Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 27th, '10

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"This is just the start." – Rebekah Brooks, News Corp


"Booted twice—and progress lost—on my single-player C&C4 game because my DSL connection blinked. DRM fail. We need new solutions." – Jeff Green, EA blogger


"I have no problem with Big Brother stepping in. Everyone who owns the technology should have a chip implanted in their computer to trace if they are stealing music." – Maria Ferrero, Testament band manager and Adrenaline PR owner



























Mini for Me

The one thing I really need on my iPhone is enlargeable text that doesn't require horizontal scrolling. The solution to the problem of zoomed web pages falling off screen was provided by Opera in the 90s. It’s hard to see why Cupertino still hasn't addressed it in 2010. Opera has now applied for app store inclusion for the Mini, its popular browser for handhelds, and if Opera Mini can fix my iPhone text I’m installing it. Then there’s speed, a traditional Opera strength. Opera claims its caching system, which compresses and preloads web pages on its own high speed servers, increases download speeds by several factors. There are privacy concerns when third parties cache pages, and people are raising them now, but I’m not sure how justified these are here. First of all the feature may be optional. Ideally a user could turn it on or off, much like Opera’s present “Turbo” system for PCs. But the privacy issue is bigger than Opera, and without being too facetious, some critics seem to be under the impression they go straight to a website without first getting on the internet.

The fact is gatekeepers are everywhere. Our ISPs collect data, Wi-Fi networks see what we do, the telcos stream our data through their servers at each page load and ad servers track everything. Wherever we are and whenever we surf, we engage third parties.

The issue isn't privacy vs. potential Opera snooping. It’s potential abc snooping vs. potential abcd snooping, and e and f and g ad-infinitum. Certain levels of safety (read: any) are incompatible with consumer use of internet architecture. It takes cumbersome proxying like TOR to begin to achieve any real measure of online protection.

I don't know how stringently Opera treats user data, but I don't personally know how others do either. I do however remember hearing about some trouble AT&T got into a few years back...

Privacy issues notwithstanding, there’s no guarantee Apple will allow Opera on its products to begin with. But with this weeks announcement that Sprint’s delivering a 4G Android phone so fast it streams HDTV right onto your home television screen, Apple should be grateful someone’s offering them a browser that’s five times faster than what they have now. On the other hand, if Sprint really is that fast, maybe it’s time I hung up on Cupertino.

















Enjoy,

Jack


















March 27th, 2010




UK Police Asks Internet Cafes to Monitor Customers

Internet cafe users in the British capital may want to watch what they download. Scotland Yard is advising administrators of public Web spaces to periodically poke through their customers' files and keep an eye out for suspicious activity.

The Metropolitan Police said Thursday that the initiative - which has been rolled out over the past weeks under the auspices of the government's counterterrorism strategy - is aimed at reminding cafe owners that authorities are ready to hear from them if they have concerns about their Internet users.

Posters and computer desktop images emblazoned with Scotland Yard's logo are also being distributed.

"It's not about asking owners to spy on their customers, it's about raising awareness," a police spokesman said, speaking anonymously in line with force policy. "We don't ask them to pass on data for us."

Still, he said, police were "encouraging people to check on hard drives." He did not elaborate, saying it would be up to cafe owners to decide if or how to monitor what customers left on their computers.

Checking hard drives could reveal what customers were up to fairly easily under the right circumstances, according to Graham Cluley of software security company Sophos. For example, an owner could examine a browser's Internet history or sift through the programs or documents the customer downloaded - although distinguishing which user did what might be difficult in a busy cafe.

But Cluley noted that a computer-savvy criminal could make their activities invisible in a few simple steps.

"You would expect any cybercriminal who had made the decision to use an Internet cafe to pretty much dust off their fingerprints," he said.

Still, Cluley said "there's no harm in keeping an eye open."

While the program is voluntary - owners can ignore police advice if they so choose - civil libertarians aren't happy. One said it risked creating an atmosphere of fear while undermining Internet users' privacy.

"What you're going to end up with is a lot of people reporting Muslims in Internet cafes," said Simon Davies, the director of U.K.-based Privacy International. Although he acknowledged that people might have lower expectations of privacy in an Internet cafe than at home, he said their communications should nonetheless be kept to themselves.

"We don't expect that our calls from a public phone would be monitored, anymore than we should expect our e-mails to be monitored," he said. "As citizens we have to hold the line that there is a fundamental right of privacy of communications."

Police say Internet cafe owners should remain vigilant in part because the venues have often been used by terrorists and other criminals in an attempt to evade detection. The police spokesman noted that the men behind the plot to blow up U.S.-bound passengers jets with liquid explosives secreted into soft drink containers used an Internet cafe to coordinate their plot.

So far the only visible sign of the police's initiative were some sternly worded posters warning customers against accessing "inappropriate or offensive content" posted at Internet cafes in various areas of London. The desktop images promoted by Scotland Yard - which would have the warning staring out from every computer screen - were absent from the few north London cafes seen by The Associated Press.

In other EU nations Internet cafes generally go about their business with a minimum of official interference.

Germany's federal police agency Bundeskriminalamt has no similar program, spokeswoman Barbara Huebner said, while French Internet cafes do not generally monitor users' activity.

At a Paris Internet cafe that is part of the Cybercafe Milk chain, employees are not allowed to view what their customers are researching on the Internet.

"It's private, thankfully," said employee Pierre Larroque, 31.

Back in Britain, K. Jama of IFKA Tele.com in the Camden area of north London said his cafe couldn't be bothered to monitor its customers' downloads or Internet history - which he said were wiped from the computers every day in any case. Still, the 34-year-old said the police's posters were a useful way of deterring criminals from his shop.

"When they see the poster hanging there, they will think twice, that's the main thing," Jama said.

But Arash Assam, an 18-year-old student who was browsing Facebook in the basement of the shop - just beneath the bright purple police warning - wasn't impressed.

"I didn't even notice it," he said.

The Internet cafe initiative came as lawmakers criticized the government's counterterrorism strategy. A report published by a parliamentary committee on human rights Thursday said civil liberties were all too often "squeezed out by the imperatives of national security and public safety" in the fight against terrorism.

The government said the threat to Britain from terrorists remained "real and serious."
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-st...s-1928322.html





Artists, Industry React to Rapidshare's Action Against Illegal Filesharing
Jon Wiederhorn

A spokesperson for the firesharing service Rapidshare has confirmed that the company has been aggressively terminating the accounts of users who upload and download copyrighted material.

The German-owned company which operates out of Switzerland is one of the most popular filesharing sites, servicing hundreds of millions of users each month and has been listed as one of the most 50 used sites on the Internet. The company offers limited downloading for free and unlimited downloading to premium users -- for a fee -- and is capable of handling three million users simultaneously.

The move comes in the wake of increased pressure from record labels, film companies and book publishers to take action against Internet services that host music, movies and other intellectual property distributed without the permission of the artists or content owner. Recently, Rapidshare was ordered to proactively filter 148 book titles in order to avoid prosecution and large fines. In the past, Rapidshare has condemned users who upload illegal content, but they've guarded downloaders. Now, they seem to have changed their policy and they seem prepared to cooperate with authorities. In addition to terminating accounts, they've have agreed to pass over IP addresses and records of filesharing activity for legal purposes.

The move is being applauded by many in the music industry, whose earnings have taken a severe beating since the advent of filesharing. "You stop supporting your [favorite] bands the moment you illegally obtain their new album," Nuclear Blast label manager Gerardo Martinez told Noisecreep. "To quote the guys in Exodus, 'You don't just go to a dealer and steal a car and expect to get away with it.'

"This is a good first step," continued Martinez. "But I honestly think that in order to have someone policing over this, we'd need governments to step in. Then again, do we really want governments monitoring the Internet? It's a double-edged sword."

"I have no problem with Big Brother stepping in," adds Testament manager and Adrenaline PR owner Maria Ferrero. "Everyone who owns the technology should have a chip implanted in their computer to trace if they are stealing music In 27 years in the music business I've seen the rise and fall [of metal] and band comebacks. But nothing has had such a direct impact on the entertainment industry such as people who steal downloads. It's just gross. It's like walking into a restaurant and ordering a meal and walking out without payment. It's like calling a plumber to fix your toilet and not paying them. This 'practice' has a direct effect on the economy as well as people's lives. Artists are less likely to put out records because they aren't getting paid."

Ferrero emphasized that the theft of intellectual property isn't limited to the music industry. "It's happening on a mass scale," she said. "The film industry is affected by the stealing as well. Part of me blames technology. Big companies keep advancing their wares and technology such as CD burners, allowing people to simply steal. I feel they are a big part of the problem and should be held accountable as well."

There's no question that the action Rapidshare is taking will limit the number of illegally transferred files through their site. It will likely also substantially reduce their traffic. And while the company has been a popular location for filesharers, it's hardly the only one.

"There will always be another site where you can download and share files illegally," said Something to Burn bassist Jeff Ballard. "Labels will keep hunting them down and another one will pop up. I know Something to Burn looks at our record as a promotional tool that helps bring people out to our shows. We personally are fine with our record being shared. It's long past the days of record sales being a viable income."

Other musicians are even more supportive of filesharing. "I favor it," Unearth guitarist Ken Susi said on a recent episode of ''Creep Show.' "I haven't bought a record since Muse's 'Absolution' came out in 2002 or whatever. I mean, I don't make any money off of our records. So the point is, you come to the show and you party and you sell merch and you hang out with your fans. You don't rely on album sales. People don't sell records today, but [they're hearing the music from sharing files], and word gets out a little bit faster."

Warbeast guitarist Rick Perry equates Internet file sharing to the tape trading that went on the '80s, but because of the scope of the phenomenon, and the fact that the quality of a file-shared recording is comparable to that of a purchased CD, he admits that filesharers are taking a major cut out of record sales and hurting both labels and artists.

"I've been playing in underground metal bands since the '80s," he said. "Many bands back then built up their following through tape trading. So, for a band who is trying to make a dent in the industry, it's a double-edged sword because you are building up your following but no one is paying for your music. I'm flattered that someone likes our music enough to steal it, but the bottom line is it is still stealing. If I do the work and people are being entertained by it, I expect to get paid."

In a guest blog he wrote for MTV, Mudvayne vocalist Chad Gray lashed out against filesharers and concluded his argument by lambasting those who think downloading albums illegally is only damaging to labels and doesn't hurt their favorite bands, who, as Susi said, usually don't see money from album sales anyway.

"If people who download music illegally think they're sticking it to the man, that's bulls-t because the man is going to stick it right back to the band [by reducing tour support, demanding a cut of tour profits and merch sales]. At the end of the day, you're hurting the people that you look up to or that get you through hard times, or people you just love. Next time you download something without paying for it, remember that it's the bands that's really gonna take the hit."
http://www.noisecreep.com/2010/03/26...l-filesharing/





House Passes File Sharing Bill
Aliya Sternstein

The House on Tuesday passed a bill that would mandate a policy banning the use of file sharing software on federal computers and networks, along with those used by contractors.

H.R. 4098, introduced in November, directs the Office of Management and Budget to issue rules that forbid the tools and allow agencies to seek exemptions for legitimate uses on a case-by-case basis.

The House vote -- 408 to 13 -- will bolster national security by safeguarding sensitive information, backers of the bill said. "We can no longer ignore the threat to sensitive government information, businesses and consumers that insecure peer-to-peer networks pose," said Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., the bill's sponsor, in a statement. "Congress acted today to protect the American people by helping to prevent inadvertent security breaches on insecure networks." The bill now moves to the Senate.

Peer-to-peer file sharing allows users to instantly exchange content, typically music, video or other large documents, with other people who have the same file sharing software on their computers. If not properly configured, users can inadvertently open up their hard drives -- and all the private materials stored there -- on to the Internet for public access. In November, an internal report discussing House members' alleged ethics violations reportedly leaked out by accident through a peer-to-peer program - renewing interest in a ban.

Towns, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, first mentioned his intent to pass legislation at a July hearing on the subject. The hearing was one of several prompted by the discovery materials describing the president's helicopter on a file server in Iran. The origin of the content was traced back to a defense contractor in Bethesda, Md.

Some security specialists have said that a ban alone will have little effect in preventing the inadvertent release of sensitive information to the public. Tests to monitor break-ins and automated controls that block such applications are also needed, they claim.

Software programs such as Napster gave rise to the popularity of file sharing applications in the late 1990s. Today, federal officials estimate that up to 20 million peer-to-peer users are active at any point in time.
http://techinsider.nextgov.com/2010/...f=latest_posts





Spanish Govt Backs Anti-Piracy Proposals
Howell Llewellyn

The Spanish government took a big step towards outlawing Web site links to unauthorized content when its council of ministers approved a proposed law that would give Madrid's high court the authority to close or block such links.

The Sustainable Economy Law (LES) will now go to parliament for debate, and analysts think it could be approved by the end of June. The LES is a wide-ranging anti-economic crisis law, but it includes one section that would introduce Spain's first ever anti-piracy legislation.

It would set up an Intellectual Property Commission (CPI) dependent on the culture ministry, composed of a handful of Internet experts. They would have the power to denounce Web sites that offer links to unauthorized content for downloading.

Such links and peer-to-peer file sharing in general are currently not considered illegal in Spain if no profit motive can be proved. A March 16 judgement underlined the courts' stance on the issue.

The news of the approval sparked an immediate wave of protest on the Internet. Several Web sites that offer unauthorized links, such as Cinetube.es, Series Yonkis.com and Divxonline.com shut themselves down until midnight, showing only the message "For freedom in the Web. No to the closure of Web [sites]," with a black background.

Many other blogs, Web sites, and specialized media again put up a manifesto written on December 2 entitled "In defense of the fundamental rights in Internet."

Julio Alonso, founder of Weblogs, one of the manifesto's authors, announced through Twitter "I shall not vote for any party that approves the 'Sinde law' in Congress."

This anti-piracy legislation has become known as the 'Sinde Law', after the culture minister Angeles Gonzalez-Sinde, whose socialist party forms the government pressing through the law.

Under the proposed law, if the CPI considers that a Web site offers unauthorized links, the high court would have a maximum of four days to rule on its full or partial closure. The judicial intervention would be limited to deciding if the closure of a Web site would violate fundamental rights, such as the freedom of expression.
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...be7467bc7350a7





Judge Orders Blocking of Torrent Sites in Spain
enigmax

A court in Spain has ordered that a total of 16 torrent and other file-sharing sites must be blocked and the bank accounts and email addresses of their alleged administrator frozen. A web-host says that one of their staff is accused of both hosting and running the sites.

In 2007, Spanish police took two torrent sites offline, Todotorrente and sister-site Trackertdt, and arrested their administrators for facilitating copyright infringement.

September 2008 saw the acquittal of the Todotorrente admin, Rafael Mellado, a case which will now go to appeal.

In December last year, police again arrested Mellado, this time along with three other family members during an operation which targeted the illegal recording of movies in theaters. Mellado’s home was searched, his equipment seized and he was released on bail. He stands accused of preparing videos and making them available on the Internet through a network of file-sharing sites.

Following a complaint from Columbia Tristar, Universal, Disney and other studios, last week a magistrates court ordered the blocking of 16 torrent and other file-sharing sites allegedly operated by Mellado. Citing “ample evidence” that the sites were being used for “criminal activities”, the court also ordered that Mellado’s bank accounts and email addresses should be frozen. Mellado denies the charges.

In addition to todotorrent.com and trackertdt.com, the sites to be blocked include bajandoseries.com, estrenostotal.com, helicityspain.com, lanzadivx.com, lanzamp3.com, masqueforo.com, mejorinline.net, poremule.com, portorrent.com, soloestrenos.com, spadescargas.com, subestrenos.com and torrentmas.org.

Since the initial reports, a notice has sprung up on a handful of the blocked sites detailed above. In summary, the announcement from a claimed hosting company (Hostingpac.net – a domain which redirects to TodoTorrente) says that they have closed access to the sites because they are not only being accused of hosting them, but running them too.

“…one administrator from HostingPac.NET was arrested and accused of being the administrator of 16 file-sharing sites,” says the announcement, which goes on to deny the accusations leveled against him.

Details are very sketchy, but it appears the host claims that in some cases they offer hosting to clients (presumably in this case the operators of file-sharing sites) in exchange for placing advertising on them.

“We’re sorry for the damages that have been done to the administrators of those domains and their users. We hope that they’re back in a few weeks on a new server,” they conclude.
http://torrentfreak.com/judge-orders...-spain-100327/





Digital Economy Bill to be Pushed Through Parliament Next Month

Controversial digital economy bill to get second reading in the Commons on 6 April
Charles Arthur

The controversial digital economy bill will be pushed through in the "wash-up" leading up to an election, after the government confirmed that it will receive its second reading in the Commons on 6 April – the same day that Gordon Brown is expected to seek Parliament's dissolution.

Harriet Harman, the leader of the house, said today that the bill will get its second reading. But when questioned by Labour MPs Neil Gerrard and Tom Watson about the lack of time given to debate over controversial issues in the bill, she said only that "ministers are aware" of the strong feelings that the proposed legislation has engendered.

The "wash-up" is the system by which bills which have passed through one part of parliament can be nodded through by agreement between the whips of the main parties after parliament has formally risen for the election. It does not allow for debate of issues; the only changes that can be made to bills are deletions.

The bill has proved highly controversial with many consumers and businesses because of the measures it would take against those accused of copyright infringement online. Hotels and cafes offering Wi-Fi to customers fear that they would have to shut the service off, while rights groups say that the balance of the bill is against people accused – but not proven–- to have infringed copyright. But groups lobbying for creative industries, particularly the music business, support the bill and say that it is proportionate.

Hundreds of people demonstrated outside the Commons yesterday in protest at the bill's proposed measures.

Reacting to the scheduling of the second reading debate for 6 April, Jim Killock, head of the Open Rights Group, which campaigns for digital rights, said: "Over 17,000 letters have been sent objecting to this Bill being rushed through. This bill will restrict individual rights and freedoms and punish innocent people by disconnecting them. This needs democratic debate, it cannot simply be pushed through during 'wash up'."

More than 2,000 letters were sent to Harman, and more than 15,000 letters have been sent to MPs asking for a full debate.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...y-bill-commons





Accused Filesharers Will Have Right of Appeal, Says Minister

The digital economy bill will introduce an appeals procedure for people accused of piracy

Stephen Timms says people accused of illegal filesharing should not be disconnected before the appeals process. Photograph: Linda Nylind

The government will allow people and companies accused of illicit filesharing to appeal before they are disconnected, under new measures to be introduced in the digital economy bill, said Stephen Timms, the financial secretary to the Treasury, today.

Update: the Department for Business points out that the bill already includes provision for subscriber appeals. (I misinterpreted Timm's use of the phrase "there will be appeals available..." to mean that this was to be introduced. - Charles Arthur)

A new clause to be introduced into the bill in the next two weeks will mean "There will be an appeals procedure available which people will be able to pursue", Timms said as the prime minister Gordon Brown launched his vision of a digital Britain in which superfast broadband would be as essential as electricity.

The bill has come under fire from campaigning groups and digital chiefs who say that as presently constituted it would mean summary disconnection from the internet for people who are accused of repeated online copyright infringement, and that businesses which provide internet connections to customers – such as the British Library or hundreds of hotels and cafés – would shut down the connections rather than risk being sued or put out of business because of the actions of users.

But Timms said that "there will be no disconnection before the appeal" and added "I hope that we will not get into technical measures" – the phrase the bill uses to describe the action to be taken against individuals or businesses with internet access accused multiple times of copyright theft. He added that "we need to be able to protect the UK creative industries which produce so much value for the UK".

Rights groups said that this response does not deal with the threat that they perceive to such organisations from the bill.

The bill is controversial because it is being rushed through parliament so that it can become law before the general election. It has already passed through the House of Lords and had the first of its three readings in the Commons. But it looks increasingly likely that it will go into the "wash-up" – in which bills are nodded through in hours by agreement between party whips if they have had a second reading.

It is expected that the bill will receive a second reading on or before 6 April, in time to go into the "wash-up" if the election is called, as expected, for 6 May. Any bill still in process that does not go into the "wash-up" will not become law.

Timms acknowledged that it was "likely" that the bill will go into the "wash-up". He added: "I am confident we can address the concerns that have been raised. Essentially, we will require consultation before any technical measures are taken."

Brown blamed the problems on amendments introduced by the Tories and Liberal Democrats in the Lords – though online rights groups had criticised the bill before then.

But that has not allayed the concerns of campaigners. Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, which campaigns for online rights of citizens, said: "Online government is a great idea, but Labour cannot say that people will depend on online government, and simultaneously plan to disconnect families after allegations of minor copyright offences. Labour must drop clauses 11-18 of the digital economy bill, which would allow thousands of families to be cut off the internet."

More than 11,000 people have emailed their MPs to ask for more debate of the clauses in parliament.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...l-economy-bill





Groups Voice Concern With ACTA Provisions
Juliana Gruenwald

Ten public interest groups and library associations wrote to U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk Monday voicing concern about some provisions in a leaked version of the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement being negotiated by the United States and other countries.

A "recent leak of a full text [of ACTA] heightens our concern that this negotiation is not primarily about counterfeiting or piracy; nor is at all about trade law," according to the letter signed by such groups as the American Library Association, Association of Research Libraries, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge. "The public rationale that the treaty would not impinge on domestic law has been placed in doubt - particularly when one considers whose domestic law would be endangered,"

The groups asked Kirk about specific provisions that trouble them, including whether ACTA would include some of the exceptions to secondary liability that are part of U.S. law. In addition, the groups asked Kirk whether copyright holders "may or shall" have the option of receiving pre-established damage awards that may not reflect the alleged harm. In addition, they asked Kirk to describe the extent to which policies such as the "three strikes" principle may be imposed on Internet service providers as part of ACTA. The three strikes principle refers to laws being imposed by some countries, most notably France, that give serial infringers a limited number of chances to stop violating copyright laws before their Internet access is restricted.

In addition to specific concerns with the measure, many groups and some lawmakers in the United States and other countries have voiced concern about the secrecy surrounding the ACTA negotiations. The negotiating parties have yet to release a public draft.
"The time for public discussion as to exactly what this document will and won't do is now," according to the letter, which also was sent to the leaders of the House Judiciary and Ways and Means committees and the Senate Finance and Judiciary committees.
http://techdailydose.nationaljournal...-with-acta.php





ACTA Draft: No Internet for Copyright Scofflaws
David Kravets

The United States is nudging the international community to develop protocols to suspend the internet connections of customers caught downloading copyrighted works, according to a leaked draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

The United States is leading the 2-year-old, once-secret negotiations over the so-called ACTA accord. The Jan. 18 draft, about 56 pages and labeled “confidential,” just surfaced, and follows a string of earlier, less comprehensive leaks.

The leak shows that the treaty, if adopted under the U.S. language, would for the first time hold internet service providers responsible when customers download infringing material, unless those ISPs take action by “adopting and reasonably implementing a policy to address the unauthorized storage or transmission of materials protected by copyright or related rights.”

The specific ISP policy suggested in a footnote “is providing for the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscriptions and accounts on the service provider’s system or network of repeat infringers.”

This so-called “three strikes” or “graduated response” policy is the holy grail of internet-copyright enforcement, staunchly backed by the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America.

“This makes it clear that the U.S. has put on the table a mandatory ISP safe-harbor policy,” Michael Geist, an ACTA expert at the University of Ottawa, said in a telephone interview.

The leak, courtesy of the French digital rights group La Quadrature du Net, marks the first time the entirety of the ever-changing draft proposal has come to light, and it confirms suspicions that the Obama administration is laundering a U.S. policy change through the treaty negotiations. Under the current U.S. law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, internet service providers are responsible only for the infringing material hosted on their networks, and only if they if fail to remove the content at the rightsholder’s request.

The ACTA draft comes two weeks after European Parliament agreed to oppose the measure if it contained a three-strikes policy.

Other negotiating entities include Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and Switzerland. The ACTA negotiators are expected to meet next month in New Zealand for a new round of talks.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ght-scofflaws/





ACTA's De Minimis Provision: Countering the iPod Searching Border Guard Fears
Michael Geist

The leak of the full consolidated ACTA text will provide anyone interested in the treaty with plenty to work with for the next few weeks. While several chapters have already been leaked and discussed (see posts on the Internet and Civil Enforcement chapters, the definitional chapter, the institutional arrangements chapter, and international coooperation chapter), the consolidated chapter provides a clear indication of how the negotiations have altered earlier proposals (see this post for links to the early leaks) as well as the first look at several other ACTA elements.

For example, last spring it was revealed that several countries had proposed including a de minimis provision to counter fears that the border measures chapter would lead to iPod searching border guards. This leak shows there are four proposals on the table:

The E.U. version:

Where a traveler's personal baggage contains goods of a non-commercial nature within the limits of the duty-free allowance and there are no material indications to suggest the goods are part of commercial traffic, each Party may consider to leave such goods, or part of such goods, outside the scope of this section.]

Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Singapore support alternative wording:

Where a traveler's personal baggage contains trademark goods or copyright materials of a non-commercial nature within the limits of the duty-free allowance {Aus: or where copyright materials or trademark goods are sent in small consignments} and there are no material indiciations to suggest the goods are part of commercial traffic, Parties may consider such goods to be outside the scope of this Agreement.]

Japan favours the following:

Where a Party excludes from the application of the provisions in this Section small quantities of goods of a non-commercial nature contained in traveler's personal luggage, the Party shall ensure that the quantitites of goods eligible for such exclusion shall be limited to the minimum allowed within its available resources.]

And Canada, New Zealand, and the U.S. would also support this approach:

Where a traveler's personal baggage contains goods of non-commerical nature in quantities reasonably attributable to the personal use of the traveler there are no material indications to suggest the goods are part of commercial traffic, each Party may consider that such goods are outside the scope of this section]

This is just for the personal search issue. The consolidated version runs to 56 pages with dozens of issues still in square brackets that signal a lack of agreement. More on the new issues - particularly the creation of an ACTA super-structure designed to rival WIPO - shortly.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4900/125/





Anti-Counterfeiting Agreement Raises Constitutional Concerns
Jack Goldsmith and Lawrence Lessig

The much-criticized cloak of secrecy that has surrounded the Obama administration's negotiation of the multilateral Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was broken Wednesday. The leaked draft of ACTA belies the U.S. trade representative's assertions that the agreement would not alter U.S. intellectual property law. And it raises the stakes on the constitutionally dubious method by which the administration proposes to make the agreement binding on the United States.

The goal of the trade pact is to tighten enforcement of global intellectual property rules. The leaked draft, though incomplete in many respects, makes clear that negotiators are considering ideas and principles not reflected in U.S. law.

ACTA could, for example, pressure Internet service providers -- such as Comcast and Verizon -- to kick users offline when they (or their children) have been accused of repeated copyright infringement because of content uploaded to sites such as YouTube. It also might oblige the United States to impose criminal liability on those who "incite" copyright violation. The draft more generally addresses "IP infringement" and thus could extend some of its rules to trademark and possibly patent law in ways that, after inevitable international compromises, will depart from U.S. law. It also contemplates creating an international "oversight council" to supervise (and possibly amend) aspects of the agreement.

These proposals might or might not make sense. But they ought at least be subject to public deliberation. Normal constitutional procedures would require the administration to submit the final text of the agreement for Senate approval as a treaty or to Congress as a "congressional-executive" agreement. But the Obama administration has suggested it will adopt the pact as a "sole executive agreement" that requires only the president's approval.

Such an assertion of unilateral executive power is usually reserved for insignificant matters. It has sometimes been employed in more important contexts, such as when Jimmy Carter ended the Iran hostage crisis and when Franklin Roosevelt recognized and settled expropriation claims with the Soviet Union.

The Supreme Court, however, has never clarified the limits on such agreements. Historical practice and constitutional structure suggest that they must be based on one of the president's express constitutional powers (such as the power to recognize foreign governments) or at least have a long historical pedigree (such as the president's claims settlement power, which dates back over a century).

Joining ACTA by sole executive agreement would far exceed these precedents. The president has no independent constitutional authority over intellectual property or communications policy, and there is no long historical practice of making sole executive agreements in this area. To the contrary, the Constitution gives primary authority over these matters to Congress, which is charged with making laws that regulate foreign commerce and intellectual property.

The administration has suggested that a sole executive agreement in this instance would not trample Congress's prerogatives because the pact would not affect U.S. domestic law. Binding the United States to international obligations of this sort without congressional approval would raise serious constitutional questions even if domestic law were not affected. In any event, an anti-counterfeiting agreement made on the president's own authority could affect domestic law in at least three ways:

First, the noncriminal portions of this agreement that contemplate judicial enforcement can override inconsistent state law and possibly federal law. Second, the agreement could invalidate state law that conflicts with its general policies under a doctrine known as obstacle preemption, even if the terms are not otherwise judicially enforceable. Third, a judicial canon requires courts to interpret ambiguous federal laws to avoid violations of international obligations. This means courts will construe the many ambiguities in federal laws on intellectual property, telecom policy and related areas to conform to the agreement.

If the president proceeds unilaterally here, ACTA will be challenged in court. But the best route to constitutional fidelity is for Congress or the Senate to protect its constitutional prerogatives. When the George W. Bush administration suggested it might reach a deal with Russia on nuclear arms reduction by sole executive agreement, then-Sen. Joe Biden wrote to Secretary of State Colin Powell insisting that the Constitution required Senate consent and implicitly threatening inter-branch retaliation if it was not given. The Bush administration complied.

Congress should follow Biden's lead. If the president succeeds in expanding his power of sole executive agreement here, he will have established a precedent to bypass Congress on other international matters related to trade, intellectual property and communications policy.

These mostly secret negotiations have already violated the Obama administration's pledge for greater transparency. Embracing this deal by sole executive agreement would repudiate its pledge to moderate assertions of executive power. Congress should resist this attempt to evade the checks established by our Framers.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...032502403.html





EU Wants Anti-Piracy Treaty Published
FMQB

The European Union (EU) is calling on the U.S. and other countries to publish a draft of their secret anti-piracy agreement in order to reassure those who worry that the deal proposes cutting off Internet access for illegal downloaders. European Internet service providers said last month that they were concerned by leaked details of the talks, which indicate that the participants have discussed a "three strikes and you're out" rule for users who share copyrighted content. Repeat offenders would likely have their Internet connections suspended or completely cut off. The ISPs also are concerned about legal changes that could make them liable when users break copyright laws, which they argue would damage people's privacy rights and stifle innovation and competition in Europe's Internet industry.

EU trade official Luc Pierre Devigne told a European Commission public hearing that the EU would seek to get the U.S., Canada, Mexico, South Korea, Japan and others to agree on publishing a draft text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, according to ABC News, because the EU is anxious to assure European users that it wasn't planning to strike a deal that would force any changes to EU law.

"We want to have the negotiating document released so that rumors can be dispelled," he said, according to ABC. "Three strikes is no one's idea, no one has ever proposed that."
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1742940





EA's Mouthpiece Foiled by Command and Conquer DRM
Ben Kuchera

When you have to be connected to the Internet at all times to be able to play a single-player game, something has gone terribly wrong with this industry. EA's first-party blogger and outspoken mouthpiece Jeff Green found this out the hard way, and spread the word. "Booted twice—and progress lost—on my single-player C&C4 game because my DSL connection blinked. DRM fail. We need new solutions," he posted to Twitter.

He then goes on and says that calling it a single-player game may not be fair. "However, C&C4 experiments w/what a "single-player game" is—given it's constantly uploading progress/stats for unlocks. It's complicated... I think if we think of C&C4 as an 'online-only' game—which it basically is—then maybe we'd adjust our expectations accordingly."

Making single-player games effectively online-only is a bad solution to any problem, especially after we've explored how many people live without reliable Internet connections. You could save the points and progress and upload them when there is a connection, as Green points out, or simply design your games assuming players may not always be where there is Internet.

Green sent a warning to prospective players. "The story is fun, the gameplay is interesting and different at least—but if you suffer from shaky/unreliable DSL—you've been warned."
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2...onquer-drm.ars





Pirate Party Calls for File-Sharing to be Legalised

The Pirate Party has launched its manifesto, calling for an overhaul in copyright law and consumer privacy online.

The copyright crusading party, which only formed its UK branch last year, is planning to field at least two candidates in this summer's General Election. The Swedish branch of the party won two seats in last year’s EU elections.

Its UK manifesto argues copyright law has become “biased” as a result of money and pressure from lobbying groups.

“Currently copyright carries on for more than 70 years after the author of a work dies. We believe… 10 years of copyright protection is long enough," the party's manifesto states. "Shorter copyright will encourage artists to keep on creating new work, will allow new art forms… and will stop big businesses from constantly reselling content we have already paid for.”

“Our ten year copyright length will include a renewal after five years (allowing works that the creator is no longer interested in to fall into the public domain after five years),” the manifesto states, adding the practice of “restarting the clock” on copyright by shifting the content to a different format will also be scrapped.

With the subject of file-sharing at the centre of the Government’s Digital Economy Bill, the Pirate Party is also calling for the practice to be legalised provided “no money changes hands”.

The party says this will overhaul copyright laws in favour of the consumer, as it will legalise format shifting (ie. from a CD to an iPod, which is currently illegal) and file-sharing, which the party argues “provides free advertising that is essential for less well-known artists”.

‘You already pay for this’

A major overhaul of the BBC is also called for. “[The BBC] is funded by the licence-paying public and should therefore belong to the licence paying public,” the party argues. The use of DRM by the broadcaster will be blocked and all content will be placed in the public domain under a Creative Commons licence.

The party is also calling for an explanatory warning label to be placed on any products containing DRM, in order to educate the public on the “defects” inherent in the products.

These include region coding, or products that can be remotely turned off by the manufacturer, or must "phone home" and would therefore stop working if the manufacturer went bankrupt.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/356644/p...o-be-legalised





Music File Sharing Site Man Cleared of Conspiracy

RIAA claimed it was the victim

A man accused of uploading thousands of copyright protected files was found not guilt of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement.

Matthew Chow, a member of Rabid Neurosis, faced a maximum sentence of five years in clink and fined $250,000. He would also have had to pay restitution to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) if he'd been found guilty.

But he was found innocent of the charges, and another member of RNS, Adil Cassim was also cleared on Friday in a Houston court. Three other members of RNS pleaded guilty and testified for the government.

Lawyer Terry W. Yates said: "We encountered some extremely complex factual and legal issues in this case. The jury's verdict was just."

Chow himself said he was relieved by the jury's verdict.
http://www.techeye.net/business/musi...-of-conspiracy





UK Anti-Piracy Lawyers Threaten File-Sharing Forum
enigmax

ACS:Law have been making news headlines damaging to their reputation ever since they started sending out thousands of threatening letters to alleged file-sharers in the UK. Now they are threatening to sue Slyck.com, one of the Internet’s oldest file-sharing forums, because they don’t like what members have written about them.

Slyck.com is one of the longest-established file-sharing discussion forums on the Internet. For the best part of a decade the site has been home to every part of the file-sharing community, from Napster users through to just about every other file-swapping mechanism on the planet.

While here at TorrentFreak we have published many news articles on the antics of anti-piracy lawyers Davenport Lyons and latterly ACS:Law, what many people won’t realize is that it’s over on Slyck where the real meat of the ‘backroom’ discussions about this business have been taking place.

In Slyck’s ‘UK Filesharing Allegations/Lawsuit Discussion’ section are multiple thousands of posts from those affected by these ‘pay up or else’ schemes. It is from these forums that people have worked together to support each other and work out ways of fighting back against intimidation. Many forum posters, with the help received on Slyck and these threads, have refused to pay up and have still not done so. The value of these threads to letter recipients cannot be understated.

Herein lies the problem. This forum has dramatically undermined the business model of both Davenport Lyons and ACS:Law because, quite simply, it enables people to stand strong and cut off the revenue source to these lawyers’ clients.

And now ACS:Law have moved to do something about it through the legal system, claiming that some forum posts by Slyck members are harming their business, citing grounds of defamation.

According to site editor Thomas Mennecke, Slyck were told to remove three discussion threads containing more than 10,300 posts in their entirety by 4:00pm March 12, 2010.

Mennecke says that ACS:Law cites just 11 posts as evidence of defamation. One calls an employee of ACS:Law, Terence Tsang, a “wanker” and another describes the ‘pay up or else’ scheme as “a wank plan” while saying that ACS:Law are “not the best at getting things right.”

It is very interesting that ACS:Law have chosen these comments.

When ACS:Law first burst onto this scene, TorrentFreak contacted owner Andrew Crossley and asked him if there is a connection between his company and Davenport Lyons, since we suspected he’d taken up the work previously done by the London-based firm.

He told us that connections were “NONE” – but sadly this wasn’t true.

We’ve long suspected it, but it was recently confirmed in an interview conducted by the BBC with Andrew Crossley that, “Many of the cases already under way were passed on to ACS: Law by another law firm, Davenport Lyons, which originally began the claims.”

In respect of the forum post about Terence Tsang, although we don’t know what he does in the privacy of his own home, what we do know is that while he is currently working for ACS:Law, he previously worked for Davenport Lyons.

Furthermore, staff from ACS:Law and Davenport Lyons have all been seen together in court together, working on these cases. So as the connections between the companies mount up, it seems that ACS:Law really aren’t the best at “getting things right” after all.

Needless to say, Slyck aren’t going to be bullied by ACS:Law and have refused to take down the posts.

You can read the whole sorry episode in Thomas Mennecke’s article “Wank Plan Goes Wrong: ACS:Law Threatens Slyck.com With a Lawsuit” over on Slyck.

TorrentFreak has also been informed that a torrent of all the discussions is being prepared and will soon be seeded on every major BitTorrent tracker. If ACS:Law haven’t yet heard of the Streisand Effect, maybe they should look it up.
http://torrentfreak.com/uk-anti-pira...-forum-100322/





Happy Birthday, Gnutella: Pioneering P2P Protocol Turns Ten
Janko Roettgers

Ten years ago this week, online music pioneer Justin Frankel released a little application dubbed Gnutella that enabled file sharing through a distributed P2P network. Frankel, whose previous claim to fame was programming the then hugely-popular Winamp MP3 player software, supposedly named the client after his favorite hazelnut cream spread, and the first version published online was really more of a proof of concept than anything else.

Still, Gnutella hit a nerve. Napster had been sued three months before, and many file sharers were rightfully fearing that the music industry would eventually prevail in court and force Napster to switch off its servers. With Gnutella, no such switch existed, as the client was allowing direct P2P connections without the help of any centralized server. Add to it the fact that Gnutella, unlike Napster, allowed users to swap videos and software as well as MP3s, and you begin to see why many immediately viewed Gnutella as the next step in P2P file sharing.

A step, one should add, that made Frankel’s employer AOL more than a little nervous. It only took the Internet giant a day to force Frankel and his colleagues to take down Gnutella – but even that was too long, as countless sites quickly started to first mirror, then build upon Frankel’s official Gnutella client. There’s always been a little bit of mystery surrounding the exact happenings of those days, but some people have been musing that a person with a surprising amount of insider knowledge showed up in one of the first IRC chat rooms dedicated to Gnutella soon after AOL pulled the plug, only to provide some very detailed information about the inner workings of the client’s P2P protocol.

Speaking of IRC: Early versions of the software didn’t really have any way for users to connect, save for entering another user’s IP address, which is why IRC quickly became an integral part of the early days of Gnutella. It was also in those IRC chat rooms that the myth of Gnutella as a seemingly invincible P2P protocol was born, and the fact that AOL tried but couldn’t contain the software seemed to fit right into that picture. Gnutella was one of the very first P2P apps I ever wrote about, so I lurked in those chat rooms as well, where people were cheering the fact that someone finally found a file sharing solution that couldn’t be shut down. I still remember one IRC user saying: “We’ve started a damn cult again!”

Only Gnutella wasn’t really ready to be a cult. The network routed search requests from peer to peer, leading to an exponential growth of traffic as its network became bigger. Napster programmer Jordan Ritter described the problem early on in a paper titled “Why Gnutella Can’t Scale. No, Really,” and Frankel himself, who has hardly ever gone on the record about Gnutella, once stated that he was fully aware of “how poorly it would scale” when he released the client.

Still, Gnutella captured the imagination of many, one of them being Mark Gorton, founder of the New York-based Lime Group. Gorton was at the time pursuing a vision of automating businesses through structured data, and Gnutella, as something that could, for example, distribute real estate listings wrapped in XML, seemed to fit that image quite nicely. Early versions of the Gnutella client of Gorton’s LimeWire venture were still written with this vision in mind, hoping to build a P2P network that could eventually be used to do all kinds of things with which we’re now familiar on the web, thanks to web services.

LimeWire’s engineers joined a growing group of developers loosely connected through web sites like the long-defunct Gnutella.wego.com (whose admin Gene Kan tragically committed suicide in 2002) and mailing lists like the one for the Gnutella Developer Forum, and one of the first issues to be tackled was scalability. The introduction of a two-tiered system of ordinary clients and so-called Ultrapeers helped grow both the network as a whole and each user’s search horizon. The idea was also later adopted by the developers of KaZaA, whose own take on this two-tiered approach still lives on in Skype’s P2P network.

Technical improvements like these helped Gnutella to grow, but the competition was quick to catch up. Bram Cohen unveiled a first version of BitTorrent only two years after Frankel had published Gnutella, and BitTorrent quickly became the file sharing client of choice for sharing videos online. Part of BitTorrent’s quick rise to fame was its modular simplicity: Cohen had outsourced much of the search and indexing of files to torrent web sites, only handling the actual distribution of data within the client. Gnutella on the other hand was meant to work without any web server. That made it much more invincible, but also much less accessible to users who migrated from apps and clients to a world of web services.

Another issue that has plagued Gnutella from the beginning is not technical, but legal. The protocol was supposed to outsmart trigger-happy lawyers, but the mere fact that there wasn’t a central switch to turn off the Gnutella network didn’t stop rights holders from going after people and companies associated with it. Lawsuits and legal threats forced Morpheus, Xolox, Bearshare and a number of other companies and developers to throw the towel.

LimeWire got sued by the music industry as well in 2006, but that hasn’t stopped the company from continuing with the development and monetization of its client. LimeWire’s client also utilizes BitTorrent these days, but LimeWire’s VP of Product Management Jason Herskowitz told me during a phone conversation that Gnutella has “worked really well” for the company, and that its engineers are looking into ways to make Gnutella once again more attractive to developers by exposing some of its functionality through web services. “There is still a long future ahead for Gnutella,” he predicted.

Not everyone agrees with that outlook. Adam Fisk, who was hired by LimeWire as one of its first developers in the summer of 2000, but left the company in 2004 to eventually start his own P2P venture dubbed Littleshot, believes that some core assumptions of the Gnutella protocol are outdated. “I don’t think that distributed P2P search makes any sense,” he told me, explaining that the very server-less search functionality that made Gnutella superior to Napster also ended up being its biggest burden, and that it would be much easier to have servers handle search and just use P2P to deliver data – a recipe that has already helped BitTorrent succeed.

Sure, LimeWire and some other Gnutella clients could still stick around for a long time, Fisk admitted, but he was skeptical that we would ever see any significant new project based on Gnutella. “That would be shocking,” he said.
http://newteevee.com/2010/03/20/happ...col-turns-ten/





What’s New

Sky Downloader Helps You Pull Music and Video From the Web
Preston Gralla

Looking for a simple-to-use way to find music, video, TV shows and other goodies to download? Then try the free SkyDownloader (6.9MB), an attractive downloader with a built-in music and video player.

Search for what you want from right within SkyDownloader, select your downloads, and Sky Downloader gets to work. Each download is rated by other users, so you have some advice to go on before you download. SkyDownloader uses both the Gnutella file-sharing network and the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol, so that you get the best of both worlds.

You can pause and resume downloads, and SkyDownloader handles your downloaded files as well. Its media player is exemplary. And SkyDownloader does more than just search for files, manage them and play them. You can also watch TV shows from inside it from Hulu.com, and listen to Internet radio stations.

If you're looking for a pleasing-looking download and media player, SkyDownloader is a solid bet.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/191363





The Real Truth About Broadband Speeds
Bill Snyder

Suppose you went to the supermarket to buy a pound of steak for dinner and when you got home you noticed that the package seemed very light. So you went back and complained to the manager, only to be told that the label says "up to 1 pound," and you're stuck with it.

You'd be furious, of course. But that seemingly ridiculous stratagem is used every day by broadband providers across the country. Don't believe me? Check your agreement. In my case, AT&T tells me that I'm entitled to upload speeds of "up to" 3 Mbps and download speeds of "up to" 384 kbps. What do I have? Download speeds that average about 15 percent slower depending on the time of day, and upload speeds that are more or less as promised.

You can do the math as well I can. A big file, such as a backup or a photo album that takes 120 minutes to download at 3 Mbps, takes an extra 17 minutes at 2.5 Mbps, my actual download speed.

OK, so maybe that's not the biggest deal in the world, but why should I burn up an extra 17 minutes when I thought I was paying to avoid that? And as I found out, I'm lucky. Many consumers get just 50 percent of the speed they thought they purchased.

If we were talking about almost any other consumer service, you'd have the choice of taking your business elsewhere. But not in broadband. "Ninety-six percent of the country has two or fewer choices for broadband -- the cable provider and the phone company," says Chris Riley, policy counsel for Freepress, a non-partisan advocacy group.

How Fast Is Fast?

Not only do we lack a standard for acceptable broadband service, there's not even a standard definition of what constitutes broadband. The FCC, as part of the National Broadband Plan, has just begun collecting data on connection speeds across the country via a test posted on its website. Sure, that's a good idea, but hello, this is 2010! Why don't we know this already? Why, as Eric London of the Open Internet Coalition points out, are ISPs allowed to claim that 90 kbps is broadband?

That 90 kbps figure may sound like a relic of the analog modem days, but in fact it's what you get on your iPhone when forced to connect to AT&T's sclerotic and nearly useless Edge wireless network.

Authorized by Congress, the Broadband Plan lays out numerous goals for this country's data infrastructure, most notably assuring 100 Mbps access for most of the country by 2020. To reach that goal, average download speeds in the United States will have to increase five fold.

Although its data is incomplete, the FCC cites private research indicating that broadband customers aren't getting what they pay for. In fact, households are, on average, experiencing download speeds that are approximately 40 percent to 50 percent of the advertised "up to" speed they paid for, the report states. Upload speeds average about 45 percent of what's advertised. All in all, it appears that the average actual download speed around the country is about 4.1 Mbps.

"There's no excuse for the industry to use 'up to' speeds," says Joe Ridout, of Consumer Action in San Francisco. "It's useless to consumers. The FCC should require the use of average speeds."

Number Games

Sadly, the slippery marketing of broadband service is hardly the only numbers game designed to fool technology consumers. Most egregiously, printers are marketed as "up to" a certain number of pages per minute, a speed not often realized in the real world. Similarly, expensive ink cartridges are marketed the same way, and if you think it's difficult to note how fast your printer prints, just try and keep track of how many pages you get from an ink cartridge.

PCs and cameras are a bit different. If Intel says a chip runs at 1.63 GHz, it probably does; and if your camera is designed for a resolution of 10 Megapixels, you'll likely get it. However, it's taken consumers a long time to look behind those numbers and understand what they really mean. As many of us have learned, CPU speed and megapixels by themselves tell you little about the real-world performance of a PC or the quality of a digital photo.

Broken Speedometers

Unfortunately, there are real questions about the reliability of download/upload tests. Part of the problem is the very real issue of network congestion. Connection speeds drop off sharply around dinner time in much of the country, as consumers jump on the Net.

What's more, the tests themselves are often inconsistent. The FCC, for example, is using two providers: Ookla and M-Lab. In tests of my DSL connection, I saw relatively minor variations in results between the two services, but others have found huge discrepancies.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times recently, journalist David Lazarus said his cable connection was clocked by one of the services on the FCC page at 18 Mbps; and a few seconds later the other reported speeds of 6 Mbps. And if you use one of the numerous speed tests on privately owned sites, the numbers can be all over the map. My 2.5 Mbps connection (according to Ookla) plummeted to 1.16 Mbps when clocked by CNET's Shopper.com.

And you thought that butcher had a heavy thumb.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/19212...nd_speeds.html





Can 4G Wireless Take on Traditional Broadband?
Marguerite Reardon

The 4G revolution in wireless won't just make Web surfing on your mobile phone faster; it could help you say good-bye to traditional cable and DSL broadband.

Clearwire's 4G WiMax service, currently the only 4G wireless service on the market, offers average download speeds between 3Mbps and 6Mbps, which are comparable with many DSL and cable modem services on the market.

As a result, consumers in the 27 markets where Clearwire currently offers service now have another choice for their broadband service. And many are deciding to ditch cable and DSL for 4G wireless.

Tim Elliott, who lives in Atlanta, is one of those customers. Ten months ago when Clearwire came to town, Elliott, who had subscribed to an AT&T DSL package, canceled his service and signed up.

Elliott said he was convinced to subscribe to the service because he got a free Netbook as part of a promotion. He added that he plans to stick with Clearwire even after his contract expires because he likes the convenience of having broadband anywhere. Even though he could have gotten free Wi-Fi access to any AT&T hot spot as part of his old AT&T DSL subscription, Elliott said the ubiquity of WiMax makes the service more valuable to him.

"I love being able to go anywhere in town with my laptop and not worry about finding a hot spot," he said.

Elliott isn't the only subscriber who has decided to cancel his existing broadband service for Clearwire's 4G wireless service.

In fact, Clearwire's chief commercial officer, Mike Sievert, said during the company's fourth-quarter 2009 earnings call last month that roughly half of the company's subscribers are using its new Clear brand 4G wireless broadband service as a replacement for DSL and cable modem services.

Sievert's comments are the first indication that 4G wireless could actually compete in the duopolistic broadband market. Wireless executives at this week's CTIA trade show in Las Vegas may downplay this fact as they tout new mobile devices for 4G.

But as 4G wireless speeds continue to match speeds for traditional broadband, 4G wireless will serve as a viable replacement for some consumers who are not interested in subscribing to a costly triple-play package of TV, phone, and Internet services.

Indeed, other 4G wireless services will offer similar speeds to those offered today from Clearwire. Verizon Wireless is building its own 4G network using a technology called LTE and is expected to launch the service in 25 to 30 markets by the end of the year. It claims that the average download speeds it has seen in its test networks are between 6Mbps and 12Mbps.

But Verizon and AT&T, which will test 4G LTE technology later this year, have been careful not to talk much about 4G wireless as a broadband replacement service. After all, these companies sell DSL services and they have each invested billions of dollars upgrading their wired networks to provide faster fiber-based services.

Verizon has taken fiber all the way to the home with its Fios service. And AT&T has extended fiber to neighborhoods to boost high-speed Internet speeds.

Neither AT&T nor Verizon Wireless have talked about how they will price their 4G wireless services. There are some indications that the companies plan to implement usage-based pricing, which would likely discourage many people from using their 4G wireless services as a replacement for DSL.

But it's clear from the recently released National Broadband Plan that the Federal Communications Commission expects 4G wireless to be a broadband competitor.

Today, about 95 percent of the U.S. population has access to at least one broadband provider, according to the FCC's report. About 13 percent have access to only one provider, while the vast majority, roughly 78 percent, have access to two providers, cable and DSL. Only 4 percent have access to three or more providers.

The FCC recognizes that broadband needs to be delivered not only to the 4 percent who don't have it, but also that more competition is needed in markets with only one provider.

Even though two competitors are better than one or none at all, three could be even better, which is why many consumer groups have advocated for more competition even in markets with two suppliers.

The problem is that putting broadband infrastructure in the ground is expensive. And earlier attempts to force competition in the telecommunications market through regulation have not been successful.

Now it looks like the FCC has acknowledged that getting a "third wire" into the home is unlikely, and it has instead turned its attention to 4G wireless.

"Bringing down the cost of entry for a facilities-based wireline service may encourage new competitors to enter in a few areas, but it is unlikely to create several new facilities-based entrants competing across broad geographic areas," the National Broadband Plan says.

"Bringing down the costs of entry and expansion in wireless broadband by facilitating access to spectrum, sites, and high-capacity backhaul may spur additional facilities based competition."

Aside from the economic drivers that make 4G wireless a good choice as a third competitor to traditional broadband, other factors will likely drive it in this direction.

Just as people fell in love with the idea of being able to talk on the phone wherever they were with a cell phone, it won't take long before people will also begin to appreciate accessing broadband anywhere and everywhere.

Once mobile broadband becomes ubiquitous, it's easy to see how some of these people may decide to stop paying for two broadband services, much like many cell phone users decided to get rid of their home phones. In fact, 2009 marked the first time that cell phone households in the U.S. surpassed households that only had traditional phones.

"People first added cellular phone service to their monthly budgets because they wanted mobility," Sievert said. "We are starting to see the same thing in mobile broadband. People are attracted to the convenience, but they'll eventually realize they can consolidate services."

The trend is seen first among young adults. Just as people under 30 were the first to ditch home phone service, they are also the first to use wireless-only broadband.

"Right now, substituting 4G wireless for regular broadband appeals mostly to young people who often live with roommates," Sievert said. "They want to be able to take their broadband anywhere."

To be fair, wireless-only broadband will not appeal to every consumer, especially ones who consume a lot of bandwidth. Because of the physical limitations of any wireless service, it will never keep pace with the super-fast speeds of services delivered on fiber networks. Therefore, 4G wireless will never satisfy the needs of the most bandwidth-hungry users.

That said, average users looking to reduce their overall monthly communications spending could see wireless broadband as an alternative to pricey triple-play packages that promise lower prices for broadband in exchange for subscribing to expensive TV packages and phone service.

But will 4G wireless networks help force down the price of their competitors? Maybe. If the FCC can successfully make 500MHz more bandwidth available in the next decade as they plan, new wireless companies may emerge, which could translate into three, four, five, or even six broadband competitors in any given market.

This level of competition could finally force prices lower on broadband services for consumers.

Today, the market is a long way from major shifts in price. Currently, Clearwire's prices are competitive, but the company's not undercutting traditional broadband players by much if at all in some markets.

In fact, its unlimited home service, which offers up to 6Mbps on downloads and 1Mbps on uploads, is priced comparably to AT&T's 6Mbps DSL service, which is also $40. Verizon, which offers a 7Mbps DSL service, charges $55 for the service.

Meanwhile, cable operators typically offer faster speed connections for roughly the same price as the Clearwire service.

It's evident that Clearwire isn't looking to compete on price.

"There may be some people who subscribe to our service to save money," Sievert said. "But I don't think that's the main motivation. I think people like the convenience of the mobile experience."

One reason Clearwire may not be launching a price war could be that two of the nation's largest broadband providers are investors in Clearwire.

Time Warner Cable and Comcast have each contributed billions of dollars to Clearwire to help the company complete its network. As part of the deal, they are reselling the 4G service as an add-on to their existing broadband customers.

Even without significant discounts for the Clearwire 4G wireless service, this still offers broadband subscribers a choice. In the second half of this year, even more consumers in cities such as New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Washington, D.C., will also have the option of ditching their cable modem or DSL providers to get broadband wirelessly. And for some people, a little bit of choice is better than no choices.

"It's nice to just be able to have a choice," said Elliott, who also admitted the Clearwire service costs almost as much and performed as well as his previous broadband service. "I guess it's the lesser of the other evils out there."
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/....html?hpt=Sbin





HTC EVO 4G is Sprint's Android-Powered Knight in Superphone Armor, We Go Hands-On
Paul Miller

We've been rumoring a WiMAX "HTC Supersonic" for a while now, and Sprint just dropped the hard news: the phone will be dubbed the HTC EVO 4G, will be released this Summer and it's easily the best specced phone we've ever witnessed. The hardware is of quite obvious HD2 descent, but with Android onboard and some nice aesthetic tweaks, the EVO 4G takes on a life of its own.

The handset is centered around a 480 x 800 4.3-inch TFT LCD, with a Snapdragon QSD8650 1GHz processor under the hood (the CDMA version of the QSD8250 in the HD2 and Nexus One), and even a helpful 1GB of built-in memory and 512MB of RAM -- hello app storage! Even the battery is bigger than the HD2, and the camera is an 8 megapixel monstrosity with flash, that's capable of 720p video, and is augmented by a 1.3 megapixel front facing camera for good measure.

The phone features HDMI out (though you'll need an adapter for turning it into a TV-familiar HDMI plug), 802.11b/g WiFi, and an 8GB microSD card. There's that still-rare Android 2.1 underneath an updated version of HTC's Sense UI. But... despite all these wild features, what actually sets the EVO 4G apart is the fact that it's Sprint's first 4G phone.

The handset runs a combo of EV-DO Rev. A and WiMAX, with calls still being made over CDMA and the EV-DO / WiMAX options for data. Interestingly, it sounds like concurrent data and voice use might be possible for the first time on CDMA carrier in this way (killing AT&T's well-advertised differentiator), though Sprint says that's still in the testing phase. One other new feature is the Sprint hotspot app, another MiFi-style connection sharing number, which is obviously aided greatly by the WiMAX on board and can support up to eight concurrent users.

We got to play with the phone for an all-too-brief matter of minutes, but everything we saw was frankly breathtaking. The camera does seem to be indeed of a high quality (though we'll still be holding on to our compact shooter, thank you very much), the screen is naturally gorgeous, and the Sense UI was as responsive as we've seen it, and frankly delicious at this jumbo size. The capacitive face buttons are flat and almost a little difficult to see due the thin chrome icons, but the physical buttons (a volume rocker and a power button up top) are very large, tactile and friendly. Around back there's strong, chrome kick stand, and when you pop off the cover the battery is surrounded by beautiful "Ferrari red" plastic. The touchscreen keyboard is positively ginormous, though we're not sure we're feeling some of the recent things that have been crammed in there like huge cursor buttons and the voice recognition button -- just because you can fit stuff in there doesn't mean you should, and they look a little comical at this size. In our testing we weren't really able to get a feel for the browsing speed on WiMAX, but at this point we're primarily enthused that it's even an option, and obviously the theoretical speeds are far beyond 3G, with a bunch of new markets due to go online this year. Battery life is stated as "comparable."

Our biggest questions at this point are availability and pricing. Sprint is keeping mum, just stating a "Summer" availability, and interestingly clarified that not only is it not announcing device pricing, but it's not announcing plan pricing yet either -- sounds like a 4G-on-a-phone surcharge could be somewhere in our future.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/23/h...perphone-armo/





Palm Says “Achtung Baby” to Bono’s Big Bet
Robert Cyran

Elevation Partners has poured money into a few concentrated bets but is struggling to find what it’s looking for — profits. The fund where Bono, the frontman of rock band U2, is a co-founder is now seeing its biggest gamble, the turnaround of handset maker Palm, starting to unravel.

Palm’s stock plunged by a quarter by early afternoon on Friday following the company’s earnings announcement. The main bombshell was that while Palm shipped 960,000 phones in the quarter ending Feb. 28, it only actually sold about 40 percent as many.

Elevation’s fate rides largely on Palm, in which it has sunk $460 million. The investment firm has managed to double its $300 million investment in video game maker BioWare/Pandemic. But its other investments have given few signs they can outweigh any failure to deliver on Palm.

The firm bought 40 percent of Forbes’ publishing business from the Forbes family in 2006, paying around $275 million according to news reports at the time. Since then, valuations of media rivals have melted down. If October’s sale of Business Week for $9 million is anything to go by, Elevation’s stake is hurting. And a $100 million investment in Move, an online realty services company, doesn’t look spectacular, either.

So the prospects for the Palm investment are crucial. Happily for Elevation, the combination of preferred stock, common stock and warrants it bought has protected it somewhat from Palm’s troubles — the holding is roughly breaking even so far. But if the firm’s phones don’t sell better in the next few quarters, the company’s cash burn could accelerate, and Elevation’s investment could head south.

Palm thinks adding a new cellphone operator partner — perhaps AT&T — could help, as might ironing out problems with Verizon, an existing partner. And its impressive smartphone operating system could yet attract new customers.
There are other options, too. Palm could license out its software, or even sell itself to a rival with more resources. But smartphone competition is harsh and intensifying. Apple, Research in Motion, Nokia, Google and Microsoft are all backing differing operating systems. There’s still tomorrow for Palm. But time is running short.
http://blogs.reuters.com/columns/201...bonos-big-bet/





Pwn2Own 2010: iPhone Hacked, SMS Database Hijacked
Ryan Naraine

A pair of European researchers used the spotlight of the CanSecWest Pwn2Own hacking contest here to break into a fully patched iPhone and hijack the entire SMS database, including text messages that had already been deleted.

Using an exploit against a previously unknown vulnerability, the duo — Vincenzo Iozzo and Ralf Philipp Weinmann — lured the target iPhone to a rigged Web site and exfiltrated the SMS database in about 20 seconds.

The exploit crashed the iPhone’s browser session but Weinmann said that, with some additional effort, he could have a successful attack with the browser running.

“Basically, every page that the user visits on our [rigged] site will grab the SMS database and upload it to a server we control,” Weinmann explained. Iozzo, who had flight problems, was not on hand to enjoy the glory of being the first to hijack an iPhone at the Pwn2Own challenge.

Weinmann, a 32-year-old from the University of Luxembourg, collaborated with Iozzo (a 22-year-old Italian researcher from Zynamics) on the entire process — from finding the vulnerability to writing the exploit. The entire process took about two weeks, Weinmann said.

Halvar Flake, a renowned security researcher who assisted with the winning exploit, said the biggest hiccup was bypassing the code-signing mitigation implemented by Apple on its flagship mobile device.

“This exploit doesn’t get out of the iPhone sandbox,” Flake explained, noting that an attacker can do enough damage without escaping from the sandbox.

“Apple has pretty good counter-measures but they are clearly not enough. The way they implement code-signing is too lenient,” Flake added.

On the Zynamics blog, Flake celebrated:

The payload used chained return-into-libc (“return oriented programming”) on ARM to execute in spite of code signing. As far as we know, this is the first public demonstration of chainged return-into-libc on thre ARM platform.

In addition to hijacking the SMS database, Weinmann said the winning Pwn2Own exploit could have exfiltrated the phone contact list, the email database, photographs and iTunes music files.

In the iPhone sandbox, Weinmann said there’s a non-root user called ‘mobile’ with certain user privileges. “With this exploit, I can do anything that ‘mobile’ can do.”

Weinmann declined to publicly discuss the techniques he used to find the vulnerability. “We’re working on developing techniques to find a certain class of vulnerabilities. I don’t want to discuss it too much.”

Aaron Portnoy, a security researcher at TippingPoint Zero Day Initiative (the company sponsoring Pwn2Own), described the attack as “very impressive.”

“It was a real world exploit against a popular device. They exfiltrated the entire SMS database in about 20 seconds. It was as if a Web page was loading.”

TippingPoint ZDI acquired the exclusive rights to the flaw information. The company will report the issue to Apple and will withhold details until a patch is released.

Weinmann and Iozzo won a $15,000 cash prize and got the keep the hijacked iPhone.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=5836





Opera Applies for its Browser to get iPhone Access

Opera Software said it would apply on Tuesday for its mobile browser to be distributed on Apple's iPhone, seeking to crack a new and potentially lucrative market closely guarded by Apple.

Analysts have said Apple -- whose application store is the only way to distribute software for iPhone users -- could try to stop Opera, to maintain control of its Internet browsing function, a key behind the success of the iPhone.

Opera said it saw no reason why its Mini browser, the world's most widely used on cellphones, should be rejected.

Opera showed the browser -- which promises up to six times faster download speeds than Apple's own browser and to cut data traffic by up to 90 percent -- last month at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona.

Massive data traffic from iPhone mobile phones has caused problems for many operators' networks.

(Reporting by Tarmo Virki; Editing by Dan Lalor)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...technologyNews





IPhone App To Sidestep AT&T
David Pogue

For a little $1 iPhone app, Line2 sure has the potential to shake up an entire industry.

It can save you money. It can make calls where AT&T’s signal is weak, like indoors. It can turn an iPod Touch into a full-blown cellphone.

And it can ruin the sleep of cellphone executives everywhere.

Line2 gives your iPhone a second phone number — a second phone line, complete with its own contacts list, voice mail, and so on. The company behind it, Toktumi (get it?), imagines that you’ll distribute the Line2 number to business contacts, and your regular iPhone number to friends and family. Your second line can be an 800 number, if you wish, or you can transfer an existing number.

To that end, Toktumi offers, on its Web site, a raft of Google Voice-ish features that are intended to help a small businesses look bigger: call screening, Do Not Disturb hours and voice mail messages sent to you as e-mail. You can create an “automated attendant” —“Press 1 for sales,” “Press 2 for accounting,” and so on — that routes incoming calls to other phone numbers. Or, if you’re pretending to be a bigger business than you are, route them all to yourself.

The Line2 app is a carbon copy, a visual clone, of the iPhone’s own phone software. The dialing pad, your iPhone Contacts list, your recent calls list and visual voice mail all look just like the iPhone’s.

(Let’s pause for a moment here to blink, dumbfounded, at that point. Apple’s rules prohibit App Store programs that look or work too much like the iPhone’s own built-in apps. For example, Apple rejected the Google Voice app because, as Apple explained to the Federal Communications Commission, it works “by replacing the iPhone’s core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls.” That is exactly what Line2 does. Oh well—the Jobs works in mysterious ways.)

So you have a second line on your iPhone. But that’s not the best part.

Line2 also turns the iPhone into a dual-mode phone. That is, it can make and receive calls either using either the AT&T airwaves as usual, or — now this is the best part — over the Internet. Any time you’re in a wireless hot spot, Line2 places its calls over Wi-Fi instead of AT&T’s network.

That’s a game-changer. Where, after all, is cellphone reception generally the worst? Right — indoors. In your house or your office building, precisely where you have Wi-Fi. Line2 in Wi-Fi means rock-solid, confident reception indoors.

Line2 also runs on the iPod Touch. When you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot, your Touch is now a full-blown cellphone, and you don’t owe AT&T a penny.

But wait, there’s more.

Turns out Wi-Fi calls don’t use up any AT&T minutes. You can talk all day long, without ever worrying about going over your monthly allotment of minutes. Wi-Fi calls are free forever.

Well, not quite free; Line2 service costs $15 a month (after a 30-day free trial).

But here’s one of those cases where spending more could save you money. If you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot most of the time (at work, for example), that’s an awful lot of calling you can do in Wi-Fi — probably enough to downgrade your AT&T plan to one that gives you fewer minutes. If you’re on the 900-minute or unlimited plan ($90 or $100 a month), for example, you might be able to get away with the 450-minute plan ($70). Even with Line2’s fee, you’re saving $5 or $15 a month.

Line2 also lets you call overseas phone numbers for Skype-like rates: 2 to 5 cents a minute to most countries. (A full table of rates is available at toktumi.com.) As a handy globetrotters’ bonus, calls home to numbers in the United States from overseas hot spots are free.

All of these benefits come to you when you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot, because your calls are carried by the Internet instead of by AT&T. Interestingly enough, though, Line2 can also make Internet calls even when you’re not in a hot spot.

It can, at your option, place calls over AT&T’s 3G data network, where it’s available. Every iPhone plan includes unlimited use of this 3G network — it’s how your iPhone sends e-mail and surfs the Web. So once again, Line2 calls don’t use up any of your monthly voice minutes.

Unfortunately, voice connections on the 3G network aren’t as strong and reliable as the voice or Wi-Fi methods. Cellular data networks aren’t made for seamless handoffs from cell tower to tower as you drive, for example — there’s not much need for it if you’re just doing e-mail and Web — so dropped calls are more likely. Fortunately, if you’re on a 3G data-network call and you walk into a hot spot, Line2 switches to the more reliable Wi-Fi network seamlessly, in midcall.

Whenever you do have an Internet connection — either Wi-Fi or a strong 3G area —you’re in for a startling treat. If you and your calling partner are both Line2 subscribers, Line2 kicks you into superhigh audio-quality mode (16-bit mode, as the techies call it).

Your calling partners sound as if they’re speaking right into the mike at an FM radio station. It’s almost too clear; you hear the other person’s breathing, lip smacks, clothing rustling and so on. After years of suffering through awful cellphone audio, it’s quite a revelation to hear what you’ve been missing.

Now, this all sounds wonderful, and Line2 generally is wonderful. But there’s room for improvement.

First, as you’ve no doubt already concluded, understanding Line2 is complicated. You have three different ways to make calls, each with pros and cons.

You miss a certain degree of refinement, too. The dialing pad doesn’t make touch-tone sounds as you tap the keys. There’s no Favorites list within the Line2 app. You can’t get or send text messages on your Line2 line. (The company says it will fix all this soon.)

There’s a faint hiss on Line2 calls, as if you’re on a long-distance call in 1970. The company says that it deliberately introduces this “comfort noise” to reassure you that you’re still connected, but it’s unnecessary. And sometimes there’s a voice delay of a half-second or so (of course, you sometimes get that on regular cellphone calls, too).

Finally, a note about incoming calls. If the Line2 app is open at the time, you’re connected via Wi-Fi, if available. If it’s not running, the call comes in through AT&T, so you lose the benefits of Wi-Fi calling. In short, until Apple blesses the iPhone with multitasking software, you have to leave Line2 open whenever you put the phone to sleep. That’s awkward.

Still, Line2 is the first app that can receive incoming calls via either Wi-Fi or cellular voice, so you get the call even if the app isn’t running. That’s one of several advantages that distinguish it from other voice-over-Internet apps like Skype and TruPhone.

Another example: If you’re on a Wi-Fi call using those other programs, and someone calls your regular iPhone number, your first call is unceremoniously disconnected. Line2, on the other hand, offers you the chance to decline the incoming call without losing your Wi-Fi call.

Those rival apps also lack Line2’s call-management features, visual voice mail and conference calling with up to 20 other people. And Line2 is the only app that gives you a choice of call methods for incoming and outgoing calls.

All of this should rattle cell industry executives, because let’s face it: the Internet tends to make things free. Cell carriers go through life hoping nobody notices the cellephant in the room: that once everybody starts making free calls over the Internet, it’s Game Over for the dollars-for-minutes model.

Line2, however, brings us one big step closer to that very future. It’s going to be a wild ride.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/te...h/25pogue.html





AT&T Sees Big Cash in Small Gizmos Like Dog Collars

With most Americans already toting cellphones, AT&T Inc now wants to target their dogs.

A wireless dog collar set to hit the market this year is just one of a plethora of new devices the telephone company hopes will catch on with U.S. consumers.

The collar could send text messages or emails to the owner of a pet when it strays outside a certain area, or the device could allow continuous tracking of the pet.

Other gadgets include a pill box that uses a wireless connection to remind people to take their medicine, e-readers, a device that tracks product pallets for shipping companies, and entertainment systems for people riding in cars.

When all these are connected to other devices or the Internet, they will connect using AT&T's network -- meaning more revenue for the company. AT&T expects they will bring in about $1 billion in annual services revenue in about five years.

"We see opportunities in dogs, in pallets, in cars and how you take your pills," Ralph de la Vega, the head of AT&T's mobile business, said at the CTIA annual wireless trade show.

After talking up wireless dog collars for more than a year, the No. 2 U.S. cellphone company said on Wednesday that it is almost ready to reconnect dog owners with their lost pets.

It is for those people out there who care as much about their dog as they do about their children, joked Glenn Lurie, who heads AT&T's emerging devices business.

Showing off a red collar designed for bigger dogs, the company said the device could work for virtually any size of dog, but would not reveal where it would go on sale or how much it would cost.

De la Vega noted that even if many of the emerging devices only use the wireless network infrequently, it could end up providing a lot of service revenue if millions of devices are connected.

However, the dog collar -- developed by Berkeley, California-based Apisphere -- may end up with a bigger market than expected. One person asked if it could track teenagers.

"My wife shot me a note and said she wants to get one for me," said one executive who asked not to be named.

(Reporting by Sinead Carew; Editing by Gary Hill)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...technologyNews





AT&T Execs Want More Spectrum, Lighter Regulation
Marguerite Reardon

AT&T executives are pushing the government to allocate more spectrum for wireless broadband and back off on regulation in order to keep the mobile broadband growth engine revving.

Ralph de la Vega, head of AT&T Mobility and the new chairman of CTIA, and Randall Stephenson, the CEO of AT&T, each spoke at the CTIA 2010 wireless trade show here Tuesday about how the U.S. leads the world in wireless broadband, but they emphasized the need for more spectrum and a light regulatory touch from the government to keep the momentum going.

De la Vega said the U.S. has more 3G subscribers than any other country in the world. In fact, one in five new subscribers to 3G are in the U.S., he added.

The U.S. is also leading the world in terms of building new advanced networks. Verizon Wireless is currently building its 4G LTE network. Meanwhile, Clearwire, which is partnered with Sprint, the third largest wireless provider in the U.S., is also well on its way to offering 4G services.

He also pointed out that the U.S. carriers are spending aggressively on mobile. In total, the four major U.S. carriers will spend $45 billion in 2010; about $22 billion to $23 billion will be spent on building wireless networks.

Stephenson said this growth and investment is a direct result of government policies that are more "hands off."

"When the rules and incentives are right, capital investment flows and it flows aggressively," he said during his speech. "The results (in the U.S.) are indisputable. The U.S. leads in 3G subscribers, mobile broadband, mobile apps, and emerging devices. Mobile broadband stands to be this decade's economic growth engine. "

But he warned that continued success is not guaranteed, and the government needs to continue taking an active role in promoting polices to encourage investment.

Top on the list for AT&T and the entire wireless industry is getting more spectrum into the market. The tag-team duo made a compelling case for the need for more spectrum. They said that demand for mobile broadband services is here today.

"Consumers have gotten a taste of mobile broadband," De la Vega said. "And the appetite seems unlimited."

He pointed out Pew Research predictions that mobile devices will become the primary device for accessing the Internet for most people in the world by 2020. And he noted that smartphones, which provide a more robust Internet experience and are growing in popularity, generate 10 times more traffic than typical feature phones.

Stephenson said that demand for mobile broadband will grow twice as fast as demand for traditional DSL and cable modem services. The key to meeting this demand is directly related to carriers' ability to access more spectrum, they said.

The CTIA has asked the FCC to free up an additional 800MHz of spectrum. The Federal Communications Commission said in its National Broadband Plan filed last week that it will work to get 500MHz of spectrum freed in the next 10 years. It expects to get 300MHz available within the next three years.

De la Vega said that the new spectrum allocation will likely not come fast enough and he called on the industry to make more efficient use of spectrum. He said that the 4G wireless technology LTE will help because it is 2.5 times more efficient than current 3G HSPA technology. But he also said applications need to be more efficient in their use of wireless networks.

"Consumers won't wait for us to get new spectrum," he said. "And even with the additional spectrum, it won't be enough. We need to find greater technology efficiencies."

He also emphasized the importance of using Wi-Fi, as well as femtocells, to offload traffic. AT&T has more than 20,000 Wi-Fi hot spots in the U.S. He emphasized that the U.S. is already leading in terms of Wi-Fi deployments, with more than 70,000 public Wi-Fi networks running--twice as many as other nations.

"We need to look at complementary technology and redirect demand there," he said. "Wi-Fi and femtocells are a win-win for consumers and carriers."
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-12261_7...-10356022.html





Verizon Winds Down Expensive FiOS Expansion
AP

If Verizon Communications Inc. hasn't already started wiring your city or town with its FiOS fiber-optic TV and broadband service, chances are you won't get it.

Where it's available, FiOS usually provides the only competition for cable TV apart from satellite service. Studies have shown that its entry into an area leads to lower cable prices, though FiOS itself has not been undercutting cable TV prices substantially.

But Verizon is nearing the end of its program to replace copper phone lines with optical fibers that provide much higher Internet speeds and TV service. Its focus is now on completing the network in the communities where it's already secured ''franchises,'' the rights to sell TV service that rivals cable, said spokeswoman Heather Wilner.

That means Verizon will continue to pull fiber to homes in Washington, D.C., New York City and Philadelphia -- projects that will take years to complete -- but leaves such major cities as Baltimore and downtown Boston without FiOS.

Verizon is still negotiating for franchises in some smaller communities, mainly in New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, but it is not working on securing franchises for any major urban areas, Wilner said. For instance, it's halted negotiations for the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Va.

Verizon never committed to bringing FiOS to its entire local-phone service area. It has introduced FiOS in 16 states, but the deployment is concentrated on the East Coast, and Verizon is selling off most of its service areas in the Midwest and on the West Coast. Its stated goal was to make FiOS available to 18 million households by the end of 2010, and it's on track to reach or exceed that.

That will still leave a third of its service area (excluding the territories it is selling) without fiber. And as Verizon has signaled this month that it's focusing on communities where it already has franchises, it's now becoming clear which ones are in and which are out.

The New York-based company hinted in 2008 that it might continue expansion of FiOS beyond this year, but the recession seems to have crimped that possibility. The company has pulled back on promotions for new subscribers, like the 19-inch TVs it gave away under one campaign. That in turn has led to lower recruitment figures.

CEO Ivan Seidenberg told investors in January that FiOS itself has been doing well, but Verizon's sales of services to large businesses have suffered in the downturn, and it needed to offset that by not being too ''aggressive'' in marketing FiOS.

Verizon doesn't appear to have ruled out further FiOS expansion, but doesn't have any plans, either. The economics apparently are not attractive enough: TV service carries fairly low margins compared to Verizon's phone business, according to analyst Craig Moffett at Sanford Bernstein.

Moffett believes the end of FiOS expansion means that cable companies will lose fewer subscribers, starting next year.

The recruitment of new FiOS TV subscribers slowed last year. In the fourth quarter, it added 153,000 subscribers, little more than half of the number it added in the same period the year before.

At the end of last year, Verizon had 2.86 million FiOS TV subscribers and 3.43 million FiOS Internet subscribers (most households take both).

Verizon has faced skepticism from investors over the project because of the high costs. Wiring a neighborhood for FiOS costs Verizon about $750 per home. Actually connecting a home to the network costs another $600. The total cost from 2004 to 2010 was budgeted at $23 billion. But it's allowed Verizon to mount an effective resistance to cable companies, which are siphoning off landline phone customers and can offer higher broadband speeds than phone companies without fiber straight to homes can.

Verizon is the only major U.S. phone company to draw fiber all the way to homes and the only one to offer broadband speeds approaching those available in Japan and South Korea. The halt to further expansion comes as the Federal Communications Commission has sent Congress the country's first ''national broadband plan,'' aimed at making Internet access faster, more affordable and more widely available.

AT&T Inc. and Qwest Communications International Inc. are laying fiber into neighborhoods, but still use copper phone lines to take the signal the last stretch of the way, into homes. That's a less costly strategy that has drawn less scrutiny from Wall Street, but it also limits top broadband speeds. Meanwhile, cable companies are upgrading modems this year to offer higher speeds, a relatively inexpensive move.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010...izon-FiOS.html





Telecom Giant Challenges FCC Role in Broadband
Cecilia Kang

One of the nation's biggest telecommunications providers urged the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday not to assert its authority over Internet services, a challenge that comes as the agency embarks on a 10-year effort to greatly expand broadband access across the country.

Verizon Communications said that the FCC's power over high-speed Internet services is "at best murky" and offered recommendations to Congress that could take away much of the agency's power.

Tom Tauke, Verizon's top lobbyist, urged lawmakers to rethink the way the government oversees broadband, arguing that the FCC should shift to more of an enforcement role -- like that of the Federal Trade Commission -- from its current status as a rule-making body.

"In my view, the current statute is badly out of date. Now is the time to focus on updating the law affecting the Internet," Tauke said in a speech before a tech policy forum in Washington. "To fulfill broadband's potential, it's time for Congress to take a fresh look at our nation's communications policy framework."

Tauke's comments echo recent questions raised about the FCC's jurisdiction over Internet services. Currently, the agency says it can oversee broadband providers as part of its supervision of other communications services. However, that power has been tested by a lawsuit filed against the FCC by cable giant Comcast that is before a federal appeals court.

There is a growing push within the agency to reclassify broadband as a common carrier service, meaning Internet service providers would be regulated like telephone companies. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski told The Washington Post this month that the agency will continue to fight its case but that it would consider reclassification if the court determined the agency doesn't have jurisdiction over broadband.

But telecom and cable companies have balked at the idea of reclassification. On Wednesday, AT&T issued a statement after Tauke's speech, suggesting that Congress determine laws for Internet oversight.

"If there are any questions about the authority of the FCC in the Internet ecosystem, the proper answer is not for the FCC to get adventurous in interpreting its authority, as some are urging," said AT&T senior vice president Jim Cicconi.

An FCC spokeswoman declined to comment.

Law professors and analysts said that Congress would probably not take on the task of writing a new telecommunications law to overhaul the existing government framework for broadband oversight.

"This is an awfully big hill to climb for Congress this year," said Paul Gallant, an analyst at Concept Capital research. "But it is probably the beginning of a serious multi-year discussion about Congress changing the regulatory landscape for the tech sector."

The public interest group Free Press said Verizon's recommendations could hurt consumers, who would have a weaker FCC overseeing Internet service providers.

"This speech illustrates the incumbents' desire for a toothless, do-nothing regulator," said Josh Silver, director of Free Press. "After eight years of that, consumers are left with higher prices, lower speeds and ever-dwindling choices."

Tauke said that the government shouldn't be light on regulation and that other Internet-related companies should also be under scrutiny, such as Google and Yahoo, software makers and manufacturers of Internet-enabled devices.

He said that rule-making shouldn't be the focus on the government entity that oversees the Web, but that it should be focused on enforcement.

"Instead, we could structure a process that uses the innovative, flexible and technology-driven nature of the Internet to address issues as they arise," Tauke said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...032403106.html





Key Lawmaker Backs FCC's Spectrum Plan

A key U.S. lawmaker expressed support on Thursday for a proposal by communications regulators to give auction proceeds to broadcasters as an incentive to give up some airwaves highly sought by wireless broadband providers.

Representative Rick Boucher, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, called the proposal by the Federal Communications Commission "the right approach."

Last week the FCC unveiled its National Broadband Plan, a blueprint aimed at bringing faster Internet speeds to all U.S. households at affordable prices.

The blueprint, which was requested by Congress, also proposes that broadcasters like CBS Corp voluntarily give up some of their airwaves for auction to wireless broadband providers, with broadcasters getting some of the proceeds.

The approach, which would need Congressional approval, would give wireless carriers desperately needed spectrum for their mobile devices, such as the iPhone and Blackberry.

However, in a sign that there could be opposition to the plan, Democrat John Dingell said he was concerned because broadcasters already gave up airwaves during the digital transition, and it could hamper the promotion of diversity and localism.

"Further loss of spectrum can have a very serious adverse affect on the public," Dingell said at the hearing to examine the FCC's broadband plan.

In the plan the FCC is seeking to free 500 megahertz of airwaves for mobile broadband services over the next decade. The agency wants additional authority from Congress to conduct those auctions.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and wireless companies such as AT&T Inc, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel Corp and T-Mobile, the U.S. unit of Deutsche Telekom AG, have been warning of a looming spectrum crisis. Verizon Wireless is a venture of Verizon Communications Inc and Vodafone Group Plc.

Members of the House panel did not say when they might introduce legislation to expand the FCC's auction authority.

Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican, said committee members are working on auction legislation but also expressed concern that reallocating airwaves could cause harm to consumers and broadcasters.

The FCC is also proposing to auction a section of the airwaves called the "D Block" for commercial purposes. The proceeds of that auction is expected to fund an emergency broadband response network for firefighters, police and other public safety officials.

The chairman of the full committee, Henry Waxman, said he supports using the D Block auction proceeds for building the emergency system, which could cost between $12 billion and $16 billion to build and operate.

(Reporting by John Poirier; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick and Tim Dobbyn)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...032502375.html





U.S. Eyes Early Summer for Airwaves Auction Process

The Federal Communications Commission plans to begin a process in a few months aimed at auctioning airwaves that failed to garner enough interest during the 2008 spectrum auction.

The segment, called the D-block, is part of the 700 megahertz band of the airwaves that raised about $19 billion for the U.S. government when other blocks were sold to carriers in 2008. But the D-Block did not sell because carriers did not like some of the conditions for use.

Companies are waiting for the FCC to issue the terms and conditions, if any, to be attached to the auction for use of the D block airwaves.

Jamie Barnett, chief of the FCC Public Safety & Homeland Security Bureau, told Reuters on Friday, after speaking to state and local emergency officials who want the D block for public safety use, that the FCC could issue a notice of inquiry "early summer" but a final decision has not been made.

The auction, which is planned for commercial purposes, could take place in the first or second quarter of 2011, he said.

The opening of the 10-megahertz D-block could be welcome news for smaller carriers such as T-Mobile, the U.S. unit of Deutsche Telekom AG, which wants to acquire more spectrum to better compete with powerhouses AT&T Inc and Verizon Wireless, a venture of Verizon Communications Inc and Vodafone Group Plc.

By deciding what to do with the D block, the FCC can move forward with building a nationwide wireless communications system for police, ambulances and firefighters who could not communicate with each other during the September 11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina.

The FCC plans to create an Emergency Response Interoperability Center at the FCC to establish better communications among the array of emergency workers, including hospitals.

The FCC has told state and local emergency officials seeking more spectrum the agency wants to allow public safety workers access to the entire 700 megahertz band when necessary, and carriers that hold licenses in that band will be compensated accordingly.

FCC officials said they will ask Congress to fund the emergency preparedness network, which could cost between $12 billion and $16 billion to build and operate over a period of 10 years.

Public safety workers have already been allocated one-eighth of the 700 megahertz band of the spectrum, which was vacated by the broadcasters during the digital television transition.

The FCC also plans to reallocate a larger portion of spectrum, including some held by broadcasters, to wireless companies anticipating a shortage, as more Americans surf the Internet on their mobile devices.

Plans to auction the D block and other airwaves and establish an emergency network were some of recommendations in the FCC's National Broadband Plan released earlier this week.

(Reporting by John Poirier; editing by Andre Grenon)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...technologyNews





Sweden Tops IT Economy Ranking
Paul O'Mahony

Sweden has the world's most hooked-up economy, according to a new report from the World Economic Ranking (WEF).

Nordic countries all performed well on the list in the WEF Global Information Technology report released on Thursday.

Sweden displaced Denmark to rank first on the chart, with the Danes sliding to third place. Other Nordic countries were also in the top 10, with Finland in sixth place and Norway in tenth.

Singapore crept closer to the top, moving up from fourth place last year to second place now.

Fellow Asian economy Hong Kong was in eighth place, also gaining from 12th place a year ago.

The so-called Networked Readiness Index looks at how prepared countries are in using information communications technologies by measuring the general environment for the technologies, the readiness of individuals to use them as well as their actual usage. http://www.thelocal.se/25728/20100325/





Conroy's Internet Censorship Agenda Slammed by Tech Giants
Asher Moses

Australia's biggest technology companies, communications academics and many lobby groups have delivered a withering critique of the government's plans to censor the internet.

The government today published most of the 174 submissions it received relating to improving the transparency and accountability measures of its internet filtering policy.

Legislation to force ISPs to implement the policy is expected to be introduced within weeks. The filters will block a blacklist of "refused classification" websites for all Australians on a mandatory basis.

Most of the submissions called for full transparency surrounding the operation of the list and for all sites placed on the list by bureaucrats at the Australian Communications and Media Authority first to be examined by the Classification Board.

They supported a regular review of the list by an independent expert and the ability for blacklisted sites to appeal.

But many reiterated their concerns that the policy is fundamentally unsound and would do little to make the internet a safer place for children. Many said the scope of blocked content was too broad and would render legitimate sites inaccessible, while the process of adding sites to the blacklist could be subject to abuse by bureaucrats and politicians.

Google, which today officially stopped censoring search results in China, said it had held discussions with users and parents around Australia and "the strong view from parents was that the government's proposal goes too far and would take away their freedom of choice around what information they and their children can access".

Google also said implementing mandatory filtering across Australia's millions of internet users could "negatively impact user access speeds", while filtering material from high-volume sites such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter "appears not to be technologically possible as it would have such a serious impact on internet access".

"We have a number of other concerns, including that filtering may give a false sense of security to parents, it could damage Australia's international reputation and it can be easily circumvented," Google wrote.

The search giant said it was preferable instead to focus on improving education around cyber safety and providing tools that people could install on their home computers to block unwanted content.

Many of Google's concerns are mirrored by many of the other submissions by academics, technology companies, industry groups, lobby groups and ISPs.

Microsoft demanded protection against "arbitrary executive decision making" surrounding content added to the list and noted the potential for banned material to be loaded on to a site without the sanction of the owner of that site.

Yahoo and Google's submissions, along with many others, expressed concerns that the scope of content to be filtered was too broad.

"Yahoo are entirely supportive of any effort to make the internet a safer place for children, however mandatory filtering of all RC material could block content with a strong social, political and/or educational value," Yahoo's submission read.

It listed some examples of innocuous sites that could be blocked including:

- Safe injecting and other harm minimisation websites.

- Euthanasia discussion forums.

- A video on creating graffiti art.

- Anti-abortion websites.

- Gay and lesbian forums that discuss sexual experiences.

- Explorations of the geo-political causes of terrorism where specific terrorist organisations and propaganda are cited as reference material.

Yahoo also pointed to a recent paper that provided "several examples where knee jerk regulatory reactions to 'controversial' content have been entirely out of step with broader public opinion".

The Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations fears sites that are valuable to sexual health promotion might be placed on the blacklist.

"Social research has shown that information, 'chat' and even pornographic sites play an important role in providing information about sexuality and sexual health, particularly for men who have sex with men and same-sex attracted young people," it wrote.

Mark McLelland, an associate professor in the sociology program at the University of Wollongong, said the filters could block access to an entire genre of niche but popular Japanese animated fiction.

Even the Australian Christian Lobby, one of the biggest supporters of the internet filtering plan, said inadvertently adding innocuous content to the blacklist would "undermine the entire policy".

Telstra fears the blacklist of banned sites could be leaked - as has already occurred last year - and "could be used as a directory of harmful content, which would therefore become more easily available to users that are able to circumvent the ISP filter or who are located overseas".

Colin Jacobs, spokesman for online users' lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, said it was clear from the submissions that the vast majority have a difficult time stomaching the filter at all.

"Many of the submissions stated flat out that the filter was not needed," he said.

"Most of the rest held their noses and tried to come up with a way this inherently secret process could be made more transparent."
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/tec...0323-qt83.html





Islamic Court Bans Online Chat on Theft Amputation

A NIGERIAN court has banned Twitter and Facebook debates on the country's first wrist amputation for theft.

The Magajin Gari Sharia court in the northern city of Kaduna on Monday ordered the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), one of the country's leading rights groups, to suspend its Twitter and Facebook online debates on the amputation, which was carried out in 2000.

The court granted an interim injunction "restraining the respondents either by themselves or their agents... from opening a chat forum on Facebook, Twitter, or any blog for the purpose of the debate on the amputation of Malam Buba Bello Jangebe," said the order.

Jangebe was the first person to have had his right wrist amputated on the orders of a Sharia court in Zamfara State, a year after 12 northern Nigerian states adopted the strict Islamic penal code.

The order followed a suit filed last week by the Association of Muslim Brotherhood of Nigeria, a pro-Sharia group based in the northern political capital of Kaduna, which argued that internet forums would be used as "a mockery of the Sharia system as negative issues will be discussed".

The head of the CRC, Shehu Sani, confirmed to AFP that he was served with the court papers on Monday.

"We opened the blog, the Facebook and Twitter chats 10 days ago to serve as a platform for which Nigerians could air their opinions on Sharia law as a whole and the justification or otherwise of the amputation of the hand of Malam Buba Bello Jangebe," Sani said on the phone from Kaduna.

Out of Nigeria's 36 states, 12 re-adopted a strict version of Sharia in 1999 nearly a century after it had been abandoned.

Zamfara state in the predominantly Muslim north of Nigeria pioneered the move after the country returned to civilian rule following 15 years of military dictatorship.
http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news...rom=public_rss





Stance by China to Limit Google Is Risk by Beijing
Michael Wines

This is a nation that builds dams, high-speed rail lines and skyscrapers with abandon. In newly muscular China, sheer force is not just an art, but a bedrock principle of its seemingly unstoppable rise to global prominence.

Now China wants to tighten its control of the much more variegated world of online information, effectively forcing Google Inc., the world’s premier information provider, to choose between submitting to Chinese censorship and leaving the world’s largest community of Internet users to its rivals. It chose to leave.

On Tuesday, a number of experts said Google’s decision to close down the search engine it hosted in China might not cause major problems there right away. But in the longer run, they said, China’s intransigence on a basic issue of human freedom and the open flow of information has the potential to weaken its connection to the global economy.

It may also sully its image — promoted to its own people as well as the international community — as an authoritarian country that is economically on the move, perhaps even more so than the sclerotic, democratic West.

“The Chinese are very serious about pushing their soft-power agenda,” Bill Bishop, a Beijing Internet entrepreneur and author of the technology blog Digicha, said Tuesday. “Google just put a big hole in that sales pitch, and I think they know that.”

China’s leaders appear fully aware of their dilemma. But at this stage in China’s history, and given the Communist Party’s determination to maintain absolute rule, the nation’s leaders still put political control ahead of all other concerns.

“What does Google’s exit say? What it says publicly is what everyone deeply engaged in China knows privately,” Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a Brookings Institution scholar and former Clinton administration adviser on China, said in an interview.

“This is a system with very substantial domestic imperfections,” Mr. Lieberthal said. “And the view from afar that this is simply an unstoppable juggernaut — that they have found the keys to the magic kingdom — is not correct. China’s leaders understand this as well as anyone.”

In fact, domestic opinion frequently wavers between what Mr. Lieberthal called “triumphalism,” a nationalistic view that China should ignore Western models, and the nearly opposite view that China has far to go before it approaches Western living standards or democratic norms.

The conclusion of Google’s four-year Internet experiment in China — an effort to transplant Western free-speech norms here — was anything but smooth.

Google said in January that it would stop cooperating with China’s Internet censorship and consider shutting down its operations in the country, citing hacker attacks on its computer systems.

As Google began redirecting tens of millions of mainland Chinese users early Tuesday, Beijing time, to its Hong Kong-based Web site, google.com.hk, parts of the company’s remaining mainland operations quickly came under pressure from Google’s Chinese partners and from the government itself.

China’s biggest cellular communications company, China Mobile, was widely expected to cancel a deal that had placed Google’s search engine on its mobile Internet home page, used by millions of people daily. One official in China’s media industry said that the company was scrapping the deal under government pressure even though it has no replacement lined up.

In Chinese terms, little of this is new. The government has never released its grip on the information industry, and if anything has steadily tightened censorship of the Chinese Web in the past couple of years. Those restrictions have not inhibited its economic growth, which remained robust even as the West staggered through its worst recession in decades.

But to this day China does not acknowledge to its own people that its censors the Internet to exclude a wide range of political and social topics that its leaders believe could lead to instability. It does not release information on the number of censors it employs or the technology it uses to create the world’s most sophisticated Internet firewall. Its 350 million Internet users, many of them with broadband connections, are assured that they have the same effectively limitless access to online information and communications that the rest of the world has.

When Google publicly challenged that stance in January, it forced Chinese officials to defend their control of the Web, which they did partly with an outburst of nationalism. And Beijing’s failure to find a way to keep Google operating in the country has pressed it to defend that stance again. The cost, at least with some influential sectors of its own society, could be steep.

In the technology sector, Google is viewed as an innovator that has spurred rapid development of the Chinese Web. Its departure will leave some Chinese companies with greater influence, but could also stifle competition, some fear.

"Google is good at innovation, and when it leaves, the rest of the companies in China will lack motivation. Without its countervailing power, the industry won’t be as healthy,” said Zhang Yunquan, a professor at the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Fang Xingdong, chief executive of Chinalabs.com, said the vast majority of Chinese Internet companies invest little in research and “simply copy each other’s technology.” With Google’s departure, their profits may rise, but China’s Web space will begin to stagnate, he says.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/wo...a/24china.html





Interview: Sergey Brin on Google’s China Move
Steve Lohr

China’s censorship of the Internet may be blunt, but Google has found negotiations with the Chinese government in recent weeks to be subtle and uncertain.

That was the message from a brief interview in New York on Monday with Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, shortly after the company announced that it was moving its Chinese Internet search engine to Hong Kong.

The former British colony has been part of China since 1997, but operates under a “one country, two systems” philosophy. The mainland authorities do not censor political news and searches on the Web in Hong Kong.

The shift of its Chinese service to Hong Kong, Mr. Brin said, was not given a clear-cut stamp of approval by Beijing. But he said there was a “back and forth” with the Chinese government on what to do. “There was a sense that Hong Kong was the right step,” Mr. Brin said.

But he added: “There’s a lot of lack of clarity. Our hope is that the newly begun Hong Kong service will continue to be available in mainland China.”

Later he added: “The story’s not over yet.”

The United States government, Mr. Brin stressed, was not involved in shaping the company’s policy. “This has all been up to Google,” he said.

Mr. Brin lived in the Soviet Union until he was nearly 6 years old, and he said the experience of living under a totalitarian system that censored political speech influenced his thinking — and Google’s policy. “It has definitely shaped my views, and some of my company’s views,” he said.

Two months ago Google cited hacking attempts on its networks and evidence of spying on the Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents as motivations for reconsidering its China stance. Mr. Brin said those episodes were “deeply troubling.” He stopped short of saying the Chinese government was directly involved in those activities.

But, he added: “I know what the goal was. So it really doesn’t matter.”

Mr. Brin went out of his way to say there were many reasons for the Chinese government to be proud of its achievements, especially its impressive economic development, “lifting so many people out of poverty.”

He noted that the Chinese government is large, with millions of officials, and varying points of view.

But in matters of censorship, political speech and Internet communications, he said, there is a totalitarian mentality that controls policy. “Our objection is to those forces of totalitarianism,” he said.

Since Google said in January that it might pull its Chinese search operation out of the mainland, bloggers have speculated that the company might then develop and distribute software tools to sidestep censorship. But when asked, Mr. Brin said, “I think those tools are going to come of their own accord. I don’t think we have to do anything.”

Google’s actions, he said, may play a long-run role in easing Internet censorship in China. ”Our hope is there is progress and a more open Internet in China,” he observed.

Mr. Brin added that efforts by China, Iran and other governments to control online speech — a “half an Internet” approach, he said – will likely fail eventually. “I think that in the long term, they are going to have to open,” he said.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/0...-china-gambit/





Google Calls for Action on Web Limits
Javier C. Hernandez

A top Google executive on Wednesday called for rules to put pressure on governments that filter the Internet, saying the practice was hindering international trade.

Alan Davidson, director of public policy for Google, told a joint Congressional panel that the United States should consider withholding development aid for countries that restrict certain Web sites. He said censorship had become more than a human rights issue and was hurting profit for foreign companies that rely on the Internet to reach customers.

“The growing problem for Internet censorship is not isolated to one country or one region,” Mr. Davidson told the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. “No single company and no single industry can tackle Internet censorship on its own.”

The fallout from China’s restrictive Internet policies widened on Wednesday when officials from Go Daddy Group, an Internet services company, told the commission that the company would halt registration of Chinese domain names.

Christine Jones, general counsel of Go Daddy, said the company was concerned about privacy after Chinese officials requested photo identification and signatures of its customers. For the first time, she said, Go Daddy had been asked to retroactively obtain documentation for individuals who had registered a domain name.

“We’re concerned about the chilling effect,” Ms. Jones said. “We made the decision that we didn’t want to act as an agent of the Chinese government.”

Ms. Jones described a chaotic scene for Internet companies in China. She said attacks from hackers were rampant, fraudulent payments were common, and spammers worked without fear of punishment from the government.

Representative David Wu, Democrat of Oregon, said he thought more companies would follow the example of Go Daddy and Google and cut back operations in China. “Pretty soon you have a cascade going,” Mr. Wu said. “There is a difference between compliance and complicity.”

More than 40 countries actively censor the Internet currently, Mr. Davidson said, and 25 governments have blocked Google over the last several years. Mr. Davidson suggested asking countries to pledge to keep sites unfiltered in international trade agreements.

On Monday, Google closed its Internet search service in China and began directing users in that country to its uncensored search engine in Hong Kong. So far, Mr. Davidson said, the company had noticed “intermittent” censorship of the Hong Kong site. Despite the restrictions, the company plans to maintain a sales team in mainland China, he said.

Google’s decision to leave China was prompted in part by a series of attacks by hackers last year, which raised broader concerns about the flow of information in the country. The Chinese government has disputed that it was the source of the attacks, which focused on e-mail accounts of human rights advocates.

Mr. Davidson said Google would consider returning to the Chinese market if the government there removed its restrictions. But he acknowledged that there would likely be a “hard road ahead” because neither side is willing to cede ground.

“It’s going to take a lot of work to combat that censorship,” he said.

In a statement to the commission, Chinese officials defended their policies, saying, “foreign companies need to abide by Chinese laws and regulations when they operate in China.”

“The Chinese government encourages the development and popularization of the Internet and is committed to the opening up of the Internet,” the statement said.

The panel included members of the Senate and House and Obama administration officials. It was chaired by Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, and Representative Sander M. Levin, Democrat of Michigan.

“Information is not to be feared, and ideas are not enemies to be crushed,” Mr. Dorgan said in opening remarks. “The truth is China too often wants a one-way relationship with the world.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/te.../25google.html





Will censor for gov’t

We're Staying in China, says Microsoft, as Free Speech Row with Google Grows

Most big internet corporations, including household names such as Yahoo and MySpace, follow Microsoft's lead
Bobbie Johnson in San Francisco, Tania Branigan in Beijing and Daniel Nasaw in Washington

Hopes that Google's forthright stand on censorship in China would inspire other companies to follow suit appeared unfounded today, with the move instead threatening to widen the rift between some of the world's most powerful internet companies.

Microsoft, which has considerable interests in the country, including its Bing search engine, responded directly to criticism by Google's co-founder Sergey Brin, who this week accused the company of speaking against human rights and free speech.

Brin, who pressed for the closing down of Google's self-censored Chinese search engine, said yesterday: "I'm very disappointed for them in particular.

"I would hope that larger companies would not put profit ahead of all else. Generally, companies should pay attention to how and where their products are used."

Microsoft rejected Brin's critique, saying it would continue to obey local laws on censorship in China.

"We appreciate that different companies may make different decisions based on their own experiences and views," a spokesman said. "We have done business in China for more than 20 years and we intend to continue our business there."

The company said it regularly talked to governments all over the world about the benefits of free speech, including the authorities in Beijing, but added that "engagement in global markets is important".

"We believe all technology companies should make public commitments to help protect internet users."

The comments come days after Google closed its Chinese search engine and moved operations to Hong Kong, which lies outside China's Great Firewall, which blocks access to some sites. That move, prompted by a hacking attack on Google's servers that has been traced back to China, is the latest attempt in the company's campaign to challenge Beijing's internet censorship.

Brin, in particular, has tried to rally the US government and other businesses behind the cause, arguing that censorship is an unfair restriction on human rights and information.

Most big internet corporations with business interests in China, including household names such as Yahoo and MySpace, are following Microsoft's lead.

However there are some exceptions.

GoDaddy.com, the world's largest internet domain registrar, told a US congressional hearing that it will pull out of China because of concerns over government interference and privacy. The company, which says it manages 27,000 Chinese domain names, said the authorities there had asked it to collect photo headshots, business licence information and signed registration forms from customers and forward them to government officials.

"The intent of the new procedures appeared … to be based on a desire by the Chinese authorities to exercise increased control over the subject matter of domain name registrations by Chinese nationals," GoDaddy's executive vice-president, Christine Jones, told the hearing.

"There appears to be a recent increase in China's surveillance and monitoring of the internet activities of its citizens."

Some other technology companies have chosen not to enter the Chinese market, echoing the arguments made by human rights activists who said that Google should never have agreed to self-censor its search engine in 2006. Among the biggest hold-outs is Facebook, which has more than 400 million users worldwide but remains blocked by the Great Firewall. The site runs a Chinese-language version but has so far refused to set up an operation inside the country, not least because it holds a vast treasury of personal information and private conversations belonging to its users.

Twitter, the social networking startup that was lauded for helping activists spread information during anti-government protests in Iran, has also indicated that it does not intend to give any element of control to the Chinese government.

Evan Williams, Twitter's co-founder and chief executive, recently said that the service, which has a significant number of users in China, but is also blocked by the authorities, wanted to be a "force for good".

"My hope is that eventually the open exchange of information will prevail in most regions, but we don't have any specific plans in China or other areas where we're blocked."

Internet analysts played down the significance of GoDaddy's move, pointing out that .cn domains made up less than 1% of the company's business and that many people were simply unwilling to register under the rules.

"It is essentially a dead business," said a Beijing-based technology pundit, Kaiser Kuo.

Journalist Michael Anti made headlines around the world when Microsoft closed his Chinese-language blog in 2005. But he said: "Microsoft has done a lot of good things for Chinese people – MSN [hosted outside the mainland] has expanded civil society. It certainly shouldn't be the first to be blamed.

"I don't think many companies can follow Google. First, Google is big enough; second, the hacking really damaged its core interests; third, their market share is only [a small] percentage of their global market."

He added: "Google is not an internet company; it's the internet company."

Others pointed out that the Global Network Initiative, founded a year and a half ago to encourage technology companies to adopt and implement human rights standards in their dealings with authoritarian regimes, included both Microsoft and Google.

"Only three companies – Yahoo, Microsoft and Google – have embraced meaningful human rights standards, and even among them there are differences in their approach to China," said Arvind Ganesan, business and human rights director for Human Rights Watch.

"There are many more companies that haven't said anything and are just as much obliged to respect human rights. That really speaks to the need for some kind of regulation."

Blogger Isaac Mao said Google had set a good example which he hoped others would follow.

Ai Weiwei, an outspoken contemporary artist with 25,000 Twitter followers, argued: "The rights to know and express yourself are basic human rights.

"Of course many companies want to do business in China, but we really think western nations should apply the same kind of moral standards they do in their own nations."

Faced with the growing conflict between American internet firms and Beijing, the US government appears to have stepped back from its wholehearted support of Google, with the Obama administration instead taking a "lie low" approach, according to James Lewis, a senior fellow in the technology and public policy programme at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

Legislation pending since last May would deter American businesses from co-operating with online censorship efforts and encourage a diplomatic push for internet freedom, but Congress has taken no action on it and observers do not expects it to reach the statute books in the near future.

Corinna-Barbara Francis, Amnesty International's China researcher, said she hoped that a greater awareness among consumers would start having an impact on the decisions made by businesses eyeing the lucrative Chinese market.

"There is no question that adopting social responsibility policies – at least in the West – is good for your image and good for business.

"People may want their jeans manufacturers to be ethical, but it's even more personal when it's the company that provides your blog or social networking. People don't want to be doing all those things with companies they don't feel good about."

But Andrew Lih, an expert on technology in China and director of new media at the University of Southern California Annenberg, said: "Americans rarely even engage in boycotting of US-based entities they know have done far worse things. I doubt the actions in China are going to energize them."

Meanwhile Beijing argues that all governments place limits on internet content. It denies any connection to cyber-attacks and says it is regularly targeted by hackers.

The companies: What they do in China

Microsoft After being criticised when it censored blogs hosted on its MSN service, Microsoft made careful changes to its policies. For example, its Hotmail email service does not keep any data in mainland China. However, the company continues to self-censor other aspects of its service, and its co-founder, Bill Gates, surprised observers recently by saying that Chinese censorship was "very limited".

MySpace Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation holds significant interests in the country, not least MySpace China, begun in 2007. The site, which is locally owned, operated and managed, is notorious for censoring users who talk about politics or religion.

Yahoo After a huge privacy backlash when the company handed over personal information that led to the jailing of a Chinese journalist, Yahoo scaled back its involvement in the country. In 2005, it exchanged its Chinese arm for a 39% share of the popular website Alibaba. "We no longer have operational control or day-to-day management over the Yahoo China business," said the company.

Cisco Systems The California-based networking company is one of the biggest targets for activists because it supplies technology and training that is used to run the Great Firewall. It remains relatively unrepentant. The company's chief executive officer recently said that he would invest hundreds of millions of dollars in building up the Chinese business, and claimed that Google's protests were part of a "natural give and take".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...-speech-google





China Issues Media Rules for Stories on Google
Tom Krazit

A Chinese government ministry ordered Chinese media companies to toe the government line this week in their reporting on Google's decision to move its search operations to Hong Kong.

The list of instructions, obtained by China Digital Times and published by The Washington Post, underscores the degree to which the Chinese government attempts to control the spread of information more than anything Google has ever said about search censorship. The list contains specific details on which types of stories can be published and asks media outlets in China to purge reader discussions from their pages that attack the government's view.

According to China Digital Times, China's State Information Council runs an Internet Affairs Bureau that Chinese journalists have dubbed the Ministry of Truth after the governing power in George Orwell's novel "1984." After Google announced its decision regarding its presence in China on Monday, the Internet Affairs Bureau distributed the list to Chinese media outlets, part of regular directives it issues about potentially sensitive topics.

"Please pay strict attention to the following content requirements during this period," the list instructed, according to a translation provided by China Digital Times, a project of the Berkeley China Internet Project. A sample of those requirements follows:

• "Only use Central Government main media (Web site) content; do not use content from other sources."

• "Do not produce relevant topic pages; do not set discussion sessions; do not conduct related investigative reporting."

• "Online programs with experts and scholars on this matter must apply for permission ahead of time. This type of self-initiated program production is strictly forbidden."

• "All Web sites please clean up text, images, and sound and videos which support Google, dedicate flowers to Google, ask Google to stay, cheer for Google and others have a different tune from government policy."

• "Chief managers in different regions please assign specific manpower to monitor Google-related information; if there is information about mass incidents, please report it in a timely manner."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20001208-265.html





Academic Paper in China Sets Off Alarms in U.S.
John Markoff and David Barboza

It came as a surprise this month to Wang Jianwei, a graduate engineering student in Liaoning, China, that he had been described as a potential cyberwarrior before the United States Congress.

Larry M. Wortzel, a military strategist and China specialist, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on March 10 that it should be concerned because “Chinese researchers at the Institute of Systems Engineering of Dalian University of Technology published a paper on how to attack a small U.S. power grid sub-network in a way that would cause a cascading failure of the entire U.S.”

When reached by telephone, Mr. Wang said he and his professor had indeed published “Cascade-Based Attack Vulnerability on the U.S. Power Grid” in an international journal called Safety Science last spring. But Mr. Wang said he had simply been trying to find ways to enhance the stability of power grids by exploring potential vulnerabilities.

“We usually say ‘attack’ so you can see what would happen,” he said. “My emphasis is on how you can protect this. My goal is to find a solution to make the network safer and better protected.” And independent American scientists who read his paper said it was true: Mr. Wang’s work was a conventional technical exercise that in no way could be used to take down a power grid.

The difference between Mr. Wang’s explanation and Mr. Wortzel’s conclusion is of more than academic interest. It shows that in an atmosphere already charged with hostility between the United States and China over cybersecurity issues, including large-scale attacks on computer networks, even a misunderstanding has the potential to escalate tension and set off an overreaction.

“Already people are interpreting this as demonstrating some kind of interest that China would have in disrupting the U.S. power grid,” said Nart Villeneuve, a researcher with the SecDev Group, an Ottawa-based cybersecurity research and consulting group. “Once you start interpreting every move that a country makes as hostile, it builds paranoia into the system.”

Mr. Wortzel’s presentation at the House hearing got a particularly strong reaction from Representative Ed Royce, Republican of California, who called the flagging of the Wang paper “one thing I think jumps out to all of these Californians here today, or should.”

He was alluding to concerns that arose in 2001 when The Los Angeles Times reported that intrusions into the network that controlled the electrical grid were traced to someone in Guangdong Province, China. Later reports of other attacks often included allegations that the break-ins were orchestrated by the Chinese, although no proof has been produced.

In an interview last week about the Wang paper and his testimony, Mr. Wortzel said that the intention of these particular researchers almost did not matter.

“My point is that now that vulnerability is out there all over China for anybody to take advantage of,” he said.

But specialists in the field of network science, which explores the stability of networks like power grids and the Internet, said that was not the case.

“Neither the authors of this article, nor any other prior article, has had information on the identity of the power grid components represented as nodes of the network,” Reka Albert, a University of Pennsylvania physicist who has conducted similar studies, said in an e-mail interview. “Thus no practical scenarios of an attack on the real power grid can be derived from such work.”

The issue of Mr. Wang’s paper aside, experts in computer security say there are genuine reasons for American officials to be wary of China, and they generally tend to dismiss disclaimers by China that it has neither the expertise nor the intention to carry out the kind of attacks that bombard American government and computer systems by the thousands every week.

The trouble is that it is so easy to mask the true source of a computer network attack that any retaliation is fraught with uncertainty. This is why a war of words, like the high-pitched one going on these past months between the United States and China, holds special peril, said John Arquilla, director of the Information Operations Center at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

“What we know from network science is that dense communications across many different links and many different kinds of links can have effects that are highly unpredictable,” Mr. Arquilla said. Cyberwarfare is in some ways “analogous to the way people think about biological weapons — that once you set loose such a weapon it may be very hard to control where it goes,” he added.

Tension between China and the United States intensified earlier this year after Google threatened to withdraw from doing business in China, saying that it had evidence of Chinese involvement in a sophisticated Internet intrusion. A number of reports, including one last October by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, of which Mr. Wortzel is vice chairman, have used strong language about the worsening threat of computer attacks, particularly from China.

“A large body of both circumstantial and forensic evidence strongly indicates Chinese state involvement in such activities, whether through the direct actions of state entities or through the actions of third-party groups sponsored by the state,” that report stated.

Mr. Wang’s research subject was particularly unfortunate because of the widespread perception, particularly among American military contractors and high-technology firms, that adversaries are likely to attack critical infrastructure like the United States electric grid.

Mr. Wang said in the interview that he chose the United States grid for his study basically because it was the easiest way to go. China does not publish data on power grids, he said. The United States does and had had several major blackouts; and, as he reads English, it was the only country he could find with accessible, useful data. He said that he was an “emergency events management” expert and that he was “mainly studying when a point in a network becomes ineffective.”

“I chose the electricity system because the grid can best represent how power currents flow through a network,” he said. “I just wanted to do theoretical research.”

The paper notes the vulnerability of different types of computer networks to “intentional” attacks. The authors suggest that certain types of attacks may generate a domino-style cascading collapse of an entire network. “It is expected that our findings will be helpful for real-life networks to protect the key nodes selected effectively and avoid cascading-failure-induced disasters,” the authors wrote.

Mr. Wang’s paper cites the network science research of Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a physicist at Northeastern University. Dr. Barabasi has written widely on the potential vulnerability of networks to so-called engineered attacks.

“I am not well vested in conspiracy theories,” Dr. Barabasi said in an interview, “but this is a rather mainstream topic that is done for a wide range of networks, and, even in the area of power transmission, is not limited to the U.S. system — there are similar studies for power grids all over the world.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/wo...ia/21grid.html





Mobs Are Born as Word Grows by Text Message
Ian Urbina



It started innocently enough seven years ago as an act of performance art where people linked through social-networking Web sites and text messaging suddenly gathered on the streets for impromptu pillow fights in New York, group disco routines in London, and even a huge snowball fight in Washington.

But these so-called flash mobs have taken a more aggressive and raucous turn here as hundreds of teenagers have been converging downtown for a ritual that is part bullying, part running of the bulls: sprinting down the block, the teenagers sometimes pause to brawl with one another, assault pedestrians or vandalize property.

On Wednesday, the police here said that they had had enough. They announced plans to step up enforcement of a curfew already on the books, and to tighten it if there is another incident.

They added that they planned to hold parents legally responsible for their children’s actions. They are also considering making free transit passes for students invalid after 4 p.m., instead of 7 p.m., to limit teenagers’ ability to ride downtown.

“This is bad decision making by a small group of young people who are doing silly but dangerous stuff,” Mayor Michael A. Nutter said in an interview Wednesday. “We intend to do something about it immediately.”

Flash mobs are not unique to Philadelphia, but they have been more frequent here than elsewhere. Others that resulted in arrests and injuries have been reported over the past year in Boston, South Orange, N.J., and Brooklyn.

Philadelphia officials added that they had also begun getting help from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to monitor social-media networks. And television and radio stations are helping to recruit hip-hop artists to make public service announcements imploring teenagers to end the practice.

In the past year, at least four of the flash mobs have broken out in the city, including one on Saturday in which roving teenagers broke into fights, several onlookers were injured and at least three people were arrested.

“It was like a tsunami of kids,” said Seth Kaufman, 20, a pizza deliveryman at Olympia II Pizza & Restaurant on South Street. He lifted his shirt to show gashes along his back and arm. He also had bruises on his forehead he said were from kicks and punches he suffered while trying to keep a rowdy crowd from entering the shop, where a fight was already under way.

“By the time you could hear them yelling, they were flooding the streets and the stores and the sidewalks,” Mr. Kaufman said.

The ad hoc gangs have scared many pedestrians off the streets.

City residents are also starting to complain about the number of unsupervised children, and child advocates are asking if there are enough activities to keep young people busy after school.

“We definitely need more jobs for kids, we need more summer jobs for kids, we need more after-school programming, and we need more parent support,” said Shelly Yanoff, executive director of Public Citizens for Children and Youth, a children’s advocacy group in Philadelphia.

Ms. Yanoff added that libraries and after-school programs had been reduced and a program for youth offenders had been cut sharply. On Friday, officials said, two preteenagers assaulted a woman as part of a violent game called “Catch and Wreck,” in which children pick out people who appear homeless and then beat them and take any money they have.

The police, who say these assaults are unrelated to flash mobs, arrested an 11-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl in the attack. The police said they also planned to charge the boy in an attack on a 73-year-old man who was beaten and robbed in the same area on March 13.

The flash mobs have raised questions about race and class.

Most of the teenagers who have taken part in them are black and from poor neighborhoods. Most of the areas hit have been predominantly white business districts.

In the flash mob on Saturday, groups of teenagers were chanting “black boys” and “burn the city,” bystanders said.

In a Feb. 16 melee, 150 teenagers spilled out of the Gallery shopping mall east of City Hall during rush hour and rampaged through Macy’s, knocking down customers and damaging displays.

The police arrested 15 of the teenagers and, according to one report, some had not been allowed to call their parents six hours after they were detained.

Clay Yeager, a juvenile justice consultant and former director of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention in Pennsylvania, said he believed the flash mobs were partly a result of a decline in state money for youth violence prevention programs.

Financing for the programs has dropped 93 percent to $1.2 million in this year’s budget compared with $16 million in 2002. City financing for such programs has dropped to $1.9 million in the past three years compared with $4.1 million from 1999 through 2002, a 53 percent drop.

Mayor Nutter, who is black, rejected the notion that race or the city cut in services was a factor.

“I don’t think people should be finding excuses for inappropriate behavior,” Mr. Nutter said. “There is no racial component to stupid behavior, and parents should not be looking to the government to provide entertainment for their children.”

Violent crime in Philadelphia has dropped 12 percent and homicides have fallen 23 percent since 2008.

Bill Wasik, a senior editor at Harper’s who is credited with introducing the notion of a flash mob in 2003, said he was surprised by the new focus of some of the gatherings.

Mr. Wasik said the mobs started as a kind of playful social experiment meant to encourage spontaneity and big gatherings to temporarily take over commercial and public areas simply to show that they could.

“It’s terrible that these Philly mobs have turned violent,” he said.

Theo Emery contributed reporting from Washington.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/us/25mobs.html





Rethinking Sex Offender Laws for Youth Texting
Tamar Lewin

In Iowa, Jorge Canal is on the sex offenders registry because, at age 18, he was convicted of distributing obscene materials to a minor after he sent a picture of his penis by cellphone to a 14-year-old female friend who had requested it.

In Florida, Phillip Alpert, then 18, was charged with distributing child pornography and put on the sex offenders registry because after a fight, he sent a photograph of his nude 16-year-old girlfriend by e-mail to dozens of people, including her parents.
In most states, teenagers who send or receive sexually explicit photographs by cellphone or computer — known as “sexting” — have risked felony child pornography charges and being listed on a sex offender registry for decades to come.

But there is growing consensus among lawyers and legislators that the child pornography laws are too blunt an instrument to deal with an adolescent cyberculture in which all kinds of sexual pictures circulate on sites like MySpace and Facebook.

Last year, Nebraska, Utah and Vermont changed their laws to reduce penalties for teenagers who engage in such activities, and this year, according to the National Council on State Legislatures, 14 more states are considering legislation that would treat young people who engage in sexting differently from adult pornographers and sexual predators.

And on Wednesday, the first federal appellate opinion in a sexting case recognized that a prosecutor had gone too far in trying to enforce adult moral standards.

The opinion upheld a block on a district attorney who threatened to bring child pornography charges against girls whose pictures showing themselves scantily dressed appeared on classmates’ cellphones.

“There’s a lot of confusion about how to regulate cellphones and sex and 16-year-olds,” said Amy Adler, a law professor at New York University. “We’re at this cultural shift, not only because of the technology, but because of what’s happening in terms of the representation of teen sexuality as you can see on ‘Gossip Girl.’ ”

There are real risks that sexually explicit pictures, meant to be shared only with a friend or partner, will make their way into wide publication on the Internet and into the hands of sexual predators.

Last year, a 14-year-old New Jersey girl was arrested and charged with possession and distribution of child pornography after posting dozens of sexually explicit photographs of herself on MySpace.

Such cases, lawyers say, are far afield from what the child pornography laws were intended for. So, too, was the case of Mr. Canal, which was upheld last year by the Iowa Supreme Court.

Mr. Canal was 18 when he sent the picture of his erect penis to a 14-year-old schoolmate, along with another picture of his face, with the text “I love you” on it. The girl, identified only by her initials, thought she erased the image, but her parents found it and passed it to the police.

“The child pornography law was about protecting children from pedophiles,” Professor Adler said. “While sexting is bad judgment, it’s simply not what the Supreme Court had in mind when it crafted the child pornography law. It just doesn’t make sense that in a lot of the sexting situations, the pornographer and the victim are one and the same person.”

As a practical matter, young people are rarely, if ever, jailed under the child pornography laws for the practice.

Some of the 14 states considering legislation would make sexting a misdemeanor, while others would treat it like juvenile offenses like truancy or running away.

“Many jurisdictions are creating a separate offense for these situations,” said Mary Leary, a law professor at Catholic University. “They’re moving it to family or juvenile court. The more choices available to a prosecutor, including diverting the case entirely from the juvenile justice system, the better.”

She and many others believe that some criminal penalties should remain on the books.

Jesse Weins, chairman of the criminal justice department at Dakota Wesleyan University, said that because the legal code functioned as a guide to acceptable behavior, “there should be something there, even if oftentimes it doesn’t make sense to prosecute.”

But there are those who favor decriminalization.

“Generally this should be an education issue,” said Witold Walczak, legal director of the Pennsylvania American Civil Liberties Union. “No one disputes that sexting can have very bad consequences, and no parent wants kids sending out naked images. But if you’ve got thousands of kids engaging in this, are you going to criminalize all of them?”

One recent survey found that about one in five teenagers reported having engaged in sexting. Another found that almost half the boys in coed high schools had seen a picture depicting a female classmate nude.

There are two basic scenarios. In one, a teenager shares a nude picture, usually with a romantic partner. In the other, a partner, or more commonly an ex-partner, distributes the image.

The new Nebraska law makes that distinction, giving a pass to children under 18 who send out their own photograph to a willing recipient who is at least 15. On the other hand, a teenager who passes the photograph on to friends could face a felony child pornography charge and five years in prison.

The Tunkhannock, Pa., case that produced Wednesday’s court ruling illustrates how complicated such cases can be. Those pictures were discovered by the school authorities, who confiscated the students’ cellphones and turned them over to the district attorney.

Mr. Walczak, the girls’ lawyer, said that he planned to file a separate lawsuit charging that the school search of material on confiscated phones breached students’ privacy.

The district attorney told parents of the students involved — both those in the images and those whose phones contained the images — that their children could be prosecuted for child pornography unless they took part in an after-school program.

The program, divided by gender, involved random drug tests, probation and classes in which the girls would “gain an understanding of what it means to be a girl in today’s society,” by, among other things, writing essays on why their actions were wrong.

Only three of more than a dozen families refused to join the program — those of two girls, ages 12 and 13, who were pictured wearing bras at a slumber party, and of a third girl who was shown emerging from the shower with a towel wrapped under her breasts. The parents say the photographs were not pornographic, a question no court has yet considered. And there has been no evidence that any of the three girls played a part in circulating the photographs.

The parents went to court, claiming that prosecution would amount to retaliation for refusal to join the program.

“We need laws that deal with sexting more holistically, based on the facts of a particular situation,” said Professor Weins, who has written a law review article on the subject. “And that’s not how the child pornography laws work.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/us/21sexting.html





The doctor is online

Hello! Your Psychiatrist Will Skype You Now
Julie Weingarden Dubin

Kanina Chavez lives an hour away from Children's Hospital in Seattle and used to have to take a whole day off from work whenever her daughter, Rachel, had an appointment with a psychiatrist. Rachel was a teenager when she started treatment for bipolar disorder roughly six years ago. Back then, she and her mother had never heard of telepsychiatry. But now they're using real-time videoconferencing in Olympia, Wash., to make it easier for Rachel to remain in the care of experts in Seattle. During the videoconferencing sessions, her psychiatrist can monitor how Rachel is doing, and Kanina can sit beside her daughter and take notes on the recommended adjustments to her daughter's medications. "I was a little apprehensive about my daughter not being face to face with the doctor," says Chavez. "But the conversation was just as good as if we were in person."

Telepsychiatry is a growing trend in mental health, says Dr. Kathleen Myers, who treats Rachel up close and personal despite the 75 miles between them. As director of the telemental health service at Children's Hospital, she points to one of the benefits of a videoconference: unlike a phone call, it allows doctors to observe a patient's facial expressions and body language. "You can talk back and forth in real time — it's off by a millisecond — so you get immediate reactions," says Myers, who, with a $3 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), is conducting the first large federally funded randomized clinical trial to determine the effectiveness of telemental health in treating mental-health problems in childhood.

The rise in telepsychiatry has come largely out of need. According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), between 7 million and 12 million youths suffer from mental, behavioral or developmental disorders. And a new nationally representative survey, funded in part by NIMH, indicates that 50% of the children in the U.S. who have certain mental disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder and depression are not being treated by a psychiatrist or other mental-health professional.
"There are not enough doctors to go around," says Dr. Martin Drell, head of child psychiatry for Louisiana State University's health-science center in New Orleans and AACAP's president-elect. For example, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the local hospital doesn't have a child psychiatrist, so doctors some six hours away, at Michigan State University in East Lansing, treat patients via videoconferencing. In South Carolina, a statewide telepsychiatry program established last summer has cut the average waiting period for a child to get a psychiatric consultation from several days (in part because many families in rural areas lack transportation to get to an urban hospital) to a few hours.

In addition to expanding the geographic reach of individual psychiatrists, videoconferencing can help cut down on some of the stigma of going to see a shrink. Students at Ball High School in Galveston, Texas, can now go to the school's health clinic and — without having to press a button or flip a switch — be face to face with a psychiatrist. "There is a flat-screen TV, and that's where they can see the clinician and talk in real time," says Dr. Fred Thomas, a psychiatric epidemiologist who heads community-based mental-health services and policy for the University of Texas Medical Branch, which now includes five telepsychiatry locations in Galveston. "The clinician has a remote and can move the camera around and zoom in on someone's face to see changes in expression or to see if someone is tearing up."

Oftentimes, according to Thomas, videoconferencing can reduce the anxiety of office visits for children and adolescents. "It's much easier to talk via a screen, especially with issues like anxiety disorders and sexual abuse," he says. "Students feel safe."

In Seattle, Myers is heading up the NIMH study that is specifically designed to determine whether expert psychiatric care through telemental health is more effective than treatment in a typical primary-care setting for children ages 6 to 12 who have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

So far, anecdotal evidence indicates that virtual psychiatry visits work just fine for children and adolescents. Perhaps it's a sign of the times, an era in which teens feel more comfortable in front of a camera than they do face to face. "Videoconferencing is part of their everyday existence — it's like texting or Skype," says Drell.

In New Orleans, Dr. Kristopher Kaliebe, an assistant professor at Louisiana State University who works with Drell, has telemed equipment set up in his home. Some of his time is spent videoconferencing with patients in a juvenile-detention center who have been diagnosed with such conditions as bipolar disorder, severe depression and posttraumatic stress disorder. "Once the conversation starts," he says, "the kids forget there's a screen between us."
http://www.time.com/time/health/arti...974196,00.html





Will Viacom's Public Airing of YouTube's Dirty Laundry Change the Web Forever?
Scott M. Fulton, III

The key issue at the heart of Viacom's case against Google and YouTube, filed in March 2007, concerns whether an Internet service that probably knows that files are traded or shown illicitly or without license there, deserves the "safe harbor" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that protect ISPs from liability for their customers' actions. In a summary judgment motion filed yesterday with US District Court in New York and unsealed this morning, Viacom is bidding to have the judge wrap up the case -- an obvious signal that it believes its case is already strong enough.

As US law stands now, a service such as Grokster or the original Napster (not the Best Buy division that today uses that name) is liable when it intentionally establishes its service for the express purpose of trading in illicit files. It's especially liable when it finds some way to advertise itself for that purpose. An Internet Service Provider such as Comcast or Cox is not liable when its service is used for accessing one of these sites, when it doesn't advertise or offer these services explicitly, and when a customer can access them without direct intervention from the ISP. And a video site such as Veoh is not liable when any measure it might take to stop customers from sharing illicit files may also conceivably infringe upon the free speech rights of other customers who may not be trading such files.

Google, the current owner of YouTube, has been arguing the Veoh case in its own defense. But Viacom's argument -- which courts have been wrestling with for over two-and-a-half years and which we now know today -- is that YouTube is a different, special case. It's more like Grokster, it argues, in that it was founded on the principle of gathering an audience around illicit files.

"Defendants are liable under Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster Ltd., because they operated YouTube with the unlawful objective of profiting from (to use their phrase) 'truckloads' of infringing videos that flooded the site," reads the opening passage of YouTube's founders single-mindedly focused on geometrically increasing the number of YouTube users to maximize its commercial value. They recognized they could achieve that goal only if they cast a blind eye to and did not block the huge number of unauthorized copyrighted works posted on the site. The founders' deliberate decision to build a business based on piracy enabled them to sell their start-up business to Google after 16 months for $1.8 billion. The Supreme Court in Grokster found no legal or societal justification for such intentional copyright infringement."

In a talking points document released today, Viacom cites various e-mails from various YouTube and Google executives, including YouTube founders Chad Hurley (CEO) and Steve Chen (CTO). Assuming these excerpts were not taken out of context, which is possible, they indicate that YouTube's founders were clearly building up a high-audience business with illicit files at their core, with the intention of selling out to somebody as soon as possible.

One excerpt has Chen suggesting that YouTube, apparently during its startup phase, "…concentrate all our efforts in building up our numbers as aggressively as we can through whatever tactics, however evil." Another suggestion, by an unnamed YouTube exec in response to a non-excerpted suggestion -- apparently asking, where should we get all this content -- reads, "Steal it! . . . We have to keep in mind that we need to attract traffic. How much traffic will we get from personal videos?"

And one excerpt attributed to Chen suggests that the whole legal process of handling DMCA takedown notices is so long and dragged on, that by the time YouTube should ever comply with one, it would be too late anyway: "But we should just keep that stuff on the site. I really don't see what will happen. What? Someone from CNN sees it? He happens to be someone with power? He happens to want to take it down right away. He get in touch with cnn legal. 2 weeks later, we get a cease & desist letter. We take the video down."

Viacom's argument that Google knows what kind of trafficking goes on via YouTube is substantiated by evidence in the form of e-mails, evidently sent prior to its acquisition of YouTube, from executives objecting to elements of what they perceived to be its business model. One message from Google's then-VP of Content Partnerships David Eun (now with AOL) to CEO Eric Schmidt cautioned, "I think we should beat YouTube . . . but not at all costs. [They are] a video Grokster." And in another excerpt, an unnamed Google executive asks, "Is changing policy [to] profit from illegal downloads how we want to conduct business? Is this Googley?"

Evidence cited in Viacom's motion for summary judgment tells the story of how Google Video failed to be competitive against YouTube, even though its engineers persisted with efforts to filter out illicit content. One memo cited says Google Video may have been throwing out 90% of its uploads, for containing suspected copyrighted material or for being generally indecent.

"But Google's good intentions and compliance with the law were not paying off," Viacom argues. "YouTube was way ahead of Google Video in the race to build up a user base. Google executives understood that YouTube's success was largely due to what they euphemistically labeled its 'liberal copyright policy' of freely allowing infringing material. Losing the user race to YouTube because of the latter's copyright infringement, Google Video executives engaged in a 'heated debate' in 2006 'about whether we should relax enforcement of our copyright policies in an effort to stimulate traffic growth.' A top senior executive, Peter Chane, Google Video's Business Product Manager, argued point blank that Google Video should 'beat YouTube' by 'calling quits on our copyright compliance standards.' Chane specifically advocated switching Google Video to YouTube's 'reactive DMCA only' policy because 'YouTube gets content when it's hot ([Saturday Night Live's] Lazy Sunday, Stephen Colbert, Lakers wins at the buzzer)' and it '[takes us too long to acquire content directly from the [legitimate] rights holder.'"

It is that statement which Viacom appears to present as a smoking gun: a suggestion from a Google Video executive that it should acquire its competitor solely because its allegedly illegitimate business model is more successful than its own, legally compliant one.

In Google's memorandum in support of summary judgment in its favor, filed after Viacom, its attorneys do not take the tack of rebutting Viacom's scorching citations -- which, if substantiated, could theoretically become the basis for future criminal complaints. Instead, Google reiterates the argument that it's a service provider which, like Veoh, is entitled to safe harbor since it looks the other way, and does not actively seek infringing uploads.

Citing the Veoh finding, Google's attorneys argue, "What matters is that Veoh 'established a system whereby software automatically processes user-submitted content and recasts it in a format that is readily accessible to its users...Inasmuch as this is a means of facilitating user access to material on its Web site,' Veoh did not lose the safe harbor 'through the automated creation of these files.' YouTube is indistinguishable from Veoh in these respects."

YouTube, Google argues, did not have direct knowledge of the circumstances whereby the specific content Viacom claimed was infringed upon (much of it from Paramount) was shared with YouTube users. Since Viacom's arguments must, at some point, focus themselves upon the specific infringing of the content in question, the DMCA protects YouTube on that count as well, Google continues. But all that may be moot, Google points on, by virtue of the fact that under current US law, the alleged infringers must have directly profited from their actions. YouTube gains revenue through advertising.

Writes Google, "A service provider loses safe harbor eligibility only if the plaintiff can show both that the service provider had the right and ability to control the alleged infringements and received a financial benefit directly attributable to those infringements...As with knowledge, the DMCA's control inquiry is specific, not general. The analysis focuses on the service provider's legal and practical control over the particular infringing activity at issue. The statute's text makes that clear: The question is whether the service provider has the right and ability to control "the infringing activity" alleged by the plaintiff and to which a financial benefit is directly attributable."

A number of declarations in support of both motions were filed today. One supporting Google was particularly interesting, because it goes to specifically that last paragraph: It's from the owner of a marketing firm who promoted the works of recording artists who appear on MTV, a Viacom property. He claimed that some of the very works Viacom claimed were infringed upon through unauthorized uploading to YouTube, actually were authorized by none other than MTV itself, as part of the promotion of the artists under his contract.

If Google's interpretation of the law is affirmed, and if this gentleman's claims are proven, then this whole case could become history faster than a judge can even say "summary judgment."
http://www.betanews.com/article/Will...ver/1269029872





Judge Looking into Leaks in Google-Viacom Fight
Tom Krazit

Parties in the Viacom-Google copyright court case plan to meet Friday to discuss an investigation into leaked materials at the heart of two CNET stories from last fall, according to multiple sources.

Judge Louis Stanton is expected to discuss the progress of an investigation into who leaked court documents related to the depositions of Google CEO Eric Schmidt and YouTube managers, revealing that Google knew it was overpaying for the video upload site in 2005 and that YouTube managers were likewise aware that copyright material was being uploaded to the site, according to the sources. It's not clear whether a person or persons involved in the leak will be identified, but the parties--including representatives for a class of plaintiffs suing Google--will meet in the U.S District Court for the Southern District of New York to discuss the matter.

A representative for the court declined to comment on the agenda for the hearing, as did representatives for Viacom, Google, and the class of plaintiffs. The class action suit and the Viacom suit have been running parallel for several years, but the $1 billion Viacom filing has understandably received the bulk of the attention.

A story written by CNET's Greg Sandoval in October revealed that in depositions taken in the long-running case, Google acknowledged it had internally valued YouTube at about $600 million to $700 million while debating whether to purchase the site. But the company decided that it was worth a nearly $1 billion premium to get control of YouTube. The final price tag was $1.7 billion.

A separate story showed for the first time that YouTube managers knew there was copyrighted material on the site uploaded by employees but chose not to remove it. Court documents released a week ago confirmed that, but also showed that Viacom employees were uploading copyright content to the site themselves in hopes of distributing it before an Internet audience.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20001177-265.html





Switzerland Passes Violent Games Ban

Government preparing to outline the specifics of new legislation that will illegalise violent games

Just a month after the proposals were first outlined in full, the Swiss National Council has now officially passed a law that will ultimately lead to the complete ban of any violent video games in the country.

GamesMarkt reports that the full implications of the ruling will not be known until the Government reveals the exact requirements that will be laid down by the new legislation – a decision that has not yet been made.

What is certain though is that the Swiss authorities have now obtained the power to introduce any measures they see fit.

The likeliest outcome seems to be an outright ban on the production, distribution and sale of any games deemed to be unsuitable – most likely anything with either a PEGI 16+ or PEGI 18+ certificate.

The original motion had called for the ban on any title that “requires cruel acts of violence against humans and humanlike creatures for in-game success”.

The nation’s games retailers had previously lobbied for a style of self-regulation that would place strict controls on the sale of games to minors, but it now looks very unlikely that the sector will escape that lightly.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/38103/Swit...lent-games-ban





Gamers Rejoice as R18+ Roadblock Steps Down
Jason Hill

The long-awaited introduction of an adults-only rating for video games in Australia could be a step closer after South Australia's Michael Atkinson yesterday resigned from his position as Attorney-General.

Mr Atkinson has been the South Australian Attorney-General since 2002 and has frustrated attempts to introduce an R18+ rating for games because its introduction requires unanimous support from all state and federal classification ministers.

"There ought to be renewal in the ministry,’’ he told reporters.

"There are talented people on the Labor backbench who deserve a go. I don’t think we want all the Labor ministers leaving in a bunch about the 2014 general election and so it’s important that that renewal be staged.’’

Australia is the only democracy in the western world not to have an adults-only rating for video games. Last year six games were refused classification for exceeding the limits of the MA15+ rating, effectively banning their sale in Australia.

Video game developer David Doe established the Gamers 4 Croydon party late last year to try to unseat the 51-year-old Mr Atkinson at the South Australian elections on the weekend and raise awareness of the R18+ issue.

Although Gamers 4 Croydon had little impact on the poll (receiving just 3.7 per cent of the vote in Croydon and 0.8 per cent in the Legislative Council) Mr Atkinson suffered a 12.4 per cent swing against him in his safe Labor seat of Croydon.

The federal Attorney-General's department recently completed a public consultation inviting Australians to have their say about the proposed introduction of an R18+ rating for games following the publication of a long-awaited discussion paper detailing the advantages and disadvantages of an adults-only rating.

Mr Atkinson frustrated attempts to release the discussion paper after disagreeing with its contents, forcing the federal Attorney-General's department to publish it alone.

Mr Atkinson is the only classification minister to publicly oppose the introduction of an R18+ games rating, although he has repeatedly claimed that there are others.

Mr Atkinson has previously told South Australian parliament that he knows the lack of an R18+ rating denies Australian adults choice but was necessary to help restrict children's access to "potentially harmful material".

The next meeting of the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General is held in Melbourne on April 29, but it is not yet known whether the introduction of an R18+ games rating will be discussed.

At least 40,000 submissions were received by the Attorney-General's department from Australians who want an adults-only rating introduced.

The result of the South Australian election is still unknown, with both Premier Mike Rann and Opposition Leader Isobel Redmond still refusing to claim victory or concede defeat.

A controversial figure

Elected to parliament in 1989, the 51-year-old Atkinson's tenure as attorney-general has been controversial.

Mr Atkinson oversaw SA’s anti-bikie laws, parts of which were ruled invalid by the Supreme Court in a judgment Labor will contest in the High Court.

Last year, he cost taxpayers about $200,000 when he settled out of court a defamation case brought against him by an Adelaide magistrate. Deputy Chief Magistrate Andrew Cannon launched the legal action after Mr Atkinson used the words "daft" and "delusional" in relation to the magistrate’s suggestion that some people might get lighter sentences because of overcrowded jails.

Mr Atkinson was also involved in SA’s first political corruption trial in 2005 when a former adviser to Mr Rann was found not guilty of abuse of public office. The adviser, Randall Ashbourne, denied offering a former Labor MP board positions in return for the politician dropping defamation action against Mr Atkinson in 2002.

And in this election campaign, Mr Atkinson was forced to scrap legislation which required people posting internet comments regarding Saturday’s poll to use their real names.

‘‘It may be humiliating for me but that’s politics in a democracy,’’ he said at the time.
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/g...0322-qous.html





Would You Pay a Girl to Play Halo With You?

GameCrush lets you get flirty and dirty with gamer girls.
Daemon Hatfield

If you're an avid online gamer chances are you sign onto, say, Xbox Live most nights and jump into a game of Modern Warfare or Gears of War with either your friends or some random players. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say the majority of gamers you encounter are dudes, and probably immature dudes at that. What if you could pay a bit of cash to play Modern Warfare with an attractive girl? Or maybe relax with a casual game of checkers while you video chat with said female? A new social service launching tomorrow, March 23, called GameCrush (www.GameCrush.com) is hoping there are gamers out there willing to pay for the opportunity to play with girls.

On GameCrush, guys are Players and girls are PlayDates. Players pay to play and PlayDates get paid to play. Guys can browse PlayDate profiles (there are currently around 1,200), view photos, and even chat with girls for free. Publicityhazard's turn ons include vibrating controllers, for instance, and is turned off by three red lights. Once you find a gal you fancy you send her a game invite and if she accepts you get six to ten minutes of one-on-one gaming time. PlayDates have the ability to block any guy they want for any reason. When the service launches tomorrow it will only support the Xbox 360 and a few casual games hosted on the GameCrush website, but there are plans to add PlayStation 3, Wii, and World of Warcraft support as soon as possible.

You must be 18 or over to create a GameCrush account -- it's being touted as the first social site for adult gamers. It's not an explicitly explicit service, but PlayDates set their gaming mood to either "flirty" or "dirty." What the two of you chat about is entirely up to you. Signing up is free, but you must purchase credits in order to get your game on. For $8.25 you get 500 credits, which is enough for one game (400 credits) and a 100 credit tip at the end. An Xbox Live game will last 10 minutes, while a casual Flash game will get you six minutes of face time with your PlayDate. That's literal face time, because you can video chat with your lady while playing a casual Flash game. Again, what goes on in that video chat is up to you and your PlayDate. GameCrush says it modeled its pricing structure after the cost of buying a girl a drink at a bar. In a bar, you're basically buying the opportunity to chat a girl up. GameCrush is hoping players will look at their service the same way.

Playing a GameCrush casual game couldn't be easier: once she accepts your invite the game begins right in your browser and the video chat window opens. But when playing an Xbox 360 game you'll need to find her gamertag on Xbox Live (PlayDates are encouraged to set up a unique gamertag just for use with GameCrush) and send her another invite. Likely because your attention won't be on your computer monitor, there is no video chat during an Xbox game. The service isn't integrated within Xbox Live -- you browse profiles, chat with girls, and set up games all from within the GameCrush website. Then you have to set up your Xbox Live game yourself.

After a session you can rate your PlayDate on her hotness, gaming skill, and flirtiness. The highest-rated girls will receive preferred placement on the site. GameCrush is assembling a team of its most highly regarded PlayDates called JaneCrush, which would be positioned similar to Ubisoft's Fragdolls in that members of JaneCrush will generate content for the site like blogs and editorials. GameCrush wants to turn its most popular girls into gaming stars.

PlayDates aren't on the GameCrush staff; they are like independent contractors. Any girl can sign up, so you're going to find a wide variety of gaming and flirting skills. These are (mostly) regular girls and they don't receive any sort of training on how to act or what to say. During an early demo of the service I played a couple casual games with PlayDate Ambibambi23. She was a nice girl (and totally kicked my ass in both pool and Battleship, btw) but her boyfriend was hanging out behind her and she made mention of him a couple times. Her game mood is set to "flirty," but there was zero flirting going on. I can imagine some guys might be disappointed if they paid to play with a girl, only to hear her go on and on about her boyfriend -- and even have to see the guy during a video chat. I gave Ambibambi23 high marks for her gaming skill but dinged her for her lack of flirtiness.

PlayDates keep 60 percent of the cash they bring in. To find its girls, GameCrush posted a Craigslist ad looking for ladies who want to get paid to play videogames. The response was enormous and there are currently around 1,200 registered PlayDates. Browsing the site, though, you'll come across many suspect profiles. Adamma here, for instance, says "I was born in Russia and come to UK 5 years ago. I am different to other girls. OK, all girls think that. But, where else can you find beauty, sophistication, fun and charm, all in one deliciously wrapped package? And I love to PLAY GAMES...I I'm sure to set your pulse racing. I like the good things in life and always expect to be treated like a lady. I take you away from the stress and strain of everyday life. Look no further."

Because it's free for girls to sign up and there is no vetting process, the service is bound to get some shady ladies. But, from what we can tell, most of the girls on the service genuinely like to play games and are simply interested in getting paid for it.

The four 360 games available at the moment are Modern Warfare 2, Gears of War 2, Grand Theft Auto IV, and Halo 3. As for the casual lineup, right now you can play no-frills versions of stuff like checkers, pool, and Battleship. GameCrush says its casual offerings should improve soon.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about GameCrush is that no one else thought of it sooner. I have no doubt there are many gamers out there who would be willing to pay a little cash to play and flirt with hot girls, the only question is whether or not GameCrush is offering the right features for the right price. You can check out the site (www.GameCrush.com) for yourself and start browsing profiles tomorrow night -- or sign up to be a PlayDate, if you're a gamer girl.
http://au.xboxlive.ign.com/articles/107/1079073p1.html





News Corp to Charge for UK Times Online from June

News Corp will charge readers for online versions of its UK Times and Sunday Times newspapers from June, becoming the first media firm to test consumers' appetite to pay for mass-market news online.

Access to two new websites for the two titles will cost 1 pound ($1.49) per day or 2 pounds for a week. Subscribers to the print versions will get free access, News Corp said on Friday.

"This is just the start," said Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News Corp's British newspaper unit News International which also publishes the Sun daily tabloid and sister paper The News of the World on Sundays.

"At a defining moment for journalism, this is a crucial step toward making the business of news an economically exciting proposition," she said in a statement.

Newspapers in Western Europe and the United States have been battered by the recession while fighting a structural shift in their business from paid-for newspapers to largely free news on the Web.

Two business newspapers -- the Financial Times and News Corp's Wall Street Journal -- charge readers for online access but consumer publications have so far not followed, fearing a massive loss of readers.

News Corp chief executive Rupert Murdoch has become a kind of champion of paid-for online news, saying Internet giant Google has deprived the industry of revenue by making news articles searchable for free.

In January, The New York Times said it would start charging readers for access to online articles from next year, acknowledging that advertising revenues were unlikely to be able to fund its journalism in the future.

The editors of the Times and Sunday Times promised interactive features to get readers more involved, personalized news feeds, and coming versions for phones, e-readers, tablet computers and other mobile devices.

The Times and the Sunday Times will launch new, separate websites in early May, which will be free to registered customers for a trial period.

The print version of the Times costs 1 pound on weekdays and 1.50 pounds on Saturdays, and the Sunday Times costs 2 pounds.

(Reporting by Georgina Prodhan)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...technologyNews





Fake Newspaper to Get Real TV Show
Dave Itzkoff

The Onion, the satirical news organization that broke the fake story that the smoke monster from “Lost” would receive its own spinoff series and cheekily reported that television critics who praised “The Wire” had never seen the show, is itself headed to the small screen. On Monday the Independent Film Channel announced that it was developing a television series based on The Onion, the humorous weekly newspaper and Web site (theonion.com), as part of a comedy-heavy slate of new programming. The Onion series, called “Onion News Network,” will bring the deadpan sensibility of the Web site’s popular video clips to a show in the vein of authentic news programs like CNN’s “Situation Room” or “Anderson Cooper 360.” “It just seems to us, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC are already doing such great comedy out there, without a whole lot of competition,” said Will Graham, an executive producer of “Onion News Network.” “We thought it was about time that someone really gave them a run for their money.” The IFC series is planned for a 2011 debut.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/ar...SPAPE_BRF.html





Final Season for ‘At the Movies’
Dave Itzkoff

THE balcony is closed, this time for good. After nearly three decades, “At the Movies,” the syndicated television program that introduced many viewers to the film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, as well as to film criticism in all its thorny and contentious glory, will cease production this summer.

Disney-ABC Domestic Television, which distributes “At the Movies,” and ABC Media Productions, which produces it, said in a statement late Wednesday that the current version of the show, which is hosted by Michael Phillips of The Chicago Tribune and A. O. Scott of The New York Times, would broadcast its last original episode the weekend of Aug. 14.

The demise of “At the Movies” was a blow to the legions of armchair reviewers it spawned in its many incarnations, some of whom went on to professional careers in criticism. “It’s impossible to overestimate the impact of what Gene and Roger did,” Mr. Scott, the co-chief film critic at The Times, said in a telephone interview. “Any one of us who’s doing this now, on any platform or in any medium, is following them.”

But the program’s cancellation is also a reflection of the rapid changes that the film and television industries have undergone in recent years — the proliferation of print and Web outlets that offer movie reviews as much as the declining value of “At the Movies” in Disney’s syndication portfolio.

“From a business perspective,” Disney said in its statement, “it became clear this weekly, half-hour, broadcast syndication series was no longer sustainable.”

“At the Movies” had its origins in a 1970s-era program, called “Opening Soon at a Theater Near You” and then “Sneak Previews,” shown on the Chicago PBS affiliate WTTW. That show paired Mr. Siskel, the buttoned-down film reviewer of The Chicago Tribune, with Mr. Ebert, the irascible critic and crosstown rival at The Chicago Sun-Times. In 1982 they took their powerful thumbs and their often heated arguments on the week’s newest release to “At the Movies,” a syndicated series produced by Tribune Entertainment.

They left to start another series, “Siskel & Ebert & the Movies,” in 1986, which went through several host changes and eventually reclaimed the title of “At the Movies.” For a time the show was disdained by other film reviewers, who felt that its thumbs-up or thumbs-down verdicts reduced movie criticism to a mere yes or no — an argument that seems downright quaint today.

After Mr. Siskel died in 1999, Mr. Ebert shared co-hosting duties with a rotating lineup of critics until his Sun-Times colleague, Richard Roeper, became permanent co-host in 2000. Mr. Ebert took absences beginning in 2006 to be treated for cancer, leading to another round of substitute critics and his eventually ceding his chair to Mr. Phillips of The Tribune.

When Mr. Ebert and Mr. Roeper officially left “At the Movies” in 2008, they were replaced by Ben Lyons, a television producer and online columnist, and Ben Mankiewicz, a radio and television host, in a flashier, more upbeat version of the show. It was not well received by fans or by Mr. Ebert, who wrote of the untested Mr. Lyons, “To put him in my seat was a mistake.” The next year Mr. Phillips and Mr. Scott became hosts.

By that time, “At the Movies” represented an increasingly tiny sliver of Disney’s syndication pie: shown once a week nearly nationwide, for a half-hour, it was not able to generate nearly as much revenue as programs like “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” or its powerhouse morning talk show, “Live! With Regis and Kelly,” which are typically broadcast five days a week.

While the show was still profitable and its ratings improved over the version hosted by the two Bens, according to several people close to the production of the show, Disney found the economic vital signs too discouraging to continue.

In a post late Wednesday on the Web site of The Sun-Times, (blogs.suntimes.com/ebert), Mr. Ebert wrote of “At the Movies” that it “didn’t fail so much as have its format shot out from beneath it.” Rather than attributing its downfall to any particular hosts, he wrote, “Blame the fact that cable TV and the Internet have fragmented the audience so much that stations are losing market share no matter what they do.”

Mr. Ebert also pointed to the limited influence that reviews can have on certain movies and certain moviegoers, adding: “Theatrical distribution is now dominated by the big-budget, heavily marketed 3-D of the Week. Such films have a success utterly independent of critics.”

Mr. Phillips said in a telephone interview that, although “At the Movies” faced increased challenges in reaching a wide audience, neither its Chicago-based production staff nor Disney ever pressured him or Mr. Scott to dumb down their on-air discussions. “When they let us on the show,” he said, “they knew they weren’t going to get anything that could fool the ‘Access Hollywood’ slash red-carpet crowd into watching. They were always stressing, we have an arena for film criticism that tells the truth.”

Mr. Scott said that the shuttering of “At the Movies” did not necessarily reflect a diminished interest in cinema criticism or a decline in its ability to influence audiences.

“It’s always been true that people can go to the movies without reading what critics have to say about the movies,” Mr. Scott said. He added: “Criticism matters to the people who care about it. It’s not that everybody out there in the world needs to hear what we have to say, but some people want to. And there is still, I think, an appetite.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/ar.../26cancel.html





Bollywood and Hollywood Vow to Stop Piracy 'Menace'

Had enough of dodgy DVDs
Marc Chacksfield

A coalition has been formed by Indian Studios and the MPAA, which hopes to stamp out DVD piracy in India.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, piracy cost the movie industry in India $959 million in 2008 – making it one of the worst countries in the world for creating DVD knock-offs.

Speaking about the coalition, MPAA chairman Dan Glickman said: "Free is great and everybody likes things for free. [But] in a civilised society, we need to pay for products and services.

"I believe that as an industry, if we offer people products at reasonable prices in a hassle free manner, people will not steal."

Glickman also noted that piracy was costing the industry jobs, saying: "The menace of copyright theft jeopardises a movie's ability to make money – if at all.

"This affects the level of investment available for new films and the ability to create new jobs for workers throughout the country,"

Non-bailable offence

Another person vocal in India's anti-piracy plight is Bollywood film-maker Yash Chopra, who said about the problems: "The Indian film industry loses millions of dollars every year due to piracy. India is also among the top 10 countries in the world when it comes to this crime.

"We need government support to implement stricter rules to prevent people from going to watch movies in cinemas with camcorders for copying purposes. If someone is caught, it should be a non-bailable offence."

We're hoping that the alliance will solve the piracy problem by challenging the pirates to a massive Bollywood dance-off. But, for some reason, it looks like the courts and police will more likely deal with the problem.
http://www.techradar.com/news/video/...menace--678505





Chatroulette Improv Piano Player Removed from YouTube

Merton, a.k.a. the Chatroulette Improv Piano Player, has had his viral video yanked off of YouTube “due to terms of use violation.”

Merton became the big Internet sensation when he logged onto Chatroulette with his glasses, hooded sweater, and trusty keyboard and created songs for random strangers on-the-fly. The result was millions of views, tons of Merton love, and even an “Ode to Merton” performed live by Ben Folds, which has also gone viral.

By their very nature, Merton’s songs were very unlikely to have violated copyrights from the big music agencies; his songs were created as soon as the next Chatrouletter appeared.

Our understanding is that the video didn’t violate any copyrights; instead, there were likely privacy issued involved, as most of the people in the video didn’t know that they were becoming part of a viral video.
http://mashable.com/2010/03/22/merton-removed-youtube/





TV and Internet Use Together Growing

Americans are spending more time watching television and surfing the Internet simultaneously, and nearly 60 percent of TV viewers use the Web at the same time at least once a month, according to a Nielsen report released on Monday.

The Nielsen Three Screen Report said the findings in its study belied early concerns that the growing popularity of the Web would kill off traditional TV.

"The initial fear was that Internet and mobile video and entertainment would slowly cannibalize traditional TV viewing, but the steady trend of increased TV viewership alongside expanded simultaneous usage argues something quite different," said Nielsen Co media product leader Matt O'Grady.

The report for 2009's fourth quarter, which tracked viewing across TV, the Internet and mobile phones, found a 35 percent rise in the amount of time Americans used the TV and Internet simultaneously compared with the same quarter in 2008.

It found Americans now spend 3.5 hours per month watching TV while on the Internet.

Active mobile video users grew by 57 percent over the year to 17.6 million from 11.2 million people, with much of the increase attributed to the growth of smartphones.

The report found that Americans now watch about 35 hours of TV per week and two hours of time-shifted TV via video recorders (DVR), with 25 to 34-year-olds making more use of time-shifting than any other age group.

DVRs are now found in 35 percent of American households, the report said.

O'Grady said America's love affair with TV looks set to continue for the foreseeable future.

"We seem to have an almost insatiable appetite for media, with online and mobile programing only adding to it," he said.

(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte and Gerald E. McCormick)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...technologyNews





"Alice" Stays Atop Box Offices for Third Week

Disney 3-D adventure "Alice in Wonderland" retained the top spot at North American box offices for a third straight week, collecting $34.5 million and beating three new films including romantic comedy "The Bounty Hunter."

"Diary of a Wimpy Kid," based on the first book in the popular series by Jeff Kinney, claimed the No. 2 spot with $21.8 million as children and parents turned out in solid numbers and pushed adult-oriented "Bounty Hunter" to third with $21 million, according to studio estimates on Sunday.

Chris Aronson, senior vice president of domestic distribution for "Wimpy Kid" studio 20th Century Fox, said audiences were roughly evenly split between males and females and more than 40 percent were over age 25, hinting that the books' adult fans turned out in theaters, too.

"It's clearly a family movie, but the audience has been broader than that," he said. "I think we just found out how deep the fan base is and how dear this (series) is," he said.

The books, four so far with a fifth due on bookshelves this year, trace the life of U.S. middle-school student Gregory Heffley and the funny things that happen to him in his daily routine of classes, chores, friends, rivals and family.

"Bounty Hunter" touted major starpower with Gerard Butler portraying a career criminal chaser whose new target is his ex-wife, portrayed by Jennifer Aniston, and it was widely promoted heading into the weekend.

Both "Wimpy Kid" and "Bounty Hunter" opened in just under 3,100 theaters, with the former earning about $7,100 per location and the latter at just over $6,800 per venue.

By contrast, Disney's "Alice" was playing in around 3,700 locations and pulled in roughly $9,300 per theater, pushing its total domestic box office in three weeks to over $265 million.

The Disney studio is a unit of Walt Disney Co, and Fox is a division of News Corp. "Bounty Hunter" was released by Columbia Pictures, a part of Sony Corp.

The weekend's other new movie, science-fiction adventure "Repo Men" was a distant fourth with $6.2 million in another disappointing opening for Universal Pictures, which last week debuted Iraq war film "Green Zone" at No. 2 behind "Alice."

"Green Zone," starring Matt Damon, fell to No. 6 this weekend with ticket sales just under $6 million, giving the big-budget action flick a total of $24.7 million. Universal is a unit of the NBC Universal media wing of General Electric Co.

It was narrowly beat to the No. 5 spot by Paramount Pictures' comedy "She's Out of My League," which claimed just over $6 million. Paramount is a unit of Viacom Inc.

Elsewhere, director Roman Polanski's thriller "The Ghost Writer" continues to play well in a limited release in major cities, earning about $2 million over the weekend, or $14,000 per theater in only 145 locations.

Widely promoted "The Runaways," starring Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning in the tale of an all-girl band, mustered $3,300 in 244 theaters for an unspectacular total of $804,000.

"The Runaways" was released by privately held Apparition Films and "Ghost Writer" by closely held Summit Entertainment.

(Reporting by Bob Tourtellotte; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62I0A220100322





Sales Full-Blooded for "New Moon" DVD
Gregg Kilday

Twilight" fans didn't show up en masse for recent new movies starring Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, but they snapped up plenty of copies of "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" DVD when it went on sale at 12:01 a.m. Saturday.

Summit Entertainment, the studio behind the teen vampire franchise, reported Tuesday that the DVD of the second installment in the "Twilight" saga sold more than 4 million units in its first weekend, surpassing the 3.8 million opening-weekend sales that the first "Twilight" racked up in 2009. That film went on to become the top-selling DVD of the year, with 9.2 million units sold.

Director Chris Weitz and many of the "Moon" cast members fanned out across the country for appearances at "'New Moon' at Midnight" events.

"The ground we have broken with in-store partnerships and the availability of this title has been a positive influence on the retail DVD business," Summit president of home entertainment Steve Nickerson said.

"Moon," released in November, has grossed more than $705 million in theaters worldwide. "Eclipse," the third installment in the series, hits the big screen in North America on June 30.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62N05720100324





DVD Series Revisits British Invasion of '60s
Gail Mitchell

The '60s British Invasion goes deeper than just the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Who. Illustrating that point to full effect is the "British Invasion" DVD series.

The first four volumes in the documentary series focus on Dusty Springfield ("Once Upon a Time 1964-1969"), Small Faces ("All or Nothing 1965-1968"), Gerry & the Pacemakers ("It's Gonna Be All Right 1963-1965") and Herman's Hermits ("Listen People 1964-1969"). Set for release Tuesday (March 30) through Reelin' in the Years Productions and Naxos of America, the four DVDs are available separately ($19.99) or as a boxed set ($79,99) packaged with a fifth disc of bonus material. The series originally was released last September in the United Kingdom.

Each DVD features a host of vintage TV performances in their entirety, punctuated by reflections on the acts' careers and music by producers, songwriters, backing singers and the artists themselves. Accompanying each disc is a 24-page booklet of insights and essays by well-known rock historians complemented by previously unseen photos and other memorabilia. "Our goal," Reelin' CEO David Peck says, "is to paint a broader and deeper picture of one of the truly great eras in music."

One of the more intriguing chapters is Springfield's. Her distinctive, melodramatic brand of blue-eyed soul powered a string of 17 hits in the '60s including "Wishin' and Hopin'" and "Son of a Preacher Man." A hands-on artist and songwriter, she produced her own records before it was the accepted norm for females. But Springfield didn't take the credit because she was "conditioned into thinking as a woman ... that it would take away from my credibility as an innocent little singer." More than 40 years later, her enduring legacy can be heard in the retro-soul of Duffy, Adele and Amy Winehouse.

Springfield's former manager Vicki Wickham, Small Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan and Herman's Hermits guitarist Keith Hopwood will be among the guests attending the "British Invasion" launch party April 8 at the British Consulate in New York. Along with Peck, they'll reveal a few details about a second boxed set due in the fall and a third slated for 2011.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62Q06C20100327





Want to Use My Suit? Then Throw Me Something
Campbell Robertson

Just after dusk on Friday night, Tyrone Yancy was strutting through one of the more uncertain parts of town in a $6,000 custom-made suit.

He was concerned about being robbed, but not by the neighborhood teenagers who trotted out in the street to join him. The real potential for theft, as Mr. Yancy sees it, came from the strangers darting around him and his well-appointed colleagues in a hectic orbit: photographers.

Mr. Yancy, 44, is a nursing assistant by profession. His calling, however, is as one of the Mardi Gras Indians — a member of the Yellow Pocahontas tribe, to be exact — the largely working-class black New Orleanians who create and wear ornate, enormous feathered costumes and come out three times a year to show them off.

He is also one of a number of Indians who have become fed up with seeing their photographs on calendars, posters and expensive prints, without getting anything in return.

Knowing that there are few legal protections for a person who is photographed in public — particularly one who stops and poses every few feet — some Mardi Gras Indians have begun filing for copyright protection for their suits, which account for thousands of dollars in glass beads, rhinestones, feathers and velvet, and hundreds of hours of late-night sewing.

Anyone could still take their pictures, but the Indians, many of whom live at the economic margins, would have some recourse if they saw the pictures being sold, or used in advertising. (News photographs, like the ones illustrating this article, are not at issue.)

“It’s not the old way of doing things, but the old way of doing things was conducive to exploitation,” said Ashlye M. Keaton, a lawyer who represents Indians in her private practice and also works with them through two pro bono legal programs, Sweet Home New Orleans legal services, and the Entertainment Law Legal Assistance Project.

The legal grounding of the strategy is debatable, the ability to enforce it even more so. But what may be most tricky of all is pushing the Indians themselves to start thinking about the legal and financial dimensions of something they have always done out of tradition.

Mardi Gras Indians have been around for more than a century — more than two, some say — and are generally thought to have originated as a way to pay homage to the American Indians who harbored runaway slaves and started families with them.

The Indians come out and parade in full dress on Mardi Gras; on St. Joseph’s Night, March 19; and on a Sunday close to St. Joseph’s — a tradition that arose out of the affinity between blacks and Sicilians in the city’s working-class precincts.

The 30 or so Indian tribes are representatives of their neighborhoods, and starting from home turf they venture out in their shimmering suits to meet other tribes on procession in the streets. Time was, these run-ins would often end with somebody in the hospital, or worse.

But over the past few decades, encouraged by the legendary Chief of Chiefs, Tootie Montana, the showdowns became primarily about the suits, and whose suit could out-prettify all the others.

Indian suits, which in the old days were occasionally burned at the end of a season, have become stunningly elaborate and stunningly expensive, costing upwards of $10,000. For many Indians, it is a matter of principle that they make a new suit from scratch each year.

The copyright idea has been floating around for a while — several of Mr. Montana’s suits were registered years ago — but Ms. Keaton began pursuing it more vigorously in 2006, when she was approached by John Ellison, a 52-year-old detailer in an auto body shop and a member of the Wild Tchoupitoulas.

Any photograph that focused on a suit protected by a copyright could arguably be considered a derivative work. The sale of such a picture (or its use in tourism ads, for example) would be on the merits of the suit rather than the photograph itself, and if the person selling it did not have permission, he could be sued.

But the idea is not so easy to put into practice. In American copyright law, clothing designs generally cannot be protected because they are more functional than aesthetic. Ms. Keaton argues that the suits, which can weigh well over 100 pounds, should be considered works of sculpture, not outfits.

The Sweet Home organization held a workshop for Indians on the topic last fall, and is pressing them to fill out copyright forms for this year’s suits. But there has not yet been a test case for the legal theory and it is unclear how one would fare.

“The Mardi Gras Indian costumes are pretty wild and not functional in the ordinary sense of the word, so that suggests that they might be copyrightable,” Kal Raustiala, a professor at the law school of the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote in an e-mail message.

“That said,” he added, “lots of runway fashion is also way out there and not likely to fit anyone’s ordinary idea of usefulness, yet it doesn’t receive copyright protection.”

Mr. Ellison filled out his copyright registration form on the spot, but later lost it, a testament to the difficulties of changing a culture.

Christopher Porché West, who has been photographing Mardi Gras Indians since 1979, said he had heard these kinds of complaints for years. They are counterproductive, he said, given the relatively small amount of money he and other photographers earn from Indian portraits.

“What they really need to do is self-exploit,” he said. If they want to make money from their culture, he said, “they should find a way to commodify it and bring that to the market.”

But words like “commodify” are foreign and even a little distasteful for many in this city, rather like finding tofu sausage in a gumbo. Indians do make a few hundred dollars here and there showing up at parties and concerts, and a few have tried, with disappointing results, to sell last year’s suits on eBay.

“Indian culture was never, ever meant to make any money,” said Howard Miller, Big Chief of the Creole Wild West, the city’s oldest tribe, and president of the Mardi Gras Indian Council. But neither should the culture be exploited by others.

“We have a beef,” he said, “with anybody who takes us for granted.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/us/24orleans.html





Company Sees Leap for Cellphone Cameras
Ashlee Vance

Mobile photographers could soon have much better cameras on their cellphones, thanks to technology known as quantum dots.

InVisage Technologies, based in Menlo Park, Calif., has spent more than three years trying to build a proprietary film that coats the image sensors used in cellphone cameras and allows them to capture more light. The film stands as a rare commercial use of an exotic semiconductor material called a quantum dot.

Jess Lee, the chief executive of InVisage, said the company’s lab tests had convinced him that within two years cellphone companies would be able to offer cameras that work about four times better than today’s cameras, particularly in low light.

The image sensors in cellphone cameras now use silicon to capture light, which is then processed to create a picture. Companies making these sensors have run into problems as they keep shrinking and tweaking the innards of the devices so that they can absorb more light.

The limitations of cameras based on this technology often appear when people try to take photos in low light, resulting in a blurry image.

“With the current techniques, you might have technology that’s 10 percent better two years from now,” Mr. Lee said. “The big guys have hit a brick wall, and it will only get harder and more expensive for them to fight it.”

Rather than trying to refine the silicon technology, InVisage turned to quantum dots to build what it calls Quantum Film, a layer of semiconductor material that gathers light better than silicon, Mr. Lee said.

Researchers have spent years working on quantum dots with little success. They are essentially semiconductor particles about a nanometer — or a billionth of a meter — in size. Technologists want to control the physical properties of the quantum dots to make them behave a certain way.

Typically, researchers must build the quantum dots with exotic materials and then struggle to control their properties in a repeatable fashion.

Morry Marshall, the vice president for strategic technologies at the chip consulting firm Semico Research, said that if InVisage had figured out how to use quantum dots effectively, it could mean a huge leap in camera performance. “I don’t know of any technology right now that is even close,” Mr. Marshall said.

Mr. Lee declined to reveal what materials InVisage had used to build its dot, calling it the company’s secret recipe. He did, however, show off vials of the quantum dots suspended in a liquid. The liquid is spread across the top of an image sensor. Mr. Lee expects that companies producing image sensor chips could use the film without substantial changes to their existing equipment.

Rather than licensing the film to companies like Sony, Toshiba or Aptina, InVisage plans to make its own sensors and sell them directly to cellphone companies.

“We expect to start production 18 months from now,” Mr. Lee said.

With such technology, the current three-megapixel camera found in the Apple iPhone could be turned into a 12-megapixel camera that works better in varying light conditions, Mr. Lee said.

Ken Salsman, the director of new technologies at Aptina, a major manufacturer of image sensors for cellphones, conceded that silicon-based sensors had proved tough to advance. But he said that Aptina had managed to improve its technology through some novel techniques, and that InVisage might be “in for a very rude surprise.”

Still, Mr. Salsman commended InVisage for trying something new in this field. “I am very excited to see what they’ve got,” he said. “Having a true change in performance never hurt the industry.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/22/te...22quantum.html





Jim Marshall, Rock ’n’ Roll Photographer, Dies at 74
Ben Sisario

Jim Marshall, a photographer whose images of Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash and others in the 1960s and ’70s helped define their subjects as well as rock ’n’ roll photography itself, died overnight on Tuesday in a hotel in New York. He was 74.

His death was confirmed by Peter Blachley of the Morrison Hotel Gallery, which represents him in New York. The cause was not immediately known, but Mr. Blachley said that Mr. Marshall had died in his sleep.

Mr. Marshall, who lived in San Francisco, was in New York to promote “Match Prints,” his new book with his friend and fellow photographer Timothy White. They had been scheduled to appear at an event at the John Varvatos clothing store in SoHo on Wednesday evening. An exhibition of photographs from the book is to open on Friday at the Staley-Wise Gallery, also in SoHo.

In crisp photographs, shot mostly in black and white and with a stable of trusty Leica rangefinders, Mr. Marshall captured pop stars in their full onstage glory, as well as in unguarded offstage scenes that humanized them as approachable or vulnerable.

Among his most famous pictures are Hendrix setting his guitar aflame at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967, which established Hendrix’s early reputation as a wild man; Cash angrily gesturing with his middle finger while at the San Quentin State Prison in 1969; a boyish Bob Dylan following a stray tire down a New York street in 1963; and Janis Joplin clutching a bottle of Southern Comfort backstage in 1968.

To get those pictures he insisted on extraordinary access, and usually got it. He was a favored portraitist for many of his subjects, who sometimes allowed him to follow them for days. He was the only photographer allowed backstage for the Beatles’ 1966 farewell concert in San Francisco, was at Woodstock in 1969, and shot the Rolling Stones’ 1972 tour on assignment for Life magazine.

Annie Leibovitz once called him “the rock ’n’ roll photographer.”

With an imposing figure and gruff, forceful personality, Mr. Marshall was something of a rock star himself, and musicians respected him as much for his pictures as for his dedication to getting them. Yet he saw his work largely in photojournalistic terms, capturing a natural scene instead of staging an artificial one.

“When I’m photographing people, I don’t like to give any direction,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1997 retrospective book, “Not Fade Away.” “There are no hair people fussing around, no make-up artists. I’m like a reporter, only with a camera; I react to my subject in their environment, and, if it’s going well, I get so immersed in it that I become one with the camera.”

Born in Chicago on Feb. 3, 1936, he moved with his family to San Francisco two years later. His father, a housepainter, left when he was a boy, and his mother worked in a laundry. As a child he enjoyed playing with his Kodak Brownie, but it was not until about 1960 that Mr. Marshall, equipped with his first Leica M2, found his calling through a chance encounter with John Coltrane. “He asked me for directions to a club,” he said in a 2004 interview. “I told him I’d pick him up and take him there if he’d let me take his picture.”

In addition to Coltrane, he shot Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and other jazz stars, but he is best known for his extensive catalog of 1960s and ’70s rockers, which includes most of the San Francisco psychedelic groups as well as Jim Morrison, the Who, Led Zeppelin, Neil Young and the Allman Brothers Band.

In 1962 Mr. Marshall moved to Greenwich Village, where his neighbors included Mr. Dylan and Judy Collins. But after two years he returned to San Francisco, where he remained. In his career he shot for Rolling Stone and other magazines and had more than 500 album cover credits.

No immediate family members survive.

Mr. Marshall spoke candidly about how his cocaine addiction had sidelined his career in the mid-1970s. By the late 1980s he had re-emerged, and his skills — and prestige — were often in demand by younger musicians like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Cult. He had numerous gallery shows in recent years, and some of his work was included in the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition “Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present,” which ran from October to January.

“A lot of photography of music is about the look, the style, the celebrity image,” said Gail Buckland, the curator of that show. But Mr. Marshall, she added, “wasn’t really manufacturing an image.”

“He was trying to see who that person was,” she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/ar...5marshall.html





Inside a Global Cybercrime Ring
Jim Finkle

Hundreds of computer geeks, most of them students putting themselves through college, crammed into three floors of an office building in an industrial section of Ukraine's capital Kiev, churning out code at a frenzied pace. They were creating some of the world's most pernicious, and profitable, computer viruses.

According to court documents, former employees and investigators, a receptionist greeted visitors at the door of the company, known as Innovative Marketing Ukraine. Communications cables lay jumbled on the floor and a small coffee maker sat on the desk of one worker.

As business boomed, the firm added a human resources department, hired an internal IT staff and built a call center to dissuade its victims from seeking credit card refunds. Employees were treated to catered holiday parties and picnics with paintball competitions.

Top performers got bonuses as young workers turned a blind eye to the harm the software was doing. "When you are just 20, you don't think a lot about ethics," said Maxim, a former Innovative Marketing programer who now works for a Kiev bank and asked that only his first name be used for this story. "I had a good salary and I know that most employees also had pretty good salaries."

In a rare victory in the battle against cybercrime, the company closed down last year after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit seeking its disbandment in U.S. federal court.

An examination of the FTC's complaint and documents from a legal dispute among Innovative executives offer a rare glimpse into a dark, expanding -- and highly profitable -- corner of the internet.

Innovative Marketing Ukraine, or IMU, was at the center of a complex underground corporate empire with operations stretching from Eastern Europe to Bahrain; from India and Singapore to the United States. A researcher with anti-virus software maker McAfee Inc who spent months studying the company's operations estimates that the business generated revenue of about $180 million in 2008, selling programs in at least two dozen countries. "They turned compromised machines into cash," said the researcher, Dirk Kollberg.

The company built its wealth pioneering scareware -- programs that pretend to scan a computer for viruses, and then tell the user that their machine is infected. The goal is to persuade the victim to voluntarily hand over their credit card information, paying $50 to $80 to "clean" their PC.

Scareware, also known as rogueware or fake antivirus software, has become one of the fastest-growing, and most prevalent, types of internet fraud. Software maker Panda Security estimates that each month some 35 million PCs worldwide, or 3.5 percent of all computers, are infected with these malicious programs, putting more than $400 million a year in the hands of cybercriminals. "When you include cost incurred by consumers replacing computers or repairing, the total damages figure is much, much larger than the out of pocket figure," said Ethan Arenson, an attorney with the Federal Trade Commission who helps direct the agency's efforts to fight cybercrime.

Groups like Innovative Marketing build the viruses and collect the money but leave the work of distributing their merchandise to outside hackers. Once infected, the machines become virtually impossible to operate. The scareware also removes legitimate anti-virus software from vendors including Symantec Corp, McAfee and Trend Micro Inc, leaving PCs vulnerable to other attacks.

When victims pay the fee, the virus appears to vanish, but in some cases the machine is then infiltrated by other malicious programs. Hackers often sell the victim's credit card credentials to the highest bidder.

Removing scareware is a top revenue generator for Geek Choice, a PC repair company with about two dozen outlets in the United States. The outfit charges $100 to $150 to clean infected machines, a service that accounts for about 30 percent of all calls. Geek Choice CEO Lucas Brunelle said that scareware attacks have picked up over the past few months as the software has become increasingly sophisticated. "There are more advanced strains that are resistant to a lot of anti-virus software," Brunelle said.

Anti-virus software makers have also gotten into the lucrative business of cleaning PCs, charging for those services even when their products fall down on the job.

Charlotte Vlastelica, a homemaker in State College, Pennsylvania, was running a version of Symantec's Norton anti-virus software when her PC was attacked by Antispyware 2010. "These pop-ups were constant," she said. "They were layered one on top of the other. You couldn't do anything."

So she called Norton for help and was referred to the company's technical support division. The fee for removing Antispyware 2010 was $100. A frustrated Vlastelica vented: "You totally missed the virus and now you're going to charge us $100 to fix it?"

An Industry Pioneer

"It's sort of a plague," said Kent Woerner, a network administrator for a public school district in Beloit, Kansas, some 5,500 miles away from Innovative Marketing's offices in Kiev. He ran into one of its products, Advanced Cleaner, when a teacher called to report that pornographic photos were popping up on a student's screen. A message falsely claimed the images were stored on the school's computer.

"When I have a sixth-grader seeing that kind of garbage, that's offensive," said Woerner. He fixed the machine by deleting all data from the hard drive and installing a fresh copy of Windows. All stored data was lost.

Stephen Layton, who knows his way around technology, ended up junking his PC, losing a week's worth of data that he had yet to back up from his hard drive, after an attack from an Innovative Marketing program dubbed Windows XP Antivirus. The president of a home-based software company in Stevensville, Maryland, Layton says he is unsure how he contracted the malware.

But he was certain of its deleterious effect. "I work eight-to-12 hours a day," he said. "You lose a week of that and you're ready to jump off the roof."

Layton and Woerner are among more than 1,000 people who complained to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission about Innovative Marketing's software, prompting an investigation that lasted more than a year and the federal lawsuit that sought to shut them down. To date the government has only succeeded in retrieving $117,000 by settling its charges against one of the defendants in the suit, James Reno, of Amelia, Ohio, who ran a customer support center in Cincinnati. He could not be reached for comment.

"These guys were the innovators and the biggest players (in scareware) for a long time," said Arenson, who headed up the FTC's investigation of Innovative Marketing.

Innovative's roots date back to 2002, according to an account by one of its top executives, Marc D'Souza, a Canadian, who described the company's operations in-depth in a 2008 legal dispute in Toronto with its founders over claims that he embezzled millions of dollars from the firm. The other key executives were a British man and a naturalized U.S. citizen of Indian origin.

According to D'Souza's account, Innovative Marketing was set up as an internet company whose early products included pirated music and pornography downloads and illicit sales of the impotence drug Viagra. It also sold gray market versions of anti-virus software from Symantec and McAfee, but got out of the business in 2003 under pressure from those companies.

It tried building its own anti-virus software, dubbed Computershield, but the product didn't work. That didn't dissuade the firm from peddling the software amid the hysteria over MyDoom, a parasitic "worm" that attacked millions of PCs in what was then the biggest email virus attack to date. Innovative Marketing aggressively promoted the product over the internet, bringing in monthly profits of more than $1 million, according to D'Souza.

The company next started developing a type of malicious software known as adware that hackers install on PCs, where they served up pop-up ads for travel services, pornography, discounted drugs and other products, including its flawed antivirus software. They spread that adware by recruiting hackers whom they called "affiliates" to install it on PCs.

"Most affiliates installed the adware product on end-users' computers illegally through the use of browser hijacking and other nefarious methods," according to D'Souza. He said that Innovative Marketing paid its affiliates 10 cents per hijacked PC, but generated average returns of $2 to $5 for each of those machines through the sale of software and products promoted through the adware.

Any Means But Spam

The affiliate system has since blossomed. Hackers looking for a piece of the action can link up with scareware companies through anonymous internet chat rooms. They are paid through electronic wire services such as Western Union, Pay Pal and Webmoney which can protect the identity of both the sender and the recipient.

To get started, a hacker needs to register as an affiliate on an underground website and download a virus file that is coded with his or her affiliate ID. Then it's off to races.

"You can install it by any means, except spam," says one affiliate recruiting site, earning4u.com, which pays $6 to $180 for every 1,000 PCs infected with its software. PCs in the United States earn a higher rate than ones in Asia.

Affiliates load the software onto the machines by a variety of methods, including hijacking legitimate websites, setting up corrupt sites for the purposes of spreading viruses and attacks over social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

"Anybody can get infected by going to a legitimate website," said Uri Rivner, an executive with RSA, one of the world's top computer security companies.

A scareware vendor distributed its goods one September weekend via The New York Times' website by inserting a single rogue advertisement. The hacker paid NYTimes.com to run the ad, which was disguised as one for the internet phone company Vonage. It contaminated PCs of an unknown number of readers, according to an account of the incident published in The New York Times.

Patrik Runald, a senior researcher at internet security firm Websense Inc, expects rogueware vendors to get more aggressive with marketing. "We're going to see them invest more money in that -- buying legitimate ad space," he said.

To draw victims to infected websites, hackers will also manipulate Google's search engine to get their sites to come up on the top of anyone's search in a particular subject. For instance, they might capitalize on news events of wide interest -- from the winners of the Oscars to the Tiger Woods scandal -- quickly setting up sites to attract relevant search times. Anti-virus maker Panda Security last year observed one scareware peddler set up some 1 million web pages that infected people searching for Ford auto parts with a program dubbed MSAntispyware2009. They also snare victims by sending their links through Facebook and Twitter.

Some rogue vendors manage their partnerships with hackers through software that tracks who installed the virus that generated a sale. Hackers are paid well for their efforts, garnering commissions ranging from 50 to 90 percent, according to Panda Security. SecureWorks, another security firm, estimates that a hacker who gets 1 to 2 percent of users of infected machines to purchase the software can pull in over $5 million a year in commissions.

Hackers in some Eastern European countries barely attempt to conceal their activities.

Panda Security found photos of a party in March 2008 that it said affiliate ring KlikVIP held in Montenegro to reward scareware installers. One showed a briefcase full of euros that would go to the top performer. "They weren't afraid of the legal implications, " said Panda Security researcher Sean-Paul Correll. "They were fearless."

Banking

One of Innovative Marketing's biggest problems was the high proportion of victims who complained to their credit card companies and obtained refunds on their purchases. That hurt the relationships with its merchant banks that processed those transactions, forcing it to switch from banks in Canada to Bahrain. It created subsidiaries designed to hide its identity.

In 2005, Bank of Bahrain & Kuwait severed its ties with an Innovative Marketing subsidiary that had the highest volume of credit card processing of any entity in Bahrain because of its high chargeback rates, according to D'Souza.

Innovative Marketing then went five months without a credit card processor before finding a bank in Singapore -- DBS Bank -- willing to handle its account. The Singapore bank processed tens of millions of dollars in backlogged credit card payments for the company, D'Souza said.

To keep the chargeback rate from climbing even higher, Innovative Marketing invested heavily in call centers. It opened facilities in Ukraine, India and the United States. The rogueware was designed to tell the users that their PCs were working properly once the victim had paid for the software, so when people called up to complain it wasn't working, agents would walk them through whatever steps it took to make those messages come up.

Often that required disabling legitimate anti-virus software programs, according to McAfee researcher Dirk Kollberg, who spent hours listening to digitized audio recordings of customer service calls that Innovative Marketing kept on its servers at its Ukraine offices. He gathered the data by tapping into a computer server at its branch in Kiev that he said was inadvertently hooked up to Innovative's website. "At the end of the call," he said, "most customers were happy."

Police have had limited success in cracking down on the scareware industry. Like Innovative Marketing, most rogue internet companies tend to be based in countries where laws permit such activities or officials look the other way.

Law enforcement agencies in the United States, Western Europe, Japan and Singapore are the most aggressive in prosecuting internet crimes and helping officials in other countries pursue such cases, said Mark Rasch, former head of the computer crimes unit at the U.S. Department of Justice. "In the rest of the world, it's hit or miss," he said. "The cooperation is getting better, but the level of crime continues to increase and continues to outpace the level of cooperation."

The FTC succeeded in persuading a U.S. federal judge to order Innovative Marketing and two individuals associated with it to pay $163 million it had scammed from Americans. Neither individual has surfaced since the government filed its original suit more than a year ago. But Ethan Arenson, the FTC attorney who handled the case, warned: "Collection efforts are just getting underway."

(Editing by Jim Impoco and Claudia Parsons)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...technologyNews





The Biggest Cloud On the Planet is Owned By ... the Crooks

Security expert says the biggest cloud providers are botnets
Robert Mullins

Who's got the biggest cloud in the tech universe? Google? Pretty big, but no. Amazon? Lots and lots of servers, but not even close. Microsoft? They're just getting started.

Household names all, but their capacity pales to that of the biggest cloud on the planet, the network of computers controlled by the Conficker computer worm. Conficker controls 6.4 million computer systems in 230 countries, more than 18 million CPUs and 28 terabits per second of bandwidth, said Rodney Joffe, senior vice president and senior technologist at the infrastructure services firm Neustar.

The biggest cloud on the planet is controlled by a vast criminal enterprise that uses that botnet to send spam, hack computers, spread malware and steal personal information and money, Joffe said.

In other words, the cloud is mobbed up.

Joffe explained how Conficker meets the definition of a cloud service provider in a presentation at the Cloud Connect conference held last week in Santa Clara, Calif.

Like legitimate cloud vendors, Conficker is available for rent and is just about anywhere in the world a user would want their cloud to be based. Users can choose the amount of bandwidth they want, the kind of operating system they want to use and more. Customers have a variety of options for what services to put in the Conficker cloud, be it a denial-of-service attack, spam distribution or data exfiltration.

Conficker is much more competitive than those legit vendors in many ways, Joffe continued. It has much more experience, dating back to 1998, has a larger footprint and unlimited new resources as it spreads malware far and wide to take over more computers.
"And there are no costs. And there are no moral, ethical or legal constraints," Joffe said, to chuckles from the audience. After all, the criminals stole their computing capacity from someone else.

By the way, the biggest legitimate cloud provider is Google, based on Joffe's information, made up of 500,000 systems, 1 million CPUs and 1,500 gigabits per second (Gbps) of bandwdith. Amazon comes in second with 160,000 systems, 320,000 CPUs and 400 Gbps of bandwidth, while Rackspace offers 65,000 systems, 130,000 CPUs and 300 Gbps.

Joffe described the vastness of the Conficker cloud to make a point that companies need to do their homework as they decide to sign up for cloud computing services as well as how to run their own IT systems. They should study up on botnets like Conficker, protect their own infrastructure and applications and assume they'll someday be a target of botnets because "they're great learners," he said.

And when a company does subscribe to a cloud computing service, make sure the provider is aware of your general "behavior," he said, such as usual patterns of compute cycles and other signs. They have a name for cloud clients whose behavior becomes abnormal, meaning they could have been compromised, Joffe said: black clouds.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/58829





Malware Delivered by Yahoo, Fox, Google Ads
Elinor Mills

These charts show incidences of malware distributed by a number of ad delivery platforms over a six-day period last month that were detected by Avast. Yahoo and Fox have the highest counts.

Malware that exploits holes in popular applications is being delivered by big ad delivery platforms including those run by Yahoo, Fox, and Google, according to Prague-based antivirus firm Avast.

Viruses and other malware were found to be lurking in ads last year on high-profile sites like The New York Times and conservative news aggregator Drudge Report.com, and this year on Drudge, TechCrunch and WhitePages.com. The practice has been dubbed "malvertising."

Now, researchers at Avast are pointing fingers at some large ad delivery platforms including Yahoo's Yield Manager and Fox Audience Network's Fimserve.com, which together cover more than 50 percent of online ads, and to a much smaller degree Google's DoubleClick. In addition, some of the malicious ads ended up on Yahoo and Google sites, Avast claims.

"It's not just the small players but the ad servers connected with Google and Yahoo have been infected and served up bad ads," said Lyle Frink, public relations manager for Avast.

The most compromised ad delivery platforms were Yield Manager and Fimserve, but a number of smaller ad systems, including Myspace, were also found to be delivering malware on a lesser scale, Avast Virus Labs said.

Found in ads delivered from those networks was JavaScript code that Avast dubbed "JS:Prontexi," which Avast researcher Jiri Sejtko said is a Trojan in script form that targets the Windows operating system. It looks for vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader and Acrobat, Java, QuickTime, and Flash and launches fake antivirus warnings, Sejtko said.

Users don't need to click on anything to get infected; a computer becomes infected after the ad is loaded by the browser, Avast said.

Since the malware started spreading in late December, Avast has registered more than 2.6 million instances of it on customer computers. Nearly 530,000 of those were from Yield Manager and more than 16,300 from DoubleClick, Sejtko said.

"The Google portion of JS:Prontexi is quite small and has gotten visibly even smaller as they have taken steps to improve the situation," Sejtko said. "That is not the case with Yahoo and Fox."

Representatives from Fox and MySpace declined to comment.

A Yahoo representative confirmed the report and said it was investigating the situation, but didn't provide much information. "We have identified the creatives in question and are working to make sure they been deactivated in our system," the company said in a statement.

"Yahoo is deeply committed to providing a high-quality experience for users, advertisers, and publishers. We expect our members to support and abide by our standards and guidelines around acceptable ad content and behavior," the statement said. "On the rare occasion that an ad is served that is in conflict with our expectations and guidelines we take action to remove it as quickly as possible."

A Google spokesman said the company had discovered malware in ads from DoubleClick on its own and halted them. "In this case, we stopped several of the ads in question on the same day, independent of this report," he said.

"When our automated system is able to identify a problem, we immediately stop serving the affected ads, and then work to refine our security measures to help capture and disable similar ads for all DoubleClick publishers and advertisers," the company said in a statement.

"DoubleClick's ad serving products maintain a security monitoring system that screens ads and is constantly adapting to respond to new developments, yet publishers are in control of what ads they serve when using DoubleClick services," the Google statement said. "We encourage publishers to maintain good quality processes, especially in terms of the networks and advertisers they deal with, and we provide tips and tricks at http://anti-malvertising.com/tips-for-publishers."

However, the Google spokesman said it was highly unlikely that malware was served on Google, adding that DoubleClick ads do not run on Google search.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20...dStoriesArea.1





Millions Continue to Click on Spam

Even though over 80% of email users are aware of the existence of bots, tens of millions respond to spam in ways that could leave them vulnerable to a malware infection, according to a Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) survey.

In the survey, half of users said they had opened spam, clicked on a link in spam, opened a spam attachment, replied or forwarded it – activities that leave consumers susceptible to fraud, phishing, identity theft and infection. While most consumers said they were aware of the existence of bots, only one-third believed they were vulnerable to an infection.

Less than half of the consumers surveyed saw themselves as the entity who should be most responsible for stopping the spread of viruses. Yet, only 36% of consumers believe they might get a virus and 46% of those who opened spam did so intentionally.

This is a problem because spam is one of the most common vehicles for spreading bots and viruses. The malware is often unknowingly installed on users' computers when they open an attachment in a junk email or click on a link that takes them to a poisoned Web site.

Younger consumers tend to consider themselves more security savvy, possibly from having grown up with the Internet, yet they also take more risks. Among the survey's key findings:

* Almost half of those who opened spam did so intentionally. Many wanted to unsubscribe or complain to the sender (25%), to see what would happen (18%) or were interested in the product (15%).
* Overall, 11% of consumers have clicked on a link in spam, 8% have opened attachments, 4% have forwarded it and 4% have replied to spam.
* On average, 44% of users consider themselves "somewhat experienced" with email security. In Germany, 33% of users see themselves as "expert" or "very experienced," followed by around 20% in Spain, the U.K. and the U.S.A., 16% in Canada and just 8% in France.
* Men and email users under 35 years, the same demographic groups who tend to consider themselves more experienced with email security, are more likely to open or click on links or forward spam. Among email users under 35 years, 50% report having opened spam compared to 38% of those over 35. Younger users also were more likely to have clicked on a link in spam (13%) compared to less than 10% of older consumers.
* Consumers are most likely to hold their Internet or email service provider most responsible for stopping viruses and malware. Only 48% see themselves as most responsible, though in France this falls to 30% and 37% in Spain.
* Yet in terms of anti-virus effectiveness, consumers ranked themselves ahead of all others, except for anti-virus vendors: 56% of consumers rated their own ability to stop malware and 67% rated that of anti-virus vendors' as very or fairly good. Government agencies, consumer advocacy agencies and social networking sites were among those rated most poorly.

The survey was conducted online between January 8 and 21, 2010 among over a thousand email users in the United States and over 500 email users in Canada, France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom. Participants were general consumers responsible for managing the security for their personal email address.

The full report is available in PDF format here.
http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=9063





Frenchman Arrested, Targeted Obama's Twitter Account

An unemployed Frenchman has been arrested for targeting the Twitter accounts of President Barack Obama and singer Britney Spears, French police said on Wednesday.

Captain Adeline Champagnat, a senior member of the police cyber crimes unit, said the 25-year-old man gained access to passwords of Twitter administrators and used them to try to break into the accounts of U.S. politicians and stars.

"He didn't get as far as their personal accounts. But he had gained control of Twitter," she told Reuters Television in an interview.

She said the FBI had tipped off the French police in July last year that one or more people were trying to get access to Twitter and had gained control of the social network.

That enabled them to create and delete accounts and steal confidential information.

The hacker, who went by the online name of HackerCroll, is under arrest in the central French town of Clermont Ferrand.

He was known to have carried out minor internet fraud but in this case was driven by the thrill of the challenge and appeared to be more interested in the private life of his victims than on obtaining sensitive data, Champagnat said.

"His aim wasn't to make money. It was simply to show that he was able to access accounts of Twitter members. And the best proof of that is that he did screen grabs of certain confidential data which he tried to post on blogs that are reserved for pirates or hackers," she said.

She said several FBI agents were currently in France to help their French counterparts carry out searches.

"The collaboration was very good with the FBI and it's always very good with the FBI, because there's a real exchange of information. It's good cooperation to arrest the offender," she said.

(Reporting by Yann Tessier; editing by Tim Pearce)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST...technologyNews





Prosecutors to Seek 25-Year Sentence for TJX Hacker
Denise Lavoie

A computer hacker who helped orchestrate one of the largest thefts of credit and debit card numbers in U.S. history faces sentencing this week for hacking into computer systems of major retailers, including TJX, BJ's Wholesale Club and Sports Authority.

Prosecutors plan to ask for a 25-year prison sentence for Albert Gonzalez, a former federal informant from Miami who pleaded guilty last year in three separate hacking cases brought in Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York.

The sentence sought by prosecutors is the maximum under the terms of plea agreements in cases against Gonzalez brought in Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York. He will be sentenced in all three cases during hearings Thursday and Friday in U.S. District Court.

His lawyer will argue that Gonzalez should get no more than 15 years.

Prosecutors said Gonzalez victimized millions of people and cost companies, banks and insurers nearly $200 million. They said just two of Gonzalez's computer servers contained more than 40 million distinct credit and debit card numbers.

"The sheer extent of the human victimization caused by Gonzalez and his organization is unparalleled," Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann said in a sentencing memorandum filed in court.

Gonzalez, 28, pleaded guilty in September to hacking into the computers of TJX, BJ's Wholesale Club, OfficeMax, BostonMarket, Barnes & Noble, Sports Authority and the Dave & Busters restaurant chain.

In December, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to computer servers at the Maine-based supermarket chain Hannaford Brothers; the convenience store chain 7-Eleven; and Heartland Payment Systems, a New Jersey processor of credit and debit cards.

Gonzalez's Boston attorney, Martin Weinberg, did not immediately return calls seeking comment on his sentencing recommendation of 15 years.

Weinberg said during an earlier court hearing that he would ask for a lesser sentence based in part on a defense psychiatrist's report that Gonzalez shows behavior consistent with Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism. The report described Gonzalez as an Internet addict with an "idiot-savant-like genius for computers and information technology," but socially awkward.

Gonzalez, who was known online as "soupnazi," was a self-taught computer genius.

He was first arrested for hacking in 2003, but he became a government informant, helping the Secret Service find other hackers. But prosecutors said that over the next five years, he hacked into the computer systems of major retailers while continuing to be an informant for the government.

During that time, authorities said, he amassed $2.8 million and lived a lavish lifestyle. As part of the plea deals, Gonzalez must forfeit more than $2.7 million, plus his Miami condo, car, Rolex watches and a Tiffany ring he gave to his girlfriend.

Authorities said Gonzalez and two foreign co-defendants used hacking techniques that involved "wardriving," or cruising through different areas with a laptop computer and looking for retailers' accessible wireless Internet signals. Once they located a vulnerable network, they installed "sniffer programs" that captured credit and debit card numbers as they moved through a retailer's processing computers — then tried to sell the data overseas.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/latest-...es/ci_14740672





T.J.Maxx Hacker Sentenced to 20 Years in Prison
Declan McCullagh

Gonzalez, a 28-year-old college dropout and Secret Service informant known as "soupnazi," had confessed to stealing millions of credit card and debit card numbers from major U.S. retail chains, including T.J.Maxx, BJ's Wholesale Club, and Barnes & Noble.

U.S. District Judge Patti Saris in Boston sentenced Gonzalez to the middle of expected prison sentences for charges filed in Massachusetts and New York, which ranged from 15 to 25 years.

Christina Sterling, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's office in Massachusetts, told CNET that Gonzalez will be sentenced on Friday for additional charges filed in New Jersey.

In an 11-page plea agreement (PDF) last year, Gonzalez admitted to unlawfully accessing a computer, wire fraud, identity theft, and other crimes. He agreed to forfeit a Miami condo, a 2006 BMW 330i, a Tiffany diamond ring, three Rolex watches, and more than $1.65 million in cash.

In August 2008, prosecutors accused Gonzalez, along with 10 others from the United States, Eastern Europe, and China, of breaking into retail credit card payment systems by wardriving--that is, using a laptop to detect retailers' unsecured wireless networks--and installing sniffer programs to capture data.

Gonzalez and his alleged co-conspirators sold the credit numbers, encoded the data onto magnetic stripes of blank cards, and used the new cards to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars at a time from ATMs, prosecutors said. They also allegedly concealed and laundered their proceeds by using anonymous Internet-based currencies within the United States and abroad, and by channeling money through bank accounts in Eastern Europe.

Separately, New Jersey prosecutors say Gonzalez conspired to steal credit card numbers from Heartland Payment Systems, 7-Eleven, and supermarket chain Hannaford Bros.

Gonzalez was reportedly paid $75,000 a year by the Secret Service to work as an undercover informant to guide agents through the illegal, clandestine marketplaces where credit and debit card numbers are sold.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20001207-38.html





Can Ubuntu Save Online Banking?
Robert L. Mitchell

Jay McLaughlin has me worried. I do my online banking from the same home computer the rest of the family uses for Web surfing and online games. I have the McAfee security suite loaded and do regular scans so accessing online banking should be protected. Right?

Not really, says McLaughlin, a Certified Information Security Professional [1] and CIO of CNL Bank. Accessing online banking from your everyday PC is just asking for trouble, he says.

In fact, the CIO of the Orlando, Florida-based regional bank would like to see all of his customers - both consumers and businesses - access online banking either from a dedicated machine or from a self-booting CD-ROM running Ubuntu Linux and Firefox.

The Ubuntu option

Recognizing that most consumers don't want to buy a separate computer for online banking, CNL is seriously considering making available free Ubuntu Linux bootable "live CD" discs in its branches and by mail. The discs would boot up Linux, run Firefox and be configured to go directly to CNL Bank's Web site. "Everything you need to do will be sandboxed within that CD," he says. That should protect customers from increasingly common drive-by downloads and other vectors for malicious code that may infect and lurk on PCs, waiting to steal the user account names, passwords and challenge questions normally required to access online banking.

A bootable CD works because it's isolated from the host PC environment. Malware on the host can't touch it - and any malware picked up when running from the CD-ROM goes away once the CD is ejected. "When you eject the CD you have removed everything off the machine," McLaughlin says.

He thinks that security suites are increasingly ineffective at keeping up with threats from organized crime rings abroad, such as the Russian Business Network [2]. Right now business users are feeling the heat, but he says consumers are being targeted as well. He's so worried about drive by downloads, in fact, that he uses Firefox with the Noscript plug-in [3], which won't allow any JavaScript to execute on his PC without his explicit permission.

"If you are using online banking you should be using a hardened system that is not used for anything else but online banking," McLaughlin says. While the FDIC, American Banking Association and Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council have come out with similar recommendations for commercial customers, McLaughlin says consumers need to follow them as well.

Raimund Genes, chief technology officer at security software vendor Trend Micro, calls the security measures used for online banking in the U.S. "a joke." Any key logger can grab the user name, password and answers to challenge questions that banks commonly use to authenticate users today, he says.

Going out of band

Genes says using your regular home PC is acceptable for online banking so long as the bank supports two-factor authentication. For example, some banks in Europe use a transaction authentication number [4], an authentication code that's sent to the user "out of band," such as via SMS to a cell phone. The user then enters the code into the Web browser to complete a transaction online. The code changes every time the user makes a new request. Another alternative is a smart token, such as an RSA token. Barring that, he says, "I would not do online banking at all. Or if I had to I would use a sandboxed browser. I would boot up a mini Linux system from a USB stick."

CNL Bank currently offers out of band authentication only when setting up an initial password on a new online account or for password reset requests. The authentication code can be transmitted via SMS, using an automated attendant that calls a phone number that the customer has set up in advance, or through e-mail (although McLaughlin says the e-mail option may be discontinued because a compromised machine may have compromised e-mail as well).

McLaughlin is also considering offering this mechanism as an authentication option each time the user logs in, and CNL may offer an even more granular option that requires out of band authentication for individual transactions - for example, for commercial customers with high risk transactions such as wire transfers.

Flash or CD-ROM?

When accessing online banking, consumers may want to consider using a secure, bootable flash drive running an environment such as U3 or MojoPak, says John Pescatore, analyst with Gartner Inc. But banks like the idea of the Ubuntu distribution because the software is free and the media is much cheaper than a memory stick. The problem with both is that the user now has to carry something to access online banking. "They hate that. That's why this approach has never broken into the mainstream," Pescatore says.
Consumers could also access online banking from a separate, bootable partition on their PC, but that's probably more work than most consumers would put up with. Another alternative, hosting a separate virtual machine (VM), is better than nothing. But McLaughlin cautions that the VM is still not totally isolated from the PC. Malware that targets the hypervisor layer underlying the VM may find its way around those defenses.

Everyone is unanimous on one point, however: Nobody seems to think doing online banking from the machine you use every day for Web surfing and e-mail is a good idea.

McLaughlin thinks the bootable Ubuntu CD option may be the best alternative right now. Regardless of who you bank with, he suggests ordering a copy of the free Ubuntu Desktop Edition selt-booting CD [5] (If you don't want to wait you can download the image and burn it on a CD yourself) and try it for your online banking.

McLaughlin and Genes put a sufficient scare into me that I've decided to give it a go. Yes, it's a hassle to reboot for online banking - until you think of what could happen if someone stole your credentials. On the plus side, I'll be exposed to Linux on a regular basis.

Who knows? I might decide that I like running Linux for more than just online banking.
http://blogs.computerworld.com/15815...online_banking





Backdoor to draconian IP laws

Cyber Bill to Penalize Hacker Havens
Tony Romm

Foreign countries that fail to crack down on cyber criminals operating within their borders could face a host of new economic penalties if a Senate bill introduced Tuesday becomes law.

That legislation, authored by Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), aims to cut down on the growing number of "countries of cyber concern" — states in which fraud schemes, cyber attacks and computer hacks targeting the United States are routinely plotted, they said.

Their new bill would charge the White House with the responsibility of identifying countries that pose cyber threats, which the president would have to present to Congress in an annual report. Those states would then have to develop plans of action to combat cybercrimes or risk cuts to their U.S. export dollars, foreign-direct investment funds and trade assistance grants, the lawmakers explained.

“Cybercrime must be a top priority for our national security,” Gillibrand said in a joint statement with Hatch. “If we’re going to protect our networks, our infrastructure, our economy and our families, we have to go after cyber criminals wherever they may be — and it must be an international effort."

Ultimately, the two lawmakers' latest effort arrives as matters of cybersecurity are becoming increasingly pressing on Capitol Hill.

A series of high-profile attacks on U.S. businesses, including Google, has reinforced lawmakers' calls for comprehensive legislation.

One such bill, drafted by Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), would establish a Senate-appointed office to manage cybersecurity matters and require agencies to develop plans of action in the event of a nationwide network breach. It has already scored a number of key allies in the tech community, though it has not yet survived a vote before the Senate Commerce Committee, which Rockefeller and Snowe lead.

By contrast, Gillibrand and Hatch's bill would travel the route of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Gillibrand's office told The Hill on Tuesday.

The two lawmakers thus see their bill as "the first piece of legislation that establishes a comprehensive framework" to handle cybercrimes -- a complement to their colleagues' work, the senator's office added.

Already, at least two influential companies have showered their praise on Hatch and Gillibrand's new proposal: Both MasterCard and Microsoft described the legislation as essential in statements the two lawmakers included in their release announcing the bill.

Hatch, too, stressed the bill's importance Tuesday, noting the prospective law could cut down on online crimes and save the United States and its businesses billions every year.

“Cybercrime is a serious threat to the security of the global economy, which is why we need to coordinate our fight worldwide. Until countries begin to take the necessary steps to fight criminals within their borders, cybercrime havens will continue to flourish,” Hatch said.

“We don’t have the luxury to sit back and do nothing. I believe the International Cybercrime Reporting and Cooperation Act will not only function as a deterrent of cybercrime, but will prove to be an essential tool necessary to keep the Internet open for business,” he said.
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-va...ns-for-hackers





8 Layers of Security Every Computer Should Have
Sue Marquette Poremba

Every time you connect to the Internet, you are putting your computer -- and the information stored there -- at risk. As Roger Thompson, Chief Security Officer with AVG Technologies told me:

The single most important thing to understand is that 99% of all attacks now originate from the Web. When you start a web browser, it starts from a trusted place .... _inside_ the firewall, so that creates a trusted tunnel thru the firewall, and if a victim visits a website of hostile intent, the attack code is able to go right through the firewall, and has a chance of executing on the pc.

So what do we need on our computers to protect our data? Thompson says the best way to set up computer security is through layering. Even if one area of protection is only 75 percent effective, the increasing layers will close all the holes. Those layers should include the following:

* Firewalls. Firewalls protect the computer from outside intruders. According to Microsoft, there are multiple options for firewall: hardware, software and wireless router firewalls.
* A traditional scanner, such as antivirus, antimalware, and antispyware software. This protects computers from viruses, Trojans, worms, rootkits and similar attacks. Today, these programs are usually bundled into one. Because there are thousands of malware variants released daily, it is hard for the software companies to keep up. A lot of users feel safer with multiple scanner programs, finding that what one program may miss, another may catch.
* A specialist Web-scanning layer to block most of the attacks immediately. The Web application scanner tests Web servers for dangerous files and other problems.
* A behavior monitoring layer. According to Thompson, a behavior monitor watches for malicious behavior. For example, a new program that installs itself so that it survives a reboot, and also starts monitoring keystrokes, is very suspicious to a behavior monitor.
* Newest version of your favorite browser. IE8 might not be perfect, but it is a lot safer than IE6, which is still the browser of choice on many computer systems.
* Network-based restrictions and user management software. One infected computer can destroy the network, so better safe than sorry when it comes to the Web sites your employees can visit while on the conpany's server.
* Data encryption software. Keep your data safe by encrypting it.
* Online backup system. This gives you access to your data in case of theft or computer malfunctions.
http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blo...have/?cs=40346





44% of UK 12-15 Year-Olds Think File-Sharing Should be Legal

The latest Children’s Media Literacy Audit from UK communications regulator Ofcom has found that 44% of 12-15 year-olds think downloading music and films for free should not be illegal.

38% said it should be illegal, though, while 18% said they didn’t have a view. According to the Guardian, boys in this age group were more likely than girls to say free downloads shouldn’t be illegal.

Bad news for the music industry, then? Well, you could say that it shows a potentially big demand among young Brits for alternative music models, whether Spotify-style ad-supported streaming, or access-based services offering ‘free’ downloads bundled into a household’s broadband tariff.

The survey also found that a quarter of 8-12 year-old internet users in the UK have accounts on Facebook, MySpace or Bebo – despite the lowest minimum age for any of these sites being 13.
http://musically.com/blog/2010/03/26...ould-be-legal/





File Sharing Network Name Leads to Most Malware

Web users who use Google to search for "Bearshare," a popular peer-to-peer file sharing service, are more likely to find themselves downloading malware than users who search for any other term, according to AfterDawn.com.

Nearly 50 percent of all the results found on a search for Bearshare lead to a malicious website. Common beliefs that searching for adult content or free music downloads will lead to viruses more than any other search are false, due to the increased legitimacy of both industries' presences on the web. Only 9 percent of adult websites lead to malware while nearly 20 percent of digital music sites result in computer viruses, according to McAfee.

There was a time when pornography resulted in computer viruses more than anything else on the web, but as most adult sites now make money from legitimate advertisements and subscriptions, the infected sites have diminished.

Behind Bearshare is the term "screensavers" as 42 percent of the links from that search result in malware. Screensaver downloads themselves are also often laden with malware.

The rise in malware from search engines is due to the rise in black hat SEO, which utilizes trending news topics in metatags to draw users to infected websites.ADNFCR-1765-ID-19685455-ADNFCR
http://www.mxlogic.com/securitynews/...malware455.cfm


















Until next week,

- js.



















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