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 18-04-12, 09:11 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 - April 21st, '12

Since 2002


































"One key problem is the arrangement shifts the burden of proof: Rather than accusers proving infringement before the graduated response process starts against a subscriber, the subscriber must disprove the accusation in order to call a halt to it. Worse, accused subscribers have to defend themselves on an uneven playing field. The final rub: Subscribers will doubtless be paying for their own [Orwellian] ‘re-education,’ as ISPs pass on their portions of the administration costs in the form of higher fees." – Parker Higgins, EFF



































April 21st, 2012




Student Bay File-Sharing ‘Admin’ Walks Free
enigmax

After a legal process lasting more than three years, the alleged administrator of The Student Bay, a Swedish website dedicated to indexing textbooks, has been acquitted today. The court ruled that there was no evidence that the 23-year-old had created or administered the website, or had any direct role in copyright infringement.

“In Sweden, education is claimed to be free of charge. Despite this students are forced every term to spend thousands of kronor on books necessary for their education.”

These were the words that accompanied the launch of a new file-sharing site in 2008. The aim of The Student Bay was to bring to free books to the masses.

“Student Bay does not publish the course books as a whole, rather we divide them up in chapters, so that one can download them for personal use,” they added.

Due to the similarities present in their domain names and logos, speculation grew that The Pirate Bay and Student Bay were connected. There were even claims that The Pirate Bay’s Gottfrid Svartholm (aka Anakata) was directly linked with the site, an accusation he denied.

By December, Student Bay had been reported to the police by the Swedish Association for Educational Writers (SLFF) with the organization insisting that Svatholm was connected to the site. In fact the only connection was that the site had been hosted at PRQ, a web host previously owned by Svartholm.

Indeed, The Pirate Bay openly criticized Student Bay for taking subscriptions via premium SMS and suggested that sharing should be free, but by May 2009 it was a moot point – Student Bay had closed.

Last December, very nearly 3 years after the original complaint against the site, Swedish prosecutor Frederick Ingblad announced that a 23-year-old man had been prosecuted for founding and running Student Bay.

He was charged with violating and assisting in breaches of copyright law between August 2008 and May 2009, and charged with “regularly receiving and assimilating payments” from site users totaling $8,000.

But despite a lengthy investigation and legal process, the prosecution were left disappointed by a ruling from the Södertörn District Court today.

In the judgment the Court said that the prosecution had not shown “that [the defendant] alone or in concert with others had started the website StudentBay.se, whose domain was registered by another person during the fall of 2007.”

The defendant had previously admitted doing some paid design work on the site but denied being the site’s operator. The District Court agreed, noting that it had “not been established” that the defendant had “administered the website.”

The Court concluded that despite being involved with the website the defendant had not done enough to be found guilty of the crime in question – facilitating copyright infringement of textbooks.

“It’s excellent that there was an acquittal,” said Victoria Westberg, spokeperson for the Young Pirates. “We believe that it’s obvious that no one should be found guilty for only having designed a website and created a logo. It feels good that the District Court shares our view.”

The prosecution is expected to appeal.
https://torrentfreak.com/student-bay...s-free-120413/





Hollywood Loses Final Appeal in Piracy Case
Ben Grubb

Pirates not off the hook

Downloaders be warned, the film industry suffered a blow in the High Court but copyright holders still have means to attack pirates, says lawyer David Moore.

Unaninmous decision: ISPs not liable for copyright infringement
Decision means net users won't be disconnected from net for piracy without courts
Content owners pressuring government to change laws

A damaging blow has been dealt to the giants of the film industry in the High Court today after it decided to dismiss their copyright infringement appeal case against internet service provider (ISP) iiNet in a landmark ruling.

The High Court's five judges unanimously dismissed the appeal. In a summary the court observed that iiNet "had no direct technical power" to prevent its customers from illegally downloading pirated content using BitTorrent.

But copyright law experts say the case is not the end of the story as more ISPs could be targeted in future and pressure will remain on internet providers to do something about piracy on their networks. The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft is already pressuring the government to change copyright laws to crack down on piracy.

Today, the court said iiNet's power to prevent customers from pirating movies and TV shows "was limited to an indirect power to terminate its contractual relationship with its customers".

Further, the High Court judges said that infringement notices sent by the film industry to iiNet did not provide the ISP "with a reasonable basis for sending warning notices to individual customers containing threats to suspend or terminate those customers"'.

If the film industry had won, the decision had the potential to impact internet users and the internet industry profoundly as it sets a legal precedent surrounding how much ISPs are required to do to prevent customers from downloading movies and other content illegally.

iiNet CEO Michael Malone welcomed the ruling and said Hollywood should now focus on increasing the availability of lawful content in a timely and affordable manner. "We have consistently said we are eager to work with the studios to make their very desirable material legitimately available to a waiting customer base - and that offer remains the same today," he said.

The High Court dismissed the appeal with costs. iiNet said legal costs of the case to date were approximately $9 million and had already been expensed.

The film industry – and content owners more broadly – want ISPs to send warning notices and even disconnect customers from the internet following allegations of copyright infringement. The ISPs have long said that content owners already have sufficient remedies through the courts and it is not the job of the ISP to decide whether someone is guilty of content piracy. The courts have so far sided with the ISPs on this point.

Recently content owners and ISPs have been back at the negotiating table over this issue however it is understood that a consensus has yet to be reached. The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has previously said that he was awaiting the outcome of the iiNet case before deciding whether new legislation was needed to crack down on illegal downloaders.

The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) is ramping up the pressure on the government to act. It said today's judgment exposed the failure of copyright law to keep pace with the online environment and the need for the government to act.

AFACT managing director Neil Gane said over half the usage of iiNet's internet service by its customers (measured in volume), was represented by BitTorrent file sharing.

"Now that we have taken this issue to the highest court in the land, it is time for government to act," he said.

"We are confident the government would not want copyright infringement to go on unabated across Australian networks especially with the rollout of the NBN."

Experts say a previous judgment in the case paves the way for further lawsuits against ISPs.

Michael Speck, a copyright expert who ran the music industry's case against Kazaa, said: "In losing the case [the film industry] still got from the courts a clear road map for how to successfully prosecute ISPs in the future and the next ISP that is prosecuted will find it almost impossible to avoid liability."

Kim Heitman, secretary of Electronic Frontiers Australia and a Peth-based IP lawyer, called Speck a "wishful thinker".

"Of course any new case can be brought against any new defendant with any new facts including whether they have gone through a more detailed road map of specifying the particular breach," she said.

"But what the Chief Justice made very clear is that if you are going to take action against end users it has to be through a legal process. It can't be simply the content owners asserting to the ISP that they should breach their contract with their customer and therefore the road map is not complete in so far as it doesn't include a legal process against the user."

Intellectual property lawyer David Moore, of legal firm Cornwall Stodart, said for now ISPs are not responsible for the infringing conduct of their users but he believes this will change.

"At some point if the level of infringement by a particular user is of a certain scale and is repeated then an ISPs will be expected to work with the copyright owners to take action and I feel that's the way that things are heading sort of based on the full Federal Court decision and now the High Court decision," he said.

"It's almost forcing ISPs to work with the copyright owners to cut out illegal downloads and the question of how they work together is perhaps somewhat grey. There's several issues floating around about the cost of putting in place, or the cost to an ISP of enforcing a policy that involves sending out warning notices and potentially terminating or suspending accounts."

But Hamish Fraser of Truman Hoyle Lawyers said: "I think most practitioners struggle with the idea that an ISP should be liable for the downloading of its users."

Heitman said the decision meant that internet users could be confident they would not be disconnected from the internet without a proper legal process and court order.

"It means that the content owners needs to decide if they are going to continue to try to keep hold of their 20th century business model or open an online shop," she said.

Heitman said that while it was unlikely, content owners could still sue individual downloaders.

"In the United States recently content owners that have tried to apply to ISPs to get a full list of the names and addresses of the people downloading have been told that they will not get that relief from the court because they are not genuinely intending to use the legal process," she said.

"It's sort of the Kill the Irishman situation where really it's just a shake down or copyright trolling."

The suit against iiNet was first filed in November 2008 by a group of the biggest Hollywood studios including Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox and Disney, as well as the Seven Network.

The film studios had sued iiNet arguing that by not acting to prevent illegal file sharing on its network it was essentially "authorising" the activity and was therefore liable.

But after an eight-week Federal Court trial in 2009 that examined whether iiNet authorised customers to download pirated movies, Federal Court judge Justice Dennis Cowdroy found that in February 2010 the ISP was not liable for the downloading habits of its customers.

The studios appealed the decision, but again lost in a judgment handed down in February 2011 after two of the three Federal Court appeal judges sided with iiNet.

The studios then appealed to the High Court, which heard the case between November 30 and December 2 last year, and which delivered its judgment today.
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/tec...#ixzz1sXMcOxpa





ISPs Have to Identify Alleged Pirates, EU Court Rules
enigmax

A dispute over whether a Swedish ISP can be forced to hand over the details of one its subscribers to an anti-piracy group has just received its long-awaited ruling from the Europe’s highest court. A few moments ago the ECJ announced that there are no EU barriers which prevent the ISP handing over its customers’ private details to copyright holders.

Not long after Sweden’s controversial IPRED legislation became law in 2009, five book publishers handed a request for information to a local court.

The rightsholders, represented by anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån, wanted to force local ISP ePhone to hand over the personal details of a subscriber who allegedly stored more than 2000 audio books on his server, 27 of which breached the publishers’ copyrights.

In June that year the court ordered ePhone to provide the information but the ISP felt it would be wrong to comply, and instead took their case to the Court of Appeal. The ruling of the lower court was overturned on appeal and the case was sent to the Sweden’s highest court.

In the event even the Supreme Court couldn’t decide and it in turn forwarded the case to the European Court of Justice. A few moments ago the ECJ released its decision, one that is sure to please rightsholders.

The ECJ decided that there are no EU barriers which stop ePhone being ordered to provide the information as requested by Antipiratbyrån and the book publishers. The Court said that Swedish law strikes an appropriate balance between the rights of copyright holders and citizens’ rights to privacy.

Having obtained the decision from the ECJ, the case will now head back to Sweden’s Supreme Court.

“We feel very satisfied with this judgment. It is extremely important that we have received this message,” said Kristina Ahlinder, president of the Publishers’ Association.

“The important next step is that the Supreme Court gives us the authority, that the evidence is sufficient and that we have the right to share this information. The illegal publication that has occurred from this IP address is comprehensive,” Ahlinder added

If Sweden’s Supreme Court indeed decides that ePhone must hand over the information, it is not clear if the publishers are even ready to continue with a civil case against the alleged infringer. But of course, other entities such as the music and movie industries have been watching closely too, since it clarifies their position going forward. IFPI, among others, are welcoming the ruling.
http://torrentfreak.com/isps-have-to...-rules-120419/





New Copyright Alert System to Target File-Sharing Users
Chris Tribbey

Starting July 1 the Center for Copyright Information (CCI) will oversee a program that has the nation’s largest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) implementing measures aimed at discouraging illegal file sharing.

CCI will oversee the Copyright Alert system, a graduated response system that has ISPs warning Internet users who participate in illegal file sharing. CCI was created in September 2011 by five major ISPs, the six major studios of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Independent Film & Television Alliance, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and The American Association of Independent Music. Comcast, AT&T, Cablevision, Verizon and Time Warner Cable are the ISPs signed on to the program.

CCI stresses that the Copyright Alert system applies to peer-to-peer file sharing only, and “does not address other possible forms of online copyright infringement involving the downloading or streaming of copyrighted content.” However, the plan is still drawing the ire of consumer advocacy groups, who say it places the burden of proof of illegal actions on the consumer.

“One key problem is the arrangement shifts the burden of proof: Rather than accusers proving infringement before the graduated response process starts against a subscriber, the subscriber must disprove the accusation in order to call a halt to it,” writes Parker Higgins, activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “Worse, accused subscribers have to defend themselves on an uneven playing field. For example, they have only 10 days to prepare a defense, and with only six pre-set options available.”

He said Internet subscribers were not included in developing the Copyright Alert system and called the Copyright Alert system’s final measures “Orwellian-sounding.”

The system works like this: Once a content owner, such as those represented by the MPAA and RIAA, notice copyrights are being misused online, they’ll contact ISPs, who will in turn notify the subscriber account connected to that Internet Protocol (IP) address.

“The alert will notify the subscriber that his/her account may have been misused for potentially illegal file sharing, explain why the action is illegal and a violation of the ISP’s policies, and provide advice about how to avoid receiving further alerts as well as how to locate film, television and music content legally,” CCI explains, adding that “Alerts will be non-punitive and progressive in nature.”

While first and second alerts to consumers will “direct the subscriber to educational resources which will help him/her to check the security of his/her computer and network, provide explanatory steps which will help to avoid copyright infringement in the future and provide information about the abundant legal sources of music, film and TV content,” third and fourth alerts will require consumers to acknowledge receipt of the message, via a click-through pop-up notice or landing page.

By the fifth and sixth alerts to a subscriber accused of illegal file sharing, the system calls for ISPs to institute “mitigation measures,” including temporary reductions of Internet speeds and redirection to a landing page until the subscriber contacts the ISP. Account termination is not required under the system agreed to by the ISPs.

Internet subscribers will be given a chance to apply for a review of their case, which will be overseen by the American Arbitration Association.

CCI executive director Jill Lesser, a technology, consumer protection and copyright expert, called the effort an “unprecedented collaboration” between content providers and distributors.

“I am excited to lead CCI as it begins this constructive effort to reduce and deter online copyright infringement in a way that is centered on education and deterrence, not punishment,” said Lesser, who has served as deputy director of public policy and director of the Civic Media Project at People for the American Way and as SVP for domestic public policy for AOL Time Warner Inc.

The reasons behind the program were underscored April 11 when the U.S. Commerce Department released a report showing that American industries that are intellectual property-intensive contribute $5 trillion (35% of U.S. GDP) and 40 million jobs (27.7% of American jobs) to the U.S. economy.

But the EFF’s Higgins contends the Copyright Alert system is the wrong way to go when it comes to protect intellectual property and copyrighted content.

“The final rub: Subscribers will doubtless be paying for their own ‘re-education,’ as ISPs pass on their portions of the administration costs in the form of higher fees,” he wrote.
http://www.homemediamagazine.com/pir...ng-users-26979





First Enforcement Notice Issued Under 'Three Strikes' Law, $15K Fine Looms
Chris Keall

A TelstraClear customer has become the first person to receive an enforcement notice under the "three strikes" internet file sharing law.

He, or she, now faces a possible date in front of the Copyright Tribunal and a fine of up to $15,000.

TelstraClear would not identify the alleged pirate, other than to say they were a residential customer, and that the notice was sent on April 12.

The enforcement notice was issued on behalf of Rianz (the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand).

It refused to tell NBR who the artist or record label behind the complaint.

The industry group copped flack in November when the first wave of detection notices were issued on behalf of Rihanna, Lady Gaga and other US-based artists.

The head of one of the big five ISPs told NBR it was a major PR blunder not to issue notices for infringement of a local artist.

The ISP boss said his organisation had been issuing around 15 notices a week on behalf of Rianz.

It had received none from NZFACT, the local lobby group representing the major Hollywood film studios.

TelstraClear confirmed to NBR today that it had also issued no notices on behalf of movie studios.

It also declined official comment on whether notices have been sent, or not. NZ Fact has said the file sharing law’s $25 per notice fee for rights holders is too high.

The fee is now under review after its first six months, a provision of the new law.

One industry insider, who did not want to be named, told NBR the Hollywood studios were just not motivated to issue notices in what, for them, is a tiny market.

For whatever reason, it seems movie downloaders are not being actively targeted.

It’s a situation that saves the industry from a problematic public relations issue.

Telecommunications Users Association CEO Paul Brislen earlier told NBR he had “not an ounce of sympathy” for anyone who pirated music, as most tracks are available through commercial download services such as iTunes.

Movies and TV shows were more problematic, he said.

With many not available in New Zealand on disc or broadcast TV, or geo-blocked on line, some users morally justified it to themselves that they could source an illegal download.

Isn't it ironic?

As New Zealand's second-largest ISP, TelstraClear was always going to get its fair share of notices under the new law.

But some industry observers will find situational irony in the fact that TelstraClear CEO Allan Freeth is an outspoken opponent of the act - not to mention a proponent of Sky TV, and other broadcasters, working with rather than against new online media trends.

The three strikes process

The Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act – aka “the Sky Net Law” or “Three Strikes Act” – came into force in September last year.

It provides for a rights holder, such as a record label or movie studio, to complain to a person’s internet service provider if they suspect piracy.

The ISP then reviews the suspected person’s internet records before sending a detection notice (which can be disputed by the customer).

See an example of a detection notice here.

If the person is suspected of reoffending, a warning notice is sent.

If they are suspected of offending a third time, an enforcement notice is sent – as TelstraClear has done.

Once the enforcement notice is sent, the rights holder has five weeks to decide whether to take the case to the Copyright Tribunal.

If it upholds the rights holder’s case – and the onus is on the accused to prove their innocence – then the tribunal can levy a fine of up to $15,000, based on the damage it thinks has been caused to the rights holder.

Rights holders can also take separate civil action against an alleged offender.
http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/first-e...-law-ck-117089





Ridiculous Statutory Damages Rules Means Judge Regretfully Awards $3.6 Million For Circumvention Of DRM
Mike Masnick

Eric Goldman points us to yet another example of ridiculous statutory damages rules around copyright creating awards in court cases that have no connection to any real harm. And, this time, it involves the violation of the highly questionable (and controversial) anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA. The case involves an online game, MapleStory, and some people who set up an alternate server, UMaple, allowing users to play the game with the official game client, but without logging into the official MapleStory servers. This kind of thing happens all the time.

In this case, the people behind UMaple apparently ignored the lawsuit, leading to a default judgment. However, even there, it appears that MapleStory went too far, and the judge is clearly annoyed with them at times. Even though judges often side entirely with winners in default judgments, in this case, the judge repeatedly express skepticism about arguments made for determining "damages" to be awarded. Thus on most of the claims, the judge seems to look for ways to avoid giving MapleStory much, if any, money. For example, in determining profits made by UMaple, the judge repeatedly knocks MapleStory for failing to show what profits were specific to UMaple's infringement, telling it that it can't just assume all money made by UMaple belongs to MapleStory. So the judge dumps a request for $68,764.23 in profits made by UMaple down to just $398.98.

But... then we get to the anti-circumvention stuff. Here, the ridiculous statutory rates set a minimum of $200 per infringement. Multiply that by 17,938 users of UMaple... and you get $3.6 million. MapleStory, of course, asked for the statutory maximum of $44,845,000, which the court refuses to grant. In fact, the judge chides MapleStory for its request for the maximum -- even to the point of noting that the arguments by MapleStory make it "question very seriously whether Plaintiff intended to actively mislead the Court or whether these oversights were merely the result of poor legal research."

The court then notes that the minimum statutory amount -- the $3.6 million -- is already "a significant windfall to Plaintiff far in excess of any amount necessary to deter future infringing conduct" and also that the "award here likely bears little plausible relationship to Plaintiff’s actual damages." In fact, it sounds like the court would very much like to decrease the amount, but notes that "nevertheless, the court is powerless to deviate from the DMCA's statutory minimum."

As Goldman says, this is "guffaw-inducing", because the minimum award seems to have no bearing on the actual seriousness of the infringement. As he points out:

this case does provide an excellent example of the ridiculousness of anti-circumvention statutory damages. $3.4M can't be the right damages award in this case, and it's so guffaw-inducing that it further erodes the legitimacy of our copyright rules.

Indeed. And yet no one seems interested in exploring just how disconnected statutory damages are from reality.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...tion-drm.shtml





Huh? Totally Clueless German Court Says ContentID Isn't Good Enough, YouTube Must Block Infringement By Keywords
Mike Masnick

We've discussed a few times the legal fight in Germany between YouTube and the overbearing collections society GEMA. German law is a bit bizarre in that it has very little regard for secondary liability protections, and often seems to default to blaming third parties for the actions of their users. On top of that, GEMA is incredibly powerful and controlling in Germany. When I was there a few years ago (in part to discuss this case), I had musicians explaining to me that they had "secret websites" because GEMA wouldn't let them offer their own music for free. The GEMA/YouTube dispute centers around the fact that GEMA wants YouTube to pay a fixed fee every time a video that includes a GEMA-covered song is played (and GEMA has actually suggested the fee for each stream should be identical to the cost of a download -- no joke). After suing YouTube/Google, GEMA refused to negotiate, making Germany the only modern country in the world in which a collection society didn't work out a deal with YouTube (and meaning that Google started blocking tons of music videos in Germany).

Unfortunately, the court has now ruled in the case, and the results seem ridiculous. It has said that YouTube is liable when users post videos (third party liability concepts still just don't make sense to German courts). Even more ridiculous, however, is that the court has said that YouTube's famous ContentID system is not enough. Instead, it must also install a keyword-based filter to block GEMA songs from being uploaded. Keyword-filters? Really. We've done this before a bunch of times and it doesn't work. At all. Keyword filters are really stupid ways to deal with these kinds of things. First off, they tend to block all sorts of legitimate content. But, more importantly, users figure out how to get around them in less than an hour. They just start coming up with easy-to-decipher substitutes. Comparing a keyword filter to ContentID is like comparing a human strapping on wings to a modern fighter plane. One of them works and can actually get the job done. One of them just makes you look like an idiot.

The only "concession" the court appears to have given YouTube is that it only expects such filtering to work going forward, rather than having them search the archive. That, of course, is barely a concession at all. If I remember correctly, this particular court, in Hamburg, is somewhat notorious for siding with copyright holders, so I wouldn't be surprised to see an appeal on this case...
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...keywords.shtml





Pirate Party Ordered to Shut Down Pirate Bay Proxy
Ernesto

Last week the Dutch Pirate Party refused to cave in to the demands of Hollywood-backed anti-piracy group BREIN, who ordered the political party to take their Pirate Bay proxy offline. As expected, BREIN didn’t let the case rest.The group obtained an injunction from the Court of The Hague which ordered the Pirates to shutter the proxy within 6 hours, or face a fine of 10,000 euros per day.

After two Dutch ISPs were ordered to censor The Pirate Bay earlier this year, there was an influx of visitors to Pirate Bay proxy sites.

These proxies render the court order useless, which is a thorn in the side of local anti-piracy outfit BREIN. In an attempt to take these proxies offline, BREIN obtained an injunction against one of the sites and used this to convince others to shut down as well.

While several site operators gave BREIN what they wanted, the local Pirate Party refused to do so. They claimed that BREIN’s demands are hampering people’s freedom of speech, and objected to the fact that an “ex parte” decision against one proxy was used to “threaten” other site owners.

“The demands are ridiculous,” Pirate Party chairman Dirk Poot told TorrentFreak last week.

“A private lobbying organization should not be allowed to be the censor of the Dutch internet. We were also amazed to find an ex-parte decision attached, threatening Dutch minors with €1000 per day fines for operating their proxy,” he added.

So the Pirate Party kept the proxy site offline and consulted with lawyers to see what steps could be taken next. However, BREIN wasn’t sitting still either and asked the Court of The Hague for a new injunction, specifically naming the Pirate Party proxy.
This injunction was issued yesterday, and the court orders the Pirates to take the proxy offline within 6 hours, or face a penalty of 10,000 euro per day. BREIN successfully argued that the proxy is an immediate threat to the effectiveness of the ISP blockade, and submitted tweets of Pirate Party chairman who confirmed how much traffic the site received.

The Pirate Party was not heard in the matter (ex parte) and according to board member “blauwbaard” the judge ignored their requests to be heard.

“The judge has decided to ignore our express and valid request to have the injunction either denied flat-out, or to at least be heard in the matter before a decision was made,” blauwbaard states in a response.

“This decision is even more strange because BREIN was allowed to bring over 20 pages of arguments to convince the judge to stretch a quaint rule of IP-law, meant to block the sudden appearance of mass quantities of counterfeited goods, far enough to be applied to the website of a political party.”

Faced with huge fines, the Dutch Pirate Party saw no other option than to take the proxy offline, replacing it with a list of tip and alternative proxies. Monday the Pirate Party will file a request to overturn the injunction, meaning that while BREIN won the first battle, the war is far from over.
https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-part...-proxy-120414/





PRESS RELEASE: PIRATES GO TO BATTLE

With the might of a whole generation behind them, today the Dutch Pirate Party goes to war for a free internet. By dragging BREIN to court, the Pirate Party finally has the chance to put forward arguments to strike the court injunction that was unilaterally imposed on it last friday by Dutch entertainment industry organisation BREIN.

After the legal harassment continued even on saturday night, when BREIN sent an email at 20:15 demanding extra measures under threat of draconian penalties, the Pirates are anxious to finally get their day in court. The penalties imposed by the court are 4 times higher than those ordered upon the large commercial ISPs XS4ALL and Ziggo, demonstrating that the ideas of a (yet) small political party are deemed more dangerous than for-profit companies.

The Pirate Party is highly disappointed that the judge ruled thusly and has allowed BREIN to rewrite their claim in order to avoid the preemptive legal request of the Pirate Party to be heard in court, were BREIN to come with a so-called “ex parte” injunction request. The Pirate Party sees this course of action as a direct attack on democracy and justice.

“It is time that the industry attack dogs understand that you can’t trample on people’s freedoms for your own monetary gain,” Pirate Party board member blauwbaard says. “Today we’ll try to explain to the judge how giving BREIN one blocking instrument causes them to stretch it in unjust ways to stifle free speech and the free flow of information. Paraphrasing Victor Hugo, nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”

At this weekend’s Pirate Parties International convention, where delegates of over 60 Pirate Parties world-wide convened, representatives of the Dutch Pirate Party made a statement about the ongoing affairs. The Dutch Pirate Party calls upon all pirates and freedom-loving landlubbers to stand up and support our fight against censorship. Because as Martin Luther King might have said it, were he alive today, “freedom on the internet is indivisible, a threat to freedom of the internet anywhere is a threat to freedom on the internet everywhere.”

Arrr!

https://depiratenpartij.wordpress.co...s-go-to-battl/





Pirate Party-NL Issued Temporary Reprieve From Brein
BSOD

After the Dutch Pirate Party took Brein to court in hopes of over-turning a recent order that prohibited the party from operating a Pirate Bay proxy site, a temporary court order has been issued. As of now, with the trial pending, the Pirate Party can continue to operate the proxy site. Access to thepiratebay can be found here. However, as of now the order against the reverse proxy still stands, only access to the far reaching generic proxy server is allowed.
http://activepolitic.com:82/News/201...rom_Brein.html





MPAA-Affiliated Anti-Piracy Group Mysteriously Disappears
enigmax

While hardly a week passes without news of a file-sharing site or service meeting its demise, it’s far more unusual to hear of their adversaries biting the dust. The MPAA has many anti-piracy affiliates around the world and one of those, a long-standing outfit based in Ireland, was recently linked to the downfall of a large file-sharing site. But now, just a handful of months later, it has completely and inexplicably disappeared.

The Hollywood studios of the MPAA have dozens of global anti-piracy partners who exist to put a local face to international issues.

A sample of the major anti-piracy companies working with the MPAA can be found on the movie outfit’s ‘Around The World‘ page.

There are many famous outfits listed including BREIN, the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) and Sweden’s Antipiratbyrån.

INFACT, the Irish National Federation Against Copyright Theft, is also present on the list and has been working away on the film industry’s behalf for many years both on- and offline. Back in 1999 INFACT was listed in court papers as a non-profit subsidiary of the Motion Picture Industry Association.

During 2010 INFACT was targeted by Anonymous’ Operation Payback and as recently as January this year the group was reported as having assisted with the investigation which led to the closure of Library.nu, a site dedicated to indexing ebooks. Indeed, whenever the anti-piracy drum has needed beating in Ireland, INFACT has been there.

Then a few weeks ago TorrentFreak had a tip from a source that has proven reliable in the past. Word on the street was that INFACT would soon close down and there would be an ‘interesting’ reason if we could get someone to speak.

So we contacted INFACT and asked them if there was any truth in the rumor but we received no response. This week we tried to follow up the lead and press INFACT for an answer but to no avail.

It appears that INFACT – the MPAA’s eyes and ears in Ireland – has simply disappeared. There has been no announcement as to its fate and its website, INFACT.ie, has completely gone.

We contacted the MPAA and asked them for information but haven’t heard anything back from them either. Emails to former employees of INFACT also remain unanswered.

So what has happened to INFACT remains a mystery. Maybe they did such a good job in tackling piracy in Ireland they’re just not needed anymore, or maybe the reverse is true. If you know, drop us a line at the usual address…..
https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-affili...ppears-120414/





Megaupload Trial May Never Happen, Judge Says
Ernesto

A US judge has put a bomb under the Megaupload case by informing the FBI that a trial in the United States may never happen. The cyberlocker was never formally served with the appropriate paperwork by the US authorities, as it is impossible to serve a foreign company with criminal charges.

kim dotcomThe US Government accuses Kim Dotcom and the rest of the “Mega Conspiracy” of running a criminal operation.

Charges in the indictment include engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement.

While the prosecution is hoping to have Megaupload tried in the US, breaking news suggests that this may never happen.

It turns out that the US judge handling the case has serious doubts whether it will ever go to trial due to a procedural error.

“I frankly don’t know that we are ever going to have a trial in this matter,” Judge O’Grady said as reported by the NZ Herald.

Judge O’Grady informed the FBI that Megaupload was never served with criminal charges, which is a requirement to start the trial. The origin of this problem is not merely a matter of oversight. Megaupload’s lawyer Ira Rothken says that unlike people, companies can’t be served outside US jurisdiction.

“My understanding as to why they haven’t done that is because they can’t. We don’t believe Megaupload can be served in a criminal matter because it is not located within the jurisdiction of the United States,” Rothken says.

Megaupload’s lawyer adds that he doesn’t understand why the US authorities weren’t aware of this problem before. As a result Judge O’Grady noted that Megaupload is “kind of hanging out there.”

If this issue indeed prevents Megaupload from being tried in the US, it would be a blunder of epic proportions. And it is not the first “procedural” mistake either.

Last month the New Zealand High Court declared the order used to seize Dotcom’s property “null and void” after it was discovered that the police had acted under a court order that should have never been granted.

The error dates back to January when the police applied for the order granting them permission to seize Dotcom’s property. Rather than applying for an interim restraining order, the Police Commissioner applied for a foreign restraining order instead.

The exact ramifications of the failure to serve will become apparent in the near future.

Update: Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom responds, and he’s not happy.
https://torrentfreak.com/megaupload-...e-says-120420/





Megaupload Founder Causes Uproar Over Lawyer Choice
Christina DesMarais

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is finding that the now-shuttered file-sharing website he ran isn't the only thing that rubbed the U.S. government the wrong way -- his choice of legal representation has, too.

At issue is whether there is a conflict of interest.

Megaupload recently hired high-profile attorney Andrew Schapiro to defend itself, yet because of his firm's participation in cases involving Google, YouTube, Disney, Fox and other movie, TV show and software companies, the government is crying foul, saying it plans to call as witnesses some of these companies in the Megaupload case, according to TorrentFreak.

YouTube, for instance, is listed as a victim in the indictment against Megaupload. Schapiro led YouTube to a summary judgment in a copyright trial against Viacom, a battle that is ongoing since that judgment was recently reversed.

And Google, which also has been represented by Schapiro's firm, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP, supposedly withdrew its AdSense service from Megaupload because of copyright concerns.

"It is unclear how Quinn Emanuel intends to zealously represent defendants Megaupload Limited and Kim Dotcom while also protecting confidential attorney-client information gained in the course of representing other clients, ... particularly where those clients interests are directly opposed to those of the defendants," the government wrote.

Schapiro's firm wrote a rebuttal decrying the government's meddling.

"[i]f the government is to have its way in this case, the only lawyers before the court will be those representing the government," the firm said. "If the government is to have its way, the only evidence available to the court would be that cherry-picked by the government, for the government, from the universe of relevant servers slated to be wiped. If the government is to have its way, in sum, Megaupload will never get its day in court and the case will effectively be over before it has even begun."

Besides the tussle over who should represent Megaupload, there's a big legal question about what to do with the tens of millions of files that were stored on Megaupload.com. That's because several groups are fighting over who should or should not maintain 1,100 servers that house the files, including Web hosting provider Carpathia Hosting which says it is shelling out $37,000 a month to maintain the servers.

The Department of Justice, which says it has all the evidence it needs against Megauplad, doesn't want the servers and the potential cost of tens of millions of dollars as the case moves forward.

Megaupload, for its part, says it will look after the servers but the DOJ and the Motion Picture Association of America, which also doesn't want the servers, object.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, in representing a video journalist who stored duplicates of his videos at Megaupload.com, says somebody needs to maintain the servers considering that many of Megaupload's customers used the services for legitimate purposes.

The judge presiding over the case told all the lawyers involved to figure it out and report back in two weeks.

Maybe one of them will come up with the bright idea to put the servers back online for a short amount of time so that anyone who has kidnapped files can retrieve them. Doing so would at least appease some people growing weary with the government's forceful attack against a man on house arrest on the other side of the world.
http://www.cio.com/article/print/704299





RapidShare: Megaupload File-Sharing Pirates Are Unwelcome

The popular file-sharing service says it's gone on the straight and narrow
Jason Koebler

After declaring the FBI's raid on Megaupload a success, an executive at Paramount Pictures released a hit list poster targeting five of the next-largest file-sharing websites. Rapidshare, one of the most popular, was conspicuously absent.

That's because the Swiss company says it's gone on the straight and narrow. Wednesday in Washington, D.C., it announced the first-ever "responsible practices" for cloud storage companies. "RapidShare has faced its own controversies, but for years now it has been working diligently on multiple fronts to distinguish itself as an important and responsible company in this growing industry," the practices sheet says.

A responsible company, it says, should take steps to go above and beyond the requirements of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which requires Internet services to delete illegal content from their servers. That commitment to deleting copyrighted files should let users rest easy at night, says Daniel Raimer, RapidShare's general counsel. Millions of Megaupload users' files are in limbo after the FBI shut down its servers.

"We can give users a guarantee that their files are safe," he says. Megaupload's attitude toward piracy was "so far from what we're doing and what we want to stand for," he adds.

RapidShare's transformation from a potentially suitable service for pirates to legitimate online file locker has taken a couple of years--and plenty of copyrighted material still exists on the site, but the company says it is vigilant in taking such material down once it's discovered. About a third of its staff of 60 is dedicated to removing illegal files, RapidShare says. In 2010, the company took a huge hit in traffic after it ended its "rewards" program, which incentivized users to upload popular, and often illegal, content. Although the company has seen traffic increase by about a third since Megaupload was raided in January, Raimer says pirates hoping to switch from Megaupload aren't welcome at RapidShare.

"Pirates shouldn't assume we're happy about them using our system in the future," he says. "Megaupload had legitimate users as well, who are welcome to use RapidShare. When it comes to copyright infringement, we're going to maintain our strict anti-abuse policy and make it clear that pirates should go to another provider."

I spoke with Raimer about the company's responsible practices document and the future of online file lockers.

What brings you to D.C.? Why are you releasing the list of responsible practices?

We have plenty of ideas about what a responsible company should do, but there's no real standards when it comes to the [Digital Millennium Copyright Act]. There are no real clear guidelines about quality of service, erasing copyright infringement, privacy--it's all in the gray zone, and we think it's important because cloud computing is the next big thing. We should have industry commitment and documents saying what everyone believes should be the minimum standards.

Do you feel like the movie and music industries have unfairly targeted RapidShare by lumping you together with Megaupload and other file-sharing sites?

Saying "unfairly targeted" sounds like I'm whining and complaining, and I don't want to do that. Those guys are doing their jobs, and we have to do our job by explaining what we stand for. We've had conversations with copyright holders who are reasonable and understand there's limitations for what we can do [with regards to deleting pirated content], other ones were not that reasonable. But that's true for all types of businesses--the tech industry has some unreasonable people as well.

So what do you stand for?

I think what's really important to us is being dedicated to consumer privacy. I believe it's so important we want to have a separate event for that. I want to talk about measures to cut down on copyright infringement today, but it's also important for us to respect consumers' needs for privacy. Five years from now, everyone will be using cloud storage without even knowing they're doing it. We need to find a perfect balance with consumers' expectations of privacy and the legitimate concerns of copyright holders who don't want their content to be distributed illegally.

How do you find and take down copyrighted material?

We have a bunch of different approaches. Obviously, we respond to take-down notices [from copyright holders], but that is the bare minimum. We try to go further than that. There are websites out there where some users upload movies and then link to them. We go to these websites and delete files we'd see that were illegitimate. Today, we have a crawling engine, a bot software that is constantly monitoring certain websites. When it finds something, it's sent to anti-abuse staff. We don't have automatic take-downs. It's all done by human beings, but we have software that's helping them.

A big controversy surrounding Megaupload is what happened to legitimate users' files--a lot of those files are still in limbo. Knowing that you have illegal content on your site, can you guarantee that the same thing won't happen to your users if you're raided?

We can give users a guarantee that their files are safe. You have to keep in mind why Megaupload was shut down. It's not about having a lot of illegal files being available. If you have a powerful technology like ours, people will illegally put up copyrighted content. You can find millions of illegal links with the help of Google, but Google's not going to be shut down. It's not about the files, it's about the alleged conduct of the Megaupload management. If you look at documents regarding the Megaupload raid and the arrest of Kim Dotcom, it's about allegations of himself uploading illegal files, about allegedly telling staff to not take files down because they wanted to make money with them.

That's so far from what we're doing and what we want to stand for. I don't see any parallel situation coming with RapidShare. The drastic measures taken by the government regarding Megaupload were probably, according to them, necessary because the Megaupload operators were hiding. No one knew where the company was. It was unclear who the operators were. That's something that has nothing in common with RapidShare. Switzerland is far away from the United States, but it's a reputable company, a reputable country. We're available. We're not hiding. There's no need for the FBI to take drastic action. If someone has a question, even law enforcement, they can contact us. We're willing to help with investigations.
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/...-are-unwelcome





Paramount Thinks That Louis CK Making $1 Million In 12 Days Means He's Not Monetizing
Mike Masnick

One of the more annoying things about debates on copyright law, is that when we talk about alternative business models that do not rely on copyright, some people feel the need to insist that this means making less money -- or, even, making no money at all. There is just this assumption that an alternative business model means something along the lines of "give it away and pray," when nothing could be further from the truth. Yet this kind of thinking is so ingrained, that even in stories of artists making a ton of money, some maximalists simply assume that they're not making any money. We saw this recently in the comments to one of our recent posts about Jonathan Coulton which talks about how he made $500k last year -- at which point, someone said that such examples are useless since no one will pay.

It appears that Paramount's "Worldwide VP of Content Protection and Outreach" Al Perry also fits into the same unthinking mode. We've already discussed Perry's recent talk to Brooklyn Law School, but there was one section that caught my eye and deserves a separate post. It comes right at the beginning:

Perry opened by noting that one has to articulate a problem before seeking to solve it, and he refers to the problem as “content theft.” He pointed out that copyright law gives creators the right to monetize their creations, and that even if people like Louis C.K. decide not to do so, that’s a choice and not a requirement.

Now that seems bizarre and totally unsupportable. Remember, Louis CK made over $1 million in just a few days -- an amount that he admits was much higher than what he would have received just for a straight up performance. In what world does going direct-to-fans, building a good relationship, automatically mean no money made at all? Not the one we're based on.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...netizing.shtml





Universal Adopts Aspera’s Faspex for Post-Production File Sharing
Neal Romanek

Universal Pictures has deployed Aspera’s faspex as its production and post-production solution for sending, receiving and sharing of media files.

Universal has tried several different file sharing solutions in past years. Some digital delivery methods required longer set up times or extensive training or hit snags in the bandwidth constraints of different facilities or in compatability with commodity computer hardware.

During post-production on such Universal tentpole films as Battleship [pictured] and Snow White and The Huntsman, an array of facilities in diverse locations must work in tandem, sharing and manipulating on a daily basis files that might be up to 30 GB.

“Aspera is now our approved standard for transferring content around the world,” said John Toal, director, post production content security at Universal Pictures. “Before Aspera, each time we started production on a new film, we had to spend a great deal of time setting up the system and training new crew members on the file transfer process. Because of Aspera’s intuitive interface and set-up, new users simply go to a web page, click, drag and drop. It couldn’t be easier. We can quickly configure the system, use it for the six-month production lifecycle, then cycle it back into use as the next post-production teams need it.”

Aspera’s president and co-founder, Michelle Munson, said “With the globalization of post-production, growing file sizes, and the enduring need to deliver to tight deadlines, studios like Universal Pictures can rely on our proven, secure and flexible data movement platform to keep their productions on schedule and teams up to date on the status of projects no matter where they are in the world.”
http://www.screendaily.com/news/digi...040613.article





Coalition Targets CBC’s Free Music Site
Steve Ladurantaye

A number of Canadian media companies have joined forces to try to shut down a free music website recently launched by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., claiming it threatens to ruin the music business for all of them.

The group, which includes Quebecor Inc. QBR.B-T, Stingray Digital, Cogeco Cable Inc. CCA-T, the Jim Pattison Group and Golden West Radio, believes that CBCmusic.ca will siphon away listeners from their own services, including private radio stations and competing websites that sell streaming music for a fee.

CBC facing difficult choices

Many consumers, facing high cable bills, are looking to cut the cord, dumping traditional cable for some other way to get their favorite shows. Enter Aereo, a new online tv service launching in New York City backed by billionaire Barry Diller's IAC/Interactive Corp.

The coalition is expected to expand soon to include Rogers Communications Inc. RCI.B-T and Corus Entertainment Inc. CJR.B-T, two of the largest owners of radio stations in Canada. It intends to file a formal complaint with the CRTC, arguing that the broadcaster has no right under its mandate to compete with the private broadcasters in the online music space.

The fight is part of a broader dispute about the role of the CBC, whose federal funding was slashed in Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s recent budget, and about how online music services should compensate rights holders for music played online.

The stakes are high. Music sales are estimated at about $500-million a year in Canada and digital sales account for 34 per cent of the market, while companies such as Corus earn hundreds of millions in revenue from radio advertising on music stations.

Dozens of competing online services are trying to sign up customers to their apps and websites, with most offering streaming music that has been selected to suit their tastes, in exchange for monthly fees that can be as high as $20.

“The only music that you can hear for free is when the birds sing,” said Stingray CEO Eric Boyko, whose company runs the Galaxie music app that charges users $4.99 a month for unlimited listening. “There is a cost to everything, yet CBC does not seem to think that is true.”

The CBC would not comment yesterday, saying it had just been made aware of the complaint.

The companies argue they must charge customers to offset royalty costs which are triggered every time a song is played, while the CBC gets around the pay-per-click problem because it is considered a non-profit corporation.

They want Ottawa to intervene and they’ve offered Federal Heritage Minister James Moore some alternatives: Shut the site down, force it to play only Canadian music, or insist that it charge for access in the same way private broadcasters do. Mr. Moore said he could not comment until he receives the letter.

“The CBC is using the preferential royalty rates it receives from the various collective societies because of its status as a non-profit public broadcaster to make the service viable in the long term,” the group wrote in a letter to be delivered to the minister today.

“We asked that the CBC be compelled to justify its actions and explain how the launch of the CBC Music service is not competitive with existing services offered by private broadcasters and how it is not damaging to the industry.”

Media executives aren’t the only ones who have expressed concern. When the CBC service was launched in February, the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers said that when it set a flat fees for the more than 100,000 music publishers it represents, it never envisioned a constant stream of free music flooding the Internet.

It plans to revisit the royalty scheme in light of the CBC service, which has proven exceedingly popular. As of last week, listeners had streamed 4.2 million hours of music.

The broadcasters pointed out that because of the CBC’s recent budget cuts, which amount to about $115-million over the next three years, the corporation will record fewer live music broadcasts and introduce advertising on its Radio 2 network. They worry that the music service foreshadows broader CBC ambitions to cut into their profits.

“These actions further distances the corporation from its mandate, while placing it directly on a collision course with private broadcasters who can only rely on advertising and subscription revenues to sustain their services,” the broadcasters warned.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/repo...rticle2399162/





Silent Magician Teller Files Copyright Suit Over "Stolen" Shadow Trick
Timothy B. Lee

Teller, the silent half of the well-known magic duo Penn and Teller, has sued a rival magician for copying one of his most famous illusions. The case promises to test the boundaries of copyright law as it applies to magic tricks.

In "Shadows," a spotlight casts a shadow of a rose onto a white screen. When Teller "cuts" the shadow on the screen with a knife, the corresponding parts of the flower fall to the floor.

A Dutch magician with the stage name Gerard Bakardy (real name: Gerard Dogge) saw Teller perform the trick in Las Vegas and developed his own version. Bakardy sells a kit—including a fake rose, instructions, and a DVD—for about $3,000. To promote the kits, he posted a video of his performance to YouTube and prepared a magazine ad. (With the video down, the link points to screenshots from the video filed by Teller in his lawsuit.)

Teller had Bakardy's video removed with a DMCA takedown notice, then called Bakardy to demand that the magician stop using his routine. Teller offered to buy Bakardy out, but they were unable to agree on a price. So Teller sued Bakardy last week in a Nevada federal court.

Can you copyright a trick?

A fundamental principle of copyright law is that copyright covers the expression of ideas but not the ideas themselves. This puts the essential elements of the trick—the concept of rose petals falling when the shadow is "cut" and the technical details of how this effect is accomplished—outside the bounds of copyright protection.

So what's left? According to New York Law School professor James Grimmelmann, copyright law protects pantomimes and choreographic works. So Teller may be able to claim the "Shadows" routine is protected under these categories. Teller describes "Shadows" as a "dramatic work."

Teller's case may hinge on exactly how similar Bakardy's routine is to Teller's. in a 1983 copyright registration, Teller describes the sequence of actions that make up his performance. Ars Technica was not able to find a copy of Bakardy's video, so we weren't able to determine how similar Bakardy's routine is to the one described in Teller's copyright registration.

Still, Grimmelmann argues that "Teller has an uphill fight on his hands." In a 2007 paper that became an instant classic, Jacob Loshin showed how magic thrives without significant protection from either copyright or patent law. Instead of relying on formal legal mechanisms, magicians derive benefit from their inventions through informal social norms that encourage magicians to give due credit to the original inventor of a particular trick.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...adow-trick.ars





Twitter's No-Lawsuit Pledge: "We Will Not Join the Patent Wars"
Jon Brodkin

Twitter today unveiled a bold new commitment that will be made in writing to its employees—the company will not use any patents derived from employee inventions in offensive lawsuits without the inventor's permission.

The move is highly unusual in the technology industry, which is awash in patent lawsuits filed by and against seemingly all of the biggest companies. Twitter has written up a draft of what it calls the "Innovator's Patent Agreement," or IPA, which encourages its developers to invent without the fear that their inventions will be used for nefarious purposes.

Twitter's decision comes a month after a former Yahoo developer complained that Yahoo promised that it would use patents for defensive purposes only, only to use the patents to sue Facebook.

Twitter will put its own promise in writing, theoretically making it a lot more binding than any spoken commitments. Twitter still maintains the right to use patents for defensive purposes, such as in a counterclaim filed to fend off lawsuits launched by others.

"Like many companies, we apply for patents on a bunch of these inventions," Twitter VP of Engineering Adam Messinger wrote in a blog post today. He noted that Twitter does acquire patents, but "we sometimes worry that they may be used to impede the innovation of others."

"The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes," Messinger wrote. "We will not use the patents from employees’ inventions in offensive litigation without their permission. What’s more, this control flows with the patents, so if we sold them to others, they could only use them as the inventor intended."

Twitter made the announcement during its quarterly Hack Week, in which employees work on projects and tools outside of their daily responsibilities. The IPA will be implemented later this year, and applied to "all patents issued to our engineers, both past and present."

The IPA draft text, posted on GitHub, enables the transfer of patent assignments from the employee to the employer with an agreement that the employer will not assert any claims except in a few exceptions for defensive purposes as defined within the agreement.

Those situations under which a defensive use would be allowed, are "against an Entity that has filed, maintained, threatened, or voluntarily participated in an intellectual property lawsuit against Assignee or any of Assignee’s users, affiliates, customers, suppliers, or distributors; against an Entity that has filed, maintained, or voluntarily participated in a patent infringement lawsuit against another in the past ten years, so long as the Entity has not instituted the patent infringement lawsuit defensively in response to a patent litigation threat against the Entity; or otherwise to deter a patent litigation threat against Assignee or Assignee’s users, affiliates, customers, suppliers, or distributors."

If Twitter wanted to use patents for any other purpose, it would have to "obtain prior written permission from all of the Inventors," according to the IPA's language. The inventors also obtain a royalty-free, irrevocable license to the patents. The exact language of the IPA will probably undergo some revision over the next few months.

With the blockbuster Oracle/Google trial getting under way this week, the technology patent wars are nowhere near over, and will likely continue to accelerate. Twitter's commitment won't change that, but it's a positive step nonetheless.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...atent-wars.ars





Feds Shutter Online Narcotics Store that Used TOR to Hide its Tracks
Dan Goodin

Federal authorities have arrested eight men accused of distributing more than $1 million worth of LSD, ecstasy, and other narcotics with an online storefront that used the TOR anonymity service to mask their Internet addresses.

"The Farmer's Market," as the online store was called, was like an Amazon for consumers of controlled substances, according to a 66-page indictment unsealed on Monday. It offered online forums, Web-based order forms, customer service, and at least four methods of payment, including PayPal and Western Union. From January 2007 to October 2009, it processed some 5,256 orders valued at $1.04 million. The site catered to about 3,000 customers in 35 countries, including the United States.

To elude law enforcement officers, the operators used software provided by the TOR Project that makes it virtually impossible to track the activities of users' IP addresses. The alleged conspirators also used IP anonymizers and covert currency transactions to cover their tracks. The indictment, which cited e-mails sent among the men dating back to 2006, didn't say how investigators managed to infiltrate the site or link it to the individuals accused of running it.

Prosecutors said in a press release that the charges were the result of a two-year investigation led by agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Los Angeles field division. "Operation Adam Bomb, " as the investigation was dubbed, also involved law enforcement agents from several US states and several countries, including Colombia, the Netherlands, and Scotland.

Lead defendant Marc Willem was arrested on Monday at his home in Lelystad, Netherlands, federal prosecutors said in a press release. On Sunday, authorities arrested Michael Evron, a US citizen who lives in Argentina as he was attempting to leave Colombia. The remaining defendants—Jonathan Colbeck, Brian Colbeck, Ryan Rawls, Jonathan Dugan, George Matzek, and Charles Bigras—were arrested at their respective homes in Iowa, Michigan, Georgia, New York, New Jersey, and Florida. Attempts to reach the men for comment weren't immediately successful.

The 12-count indictment charges all eight men with conspiracy to distribute controlled substances and to launder money. Several of them are also charged with distributing LSD and taking part in a continuing criminal enterprise. Each faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted.

The arrests come about a year after Gawker documented the existence of Silk Road, an online narcotics storefront that was available only to TOR users. The site sold LSD, Afghani hashish, tar heroin and other controlled substances and allowed customers to pay using the virtual currency known as Bitcoin, the article reported. It wasn't immediately clear what the relationship between Silk Road and Farmer's Market is.

Farmer's Market had thousands of registered users who hailed from every one of the states of the United States and the District of Columbia, as well as 34 other countries, according to prosecutors. The site relied on multiple sources of various controlled substances. The suppliers, operators, and customers communicated primarily through the website's internal private messaging system.

In addition to the eight arrests, authorities arrested seven other people on Monday. In the course of the arrests, authorities seized hash, LSD, and MDMA, in addition to an indoor psychotripic mushroom grow and three indoor marijuana growing operations.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...its-tracks.ars





Server Seizure, April 2012

April 18th, 2012, Riseup had a server seized by the US Federal Authorities. This is our press release.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

FBI seizes server providing anonymous remailer and many other services from colocation facility.

Contacts:¶

Riseup Networks, Devin Theriot-Orr, 206-708-8740, sunbird@riseup.net
May First/People Link, Jamie McClelland, 917-509-5734, jm@mayfirst.org
ECN: Isole Nella Rete, inr@riseup.net

Attack on Anonymous Speech¶

On Wednesday, April 18, at approximately 16:00 Eastern Time, U.S. Federal authorities removed a server from a colocation facility shared by Riseup Networks and May First/People Link in New York City. The seized server was operated by the European Counter Network (“ECN”), the oldest independent internet service provider in Europe, who, among many other things, provided an anonymous remailer service, Mixmaster, that was the target of an FBI investigation into the bomb threats against the University of Pittsburgh.

“The company running the facility has confirmed that the server was removed in conjunction with a search warrant issued by the FBI,” said May First/People Link director Jamie McClelland. “The server seizure is not only an attack against us, but an attack against all users of the Internet who depend on anonymous communication.”

Disrupted in this seizure were academics, artists, historians, feminist groups, gay rights groups, community centers, documentation and software archives and free speech groups. The server included the mailing list “cyber rights” (the oldest discussion list in Italy to discuss this topic), a Mexican migrant solidarity group, and other groups working to support indigenous groups and workers in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa. In total, over 300 email accounts, between 50-80 email lists, and several other websites have been taken off the Internet by this action. None are alleged to be involved in the anonymous bomb threats.

“The FBI is using a sledgehammer approach, shutting down service to hundreds of users due to the actions of one anonymous person,” said Devin Theriot-Orr, a spokesperson for Riseup. “This is particularly misguided because there is unlikely to be any information on the server regarding the source of the threatening emails.”

“We sympathize with the University of Pittsburgh community who have had to deal with this frightening disruption for weeks. We oppose such threatening actions. However, taking this server won’t stop these bomb threats. The only effect it has is to also disrupt e-mail and websites for thousands of unrelated people,” continues Mr. Theriot-Orr. “Furthermore, the network of anonymous remailers that exists is not harmed by taking this machine. So we cannot help but wonder why such drastic action was taken when authorities knew that the server contained no useful information that would help in their investigation.”

The FBI purportedly seized the server because it was hosting an anonymous remailer called Mixmaster. Anonymous remailers are used to send email anonymously, or pseudonymously. Like other anonymizing services such as the Tor network, these remailers are widely used to protect the identity of human rights activists who place themselves and their families in grave danger by reporting information about abuses. Remailers are also important for corporate whistle blowers, democracy activists working under repressive regimes, and others to communicate vital information that would otherwise go un-reported.

The Mixmaster software is specifically designed to make it impossible for anyone to trace the emails. The system does not record logs of connections, details of who sent messages, or how they were routed. This is because the Mixmaster network is specifically designed to resist censorship, and support privacy and anonymity. Unfortunately, some people misuse the network. However, compared to the rate of legitimate use, the abuse rate is very low. There is therefore no legitimate purpose for the FBI to seize this server because they will not be able to obtain any information about the sender. This is plainly extra-judicial punishment and an attack on free speech and anonymity on the internet and serves as a chilling effect on others providers of anonymous remailers or other anonymous services.

In absence of any other leads, the FBI needs to show that they are making progress in this case, and this has meant seizing a server so they can proudly demonstrate they are taking some action. But what this incident shows is they are grasping at straws and are willing to destroy innocent bystanders for the sake of protecting their careers.
https://help.riseup.net/en/seizure-2012-april





The Cybercrime Wave That Wasn’t
Dinei Florêncio and Cormac Herley

IN less than 15 years, cybercrime has moved from obscurity to the spotlight of consumer, corporate and national security concerns. Popular accounts suggest that cybercrime is large, rapidly growing, profitable and highly evolved; annual loss estimates range from billions to nearly $1 trillion. While other industries stagger under the weight of recession, in cybercrime, business is apparently booming.

Yet in terms of economics, there’s something very wrong with this picture. Generally the demand for easy money outstrips supply. Is cybercrime an exception? If getting rich were as simple as downloading and running software, wouldn’t more people do it, and thus drive down returns?

We have examined cybercrime from an economics standpoint and found a story at odds with the conventional wisdom. A few criminals do well, but cybercrime is a relentless, low-profit struggle for the majority. Spamming, stealing passwords or pillaging bank accounts might appear a perfect business. Cybercriminals can be thousands of miles from the scene of the crime, they can download everything they need online, and there’s little training or capital outlay required. Almost anyone can do it.

Well, not really. Structurally, the economics of cybercrimes like spam and password-stealing are the same as those of fishing. Economics long ago established that common-access resources make for bad business opportunities. No matter how large the original opportunity, new entrants continue to arrive, driving the average return ever downward. Just as unregulated fish stocks are driven to exhaustion, there is never enough “easy money” to go around.

How do we reconcile this view with stories that cybercrime rivals the global drug trade in size? One recent estimate placed annual direct consumer losses at $114 billion worldwide. It turns out, however, that such widely circulated cybercrime estimates are generated using absurdly bad statistical methods, making them wholly unreliable.

Most cybercrime estimates are based on surveys of consumers and companies. They borrow credibility from election polls, which we have learned to trust. However, when extrapolating from a surveyed group to the overall population, there is an enormous difference between preference questions (which are used in election polls) and numerical questions (as in cybercrime surveys).

For one thing, in numeric surveys, errors are almost always upward: since the amounts of estimated losses must be positive, there’s no limit on the upside, but zero is a hard limit on the downside. As a consequence, respondent errors — or outright lies — cannot be canceled out. Even worse, errors get amplified when researchers scale between the survey group and the overall population.

Suppose we asked 5,000 people to report their cybercrime losses, which we will then extrapolate over a population of 200 million. Every dollar claimed gets multiplied by 40,000. A single individual who falsely claims $25,000 in losses adds a spurious $1 billion to the estimate. And since no one can claim negative losses, the error can’t be canceled.

THE cybercrime surveys we have examined exhibit exactly this pattern of enormous, unverified outliers dominating the data. In some, 90 percent of the estimate appears to come from the answers of one or two individuals. In a 2006 survey of identity theft by the Federal Trade Commission, two respondents gave answers that would have added $37 billion to the estimate, dwarfing that of all other respondents combined.

This is not simply a failure to achieve perfection or a matter of a few percentage points; it is the rule, rather than the exception. Among dozens of surveys, from security vendors, industry analysts and government agencies, we have not found one that appears free of this upward bias. As a result, we have very little idea of the size of cybercrime losses.

A cybercrime where profits are slim and competition is ruthless also offers simple explanations of facts that are otherwise puzzling. Credentials and stolen credit-card numbers are offered for sale at pennies on the dollar for the simple reason that they are hard to monetize. Cybercrime billionaires are hard to locate because there aren’t any. Few people know anyone who has lost substantial money because victims are far rarer than the exaggerated estimates would imply.

Of course, this is not a zero-sum game: the difficulty of getting rich for bad guys doesn’t imply that the consequences are small for good guys. Profit estimates may be enormously exaggerated, but it would be a mistake not to consider cybercrime a serious problem.

Those who’ve had their computers infected with malware or had their e-mail passwords stolen know that cleaning up the mess dwarfs any benefit received by hackers. Many measures that tax the overall population, from baroque password policies to pop-up warnings to “prove you are human” tests, wouldn’t be necessary if cybercriminals weren’t constantly abusing the system.

Still, that doesn’t mean exaggerated loss estimates should be acceptable. Rather, there needs to be a new focus on how consumers and policy makers assess the problem.

The harm experienced by users rather than the (much smaller) gain achieved by hackers is the true measure of the cybercrime problem. Surveys that perpetuate the myth that cybercrime makes for easy money are harmful because they encourage hopeful, if misinformed, new entrants, who generate more harm for users than profit for themselves.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/o...hat-wasnt.html





Tim Berners-Lee Urges Government to Stop the Snooping Bill

Exclusive: Extension of surveillance powers 'a destruction of human rights'
Ian Katz

Sir Tim Berners-Lee said that it was moves by governments to control or spy on the internet that 'keep him up most at night'. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

The government's controversial plans to allow intelligence agencies to monitor the internet use and digital communications of every person in the UK suffered a fresh blow on Tuesday when the inventor of the world wide web warned that the measures were dangerous and should be dropped.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who serves as an adviser to the government on how to make public data more accessible, says the extension of the state's surveillance powers would be a "destruction of human rights" and would make a huge amount of highly intimate information vulnerable to theft or release by corrupt officials. In an interview with the Guardian, Berners-Lee said: "The amount of control you have over somebody if you can monitor internet activity is amazing.

"You get to know every detail, you get to know, in a way, more intimate details about their life than any person that they talk to because often people will confide in the internet as they find their way through medical websites … or as an adolescent finds their way through a website about homosexuality, wondering what they are and whether they should talk to people about it."

The British computer engineer, who devised the system that allows the creation of websites and links, said that of all the recent developments on the internet, it was moves by governments to control or spy on the internet that "keep me up most at night".

The government ran into a storm of criticism earlier this month when it emerged that it was planning to allow GCHQ to monitor all communication on social media, Skype calls and email communication as well as logging every site visited by internet users in Britain.

Berners-Lee said: "The idea that we should routinely record information about people is obviously very dangerous. It means that there will be information around which could be stolen, which can be acquired through corrupt officials or corrupt operators, and [could be] used, for example, to blackmail people in the government or people in the military. We open ourselves out, if we store this information, to it being abused."

He said that if the government believed it was essential to collect this kind of sensitive data about individuals, it would have to establish a "very strong independent body" which would be able to investigate every use of the surveillance powers to establish whether the target did pose a threat, and whether the intrusion had produced valuable evidence.

But he said that since the coalition had not spelled out an oversight regime, or how the data could be safely stored, "the most important thing to do is to stop the bill as it is at the moment".

The intervention of the highly respected internet pioneer creates a headache for Theresa May, the home secretary, who has said she plans to press on with introducing the new measures after the Queen's speech next month, despite concerns raised by senior Liberal Democrats. It will add to the woes of ministers mired in damaging battles over unpopular policy proposals on several fronts.

Berners-Lee was speaking to the Guardian as part of a week-long series on the battle for control of the internet, examining how states, companies and technological developments are challenging the principles of openness and universal access on which the net was built.

Berners-Lee has been an outspoken defender of the "open internet", warning in 2010 that web freedom was under threat from the rise of social network "silos" such as Facebook, "closed world" apps such as those released by Apple, and governments' attempts to monitor people's online behaviour.

He said he remained concerned about the creation of "strong monopolies" but believed it was unlikely that internet giants such as Facebook and Google would enjoy their dominance indefinitely. "The battle lines are being drawn and things are in a huge state of flux, so it's very difficult to tell, when you look at the world now, what it's going to look like in a few months' time."

He said that throughout the history of the internet, people had been concerned about the emergence of apparently dominant giants, but they were vulnerable to smaller companies that could innovate more effectively.

In a coded reference to predictions that Facebook could in soon become, in effect, for most people, the internet, he recalled a "wise" colleague who pointed out more than 20 years ago: "It's amazing how quickly people on the internet can pick something up, but it's also amazing how quickly they can drop it."

Acknowledging growing concerns about online privacy, he said computer users received significant benefits from the vast amount of data that big web companies accumulate about them, but that increasingly they would seek to apply limits to how the data could be used, as well as demanding access to the data themselves.

Although Google now allows users to obtain all the data it holds about them and Facebook provides a similar, slower service, individual users were not yet being allowed to exploit all the information relating to them to make their lives easier. Armed with the information that social networks and other web giants hold about us, he said, computers will be able to "help me run my life, to guess what I need next, to guess what I should read in the morning, because it will know not only what's happening out there but also what I've read already, and also what my mood is, and who I'm meeting later on".

Berners-Lee said big web companies would come under more pressure to make personal data more available, and that users might insist that the information was not held by the companies themselves. "Perhaps what you'd want in the future is to have this piece of cloud storage and to say to somebody like ... Google: 'Look, don't store it on your site, store it here. I will control who gets access to it.' That would turn the tables and leave me in control of the data."

He was worried by the rise of so-called "native apps" such as those produced for the iPhone and iPad, because they were not searchable. "Every time somebody puts a magazine on a phone now and doesn't put it on to a web app [a form of open software], we lose a whole lot of information to the general public discourse – I can't link to it, so I can't tweet it, I can't discuss it, I can't like it, I can't hate it."

But he said the rapid improvement of web apps, and their ability to offer functionality and slickness previously only available from Apple or Android apps, would return more information to the open internet.

In a clear dig at Apple's highly restrictive ecosystem, he said: "I should be able to pick which applications I use for managing my life, I should be able to pick which content I look at, and I should be able to pick which device I use, which company I use for supplying my internet, and I'd like those to be independent choices."

Berners-Lee, who is speaking at the World Wide Web Conference in Lyon on Wednesday, also warned people against assuming that major websites and social networks would be around for ever. "I think we need to be more conscious that places that seem very secure may in the future disappear. The long-time persistence of all this data … is an issue for all of us if we think that maybe our grandchildren, depending on which website we use, may or may not be able to see our photos."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...oring-internet





Tech Experts Rubbish Government Web Snooping Tactics

Experts claim it is no longer possible to separate content from communications data
Sophie Curtis

The UK government's proposal to separate communications data from content, as part of new plans to allow intelligence services to monitor all internet activity, is infeasible according to a panel of technology experts.

Speaking at the 'Scrambling for Safety' conference at the London School of Economics yesterday, Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, said that the distinction between traffic data as being harmless and content as being sensitive is becoming less and less relevant.

“Now that people are living more and more of their lives online, the pattern of who you communicate with and in what order gives away pretty well everything,” he said. “This means that, in data protection terms, traffic data is now very often going to be specially sensitive data.”

Snooping charter

Earlier this month it was revealed that ministers are preparing a major expansion of the government's powers to monitor the email exchanges and website visits of every person in the UK. The Home Office claims that it is vital for police and security services to be able to obtain communications data in certain circumstances to investigate serious crime and terrorism.

Communications data is defined by the government as the time, duration and dialling numbers of a phone call, or an email address. “It does not include the content of any phone call or email and it is not the intention of government to make changes to the existing legal basis for the interception of communications,” said the Home Office in a statement.

According to digital evidence and cyber-security consultant Peter Sommer, however, it is no longer possible to separate communications data from content. He explained that, in the case of a phone call, things are fairly clear cut – the phone bill constitutes the communications data and the conversation that takes place is the content.

On the Internet, however, data travels in packets that contain the IP addresses of the originator and recipient, as well as mixture of communications data and content. Penetrating the packet to separate out the communications data from the content requires Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology, for which scripts have to be written to define which bits of data will be collected.

If the lines of data are clearly labelled with the type of content they contain, as in the case of traditional email, separation can be quite straight-forward. However, many webmail applications convert messages into HTML, which removes the labels that distinguish content from communications data.

In this case, web “scraping” software is needed to extract the communications data from messages. But web scraping tools need to be defined individually for every different page, making the process extremely laborious.

Anderson added that, once DPI “black boxes” have been installed on the networks, the scripts could easily be changed to monitor content as well as traffic data, enabling intelligence agencies to carry out industrial-scale surveillance.

Massive complexity

Search monitoring raises its own issues. Some people define a URL's communications data as “anything up to the first backslash”, while others suggest that the file name should also be classified as communications data.

The URLs of Google search queries offer a far more detailed view of the web user's activity, such as the search terms entered, the country they are in, and the type of browser they are using. While these details may seem insignificant, they can be used to build up a very sophisticated profile of the web user over time.

“A lot of unintrusive data, when you put it together, becomes intrusive,” said Douwe Korff, professor of international law at London Metropolitan University.

Applications like instant messaging, social media and voice-over-IP all introduce their own complexities, and Sommer warns there is a risk that the government will end up spending a lot of money trying to overcome these problems, without identifying any cyber criminals.

Meanwhile, Trefor Davies, co-founder and CTO of mobile Service provider Timico, points out that anyone using the web for serious crime or terrorism will be five steps ahead of whatever legislation comes into place. If the government starts monitoring email communications, cyber criminals will simply use another application like Dropbox to get around the surveillance.

Anderson believes that the government's proposal will fail, because once society and police understand what is going on, there will be an outcry against it. However, he predicts that the next move will be to approach service providers like Facebook and Google and ask them to install monitoring technology.

“The interesting political question is, if privacy comes down to the relationships that the government has with a small number of our service providers, then how on earth can you regulate that, and how on earth can we trust the government's arrangements that emerge,” he said.

The new legislation is expected to be introduced in next month's Queen's Speech.
http://news.techworld.com/security/3...oping-tactics/





Whistleblower: The NSA is Lying–U.S. Government Has Copies of Most of Your Emails

National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney reveals he believes domestic surveillance has become more expansive under President Obama than President George W. Bush. He estimates the NSA has assembled 20 trillion "transactions" — phone calls, emails and other forms of data — from Americans. This likely includes copies of almost all of the emails sent and received from most people living in the United States. Binney talks about Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and challenges NSA Director Keith Alexander’s assertion that the NSA is not intercepting information about U.S. citizens. This interview is part of a 4-part special. Click here to see segment 1, 2, and 4. [includes rush transcript]

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I wanted to ask William Binney about this issue. When it comes to snail mail, the old postal system, it’s very tough for the government to intercept mail, except in times of war, particular situations. When it comes to phone conversations, land phone conversations, you need a warrant to be able to intercept phone conversations. But what about email, and what about the communication now that is really the dominant form that not only Americans, but many people around the world communicate? What are the restrictions on the government in terms of email?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, after some of the laws they passed, like the PATRIOT Act and their secret interpretation of Section 215, which is—my view, of course, is same as Tom Drake’s, is that that gives them license to take all the commercially held data about us, which is exceedingly dangerous, because if you take that and put it into forms of graphing, which is building relationships or social networks for everybody, and then you watch it over time, you can build up knowledge about everyone in the country. And having that knowledge then allows them the ability to concoct all kinds of charges, if they want to target you. Like in my case, they fabricated several charges and attempted to indict us on them. Fortunately, we were able to produce evidence that would make them look very silly in court, so they didn’t do it. In fact, it was—I was basically assembling evidence of malicious prosecution, which was a countercharge to them. So...

AMY GOODMAN: Do you believe all emails, the government has copies of, in the United States?

WILLIAM BINNEY: I would think—I believe they have most of them, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And you’re speaking from a position where you would know, considering your position in the National Security Agency.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Right. All they would have to do is put various Narus devices at various points along the network, at choke points or convergent points, where the network converges, and they could basically take down and have copies of most everything on the network.

AMY GOODMAN: Jacob, your email?

JACOB APPELBAUM: Well, I selectively chose to use certain public services, like Sonic.net and Gmail, and I specifically did that so as to serve as a warning to other people. I didn’t use it for anything interesting, never once emailed Julian, for example, from those accounts. But the U.S. government again asserted in those cases, according to the Wall Street Journal, which is one way to find out about what’s going on with you—they asserted that they have the right to all that metadata. And it is possible—on Monday, I had a little interaction with the FBI, where they sort of hinted that maybe there might be a national security letter for one of my email accounts, which is also hosted by Google, specifically because I want to serve as a canary in a coal mine for other people.

AMY GOODMAN: A national security letter—it’s believed the government has given out hundreds of thousands of those.

JACOB APPELBAUM: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: I have also written about NSLs. But if you get one, you are not allowed to talk about it, on pain of something like up to five years in prison, even to mention that you were handed a national security letter that said turn something over.

JACOB APPELBAUM: Yeah. That was the case of Nick Merrill, for example, who’s a brave American, who essentially fought and won the NSL that was handed down to him.

AMY GOODMAN: And the librarians of Connecticut—

JACOB APPELBAUM: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —who were taking on the USA PATRIOT Act and didn’t want to give information over about patrons in the library that the FBI wanted to get information on.

JACOB APPELBAUM: Right, absolutely. So, an NSL, what’s specifically scary about it is that all that is required is for an FBI agent to assert that they need one, and that’s it. And you don’t have a chance to have judicial review, because you aren’t the one served. Your service provider will be served. And they can’t tell you, so you don’t get your day in court.

AMY GOODMAN: Laura, can you set up this clip that we have?

LAURA POITRAS: Yes, actually, this is what Jake was alluding to. On Monday, there was a panel at the Open Society Institute. And Jake—and there was a deputy general counsel of the FBI who was present, and Jake had the opportunity to question her about national security letters.

JACOB APPELBAUM: Are you including national security letters in your comment about believing that there is judicial oversight with the FBI’s actions?

FBI DEPUTY GENERAL COUNSEL: National security letters and administrative subpoenas have the ability to have judicial oversight, yes.

JACOB APPELBAUM: How many of those actually do have judicial oversight, in percentage?

FBI DEPUTY GENERAL COUNSEL: What do you mean by that? How many have—

JACOB APPELBAUM: I mean, every time you get a national security letter, you have to go to a judge? Or—

FBI DEPUTY GENERAL COUNSEL: No, as you well know, national security letters, just like administrative subpoenas, you don’t have to go to a judge. The statute does allow for the person on whom those are served to seek judicial review. And people have done so.

JACOB APPELBAUM: And in the case of the third parties, such as, say, the 2703(d) orders that were served on my — according to the Wall Street Journal — my Gmail account, my Twitter account, and my internet service provider account, the third parties were prohibited from telling me about it, so how am I supposed to go to a judge, if the third party is gagged from telling me that I’m targeted by you?

FBI DEPUTY GENERAL COUNSEL: There are times when we have to have those things in place. So, at some point, obviously, you became aware. So at some point, the person does become aware. But yes, the statute does allow us to do that. The statute allows us.


AMY GOODMAN: Now, Jacob, explain who she was again.

JACOB APPELBAUM: So, my understanding is that she’s the deputy general counsel of the FBI.

AMY GOODMAN: And the significance of what she has just said?

JACOB APPELBAUM: Essentially, what she says is, "We are just and righteous because you get judicial review. But there are some cases where you don’t, and we are still just and righteous. And you should trust us, because COINTELPRO will never happen again." That’s what I heard from that. And, in fact, later, someone asked about COINTELPRO and said, "How can we" —

AMY GOODMAN: The counterintelligence program that targeted so many dissidents in the 1970s.

JACOB APPELBAUM: Yeah. Tried to get Martin Luther King Jr. to kill himself, for example. The FBI wrote him a letter and encouraged him to commit suicide. So for her to suggest that it is just and right and that we should always trust them sort of overlooks the historical problems with doing exactly that for any people in a position of power, with no judicial oversight.

JUAN GONZALEZ: William Binney, what about the companies that are approached by the government to participate or facilitate the surveillance? Your sense of the degree of opposition that they’re mounting, if at all? And also, has there been any kind of qualitative change since the Obama administration came in versus what the Bush administration was practicing?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, first of all, I don’t think any of them opposed it in any way. I mean, they were approached to saying, "You’ll be patriotic if you support us." So I think they saluted and said, "Yes, sir," and supported them, because they were told it was legal, too. And then, of course, they had to be given retroactive immunity for the crimes they were committing. So—

JUAN GONZALEZ: Approved by President Obama.

WILLIAM BINNEY: And President Bush, yeah. It started with Bush, yeah.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the differences in the administrations?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Actually, I think the surveillance has increased. In fact, I would suggest that they’ve assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about U.S. citizens with other U.S. citizens.

AMY GOODMAN: How many?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Twenty trillion.

AMY GOODMAN: And you’re saying that this surveillance has increased? Not only the—

WILLIAM BINNEY: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —targeting of whistleblowers, like your colleagues, like people like Tom Drake, who are actually indicted under the Obama administration—

WILLIAM BINNEY: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —more times—the number of people who have been indicted are more than all presidents combined in the past.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Right. And I think it’s to silence what’s going on. But the point is, the data that’s being assembled is about everybody. And from that data, then they can target anyone they want.

AMY GOODMAN: Bill Binney, talk about Bluffdale, Utah. What is being built there?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, a very large storage device, basically, for remote interrogation and remote processing. That’s the way I view that. Because there’s not enough people there to actually work the data there, so it’s being worked somewhere else.

AMY GOODMAN: Where do you get the number 20 trillion?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Just by the numbers of telecoms, it appears to me, from the questions that CNET posed to them in 2006, and they published the names and how—what the responses were. I looked at that and said that anybody that equivocated was participating, and then estimated from that the numbers of transactions. That, by the way, estimate only was involving phone calls and emails. It didn’t involve any queries on the net or any assembles—other—any financial transactions or credit card stuff, if they’re assembling that. I do not know that, OK.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the original—the original allegations that you made, in terms of the crimes being committed under the Bush administration in terms of the rights of American citizens, could you detail those?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, I made that—I reported the crime when I was raided in 2007. And it was that Bush and Cheney and Hayden and Tenet conspired to subvert the Constitution and violate various laws of the—that exist in the statute at the time, and here’s how they did it. And I was reporting this to the FBI on my back porch during the raid. And I went through Stellar Wind and told them what it did and what the information it was using and how they were spying on—or assembling data to be able to spy on any American.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to a clip of Congress Member Hank Johnson—he’s the Georgia Democrat—questioning National Security Administration director, General Keith Alexander, last month, asking him whether the NSA spies on U.S. citizens.

REP. HANK JOHNSON: Does the NSA routinely intercept American citizens’ emails?

GEN. KEITH ALEXANDER: No.

REP. HANK JOHNSON: Does the NSA intercept Americans’ cell phone conversations?

GEN. KEITH ALEXANDER: No.

REP. HANK JOHNSON: Google searches?

GEN. KEITH ALEXANDER: No.

REP. HANK JOHNSON: Text messages?

GEN. KEITH ALEXANDER: No.

REP. HANK JOHNSON: Amazon.com orders?

GEN. KEITH ALEXANDER: No.

REP. HANK JOHNSON: Bank records?

GEN. KEITH ALEXANDER: No.

REP. HANK JOHNSON: What judicial consent is required for NSA to intercept communications and information involving American citizens?

GEN. KEITH ALEXANDER: Within the United States, that would be the FBI lead. If it was a foreign actor in the United States, the FBI would still have the lead and could work that with NSA or other intelligence agencies, as authorized. But to conduct that kind of collection in the United States, it would have to go through a court order, and the court would have to authorize it. We are not authorized to do it, nor do we do it.


AMY GOODMAN: That was General Keith Alexander, the NSA director, being questioned by Democratic Congress Member Hank Johnson. Bill Binney, he’s the head of your agency, of the NSA. Explain what he’s saying—what he’s not saying, as well.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, I think it’s—part of it is a term, how you use the term "intercept," as to whether or not what they’re saying is, "We aren’t actually looking at it, but we have it," you know, or whether or not they’re actually collecting it and storing it somewhere.

JUAN GONZALEZ: So the mistake of the congressman was not to ask, "Are you collecting information?"

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, he also said things like, "We don’t collect" — or, "We don’t collect against U.S. citizens unless we have a warrant." And then, at the same time, he said that we don’t—at the same interview, he said, "We don’t have the capability to collect inside this country." Well, those are kind of contradictory.

AMY GOODMAN: Is he lying? Is General Keith Alexander lying?

WILLIAM BINNEY: I wouldn’t—you know, the point is how you split the words. I wouldn’t say "lying." It’s a kind of avoiding the issue.

AMY GOODMAN: Jacob Appelbaum, how does this relate to you? And how powerful is General Keith Alexander?

JACOB APPELBAUM: I was saying to Bill that I think he’s probably the most powerful person in the world, in the sense that—

AMY GOODMAN: More powerful than President Obama?

JACOB APPELBAUM: Well, sure. I mean, if he controls the information that arrives on Obama’s desk, and Obama makes decisions based on the things on his desk, what decisions can he make, if—except the decisions presented to him by the people he trusts? And when the people he trusts are the military, the military makes the decisions, then the civilian government is not actually in power.

AMY GOODMAN: Bill Binney, you’re nodding your head.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Yes. I mean, well, for example, their responsibility is to interpret what they have and report up echelon. So, I mean, that’s the responsibility of all the intelligence agencies. So, they basically filter the information to what they believe is important, which is what they should do, because, you know, they’re occupying—it takes time for leaders to review material to make decisions. So they have to boil it down as best they can. So it’s a function of their processing, but it is important that they do it correctly to make sure the information that gets there is correct and complete as it can.

AMY GOODMAN: Is General Alexander more powerful than President Obama?

WILLIAM BINNEY: In the sense of making—of presenting information for decision making, sure.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Laura, the impact on journalists, who have to go through what you go—you’ve gone through the last few years, just to be able to report what’s going on with our government? The chilling effect that this has on—maybe not on you, but on many other journalists?

LAURA POITRAS: Sure. I mean, I feel like I can’t talk about the work that I do in my home, in my place of work, on my telephone, and sometimes in my country. So the chilling effect is huge. It’s enormous.

AMY GOODMAN: You keep your computers and telephones away from conversations you’re having in a room?

LAURA POITRAS: Yeah. When we had a meeting with you, remember, we told you—we kicked all your cell phones and all your computers out of the room.

AMY GOODMAN: You un—the wired phone, you unwired.

LAURA POITRAS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: My cell phone, you didn’t allow me to have it in the room. And you made sure there were no computers in the room.

LAURA POITRAS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

LAURA POITRAS: Because we wanted—well, we wanted to talk about—because we were bringing—we were bringing William to New York. And—

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there, but we’re going to go online right now at democracynow.org. We’re going to continue this conversation with Bill Binney of the NSA, formerly with NSA; Laura Poitras and Jacob Appelbaum.
https://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/...sa_is_lying_us





Why I'm Suing the US Government to Protect Internet Freedom

The NDAA means the US military can put anyone under suspicion of being a terror threat and detain them for ever
Birgitta Jónsdóttir

Freedom for most people is something sacred, and many have been willing to sacrifice their lives for it. It is not just another word, for we measure the health of our democracies by the standard of freedom. We use it to measure our happiness and prosperity. Sadly, freedom of information, expression and speech is being eroded gradually without people paying much attention to it. Freedom of movement is permitted within certain zones, freedom of reading is disappearing, and the right to privacy is dwindling with the increased surveillance of our every move.

When the world wide web came into being, it was an unrestricted, free flowing world of creativity, connectivity and close encounters of the internet kind. It was as if the collective consciousness had taken on material (yet virtual!) form and people soon learned to use it to work, play and gather. Today's social and democratic reform is born and bred online where people can freely exchange views and knowledge. Some of us old-school internet freedom fighters understood this value way before the web became such a part of our daily lives. One of them is John Perry Barlow, who in 1996 wrote a Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in a response to an attempt to legalise restrictions on this brand new world. In it he declares: "Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."

Barlow inspired me and others to create the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), a parliamentary proposal unanimously approved by the Icelandic parliament in 2010, tasking the government to make Iceland a safe haven for freedom of information and expression, where privacy online would be as sacred and guarded as it is in the real world. The spirit of IMMI is in stark contrast with the serious attacks we are currently faced with. We have legal monsters like Acta, Sopa, Pipa and now Cispa; we have anti-terrorist acts abused to tear these liberties apart; we have armies of corporate lawyers scrutinising every bit of news prior to it getting out to us before we ever get to know the real stories that should remain in the public domain.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. The US government legally hacks into other nations' parliamentary private social media data because it is stored on servers originating in the US, as in my Twitter case. The infamous EU data retention law is making us all into terrorist subjects by default, and now we have the newest addition in a dangerous cocktail of erosion of civil liberties online with the offline reality: meet the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), also known as the Homeland Battlefield Act. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) describes it thus:

"For the first time in American history, we have a law authorising the worldwide and indefinite military detention of people captured far from any battlefield. The NDAA has no temporal or geographic limitations. It is completely at odds with our values, violates the constitution, and corrodes our nation's commitment to the rule of law."

Since the US department of justice is ploughing my private data and WikiLeaks (whom I volunteered for in 2010 by co-producing Collateral Murder) are defined by the US vice-president as cyberterrorists, I felt under direct threat when NDAA was passed. I have not been able to travel to the US for more than a year under advice from the Icelandic state department. The only way for me to go is on a UN visa (the same kind as Gaddafi and Hussein got when going to the UN) when I plan to attend the UN assembly later this year. Basically what NDAA means is that the US military can put anyone, anywhere under the suspicion of being a terror threat or an associate and detain you for ever, without you having access to a lawyer or a court. So I joined Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg and other activists in suing the United States government to stop the implementation of the NDAA. Naomi Wolf was kind enough to read my testimony at a US court last month, since I could not be there in person.

The good news is that cyberspace is full of hacktivists and our offline world has a growing Occupy movement, inspiring all of us into action, co-creating a different reality in the spirit of a true online and offline freedom.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...ternet-freedom





A German Pirate Party Could Bring a European Coalition

A new majority is in the making: A band of natural allies for a commons-centred transformation is on the rise.
Michel Bauwens

New social movements always start first as a new subculture, consisting of people who invent new social practices. The Swedish filesharing communities that lay at the root of the Swedish Pirate Party simply consisted of music lovers who wanted to share their music and discoveries.

In a second moment, the sharing communities discovered that such sharing was actually illegal, because the feudal property modalities still attached to intellectual property do not give the user sovereignty over their acquired material, but subject it to a prohibition of sharing, in order to ensure a guaranteed rent income to global entertainment corporations.

At first, such communities do not directly attack the system that repressed their freedom to share, but they started building their own infrastructure, such as the new type of Creative Commons and other Copyleft licenses which legalise their right to share, as well as a whole technical infrastructure based on distributed filesharing, of which the Pirate Bay was the most notorious.

However, a third moment in the evolution of a new social movement and culture is always inevitable. It is the moment when of discovery: in order to ensure their survival and development, political power is vital. It's not enough to create new institutions on the margins of society; more effective defence mechanisms against the constant attacks of the dominant powers are a vital necessity.
Can pirates shake up European politics?

Player #1: The Pirate Parties

Hence from this realisation and evolution of filesharing consciousness, the Swedish Pirate Party was born - under the leadership of Rick Falkvinge, the first party that expressed the necessity to defend and extend the new information commons, conscious of the need to change institutional realities and power structures to make such a thing possible. Their first success in Sweden set the stage for a second success in the local elections in Berlin. In both cases, the Pirate Party took the majority of the youth vote, making their victories a portend for a larger social revolution that is driven by the peer-to-peer (P2P)socialised youth.

In the case of Germany, under the leadership of people such as Andreas Baum, the party has clearly taken on a progressive agenda, and extended its commons approach not just to the digital commons, but to the physical commons, proposing generalised free public transportation and a generalised basic income, which takes labour out of the sphere of being a freely traded commodity and turns it into a commons. Opinion polls predict an average support rate for the Pirate Party hovering around the ten to 12 per cent range, making their victorious appearance in the German national elections almost a certainty.

The importance of this can hardly be overrated. If the Pirates are needed to form a national coalition government, which is likely, Germany would no longer be a player in imposing further IP restrictions on behest of the US conglomerates, and would equally certainly start dismantling already existing restrictions to a substantial degree. With dominant Germany out of the game, and eastern European states already mostly opposed to further IP repression, this also means the end of any EU support for international IP strengthening. In other words, a victory of the German Pirate Party would actually be a global victory for the forces favouring information commons.

Player #2: The Greens

But there is much more to the story than that. Indeed, our civilisation does not only suffer from the artificial scarcities and enclosures imposed on the sharing of culture and science, it also suffers from a lack of recognition of the physical commons on which human life depends. As we argued earlier, our societies suffer from being based on "pseudo-abundance", a false belief that nature can be exploited infinitely without regard for its regenerative capacities. And who are the natural defenders of these ecological and natural commons? The Green Parties, which have also a substantial presence on the European political scene - but especially in Germany.

An explicit commons-orientation of the Green Parties is still weak, and they are still most favouring state-based (such as carbon-taxes) or market-based solutions (cap and trade). Nevertheless, they are the defenders of the integrity of the natural commons, and, under the impulse of think thanks such as the Heinrich Boll Foundation, are moving slowly but surely in the direction of more explicit commons-oriented approaches. Recently, the European Green Federation organised a very successful Commons conference.

This in my view, makes them a natural ally of the Pirates, although the German Greens are at present suffering from a leakage of their younger voters to the Pirate Party. Both parties also share a sociological complementarity. The Greens are the party of the older knowledge workers, relatively well-off professionals, while the Pirates attract the precarious youth, who are now the majority of the new cohort of knowledge workers.

Player #3: Labour and social justice movements

A coalition of the commons between the defenders of the intellectual commons and the defenders of the natural commons would make enormous sense.

On the condition however, that the coalition can be extended to the third major issue affecting the current social and political system: the existence of social inequity. Hence a coalition of the commons would naturally extend to those parties that stand for social justice and are historically connected with the traditional workers movements in industry and government. The choice here is between an alliance with the social democrats, which have long abandoned any pretence of offering a transformative alternative, but may still have relatively progressive factions in their midst, and the new parties of the more radical left, which also exist with quite strong followings in many European countries. To give a few examples, Germany has Die Linke, France has the strong candidacy of M Melenchon, and in the Netherlands, the SP leader is the most popular politician.

These parties represent, in fact, the third type of commons that we need. Apart from the informational commons that we create as humanity, and the physical commons that we inherit and must protect for future generations, there is the third type of physical commons that we are making ourselves, ie: the commons of our productive resources. This has always been the concern of labour-oriented parties and movements, which represent the population that is more active in the sphere of physical production, and therefore sociologically complements the social base of the Pirates and the Greens.

Both politically and economically, there is substantial movement that may move these parties to more commons-friendly positions. There is indeed an increasing alignment of the left-leaning movements towards the commons. For example, the Occupy movement organised a Occupy Commons Forum and the World Social Forum will make the Commons a centrepiece of its approach to the Rio+20 conference next June. More than 40 European organisations met in Rome in February to discuss commons-oriented policy-making approaches.

Player #4: The Social Liberal Parties

An alliance between the Pirates, the Greens and Labour movements makes perfect sense, as it is based not just on a political complementary of themes (each movement has a priority orientation around one particular type of commons), but also sociologically, as each reaches in priority a different segment of the working population.

A final element of such a coalition can consist of progressive liberal forces, ie: social-liberal parties. For example, in Denmark, Minister of Culture Uffe Elbaek is known for his commons-friendly approaches. Such parties can represent the link with progressive and socially progressive enterpreneurs, which often create enterprises around shared innovation commons. Sociologically, this party represents the new middle classes creating the digitally savvy corporations of the emerging collaborative economy.

In this way, a new progressive majority can be created around free culture, respect for nature and its limits, the necessity of social justice, and the free ethical enterpreneurship - all of which can create a new political majority for social change.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opi...253184145.html





Assange-Link Lawyer on 'Inhibited' Fly List
Henrietta Cook

An Australian human rights lawyer and WikiLeaks supporter has reportedly been placed on a watch list and requires permission from the Department of Foreign Affairs to fly home.

Jennifer Robinson claims she was stopped at Heathrow airport this morning, only days after meeting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Ms Robinson said she was told she was on an inhibited travel list and unable to enter Australia without permission from the Department of Foreign Affairs.

"Just delayed from checking in at LHR because I'm apparently 'inhibited' - requiring approval from Australia House @dfat to travel," she tweeted.

An airport security guard told the London-based human rights lawyer she "must have done something controversial" and said he would have to phone the embassy, she said.

She then tweeted, "@dfat Please explain: What is the 'inhibited' travel list? And why am I now apparently on it?"

The Department of Foreign Affairs said it was not aware of any Australian government restrictions on Ms Robinson's travel.

"As an Australian with a valid passport, she would be free to return to Australia at any stage," a spokesman said.

"The UK border authorities or airline of travel may be able to provide further insight on claims that she was impeded from boarding her flight."

WikiLeaks expressed concern about the incident, which comes only a day after Mr Assange's talk show The World Tomorrow premiered on TV network Russia Today with an interview with Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the militant group Hezbollah.

"Jennifer Robinson (@suigenerisjen) met with Assange on Monday. Assange show broadcast Tuesday. Australian watchlist incident Wednesday," WikiLeaks tweeted.

Robinson's twitter name @suigenerisjen began trending in Melbourne and Sydney shortly after the incident. It is believed she was eventually able to board the plane, which is flying to Sydney via Hong Kong.

Greens Senator Scott Ludlam fired off an angry tweet to the Department of Foreign Affairs, requesting information about why the human rights lawyer was allegedly placed on a watch list.

"@DFAT care to explain why @suigenerisjen is on your watch list? what kind of threat do human rights lawyers pose exactly? #auspol," he tweeted.

Ms Robinson is the director of legal advocacy at the Bertha Foundation in London.

She advises WikiLeaks and Mr Assange and acted for Mr Assange in extradition proceedings in Britain.

She recently recently appeared on behalf of WikiLeaks at the Bradley Manning court proceedings in the United States.

The Rhodes scholar is due to speak at a Queensland Public Interest Law Clearing House event in early May and was travelling to Australia to speak on a panel titled Lawyers on the Frontline at tomorrow's Commonwealth Lawyer's Association's Regional Law Conference.

Attorney-General Nicola Roxon will speak about terrorism and human rights at the same event.

The UK Border Agency has been contacted by The Age but is currently closed.
http://www.smh.com.au/national/assan...419-1x8sf.html





ACTA Suffers Major Blow Following European Rejection Call
Zack Whittaker

Summary: ACTA could be ‘dead in the water’ after the treaty’s rapporteur said in his recommendations to Brussels that the European Parliament should reject the agreement.

ACTA, the controversial anti-counterfeit and copyright-bolstering treaty, which at one point threatened the very existence of the Web, may not have its desired global effect should the European Parliament reject the trade agreement.

And it’s one step closer to being thrown out after the guiding “rapporteur” for the treaty warned fellow parliamentarians not to pass the agreement in Europe’s 27 member states.

The blow that could derail the European efforts to ratify the agreement came as new rapporteur David Martin MEP — only a few weeks after Europe’s original guiding light Kader Arif MEP resigned in protest of the proposed treaty — told his fellow members of the European Parliament to reject the bill when it comes before them later this year.

Martin said in his written recommendations: “The intended benefits of this international agreement are far outweighed by the potential threats to civil liberties. Given the vagueness of certain aspects of the text and the uncertainty over its interpretation, the European Parliament cannot guarantee adequate protection for citizens’ rights in the future under ACTA.”

“Your rapporteur therefore recommends that the European Parliament declines to give consent to ACTA,” he concluded.

Despite 20 member states of European Union already accepting the terms to ACTA, the members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in Brussels are given the final say — much like in many other instances of European law.

In 2010, the European Parliament voted not to pass ACTA if it included a three-strike rule; measures which would force persistent file-sharers and copyright infringers off the web after three warnings. Backed heavily by the MPAA and the RIAA, while it doesn’t guarantee the U.S. will not enforce such a rule, it means European citizens will not be subject to a three-strike system.

If Europe rejects ACTA, the 20 member states will have their signatures erased and will not be able to participate in the treaty, leaving the United States, Australia, Canada, South Korea, Japan, and a few others fighting the battle alone.

In an interview with the Telegraph, Martin added that secrecy was one of the agreement’s main failings, and that governments were anything but transparent about the once-secret process.

While the Parliament could reject Martin’s recommendations and pass the agreement, staunch opposition, protests and clashes around Europe have sent a strong signal to Europe’s finest to avoid making such moves.

But even if the ACTA agreement falls at the parliamentary hurdle, Martin warns that new directives and proposed legislation will still be conjured up by the Commission — and has already been working on such laws — as part of its efforts to bolster copyright and counterfeiting laws for its 500 million citizens.
https://www.zdnet.com/blog/london/ac...tion-call/4098





New CISPA Draft Narrows Cybersecurity Language as Protests Loom
Alex Fitzpatrick

The U.S. House Intelligence Committee has released a new draft of the Cybersecurity Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), narrowing the definition of “cybersecurity threat” in response to alarms being sounded throughout the technology community.

A “discussion draft” was posted to the committee’s website Friday afternoon. It shows amendments already cleared by the committee as well as those still being debated, and some of the language that caught the ire of the technology community has been altered or is now under debate.

One proposed amendment narrows the category of information shared under CISPA from that about “theft or misappropriate of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information” to “efforts to gain unauthorized access to a system or network, including efforts to gain such unauthorized access to steal or misappropriate private or government information.”

The mention of “intellectual property” in the first version of the bill is partially why CISPA piqued the early attention of the technology community, which is standing guard for a legislative resurrection of the much-hated Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

However, the new draft didn’t backtrack from a national security clause which civil liberties groups have warned could result in the intelligence community abusing the bill. The new draft of CISPA would restrict the federal government from affirmatively searching any data shared with it by private firms about cybersecurity threats — unless the purpose for the search is for protecting “national security,” a category seen by some observers as overly broad. It also protects shared information from requests made under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Additionally, a proposed liability clause protects private firms and the government from lawsuits in relation to “willful misconduct” involving cybersecurity data. Anyone trying to sue a firm or agency on those grounds will have to prove an intention to achieve a “wrongful purpose,” that misconduct was carried out without “legal or factual” justification, and that the harm caused by the action was greater than the benefit.

Some passed amendments state that CISPA won’t require private firms to share cybersecurity threat information with the federal government, the government won’t be able to withhold threat data from private firms that haven’t sent any threat data to the government, and the Inspector General of the intelligence community will be required to submit an annual report to Congress detailing the bill’s impact on civil liberties.

The new draft reflects some of the key points stressed by CISPA’s authors during a conference call with technology journalists and bloggers held earlier this week — namely, that the bill’s intention is to make it easier for companies and the government to share knowledge of cybersecurity threats on a two-way basis and that the authors were listening to opponents of the bill.

Facebook, an advocate of CISPA, released a statement Friday afternoon explaining that the company backs the bill because it allows it to receive information about cyber threats. Kaplan said the company would not use CISPA to share private information about its users to the government.

“The concern is that companies will share sensitive personal information with the government in the name of protecting cybersecurity,” wrote Joel Kaplan, vice president of U.S. public policy at Facebook.

“Facebook has no intention of doing this and it is unrelated to the things we liked about HR 3523 in the first place — the additional information it would provide us about specific cyber threats to our systems and users.”

Meanwhile, a group of Internet freedom advocacy organizations and technology blogs are planning a “week of action” against what Rebecca Jeschke, Electronic Frontier Foundation’s media relations director called “bad cybersecurity legislation” beginning Monday morning.

“We want Congress to reject legislation that uses dangerously vague language to define the breadth of data that can be shared with the government, hands the reins of America’s cybersecurity defenses to the National Security Agency,” said Jeschke.

CISPA is likely to be opened to a full vote on the House floor later this month.

You can read the discussion draft below — changes highlighted in green have already been adopted, those in yellow are still being debated.
https://mashable.com/2012/04/14/new-cispa-draft/





CISPA Sponsor Mike Rogers Says Protests Are Mere 'Turbulence' On Landing
Mike Masnick

It appears that Congress still doesn't get it. Rep. Mike Rogers, the sponsor of the bad CISPA bill that puts your privacy at risk, really doesn't seem particularly concerned about the protests that have been happening online this week. He referred to them as being "like turbulence on the way down to landing" for the bill. He also said that he fully expects the bill to easily pass next week when its brought to the floor.

What really comes through in the article -- which mostly talks about how Rogers has been supposedly working with Google to change some of the language in the bill to make it more acceptable -- is how little concern Rogers has for the public. Instead, most of the article just talks about how he's been working with tech companies to make sure they're okay with the bill. And while that's a start, it's no surprise that lots of tech companies would be okay with CISPA, because it grants them broad immunity if they happen to hand over all sorts of private info to the government.

But to then call the protests mere "turbulence" is pretty damned insulting to the actual people this will impact the most: the public, whose privacy may be violated. While we appreciate Rogers' willingness to amend the bill, it seems clear that there are still major problems with it, and Rogers does not seem to be actually listening to the privacy concerns of the public -- just the various tech companies.

In the meantime, the protests continue, and if Rogers thinks they're mere "turbulence" then it appears that not enough people are speaking out. The folks at Fight for the Future have put together an excellent page to make it easier to speak out, over at CongressTMI.org. At the very least, is it that difficult for Congress to present a real reason why this bill is needed? Bogus stories of planes falling from the sky or evil Chinese hackers really aren't cutting it. Perhaps Congress should talk to some of the experts who note that Congress doesn't understand the tech enough to regulate it properly. As privacy expert Jim Harper notes:

"Congress has no particular capacity or knowledge of how to do cybersecurity," Harper says. "It's not a choice between two different versions in the House and two different versions in the Senate. The question is still open: is Congress capable of doing any good here?"

Unfortunately, in the mad dash to pass these bills (which appear to be much more about who gets to control multi-billion dollar "cybersecurity budgets" than anything else), no one in Congress seems willing to address the basic question of what problem this really solves.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...-landing.shtml





MPs Want ISPs to Block Porn By Default

ISPs should be forced to provide a censored internet feed to protect children from “adult” content, say MPs
Tom Brewster

MPs have proposed a system where porn would be censored online by default in the UK, in a bid to protect children from adult content.

The move, first suggested in 2010, has been firmed up , after a cross-party Parliamentary inquiry examined the state of online child protection. The current proposal is a “network-level ‘Opt-In’ system”, going beyond the “active choice” model launched by ISPs BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin last October.

This would provide a “clean internet feed” as standard, which has been criticised as “censorship”. Anyone wanting to watch porn would have to change their settings.

MPs said this “would preserve consumer choice but provide an additional content barrier that protected children from accessing age-inappropriate material”.

“This model would emulate the system already used by most major UK mobile phone companies, where access to adult content is blocked until an age verification check is conducted by the network operator, and could use the filtering technology already operating in all schools and on some public Wi-Fi hubs,” the report read.

“We find it perverse that companies who apply an adult content block for their customers accessing the internet via a mobile device would argue against introducing a similar system for their fixed broadband customers.”

Porn party poopers?

It argued there was no evidence the model would add “substantial cost” or slow down access speeds, adding that the main objections were ideological.

The inquiry said its research suggested an opt-in would be popular, with almost six in ten people saying they would use the service. However, only 27 percent of men said they would use it.

MPs are hoping ISPs will be forced to roll out suitable services in the next 12 months.

“We accept that providing an Opt-In system might create a risk of complacency among parents but think that in practice it would offer far better overall protection for children in the online environment than the current system where only a minority of households install device-level filters,” the MPs said.

They also want the Government to “consider a new regulatory structure for online content, with one regulator given a lead role in the oversight and monitoring of internet content distribution and the promotion of internet safety initiatives”.

Former home secretary and one of the contributors to the inquiry, Jacqui Smith, said she had spoken to porn producers, who had concerns themselves about the ease of access to their sites. “The first thing I thought was very interesting was that the people involved in making pornography themselves, who were concerned about the extent to which free and un-age restricted access through the internet was enabling young people,who they themselves didn’t think should be watching their material, to be able to access it,” Smith said.

ISPs have done plenty of work to deal with porn access already. Late last year BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin all committed to offering customers an “active choice” at the point of purchase to block adult content. The move came after more government pressure to put more barriers in place to prevent users from accessing prurient material.

Those ISPs were quick to note that their measures would not be opt-in as some had suggested.

Misguided legislation?

The Internet Services Providers’ Association (ISPA) has slammed the proposals, saying the measures would be inappropriate.

“Forcing ISPs to filter adult content at the network level, which users would then have to opt out of, is neither the most effective nor most appropriate way to prevent access to inappropriate material online,” said Nicholas Lansman, ISPA secretary general. “It is easy to circumvent, reduces the degree of active interest and parental mediation and has clear implications for freedom of speech. Instead parents should choose how they restrict access to content, be it on the device or network level with the tools provided.

“Government should concentrate on helping educate consumers to ensure they know about the tools already available to them to restrict unwanted content.”
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news...-default-73519





TeliaSonera 'Profits by Helping Dictators Spy'

TeliaSonera, the successor to Sweden's state telecom monopoly, has given state security services access to systems it operates in the former Soviet Union in order to secure lucrative contracts there, according to Swedish media reports.

The Swedish-Finnish telecom giant earns huge sums from deals with dictatorships in the former Soviet Union, but the contracts are often signed on the condition that the countries' security services be granted access to their systems in order to facilitate spying on individuals.

In Azerbaijan, Belarus, and Uzbekistan, for example, there is a system called Sorm which is connected to TeliaSonera's network and which allows authorities complete access to the countries' telecom system, Svergies Television (SVT) investigative journalism programme "Uppdrag granskning" has shown.

The system allows security services direct access to subscribers' telephone calls, data, and text messages, resulting in wiretaps which have led to the arrest of members of the political opposition.

In one instance, a man in Azerbaijan was called in to an interrogation by the country's security service after having voted for Armenia in the finals of the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest.

TeliaSonera spokesperson Cecilia Edström told SVT that "police authorities have the right to access information from the net in order to fight crime."

"The laws in the countries go to different lengths in terms of the powers they grand police authorities to fight crime," she said.

Foreign minister Carl Bildt, who on Thursday opened a conference in Stockholm examining internet freedom, refused to comment on what responsibility Swedish telecom companies have when dealing with dictators.

According to Bildt, good communications are important for democracy.

"In general, I think that it's good that we participate in developing telecommunications in different countries. Having a working mobile phone system in Belarus is better for the opposition than for the regime," he told the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper.

TeliaSonera, meanwhile, pointed out that different countries have different laws when it comes to tapping private communications of their citizens.

"In all countries, including Sweden, security services have the right, under certain circumstances related to fighting and preventing crime, to set up wiretaps and access traffic on the network. That's controlled by national legislation and we need to follow the laws of the countries we're in," company spokesperson Thomas Jönsson told the TT news agency.

"These are tough issues and nothing we take lightly. But as a lone telecom operator we can't do much."

However, insurance company Folksam, one of TeliaSonera's owners, was surprised by the report, which is set to broadcast in Sweden on Wednesday night.

"It's a little shocking that they house the security services in their own offices," Folksam's Carina Lundberg Markow told TT.

Martin Uggla, chair of the human rights organization Östgruppen för demokrati och mänskliga rättigheter ('The East group for democracy and human rights'), called the revelations about TeliaSonera's actions in the region "remarkable and scandalous".

"The information that has come out shows that TeliaSonera's claims that they act in an ethically acceptable manner aren't true," he said.

On Wednesday, Sweden's financial markets minister Peter Norman, who handles the government's management of state-owned companies, spoke with TeliaSonera chair Anders Narvinger and demanded he come to the ministry to explain what was revealed in the SVT report.

The Swedish government is the largest shareholder in TeliaSonera, owning just over 37 percent of the company's shares.

According to a government statement, the company will also be required to develop an action plan for how the company plans to address issues related to democracy in companies in which TeliaSonera is a partial owner.
http://www.thelocal.se/40334/20120418/





Web Freedom Facing Greatest Threat: Google Founder

The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the Internet's creation are facing their greatest-ever threat, the co-founder of Google Sergey Brin said in an interview published by Britain's Guardian newspaper on Monday.

Brin said the threat to freedom of the Internet came from a combination of factors, including increasing efforts by governments to control access and communication by their citizens.

Brin said attempts by the entertainment industry to crack down on piracy, and the rise of "restrictive" walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms, were also leading to greater restrictions on the Internet.

"There are very powerful forces that have lined up against the open Internet on all sides and around the world," Brin was quoted as saying. "I am more worried than I have been in the past. It's scary."

He said he was concerned by efforts of countries such as China, Saudi Arabia and Iran to censor and restrict use of the Internet.

Brin said the rise of Facebook and Apple, which have their own proprietary platforms and control access to their users, risked stifling innovation and balkanizing the web.

(Reporting by Stephen Mangan; Editing by David Brunnstrom)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...83B1GJ20120416





Going With the Flow: Google’s Secret Switch to the Next Wave of Networking
Steven Levy

In early 1999, an associate computer science professor at UC Santa Barbara climbed the steps to the second floor headquarters of a small startup in Palo Alto, and wound up surprising himself by accepting a job offer. Even so, Urs Hölzle hedged his bet by not resigning from his university post, but taking a year-long leave.

He would never return. Hölzle became a fixture in the company — called Google. As its czar of infrastructure, Hölzle oversaw the growth of its network operations from a few cages in a San Jose co-location center to a massive internet power; a 2010 study by Arbor Networks concluded that if Google was an ISP it would be the second largest in the world (the largest is Level 3, which services over 2,700 major corporations in 450 markets over 100,000 fiber miles.)

‘You have all those multiple devices on a network but you’re not really interested in the devices — you’re interested in the fabric, and the functions the network performs for you,’ Hölzle says.

Google treats its infrastructure like a state secret, so Hölzle rarely speaks about it in public. Today is one of those rare days: at the Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, California, Hölzle is announcing that Google essentially has remade a major part of its massive internal network, providing the company a bonanza in savings and efficiency. Google has done this by brashly adopting a new and radical open-source technology called OpenFlow.

Hölzle says that the idea behind this advance is the most significant change in networking in the entire lifetime of Google.

In the course of his presentation Hölzle will also confirm for the first time that Google — already famous for making its own servers — has been designing and manufacturing much of its own networking equipment as well.

“It’s not hard to build networking hardware,” says Hölzle, in an advance briefing provided exclusively to Wired. “What’s hard is to build the software itself as well.”

In this case, Google has used its software expertise to overturn the current networking paradigm.

If any company has potential to change the networking game, it is Google. The company has essentially two huge networks: the one that connects users to Google services (Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.) and another that connects Google data centers to each other. It makes sense to bifurcate the information that way because the data flow in each case has different characteristics and demand. The user network has a smooth flow, generally adopting a diurnal pattern as users in a geographic region work and sleep. The performance of the user network also has higher standards, as users will get impatient (or leave!) if services are slow. In the user-facing network you also need every packet to arrive intact — customers would be pretty unhappy if a key sentence in a document or e-mail was dropped.

The internal backbone, in contrast, has wild swings in demand — it is “bursty” rather than steady. Google is in control of scheduling internal traffic, but it faces difficulties in traffic engineering. Often Google has to move many petabytes of data (indexes of the entire web, millions of backup copies of user Gmail) from one place to another. When Google updates or creates a new service, it wants it available worldwide in a timely fashion — and it wants to be able to predict accurately how quickly the process will take.

“There’s a lot of data center to data center traffic that has different business priorities,” says Stephen Stuart, a Google distinguished engineer who specializes in infrastructure. “Figuring out the right thing to move out of the way so that more important traffic could go through was a challenge.”

But Google found an answer in OpenFlow, an open source system jointly devised by scientists at Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley. Adopting an approach known as Software Defined Networking (SDN), OpenFlow gives network operators a dramatically increased level of control by separating the two functions of networking equipment: packet switching and management. OpenFlow moves the control functions to servers, allowing for more complexity, efficiency and flexibility.

“We were already going down that path, working on an inferior way of doing software-defined networking,” says Hölzle. “But once we looked at OpenFlow, it was clear that this was the way to go. Why invent your own if you don’t have to?”

Google became one of several organizations to sign on to the Open Networking Foundation, which is devoted to promoting OpenFlow. (Other members include Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Verizon and Deutsche Telekom, and an innovative startup called Nicira.) But none of the partners so far have announced any implementation as extensive as Google’s.

Why is OpenFlow so advantageous to a company like Google? In the traditional model you can think of routers as akin to taxicabs getting passengers from one place to another. If a street is blocked, the taxi driver takes another route — but the detour may be time-consuming. If the weather is lousy, the taxi driver has to go slower. In short, the taxi driver will get you there, but you don’t want to bet the house on your exact arrival time.

With the software-defined network Google has implemented, the taxi situation no longer resembles the decentralized model of drivers making their own decisions. Instead you have a system like the one envisioned when all cars are autonomous, and can report their whereabouts and plans to some central repository which also knows of weather conditions and aggregate traffic information. Such a system doesn’t need independent taxi drivers, because the system knows where the quickest routes are and what streets are blocked, and can set an ideal route from the outset. The system knows all the conditions and can institute a more sophisticated set of rules that determines how the taxis proceed, and even figure whether some taxis should stay in their garages while fire trucks pass.

Therefore, operators can slate trips with confidence that everyone will get to their destinations in the shortest times, and precisely on schedule.
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise...e-flow-google/





Unanswered Questions in F.C.C.’s Google Case
David Streitfeld and Edward Wyatt

One of the most audacious projects ever to come out of Google was the plan to photograph and map the inhabited world, one block at a time. But a report over the weekend from federal regulators has rekindled questions over exactly what the company was doing — questions the search giant has spent years trying not to answer.

The Federal Communications Commission censured Google for obstructing an inquiry into the Street View project, which had collected Internet communications from potentially millions of unknowing households as specially equipped cars drove slowly by.

But the investigation, described in an interim report, was left unresolved because a critical participant, the Google engineer in charge of the project, cited his Fifth Amendment right and declined to talk. It is unclear who else at Google might have known about the data gathering, or when they might have known.

Google maintains that the data gathering was unauthorized, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, but the engineer is maintaining that other people at the company knew about it.

Google was fined $25,000 for obstruction, a penalty it can challenge. It and the F.C.C. are wrangling over how much information can be revealed in the final report. In the interim report, many passages were heavily redacted.

Privacy advocates said the F.C.C. report was only a start.

“I appreciate that the F.C.C. sanctioned Google for not cooperating in the investigation, but the much bigger problem is the pervasive and covert surveillance of Internet users that Google undertook over a three-year period,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. He said that on Monday he would ask the Justice Department to investigate Google over wiretapping.

Google said Sunday that it disagreed with the F.C.C.’s characterization of its lack of cooperation, but that its collection of what is called payload data — Internet communications, including texts and e-mails — was legal, if regrettable. “It was a mistake for us to include code in our software that collected payload data, but we believe we did nothing illegal,” a spokeswoman said.

As part of the Street View project, as Google was collecting photographs on every street, it was also gathering information about local wireless networks to improve location-based searches.

But the Google engineer wrote a program for the project that went beyond what was originally envisioned. Using this program, Google collected unencrypted data sent by computers.

The data proved be a snapshot of what people were doing at the moment the cars rolled by — e-mailing a lover, texting jokes to a buddy, balancing a checkbook, looking up an ailment. Google spent more than two years scooping up that information, from January 2008 to April 2010.

The photographs were used to refine Google’s maps, the wireless information to improve searches. Google had not figured out what, if anything, to do with the personal data, nor had it even looked at it, when rumors about the secret project began in 2010.

Google first said it had not collected personal data. Then it said such data was in fragments. Then it conceded there were things like entire e-mails. People, mostly in Europe, were furious.

Even in the United States, where regulators take a more restrained approach to privacy issues than in Europe, there was widespread concern. A multistate inquiry was begun by state attorneys general. The Federal Trade Commission looked into it.

Google, by simultaneously apologizing, promising to do better and saying as little as possible, made the issue go away.

Coincidentally, the F.C.C. opened its investigation of the Street View project on the same day in October 2010 that the F.T.C. ended its inquiry.

While staff members from the two entities spoke about their efforts, they were looking at potential violations of different statutes and their investigations took place separately.

Some F.C.C. staff members argued strongly that Google should be charged with a violation of the Communications Act, and the agency and Google spent weeks debating whether Google had violated the Wiretap Act or the Communications Act.

The F.C.C.’s enforcement division finally declined to charge Google with violating the Communications Act after determining that there was no precedent for applying the statute to Wi-Fi communications. But by publicly reprimanding Google for its conduct, the F.C.C. is hoping that Congress will see that the law has not kept up with advances in digital communications and will rewrite the statutes. Encryption technology did not exist when the Communications Act was written.

Google argued that the few precedents that do apply favor a broad interpretation of what is permissible under the two laws.

People close to the discussion said that determination was affected by inconsistent language between the two statutes. The Communications Act prohibits intercepting radio communications “except as authorized by” the Wiretap Act.

The Wiretap Act says it is “not unlawful to” intercept unencrypted communication, but it does not give specific permission for the interception of unencrypted communications.

Federal courts have generally given a broad interpretation, however. But the F.C.C. was not able to determine if there had been actions that clearly would violate the statutes — say, if Google intercepted and made use of encrypted information — because the Google engineer who would know invoked his Fifth Amendment right.

The determination not to charge Google with a Communications Act violation was made by the enforcement division staff. Google can decide whether to oppose the obstruction charge and fight the fine, eventually taking the fight to the five-member commission and perhaps to federal court.

In Europe, where the outcry against Google was greatest, most government data protection regulators have settled their disputes with the company.

Some countries, like Ireland, asked Google in 2010 to simply destroy the data it had gathered illegally in their jurisdictions. Google informed Ireland and other countries that it had done so and no penalties were levied.

On April 5, the Dutch Data Protection Authority closed its investigation after Google gave residents in the Netherlands the option of removing their Wi-Fi routers from Google’s global tracking database.

But in Germany, where Google’s collection of personal data was first uncovered by a regulator in Hamburg, two proceedings are officially up and running.

The Hamburg prosecutor’s office is still pursuing a criminal investigation, which it opened in May 2010, into whether Google broke German law by illegally intercepting private data through electronic means.

Johannes Caspar, the Hamburg regulator, said in a recent interview that he was delaying his own administrative review of the situation until the Hamburg prosecutor decides whether or not to press criminal charges.

J. Trevor Hughes, president of the International Association of Privacy Professionals, said the Google case represented what happened when technical employees of technology companies made “innocent” decisions about collecting data that could infuriate consumers and in turn invite regulatory inquiry.

“This is one of the most significant risks we see in the information age today,” he said. “Project managers and software developers don’t understand the sensitivity associated with data.”

Kevin J. O’Brien and Somini Sengupta contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/16/t...questions.html





Iraq Emerges From Isolation as Telecommunications Hub
Eric Pfanner

Iraq, cut off from decades of technological progress because of dictatorship, sanctions and wars, recently took a big step out of isolation and into the digital world when its telecommunications system was linked to a vast new undersea cable system serving the Gulf countries.

The engineers who designed and installed the cable that made shore in Al-Faw, near Basra, had to deal with an unusual number of challenges. There were more than 100 oil and natural gas pipelines to cross; stretches of shallow water where the cable had to be buried; and unexploded ordnance from the Iraq war that had to be avoided.

“It was not easy,” said Ahmed Mekky, chief executive of Gulf Bridge International, the company that built the system. “But this could be a significant foundation stone for the country’s recovery.”

The new cable will speed Internet and telephone traffic to India in the East and Sicily in the West. From there, traffic moves onto other networks to connect to the rest of the world.

Much of the world takes lightning-fast broadband service for granted, but any kind of Internet access remains a rarity in Iraq, where fewer than 3 percent of households are online. The new capacity could help bring Internet connections to 50 percent within two years, said Mohammed Tawfiq Allawi, the Iraqi communications minister.

“You have to have a culture of using it, you have to have the infrastructure in place and you have to have access to low-cost devices,” he said.

Mr. Allawi and Mr. Mekky see more than just domestic benefits for Iraq. They want the connection to the undersea network to serve as the first step in a plan to turn Iraq into a conduit for telecommunications traffic between East and West, which would provide the country with lucrative revenue from use of the network.

“This is going to make Iraq an important hub for connecting Asia to Europe,” Mr. Mekky said. “It’s very strategic for the country.”

Like traders plying the ancient Silk Road, telecommunications operators routing bits and bytes from Asia to Europe and back have to pass through the Middle East, whose tricky geography and even more challenging geopolitics have sometimes made the region just as much of a bottleneck in the digital realm as in the physical world. When things go wrong, the consequences can be serious and far-reaching.

In January 2008, for example, several underwater cables off the Mediterranean coast of Egypt were inexplicably severed. Only days later, a separate cable was cut in the Gulf, near Dubai; this time, a ship’s anchor was blamed. Telecommunications activity throughout the Middle East was severely disrupted, and there were ripple effects for carriers across the world. A similar, though less serious, incident occurred in February of this year in the Red Sea.

Meanwhile, traffic is surging, both internationally and within the region, fueled by the spread of mobile phones and a belated but enthusiastic adoption of the Internet.

Demand for international bandwidth has grown at a compound annual rate of nearly 100 percent across the region over the past five years, according to TeleGeography, a research firm. That is the fastest growth of any region in the world, and roughly double the rate of increase in North America.

Until recently, options for passing through the Middle East were limited, and links within the region were often spotty. Most East-West traffic had to go via Egypt and the Red Sea; the vulnerability of that route was exposed by the 2008 incident. Telecommunications operators in the Gulf also want more competition, in order to bring down tolls.

Since 2008, governments and telecommunications companies across the region have been investing heavily in alternatives, laying cables underwater and across land at a previously unseen pace. Projects like Gulf Bridge, whose shareholders include the Qatar Foundation and sovereign wealth funds of several other Gulf states, are the result.

The Gulf Bridge network, a $500 million project in its initial phase, became active in February, providing high-speed connections to Bahrain, Iran, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Iraq.

Gulf Bridge is not the only new arrival. In March, Tata Communications of India activated a $200 million cable that serves many of the Gulf countries, though not Iraq. The cable sends traffic to Mumbai, where it hooks into Tata’s worldwide network. Unlike Gulf Bridge, Tata’s cable travels over land to Oman, avoiding the Strait of Hormuz, a choke point in times of regional conflict.

With so much new bandwidth coming into service, some analysts have raised concerns about overcapacity, though network operators say it is only a matter of time before the new networks are humming with activity.

“Every time more cable systems are built, use catches up more quickly than forecast,” Radwan Mousalli, head of Tata Communications’ Middle East and North Africa operations.

Given the varied risks in the region, from errant anchors to political tensions like the saber-rattling over the Iranian nuclear program, it is important to have a diverse range of options for routing traffic, executives say.

Another cable-building project, scheduled to be completed this year, would pass through Iran, linking the Gulf to Europe via that country and Russia. But analysts say economic sanctions against Iran could make it hard to attract European customers.

Two other overland lines linking the Gulf to Europe — one recently activated, the other still under development — pass through Syria, where protests over the regime of President Bashar al-Assad continue.

Because of the crisis in Syria and the tensions over Iran, the possibility of routing traffic via Iraq has suddenly become more attractive to telecommunications operators.

“If you want to go from Saudi Arabia to Europe, you either have to go through Iran, Iraq or Syria,” said Alan Mauldin, an analyst at TeleGeography. “Which is the most stable of those countries now? Iraq has emerged as the least bad of all the options.”

Mr. Allawi said his government had reached agreements in principle with partners in neighboring countries to develop a cable system connecting the Gulf to Europe via Turkey, though he said details could not be announced yet.

Mr. Allawi is thinking big. He said Iraq could use the infrastructure improvements to turn itself into a regional Internet hub, playing host to Web sites serving neighboring countries — where, he said, communications freedoms are more restricted.

Telecommunications operators say Iraq provides additional advantages, beyond stability. It offers the shortest overland connection from the Gulf to Europe, so delays in transmission could be reduced, said John Maguire, head of wholesale services at Vodafone Qatar, a mobile operator whose shareholders include the Qatar Foundation, controlled by the royal family of the Gulf emirate.

“Iraq has a very strong strategic position to become a transit point for traffic between Europe and Asia,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/16/t...tions-hub.html





Boeing Prepares an Ultra-Secure Smartphone
Josh Wretlind

Earlier this week, it was revealed that aerospace firm Boeing was working on a high security mobile device for the various intelligence departments. This device will most likely be released later this year, and at a lower price point than other mobile phones targeted at the same communities. Typically, phones in this range cost about $15,000-$20,000 per phone, and use custom hardware and software to get the job done. This phone will most likely use Android as its main operating system of choice, which lowers the cost per phone, since Boeing's developers don't have to write their own operating system from scratch. Click here tp see pictures.

This is a welcome move by Boeing, as there are not many high security devices out on the market today. Additionally, any lowering of the price point for these phones is refreshing, as that would make it slightly cheaper to run operations. Boeing also stated that this is the first time that they have ever designed a mobile phone. It is also unknown which version of Android the phone will be running, but one would assume that it will be a version of Android 4.0.

The reasoning Boeing provided for this move was that it noticed a trend among its own employees that they have been wondering why the technology that they use at work isn't as good as the technology they use at home. This used to not be the case, and that's the main reason why Boeing choose to use Android as the Operating System.

Boeing also refused to give details on what the device will be named. Additionally, they also refused to name who they were partnering with on this project. This makes sense, however, since it is supposed to be a high security device. Boeing does not want information to get out about who they are talking to for this project so that there can't be any pre-emptive breaches of security for their hardware/software.

So, what do you think? Do you think that Android is a step in the right direction for this, or should Boeing have chosen to take the more tried and true way of developing their own operating system? Also, what do you think of the typical price point for these devices? Is it justified, or should they be cheaper(or, more expensive)? Let me know down in the comments section below. As always, if you like this article, follow me on Twitter here, and subscribe to get more of my articles here.Additionally, you can buy me a coffee with bitcoins here: 16KHgNM1crGt3t2HeWsaUj6hZEU5cDWJwb
http://www.examiner.com/computers-in...alerts_article





Mobile Carriers Warn of ‘Spectrum Crisis’; Others See Hyperbole
Brian X. Chen

AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint say they need more radio spectrum, the government-rationed slices of radio waves that carry phone calls and wireless data.

The wireless carriers say that in the next few years they may not have enough of it to meet the exploding demands for mobile data. The result, they ominously warn, may be slower or spotty connections on smartphones and tablets. They imply in carefully couched language that, given the laws of supply and demand, the price of cellphone service will soar.

It will affect “the services they’re paying for because of the capacity issues,” said Ed McFadden, Verizon’s vice president for policy communications. “It potentially hinders our ability to meet consumer need.”

But is there really a crisis? Some scientists and engineers say the companies are playing a game that is more about protecting their businesses from competitors.

Not even the inventor of the cellphone, Martin Cooper, is convinced that the wireless industry faces a serious challenge that cannot be overcome with technology. Mr. Cooper, a former vice president of Motorola and chairman of Dyna L.L.C., an incubator for new companies, says that claims of a so-called spectrum crisis are largely exaggerated.

“Somehow in the last 100 years, every time there is a problem of getting more spectrum, there is a technology that comes along that solves that problem,” he said in an interview. Mr. Cooper also sits on the technical advisory committee of the Federal Communications Commission, and he previously founded ArrayComm, a company that develops software for mobile antenna technologies, which with he said he is no longer associated.

He explained that for carriers, buying spectrum is the easiest way for them to expand their network, but newer technologies, like improved antennas and techniques for offloading mobile traffic to Wi-Fi networks, could multiply the number of mobile devices that carriers can serve by at least tenfold.

Everyone agrees that data-guzzling smartphones and tablets are selling fast, and the wireless industry needs to keep up. Cisco, the networking company, published a study that shows mobile data usage more than doubled in 2011.

Cellphones are radios and their calls are carried on the electromagnetic radio spectrum just like an FM radio signal or a walkie-talkie. The F.C.C. divides up the spectrum by bands of frequency, under the theory that no one wants signals on certain frequencies interfering with one another.

The F.C.C. hands out licenses for each frequency band to entities like the military, TV stations, astronomy researchers and the phone carriers. Carriers now want some of the spectrum others have and are seeking approval from the F.C.C. to buy it at government auction or by buying licenses for it.

Verizon, the largest carrier in the country, has been on the hunt for more. It has been trying to buy wireless spectrum licenses from a group of cable companies, including Time Warner and Comcast. These transactions are being opposed by T-Mobile USA and some other smaller players in the wireless industry. AT&T’s ill-fated deal to buy T-Mobile came about in large part to get more spectrum.

The F.C.C. believes that a combination of adding new spectrum and using new technologies will be needed to help the wireless industry evolve. “No single action is a silver bullet when it comes to meeting mobile capacity needs,” said Neil Grace, an F.C.C. spokesman. “More efficient use of spectrum, new technologies, and unleashing new spectrum are all important parts of the mix.”

Arguing that the nation could run out of spectrum is like saying it was going to run out of a color, says David P. Reed, one of the original architects of the Internet and a former professor of computer science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He says electromagnetic spectrum is not finite.

Mr. Reed, who is now senior vice president at SAP Labs, a company that provides business software, explained that there are in fact newer technologies for transmitting and receiving signals so that they do not interfere with one another. That means separating the frequency bands would not be required — in other words, everybody could share spectrum and not run out.

The reason spectrum is treated as though it were finite is because it is still divided by frequencies — an outdated understanding of how radio technology works, he said. “I hate to even use the word ‘spectrum,’ ” he said. “It’s a 1920s understanding of how radio communications work.”

Why, then, wouldn’t carriers want to use these newer technologies that cause frequencies to not interfere? Because licensing spectrum is a zero-sum game. When a company gets the license for a band of radio waves, it has the exclusive rights to use it. Once a company owns it, competitors can’t have it.

Mr. Reed said the carriers haven’t advocated for the newer technologies because they want to retain their monopolies.

David S. Isenberg, who worked at AT&T Labs Research for 12 years before leaving to start an independent consulting firm, said the carriers have been deliberately slow with adopting more advanced radio technologies. He said that spectrum licenses come with obligations where carriers had to agree to serve the public interest, but those agreements have significantly weakened. “Their primary interest is not necessarily in making spectrum available, or in making wireless performance better,” he said. “They want to make money.”

Mr. Cooper, the inventor of the mobile phone, says that rather than give the carriers a few more slices of spectrum, he suggests requiring them to use newer technologies that amplify their networks.

He said that currently the technology with the most potential for carriers to use their networks more efficiently is the smart antenna. A traditional radio antenna on a cellphone tower spews energy out in all directions, but only a portion of it gets to the right phone, he explained. By contrast, the smart antenna would direct energy straight at the phones, and as a result, current spectrum would be put to more efficient use.

Fourth-generation LTE networks are supposed to adopt smart antennas, but most carriers haven’t started installing these yet, he said. These new antennas will also start shipping in phones in the next two years, which would make even better use of the network, he said.

In interviews, representatives of AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint said new technology would not be enough to solve all their problems, and they said they would eventually need access to more of the nation’s radio waves. “They’re all Band-Aids, and you have to provide additional spectrum to deal with the wound to deal with the large capacity of bandwidth demands,” said Kathleen Ham, vice president for federal regulatory affairs of T-Mobile USA.

Mr. Cooper doesn’t agree.

“Every two and a half years, every spectrum crisis has gotten solved, and that’s going to keep happening,” Mr. Cooper said. “We already know today what the solutions are for the next 50 years.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/t...hyperbole.html





Report: One In Five U.S. Adults Does Not Use The Internet
Frederic Lardinois

Internet adoption among U.S. adults increased rapidly from the mid-’90s to about 2005. Since then, though, the number of adult Internet users has remained almost stable at around 75 to 80%. The Pew Internet & American Life Project’s latest poll shows that this trend continued in 2011. Those who are online use the Internet more than ever before, but about one in five U.S. adults is simply not online.

According to this report, “senior citizens, those who prefer to take our interviews in Spanish rather than English, adults with less than a high school education, and those living in households earning less than $30,000 per year are the least likely adults to have Internet access.” Age, household income and education have remained the strongest positive predictors of Internet use since Pew started tracking these numbers.

Virtually every U.S. household with an annual income over $75,000 is online, but that’s only true for 63% of adults who live in a household with an annual income under $30,000. The numbers look quite similar for different education levels: 94% of adults with post-graduate degrees are online, but 57% of those without high school diplomas remain offline.

Beside the obvious economic barriers to entry, though, the Pew poll also found that half of those who don’t go online do so because they just don’t think “the Internet is relevant to them.” One in five of those who are not online today think that they just don’t know enough about technology to use the Internet on their own.

On the positive side, though, this new study also found that the gap in Internet access between whites and minorities in the U.S. is slowly disappearing. Neither race nor gender, the Pew report says, “are themselves part of the story of digital differences in its current form.”
http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/13/rep...-the-internet/





When Big Brother Watches IT

New software analyzes email of IT staff for changes in attitude, behavior
Chris Nerney

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article on how IT departments are coping these days with the biggest threat to data security -- namely, employees in the IT department.

That the "enemy within" is the biggest threat to an enterprise is nothing new, but buried in the article was something that struck me as, well, Orwellian. The WSJ reports that some organizations "are even using new technology to look at the language of their IT staff's emails to determine whether their behavior or mind-set has changed."

"If you start to feel differently about the company you work for and the people you work with, you'd be surprised how your language changes," says Ed Stroz, co-president at digital-risk-management firm Stroz Friedberg LLC, New York. The company, like other consulting firms such as Ernst & Young, makes technology to examine linguistics.

Common red flags include a dramatic change in the length of a person's emails. For example, someone may start writing emails of half a dozen words when their messages used to read like novels. Other tip-offs: a rise in the number of anger-related phrases, greater use of the word "me," and signs of more-polarized thinking, like the words "never" and "always."


I understand the need to be aware of the attitudes of workers with high-level access to data and networks, but this strikes me as creepy. What if an IT employee suddenly has relationship problems or family issues? Will they then be flagged by HR as potentially troublesome or even a data security risk? And all without them even knowing there's a dossier being created of them and their "suspect" behavior?

I have to agree with the sole commenter to the WSJ article, who said, "If you're worried about questionable behavior, do your due diligence as a manager. Actually pay attention to your staff's activity, be aware of their behavior and moods."

All of which, by the way, can be done without spying on and linguistically interpreting an IT employee's email. What's next, surreptitious mind-scans?

Enterprises have a right to protect their data. That's indisputable. In that regard, software intended to detect unusual network and file-access activity makes perfect sense. Same with checks and balances on high-level network access to prevent rogue actions.

But secretly reading IT workers' email to draw conclusions about their mental and emotional state? I think that's way over the line.
http://www.itworld.com/security/2677...her-watches-it





IT Protects the Company. Who Protects IT?
Shara Tibken

Companies' IT staffs often hold the keys to the castle. And that's the problem.

At many companies, the people in the IT department pose the biggest risks to data security. They can access nearly anything on the network, usually with no one looking over their shoulders. What's more, outside hackers increasingly are targeting IT administrators' profiles to gain access to a system without being detected.

To combat this threat, more companies are taking extra care to screen their IT staff and make sure there are checks and balances in place once they're on the job. Some organizations are using monitoring software that tracks the network activity of the staff, quickly flagging anything unusual. Some are even using new technology to look at the language of their IT staff's emails to determine whether their behavior or mind-set has changed.

"It has gotten to the point where we have to monitor everything everybody does, especially those working with sensitive data like the IT staff," says Stacey Gregerson, senior database security analyst at ATM maker Diebold Inc. "If something goes wrong, the first person you look at is the person with the highest amount of access."

Who Gets Hired

Companies put IT professionals under the microscope even before they've joined the outfit. Many organizations perform tougher background checks on potential IT employees than on others, making sure the job candidates can be trusted to carry out critical security tasks.

And once candidates are hired, their actions typically are scrutinized more closely than those of others on the network. Many companies do this using technology that analyzes network traffic and alerts them to anything abnormal—such as employees opening files they don't normally access or going on the network at odd hours.

"If someone works 9 to 5 and all of a sudden their privileges are used at 3 in the morning, it needs to set off an alarm within the company," says Chip Tsantes, a Washington, D.C.-based principal at Ernst & Young who advises financial-services firms about security and other issues.

Companies are also employing a newer class of technology that allows them to examine how the language used in communications among IT staff changes over time. That helps the organization figure out who might have motivation for stealing data or sabotaging the network.

"If you start to feel differently about the company you work for and the people you work with, you'd be surprised how your language changes," says Ed Stroz, co-president at digital-risk-management firm Stroz Friedberg LLC, New York. The company, like other consulting firms such as Ernst & Young, makes technology to examine linguistics.

Common red flags include a dramatic change in the length of a person's emails. For example, someone may start writing emails of half a dozen words when their messages used to read like novels. Other tip-offs: a rise in the number of anger-related phrases, greater use of the word "me," and signs of more-polarized thinking, like the words "never" and "always."

Deluxe Corp., a check printer and marketing-services provider based in Shoreview, Minn., uses technology that scans emails for patterns typically associated with security problems, and the IT staff receives the highest level of scrutiny. The company looks for triggers such as vulgar words, messages marked as high priority and privileged information such as credit-card numbers. While an employee may be sending a credit-card number to a family member, they just as easily could be trying to email the personal data of a customer.

"You wouldn't believe the number of people who don't think twice about putting a Social Security number or credit-card number on an email," says Daniel Ritari, Deluxe vice president of enterprise information risk management.
Monitoring the Monitors

Monitoring takes place on a huge scale at the Department of Health and Human Services—which encompasses the Food and Drug Administration, Medicare and the National Institutes of Health, among others.

The department's Computer Security Incident Response Center looks for anomalies or odd behavior in more than 10 billion computer-system security logs a day from within the HHS and its component organizations. Each organization has its own network and security operations centers, but they all share their security and audit logs with the HHS computer security center.

In addition, no one systems administrator or security analyst has complete control, as HHS makes sure the more critical security functions and tasks performed by one individual are checked by a peer.

The checks and balances represent "best practices in network security," says Daniel Galik, HHS chief information-security officer.

Without such safeguards, he says, system administrators with special privileges would be able "to cover their tracks if maliciously accessing systems."

"It's like the nuclear bomb scenario, where no rogue general can push the button on his own," he says.

"Where people are given more responsibilities and have authority to perform actions or grant privileges," Mr. Galik says, "a little more attention has to be paid to those individuals."
http://professional.wsj.com/article/...bs %3Darticle





Workers Did Not Exceed Authorization When Data Stolen, Says Appeals Court

Ninth Circuit offers unique take on Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
Jaikumar Vijayan

In a somewhat startling decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit last week ruled that several employees at an executive recruitment firm did not exceed their authorized access to their company's database when they logged into the system and stole confidential data from it.

In a 22-page ruling, the appellate court held that an employee with valid access to corporate data cannot be held liable under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) if they then misuse or misappropriate the data.

"The CFAA expressly prohibits improper 'access' of computer information," chief judge Alex Kozinski wrote in the court's majority opinion. "It does not prohibit misuse or misappropriation," he wrote. The term "exceed authorized access" under the CFAA applies specifically to external hackers and violations of "restrictions on access to information, and not restrictions on its use," Kozinski held.

The appellate court's decision affirms a previous ruling made by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The government must now decide if it wants to take the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The case in question involves David Nosal, a former employee at Korn/Ferry, a large executive recruitment firm based in Los Angeles. Soon after Nosal left the firm a few years ago, he convinced a few of his former colleagues to join him in setting up a competing firm, according to a description of the case in court documents.

Before joining Nosal, some of he employees used their login credentials to access a confidential Korn/Ferry database and download a large list of names and contact information of executive candidates from around the world. The information, which was clearly marked as meant for Kron/Ferry's internal use and prohibited from disclosure, was then passed on to Nosal.

After the theft was discovered, Nosal was indicted on 20 counts, including mail fraud, trade secret theft and violations of the CFAA. He was accused under CFAA of aiding and abetting his former colleagues to exceed their authorized access on the Korn/Ferry system. Nosal appealed the CFAA charges, contending that the law applied only to external hackers and not to individuals who misused data after obtaining it in an authorized fashion.

His appeal was originally dismissed by the district court. The court held that individuals who accessed a computer with the intention to defraud were in fact exceeding their authorized access to the system.

Nosal filed a second appeal seeking to dismiss the CFAA charges after a Ninth Circuit decision in a separate case involving similar unauthorized access charges. That case involved an individual named Christopher Brekka, who was accused by his employer LVRC Holdings, LLC of accessing the company's computers without proper authorization, both while he was an employee and later after he had left the firm. The appellate court ruled that Brekka did not violate CFAA provisions through his actions, even when he accessed LVRC's computers and emailed confidential documents to himself and his wife just prior to leaving the company.

The court held that Brekka had been authorized to use the computer and had been entitled to access the documents and therefore could not be charged of exceeding his access rights.

The district court upheld Nosal's second motion to dismiss the CFAA charges, after the Brekka ruling. The government filed an appeal following that decision. Kozinski last week offered the same rational used in the Brekka case to dismiss the government's appeal.

The CFAA, he wrote, applies primarily to unauthorized access involving external hackers. The definition of "exceeds authorized access" under the CFAA applies mainly to people who have no authorized access to the computer at all. The term would also apply to insiders who might have legitimate access to a system but not to specific information or files on the system. Applying the language in the CFAA any other way would turn it into a "sweeping Internet-policing mandate," he wrote.

"Consider the typical corporate policy that computers can be used only for business purposes. What exactly is a 'nonbusiness purpose'?" he wrote. "If you use the computer to check the weather report for a business trip? For the company softball game? For your vacation to Hawaii? And if minor personal uses are tolerated, how can an employee be on notice of what constitutes a violation sufficient to trigger criminal liability?"

Kozinski acknowledged that other appellate courts have applied the CFAA more broadly to apply to violations of corporate computer use restrictions or violations of a "duty of loyality". In his opinion, Koznski said he was not persuaded by the decisions of the other courts and insisted that the term "exceeds authorized access" was meant to be applied in a very narrow and specific context.

"Basing criminal liability on violations of private computer use polices can transform whole categories of otherwise innocuous behavior into federal crimes simply because a computer is involved," he said. "Employees who call family members from their work phones will become criminals if they send an email instead."

In a dissenting opinion, Circuit Judges Barry Silverman and Richard Tallman wrote that the majority had taken a clearly written federal statute and parsed it in a manner that distorts the original intent.

"This is not an esoteric concept," Silverman wrote. "A bank teller is entitled to access a bank's money for legitimate banking purposes, but not to take the bank's money for himself." Similarly, while a new car buyer might be entitled to test drive a new car, he would "exceed his authority" to take the car to Mexico. "No other circuit that has considered this statute finds the problems that the majority does," he wrote.
https://www.computerworld.com/s/arti... ppeals_court





CIA’s Secret Fear: High-Tech Border Checks Will Blow Spies’ Cover
Jeff Stein

When Tom Cruise had to break into police headquarters in Minority Report, the futuristic crime thriller, he got past the iris scanners with ease: He just swapped out his eyeballs.

CIA agents may find that just a little beyond the call of duty. But meanwhile, they’ve got to come up with something else: The increasing deployment of iris scanners and biometric passports at worldwide airports, hotels and business headquarters, designed to catch terrorists and criminals, are playing havoc with operations that require CIA spies to travel under false identities.

Busy spy crossroads such as Dubai, Jordan, India and many E.U. points of entry are employing iris scanners to link eyeballs irrevocably to a particular name. Likewise, the increasing use of biometric passports, which are embedded with microchips containing a person’s face, sex, fingerprints, date and place of birth, and other personal data, are increasingly replacing the old paper ones. For a clandestine field operative, flying under a false name could be a one-way ticket to a headquarters desk, since they’re irrevocably chained to whatever name and passport they used.

“If you go to one of those countries under an alias, you can’t go again under another name,” explains a career spook, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he remains an agency consultant. ”So it’s a one-time thing — one and done. The biometric data on your passport, and maybe your iris, too, has been linked forever to whatever name was on your passport the first time. You can’t show up again under a different name with the same data.”

The issue is exceedingly sensitive to agency operatives and intelligence officials, past and present. “I think you have finally found a topic I can’t talk about,” said Charles Faddis, a CIA operations officer who retired in 2008.

“I can’t help you with this,” added a former intelligence agency chief. “I do think this is a significant issue with great implications for the safety and security of our people, so I recommend you not publish anything on this. You can do a lot of harm and no good.”

Other former operatives would not even allow their polite refusals to comment to be quoted. The CIA, naturally, refused to comment for this story.

But several intelligence sources speaking on condition of anonymity agreed to discuss the issue with Danger Room, on the grounds that the problem is already well known to foreign spy agencies and terrorist groups, since it effects everyone seeking to operate covertly or illegally across a border.

In “the old days,” as one put it — that would be before 9/11 — deep-cover CIA operatives could use and discard false passports like hand wipes. “The only way immigration could tell if the passports were fake was to look at the stamps, paper, photo, and so on,” said another recently retired CIA operative, whose worked on sensitive projects under non-official cover. Operatives could land at, say, Dubai, with a passport with one false name, then pick up another from the local CIA station to register at the hotel and conduct a mission. Then the same operative could return the country several times under different names, repeating the process.

Biometrics are making that impossible. Even crossing the border with a real identity, then donning a fake one in-country, presents its own risks. “When you go to check into a hotel room for a meeting with an asset, or even rent a car to drive to the meeting — or hold the meeting in the car — many hotels and car rental agencies upload their customer data, including passport number, to immigration every day,” the former spook notes. “Most countries are looking for visa overstays. But when you show up on the list as never having entered the country … it brings the police around to ask questions.”

If the CIA is working in concert with a local intelligence agency, as it commonly does in E.U. countries, Jordan, Thailand and other spots, undercover entries and exits can be smoothed over.

But “unilateral ops” — where the agency is trying to conceal its activities from the host country — “have deteriorated significantly” because of the new technologies, the career spook said.

The agency saw the windows closing, of course: The clamor for new counterterrorism border controls reached high decibels after 9/11. By mid-decade, the E.U. was requiring member states to issue biometric passports and testing iris scanners.

Right away, the new world of border controls loomed as a big headache for the CIA. The ability to travel under false identities is as basic to spy work as motor oil is to engines. The day of the trench-coated, fast-talking spy easily slipping in and out of countries on false papers multiple times was coming to an end.

Often, a CIA operations officer traveling under nonofficial cover (so-called NOCs) can pick up a new set of documents from a CIA courier or dead drop once he or she is in the country. There’s nothing new about that. But since the better hotels require guests to present their passports, which are scanned into the system, that ruse is increasingly rendered moot, especially in hostile climes like Iran, where the interior ministry’s computers are assumed to be hard-wired into the airline passenger and hotel guest lists.

“Not that they couldn’t duplicate the technology or the bonafides of the passports themselves — watermarks, holograms, et cetera…” the retired operative added. “Their biggest worry was getting the [false] passport and travel data into the country’s databases.”

One obvious workaround is for operatives to book one-star hotels where such impediments are less likely. But if they’re traveling undercover as, say, a prosperous Western business executive, booking a room in a seedy joint only raises red flags with the desk clerks and local gendarmes.

So after 9/11, intelligence sources said, CIA ops managers began putting renewed emphasis on recruiting spies in foreign border-control agencies — people with access to the electronic files, who can change, add or eliminate documents.

“Just before I left, they were gearing up to make a request for CIA officers to recruit foreigners with access to immigration databases,” said the retired NOC. “I’m sure that several people made careers out of just this kind of operation, much as some officers did when the NSA suddenly lost millions of access points to intelligence when the world switched from microwave towers to fiber optic lines — whole departments were formed to recruit telephone company assets in foreign countries.”

The challenge isn’t just the CIA’s, of course. Every intelligence agency faces it. The problem is especially acute for Israel’s Mossad.

“That’s right,” says former Mossad operative Michael Ross. “I remember discussions about that in the latter part of my career, just before 9/11. Obviously for Mossad the issue of documents and identity are an ongoing huge, huge project…. You can’t go into Syria, say, or basically anywhere in the Middle East, with an Israeli passport, for obvious reasons, so we have to use other documents.”

Mossad puts its documents through test runs, said Ross, who retired in 2001.

“We get into, say, France, with a document, then change our appearance, then go into Germany and see if they pick up the physical change, to see if the two speak to each other and say, ‘Wait a minute, is this the same guy? Before he had a beard and glasses, and now he’s clean-shaven and wears contacts.’”

“There are some very smart people in Mossad who spend a lot of time and energy ensuring that we can get our people in and out of countries without a document flap,” Ross added.

But something went wrong in a Dubai hotel in January 2010. A Hamas official was assassinated, almost certainly at the hands of Mossad. As it turned out, Israeli operatives, who entered Dubai on forged passports from the United Kingdom, Ireland, France and Germany, were videotaped in the hotel by its security cameras. The resulting dust-up mystified longtime intelligence observers, who thought Mossad incapable of such sloppy tradecraft. Either Mossad hadn’t locked down its relations with Dubai authorities as tightly as it thought, Ross speculated, or an Iranian mole leaked the surveillance tapes.

For day-in, day-out CIA espionage operations abroad, “biometrics is a problem only if you have the same case officer traveling into the country multiple times with multiple aliases,” said the former NOC. ”The easy fix to that is to break up the workload among several case officers who only travel to that country under one alias.”

Or to meet your spies someplace else, others suggested, where border controls are looser, such as Cyprus.

Or better yet, introducing malware into the computers of foreign immigration and border control services, to change data on demand.

But the electronic curtain is descending all over the world.

All EU countries are now required to issue second-generation biometric passports, however, the EU does not require foreign visitors to present a biometric passport. By last September, only Belgium had not complied, according to a scolding press release by the European Commission. At most American airports and seaports, foreign nationals have to produce biometric passports to submit to a fingerprint check before entering the country.

Meanwhile, a business newsletter anticipated last year that “Research analysts predict that in five years, iris scans will be commonly used for airport security and border control.”

That might be a little ambitious. Britain’s groundbreaking iris-scanning system is being quietly scaled back, according to reports from last November.

It’s not that the machines weren’t accurate. They just didn’t work as fast as planned. Lines were long.

“We currently do not have any iris scanners in use,” said Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman Stephanie Malin.

Testing continues. One company alone, Eyelock Corp., has deployed machines in some U.S. ports, as well as Mexico, Singapore and Columbia, a company spokeswoman said. It has pilot programs running in Brazil, Chile, France, Spain, the U.K. and unspecified “Middle East” ports.

Dubai loves it. In 2009, Ministry of Interior officials claimed its iris scans had netted 54,000 criminals and 1,088 forged passports the previous year.

Did they catch any CIA operatives in their biometric dragnet? If so, no one is talking.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012...iometric-tech/





Great Piece by Charlie Stross on the DOJ’s e-Book Price-Fixing Lawsuit:

DRM on ebooks is dead. (Or if not dead, it’s on death row awaiting a date with the executioner.)

It doesn’t matter whether Macmillan wins the price-fixing lawsuit bought by the Department of Justice. The point is, the big six publishers’ Plan B for fighting the emerging Amazon monopsony has failed (insofar as it has been painted as a price-fixing ring, whether or not it was one in fact). This means that they need a Plan C. And the only viable Plan C, for breaking Amazon’s death-grip on the consumers, is to break DRM.


I think he’s right, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. DRM is a religion for old-growth media executives. Rational thought could lead them to this solution, but won’t, because they’re starting with an irrational bedrock assumption: that there can exist a technical solution to defeat piracy. Their belief in DRM is a matter of faith, not logic.

If I’m wrong though, and the publishers see the light of day and start selling DRM-free ePub books, I think that’d be a win for Apple, in the same way that dropping DRM from music has helped, not hurt, Apple’s music business. Amazon is the one whose Kindle devices and apps do not support DRM-free ePub books.
http://daringfireball.net/linked/201...oss-amazon-drm





Daring to Cut Off Amazon
David Streitfeld

Plenty of people are upset at Amazon these days, but it took a small publishing company whose best-known volume is a toilet-training tome to give the mighty Internet store the boot.

The Educational Development Corporation, saying it was fed up with Amazon’s scorched-earth tactics, announced at the end of February that it would remove all its titles from the retailer’s virtual shelves. That eliminated at a stroke $1.5 million in annual sales, a move that could be a significant hit to the 46-year-old EDC’s bottom line.

“Amazon is squeezing everyone out of business,” said Randall White, EDC’s chief executive. “I don’t like that. They’re a predator. We’re better off without them.”

It is an unequal contest. EDC has 77 employees, no-frill offices on an industrial strip here and a stock-market valuation of $18 million — hardly a threat to Amazon, a Wall Street darling worth $86 billion. But Mr. White’s bold move to take his 1,800 children’s books away from the greatest retailing success of the Internet era is more evidence of the extraordinary tumult within the book world over one simple question: who gets to decide how much a book costs?

The Justice Department last week sued five major publishers and Apple on price-fixing charges, simultaneously settling with three of the houses. The publishers say they were not illegally colluding but simply taking advantage of a new device platform — Apple’s iPad — to sell their e-books in a different way, where they controlled the prices.

The publishers wanted to stop Amazon from using what one of them called “the wretched $9.99 price point,” according to court papers. Selling e-books so cheaply, they feared, would solidify Amazon’s robust grip on the business while simultaneously building a low-price mind-set among consumers that could prove ruinous to other bookstores and the publishers themselves.

EDC does not produce e-books, but saw exactly this happening with its physical inventory. Amazon was buying EDC’s books from a distributor and discounting them to the bone, just as it does with everything it sells. This might have been a boon for readers, but it was creating trouble with other retailers who carry the company’s titles, as well as with EDC’s network of independent sales agents, who market its books from their homes.

“They were becoming showrooms for Amazon,” Mr. White said. “We were shooting ourselves in the foot.”

Amazon is generally reluctant to explain its business practices and declined to comment for this article. But its executives say it is shaking up an antiquated business model by eliminating middlemen and passing the savings on to consumers. Publishers that try to cling to the past, they have said, will die.

The retailer’s growing list of critics, however, argue that Amazon has $48 billion in revenue but hardly any profit, proof that its approach is opportunistic and unsustainable. When traditional publishers, booksellers and wholesalers are destroyed, these opponents say, Amazon will be left with a monopoly that will be detrimental to the larger health of the culture.

In recent months, the dispute over Amazon’s strategy of selling books below cost has boiled over from several directions.

During the holiday season, Amazon encouraged customers to use physical stores as showrooms before ordering more cheaply online, a move that infuriated bookstores in particular. Publishers and distributors say that Amazon, never exactly shy in negotiating terms, has been more assertive in its quest for ever-better deals.

In February, Amazon demanded better margins from the Independent Publishers Group, a Chicago distributor of dozens of small imprints. IPG balked, so Amazon removed nearly 5,000 of the company’s e-books from its site.

“Amazon wants the price of books to be very, very low — lower than the publishing community can support,” said Curt Matthews, IPG’s chief executive. “Making a book is still a craft industry. Books need to be edited, to be publicized. Someone needs to say this is good and this is not. If there is not enough money to support that whole chain, the system will break down.”

Publishers have often been ambivalent about Amazon. On the one hand, it offers an extraordinarily efficient method of distributing their wares. Readers anywhere can easily order the most obscure volume and have it delivered the next day. With e-books, access is even easier, but publishers’ vulnerability is compounded; Amazon controls not just the method of distribution but the actual device the text is consumed on.

“Last year was the best in our 37 years, mainly due to the way Amazon was pushing the books,” said Bryce Milligan of Wings Press in San Antonio, an IPG client. “Then Amazon cut us off because they couldn’t get a better deal. Now our e-books sales are down 50 percent.”

If publishers and wholesalers feel threatened, writers are caught in the middle — both pawns and prize.

Ted McClelland, a writer in Chicago, had two IPG e-books dropped by Amazon. He just got a royalty statement on one of them, “Horseplayers: Life at the Track.” Half of his modest income on the book came from Kindle sales on Amazon.

“I don’t know whether Amazon is being greedy or IPG is being cheap, but I’m caught in the middle,” Mr. McClelland said. “What matters to me is getting my books back on Kindle.”

Here in Tulsa, EDC operates out of offices on the eastern outskirts in a less-than-glamorous district of warehouses and auto supply shops. Like IPG, it is primarily a distributor, selling picture books developed in England by Usborne Books to toy stores and bookshops in the United States. Its publishing line, Kane Miller, produces the popular “Everyone Poops” book and its sequels.

EDC’s so-called consultants — a direct sales force of about 7,000 women — sell to friends and acquaintances as well as their local schools. For a while the party plan was successful. Sales more than doubled from 2000 to 2004.

In recent years, though, the consultants have found it rough going. They would pass around a picture book like “The Noisy Body Book” or “Guess How Much I Miss You,” talking it up, and then the customer would order it online. Sales fell about 20 percent. Frustrated consultants began quitting.

What happened in February to Christy Reed, a sales consultant in Pleasanton, Tex., was becoming all too routine. Her school district decided to order 16 copies of a science encyclopedia and a science dictionary but then completed the deal on Amazon.

“I worked so hard to sell those books,” Mrs. Reed said. “I had to talk to so many different people. Then I lost the sale to a couple of clicks on the computer.”

She acknowledged that the district saved a few dollars but added: “I’m here, in the neighborhood. I went to school here. My kids went to school here. Yes, they got the books for less. But my earnings go back into our community. Amazon’s do not.”

After Mr. White, EDC’s chief, heard about that episode, his exasperation with Amazon peaked. Several times in the past, he had grappled with the retailer. He tried to get it to lower its discount on his books three years ago, but a tentative deal did not stick, he said. He was outraged that the company did not collect sales tax, which had the effect of making its books even cheaper.

Two months ago, he asked his biggest wholesaler, Baker & Taylor, to stop selling all EDC books to Amazon. When Baker & Taylor refused, Mr. White canceled its account. Baker & Taylor declined repeated requests to comment about EDC.

Of EDC’s $26 million in annual revenue, Baker & Taylor was responsible for about 6 percent, most of which was because of Amazon. Mr. White, a trim 70, said that when he made the decision to bail out, his blood pressure soared. But he’s also reveling in the excitement, just a little. He commissioned a drawing of EDC in the role of David taking on the giant Amazon. “I’m Type A,” he said. “I don’t mind a fight.”

Somewhat to Mr. White’s surprise, EDC is doing better without Amazon, at least for the moment. (Some of its books are still available on Amazon from third-party sellers.) Sales in March rose, in part because of new accounts like a toy store in Round Rock, Tex., that placed an initial order for 61 books. And colleagues in the business have been congratulating the publisher, or at least expressing their admiration for Mr. White’s guts.

“I tell them, ‘You never had the chance to make 7,000 women happy in one day,’ ” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/16/b...ublishers.html





How the Tech Parade Passed Sony By
Hiroko Tabuchi

TOKYO

THE lights dimmed. The crowd hushed. The teleprompters flickered.

Kazuo Hirai stepped up and flashed a winning smile: it was show time. The scene was oddly upbeat inside the Sony Corporation last Thursday as Mr. Hirai, the company’s new chief executive, faced the cameras. He outlined a strategy that, he vowed, would return the troubled electronics giant to profit.

“The time for Sony to change is now,” said Mr. Hirai, who formally took up the C.E.O. post on April 1. He posed for the cameras, one finger held high in a No. 1 sign. “I believe Sony can change,” he said.

Outside Sony — and inside it, too — not everyone is quite so sure.

That is because Sony, which once defined Japan’s technological prowess, wowed the world with the Walkman and the Trinitron TV and shocked Hollywood with bold acquisitions like Columbia Pictures, is now in the fight of its life.

In fact, it is in a fight for its life — a development that exemplifies the stunning decline of Japan’s industrialized economy. Once upon a time, Japan Inc., not to mention Sony itself, seemed invulnerable. Today, Sony and many other Japanese manufacturers are pressed on all sides: by rising Asian rivals, a punishingly strong Japanese yen and, in Sony’s case, an astonishing lack of ideas.

No one was terribly surprised last week when Sony announced that its losses this year would be worse than it had expected. Sony, after all, hasn’t turned a profit since 2008. It now expects to lose $6.4 billion this year. The reason is plain: Sony hasn’t had a hit product in years.

The verdict of the stock market has been swift and brutal. Sony’s share price closed at 1,444 yen ($17.83) on Friday, a quarter of its value a decade ago and roughly where it stood in the mid-1980s, when the Walkman ruled. Sony’s market value is now one-ninth that of Samsung Electronics, and just one-thirtieth of Apple’s.

Even in Japan, where many consumers remain loyal to the brand, some people seem to be giving up on the company.

“It’s almost game over at Sony,” said Yoshiaki Sakito, a former Sony executive who has worked for Walt Disney, Bain & Company, Apple and a start-up focused on innovation training. “I don’t see how Sony’s going to bounce back now.”

WHAT went wrong is a tale of lost opportunities and disastrous infighting. It is also the story of a proud company that was unwilling or unable to adapt to realities of the global marketplace.

Sony’s gravest mistake was that it failed to ride some of the biggest waves of technological innovation in recent decades: digitalization, a shift toward software and the importance of the Internet.

One by one, every sphere where the company competed — from hardware to software to communications to content — was turned topsy-turvy by disruptive new technology and unforeseen rivals. And these changes only highlighted the conflicts and divisions within Sony.

With its catalog of music and foundation in electronics, Sony had the tools to create a version of the iPod long before Apple introduced it in 2001. The Sony co-founder, Akio Morita, envisioned as early as the 1980s marrying digital technology with media content for a completely new user experience.

It didn’t happen. Initially, Sony engineers resisted the power of the company’s media divisions. Then Sony wrestled with how to build devices that let consumers download and copy music without undermining music sales or agreements with its artists. The company went its own way: its early digital music players, for instance, used proprietary files and were incompatible with the fast-growing MP3 format.

By the time the different divisions had been corralled into cooperating, Sony had lost its foothold in two crucial product categories: televisions and portable music devices. It was late to flat-panel displays, as well as to digital music players like the iPod.

After disappointing sales, Sony pulled the plug on its answer to Apple’s iTunes, the Sony Connect online store, after just three years. It has not been able to offer up a comprehensive alternative since.

Lower-cost manufacturers from South Korea, China and elsewhere, meanwhile, are increasingly undercutting Sony and other high-end electronics makers. As Sony’s brand started losing much of its luster, the company found that it had a harder time charging a premium for its products.

“At this point, Sony just needs some strategy, any strategy, because that is better than no strategy at all,” said Sea-Jin Chang, chairman for business policy at the National University of Singapore and author of “Sony vs. Samsung: The Inside Story of the Electronics Giants’ Battle for Global Supremacy.”

AN area where Sony has found success — and perhaps one that most crystallizes the transition from stand-alone consumer electronics into a digital, Internet-centered world — is video games. Sony marketed its PlayStation 3 console, for example as an integrated entertainment system that serves as a hub in the living room, connecting the Internet and television.

But Sony’s obsession with hardware has marred that strategy. A delay in developing the console’s Blu-ray DVD player forced Sony to push back its release. Sales suffered because the PlayStation 3 cost much more than rival models from Nintendo and Microsoft. Sony was also slow to move into the world of online games, giving Microsoft a head start.

Sony’s woes mirror a wider decline in Japanese electronics. Though executives here are quick to blame a strong yen, which hurts exports, a deeper issue is that once-innovative companies seem to have run out of ideas. And when a nation can no longer compete on abundant labor or cheap capital, ideas and innovation are paramount.

Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers “have lost their technology leadership in many areas,” Steve Durose, head of Asia Pacific telecommunications, media and technology ratings at Fitch Ratings, said in a recent industry commentary.

“Ten years ago, these companies were major technology innovators, the creators or leading developers of many electronic products and trendsetting devices such as televisions, digital cameras, portable music players and games consoles,” Mr. Durose said. “Today, however, the number of products remaining where they can boast undisputed global leadership has narrowed significantly, having being usurped or equaled by the likes of Apple and Samsung Electronics.”

Both publicly and privately, Sony’s top management shows a deep understanding of many of these fundamental challenges: the need for different sections of the company to work better together, for a more unified user experience, for innovation.

But Sony’s recent leaders have had trouble wielding authority over the sprawling company. Sony remains dominated by proud, territorial engineers who often shun cooperation. For many of them, cost-cutting is the enemy of creativity — a legacy of Sony’s co-founders, Mr. Morita and Masaru Ibuka, who tried to foster a culture of independence. But the founders had more success than recent executives in exerting control over division managers.

Executives complain privately of recalcitrant managers who refuse to share information or work with other divisions. One executive said he was startled to discover that a manager whose position had been eliminated had been rehired under a different title. (“Or maybe he never really left,” said this executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of angering his bosses.)

In 2005, such challenges prompted Sony to select Howard Stringer, a British-born American businessman, as C.E.O., rather than Ken Kutaragi, the brains behind PlayStation. Mr. Stringer had a record as an agent of change: as head of Sony in the United States, he oversaw music, movies and electronics there and eliminated 9,000 of 30,000 jobs.

At his first news conference as C.E.O., Mr. Stringer declared that he would “accelerate cross-company collaboration, thereby revitalizing the company and promoting creativity.”

But not even Mr. Stringer, who has stepped aside for Mr. Hirai but will remain as chairman, could break down all the silos at Sony.

The company still makes a confusing catalog of gadgets that overlap or even cannibalize one another. It has also continued to let its product lines mushroom: 10 different consumer-level camcorders and almost 30 different TVs, for instance, crowd and confuse consumers.

“Sony makes too many models, and for none of them can they say, ‘This contains our best, most cutting-edge technology,’ ” Mr. Sakito said. “Apple, on the other hand, makes one amazing phone in just two colors and says, ‘This is the best.’ ”

Sony’s online strategy is problematic as well. The company has yet to come up with an integrated common platform to deliver music, movies and games, each of which, until recently, had its own network, with other platforms like the PlayMemories photo- and video-sharing services to boot.

Now, these disjointed services, developed by far-flung units, are being forced into the Sony Entertainment Network, which Sony says will be its overarching content delivery platform.

The services “have different looks, feels and user-experiences” and are “super-disjointed,” said a former Sony executive who left in frustration. He spoke on condition of anonymity, saying he did not want to hurt relations with his former employer. “Sony has been talking networks for so long, but there’s really nothing very tangible,” he said.

Sony’s woes hurt not just Sony, but also Japan. In the United States, new technologies are often developed by young companies not held back by their past. These upstarts eventually replace slow-to-adapt giants. But in Japan, no major electronics manufacturer has joined the industry’s top ranks for over a half-century. And, though struggling, companies like Sony continue to lure some of the country’s top talent.

Still, the creative destruction of global capitalism is a touchy subject in Japan, where public opinion still sides with established names. When Tomoko Namba, founder of the successful mobile games company DeNA, remarked in 2010 that companies like Nintendo and Sony “had reached retirement age” and that she hoped DeNA would be the first new Japanese tech company in decades to go global, she set off a firestorm in the Japanese blogosphere.

WHERE will Sony go from here? Experts say it will have to start exiting some product lines. It has already spun off a chemicals business, for instance, and some analysts wonder about its money-losing TV business.

Mr. Hirai, the new C.E.O., has said that the company will focus on three businesses: mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets; cameras and camcorders; and games. But he says Sony will not retreat in TVs. “It’s at the center of every home,” he said last week. “It is part of Sony’s DNA”

Some analysts wonder if Mr. Hirai — who previously ran the money-losing games and TV businesses — is the right man to lead Sony. A protégé of Mr. Stringer, he appears to have been appointed as much for his ease in English as his management skills, analysts say.

“The bottom line is: if you want to be perceived as a creator of cool tech, you have to create cool tech. The challenge for Sony is that those examples have not been there, and they haven’t been there now for a number of years,” said Steve Beck, founder and managing partner at cg42, a management consulting firm that focuses on brand vulnerabilities at top tech companies. “The tarnish on their brand has definitely begun.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/t...ch-parade.html





Seattle Rex vs. Apple: The Verdict Is In
Seattle Rex

A few years ago, Apple sold me a $4,000 computer with a defective graphics chip/logic board. The defective part was the Nvidia 8600M GT GPU, and when it was discovered that the machine was defective, Apple refused to take it back and issue me a refund. Instead, they promised to replace the 8600M GT boards when they failed, up to 4 years from the date of purchase.

Three years later, the board failed, and predictably, Apple refused to replace it. Instead, they used the fact that the machine wouldn’t boot (due to the failed logic board) to deny the repair. Not only that, but in addition, they tried to charge me a hefty sum of money to have it replaced, knowing full well that Nvidia pays for the full repair cost.

Three and a half months ago, after having my repair denied, I announced on this very site that I was going to sue Apple. Reading these lawsuit threats often, many people assumed that I was bluffing or blowing off steam, but true to my word, I did exactly what I said I was going to do. I sued Apple.

I did not take this step lightly, however. In the months following the announcement, I did everything in my power to keep my dispute with Apple out of the court system.

First, I filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. In their rebuttal to the BBB, Apple blatantly lied about the diagnostics they had run on my computer, and the BBB promptly closed the case, leaving Apple’s “A+” rating intact. Next, I spoke with Apple Executive Services … three separate times. Each time, I was told that “We value each customer and hope that they have a positive experience with Apple, and are sorry that you did not have this experience, but you will get nothing.” … or something to this effect.

After that, I sent a demand letter to Apple via certified mail. I informed them that if I did not have my issue resolved within 10 days, I would sue.

Only then, after Apple failed to reply, did I file a Small Claims lawsuit.

Last week, the trial was held.

I arrived at the King County Courthouse shortly after 8am, and about forty five minutes later, the clerk performed roll call. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Apple had sent not one, but two people to represent the company. When Apple told me that I would get nothing, they really meant it.

After calling roll, and before calling the docket, the clerk went down the case list and asked each litigant if they would be willing to try mediation. Mediation keeps cases out of the court system, and keeps the outcomes confidential. This is especially beneficial to companies, as having judgements issued against them by customers is bad PR.

Always one to exhaust all good-faith remedies before resorting to more drastic measures (really, nobody can say I didn’t try my hardest to stay out of court), I agreed to try mediation, and to my surprise, so did Apple. Since everything said in the mediation room is confidential, I cannot go into details about what happened there, but I will tell you that it failed, and the case was sent back to the courtroom.

In retrospect, I am glad that mediation did fail. After seeing that Apple sent two guys … two guys who were in continuous contact with Apple legal via text and cell … I knew that I was outgunned, outspent, and out-everything elsed. $500,000,000,000 vs. $37 and a pack of chewing gum is not a fair fight. Because of this, I offered settlements that were ridiculously favorable to Apple and unfavorable to myself, but even these were rejected. Thank goodness that they were.

After failing mediation, shortly after 11am, we were called before the judge, sworn in, and I read my opening statement. I said basically everything I’ve been saying on this blog for the last several months. I stuck to the facts, handed my exhibits to the clerk (several printed pages), and was as professional as possible.

When it was Apple’s turn, their representatives opened by throwing a hail mary pass. While holding up the press release outlining the 8600GT replacement program, they claimed that, because the CPU in my MacBook Pro was clocked at 2.6Ghz, and not 2.4Ghz, or 2.5Ghz as stated in the release, that I had a completely different computer … one that was not subject to the 4 year replacement program.

You see, when I ordered my MacBook Pro, I paid about $300 extra for them to up-clock the chip from 2.5Ghz to 2.6Ghz. Yes, it was a classic Apple ripoff, and yes, I was dumb to order it, but I did it, mea culpa.

I had absolutely no idea that it would be used against me in a court of law to explain to a judge why I should not be covered by an extended warranty, and it caught me off-guard. Perhaps, despite everything, I am still a bit naive, because not even I expected Apple to just … lie. At least not in such a silly manner.

Remember, I was not going up against the owner of some taco stand, I was up against the most profitable company in the USA. I honestly expected more than a silly fib.

After listening to Apple, the judge turned to me and asked for my response, and I explained to him, in detail, that the chips, logic boards, and GPUs in all of the MacBook Pro models were the same, regardless of the speed at which the CPUs had been clocked.

Confused, the judge turned to Apple and asked, “Is this true?”

There was some awkward silence as the Apple guys exchanged uncomfortable looks between each other, before one of them finally said “Yes, it is.”

“So, this machine IS covered by the 8600GT repair program?”, asked the judge.

“Yes it is, your honor”, replied Apple.

So, there we were. Not more than 2 minutes into the trial, and Apple conceded to trying to hoodwink the judge.

This is more or less the way the rest of the trial played out. I made a point, Apple rebutted it with something completely off-the-wall and irrelevant, and I explained to the judge why Apple’s rebuttal was nonsense. I took the time to explain everything clearly, I answered all of the judge’s technical questions in detail, and at one point, the judge even declared that he would accept my testimony as that of an “expert witness”.

Apple, well, they didn’t really have a defense. They just kept repeating things like “It’s Apple’s policy to do this”, and “It’s Apple’s position that we do that”. The Apple guys seemed genuinely surprised that I knew as much as I did about computer hardware. I’m not trying to insult iPeople, at least not in this article, but during both mediation and the trial, I realized that Apple has a strong expectation that their users not be tech-savvy and, as such, Apple seems used to infantilizing and bamboozling their customers with silly and nonsensical explanations of highly technical matters.

Years ago, I remember debating the Mac vs. Everything Else issue with a friend of mine, and every time I would bring up the relative attributes of a particular component, he would always respond with “Specs don’t matter!”

I thought he was just being stubborn, but after this experience, I realize that this type of “I don’t care about gigahertz and whatchamajiggers, I just know that Macs use pixie dust and purple elephant dung to make magic!” mentality is a part of the Apple culture from the top down. From the lowest-level sales rep all the way up to the corporate guys.

As the trial went on, I showed the judge evidence that the 8600M graphics cards were known to be defective, I showed him that I had an 8600M in my machine, and I explained to him that, despite their promise to do so, Apple refused to replace my board because it would not boot, and it would not boot because the 8600M had failed.

The judge accepted these explanations, and when he asked Apple what it would cost to replace my logic board if I paid in cash, I interjected and explained to the judge that if Apple replaced only the logic board, it would simply be another logic board with a defective GPU, therefore, such a solution would not be acceptable.

The judge responded by asking Apple if my machine could be fitted with a different GPU, and when they replied “No, that machine will only accept an 8600M GT”, the judge declared my make & model of MacBook Pro to be defective and unrepairable by any means.

Eventually, over the continued objections of the Apple folks (one of the guys kept arguing that I should give Apple one last chance to fix it), I was awarded a cash amount. The amount I was awarded is enough to replace the computer, which means that I should once again have a 17″ laptop. Assuming Apple actually pays me.

Now, I didn’t get everything I asked for. When I filed the suit, I was pissed off, so I asked for the kitchen sink … a refund of Apple Care (which I only purchased when I learned the machine was defective), compensation for loss of use, and even some punitive damages.

Had I been able to show loss-of-use damages, I probably would have gotten them, but the judge awarded what would “make me whole” … essentially, putting me back in the same place that I was before Apple wronged me. This being the case, I received compensation for the machine itself, plus court costs, costs of service, etc.

It was a fair ruling, a little more than I expected actually, and I thanked the judge.

The Apple guys, well, they were none too happy. By the time I stood up, they had already beat a hasty path to the courtroom door. I was going to offer my hand, thank them for their time, and explain that it was nothing personal, but they weren’t interested in any of it.

And that was that.

I guess what they say is true. The sun even shines on a dog’s butthole every now and then, and on this day, I got myself a nice tan.

David faced Goliath, and not unlike the AT&T case a couple of months ago, David somehow, someway, came out on top.

Even though I’m glad it turned out the way it did, one question still nags me:

Why?

Why did it have to come to this?

At one point, the judge asked Apple how much it would have cost them to have simply replaced my logic board when I had taken it in, and one of the Apple guys said “Oh, it wouldn’t have cost us anything, Nvidia foots the bill for each board we replace.”

The judge’s face almost hit the floor as he shot me a quizzical look, to which I just shrugged. I knew that he, and everyone else in the courtroom was thinking the same thing:

If Apple could have replaced my logic board at no cost to themselves, then why in the hell did they drag this out for so long, and why did they send two people to court to try and make sure that I got absolutely nothing?

Friends, this is a question I have been asking myself for three months, and it is a question that I do not have the answer to.

You know, I fully respect a person or a company that stands up for himself/itself when they are in the right. It’s the correct thing to do. What I don’t understand, however, is why Apple fought so hard against me when they were clearly in the wrong. It wasn’t even a judgement call. I knew they were wrong, the judge knew they were wrong, the clerk knew it, the audience knew it, and you could tell … you could just tell that Apple knew it as well.

And what of the shareholders? What should they make of this? Apple’s stock has been an E-ticket ride lately, but this incident should really give shareholders pause. I mean, what kind of judgement are the current leaders of Apple using?

Think about it … instead of repairing my computer under the repair program that they, themselves, announced … at absolutely no cost to themselves … Apple paid two guys to come to Downtown Seattle, and … well … lie, so that I would not have a non-defective computer. When you factor in the time it took them to get here, the time spent in court, and the time to get home, Apple paid two guys a day’s wages to defend this suit.

In addition, instead of paying nothing for the repair, they paid a legal team to oversee the case, and, oh yeah … you guys, the shareholders, are buying me a new computer too. Thanks.

As far as I can tell, Apple spent all of this time and money, solely to be a bully. Was that really money well-spent? I mean, you can almost excuse the holy wars against Adobe, Samsung, Android, and the prototype guys … but a local blogger?

The obsessiveness of crushing all perceived enemies, no matter how big or small, regardless of whether they are wrong or right, should be of concern to all iFans and financiers. It’s getting to the point where it’s really, really just sick.

Gone are the days of the scrappy underdog, throwing a hammer through the window of conformity, and what has emerged is … well, it’s far worse than what it was rebelling against.

Apple has become the Orwellian nightmare that it warned us about some 30 years ago. A huge vehicle of sameness backed by legions of newthink practitioners, gleefully cheering as Big Bully annihilates one thoughtcriminal after another.

Apple may be profitable, but it’s not well. Something is wrong at the highest levels, and if I was strongly tied to the company financially, I might be worried. Although blinded by Apple’s success in the near-term, I don’t think history will judge the company favorably.

Anyway, now comes the hard part.

Collecting the money. A judgement is only a piece of paper. It’s worth nothing if you can’t collect. If what I have seen from Apple is any guide, they will spend $50 Million to get out of paying my four-figure judgement, simply out of spite. Just how much of the shareholder’s money Apple will end up spending because they tried to screw Seattle Rex remains to be seen.

I’ll fight on, though. No matter how many obstacles Apple throws in my way, I’ll keep going. After all, it’s what I do. I guess you can say I …

Think Different.

Update: Wow, this article really set off a firestorm. I’ve received scores of emails from people who were given the same “it won’t boot so we won’t repair it” explanation that I was, and were forced to pay for the repair out of their own pocket.

This really is a larger suit, perhaps a class-action suit in the making (as much as I detest class-actions for their unfairness toward the class), and I am exploring the possibilities of bringing a second suit against the company for fraud, misrepresentation, etc.

I’m simply astounded by how many people received the same treatment as myself over the 8600M issue.
http://www.seattlerex.com/seattle-re...verdict-is-in/





Norwegian Killer Used Computer Wargames to Plan Attack
Walter Gibbs

Norwegian anti-Islamic fanatic Anders Behring Breivik told a court on Thursday that he used computer games to prepare for his attacks, once spending an entire year isolated from society playing a game for hours on end.

Breivik, on trial for massacring 77 people last July, said he spent "lots of time" playing Modern Warfare, a first-person shooting game, and also took an entire year off to play World of Warcraft, a multi-player role-playing game with more than 10 million subscribers.

"I don't really like those games but it is good if you want to simulate for training purposes," Breivik said as he discussed Modern Warfare, smiling when asked about the aiming system.

Breivik killed eight people with a car bomb in Oslo on July 22 and then killed 69, mostly teenagers, at a Labour Party summer youth camp on Utoeya island, in a gun massacre.

Although he pleaded not guilty, he admitted the killings, saying his victims were traitors who supported immigration and multiculturalism, threatening Norwegian ethnic purity.

Breivik, who once played Modern Warfare 17-hours straight on New Year's Eve 2010/2011, said he used such games to simulate the police response and the best escape strategy.

"I calculated the likelihood of surviving unharmed at less than 5 percent," he told the court in his third day of testimony, referring to the bomb attack on government headquarters, when he expected to be swarmed by police officers.

"I trained myself to get out of such a situation. That is what I was simulating."

When he acquired the weapons for the actual attacks, he turned to Norse mythology in naming them.

"The rifle I called Gungnir, which is the name of the magical spear of Odin, which returns after you have thrown it. And the Glock I called Mjoelnir...It is the warrior god Thor's Hammer," he said, adding that he marked the weapons with their names in runes.

While playing computer games, Breivik said, he withdrew from his friends, saying personal relationships were not a priority.

In 2006, he moved in with his mother to save money and rarely interrupted his game of World of Warcraft, even though his mother became anxious.

"Of course I couldn't tell her I was going to take a sabbatical because I am going to blow myself up in five years' time."

"During that year I played perhaps 16 hours a day. It was a lot. Only playing for an entire year -- playing and sleeping, playing and sleeping....It was a dream I had, and I wanted to do this."

Thomas Hylland Eriksen, a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, said such computer games could put Breivik in a state of delusion.

"When he went out on Utoeya, possibly at some level still believing he was still paying a computer game and shooting people in real life," Eriksen told Reuters away from the court proceedings.

"He does not seem to be very successful at distinguishing between the virtual reality of world of Warcraft and other computer games and reality," he said.

Breivik's trial, set to last 10 weeks, turns on the question of his sanity and thus whether he can be jailed. He has said that an insanity ruling would be "worse than death".

One court-appointed team of psychiatrists concluded he was psychotic, while a second team found him to be of sound mind.

On Wednesday he said he should either be executed or acquitted, calling the prospect of a prison sentence "pathetic".

Breivik has insisted he is a commander in a resistance movement but has acknowledged some of his claims were an exaggeration. He spent much of Wednesday defending the claim that it existed at all.

In court, he has Breivik struggled to defend his claim of being ordained into a militant-nationalist group called the Knights Templar in London in 2002 after preliminary contact in 2001, refusing to answer over 100 questions on the topic.

(Writing by Balazs Koranyi; Editing by Angus MacSwan)





Social Networks, Small and Smaller
Randall Stross

FACEBOOK makes sharing easy — too easy, some would say. Because one’s social network often consists not only of actual friends but also relatives and sort-of friends, along with sort-of friends of their sort-of friends, you need to be careful about what you post. Yes, the site does allow you to define smaller circles of friends, but that requires constantly monitoring what should — and should not — be shared with whom.

All of this has created an opportunity for start-ups to offer sharing that is intimate by design.

Newer social networks, like Path, FamilyLeaf and Pair, offer a range of constraints. A Path network, available only on smartphones, has a maximum of 150 friends. FamilyLeaf is restricted to family members. And Pair, which like Path is for smartphones only, is as small as a social network can be: just one other person.

The average Facebook user in United States has 245 friends, according to a study published in February by the Internet and American Life Project of the Pew Research Center. That figure, however, well exceeds the “Dunbar number,” the 150 meaningful relationships that Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist, has suggested is the effective neurological limit the human brain can handle.

Dave Morin, who worked at Facebook for four years before leaving to help found Path in 2010, explains the rationale for his company this way: “Facebook has made socializing on the Internet normal. But now there is an opportunity to return to intimate socializing.”

Mr. Morin says he called Mr. Dunbar, a professor at the University of Oxford , to find out more about his research and theory. Mr. Dunbar told him that social networks resemble a set of concentric circles: 150 people constitute the outer boundary of friends, 50 is the limit for trusted friends, 15 for good friends, and 5 for best friends.

When Path introduced its social network, it capped the number of friends at 50. Today, Path has more than a million active users, and the average user has 40 friends. Last year, Path raised the maximum to 150 because, Mr. Morin says, the users “like the headroom.”

Still, the core proposition is unchanged. No subgroupings are permitted, and there are no privacy settings to adjust. Close friends are in; everyone else is out. “You’ll never experience the problem of accidentally sharing something with the wrong people,” Mr. Morin says.

FamilyLeaf limits an individual’s network in a different way: it is just for relatives. This start-up, founded just eight weeks ago by Wesley Zhao and Ajay Mehta, both 19, received financing and guidance from Y Combinator, a seed fund in Mountain View, Calif. After the site opened, demand soon exceeded capacity, and there is now a waiting list to join.

Mr. Mehta says he and Mr. Zhao have used Facebook solely with their friends. When their older relatives want to join in, to stay in touch, a problem can arise: a moment’s inattention when posting can lead to accidental sharing with those one doesn’t intend to include. “I don’t want to have to filter myself for two completely different audiences,” Mr. Mehta says.

Mr. Zhao adds: “It’s no more feasible than thinking that you could use Facebook for both friends and work. It’s as if there would be no need for LinkedIn.”

Each family’s network has one designated gatekeeper, though one person can belong to more than one family’s network.

FamilyLeaf has streamlined photo sharing, which can be done simply by sending photographs in an e-mail attachment to the family photo album maintained at the FamilyLeaf site.

“My mom is technologically unsavvy,” Mr. Mehta says. “She can’t use Facebook, but she can use FamilyLeaf. Same with my grandparents in Mumbai.”

Pair offers a way to share with one, and only one, person. It was first financed by Y Combinator, and Pair’s five founders spent the first three months of this year in the San Francisco Bay Area, working with Y Combinator’s partners. The start-up’s founders are from Canada, and three had girlfriends who remained there. They created the Pair app to communicate with distant loved ones without having to worry about misdirected messages.

Jamie Murai, one of Pair’s founders, offers an example: In text-messaging, “you have to scroll through a list,” he says. “Sometimes you think you’re sending a message to your girlfriend, but it’s actually going to your workout buddy. You can be confident that once you tap on the Pair icon, everything you share is only shared with your partner.”

Pair users can send a text message, photograph or video, but the application also has some distinctive additions to the usual menu. The pair of users can create a drawing together simultaneously, share a to-do list or press a button to let one person know the other’s location. Pair also offers “thumbkissing”: Pressing one’s thumb on the screen, aligned with the image of the other’s, causes both phones to vibrate.

Pair’s mobile-only app was released last month and had 100,000 users after only seven days, according to the company. (At present, it is available only on the iPhone.)

If a relationship changes, the app can be paired with a new most-important person. “Initially, we focused on the romantic relationships,” Mr. Murai says, “but, really, it’s turning out to be for the one most important relationship in your life, which could be your best friend or your son or daughter.”

These micro- and supermicro-size social networks aren’t competing directly with Facebook or even with one another. Conceivably, one could be active on all of them. But then we may bump up against a new neurological limit: the maximum number of social networks that the human brain can handle.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/b...-networks.html





An Online TV Site Grows Up
Amy Chozick and Brian Stelter

Five years ago, some of the most powerful players in television banded together to introduce Hulu, a streaming service intended to revolutionize the TV industry.

This week, Hulu will look more like a traditional network than an Internet pioneer.

At a presentation on Thursday in New York, Hulu, created as a service for watching network television online, will pitch advertisers on original programming in an annual ritual known as upfronts that are typically reserved for cable channels and network broadcasters.

Hulu executives are expected to take the stage to sell advertisers on new series. The executives will also promote the service’s desirable demographic of young viewers who turn to Hulu for popular network sitcoms like “New Girl” and “Family Guy,” available only after they are broadcast on Fox.

As an online television destination, Hulu is something of a teenager now, sometimes tolerating feuding parents and succeeding perhaps in spite of them. Hulu is growing steadily, despite disagreements among its corporate owners, and the new restrictions those owners have placed on free streaming of network shows.

This week Hulu will announce that it has topped two million subscribers for its $8-a-month Hulu Plus service in the first quarter, half a million more than it had at the end of 2011. But it has not been an easy path to growth.

The executives who were the greatest champions of Hulu at its inception — Jeff Zucker, the former chief executive of NBCUniversal, and Peter Chernin, formerly the chief operating officer at News Corporation — have moved on. Their successors are less enamored with the service, which they view as a potential threat to traditional revenue streams. Hulu’s owners are the Walt Disney Company, the News Corporation’s Fox Broadcasting unit, Comcast’s NBCUniversal unit and Providence Equity Partners. In 2007, when Internet television viewing began to take off in earnest, Hulu’s corporate parents raced to create a legal TV-streaming service supported by advertising. But more recently, those corporate parents have struck multibillion-dollar streaming deals with cable and satellite operators to make shows available online to their subscribers with tablets or smartphones.

Even though its audience was growing — and continues to grow — Hulu’s corporate parents questioned whether giving their shows away online could put at risk the hundreds of millions they earn from traditional cable and satellite deals. Hulu has embraced its new reality, and has maintained growth while doing so. With roughly 38 million visitors a month, according to the measurement firm comScore, the service had revenue of $420 million in 2011, up 60 percent from $263 million in 2010.

Attesting to the shift toward subscriptions, the company expects revenue from Hulu Plus to account for more than half of its total in 2012.

“The bulk of our business is working with those big media companies, and they’re going to make choices based on how they see the whole ecosystem evolving,” said Andy Forssell, Hulu’s senior vice president of content.

But Hulu still has to figure out how to marry its own subscription service with the systems that are being set up by the cable and satellite operators.

A few years ago, Hulu had a motivational effect on the media industry. It is widely credited with accelerating a trend toward on-demand television that forced networks and studios to figure out what to stream online, and what not to stream.

Some shows, like “Community” on NBC and “Fringe” on Fox, have benefited markedly from online streaming. “If we’re really on our game, people will look back on it and will say, ‘Wow, I can’t believe TV was like that in 2007,’ ” Jason Kilar, Hulu’s chief executive, said at a recent advertising industry conference. He declined interview requests for this article.

But like Netflix, Hulu has faced challenges in acquiring can’t-miss TV, even from its owners. At the Hulu board level, “there is disagreement about the amount of investment necessary to acquire content for Hulu Plus,” said a television executive who insisted on anonymity because of business relationships with Hulu.

So, like Netflix, Hulu is making a push into original series. It has also licensed 13 television shows that will appear exclusively online.

Hulu differs from Netflix, though, in that it streams most of its shows at no cost with ads attached, opening them up to a much wider potential online audience. Netflix is available only to subscribers.

Mr. Forssell said that Hulu would try to “get stuff made and not compete with our partners” as it waded further into original series. He also shops for exclusive digital syndication deals like the one Hulu struck to stream “Community,” an NBC sitcom popular with the young, Web-savvy men who often watch television online.

After a scrapped bid to sell Hulu last summer, its owners have said they are committed to Hulu for now. Even so, talk of a possible sale lingers. This fall, Providence Equity has a window to exit the joint venture, according to two executives with knowledge of Hulu who insisted on anonymity to avoid harming business relationships.

“Providence can stay, or they can get out of their position. The owners would be forced to buy out Providence’s share,” said one of the executives. A spokesman for Providence declined to comment.

Hulu also faces increased threats from online competitors, most notably from YouTube, owned by Google. YouTube will hold its upfront in May and will fight for its piece of the estimated $39.5 billion that United States marketers will spend in 2012 to place ads online, up 23 percent from 2011, according to the research firm eMarketer.

What it lacks in mass audience, Hulu tries to make up through data collection on viewers and then offering those appealing demographics to advertisers.

Stoking envy among traditional television executives, the Web site collects a trove of data on its users’ preferences in programming and ads. Through its “Ad Select” feature, viewers can choose which ads they see.

If a user selects a Diet Coke ad, for example “in the future, I know you’re more of a diet-conscious person and can send you more ads for diet drinks,” said Jean-Paul Colaco, Hulu’s senior vice president for advertising.

“On a one-to-one basis, advertising placed on Hulu for our clients was more effective than advertising placed on television for the same programming,” said Steven J. Farella, chief executive at TargetCast TCM, which buys advertising time for companies.

Hulu competes with its owners not just for advertising dollars, but for viewers’ time.

“Battleground,” the Hulu original sitcom about a Senate campaign that premiered in February, was originally a pilot script developed for Fox. “A Day in the Life,” the reality show from the documentarian Morgan Spurlock, which follows celebrities for an entire day and started its second season in March, was initially pitched to cable channels. This summer, Hulu will introduce “Up to Speed,” an unscripted travel series from Richard Linklater, who directed movies like “Dazed and Confused” and “Slacker.”

To date, though, the audience for “Battleground” has not matched the online audience for TV sitcoms like “The Office,” from NBC, or “New Girl,” from Fox.

On Hulu’s monthly list of its top 100 videos, only one episode of “Battleground” shows up. Of course, viewers could discover “Battleground” a month or a year from now, and that is fine with Hulu.

The executive producer of “Battleground,” J.D. Walsh, said Hulu was “looking for less of a broad audience across every demographic and more of a specifically targeted group of people who are passionate about the show.” Mr. Spurlock said his deal with Hulu gave him greater ownership of “A Day in the Life.” Plus, he said, the service reflects how the people he knows watch television these days. “A lot of friends of mine have already started to give up their cable subscriptions,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/b...ogramming.html





Hillman Curtis, a Pioneer in Web Design, Dies at 51
Paul Vitello

Hillman Curtis, a former rock musician who became a prominent first-generation Web designer and a visionary figure in the Internet’s evolution from a predominantly text-based medium to the multimedia platform it is today, died on Wednesday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 51.

Hillman Curtis called himself a serial self-reinventor.

The cause was colon cancer, his wife, Christina, said.

Mr. Curtis was the art director of a San Francisco software company in 1996 when he designed the first Web site formatted for a new technology called Flash Player, a browser plug-in that could be used to turn out high-quality animated imagery quickly. Before then the process would take hundreds of hours.

His mastery of the technology, which had been developed for several years before but never fully deployed in a way that unveiled its creative potential, made Mr. Curtis a revered figure in the emerging world of Web design.

His Flash Player design technique set the groundwork for a format that later evolved exponentially to accommodate online advertisements, Facebook applications and video sites like YouTube.

Richard Shupe, who teaches Web design at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, said Mr. Curtis’s Flash Player design was a milestone that “brought Web design to life.” His ability to teach other Web designers, he added, helped “jump-start a process of Web democratization that continues today.”

In 2000, Mr. Curtis published a popular how-to book, “Flash Web Design,” which sold more than 100,000 copies and remains a standard online design text. Heading his own firm, HillmanCurtis, which he started in Brooklyn in 1998, he produced Web designs for commercial clients including Yahoo, Sprint, Adobe, Rolling Stone magazine, Fox Searchlight Pictures and the Metropolitan Opera.

His mystique in the design world only deepened when, at the height of his career, he gave up Web work to learn to make movies with a handheld video camera.

For Mr. Curtis, who called himself a serial self-reinventor, it was the start of a third career. A nephew of Chris Hillman, an original member of the Byrds, he had played in a rock band in the 1980s and early ’90s before teaching himself Web design.

He was beginning to gain wider notice in his last years for his films, including a 2008 series of short documentaries about designers and artists like Milton Glaser, Paula Scher and Stefan Sagmeister, and a 2010 feature-length film, “Ride, Rise, Roar,” chronicling a concert tour by David Byrne and Brian Eno.

He once explained his penchant for reinventing himself in an interview. “I originally went to school for creative writing and film,” he said. “I then spent 10 years pursuing music, and, after failing at that, I did various random jobs. I got into design out of desperation — I didn’t want to wait tables or pound nails.”

David Hillman Curtis was born on Feb. 24, 1961, in the La Jolla section of San Diego. He and two sisters were raised by his mother and stepfather, Susan and Paul Zimmerman, both high school teachers.

As a student at San Francisco State University, Mr. Curtis formed a rock group, later known as the Green Things, which toured for almost a decade and produced one album for MCA Records before disbanding.

Mr. Curtis learned about art and design drawing posters and fliers for his band. After it broke up he took night classes in Photoshop, he told interviewers.

By then, already in his 30s, he had landed a few part-time design jobs before being hired for a low-level position at Macromedia, where he worked his way up to art director.

Besides his wife and mother, Mr. Curtis is survived by a son, Jasper, a daughter, Tess, and his sisters, Madeleine Curtis and Rebecca Curtis-Cassacia.

Long after designing his last Web site, Mr. Curtis remained an important presence in the imagination of Web designers. And professional online journals, which referred to him as “the Michael Jordan of Web design” and “the Grandmaster of Flash,” remained fascinated by his decision to give it all up.

“It seems like you had it made,” an interviewer said recently on the Web magazine the 99%. “Why did you move on?”

Mr. Curtis answered that he had always wanted to make films and had accomplished his goals as a designer. He detailed those goals in a 2002 interview: “The reason for designing new media is simple — to subtly and quietly change the world.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/21/t...ies-at-51.html





Using His Software Skills With Freedom, Not a Big Payout, in Mind
Jim Dwyer

Nadim Kobeissi, master hacker, summoned for interrogation multiple times as a teenager by cyber-intelligence authorities in Beirut, Lebanon, sat in the backyard of a restaurant in Brooklyn, astounded that he was being treated to lunch.

“Please,” he protested, “you shouldn’t pay for my omelet.”

Mr. Kobeissi, 21, now a college student in Montreal, spent the weekend in New York City with elders of his tribe, software code writers who have ambitions that do not involve making suitcases of money off clever applications for sharing photographs online.

This group was building a project called Cryptocat, which has a simple, countercultural goal: people should be able to talk on the Internet without being subjected to commercial or government surveillance.

“The whole point of Cryptocat is that you click a link and you’re chatting with someone over an encrypted chat room,” said Mr. Kobeissi, who was born in Lebanon and said he had lived through four wars. “That’s it. You’re done. It’s just as easy to use as Facebook chat, Google chat, anything.”

The Arab Spring showed that the power of the Internet and Web communications is a multi-edged blade, with activists able to organize through social media and to get their stories out, and authoritarian governments often able to target the activists by following the trail of digital crumbs.

Among the conspicuous sources of information are the chat transcripts often kept on commercial servers, making it easy to see who was talking, what they talked about, and when the conversations took place. Cryptocat and a few other services disguise the content of chat messages so that they look like gibberish to anyone who does not have the encryption key. There is nothing new about encryption technology, but it is a brain-breaking subject, and the tools for using it are tricky.

Mr. Kobeissi started building Cryptocat a year ago in his bedroom with the goal of making it simple to encrypt an online conversation. He had help last weekend from the Guardian Project, a group of developers who are trying to make mobile phones secure. They figured out a way to encrypt a chat on an Android phone by shaking it, taking advantage of the motion detectors in many smartphones. This will generate the digits that are part of the encryption process.

“You can dance with your phone to encrypt it,” Mr. Kobeissi said.

Up to 10 people can speak privately to one another at a time in a Cryptocat chat room, a feature that distinguishes it from other encryption chat services. It is not ready for use by people in life-and-death situations, Mr. Kobeissi said, but it can give people a place to avoid everyday monitoring of routine conversation.

“Cryptocat is an enabling, positive technology, and it’s an alternative,” said Jacob Appelbaum, a developer with the Tor project, which routes Web traffic in ways that help disguise sites that people have visited. “A key thing here is that it is an experiment, with valid criticisms. It’s not perfect. But it is important that we have people who are interested and knowledgeable about computer security who are working on these things, not just for money, and not just to break into people’s computers.”

The group met over the weekend at a code-a-thon organized by Julia Angwin of The Wall Street Journal, which has chronicled the spread of commercial surveillance in everyday technology in a vital series of articles and engaging online demonstrations called What They Know. A recent article in Wired magazine detailed big advances in United States government surveillance capabilities. Mr. Appelbaum and a documentary filmmaker, Laura Poitras, are holding a teach-in Friday evening at the Whitney Museum of American Art on the subject of surveillance.

The invention of powerful tools to thwart the commercial and governmental collection of personal data has been criticized as creating hiding places for terrorists and online sexual predators. Mr. Kobeissi said he had been startled by those complaints. “Evil people have been evil forever,” he said. “I don’t think they’re going to stop being evil or become more evil because of Cryptocat.”

He appears to be wide open and unguarded about himself.

“I love it when people criticize me,” he said, pausing for a second and then amending his words. “When they criticize me technically.”

His ambitions with Cryptocat are not financial, though he is trying to raise $2,000 to cover his costs for the next year. “Money is great, money is amazing,” he said. “It’s not like money is something I don’t understand. I understand what it is. I care more about making something nice that people can use, and it’s free and it makes a difference.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/n...m-in-mind.html





News Corporation Acknowledges Breach of Foreign Ownership Rule
Amy Chozick

News Corporation said Wednesday it would suspend half of the voting rights of its non-American shareholders in order to comply with United States government regulations on foreign ownership.

The Federal Communications Act limits the ownership and voting power of foreign investors in broadcast stations to no more than 25 percent. In a breach of government rules, News Corporation’s foreign investors owned 36 percent of the company’s class B voting shares. The company’s board said it approved an immediate suspension of 50 percent of foreign shareholders’ voting rights.

The family of Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, which holds a 39.7 percent of the company’s voting shares, has agreed not to vote with respect to a portion of its shares. “Doing so would increase their percentage of voting power from what it was prior to the suspension,” the company said.

Mr. Murdoch is not considered a foreign investor since he is an American citizen. Foreign investors include Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, who owns roughly 7 percent of voting stock.

News Corporation owns 27 television stations and Fox Broadcasting. In the fiscal year 2011, the company’s television business brought in $4.8 billion in revenue and $681 million operating profit.
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.co...wnership-rule/





British Prosecutors Consider Charges in Phone Hacking Case
John F. Burns

The wide-ranging police inquiry into phone hacking and other wrongdoing at Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid newspapers moved a step closer to possible criminal prosecutions on Wednesday when Scotland Yard sent files on 11 unidentified people, including four journalists and a police officer, to the Crown Prosecution Service.

Under Britain’s judicial system, criminal charges are drawn up by the Crown Prosecution Service on the basis of evidence gathered by the police. A spokeswoman for the service said that the names of those now being considered for prosecution would not be released, and that the service could not say when it would take the next step, deciding whether to prosecute those involved or not.

A statement from the prosecution service listed the offenses covered by the police files as including misconduct in public office and breaches of the Data Protection Act, involving one journalist and one police officer; perverting the course of justice, involving one journalist and “six other members of the public”; and witness intimidation and harassment, involving one journalist.

The statement’s list of offenses under review also included breaches of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, a broad statute that regulates the powers of public bodies to carry out surveillance and investigation, and to intercept communications, involving one journalist.

The spokeswoman said no further details would be released for the time being. “We are not prepared to discuss the identities of those involved or the alleged offenses in any greater detail at this stage as a number of related investigations are ongoing,” she said. “We are unable to give any time scale for charging decisions, except to say that these cases are being considered.”

No new criminal prosecutions have taken place since the phone hacking scandal broke into public view nearly six years ago with the arrest and subsequent conviction of two men in a case involving hacking into the cellphone messages of members of the royal family and their aides. Those two men — Clive Goodman, a former royal reporter for the now-defunct News of the World tabloid, and Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator working for the paper — served brief jail terms.

But the cases now under review for possible prosecution cover a far wider range of offenses, with a potential for much stiffer jail terms upon conviction, according to legal experts. The 43 people who have been arrested and released on bail since Scotland Yard reopened its investigations last year, most of them with links to the two Murdoch-owned tabloids, have faced police questioning on alleged wrongdoing that has included systematic hacking of the cellphone messages of politicians, celebrities, sports figures and crime victims; bribery of police officers for disclosing confidential information; and giving false or misleading information to the police.

Those waiting to be told whether charges would be filed against them include some of the best-known figures of recent years in the world of mass-market journalism in Britain. Among them is Rebekah Brooks, a former editor of both Murdoch tabloids, the weekend News of the World and the daily Sun, who quit last summer as chief executive of News International, the British newspaper subsidiary of Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation.

Another prominent figure who was arrested and released on bail was Andy Coulson, a former editor of The News of the World who quit after the original scandal over the hacking of royal palace figures, and moved to a post with the Conservative party that led to his appointment as communications chief at 10 Downing Street after David Cameron became prime minister in 2010. Mr. Coulson resigned that post last year, saying that the pressures of the hacking scandal were distracting him from his work.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/w...king-case.html





'Just Shut Them Down, Man'
Thomas Hüetlin and Philipp Oehmke

In a SPIEGEL interview, German pop star Jan Delay and Christopher Lauer, a Pirate Party member of the Berlin state parliament, debate the value of art in the digital age and whether music and movies should be made available for free download on the Internet.
Info

Jan Delay is one of Germany's most successful pop musicians. Like many fellow artists, he feels threatened by the Pirate Party's call for the legalization of online music-sharing sites like Pirate Bay. Like many, Delay worries musicians will no longer be able to make a living if their work is given away for free on the Internet. Last week, the musician met with Pirate Party politician Christopher Lauer at SPIEGEL's headquarters in Hamburg to continue a debate sparked by musician and writer Sven Regener (the author of the novels "Element of Crime" and "Herr Lehmann") four weeks ago. Regener argues that the refusal to consider music a commodity for which one should pay is "preposterous."

Delay, 35, is a Hamburg native, and his last two albums topped the German music charts. Lauer, 27, is a member of Berlin's regional parliament and the cultural policy spokesman for the Pirate Party group in the city-state's legislature.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Lauer, the Pirate Party is demanding the legalization of online music file sharing sites. That would mean that people would no longer pay a cent for songs by Jan Delay. How do you explain to him that you apparently consider his work to be worthless?

Lauer: I'm not saying his work is worthless. At the Pirate Party, we are just saying that there's no point in criminalizing the downloading of music off of the Internet. We're talking about 15-year-olds who barely have any money. Jan, you should be imaginative enough to realize that a 15-year-old who downloads your album today or watches something of yours on YouTube will say to himself, "OK, that's good music. One day, if I have money, I'll buy myself a CD or go to a Jan Delay concert."

Delay: Really? That's funny. CD sales have almost halved over the last decade. And now someone from the Pirate Party comes along and says that's advertising for musicians! I know that many 15-year-olds don't have money, but that's still a strange argument. If a 15-year-old steals a bottle of vodka from a supermarket, should we say it's OK because the kid doesn't have any money?

Lauer: There is a market of consumers who pay money for cultural goods. However, money is distributed differently on the Internet. Unknown artists get an opportunity to become noticed in a way that they would never have in the classic record company system. Supply and demand now regulate the market directly.

SPIEGEL: How?

Lauer: Because artists get money directly from consumers through direct payment systems, sales on online platforms and concerts. What doesn't work any longer is the old system between artists, labels and consumers. I understand that this annoys people, but that's the reality. Get used to it!

Delay: I'm certainly not going to get used to it -- because you want to eliminate all our copyrights.

Lauer: Of course artists should keep their copyrights. We don't want them to grow poor. All we are saying is that if a copyright holder signs a contract with a distributor, the distributor should only be granted exclusive utilization rights for a maximum of 25 years. In your case, Jan, that would mean that if you sign a contract with Universal, they will only have utilization rights for a maximum of 25 years -- and only for the sales channels known at the time the contract was concluded. That strengthens your position as an artist.

Delay: I think it's high time I explained a few things to you Pirates. Much of what you say is based on dangerous half-truths. You piece together your opinions from various blog posts and Wikipedia entries, but none of you have been involved with the music industry for 20 years, either as a creative artist or a purchaser. You always consider record companies to be the bad guys, but that's a cliché. What you always forget is the entire infrastructure associated with it: Video production companies, studios and suppliers, who have all been dying off over the past ten years.

Lauer: Ninety-five percent of musicians would have difficulty making money even if the Internet or the Pirate Party didn't exist. The discussion about copyright focuses attention on the conditions under which most artists work. Last year the musicians registered with the Künstlersozialkasse, the German artists' social insurance scheme, earned an average of less than €12,000 ($15,788).

Delay: Sorry, but are you now trying to position yourselves as the supposed avengers of badly paid artists?

Lauer: I just want to debunk the claim that the Pirate Party wants to put all copyright holders out of work. We want copyrights to remain with the copyright holders. We just want to change the rules regarding copyright holders and distributors.

Delay: No way man. Please don't change any rules. What you're talking about right now is something that artists negotiate with their label. If they have a bad lawyer, they'll get a bad contract. If their music is bad, they'll be dropped. If they make good music, they have a better chance because people will want to sign them by all means. It's none of your business what contracts artists sign.

Lauer: The issue is the question of how you connect artists and consumers.

Delay: No. You can't. Because between the two there are always the distributors, in other words those record companies you're always bitching about. And we need them because we make music and create art. We can't deal with how things are sold, how they are invoiced or how they are protected. We need distributors for that.

Lauer: We don't want to ban distributors, but the role of distributers is changing.

Delay: For 10 years now, I've been complaining that the record industry didn't come up with something like iTunes. They really missed the boat there. Be that as it may, the record industry's failings are no reason to legalize file sharing sites. Even the term is wrong. It sounds so harmless. Nothing is being shared. My songs are being copied for free.

Lauer: Yes, but we've got a population that uses these file sharing sites. That's why we say "yes" to file sharing sites. So the question is how we deal with this. Do we criminalize the majority of our young people, for instance with the "two strikes" or "three strikes" rules currently being considered, under which people would have their Internet connection blocked if they acted illegally two or three times? Internet bans are being discussed. And there are lawyers out there sending out fines of €1,500 or more.

Delay: Finally we agree on something! These fines are like smacking a baseball player on the mouth every time he's caught chewing gum. It just breeds hatred of the record industry. It's a dodgy business model that a couple of lawyers dreamed up as a way of profiting from and indeed making a fortune on the situation artists and record labels find themselves in. They get low-paid workers to sit in sweatshops filtering out IP addresses for €5 an hour.

SPIEGEL: Are the levied fines actually paid out to artists?

Delay: Embarrassingly enough, I found an entry to this effect on my last statement. It's disgusting. I don't want that money, and donate it to charity instead. But I think there are bands and labels that are making a lot of money off that.

Lauer: The payment demands are usually accompanied by cease-and-desist orders, and they are really going to cause mayhem. If you sign one of those, you pledge to pay a fine of up to €250,000 the next time you get caught. We say we shouldn't worry about file sharing sites because there are plenty of other ways to pay musicians.

SPIEGEL: What 15-year-old would pay for something that he or she could legally get for free? What you are suggesting is a kind of charity system.

Lauer: Don't you understand? You can't get rid of file sharing sites.

Delay: Sure you can. Just shut them down, man.

Lauer: How can you switch off a peer-to-peer network distributed across thousands of servers without deep packet inspection?

Delay: What was that?

Lauer: I mean, how can you switch off such a network without massive intrusion into the network structure? For instance, Jan Delay's song "Klar," which I think is great, even though I usually don't listen to his music …

Delay: I don't listen to you guys either.

Lauer: I now have this song on my hard drive. If I open up a Torrent program, anyone can download the song from my computer. So computers start copying files. A body that wanted to prevent that would have to look into every packet of data my computer makes available to determine what is being sent back and forth: Is it a piece of music by Jan Delay or a love letter to my girlfriend? From an overall societal standpoint, it would be easier to legalize file sharing sites than to build up a surveillance infrastructure.

Delay: Web sites like Kim Schmitz' Megaupload or kino.to have been switched off.

Lauer: They aren't file sharing sites. On those, music or films are uploaded to a Web site that earns money from advertising pornography. It's a racket. Torrent file sharing sites work differently. I simply load a Torrent file onto my computer. It's not the song or the movie itself, but merely information about where it can be found. In principle, it's like the Yellow Pages. The program searches through all the computers and servers on which the music file can be found, and copies the information onto my computer. At the same time, my computer makes the music file available to other computers.

Delay: And you think that's OK?

Lauer: File sharing sites such as Pirate Bay contain things I can't even buy legally. For instance, I'm currently watching the American cartoon series "Family Guy." I can't download the most recent episodes on iTunes, so I go to Pirate Bay, where I can find recordings in English from American TV. File sharing sites enable people to exchange cultural goods. That helps unknown artists distribute their work.

Delay: Kim Schmitz did that with Megaupload too. You can't use that argument.

Lauer: But there was a commercial interest behind it.

Delay: File sharing sites like Pirate Bay also have banner ads. Why is one OK, but the other isn't?

Lauer: Pirate Bay is a search engine for Torrents. Megaupload and kino.to make files available for money.

Delay: No. Those things are available there for free too.

Lauer: But kino.to is a commercial service because it contains advertising banners.

Delay: So do your Torrent sites! You still haven't answered my question.

Lauer: Fine. You got me there.

Delay: To be honest, I got you on most of the points we've discussed so far. I don't mean to be nasty, but apart from the copyright issue the whole Pirate Party thing is like someone going round saying, "Hey! We're a party that wants free chocolate for everyone." A few non-voters might say, "Cool! Free chocolate! That's the sort of politics I can relate to." But do you guys really have any solutions? Do you even know what you're talking about? I believe you when you say you understand computers. But that's about it.

Lauer: At least we make suggestions.

Delay: Whatever dude. I could rip all the suggestions you've made here so far to shreds. Would you like to hear some of my suggestions?

Lauer: Yes.

Delay: On the one hand you say that kids who get songs or movies through Pirate Bay or kino.to shouldn't be criminalized. I agree. But if you steal Legos from a store and get caught, you're going to get fined. That's just how it is. I've always ridden public transport without paying. If I get caught, I'll pay the €60 fine, and that's OK. If you download a "Superman" movie and get caught, you should also pay €60. This money shouldn't be given to the major musicians, but to those who really suffer because of all this downloading. I shouldn't get any of that.

SPIEGEL: Are you saying people should try to steal from you, but try not to get caught?

Delay: Yes. I'm not Lars Ulrich from Metallica, who constantly says stealing is dumb. I'm a HipHopper. We paint trains at night! We steal music and use it to make more music! That's our art.

SPIEGEL: And yet you still insist we abide by basic civic principles? "Please pay me if you want something from me."

Delay: I don't care if all the bad music is downloaded off of the Net, but I want people to pay for the good stuff, which artists really put their heart into. And I don't think it's uncool to say that publicly.

SPIEGEL: It seems that this is precisely what musicians are afraid of: Appearing uncool for insisting that illegal copying should be prevented.

Delay: Hey, I think that's chicken shit. They should be worrying about not making uncool music instead.

SPIEGEL: Berlin-based musician Sven Regener reignited the debate about copyright and the Pirate Party's plans in a radio interview. He also claimed that many musicians didn't dare speak their mind.

Delay: I think Regener's rant was excellent, but I don't understand why he says he's worried that his attitude is uncool.

SPIEGEL: Maybe he's right. The pop world has always been critical of capitalism. It's therefore hard to say, "I want people to pay."

Delay: I don't think that pop is anticapitalist per se. HipHop certainly isn't.

Lauer: When I heard Regener, I thought the demand to ban file sharing sites was like trying to ban gravity. We derive our demands from the technical realities of the Net. For us they are like laws of nature. That's why you and many other people often have difficulty understanding us.

SPIEGEL: We have difficulty understanding why your Pirate Party is advocating an entirely unjustified, no-cost culture on the Web. You say that music, movies and even journalistic articles ought to be free.

Lauer: We're looking for solutions, including how to pay for intellectual property. If a musician has an idea for a record, he can publicize the fact on the Web and ask who is willing to pay for it.

Delay: Is he supposed to pass the hat round? This only works if the artist in question is already well known. How are unknown artists supposed to get money for an idea? Forget it!

Lauer: Sorry. We have to experiment a little in terms of online payment models. If every suggestion is simply dismissed, we needn't bother talking about it. Of course we sometimes make mistakes, and sometimes we don't know something, but I hope people realize that we are addressing the problem of copyright and the conditions under which creative artists produce their work. Incidentally, it's not about stealing. If I steal the cap off your head, Jan, it's gone. If I copy one of your songs online, it's still there.

Delay: The song is still there, but the musician who played it won't be able to record another because he didn't earn any money on the first one. So you really are depriving people of something. My own history as a creative artist is a case in point. I started playing music at the age of 15 when I was still at school. Then I did my mandatory civilian service (as a conscientious objector from Germany's former mandatory military service) and continued playing music because it was going well. I started a degree and then, suddenly, I had a hit and didn't have any time for my degree anymore. In other words, to put it crassly, I continued playing music because there wasn't an Internet at the time. If everyone had been able to download all my music for free, I would have stopped. I would have studied law or economics instead or perhaps I'd be a junkie now.

SPIEGEL: Can young creative artists live on their record sales nowadays?

Delay: Not if, like me, you value high-quality production and lavish videos. Today musicians earn their money from live shows, merchandise or making themselves available for advertising. I sold 100,000 copies of my last album and therefore went gold, yet I still lost money on it.

Lauer: Why?

Delay: Nowadays 10,000 sales are enough in a slow week to put your song in the No. 1 spot in the German charts. Fifteen years ago, you would have needed several times that number. But marketing costs have gradually risen. Record companies invest a lot of money, but most of that is offset against my sales. That doesn't leave much, especially if you shoot costly videos. So you really have to go platinum -- in other words sell 200,000 copies -- in order to earn something in the end.

Lauer: Do you sell your music through iTunes?

Delay: Of course, but I only get 15 percent of the $0.99 a song costs to buy on average, and I have to use that to pay for production and my musicians. That's a joke.

Lauer: You see?

Delay: And yet you got yourself a €1,500 fine earlier.

Lauer: What?

Delay: You admitted that you downloaded "Family Guy" on Pirate Bay. It's been noted. That's going to cost you.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Lauer, Mr. Delay, we thank you for this interview.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...828588,00.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

April 14th, April 7th, March 31st, March 24th

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
__________________
Thanks For Sharing
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 30th, '11 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 27-07-11 06:58 AM
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 - 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 02:49 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)