free” smartphone with people who really dig Facebook.)

Will businesses take to it? Almost certainly not. No business, other than maybe Buzzfeed, wants its employees spending more time on Facebook. Will it be a hit with early adopters and the tech set? That’s laughable. No. Will millions of Americans just want a handset that can run Facebook? That seems like a bet I’d take.

You see, if you’re not already Facebook averse* there’s no real downside to Facebook Home. It’s just more software that makes it easier to do the things you already do without having to give anything up–other than your privacy but that’s a devil’s bargain you long ago forged with Zuck anyway.

There’s another thing Facebook is really good at too, and that’s tracking. And by all appearances this phone is good at that too. It’s going to know where you are, who you’re talking to and when, even what apps you’re running. All of which is great for Facebook, because ultimately Facebook wants to know every little thing it can about you so it can get you to click on some ads.

Facebook Home doesn’t even have to be a hit. At least not right away. The important thing is that it’s out there, and it didn’t require a lot of up-front capital or R&D investment in hardware. It’s a better strategy than anything else the company has done in mobile. People who already really like Facebook will also like this. For people who live in Facebook, it may even drive them to buy one handset over another. Sometimes mediocre is all it takes.

*Maybe you should be.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/...of-mediocrity/





PC Quarterly Sales Plummet, Sharpest Drop On Record
Bill Rigby

Personal computer sales plunged 14 percent in the first three months of the year, the biggest decline in two decades of keeping records, as tablets continue to gain in popularity and buyers appear to be avoiding Microsoft Corp's new Windows 8 system, according to a leading tech tracking firm.

The huge drop over a year ago, the steepest since International Data Corp started publishing sales numbers in 1994, mark a new milestone in the apparent decline of the age of the PC as computing goes mobile via tablets and smartphones.

Total worldwide PC sales fell 14 percent to 76.3 million units in the first quarter, IDC said on Wednesday, exceeding its forecast of a 7.7 percent drop. It was the fourth consecutive quarter of year-on-year declines.

That marked the lowest level since the middle of 2009, according to competing data tracker Gartner Inc, which published its own figures showing an 11 percent decline on the same day.

Both firms blamed the sales drop on fading sales of netbooks, the small laptops that have been rendered obsolete by tablets, and more consumer spending going toward smartphones.

"Consumers are migrating content consumption from PCs to other connected devices, such as tablets and smartphones," said Mikako Kitagawa, an analyst at Gartner. "Even emerging markets, where PC penetration is low, are not expected to be a strong growth area for PC vendors."

Microsoft's new Windows 8 actually deterred potential PC buyers, IDC said, as users felt they could not afford touch-screen models required to make the most of Windows 8, even though the system runs equally well on standard PCs and laptops.

"People think they have to have touch, and they go look at the price points for these touch machines, and they are above where they want to be and they say, 'I guess I'll wait,'" said Bob O'Donnell, an analyst at IDC.

O'Donnell said other users were simply uncomfortable with the new Windows system, which dispensed with the familiar start menu and uses colorful 'tiles' to represent applications.

New Microsoft operating systems usually boost PC sales, but the lukewarm reception for Windows 8 will likely mean an even greater drop in the market this year, said Jay Chou, senior research analyst with the IDC unit that tracks PC sales.

"Users are finding Windows 8 to offer a compromised experience that doesn't excel either as a new mobile interface or in a classic desktop interface," he said. "As a result, many users find a decline in the traditional PC experience without gaining much from new features like touch. The result is that many consumers are worried about upgrading to Windows 8, to say nothing of business users who are still just getting into Windows 7."

Among manufacturers, Hewlett-Packard Co saw a 24 percent decline in sales in the quarter, but narrowly held on to its title of No. 1 global PC supplier, with 15.7 percent market share. Fast-growing rival Lenovo Group managed to keep sales flat and is now just behind HP with a 15.3 percent global share.

Dell Inc, roiled by plans to go private, along with rivals Acer Inc and Asustek, all saw double-digit declines in PC sales.

Apple Inc was not immune from the decline, as some sales of its own Macs appeared to be displaced by iPads. Its U.S. PC sales fell 7.5 percent in the quarter, but it held on to its spot as No. 3 U.S. PC manufacturer, behind HP and Dell.

(Reporting by Bill Rigby; Editing by Phil Berlowitz and Leslie Gevirtz)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...93914P20130410





Set Your Watches For The End Of Windows XP

Australian enterprise wedded to old OS that 'just works'.
Allie Coyne

One year from today, the world's most popular PC operating system, Windows XP, will no longer be supported by Microsoft.

As of April 8, 2014, the software vendor will no longer provide security patches or other updates to the software.

The deadline - which Redmond has moved several times - will prove a challenge for many of Australia’s largest users of IT, all struggling to migrate to new Microsoft environments.

An iTnews survey in March 2012 found the likes of Westpac, National Australia Bank (NAB), the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) and the Department of Health were still running Windows XP and IE6 despite Microsoft announcing it would officially end support for IE6 in 2014.

Microsoft has been urging its users to migrate off its 12-year old internet browser, even launching a website this year to watch the number of IE6 users drop down to a target of under one percent worldwide. At the time of writing, 6.7 percent of worldwide browsers were still using IE6.

But large organisations haven’t been quick to act, citing compatibility issues and complex setups as hurdles to upgrade.

This time last year, the Australian Tax Office and its 26,000 workers were reliant on IE6 and Windows XP to run hundreds of programs that required modification before it could migrate to Windows 7 and Office 2010.

The ATO initially planned to start rolling out the solution last December to June this year, but recently told iTnews the full roll-out would now begin in November, after its peak 2013 tax period, bringing it achingly close to the XP deadline.

An ATO spokesperson said about 15 percent, or "hundreds", of its desktop applications needed to be modified for compatibility before the upgrade could commence.

“We could not risk undertaking a rollout in early 2013 that may impact on tax time 2013," the spokesperson said. "As part of the contingencies in our planning the decision was taken to move the rollout till after tax time peak processing had ended.”

Around 2600 applications including Excel macros, VisualBasic scripts and other mission-critical applications required careful handling ahead of migration to Windows 7.

“It took us longer than expected to set up the infrastructure and to package these applications prior to testing,” a spokesperson said.

“The department has migrated all but a very small number users from XP to Windows 7 as a part its desktop refresh last year. The remainder will be migrated in the coming months,” the department told iTnews.

The Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA) is yet to set a firm date for its Windows 7 upgrade. The government agency has around 250 applications with an IT budget of $80 million, and wants to rationalise down to 50 applications via a move out of Windows XP desktops to Windows 7 and Office 2010.

CIO Shane McLeod told iTnews last month the body was close to forming the schedule and expected to be “well progressed” by the calendar year.

Insurance giant Allianz commenced its upgrade process to Windows 7 and IE9 in May last year. The standard operating environment (SOE) build and application packaging was completed in October last year.

CIO Steve Coles told iTnews the SOE and packaging underwent extensive testing to ensure it was robust enough to “support the applications across our environment.”

Allianz’s rollout started in earnest at the beginning of 2013. It is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter of this year.

“We have about 4000 Allianz users across 5200 assets nationally,” Coles said. “[There have been ] no material issues identified to date and the program is progressing well and slightly ahead of the original plan.”

The Department of Health and Ageing embarked on a Windows 7 upgrade path in February last year, while replacing its thick clients with virtual desktops.

It completed most of the upgrade, to 4500 staff, last year with a few stragglers still remaining.

National Australia Bank started its upgrade late in 2012. It will deploy Windows 7 and IE9 on physical laptops, desktops and thin clients, and is in the early stages of the project. It is currently identifying, testing and remediating applications.

The bank declined to comment on when the project is expected to be completed but said it will roll out in a staged approach.

Westpac and AMP did not respond to request for comment on rollouts at the two financial services companies.

Close to the wire

Australia's attachment to Windows XP is backed up when studying the browsing choices of iTnews readers. Twelve years after launch, Windows XP is still the second most used operating system among iTnews readers.

The most popular Windows OS with iTnews readers is Windows 7 with 52 percent, followed by Windows XP with 17 percent, Windows 8 on 5 percent, while just two percent of iTnews readers use Vista. Overall, Windows users make up 79 percent of all iTnews readers.

Users and IT departments are attracted to Windows XP because “it just works”, IBRS analyst Joe Sweeney told iTnews.

“It gives them everything they need,” he said.

He said the above organisations were approaching upgrades intelligently by taking their time to ensure it was done right.

“Have organisations left this too late? I don’t think so,” he said. “I think large organisations that have planned to roll out over an extended period of time are doing the right thing. They are probably smart enough to know they don’t need to worry about the end of service deadline.

“That out of support deadline means very little to these organisations in many ways,” he said. “Most are on Software Assurance, and the support for XP within their own organisations is so rich - there is 13 years of experience there.

Sweeney said its less critical "when you make the change" and more critical that you "do it well.”
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/337201...indows-xp.aspx





Jenna Marbles, the Woman With 1 Billion Clicks
Amy O’Leary

A young woman with magenta-streaked hair stands in her bathroom, speaking to a webcam. In a hushed tone, she chews over a thorny problem of young adulthood: how to apply full evening makeup when you’re already inebriated from drinking all day?

She begins her tutorial by wielding that totem of collegiate binge drinking everywhere: a red plastic Solo Cup. One jump cut later (after a “Law and Order: S.V.U.” drinking game), she re-emerges, thoroughly intoxicated. She misapplies a gob of glue. It dangles from a false eyelash. She lines her lips with a black pencil.

“It doesn’t matter what color it is, ’cause you’re gonna blend it,” she slurs, batting her eye glue. “Don’t let this scare you.”

The video, titled “Drunk Makeup Tutorial,” is completely awesome to some, bewildering to others — and above all, classic Jenna Marbles, another installment from a reigning queen of YouTube. The episode has been viewed 14.6 million times.

While few people older than 30 probably know who Jenna Marbles is, her popularity is unquestioned among teenage girls who live on the Internet. She has more Facebook fans than Jennifer Lawrence, more Twitter followers than Fox News and more Instagram friends than Oprah. Her weekly videos on topics as quotidian as “What Girls Do in the Bathroom in the Morning,” “My Favorite Dance Moves” and “I Hate Being a Grown Up,” place her in an elite club of more than one billion YouTube views, with more than eight million subscribers and growing.

“My perspective is to think, ‘I just have a lot of Internet friends,’ ” said Jenna Marbles, 26, whose real name is Jenna Mourey (Marbles is the name of her Chihuahua). She acknowledges it is an odd kind of celebrity. She is a D.I.Y. digital entertainer who conceives of, stars in, shoots, edits and uploads her own videos — often in a single day.

Her videos are a highly shareable cocktail of comedy, sex appeal, puppies and social commentary, laced with profanity. She skillfully juggles Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube to build a deeply loyal connection with fans who find her eminently easy to relate to.

The result is more than a million views every single day and more money than she had ever seen before in her life. She may be unique, but she is no viral-video fluke. To a younger generation who spends more time on YouTube than TV, Jenna Marbles already embodies the future of celebrity.

Internet fame can come on fast. In the summer of 2010, Ms. Mourey shared a three-bedroom apartment in Cambridge, Mass., where her $800 rent was scrounged together from a patchwork of part-time gigs: bartending, blogging, go-go dancing at nightclubs and working at a tanning salon, where she remembers the singularly depressing chore of mopping up customers’ sweat. Meanwhile, her newly completed master’s degree in sports psychology gathered dust.

“My life was a hot, hot, hot mess,” she said.

One afternoon, she uploaded a video of herself putting on makeup for her dancing job. It was called “How to Trick People Into Thinking You’re Good Looking.” In a dim, white-paneled bedroom, Ms. Mourey sat before her computer and began: “If you were born really ugly like me, have no fear. There’s steps you can take to be good-looking. Kind of.”

In a mesmerizing kind of reverse burlesque, her naked face and pale blue eyes disappeared under a flurry of foundation, false eyelashes and frosted pink lipstick. In two and a half minutes, she transformed herself from a plain girl with a bad case of bedhead to a hypercharged cartoon sexpot. “There is no cure for ugly,” she says in her flat Rochester accent, “but you can make yourself into a human optical illusion.”

The video ends as she clutches her degree in a fit of mock sobbing. She uploaded the video on a Friday. Over the weekend it became so popular that it reached the true mark of viral success: she had to call her mother.

“She said, ‘Mom, I made this video on the Internet and a lot of people are watching it and I swear in it,’ ” said Deborah Mourey, a marketing consultant who still lives in Rochester. Mom was not upset; she laughed, along with five million other people that first week.

Since then, the formula for a Jenna Marbles video hasn’t changed much. Unlike other YouTube personalities who invest in better cameras, lighting and production values, Ms. Mourey has stuck with her original lo-fi operation.

On a bright Monday this winter, Ms. Mourey allowed the rare reporter inside her rented $1.1 million Santa Monica town house. The décor could be called contemporary teenage mess. Pizza boxes and a parking ticket littered the countertop. A fruit bowl held two bananas, turned solid black. Nerf darts spilled across the floor. A lonely dart clung to a high window, just out of reach.

Any chaos in her daily life, however, sits neatly out of frame. When she pulls her laptop out and records a new video at the kitchen table, viewers typically see only her and a blank wall.

The process starts a day earlier, when Ms. Mourey polls her eager Facebook fans for ideas. Thousands of suggestions roll in: eat soup with a fork, wax a friend’s armpits drunk, or “dress as Barry Manilow and see how many spicey cinnamon hearts you can stuff in your face before you explode.” She considers them all, she said, but in the end, Ms. Mourey shoots what she can handle alone in her house.

She does impersonations (Snooki, Gaga, Palin, Bieber). She rants (“Sluts on Halloween,” “Things Boys Don’t Understand”). She plays off gender dynamics (“What Boys Think About During Sex” and “What Girls Do in the Car”). She starts mini-memes. She undermines her camera-ready good looks for the sake of comedy, say, by vomiting oatmeal or sticking her dog in her shirt for extended periods.

“It’s a very odd kind of skill we haven’t seen in entertainment before,” said Alan Van, the executive editor of the online media blog NewMediaRockstars.com, which began chronicling the emerging video genre in 2011. “Comedic blogging has mostly been a man’s domain, but she’s definitely at the top.”

Like Jenna Marbles, the pantheon of telegenic 20-something YouTube stars has carved out a new entertainment genre, complete with its own rules and visual vocabulary.

In videos that typically last five to eight minutes, they talk straight to the camera and riff through head-spinning jump cuts, non sequiturs and exaggerated facial expressions to court shrinking attention spans and rack up views.

A few years ago, YouTube stars were one-hit wonders, viral accidents whose fame came and went like a passing storm.

“Now we have this whole industry, with networks, managers, P.R. and award shows,” Mr. Van said. “We have this whole system dedicated to making more money and sustaining success, so these personalities are more likely to succeed longer than they could have before.”

A small army of them has descended on Los Angeles, looking to connect with one another, and Hollywood. Sensing an opportunity, YouTube recently opened a 41,000-square-foot production facility in a former airport, once owned by Howard Hughes, to nurture the next big viral hit. But many young viral stars are unsure if YouTube fame is enough, and many are hoping to move into film or television.

“I’m not completely sold that you ever have to transition to mainstream media, you know?” said Ms. Mourey, who cherishes her creative freedom. “What I get to do is have fun in my house, by myself, and put it on the Internet.”

Still, Ms. Mourey has needed to professionalize her business affairs, partly to handle the deluge of endorsement requests and fan mail that comes her way — more than 50,000 messages a month. Her team recently expanded to include a personal assistant, a business manager, her mother and a soon-to-be-hired chief technical officer.

Ms. Mourey would not disclose any financial details, but industry experts estimate that a star at Jenna Marbles’s level could make a very comfortable six figures from advertising revenues that the video network pays out to members of the “YouTube Partner Program.” TubeMogul, a video ad-buying platform in California, examined traffic on the Jenna Marbles channel and estimated that she could have earned as much as $346,827.12 in 2012.

“I make more money than I need, ever,” is all that Ms. Mourey would say. That may explain why she has felt free to turn down offers from electronics and cosmetics companies, among others, seeking to tap her loyal audience.

Teenage girls love her exactly because she seems so genuine. Her videos are catnip to them, the kind of thing they discover privately in their Facebook feed, where her profanity and tell-it-like-it-is rants on sex, boys, sports bras and makeup speak directly to her core audience, 75 percent of whom are young women and girls, mostly from the ages of 13 to 17.

At first that surprised Ms. Mourey, who thought she was making videos for her peers. “In my mind, my videos sometimes are inappropriate for a 13-year-old,” she said. “But that’s what they’re watching.”

Despite her anything-goes brashness, Ms. Mourey cares very much about her position as a role model. Her mother sifts through her fan mail, and regularly finds mash notes from girls as young as 9. While Deborah Mourey is proud of her daughter’s positive messages about self-respect and acceptance, she hopes that the youngest Jenna Marbles fans are at least watching with an adult.

But most aren’t. When one parent commented on a recent video that the language was inappropriate for girls and asked that it be taken down, the comment thread was swarmed by teenagers defending Jenna.

One fan, Allee Hamilton, of Livonia, Mich., wrote: “Seriously, I’m 13. You need to understand that we watch Jenna Marbles, we swear, we think wrong, we act insane, we have Facebooks, we can’t live without Internet, we can’t live without our phones. THATS JUST THE WAY IT IS!!”

In an interview, Allee added that she rarely watches television. “I would rather watch Jenna Marbles all day than anything else,” she said. “She swears a lot, but she’s funny.”

But she has her detractors. Beyond viewers who find the Jenna Marbles brand of humor incomprehensible or simply annoying, some were deeply offended by her impersonation of Nicki Minaj, in which she applied copious amounts of bronzer and put on a butt-pad and pink wig. Critics say it amounted to blackface and crossed the line from parody to racism.

Louder cries were heard over the video “Things I Don’t Understand About Girls Part 2: Slut Edition,” which she released last December. In the video, which has generated 4.6 million views, Ms. Mourey defined a slut as “someone who has a lot of casual sex,” before ticking off a list of “slutty” behaviors, including one-night stands and sleeping with another girl’s boyfriend.

The feminist blogosphere roared back with posts, video responses and animated GIF compilations, charging the video with victim-blaming and slut-shaming. Even longtime fans said that it was a misfire, and that her sizable audience requires her to be more mindful in the future. Ms. Mourey said she doesn’t regret the video, but plans on avoiding similar topics for now.

“I got crucified,” Ms. Mourey said. “Crucified.”

The bigger Ms. Mourey gets, the more she has had to grapple with the peculiarities of Internet fame. “Sometimes I like to think it would be nice if you just had a character and your personal life was your personal life,” she said. “My life is definitely out there, you know?”

At no time was this more challenging than her recent breakup with Max Weisz, her longtime boyfriend. Regular fans had come to know Mr. Weisz through his frequent cameos. They were an attractive and playful couple. She cut his hair. He tried to put makeup on her. They wore elaborate Halloween costumes. It seemed like a teenage girl’s fantasy of what it would be like to be grown up with a cute boyfriend and a job that consisted mostly of hanging around online.

But as real life seeped in, Ms. Mourey had to improvise a strategy to manage the news. “It was incredibly stressful,” she said. “I had to tell these 13-year-old girls that I broke up with my boyfriend — who they love — and I wanted to do it in a way that wasn’t going to hurt his channel.”

When she eventually announced the split on YouTube, her fans reacted on Twitter: “MY LIFE IS OVER,” they mourned, “I feel like my parents are getting divorced,” and “everything I know about love is a lie.” Many posts were tagged “#crying.”

At the time, Mr. Weisz, who goes by the YouTube handle MaxNoSleeves, already had more than 300,000 subscribers. Since the split, he began making weekly videos of his own. While his audience is just a fraction of hers (459,000 subscribers), he said he is making enough money from YouTube to support himself, following his ex-girlfriend’s template: producing funny, low-budget videos on a strict schedule.

They both say the work is lonely. “Luckily, I have a buddy now who holds my camera for me,” Mr. Weisz said.

Ms. Mourey, on the other hand, still operates the camera by herself. She is adjusting to living alone in a city where, for all her Internet fame, she has few friends and rarely goes out.

Like lots of other YouTube personalities, Ms. Mourey said, “for the most part, we all just stay in our houses, alone, making videos.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/f...a-marbles.html





Flare and Fury: How Artists Lambasted Margaret Thatcher
Peter Wilkinson

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is dead at 87, spokeswoman says
Known as the "Iron Lady," Thatcher's policies divided Britain during the 1980s
Lynskey: Some of decade's best music was in response to Thatcher policies
Designer Katherine Hamnett on Thatcher: "She was appalling ... she did nothing for the arts."

No British politician has ever aroused admiration and respect like Margaret Thatcher. But none has inspired the same level of fear and animosity.

To her fans she was the Conservative warrior-queen who vanquished both the "enemy within" -- the striking Yorkshire coal miners led by Arthur Scargill -- and the enemy without -- Gen. Galtieri's Argentine force that invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982. She was the country's only female prime minister, and the first to win three general elections in a row.

In Parliament, Thatcher brushed aside all dissenting voices, and for a decade from 1979 she was indomitable. While the left feuded over how best to fight her government's right-wing policies of austerity, privatization and laws to curb the labor unions, the only opposition with any bite came from comedians, satirists and musicians, all of whom pilloried the "Iron Lady" and her ministers with wit, flare and fury.

Anti-Thatcher playlist


The Specials - "Ghost Town"

The Jam - "Town Called Malice"

The Beat - "Stand Down Margaret"

UB40 - "One in Ten"

Billy Bragg - "Between The Wars"

Pet Shop Boys - "King's Cross"

Elvis Costello - "Tramp The Dirt Down"

Elvis Costello/Robert Wyatt - "Shipbuilding"

Crass - "How Does It Feel?"

Morrissey - "Margaret On The Guillotine"

Dub Syndicate - "No Alternative (but to Fight)"

Notsensibles - "I'm in Love with Margaret Thatcher"

The polarized society that Britain became was encapsulated by the song "Ghost Town," by ska revivalists The Specials, the haunting soundtrack of 1981 as riots erupted in London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Leeds. With a haunting melody, the song recounted how "This town's becoming like a ghost town / Government leaving the youth on the shelf."

The Coventry-based band's songwriter Jerry Dammers said the No. 1 single was inspired by a loathing of Thatcher. "That song was our political reflection on the situation in the 1980s, which wasn't good, and that Thatcher's own policies had helped create.

"I'm proud to have put out songs opposed to her as she changed our country for the worse. Britain is no longer self-sufficient and we don't pay our way in the world anymore.

"A lot of musicians were happy to put their opinions into song, for example us, Elvis Costello and The Beat, a trend that hasn't happened since the time of Thatcher."

Many other memorable protest songs followed: Some, like "Ghost Town" and The Jam's "Town Called Malice," were directly political in voicing opposition to the austerity and mass unemployment of the era; others articulated a deep visceral hatred of the woman herself, as in Elvis Costello's "Stamp the Dirt Down" or "Margaret on the Guillotine" by Morrissey.

One music writer said Thatcher inspired so many angry young songwriters because she appeared to go out of her way to stir up confrontation. "She was such an oppositional figure, singling out certain enemies, for example the Argentine junta, unions, travelers, people on benefits, the left wing in general," said Dorian Lynskey, author of "33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs."

"She was unflinching and vicious in her attacks on them. There was a sense she was conducting a war on certain sections of society. She referred to the miners as 'the enemy within.' This just was not the way politicians talk about their citizens. (Current UK Prime Minister) David Cameron does not do that; Tories before Thatcher did not do that. That aspect enraged people because they felt she was treating them with rhetorical and political violence. That encouraged them to respond with their own violence."

The songs that spewed from this disgust at Thatcher's policies and personality formed a strand of the decade's best music, according to Lynskey, who says all the best music has been political in some way. "If you look at a list of the greatest songs ever, many of these will be political. 'Strange Fruit,' (performed most famously by Billie Holiday) 'Ohio,' (Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young) 'For What It's Worth,' (Buffalo Springfield) 'What's Going On, (Marvin Gaye) 'Born In the USA,' (Bruce Springsteen) 'Sign O' the Times' (Prince) -- all were successful songs, but intensely political at the same time."

Thatcher was eventually deposed in 1990 by her fellow Conservatives in Parliament, not musicians, but that, according to Lynskey, misses the point of artistic expression: Just as Picasso's "Guernica," portraying the 1937 bombing of a Spanish Basque town by German and Italian warplanes, did not end the Spanish Civil War, it was important in expressing outrage and making a political point.

"Art can make people angry, can inform or inspire them. It can make them feel they're not alone. It can make them feel better when they're low."

In other fields, a new era of fashion, film, TV programs, style magazines and nightclubs was also flowing out of the punk rebellion of the previous decade. "There were just so many exciting things going on then," Lynskey recalled.

Whether any of this artistic explosion was directly due to the Thatcher effect is debatable -- especially in light of her reported aversion to the arts -- but one commentator for a left-leaning publication believes that her philosophy was certainly echoed in the youth culture of the day, whether the hip young gunslingers agreed with her divisive politics or not.

"The punks and their fellow-travellers had an anti-establishment, DIY, can-do attitude," wrote Jason Cowley in the New Statesman. "The feeling was one of fundamental discontinuity with the past. They shared with the Thatcherites an overwhelming desire to break from the established order, and to make it all new, as the modernists had."

The fashion world also joined the protests against the Conservative government's policies. At one party in Downing Street in 1983, Katherine Hamnett wore a T-shirt bearing the message: "58% don't want Pershing" (referring to an opinion poll showing public opposition to the deployment of U.S. nuclear-capable missiles to the UK).

Hamnett recalls three decades later how fellow designer Jasper Conran tried to dissuade her from attending the official reception. "He said, 'Why should we have a glass of wine with that murderess?' But I thought on impulse it was quite a good photo opportunity, so we knocked up a T-shirt that afternoon and I wore it to the party.

"Thatcher wasn't very happy and was quite rude. She told me: 'We don't have Pershing here, we have cruise (missiles). I think you've got the wrong party.' I thought this was rather rude because she invited me in the first place. I stayed at the party though!"

Hamnett agrees that the arts did blossom during that era, but believes it had little to do with the "destructive" politician herself.

"She was appalling," said Hamnett. "She did nothing for the arts. Thatcher used to design her own frumpy clothes. I don't know if she would have made a better fashion designer than a prime minister, but it wouldn't have been hard.

"We did well in the '80s. We produced some of the best designers in the world, because of our clothing culture and the fact we're more liberal with our children. They can go to school in 'Red Indian' outfits if they want. We did produce good designers, regardless of Thatcher."

Humor was another field that boomed in direct response to Thatcher. So-called "alternative comedians" on TV and in clubs took a sharp left turn away from the routines of their more reactionary predecessors, with many of the newcomers poking fun at the po-faced prime minister. The most biting of all was "Spitting Image," a satirical puppet show broadcast on Sunday evenings on ITV from 1984 until 1996 that pilloried public figures, especially Thatcher, whom the program often portrayed as an insane megalomaniac.

Roger Law, who with Peter Fluck designed the caricature puppets for the show, said the purpose of the show was to lance a bubble every week, and to educate Britons about what the government was doing in their name.

"Thatcher was one of the main reasons we did 'Spitting Image' -- I knew why I was doing it and I would have killed my mother to have done it," he said. "I knew what she was about and what she intended to do, things such as the mindless thuggery of the Falklands war."

Law, who now divides his time between Australia and China, said he and his colleagues tried various ways to portray the PM. "The puppets were just heightened versions of reality, so there were three Thatchers: one that talked to you as if your dog had died; one that shouted at you and a foaming-at-the-mouth one. There never really was a smiley Thatcher. What would be the point?"

In one famous scene set in a restaurant, a waiter asks Thatcher, who is treating her ministers to a meal, what she would like to eat: "Steak, raw please," comes the reply. "And what about the vegetables?" asks the waiter. "Oh, they'll have the same as me."

The scene mocks Thatcher's Cabinet colleagues as being weak and ineffectual, and while Law admits he was worried about glorifying Thatcher, he said he tried to be fair to both sides. "We dished out the same stick to everybody, including (opposition leader Neil) Kinnock, but at least we tried to get it right."

Thatcher left Britain in a worse situation than before she came to power, Law believes. "I believe she had a strong effect on what happened here. She threw a lot of people to the dogs and you're seeing now what she actually did. I'm still angry about that now.

"When you think of how our parents worked, when you could go to the doctor without thinking about the money. People like myself got half an education. I went to art school from a working class background without qualifications simply because I had some talent. Try doing that now. All of that has gone, and you know that was her aim. It's what she wanted.

"I don't have any answers like lots of other critics. But take a look around you. The people who came after inherited the mantle of Thatcher: her heirs ... the bitch she left behind was Tony Blair ... and now we have a huge underclass. Give up on consensus politics, and the notion of educating everybody properly. F**k 'em, basically."
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/08/wo...hties-culture/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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