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Old 20-07-11, 07:48 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 23rd, '11

Since 2002


































"There has been a catalogue of failures by the Metropolitan Police, and deliberate attempts by News International to thwart the various investigations." – Committee Chair Right Hon Keith Vaz MP



































July 23rd, 2011




ISP Refuses To Block The Pirate Bay
enigmax

Previously, representatives from the Finnish music industry filed a lawsuit against Elisa, one of the country’s largest ISPs, demanding that it should block subscriber access to The Pirate Bay. In a reply filed at the district court, Elisa has refused to comply, describing the blocking demands as “unreasonable.”

During May the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre (CIAPC) and the Finnish branch of IFPI announced that they had filed a lawsuit at the District Court in Helsinki.

The latest in a growing line of lawsuits against service providers worldwide, the legal action demands that Elisa, one of Finland’s largest ISPs, should block all subscriber access to The Pirate Bay.

Elisa, however, aren’t going to give in so easily.

Despite CIAPC (better known locally as TTVK) and IFPI’s claims that blocking The Pirate Bay is the only practical solution to slow down piracy, Elisa have lodged a reply at the District Court which rejects the demands of the music groups.

While Elisa indicate that they have no fundamental objection to assisting with the fight against unlawful file-sharing, Elisa Senior Vice President Panu Lehti says the lawsuit’s demands are unacceptable.

“The fact that the requirement [to block TPB] applies to only one Internet service provider is unreasonable,” says Lehti.

Singling out one ISP for legal action is the usual modus operandi for the entertainment industries, especially in website blocking cases. CIAPC and IFPI selected Elisa because they have proportionally more subscribers using The Pirate Bay than any other ISP.

Lehti says the basic censorship strategy is flawed and successfully blocking The Pirate Bay would prove technically “very difficult or even impossible.”

The industry groups counter by saying they have been left with no other choices after the criminal conviction of the Pirate Bay admins following their November 2010 appeal failed to close down the site. Instead, the number of Finns using the site only increased.

According to the industry groups The Pirate Bay is the preferred online location for Finns to access illicit music. This makes it one of the most popular sites in the country, and one which has broken into the top 30 most-visited sites.

“The development of a legitimate online market in Finland will not be successful if illegal services such as the Pirate Bay can continue to operate,” says producer representative Lauri Rechardt.

Others believe the reverse is true, i.e build the legal services and “they shall come.”

This week, Johan Lagerlöf the CEO and Co-Founder of X5 Music Group in Sweden, has been speaking about the success enjoyed by Spotify, the ‘pirate-killing’ service that has just launched in the US.

“Spotify has had the biggest impact on the Scandinavian music market since the launch of the CD,” Lagerlöf told Hypebot in a Q&A.

“Spotify is currently the biggest single revenue source for the music industry and is estimated to be over 3 times bigger than iTunes in Scandinavia. Despite that, digital downloads grew 17% in Sweden last year compared to 3% in the US.”

“Piracy for music has almost stopped.”
http://torrentfreak.com/isp-refuses-...te-bay-110717/





Airtel Unblocks All FileSharing Sites
Shayne Rana

Update: Airtel’s official twitter ID has tweeted that all filesharing sites are accessible using its network and none of them are blocked.

The latest news making its way around the web is that apparently the Government, specifically the Department of Telecom (DoT) India has gone Big Brother on us all over again and has this time taken on the ISPs. Filesharing websites that include the likes of Rapidshare Megaupload, Hotfile and many more were blocked, preventing access to users looking to download media content. Even as consumers were confused as to why this was so, it surfaced that Reliance Entertainment had issued Indian ISPs like Airtel, Reliance and some others a court order to prevent the pirated version of their upcoming movie, Singham, from being shared and downloaded.

After conducting our own research though, we found out that the block seemed to be generic in nature, preventing any and every content from being downloaded - Bollywood or otherwise. So what seems to have begun as a cease and desist notice to block the unauthorized sharing of a new specific movie spiraled into a generic block for all file sharing websites. Oddly though, DoT (The Department of Telecom) India, has not issued any statement, which could mean that this action was done directly by the ISPs themselves.

After speaking with a representative from Reliance Entertainment who are the official producers and distributors for the film, this is what we know. A court order was issued to get Indian ISPs to ensure that the Reliance Entertainment's movie Singham, be blocked from unlawful or rather pirated release on filesharing websites. There didn’t seem to be any mention of blocking access to anything else. The bottom line is that the block was to be issued for those trying to download this movie and this movie alone.

So why did the ISPs block these sites? Was it just some sort of easy way out for ISPs to block all sites that would potentially carry the pirated copy of the movie or is this genuinely the government’s method of curbing piracy? While to some, this may seem like the ‘right’ thing to do, we’re not sure if this blanket ban is really the right way to go about it. And of course, as all of us know there’s always a way around the system. In fact, there are already sites that are detailing simple methods to circumvent this ban altogether.

There are more questions than we have answers regarding this rather large issue and we’re sure that like us, you are as enraged and curious for answers.

So far streaming websites seem to be working, but we fear, that too may be a short lived scenario. Torrent hosting sites also seem unaffected, but it’s only a matter of time before it will be the end of the line for them as well. ISPs have apparently been issued the order to block these sites and if yours isn’t blocked yet, it will be soon. Airtel, Reliance and BSNL were apparently the first to begin this painful procedure. Speculation is also suggesting that it’s not just file sharing and torrents that will be blocked, but that porn sites will also go the same way.

Here’s a list of the sites that have been reported as blocked so far - Rapidshare.com, Megaupload.com, Mediafire.com, Hotfile.com, Fileserve.com, Filesonic.com, Filesonic.in, Megavideo.com, Novamov.com, Movshare.net, Putlocker.com, Wupload.com, Uploaded.to, UploadStation.com, Depositfiles.com, VideoBB.com etc.

A petition opposing the ban has been started for those who are opposed to the idea of this overzealous government control on websites and downloads.

Do let us know if you are able to access some of these sites, and don’t forget to mention your ISP.
http://tech2.in.com/news/isps/airtel...g-sites/231902





India Bans Popular Filesharing Websites
Nachiket 'therapist' Mhatre

Update: Apparently, Reliance BIG Pictures is behind this fiasco. The ADAG subsidiary obtained a cease and desist order from the Delhi High Court to prevent the piracy of its upcoming movie Singham. The scope includes cable operators and CD \ DVD pirates, while also expanding to cover the internet. Reliance then served notices to all ISPs, requiring them ensure the prevention of piracy of the film through their networks. The ISPs seem to have played safe and issued a blanket ban on filesharing websites altogether.

Last night, many Indian internet users were shocked to find their favourite filesharing websites banned. Members of the India Broadband Forum reported that visiting popular websites such as Megaupload, RapidShare, MediaFire, DepositFiles, and many others served up a static page saying that the "site has been blocked as per instructions from the Department of Telecom". This ban was reported by subscribers of major ISPs, including Reliance, MTNL, and Airtel.

There has been no official announcement from either the ISPs or the Department of Telecom (DoT) on the ban. I encountered the same static page with MTNL and Airtel when I tried accessing the filesharing websites earlier in the day. Interestingly, various filesharing portals have been banned and unbanned intermittently since last night across different ISPs. As of this writing, I found both MTNL and Airtel to have lifted the ban. However, there is no saying if and when then ban will recur.

Although users can bypass the ban with proxies (by enabling Opera Turbo in the Opera browser, for example), it's still ridiculous for the DoT to infringe upon users' rights. Forums are abuzz with various conspiracy theories, including one that cites Bollywood lobbying for the ban under the pretext of piracy. Whatever may the the excuse, the government has no business banning an entire service altogether just because it's being misused by some. This is just as daft as deploying thermonuclear warheads to cure polio. Hopefully, these websites will continue to remain operational.
http://www.techtree.com/India/News/I...15582-643.html





Italy Censors Proxy That Bypasses BTjunkie and Pirate Bay Block
Ernesto

Italy is taking its crusade against BitTorrent sites to an unprecedented level. The authorities have moved against the general purpose proxy site proxyitalia.com because it could be used by Italians to access BTjunkie and The Pirate Bay. Following this logic they will also have to censor thousands of other proxy sites and ban all VPN services, or shut down the Internet entirely.

After an Italian court ordered all ISPs to block The Pirate Bay in 2008, this year the authorities shifted their focus to making BTjunkie unavailable too.

This week it turned out that not all Internet providers were complying with this second court order, which prompted the Sardinian prosecutor to sue these ISPs for aiding and abetting criminal copyright infringement.

But even if all ISPs block BTjunkie there are still several ways to access the site from Italy, through a proxy site for example.

When BTjunkie’s owner heard that Italy had blocked his site he decided to register the domain proxyitalia.com. “I’m disappointed with the Italian judicial system,” he told TorrentFreak at the time. “We will do our best to fight for Italian people’s right to communicate.”

A few hours later the new domain was hosting a general purpose proxy service which allows Italians to browse the Internet from a foreign IP-address. The added benefit is of course that censored websites such as BTjunkie and The Pirate Bay are readily accessible. Or were accessible, we should say.

Yesterday the Italian authorities decided to step up their anti-piracy actions and block access to the proxy site as well. The Guardia di Finanza (GdF), the Italian police tasked with cybercrime cases, took out the site after a request from Cagliari deputy prosecutor Giangiacomo Pilia.

According to the authorities proxyitalia.com was acting illegally by allowing Italians access to BTjunkie and The Pirate Bay. This far-reaching intervention means that practically all proxy sites and VPN services located outside of Italy can be branded as illegal.

Following the logic of the Italian prosecutor means that the authorities will have to add thousands of sites and services to their blacklist in order to fully block the two torrent sites. Even then, it takes only a few hours to set up a new proxy site, so this cat and mouse game will never end.

BTjunkie’s owner told TorrentFreak that he’s in utter disbelief following the latest developments in Italy. He’s not going to give up yet though, and will try once more to help out BTjunkie’s Italian users.

“I’m going to offer the same type of proxy site, but hosted at Google apps this time. Let’s see if the police will ban Google’s IP-addresses as well,” he told us.

More info on the new proxy site will become available in the days to come.
http://torrentfreak.com/italy-censor...-block-110716/





PayPal Joins London Police Bid to Financially Starve "Illegal" Websites
Matthew Lasar

PayPal has joined a music copyright association and the City of London police department's bid to financially starve websites deemed "illegal." When presented with sufficient evidence of unlicensed downloading from a site, the United Kingdom's PayPal branch "will require the retailer to submit proof of licensing for the music offered by the retailer," said the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry's latest press release.

The company will then "discontinue services to retailers in cases where licensing appears to be inadequate." The announcement comes with the requisite gung-ho statement from Carl Scheible, PayPal UK's managing director.

This shows that PayPal is "very serious about fighting music piracy," Scheible explains. "We've always banned PayPal's use for the sale of content that infringes copyright, and the new system will make life even harder for illegal operators. Our partnership with the music industry helps rights holders make money from their own content while stopping the pirates in their tracks."

Expeditious enforcement

MasterCard and Visa are already on board this initiative, originally unveiled in March. The process works like this: IFPI submits allegedly infringing websites to the City of London police department's Economic Crime Directorate. Once the division has "verified the evidence," it passes the information on to MasterCard, Visa, and now PayPal.

The card providers then "require the acquiring bank providing the retailer with payment services to produce evidence of appropriate licenses to sell music or cease providing those services to the retailer," IFPI explains. MasterCard has promised to respond to law enforcement requests "expeditiously."

According to the group, industry anti-piracy experts have also composed a set of "best practice procedures" for MasterCard and Visa "to distribute both internally and to banks that use their services, which help identify infringing websites and prevent them from being granted card payment facilities."

This alliance appears to be primarily targeted at sites based in Russia and the Ukraine. Getting banks to cut off credit card support was crucial to the crusade against Russia's AllOfmp3.com music download service several years ago (that, and forcing Russia to crack down on Allofmp3.com as a condition for joining the World Trade Organization).

In March, IFPI said that 24 suspect online music outlets had already been turned over to the cops. Looks like the trade association has gotten a 100 percent conviction rate for its trouble.

"Since the March announcement with MasterCard and Visa, their payment services have been withdrawn from 24 illegal music services," the latest announcement adds. And since then, IFPI investigators have submitted the details of another 38 sites "suspected of infringing copyright on a grand scale."

We pinged Alex Jacob, IPFI media contact, for a list of these sites. "I think it's probably best that the City of London Police answer your question on the site names as they will know which are clear of any ongoing investigation," he explained. The London Police didn't reply to our inquiry.

In any event, now PayPal is part of the mix, and its involvement is applauded by the authorities.

"We are fully committed to proactive initiatives such as these where we work with the private sector to prevent offending, stop legitimate business services such as PayPal being exploited by criminals and minimise harm to entire business sectors such as the music industry," Detective Chief Superintendent Steve Head of the City of London Police added in the IPFI announcement.

"The benefits are palpable not only in terms of delivering an effective response to victims and the business community as a whole, but also in enabling the City of London Police Economic Crime Directorate to maximise our resources in tackling a wide range of criminality."

Your honor?

The real question is whether, at any time in this process, the City of London submits the evidence of infringement or some aspect of the process to a court for review. The ECD has a history of working with the Metropolitan Police Film Piracy Unit, long at the service of the movie industry's Federation Against Copyright Theft.

FACT aided UK law enforcement to prosecute the famous Filesoup file sharing site. The police eventually dropped that case, conceding that the legal basis for a criminal trial wasn't there.

But in this announcement, neither IFPI or the City of London police department mention any judicial body which the authorities consult on the "illegality" of a site. We asked IFPI's Jacob about this. Does any judge appear in the mix? Is there any judicial sign-off at any point in the process?

The answer:

The removals are considered by MasterCard, PayPal, and Visa and it is their commercial decision to terminate merchant accounts based on a request from the police and their own due diligence processes. The police check and verify all evidence submitted by rights holders.

UK PayPal public relations person Rob Skinner explained the procedure to us as follows:

"The way the new process works is that we will require proof from a seller of music via PayPal that they have the necessary licensing in place for the sale of music," Skinner explained. "In other words, we’re looking for proof of the right to sell, rather than proof of infringement, but we do also have a notification system for rights owners to report cases of alleged copyright infringement."

Back in March, we asked IFPI for details about those "best practices."

"As these include advice to help payment providers on how to identify signs of illegal activity," we were told, "you would not expect them to be published so that those engaging in such business could be aware of how to hide their activities."

The proposed PROTECT IP Act—with its provisions allowing the government to crack down allegedly infringing sites and search engines—has a court order mechanism and requires judicial sign-off. But by framing this issue as a private merchant dispute with a payment processor, the new scheme avoids the need for such oversight.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...l-websites.ars





Scope of New Zealand Copyright Law Changes Limited to P2P File Sharing
Mauricio Freitas

Sharing a release received from InternetNZ today:

InternetNZ (Internet New Zealand Inc) has obtained clarification from the Ministry of Economic Development (MED) that the intention of the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act 2011 is to cover copyright infringement by online file sharing using peer-to-peer protocols only.

The new notices and penalty regime introduced by these amendments is not intended to cover video/music streaming websites or online file lockers.

InternetNZ Chief Executive Vikram Kumar says, "What this means is that watching videos on YouTube or via blinkx, streaming music from Grooveshark, and downloading from online file lockers like MediaFire and 4shared will not be subject to the changes introduced by the amendments to the law coming into force on 1 September 2011. MED's confirmation addresses some of the questions that arose when we were looking at the law changes in detail".

"It keeps the scope of the changes narrowly focussed on copyright infringements by online file sharing via peer-to-peer networks and applications. This will be welcomed by many people. However, despite the intentions behind the law, the definitive interpretation will come from decisions made by the Copyright Tribunal and Courts if this aspect of the law is ever tested."

"Streaming websites and online file lockers typically provide copyright owners with a more direct means of enforcing their rights.

Generally, this is achieved by copyright owners providing a notice directly to the website that infringing content is appearing on the site and needs to be removed. For example, YouTube has tools like Content ID and a Copyright Verification Tool that enable copyright owners to easily identify, control, and even remove their content from the site."

"This clarification doesn't mean that copyright infringements by means other than peer-to-peer applications and networks aren't covered by the Copyright Act. The Internet Service Providers' liability provisions inserted by the Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Act 2008 of general infringement (92B), storing infringing material (92C), and caching (92E) still continue. Rights owners can continue to seek enforcement through the Courts. However, they can't use the new streamlined provisions of sections 122A to 122U for alleged infringements relating to Internet Service Providers' storage and caching of infringing content."

"This is a good time to emphasise that peer-to-peer technologies aren't in themselves bad. Quite the contrary. These technologies provide significant advantages for many legitimate uses, such as eliminating the single point of failure typical of client-server systems and distributing computing resources. For example, peer-to-peer technologies are extensively used by popular services like Facebook, Skype and Twitter as well as for efficient data distribution in scientific research and Linux distributions. So blocking peer-to-peer protocols rather than focussing on copyright infringement in response to the law changes is a bad response."

Explanatory note

"Streaming" is a technique for transferring data so that it can be processed as a steady and continuous stream. This allows a person to start watching online, say a video or TV show, without waiting to get the whole file. Typically, streaming is used in a one-to-many situation. "Peer-to-peer" on the other hand is a distributed architecture where peers are both consumers and suppliers. People can connect directly with other people and is therefore used in a many-to-many situation.

Examples of peer-to-peer protocols include Gnutella and BitTorrent.

Popular peer-to-peer software includes uTorrent, BitComet, FrostWire, Ares, LimeRunner, and Vuze.

Online file lockers are ways for storing and sharing a wide variety of files online. Examples of online file lockers include MediaFire and 4shared.

http://www.geekzone.co.nz/freitasm/7746






Google Wants NZ file Sharing Law Changed

Google wanted a key clause removed from New Zealand’s new copyright legislation, which revolves around the presumption of guilt.

The Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act passed on April 14 and comes into effect September 1.

Under the new law, a rights holder, such as a record company or movie studio, can ask an alleged pirate’s ISP to send them a series of three warnings (for a $25 fee). If these warning are ignored, a rights holder can take the case to the Copyright Tribunal, which has the power to fine an offender up to $15,000.

The Ministry of Economic Development today released submissions made around a regulatory document it published around the legislation.

Presumption of guilt
In its submission, dated May 27 and prepared by Google Australia and New Zealand public policy and government affairs manager Ishtar Vij, the US company said its preference would be for Section 122N(1) of the Act to be removed.

With the heat taken out of the account termination argument (keep reading), this so-called presumption of guilt clause has been highlighted by a number of groups that still oppose the legislation.

The clause reads in part that “In proceedings before the [Copyright] Tribunal, in relation to an infringement notice, it is presumed … that each incidence of file sharing identified in the notice constituted an infringement of the rights owner's copyright in the work identified.”

Each instance of file sharing should not be viewed as an incidence of piracy.

Rather, the Act should be changed so the Tribunal has to make a positive finding of infringement, Google said.

As currently drafted, the law could require the Tribunal to find against an offender, even if it isn’t satisfied the a rights holder has a strong case, according to Google’s interpretation.

Out of whack
The problem could be exacerbated by the fact that an offender’s legal resources would likely be mismatched with that of a rights holder.

To help correct the balance, Google would like to see rights holders required to collect and present more informaiton about an alleged office.

Penalites for false allegations
It also calls for "provision for penalties to be imposed on rights owners who make false declarations and/or bad faith claims". Sworn declarations (the law's key safeguard in its current form) are not enough, Google maintained.

Against account termination
Google also re-iterated its opposition to an offender’s internet account being disconnected.

“Suspension orders will rarely if ever be a proportionate response to infringement,” the search giant wrote in its submission, “And may have far reaching and unanticipated consequences, including a chilling effect on legitimate users of the internet and lawful uses of copyright material."

"Off the table"
A compromise deal, which won Labour Party support for the Act, saw account termination removed from the Copyright Tribunal’s list of sanctions.

A person’s internet account can still be cut by an Order in Council – that is, an order created by a cabinet minister then signed by the Governor General – but Labour maintained the process was so arcane and unlikely that the provision had essentially been “taken off the table”.

Stealing something that was never here
NBR's favourite submission comes from Auckland freelancer Juha Saarinen, who wrote:

Quote:
When awarding any penalties or damages, the Tribunal must consider whether or not at the time of the file sharing and copyright infringement the material in question was freely available for sale in New Zealand for New Zealanders.

If the material wasn't available for sale in New Zealand at the time the infringement is said to have occurred, the rights holder cannot claim a loss due to losing out on one or more sales.

If the download caused no loss to the rights holder, the Tribunal cannot award penalties against the person accused of infringing.
Mr Saarinen made his submission as an Associate Member of the NZ Computer Society.

Second favourite: using (cough) slightly less sophisticated language, "Aaron" pointed out that peer-to-peer technology was used legitimately by companies such as Microsoft and Sony for software updates.

Cracking down on BitTorrent-style services because a few used them illegally would be like "banning James Cook form [sic] exploring becourse [sic] pirates used ships!!!"

Poor use of English, but a good point - and one frequently expoused elsewhere by ex-Intel chief executive Andy Grove.
http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/google-...g-law-ck-97275





Submissions on Copyright Act Document Show Variety of Views

Presumption of guilt still an issue for many submitters
Stephen Bell

Submissions on regulations associated with the Copyright (Infringing File-Sharing) Act, belatedly released after the Ministry of Economic Development had made its decisions, show a number of people and organisations were still trying to change the government’s mind on provisions of the legislation outside the administrative aspects the MED asked them to comment on.

Many of the comments focus on the continuing shadow of a possible presumption of guilt on the part of alleged infringers. While the Bill’s language on this point was modified in its final stages, to make it clear evidence of innocence presented by the alleged offender had to be taken into account, this was??? still not enough for some submitters, including Google.

“As [the Act is] presently drafted, it is possible that the [Copyright] Tribunal may consider itself (in the absence of any evidence from the account-holder) required to find in favour of the rights-holder without itself being satisfied that each alleged infringement in fact infringed the rights owner’s copyright,” Google’s submission stated. “This is open to abuse by rights holders.”

Google's submission asked for the pertinent section - 122N(1) - to be removed and the Tribunal be “required to make a positive finding of infringement”.

MP Gareth Hughes, representing the Green Party, suggested that before a complaint of infringement can be upheld, detection should have been “direct … meaning that data has been downloaded from the offending address and verified as being copyright material for which the rights-holder has the rights” – rather than simply spotting someone with that IP address in a peer-to-peer pool requesting copyright content.

IT journalist Juha Saarinen suggests that partial downloads should not count as infringement. “Rights holders must show that the file in question was downloaded or uploaded in full,” he stated. “Partially downloaded files are not viewable or audible”
Incomplete files, Saarinen argues “may be the result of accidental access that was never completed and therefore the infringement never occurred.”

Judge David Harvey, probably the country’s most internet-savvy judge - emphasising that he is commenting in a personal capacity - suggests that more information be disclosed about the location of a complaining rights holder than MED recommends; this should include a physical address, he suggests. Such openness will discourage “vexatious” complaints. “The process must not be abused and only used for serious well-founded complaints,” Judge Harvey wrote. “Those claiming to be rights holders should be easily identifiable and locatable.”

On the question of fees, he recommends that charges to rights holders by ISPs be sufficient to defray the initial cost of setting up facilities for serving notices of alleged infringement, as well as the ongoing cost of their operation.

Rights holders’ organisations, naturally, veer towards minimising or eliminating fees. “We maintain that whatever costs are encountered by the IPAP [internet protocol address provider; a modified definition of ISP] should be at their expense,”the Australasian Performing Rights Association and Mechanical Copyright Owners’ Society (APRA-AMCOS) stated in its submission.. “This is a reflection of the commercial advantage they receive from the communication of the infringing files.”

The Recording Industry Association of NZ (RIANZ) and record-label representative organisation IMNZ also pushed for minimal fees in a joint submission. “If IPAPs were allowed to pass the cost of performing the [notice-serving and tracking] on to copyright owners, this would considerably reduce …incentives for IPAPs to create and use efficient notification mechanisms,” it states.

RIANZ and IMNZ both utilise the “commercial advantage” argument. “For many years, IPAPs have benefitted from the increased take-up of their broadband services, driven in large part by the demand for illegal copies of entertainment content,” they say.

In contrast to Judge Harvey, RIANZ and IMNZ see no need for alleged infringers to have contact information for rights-holders, since formal channels are set up to allow the accused to file a defence.

In the event, MED decided on a fee of $25 per notice (modified in Cabinet from an initially suggested $20) - more than the rights-holders wanted but less than many ISPs think is justified. Orcon, for one, presents calculations to show an estimated cost of serving and tracking one notice to be $76.73.

The Telecommunications Carriers’ Forum estimates per-notice costs as “likely to be around $40”. It rebuts the rights-holder lobbies’ assumption of a profit from copyright infringement. “IPAPs are businesses,” TCF says. “They do not condone copyright infringement nor do they seek to benefit from it.”
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/...riety-of-views





Global Fight Against Internet Piracy Continues

The fight against piracy enters a new phase, but no resolution in sight
Michael Hatamoto

Copyright groups and online file sharers are engaged in attrition warfare that has led to confusing government and ISP involvement. The battle lines have been drawn, and internet users downloading and sharing files run the low risk of warnings and possible enforcement.

The United States government claims to have no interaction -- but supports the new six-strikes policy -- with the recently created Center for Copyright Infringement (CCI) effort between ISPs and copyright groups. The partnership will offer a sort of copyright alert and reeducation program that has only led to confusion and uncertainty among file sharers.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) group published a short blog post that highlights some issues related to the controversial framework.

Governments in the European Union have tried to find different methods to attack piracy, but have had varying results. Spanish file sharing sites brought to court for linking to copyrighted works recently scored a victory, which only proves the difficulty in punishing these sites. Meanwhile, Italian ISPs are facing legal action after ignoring a ban against a torrent site.

France implemented a three-strikes system to possibly boot repeat offenders, and more than 18 million file sharers have been tracked. However, budget and manpower issues have only led to 470,000 warnings issued to first-time copyright violators. Just 20,000 letters were sent out as second warnings, and only 10 people are at risk of having a judge personally review their file sharing case.

The cat-and-mouse game between file sharers and copyright holders will continue for the rest of 2011, while very little is being done to reach a mutual agreement. For example, the use of three-strikes laws have done very little to intimidate pirates to stop file sharing, while ISPs are criticized by subscribers and terrorized by copyright groups.

Instead, BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer file sharers are getting better at masking their identities to prevent detection by watch groups. However, the federal government has moved to domain seizures as a critical method to help fight Internet piracy, with the practice expected to accelerate.

Expect to see continued copyright group efforts against file sharers, while ISPs are also forced into turning over users rather than face court issues. The federal government and the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have been recruited to lend an effective hand against pirates.
http://www.dailytech.com/Global+Figh...ticle22159.htm





Bardem, Film-Makers Urge Treaty Against Piracy

* Piracy denounced as "biggest bane of industry"

* Stars back global treaty which U.N. agency sees in 2012

Stephanie Nebehay

Spanish actor Javier Bardem and film-makers urged Internet users on Tuesday to support creative industries struggling to survive in an age of digital piracy by shunning illegal downloading of free films and music.

British film director Iain Smith, Egyptian producer Esaad Younis and Indian producer and director Bobby Bedi joined Bardem in appealing for a new global treaty to boost audiovisual performers' rights.

The Oscar-winning Bardem, now starring in "Biutiful", said of the movie industry: "More than 90 percent of people have serious problems to pay the rent, the bills and even eat.

"Remuneration is crucial, not for me but for the 90 percent who have serious problems in making a living."

Actors' rights -- unlike those of directors, screenwriters and musicians -- were not protected under current international copyright law, he told a news conference.

"We bring something else, we are authors in a sense."

The Spaniard, who took home an Academy Award for his best supporting actor role in the 2007 Coen brothers film "No Country for Old Men", is married to Penelope Cruz, who stars opposite Johnny Depp in "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides".

Bardem, referring to non-paying downloaders on the Internet, said: "People think they harm the producer that flies around in a private jet or has five swimming pools or the Hollywood actor with three mansions in every town.

"They are wrong. They are harming people who are hardly making a living."

Digital technology has made it easy and cheap to download new cultural works around the world instantaneously.

"It does permit theft of our product at high-quality. It's just not perceived as theft," Bardem said.

"Hollywood Nightmare"

Smith, a Scottish-born producer whose works include "Seven Years in Tibet", said the Hollywood dream had become a "Hollywood nightmare".

"Piracy is a huge threat, it has caused a massive loss of revenue to American-based industry and others," he said, estimating the U.S. industry alone lost $25 billion last year.

"Avatar" had 16.5 million illegal downloads, followed by "Kick Ass" at 11.4 million, while ticket sales had fallen, Smith said.

"Audience demand is clearly for magic, but it comes at a price. There has to be a contract between the money and the art, the investment and the creation," he said.

Bedi said digital technology offered an opportunity for the industry to develop. "But if it is mishandled it can be a huge problem for us. Piracy is the biggest bane of my industry."

His native India, home to the "Bollywood" film industry, had copyright laws but they were not fully enforced, he said.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a United Nations agency that protects copyright, aims to reach agreement on a new international pact on audiovisual performers' rights next year, WIPO director-general Francis Gurry said.

An agreement between the United States and European Union last month paved the way for concluding a pact as early as mid-2012, although the ratification process by WIPO's 184 member states would take longer, said Gurry.

"We're hoping this treaty will contribute to making a more comprehensive international legal framework by including actors' rights," he told reporters.

(Editing by Ralph Gowling)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7IJ2N120110719





15 Year-Old Boy Faces File-Sharing Prosecution
enigmax

A 15 year-old from Sweden is facing prosecution after sharing movies online. The boy was tracked on file-sharing networks by so-far unnamed “international” film companies. While his alleged actions are clearly illegal, this kind of legal action against a teenager makes little sense and is a PR failure ready to happen.

For an old-timer like me, 15 years-old is a distant dream of a growing interest in the opposite sex but too much homework to do anything about it, a developing adult mind restricted by loving parents who prefer to keep a child, and a general desire to be older and all that entails.

It also meant some of the best computing memories ever. 8 bit machines crawling along with brick-sized modems powered by lists of random phone numbers culled from BBSs, each one dialled in the hope that no human would answer, but the comforting tone of a computer – any computer – instead.

There can be little doubt that, in hindsight, some of what my friends and I did was illegal. But the thought of being arrested and facing prosecution for our ‘fun’ never crossed our minds – my main preoccupation was the arrival of a stupid-sized telephone bill and furious parents.

Online ‘fun’ these days, more than 25 years down the line, is a very different affair, a lesson currently being learned by a teenager from Sweden.

According to a report from GP.se, a 15-year-old boy from Gothenburg is now facing prosecution for allegedly sharing files online.

He was tracked by “international movie companies”, most likely the MPA/A, who subsequently reported him to Swedish authorities.

Prosecutor Frederick Ingblad said that the teenager, who will be assigned a lawyer, is accused of downloading and then making available 30 movies online.

Sweden, which has a culture of file-sharing, has traditionally been gentle with infringers but following the meteoric rise of The Pirate Bay and the subsequent fallout, has succumbed to international movie and music industry pressure to get tough.

If the volume of news stories are any barometer, Sweden now punishes more file-sharers than any other country in Europe. The punishments can be harsh, ranging from fines to imprisonment of up to 2 years.

While this teenager will probably ‘only’ pick up a fine, is state punishment the correct way to deal with a 15 year-old for his non-profit file-sharing? Is it proportional for his final years in school to be troubled by a prosecution for an activity that represents normal activity for people of his age group?

One can’t help but think that a slap on the wrist is in order here, rather than a full-on prosecution. Anything other than that would be a PR failure for the movie companies.

But maybe the movie studios, in this case being represented by Svenska Antipiratbyrån, feel that an example should be set, that 15 year-olds up and down the country should be made aware that they are committing a crime, a crime that will not go unpunished?

Finally, a parting thought. While in Sweden we’re now looking at the prosecution of a teenager for movie sharing, in the studios’ own homeland – the United States – the same file-sharing offenses will shortly result in a strongly-worded “copyright alert” instead.
http://torrentfreak.com/15-year-old-...cution-110720/





Big Content's Latest Antipiracy Weapon: Extradition
Timothy B. Lee

As major American copyright holders continue their long war on file-sharing, the focus of the debate has increasingly shifted overseas. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has begun seizing the domain names of so-called rogue sites based overseas. And copyright interests are pushing for the passage of the PROTECT IP Act, which would draft various intermediaries, including DNS providers, into the fight against such sites.

In May, American law enforcement officials opened up yet another front in this war by seeking the extradition of Richard O'Dwyer. The 23-year-old British college student is currently working on his BS in interactive media and animation. Until last year, he ran a "link site" that helped users find free movies and TV shows, many of them infringing. American officials want to try him on charges of criminal copyright infringement and conspiracy.

The extradition request is remarkable; O'Dwyer has no obvious connection to the United States. He hasn't set foot there since he was a small child, his servers were not located there, and it's not clear he has broken UK law. With his family's support, O'Dwyer is fighting extradition and seeking a trial in the United Kingdom instead.

The case is likely to become a new focal point in the ongoing global debate—one that exploded in the 1990s among legal scholars and has been raging ever since—over who has jurisdiction to try crimes committed wholly online. Extradition is normally reserved for the most serious crimes; critics doubt that operating a linking site qualifies. If O'Dwyer is extradited to the United States, it could set the precedent that website operators around the world are obligated to comply with American laws, even if they differ from the laws in their own country. If they don't, they could face US justice.

Free movies

We recently covered the legal battle over Hotfile, an online "cyberlocker" site that Hollywood studios have accused of facilitating massive illegal downloading of their movies. In their complaint, the studios said that Hotfile relies on "link sites" to "host, organize, and promote URL links" to its content.

O'Dwyer's site, TVshack, was allegedly such a link site. It served as a clearinghouse for users to share links to movies and television shows available for free—but not necessarily legal—download. It's no longer online, but cached copies suggest that most of the links were to Hollywood content like Toy Story 3, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and episodes of "Family Guy." Needless to say, these copies weren't authorized by the relevant copyright holders.

It was a profitable venture. As TVshack's traffic grew, O'Dwyer began selling advertising space on the site. Richard's mother Julia told Ars that she first became concerned when she learned how much money her son was making. "It was apparent that this income was becoming bigger and bigger," she said. "He wasn't that interested in generating an income, and I think he was getting a bit frightened."

A knock on the door

In late June 2010, the TVshack.net domain name was seized in a virtual sting by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a move made possible by the fact that all .com and .net domain names are registered through US companies. As usual, ICE redirected the TVshack domain to a banner indicating the domain name had been seized by the federal government. (ICE has previously noted that most of these requests for takedowns come from industry, and it works closely with groups like the MPAA.)

O'Dwyer didn't back down. Within days, he had the site back up at a new address, TVShack.cc, which did not require a US-based domain name registrar. He slapped a notice to the top of the new site urging users to update their bookmarks.

The feds were not amused. In November 2010, British police showed up at O'Dwyer's house. Julia told Ars what happened next.

"They had two American guys with them, which Richard assumes were men from ICE," she said. "They questioned him about his website. It wasn't more than an hour." The police also seized two of Richard's computers.

"The ICE men shook his hand when they left," she said. "One of them said 'Don't worry, you won't have to go to America.'"

Julia says the men didn't ask him to take TVShack down, but he closed it himself. Nevertheless, the TVShack.cc domain was also (eventually) seized by ICE.

"A big shock"

Richard was asked to report to his local police station on May 23, 2011. "We got him a lawyer, and I arranged to go with him to the police station," Julia said. "We thought that he was going to either be charged with an offense in the UK or to be further questioned."

Instead, the O'Dwyers learned that the British investigation had been dropped. Instead, the US had requested Richard's extradition. "That was a big shock," Julia said. "Obviously, that had never entered our heads, that that's what would be happening on that day—or any other day, for that matter."

"I can't see how they can say that there is a connection" to the United States, she added. "He had no servers in America. He was never in America since he was 5 years old. It just seems like ICE are trying to make the rules to suit them."

Forcing Richard to stand trial in the United States would be a severe hardship for his family, Julia said. "It will cost £1500 at least to have a trip to America. And then you go all that way for an hour's visiting time in jail. It seems ridiculous. The threat of being extradited is like an extra punishment that you're given before you even get to any charges."

The rarity of extradition

So why is Richard being taken to America rather than being allowed to stand trial in the UK? The American law enforcement agencies behind the extradition request declined to comment on the case when we asked. But Erik Barnett, an assistant deputy director for ICE, has told the Guardian that the United States regards any website with a US-controlled domain like .net to be within its jurisdiction. Until now, ICE's campaign against these websites has been focused on domain name seizures, but O'Dwyer's case may represent the first escalation of that campaign to include the extradition of website owners.

The effort to extradite Richard is almost unprecedented. We could only find two examples of individuals extradited to the United States for computer crimes committed without ever setting foot here.

One of them, Gary McKinnon, was a UK citizen who was accused of hacking into Pentagon and NASA computer systems—a case which therefore had a much clearer US nexus. At last report, he was still in the UK fighting extradition. The other example is Australian resident Hew Griffiths, who was sent to the United States on warez charges in 2007 after a 3-year extradition fight. He served a total of 51 months in jail for his leadership role in the software cracking group DrinkOrDie.

Richard's mother also points to the case of Ryan Cleary, a 19-year-old Brit who was arrested in June 2011 for his alleged role in the LulzSec hacker group. "I wouldn't suggest that he should be extradited, because I wouldn't wish that on anyone," she said. But she noted that LulzSec has attacked numerous American targets, including the CIA. She wondered why her son is being extradited while Cleary is apparently being allowed to stand trial in the UK despite a much more direct connection to the United States.

The legality of linking

It's not clear whether O'Dwyer has even committed a crime under UK law. O'Dwyer is not accused of hosting infringing content himself. Instead, his site provided links to content hosted by other websites. In December, a British judge ruled in favor of TV-Links, a website that, like Tvshack, offered links to video content, some of it infringing.

What about the United States? Ars asked Daniel Gervais, a law professor at Vanderbilt, for comment. He pointed to the Supreme Court's 2005 Grokster decision, under which defendants can be held liable for "inducing" their users to infringe copyright. He said that if O'Dwyer was "linking multiple times to content that is entirely or almost essentially infringing," which it appears he was, then O'Dwyer likely faces "secondary liability" under copyright law.

However, he said, "it is so unusual to have this prosecuted under criminal statutes. Criminal copyright infringement is extremely rare. Typically we'd be looking at people who would manufacture or import pirate DVDs."

O'Dwyer's mother said that if Richard were found guilty in the UK, the maximum penalty for his actions would be just two years of prison, compared to five years in the United States.

Britain's lopsided extradition rules

Julia places most of the blame for her son's predicament at the feet of her own government. In 2003, Britain signed what critics regard as a one-sided treaty with the United States. The treaty makes it more difficult to extradite an American citizen to the United Kingdom than the other way round.

The O'Dwyers have a powerful voice on their side; in June, the Parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights issued a report calling for extradition reforms.

One proposed reform in particular would help Richard's case, a provision allowing a judge to deny extradition requests if the alleged conduct occurred in the UK and "it would not be in the interests of justice" for the defendant to be tried in the requesting country. Language to this effect was included in a 2006 Police and Justice Bill, but to overcome political opposition, it was rendered inactive before final passage.

"Parliament has already agreed to this principle and the Government should bring forward the relevant provisions," the Joint Committee wrote in its June report. "It is difficult to understand why this has not yet happened."

Richard's next court date isn't until September, so there's still time to change the law. "If they just sat down in parliament and changed it, it would be in action within a month," his mother said.

But so far she's been frustrated by the pace of change. "These politicians always say they have no power. Why do we have powerless people running our country?"
The case against extradition

Both experts we spoke with were critical of the American government's move to extradite Richard. Gervais pointed out that the case could have sweeping implications. "Because so many copyright owners are actually US-based companies, it would basically make US courts the world criminal courts for copyright infringement," he said.

And it could be even worse than that. If people can be extradited for copyright infringement by countries in which they haven't set foot, "every website like this could give rise to prosecution in several jurisdictions. It will become impossible for the person to defend without spending millions of dollars."

Corynne McSherry, the Intellectual Property Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agreed. "We should think long and hard about whether IP is something we want to extradite people across borders for," she told Ars.

She pointed to the case of Rojadirecta.org, a Spanish site which had its domain name seized by ICE earlier this year. "Two separate courts found that [the site] was legal" in Spain, she said. "Nonetheless, action was taken in the US. Now imagine if we tried to extradite them to the US. Think about the message that would send about our respect for the other court."

She also warned that the effort could backfire. Imagine "you do something that violates French copyright law," she said. "They don't have a First Amendment. They have a different regime for IP. You'd be worried if French could extradite you and bring you to a French court."

McSherry lays the ultimate blame for ICE's aggressive stance at the feet of domestic content industries. "There is a fair amount of pressure being brought to bear by the content industries and media to 'do something' about online infringement," she said. "I think this is a response to that. The question we need to ask is whether that responsiveness is causing collateral damage to other interests."

Reached by e-mail, the Motion Picture Association of America declined to comment.
Years of debate

The debate over extradition in this case is just one strand of a long-running argument about "borders" and "jurisdiction" on the Internet. Law professors were especially concerned about the question in the mid-1990s, when famous articles like "Law And Borders: The Rise of Law in Cyberspace" by David Post and David Johnson made sweeping statements about the problems of government authority on the "borderless" 'Net.

Efforts to control the flow of electronic information across physical borders—to map local regulation and physical boundaries onto Cyberspace—are likely to prove futile, at least in countries that hope to participate in global commerce. Individual electrons can easily, and without any realistic prospect of detection, "enter" any sovereign's territory. The volume of electronic communications crossing territorial boundaries is just too great in relation to the resources available to government authorities to permit meaningful control.

As for which law to apply, Post and Johnson argued that questions of jurisdiction were a total mess; every law might apply to everyone!

Because events on the Net occur everywhere but nowhere in particular, are engaged in by online personae who are both "real" (possessing reputations, able to perform services, and deploy intellectual assets) and "intangible" (not necessarily or traceably tied to any particular person in the physical sense), and concern "things" (messages, databases, standing relationships) that are not necessarily separated from one another by any physical boundaries, no physical jurisdiction has a more compelling claim than any other to subject these events exclusively to its laws.

"Realists" objected to this view, saying 1) that governments certainly could (and did) create Internet borders and that 2) the jurisdictional questions weren't nearly as complicated as the cyber-libertarians suggested. (Perhaps the best statement of this view came in the 2006 book Who Controls the Internet? by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu.)

In his 1998 paper "Against Cyberanarchy," Harvard's Jack Goldsmith noted that the Internet wasn't really a free for all in which any nation could enforce any of its laws against any netizen. Instead, as a practical matter, laws would only be enforced against:

(i) persons with a presence or assets in the nation’s territory; (ii) persons over whom the nation can obtain personal jurisdiction and enforce a default judgment against abroad; or (iii) persons who the nation can successfully extradite.

When someone like O'Dwyer causes an alleged harm in the US but has no assets here and no residence here, the government has generally left such people to the justice of their own governments (unless they have done something to specifically target American users as offshore gambling sites did by, say, accepting money in US dollars). But as the O'Dwyer case suggests, at least one part of the US government sees Goldsmith's third point as a reminder that it's not powerless to reach such people. Instead, it's a call to action: let's start extraditing!
A question of proportion

It's hard to defend Richard O'Dwyer's actions. He appears to have knowingly profited from large-scale copyright infringement, even if he didn't directly host the content. It's not entirely clear if he broke the letter of the law in either the UK or the US, but we can't fault content companies and law enforcement officials for at least pursuing his site.

But the effort to extradite O'Dwyer to the United States seems disproportionate and unfair. O'Dwyer resided in the United Kingdom throughout the time period when he was operating TVshack. Unless there's evidence his actions were specifically directed at the United States—and simply operating a linking site in English or signing up for a .com/.net domain hardly seems like such evidence—any trial against him should occur in the UK. We're confident that there are more urgent uses of US law enforcement and judicial resources.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...xtradition.ars





Universal Music Accused of Using Fraudulent DMCA Notices as a Negotiating Tactic in Licensing Music from Other Labels
Cory Doctorow

Skepta, a London-based hip-hop artist, uploaded a video for his original song called "Dare to Dream" to YouTube earlier this month. Jimmy Iovine, founder of the Universal-owned label Interscope, heard the song and decided that he'd like to license it for use by Eminem, who is signed to Iovine's label. So far, so good.

But then it gets weird. Iovine reportedly then filed a fraudulent copyright declaration with YouTube, claiming he owned the rights to the song and getting it taken down. Then he approached Skepta and his label to license the song for Eminem's use.

Presumably, the false DMCA declaration -- which is illegal as hell -- was used to prevent competitors from bidding against Iovine, or perhaps to prevent the song from becoming overly associated with Skepta.

Whatever the motivations, this demonstrates the pervading mentality regarding copyright takedowns in entertainment companies: they're handy tools for removing anything you don't like from the Internet for an indefinite period, and there's no penalty for perjuring yourself in your notices.

I'm not sure who has standing to pursue Iovine for his alleged fraud. I fear that the only party situated to bring him to justice are Skepta and his label (who are unlikely to pursue a claim against their new business partner). But I hope that YouTube can -- and does -- take action to produce an object lesson that abusing the law to censor the Internet isn't a consequence-free tactic in the normal course of business, but a crime that undermines copyright law itself.
http://www.boingboing.net/2011/07/20...usic-accu.html





Indie Labels Sue LimeWire Over Failed Copyright Deal
Chloe Albanesius

A collection of indie music labels have filed suit against the now-defunct LimeWire file-sharing Web site for failing to honor a copyright infringement settlement.

Merlin, which represents labels like Rough Trade and Epitaph and artists like Arcade Fire and Tom Waits, filed suit against LimeWire last week, arguing that LimeWire failed to offer it a deal like the $105 million agreement it reached with the major U.S. music labels.

"Merlin confirms it has filed a breach of contract claim against Lime Wire in the US District Court ... for damages believed to be in excess of $5m," the company said in a statement. "The claim relates to the breach of an agreement to settle claims of infringement of Merlin members' copyrights on the Lime Wire peer to peer service."

Merlin said it issued a cease and desist order to LimeWire as early as September 2008, but agreed not to sue because LimeWire said if it reached a deal with the major labels—Universal, Sony, Warner, and EMI—it would offer Merlin the same deal.

The deal with the majors came down in May 2010. The following month, the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA), also filed suit, eventually resulting in the October shutdown of LimeWire's file-sharing service. LimeWire closed up shop completely in early 2011.

Despite their alleged deal, however, Merlin said "the Lime Entities did not offer to Merlin and its label members a settlement on the same material terms (adjusted to account for relative market share) as the settlement with the major labels. In fact, the Lime Entities did not make an offer to Merlin at all."

When confronted, "the Lime Entities simply refused" to pay, according to Merlin, which said it is entitled to a payment "no less than the amount of the cash payment made to the major labels."

Merlin wants damages that will total at least $5 million and costs, according to court filings.

In the wake of the LimeWire shutdown, the percentage of U.S. Internet users who access P2P file-sharing services dropped about 7 percent from it all-time high in 2007, according to data from NPD Group. In May, a coalition of artists, led by the founder of FilmOn.com, sued CBS Interactive and CNET for facilitation of massive copyright infringement by offering LimeWire for download.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2388627,00.asp





China’s Biggest Search Engine, Known for Illegal Downloads, Makes Music Deal
Dan Levin

Baidu, the dominant Chinese Internet search engine, on Tuesday announced a major licensing deal with three of the world’s largest music companies that would allow Chinese Web users to legally download and stream hundreds of thousands of songs free.

The agreement between Baidu and One-Stop China, a joint venture between the Universal Music Group, the Warner Music Group and Sony BMG, will shut down access to a vast amount of pirated music and promises to broadly reshape the way China’s 450 million Web users gain access to online music. The country has long been a haven for pirated content. Baidu has been one of the chief conduits to it, much to the consternation of record labels, publishers and artists both here and abroad.

Under the two-year deal between Baidu and One-Stop China, the three music labels will license over 500,000 songs, about 10 percent of them in Mandarin and Cantonese, which will be stored on Baidu’s servers and available for free streaming and download on the site’s ad-supported MP3 search page and social music platform, Ting.

Baidu will pay a fee to the labels for each time a song is downloaded or played in a stream. It will also share revenue from online ads if that revenue exceeds a certain amount, as well as provide promotional support for the labels. The companies declined to disclose financial details of the agreement.

With Baidu taking up the costs, this deal keeps music free — but legal. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which represents global music companies, estimates that 99 percent of the music found online in China is illegal, much of it available through Baidu. Although China has more broadband connections than the United States and a rapidly growing middle class, the global recorded music industry’s revenue in the country for 2009 was worth just $75 million, compared with $4.6 billion in the United States, according to the federation. So making money from music downloads and streaming in China will have an outsize impact for the labels, since digital sales accounted for 76 percent of the country’s legitimate music revenue in 2010, compared with just 29 percent globally, where CD sales remain dominant.

As part of the deal, on Monday the labels and Baidu agreed to a settlement endorsed by the Beijing Higher People’s Court ending all outstanding litigation. For years, the American and Chinese music industries have singled out Baidu for criticism, saying the company has enabled users to steal vast quantities of copyrighted music, accusations that spurred a number of unsuccessful lawsuits.

In February, the United States trade representative named Baidu as one of the world’s 33 “notorious markets” for piracy and counterfeiting, centering on Baidu’s practice of “deep linking,” or providing search results that direct users to unlicensed songs on other Web sites. Although American search engines have long been forced to abandon such practices, Chinese courts had ruled that deep linking was legal because the music was not stored on Baidu’s servers.

Despite those favorable court decisions, Baidu has now agreed to remove all deep links to music belonging to the three labels, though a small amount of other independently loaded music may remain available. “We’ve never wanted to stand there and thumb our noses at the recording industry,” said Kaiser Kuo, Baidu’s director of international communications. “This is a watershed moment. It’s a great way for us to deliver the best possible user experience by providing free and high-quality music and brings obvious tangible benefits to all parties involved including the labels, artists and advertisers.”

Later this year, as part of the agreement, Baidu plans to introduce a premium fee-based service which will allow paying users to download music onto any computer, tablet or mobile device from a virtual storage locker.

Mr. Kuo added that music search was profitable but had never been a source of major traffic. He said it accounted for a high of 30 percent in 2004 and was now less than 10 percent.

The big label licensing agreement is the company’s latest move toward a more legitimate business model since its rival Google began directing mainland Chinese Web users to its Hong Kong site in March 2010.

In late March this year, Baidu announced it had deleted 2.8 million written works from its online library service, Wenku, in an effort to appease Chinese authors who demanded compensation, arguing that the company allowed pirated content on the site’s servers for free download. The move came days after China’s National Copyright Administration stated that it was investigating the company for copyright infringement of books.

A few days later, Baidu said it would pay a fee to songwriters belonging to the Music Copyright Society of China, the country’s official performing rights organization, each time one of their songs was downloaded or streamed through Baidu. Last year the organization won a rare lawsuit against Baidu over the company’s providing unauthorized lyrics to 50 songs on its servers.

Other Internet and media companies in China have signed contracts with music labels, with varying degrees of success. China Mobile made over $2 billion from its licensed ring tone service in 2009 alone, giving record companies a cut of the purchase price. Google in China offers more than a million songs for free through download and streaming and shares ad revenue. But at 84 percent, according to iResearch, an analytics firm based in Shanghai, Baidu’s share of the Chinese Internet search market dwarfs that of Google and other rivals. Its agreement with Universal, Warner and Sony BMG, which account for most of the global music market, is expected to give the industry a brighter outlook in China after years of frustration.

“We’re delighted with this because it means Baidu is genuinely partnering with us to move China’s legitimate music market forward,” said Max Hole, chief operating officer of Universal Music Group International, speaking on behalf of One-Stop China in a phone interview.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/t...sing-deal.html





ACS:Law File-Sharing Claims Finally Settle as SRA Moves On Firm Chief
Joanne Harris

The saga of claims brought by ACS:Law against individuals accused of file-sharing has come to a conclusion with all outstanding claims settling.

Ralli, the law firm acting for some of the individuals who had been facing claims from ACS:Law, said the matters “have been settled on a basis confidential between the parties”.

Meanwhile, the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has published the charges facing ACS:Law founder Andrew Crossley when he appears before the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) later this year.

decision to prosecute Crossley before the tribunal was made in August 2010, it was not published until this week.

The SRA claimed Crossley acted contrary to his clients’ best interest and in a way that would diminish public trust in him and the legal profession. It also alleged that he used his position as a solicitor to take, or attempt to take, unfair advantage of other people either for his own benefit of the benefit of his clients.

Additionally the decision alleges Crossley provided false information in statements made to the courts.

ACS:Law was bringing claims against a number of individuals who, it was alleged, had illegally downloaded and shared copyrighted material - including pornographic films. The defendants were among a much larger number of people who had been sent letters by the firm on behalf of its client Media CAT, asking for £495 as compensation for the downloads.

The cases were heard several times in the Patents County Court, even after Crossley said he was dropping the claims (25 January 2011) and closed ACS:Law down (8 February 2011).

In April Judge Birss QC handed down a strongly critical judgment on the wasted costs application made by the defendants (27 April 2011).

Due to the settlement, the second stage of the costs application will now not proceed.

Although the claims have settled, Ralli is pursuing a potential harassment claim on behalf of those who received letters from ACS:Law and other firms.
http://www.thelawyer.com/acslaw-file...008623.article





Lawyer Denies Greek Piracy 'Scam'
BBC

A lawyer whose firm demanded money from alleged illegal downloaders in the United Kingdom has denied re-starting the scheme in Greece.

Andrew Crossley told the BBC that e-mails sent out in the name of ACS:Law were a scam and nothing to do with him.

The messages accuse their recipients of file sharing and demand payments of £1,665.

Mr Crossley's firm was wound-up and he is the subject of disciplinary action for sending similar letters in the UK.

The Greek letters were brought to light by Ralli Solicitors, which represented some of those accused by ACS:Law. It is now advising a client based in Greece.

"They have received e-mails purporting to be from the law firm," said Ralli solicitor Michael Forrester.

The letters have been sent to overseas addresses.

"The IP addresses quoted do not appear conventional, making reference to country codes outside of the UK," said Mr Forrester.

"Despite this, the letters of claim refer to UK law under the Copyrights, Design and Patents Act," he added.

Compensation

One of the letters seen by the BBC read: "We act as solicitors for DigiProtect Ltd, the owners of copyright of various films and music rights.

"Our client has retained forensic computer analysts to search for and identify internet addresses from which their copyright works are being made available on so-called peer-to-peer programs."

The letter asks that cheques are made payable to ACS:Law and supplies a central London address, which is in an adjacent building to where the law firm used to trade from.

However, Andrew Crossley contacted the BBC to say he was not involved.

"It is not my email, not my address - the address is old and post code is misstated, there is no client or company of that name, it is not a demand made by me and it is quite clear from the way it was written that it was not," he wrote in an e-mail.

Mr Crossley said he plans to contact the police in relation to the messages.

UK cases

Prior to its closure, ACS:Law was accused of taking advantage of new UK laws on piracy in order to make money.

Its sole proprietor, Mr Crossley teamed up with companies DigiProtect and MediaCAT, which purported to represent copyright owners.

Together they sent letters to around 10,000 people in the UK, alleging that the IP addresses of their computers had been linked to illegal file sharing.

Individuals were given the option of paying £500 or facing court action.

Many of those contacted said they had never engaged in such activity. Consumer watchdog Which accused the firm of speculative invoicing and claimed that none of the evidence would stand up in court.

Bankrupt

Mr Crossley eventually brought 26 cases to court, but soon after hearings began he tried to have them dismissed.

Judge Colin Birss QC refused to allow proceedings to stop and accused Mr Crossley of trying to "to avoid judicial scrutiny".

He, in turn, left the court mid-way through the case and had his barrister read out a statement in which he said that he no longer wanted to pursue net pirates because he had received death threats.

The case was dismissed and Mr Crossley faced a large bill for wasted costs. The accused have since settled out of court.

Soon after, ACS:Law was wound up and declared bankrupt.

Mr Crossley is currently the subject of an investigation by the Solicitors' Regulation Authority.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14215510





Judge Behind File-Sharing Order ‘Targeted By Cyber-Terrorists’

THE HIGH COURT judge who issued a controversial order restricting access to a well-known file-sharing website has said he was personally targeted by hackers from central Asia following his ruling.

Justice Peter Charleton issued the order in July 2009, requiring Eircom to block all access to The Pirate Bay, as part of a settlement agreed between the internet provider and music label EMI.

The order was the first issued by an Irish court blocking access to a website.

In a speech to a US conference earlier this year, reported in this morning’s Irish Times, Charleton revealed that he had been targeted by “cyber-terrorists” from “places like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, among others”.

“The people in question… were proposing to hack into my computer to get my credit card and other details, ordering any number of pizzas for my greedy gut, and get call girls to turn up to my door and plant child pornography on my work computers.”
http://www.thejournal.ie/judge-behin...79822-Jul2011/





Judge Slashes ‘Appalling’ $1.5 Million File Sharing Verdict to $54,000
David Kravets

A federal judge has lowered a file sharing verdict to $54,000 from $1.5 million, ruling Friday that the jury’s award “for stealing 24 songs for personal use is appalling.”

The decision by U.S. District Judge Michael Davis follows the third trial in the Recording Industry Association of America’s lawsuit against Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the first file sharer to take an RIAA lawsuit to a jury trial. Under the case’s latest iteration, a Minnesota jury dinged her in November $62,500 for each of 22 songs she pilfered on Kazaa.

With the decision, Judge Davis has now overturned the judgments of three separate juries in the case dating to 2007. And Friday’s outcome is not likely to be the last word, either.

Thomas-Rasset, of Brainerd, Minnesota, has repeatedly vowed to appeal what her lawyers said were “excessive damages.” Her first trial ended with a $222,000 judgment, but Davis declared a mistrial, on the grounds that he’d improperly instructed the jury on a point of law. After the second trial, Davis tentatively reduced the award from $1.92 million to $54,000, and ordered a new trial on damages if the parties didn’t agree to that amount or settle. That third trial last year ended in the $1.5 million judgement that Davis overruled Friday.

The RIAA has maintained that judges do not have the power to lower jury verdicts in cases concerning the Copyright Act, which allows damages of as much as $150,000 a music track. Judge Davis, however, said Friday that fairness demanded his decision to reduce the award to $2,250 per track.

The jury’s award was “so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportionate to the offense and obviously unreasonable,” he wrote.

The three verdicts prove that federal juries are willing to slap file sharers with monster awards. The only other file sharing case to have gone to trial resulted in a Boston jury awarding the RIAA $675,000 for 30 songs, which a judge reduced last year to $67,500.

Davis was the nation’s first judge to reduce the amount of damages in a Copyright Act case.

The third trial involved the jury assuming the woman’s liability. All the jury was required to do was affix a damages figure. Because of the posture of the case after the second trial, the parties could not have directly appealed the judge’s decision lowering the jury’s verdict.

Among the big bones of contention that are to be addressed on appeal, if one comes to pass, would be Thomas-Rasset’s contention that damages under the Copyright Act are unconstitutionally excessive, even with the reduced verdict. The RIAA claims that judges do not have the power to lower a Copyright Act jury award.

“We disagree with the decision and are considering our next steps,” RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth said.

Thomas-Rasset, who did not immediately respond for comment, famously lost her first trial in 2007 — resulting in a $222,000 judgment. But months after the four-day trial was over, Judge Davis declared a mistrial, saying he add incorrectly instructed the jury that merely making copyrighted work available on a file sharing program constituted infringement, regardless of whether anybody downloaded the content.

Most of the thousands of RIAA file sharing cases against individuals settled out of court for a few thousand dollars. The RIAA has said it has ceased its 5-year campaign of suing individual file sharers and, with the Motion Picture Association of America, have convinced internet service providers to take punitive action against copyright scofflaws, including terminating service.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...rdict-slashed/





Frustrated Judge Pushes Google Digital Book Deal

A Manhattan federal judge set a Sept. 15 deadline for Google, authors and publishers to come up with a legal plan to create the world's largest digital library, expressing frustration that the six-year-old dispute has not been resolved.

At a hearing on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Denny Chin said if the dispute is not "resolved or close to resolved in principle" by mid-September, he will set a "relatively tight schedule" for the parties to prepare for a possible trial.

"I'm a little bit concerned. This is a six-year-old case," Chin said. "One thought is to put you on a schedule, give you a deadline."

Citing antitrust and copyright concerns, Chin had on March 22 rejected a $125 million settlement. He said it went "too far" in allowing Google to exploit digitized copyrighted works by selling subscriptions to them online and engaging in "wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission."

Google, which runs the world's largest Internet search engine, had scanned about 12 million books, saying it would ease access to materials for readers and researchers.

After Tuesday's hearing, Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker said the company is exploring "a number of options" to address Chin's concerns. Google made a similar statement after Chin's last hearing in the case on June 1.

Opt-In Structure Sought

The rejected settlement would have resolved a lawsuit by The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers.

Google would have been allowed to sell online access to millions of out-of-print books. The Mountain View, California company would have created a registry of books and paid $125 million to people whose copyrighted books had been scanned and to locate authors of scanned books who had not come forward.

But Amazon.com Inc, Microsoft Corp and various academics and authors said the agreement gave Google too much power or violated antitrust and copyright law. The Justice Department also said it appeared to violate the law.

Amazon sells the Kindle digital reader, which is not compatible with Google's library. Sony Corp, which makes an compatible e-reader, favored the agreement.

Chin has urged that a settlement include only books whose copyright owners agree to the arrangement, rather than require authors to "opt out."

Michael Boni, a lawyer representing The Authors Guild, told the judge that "we are trying to settle this case with an opt-in structure."

Chin was elevated last year to the federal appeals court in New York, but retained jurisdiction over the Google case.

The case is The Authors Guild et al v. Google Inc, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 05-08136.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/busine...,1347946.story





Textbook Rentals Come to the Kindle: Probably Not a Money-Saver
Audrey Watters

Amazon unveiled a Kindle Textbook Rental, giving students the ability to rent instead of buy digital textbooks. Amazon says that "tens of thousands" of titles from some of the major textbook publishers - including John WIley & Sons, Wlsevier, and Taylor & Francis - will be available for this school year.

It's not just the selection that the company is touting, of course, it's the savings: "now students can save up to 80% off its textbook list prices by renting from the Kindle Store." Amazon's boasted savings for students has put the company at odds with brick-and-mortar college bookstores, and the National Association of College Stores has accused the online retailer of misleading students about the potential for savings when buying textbooks from Amazon.

But renting textbooks has becoming a popular alternative to buying recently, with companies like Chegg offering students the ability to rent books just for the duration of a semester. Amazon's new program is similar, but with the added bonus of being digital rather than physical, letting students read the e-books on Kindles and on Kindle apps.

Buying Used Textbooks, Still Cheaper Than Renting

The Kindle Textbook Rental program also lets students configure the length of the rental, from 30 days to 360 days. Of course, the longer you rent, the more expensive it becomes. A $100 Kindle purchase can be rented for $40 for a month, but that quickly increases the longer you keep the book - and most students will keep it for at least a semester. It's still cheaper to buy used textbooks in most cases, and when you buy a physical book, of course, you can keep the book or sell it back as you deem fit.

To make this option more appealing, Amazon has added a new feature to the Kindle Textbook Rental program, the ability for students to keep any of the notes they make in the textbooks they've rented. Typically, when you borrow an e-book, any marks you make in the text disappear when you return them. But Amazon says you'll be able to keep your highlights and notes "in the Amazon Cloud," and should you buy or rent the book again, the notes will be "just where you left them."

College Students Lukewarm about Kindles

The Kindle itself hasn't gained much traction among college students, and several studies have found that students say that they don't find e-readers to be very useful for their note-taking and studying needs. It's worth noting that on Amazon's page announcing the new program that an actual Kindle isn't depicted. Instead, there's an e-book on a laptop and displayed on a large monitor. You needn't use a Kindle, the message seems to suggest, just a Kindle app.

Textbooks are big business, and college students spend billions of dollars a year on them. With new and used titles for sale in print, Amazon has already wooed a number of students to buy from it, rather than from their local college bookstores. But it remains to be seen if the price - and of course the availability - of digital textbook rentals are something students are interested in. For the time being, it seems, used textbooks still look like the better deal, despite all the arguments that digital books are easier to carry around campus.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...ably_not_a.php





Suppressed Report Found Busted Pirate Site Users Were Good Consumers
enigmax

In June, police across several countries raided the operators of streaming video links portal Kino.to. This massive operation was one of the largest of its type and site admins and users alike were branded as enemies of the TV and movie business. However, it now appears that in respect of the latter group, the opposite was found to be true.

The June raids against Kino.to, which involved as many as 250 police and other authorities, dwarfed even the 2006 raids against The Pirate Bay.

Following the event the Kino.to site displayed notices which stated that the site had been “closed on suspicion of forming a criminal organization to commit professional copyright infringement.” While noting that several operators of the site had been arrested, it also criticized the site’s users.

“Internet users who illegally pirated or distributed copies of films may be subjected to a criminal prosecution,” read the warning.

But were the site’s users all criminals hell-bent on destroying the movie industry? According to a report from Telepolis, a recent study found the reverse was true.

The study, which was carried out by Society for Consumer Research (GfK), found that users of pirate sites including Kino.to did not fit the copyright lobby-painted stereotype of parasites who take and never give back.

In fact, the study also found that Internet users treat these services as a preview, a kind of “try before you buy.”

This, the survey claims, leads pirate site users to buy more DVDs, visit the cinema more often and on average spend more than their ‘honest’ counterparts at the box office.

“The users often buy a ticket to the expensive weekend-days,” the report notes.

In the past similar studies have revealed that the same is true for music. People who pirate a lot of music buy significantly more music than those who don’t.

Obviously it would be of great interest to see the report in full, but it appears that is not going to be possible. According to an anonymous GfK source quoted by Telepolis, the findings of the study proved so unpleasant to the company that commissioned the survey that it has now been locked away “in the poison cupboard.”

GfK says it has a policy of not revealing who they conduct research for if their clients don’t want to be exposed. However, they do carry out research for the movie industry. Telepolis go a stage further and call that work “lobbying”.

The GfK source says that the study shows “If you download films, you have an increased interest in the cinema”, which only highlights how stupid it would be for the authorities to carry out their implied threat of prosecuting Kino.to users.
http://torrentfreak.com/suppressed-r...sumers-110719/





Thomas Jefferson on Patents

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
http://cdixon.org/2011/07/16/thomas-...on-on-patents/





Hollywood Overlooks The Web, Except When It Can Be Put On TV
Liz Shannon Miller

This week’s Emmy nominations include the usual variety of wins (hooray Friday Night Lights!) and disappointments (wherefore art thou Community?). It also included nine nominations for digital content — five nominees for Creative Achievement in Interactive Media, and two each for short-format live-action entertainment programs and short-format nonfiction programs.

But looking at these nominees, two things become clear: 1) broadcast and cable television have become increasingly innovative in how they use the web to grow show branding, and 2) independent web production still has a long way to go when it comes to building mainstream awareness.

While last year, the nomination and eventual win of Star Wars Uncut gave hope that in the future more indie projects would be considered by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, this year witnesses a return to the tradition of nominating Fringe “webisodes,” the (admittedly excellent and innovative) digital experience for TBS’s Conan and an NBC.com website about Jay Leno’s cars.

But at the same time web originals are overlooked by awards shows and the digital studios producing them are shuttered, there’s been increased movement in another arena — web-to-television adaptations.

Showtime, for example, premiered Lisa Kudrow and Don Roos’s Web Therapy this week, which originated as a web series produced by L Studio. Web Therapy, based on the first episode, has not changed a bit from the original web version — the actors are still filmed web cam style, the desktop screenshots still drive changes in camera angles. It also jumps right into the story of unconventional therapist Fiona (Kudrow), who’s trying to establish a practice without ever having to leave her desk.

Episodes of the web series would focus on one individual client at a time, and the approach to adapting that for a half-hour format has been a simple one — keeping the one-on-one element of the web series, but structuring the episode as multiple “sessions” with “clients” (who, in the upcoming season, include Victor Garber, Rashida Jones, Jane Lynch, Steven Weber and Lily Tomlin), strung together to make a full-length episode. There is some effort to create a linear narrative within that framework, but the emphasis remains on exploring the depths of Fiona’s dysfunction over a full narrative.

Another group of folks to make the web-to-TV leap lately are comedy duo Rhett and Link, whose branded series I Love Local Commercials has found its way to IFC as Rhett and Link: Commercial Kings. The title’s different but the premise — two guys traveling around the country to make commercials for local businesses — remains the same; the major change made in bringing the series to television is combining the actual commercials and behind-the-scenes footage into a complete package.

Whereas Local Commercials broke apart the commercials produced by Rhett and Link and the behind-the-scenes elements, with an emphasis on the quasi-facetious commercials for small businesses, Commercial Kings frames each episode around the journey of producing the commercials, following Rhett and Link through development and production, revealing the actual commercials for the end. Conceptually, though, it’s a very clean adaptation, and extremely entertaining.

Neither of these shows are necessarily on next year’s Emmys short list (except, perhaps, for Web Therapy‘s admittedly talented cast). But they’re both examples of high-quality content that didn’t require much work to shift from the web to TV. As the lines continue to blur between the two mediums, projects like this will become more and more important — if only as a reminder for Hollywood to keep its eyes on what’s happening on the Internet.
http://gigaom.com/video/hollywood-ov...-put-it-on-tv/





Music Publishers File Copyright Suit Against Grooveshark
Greg Sandoval

Grooveshark just can't seem to shake its copyright woes.

A group of songwriters and music publishers filed a lawsuit on July 15 in Tennessee against the digital-music service, claiming Grooveshark enables users to obtain music illegally and therefore is liable for copyright infringement, contributory infringement, and vicarious infringement.

Grooveshark, based in Gainesville, Fla., is a service that offers free music by enabling users to post their own tracks to the site and then share them with other users.

Grooveshark's "users and subscribers are actively infringing plaintiffs' copyrighted musical compositions," the plaintiffs said in their complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. "Defendant neither sought nor obtained a license, permission, or authorization from plaintiffs."

Among the plaintiffs are Mark Farner, who made a name for himself as the lead singer of Grand Funk Railroad, and Mark Weiss, the songwriter who penned the hit 1970s tune "Rhinestone Cowboy." A Grooveshark representative wasn't immediately available for comment, but the company has said in the past that it obeys the rules of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and maintains that as a service provider, it is protected against any copyright violations committed by its users.

Grooveshark already is locked up in a legal battle with Universal Music Group, the largest of the four top record companies. Previously, EMI Music had filed suit against the company but that was settled. In April, Google responded to complaints from the Recording Industry Association of America by removing Grooveshark's app from the Android Market.

This isn't the kind of news that Grooveshark can use right now. All the momentum in the digital music sector seems to be with newcomer Spotify, the European service that has finally landed in the United States, and Turntable.fm. Spotify is fully licensed and Turntable seems to be headed that way. The company announced this week that it had struck agreements with two major music-rights groups.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20...t-grooveshark/





Alex Steinweiss, Originator of Artistic Album Covers, Dies at 94
Steven Heller

Alex Steinweiss, an art director and graphic designer who brought custom artwork to record album covers and invented the first packaging for long-playing records, died on Sunday in Sarasota, Fla. He was 94.

His death was confirmed by his son, Leslie.

The record cover was a blank slate in 1939, when Mr. Steinweiss was hired to design advertisements for Columbia Records. Most albums were unadorned, and on those occasions when art was used, it was not original. (Albums then were booklike packages containing multiple 78 r.p.m. discs.)

“The way records were sold was ridiculous,” Mr. Steinweiss said in a 1990 interview. “The covers were brown, tan or green paper. They were not attractive, and lacked sales appeal.” Despite concern about the added costs, he was given the approval to come up with original cover designs.

His first cover, for a collection of Rodgers and Hart songs performed by an orchestra, showed a high-contrast photo of a theater marquee with the title in lights. The new packaging concept was a success: Newsweek reported that sales of Bruno Walter’s recording of Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony increased ninefold when the album cover was illustrated.

“It was such a simple idea, really, that an image would become attached to a piece of music,” said Paula Scher, who designed record covers for Columbia in the 1970s and is now a partner in the design company Pentagram. “When you look at your music collection today on your iPod, you are looking at Alex Steinweiss’s big idea.”

Mr. Steinweiss preferred metaphor to literalism, and his covers often used collages of musical and cultural symbols. For a Bartok piano concerto, he rejected a portrait of Bartok, using instead the hammers, keys and strings of a piano placed against a stylized backdrop. For a recording of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” he used an illustration of a piano on a dark blue field illuminated only by an abstract street lamp, with a stylized silhouetted skyline in the background.

Alex Steinweiss was born March 24, 1917, in Brooklyn. His father, a women’s shoe designer from Warsaw, and his mother, a seamstress from Riga, Latvia, emigrated to the Lower East Side of Manhattan and eventually settled in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn.

On the strength of his high school portfolio, Mr. Steinweiss earned a scholarship to the Parsons School of Design. After graduation he worked for three years for the Austrian poster designer Joseph Binder, whose flat color and simplified human figures were popular at the time and influenced his own work.

During World War II Mr. Steinweiss became Columbia’s advertising manager. He left for a job at the Navy’s Training and Development Center in New York City, where he produced teaching materials and cautionary posters.

After the war, Mr. Steinweiss freelanced for Columbia. During one lunch meeting there, the company’s president, Ted Wallerstein, introduced him to an innovation that the company was about to unveil: the long-playing record. But there was a problem. The heavy, folded kraft paper used to protect 78 r.p.m. records left marks on the vinyl microgroove when 33 1/3 r.p.m. LPs were stacked.

Mr. Steinweiss was asked to develop a jacket for the new format and, with help from his brother-in-law, found a manufacturer willing to invest about $250,000 in equipment. Mr. Steinweiss had the original patent for what became the industry packaging standard (he did not develop the inner sleeve, only the outer package), but under his contract with Columbia he had to waive all rights to any inventions made while working there.

Mr. Steinweiss left the music business at 55, when he realized his design ideas were out of step with the rock era. He turned to his own art, making ceramic bowls and pots and later paintings, often with a musical theme. In 1974 he and his wife moved to Sarasota.

Mr. Steinweiss’s wife of 71 years, Blanche, died in 2010. In addition to his son, of Brooklyn, he is survived by a daughter, Hazel Steinweiss of Sarasota; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Mr. Steinweiss said he was destined to be a commercial artist. In high school he marveled at his classmates who “could take a brush, dip it in some paint and make letters,” he recalled. “So I said to myself, if some day I could become a good sign painter, that would be terrific!”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/b...ies-at-94.html





iOS 4.3.4 Has Been Jailbroken

Kwame Opam — Even though the newly-released 4.3.4 update was supposed to correct the PDF vulnerability that allowed for jailbreaking, the folks at Redmond Pie managed to cobble together a tethered jailbreak with PwnageTool that'll get you right back into Cydia.

The new method works for all devices except the iPad 2. Of course, you should still stick with 4.3.3 if you don't want to bother with re-jailbreaking anytime your phone shuts off.
http://gizmodo.com/5821905/ios-434-has-been-jailbroken





Hotmail Adds New Feature “My Friends Been Hacked”

Hotmail Adds New Feature My Friends Been HackedThe people at Hotmail have added a new feature to help combat hijacked accounts. They call it the “My Friends Been Hacked” button.

When you think that your friends account may have been compromised and is sending out spam, just flag the message with “My Friends Been Hacked” and Hotmail will put the account in recovery mode which will cause a password reset. When the account has been determined to be hijacked, the spammer will immediately lose all access to the account in question.

Hotmail even went further, if you get a spam email from users on Yahoo or Gmail accounts you can even report those and the reports will go to the right people. The people at Hotmail claim that the feature has only been active for a couple of weeks but they have already identified thousands of compromised accounts.

Hotmail is also working hard to eliminate accounts that have simple passwords such as “12345678″ and “password” by increasing security measures and not allowing simple passwords to be created. These changes are welcomed, even if I don’t use Hotmail anymore.
http://www.tekgoblin.com/2011/07/16/...s-been-hacked/





Google Warns Users About Active Malware Infection
Zeljka Zorz

The warning begun popping up yesterday, and does so only for users whose computers have been infected by a particular strain of malware that hijacks search results in order to drive users towards websites that use pay-per-click schemes.

"Some forms of malicious software will alter your computer settings to redirect some or all of your traffic through a proxy controlled by the attacker," Google explains. "When you use Google, the proxy forwards your query to the real Google servers to fetch the search results. If our system detects that a search came through one of these proxies, we display the warning."

For those wondering how they might have gotten infected, the answer is that they have likely been tricked into downloading this software when visiting a site or reading an email.

Or, as Google security engineer Damian Menscher shared with Brian Krebs, the search hijacking malware is part of a fake AV solution users have been tricked into downloading and installing on their computers.

Google is advising users to install or update their antivirus software in order to get rid of the malware, but warn users who don't have an AV solution already installed to be careful when searching for one online - more so since the malware in question is more likely to serve up links to fake AV solutions.
http://www.net-security.org/malware_news.php?id=1777





Apple Laptop Batteries Can Be Bricked, Firmware Hacked
Dennis Fisher

Security researcher Charlie Miller, widely known for his work on Mac OS X and Apple's iOS, has discovered an interesting method that enables him to completely disable the batteries on Apple laptops, making them permanently unusable, and perform a number of other unintended actions. The method, which involves accessing and sending instructions to the chip housed on smart batteries could also be used for more malicious purposes down the road.

The basis of Miller's research, which he plans to present at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas next month, is the battery that's used in most Apple laptops. The battery, like many others in modern laptops, has a chip on it that contains instructions for how the battery is meant to behave and interact with the operating system and other components. Inspired by Barnaby Jack's ATM hacking talk at last year's conference, Miller was interested in seeing what would happen if he could get access to the chip and start messing with the instruction set and firmware.

A lot, as it turns out.

"The battery has its own processor and firmware and I wanted to get into the chip and change things and see what problems would arise," said Miller, a principal research consultant at Accuvant.

What he found is that the batteries are shipped from the factory in a state called "sealed mode" and that there's a four-byte password that's required to change that. By analyzing a couple of updates that Apple had sent to fix problems in the batteries in the past, Miller found that password and was able to put the battery into "unsealed mode."

From there, he could make a few small changes to the firmware, but not what he really wanted. So he poked around a bit more and found that a second password was required to move the battery into full access mode, which gave him the ability to make any changes he wished. That password is a default set at the factory and it's not changed on laptops before they're shipped. Once he had that, Miller found he could do a lot of interesting things with the battery.

"That lets you access it at the same level as the factory can," he said. "You can read all the firmware, make changes to the code, do whatever you want. And those code changes will survive a reinstall of the OS, so you could imagine writing malware that could hide on the chip on the battery. You'd need a vulnerability in the OS or something that the battery could then attack, though."

In his lab, Miller was able to brick the battery so that it wouldn't take a charge or discharge any power, and he said it's also possible to send faulty instructions to the OS, giving it bad information about the level of power left in the battery. He wasn't able to accomplish his main goal, however.

"I started out thinking I wanted to see if a bad guy could make your laptop blow up. But that didn't happen," he said. "There are all kinds of things engineers build into these batteries to make them safe, and this is just one of them. I don't know if you could really melt the thing down."

Miller plans to release a tool at Black Hat that will go in and change the defualt passwords on the battery's processor so that the hacks he developed won't work. It will lock the battery in sealed mode permanently.
https://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/a...-hacked-072211





Court Allows Webcam Spying On Rental Laptops
tekgoblin

Back in May there was a class action lawsuit filed against the rental company Aaron's, which had secretly installed spying software that would turn on a laptop's webcam, take pictures and then send them back to the company. Overall it seemed like a large invasion of privacy, which should at least warrant an injunction to stop use of the software until the case is settled, right? Not to the judge, who refused to order an injunction on the grounds that the family was no longer in possession of the laptop. As for everyone else still using their Aaron's laptops, the judge had this to say to them (PDF): "Moreover, it is purely conjecture that the other members of the putative class will be subjected to remote access of personal information."
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/07/...Rental-Laptops





Meet the ‘Keyzer Soze’ of Global Phone-Tracking
Spencer Ackerman

Chances are you’ve never heard of TruePosition. If you’re an AT&T or T-Mobile customer, though, TruePosition may have heard of you. When you’re in danger, the company can tell the cops where you are, all without you knowing. And now, it’s starting to let governments around the world in on the search.

The Pennsylvania company, a holding of the Liberty Media giant that owns Sirius XM and the Atlanta Braves, provides location technology to those soon-to-be-merged carriers, so police, firefighters and medics can know where you’re at in an emergency. In the U.S., it locates over 60 million 911 calls annually. But very quietly, over the last four years, TruePosition has moved into the homeland security business — worldwide.

Around the world, TruePosition markets something it calls “location intelligence,” or LOCINT, to intelligence and law enforcement agencies. As a homeland security tool, it’s enticing. Imagine an “invisible barrier around sensitive sites like critical infrastructure,” such as oil refineries or power plants, TruePosition’s director of marketing, Brian Varano, tells Danger Room. The barrier contains a list of known phones belonging to people who work there, allowing them to pass freely through the covered radius. “If any phone enters that is not on the authorized list, [authorities] are immediately notified.”

TruePosition calls that “geofencing.” As a company white paper explains, its location tech “collects, analyzes, stores and displays real-time and historical wireless events and locations of targeted mobile users.”

‘The capability of doing mass tracking is possible.’

It can also work other ways: pinging authorities when a phone used by a suspected terrorist or criminal enters an airport terminal, bus station or other potential target. And it works just as well in monitoring the locations of phones the suspect’s phone calls — and who they call and text, and so on.

For the past four years, TruePosition has quietly taken that tracking technology global. In the U.S., Varano says, TruePosition sells to mobile carriers — though it’s cagey about whether the U.S. government uses its products. But abroad, it sells to governments, which it won’t name. Ever since it came out with LOCINT in 2008, he says, “Ministries of Defense and Interior from around the world began beating down our door.”

That’s got some surveillance experts and mobile activists worried. Keeping suspected terrorists away from nuclear power plants and discovering their networks of contacts is well and good. But in the hands of foreign governments — not all of whom respect human rights — TruePosition tech can just as easily identify and monitor networks of dissidents.

For a company that can do so much to find out where a mobile user is, few outside of the surveillance industry know much about TruePosition. That’s a deliberate strategy on the company’s part, to keep a “low profile from jump,” Varano says. It grants few interviews — a little-noticed Fox News story from 2009 is a rare exception — and discloses little about its foreign clients. Several surveillance experts contacted for this story were unfamiliar with the company.

The result, says Christopher Soghoian, a graduate fellow at Indiana University’s Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, is to make TruePosition the most important global geolocation company you’ve never heard of. “It’s like that line about Keyser Soze from The Usual Suspects — the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist,” Soghoian says. “They’ve done the same thing. Staying entirely below the radar.”

Except TruePosition is hardly satanic. Its “Enhanced 911,” or “E-911,” services save lives. In one case the company cites, a corrections officer in Ohio’s Hamilton County was abducted by a recent parolee and stuffed into the trunk of his car. Her family had no idea where she was. But because her cellphone was turned on and her carrier used TruePosition’s location tech, police were able to locate the phone along a Kentucky highway. They set up a roadblock, freed the officer and arrested her captor.

Here’s how it works. TruePosition’s location tool, known as Uplink Time Difference of Arrival or U-TDOA, calculates the time it takes a signal travelling from a mobile device to reach sensitive receivers installed in the transceiver station of a cell tower. (The receiver itself is said to resemble a pizza box.) Determining the difference in time it takes for the signal to reach receivers in different towers, determined by servers called Wireless Location Processors, calculates the phone’s location. The company says it has receivers installed in about 75,000 cell towers around the country.

Notice that the location tech here has nothing to do with GPS. It’s network-based, rather than dependent on a GPS receiver inside a handset. It’s not reliant on any line of sight to a satellite. That’s a point of pride within TruePosition. GPS has accuracy and precision woes in dense urban areas and the indoors. Or inside the trunk of a car.

For the better part of the decade, TruePosition has had contracts to provide E-911 services with AT&T (signed originally with Cingular in 2001, which AT&T acquired) and T-Mobile (2003). As more and more 911 calls came from mobile phones — by definition not linked to a fixed address — the Federal Communications Commission required wireless providers provide precise location data to emergency call centers. The accuracy requirements for E-911 top out at 300 meters. TruePosition says U-TDOA is accurate to within 50 meters. (The FCC met on Monday to consider changing the standard — the reason, Varano says, he granted me an interview.)

‘We can figure out which phone disappeared at the time of the detonation. We can find the triggerman.’

But TruePosition soon saw a growth market in a field where U-TDOA had relevance: the expanding, globalized field of homeland security. “It really was recession-proof,” Varano explains, “because in many parts of the world, the defense and security budgets have either maintained where they were or increased by a large percentage.”

That realization led the company to explore U-TDOA’s potential for as a security tool, as it’s the rare terrorist or criminal who doesn’t have a mobile device. LOCINT was born in October 2008. Imagine, a LOCINT primer on TruePosition’s website explains, “An explosion destroys an oil refinery — who, exactly, was inside the facility prior to the explosion?” If they’ve got a mobile device, U-TDOA-enabled geofences can answer the question.

Or consider the value that U-TDOA could have for finding networks that build and detonate homemade bombs. If the bomb is detonated with a cellphone — as Iraq’s bombs were, before jamming tech neutralized them — “we can go back into the cellular network and figure out which phone disappeared at the time of the detonation,” Varano says. “We find which phone called that phone — that’s our triggerman. Then we find which phones they called — the initial suspects. If they held onto that phone, we’d be able to see who that phone contacted.” And where they are now, in real time.

This isn’t something TruePosition does itself. It had nothing to do with the “location-gate” scandals that plagued Apple and Google earlier this year, when both companies conceded they collected and stored geodata from iPhone and Android phone customers. All the company does is enable a geolocation security system for its clients to use. How they use it is up to them — and the relevant laws of the countries that employ it.

But geofences might be legally problematic inside the United States. Law enforcement can’t just set up blanket location surveillance of mobile phones around a particular area; courts have to sanction surveillance around specific phones. The fences, however, would approve specific authorized phones; but any unauthorized phone that enters the fence triggers an alert.

“It would be hard for the company’s tool to distinguish the terrorist from the tourist,” says Greg Nojeim, a senior counsel with the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington.

And what if the governments using TruePosition’s gear aren’t so scrupulous about following laws, or respecting the civil liberties of their citizens? In the U.S., even after the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act, law enforcement and intelligence agencies still don’t have unfettered abilities to turn a cellphone into a homing device, or to trace a web of connections between callers or SMS recipients. If, say, Syria’s Bashar Assad had TruePosition’s technology, could he use it to determine who’s participating in anti-government protests?

“Correct,” Varano says, “if it was deployed in that region.” He adds, however, “we’ve never run into anything like that.”

Varano won’t specify which governments use TruePosition’s LOCINT tools. “I have to be nebulous about where it’s actually being deployed,” he says. That includes inside the United States. “We do not disclose who is currently using TruePosition LOCINT,” Varano says, but adds, “U.S. government [agencies] have not bought anything from us, and don’t write a check to us.” But, he says, the company’s various outposts (London, Dubai, Miami) pitch LOCINT solutions to countries from Europe to the Middle East to Latin America to the Carribean.

And if some repressive governments are in that mix, TruePosition’s position is that what they do with LOCINT is on them.

“We’re providing this tool to governments and it’s the governments’ onus to adhere to laws on its use,” Varano says. In western countries, he says, warrants, court orders and other safeguards prevent LOCINT abuse. But surveillance works differently elsewhere: “It’s not being used like that in the U.S. or western societies, but in other parts of the world, the capability of doing mass tracking is possible.”
‘It would be hard for TruePosition’s tool to distinguish the terrorist from the tourist.’

That’s what worries advocates for foreign dissidents. “This seems to be integrated a little bit deeper and the operator is fully complicit in the situation. It makes it more difficult for activists, for sure,” says Nathan Freitas of the Guardian Project, which designs anonymity tools for mobile users. “Vodaphone Egypt would only go so far to violate the rights of the Egyptian people — it shut the network down, but beyond that, they don’t have a fire hose out of a data center. U-TDOA could be a firehose-type product.” Again, Varano says the company’s never encountered such a situation.

An FBI spokesman, Christopher Allen, was unfamiliar with TruePosition, and invited Danger Room to file out a Freedom of Information Act request. Department of Homeland Security officials didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment. AT&T didn’t respond to an inquiry. T-Mobile USA’s director of external communications, Hernan Daguerre, confirmed the company’s relationship with TruePosition but wouldn’t comment beyond saying, “We’ll continue to monitor and evaluate advances in all E-911 location solutions to ensure the safety of our customers.”

Federal contractor databases don’t show any contracts between TruePosition and government agencies, with the exception of a 2006 deal with the General Services Administration (cancelled in 2009) for computer services that appears never to have been actualized. Varano, initially unfamiliar with the contract, explains, “We originally signed up to be part of the GSA in 2006, but nothing ever came from it.” Joining the GSA Schedule is what allows companies to compete for federal contracts.

Varano didn’t directly answer whether TruePosition intends to seek U.S. government contracts or is content to peddle LOCINT abroad while remaining an e-911 company at home.

At home, the courts are currently deciding whether geolocation tracking by law enforcement requires a warrant, and there’s legislation moving on Capitol Hill to settle the question in the affirmative. Should U.S. homeland security or intelligence officials make use of TruePosition’s LOCINT, they may have to go through a judge first.

But for this global geolocation company, the worldwide interest is piling up.

“We do go to a lot of defense and security trade shows,” Varano says. “Once people hear about the capabilities — they know cellphones are being used by bad guys doing bad things — their eyes widen and jaws drop. Typically, the deals grow in terms of the geographical area they wanna cover and the number of government agencies that want access to this type of intelligence.”
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011...tracking/all/1





Senator Kohl Says AT&T Deal Should be Blocked

Senator Herb Kohl, chairman of the U.S. Senate's antitrust subcommittee, urged the federal government to block AT&T's $39 billion plan to buy T-Mobile USA, a unit of Deutsche Telekom.

In a letter to the Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission, Kohl said that the deal "would likely cause substantial harm to competition and consumers, would be contrary to antitrust law and not in the public interest, and therefore should be blocked by your agencies."

Separately, three other lawmakers, Representatives Edward Markey, John Conyers and Anna Eshoo, also expressed concern about the deal on Wednesday, saying in a letter that they were worried about growing concentration in the wireless market.

In June, 76 lawmakers sent a letter to the Justice Department and FCC urging approval of the deal, citing AT&T's promises to improve access to poor and rural Americans.

The lawmakers have no direct role in reviewing the merger that was proposed in March, but Congress, through oversight of the regulators and by holding hearings on such deals, can influence the climate of public opinion.

Kohl's letter said the transaction would eliminate low-price competitor T-Mobile from the market.

If approved, the deal would vault No. 2 U.S. mobile service AT&T well ahead of current market leader Verizon Wireless and put nearly 80 percent of the wireless market in the hands of just two companies. Third placed Sprint Nextel has urged U.S. regulators to reject the deal.

Verizon Wireless is a venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group Plc.

In his letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, Kohl said AT&T and T-Mobile are head-to-head competitors and the deal would leave just three nationwide wireless carriers.

Kohl argued that the market should be evaluated on a national basis, rather than by local markets as antitrust regulators often do in telecommunications deals.

Kohl also argued that there were no effective remedies that the companies could offer regulators that would allow them to fix the deal, saying that any proposed fix would "involve extensive regulatory supervision and interference with the complex on-going business operations of AT&T."

Kohl is head of the Senate Judiciary Committee's antitrust subcommittee, which oversees the Justice Department's antitrust division.

AT&T said that it continued to believe the deal would be approved.

"We respect Senator Kohl," said an AT&T spokesman in an emailed statement. "However, we feel his view is inconsistent with antitrust law, is shared by few others, and ignores the many positive benefits and numerous supporters of the transaction."

The three representatives said in their letter that approval of the deal would be a backward step from nearly two decades of promoting competition by accepting a duopoly in the wireless marketplace.

"Such industry consolidation could reduce competition and increase consumer costs at a time our country can least afford it," they said in their letter to Holder and Genachowski. (Reporting by Diane Bartz; Editing by Phil Berlowitz and Tim Dobbyn)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...76J5ED20110720





Rogers Listens, Bumps Data Caps, Lets You Stream a Few Extra Netflix Movies a Month
Terrence O'Brien

Rogers hasn't exactly made a lot of fans with the rather draconian caps on its cable modem service. But the company wants you to know, it has heard your complaints and doesn't want to cut you off from your precious, bandwidth-intensive Netflix streams. That's why it's raising the limits on its three top tier plans later this month.

Extreme subscribers are getting a bump from 80GB to 100GB, Extreme Plus users from 125GB to 150GB, and Ultimate customers from 175GB to 250GB. The company is even boosting speeds, you know, to help you make more efficient use of that newly raised data ceiling -- from 15Mbps to 24Mbps for the Extreme and 25Mbps to 32Mbps for Extreme Plus. It's always nice to see a company listen to its customers, and come on, data caps aren't all that bad.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/21/r...-few-extra-net





Anticensorship in the Internet's Infrastructure
J. Alex Halderman

I'm pleased to announce a research result that Eric Wustrow, Scott Wolchok, Ian Goldberg, and I have been working on for the past 18 months: Telex, a new approach to circumventing state-level Internet censorship. Telex is markedly different from past anticensorship efforts, and we believe it has the potential to shift the balance of power in the censorship arms race.

What makes Telex different from previous approaches:

• Telex operates in the network infrastructure — at any ISP between the censor's network and non-blocked portions of the Internet — rather than at network end points. This approach, which we call “end-to-middle” proxying, can make the system robust against countermeasures (such as blocking) by the censor.
• Telex focuses on avoiding detection by the censor. That is, it allows a user to circumvent a censor without alerting the censor to the act of circumvention. It complements anonymizing services like Tor (which focus on hiding with whom the user is attempting to communicate instead of that that the user is attempting to have an anonymous conversation) rather than replacing them.
• Telex employs a form of deep-packet inspection — a technology sometimes used to censor communication — and repurposes it to circumvent censorship.
• Other systems require distributing secrets, such as encryption keys or IP addresses, to individual users. If the censor discovers these secrets, it can block the system. With Telex, there are no secrets that need to be communicated to users in advance, only the publicly available client software.
• Telex can provide a state-level response to state-level censorship. We envision that friendly countries would create incentives for ISPs to deploy Telex.

The Problem

Government Internet censors generally use firewalls in their network to block traffic bound for certain destinations, or containing particular content. For Telex, we assume that the censor government desires generally to allow Internet access (for economic or political reasons) while still preventing access to specifically blacklisted content and sites. That means Telex doesn't help in cases where a government pulls the plug on the Internet entirely. We further assume that the censor allows access to at least some secure HTTPS websites. This is a safe assumption, since blocking all HTTPS traffic would cut off practically every site that uses password logins.

Many anticensorship systems work by making an encrypted connection (called a “tunnel”) from the user's computer to a trusted proxy server located outside the censor's network. This server relays requests to censored websites and returns the responses to the user over the encrypted tunnel. This approach leads to a cat-and-mouse game, where the censor attempts to discover and block the proxy servers. Users need to learn the address and login information for a proxy server somehow, and it's very difficult to broadcast this information to a large number of users without the censor also learning it.

How Telex Works

Telex turns this approach on its head to create what is essentially a proxy server without an IP address. In fact, users don't need to know any secrets to connect. The user installs a Telex client app (perhaps by downloading it from an intermittently available website or by making a copy from a friend). When the user wants to visit a blacklisted site, the client establishes an encrypted HTTPS connection to a non-blacklisted web server outside the censor’s network, which could be a normal site that the user regularly visits. Since the connection looks normal, the censor allows it, but this connection is only a decoy.

The client secretly marks the connection as a Telex request by inserting a cryptographic tag into the headers. We construct this tag using a mechanism called public-key steganography. This means anyone can tag a connection using only publicly available information, but only the Telex service (using a private key) can recognize that a connection has been tagged.

As the connection travels over the Internet en route to the non-blacklisted site, it passes through routers at various ISPs in the core of the network. We envision that some of these ISPs would deploy equipment we call Telex stations. These devices hold a private key that lets them recognize tagged connections from Telex clients and decrypt these HTTPS connections. The stations then divert the connections to anti#censorship services, such as proxy servers or Tor entry points, which clients can use to access blocked sites. This creates an encrypted tunnel between the Telex user and Telex station at the ISP, redirecting connections to any site on the Internet.

Telex doesn't require active participation from the censored websites, or from the non-censored sites that serve as the apparent connection destinations. However, it does rely on ISPs to deploy Telex stations on network paths between the censor's network and many popular Internet destinations. Widespread ISP deployment might require incentives from governments.

Development so Far

At this point, Telex is a concept rather than a production system. It's far from ready for real users, but we have developed proof-of-concept software for researchers to experiment with. So far, there's only one Telex station, on a mock ISP that we're operating in our lab. Nevertheless, we have been using Telex for our daily web browsing for the past four months, and we're pleased with the performance and stability. We've even tested it using a client in Beijing and streamed HD YouTube videos, in spite of YouTube being censored there.

Telex illustrates how it is possible to shift the balance of power in the censorship arms race, by thinking big about the problem. We hope our work will inspire discussion and further research about the future of anticensorship technology.

You can find more information and prototype software at the Telex website, or read our technical paper, which will appear at Usenix Security 2011 in August.
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/j...infrastructure





Internet Bill Could Help Hackers, Experts Warn
Sara Jerome

Legislation cracking down on rogue websites could inadvertently help hackers who have struck major corporate and government targets in recent weeks, a group of computer science experts said on Thursday.

“America is getting hacked,” security consultant Dan Kaminsky said at a Center for Democracy and Technology briefing. “On a deep architectural level, we have to fix this or our economy cannot work.”

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., introduced the PROTECT IP Act to crack down on websites that sell copyrighted and counterfeited materials, and it passed out of committee in May.

But Kaminsky and other Internet architecture experts object to a section that requires Internet service providers to use a controversial method known as domain name system filtering to direct traffic away from websites selling copyrighted or counterfeit materials.

Authorities could use a court order to make service providers do the filtering--in essence, redirecting web users from a rogue website to another website that carries a notice about why the site couldn't be reached. But the filtering mandate could undermine online safety initiatives that hinge on use of Web addresses, the experts say.

The system that would allow filtering would also prevent providers from using an emerging security system known as DNSSEC. This security system sends credentialed messages between browsers and ISPs to ensure that users are taken to the proper website—and not a scam website—when they enter a URL.

Not only would a filtering requirement undermine the spread of DNSSEC, but hackers are likely to offer workarounds to private users. When clicked, these workarounds could also function as entry points, the computer architects argued.

Kaminski, Steve Crocker of the security consultancy Shinkuro, David Dagon of the Georgia Institute of Technology, Danny McPherson of security firm Verisign, and Paul Vixie of the Internet Systems Consortium wrote a white paper in May predicting that businesses relying on secure connections will quickly feel the repercussions of the proposal when hacking increases.

Kaminsky’s group said the redirection measures in the bill can be easily circumvented, adding that they have met with the White House, Commerce Department, and members of Congress to air their concerns, which are confined to the technical sections of the bill and not the entire proposal.

The Motion Picture Association of America, a key supporter of the bill, issued a statement on Thursday strongly disputing these claims. Web users are unlikely to reconfigure their computers to circumvent the filtering, the MPAA said, and the security standards cited by the authors ought to be flexible enough to allow for IP protection.

“Here's the bottom line: We rely on the Internet to do too much and be too much to let it decay into a lawless Wild West. We are confident that America's technology community, which leads the world in innovation and creativity, will be capable of developing a technical solution that helps address the serious challenge of rogue sites,” said Paul Brigner, chief technology officer at MPAA.

The technical grievances are just one sticking point in a bill that has received strong criticism from the Internet sector, which fears new costs involved with combating piracy. Civil libertarians fear an overly broad bill could suppress online speech. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., placed a hold on the bill earlier this year after it passed out of committee.

“By ceding control of the Internet to corporations through a private right of action, and to government agencies that do not sufficiently understand and value the Internet, [the legislation] represents a threat to our economic future and to our international objectives,” Wyden said at the time.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/...-warn-20110714





Sony Insurer Sues to Deny Data Breach Coverage
Ben Berkowitz

One of Sony Corp's (6758.T) insurers has asked a court to declare that it does not have to pay to defend the media and electronics conglomerate from mounting legal claims related to a massive data breach earlier this year.

The dispute comes as demand soars for "cyberinsurance," with companies seeking to protect themselves against customer claims and associated costs for data and identity theft.

How to write such policies has become a huge subject of debate in the insurance industry. [ID:nN13141787] [ID:nN1E76J0GU]

Zurich American Insurance Co asked a New York state court in documents filed late on Wednesday to rule it does not have to defend or indemnify Sony against any claims "asserted in the class-action lawsuits, miscellaneous claims, or potential future actions instituted by any state attorney general."

Zurich American, a unit of Zurich Financial Services (ZURN.VX), also sued units of Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance, AIG (AIG.N) and ACE Ltd (ACE.N), asking the court to clarify their responsibilities under various insurance policies they had written for Sony.

"Zurich doesn't think there's coverage, but to the extent there may be a duty to defend it wants to make sure all of the insurers with a potential duty to defend are contributing," said Richard Bortnick, an attorney at Cozen O'Connor and publisher of the digital law blog CyberInquirer.

Bortnick, who is not involved in the case, said that while Sony may be able to claim there was property damage as a result of the data breach, Zurich is likely to argue that the sort of general liability insurance it wrote for Sony was never intended to cover digital attacks.

Sony could not immediately be reached for comment. AIG declined to comment, and Mitsui Sumitomo could not immediately be reached.

In April, hackers accessed personal data for more than 100 million users of Sony's online video games. Sony has said it could not rule out that some 12.3 million credit card numbers had been obtained during the hacking.

In May, Sony said it was looking to its insurers to help pay for its massive data breach. [ID:nN05241925]

Sony has said it expects the hacking to drag down operating profit by 14 billion yen ($178 million) in the current financial year, including costs for boosting security measures.

55 Suits To Date

Zurich American, in its court papers, said 55 purported class-action complaints have been filed in the United States against Sony. The insurer also said Sony has been subject to investigations by state and federal regulators since the breach.

Zurich American has subsequently received claims for coverage from Sony under its policy, a commercial general liability policy written for Sony Computer Entertainment of America as of April 1.

The insurer said it does not have any obligation to defend any other Sony unit under that primary policy, since it only applies to the specific business in question.

In addition, Zurich American said its policy only covers the Sony unit for "bodily injury, property damage or personal and advertising injury." It said no such claims have been made in any of the class-action lawsuits.

Even if such claims had been made, Zurich American said, the policy had exclusions in place that would deny Sony coverage for the claims made.

The case is Zurich American Insurance Co and Zurich Insurance Co Ltd vs. Sony Corp of America et. al, Supreme Court of the State of New York, No. 651982/2011. ($1=78.7 yen) (Reporting by Ben Berkowitz, additional reporting by Liana Baker in New York; Editing by Ted Kerr)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...76K0V920110721





Anonymous & Lulz Security Statement

By: AnonymousIRC [15] | Jul 21st, 2011 |

Hello thar FBI and international law authorities,

We recently stumbled across the following article with amazement and a certain amount of amusement:

http://www.npr.org/2011/07/20/138555...nymous-hackers

The statements made by deputy assistant FBI director Steve Chabinsky in this
article clearly seem to be directed at Anonymous and Lulz Security, and we are
happy to provide you with a response.

You state:

"We want to send a message that chaos on the Internet is unacceptable,
[even if] hackers can be believed to have social causes, it's entirely
unacceptable to break into websites and commit unlawful acts."

Now let us be clear here, Mr. Chabinsky, while we understand that you and
your colleagues may find breaking into websites unacceptable, let us tell
you what WE find unacceptable:

* Governments lying to their citizens and inducing fear and terror to keep
them in control by dismantling their freedom piece by piece.

* Corporations aiding and conspiring with said governments while taking
advantage at the same time by collecting billions of funds for
federal contracts we all know they can't fulfil.

* Lobby conglomerates who only follow their agenda to push the profits
higher, while at the same time being deeply involved in governments around
the world with the only goal to infiltrate and corrupt them enough
so the status quo will never change.

These governments and corporations are our enemy. And we will continue to
fight them, with all methods we have at our disposal, and that certainly
includes breaking into their websites and exposing their lies.

We are not scared any more. Your threats to arrest us are meaningless to
us as you cannot arrest an idea. Any attempt to do so will make your
citizens more angry until they will roar in one gigantic choir. It is our
mission to help these people and there is nothing - absolutely nothing - you
can possibly to do make us stop.

"The Internet has become so important to so many people that we have to
ensure that the World Wide Web does not become the Wild Wild West."

Let me ask you, good sir, when was the Internet not the Wild Wild West? Do
you really believe you were in control of it at any point? You were not.

That does not mean that everyone behaves like an outlaw. You see, most
people do not behave like bandits if they have no reason to. We become bandits
on the Internet because you have forced our hand. The Anonymous bitchslap rings
through your ears like hacktivism movements of the 90s. We're back - and we're
not going anywhere. Expect us.
http://pastebin.com/RA15ix7S





Anonymous Hack One Gigabyte of Data from NATO Servers
Abhijit Bangera

The AnonymousIRC hacking organisation have claimed this afternoon that they have hacked into NATO servers. As one of there tweets says:

Yes, #NATO was breached. And we have lots of restricted material. With some simple injection. In the next days, wait for interesting data :)

AnonymousIRC today also tweeted the following

We are sitting on about one Gigabyte of data from NATO now, most of which we cannot publish as it would be irresponsible. But Oh NATO….

So did they really hack into NATO?

Well, to support this claim they did release NATO Restricted PDF. The pdf was later unavailable from the site. However Blottr did obtained the PDF and for security reasons didnt share the PDF. However some screenshot of the pdf were leaked.
http://geektech.in/archives/1523





Banned from Google+, Anonymous Creates Anonplus
Emil Protalinski

Google has reportedly banned a handful of Anonymous members from Google+ (it's not exactly clear how many accounts were shut down). The hacktivist group likened Google's actions to the stories of activists being banned from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, as well as governments blocking various websites using Internet censorship tools. As a result, Anonymous has decided to create its own social network: Anonplus, located at anonplus.com.

Currently, the site has only been announced. At the bottom left hand corner, it says "Revision :0.1 Alpha." While this version number is meant to indicate that the site is still very early in development, it's not a social network yet. There is no way to sign up or interact. Currently there's just one webpage with the Anonplus name, the motto "Social Networking Anonymously," and the heading "Welcome to Anonplus.com the Anonymous Social Networking site."

The only link is to the Dev Forum, which uses the Zetaboards forum software, and isn't even on the anonplus.com domain name. There are four subforums set up: The Logic, The Interface, General Chatter, and Staff Postions. At the time of writing, the forum already had over 100 registered members.

This initiative is an odd one because it jibes with what Anonymous is all about: getting things done anonymously. Still, it is technically possible to build a social network that doesn't share anything with anyone unless you specifically give it permission to. In fact, Anonplus will probably not encourage sharing information like your full name and location. Either way, the goal appears to be to build a social network where you can say and do anything you want.

"This is one social network that will not tolerate being shut down, censored, or oppressed - even in the face of blackout," an Anonymous spokesperson wrote in a statement. "We the people have had enough…enough of governments and corporations saying what's best for us - what's safe for our minds. The sheep era is over. The interwebz are no longer your prison."
http://www.techspot.com/news/44721-a...-anonplus.html





Hackers Hit Anonymous Social Network
Andy Chalk

Just two days after it was revealed to the world, the Anonymous Social Network has been hacked.

Disclaimer: this whole situation could very easily be one big, silly joke. It's certainly ridiculous enough to merit at least a little bit of disbelief. But if there's one thing I've learned during my life on the internet, it's that "ridiculous" does not equal "didn't happen," and thus I present to you the story of Anon-Plus and the hackers who hacked the hackers.

As you might recall, we found out a couple of days ago that Anonymous, tired of being pushed around by the bullies at Google, launched Anon-Plus, its very own social network, where anything goes except breach of privacy. While still in the very early stages of development when it was unveiled, the creators promised big things for the future, although the focus seemed to be more on sticking it to The Man rather than sharing photos and "likes."

But two days later, things appear to have taken an interesting and, yes, amusing twist. Those who went to the site at anonplus.com this morning found that it looked a little different than it did the night before, with a modified Anonymous logo, another logo for "Cyber-Warrior Tim" and the following message:

Quote:
We Are TURKIYE. We Are AKINCILAR.

This logo suits you more..How dare you rise against to the World..Do you really think that you are Ottoman Empire?
We thought you before that you cannot challenge with the world and we teach you cannot be social
Now all of you go to your doghouse..
Akincilar is the name of a town and district in Turkey, and also the handle used by a group of presumably-Turkish hackers who enjoy defacing random websites with militantly pro-Turkish messages. What the group has against Anonymous is a mystery at this point, but it's a safe bet that Anonymous will not just go to its doghouse as Akincilar suggested.

UPDATE: Anonymous has begun to undo the "damage" caused by Akincilar and while I still think the whole thing may be a lulzy ruse, the colorful comments directed at those responsible do tend to suggest that the attack was legitimate. If so, the fun might just be getting started.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news...Social-Network





FBI Raids Homes, Seizes Computers in Hacking Probe
AP

The FBI has raided several New York homes during a probe into the hacker group Anonymous.

FBI spokesman Jim Margolin says agents searched residences and seized computers at one address in Brooklyn and three on Long Island. He declined further comment. The targets of the searches were not named. The raids were first reported by FoxNews.com.

Anonymous is an amorphous, loosely organized group of hackers sympathetic to WikiLeaks. It has claimed responsibility for numerous attacks against corporate and government websites around the world.

The group claims credit for disrupting the websites of Visa and Mastercard in December when the credit card companies stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.

It is known for attacks on the Church of Scientology and Kiss bassist Gene Simmons.
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/201...ous-Raids.html





U.S. Arrests 14 for Roles in PayPal Cyber Attack
Jeremy Pelofsky and Diane Bartz

U.S. authorities on Tuesday arrested 16 people on charges they participated in major cyber attacks, including an attempt to cripple eBay's PayPal website as retribution for dropping WikiLeaks as a client.

FBI agents arrested 14 people in nine states and Washington, D.C., for the PayPal attack, which occurred last December and was allegedly coordinated by the hacking group Anonymous. It was the biggest response by authorities tied to a recent spate of high-profile cyber attacks.

Financial institutions like PayPal, Visa and MasterCard withdrew services from WikiLeaks last year after the website published thousands of sometimes embarrassing secret U.S. diplomatic reports that have caused strains between Washington and numerous allies.

Hackers responded with so-called distributed denial-of-service attacks that flooded the companies' websites with requests for information and rendered them unavailable to legitimate users, according to the indictment filed in federal court in San Jose, California.

PayPal suffered attacks for several days last December. Company spokesman Anuj Nayar said he could not comment on current legal action.

The 14 individuals were charged with conspiracy, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison if convicted, and intentional damage to a protected computer, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

The accused ranged in age from 20 to 42 and lived in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio.

One of the difficulties authorities have had tracking down hacking attacks is that they can be launched from anywhere and can come from an individual who can mask his location.

Law enforcement authorities believe Anonymous is mostly made up of hackers believed to be in their teens and early 20s. The group has taken credit for numerous attacks, including attacks on Bank of America, Sony and the Malaysian government.

"The fact that they have been tracked back and that some of them have been arrested is a significant development," said Mark Rasch, a former chief of the Justice Department's cyber crimes unit and now director of Cybersecurity and Privacy Consulting for the government technology services firm CSC.

Cyber Attack Probes Continue

In a likely sign investigations are intensifying, U.S. authorities executed more than 35 search warrants around the country in their investigation of coordinated cyber attacks against major companies and organizations, the Justice Department said.

The Justice Department and FBI have been under pressure to crack down on hackers who have stepped up their attacks on corporate and government websites in the past several months in a bid to thwart their activities.

Stewart Baker, a former top official of the Homeland Security Department, said the FBI probably gave the case extra attention because of the public taunting the bureau received from Anonymous and related groups.

"It does look like some of these guys (hackers) were just fools. The PayPal attack in particular," said Baker, now at the law firm Steptoe and Johnson LLP. "It looks like these bozos must have just said 'Cool, an attack on PayPal. You can use my machine.'
"I think it makes it a lot less likely that that people will join the next digital lynch mob," he said.

Another related arrest came in New Mexico where an employee for a contractor for AT&T's wireless service faced charges of accessing a computer without authorization by allegedly downloading thousands of documents related to its 4G data network and LTE mobile broadband network.

The data was subsequently downloaded to a file-sharing web site in April and another one of the loosely organized groups of hackers, Lulz Security, subsequently publicized the data breach, the complaint said. AT&T had no comment on the arrest.

The other man arrested by FBI agents was in Florida, where he was charged with illegally accessing Tampa Bay Infragard's website and uploading three malicious files. The group is an FBI-sponsored organization focused on critical infrastructure.

The Justice Department said British police arrested one person and Dutch authorities arrested four for cyber crimes related to recent attacks on major companies and organizations.

(This story was corrected in the first paragraph to make clear the attack attempted to cripple PayPal but did not cripple the site.)

(Additional reporting by Basil Katz and Christine Kearney in New York, Jim Finkle in Boston, Dan Levine and Alistair Barrin San Francisco; editing by Todd Eastham and Bill Trott)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...76I4E320110720





Papers from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling
33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
and which should be available to everyone at no cost, but most
have previously only been made available at high prices through
paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR.

Limited access to the documents here is typically sold for $19
USD per article, though some of the older ones are available as
cheaply as $8. Purchasing access to this collection one article
at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Also included is the basic factual metadata allowing you to
locate works by title, author, or publication date, and a
checksum file to allow you to check for corruption.

ef8c02959e947d7f4e4699f399ade838431692d972661f145b782c2fa3eb cc6a sha256sum.txt

I've had these files for a long time, but I've been afraid that if I
published them I would be subject to unjust legal harassment by those who
profit from controlling access to these works.

I now feel that I've been making the wrong decision.

On July 19th 2011, Aaron Swartz was criminally charged by the US Attorney
General's office for, effectively, downloading too many academic papers
from JSTOR.

Academic publishing is an odd systemΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥the authors are not paid for their
writing, nor are the peer reviewers (they're just more unpaid academics),
and in some fields even the journal editors are unpaid. Sometimes the
authors must even pay the publishers.

And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageously
expensive pieces of literature you can buy. In the past, the high access
fees supported the costly mechanical reproduction of niche paper journals,
but online distribution has mostly made this function obsolete.

As far as I can tell, the money paid for access today serves little
significant purpose except to perpetuate dead business models. The
"publish or perish" pressure in academia gives the authors an impossibly
weak negotiating position, and the existing system has enormous inertia.

Those with the most power to change the system--the long-tenured luminary
scholars whose works give legitimacy and prestige to the journals, rather
than the other way around--are the least impacted by its failures. They
are supported by institutions who invisibly provide access to all of the
resources they need. And as the journals depend on them, they may ask
for alterations to the standard contract without risking their career on
the loss of a publication offer. Many don't even realize the extent to
which academic work is inaccessible to the general public, nor do they
realize what sort of work is being done outside universities that would
benefit by it.

Large publishers are now able to purchase the political clout needed
to abuse the narrow commercial scope of copyright protection, extending
it to completely inapplicable areas: slavish reproductions of historic
documents and art, for example, and exploiting the labors of unpaid
scientists. They're even able to make the taxpayers pay for their
attacks on free society by pursuing criminal prosecution (copyright has
classically been a civil matter) and by burdening public institutions
with outrageous subscription fees.

Copyright is a legal fiction representing a narrow compromise: we give
up some of our natural right to exchange information in exchange for
creating an economic incentive to author, so that we may all enjoy more
works. When publishers abuse the system to prop up their existence,
when they misrepresent the extent of copyright coverage, when they use
threats of frivolous litigation to suppress the dissemination of publicly
owned works, they are stealing from everyone else.

Several years ago I came into possession, through rather boring and
lawful means, of a large collection of JSTOR documents.

These particular documents are the historic back archives of the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal SocietyΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥a prestigious scientific
journal with a history extending back to the 1600s.

The portion of the collection included in this archive, ones published
prior to 1923 and therefore obviously in the public domain, total some
18,592 papers and 33 gigabytes of data.

The documents are part of the shared heritage of all mankind,
and are rightfully in the public domain, but they are not available
freely. Instead the articles are available at $19 each--for one month's
viewing, by one person, on one computer. It's a steal. From you.

When I received these documents I had grand plans of uploading them to
Wikipedia's sister site for reference works, WikisourceΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥ where they
could be tightly interlinked with Wikipedia, providing interesting
historical context to the encyclopedia articles. For example, Uranus
was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel; why not take a look at
the paper where he originally disclosed his discovery? (Or one of the
several follow on publications about its satellites, or the dozens of
other papers he authored?)

But I soon found the reality of the situation to be less than appealing:
publishing the documents freely was likely to bring frivolous litigation
from the publishers.

As in many other cases, I could expect them to claim that their slavish
reproductionΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥scanning the documentsΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥ created a new copyright
interest. Or that distributing the documents complete with the trivial
watermarks they added constituted unlawful copying of that mark. They
might even pursue strawman criminal charges claiming that whoever obtained
the files must have violated some kind of anti-hacking laws.

In my discreet inquiry, I was unable to find anyone willing to cover
the potentially unbounded legal costs I risked, even though the only
unlawful action here is the fraudulent misuse of copyright by JSTOR and
the Royal Society to withhold access from the public to that which is
legally and morally everyone's property.

In the meantime, and to great fanfare as part of their 350th anniversary,
the RSOL opened up "free" access to their historic archivesΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥but "free"
only meant "with many odious terms", and access was limited to about
100 articles.

All too often journals, galleries, and museums are becoming not
disseminators of knowledgeΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥as their lofty mission statements
suggestΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥but censors of knowledge, because censoring is the one thing
they do better than the Internet does. Stewardship and curation are
valuable functions, but their value is negative when there is only one
steward and one curator, whose judgment reigns supreme as the final word
on what everyone else sees and knows. If their recommendations have value
they can be heeded without the coercive abuse of copyright to silence
competition.

The liberal dissemination of knowledge is essential to scientific
inquiry. More than in any other area, the application of restrictive
copyright is inappropriate for academic works: there is no sticky question
of how to pay authors or reviewers, as the publishers are already not
paying them. And unlike 'mere' works of entertainment, liberal access
to scientific work impacts the well-being of all mankind. Our continued
survival may even depend on it.

If I can remove even one dollar of ill-gained income from a poisonous
industry which acts to suppress scientific and historic understanding,
then whatever personal cost I suffer will be justifiedΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥it will be one
less dollar spent in the war against knowledge. One less dollar spent
lobbying for laws that make downloading too many scientific papers
a crime.

I had considered releasing this collection anonymously, but others pointed
out that the obviously overzealous prosecutors of Aaron Swartz would
probably accuse him of it and add it to their growing list of ridiculous
charges. This didn't sit well with my conscience, and I generally believe
that anything worth doing is worth attaching your name to.

I'm interested in hearing about any enjoyable discoveries or even useful
applications which come of this archive.

- ----
Greg Maxwell - July 20th 2011
gmaxwell@gmail.com Bitcoin: 14csFEJHk3SYbkBmajyJ3ktpsd2TmwDEBb

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http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6554...Society_ _fro





Anonymous To Release Sun, News Of The World Emails Today?
Desire Athow

After having pwned Rupert Murdoch's flagship news website, thesun.co.uk, by redirecting its readers to a spoof front page and pilfer its email servers, Anonymous' unofficial mouthpiece, Sabu, has revealed that the group is "sitting on [the sun's & NOTW's] emails" with a press release from Anonymous & possibly more coming in a few hours.

While that website has already been taken down (you can check a screen capture of the web page here), the email bounty is likely to be potentially more damaging with Sabu releasing details of two of the Sun's top three employees, Rebekah Wade and Bill Akass, the former editors of the Sun and News of the World respectively as well as Lee Wells & Danny Rogers, Editorial Support Manager at News International and Sun Online Editorial Manager respectively, as a taster of what's coming next.

In addition, the phone numbers of Pete Picton, the former editor of Sun Online, Harvey Shaw, the Publishing Operations Team Manager, Chris Hampartsoumian, the former Online editor of TimesOnline were also part of the leak on Anonymous' Twitter account.

Numerous news outlets, many being rivals to the Sun, reported that the internal webmail systems of the Sun have been taken down as a precautionary measure and that passwords have been reset and remote access rescinded temporarily.

Sabu claimed that Anonymous managed to get root access on one server while another one was a "buggy [Oracle] Solaris Kernel" which "kept freezing" on them so they had to redirect the site's traffic rather than hack it altogether. He also warns "Media. Federal Contractors. Royal Families" that Anonymous "will be going hard on you".
http://www.itproportal.com/2011/07/1...-emails-today/





LulzSec Claims to Have News International Emails

Member of hacking group LulzSec says it will make public 4GB of emails it claims were taken from attack on servers at the Sun
Charles Arthur

One of the members of the LulzSec hacking group has claimed on Twitter that the group has got 4GB of emails taken from the Sun and the "royal family" which may be released as soon as lunchtime on Thursday.

The claim follows a hacking attack against News International on Tuesday night during which members of LulzSec apparently broke into computer systems there and redirected readers of the Sun's website to a faked page claiming News Corp chief executive Rupert Murdoch had been found dead.

Significantly, the group also seems to have broken into the email database at News International.

Some accounts belonging to Anonymous also began tweeting email addresses and passwords for staff at News International, including what seemed to be an email account and password for Rebekah Brooks under her previous married name of Wade while at the Sun.

The password appeared to be valid based on the contents of the tweet, which included the encrypted form of the password.

News International reacted by closing down all external access to its webmail systems and forcing users to reset their passwords.

The company declined to comment at the time on whether the hackers might have had external access to email accounts, but the fact that it shut down the access suggests that it feared they might.

Equally, the hackers almost certainly would not have begun tweeting details of their find without having first exploited it.

Contacts within Anonymous have told Guardian journalists that News International's email systems were being probed last week and that downloads were being made then.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...-international





Troubles That Money Can’t Dispel
David Carr

“Bury your mistakes,” Rupert Murdoch is fond of saying. But some mistakes don’t stay buried, no matter how much money you throw at them.

Time and again in the United States and elsewhere, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation has used blunt force spending to skate past judgment, agreeing to payments to settle legal cases and, undoubtedly more important, silence its critics. In the case of News America Marketing, its obscure but profitable in-store and newspaper insert marketing business, the News Corporation has paid out about $655 million to make embarrassing charges of corporate espionage and anticompetitive behavior go away.

That kind of strategy provides a useful window into the larger corporate culture at a company that is now engulfed by a wildfire burning out control in London, sparked by the hacking of a murdered young girl’s phone and fed by a steady stream of revelations about seedy, unethical and sometimes criminal behavior at the company’s newspapers.

So far, 10 people have been arrested, including, on Sunday, Rebekah Brooks, the head of News International. Les Hinton, who ran News International before her and most recently was the head of Dow Jones, resigned on Friday. Now we are left to wonder whether Mr. Murdoch will be forced to make an Abraham-like sacrifice and abandon his son James, the former heir apparent.

The News Corporation may be hoping that it can get back to business now that some of the responsible parties have been held to account — and that people will see the incident as an aberrant byproduct of the world of British tabloids. But that seems like a stretch. The damage is likely to continue to mount, perhaps because the underlying pathology is hardly restricted to those who have taken the fall.

As Mark Lewis, the lawyer for the family of the murdered girl, Milly Dowler, said after Ms. Brooks resigned, “This is not just about one individual but about the culture of an organization.”

Well put. That organization has used strategic acumen to assemble a vast and lucrative string of media properties, but there is also a long history of rounded-off corners. It has skated on regulatory issues, treated an editorial oversight committee as if it were a potted plant (at The Wall Street Journal), and made common cause with restrictive governments (China) and suspect businesses — all in the relentless pursuit of More. In the process, Mr. Murdoch has always been frank in his impatience with the rules of others.

According to The Guardian, whose bulldog reporting pulled back the curtain on the phone-hacking scandal, the News Corporation paid out $1.6 million in 2009 to settle claims related to the scandal. While expedient, and inexpensive — the company still has gobs of money on hand — it was probably not a good strategy in the long run. If some of those cases had gone to trial, it would have had the effect of lancing the wound.

Litigation can have an annealing effect on companies, forcing them to re-examine the way they do business. But as it was, the full extent and villainy of the hacking was never known because the News Corporation paid serious money to make sure it stayed that way.

And the money the company reportedly paid out to hacking victims is chicken feed compared with what it has spent trying to paper over the tactics of News America in a series of lawsuits filed by smaller competitors in the United States.

In 2006 the state of Minnesota accused News America of engaging in unfair trade practices, and the company settled by agreeing to pay costs and not to falsely disparage its competitors.

In 2009, a federal case in New Jersey brought by a company called Floorgraphics went to trial, accusing News America of, wait for it, hacking its way into Floorgraphics’s password protected computer system.

The complaint summed up the ethos of News America nicely, saying it had “illegally accessed plaintiff’s computer system and obtained proprietary information” and “disseminated false, misleading and malicious information about the plaintiff.”

The complaint stated that the breach was traced to an I.P. address registered to News America and that after the break-in, Floorgraphics lost contracts from Safeway, Winn-Dixie and Piggly Wiggly.

Much of the lawsuit was based on the testimony of Robert Emmel, a former News America executive who had become a whistle-blower. After a few days of testimony, the News Corporation had heard enough. It settled with Floorgraphics for $29.5 million and then, days later, bought it, even though it reportedly had sales of less than $1 million.

But the problems continued, and keeping a lid on News America turned out to be a busy and expensive exercise. At the beginning of this year, it paid out $125 million to Insignia Systems to settle allegations of anticompetitive behavior and violations of antitrust laws. And in the most costly payout, it spent half a billion dollars in 2010 on another settlement, just days before the case was scheduled to go to trial. The plaintiff, Valassis Communications, had already won a $300 million verdict in Michigan, but dropped the lawsuit in exchange for $500 million and an agreement to cooperate on certain ventures going forward.

The News Corporation is a very large, well-capitalized company, but that single payout to Valassis represented one-fifth of the company’s net income in 2010 and matched the earnings of the entire newspaper and information division that News America was a part of.

Because consumers (and journalists) don’t much care who owns the coupon machine in the snack aisle, the cases have not received much attention. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t a useful window into the broader culture at the News Corporation.

News America was led by Paul V. Carlucci, who, according to Forbes, used to show the sales staff the scene in “The Untouchables” in which Al Capone beats a man to death with a baseball bat. Mr. Emmel testified that Mr. Carlucci was clear about the guiding corporate philosophy.

According to Mr. Emmel’s testimony, Mr. Carlucci said that if there were employees uncomfortable with the company’s philosophy — “bed-wetting liberals in particular was the description he used” Mr. Emmelt testified — then he could arrange to have those employees “outplaced from the company.”

Clearly, given the size of the payouts, along with the evidence and testimony in the lawsuits, the News Corporation must have known it had another rogue on its hands, one who needed to be dealt with. After all, Mr. Carlucci, who became chairman and chief executive of News America in 1997, had overseen a division that had drawn the scrutiny of government investigators and set off lawsuits that chipped away at the bottom line.

And while Mr. Murdoch might reasonably maintain that he did not have knowledge of the culture of permission created by Mr. Hinton and Ms. Brooks, by now he has 655 million reasons to know that Mr. Carlucci colored outside the lines.

So what became of him? Mr. Carlucci, as it happens, became the publisher of The New York Post in 2005 and continues to serve as head of News America, which doesn’t exactly square with Mr. Murdoch’s recently stated desire to “absolutely establish our integrity in the eyes of the public.”

A representative for the News Corporation did not respond to a request for comment.

Even as the flames of the scandal begin to edge closer to Mr. Murdoch’s door, anybody betting against his business survival will most likely come away disappointed. He has been in deep trouble before and not only survived, but prospered. The News Corporation’s reputation may be under water, but the company itself is very liquid, with $11.8 billion in cash on hand and more than $2.5 billion of annual free cash flow.

Still, money will fix a lot of things, but not everything. When you throw money onto a burning fire, it becomes fuel and nothing more.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/b...nt-dispel.html





MPs Publish Report on Unauthorised Tapping or Hacking of Mobile Communications

The Commons Home Affairs Committee "deplores" News International's attempt to "deliberately thwart" the original investigation into phone hacking in 2005-06 but also states that the police set aside a huge amount of material that could have identified other perpetrators and victims.

Report: Unauthorised tapping or hacking of mobile communications (PDF PDF 515 KB)

John Yates

The committee agrees with John Yates's own assessment that his 2009 review of this investigation was "very poor", that he did not ask the right questions and that he was guilty of a "serious misjudgement".

Andy Hayman

The committee criticises Andy Hayman's cavalier attitude towards his contacts with those in News International who were under investigation which, even if entirely above board, risked seriously undermining confidence in the impartiality of the police, and accuses him of deliberate prevarication in order to mislead the committee. It urges the swift and thorough investigation of allegations that payments were made to police officers by the media, which will help to establish whether or not such payments may have influenced police inquiries into phone hacking.

DAC Sue Akers

The committee welcomes DAC Sue Akers's decision to contact all potential victims of phone hacking by the News of the World as part of the current investigation, but is alarmed that only 170 have as yet been informed. At this rate it would take years to inform all of the several thousands of people potentially affected. The committee therefore recommends that extra resources are allocated to her investigation, by the Government directly if necessary.

Current laws

The committee also expresses concern about both the scope and understanding of current laws on phone hacking, with prosecutors and police still arguing over the meaning of relevant sections of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. However, this was no reason for the Metropolitan Police to limit their investigation of these matters.

Information Commissioner

Finally, potential victims of phone hacking should be given a means of seeking formal advice from the Information Commissioner and easier access to redress. The Information Commissioner should be given additional powers to deal with breaches of data protection, including phone hacking and blagging. Mobile phone companies should give greater prominence to security advice in the information provided to their customers.

Committee Chair Right Hon Keith Vaz MP said:

"There has been a catalogue of failures by the Metropolitan Police, and deliberate attempts by News International to thwart the various investigations. Police and prosecutors have been arguing over the interpretation of the law.

The new inquiry requires additional resources and if these are not forthcoming, it will take years to inform all the potential victims. The victims of hacking should have come first and I am shocked that this has not happened."
http://www.parliament.uk/business/co...acking-report/





Rebekah Brooks' Husband 'Accidentally' Has Computer Thrown Out
Hunter

This. Is. Hilarious.

Detectives are examining a computer, paperwork and a phone found in a bin near the riverside London home of Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of News International. [...]

It is understood the bag was handed into security at around 3pm and that shortly afterwards, Brooks's husband, Charlie, arrived and tried to reclaim it. He was unable to prove the bag was his and the security guard refused to release it. [...]

Wilson said Charlie Brooks had left the bag with a friend who was returning it, but dropped it in the wrong part of the garage. When asked how the bag ended up in a bin he replied: "The suggestion is that a cleaner thought it was rubbish and put it in the bin."


Now, I don't know if anything will come of this or not. I just love the incredible story. Your wife has just been arrested in a case involving, among other things, covering up evidence. And a computer, phone and "paperwork" from your house just happens to get thrown into the trash soon afterward.

So the excuse is, some cleaning person saw your computer, phone and papers, and they just happened to be in a bag (no further definition on what the word "bag" means, in this context), because that's how you always move your computer, phone and papers around ... and so the cleaning person mistook it for trash and threw it away. Oops!

Oh—and into someone else's garbage. You know, not your bin, but a bin belonging to a nearby shopping center.

Yeah. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Police are looking at security footage to see who dropped the computer off: no word yet on what they found. Maybe her husband's story will turn out to be true; maybe it won't. All I know is that this is either one of the more unfortunate coincidences in recent police history, or a crime-and-punishment Darwin award in the making.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/0...ter-thrown-out





Ex-Executives Dispute Testimony of Murdoch Son
Jo Becker and Don Van Natta Jr.

Two former News International executives publicly contradicted James Murdoch’s testimony to a parliamentary committee, saying Thursday that they told him of evidence in 2008 that suggested that phone hacking at one of the company’s tabloid newspapers was more widespread.

The former executives said they informed Mr. Murdoch at the time that he was authorizing an unusually large secret settlement of a lawsuit brought by a hacking victim.

Mr. Murdoch, who runs the News Corporation’s European and Asian operations, including News International, the British subsidiary, told the committee on Tuesday that he agreed to pay £725,000, which was then about $1.4 million, in the case because it made financial sense. He testified that he was not aware at the time of the evidence, which most likely would have become public had the case proceeded and undermined the company’s assertion that hacking was limited to “a lone rogue reporter.”

But Colin Myler, the former editor of the tabloid, The News of the World, and Tom Crone, the former News International legal manager, said Mr. Murdoch was “mistaken” in his testimony delivered to the parliamentary committee. They said he knew when settling the lawsuit brought by a soccer union leader, Gordon Taylor, about a crucial piece of evidence that had been turned over to the company: an e-mail marked “for Neville” containing the transcript of a hacked cellphone message, apparently a reference to the paper’s chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck.

“In fact, we did inform him of the ‘for Neville’ e-mail which had been produced to us by Gordon Taylor’s lawyers,” Mr. Myler and Mr. Crone said in the statement released Thursday night.

The circumstances surrounding the settlement of the Taylor case are a focus of the parliamentary inquiry because they could shed light on whether there was an effort by News International to obscure the extent of the hacking. It was the first lawsuit brought by a hacking victim, and it came while the company, which owned the tabloid, was reeling from the 2007 guilty pleas of Clive Goodman, the paper’s royal reporter, and Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator, for hacking the phones of the royal household.

Mr. Myler and Mr. Crone’s statement seems to mark a round of finger-pointing, coming days after the testimony of Mr. Murdoch and his father, Rupert, the News Corporation chairman, who testified that he was not to blame for the hacking and was let down by people he trusted.

Mr. Myler and Mr. Crone spoke out because they were angered that the company was telling reporters that they had failed to tell James Murdoch about critical facts in the civil lawsuit, three executives said in interviews. In a statement, Mr. Murdoch said, “I stand by my testimony to the select committee.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Murdoch also told the committee that he “did not get involved in any of the negotiations directly” and that the settlement seemed reasonable at the time. Beyond Mr. Myler and Mr. Crone, other News International executives, as well as members of Mr. Taylor’s legal team, painted a picture of Mr. Murdoch as being quite engaged in keeping the case from going to trial. They say that the size of the settlement he authorized reflected that.

In July 2008, News International’s chief financial officer, Clive Milner, was asked to endorse a check for £725,000. He was not told what it was for — only that “the check is for James Murdoch,” according to a company official with direct knowledge of the matter and an account Mr. Milner has shared with friends.

The negotiations were so tightly held that only Mr. Crone, Mr. Myler and Mr. Murdoch knew about them, said two company officials. The officials said that even employees who were typically involved in legal decisions did not learn of the settlement until it leaked in a newspaper.

“I was gobsmacked” at the amount, said one of them.

Mr. Murdoch testified on Tuesday that the size of the settlement reflected a judgment “by distinguished outside counsel” that the company was going to lose the case and that potential damages that could run up to about $1.6 million at today’s rates.

But the $1.4 million settlement was a record amount for a privacy case. At the time, cases involving published stories shown to have violated the privacy of claimants were settling for $6,000 to $24,000, lawyers said. Another factor that made the Taylor settlement unusual was that The News of the World had only prepared, but not published, an article about Mr. Taylor.

On July 24, 2008, while the negotiations in the Taylor settlement case were drawing to a close, Max Mosley, a former auto racing executive, won a $120,000 judgment over a front-page article in The News of the World that falsely accused him of engaging in “sick Nazi orgies.” That settlement was considered a record at the time. In current hacking cases, News International itself has said any settlement beyond about $160,000 is unreasonable.

When Mr. Taylor’s legal team began negotiations, the company offered about $99,000. But the figure kept rising as the company was made aware of the evidence that Mr. Taylor’s lawyer had obtained by court order.

The evidence came from a trove Scotland Yard had seized during the investigation of the hacking of the royal household’s phones from the home of Mr. Mulcaire, the private investigator who worked for the tabloid.

In addition to the “for Neville” e-mail, News International lawyers were also shown a draft of the unpublished article about what was said to have been an affair between Mr. Taylor and his assistant. The article was based on a voice mail left on his phone by the assistant that said, “Thank you for yesterday.” In fact, the woman’s gratitude was for a speech Mr. Taylor gave at her father’s funeral, according to his lawyer, Mark Lewis.

Among the evidence made available to News International was an audiotape of Mr. Mulcaire instructing a reporter on how to hack phone messages. It turned out that the reporter worked for another newspaper, but at the time, company executives believed he worked for them, said one executive.

The turning point in negotiations came in April 2008 after a judge ordered Mr. Mulcaire, in open court, to identify “Neville” and the reporter whose voice was heard on the audiotape. That is when News International increased the offer to about $798,000 for Mr. Taylor and $648,000 for legal costs, according to three people with direct knowledge of the talks. The legal fees represented 100 percent of the amount requested by Mr. Taylor’s legal team, which occurs only rarely in such cases, the three people said.

“It very quickly became silly money,” said a person with knowledge of the negotiations.

Indeed, counting News International’s own legal bills, the total cost to the company exceeded the $1.6 million figure, at today’s exchange rates, that Mr. Murdoch testified he worried the company would have to pay if the case went to trial.

After Mr. Murdoch insisted that he knew nothing about the underlying facts, Tom Watson, a Labour member of Parliament, said to him on Tuesday, “But you paid an astronomical sum, and there was no reason to.”

Mr. Murdoch told the committee that he thought it was “simply a matter” relating to Mr. Goodman’s actions, and that he acted on the advice of both Mr. Myler and his counsel.

Pressed about his lack of knowledge — at one point Adrian Sanders, a Liberal Democrat member of Parliament, asked him if he “was familiar with the term willful blindness” — Mr. Murdoch explained that he had only just taken over the News Corporation’s Europe and Asia operations when he was advised, in early 2008, to settle the case.

He said that even with the benefit of hindsight, he would do it again, but added that “if I knew that what we know now,” he would also have contacted the police and “moved faster to get to the bottom of these allegations.”

Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/22/w...22murdoch.html





Twitter Rages: Murdoch's Times of London Famine Cartoon 'Most Offensive' Thing Yet?
Mallory Simon


An editorial cartoon in the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times of London is causing some outrage on Twitter.

If you thought the outrage over the phone-hacking scandal was starting to die down, The Times of London, one of Rupert Murdoch's own papers, may have brought it straight back into the spotlight.

An editorial cartoon published Thursday morning in the paper with the title "Priorities" shows starving people in Somalia saying "We've had a bellyful of phone-hacking ... " It's causing quite a firestorm on Twitter. You can access the newspaper's site here, but you won't be able to get past the pay wall without a subscription. The paper has not yet returned calls for comment.

The Guardian's Deputy Editor Katharine Viner (@KathViner) tweeted a link to a photo of the cartoon this morning and asked what people thought of it.

And boy, did she get a response. From regular citizens in the U.S. and UK, to politicians, media specialists and PR folks, the responses are rolling in at a mile a minute.

The responses generally fall in one of two directions: utter disgust or the notion that while the cartoon makes a point, having it come from a Murdoch-owned newspaper makes it just straight ridiculous. For some, it's being seen as an attempt to try to get readers to move away from the story and focus on something else.

The cartoon does come a day after the questioning of British Prime Minister David Cameron, who has also become a part of the phone-hacking story, during which several UK lawmakers argued that perhaps it was time to move on to more pressing issues.

Emma Gilbey Keller, who is married to New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller and is a contributor to Vanity Fair Daily, had one of the most retweeted responses to the cartoon.

She tweeted the following: @EMMAGKELLER: "Anyone else wondering if this cartoon from today's London Times is part of the Edelman strategy? http://yfrog.com/kezx9np"

Keller is referring to the giant public relations firm that is now working with Murdoch and his team to try to repair their damaged image after the phone-hacking scandal.

There's been a lot said in the media and online about how the Murdoch empire has handled the scandal. In a post on media blog Mediaite about the cartoon, writer Alex Alvarez calls it a "tacky, potentially offensive cartoon" and says it probably isn't the right way to divert attention.

"There are several methods of dealing with a much-publicized scandal, some less advisable than others. Issuing a public apology for mistakes or poor judgment? Pretty much always a good idea. Holding individuals responsible for their roles and dealing with them accordingly? Usually works out pretty well," she writes. "Publishing a tacky, potentially offensive cartoon making light of serious allegations AND life-threatening poverty? Oddly enough, that rarely ever works."

She does, however, agree that more attention needs to be paid to the crisis in Somalia and elsewhere - and she's got a suggestion for what The Times of London may do to really make a statement about the issue.

"We agree that eradicating childhood hunger is still a global priority and that outlets diligently, even obsessively, covering the phone hacking scandal were probably not devoting too many headlines to the plight of starving, saucer-eyed children in the first place? Although, hey. Maybe the Times of London can change the tide by donating to charities fighting to end hunger, or devoting an issue to poverty instead of offering up condescending, out of touch editorials that only work to reflect poorly on its already beleaguered employer."

And there is indeed a major problem in Somalia. The president has issued an urgent appeal for international aid as his drought-stricken country faces a famine that has left half of the population in dire need.

Anna Holmes, founder of the popular news blog Jezebel.com, which caters to women, acknowledged in response to someone else that she believes there's truth in the cartoon that the famine news has been buried. But she tweeted (@AnnaHolmes) "the media/public can walk and chew gum at the same time. They can talk about hacking *and* famine."

Ryan Bourne, an economic and statistical researcher at the UK Centre for Policy Studies, tweeted (@RyanCPS) "I know the point The Times are getting at, but I find this cartoon very distasteful."

Was it an attempt to guilt-trip readers into changing their focus? Political Scrapbook, a political blog, tweeted (@psbook) that the cartoon was an attempt to tell us to "move on," and in an post on its site, it said "the third and most tasteless prong of resistance has come from a graphic in The Times depicting children in Somalia, suggesting that talking about phone hacking has prolonged their starvation. No one is stopping The Times covering both stories."

Jeff Jarvis, well-known media critic, journalism professor and creator of the BuzzMachine blog, (@jeffjarvis) simply tweeted: "Good God. Murdoch's troops no bounds" in response to Viner's search for feedback on the cartoon.

Others, like Tim Karr, campaign director of the Free Press, a media reform group, called it "shameless." A lengthy search through the responses finds similar synonyms and sentiments, including that it was "brutal."

One of the most retweeted comments in response to Emma Gilbey Keller's tweet was from (@TeresaKopec), who said the "Cartoon in Murdoch's London Times may be most offensive thing they've done yet."

There's no doubt the comments will keep coming, and in a variety of forms, just as the tentacles of the story continue to grow and the implications of the scandal continue to murk the media waters.
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/07/21...ive-thing-yet/





Lulz? The ‘Murdoch Leaks Project’ Gets A Landing Page
Rip Empson

Over the last week, there’s been quite a bit of news swirling around Rupert Murdoch’s empire, including, most recently, the now infamous LulzSec’s pwnage of The Sun, News Corp’s daily tabloid newspaper.

On Monday, the network of merry hacktivists hacked into The Sun, pinned a fake news story about Murdoch’s supposed death on the homepage, redirected the site to its Twitter page, and brought down a number of other News Corp and News International websites — all in one fell swoop.

If that weren’t enough, on Thursday, the hacker known as “Sabu” (who is reportedly affiliated with LulzSec and Anonymous) claimed to have 4GB worth of emails, or “sun mails” that might “explode this entire case” that were lifted during the hacking. Sabu was, of course, referring to the ongoing News Corp/News Of The World scandal, in which top executives have been accused, some arrested (and on trial) for illegal phone tapping of everyone from celebrities to murder victims.

It has since been unclear whether or not LulzSec would be releasing some or any of those emails to the public, though AnonymousIRC, for one, indicated via Twitter they may not. While that assertion remains intact, we’ve just discovered this site: “MurdochLeaks.org“, which appears to be the landing page where Lulzsec and/or Anonymous may dump none, some — or all — of its News International email loot.

As of right now, the site is blank, with only a “Murdoch Leaks” heading, accompanied by the following text: “Coming soon … To volunteer with the Project contact us at 18009275@hush.com”. And, of course, a link to a Twitter account, inscribed with: “Launching soon… Making Rupert Murdoch, News Corp and News International accountable.”

These hackers sure love Twitter.

Again, to be clear, at this point it’s not evident who owns the site, but we’re looking into it. (Probably Louise Boat.) And, with “leaks” in the headline, all signs point toward this being a Lulzsec/Anon. production.

Should the site go live, we will of course update with more.


http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/22/lul...-landing-page/





Murdoch-Owned Media in UK Praise His Performance
AP

The Sun tabloid in Britain gives its owner, Rupert Murdoch, rave reviews for his testimony before a U.K. parliamentary committee investigating phone hacking at another newspaper owned by the media magnate.

The Times, another Murdoch title, led one story Wednesday about how Murdoch's Chinese-born wife, Wendi Deng, thumped a prankster who accosted him. The snappy headline played off the title of an acclaimed martial arts movie: "Crouching Wendi, hidden dragon."

While analysts say the Murdoch-owned media showed loyalty to their boss in their reports on the scandal that has engulfed Britain's political and media elite, other newspapers were skeptical about Murdoch's claim that he was unaware of any wrongdoing in his News Corp. global media empire.
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/201...ing-Press.html

















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