P2P-Zone  

Go Back   P2P-Zone > Peer to Peer
FAQ Members List Calendar Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

Peer to Peer The 3rd millenium technology!

Reply
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Old 15-10-14, 08:39 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
JackSpratts's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 18th, '14

Since 2002


































"When you say, 'I have nothing to hide,' you’re saying, 'I don’t care about this right.' You’re saying, 'I don’t have this right, because I’ve got to the point where I have to justify it.' The way rights work is, the government has to justify its intrusion into your rights." – Edward Snowden


"This is not a paper vote; this is not an empty vote. This is a very clear vote that we are not going to tolerate the kind of responses we got from Charter and Comcast." – Worcester Councilwoman Konstantina Lukes, D-At Large


"This is the beginning of the end of cable." – Ben Collins


"Let the unbundling begin." – TechCrunch






































October 18th, 2014




File Sharing Justified, Contributes to Artists’ Exposure
Jon Stinchcomb

You may recall seeing an email appearing in your inbox recently regarding the University’s policy on downloading and distributing digital copyrighted material across its network.

While it is incredibly important for any users, students and faculty alike, to follow these policies and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act when on-campus or using University-owned computer equipment, the discussion of ethical implications concerning online file sharing is an entirely different matter.

The lobbying forces behind the film and recording industry, MPAA and RIAA respectively, have made the direct comparison to traditional theft. “You wouldn’t steal a car,” the MPAA said in an infamous anti-piracy ad years ago.

The problem: stealing a car isn’t even remotely comparable to online file sharing. The ad was utilizing a false equivalence fallacy.

When a vehicle is stolen, usually the original legal owner didn’t voluntarily share it. Even more importantly, there is a physical loss of access to the vehicle.

File sharing, on the other hand, is a process of duplication. It’s quite literally the sharing of digital information. The person sharing the file doesn’t lose access to it.

Even when someone shares a video file of the latest “Batman” film or an audio file of the latest Taylor Swift song, that too is merely the sharing of digital information.

In the abstract, we can consider this information to be art.

Detractors to the stance taken here will argue that sharing art over the internet is stealing from the artists. Would you steal a painting?

The problem with that analogy is the same as the one that asks if you’d steal a car. Nothing physical is being taken.

So the loss, if there is any at all, would only come if this sharing directly resulted in lost earnings that the artists would have otherwise made if the sharing had not occurred.

The problem with that claim is knowing the vast majority of file sharing is done among those who would otherwise never had consumed the art in any other fashion, especially if it had cost money.

For consumers, file sharing is not an alternative to making the legal purchase. It’s an opportunity to explore art they otherwise never would have. In turn, it’s also an opportunity for artists to gain exposure and reach new audiences.

If consumers enjoy the art enough, they will then actively seek to support artists, especially if they offer a good or service that is worth its price.

Generally, that doesn’t come from retail sales of CDs/DVDs/Blu-rays/etc. on Amazon or at Wal-Mart. Only a fraction of those sales typically make it back to the original artists.

If a consumer discovers a new musician they like enough to support, they may see them in concert or buy merchandise directly from them.

In a free-market economy, the sharing of art online can actually be a force for good. It should drive both the content creators and retailers alike to offer products of a high enough quality at a low enough price to incentivize consumers to give them their support.

So should you have any ethical qualms about that last movie or song you downloaded?

If you’re willing to be completely intellectually honest, there is absolutely no ethical nor moral problem with it assuming these are movies and songs you would have otherwise never seen or heard via traditional purchases.

If you then enjoyed the art enough to want to seek out opportunities to support the artist, find good ways to do so. Retail isn’t always it.

I’m willing to put my money where my pen is: “Steal” this column. As described above, we know that really means share it.

But I’ll go a step further: Feel free to do so without my individually expressed written consent. Use this collection of information in any way you see fit. You won’t hear a complaint from me.

As a journalist, it’s my job to share information and to ensure the said information has value. The words and ideas making up the bodies of my articles are far more important those in the byline.
http://www.bgnews.com/forum/file-sha...bb6a959e4.html





Hundreds of Alleged Dropbox Passwords Leaked

Hundreds of alleged usernames and passwords for online document-sharing site Dropbox were published on Monday on Pastebin, an anonymous information-sharing website.

The anonymous user, who claims to have hacked close to 7 million accounts, is calling for Bitcoin donations to fund the operation.

"We will keep releasing more to the public as donations come in, show your support," the anonymous Pastebin user said on the site.

Dropbox, however, said it has not been hacked.

"These usernames and passwords were unfortunately stolen from other services and used in attempts to log in to Dropbox accounts. We'd previously detected these attacks and the vast majority of the passwords posted have been expired for some time now. All other remaining passwords have been expired as well," a Dropbox spokesman said in an email to Reuters.

Dropbox is a Silicon Valley startup that has proved a hit with consumers and boasts more than 200 million users six years after it was started. It has undergone tremendous growth amid the meteoric rise of cloud, which is expected to continue booming alongside mobile computing.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden last week advised those concerned about their privacy to "get rid of Dropbox" and cease using Facebook and Google.

(Reporting by Supriya Kurane in Bangalore; Editing by Gopakumar Warrier)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/1...0I309R20141014





Edward Snowden’s Privacy Tips: “Get Rid Of Dropbox,” Avoid Facebook And Google
Anthony Ha

According to Edward Snowden, people who care about their privacy should stay away from popular consumer Internet services like Dropbox, Facebook, and Google.

Snowden conducted a remote interview today as part of the New Yorker Festival, where he was asked a couple of variants on the question of what we can do to protect our privacy.

His first answer called for a reform of government policies. Some people take the position that they “don’t have anything to hide,” but he argued that when you say that, “You’re inverting the model of responsibility for how rights work”:

When you say, ‘I have nothing to hide,’ you’re saying, ‘I don’t care about this right.’ You’re saying, ‘I don’t have this right, because I’ve got to the point where I have to justify it.’ The way rights work is, the government has to justify its intrusion into your rights.

He added that on an individual level, people should seek out encrypted tools and stop using services that are “hostile to privacy.” For one thing, he said you should “get rid of Dropbox,” because it doesn’t support encryption, and you should consider alternatives like SpiderOak. (Snowden made similar comments over the summer, with Dropbox responding that protecting users’ information is “a top priority.”)

[Update: In a June blog post related to Snowden, Dropbox actually says, "All files sent and retrieved from Dropbox are encrypted while traveling between you and our servers," as well as when they're "at rest on our servers," and it points to other security measures that the company is taking. The difference between Dropbox and SpiderOak, as explained elsewhere, is that SpiderOak encrypts the data while it's on your computer, as opposed to only encrypting it "in transit" and on the company's servers.]

[And here's a more complete Snowden quote, from around 1:04:55 in the video: "We're talking about encryption. We're talking about dropping programs that are hostile to privacy. For example, Dropbox? Get rid of Dropbox, it doesn't support encryption, it doesn't protect your private files. And use competitors like SpiderOak, that do the same exact service but they protect the content of what you're sharing."]

He also suggested that while Facebook and Google have improved their security, they remain “dangerous services” that people should avoid. (Somewhat amusingly, anyone watching the interview via Google Hangout or YouTube saw a Google logo above Snowden’s face as he said this.) His final piece of advice on this front: Don’t send unencrypted text messages, but instead use services like RedPhone and Silent Circle.

Earlier in the interview, Snowden dismissed claims that increased encryption on iOS will hurt crime-fighting efforts. Even with that encryption, he said law enforcement officials can still ask for warrants that will give them complete access to a suspect’s phone, which will include the key to the encrypted data. Plus, companies like Apple, AT&T, and Verizon can be subpoenaed for their data.

Beyond the privacy discussion, Snowden talked about how and why he decided to leak documents bringing the government’s electronic surveillance programs to light. He repeatedly claimed that he wasn’t pursuing a specific policy outcome, but just trying to have an open conversation about these issues:

We can have secret programs. You know, the American people don’t have to know the name of every individual that’s under investigation. We don’t need to know the technical details of absolutely every program in the intelligence community. But we do have to know the bare and broad outlines of the powers our government is claiming … and how they affect us and how they affect our relationships overseas. Because if we don’t, we are no longer citizens, we no longer have leaders. We’re subjects, and we have rulers.

As for why Snowden hasn’t come back to the United States to stand trial, he said that when he looked at how the US government treated whistleblowers like Thomas Drake and Chelsea Manning, he became convinced that wouldn’t be able to present his case to a jury in an open trial.

“I’ve told the government again and again in negotiations, you know, that if they’re prepared to offer an open trial, a fair trial in the same way that Dan Ellsberg got, and I’m allowed to make my case to the jury, I would love to do so,” he said. “But to this point they’ve declined.”

Snowden acknowledged that there’s some irony in his taking shelter in China and Russia, countries that don’t exactly have spotless human rights or privacy records themselves. He said Russia was supposed to be a transit point on his way to Latin America — but his passport was canceled while he was at the Moscow airport.

The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer ended the interview on a light note, suggesting that Snowden was now free to enjoy some vodka. He replied, “I actually don’t drink alcohol. Little-known fact: I’ve never been drunk.”
http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/11/edw...rker-festival/





Can File Sharing Ever be Truly Secure? Tresorit Claims the Edge
Steve Brooks

Tresorit have launched a secure file sharing platform with client-side encryption claiming it to be the most secure on the market.

At IPExpo Chris Houle, COO and István Lám, CEO of Tresorit announced the launch of their new file sharing and Digital Rights Management (DRM) platform. Their claim that this is the most secure on the market was backed by three things at IPexpo.

1. The platform is the only one that supports client side encryption, which means that only those people with access to the key on their devices will be able to decrypt and view the data.
2. The $50,000 prize for hacking the platform where all the data is stored remains unsolved. It is refreshing that Lám himself admits that one day this prize may be claimed, understanding that there may be a fault in the algorithm they use. However that no one has managed to hack into for over a year would indicate that it is one of the most secure platforms out there.
3. The presence of Carl Leeming in the room, a security consultant and ex hacker, who had had access to the platform and is impressed by its security. Scathing of platforms such as Dropbox he clearly feels that protecting ones data should be within an individual’s power rather than the company hosting the data. Client side encryption means that without the appropriate key Tresorit are unable to decrypt the data held on their servers.

Everyone in the room confirmed that although the platform is secure the weakest link is always the personal device of the user. If a laptop or desktop is compromised so is the data. This is the same for all file sharing of course but it interesting that at some point increased security on file sharing becomes a moot point if the personal security is the weakest.

Interestingly Tresorit have launched their solution with multiple mobile device support than includes, iOS, Windows mobile, Android and Blackberry. When challenged as to why Blackberry, Houle admitted that Blackberry is still being used by a number of finance companies in the US and these are a target market. Blackberry announced its Passport device on Friday aimed at its core business user group and initial reaction has been extremely positive which suggests that Tresorit may have a jump on its competitors who have been dropping Blackberry support.

Is there a market for another file sharing platform?

Houle explained that they felt there is a gap in the market for companies who truly need a secure platform indicating that those with legal or compliance requirements such as HIPAA, ISO27001 or FSA regulation should seriously consider their platform. There is an argument here that some, including Egnyte and Box, might dispute that theirs is the only truly secure platform. This is interesting premise and with increasing fines for data breaches, notably the 5% of annual turnover from GDPR, the European General Data Protection Regulation, Tresorit’s launch is timely.

Lam feels that many of the “Cloud storage providers are moving up the stack, rushing to add new features on top of Gigabytes, but these features do not solve the complex problem of security in the cloud,”. A case in point being the recent Box’s recent announcement of supporting the medical imaging market

This is not an empty market, with wuala in Switzerland and SpiderOak in the US offering similar levels of security. Of the three Tresorit is not the cheapest at $12.50 for 100GB compared to $12.66 for wuala and $8.33 for SpiderOak, but it is certainly the simplest model especially as SpiderOak incurs set up fees. Houle is bullish though and the platform, currently based in the EU, has been successful to date with 40% of clients based in North America, 40% in the EU and 20% in the rest of the world. The platform is currently hosted only in the EU however there are plans to launch in the US as well in order to meet the concerns of some US companies over data sovereignty.

Can Tresorit make a difference

Tresorit is a company and platform that still feels new though. Houle is looking to expand their channels with the addition of MSP’s (Managed Service Providers). With the experience gained at both Quantrix and Scala Houle is well placed to deliver these channels across the globe and it will be interesting to see. During the interview Lám mentioned new features that Leeming had clearly not spotted yet and Houle also declared that API’s would likely be available in around six months.

In using such a platform there is always a balance between usability and security, Tresorit seems to have hit the middle ground. It is possible to share folders securely but not individual files within those folders. This might seem a restriction but actually trying to manage the sharing by individual file merely adds complexity to the platform that isn’t warranted. It does mean that directors can share some folders with PA’s and not others though.

It is also possible to send a link to other parties external to the company, with a time out or a final activation feature. Houle sees this as critical especially to the legal and finance sectors, such as tax returns where it is possible for an accountant to share a folder with his client but no one else. Tresorit also support two factor authentication, through the use of text messages, probably one of the most secure (although at times annoying) methods, after all it only works when one had a mobile signal.

One final piece of information that Houle imparted was around the name Tresorit, in German the word Tresor means a safe or vault, and it is this word from which the company name derives rather than the French (treasure). Interestingly there is also a recursive acronym "TRESOR Runs Encryption Securely Outside RAM” within the Linux world that may just be a red herring in solving the $50,000 prize.

Conclusion

From its birth in Budapest, Hungary two and a half years ago with a $1.7m investment from Euroventures in 2012 this is a start-up that is launching itself into a crowded market. The challenge will be educating the market about real security in cloud file sharing and ensuring that their brand is known. Dropbox is the brand that everyone has heard of and Box have recently been making a lot of noise in the press. If Tresorit can continue to deliver new features and so big names in industry then they will have a good chance. Unfortunately the best product does not always win.
https://www.business-cloud.com/artic...it-claims-edge





Tiny Anonabox to Offer Online Anonymity Through Tor

The device is an open-source, plug-and-play wireless router
Lucas Mearian

A startup is offering a tiny wireless router to users who want their anonymity protected by first encrypting and then routing their traffic over the Tor network.

The Anonabox is an open source, Internet networking device designed to run alongside a current home router or modem. Small enough to fit in a shirt or pants pocket, the device directs all your Internet data via Wi-Fi or an Ethernet cable to Tor, where your IP address is hidden from prying eyes.

The Anonabox router project, currently being funded through a Kicksarter campaign, is approaching 10 times the original $7,000 it was seeking after just one day of crowdfunding.

"We knew that the device had to be small enough to easily conceal, built with quality components and rock solid. But we also wanted to make it inexpensive. We wanted to make it available to as many people as possible," the company explained on its Kickstarter campaign page.

Tor (The Onion Router) is a free software project that conceals a user's IP address by bouncing online activity and all data through a random, worldwide network made up of more than 5,000 relays.

Use of the Tor network does reduce Internet speed and page-loading times because the data is being routed to computers around the world.

Anonabox is not the first Tor-enabled hardware device. The Tor community announced the Torouter Dreamplug hardware project last year.

The Tor website noted that Dreamplug is still "highly experimental and while seemingly functional, we have lots of bugs to iron out and features to implement."

Also last year, Pogoplug launched Safeplug, a Tor-enabled web privacy device that has ad-blocking software and retails for $49. The Safeplug router, however, is about the same size as a typical home router and doesn't add data encryption to network traffic as the Anonabox does.

Over the past four years, the new Anonabox has seen four prototypes. The company said that its first generations were "pretty clunky and cost between $200-$400 just for the parts."

The latest version, however, is smaller than a deck of playing cards.

The Anonabox is also simple to use, according to the company; you plug it into an existing modem or router via an Ethernet port. Them plug in the USB power cable; a blue LED light on the Anonabox will then illuminate. The Anonabox router then uses Wi-FI to connect to any Windows, Mac or Linux computer, tablet or smartphone.

If a device has no wireless capability, a user can plug the computer directly into a second LAN Ethernet port on the Anonabox.

A promotional video suggests several uses for the device, including using it to securely share Internet access with family and friends, or to stream live audio from sports games that are blocked in a specific region.

Businesses such as hotels and coffee shops might also consider the Anonabox as a way to ensure customer data is protected as people use free Wi-Fi services.

It "protects your privacy from unscrupulous marketers and identity thieves and protects communications from irresponsible corporations," the video states.

The promo even suggests that journalists can use the encrypted connection to gain access to the Internet in "places where the web is being censored in order to get the story out."
http://www.computerworld.com/article...rough-tor.html





Router that Anonymises Internet Activity Raises $300,000 on Kickstarter

Anonabox, a device that re-routes data through the cloaking Tor network, is tool for freedom of information, developer says
Dominic Rushe

An internet router that aims to anonymise online activity had raised over $300,000 Tuesday, after less than 48 hours on the Kickstarter fundraising site.

Anonabox, a 2.4in by 1.6in router, directs internet data that connects to it by ethernet or Wi-Fi through the Tor network, software designed to allow anonymous web browsing.

Tor acts as a cloaking device, hiding information including the computer’s the current logged-in user name and the last-visited URL, IP address and other information disclosed through regular browsing. The service can be used to help people chat and email anonymously as well as skirt censorship.

Anonabox had hoped to raise $7,500 in 30 days but raised that amount in the first six hours of the fund raiser, said its developer August Germar.

“When we first started building it, I had no idea that anyone would be interested in it,” he said. “Initially we thought there would be enthusiasm from developers, journalists and librarians. But it turns out there are a lot more regular users. I think it’s not so much about privacy as about freedom of speech and freedom of information. This allows people to access information when people might try to censor them.”

Anonabox is open source – meaning outside developers will be able to develop the system. Germar, a California-based IT contractor, said the extra money would mean he could make more devices and speed up production and get it to more developers.

Germar aims to sell the device for $45 (£28).

There have been other attempts to popularise Tor routers but they have been more expensive and less portable. Germar said the device would not be useful for people looking to download movies or stream music anonymously, as the re-routing is likely to slow transmission of large files. “This is not a toy,” he said.
http://www.theguardian.com/technolog...ivity#comments





Anonabox - Tor Router Box is False Representation, Possibly Even Scam!
htilonomx3

Hi guys,

So everyone noticed the massive hype about Anonabox router that is supposed to be used for automatic "anonymization" worldwide.

I didn't like it from the start, considering I've been using the same on Raspberry Pi, WR703n clone called Gl-iNet (powered by OpenWRT) and because it looked like devices mentioned above.

What really pissed me off is because they said THEY had built FOUR prototypes before.

Picture: https://i.imgur.com/wgpd2bh.png

First on the left is a board that looks like PC Engines ALIX board, I don't recognize numbers 2 and 3, but 4th is definitely a Chinese clone of TL-WR703N (and there's gazillion of them).

How is this THEIR prototype and how is the hardware open source? As for software, they published some code, since I'm not a coder I won't judge it but it looks like OpenWRT to me.

Here's Anonabox 4th prototype with picture of Chinese router:

https://i.imgur.com/dvBjzJO.jpg (credit goes to /u/cstyves)

Here's PC Engines Alix http://www.pcengines.ch/pic/alix.jpg

See anything similar?

YOU CAN EVEN BUY THEIR PROTOTYPE ON ALIEXPRESS FOR 20$: http://www.aliexpress.com/item/New-2...691403728.html

I bet if you order thousands you get each under 10$...

So to keep things short, here's what bothers me:

• They say hardware and software is open source, which isn't the case
• They say they had four prototypes and all are THEIR prototypes. Which is a blatant lie, they are reselling Chinese devices.
• They will sell the device for about 50$, while the Chinese ones go under 20$.

I don't mind having TOR enabled router, but I most certainly don't want to give money to a campaign that's making false claims and it can be a scam. What makes things worse, they already have 367,119 $ on their campaign.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...ardware-router

EDIT: looks like the main guy for Anonabox is doing an AMA. I would kindly ask everyone to switch over the discussion to there. I'm a bit tired after a marathon of comments : ) i just hope the main issues get resolved. I would hate to see all the backers disappointed.

http://www.reddit.com/r/anonabox/com..._the_anonabox/

EDIT AGAIN:

Wow, just wow! A lot of bullshit on the AMA. We're 2 hours in Anonabox AMA and August Gramar has given us nothing else than vague and incomplete answers.

• He refused to admit that he's using off the shelf hardware available from Aliexpress and other Chinese suppliers

• He refused to admit that he did not design the anonabox case, board or anything else than the name

• Perfect example! and proof that in fact he did get the board from the Chinese and that others may try to sell it?!

• This guy basically proved he's using a Chinese PCB, and all the August could say it's this, which is lame.

So, I'm officially calling bullshit on this performance of Anonabox author. It's a shame really, and I kinda feel bad that so many people will be disappointment. Even if it's not a fraud, it's not as advertised and most certainly not 100% open source as the kickstarter says.

At this point, it seems that very unlikely the demand will be met, primarily because the Anonabox guy seems incompetent. Additionally, he is fucking with everyone on that thread by giving vague and incomplete answers. It just doesn't give hope.

I suggest everyone thoroughly reads his AMA, because there's so much bullshit there, it's worth reading it.

Since I REALLY feel bad for disappointing a lot of people, I'll tell you what. In the next few days I'll post about how to configure TOR on currently available mini routers. There's also a lot of guides already there, even devices like Onion Pi.

Sorry! :/

EDIT AGAIN AND AGAIN: Wired issued an update to the article!

1Update 9:15am 10/15/2014: As the Anonabox Kickstarter campaign has exploded to half a million dollars in just over two days (despite its initial goal of only $7,500) some critics on Reddit have called attention to Germar’s misrepresentation of the “custom” hardware board and plastic case used for the device. They point to stock devices available on Alibaba from Chinese suppliers that appear to be nearly identical. This piece has been corrected from an earlier version that included his claims that both the board and case were custom-built for the project.

In a followup phone call with Germar, he clarified that the router was created from a stock board sourced from the Chinese supplier Gainstrong. But he says that the project’s developers requested Gainstrong add flash memory to the board to better accommodate Tor’s storage demands. Germar also says now that the case was supplied by Gainstrong and was not custom-designed by the Anonabox developers, a partial reversal of how he initially described it to WIRED.

Thanks /u/jonthebold for letting me know!

Full Wired article (update is below the text) http://www.wired.com/2014/10/tiny-bo...ything-online/

MORE EDIT:

Daily Dot was among the first to write an article following up our discussion here. It's a shame really that they are being called out on twitter as trolls.

Full article hre: http://www.dailydot.com/politics/anonabox-accusations/


EDIT and UPDATE

I suggest you guys check @stevelord, he is dissecting Anonabox OpenWRT image and finding a lot of interesting issues! https://twitter.com/stevelord

EDIT about TOR package:

Anonabox is using grugg/portal from @thegrugq for TOR ! https://github.com/grugq/portal

EDIT: The Inquirer has published an article http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...ersy-at-reddit

EDIT: Network World has published an article about the controversy! http://www.networkworld.com/article/...medium=twitter

EDIT & MORE UPDATES:

Okay, so the rabbit hole goes deeper! I suggest everyone to follow Twitter hashtag anonabox because people are reporting hilarious issues and further revealing fraud!

/u/lugh points out https://twitter.com/Sc00bzT/status/522471884177547264 Which shows that Anonabox guy doesn't really know what Tor is.

/u/CaptainStouf is a creator of UnJailPi and he noticed actual wording being taken from webpage!

http://hackaday.com/2014/09/06/secur...ty-everywhere/
http://hackaday.io/project/2040-web-security-everywhere

Here is a full analysis by /u/CaptainStouf: https://i.imgur.com/wtEfOtK.png (I was forced to provide screenshot to save space for new updates, we're hitting the 15000 character limit!)

• Also, another Twitter link by @kpoulsen (Kevin Poulsen) https://twitter.com/kpoulsen/status/522463109945229313 which proves that Anonabox photo in the video introduction is shopped!


UPDATE ON TWITTER TROLLS:

https://mobile.twitter.com/stonemirror this guy is apparently a friend of August, the guy behind Anonabox. He is non stop tweeting that this is all a big troll to discredit Anonabox. Watch him being owned by community.

THIS IS GOLD https://twitter.com/cybergibbons/sta...90901063819265

Another update on SCAMMERS helping the Anonabox guy!

https://www.kickstarter.com/profile/714952146

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...outer/comments

Above linked is David Schlesinger, who is also on twitter known as @stonemirror. He has been non-stop LYING and changing the facts about all discovered and proved issues. He is a friend of August on Facebook, as proven on Twitter by @cybergibbons. I also believe they are using additional Kickstarter accounts to mislead the backers!!!!!!!!!!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B0BCtH9IcAAUrar.png:large

THIS IS PATHETIC AND DISGRACEFUL ATTEMPT BY ANONABOX GUY AND HIS FRIEND, THEY ARE LYING AND DOING EVERYTHING THEY CAN SO THE KICKSTARTER DOESN'T CANCEL THEIR SCAM.

FINAL EDIT (for now):

People, we need to talk.

We have proved that Anonabox guy and his twitter friends have intentionally deceived the public.

• They lied about the prototypes, saying that they invented the device while the device is bought from Aliexpress. What makes things absurd, they offered a bullshit story on how Arab Spring inspired them to create the device. Arab Spring started in 2010, so they are actually implying that the device was in the making for FOUR years, which is a blatant lie. All this to gain more sympathies from the people, thus deceiving them into backing their project!

• during AMA was the perfect opportunity for August Anonabox to come clean, to admit that he lied and everyone would forget about it. Of course, that did not happen. He continued to lie more and intentionally ignored the important questions for hours. When he replied he basically tried to "stonewall" people proving he is a liar and acted like he did not know about the Chinese devices.

• He finally came clean to the Wired author that in fact they are using the board from China, sourced by the company called Gainstrong. That is only about 10% of the truth, the whole device including design, board, plastic and everything was already made in China a long before August decided to “invent” Anonabox.

• Anonabox software is actually OpenWRT, which is something they did point out in logo, but intentionally withheld any actual specifications for the reason in next point. They withheld that information to BOOST SALES.

• They are intentionally misleading the public (LYING) about the device being fully open source, while it’s not. Hardware, the most important part of the device, is not open source. It’s a Chinese knockoff of TP-Link “3G routers” which opens the possibilities for a hardware backdoors in the hardware (think of Huawei backdoors). The reason why they did so is simple, nobody would buy the device in such numbers. Everyone would just build their own device.

• Their Tor package is actually The Grugq’s Portal (linked in edit above).

• OpenWRT is so BADLY configured by Anonabox team that device that is supposed to protect you is actually giving away your information. The device has BACKDOOR root password, OPEN wireless network (so anyone can connect to it) and is shipped with SSHD!!! This means that anyone can take control of the device!

• Anonabox marketing terms, pictures and prototypes are all ripped from various web sources. Wording is ripped off from UnJailPi, photos are actually just a photos of a Chinese clone, “prototypes” are well know hardware devices that are NOT invited by Anonabox.

If the above is not enough for you to back off, here’s my opinion on FAR WORSE issue that none seems to notice.

The Anonabox guy (and his helpers) are amateurs. They are offering fully secure device (and encrypted as they point out wrongfully) to people who need the anonymity. Their target group are non-tech people, journalists and whistle-blowers who are supposed to trust their LIFE to this piece of Chinese knockoff!

The fact that the Anonabox guys continued to intentionally mislead the public, proves that they do not care about the people they are providing the device for! They just want to either steal the money with fake kickstarter or provide off the shelf “3G router” made in China with badly patched bunch of scripts they found online. Tor as every other service / application is constantly being audited for vulnerabilities, which will NOT be patched when discovered on Anonabox because 1) authors are not providing a way to update firmware 2) they do not posses the knowledge to do it!

All mentioned above is a fraction of their craziness, DO NOT TRUST THEM. Seriously, DO NOT TRUST THEM OR BUY THEIR DEVICE. IT DOES NOT DO WHAT THEY ARE CLAIMING!!!!


UPDATE, again, for who knows which time now!

So the guy from Anonabox, August has made a update to Kickstarter page. For full update go here https://www.kickstarter.com/projects.../posts/1018317

I don't know if he is actually being stupid or just act like it, but here's what he said:

I have seen that a few people think we should mention OpenWrt more, and that we use it as the OS for the anonabox.

A FEW?! We're talking about thousands of people here, redditors, tweeets and this guy is diminishing the importance by saying it's just a few people?! What's worse, the OpenWRT wasn't even the question, everything else was! Coming late to the party, August decided to IGNORE all the serious accusations and just confirmed that it's OpenWRT that they are using. Yea, we kinda knew that since the beginning, don't you think? This wasn't even a issue. This is a really disgraceful way that shows they do not care about the device, they just want the money.

Please read the rest of above linked update from August to see it yourself, they are continuing the blatant charade of lies.

Please donate to TOR and OpenWRT! https://www.torproject.org/donate/donate https://dev.openwrt.org/wiki/SupportDonate
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/com...representation





Kickstarter Freezes Anonabox Privacy Router Project for Misleading Funders
Andy Greenberg

All August Germar asked for was $7,500 to fund his privacy-focused router project. But as the attention and controversy around his Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign snowballed over the last five days, he found himself at one point with 82 times that amount—and now with nothing.

On Friday afternoon Kickstarter suspended the crowdfunding campaign for Anonabox, an initiative to sell a tiny, $45 router that would run all a user’s online traffic over the anonymity network Tor. The idea tapped into an explosive demand for simple privacy technology, and earned more than 10 times its modest goal in hours. But as funders shoveled more than half a million dollars into the project, they also began to pick apart Anonabox’s claims of creating custom hardware, as well as the promised security of its software. Soon, many were calling for the project to be cancelled, and asked others to report its shortfalls to Kickstarter staff, who now say they’ll cancel all investors’ pledges.1

In an email to the project’s investors, Kickstarter told backers only that “a review of the project uncovered evidence that it broke Kickstarter’s rules.” Those rules, the email continued, prohibit “offering purchased items and claiming to have made them yourself,” “presenting someone else’s work as your own” and “misrepresenting or failing to disclose relevant facts about the project or its creator.”

The backlash against Anonabox began Tuesday evening, as users pointed out that the router’s hardware, which Anonabox creator Germar had claimed was custom-designed, could be found for sale from Chinese suppliers on sites like the business e-commerce platform Alibaba. In fact, Germar soon clarified to WIRED that the Anonabox prototype was built from an off-the-shelf case and a nearly stock board tweaked to add more flash memory storage, both sourced from the Chinese manufacturer Gainstrong. That was a reversal of some claims he had made to WIRED before our initial story on Anonabox, which we corrected Wednesday; Germar had said, for instance, that the case was created with a custom injection mold that Anonabox had paid to have its supplier create.

Others soon followed up with critiques of Anonabox’s software: the router’s default settings left its wireless network open and included a hardcoded root password that would leave users vulnerable to spying or compromise by hackers, the said. Those security shortcomings, the project’s critics argued, were especially egregious considering that Anonabox’s founders had said they intended the device to be used by journalists protecting sources and political dissidents in repressive regimes.

Over the last two days, Anonabox’s total funding had already dropped by more than $25,000 as disillusioned backers pulled their pledges. Following the project’s suspension, Germar didn’t immediately respond to an email from WIRED, and a Kickstarter spokesperson declined to comment.

As the controversy around Anonabox grew, Germar told WIRED earlier in the week that he had never intended the project to be aimed at normal, non-expert users, so much as developers who would contribute feedback and continue to improve the router. But Kickstarter users who poured money into the project instead read Germar’s claims as promising an easy, secure device that was ready for the consumer market. “I had thought this would be like push-starting a car,” Germar said on Wednesday. “Instead, it’s been like being handcuffed to a rocket.”

Kickstarter backers on the suspended Anonabox funding page mostly applauded the site’s decision to reverse their pledges. “Kickstarter thanks for protecting us! Good call,” wrote one user. “Thanks everyone for exposing this!” added another.

But some users were dismayed to see that the project was cancelled and wrote that they would be willing to fund a similar attempt to create a hardware-based Tor device if it were restarted elsewhere. “Regardless of [Kickstarter] rules being broken (and the apparently ‘drama’ surrounding it), I’d still like to get my hands on one,” wrote one backer. “So where?”

“We need someone to step forward for this project, and 9,000 of us proved it,” commented another supporter. “Wherever August starts this up again, I will learn where and join again.”
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/kicksta...pends-anonabox





VeraCrypt a Worthy TrueCrypt Alternative

A fork of TrueCrypt's code, VeraCrypt strengthens the open source encryption software's transformation process and addresses other weaknesses.
Paul Rubens

If you're reluctant to continue using TrueCrypt now that the open source encryption project has been abandoned, and you don't want to wait for the CipherShed fork to mature, one alternative that's well worth investigating is VeraCrypt.

VeraCrypt is also a fork of the original TrueCrypt code, and it was launched in June 2013. IT security consultant Mounir Idrassi, who is based in France, runs the project and is its main contributor.

Idrassi's motivation for developing VeraCrypt stems back to 2012 when he was asked to integrate TrueCrypt with a client's product. Before doing this he carried out a security audit of the code and discovered some issues. "There were no big problems, no backdoors or anything like that. But there were some small things, so we decided to start VeraCrypt," he said.

Idrassi said the main weakness in TrueCrypt was that - in his view - it was not secure against brute force attacks. Specifically, the way the software transformed a password to derive a key was not good enough, he said. "TrueCrypt uses a transformation that is not very complex. It is not sufficient, especially now with cloud cracking systems," he explained.

TrueCrypt Weakness

In technical terms, when a system partition is encrypted, TrueCrypt uses PBKDF2-RIPEMD160 with 1,000 iterations. For standard containers and other (i.e. non system) partitions, TrueCrypt uses at most 2,000 iterations.

What Idrassi did was beef up the transformation process. VeraCrypt uses 327,661 iterations of the PBKDF2-RIPEMD160 algorithm for system partitions, and for standard containers and other partitions it uses 655,331 iterations of RIPEMD160 and 500,000 iterations of SHA-2 and Whirlpool, he said.

While this makes VeraCrypt slightly slower at opening encrypted partitions, it makes the software a minimum of 10 and a maximum of about 300 times harder to brute force. "Effectively, something that might take a month to crack with TrueCrypt might take a year with VeraCrypt," Idrassi said.

As a result of this change, the VeraCrypt storage format is incompatible with TrueCrypt. While that could be a problem for anyone looking to move from TrueCrypt to VeraCrypt, Idrassi said he is working on a conversion tool which will be available within the next three months.

Better than TrueCrypt

As well as increasing the number of iterations that are carried out, Idrassi said he has addressed weaknesses in the API and drivers, and in parameter checking. The code has also been run against static analysis tools and changes made to correct defects that the analysis detected.

"Our focus has been on security so far, but the next step will be to add new features," Idrassi said, adding that new features will include compatibility with UEFI (to make the software work with Windows 8 and 10, for example) and capabilities for steganography – used to hide information in things like digital image files.

An obvious question to ask is whether Idrassi has considered teaming up with the CipherShed project. He said he was contacted by Bill Cox, a member of the CipherShed project management committee, back in June and asked to help, but he is too busy. "I don't have a lot of time but I can certainly contribute patches and things like that," he said.

But there are other reasons why Idrassi is reluctant to get involved.

"The main issue I have is that we don't agree on one thing: CipherShed think it is OK to continue using the TrueCrypt format (using the smaller number of iterations.) But we don't consider it secure enough - not to provide a high level of security against people or organizations with huge resources," he said.

The NSA Effect

Idrassi hinted that breaking compatibility with TrueCrypt is a good idea for another reason too. "For more than 10 years, law enforcement agencies have developed an infrastructure and tools to do forensic analysis of TrueCrypt volumes," he said.

Changing format and adding complexity is therefore not something that security agencies welcome, which, he suggested, makes it a problem for any U.S. based developers to contribute to VeraCrypt. "If you contribute to a project like this then you will be on a watch list in the U.S. We are based in France, so this is not a problem for us," he said.

As a result, VeraCrypt has few contributors apart from Idrassi himself. "This is not a game," he said. "It is very serious and we do it as professionals. We are very clear: The project is public, the French authorities are aware of it. But that's why not a lot of people contribute."

No TrueCrypt Conspiracy

As for the reason that TrueCrypt was abandoned by its original authors, Idrassi sees no cause for alarm. "I am sure the people involved in TrueCrypt couldn't have stayed anonymous and the security agencies knew who they were," he said. "But when you look at the code, you get the idea that these people must have been in their 40s back in 1995. So now they are in their 60s, and they are probably tired or retired.

"When they stopped the project they knew that it would cause new initiatives to start. I certainly don't believe there was anything suspicious,"Idrassi said.
http://www.esecurityplanet.com/open-...ternative.html





Least Worst Golden Key
Guest

The Washington Post seems to have kicked a crypto hornets nest recently, with their suggestion that Apple (and other phone manufacturers, though I’ll stick with Apple as an example) should include a golden escrow key to allow law enforcement to decrypt suspects’ phones. This provoked the expected reaction from everybody who gets it that escrow is a terrible idea. Fair enough. But what’s the least worst escrow system we can devise?

Why would we want to design such a system, given that implementing a golden key would be a disaster? Well, disaster planning is hardly a new idea. Nor does coming up with a plan for the worst case scenario necessarily mean you want it to happen. Devising fire evacuation plans for an office building doesn’t make one an arsonist. I think having a good escrow plan ready is better than having none and being forced to design one on the spot. Even worst case scenarios can be subdivided into worst worst and least worst. And so, without advocating for a key escrow system, here’s how I might go about building one.

Point zero, I’m going to skip over most of the crypto nuts and bolts. Whatever key your phone uses to encrypt all its data, stipulate that that key is then encrypted with the public escrow key. Your data is then secure as long as the matching private key is secure. Huge if, and the crux of the problem, but I’m not going to worry about the crypto itself. We’ll assume that’s already solved.

First, having a single golden key would be a disaster. It will get out, and then that’s it. By necessity it can’t be rotated, so whoever knows it today will know it forever. A single key would be like the nuclear launch codes, except they’d be in regular use and some large number of people would know them as a matter of course.

Let’s start over with multiple keys, like one per device. When the FBI asks to decrypt Alice’s phone, they get Alice’s key. Maybe Apple would handle the decryption instead, but that leaves open the question of how the decrypted data gets from Apple back to the FBI. The important principle is that Alice’s key cannot be used to decrypt Bob’s phone. Whenever a key is “brought to the surface”, there is a risk of exposure, which is why the single golden key plan is such a disaster. The compounded risk of a leak is too great, but separate keys don’t compound.

Unfortunately, having a database of all the keys still represents a single point of failure. The compounding risk factor is now every access to this database. We’re also only talking about a few hundred bytes per device. Exfiltrating the entire database is a little harder than stealing a single key, but hardly impossible. The only good news is that there’s a degree of forward secrecy. If (when?) the database is compromised, it won’t compromise future devices.

We can make the database harder to steal. Perhaps by keeping it offline. Perhaps by not keeping it in a computer at all. Print all the escrow keys on a sheet of paper. Thick, heavy paper (this is a long term archive after all) with one key per sheet. You’re not going to exfiltrate a million sheets of paper in your cargo pockets. You’re not going to be able to take pictures of all the pages. At least that’s my assumption, that with some reasonable physical security, we can keep “foreign agents” away from the data.

If we prevent the database from being stolen, we’ve also imposed an ordering constraint on anyone trying to decrypt a phone. They have to get the phone first, then break into the database to find the key. They can’t preemptively obtain the key because they don’t know which one to acquire. The smash and grab can only take place after looking at the phone.

We can make the breaking and entering part more difficult by sharding the keys. Dividing the keys between multiple sites makes it harder to get one particular key. But we need to balance that with the fact that more sites are more difficult to individually secure. Apple could keep the keys in a hundred different underground silos. The general surface vicinity would be off limits, but each silo would also be accessible only by unique personnel. The next obvious extension would be to split each key into a few parts and store them separately as well.

There’s my least worst idea. A per device backup key, split in pieces, stored on paper in underground silos.

The focus so far has been on preventing unauthorized access. The question of what constitutes authorized access is also of great concern, but also much murkier and not strictly a technical question. I’ll settle for saying that Apple should be running the storage sites, not the FBI, as a sort of check against rampant abuse.

At some level, asking “Would you rather have your escrow key kept in a mysql database in Cupertino or a Minuteman silo in North Dakota?” is like asking “Would you rather live without elbows or knees?”, but nevertheless I’m fairly confident that one option would let me sleep better than the other.

What’s the point? Because the common objection to key escrow is “It’s too hard.”, which is really only a compelling argument to people who already believe it. Anybody else watching the conversation from the outside will just say “You obviously haven’t even tried.” (“We already had this talk in the 90s.” is also apparently not very convincing. Without veering too far off topic, “women should vote” was also at one time “already discussed and dismissed” but fortunately kept coming back. It would be nice if the already discussed cannon only targeted bad ideas, but since it can obviously be targeted at any idea, it’s not a reliable ally.) Let’s try building the best escrow system we can, and then point out all the faults that remain.

Remember that the ultimate audience for this argument is the Senate. “Keeping secrets is impossible.” is not an argument that carries much water with Senators, because if they weren’t capable of keeping secrets, none of them would still be office. The fact that they continue to be reelected is, to them, convincing counterevidence that secrets can be kept.
http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/...rst-golden-key





F.B.I. Director to Call ‘Dark’ Devices a Hindrance to Crime Solving in a Policy Speech
Michael S. Schmidt

In his first major policy speech as director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey on Thursday plans to wade deeper into the debate between law enforcement agencies and technology companies about new programs intended to protect personal information on communication devices.

Mr. Comey will say that encryption technologies used on these devices, like the new iPhone, have become so sophisticated that crimes will go unsolved because law enforcement officers will not be able to get information from them, according to a senior F.B.I. official who provided a preview of the speech.

The speech was prompted, in part, by the new encryption technology on the iPhone 6, which was released last month. The phone encrypts emails, photos and contacts, thwarting intelligence and law enforcement agencies, like the National Security Agency and F.B.I., from gaining access to it, even if they have court approval.

The F.B.I. has long had concerns about devices “going dark” — when technology becomes so sophisticated that the authorities cannot gain access. But now, Mr. Comey said he believes that the new encryption technology has evolved to the point that it will adversely affect crime solving.

He will say in the speech that these new programs will most severely affect state and local law enforcement agencies, because they are the ones who most often investigate crimes like kidnappings and robberies in which getting information from electronic devices in a timely manner is essential to solving the crime.

They also do not have the resources that are available to the F.B.I. and other federal intelligence and law enforcement authorities in order to get around the programs.

Mr. Comey will cite examples of crimes that the authorities were able to solve because they gained access to a phone.

“He is going to call for a discussion on this issue and ask whether this is the path we want to go down,” said the senior F.B.I. official. “He is not going to accuse the companies of designing the technologies to prevent the F.B.I. from accessing them. But, he will say that this is a negative byproduct and we need to work together to fix it.”

Mr. Comey is scheduled to give the speech — titled “Going Dark: Are Technology, Privacy and Public Safety on a Collision Course?” — at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Mr. Comey took over as the F.B.I. director in September 2013, and he received little national attention. He spent a significant amount of time crisscrossing the country to visit nearly each of the F.B.I.'s 56 field offices. At each stop, he gave a briefing to members of the local news media, although those rarely generated significant news.

In recent weeks, however, he has been far more visible. For the past two Sundays, he has been featured on the CBS News program “60 Minutes.” Jimmy Fallon, host of “The Tonight Show” on NBC, even chided him for his response to a question on “60 Minutes.”

And, he has latched on to the encryption issue, repeatedly criticizing Apple.

In the interview that aired on “60 Minutes” on Sunday, Mr. Comey said that “the notion that we would market devices that would allow someone to place themselves beyond the law troubles me a lot.”

He said that it was the equivalent of selling cars with trunks that could never be opened, even with a court order.

“The notion that people have devices, again, that with court orders, based on a showing of probable cause in a case involving kidnapping or child exploitation or terrorism, we could never open that phone?” he said. “My sense is that we've gone too far when we've gone there.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/us...e-solving.html





South Korea Tries to Ease Cyber Surveillance Fears
Se Young Lee and Sohee Kim

South Korea is trying to ease worries about online privacy after a domestic chat app lost customers to a foreign rival because of fears prosecutors in one the world's most wired countries might get access to online conversations.

Prosecutors last month launched a cyber investigation team after President Park Geun-hye spoke out against online rumours that she said "crossed the line" and were deepening divisions in society.

But that has sown confusion and fear of snooping among users and providers of online services.

On Thursday, Prime Minister Chung Hong-won tried to reassure the public about online privacy, saying the government would only seek monitoring rights in special circumstances, such an investigation of murder, human trafficking or insurrection.

"(He) emphasised that the government has been steadfast in ensuring freedom of expression and other basic privacy rights and will continue to do so," Chung's office said in a statement.

Authorities insist they have no intention or ability to conduct large-scale surveillance of the public but South Korean messaging app KakaoTalk said it had lost users because of the fears about surveillance.

A rival German app, Telegram, which does not have servers in South Korea, added more than two million Korean users in the two weeks through to Oct. 11, according to market researcher Rankey.com.

Telegram rushed out a Korean-language version in response to the surge in business.

"The defection to a foreign app reflects hostility towards the government," said Sohn Dong-young, a media professor at Hanyang University.

Daum Communications Corp, KakaoTalk's operator, said on Monday it had stopped complying with monitoring warrants since Oct. 7 to protect KakaoTalk user privacy.

It also shortened the time it keeps data on servers and would introduce privacy modes, making it nearly impossible for third parties to see user conversations, it said.

"We will introduce real-time monitoring devices if that becomes a legal responsibility of operators," Daum co-chief executive Sirgoo Lee said at a parliamentary hearing on Thursday. "But today this decision is for the operators to make, and we have no intention of doing so."

South Korea is a vibrant democracy but until 1987 it was an authoritarian state, with tight restrictions on freedom of expression and widespread surveillance.

That history makes South Koreans especially sensitive to any encroachment on freedom of speech, said Sung Dong-kyoo, a professor at Chung-Ang University's department of mass communication and journalism.

"We have rapidly transitioned from being a tightly controlled society, and react more sensitively about ensuring the protection of privacy," Sung said.

In a poll of 500 South Koreans released on Thursday by Realmeter, 43.5 percent said they agreed with Daum's stance not to comply with monitoring warrants because protection of private information was important, while 30 percent disagreed, saying it was an obstruction of justice.

(Editing by Tony Munroe and Robert Birsel)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/1...0I618920141017





Mass Internet Surveillance Threatens International Law, UN Report Claims

Actions of intelligence agencies are ‘corrosive of online privacy’, Ben Emmerson says in response to Edward Snowden leaks
Owen Bowcott and Spencer Ackerman

Mass surveillance of the internet by intelligence agencies is “corrosive of online privacy” and threatens to undermine international law, according to a report to the United Nations general assembly.

The critical study by Ben Emmerson QC, the UN’s special rapporteur on counter-terrorism, released on Wednesday is a response to revelations by the whistleblower Edward Snowden about the extent of monitoring carried out by GCHQ in the UK and the National Security Agency (NSA) in the US.

Emmerson’s study poses a direct challenge to the claims of both governments that their bulk surveillance programs, which the barrister finds endanger the privacy of “literally every internet user,” are proportionate to the terrorist threat and robustly constrained by law. To combat the danger, Emmerson endorses the ability of Internet users to mount legal challenges to bulk surveillance.

“Bulk access technology is indiscriminately corrosive of online privacy and impinges on the very essence of the right guaranteed by [the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights],” Emmerson, a prominent human rights lawyer, concludes. The programmes, he said, “pose a direct and ongoing challenge to an established norm of international law.”

Article 17 of the covenant, Emmerson points out, states that “no one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, home and correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation”.

The 22-page report warns that the use of mass surveillance technology, through interception programs developed by the NSA and GCHQ such as Prism and Tempora, “effectively does away with the right to privacy of communications on the internet altogether”.

It also highlights more intrusive methods, such as the NSA’s Quantum program, which enables the agency to take “secret control over servers in key locations” and by impersonating websites “inject unauthorized remote control software into the computers and Wi-Fi-enabled devices of those who visit the clone site”.

Most countries possess the technical capacity to intercept and monitor calls made on a landline or mobile telephone, enabling an individual’s location to be determined, his or her movements to be tracked through cell site analysis and his or her text messages to be read and recorded, Emmerson says. An increasing number of countries also use malware systems that infiltrate individuals’ computer or smartphone, to override settings and monitor its activity.

But Emmerson differentiates between targeted surveillance, which follows a belief that its subject is involved in a specific act of wrongdoing, with bulk surveillance, which indiscriminately swallows up digital or telephonic communications data. The latter practice gives countries like the US and the UK access to an “effectively unlimited number of users,” Emmerson writes.

“This amounts to a systematic interference with the right to respect for the privacy of communications, and requires a correspondingly compelling justification,” Emmerson maintains.

“Merely to assert – without particularization – that mass surveillance technology can contribute to the suppression and prosecution of acts of terrorism does not provide an adequate human rights law justification for its use. The fact that something is technically feasible, and that it may sometimes yield useful intelligence, does not by itself mean that it is either reasonable or lawful.”

The argument that anything online should be considered to be in the public domain is demolished by Emmerson. “Merely using the internet as a means of private communication cannot conceivably constitute an informed waiver of the right to privacy,” he states. “The internet is not a purely public space. It is composed of many layers of private as well as social and public realms.”

Mass surveillance of digital content and communications data is “a serious challenge to an established norm of international law”, according to the report. “The very existence of mass surveillance programmes constitutes a potentially disproportionate interference with the right to privacy.

“It is incompatible with existing concepts of privacy for states to collect all communications or metadata all the time indiscriminately. The very essence of the right to the privacy of communication is that infringements must be exceptional, and justified on a case-by-case basis.”

Emmerson’s report follows a finding this summer from Navi Pillay, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, that criticised the US and its allies for a “disturbing lack of transparency” about their surveillance practices. Pillay stated in July that Snowden ought not to be prosecuted for disclosing the extent of the surveillance dragnets.

Within the US, where a tumultuous year-long debate over surveillance reform appears to have stalled, intelligence officials insist that their surveillance activities are restrained by laws like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa) and the Patriot Act - passed by the US Congress and subject the watchful judicial eye of the secret Fisa court.

While Emmerson’s report does not explicitly criticise the US, it rejects those assertions. The sheer volume of US surveillance, by its nature, cannot “be spelled out in legislation”, meaning Americans’ and foreigners’ privacy rights can be violated “without commensurate safeguards”.

Deriving authority for bulk surveillance from laws that, on their face, do not authorise the practice amount to “secret legal frameworks”, an echo of a criticism made by US senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall.

“Nothing short of detailed and explicit authorization in primary legislation suffices to meet the principle of legality,” Emmerson writes.

Emmerson also proposes a remedy for the vulnerability of digital communications data. “Any Internet user,” he concludes, ought to have legal standing to “challenge the legality, necessity and proportionality” of mass surveillance.

Courts in the US have not viewed that contention favourably. Before Snowden’s leaks, several judges rejected legal challenges because those bringing the suit had no way of knowing their specific communications were collected.

Even after Snowden disclosed the bulk collection of Americans’ phone data, US justice department lawyers began arguing that surveillance only truly occurred once the collected communications data was analysed, something else users cannot know.

During arguments in a New York federal court last month, government lawyers argued the judges themselves have no authority to review the NSA’s bulk phone-records collection.

The report refers to revelations first published in the Guardian last year about the NSA’s mass collection of telecommunications data and its authorisation under a secret court order.

“The right to privacy is not,” Emmerson’s report acknowledges, “an absolute right. Once an individual is under suspicion and subject to formal investigation by intelligence or law enforcement agencies, that individual may be subjected to surveillance for entirely legitimate counter-terrorism and law enforcement purposes.”

But he adds: “There is an urgent need for states to revise national laws regulating modern forms of surveillance to ensure that these practices are consistent with international human rights law.

“The absence of clear and up-to-date legislation creates an environment in which arbitrary interferences with the right to privacy can occur without commensurate safeguards. Explicit and detailed laws are essential for ensuring legality and proportionality in this context.”

The report concludes: “The prevention and suppression of terrorism is a public interest imperative of the highest importance and may in principle form the basis of an arguable justification for mass surveillance of the internet.

“However, the technical reach of the programmes currently in operation is so wide that they could be compatible with article 17 of the covenant only if relevant States are in a position to justify as proportionate the systematic interference with the internet privacy rights of a potentially unlimited number of innocent people located in any part of the world.”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...-snowden-leaks





Revealed: ISPs Already Violating Net Neutrality to Block Encryption and Make Everyone Less Safe Online
Mike Masnick

One of the most frequent refrains from the big broadband players and their friends who are fighting against net neutrality rules is that there's no evidence that ISPs have been abusing a lack of net neutrality rules in the past, so why would they start now? That does ignore multiple instances of violations in the past, but in combing through the comments submitted to the FCC concerning net neutrality, we came across one very interesting one that actually makes some rather stunning revelations about the ways in which ISPs are currently violating net neutrality/open internet principles in a way designed to block encryption and thus make everyone a lot less secure. The filing comes from VPN company Golden Frog and discusses "two recent examples that show that users are not receiving the open, neutral, and uninterrupted service to which the Commission says they are entitled."

The first example you may have actually heard about. It got some attention back in July, when entrepreneur Colin Nederkoorn released a video showing how Verizon was throttling his Netflix connection, which was made obvious when he logged into a VPN and suddenly his Netflix wasn't stuttering and the throughput was much higher. That video got a lot of attention (over half a million views) and highlighted the nature of the interconnection fight in which Verizon is purposely allowing Netflix streams coming via Level 3 to clog. As most people recognize, in a normal scenario, using a VPN should actually slow down your connection somewhat thanks to the additional encryption. However, the fact that it massively sped up the Netflix connection shows just how much is being throttled when Verizon knows it's Netflix traffic. Nederkoorn actually was using Golden Frog's VyprVPN in that video, so it actually makes Golden Frog look good -- but the company notes that it really shows one way in which "internet access providers are 'mismanaging' their networks to their own users' detriment."

But the second example Golden Frog provides is much scarier and much more pernicious, and it has received almost no attention.

In the second instance, Golden Frog shows that a wireless broadband Internet access provider is interfering with its users’ ability to encrypt their SMTP email traffic. This broadband provider is overwriting the content of users’ communications and actively blocking STARTTLS encryption. This is a man-in-the-middle attack that prevents customers from using the applications of their choosing and directly prevents users from protecting their privacy.

They demonstrate this with the following graphic

This is scary. If ISPs are actively trying to block the use of encryption, it shows how they might seek to block the use of VPNs and other important security protection measures, leaving all of us less safe. Golden Frog provides more details of what's happening in this case:

Golden Frog performed tests using one mobile wireless company’s data service, by manually typing the SMTP commands and requests, and monitoring the responses from the email server in issue. It appears that this particular mobile wireless provider is intercepting the server’s banner message and modifying it in-transit from something like “220 [servername] ESMTP Postfix” to “200 ********************.” The mobile wireless provider is further modifying the server’s response to a client command that lists the extended features supported by the server. The mobile wireless provider modifies the server’s “250-STARTTLS” response (which informs the client of the server’s capacity to enable encryption). The Internet access provider changes it to “250-XXXXXXXA.” Since the client does not receive the proper acknowledgement that STARTTLS is supported by the server, it does not attempt to turn on encryption. If the client nonetheless attempts to use the STARTTLS command, the mobile wireless provider intercepts the client’s commands to the server and changes it too. When it detects the STARTTLS command being sent from the client to the server, the mobile wireless provider modifies the command to “XXXXXXXX.” The server does not understand this command and therefore sends an error message to the client.

As Golden Frog points out, this is "conceptually similar" to the way in which Comcast was throttling BitTorrent back in 2007 via packet reset headers, which kicked off much of the last round of net neutrality concerns. The differences here are that this isn't about blocking BitTorrent, but encryption, and it's a mobile internet access provider, rather than a wired one. This last point is important, since even the last net neutrality rules did not apply to wireless broadband, and the FCC is still debating if it should apply any new rules to wireless.

After reading the Golden Frog filing, the answer should be that it is absolutely necessary to apply the rules to wireless, because practices like these put us all at risk by undermining the encryption that keeps us all safe. As Golden Frog notes:

Absent enforceable Commission rules, broadband providers can (and at least one already does) block and discriminate against entirely acceptable Internet uses. In this case, users are not just losing their right to use the applications and services of their choosing, but also their privacy. It is not at clear that this type of encryption blocking would be forbidden for fixed broadband Internet access, under the proposed rules’ exception for reasonable network management. This example involves mobile wireless broadband, however, and it is clear that the proposed rules would not prohibit the activity. STARTLLS encryption does not constitute “a lawful website” or “an application[] that compete[s] with the provider’s voice or video telephony services[.]”11 The proposed rules on their face do not prohibit mobile broadband Internet access providers from blocking user efforts to maintain privacy through encryption.

Furthermore, Golden Frog concludes:

The claim that rules banning blocking and unreasonable discrimination are solutions in search of a problem is flatly wrong. There have been problems in the past and there are problems now. The proposed rules do not resolve all of the problems identified in the NPRM. Further broadband Internet access providers are still interfering with beneficial and privacy-enhancing applications users want to employ.

This is incredibly important -- just at a time when we need stronger encryption and privacy online, the FCC may undermine it with weak net neutrality rules that allow this type of behavior to continue.

A few months ago, I got into a conversation with a well-known internet entrepreneur/investor, who asked about possible "compromise" rules on net neutrality, suggesting that maybe it's okay to throttle Netflix traffic because there's so much of it. He argued that, perhaps there could be some threshold, and if your traffic was above that threshold it's okay to throttle it. After some back and forth, I asked the hypothetical about encryption: what if, at a time when more and more encryption is important, such a rule was in place, and overall encrypted traffic passed that threshold, then suddenly access providers could throttle all encrypted traffic, doing tremendous damage to security and privacy. What I didn't realize was that some access providers are effectively already attacking privacy and encryption in this manner.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...e-online.shtml





Millions of Voiceprints Quietly Being Harvested As Latest Identification Tool

• ‘Voice biometrics will be the de facto standard in 2-3 years’
• More than 65m voiceprints already on databases

Over the telephone, in jail and online, a new digital bounty is being harvested: the human voice.

Businesses and governments around the world increasingly are turning to voice biometrics, or voiceprints, to pay pensions, collect taxes, track criminals and replace passwords.

“We sometimes call it the invisible biometric,” said Mike Goldgof, an executive at Madrid-based AGNITiO, one of about 10 leading companies in the field.

Those companies have helped enter more than 65m voiceprints into corporate and government databases, according to Associated Press interviews with dozens of industry representatives and records requests in the United States, Europe and elsewhere.

“There’s a misconception that the technology we have today is only in the domain of the intelligence services, or the domain of Star Trek,” said Paul Burmester, of London-based ValidSoft, a voice biometric vendor. “The technology is here today, well-proven and commonly available.”

And in high demand.

Dan Miller, an analyst with Opus Research in San Francisco, estimates that the industry’s revenue will roughly double from just under $400m last year to between $730m and $900m next year.

Barclays plc recently experimented with voiceprinting as an identification for its wealthiest clients. It was so successful that Barclays is rolling it out to the rest of its 12 million retail banking customers.

“The general feeling is that voice biometrics will be the de facto standard in the next two or three years,” said Iain Hanlon, a Barclays executive.

Vendors say the timbre of a person’s voice is unique in a way similar to the loops and whorls at the tips of someone’s fingers.

Their technology measures the characteristics of a person’s speech as air is expelled from the lungs, across the vocal folds of the larynx, up the pharynx, over the tongue, and out through the lips, nose and teeth. Typical speaker recognition software compares those characteristics with data held on a server. If two voiceprints are similar enough, the system declares them a match.

The Vanguard Group Inc, a Pennsylvania-based mutual fund manager, is among the technology’s many financial users. Tens of thousands of customers log in to their accounts by speaking the phrase: “At Vanguard, my voice is my password” into the phone.

“We’ve done a lot of testing, and looked at siblings, even twins,” said executive John Buhl, whose voice was a bit hoarse during a telephone interview. “Even people with colds, like I have today, we looked at that.”

The single largest implementation identified by the AP is in Turkey, where the mobile phone company Turkcell has taken the voice biometric data of some 10 million customers using technology provided by market leader Nuance Communications Inc. But government agencies are catching up.

In the US, law enforcement officials use the technology to monitor inmates and track offenders who have been paroled.

In New Zealand, the Internal Revenue Department celebrated its 1 millionth voiceprint, leading the revenue minister to boast that his country had “the highest level of voice biometric enrolments per capita in the world”.

In South Africa, roughly 7m voiceprints have been collected by the country’s Social Security Agency, in part to verify that those claiming pensions are still alive.

Activists worry that the popularity of voiceprinting has a downside.

“It’s more mass surveillance,” said Sadhbh McCarthy, an Irish privacy researcher. “The next thing you know, that will be given to border guards, and you’ll need to speak into a microphone when you get back from vacation.”
http://www.theguardian.com/technolog...ification-tool





Cops Need a Warrant to Grab Your Cell Tower Data, Florida Court Rules
Kim Zetter

Americans may have a Florida drug dealer to thank for expanding our right to privacy.

Police departments around the country have been collecting phone metadata from telecoms and using a sophisticated spy tool to track people through their mobile phones—often without obtaining a warrant. But a new ruling out of Florida has curbed the activity in that state, on constitutional grounds. It raises hope among civil liberties advocates that other jurisdictions around the country may follow suit.

The Florida Supreme Court ruled Thursday that obtaining cell phone location data to track a person’s location or movement in real time constitutes a Fourth Amendment search and therefore requires a court-ordered warrant.

The case specifically involves cell tower data for a convicted drug dealer that police obtained from a telecom without a warrant. But the way the ruling is written, it would also cover the use of so-called “stingrays”—sophisticated technology law enforcement agencies use to locate and track people in the field without assistance from telecoms. Agencies around the country, including in Florida, have been using the technology to track suspects—sometimes without obtaining a court order, other times deliberately deceiving judges and defendants about their use of the devices to track suspects, telling judges the information came from “confidential” sources rather than disclose their use of stingrays. The new ruling would require them to obtain a warrant or stop using the devices.

The American Civil Liberties Union calls the Florida ruling “a resounding defense” of the public’s right to privacy.

“Following people’s movements by secretly turning their cell phones into tracking devices can reveal extremely sensitive details of our lives, like where we go to the doctor or psychiatrist, where we spend the night, and who our friends are,” said Nate Freed Wessler, an attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. “Police are now on notice that they need to get a warrant from a judge before tracking cell phones, whether using information from the service provider or their own ‘Stingray’ cell phone tracking equipment.”

The ruling constitutes the first time that a state court has reached this finding under the Fourth Amendment. It comes at a timely moment when federal courts of appeal in other jurisdictions are in the midst of taking up the question of cell tower data, Wessler told WIRED. Even if other jurisdictions rule differently, the Florida case makes it more likely that the issue will one day get to the U.S. Supreme Court. If it does, civil liberties advocates hope that the federal court would rule as it did on the use of GPS tracking devices used by police, determining that it constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment. Though the court in that case fell short of ruling that the use of GPS devices requires a warrant, law enforcement agencies around the country have changed their practices as a result of the ruling.

Stingrays are equally as invasive as GPS trackers, if not more so since GPS trackers are generally used on vehicles traveling public roads. Stingrays, however, can track the mobile phone wherever it goes—inside an apartment building and even down to the exact apartment where a person resides.

The stingrays, also known as IMSI catchers, simulate a cellphone tower and trick any nearby mobile devices into connecting with them, thereby revealing their location. When mobile phones connect to the stingray, the device can see and record their unique ID numbers and traffic data, as well as information that points to the phone’s location. By moving the stingray around, authorities can triangulate the phone’s location with greater precision than they can using data obtained from a fixed tower location and from telecoms.

The Justice Department has long asserted that law enforcement agencies don’t need a probable-cause warrant to use stingrays because they don’t collect the content of phone calls and text messages. Instead, authorities say, they operate like pen-register and trap-and-trace systems, collecting the equivalent of header information. A pen register system records the phone numbers that a person dials, while a trap-and-trace system records the phone numbers of incoming calls to that phone.

The ACLU and others argue, however, that stingrays are more invasive than a trap-and-trace and should require a warrant. By not seeking a warrant to use them, police in Florida have been able to not only conceal from judges and defendant’s their use of the devices but also prevent the public from learning how the secretive technology is employed.

With regard to the Florida drug case—involving cell tower data obtained from a telecom—the ruling is significant for another reason in that the court rejected arguments that a user has no expectation of privacy in data collected by a telecom.

The government argued in the case that they had a right to obtain the data without a warrant because it carried no special protection under the so-called third-party doctrine. Under this argument the government asserts that information a person provides to a third-party—in this case the telecom—carries no expectation of privacy. When a mobile user’s phone pings nearby cell towers, the user is willingly providing the cell tower, and telecom, with their location information, the government argued.

But the judges rejected this argument out of hand.

“Simply because the cell phone user knows or should know that his cell phone gives off signals that enable the service provider to detect its location for call routing purposes, and which enable cell phone applications to operate for navigation, weather reporting, and other purposes, does not mean that the user is consenting to use of that location information by third parties for any other unrelated purposes,” the judges wrote. “While a person may voluntarily convey personal information to a business or other entity for personal purposes, such disclosure cannot reasonably be considered to be disclosure for all purposes to third parties not involved in that transaction.”

The drug dealer in question, essentially, did not consent to give his location to police just by possessing and using a cell phone.
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/florida...ll-tower-data/





Revealed: How Whisper App Tracks ‘Anonymous’ Users

• Some Whisper users monitored even after opting out of geolocation services
• Company shares some information with US Department of Defense
• User data collated and indefinitely stored in searchable database

Whisper app rewrites terms of service and privacy policy
Paul Lewis and Dominic Rushe

The company behind Whisper, the social media app that promises users anonymity and claims to be the “the safest place on the internet”, is tracking the location of its users, including some who have specifically asked not to be followed.

The practice of monitoring the whereabouts of Whisper users – including those who have expressly opted out of geolocation services – will alarm users, who are encouraged to disclose intimate details about their private and professional lives.

Whisper is also sharing information with the US Department of Defense gleaned from smartphones it knows are used from military bases, and developing a version of its app to conform with Chinese censorship laws.

The US version of the app, which enables users to publish short messages superimposed over photographs or other images, has attracted millions of users, and is proving especially popular among military personnel who are using the service to make confessions they would be unlikely to publish on Facebook or Twitter.

Currently, users of Whisper are publishing as many as 2.6m messages a day. Facebook is reportedly developing its own Whisper-style app for anonymous publishing. The trend toward anonymity in social media has some privacy experts concerned about security.

Approached for comment last week, Whisper said it “does not follow or track users”. The company added that the suggestion it was monitoring people without their consent, in an apparent breach of its own terms of service, was “not true” and “false”.

But on Monday – four days after learning the Guardian intended to publish this story – Whisper rewrote its terms of service; they now explicitly permit the company to establish the broad location of people who have disabled the app’s geolocation feature.

Whisper has developed an in-house mapping tool that allows its staff to filter and search GPS data, pinpointing messages to within 500 meters of where they were sent.

The technology, for example, enables the company to monitor all the geolocated messages sent from the Pentagon and National Security Agency. It also allows Whisper to track an individual user’s movements over time.

When users have turned off their geolocation services, the company also, on a targeted, case-by-case basis, extracts their rough location from IP data emitted by their smartphone.

The Guardian witnessed this practice on a three-day visit to the company’s Los Angeles headquarters last month, as part of a trip to explore the possibility of an expanded journalistic relationship with Whisper.

After reviewing Whisper’s back-end tools and speaking extensively with the company’s executives, the Guardian has also established that:

• User data, including Whisper postings that users believe they have deleted, is collated in a searchable database. The company has no access to users’ names or phone numbers, but is storing information about the precise time and approximate location of all previous messages posted through the app. The data, which stretches back to the app’s launch in 2012, is being stored indefinitely, a practice seemingly at odds with Whisper’s stated policy of holding the data only for “a brief period of time”.

• A team headed by Whisper’s editor-in-chief, Neetzan Zimmerman, is closely monitoring users it believes are potentially newsworthy, delving into the history of their activity on the app and tracking their movements through the mapping tool. Among the many users currently being targeted are military personnel and individuals claiming to work at Yahoo, Disney and on Capitol Hill.

• Whisper’s policy toward sharing user data with law enforcement has prompted it on occasions to provide information to both the FBI and MI5. Both cases involved potentially imminent threats to life, Whisper said, a practice standard in the tech industry. But privacy experts who reviewed Whisper’s terms of service for the Guardian said the company appeared to require a lower legal threshold for providing user information to authorities than other tech companies.

• The company is cooperating with the US Department of Defense, sharing information with researchers investigating the frequency of mentions of suicide or self-harm from smartphones that Whisper knows are being used from US military bases. Whisper stressed that “specific user data” is not being shared with the DoD, adding that the company was “proudly working with many organisations to lower suicide rates and the US military is among them”.

• Whisper is developing a Chinese version of its app, which received a soft-launch earlier this month. Companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter are banned in mainland China. Whisper executives said they had agreed to the demands China places on tech companies operating in its jurisdiction, including a ban on the use of certain words.

Whisper’s targeted monitoring of some people who use the app – even some of those who have declared they do not want to be followed by opting out of geolocation – is likely to surprise its users, who are drawn to the app by the bold promises the company makes about their anonymity.

“Whisper isn’t actually about concealing identity. It’s about a complete absence of identity,” the company’s co-founder and CEO, Michael Heyward, recently told Entrepreneur magazine. “The concept around Whisper is removing the concept of identity altogether, so you’re not as guarded.”

He has called Whisper the “safest place on internet” and portrays the app as a secure place in which users should feel free to express their innermost feelings and confessions.

Whisper, which was recently valued at over $200m, has grown rapidly since its launch two years ago. It is among the fleet of confessional apps, such as Secret and Yik Yak, which backers say enable users to be more candid than they are on other social media platforms.

To stamp out inappropriate behaviour, Whisper has an offshore base in the Philippines, where more than 100 employees screen messages 24 hours a day. Whisper described the process as “extremely secure”.

In an attempt to promote content posted on the app, Whisper has worked hard to build relationships with news organisations. Its longest-standing partnership is with Buzzfeed, and Whisper’s executives said they are now in discussions with newspapers and TV networks.

On Thursday, a Buzzfeed spokesperson said the news outlet is now halting its partnership with Whisper. “We’re taking a break from our partnership until Whisper clarifies to us and its users the policy on user location and privacy,” a spokesperson said.

Over the last year, Whisper has promoted revelations posted by anonymous users about the dismissal of Dov Charney, the founder of American Apparel, and accusations about Gwyneth Paltrow’s private life.

In September, Whisper returned to the headlines when an apparently suicidal man in Texas used the app to broadcast messages and photographs from the middle of a standoff with armed police.

The Guardian had previously worked with Whisper to find Iraq war veterans who wanted to share their opinions of Isis, find an undocumented immigrant to write an opinion article and post people’s confessions about Valentine’s Day. At no point during those collaborations did Whisper indicate it was ascertaining the location of individual users who had disabled their geolocation feature.

The Guardian visited the Whisper offices to consider the possibility of undertaking other journalistic projects with the company and sent two reporters last month to look in detail at how the app operates. At no stage during the visit were the journalists told they could not report on the information shared with them.

The Guardian is no longer pursuing a relationship with Whisper.

Whisper introduced its optional geolocation feature earlier this year, enabling users to view other people’s messages that have been posted by users within a set-mile radius, known as the “nearby” function. Crucially, the app also contains a button that allows users to opt out of its geolocation service, a facility its terms state is “purely voluntarily”.

That system provided Whisper with a hoard of easily analysed location data from those who opted into the service, and the company has become increasingly open with journalists that its in-house technology allows it to locate users. The company now uses geolocation to make judgments about the “veracity” of users posting on the site.

In July, during the recent Israeli war in Gaza, Whisper was able to monitor Israeli Defense Force soldiers on the frontline. “We had 13 or 14 soldiers who we were tracking – every whisper they did,” one Whisper executive said during the Guardian’s visit.

Separately, Whisper has been following a user claiming to be a sex-obsessed lobbyist in Washington DC. The company’s tracking tools allow staff to monitor which areas of the capital the lobbyist visits. “He’s a guy that we’ll track for the rest of his life and he’ll have no idea we’ll be watching him,” the same Whisper executive said.

Now the company plans to make its database and a version of its mapping tool available to select journalists in the coming months.

When Guardian reporters visited Whisper last month, Zimmerman and another executive said that when they wanted to establish the location of individual users who are among the 20% who have opted out of geolocation services, they simply asked their technical staff to obtain the “latitude and longitude” of the phones they had used.

One of the users that Whisper suggested the Guardian could be interested in researching, for example, claimed to be soldier who could be imminently deployed to Iraq.

The user had apparently turned off their geolocation facility, denying the company permission to track them. Yet Whisper was able to ascertain the dates the user had been in Afghanistan and Fort Riley, Kansas.

Whisper later explained that when it wants to establish the location of users who have disabled their geolocation services, the company uses their IP location.

On Thursday last week, the Guardian contacted Whisper, explained it planned to write a story about the company’s internal practices and asked for comment.

Whisper acknowledged that it researches the location of specific users it believes are posting newsworthy information, but emphasised it typically uses GPS data.

Whisper stressed the IP location data it uses for people who have asked not to be followed is rough and unreliable.

“We occasionally look at user IP addresses internally to determine very approximate location,” the company said. “User IP addresses may allow very coarse location to be determined to the city, state or country level.”

It added: “Whisper does not request or store any personally identifiable information from users, therefore there is never a breach of anonymity. From time to time, when a user makes a claim of a newsworthy nature, we review the user’s past activity to help determine veracity.”

The company strongly rejected any assertion of wrongdoing. “The Guardian’s assumptions that Whisper is gathering information about users and violating user’s privacy are false,” it said. “The privacy of our users is not violated in any of the circumstances suggested in the Guardian story.”

Four days later, Whisper rewrote large sections of its terms of service and introduced an entirely new privacy policy.

Whereas the previous terms and conditions described all of Whisper’s tracking of user location as “voluntary”, the new terms now warn users to “bear in mind that, even if you have disabled location services, we may still determine your city, state, and country location”.

Since becoming aware that the Guardian planned to publish its story, the anonymous app has also inserted a new line into its privacy policy.

It now warns users that turning on the app’s geolocation feature may “allow others, over time, to make a determination as to your identity”.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...tracking-users





The Future of Civilization Is a Battle Between Google and Wikileaks
Eugene Jarecki

Last weekend, I participated in an event that grabbed headlines around the world, even making it into Jimmy Fallon’s opening monologue on “The Tonight Show.” Yet the real cover story has to date gone unreported.

The fourth annual Nantucket Project (co-sponsored this year by TIME) is a weekend of TED-style talks for the luminary set that hobnobs off the Massachusetts coast. I interviewed notorious Wikileaks founder Julian Assange by hologram, beamed in from his place of asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. News coverage the next day focused in one way or another on the spectacular and mischievous angle that Assange had, in effect, managed to escape his quarantine and laugh in the face of those who wish to extradite him by appearing full-bodied in Nantucket before a packed house of exhilarated conference attendees.

Beyond the spectacle, though, what got less attention was what the interview was actually about, namely the future of our civilization in an increasingly digital world. What does it mean for us as people to see the traditional town square go digital, with online banking displacing bricks and mortar, just as email did snail mail, Wikipedia did the local library, and eBay the mom and pop shop? The subject of our ever-digitizing lives is one that has been gaining currency over the past year, fueled by news stories about Google Glasses, self-driving cars, sky-rocketing rates of online addiction and, most recently, the scandal of NSA abuse. But the need to better understand the implications of our digital transformation was further underscored in the days preceding the event with the publication of two books: one by Assange and the other by Google Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt.

Assange’s book, When Google Met Wikileaks, is the transcript (with commentary by Assange) of a secret meeting between the two that took place on June 23, 2011, when Schmidt visited Assange in England. In his commentary, Assange explores the troubling implications of Google’s vast reach, including its relationships with international authorities, particularly in the U.S., of which the public is largely unaware. Schmidt’s book, How Google Works, is a broader, sunnier look at how technology has presumably shifted the balance of power from companies to people. It tells the story of how Google rose from a nerdy young tech startup to become a nerdy behemoth astride the globe. Read together, the two books offer an unsettling portrait both of our unpreparedness for what lies ahead and of the utopian spin with which Google (and others in the digital world) package tomorrow. While Assange’s book accuses Google of operating as a kind of “‘Don’t Be Evil’ empire,” Schmidt’s book fulfills Assange’s worst fears, presenting pseudo-irreverent business maxims in an “aw shucks” tone that seems willfully ignorant of the inevitable implications of any company coming to so sweepingly dominate our lives in unprecedented and often legally uncharted ways.

No sooner had these divergent visions been introduced to the world in print than their authors went toe-to-toe in the press, with Assange characterizing Google as the “privatized version of the NSA” and Schmidt firing back that Assange is simply “paranoid.” These simple sound bites belie the depth of each author’s worldview and even of their views of one another. Though Assange is an anti-establishment vigilante and Schmidt comes from a wildly different position as chief shopkeeper of the digital marketplace, their 2011 conversation shows a surprising level of agreement in key areas, such as the importance of information architecture and the way the digital world promotes public bargaining power. Assange of course wishes to promote these in the service of a more informed citizenry, while Schmidt seeks to empower more and better consumers.

Strangely, any such depth is absent in Schmidt’s book, which is more a sort of Pollyannish collection of “what they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School”-type maxims, gleaned at the helm of the world’s most dominant company. As with so much about Google, one is drawn to read Schmidt’s words despite oneself, though they are really just thinly veiled propaganda for his company. I felt like fact-checking some of what I read, but where would I go? Google?

So suddenly, a classic standoff has emerged across the digital town square. On one side, we see an exhausted but indefatigable vigilante, half-armed, bleeding, possibly half-crazed. On the other, the gleaming company man, armed to the teeth, with stars and stripes billowing behind him, swaggering with the confident ease of invincibility. As their crosshairs train on one another now across the digital frontier, I am reminded from Assange’s book that they were, in a sense, friends once, or at least kindred spirits in the quest to understand the road ahead.

For me, the most significant takeaway from this duel of perspectives came during my interview with Assange. I passingly referred to the Internet as a kind of Wild West, one with limited regulation and desperados vying for control. He stopped me and said I was only half right to characterize it this way. Citing his own legal difficulties and the larger ongoing NSA scandal, he argued that the Internet is in no way a lawless place when it comes to government controls. Rather, it is only lawless where the rights of citizens are concerned. Assange painted a picture of the old world — admittedly imperfect but built upon a legal system that seeks to balance human rights with human accountabilities, the privileges of citizenship with its costs. He then went on to describe the new world, where this delicate architecture is being replaced by one with highly developed structures for the enforcement of accountability but little or none to ensure the rights and freedoms of citizens.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that, in the same week that Assange and Schmidt squared off as adversaries, Tim Berners-Lee, the person credited with actually creating the world wide web (sorry, Al) returned to the role of cool-headed arbitrator, calling for a Magna Carta of the digital age. “The power to abuse the open Internet has become so tempting both for government and big companies,” Berners-Lee warned, that a kind of bill of rights for Internet users is urgently needed. Berners-Lee’s testimony offers, perhaps, a third way between the extremes represented by Assange and Schmidt, coolly reminding us that somewhere between the heedless profit-pursuit of those in power and the strident antagonism of those opposed, we are long overdue for a kind of constitutional convention, the kind of democratic gathering necessary at the dawn of any brave new world to ensure that we strike a balance between the better and lesser angels in our nature.
http://time.com/3490585/google-eric-...ulian-assange/





Google Tests Waters for Potential Ultra-Fast Wireless Service
Alexei Oreskovic

Google Inc is preparing to test new technology that may provide the foundation for a wireless version of its high-speed "Fiber" Internet service, according to telecommunication experts who scrutinised the company's regulatory filings.

In a public but little-noticed application with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Monday, Google asked the agency for permission to conduct tests in California across different wireless spectrums, including a rarely-used millimetre frequency capable of transmitting large amounts of data.

It is unclear from the heavily redacted filing what exactly Google intends to do, but it does signal the Internet giant's broader ambition of controlling Internet connectivity. The technology it seeks to test could form the basis of a wireless connection that can be broadcast to homes, obviating the need for an actual ground cable or fibre connection, experts say.

By beaming Internet services directly into homes, Google would open a new path now thoroughly dominated by Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and other entrenched cable and broadband providers. It could potentially offer a quicker and cheaper way to deliver high-speed Internet service, a potential threat to the cable-telecoms oligopoly, experts said.

“From a radio standpoint it’s the closest thing to fibre there is,” said Stephen Crowley, a wireless engineer and consultant who monitors FCC filings, noting that millimetre frequencies can transmit data over short distances at speeds of several gigabits per second.

“You could look at it as a possible wireless extension of their Google Fiber wireless network, as a way to more economically serve homes. Put up a pole in a neighbourhood, instead of having to run fibre to each home,” said Crowley.

Craig Barratt, the head of the Google Access and Energy division leading the effort to offer high-speed fibre networks in Kansas City and other locations, signed off as the authorized person submitting Google's FCC application.

The world’s No.1 Internet search engine has expanded into providing consumers with services such as Internet access. The company said it wants to roll out its high-speed Internet service to more than 30 U.S. cities, and in 2013 it struck a deal to provide free wireless Internet access to 7,000 Starbucks cafes across America.

Earlier this year, technology news website The Information reported that Google was exploring ways to offer a full-fledged wireless service, with voice and Internet access, in markets where the company already offers its Fiber service.

Google’s application to conduct the 180-day test is heavily redacted to protect confidential information that Google said would provide “valuable insight into Google’s technology innovations and potential business plans and strategy.”

The purpose of the test is so that Google can “expeditiously test radios in a way that is likely to contribute to the development, extension, expansion or utilization of the radio art,” Google stated cryptically in one of the filings.

Google declined to comment on the FCC filing.

COULD BE JUST BASIC RESEARCH

Wireless experts noted that the tests could simply be basic research that does not ultimately lead to new products or services. In the past, Google has submitted applications with the FCC to test wireless communications.

The latest test, which Google hopes to begin on Nov. 13, will include three sites in the San Francisco Bay Area, including one in San Mateo county and two locations a half-mile apart which appear to be on Google’s Mountain View, California campus. Google said the effort will use radio transmitters operating in the 5.8 GHz frequency, the 24.2 GHz frequency and in the millimetre wave bands of 71-76 GHz and 81-86 GHz, according to the application.

Millimetre wave frequencies work best over short distances, such as a few city blocks, and require a direct line-of-sight connection to a receiver. But multiple such devices placed next to each other, atop buildings could provide an alternative to in-the-ground fibre cables used for shuttling data throughout a city as well as for delivering Internet access directly to residences, theorized several wireless experts.

“This could be anything from something relatively small scale, like a way to supplement their existing fibre system to something like how to put a wireless cloud around your city that leverages your fibre backbone,” said Harold Feld, a senior vice president at Public Knowledge, a non-profit that focuses on broadband access and competition issues and which receives funding from tech companies including Google.

The FCC is scheduled to hold a meeting on Friday about the use of wireless spectrum above 24 GHz for mobile services, including ways the agency can facilitate the development and deployment of technology using such frequencies.

Google noted that the tests are for narrow-bandwidth transmissions. According to Crowley, the application suggests that Google will not be transmitting data over the networks, but sending simple pings between locations to gauge how the signals travel over distances and in different terrains.

Google appears to be trying to get ahead of the competition in understanding the potential to use the millimetre frequencies now being discussed by the FCC, said Public Knowledge's Feld.

“If they can pull it off, they will have a potentially very innovative next-generation delivery system,” he said.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Bernard Orr)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/1...0I42T920141015





Google Fiber to Launch in Austin in December
Gary Dinges, Brian Gaar and Claudia Grisales

Google will launch its ultra-fast Google Fiber Internet service in South and Southeast Austin in December, Google officials said Wednesday.

Google announced in April 2013 that Austin would be the second U.S. city - after Kansas City - to get its Google Fiber 1-gigabit service. Google has since added the ultra-fast service in Provo, Utah.

Google initially said the service would be available in Austin by mid-year 2014, but that deadline came and went without the service being ready to launch.

Signups will begin in December for new users in South and Southeast Austin, said Mark Strama, head of Google Fiber’s Austin operations.

At 1 gigabit, the service is more than 100 times faster than today’s typical broadband Internet access and lets a user download 25 songs in 1 second, a TV show in 3 seconds and a high-definition movie in less than 36 seconds.

After Google’s Austin announcement last year, competitors Time Warner Cable and AT&T said they were ready to make additional investments in their networks. Late last year, AT&T rolled out its U-verse service with GigaPower, which then offered speeds of up to 300 megabits per second. This month, the telecom giant said it upped those speeds to 1 gigabit.

In February, San Marcos-based Grande Communications began rolling out 1-gigabit service to their Austin customers.
http://www.statesman.com/news/busine...ecember/nhj2L/





Samsung Electronics Sets 5G Speed Record at 7.5Gbps, Over 30 Times Faster than 4G LTE

• Samsung achieved major milestones in 5G development with industry best 7.5Gbps speed record and uninterrupted 1.2Gbps 5G connection while travelling at over 100km/h.

Samsung Electronics announced two industry first milestones in the development of 5G telecommunications networking technology, as the company clocked 7.5Gbps, or 940MB per second, the fastest-ever 5G data transmission rate while in a stationary environment. The company was also the industry’s first to achieve uninterrupted and stable connection at 1.2Gbps, or 150MB per second, in a mobile environment from a vehicle travelling at over 100km/h.

“We will continue to build upon these milestones and develop advanced technologies that contribute to the 5G standard,” said ChangYeong Kim, Head of DMC R&D Center at Samsung Electronics. “In addition to leveraging our own global R&D capabilities, we will also continue to cooperate with other industry leaders and research centers across the world. Whether you are talking about mobile devices, the cloud, or the Internet of Things, the demand for 5G telecommunications standard and its supporting technologies will continue to grow.”

In addition to sheer numbers, Samsung’s recent stationary test was also the industry’s first successful 5G test that was conducted in an outdoor setting. Previous successful 5G tests throughout the industry have been conducted in stabilized, indoor environments, including laboratories. Meanwhile, the mobile test took 5G testing to another level, as it was conducted from a vehicle racing at high speeds on a 4.35km professional outdoor race track.

Both the stationary and mobile tests were conducted over a 28GHz 5G network. Until now, the industry as a whole has not used higher frequencies, such as 28GHz, despite their speed-related benefits, due to the likes of short communication range. However, Samsung overcame these obstacles through the company’s own Hybrid Adaptive Array Technology, which uses millimeter wave frequency bands to enable the use of higher frequencies over greater distances. While the 5G standard has yet to be ratified, 5G networks are expected to offer data transmission rates that are tens, if not hundreds, of times greater than 4G LTE.

The recent milestones were also a seven-fold increase upon testing results from May 2013, when the company became the industry’s first to achieve 1Gbps over a 28GHz 5G network.

While Samsung maintains its focus on technical developments, the company has also continued to engage other industry members in discussions, including those through standard-setting organizations, to help steer the overall direction of 5G development. Most recently, Samsung proposed the 5G Rainbow to other industry members. The 5G Rainbow identified seven core technical pillars of 5G technology that would truly ensure a differentiated 5G user experience. These pillars are maximum data rate, spectral efficiency, speed of mobility, data transmission rate at the cell boundary, the number of simultaneous connections, communication delays, and cost. In order to address these technical needs, Samsung has already been developing a diverse range of key technologies, such as transmission technologies for high frequency bands, multiple access schemes and low latency networks.
http://global.samsungtomorrow.com/?p=43349





FCC Chief Says He Agrees With Obama on Net Neutrality. Advocates Don't Buy it.

The chairman's proposal would allow for Internet "fast lanes" in some cases.
Brendan Sasso

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said Friday that he and President Obama agree on the importance of protecting net neutrality.

"My position is unchanged," FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said at a press conference. "The president and I agree—and have always agreed—on the importance of an open Internet."

But net-neutrality advocates responded that as long as Wheeler supports allowing large companies to pay for special "fast lanes" on the Internet, he and the president are miles apart.

Obama has supported net neutrality since he first ran for president in 2008, and he emphasized his opposition last week to any pay-for-priority Internet traffic deals.

Marvin Ammori, a consultant for tech companies and one of the leading net-neutrality advocates, said Wheeler's "legal proposal has the support of AT&T and Comcast, not Obama or the American public."

"He needs to propose a final rule that will actually ban tolls, discrimination, and paid prioritization. Rhetoric is not enough," Ammori said.

The goal of net neutrality is to ensure that Internet service providers like Comcast can't abuse their gatekeeper power to distort the Internet for their own purposes.

In May, Wheeler proposed net-neutrality rules that would prohibit broadband providers from blocking websites. But they would be allowed to charge websites for faster service as long as the agreements are "commercially reasonable."

His goal is to enact rules that can survive legal challenges after the FCC's first attempt at net neutrality was struck down in court earlier this year. But the proposal sparked a massive backlash, and 3.7 million people filed comments with the FCC—the most ever for any issue.

Asked about the issue last week in Los Angeles, Obama said he is "unequivocally committed" to net neutrality and that he is opposed to "the notion that somehow some folks can pay a little more money and get better service, more exclusive access to customers through the Internet."

Obama was careful to note that the FCC is an independent agency and that he can't "just call [Wheeler] up and tell him exactly what to do." But he said the FCC chairman "knows my position."

"What I've been clear about, what the White House has been clear about, is that we expect whatever final rules to emerge to make sure that we're not creating two or three or four tiers of Internet," Obama said. "That ends up being a big priority of mine."

On Friday, Wheeler said he hasn't spoken with Obama personally on the issue, but that he has kept White House staff informed.

He pointed to numerous statements he's made over the last several months criticizing pay-for-priority Internet traffic deals.

For example, in May, Wheeler emphasized that he would ban any fast lane deals that hurt consumers, competition, or innovation. He has also said he doesn't want to let Internet providers choose "winners and losers" or for there to be "haves and have-nots" on the Internet.

But the FCC chairman did not explicitly commit to revising his proposal to ban all paid-prioritization of Internet traffic in all circumstances.

A White House spokesman declined to respond to Wheeler's latest comments.

Michael Weinberg, a vice president at the consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, said he's encouraged that Wheeler thinks he's on the same page as Obama.

"If that's true, then the proposal that comes out has to reflect the rules that President Obama has articulated," Weinberg said.

Wheeler has said he wants final rules on the books by the end of the year. But the court decision earlier this year has left him with limited legal options in enacting new net-neutrality rules.

Net-neutrality advocates are urging the FCC to reclassify broadband Internet as a "telecommunications service." The activists claim the legal maneuver, which would grant the FCC sweeping new powers, is the only way to put the rules on firm legal ground.

But broadband providers and Republicans are fiercely opposed to that option, warning it would strangle the industry's growth with outdated utility-style regulations.

Obama hasn't commented on which legal powers the FCC should use.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/...uy-it-20141017





Irony, Thy Name is Jony Ive.
Adriana Lee

You know that saying about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery? It’s total hogwash, at least according to Apple’s Jony Ive.

At the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit on Thursday, the typically reclusive, but recently chatty Sir Ive fielded a question about tech maker Xiaomi and its rather Applesque product design: “I don’t see it as flattery,” said the executive, who’s responsible for the design of the company’s popular range of devices. “I actually see it as theft.”

He was careful to say that those sentiments weren’t specifically aimed at the Chinese company, which denies replicating Apple's look, but at any competitor that rips off his company’s products.

Well, that’s nothing new. Apple has a long history of hating copycats—even as it's built its own hugely successful business in part on designs and features that originated elsewhere.

There’s a fine line between drawing inspiration from someone else’s work and Xeroxing their design blueprints. (There’s also a distinction between copying something and actually stealing it, in a literal sense. But let’s not split hairs.)

Photographers, artists, musicians and fashion designers have known that for a long time. That's why many professionals protect their works, to stop knock-offs from cutting off their livelihoods. Likewise for tech companies, imitators who swipe features and product designs can represent real threats.

For Apple, it’s a touchy subject that goes way back.

It’s no secret that deceased co-founder Steve Jobs thought Microsoft’s Windows operating system copied the "look and feel" of Apple’s Mac desktop software. Walter Isaacson’s biography on Jobs laid bare his frustration—especially in this passage, excerpted by Fortune, chronicling a face-to-face encounter between his subject and Microsoft’s Bill Gates in 1983:

Their meeting was in Jobs’s conference room, where Gates found himself surrounded by ten Apple employees who were eager to watch their boss assail him. Jobs didn’t disappoint his troops. “You’re ripping us off!” he shouted. “I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!” Gates just sat there coolly, looking Steve in the eye, before hurling back, in his squeaky voice, what became a classic zinger. “Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”

Today, the name of Apple’s blame game appears to be the same, only now one of the players has changed. Apple's public enemy number one is Samsung. The iPhone maker alleges that the South Korean electronics giant’s Galaxy line of Android smartphones infringed on several of its mobile tech patents.

Apple, which won some rulings earlier this year, may be feeling pretty righteous these days. But if you listen closely, you might hear a *fwump* somewhere far off in the distance. It’s the sound of numerous Android fans slapping their foreheads.

Plenty of Android fans think the iPhone's software is the copycat, not the other way around.

They point to features that Google's mobile operating system has offered years before Apple’s iOS software—including swipe-down notifications and multitasking (so apps can run in the background).

With iOS 8, iPhones have have even more Android-like features. These include predictive text, replaceable keyboards, voice-activated voice command and widgets—those software panels that display bits of live, updated information without forcing the user to actually launch an app.

Perhaps the most glaring example is Apple’s new mobile hardware. With the new 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus, the company has its very first phablet, a category of giant smartphones that Samsung’s first Note originated and made popular.

Although those big devices can't seem to save the South Korean tech company's suffering mobile division now, that hasn't stopped Apple from taking the phablet ball and running with it—all the way to the bank.
http://readwrite.com/2014/10/13/jony...ng-vanity-fair





When Keurig Fights “Coffee Pirates,” Who Loses? Loyal Consumers

Ethical companies—smart companies—don’t pull the rug out from under their best customers
Chris MacDonald

As you may have heard, Keurig is engaged in a battle with a host of companies that aspire to provide consumers with ‘pirate’ coffee pods. And who is losing this battle? The consumer.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Keurig’s business model is pretty much the same as the business model used by most producers of desktop printers. Desktop printers have become almost trivially cheap — you can buy a laser printer for under a hundred bucks now — but the cartridges cost a bundle. That’s where they make their money. Likewise, Keurig sells its popular single-cup coffee makers at astonishingly reasonable prices, and makes its money on the coffee pods. Naturally, given that the pods are lucrative and easy to make, there have been imitators. A large number of companies have sold, over the last few years, their own “K-cups,” pods of coffee designed specifically to work in Keurig’s machines. Consumers love this, both because competition lowers prices and because it expands the range of roasts and flavours available.

To fight the onslaught of packagers of (perfectly legal) pirate K-cups, Keurig recently starting selling its “Keurig 2.0″ line of coffee makers. The 2.0 machines incorporate a digital rights management (DRM) system, designed to ensure that Keurig machines work only with Keurig branded and Keurig licensed pods, effectively shutting out the competition, at least temporarily. The result is that all those non-licensed Keurig imitators won’t work in the new 2.0 machines.

The result has included a $600 million lawsuit, along with some professional and some amateur attempts to break Keurig’s DRM.
Download NextIssue today to enjoy Canadian Business and 130+ more magazines every month for one low price! Start your 30-day free trial now »

Who ultimately loses in this fight? Arguably the consumer. Not only has choice been restricted, but there’s also an enormous information gap. Keurig has done a less than stellar job—I’m being charitable, here—of informing consumers about their new DRM system. The result has been frustration, both with the newly-limited choice of pods, but also with coffee machines that don’t work as expected.

Take me for example. My beloved Keurig died a couple of weeks ago. Its high-pressure water pump moaned and groaned and finally gave up the ghost. So I promptly bought a shiny new Keurig 2.0 (with a number of fancy new features) at Costco. Nowhere on the packaging did Keurig inform me that most of the dozen or so boxes of coffee and tea currently in my basement (well over $100 worth) simply will not work in the new machine. And it’s not just “pirate” pods that won’t work; nor will older Keurig-licensed K-cups—ones that bear the Keurig logo but that don’t have have the DRM-ready labels that the new machines require. Those are essentially garbage now.

A call to Keurig resulted in an offer of three gift certificates, each good for a box of pods (worth $12 or so). But that doesn’t come anywhere close to covering what I’ve lost, never mind the frustration.

And it’s not just Keurig itself. Retailers have been complicit in this abuse of customers. Many of them still stock the “pirate” pods, as well as older Keurig-licensed pods. In some cases (and Canadian Tire for example is guilty of this), they do this while aggressively selling the 2.0 machines, without any hint to the consumer of what the problem is.

The battle of the K-cups is about a bunch of things: intellectual property, competition, and innovation for starters. The back-and-forth of those things is pretty much standard fare in a thriving market economy. But ethical businesses—not to mention smart businesses—need to work harder to stay true to their goal of providing good value to their customers.
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/blog...scence-ethics/





Are Copyright Laws Too Strict?

Crooner in rights spat
Louis Menand

Rod Stewart is being sued over the rights to an image of his own head.

In 1981, a professional photographer named Bonnie Schiffman took a picture of the back of Stewart’s head, which was used, eight years later, on the cover of the album “Storyteller.” Now a different picture of Stewart’s head, also from the back, has been used to promote his Las Vegas act and world tour. Schiffman claims that the resemblance between her photograph and the new image is too close—the legal term is “substantial similarity”—and she is suing for copyright infringement. She is asking for two and a half million dollars.

A copyright is, first and foremost, the right to make a copy. The first products to be protected by copyright—the statutory history begins in Britain, in 1710, with the passage of a law known as the Statute of Anne—were books. Once you buy a book, you can legally do almost anything to it. You can sell it to someone else, you can tear the pages out, you can throw it on a bonfire. God knows you can print terrible things about it. But you cannot make copies of it. The right to do that belongs to the author of the book and his or her heirs and assigns.

As with any right, the right to make a copy is a lot less straightforward than it sounds. As the person who wrote this article, I own the right to make copies of it. Since 1976, in the United States, that right has been born with the article, and there are few formalities still required for me to assert it. The belief that you have irrecoverably forfeited your copyright if you have not sent a copy of your book to the Library of Congress, or put a © on it somewhere, is obsolete.

I have granted The New Yorker an exclusive license to the article for a limited period, after which the magazine retains certain privileges (including printing it in a collection of New Yorker writings and keeping it on its Web site). If, a year from now, someone else, without my permission, reprints my article in a book called “The Most Thoughtful and Penetrating Essays of 2014, ” I can complain that my right to make copies is being violated and, if the court agrees with me, legally suppress the book. Theoretically, the court could compel the publisher to pulp all the unsold copies. Although not the author of this piece, you, too, would likely feel that the publisher of “Most Thoughtful Essays” was a bandit, and you would share my sense of righteous indignation.

But suppose that a Web site, awesomestuff.com, ran an item that said something like “This piece on copyright is a great read!” with a hyperlink on the word “piece” to my article’s page on The New Yorker’s Web site. You wouldn’t think this was banditry at all. You would find it unexceptionable.

This is partly because of what might be called the spatial imaginary of the Web. When you click on a link, you have the sensation that you no longer are at a place called awesomestuff.com but have been virtually transported to an entirely different place, called newyorker.com. A visual change is experienced as a physical change. The link is treated as a footnote; it’s as though you were taking another book off the shelf. The Web reinforces this illusion of movement by adopting a real-estate vocabulary, with terms like “site” (on which nothing can be built), “address” (which you can’t G.P.S.), and “domain” (which is a legal concept, not a duchy).

Some courts have questioned the use of links that import content from another Web site without changing the URL, a practice known as “framing.” But it’s hard to see much difference. Either way, when you’re reading a linked page, you may still be “at” awesomestuff.com, as clicking the back button on your browser can instantly confirm. Effectively, awesomestuff.com has stolen content from newyorker.com, just as the compiler of “Most Thoughtful Essays” stole content from me. The folks at awesomestuff.com and their V. C. backers are attracting traffic to their Web site, with its many banner ads for awesome stuff, using material created by other people.

An enormous amount of Web business is conducted in this manner. Most Web users don’t feel indignant about it. On the contrary, most Web users would feel that their rights had been violated if links like this were prohibited. Something that is almost universally condemned when it happens in the medium of print is considered to be just how digital media work. Awesomestuff.com might even argue that no one is harmed by the link—that it is doing me and The New Yorker a favor by increasing our article’s readership at no cost to us. But the publisher of “Most Thoughtful Essays” could say the same thing, and the court would be unmoved.

This almost instinctive distinction between what is proper in the analog realm and what is proper in the digital realm is at the center of a global debate about the state of copyright law. Statutes protecting copyright have never been stricter; at the same time, every minute of every day, millions of people are making or using copies of material—texts, sounds, and images—that they didn’t create. According to an organization called Tru Optik, as many as ten billion files, including movies, television shows, and games, were downloaded in the second quarter of this year. Tru Optik estimates that approximately ninety-four per cent of those downloads were illegal. The law seems to be completely out of whack with the technology.

The point of Peter Baldwin’s fascinating and learned (and also repetitive and disorganized) “The Copyright Wars” (Princeton) is that the dispute between analog-era and digital-era notions of copyright is simply the latest installment of an argument that goes all the way back to the Statute of Anne. The argument is not really about technology, although major technological changes tend to bring it back to life. It’s about the reason for creating a right to make copies in the first place.

In the United States, the reason is stated in the Constitution. Article I gives Congress power “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The Copyright Act of 1790 set the length of copyright at fourteen years, renewable for another fourteen, after which the work falls into the public domain.

A right is just the flip side of a prohibition. The thinking behind Article I is that prohibiting people from copying and selling someone else’s original work is a way of encouraging the writing of useful or entertaining books, just as awarding a patent is a way of encouraging the invention of useful or enjoyable things. The prohibition operates as an incentive for the protected party. For a limited period—fourteen or twenty-eight years—authors get to enjoy the profits from sales of their books, and this prospect of reward induces people to write.

But Article I makes it clear that the ultimate beneficiary of books and inventions is the public. Copyrights are granted and patents are issued in order “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” This is why the Constitution dictates a limit on the right to make copies. After the term of protection expires, a work cannot be copyrighted again. It becomes a public good. It is thrown into the open market, which allows it to be cheaply reproduced, and this speeds the distribution of knowledge. “Intellectual property is a frail gondola that ferries innovation from the private to the public sphere, from the genius to the commons,” as Paul K. Saint-Amour, one of the leading literary scholars of copyright, elegantly describes it.

Drugs make a good analogy (as they so often do). A pharmaceutical company that develops a new medication is rewarded for its investment in R. & D. by the right to market the medication exclusively for a limited period of time. When that period expires, other pharmaceutical companies can manufacture and sell knockoff versions. These generic meds are usually far cheaper than the original, brand-name drug, and the result is an improvement in the public’s health.

The United States also found another, and even better, way to speed the distribution of knowledge, and that was not to extend copyright to foreign works. This was not uncommon in the nineteenth century, but the United States was particularly slow to reform the practice. Until 1891, a book published elsewhere could be legally copied and sold here without payment to the author or to the original publisher. “It seems to be their opinion that a free and independent American citizen ought not to be robbed of his right of robbing somebody else,” Arthur Sullivan, of Gilbert and Sullivan, complained. Charles Dickens campaigned aggressively against the evils of piracy, to no avail. The loss to British authors was not small. The United States is the world’s largest consumer of books. Baldwin says that by the late nineteenth century the American book market was twice the size of Britain’s.

The term of copyright has been expanded in the United States periodically since 1790. In 1831, copyright was made renewable for up to forty-two years from the time of publication; in 1909, for up to fifty-six years. In 1976, the law was rewritten to protect copyright for fifty years after the death of the author, and formalities, like requiring authors to register their copyright, were relaxed. This means that anything and everything is now copyrighted. If you made it, no matter how trivial, you own it, and if someone else copies it you can sue.

Finally, in 1998, protection was increased to life plus seventy years, thanks to the passage of what is known as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, named for the late, great songster turned California congressman. (Works with corporate authorship are protected for a hundred and twenty years after creation or ninety-five years after publication, whichever is first.) This means that copies—and, if Bonnie Schiffman prevails in her lawsuit, imitations—of Schiffman’s picture of Rod Stewart’s head, which is already thirty-three years old, may be illegal until some time in the twenty-second century.

The Bono Act also altered the term for works still in copyright that were published between 1923 and 1978, increasing it to ninety-five years from the date of publication. (In 1993, the European Union had gone even farther, reviving lapsed copyrights of works by authors who died between 1925 and 1944, as a way of compensating rights holders for sales lost during the Second World War.) In 2003, the Supreme Court, in Eldred v. Ashcroft, rejected a challenge to the constitutionality of this additional award to works already under copyright. The Constitution was explicit in granting Congress the power to set the term of copyright, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote, provided that term was a limited one. The Constitution did not define what “limited” meant, and it was not the Supreme Court’s business to decide whether Congress had exercised its power wisely.

As a result of the Bono Act, you can publish new English translations of the first four volumes of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” all of which appeared before Proust’s death, in 1922, but the copyright for English translations of the last three will continue to be owned by Random House until 2019. Although James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” has been in the public domain in Europe since the end of 2011 (seventy years after Joyce died), it will remain under copyright in this country until the end of 2034 (ninety-five years after it was published).

On another stratum of economic value, Mickey Mouse, who made his début in 1928, in an animated picture called “Steamboat Willie,” won’t come out of copyright until 2024. The Disney Company, which owns rights to a number of valuable but, by the standards of the entertainment industry, ancient cartoon characters, lobbied hard to get the Bono Act passed.

As it happens, Mickey Mouse owes his very existence to a copyright issue. In 1927, Walt Disney created a character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and was engaged to create a series of animated shorts featuring the character for Universal Studios. During a dispute over compensation, he discovered that Universal owned the rights to Oswald, and that the studio could fire him and make Oswald movies without him. He vowed never to give up his rights again, and created Mickey Mouse.

Courts have been receptive, as well, to claims of “subconscious infringement.” Even people who are not pirates can be made to cease and desist, or to pay damages. In 1976, an American court found that George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” had infringed the copyright on “He’s So Fine, ” by the Chiffons, which was a hit in 1963. One critic went so far as to observe that the refrain “Hare Krishna” essentially copied the refrain “Doo-lang,” in “He’s So Fine.” Harrison ended up paying five hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars.

Baldwin joins Saint-Amour, the law professors Lawrence Lessig, Jeanne Fromer, and Robert Spoo, and the copyright lawyer William Patry in believing that, Internet or no Internet, the present level of copyright protection is excessive. By the time most works fall into the public domain, they have lost virtually all their use value. If the public domain is filled with items like hundred-year-old images of the back of Rod Stewart’s head, the public good will suffer. The commons will become your great-grandparents’ attic.

As it is, few creations outlive their creators. Of the 187,280 books published between 1927 and 1946, only 2.3 per cent were still in print in 2002. But, since there is no “use it or lose it” provision in copyright law, they are all still under copyright today. Patry, in his recent book, “How to Fix Copyright,” notes that ninety-five per cent of Motown recordings are no longer available. Nevertheless, you can’t cover or imitate or even sample them without paying a licensing fee—despite the fact that your work is not competing in the marketplace with the original, since the original is no longer for sale. (U.S. law does not protect recorded music made before 1972, but state laws can apply—as the nineteen-sixties group the Turtles are claiming in a lawsuit, for more than a hundred million dollars, against Sirius XM.)

In the case of Motown, at least you know whom to call. In the case of many books and photographs, the rights holders are unknown; in other cases, it’s expensive to track down the heirs or the legatees or the firms, possibly no longer in existence, to whom the copyright belongs. And so, for fear of being sued and having their work pulped or otherwise erased from the universe, people avoid the risk. Patry says that the BBC has a million hours of broadcasts in its archives that cannot be used, because no one knows who holds the rights.

Before the Internet, the social cost of this obstacle was minimal. Only a few people had the time and the inclination to travel to where they could see or listen to archived broadcasts. But today, when everything can be made available to the entire world at minimal expense, it seems absurd to hold enormous amounts of content hostage to the threat of legal action from the odd descendant. “That a vast existing cultural patrimony, already paid for and amortized, sits locked behind legal walls, hostage to outmoded notions of property, when at the flick of a switch it could belong to all humanity—that is little short of grotesque, ” Baldwin concludes. Yet the odd descendant has the law on her side. She has the power to pulp.

What’s the rationale for maximizing protection? The idea of a public domain belongs to the theory that individual rights are intended to promote public goods. The First Amendment protects individual expression, for example, because it’s in society’s best interest to have a robust debate—not because each person has a right to say what he or she thinks simply by virtue of being human. So the right to make copies was imagined by the Framers as a way to encourage the writing of books by individuals for the good of an educated citizenry. But, if you are a natural-rights person and you think that individual rights are inalienable, then you don’t recognize the priority of the public domain. You think that society has no claim on works created by individuals. The right to control one’s own expressions, to sell them or not, to alter them or not, is not a political right. It’s a moral right, and it cannot be legislated away.

Moral rights give authors control over not just the reproducibility but the integrity of their creations. This control can extend beyond the limits of copyright protection—as in cases where the author has assigned the copyright to someone else, like a publisher, or when the term of copyright has elapsed. Moral right is a recognized legal concept in Europe. Courts there have held, for example, that although the buyer of a work of art may destroy it, he or she cannot deface or otherwise alter it. That right belongs to the artist in perpetuity.

Samuel Beckett’s restrictions on the staging of his plays is a well-known example of the exercise of copyright as a moral right. Beckett and his estate consistently refused permission to mount productions of his work—“Endgame” in an abandoned subway station is the classic case, but there are many others—unless Beckett’s stage directions were complied with literally. The refusal was not based on any economic consideration; these performances were not copies competing with the originals. It was based on the right of the playwright to protect the integrity of his plays.

A natural-rights person would ask why the law shouldn’t treat a book the same way it treats any form of real property. If you own a house or a piece of land, the state sets no time limit on your right to use it. A family can live off the income from real estate or from a trust fund in perpetuity. Why can’t Ernest Hemingway’s heirs live off the income from his books? Is it fair for people who had no relation to Ernest Hemingway to someday make money selling those books? Should they be able to abridge them, or change the endings, with impunity?

These are the two philosophical rationales for copyright protection. Baldwin calls the limited-term, public-domain conception the Anglo-American conception and the much stricter real-property, moral-rights conception the European conception. The differences began emerging toward the end of the nineteenth century, with the founding of the Berne Union, which was created to regularize international copyright laws. Baldwin attributes the Continental conception of copyright as a moral right to the desire of countries like France and Germany to assert their cultural superiority. Protecting the rights of artists was imagined as a way of rejecting the commercialization and commodification of culture that European countries thought less restrictive copyright laws were designed to facilitate. Europeans thought, in effect, that Americans wanted great literature to fall into the public domain so they could make cheesy movies from it.

Britain joined the Berne Union when it was founded, although, Baldwin says, grudgingly. The United States did not join until 1989. Baldwin thinks that this, along with the adoption, in the nineteen-nineties, of a number of additional regulations stiffening copyright protection, including the Bono Act, marked the triumph of the European model. “Copyright’s evolution is often told as a story of American cultural hegemony,” he says. “In fact, the opposite is more plausible.”

At bottom, the argument about copyright is not really a philosophical argument. It’s a battle between interest groups. Baldwin points this out—although, like everyone who takes a position on copyright, he also thinks that his is the philosophically defensible one. In the copyright wars, there are many sets of opposing stakeholders. Much litigation involves corporate entities, which have the financial resources to pursue cases through the courts. In these copyright battles, the main antagonists are the businesses that own copyrighted goods and the businesses that don’t.

Let’s call the first type of business Hollywood and the second type Silicon Valley. Hollywood, along with the music industry and the publishing industry, which are the other major analog-era corporate interests, makes money by producing and distributing content. Silicon Valley makes money by aggregating other people’s content. Hollywood fears pirates; Silicon Valley fears paywalls. Silicon Valley accuses Hollywood of “monopoly” and “artificial scarcity,” and talks about the democracy of the Internet. Hollywood accuses Silicon Valley of “free riding” and “contributory infringement, ” and talks about protecting the dignity of the artist. But each side is only trying to defend its business model.

Freelancers versus salaried content creators is another interest-group antagonism. Most of the people who are critical of the length of copyright protection today are academics. (Patry is an exception, but he’s the senior copyright counsel at Google.) This is probably not unrelated to the fact that academics have almost no financial stake in copyright. The research and writing they do is part of their job as employees of universities, or as the recipients of external, usually taxpayer supported grants. They don’t depend on sales to survive.

Freelancers, on the other hand, are unhappy with what they regard as the erosion of their right to control copying, which they see, for example, in the legally sanctioned practice of posting “snippets” on sites like Amazon, iTunes, and Google Books. Musicians and other artists tend to regard the Internet as a place where anything goes, an ungovernable Barbary Coast. On the Web, the general rule—known as a “take-down notice”—is that you can post almost anything as long as you take it down when the rights holder complains. No harm, no foul. There are some technical preconditions that the poster has to meet to earn the protection, but this does not seem to freelancers to be a very effective way to discourage copying.

Academics oppose copyright protection for another reason as well. They want access to the research in their fields. In the case of scientific research, much of that access is controlled by giant media companies like Springer, Elsevier, and Wiley. These companies publish academic journals and then charge huge subscription fees to the libraries of the universities that supported the very work they are selling back to them. Baldwin calls it “a notorious rentseeking boondoggle,” and many academics have organized to find ways to circumvent it—by starting new journals, or by putting their work online in disregard for the copyright claims of Springer and the rest. It was for trying to open access to the digital compiler of academic journals JSTOR that Aaron Swartz was arrested at M.I.T.

As the Constitution states, the ultimate purpose of copyright protection is the spread of knowledge. A lot of the debate over copyright is carried on using the examples of famous novels and popular songs (as in this article). But people aren’t going to stop writing and reading novels, or making and listening to music. The analog-era industries will find—they are already in the process of finding—a sounder business model. For the rest of us, less is at risk. The species can survive without cheaper copies of Mickey Mouse cartoons and “Finnegans Wake.” It is hard to write these words, but the species can probably survive without Motown.

Copyright law does not completely shut down the circulation of cultural goods. It protects only expression. Facts, ideas, systems, procedures, methods of operation, and many compilations of data are denied protection. The 1976 copyright act made statutorily explicit something that has always been part of the common law of copyright: the doctrine of fair use. Most copyright litigations are essentially disputes over the proper definition of this concept. In the United States, the meaning of fair use is vague, which is good, because courts can judge each case in its own context, but also bad, because guessing wrong can be very expensive.

Contrary to popular belief, fair use does not dictate a maximum number of copyrighted words that you can quote or lines that you can reprint. Parody is protected under fair use, and so are many educational uses of copyrighted material. The key concept is “transformative copying.” You can use someone else’s creation if the purpose is to make something new with it.

The problem is that the judicial record is inconsistent. The law on musical sampling is draconian, but restrictions on the right to quote from unpublished works (like J. D. Salinger’s letters) have been relaxed. Judicial unpredictability makes for legal anxiety. Professors who copy material for use in class are frequently uncertain whether or not they need to seek permission, which almost always entails paying a fee. If they ask their college’s general counsel, they will be told to pay the fee. Any lawyer would give the same answer. Paying a small fee (which, in the case of educational materials, can usually be passed along to the students) is a lot cheaper than facing a lawsuit, even one that you should win.

Lawyers remember that ASCAP once demanded that the Girl Scouts pay royalties for copyrighted songs sung around the campfire, and that Warner Bros., the producer of “Casablanca,” went into action when it learned that the Marx Brothers were making a movie called “A Night in Casablanca.” (Groucho, in turn, wondered whether Warner Bros. had the rights to the word “brothers.”) You think these laws don’t affect you? Warner/Chappell Music claims to own the copyright to “Happy Birthday to You.” So far, in cases like Eldred, the Supreme Court has leaned to the side of copyright owners. But the Court always takes a while to catch up with the times, so it seems likely that the law will eventually change.

The most fundamental opposition in the copyright wars is between creators and consumers. In parliamentary debates in the nineteenth century, Thomas Macaulay called copyright “a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers.” Creators want to sell high, and consumers want to buy low. Almost the minute a popular book falls into the public domain, cheap editions flood the market. A virtual minute after that, a digital edition becomes available online for nothing. This is what Congress had in mind when, in 1790, it restricted copyright to fourteen years with a single term of renewal. It wanted to speed the availability of inexpensive copies.

Freelance cultural producers are only weakly organized, in groups like the Authors Guild and the American Federation of Musicians. That’s one reason they are better off assigning copyright to a corporate entity, which has the muscle to protect it. Cultural consumers are not organized at all. They can speak only through their elected representatives, but most of those people will be listening to the money—to the lobbyists for the content industries, new and old, as those industries search for more reliable ways to squeeze profits from the awesome stuff that human beings have created.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...er-rights-spat





The Internet Of Someone Else’s Things
Jon Evans

The Internet Of Things is coming. Rejoice! …Mostly. It will open our collective eyes to petabytes of real-time data, which we will turn into new insights and efficiencies. It will doubtless save lives. Oh, yes: and it will subtly redefine ownership as we know it. You will no longer own many of the most expensive and sophisticated items you possess. You may think you own them. But you’ll be wrong.

They say “possession is nine-tenths of the law,” but even if you physically and legally own a Smart Thing, you won’t actually control it. Ownership will become a three-legged stool: who physically owns a thing; who legally owns it; …and who has the ultimate power to command it. Who, in short, has root.

This is not a hypothetical situation. Your phone probably has three separate computers in it (processor, baseband processor, and SIM card) and you almost certainly don’t have root on any of them, which is why some people refer to phones as “tracking devices which make phone calls.” The New York Times recently ran a story about cars being prevented from starting because payments were days late. (And as CityLab points out: “Losing transportation could mean losing everything.”) Consider also the recent discovery that Belkin routers apparently had to connect to Belkin’s servers before they would connect to the rest of the Internet.

As The Atlantic puts it:

the smarter one’s things, the greater the possibility that they’ll be conscripted into schemes you never would have imagined and might not like.

The fundamental issue here is that the Internet of Things will not have a standard set of open APIs for consumers. (Well, there’s ThingSpeak, but it’s not exactly widely supported.) You can’t get your Tesla to dump all of its data to a server you specify. While Nest has a public API, they maintain gatekeeper control over it. (You may think: “Of course!” — but imagine being told that you can’t use Safari to access any Google services without Apple’s explicit consent and approval.) When you buy a Smart Thing, you get locked into its software ecosystem, which is controlled by its manufacturer, whether you like it or not.

Techno-utopians like to argue that open systems always win, but that simply isn’t true, as the mobile era has shown. Android is more open than iOS, but for most intents and purposes, both are walled gardens.

So are we doomed to a future of fifth-column Smart Things that we don’t really own, talking behind our backs to an array of siloed Stacks?

…Maybe. But not necessarily.

For one thing, I suspect that at some point, after the first wave of the Internet of Things, open APIs and root access will become a selling point. Either enough customers (especially business customers) will want them badly enough, or smart hardware will become enough of a commodity that startups will start selling “repluggable” Smart Things, which buyers can root and configure to speak to the server(s) of their choice.

More interesting to me, though, is the possibility of a decentralized Internet of Things; smart things which don’t communicate with any central server, but rather with a peer-to-peer, perhaps blockchain-based network. Consider the way FireChat is being used in Hong Kong, so that protestors can communicate despite the authorities’ control of the mobile networks. You don’t always actually need a central server, especially if you have a distributed-consensus system — like a blockchain — for longer-term data storage and algorithmic coordination.

I concede this is a handwavey vaporware notion, but, well, I believe it’s an important handwavey vaporware notion. Similarly, a la Overstock or Reddit:

As someone who often argues that capitalism needs to evolve as technology remakes our societies and economies, I’m not necessarily opposed to a subtle redefinition of “ownership.” But I don’t want it to come to mean “transferring de facto control over every interesting thing in my possession to distant corporations.” Bring on an open, decentralized Internet Of Things, eventually. The Stacks control quite enough already.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/11/the...-elses-things/





Cloud Computing Is Forcing a Reconsideration of Intellectual Property
Quentin Hardy

Almost overnight, our technology revolution is shaking up entire industries and remaking society. Don’t get caught up in the small stuff, though: Tech really is changing how we think about our ideas.

We’ve used ideas to sculpt the globe since the Industrial Revolution, thanks largely to the way we handle intellectual property. When machines, and machines to make identical machines, mass-produced reliably identical goods, it was because people understood the same set of instructions.

Mass-produced books, music and movies were possible, too. Like machine-making instructions, these items were made reliable and protected with laws of copyright, patent and trademark.

Now, according to people involved in the business of protecting ideas, all of that is set to change.

Software, lashing together thousands of computer servers into fast and flexible cloud-computing systems, is the reason. Clouds, wirelessly connected to more software in just about everything, make it possible to shift, remix and borrow from once separate industrial categories.

“Products are taking on a lot more functionality, like cars that have touch screens, streaming video, and Wi-Fi antennas,” said Russell E. Levine, a Chicago-based partner at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis who specializes in patent infringement and licensing. “Carmakers are used to thinking about the I.P. around brakes and exhaust systems. Now they need to think about who owns what technology in all kinds of products.”

Mr. Levine works with a lot of smartphone companies. In that business, it’s not just that an app-rich, cloud-connected phone may be at one moment a chessboard, then an Internet browser. Smartphones are an example of connected products that are intended to sell by the hundred million, standardized across a hundred countries. The cross-licensing of ideas across that many borders is almost as complicated as the global cloud itself.

“These are things we never thought about, as industries get connected to each other,” said Pamela Demain, president of the Licensing Executives Society, an intellectual property trade group. “There is a huge amount of complexity in software-driven converged devices, with I.P. at the center of the development. You add in wireless and globalization, that just adds more complexity.”

So far, this sounds like full employment for the lawyers, and an intensification of business as usual. Looking at the long-term direction of tech, however, it could spell the opposite.

There are over one million servers in each of the big clouds of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, executives at those companies say. For new entrants, one limit is that capital spending costs more than $1 billion a year. Another is engineering know-how; how the future works will be in just a couple of thousand heads, at most.

Everything, be it software and networking or power, is different when so many computers are spread across the globe. The pace of innovation is so quick, and the number of players so small, that in some cases, the players elect not to patent inventions, wary of what they’d disclose about themselves in the application.

A number of other big players are still trying to come at the proprietary hold of these giants, and to do it, they’re using open-source software, a license-free method of creating a product, fast, by distributing the work as widely as possible.

“Open source isn’t just a way to give back to the community. It’s a way to blow up the other guy,” said Bill Hilf, who oversees Hewlett-Packard’s work on OpenStack, a kind of open-source, cloud-computing software.

Hoping to build a product better than Amazon’s cloud, HP has over 400 paid engineers working full time to help a community of thousands create this free software. It has also donated enormous amounts of valuable software, like networking and automation tools. It even indemnifies its OpenStack customers against patent lawsuits.

“That gives our lawyers ulcers,” Mr. Hilf said. “They have to protect a product that is being changed all the time by people who don’t work for HP.”

Still, the corporate donations to cloud-based open source seem unstoppable. Mr. Hilf noted that Linux, an open-source operating system “took 15.8 years to get 180 companies contributing. OpenStack took 1.6 years to get 160 companies. It’s insane.”

Last month, Facebook, Google, Walmart’s online operation and others announced a consortium with a goal of enabling new versions of software to be released multiple times a day. They used to come out every few years.

Hoping to move even faster against his competitors, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, three years ago took the unusual strategy of open-sourcing not software, but computer hardware. In June, this produced a networking switch, or a gear that helps direct data traffic over large computer networks.

Hardware and software of all kinds may further change with 3-D printing. Designs there can be widely shared and modified in a computer, to an extent that originals are hard to recognize, let alone protect.

In a provocative article published in March, Mark Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law, projected a similar copy-paste-change fate for the information of synthetic biology.

“How will our economy function in a world where most of the things we produce are cheap or free?” he asked. “It is hard even to begin to think about the transition.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/1...tual-property/





Leaked Draft Confirms TPP Will Censor Internet and Stifle Free Expression Worldwide
David Christopher

This morning Wikileaks published a second leaked draft of the Intellectual Property chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The draft confirms people’s worst fears about Internet censorship. That’s according to community-based organization OpenMedia, which is leading a large international Fair Deal Coalition aimed at securing balanced copyright rules for the 21st Century.

“It is hugely disappointing to see that, yet again, Canadians - and members of the public worldwide - have to be informed about these critical issues through leaked drafts, instead of through democratic engagement on the part of governments and elected officials,” said OpenMedia Campaigns Coordinator Meghan Sali. “When will our decision-makers recognize that negotiating serious issues - especially proposals that would censor our use of the Internet - must be considered and debated democratically instead of in secret meetings with industry lobbyists?”

Sali continued, “It is now clearer than ever that we need a positive alternative to this secretive process. It is unacceptable to design and impose new laws through closed-door processes that disenfranchise individuals around the world and shut off debate on important issues that will affect all of our futures. This is what the Our Digital Future report, released just yesterday, is all about - challenging the notion that we can’t make these laws in a more democratic manner.”

This morning, copyright and digital rights expert, Prof. Michael Geist, weighed in on his blog about the most recent leaked draft, noting that the Canadian negotiators have been opposing U.S. pressure to introduce stricter enforcement for patent and copyright law - with the strongest pushback coming in the “patents, enforcement, trademarks and copyright sections.”

Geist writes on his blog: “As the treaty negotiations continue, the pressure to cave to U.S. pressure will no doubt increase, raising serious concerns about whether the TPP will force the Canadian government to overhaul recently enacted legislation that it has steadfastly defended as reflecting a balanced, “made in Canada” approach.”

With the next round of TPP negotiations taking place in Australia at the end of October, pressure is mounting on negotiators to finalize the agreement, and copyright issues are a main stumbling block to achieving the consensus needed to finish negotiations. This leaked document may contribute additional strain to already tense negotiations.

Early legal analysis of the leaked TPP IP chapter can be found through Fair Deal Member KEI here: http://keionline.org/node/2108

About OpenMedia.ca

OpenMedia.ca is an award-winning community-based organization that safeguards the possibilities of the open Internet. We work toward informed and participatory digital policy by engaging hundreds of thousands of people in protecting our online rights.

Through campaigns such as StopTheMeter.ca and StopSpying.ca, OpenMedia.ca has engaged over half-a-million Canadians, and has influenced public policy and federal law.

About the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement:

The TPP is one of the most far-reaching international free trade agreements in history. We know from leaked TPP draft texts that participating nations would be bound to much stricter and more extreme copyright laws than now exist under current national laws. These new rules would criminalize much online activity, invade citizens’ privacy, and significantly impact our ability to share and collaborate online.

Negotiators from 12 of the TPP negotiating nations—Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Peru, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore, Vietnam, and the United States— are meeting in Asia this week to discuss these changes without input from the public, creators, or most businesses. The negotiating documents are classified—unless you are one of just 600 industry lobbyists permitted to participate.

U.S. negotiators are pushing hard to force smaller nations into accepting a censored Internet. However, reports have indicated that the intellectual property provisions have been quite a “challenging” issue for those behind the agreement.

Hundreds of thousands of people have supported campaigns organized by OpenMedia to speak out about Internet censorship and the secrecy surrounding the TPP.
https://openmedia.ca/news/leaked-dra...sion-worldwide





After More Than Two Years, Google Finally Releasing New “Pirate Update” To Fight Piracy

After recent criticism it's not doing enough to fight piracy, Google moves to update its long-neglected filtering system.
Danny Sullivan

In August 2012, to stem accusations that it doesn’t do enough to fight piracy, Google released what’s known as the Pirate Update, a system that penalized sites deemed to be violating copyright laws. Next week, Google is finally going to refresh that system to catch new offenders and release others that may have cleaned up their acts.

Google announced the new Pirate Update — call it Pirate Update 2 — will come out next week, along with new ad and editorial formats it says may help stem piracy.

What Is The Pirate Update?

The Pirate Update — similar to other updates like Panda or Penguin — works like a filter. Google processes all the sites it knows about through the Pirate filter. If it catches any deemed to be in violation, those receive a downgrade.

Anyone caught by this filter is then stuck with a downgrade until the next time it is run, when, presumably if they’ve received fewer or no complaints, they might get back in Google’s good graces. We don’t really know how that works yet, though, because Google has never rerun the Pirate Update filter.

That also means that anyone who might be in violation of what Pirate was aimed to catch has escaped any penalty since it first launched. Since it has never been rerun until now, it has never caught any new violators.

Fresh Attacks On Old System

This is what I pointed out last month, when a war-of-words erupted between News Corp and Google over online piracy. Google said it does much to fight piracy and made a reference to the Pirate filter. I noted that wasn’t a great defense, since the company had been tardy in maintaining that system:

Google has never announced a fresh run of its Pirate filter, so citing this feels odd. It means that for over two years now, Google’s not tried to rerun that system to catch new sites exhibiting such behavior.

News Corp has continued its war-of-words with Google in the weeks since. So Google, it seems, is finally getting back to attending to the Pirate Update that it has long neglected, lest that became further bad PR fodder.

New Ad Formats

Google also has just introduced a new ad display in relation to queries where people might try to download movies from pirate sites:

Above, you can see the display between the search box and the first non-paid listing from HBO. Expect Google will likely take some flak over an effort to point people to originating content, rather than pirated content, that involves publishers buying ads.
http://searchengineland.com/google-pirate-update-206124





Web-Era Trade Schools, Feeding a Need for Code
Tamar Lewin

A new educational institution, the coding boot camp, is quietly emerging as the vocational school for the digital age, devoted to creating software developers.

These boot camps reflect the start-up ethic: small for-profit enterprises that are fast (classes are two to four months), nimble (revising curriculum to meet industry needs) and unconcerned with SAT scores or diplomas. Most are expensive, but some accept a share of the graduates’ first-year earnings or a finder’s fee from employers as payment.

Most important, at a time when so many young people are underemployed, most graduates, especially those from highly selective boot camps, quickly find well-paying jobs. In a recent survey of 48 boot camps, Course Report, an online boot camp directory, found that three-quarters of graduates were employed, with raises averaging 44 percent from their pre-boot camp pay and an average salary of $76,000.

Enrolling 20 to 40 students at a time, many boot camps have venture capital backing; in May, Dev Bootcamp, which started here and expanded to New York and Chicago, was bought by Kaplan, the educational services company.

With trade schools out of fashion, for-profit colleges often dismissed as expensive dropout factories, and community college students failing to graduate a majority of their students, the rise of boot camps over the past two years is challenging assumptions about higher education, at least for some smart, highly motivated people.

Many boot camps are clustered in the South of Market neighborhood here, a center for software start-ups. But 60 such schools have been started across the nation since 2012, attracting students with the promise that anyone — even someone without a computer background — who works hard can learn enough to qualify for a job developing software in an industry desperate for programming talent.

On one recent evening at Dev Bootcamp, where class officially ended at 6 p.m. and faculty members were long gone, a sixth-floor classroom was still humming at 9, filled with students sitting in pairs, working on their projects.

“It’s a lot of hours, it’s exhausting, and each week I think I can’t do it anymore,” said Shakrah Yves, 31, who three months ago was working as a seamstress. “But each week I learn so much, and it’s so exciting to be able to build your own app.”

Most boot camps charge $1,000 a week or more, and attract a mix of career changers — lawyers, consultants, artists — and students who left college to learn to code, looking for a fast track to a well-paying career.

Anthony P. Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, said that in the old industrial economy such training took place on the job, but that today’s economy relies on postsecondary schools to prepare young people for jobs. And most colleges have no ready niche for teaching students to write software.

“This is too applied, too hands-on, too small-bite to fit easily into a college curriculum,” he said. “Think of it as a place where technology outruns education.”

The schools’ revenue models differ substantially. App Academy, in San Francisco and New York, charges no tuition, but takes 18 percent of graduates’ first-year salaries, with a $5,000 discount for those who take a job with a partner employer. At the Flatiron School, in New York, tuition is $12,000, with a $4,000 refund for students who take a job with a partner employer. (Employers are also asked to pay the school 15 percent of the students’ first-year salaries.)

Many schools offer discounts for women and minorities. Some accept fewer than 10 percent of applicants, culled through Skype interviews and coding exercises.

Working 10 hours a day, boot camp students cover a semester’s worth of material in four days, said Anne Spalding, who left a tenured computer-science post to teach at Dev Bootcamp.

“It’s a more engaging way to learn, through projects, and each group amazes me with their final projects,” she said. “My goal is that in 10 years, the boot camp approach will be part of higher education.”

The most selective boot camps claim job-placement rates of nearly 100 percent and average salaries of $85,000 to $100,000 (lower in New York than in San Francisco). But the numbers are self-reported, and some count temporary jobs and internships as employment.

At some point, the market will be saturated, but for now the demand for skilled programmers is enormous.

“There are almost five jobs for every one web developer,” said Bethany Marzewski of Stack Overflow Careers, a computer job website. “It’s absolutely the toughest job to fill.”

Alyssa Ravasio knows the problem. She founded Hipcamp, which helps people choose California camping sites, after finishing Dev Bootcamp last year.

“It’s a talent war, especially for people with a few years of experience,” Ms. Ravasio said. “I’ve tried to hire a couple of my classmates, but they all had jobs they were happy with.”

Dev Bootcamp’s students must spend nine weeks mastering fundamentals on their own before starting the nine-week residential program. A new group begins every three weeks, and students falling behind can repeat a three-week module for free.

“I was at the lower end when I started,” said Ian Root, a former schoolteacher, recalling his Dev Bootcamp experience. “I had to work 100-hour weeks here to keep up.”

Now an evening coach there, he sits calmly, waiting for students to approach, laptops in hand, seeking advice on where their code has gone wrong. Mr. Root looks hard at their screens, then makes a suggestion or sends them back a few steps.

Mr. Root’s group included a 20-year-old who had not finished college and a Harvard graduate who later returned to the same company where he had worked, but as a coder.

Some boot camp students have already taken college computer classes, but realized that while they had learned a lot of theory and algorithms, they had not gotten fluency in Ruby or JavaScript, the programming languages favored by industry, or real experience in building things.

Boot camp students spend time working in pairs at shared stations, taking turns as the “driver,” who types lines of code, and the “navigator,” who reviews the lines and suggests changes.

While skeptics say a few weeks at boot camp is not enough to produce a functioning developer, some employers disagree. Indiegogo, a San Francisco-based crowdfunding site, has hired six people straight from boot camps, and Victor Kovalev, the vice president for engineering, pronounced them “awesome.”

“It’s very impressive to put your life on pause and learn engineering in a boot camp,” he said. “The boot camp engineers tend to be very sharp, very driven, very excited to be engineers.

Many boot camps emphasize that software developers need more than technical expertise, and aim to develop students’ ability to work with diverse partners and meet new challenges.

“We do all kinds of crazy things to keep people in that beginner state, like teaching them lock-picking, origami and yoga,” said Adam Enbar, president and co-founder of the Flatiron School, which he said admits about 6 percent of applicants.

This summer, along with the regular class at Flatiron’s Lower Manhattan headquarters, a mostly female group in Brooklyn took the course for free through a New York City job-training program.

“It’s been a fantastic experience,” said Kate Brender, a Barnard College graduate who majored in astrophysics and worked as a paralegal before participating in the Brooklyn program. “I’ve always liked logic, but I was surprised at how much I liked this. Even though I’m still a beginner, I know this is what I want to do.”

One month after graduation — when about half her classmates had started a job — Ms. Brender was still interviewing but was not discouraged.

“I have three interviews next week,” she said. “And it just takes one.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/14/us...-for-code.html





EXCLUSIVE: WhatsApp’s Next Version to Include VoIP Calls and Recording
Simona Weinglass

With the introduction of VoIP call recording on WhatsApp, we may soon live in a world where regular folks have to watch what they say every minute of every day

The newest version of the WhatsApp mobile messaging app will include VoIP telephone calls as well as VoIP call recording, Geektime has learned.

Apps like Viber, Skype, Tango, Google Hangout, and Facebook already support VoIP, which allows you to make voice calls over a broadband connection. Beyond WhatsApp’s huge pool of over 600 million active users, which will undoubtedly compete against these VoIP providers, what is even more intriguing is the VoIP recording feature. Though add-ons are currently available for Skype and Google Voice to record calls, no other VoIP app includes this feature so prominently.

Legal challenges (a.k.a privacy concerns) to recording phone calls around the world

In the United States, it is illegal to record a telephone conversation without at least one other party’s knowledge or consent. According to federal law, you can theoretically record a phone call between you and someone else and not tell that person since you (one party) knows that the conversation is being recorded. However, many states require that everyone in a call knows that the conversation is being recorded, and depending on the state and case, federal or state law can override the other.

But in many countries, the practice is perfectly legal (if sneaky). In the past, it required special recording equipment that mostly call centers used for quality assurance purposes. These days, the sketchy ones among you have started to download special call recording smartphone applications.

For instance, in a country like Israel, where undisclosed phone recording is perfectly legal, wary citizens are careful to watch their words when, for instance, a business associate calls and says, “you owe me $10,000!” Because if they say yes, even in a moment of distraction, the evidence is admissible in court.

Recording phone calls: nifty or shifty?

With the new WhatsApp feature, private individuals will be able to record conversations more easily than ever before – needless to say, it could open up a can of worms.

What happens when everybody starts recording every conversation, just for the fun of it? And imagine that speech-to-text technology converts all the recorded phone calls into text, and these become legally binding written documents. What if phone conversations are regularly transcribed and then shared over the internet?

Combine that with the widespread adoption of wearable video recorders like Google Glass and we might soon live in a world where private citizens must watch their step at each moment of each day. That petty gossip you engaged in over a beer with a group of friends? It may have been recorded for posterity. A shouting match with one’s estranged spouse? Yeah, that could later be admissible in divorce court.

And what about children? Children say mean things all the time. Will parents soon be able to go to the school principal with recorded evidence of bullying?

Perhaps in the future, when we want to let off steam, we’ll just shout into an app that muffles our voices and that app will promptly, thankfully, erase it forever.

Until someone hacks into it (cough cough, SnapChat).
http://www.geektime.com/2014/10/12/e...all-recording/





SWAT: An App To Keep Dirty Cops Honest
Mark Wilson

A pair of Georgetown students want to build an app that protects your recordings of the police, even if your phone is smashed.

It’s legal in every US state to record police officers, so long as you’re not interfering with their duty. Even still, it’s fairly common for police to claim otherwise. Most recently, reporters from Huffington Post and Washington Post were detained and assaulted, likely for filming Ferguson police officers. The pair walked away from the incident without charges, but if a citizen’s phone is broken or confiscated during a debate, they’re left without evidence to defend their own rights.

SWAT is an app concept in development by a pair of Georgetown students Brandon Anderson and Joseph Gruenbaum. It wants to bring the convenience of streamlined mobile design to your civil liberties--consider it the equivalent of NYCLU’s Stop & Frisk app--except built for an entire nation.

One tab, for instance, allows you to file a police complaint without the intimidation of walking into a police station. Another tab spots your GPS coordinates and conveniently feeds you your specific regional rights as a citizen at a US, state, and city level. But its pièce de résistance is its built-in cloud camera app. Rather than saving your footage locally, it streams your recording, in realtime, to be saved on a central server. So if your phone is lost, your evidence remains intact.

“I saw this as a need when I visited Ferguson a couple of weeks ago,” Anderson tells Co.Design. “A lot of phones were being smashed by police officers, and many phones were being accidentally crushed in the movement.”

Specifically, Anderson cited two instances where he witnessed Ferguson police breaking phones. And unfortunately, that scenario matches what he’s hearing in product validation sessions his team has been conducting in D.C., Boston, and cities in California. Anderson believes this need--of protecting evidence from someone’s cellphone--is so strong that he’s staking his company’s business plan on it. Because while he’s somewhat open to building SWAT as a nonprofit that could run off of grant money, he sees its future as a B-corporation that could provide data to civil rights attorneys filing class action lawsuits against authorities. SWAT would operate off of a percentage charge for settlements.

As of today, the SWAT team has a long way to go to bring the app to market. Specifically, they don’t even have anything coded yet and are seeking a technical partner to make the vision a reality. That said, there’s no part of their proposed design that’s unattainable by current technology. Platforms like Justin.tv have livestreamed video from smartphones for years. And aside from its technical feasibility, Anderson has particular motivation to see his app realized.

“I lost my partner and high school friend to police brutality,” Anderson recalls of his days growing up in Oklahoma. “The cops weren't prosecuted due to lack of evidence.”
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3036930/...ty-cops-honest





Finnish Police Request 500 Euro Banknotes be Taken Out of Circulation
Yle

The Finnish Police have called for all 500 euro banknotes to be taken out of circulation, saying their existence enables under-the-table grey economy activities and money laundering. The Bank of Finland maintains that the use of larger bank notes in Finland is minimal in normal payment transactions and benefits outweigh the perceived disadvantages.

The Finnish Police are concerned that larger banknotes, like the 200 euro and 500 euro banknotes, encourage criminal activity and should therefore be removed from the Finnish market.

“In practice they enable and fortify the grey economy and money laundering. For this reason, we believe their circulation should be phased out,” says National Bureau of Investigation’s Markku Ranta-aho, head of the Money Laundering Clearing House of Finland.

“Criminal activity almost exclusively deals in cash. Criminals do not pay out from one bank account to another; they use cash. Larger bills make it easier to carry large quantities of money in a small space across borders, both within and outside Europe,” he says.

Chief Inspector Ranta-aho says criminals prefer cash because it is harder for police to trace its movements. A record of all electronic money transfers always remains in the banking system, which makes the police’s job considerably easier.

Ranta-aho says that 200 and 500 euro banknotes should also be removed because Finnish residents no longer use them to pay for their purchases now that bankcards have become more common. In his opinion, no one needs a banknote higher than one hundred for everyday use anymore today.

Bank of Finland says no

The Bank of Finland admits that the use of larger banknotes as a form of payment has diminished in recent years in Finland and the euro zone.

“The demand and need for 500 and 200 euro banknotes in Finland’s circulation is small and their use in normal payment traffic is very minimal,” says the Bank’s advisor Kari Takala.

The Bank of Finland is sceptical about the ability of a ban on 500 euro banknotes to eliminate underground labour and trade in Finland, however.

“Removing larger banknotes could make things more difficult for the grey economy, but it would certainly not do away with it or even affect it much. They would just switch to smaller bills,” says Takala.

“There must be other ways to prevent people being paid under the table than by taking larger banknotes out of circulation. It seems they play a pretty negligible role in the parallel market overall. More illegal transactions take place via bank transfers,” he says.

The Bank of Finland’s Takala says the larger banknotes will remain in circulation for the time being because the benefits are still seen to outweigh the perceived disadvantages.
http://yle.fi/uutiset/police_request...tio n/7527539





This POODLE Bites: Exploiting the SSL 3.0 Fallback

Today we are publishing details of a vulnerability in the design of SSL version 3.0. This vulnerability allows the plaintext of secure connections to be calculated by a network attacker. I discovered this issue in collaboration with Thai Duong and Krzysztof Kotowicz (also Googlers).

SSL 3.0 is nearly 15 years old, but support for it remains widespread. Most importantly, nearly all browsers support it and, in order to work around bugs in HTTPS servers, browsers will retry failed connections with older protocol versions, including SSL 3.0. Because a network attacker can cause connection failures, they can trigger the use of SSL 3.0 and then exploit this issue.

Disabling SSL 3.0 support, or CBC-mode ciphers with SSL 3.0, is sufficient to mitigate this issue, but presents significant compatibility problems, even today. Therefore our recommended response is to support TLS_FALLBACK_SCSV. This is a mechanism that solves the problems caused by retrying failed connections and thus prevents attackers from inducing browsers to use SSL 3.0. It also prevents downgrades from TLS 1.2 to 1.1 or 1.0 and so may help prevent future attacks.

Google Chrome and our servers have supported TLS_FALLBACK_SCSV since February and thus we have good evidence that it can be used without compatibility problems. Additionally, Google Chrome will begin testing changes today that disable the fallback to SSL 3.0. This change will break some sites and those sites will need to be updated quickly.

In the coming months, we hope to remove support for SSL 3.0 completely from our client products.

Thank you to all the people who helped review and discuss responses to this issue.
http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot...ng-ssl-30.html





Russian Hackers Used Bug in Microsoft Windows for Spying, Report Says
Mark Scott

Russian hackers used a bug in Microsoft Windows to spy on several Western governments, NATO and the Ukrainian government, according to a report released Tuesday by iSight Partners, a computer security firm in Dallas.

The targets also included European energy and telecommunications companies and an undisclosed academic organization in the United States, the cybersecurity report said.

While it is unclear what type of information may have been retrieved, iSight said that the targets of the attacks were often linked to the continuing standoff in Ukraine between Russia and the West.

That included the NATO summit meeting in Wales in early September at which the Russian hackers targeted the Ukrainian government and at least one American organization, the report said.

The illegal activities started as early as 2009 and used a variety of techniques to gain access to delicate information. ISight said the Russian hackers started using what experts refer to as a zero-day attack on Windows only in the late summer. The technique refers to a previously unknown vulnerability.

The bug affected versions from Windows Vista to the company’s latest software, Windows 8.1, though Microsoft is expected to release an update on Tuesday to resolve the potential vulnerability.

Despite efforts to thwart the Russian hackers’ attacks, iSight said using the Microsoft zero-day bug and other illegal tactics almost certainly allowed the hackers to gain some access to their targets.

“The use of this zero-day vulnerability virtually guarantees that all of those entities targeted fell victim to some degree,” the computer security company said in a statement.

While the vulnerability affected many versions of Windows, iSight said the Russian hackers appeared to be the only group to use the bug. The company added, however, that other companies and organizations may also have been affected by the attacks.

Representatives for Microsoft and the Russian government were not immediately available for comment.

The discovery of the hacking is the latest in a series of worldwide cyberattacks that have affected individuals, government agencies and companies.

Many of these attacks have originated in Russia and other Eastern European countries, though the purpose of the hackers’ efforts has often varied.

Last year, for example, Eastern European hackers gained access to the data of up to 110 million customers of the retailer Target.

In August, security researchers discovered that a separate Russian crime ring had amassed a huge collection of stolen online information, including roughly 1.2 billion user names and passwords and more than 500 million email addresses.

And this month, JPMorgan Chase also revealed that another cyberattack, which experts believe originated in Russia, had compromised the banking accounts of roughly 76 million households and seven million small businesses.

ISight said it had called the most recent Russian hackers the Sandworm team because they used encoded references to the science fiction series “Dune” in their attacks.

ISight said the group often used so-called spear-phishing techniques in its attacks against Western government and commercial targets. That involved sending emails to prospective targets with documents attached that, when opened, could allow the attacker to gain control of the computer.

Many of the emails were specifically related to the Ukrainian conflict and to wider issues linked to Russia, the company said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/bu...port-says.html





Commerce Secretary Pritzker Reaffirms US Commitment to the Multi-Stakeholder Process at ICANN
Shane Tews

This week’s ICANN meeting is setting the tone for other upcoming Internet governance conferences dealing with strategies for managing the Internet infrastructure as a global asset. Keeping the Internet free and open to content, communications, and commerce on a global scale requires a commitment by all participants in the decision making processes that make up the Internet governance forums. During yesterday’s ICANN opening ceremony, US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker delivered a strong message to the crowd, reiterating the administration’s commitment to a free and open Internet that is vibrant for all. Secretary Pritzker is the first Commerce Secretary to ever attend an ICANN conference, and her attendance speaks volumes of the level of attention Internet governance has come to receive in Washington.

Since ICANN’s establishment in 1998, the US government has fully supported the multi-stakeholder model for making decisions regarding Internet governance. Secretary Pritzker’s message to the world is that the US government will reinforce this position in every forum: “Let me be clear about this. The United States will not allow the global Internet to be coopted by any person, entity, or nation seeking to substitute their parochial worldview for the collective wisdom of this community.” Secretary Pritzker was as direct throughout the entire speech, cautioning against governments that are interested in “promoting narrow national interests” in Internet governance.

The administration’s strong comments that the US government is “all in” regarding support for the global debate on Internet governance issues are very timely given the ongoing discussion around the transition of the IANA function, a topic that is also heavily featured at ICANN. Secretary Pritzker highlighted the importance of holding the IANA function accountable to its technical customers and the broader Internet community, stressing that it is technical accuracy – not promoting government agendas – that is the goal for the IANA transition.

Innovation is fuel to the Internet architecture, but this synergy is in danger of being stifled by regulation implemented in the wrong place at the wrong time. As we go into the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Plenipotentiary meeting next week, the Secretary’s message sends a very strong signal that the US government is not interested in seeing the Internet be bogged down by telecommunications tariff rules that bind it to outdated physical boundaries of governance.

During her speech, the Secretary stressed that, “the Internet is also a vital platform for free expression and the exchange of ideas. And that is why I stand before you today to make this fundamental promise: the United States will protect and preserve a free, vibrant and open Internet.” This may seem like an obvious statement to most Internet users, but there are in fact plenty of foreign government representatives attending these decision-making meetings who do not share the fundamental principle of global Internet freedom. Secretary Pritzker’s commitment to denying any person, entity, or nation the ability to put their parochial worldview above that of the multi-stakeholder community is important because it reinforces the collaborative model as the right framework.

How institutions make and abide by decisions is important to both institutional participants and to those who operate within the framework that springs from the process. Governments, companies, and end-users need to see accountability in the development of policies in order to be assured that they are participating in a fair process. Being publically committed to a transparent, accountable, and measurable decision-making process will move the evolution of the Internet governance process to the next level.

Both the ICANN community and those who support the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) are very committed and hard-working individuals from around the world who bring different – albeit often conflicting – views and priorities to the discussion. Yet they continue to attend meeting after meeting, working hard to create a consensus that can develop into the guidelines that are needed to move Internet governance policies to the next phase.

The accountability and transparency dialogues going on this week at ICANN are a testament to the commitment of these dedicated individuals, companies, and governments to ensure that the multi-stakeholder process is open to all participants and that the decision-making process is clear to the world. Secretary Pritzker’s remarks and presence goes a long way in reaffirming America’s commitment to these values.
http://www.techpolicydaily.com/techn...icann-remarks/





“It’s a Terrible Company”: Comcast Not Welcome in City, Council Says

Worcester City Council can't block the transfer but is making its voice heard.
Jon Brodkin

The City Council in Worcester, MA does not want Comcast coming anywhere near its residents. The cable company is seeking a license transfer from Charter as part of a customer swap that's tied to its purchase of Time Warner Cable, but the council is trying to block it.

"It's a terrible company," City Councilor Gary Rosen said after a vote last night, pointing to Comcast's "deplorable and substandard" customer service in other municipalities. "In my opinion, they should not be welcome in this city. Comcast is a wolf in wolf's clothing; it's that bad. They are awful, no doubt about it. Maybe we can't stop it, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't speak out."

The Telegram & Gazette in Worcester reported today:

The City Council is urging City Manager Edward M. Augustus Jr. not to sign off on the transfer of the city's cable television license from Charter Communications Inc. to Comcast Corp.

By an 8-3 vote, the council Tuesday night asked Mr. Augustus to reject Comcast's request for the license transfer because it feels the cable company lacks the necessary managerial experience, based on the number of public complaints there have been about its "substandard customer service practices."


The vote is advisory only, the paper wrote. If Augustus takes no action today, the transfer will automatically be approved. If he rejects the transfer, Comcast is expected to appeal the decision to the state cable commission.

Comcast may not have to take it that far. According to Deputy City Solicitor Michael E. Traynor, the transfer cannot be blocked based upon Comcast's customer service record. "The cable license transfer can only be based on four criteria: the company's management, technical and legal experience, as well as its financial capabilities. If Comcast can meet that criteria, the transfer cannot be denied, Mr. Traynor said," the Telegram & Gazette wrote. "He said Comcast's customer service record does not fall within the standard of measuring the company's management experience."

City Councilor Konstantina Lukes said the vote should send a message to the Federal Communications Commission, which could block the Comcast/TWC merger. "This is not a paper vote; this is not an empty vote," she said. "This is a very clear vote that we are not going to tolerate the kind of responses we got from Charter and Comcast."

Councilor Frederick Rushton acknowledged that "We are just bit players in a big play. It may feel good to vote this, but it may very well end up having no effect."

Nationwide, Comcast would gain 1.6 million customers from Charter while Charter would gain 1.6 million customers from Time Warner Cable. In Massachusetts, Comcast would add 182,999 customers in 53 communities, the newspaper report said.

Worcester isn't the first city where officials object to the merger. In Lexington, KY, which is served by Time Warner Cable, city officials are demanding commitments to improve customer service in the cable franchise agreement, which has lapsed and must be renewed before it can be transferred. In Lexington, the license would be transferred to Comcast and then Charter.

But that's a rarity. Comcast told Ars last week that it has approval to move ahead in 89 percent out of 5,800 franchise authorities that are being asked to approve license transfers.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2014...-council-says/





This Is the Beginning of the End of Cable

HBOGO is about to be available without a cable subscription. The Lannisters and John Oliver aren't really enough to take down a hundred billion dollar cable industry, are they? Right? Wait, are they?
Ben Collins

In 2015, you’ll be able to subscribe to HBO by itself, without a cable subscription. It’s one announcement, but it’s had more of an impact in one day for the takedown of the cable oligopoly than any other single action to date. And companies like Netflix have spent the last half-decade trying to do only that.

Those companies, Amazon and Google’s YouTube included, have made incremental gains in chipping away at a $100-plus billion cable oligopoly that—with the impending merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable—might become even harder to break down. But this was a wrecking ball.

As TechCrunch put it today: Let the Unbundling Begin. Or, in English: Let the death of cable commence.

HBO is the most valuable single network entity—sports aside—on cable, and maybe all of TV content creation. The New York Post wondered in July if HBO alone was worth more than Fox’s $80 billion bid for all of Time Warner. It might be. And now you can watch it—and Game of Thrones and True Detective and John Oliver—without cable, or breaking the law.

That unbundling means that the inflated price of cable—even basic cable, which has increased 176% in price since 1995—is about to go down, or cable is about to die altogether.

Up until today, here was the position from conglomerates like Time Warner, the owner of HBO: Even if a large swath of the 80 million potential customers who don’t have cable want HBO, it’s not worth jeopardizing a large chunk of HBO’s revenue stream to cater to them. HBO receives carriage fees from telecoms like Comcast and former subsidiary Time Warner Cable. (The two companies split in 2009.)

Here was Time Warner’s fear if they were to relent to a cable-free HBOGO: If these potential subscribers are in the prime 18-to-35 demo, maybe they’ll get so used to a la carte HBO and Netflix that they won’t need cable when they’ll be able to afford it.

It wouldn’t be worth it to get $10-$15 from HBOGO-only subscribers now when they can get even more from cable subscribers—who’ll also pay for TNT, TBS, CNN and other Time Warner entities—in the not-too-distant future. And those other Time Warner cable entities? They have a dual revenue stream to worry about—one that buoys the larger business with advertising dollars.

Surely, there are some who only subscribe to cable to purchase HBO, but those people might also be converted into potential watchers of high-priced ads on TNT's basketball or TBS's baseball programming.

Losing those viewers just wasn’t worth the long-term risk.

But today, HBO flipped.

Now, this is arguably the Waterloo for the concept of the big bundle, the telecom industry’s cash cow that lumps together expensive cable packages with limited choices and often ties them to Internet and home phone service. One study believes that if cable subscribers were allowed to choose their stations one by one, or even in smaller groups, the telecoms would lose $70 billion of revenue (about 50 percent of the industry) in a year.

HBO just took the first step toward that new reality.

Time Warner is betting big on a future with more choices and fewer expensive cable package subscriptions. If companies with even less business incentive to stay on cable—like AMC Networks, which has no NBA or MLB ad space to sell, but plenty of Walking Dead pirates that are potential customers—decide to join them, could this be it for cable?

Is that all it took the whole time? The dumbing down of sponsor-heavy basic cable, plus a handful of great TV shows on networks that eschewed that idea? Could this kill—or at least bring back down to Earth—the cable oligopoly?

Do not cry for the telecommunications industry.

Three of the final eight corporations in Consumerist’s Worst Company in America poll last year were cable providers: Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and the eventual winner (or loser) Comcast. In the final, Comcast defeated Monsanto, the government’s primary manufacturer of Agent Orange and DDT in their respective primes. Now two of those telecoms, TWC and Comcast, are merging into one company, as long as the FCC and Department of Justice declare that the new megacorporation does not constitute a monopoly.

Comcast, remember, has also been using its weight to lobby the FCC for rules that will limit speech on the web. If passed, the euphemistic "fast lane on the web" would allow telecoms to determine which messages get priority, and artificially slow traffic to competitors or unpopular speech. Most insiders believe the rules will pass because FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s last job was the President of America’s largest telecom lobby—one that represents Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

This can only happen because it is too big and offers too little, and Comcast is only set to get bigger if they are allowed to purchase Time Warner Cable.

HBO found a way to undercut the industry with the hope it’ll make a lot more money. It probably will, at least immediately, even if it might kill its parent company's most reliable long-term revenue stream. The only question remaining is why TimeWarner decided to join the fight.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/news/be...e-end-of-cable





CBS Offers Web Service as TV Unbundles Itself
Emily Steel

CBS announced a new subscription Internet streaming service on Thursday that allows people to watch its live television programming and thousands of its current and past shows on demand without paying for a traditional TV subscription.

The new “CBS All Access” service, costing $5.99 a month, is the first time that a traditional broadcaster will make a near-continuous live feed of its local stations available over the web to non-pay-TV subscribers. At its start, the live stream will be available in 14 markets in the United States.

CBS’s announcement comes a day after HBO said it would start an Internet-only offering that would not require a traditional television subscription.

The moves by CBS and HBO signal the arrival of a new age of web-delivered television, where viewers have more options to pay only for the networks or programs they want to watch — and to decide how, when and where to watch them.

Indeed, people have long been able to watch broadcast television networks for free via antennas. But quickly fading away are the days when people pay an average $90 a month for a bundle of networks from a traditional cable, satellite or telecom provider.

After much anticipation, this new era of à la carte TV has suddenly arrived — all at once and more quickly than many industry executives, observers and television fans had expected. And with it, the virtual monopoly that cable, satellite and telecommunications companies have had over TV programming is dissipating.

“Everybody is talking about it,” Leslie Moonves, chief executive of the CBS Corporation, said in an interview. “It is an important part of our future. Our job is to do the best content we can and let people enjoy it in whatever way they want. The world is heading in that direction.”

The push into web-only offerings by HBO and CBS, two networks that have enjoyed billions of dollars in profits from the traditional system, highlights how rapidly the television landscape is shifting.

Their moves are largely a reaction to the success of Netflix, whose popular streaming service has more than 50 million global subscribers. Along with Netflix, a host of other insurgents like Amazon and Hulu now offer on-demand programming that can be watched anytime and anywhere on a laptop or a smartphone.

Subscribers to “CBS All Access” will be able to watch local CBS television stations in 14 markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas and San Francisco. More affiliates are expected to join.

Available in all other United States markets beyond the initial 14 markets are episodes of current prime time shows like “The Big Bang Theory” and “NCIS” the day after they are shown, and more than 5,000 episodes of such series as “Star Trek,” “Cheers” and “MacGyver.”

In a notable carve-out, National Football League games will not be available on the service. CBS executives said they are now in discussions with the N.F.L. and that other live sports are already available for streaming. A similar service from Showtime, the premium cable network owned by CBS, is likely in the “not too distant future,” Mr. Moonves said.

The initiative is an attempt to stay relevant to a generation of “cord nevers,” people who have never paid for a standard television package, or the “cord cutters” who have canceled their cable or satellite subscriptions. This growing audience pays for Internet service and watches television programs and movies using cheaper streaming alternatives such as Netflix, which costs $7.99 a month. And the abundance of free web video on YouTube and other social media is also cutting into traditional TV watching.

Television executives are eager to woo those viewers, who often are younger and represent their future audiences. But at the same time, these traditional television networks must perform a careful balancing act to not cannibalize the billions of dollars in revenue they generate each year through existing business models.

CBS, HBO and other media groups were careful to say that they would work with both current and new business partners.

Cable, satellite and telecommunications companies could be forced to create more segmented packages to hold on to potential cord cutters. But in some ways, the new web-only products will strengthen the business of providing Internet service into the home. Netflix, and now HBO and CBS, will need broadband service to reach customers over the web.

CBS and HBO are not the only two new web-only offerings. Sony is readying an Internet product that is expected to include live and on-demand programming from Viacom, the parent of MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central networks.

Even Aereo, the television streaming service effectively shut down by the United States Supreme Court this year for violating copyright laws, is looking for a lifeline. Aereo, which captured broadcast signals on tiny antennas and delivered them to subscribers for a fee, had argued that it helped subscribers do what they could do lawfully in the era of rabbit ears: watch free broadcast television delivered over public airwaves. Now, it is seeking a different legal classification from regulators that could allow it to operate.

All of these entrants are hoping to appeal to the increasing numbers who don’t pay for a traditional television subscription and instead stream television shows or movies.

Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, said in an interview that the new wave of streaming options from traditional outlets validated his company’s long-held thesis that the Internet was replacing traditional television, apps were replacing channels, remote controls were disappearing and screens were proliferating. He said the increased competition would make Netflix work harder but also could help to evangelize the idea of Internet video.

“We are Internet disrupters, through and through,” Mr. Hastings said. “We are continuing to push that edge.”

CBS is an unlikely disrupter. The broadcaster, for example, did not join its rivals ABC, NBC and Fox when they banded together to start Hulu in 2008. CBS has made its programing available across a web of digital outlets, including Hulu, after it was shown on its traditional network. But the broadcaster deployed a strict strategy to make sure it would be paid for its programing, whether people watched it on a TV screen, laptop or a mobile phone screen.

The company held on to the digital rights for its programing so that it could build its own web and mobile offerings, such as the new “CBS All Access.” The service will be available on CBS.com and mobile apps beginning Thursday. In the coming months, it will also be available on other devices that allow people to stream Internet video on their television screens, such as Apple TV, Roku and Google’s Chromecast.

Mr. Moonves said the new service had been planned for more than a year and that he had been a skeptic during that time. He questioned whether it would offer something different from what was already available and whether it would cut into CBS’s business. “I am the old broadcasting guy here,” he said. “I continued to poke holes in it for the last year.”

Mr. Moonves said that ultimately he was convinced CBS would be able to continue to sell its programs to distributors and that the new service would generate additional subscription and advertising revenue.

For the live stream, the ads will be the same as those on the traditional television broadcast. For the on-demand programming, the typical 12 to 16 minutes of ads an hour will be reduced 25 percent. CBS Classics — shows like “Star Trek” and “Cheers” — will stream without ads.

“It is going to look a lot like Netflix,” said Marc DeBevoise, an executive vice president at CBS Interactive.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/bu...n-service.html





‘Gone Girl’ Shakes Off Box Office Cobwebs
Michael Cieply

Like the heroes of Christopher Nolan’s coming sci-fi thriller “Interstellar,” Hollywood finally may have found its wormhole to a brighter season.

Over the weekend, David Fincher’s thriller “Gone Girl” from 20th Century Fox, which had $26.8 million in domestic ticket sales, for a 10-day total of $78.3 million, backed by several new movies, pushed the box office to an estimated $149 million, up 28.2 percent from the comparable weekend last year, according to the Rentrak service.

Universal’s “Dracula Untold,” with $23.5 million in sales, Walt Disney’s “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” with $19.1 million, and Warner Bros.’s “The Judge,” with $13.3 million, were among the leading new films. Warner’s horror flick “Annabelle,” in its second weekend, ranked fourth with $16.4 million and topped “The Judge,” with Robert Downey Jr.

The burst of moviegoing follows a spring-summer season that saw domestic sales drop 15 percent from a year ago, as films like Warner’s “Edge of Tomorrow” and Sony’s “Sex Tape” failed to charm.

Now, the buzz-driven success of “Gone Girl,” about a monstrously failed marriage, along with the fresh hits, will bring viewers to trailers for potentially powerful films that should keep 2014 from becoming a box-office embarrassment.

“I think the movie is a wonder,” Brad Grey, chief executive of Paramount Pictures, promised of his own prime prospect, “Interstellar.”

Paramount shares Mr. Nolan’s film with Warner and Legendary Entertainment. And its reception may tell whether Hollywood’s fourth quarter matches last year, when “Gravity,” “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” and “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” pushed domestic sales to roughly $2.7 billion. That contributed to a robust $10.9 billion in domestic full-year sales.

To date, Paramount has kept a lid on “Interstellar,” which tells of travel through a supposed wormhole in space and time. It has avoided publicity screenings. Instead, the studio has teased fans of Mr. Nolan — he directed Warner’s “Dark Knight” films — with a gamelike Google hub and an app, the chance to sample the film on an Oculus Rift virtual reality device, and the promise of Imax and other film format (as opposed to digital) screenings two days before a wide release on Nov. 7.

Speaking last week, Mr. Grey sought to frame “Interstellar” as a Nolan masterwork: “His attention to detail in this picture on every level is stunning,” he said.

If viewers respond — it would take about $275 million in domestic sales to top last year’s “Gravity” — other films must still measure up to last year’s strong performers.

(Those who count sales can still use a favorite site, Box Office Mojo. It reappeared over the weekend, after a Friday disappearance prompted speculation that Amazon, its owner, had closed it. Amazon representatives did not answer queries.)

“The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1,” from Lionsgate, and “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies,” from Warner and its New Line Cinema unit, should line up with their predecessors.

“The Penguins of Madagascar,” an animated sequel from DreamWorks Animation and Fox, is unlikely to equal the outsize performance of Disney’s “Frozen,” which had over $400 million in domestic sales last year.

But Fox’s “Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb” — in theaters Dec. 19 — is a rough marketplace equivalent to last year’s “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues” from Paramount. And Ridley Scott’s “Exodus: Gods and Kings,” a biblical adventure from Fox, should have at least as much strength as did Martin Scorsese’s somewhat unholy “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which arrived last Christmas.

Among the more complicated prospects is “Fury,” a World War II film that stars Brad Pitt, Logan Lerman and others, and is set for release Friday by Sony. The realism of “Fury” could put it on the awards circuit, but poses a challenge for violence-averse viewers.

Sony has another question mark in “Annie,” set for a Dec. 19 release. Directed by Will Gluck, known for “Friends With Benefits,” it casts Quvenzhané Wallis, admired and awarded for her performance in “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” as the orphan in a follow-up to Columbia Pictures’ first cut at the musical, 32 years ago.

Still Hollywood has shaken off its funk, with help from “Guardians of the Galaxy,” the year’s biggest hit to date, with over $326 million in domestic sales since its release by Disney and its Marvel unit in August.

Warner remained sluggish, as Mr. Downey’s heavily promoted drama trailed competitors. But the studio was helped by “Annabelle,” a modestly budgeted film that now has about $62.2 million in total ticket sales. And Disney, whose PG-rated “Alexander,” though not a runaway hit, had anything but a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad weekend.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/13/mo...-cobwebs-.html





Is E-Reading to Your Toddler Story Time, or Simply Screen Time?
Douglas Quenqua

Clifford the Big Red Dog looks fabulous on an iPad. He sounds good, too — tap the screen and hear him pant as a blue truck roars into the frame. “Go, truck, go!” cheers the narrator.

But does this count as story time? Or is it just screen time for babies?

It is a question that parents, pediatricians and researchers are struggling to answer as children’s books, just like all the other ones, migrate to digital media.

For years, child development experts have advised parents to read to their children early and often, citing studies showing its linguistic, verbal and social benefits. In June, the American Academy of Pediatrics advised doctors to remind parents at every visit that they should read to their children from birth, prescribing books as enthusiastically as vaccines and vegetables.

On the other hand, the academy strongly recommends no screen time for children under 2, and less than two hours a day for older children.

At a time when reading increasingly means swiping pages on a device, and app stores are bursting with reading programs and learning games aimed at infants and preschoolers, which bit of guidance should parents heed?

The answer, researchers say, is not yet entirely clear. “We know how children learn to read,” said Kyle Snow, the applied research director at the National Association for the Education of Young Children. “But we don’t know how that process will be affected by digital technology.”

Part of the problem is the newness of the devices. Tablets and e-readers have not been in widespread use long enough for the sorts of extended studies that will reveal their effects on learning.

Dr. Pamela High, the pediatrician who wrote the June policy for the pediatrics group, said electronic books were intentionally not addressed. “We tried to do a strongly evidence-based policy statement on the issue of reading starting at a very young age,” she said. “And there isn’t any data, really, on e-books.”

But a handful of new studies suggest that reading to a child from an electronic device undercuts the dynamic that drives language development.

“There’s a lot of interaction when you’re reading a book with your child,” Dr. High said. “You’re turning pages, pointing at pictures, talking about the story. Those things are lost somewhat when you’re using an e-book.”

In a 2013 study, researchers found that children ages 3 to 5 whose parents read to them from an electronic book had lower reading comprehension than children whose parents used traditional books. Part of the reason, they said, was that parents and children using an electronic device spent more time focusing on the device itself than on the story (a conclusion shared by at least two other studies).

“Parents were literally putting their hands over the kids’ hands and saying, ‘Wait, don’t press the button yet. Finish this up first,’ ” said Dr. Julia Parish-Morris, a developmental psychologist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the lead author of the 2013 study that was conducted at Temple University. Parents who used conventional books were more likely to engage in what education researchers call “dialogic reading,” the sort of back-and-forth discussion of the story and its relation to the child’s life that research has shown are key to a child’s linguistic development.

Complicating matters is that fewer and fewer children’s e-books can strictly be described as books, say researchers. As technology evolves, publishers are adding bells and whistles that encourage detours.

“What we’re really after in reading to our children is behavior that sparks a conversation,” said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple and co-author of the 2013 study. “But if that book has things that disrupt the conversation, like a game plopped right in the middle of the story, then it’s not offering you the same advantages as an old-fashioned book.”

Of course, e-book publishers and app developers point to interactivity as an educational advantage, not a distraction. Many of those bells and whistles — Clifford’s bark, the sleepy narration of “Goodnight Moon,” the appearance of the word “ham” when a child taps the ham in the Green Eggs and Ham app — help the child pick up language, they say.

There is some evidence to bear out those claims, at least in relation to other technologies. A study by the University of Wisconsin in 2013 found that 2-year-olds learned words faster with an interactive app as opposed to one that required no action.

But when it comes to learning language, researchers say, no piece of technology can substitute for a live instructor — even if the child appears to be paying close attention.

Patricia K. Kuhl, a director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, led a study in 2003 that compared a group of 9-month-old babies who were addressed in Mandarin by a live instructor with a group addressed in Mandarin by an instructor on a DVD. Children in a third group were exposed only to English.

“The way the kids were staring at the screen, it seemed obvious they would learn better from the DVDs,” she said. But brain scans and language testing revealed that the DVD group “learned absolutely nothing,” Dr. Kuhl said.

“Their brain measures looked just like the control group that had just been exposed to English. The only group that learned was the live social interaction group.”

In other words, “it’s being talked with, not being talked at,” that teaches children language, Dr. Hirsh-Pasek said.

Today, what Dr. Kuhl found is commonly referred to as the “Baby Einstein” effect, named for thepopular video series that entranced children from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, but was ultimately found to have a negative association with language development in infants. In 2009, the Walt Disney Company, facing the threat of a class-action lawsuit, offered refunds to people who had bought the videos.

Similarly, perhaps the biggest threat posed by e-books that read themselves to children, or engage them with games, is that they could lull parents into abdicating their educational responsibilities, said Mr. Snow of the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

“There’s the possibility for e-books to become the TV babysitters of this generation,” he said. “We don’t want parents to say, ‘There’s no reason for me to sit here and turn pages and tell my child how to read the word, because my iPad can do it.’ ”

But parents may find it difficult to avoid resorting to tablets.

Claudia Raleigh, a mother of three children under 6 years old in Berkley, Mich., said she adhered strictly to the A.A.P. guidelines but found that she needed to distract her toddler, Teddy, during his sister’s swim class. “You know how hard it is to sit somewhere with a 2-year-old?” she said. “So that was his introduction to the iPad. It kept him from jumping in the pool.”

“I considered it a lifesaving device,” she said.

The guilt, she added, did not linger for long. “I literally read to my kids every day since birth,” she said. “I’m over feeling guilty about a little screen time.”

Even literacy advocates say the guidelines can be hard to follow, and that allowing limited screen time is not high on the list of parental missteps. “You might have an infant and think you’re down with the A.A.P. guidelines, and you don’t want your baby in front of a screen, but then you have a grandparent on Skype,” Mr. Snow said. “Should you really be tearing yourself apart? Maybe it’s not the world’s worst thing.”

“The issue is when you’re in the other room and Skyping with the baby cause he likes it,” he said. Even if screen time is here to stay as a part of American childhood, good old-fashioned books seem unlikely to disappear anytime soon. Parents note that there is an emotional component to paper-and-ink storybooks that, so far, does not seem to extend to their electronic counterparts, however engaging.

“Lilly definitely has an iPad, and there are education apps she uses,” Amy Reid, a publicist at CNBC, said of her 4-year-old. “But for her, there is nothing like the excitement of choosing her own book and bringing it home from the library.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/us...reen-time.html





Snowden Film Tests Hollywood Obama Backers

The documentary ‘Citizenfour’ raises political questions
Michael Cieply

Early in Laura Poitras’s documentary “Citizenfour,” Edward J. Snowden, who exposed vast electronic surveillance by the United States government, tells what pushed him to go public.

“As I saw the promise of the Obama administration betrayed, and walked away from,” says Mr. Snowden, referring to drone strikes and invasive monitoring by the National Security Agency, “it really hardened me to action.”

But do some of President Obama’s staunch Hollywood supporters share his sentiment?

Her provocative, and deeply admiring, look at Mr. Snowden — which had its premiere at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 10 — arrived here this week amid high hopes, intense curiosity and more than a few raised eyebrows over its sharp critique of Mr. Obama, a president who has enjoyed strong support in the movie world.

The intrigue is especially pitched because several of the companies behind “Citizenfour” — which takes issue with Mr. Obama’s expansion of Bush-era surveillance, and his administration’s attempt to prosecute Mr. Snowden for espionage — are led by some of the president’s close political allies.

They include Harvey Weinstein, the Weinstein Company’s co-chairman, as well as Jeff Skoll, the founder of Participant Media, and Richard Plepler, the chief executive of HBO, who all have been major contributors to Mr. Obama’s political campaigns.

“Citizenfour” has already landed high on the handicappers’ lists of prospects for a documentary features Oscar. The film also promises to jolt the award season with a dose of real-world politics, as happened in 2012, when Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty” and Ben Affleck’s “Argo,” the year’s best picture, converged on Washington, with screenings, receptions and a Congressional uproar over the portrayal of torture by Americans in Ms. Bigelow’s film, which was about the hunting down of Osama bin Laden.

The role that Mr. Weinstein, whose Radius-TWC unit is backing the film (and distributed last year’s Oscar-winning documentary “Twenty Feet From Stardom”), will play in promoting “Citizenfour” remains unclear. In the past, he has not shied from using his association with Mr. Obama to promote issues-oriented movies. These include the biopic “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom,” which had a much-publicized White House screening last year, and the documentary “Bully,” which was screened for Mr. Obama in 2012, just minutes after he announced his support for a pair of anti-bullying bills.

Also in 2012, Mr. Weinstein arranged a high-profile Washington showing of his “SEAL Team Six: The Raid on Osama bin Laden,” raising complaints that its flattering portrayal of Mr. Obama — who was edited into the film before its election-week premiere — amounted to a campaign stunt.

On Tuesday, it was the Radius-TWC co-presidents, Jason Janego and Tom Quinn, and not Mr. Weinstein, who played host as Ms. Poitras introduced “Citizenfour” to film buffs and some potential Oscar voters at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“The film is certainly about the danger of N.S.A. surveillance, but it’s also really about courage,” Ms. Poitras said. (The movie’s title comes from Mr. Snowden’s self-designated code name when he began communicating with Ms. Poitras.)

In a later phone interview, Mr. Quinn and Mr. Janego said they had exercised considerable autonomy in acquiring rights to “Citizenfour” after Mr. Quinn visited Ms. Poitras to discuss the unfinished film at her home in Berlin. Both stressed that Mr. Weinstein and his brother, Bob, co-chairmen of the parent company, were not a driving force in the decision to distribute the film, which is to open on Friday in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Washington.

“We did not see the actual film until very late in the process,” Mr. Quinn added.

Promotional screenings and talks are likely among the tech crowd in San Francisco and among political types in Washington, but scheduling has been hampered by that late delivery, he said.

The potential power in “Citizenfour” lies less in its revelations — though its ending points to the existence of another, as yet unidentified, government-surveillance whistle-blower — than in its intimacy and attempt to make narrative sense of the disclosures by Mr. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor.

At the film’s core are startlingly close encounters with Mr. Snowden, shot during eight days in a Hong Kong hotel room in 2013, as he began revealing secrets of the N.S.A. to the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, and wrestled with the implications of his leaks. At one point, in nearly silent pantomime, he reshapes his beard and restyles his hair, preparing to slip from the hotel and eventually seek refuge in Russia.

The footage of Mr. Snowden is framed against shots of Mr. Obama and members of his administration, first denying the existence of domestic surveillance, then promising a review of programs, and finally insisting on Mr. Snowden’s prosecution.

In the Oscar race for best documentary, “Citizenfour” is likely to find itself up against some less volatile documentaries. Among those are “Red Army,” about Soviet hockey stars; “Life Itself,” about the film critic Roger Ebert; and “Tales of the Grim Sleeper,” about the predations of a serial killer in South Los Angeles.

But “Citizenfour” recalls a different political dynamic, in 2004, when Mr. Weinstein introduced Michael Moore’s anti-Bush “Fahrenheit 9/11” at the Beverly Hills headquarters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with a personal tribute to Mr. Moore. The two received a roaring ovation from like-minded Academy members.

But “Fahrenheit 9/11” won no Oscars. It was ruled out of the race when Mr. Moore chose to air it on pay-per-view television shortly before the presidential election.

This time around, though, some key voices are quieter.

Mr. Plepler, whose top documentary executive, Sheila Nevins, is an executive producer of “Citizenfour,” has not yet seen the movie, an HBO spokesman said. Mr. Skoll, through a Participant Media spokeswoman, declined to comment when asked whether he had concerns about the film’s view of Mr. Obama. In an email, referring to Mr. Quinn and Mr. Janego, of Radius-TWC, Mr. Weinstein said: “This is Tom and Jason’s show. They have autonomy, and it’s all their call.”

Mr. Janego, on Wednesday, asserted that Ms. Poitras’s cinéma vérité approach leaves a comfort zone for both those who support Mr. Snowden and those who find his actions offensive. “You’re left to make up your own mind,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/mo...-backers-.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

October 11th, October 4th, September 27th, September 20th


Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public."
- Hugo Black
JackSpratts is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply


Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 16th, '11 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 13-07-11 06:43 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 9th, '11 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 06-07-11 05:36 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 30th, '10 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 27-01-10 07:49 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 16th, '10 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 13-01-10 09:02 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 5th, '09 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 02-12-09 08:32 AM






All times are GMT -6. The time now is 10:32 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
© www.p2p-zone.com - Napsterites - 2000 - 2024 (Contact grm1@iinet.net.au for all admin enquiries)