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Old 22-08-12, 09:03 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 25th, '12

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"There’s not a million-seller out there that doesn’t have radio play, but its first million generally doesn’t come from radio." – Jay Frank



































August 25th, 2012




BitTorrent Bonanza: Monitoring File-Sharers Forbidden in Norway
enigmax

From today, file-sharers in Norway can download pretty much whatever they like without facing any consequences. Pirates were effectively given the green light after the only law firm in the country permitted to monitor file-sharing networks lost its license and were denied a new one.

For more than half a decade the Simonsen law firm has been obtaining licenses from Norway’s data protection office which enabled the company to monitor file-sharers and collect their IP addresses.

There have been difficult periods though, such as in 2009 when the company’s license expired in the midst of a debate over what licensees can and cannot do. Now, three years later, Simonsen face another crisis.

Simonsen, which is home to famous pirate-chaser Espen Tøndel, became unlicensed in March this year after the Privacy Appeals Board rejected the law firm’s appeal against the Data Inspectorate’s decision not to issue a new license on data protection grounds. The effects of that rejection are now being felt.

“As of today no hunting of file-sharers is allowed in Norway,” said Cecilie Rønnevik, senior advisor to the Norwegian Data Inspectorate.

Simonsen, who work on behalf of clients such as the MPAA, says the decision is a blow to rightsholders.

“When no one is authorized to process personal data in order to stop copyright infringement, it weakens licensees’ ability to pursue violations happening online, and thus their ability to protect their interests. We hope and believe that this problem will soon be solved,” the company told TU.NO in an email.

There is a suggestion that one way around the problem would be to form an anti-piracy group to represent rightsholders, such as those that exists across the border in Sweden.

“We have been asked if we could accept an organization on the licensee side, a bit like Antipiratbyrån in Sweden,” said Cecilie Rønnevik from the Data Inspectorate. “We will consider it if we get an application for a license.”

No application has yet been received, so until one is – and a license is granted – Norwegian file-sharers can download whatever they like without any fear of repercussions. Whether that green light will have any effect on their habits remains to be seen.
https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-...norway-120825/





RapidShare Urges US Government to Punish Linking Sites and Not File-sharing Sites
Ravi Mandalia

RapidShare has said that the US Government should go ahead with crack down on linking sites rather than punishing file-sharing sites and strangling innovation.

The file sharing site is understandably a little worried about the recent crackdowns on sites involved in or found to be promoting piracy because to some extent RapidShare is also used to host copyrighted content such as movies, software and all sorts of such copyright infringing material. Daniel Raimer, RapidShare’s Chief Legal Officer, is to meet with technology leaders and law enforcement in Aspen today at Technology Policy Institute forum.

RapidShare provides technology based on which people can share their files. The real problem starts when other sites start linking to the site. Raimer is a panel member that will be talking on Copyright and Piracy and he is going to defend file sharing sites and is going to counter the claims that such sites are a problem.

Raimer believes it’s important to stress that “legitimate” file-hosting services are merely offering a technology, and are not the ones facilitating piracy. RapidShare responded to a public consultation on the future of U.S. IP enforcement early last week and stressed that linking sites are the real problem.

RapidShare wrote, “Rather than enacting legislation that could stifle innovation in the cloud, the U.S. government should crack down on this critical part of the online piracy network.”

Raimer is of the viewpoint that the U.S. Government should work towards pushing forward voluntary industry agreements rather than writing more and more legislations.

The file-sharing site stressed that it works diligently as a responsible company and “that it has an obligation to protect the intellectual property and copyright interests of creators.”
http://paritynews.com/web-news/item/...-sharing-sites





“Pirate Patch” Unblocks The Pirate Bay In a Blink
Ernesto

Due to court imposed blockades millions of Pirate Bay users rely on proxy websites to access their favorite BitTorrent site. Approximately 5% of all Pirate Bay users now visit the site through a proxy address, and thanks to “The Pirate Patch” app they can now do so using the familiar thepiratebay.se and .org domains.

After several large ISPs in the UK and the Netherlands were ordered to block The Pirate Bay this year, reverse proxy sites popped up left and right.

These sites allow users to access the BitTorrent site through an alternate domain name. The UK Pirate Party operates the most visited proxy site and they alone get more than a million visits a month.

In total, more than 5% of all Pirate Bay users now access the site through a proxy.

While these proxies work well they don’t allow people to access the site through the official thepiratebay.se domain. This means that referrals through Google and meta-search engines such as Torrentz no longer work. At least, not without a bit of effort.

Those who know their way around a computer can edit their “hosts file” to link the original Pirate Bay domain to one of the many reverse proxies. All they have to do is add a few lines and The Pirate Bay becomes available again via its usual address.

To simplify this process The Pirate Patch was coded by the Dutch-based Pirate Bay user Qarizma. The Windows application automatically adds the required entries into the hosts file through a simple batch script.

“The real domain is blocked where I live, and it gives me a kick when I browse The Pirate Bay on the original URL. It just feels better,” Qarizma told TorrentFreak in a comment.

The application has three options. People can install it, remove the changes that were made, or ask for an update if it’s no longer working. Qarizma told TorrentFreak that he maintains and updates the list of working proxy IP-addresses himself.

The Pirate Patch is Open Source and the batch file is accessible by extracting the .exe file. While the application works as advertised, some anti-virus software may block it because of the edits it makes to the hosts system file, although the same edits can easily be made manually.

Initiatives such as The Pirate Patch show that while these blockades may stop some people from accessing a site, the really determined have plenty of options.

Proof of the ineffectiveness of censorship attempts was recently highlighted by several Dutch and UK Internet providers, who claimed that BitTorrent traffic didn’t decline after the blockades were implemented.
https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-patc...-blink-120821/





How Hollywood Is Encouraging Online Piracy

The death of the DVD is pushing users to piracy
David Pogue

Face it, movie fans: the DVD is destined to be dead as a doornail.

Only a few Blockbuster stores are still open. Netflix's CEO says, “We expect DVD subscribers to decline steadily every quarter, forever.” The latest laptops don't even come with DVD slots. So where are film enthusiasts suppose to rent their flicks? Online, of course.

There are still some downsides to streaming movies—you need a fast Internet connection, for example, and beware the limited-data plan—but overall, this should be a delightful development.

Streaming movies offers instant gratification: no waiting, no driving—plus great portability: you can watch on gadgets too small for a DVD drive, like phones, tablets and superthin laptops.

Hollywood movie studios should benefit, too. The easier it is to rent a movie, the more people will do it. And the more folks rent, the more money the studios make.

Well, apparently, none of that has occurred to the movie industry. It seems intent on leaving money on the table.

For all of the apparent convenience of renting a movie via the Web, there are a surprising number of drawbacks. For example, when you rent the digital version, you often have only 24 hours to finish watching it, which makes no sense. Do these companies really expect us to rent the same movie again tomorrow night if we can't finish it tonight? In the DVD days, a Blockbuster rental was three days. Why should online rentals be any different?

When you rent online, you don't get any of the DVD extras—deleted scenes, alternative endings, subtitles—even though you're paying as much as you would have paid to rent a DVD.

Yet perhaps most important, there's the availability problem. New movies aren't available online until months after they are finished in the theaters, thanks to the “windowing” system—a long-established obligation that makes each movie available, say, first to hotels, then to pay-per-view systems, then to HBO and, only after that, to you for online rental.

Worse, some movies never become available. Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, A Beautiful Mind, Bridget Jones's Diary, Saving Private Ryan, Meet the Fockers, and so on, are not available to rent from the major online distributors.

None of the movie studios would talk to me on the record about this subject, so I can't tell you why so many major movies are missing. Obviously somebody, somewhere, objects to releasing the rights—a lawyer, a director, a studio executive. (Disney's Web site answers the question this way: “Unfortunately, it is not possible to release or have all our titles in the market at once.” Oh, okay. So they're not available because they're not available.)

The people want movies. None of Hollywood's baffling legal constructs will stop the demand. The studios are trying to prevent a dam from bursting by putting up a picket fence.

And if you don't make your product available legally, guess what? The people will get it illegally. Traffic to illegal download sites has more than sextupled since 2009, and file downloading is expected to grow about 23 percent annually until 2015. Why? Of the 10 most pirated movies of 2011, guess how many of them are available to rent online, as I write this in midsummer 2012? Zero. That's right: Hollywood is actually encouraging the very practice they claim to be fighting (with new laws, for example).

Yes, times are changing. Yes, uncertainty is scary. But Hollywood has case studies to learn from. The music industry and the television industry used to fight the Internet the same way—with brute force: copy protection, complexity, legal challenges.

Eventually all of them found roads to recoup some of their lost profit not by fighting the Internet but by working with it. The music industry dropped copy protection and made almost every song available for about $1 each. The TV industry made its shows available for free at sites such as Hulu, paid for by ads.

The moral? Make your wares available legally, cleanly and at a fair price—and only the outliers will resort to piracy. And you can keep making money.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...g-onine-piracy





Surprise: File Sharing May Not Help Sell CDs After All
Kory Grow

In 2007, a study conducted by Industry Canada appeared to suggest that file sharing wasn't bad for CD sales. In fact, its authors claimed, the data showed file sharing actually helped move physical albums. The results sounded a little fishy, but how can you argue with hard numbers?

Evidently, the answer is "by re-examining the data," which is exactly what Australian National University's Professor George Barker did. In a fresh study, he pored over what he claims are flaws in the conclusions drawn by Danish academic Birgette Andersen, who authored the original report. As Billboard and law blogger Barry Sookman point out, Barker used the same raw figures as Andersen, but concluded they proved the opposite of her findings. In raw statistics, Barker says a "10 percent increase in P2P downloads reduces CD demand by around 0.4 percent."

Barker writes that Andersen excluded consumers who had completely stopped purchasing CDs "(potentially because of P2P activity) prior to 2005" when those are the people more likely to have substituted downloading with purchasing. Also, he "controlled" for the fact that interest in both CD purchasing and illegally downloading "may be correlated" because of an individual's love of music.

Barker's findings support a study conducted in 2006 by economist Stanley Liebowitz. Billboard cites that paper as saying, "When given the choice of free and convenient high-quality copies versus purchased originals, is it really a surprise that a significant number of individuals will choose to substitute the free copy for the purchase?" Sometimes the logical conclusion is the right one.

Near the end of Sookman's blog, he speculates on how studies like these tie into lawmaking. He also cites a Canadian legislative summary about a bill that amends the country's Copyright Act as referencing the Industry Canada data. "The study should be removed from Industry Canada's website," Sookman says. "At the very least, like cigarettes, it should be appropriately labeled with a prominent notice."
http://www.spin.com/articles/surpris...-cds-after-all





Anti-Piracy Law Firm Will Publicly Humiliate The Clergy, Police & Arabs
enigmax

A German law firm will hit a new low next week, even for companies engaged in the file-sharing settlement letter business. The company says that from September 1st it will begin publishing the details of individuals it claims have infringed their clients’ copyrights by sharing hardcore pornography online. To make matters worse, they’re threatening to target churches, police stations and Arabs first. Neither the Pirate Party nor Anonymous are happy and now the latter are threatening action of their own.

When the RIAA embarked on its file-sharing settlement letter campaign last decade it unwittingly created a monster. Although the music industry group discontinued its actions in this field some time ago, dozens of other companies – notably in the porn business – followed in their footsteps.

The exact figures aren’t clear, but several hundred thousands individuals have been pursued for cash settlements for file-sharing in the United States and around Europe the problem is even worse. Germany has been hit by the trolls particularly hard, and it is from there that a new horror story is developing.

In a statement on its website the Urmann law firm explains that a large number of the file-sharing cases it is involved in end in settlements, a situation that is “often more useful than going through the courts.”

However, the company says that if necessary it will go to court to get justice for its clients, but there are things it can do to persuade stubborn individuals to pay up instead of having a hearing.

Starting September 1st, Urmann says it will begin publishing the personal details of Internet account holders it claims have violated their clients’ copyrights. The exact number is unknown, but Urmann previously claimed to have the identities of 150,000 individuals.

According to comments made by the law firm to Der Spiegel, the bulk of the firm’s clients aren’t record label owners either – they’re sellers of German hardcore pornography.

But the worst is yet to come. According to comments an Urmann insider made to Wochenblatt, the law firm is planning to target the most vulnerable people first – those with IP addresses registered to churches, police stations and – quite unbelievably – the embassies of Arab countries.

Urmann insists that it is completely entitled to take this action because the law is on its side. The company is leaning on a 2007 Federal Constitutional Court ruling that deemed it legal for law firms to publish the names of their clients’ opponents in order to advertise their services. However, there is some debate if the ruling applies since it was targeted at commercial opponents, not regular citizens.

Bernd Schlömer of the German Pirate Party describes the law firm’s threats to undermine the privacy rights of individuals as “shocking” and says that Urmann’s actions could be construed as “legal coercion.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, the loose-knit activist collective Anonymous are also unhappy and are hinting at action of their own.

“A law firm has announced that shortly it will publish a so-called enemies list on the web,” the group said in an announcement.

“Once the list of Urmann and colleagues is online, we will take care of it!”

Urmann courted controversy last year when it started an auction to sell the unpaid settlements of 70,000 alleged file-sharers to the highest bidder.
https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy...-arabs-120823/





Court Affirms $675,000 Penalty in Music-Downloading Case

Joel Tenenbaum, handed a $675,000 penalty for illegally downloading and distributing 31 songs, looks on as court upholds the size of the damages fee. The fee had been lowered once; then reinstated.
Elinor Mills

A federal court in Massachusetts today upheld a $675,000 damages award against Joel Tenenbaum, who was accused of illegally downloading 31 songs from a fire-sharing Web site and distributing them and was sued by the main recording companies in the U.S.

U.S. District Court Judge Rya W. Zobel rejected Tenenbaum's request for a new jury trial, saying jurors had appropriately considered the evidence of Tenenbaum's actions -- downloading and distributing files for two years despite warnings -- and the harm to the plaintiffs. The penalty is at the low end of the range for willful infringement and below the limit for even nonwillful infringement, and thus was not excessive, the judge ruled.

"In light of these factors, a rational appraisal of the evidence before the jury, viewed in the light most favorable to the verdict, supports the damages award," the judge wrote.

"We are pleased with the District Court's decision," was the comment from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which is the industry trade group.

Tenenbaum's lawyer, Harvard Law School Professor Charles Nesson, did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment this afternoon.

In 2007, the top record companies filed a copyright infringement suit against Tenenbaum, a Boston University student at the time. A jury found that Tenenbaum's infringement was willful and ordered him to pay $675,000 in damages. Tenenbaum argued that the jury award was unconstitutional and the federal judge who oversaw his trial agreed that the amount was "excessive."

When an appellate court agreed with the recording companies, Tenenbaum's attorney asked the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in. It declined.

The decision is here (PDF)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57499519-38/court-affirms-$675000-penalty-in-music-downloading-case/





Who Inherits Your iTunes Library?

Why your digital books and music may go to the grave
Quentin Fottrell

Many of us will accumulate vast libraries of digital books and music over the course of our lifetimes. But when we die, our collections of words and music may expire with us.

Someone who owned 10,000 hardcover books and the same number of vinyl records could bequeath them to descendants, but legal experts say passing on iTunes and Kindle libraries would be much more complicated.

And one’s heirs stand to lose huge sums of money. “I find it hard to imagine a situation where a family would be OK with losing a collection of 10,000 books and songs,” says Evan Carroll, co-author of “Your Digital Afterlife.” “Legally dividing one account among several heirs would also be extremely difficult.”

Part of the problem is that with digital content, one doesn’t have the same rights as with print books and CDs. Customers own a license to use the digital files—but they don’t actually own them.

Apple AAPL +0.09% and Amazon.com AMZN +1.88% grant “nontransferable” rights to use content, so if you buy the complete works of the Beatles on iTunes, you cannot give the White Album to your son and Abbey Road to your daughter.

According to Amazon’s terms of use, “You do not acquire any ownership rights in the software or music content.” Apple limits the use of digital files to Apple devices used by the account holder.

“That account is an asset and something of value,” says Deirdre R. Wheatley-Liss, an estate planning attorney at Fein, Such, Kahn & Shepard in Parsippany, N.J.

But can it be passed on to one’s heirs?

Most digital content exists in a legal black hole. “The law is light years away from catching up with the types of assets we have in the 21st Century,” says Wheatley-Liss. In recent years, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Indiana, Oklahoma and Idaho passed laws to allow executors and relatives access to email and social networking accounts of those who’ve died, but the regulations don’t cover digital files purchased.

Apple and Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.

There are still few legal and practical ways to inherit e-books and digital music, experts say. And at least one lawyer has a plan to capitalize on what may become be a burgeoning market. David Goldman, a lawyer in Jacksonville, says he will next month launch software, DapTrust, to help estate planners create a legal trust for their clients’ online accounts that hold music, e-books and movies. “With traditional estate planning and wills, there’s no way to give the right to someone to access this kind of information after you’re gone,” he says.

Here’s how it works: Goldman will sell his software for $150 directly to estate planners to store and manage digital accounts and passwords. And, while there are other online safe-deposit boxes like AssetLock and ExecutorSource that already do that, Goldman says his software contains instructions to create a legal trust for accounts. “Having access to digital content and having the legal right to use it are two totally different things,” he says.

The simpler alternative is to just use your loved one’s devices and accounts after they’re gone—as long as you have the right passwords.

Chester Jankowski, a New York-based technology consultant, says he’d look for a way to get around the licensing code written into his 15,000 digital files. “Anyone who was tech-savvy could probably find a way to transfer those files onto their computer—without ending up in Guantanamo,” he says. But experts say there should be an easier solution, and a way such content can be transferred to another’s account or divided between several people.“We need to reform and update intellectual-property law,” says Dazza Greenwood, lecturer and researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab.

Technology pros say the need for such reform is only going to become more pressing. “A significant portion of our assets is now digital,” Carroll says. U.S. consumers spend nearly $30 on e-books and MP3 files every month, or $360 a year, according to e-commerce company Bango. Apple alone has sold 300 million iPods and 84 million iPads since their launches. Amazon doesn’t release sales figures for the Kindle Fire, but analysts estimate it has nearly a quarter of the U.S. tablet market.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/who...ary-2012-08-23





Elisabeth Murdoch Takes Aim at Brother on Media Morality
Paul Sandle

Elisabeth Murdoch urged the media industry on Thursday to embrace morality and reject her brother James's mantra of profit at all costs, in a speech seen as an attempt to distance herself from the scandal that has tarnished the family name.

Addressing television executives, she said profit without purpose was a recipe for disaster and the phone hacking scandal at the News of the World tabloid - which has badly hurt her father Rupert Murdoch's News Corp empire - showed the need for a rigorous set of values.

The comments from a woman who has powerful friends in the British establishment and the support of her PR husband Matthew Freud, are likely to be examined for whether she could one day run News Corp instead of her brothers whose chances have faded.

"News (Corp) is a company that is currently asking itself some very significant and difficult questions about how some behaviors fell so far short of its values," she said in the annual television industry MacTaggart lecture.

"Personally I believe one of the biggest lessons of the past year has been the need for any organization to discuss, affirm and institutionalize a rigorous set of values based on an explicit statement of purpose," she said in remarks which drew applause.

Elisabeth Murdoch - a successful television producer who was overlooked for senior jobs at News Corp that went first to her brother Lachlan and then James - said a lack of morality could become a dangerous own goal for capitalism.

Rupert Murdoch last year closed the News of the World, which was owned by a News Corp unit, amid public anger that its journalists had hacked into the voicemails of people from celebrities to victims of crime. A number of former executives have appeared in court over the case and the government set up a judicial inquiry into press standards.

"There's only one way to look at this," Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff told Reuters. "This is part of a strategic repositioning of Liz Murdoch within the media world, with the business world and within the family."

The often humorous lecture delivered at the annual Edinburgh Television Festival came three years after James Murdoch used the same platform to confront a largely hostile audience with his vision for the industry.

Elisabeth, 44, and 39-year-old James had been very close, according to sources close to the family, but their relationship became strained by the hacking affair.

"Writing a MacTaggart (lecture) has been quite a welcome distraction from some of the other nightmares much closer to home. Yes, you have met some of my family before," she said to laughter, in a rare speech for the founder of the successful television production company Shine.

Stewart Purvis, the former head of broadcast news provider ITN, said on Twitter that the speech should be called "Why I am not my father or my brother".

Her highly personal speech appeared designed to win over any doubters, with references to childhood conversations at the breakfast table with dad to her continuing affection for the much-loved British playwright Alan Bennett.

She even lavished praise on the state-owned BBC, previously the butt of jokes by her brother but which also regularly airs programs made by her Shine company.

RECIPE FOR DISASTER

Referring to her younger brother James's 2009 speech, Elisabeth said his assertion that the only reliable, durable and perpetual guarantor of media independence was profit had fallen short of the mark.

"The reason his statement sat so uncomfortably is that profit without purpose is a recipe for disaster," she said.

"Profit must be our servant, not our master," she added. "It's increasingly apparent that the absence of purpose - or of a moral language — within government, media or business, could become one of the most dangerous own goals for capitalism and for freedom."

British tabloids have been accused of producing ever-more salacious stories before the scandal broke in an effort to maintain circulation. Rupert Murdoch admitted that the scandal had left a serious blot on his reputation.

The sharp change in tone, with its emphasis on personal responsibility, underlined how much had changed since James Murdoch used his own MacTaggart lecture to accuse the BBC of having "chilling" ambitions.

That speech, delivered in his role as chairman of the pay-TV group BSkyB and head of News Corp in Europe and Asia, consolidated James's position as heir apparent to his father's role. It also echoed Rupert Murdoch's own 1989 speech that broadcasting was a business that needed competition.

Since then, both men have been chastened by the fallout of the phone hacking affair.

At the height of the scandal News Corp had to halt a $12 billion bid to buy the rest of BSkyB it did not already own, angering investors and sowing doubts as to whether James had what it took to run the $55 billion empire.

News Corp announced in June that it was splitting off its newspaper business.

While brother Lachlan was often pictured with the family last year, Elisabeth stayed in the background. Lachlan stood down from his role as News Corp deputy chief operating officer in 2005 after clashing with senior executives.

Now James Murdoch's fall from grace has turned the spotlight onto Elisabeth in the long-running debate over who will one day replace their 81-year-old father at the head of the company.

"I think she was trying to put her mark on where she had come from and where she fits in," Enders analyst Toby Syfret told Reuters after emerging from the speech. "She made it clear where she didn't agree with James, and she made clear the things about her father that she admired.

"From a political level it was quite interesting."

Stressing her links to her father and the vision he espoused when he built his company over 60 years ago, she spoke in glowing terms of his 1989 speech.

"A quarter of a century later, I am still wholly inspired by those words and they are still deeply relevant today," she said. "I understood that we were in pursuit of a greater good - a belief in better."

(Writing by Kate Holton; editing by David Stamp)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...87M0UC20120824





The Best Book Reviews Money Can Buy
David Streitfeld

TODD RUTHERFORD was 7 years old when he first understood the nature of supply and demand. He was with a bunch of other boys, one of whom showed off a copy of Playboy to giggles and intense interest. Todd bought the magazine for $5, tore out the racy pictures and resold them to his chums for a buck apiece. He made $20 before his father shut him down a few hours later.

A few years ago, Mr. Rutherford, then in his mid-30s, had another flash of illumination about how scarcity opens the door to opportunity.

He was part of the marketing department of a company that provided services to self-published writers — services that included persuading traditional media and blogs to review the books. It was uphill work. He could churn out press releases all day long, trying to be noticed, but there is only so much space for the umpteenth vampire novel or yet another self-improvement manifesto or one more homespun recollection of times gone by. There were not enough reviewers to go around.

Suddenly it hit him. Instead of trying to cajole others to review a client’s work, why not cut out the middleman and write the review himself? Then it would say exactly what the client wanted — that it was a terrific book. A shattering novel. A classic memoir. Will change your life. Lyrical and gripping, Stunning and compelling. Or words to that effect.

In the fall of 2010, Mr. Rutherford started a Web site, GettingBookReviews.com. At first, he advertised that he would review a book for $99. But some clients wanted a chorus proclaiming their excellence. So, for $499, Mr. Rutherford would do 20 online reviews. A few people needed a whole orchestra. For $999, he would do 50.

There were immediate complaints in online forums that the service was violating the sacred arm’s-length relationship between reviewer and author. But there were also orders, a lot of them. Before he knew it, he was taking in $28,000 a month.

A polite fellow with a rakish goatee and an entrepreneurial bent, Mr. Rutherford has been on the edges of publishing for most of his career. Before working for the self-publishing house, he owned a distributor of inspirational books. Before that, he was sales manager for a religious publishing house. Nothing ever quite worked out as well as he hoped. With the reviews business, though, “it was like I hit the mother lode.”

Reviews by ordinary people have become an essential mechanism for selling almost anything online; they are used for resorts, dermatologists, neighborhood restaurants, high-fashion boutiques, churches, parks, astrologers and healers — not to mention products like garbage pails, tweezers, spa slippers and cases for tablet computers. In many situations, these reviews are supplanting the marketing department, the press agent, advertisements, word of mouth and the professional critique.

But not just any kind of review will do. They have to be somewhere between enthusiastic and ecstatic.

“The wheels of online commerce run on positive reviews,” said Bing Liu, a data-mining expert at the University of Illinois, Chicago, whose 2008 research showed that 60 percent of the millions of product reviews on Amazon are five stars and an additional 20 percent are four stars. “But almost no one wants to write five-star reviews, so many of them have to be created.”

Consumer reviews are powerful because, unlike old-style advertising and marketing, they offer the illusion of truth. They purport to be testimonials of real people, even though some are bought and sold just like everything else on the commercial Internet.
Mr. Liu estimates that about one-third of all consumer reviews on the Internet are fake. Yet it is all but impossible to tell when reviews were written by the marketers or retailers (or by the authors themselves under pseudonyms), by customers (who might get a deal from a merchant for giving a good score) or by a hired third-party service.

The Federal Trade Commission has issued guidelines stating that all online endorsements need to make clear when there is a financial relationship, but enforcement has been minimal and there has been a lot of confusion in the blogosphere over how this affects traditional book reviews.

The tale of GettingBookReviews.com, which commissioned 4,531 reviews in its brief existence, is a story of a vast but hidden corner of the Internet, where Potemkin villages bursting with ardor arise overnight. At the same time, it shows how the book world is being transformed by the surging popularity of electronic self-publishing.

For decades a largely stagnant industry controlled from New York, book publishing is fragmenting and changing at high speed. Twenty percent of Amazon’s top-selling e-books are self-published. They do not get to the top without adulation, lots and lots of it.

Mr. Rutherford’s insight was that reviews had lost their traditional function. They were no longer there to evaluate the book or even to describe it but simply to vouch for its credibility, the way doctors put their diplomas on examination room walls. A reader hears about a book because an author is promoting it, and then checks it out on Amazon. The reader sees favorable reviews and is reassured that he is not wasting his time.

“I was creating reviews that pointed out the positive things, not the negative things,” Mr. Rutherford said. “These were marketing reviews, not editorial reviews.”

In essence, they were blurbs, the little puffs on the backs of books in the old days, when all books were physical objects and sold in stores. No one took blurbs very seriously, but books looked naked without them.

One of Mr. Rutherford’s clients, who confidently commissioned hundreds of reviews and didn’t even require them to be favorable, subsequently became a best seller. This is proof, Mr. Rutherford said, that his notion was correct. Attention, despite being contrived, draws more attention.

The system is enough to make you a little skeptical, which is where Mr. Rutherford finds himself. He is now suspicious of all online reviews — of books or anything else. “When there are 20 positive and one negative, I’m going to go with the negative,” he said. “I’m jaded.”

Trainloads of Books

“If there was anything the human race had a sufficiency of, a sufficiency and a surfeit, it was books,” the New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell wrote in 1964. He reflected on “the cataracts of books, the Niagaras of books, the rushing rivers of books, the oceans of books, the tons and truckloads and trainloads of books that were pouring off the presses of the world at that moment,” regretting that so few would be “worth picking up and looking at, let alone reading.”

Since then, the pace of production has picked up quite a bit, although it is debatable whether Mr. Mitchell, who died in 1996, would be any more impressed by the quality. There has been a boom in what used to be called vanity publishers, which can efficiently produce physical copies that look just as good as anything from the traditional New York houses. But an even bigger factor is the explosion in electronic publishing. It used to take the same time to produce a book that it does to produce a baby. Now it takes about as long as boiling an egg.

In 2006, before Amazon supercharged electronic publishing with the Kindle, 51,237 self-published titles appeared as physical books, according to the data company Bowker. Last year, Bowker estimates that more than 300,000 self-published titles were issued in either print or digital form.

“I don’t know how many people have a book in them trying to get out, but if they do, all the barriers are being removed,” said Kelly Gallagher, vice president of Bowker Market Research. “This is a golden age of being able to make yourself more widely known.”

In theory, at least, good reviews are proof that a writer is finding his or her way, establishing an audience and has something worthwhile to say. So as soon as new authors confront that imperative line on their Amazon pages — “Be the first to review this item” — the temptation is great for them to start soliciting notices, at first among those closest at hand: family, friends and acquaintances. They want to be told how great they are.

“Nearly all human beings have unrealistically positive self-regard,” said Robert I. Sutton, a Stanford professor and the author of several traditionally published books on business psychology. “When people tell us we’re not as great as we thought we were, we don’t like it. Anything less than a five-star review is an attack.”

Mr. Sutton’s best-known book, about bullies in the workplace, had 110 five-star reviews on Amazon late last week, none of which he paid for but a few of which he says he solicited. He once asked his wife to review one of his books. To his disappointment, she refused.

Mr. Rutherford’s customers faced no such setbacks. Mark Husson, author of “LoveScopes: What Astrology Knows About You and the Ones You Love,” wrote in an online testimonial about GettingBookReviews.com that “my review was more thorough than I expected. I wanted to go back out and buy my own book.” On Amazon, “LoveScopes” had 70 reviews, 65 of which were five-star.

Peter Biadasz, a writer here in Tulsa, hired GettingBookReviews when he published “Write Your First Book.” As a writing coach, he knows all about how writers obsess over bad reviews. “Nobody likes to hear their baby’s ugly,” he said. Still, he added: “I know the flaws in my book. I know my baby’s not perfect.”

But it is perfect, according to all 18 reviewers on Amazon, every one of whom gave it five stars.

“For me, it came out very favorably,” Mr. Biadasz acknowledged. Most books, he cautioned, will not get such uniformly glowing notices.

This is true. For example, here’s a derisive notice, recently posted on Amazon: “I was utterly bored.” A second reader offered this: “Mediocre.” A third: “This isn’t good prose.”

All three were offering their opinions of “The Great Gatsby.” Quite a few reviews of the book, the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic that’s among the greatest American novels of the last century, deem it somewhere between so-so and poor.

Roland Hughes, another self-published writer, has a theory about this: “Reviews for the established classics tend to come from actual readers.”

A computer programmer and novelist based in Illinois, Mr. Hughes, 48, says he has spent about $20,000 on review services. “I’d like to say I view it as an education,” he wrote in an e-mail. His goal, not yet accomplished, is to make that difficult leap from “being an author” to “being a recognized author.”

His thriller “Infinite Exposure” had an average rating of 4.5 stars out of 5 late last week on Barnes & Noble, while another of his books, “The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer,” got 5 out of 5.

“Some of these review services will actually ensure your title is read by someone who likes your genre of books,” he added. “The last thing you want is someone who loves Christian and romance novels reviewing a science-fiction book which has no romance and calls into account the existence of God.”

Finding the Reviewers

Traditional journalism jobs may be dwindling, but the Internet offers many new possibilities for writers. As soon as the orders started pouring in, Mr. Rutherford realized that he could not produce all the reviews himself.

How little, he wondered, could he pay freelance reviewers and still satisfy the authors? He figured on $15. He advertised on Craigslist and received 75 responses within 24 hours.

Potential reviewers were told that if they felt they could not give a book a five-star review, they should say so and would still be paid half their fee, Mr. Rutherford said. As you might guess, this hardly ever happened.

Amazon and other e-commerce sites have policies against paying for reviews. But Mr. Rutherford did not spend much time worrying about that. “I was just a pure capitalist,” he said. Amazon declined to comment.

Mr. Rutherford’s busiest reviewer was Brittany Walters-Bearden, now 24, a freelancer who had just returned to the United States from a stint in South Africa. She had recently married a former professional wrestler, and the newlyweds had run out of money and were living in a hotel in Las Vegas when she saw the job posting.

Ms. Walters-Bearden had the energy of youth and an upbeat attitude. “A lot of the books were trying to prove creationism,” she said. “I was like, I don’t know where I stand, but they make a solid case.”

For a 50-word review, she said she could find “enough information on the Internet so that I didn’t need to read anything, really.” For a 300-word review, she said, “I spent about 15 minutes reading the book.” She wrote three of each every week as well as press releases. In a few months, she earned $12,500.

“There were books I wished I could have gone back and actually read,” she said. “But I had to produce 70 pieces of content a week to pay my bills.”

An E-Book Best Seller

John Locke started as a door-to-door insurance salesman, was successful enough to buy his own insurance company, and then became a real estate investor. In 2009, he turned to writing fiction. By the middle of 2011, his nine novels, most of them suspense tales starring a former C.I.A. agent, Donovan Creed, had sold more than a million e-books through Amazon, making him the first self-published author to achieve that distinction.

Mr. Locke, now 61, has also published a nonfiction book, “How I Sold One Million E-Books in Five Months.” One reason for his success was that he priced his novels at 99 cents, which encouraged readers to take a chance on someone they didn’t know. Another was his willingness to try to capture readers one at a time through blogging, Twitter posts and personalized e-mail, an approach that was effective but labor-intensive.

“My first marketing goal was to get five five-star reviews,” he writes. “That’s it. But you know what? It took me almost two months!” In the first nine months of his publishing career, he sold only a few thousand e-books. Then, in December 2010, he suddenly caught on and sold 15,000 e-books.

One thing that made a difference is not mentioned in “How I Sold One Million E-Books.” That October, Mr. Locke commissioned Mr. Rutherford to order reviews for him, becoming one of the fledging service’s best customers. “I will start with 50 for $1,000, and if it works and if you feel you have enough readers available, I would be glad to order many more,” he wrote in an Oct. 13 e-mail to Mr. Rutherford. “I’m ready to roll.”

Mr. Locke was secure enough in his talents to say that he did not care what the reviews said. “If someone doesn’t like my book,” he instructed, “they should feel free to say so.” He also asked that the reviewers make their book purchases directly from Amazon, which would then show up as an “Amazon verified purchase” and increase the review’s credibility.

In a phone interview from his office in Louisville, Ky., Mr. Locke confirmed the transaction. “I wouldn’t hesitate to buy reviews from people that were honest,” he said. Even before using GettingBookReviews.com, he experimented with buying attention through reviews. “I reached out every way I knew to people to try to get them to read my books.”

Many of the 300 reviews he bought through GettingBookReviews were highly favorable, although it’s impossible to say whether this was because the reviewers genuinely liked the books, or because of their well-developed tendency toward approval, or some combination of the two.

Mr. Locke is unwilling to say that paying for reviews made a big difference. “Reviews are the smallest piece of being successful,” he said. “But it’s a lot easier to buy them than cultivating an audience.”

Mr. Rutherford, who says he is a little miffed that the novelist never gave him proper credit, is more definitive. “It played a role, for sure,” he said. “All those reviews said to potential readers, ‘You’ll like it, too.’ ”

End of a Venture

By early 2011, things were going swimmingly. Mr. Rutherford rented a small office in Tulsa and hired two assistants, including an editor who polished his reviews for $2 each. He had plans for a multimillion-dollar review business that went far beyond just books. But the end was near.

The collapse was hastened by a young Oregon woman, Ashly Lorenzana, who gave Mr. Rutherford and GettingBookReviews.com perhaps their only bad review. Ms. Lorenzana, 24, self-published some of her journal entries as an exceedingly bleak book, “Sex, Drugs & Being an Escort” (“I hated today,” reads one representative passage. “Today was full of hate. I hate, hate, hate.”) In seeking some attention for it, she checked out Kirkus, a reviewing service founded in 1933 that has branched out into self-published books. Kirkus would review “Sex” for $425, a price that made her balk.

Another issue with Kirkus was that it did not guarantee its review would be positive. Ms. Lorenzana felt she would then be in the position of having spent a bundle just so someone she did not know could insult, belittle or devalue her work. On the Internet, you can usually get someone to do that free.

“You’re taking a chance by putting your writing out there — a huge chance,” she said. “You want validation that it’s not a joke.”

When Ms. Lorenzana found GettingBookReviews.com, $99 seemed reasonable. But the review did not show up as quickly as she expected. She posted a long, angry accusation against Mr. Rutherford and his service on several consumer sites, saying she had received better treatment from a reviewer whom she had hired for $5. (“You could tell that the person had really spent a few minutes checking out the information about my book and getting a feel for it before just diving into writing a meaningless review.”)

Mr. Rutherford refunded her fee, but his problems were just beginning. Google suspended his advertising account, saying it did not approve of ads for favorable reviews. At about the same time, Amazon took down some, though not all, of his reviews. Mr. Rutherford dropped his first name in favor of his middle name, Jason, so that people who searched for him through Google would not automatically see Ms. Lorenzana’s complaints.

These days, Mr. Rutherford is selling R.V.’s in Oklahoma City and planning a comeback in that narrow zone straddling what writers want and what the marketplace considers legitimate. Bowker, the data firm, says that as many as 600,000 self-published titles could appear in 2015, and they all will be needing their share of attention.

Mr. Rutherford tried to start another service, Authors Reviewing Authors — a scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours approach. Authors preferred receiving over giving, however, and that venture failed. Now he is developing a service where, for $99, he blogs and tweets about a book — he has 33,000 Twitter followers — and solicits reviews from bloggers and regular Amazon reviewers. No money is paid to the reviewers, so Google has approved ads for the service.

He says he regrets his venture into what he called “artificially embellished reviews” but argues that the market will take care of the problem of insincere overenthusiasm. “Objective consumers who purchase a book based on positive reviews will end up posting negative reviews if the work is not good,” he said.

In other words, the (real) bad reviews will then drive out the (fake) good reviews. This seems to underestimate, however, the powerful motivations that writers have to rack up good reviews — and the ways they have to manipulate them until a better system comes along.

“It’s a quagmire,” Mr. Rutherford conceded.

A few months ago, he self-published a guide for aspiring authors called “The Publishing Guru on Writing.” Late last week, it had one lone review on Amazon, two sentences from someone named Kelly. “Great advice,” it read, giving the book five stars and, even more important, that all-important shot of credibility. Mr. Rutherford said he had no idea who Kelly was, but added, “I’m glad she liked it.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/b...ine-raves.html





Media Companies, Seeing Profit Slip, Push Into Education

Last year, Discovery introduced its line of digital textbooks, called Techbooks. The manuals are used at Mooresville Middle School in North Carolina.
Brooks Barnes and Amy Chozick

As another academic year starts, about 500,000 children across the country will find themselves learning subjects like middle school history or high school biology from a new line of digital textbooks. These manuals, branded Techbooks, come with all the Internet frills: video, virtual labs, downloadable content.

But the Techbook may be most notable for what it does not have — backing from a traditional educational publisher. Instead it has the support of Discovery, the cable TV company.

Discovery, which also sells an educational video service to school districts, is entering the digital textbook market largely because it sees a growth opportunity too good to pass up.

Conventional textbooks for kindergarten through 12th grade are a $3 billion business in the United States, according to the Association of American Publishers, with an additional $4 billion spent on teacher guides, testing resources and reference materials. And almost all that printed material, educators say, will eventually be replaced by digital versions.

“It’s kind of perfect for us,” said David M. Zaslav, chief executive of Discovery Communications, which owns networks like Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and TLC. “Educational content is core to our DNA, and we’re unencumbered — unlike traditional textbook publishers, we’re not defending a dying business.”

Mr. Zaslav is not the only media executive talking grandly about education these days. Movies, television, newspapers and magazines are in decline or facing headwinds, putting pressure on media companies to find new areas of expansion.

Education is emerging as an answer, largely because executives see a way to capitalize on the changes that technology is bringing to classrooms — turnabout as fair play, given the way that the Web has upended major media’s own business models.

“We think the opportunity continues to be to use digital technologies to be disruptive to an enormous business stuck decades in the past,” Chase Carey, News Corporation’s chief operating officer, told analysts this year.

News Corporation is betting on just that. This month, the company said it would infuse its fledgling education division, Amplify, with $100 million.

Amplify, focused on digital teaching and assessment tools, is run by Joel I. Klein, the former New York City schools chancellor. Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corporation, has said he would be “thrilled” if education were to account for 10 percent of its revenue five years from now.

Old-line education companies, however, may be more difficult prey than Mr. Zaslav and Mr. Murdoch think. Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are introducing digital educational products of their own, and these stalwarts have a technology giant on their side: Apple, seeking to bolster iPad sales, recently started selling digital high school textbooks through its iBooks store, with those three publishers as partners.

“Over the last 10 years alone, we’ve invested $9.3 billion in digital innovations that are transforming education,” said Will Ethridge, chief executive of Pearson North America, part of Pearson P.L.C., the world’s largest education and learning company. “One way to describe it would be an act of ‘creative destruction.’ By this I mean we’re intentionally tearing down an outdated, industrial model of learning and replacing it with more personalized and connected experiences for each student.”

On a smaller scale, NBCUniversal has been building a service called NBC Learn, which digitizes and archives video and articles from NBC News to sell as a database and digital blackboard learning system; NBC Learn now operates in 5,000 schools in 43 states.

The Financial Times, owned by Pearson, is pushing MBA Newslines, a subscriber-only feature on its Web site that lets business students and professors create and share annotations on articles, allowing case studies to be built around real-time news events.

And then there is the Walt Disney Company. It is building a chain of language schools in China big enough to enroll more than 150,000 children annually. The schools, which weave Disney characters into the curriculum, are not going to move the profit needle at a company with $41 billion in annual revenue. But they could play a vital role in creating a consumer base as Disney builds a $4.4 billion theme park and resort in Shanghai.

Media companies have dipped their toes into education before, of course, only to find chilly waters. Discovery in 2006 promoted Cosmeo, an Internet-based service that offered children videos and other tools to help them with their homework; a year later, Discovery decided to stop marketing the product, which cost $99 a year, and laid off much of its staff. (Why pay for help when you can search Google at no cost?)

In 2007, Disney introduced a new position — senior vice president for learning — with the goal of moving into the North American education businesses. None of the company’s major efforts got off the ground, and Disney eventually pulled the plug, in part because it decided technology was changing the sector too rapidly.

News Corporation faces perception hurdles as it moves deeper into education — namely what some rivals refer to as the “Foxification” of schools, a pointed reference to Fox News Channel and its stable of conservative pundits. The company has said it has zero interest in inserting politics into schools, and notes that other assets, including the National Geographic Channel, which, like Discovery’s flagship channel, largely focuses on documentaries and educational programming, could play to the company’s advantage.

Last year, the New York State comptroller, citing News Corporation’s phone-hacking scandal in Britain, rejected a $27 million contract with its education division. The decision underscored one of the biggest hurdles faced by companies entering the education market: new products must typically gain state approval before schools even have the chance to decide to buy them.

Wall Street is skeptical that education holds as much promise as some media companies think. “When big conglomerates feel their core businesses have started to mature, they look for related synergistic businesses,” said David Bank, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets. “You have to ask yourself, are those education businesses really related and synergistic in core?”

Bill Goodwyn, chief executive of Discovery’s education unit, says in his company’s case, the answer is an emphatic yes. He conceded that Cosmeo “lost a lot of money,” but said that Discovery’s business had centered on education since its earliest days. Discovery Channel’s original name was Cable Education Network, for instance, and the company used to make money by shipping VHS cassettes of documentaries to schools.

Discovery currently sells a popular subscription streaming service to schools, which comes with 50,500 video segments and 6,200 full-length videos on topics like math, social studies and language arts. The service costs $1,570 a year for a school that serves kindergarten through eighth grade; high schools pay $2,095.

Still, Discovery’s previous efforts pale in scope to its Techbook initiative.

Mr. Goodwyn’s 200-employee division introduced the line of digital textbooks last year. Their cloud-based technology works with whatever hardware a district has — iPads, laptops, desktops. Discovery tailors them to the particular curriculum needs of various states (or districts within states).

“As a 30-year veteran, it was not always easy giving up some of the more traditional ways of teaching,” said Roseann Burklow, a seventh-grade science teacher in Mooresville, N.C. “But I love the Techbook. Students are engaged and can work independently or collaboratively.” (She did suggest one improvement: more games to help students review material for tests.)

Traditional textbooks cost about $70 a student; Discovery’s Techbooks start at $38 a student for a six-year subscription and go up to $55, depending on the subject and grade level.

Discovery knows education will never pay its bills. Last year, the company’s learning products, for instance, generated adjusted operating income of $23 million, a 53 percent increase over a year earlier. In comparison, its United States cable networks delivered operating income of $1.5 billion, a 10 percent increase from a year earlier.

Still, Mr. Zaslav said the education unit’s small size did not dim his enthusiasm. “Television is always going to be our primary focus, but we’re incredibly excited about the business potential of the Techbook,” he said. “Education is an area of solid, sustainable growth.”

Brooks Barnes reported from Los Angeles, and Amy Chozick from New York. Christine Haughney contributed from New York.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/t...of-growth.html





German Publishers in Online Copyright Fight

Activists, bloggers and Google oppose a draft law that would charge licensing fees to link to copyrighted content.
Andrew Coombes

Step into a German cafe and you'll likely find most of your fellow customers leafing through a newspaper or magazine. The consumption of printed media here borders on the voracious - and it's comparatively rare to find your neighbour flicking through an iPad or squinting their way through a story rendered in eight-point-type on their smartphone.

But while the traditional press is relatively buoyant here, some of Germany's biggest publishing firms are now pushing for a "neighbouring right" which could fundamentally alter how their content can be shared and accessed online.

Two successive draft amendments to the federal Copyright Law prepared by Germany's coalition government are under consideration. The first draft, released in June, proposes wide-ranging restrictions on how individuals and organisations can link to copyrighted material if they are deemed to be using the content for "commercial purposes". The major publishing houses say they should be able to charge a licence fee for the reproduction of their material on other sites - including the headline and opening sentences that are currently deemed to be in the public domain under copyright law.

Internet freedom activists, search engine companies and bloggers were among those who led opposition to the proposals, and within weeks a second draft amendment was published by the German Ministry of Justice. While much narrower in its range, it maintains pressure on search engine providers and news aggregators by requiring that they pay a licence fee for any portion of material already published on a German website.

'Slowing online development'

Internet search firm Google is one of the firms that would be required to pay a licence in order to list mere snippets of published content. Under the proposals Google would face a huge rise in costs to run its news service in Germany, which allows users to see news stories aggregated by subject. The company argues that a neighbouring right would have dire implications for internet freedoms.

"We fear that such a regulation would slow down the development of the internet because it creates additional costs and leads to inefficiencies," a Google spokesman told Al Jazeera.

"The internet is a key component of Germany's economic success. It is important that any legislation supports rather than hinders innovation on the internet, to encourage new jobs and economic growth."

Google argues that it acts as an enabler, with its news service helping drive users to the very websites that hold the original copyrighted content. It says it registers about 100,000 clicks to news websites across the world every minute. But the major German publishers insist that licencing fees collected under a neighbouring right would safeguard their existing content while allowing them to make fresh investments in journalism.

The latest draft amendment proposes far less than what some German publishers sought from the beginning. Throughout the last three years that a neighbouring right has been under consideration in public hearings, the publishers have insisted that the use of its material for any commercial gain - both in the online and offline spheres - should be reflected with some recompense to them.

"The example that was given at the hearing was: a bank employee reads his morning newspaper online and sees something about the steel industry, and then advises his clients to invest in certain markets," says Mathias Schindler of Wikimedia Deutschland, who has attended the hearings.

"The publishers argued that the bank consultant was only able to advise his clients because of the journalistic work in the published article. So that means the publisher deserves a fair share of any money made from that scenario. This was the proposal from the start."

Although German newspaper and magazine sales are holding up well in comparison with other European titles, publishers here are grappling with how to bring money in from the online side of their businesses. While newspapers such as the New York Times and the Times of London have erected paywalls in different guises, there is little appetite among German publishers to bill internet users directly for access to their sites. The Berliner Morgenpost keeps some of its content available only to print edition subscribers, but most of its site remains wide-open.

Money from search engines?

Digital rights experts say the publishers are seeing the search engine companies make huge amounts from online advertising and want to benefit from their profits because they lack a strategy to make money themselves.

"They see someone making money from the internet and they don't have an idea themselves - so let's get money from the search engines. Simple as that," says Dr Till Kreutzer, a copyright expert at the Bureau for Information Law Expertise.

"There is a question on whether this could be justified in a free market. The market for journalistic content - both online and offline - is changing, so the press publishers need to find new business models. To say that we need something like a tax that is only gathered from the richest members of the media markets - in this case the search engines - is really queer."

With federal elections just over a year away the publishers and their supporters in the federal government have little time left to push a neighbouring right amendment into law. Politicians in Berlin will go into summer recess before the vote in September 2013 and opponents of the neighbouring right are expected to challenge successive sets of proposals. The two sides appear to be at implacable odds in a case which could provide a lesson for legislators, businesses and internet freedom advocates in other countries.

"Right now, it seems everyone is unhappy with the second draft," Schindler says.

"The publishers are unhappy because of the downsizing. The internet industry representatives are unhappy because of the uncertainty, the bloggers are unhappy. And since no-one anticipates any extra revenue coming out of this second version, the journalists are unhappy.

"From this point on, anything is possible, including sending the bill back or shelving it. I wouldn't be surprised that as a result of lobbying and campaigning by different parties this bill ends up dead on arrival."
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/fea...532338270.html





Google Lashes Out at German Copyright ‘Threat’
David Meyer

The company doesn’t think it’s a great idea for search engines to have to pay to reproduce headlines and story summaries in their results. But that’s nothing on the crazy earlier draft of this proposed law.

Google has launched a broadside against a proposed law in Germany that would see search engines forced to pay license fees for linking people to news stories.

Well, actually that’s slightly inaccurate: the draft law would make search engines pay for reproducing newspapers’ headlines and first paragraphs. So, take those away and the links are fine. Even if nobody will have the faintest idea what they’re linking to.

Google’s North Europe communications chief, Kay Oberbeck, sounded off about the issue this morning in a guest post for a German press agency. That was in German, of course, so I got him to vent in English as well:

“Nobody sees a real reason why this should be implemented,” he said. “It’s really harmful, not just for users who wouldn’t find as much information as they find now, but such a law is also not justified for economic reasons or judicial reasons.”

Oberbeck also pointed out the obvious: that Google send readers to the publishers’ sites. And that anyone who doesn’t want their content to be indexed by Google can just throw a robots.txt file in there. And that publishers make money off Adsense.

But wait, let’s back up. To appreciate the full absurdity of the situation, we should take in a little history.

The German publishing houses, particularly Axel Springer, are very powerful in their country, with relatively strong influence in government circles. As Matthias Spielkamp of the copyright news site iRights put it to me:

“If you look at the U.S., if print houses there want something, they are up against American companies like Google and Yahoo. Here we have local publishers that are enormously powerful and are trying to target U.S. companies. I wouldn’t say it’s anti-American – it’s just that German politicians are much more inclined to protect German publishers’ interests when balancing that with a [foreign] company or industry.”

A couple of years ago, a leaked draft showed what plans the publishing houses were pitching to their friends in the coalition government. The first official draft legislation showed up in April. What it proposed was breathtaking.

The government was calling for a form of ‘ancillary copyright’ to be brought in, that would force companies to pay publishers license fees for using their work in a commercial setting. As in, employers would have to pay up for letting their employees read the news online at work.

German industry bodies were predictably apoplectic, as were opposition parties, and the government beat a hasty retreat. The second draft, which appeared in the last couple of months, drastically narrowed the scope of the legislation, so that it would only apply to search engines.

So now Google is furious for being picked on, when it actually drives traffic to the publishers.

And the publishers aren’t happy either – Anja Pasquay, a spokeswoman for the Federal Association of German Newspaper Publishers (BDZV), told me that the second draft “won’t help”, and her organization would rather see a revival of the first draft.

So, with nobody happy, and with the government looking increasingly isolated, a third draft is rumoured to be in the works. That’s why Google is piping up now.

“An ancillary copyright would mean a massive damage to the German economy. It’s a threat to the freedom of information. And it would leave Germany behind internationally as a place for business,” Oberbeck told me.

“Publishers should be innovate in order to be successful. A compulsory levy for commercial internet users means cross-subsidizing publishers through other industries. This is not a sustainable solution.”

On balance, it’s difficult not to take Google’s side on this one. The whole idea of this kind of ancillary copyright is ridiculous, and it puts the likes of Axel Springer in a very poor light indeed.

It’s not as though Axel Springer isn’t plunging headfirst into the web industry itself – only today, it announced the purchase of an online news and classified portal.

The German publishing giants are big enough to compete in the real world. Sure, it’s tough monetizing free web content. But cooking up hokey and self-defeating new copyright laws is a pretty shabby way to go about it.
http://gigaom.com/europe/google-lash...yright-threat/





Tech Confessional: The Googler Who Looked At The Worst Of The Internet

After a year spent looking at the dark underside of the Internet — including bestiality, necrophilia and child pornography — this Google contractor wasn't even hired full-time.
Reyhan Harmanci

Sitting in the sun at a tech company cafeteria, this former Google worker described a year spent immersed in some of the darkest content available on the Internet. His role at the tech company mainly consisted of reviewing things like bestiality, necrophilia, body mutilations (gore, shock, beheadings, suicides), explicit fetishes (like diaper porn) and child pornography found across all Google products — an experience that he found “scarring.” The company refused to make him a full-time worker, keeping him on contract status without much of a support system.

After college, I went to work in politics; I was a social media guy. A recruiter called me and said, “You should work for Google.” It never occurred to me to work for a tech company. They convinced me it was the right place to go.

So I went there. I was kind of repulsed at how much I had. I think anyone who said they didn’t enjoy it would be a filthy liar: I ate breakfast, lunch and dinner there every day. They give you everything you need. As a person just getting out of college, it was fantastic. My parents, being traditional, were very proud that that I was working for this huge company.

Over the phone, the recruiter informed me I'd be dealing with “sensitive content.” It didn't occur to me that I would be doing the work without technical and emotional support.

Dealing with the ghastly underbelly of Google searches was the daily grind. Image by Joerg Sarbach/dapd / AP

One of the most shocking parts of my job was working on porn issues. Child porn is the biggest thing for internet companies. By law you have to take it down in 24 hours upon notice and report it to federal authorities. No one wanted to do it within Google.

I dealt with all the products that Google owned. If anyone were to use them for child porn, I’d have to look at it. So maybe like 15,000 images a day. Google Images, Picasa, Orkut, Google search, etc.

I had no one to talk to. I couldn’t bring it home to my girlfriend because I didn’t want to burden her with this bullshit. For seven, eight, nine months, I was looking at this kind of stuff and thinking I was fine, but it was putting me in a really dark place.

Google got someone from a federal agency to talk to me, and that’s when it occurred to me that I needed therapy. She showed me photos of seemingly innocuous activities (kind of like a modified Rorschach test) and asked me for my first visceral reaction. I was like, “That’s fucked up!” It was just a father and a child.

So I went to get therapy. Google covered one session with a government-appointed therapist — and encouraged me to go out and get my own therapy after I left.

I think my manager was a little shocked, too, when I couldn’t get hired full-time by Google. He gave me the news around the nine-month mark, so I had two months to find a job. [Ed. note: Google contractors can only stay for a year before leaving or becoming regular employees.] But he couldn’t tell me why I wasn’t hired.

A lot of people I know are ex-Google and they have the same story. Three people here were on the midnight shift for YouTube and they were given the promise that if they were going to see beheadings and child porn and all this shit all the time, they'd get hired. YouTube’s review process is proactive — they have to sit there and look at all of it, from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m., for a year. One of my really good friends lost her life for a year doing that.

But no one talks about it. Like the guy I knew at YouTube. He was the guy who knew everything about child porn, knew everything about beheadings. I worked with him very closely and every time a new video by Al Qaeda came up, he was the first guy to see it. He had to see it for everybody. But he was a contractor and they didn’t hire him. He has no idea why. His manager called the recruiters and said, do you have any idea what this guy does? They had no idea. If you’re a contractor, you’re just a name and a department.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/reyhan/tech-...ooks-at-the-wo





How Child Porn And The Other Awfulest Things Ever Get Scrubbed From The Internet

Machines are long way from being able to automatically remove the most awful images mankind has to offer — child porn, beheadings, forced bestiality — from our favorite sites and social networks. An invisible workforce has emerged to look at it so we don't have to. (Warning: You may find this piece upsetting.)
Reyhan Harmanci

“Do you know what child porn is?” she asked me. A string of god-awful words came out of her mouth. “Infant decapitation” were just two of them. Cindy* spent years as a member of the CyberTips team at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, processing thousands of images, videos, emails, social network profiles and more that were flagged as possibly criminal content.

There’s a lot of stuff on the internet, and every day more gets added to it. Not all of it is kosher. Child porn. Narco executions. Beheadings. So an invisible workforce has emerged to help scrub the festering filth, one that is often poorly paid, in entry-level positions with little support or job security. As an interview earlier this week with a former Google worker showed, the psychological costs can be high.

“We were the 911 for the internet. We handled every single report on an internet child porn,” Cindy said. “Man, I wished I worked at Google compared to what we were dealing with. Every week we saw about 25,000 reports and every single report had at least 200 to 500 images and videos to review.”

She worked the afternoon-to-evening shift. Going to work meant turning on a computer and sorting through a long queue of reports that came from a number of tech companies, as well as from concerned individuals. On a normal day, she said she could process 100, maybe 200 reports, although it felt “never ending.” She often saw tech companies overzealously reporting, erring toward an overabundance of caution: Pictures of Marge and Bart Simpson having sex, for instance, was classified as potential child porn. But she also saw the real stuff, every day.

“To have a naked child image — that’s not necessarily a crime, if you don't identify them and know their age,” she explained.

Looking at disturbing material for a living can make some workers feel “nothing.” Others say it will “rot you from the inside out,” says Helen Steele, the director of an organization that helps tech companies understand the impact of such material on workers. Experts say that the most pernicious effects of repeated exposures to horrific images has a cumulative effect, and in several interviews with current and former workers in this field, people reported desensitization and isolation as the most common side effects. And many complain that they feel like hired eyeballs, the digital equivalent of day labor.

“When you're not close to the development process you are expendable as a paper airplane and they let you know it,” said one current employee who analyzes this type of content for a community moderation platform in Silicon Valley.

There’s no trade group — or even a common job title — for this kind of work. There's no one advocating for them, and more significantly, there's no way of tracking exactly how many there are. But between the behemoth tech companies like Google and Facebook, and outsourced data firms like the United States-based Telecommunications On Demand and Caleris, two companied mentioned in a 2010 New York Times article as processing millions of images, it seems safe to say these workers number in the thousands.

This is not to say that every individual in this line of work has had a bad experience: the ability to handle such a mentally demanding job differs from person to person. And tech companies say that they do offer special benefits to employees who view disturbing content for a living. Facebook has a “safety team” that is tasked with reviewing the most sensitive material, and according to a spokesman, they offer “in-house training, and also, counseling for our employees.” A Google spokeswoman told me that the one-year contracts (which can frustrate those looking to stay on for longer) were designed to ensure that no one held the most brutal jobs indefinitely. Also, Google brings in independent counselors to talk to teams about secondary trauma — the kind of trauma that comes from seeing abused people and not being able to help.

In her role at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the country’s clearinghouse for every report of child porn logged by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others, Cindy was on the front lines of the daily war, seeing the worst of the worst. Two teams within the organization handle internet content: CyberTips, where companies are legally required to send red-flagged content, and the Child Victim Identification Program, which works to help find the victims. It was at NCMEC that the Safeguard program, a mandatory counseling and training protocol for helping employees deal with such disturbing imagery, now used by some law enforcement, was born in the early 2000s.

But Cindy told me that even with the rules in place, she left feeling let down by management. (It must be said that, this individual story aside, NCMEC is highly regarded amongst mental health professionals for their approach.) It wasn’t due to a fault in the hiring process, though: When she applied for the job on the then-seven person CyberTip team, she was shown some content and ordered to wait two weeks before accepting the position. With a law enforcement background, she thought she could handle the worst of the worst. She was only sort of right.

Part of her job was guessing ages, tracking down the identities behind screen names or IP addresses, and then passing on the info to the relevant authorities. Oddly, with government-level search engines at her disposal, she said the best way to find someone was often typing in an email address with quotations into Google.

From her perspective, some tech companies did a better job handling their vast swaths of uploaded content than others. She singled out Microsoft, MySpace and MyYearBook as good partners. Google earned a “meh” rating. And at the time she worked on the CyberTip team, Facebook only had two people assigned to vet child porn, a woefully inadequate labor force. The worst, though, was Ning, the private social network, which leased their servers from Amazon.

“That was hell on earth," said Cindy. "It became the pedophile network. We’d break down the images and it was always going back to Amazon. But [Amazon] was good, they immediately cut ties.”

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children had mandatory counseling sessions, as well as a lengthy training process. “You need to have the right mindset. I left every day grateful that I had never experienced anything like that in my life,” she said.

But as Cindy's experience with management began to sour, the workplace stresses began to mount. They were experiencing a massive surge in the number of reports coming their way — a ten-fold increase — and the cumulative effect of seeing hard-core child pornography began to eat at her. Her problems with her bosses were, she believed, due to their own desensitization as a result of years spent in the field. “All they cared about were these reports,” she said. “We might as well have been machines.” Her bad feelings got worse when she left the job: the images would come back to her at random times and she didn’t have co-workers to commiserate with.

“You have dreams about these kids, the recall that comes to your mind, you can see them. I had to go on an anti-anxiety medication — your anxiety increases,” she said. While on the phone call, Cindy told me she could still see the images of child victims being raped with vivid detail — something that always happens when questions of her previous career are inevitably brought up.

She paused. “The worst thing,” she said, “is you would watch the kids age through the abuse.”

NCMEC deals with the truly worst of the worst images, and the tech workers I spoke with did not report that degree of trauma. Two former YouTube workers, for instance, described working conditions as okay: They were warned about the job prior to being hired; they worked on a team; and they saw more mundane images than the ones that were truly shocking. At YouTube, videos that were flagged were separated into two tiers, and often one could gather the content by looking at thumbnails, rather than watching the whole thing. There are teams watching questionable content around the clock all over the world.

Another downplayed the number of upsetting images. “It's disturbing, but only a small fraction of the videos are very disturbing; most of it is porn or innocuous,” he said.

According to Heather Steele, director of The Innocent Justice Foundation, an organization that has provided training on how to help employees tasked with dealing with child porn since 2010, it is crucial to properly prepare workers and to keep tabs on their emotional well-being during and after employment.

“There are things that make it worse and things that make it easier,” she explained. Working in a dark room with social or physical isolation and crazy hours can all can exacerbate reactions to imagery. Mandated breaks, flexible time off and access to counselors can improve conditions. “It’s a cumulative build-up, then negative effects build up over time,” she said.

Steele’s foundation has worked with teams at GoDaddy, Facebook, Yahoo, MyYearBook and other tech companies to provide models for how to treat employees. Proper screening at hiring can go a long way (people with unresolved issues around child sexual abuse are obviously not great candidates), but Steele also warned that personal issues like pregnancy and going through a custody battle can wreak havoc down the line. She was hopeful, though, that both law enforcement and tech companies are becoming more aware of these issues. “I think they want to do something. Up until now, people haven’t realized how traumatic it is,” she said.

Why continue to put human beings through this when the costs are so very high? No one I spoke with seemed hopeful that these filtering processes could be fully automated anytime soon. There are technologies like PhotoDNA and web crawlers that can identify and sort some kinds of content, but humans are still needed to differentiate the merely unpleasant from the criminal. One of the ways that victims can be re-traumatized, noted Marsha Gilmer-Tullis, a children’s advocacy director at NCMEC, is through the circulation of old pictures. “The image is frozen in time. We don't know, as these young kids become older, what are the worries,” she said. Without this specific form of digital labor, the internet would be awash in such material damaging both to the viewer and to the subject.

And perhaps for the right person, being a human filter could be a good job. After publishing the Google’s account earlier this week, at least five people emailed me asking how to get employed there. “I have understood that human beings are inherently evil for a long time now,” wrote one job seeker, “so after that realization, nothing shocks me.”
http://www.buzzfeed.com/reyhan/how-c...st-things-ever





Sticky Keys Begone! The Logitech K310 Washable Keyboard
Sebastian Anthony

Logitech has released the K310, its first washable keyboard.

We’re not just talking about “splash proof” either — you can take the K310, immerse it in up to 30cm of water (12in), and give it a good scrub. The only limitation is you can only use standard washing up liquid — oh, and Logitech says you should try to keep the USB connector out of the water, too. Once you’ve washed the keyboard, simply leave it to dry. The user guide says it takes eight hours to air dry, and that you shouldn’t use a hair dryer. There are actually drainage holes on the backside of the K310, to help speed things along.

Beyond being washable, the K310 is a standard 104/105-key USB PC keyboard, with soggy rubber dome switches (boo). The switches are rated at five million cycles (yay), and the keys are laser cut so that the letters don’t fade — if only washing clothes was so easy. The specs don’t list Mac OS X as a supported OS, but in all likelihood the K310 works just fine. Don’t try putting your Mac in the sink, though — if it’s been at least 9 months, you’re probably better off just buying a new one.

Logitech is actually fairly late to the washable keyboard party. HP, Kensington, and Unotron have all had washable keyboards on the market for a while — but in general, these are dull, black, clunky units that seem more oriented towards industrial and medical settings. It also isn’t clear if these are open-air units (like normal keyboards), or if they’re sealed (like the keyboards you’ve seen in McDonald’s). The Logitech keyboard, on the other hand, is quite attractive and looks just like a normal, consumer-oriented keyboard.

So, there you have it — if you regularly spill Coke or other sticky and/or goopy fluids on your keyboard, or if you regularly shed a lot of body hair (like me), grab a Logitech K310. It goes on sale at the end of the month for $40. If you’ve never spilled Coke on your keyboard before, Logitech has provided a helpful, demonstrative video:
http://www.extremetech.com/computing...hable-keyboard





Fewer and Fewer People Want to Know About Computers, Says Google
Alexis C. Madrigal

Bouncing around Google's trend data, I came across what to me is a very sad looking chart. It's the search volume for a basket of computer and electronics related terms (e.g. "windows, mac, hp, ipod, google, dell, sony, xbox").

We see some seasonality around the holidays, as you would expect, but the dominant trend is DOWN. Every year since Google started tracking this information in 2004, the number of people trying to find information about computers has marched ever downwards. Of course, that could just mean that people understand their machines better or that the machines themselves are good enough that people don't need to look things up about them as often. Or perhaps people have settled into their brand preferences and don't comparison shop like we used to in the old Computer Shopper days.

But whatever the reasons -- and with a trend this big and long, it's almost certainly many reasons -- the number of people interested enough to Google things about desktops, laptops, and other electronics has been halved since 2004.

One partial explanation worth noting is the rise of the phones and other mobile technologies. Luckily, Google lets you plot this against the decline of computer-related search volume.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...google/261271/





How Police Tracked Down Steve Jobs' Stolen iPads
Martyn Williams

The digital breadcrumbs left behind when people use Internet-connected gadgets are what led California investigators to recover iMacs, iPads and other items stolen from the home of the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

Based on the police report, obtained by the IDG News Service, here's how they did it.

The burglary took place while the Jobs family home, in a leafy and quiet area of Palo Alto, was being renovated and was unoccupied. Sometime between the construction crew leaving the site at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, July 17, and arriving just before 8 a.m. the next morning, someone entered the house and stole several personal effects and Apple gadgets.

Within several days, the Palo Alto Police Department had enlisted the help of the Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team, a San Jose-based organization formed by local, state and federal law enforcement agencies that specializes in computer-related crimes. Local police wanted assistance tracking down the Apple computers and iPads that were reported stolen from the house.

The REACT team reached out to Apple's own investigators, who had access to the company's computer systems, and supplied them with a list of serial numbers of stolen devices. Apple was quickly able to determine that one of the stolen iPads had connected with Apple's servers soon after the burglary.
iPad Phones Home

The iPad was trying to reinstall its operating system and was recorded connecting from an AT&T U-verse Internet IP address from 7:22 a.m. to 7:31 a.m. on July 18, the morning after the house was broken into and minutes before the returning construction workers would discover the break-in.

Upon searching logs for the IP address, Apple investigators discovered a different iPad had connected from the same address at 8:10 a.m. on July 17, before the burglary took place, and again at 1:56 p.m. on July 20, after the break-in was reported to police. That iPad wasn't suspected stolen, but the iTunes account information gave investigators a lead.

Jobs introducing the original iPad

Tied with information from AT&T U-verse about the Internet connection, investigators were led to an address in Alameda, on the east side of San Francisco Bay. At that address Kariem McFarlin, the suspect in the case, was paying for AT&T Internet service, according to investigators.

While police were building their case there was more activity on the stolen devices.

Over a five-day period, Apple investigators recorded activity on McFarlin's iTunes account linked to the iPad that originally connected to restore its operating system, a second iPad stolen from the Jobs' home and an iMac computer that was also missing, according to police. One of the iPads later connected from a Comcast Internet connection in Alameda using a different iTunes account.

Investigators say they searched McFarlin's Facebook page and discovered their suspect and the owner of this new iTunes account were friends.

Before investigators made their move there was one final check that had to be made.

They traveled to the Alameda address where McFarlin lived and swept the immediate area for Wi-Fi signals.

Police wanted to determine whether there was an open Wi-Fi network that perhaps was being used without the owners' permission. If the AT&T Internet address was tied to an unsecured connection, it could complicate the case because anyone could have used it. Finding only secured Wi-Fi signals, investigators could argue it was being used by the person paying the bill or those with permission.

Caught With Stolen Goods

On August 2 police entered McFarlin's apartment and discovered one of the stolen iMac computers on his kitchen table, according to the police report.

The other iPads were recovered from people associated with McFarlin, the police say.

To get rid of stolen jewelry, McFarlin told police, he had Googled selling jewelry and found a dealer in Pennsylvania. Police say they found e-mail messages in McFarlin's phone indicating the sale and were able to recover the stolen jewelry by contacting the broker.

In a subsequent interview with McFarlin, police say he admitted breaking into the home by climbing over the builders' scaffolding and finding a spare key for the house in the garage. He said he stole two iMacs, three iPads, three iPods, one Apple TV, a diamond necklace and earrings, and several other items.

In explaining his actions, investigators say McFarlin said he had money problems and had taken to breaking into houses. He wrote a single page letter of apology admitting he had burglarized Steve Jobs' house and stolen property, but had done so because he was desperate.

McFarlin is due in court on Monday.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2610...len_ipads.html





Insight: Experts Hope to Shield Cars from Computer Viruses
Jim Finkle

A team of top hackers working for Intel Corp's security division toil away in a West Coast garage searching for electronic bugs that could make automobiles vulnerable to lethal computer viruses.

Intel's McAfee unit, which is best known for software that fights PC viruses, is one of a handful of firms that are looking to protect the dozens of tiny computers and electronic communications systems that are built into every modern car.

It's scary business. Security experts say that automakers have so far failed to adequately protect these systems, leaving them vulnerable to hacks by attackers looking to steal cars, eavesdrop on conversations, or even harm passengers by causing vehicles to crash.

"You can definitely kill people," said John Bumgarner, chief technology officer of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a non-profit organization that helps companies analyze the potential for targeted computer attacks on their networks and products.

To date there have been no reports of violent attacks on automobiles using a computer virus, according to SAE International, an association of more than 128,000 technical professionals working in the aerospace and the auto industries.

Yet, Ford spokesman Alan Hall said his company had tasked its security engineers with making its Sync in-vehicle communications and entertainment system as resistant as possible to attack.

"Ford is taking the threat very seriously and investing in security solutions that are built into the product from the outset," he said.

And a group of U.S. computer scientists shook the industry in 2010 with a landmark study that showed viruses could damage cars when they were moving at high speeds. Their tests were done at a decommissioned airport.

SAE International charged a committee of more than 40 industry experts with advising manufacturers on preventing, detecting and mitigating cyber attacks.

"Any cyber security breach carries certain risk," said Jack Pokrzywa, SAE's manager of ground vehicle standards. "SAE Vehicle Electrical System Security Committee is working hard to develop specifications which will reduce that risk in the vehicle area."

The group of U.S. computer scientists from California and Washington state issued a second report last year that identified ways in which computer worms and Trojans could be delivered to automobiles -- via onboard diagnostics systems, wireless connections and even tainted CDs played on radios systems.

They did not say which company manufactured the cars they examined, but did say they believed the issues affected the entire industry, noting that many automakers use common suppliers and development processes.

The three big U.S. automakers declined to say if they knew of any instances in which their vehicles had been attacked with malicious software or if they had recalled cars to fix security vulnerabilities.

Toyota Motor Corp, the world's biggest automaker, said it was not aware of any hacking incidents on its cars.

"They're basically designed to change coding constantly. I won't say it's impossible to hack, but it's pretty close," said Toyota spokesman John Hanson.

Officials with Hyundai Motor Co, Nissan Motor Co and Volkswagen AG said they could not immediately comment on the issue.

A spokesman for Honda Motor Co said that the Japanese automaker was studying the security of on-vehicle computer systems, but declined to discuss those efforts.

A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security declined to comment when asked how seriously the agency considers the risk that hackers could launch attacks on vehicles or say whether DHS had learned of any such incidents.

The department helps businesses in the manufacturing and transportation industries secure the technology inside their products and investigates reports of vulnerabilities that could allow attacks.

Bruce Snell, a McAfee executive who oversees his company's research on car security at the Beaverton, Oregon garage, said automakers are fairly concerned about the potential cyber attacks because of the frightening repercussions.

"If your laptop crashes you'll have a bad day, but if your car crashes that could be life threatening," he said. "I don't think people need to panic now. But the future is really scary."

A McAfee spokeswoman said that among those hackers working on pulling apart cars was Barnaby Jack, a well-known researcher who has previously figured out ways that criminals could force ATMs to spit out cash (bit.ly/bqwEbS) and cause medical pumps to release lethal doses of insulin ( reut.rs/sCD4Pr). Makers of those products responded by saying they would work to improve security.

COMPUTERS ON WHEELS

White hats are increasingly looking beyond PCs and data centers for security vulnerabilities that have plagued the computer industry for decades and focusing on products like cars, medical devices and electricity meters that run on tiny computers embedded in those products.

Automobiles are already considered "computers on wheels" by security experts. Vehicles are filled with dozens of tiny computers known as electronic control units, or ECUs, that require tens of millions of lines of computer code to manage interconnected systems including engines, brakes and navigation as well as lighting, ventilation and entertainment.

Cars also use the same wireless technologies that power cell phones and Bluetooth headsets, which makes them vulnerable to remote attacks that are widely known to criminal hackers.

"There is tons of opportunity for attack on car systems," said Stuart McClure, an expert on automobile security who recently stepped down as worldwide chief technology officer of McAfee to start his own firm.

Security analysts fear that criminals, terrorists and spies are gradually turning their attention to embedded computers, many of which can be attacked using some of the same techniques as regular computers.

Automakers are rushing to make it easy to plug portable computers and phones to vehicles and connect them to the Internet, but in many cases they are also exposing critical systems that run their vehicles to potential attackers because those networks are all linked within the car.

"The manufacturers, like those of any other hardware products, are implementing features and technology just because they can and don't fully understand the potential risks of doing so," said Joe Grand, an electrical engineer and independent hardware security expert.

Grand estimates that the average auto maker is about 20 years behind software companies in understanding how to prevent cyber attacks.

Chrysler said it was addressing security issues with industry groups and outside organizations including Battelle Corp, a non-profit company that recently established an auto security research center in Columbia, Maryland known as CAVE, or the Center for Advanced Vehicle Environments.

CAVE, which declined to discuss its research on auto security, has hired hacking expert Tiffany Strauchs Rad, a professor at the University of Southern Maine. Last year, she was part of a team that identified flaws in prison networks which could enable hackers to remotely open or lock cell doors.

'SELF DESTRUCT'

Concerns about such possibilities emerged after a group of computer scientists from the University of California and the University of Washington published two landmark research papers that showed computer viruses can infect cars and cause them to crash, potentially harming passengers.

The group chose a fairly banal name, the Center for Automotive Embedded Systems Security. Yet their work is as imaginative as that of Q, the fictional scientist who supplies weapons to British secret agent James Bond.

They figured out how to attack vehicles by putting viruses onto compact discs. When unknowing victims try to listen to the CD, it infects the car radio, then makes its way across the network to more critical systems.

For instance, they came up with a combination attack dubbed "Self Destruct". It starts when a 60-second timer pops up on a car's digital dashboard and starts counting down. When it reaches zero the virus can simultaneously shut off the car's lights, lock its doors, kill the engine and release or slam on the brakes.

In addition to designing viruses to harm passengers in infected vehicles, the academics were able to remotely eavesdrop on conversations inside cars, a technique that could be of use to corporate and government spies.

The research group disbanded after publishing two technical papers, in May 2010 and August 2011, that describe multiple types of attacks and ways to infect cars using Bluetooth systems, wireless networks as well as the car's OnBoard Diagnostics port, which is also known as an OBD-II port. (bit.ly/oao8a8)

One issue of concern is fighting ordinary PC viruses that could potentially infect cars when laptops and other devices are plugged into infotainment systems.

"Viruses are something that needs to be addressed directly. How we guard against that transfer to our system is a primary focus of our efforts," said Toyota spokesman John Hanson.

(Additional reporting by Bernie Woodall in Detroit; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...87J03X20120820





Assange Accuses U.S. of a ‘Witch Hunt’
Ravi Somaiya

Beyond the reach of police officers waiting to arrest him and with hundreds of supporters looking on, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, took to the balcony of Ecuador’s embassy here on Sunday to condemn the United States government and cast himself as one of the world’s most persecuted whistle-blowers.

Since June, Mr. Assange has been confined to the embassy, a small office in a red-brick apartment block where he fled and was granted asylum from British efforts to extradite him to Sweden. He is wanted for questioning on accusations of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion brought by two women in Stockholm in 2010, allegations he has denied.

On Sunday, with his supporters shouting encouragement, Mr. Assange did not directly mention those allegations or the women who brought them. One supporter who spoke before him, a former British diplomat, Craig Murray, asserted that Mr. Assange had been “fitted up with criminal offenses” as a pretext to prosecute him in the United States for leaking classified government documents.

It was a theme Mr. Assange continued. “I ask President Obama to do the right thing,” he said, reading from a statement as he stood on the balcony wearing a crisp blue shirt and red tie, his white hair cut short. “The United States must renounce its witch hunt against WikiLeaks. The United States must dissolve its F.B.I. investigation,” a reference to persistent reports that such an investigation is taking place. “The United States must vow that it will not seek to prosecute our staff or our supporters.”

A White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, told reporters on Saturday that the Obama administration considered the standoff a matter for the governments of Britain, Sweden and Ecuador.

Mr. Assange’s address, which was met with applause and cheers from a crowd that filled the broad streets nearby, was the latest turn in a diplomatic fracas that has captivated London. As he spoke, dozens of Metropolitan Police officers stood by, stony-faced, guarding every entrance and exit of the embassy.

In the embassy, which is legally Ecuadorean territory, Mr. Assange is safe. But should he step foot into the street to begin the journey to a new life in South America, he will be on British territory and subject to arrest.

With neither side willing to back down, and a raid on the embassy deemed unlikely in the face of international law, the diplomatic impasse shows no signs of a quick conclusion.

In granting him asylum on Thursday, President Rafael Correa of Ecuador presented his move as a pre-emptive action against American plans to seek Mr. Assange’s extradition and put him on trial in the United States on espionage charges for his role in publishing American military and diplomatic documents. American officials have not publicly disclosed any such plans.

Mr. Assange, 41, an Australian-born hacker who has been both hailed as a champion of free speech and denounced as a danger to public safety, burst onto the scene in 2010 when WikiLeaks posted secret documents on the Iraq war, classified Pentagon documents on the Afghan conflict and hundreds of thousands of classified messages from the United States State Department.

On Sunday, Mr. Assange used his 10-minute speech to criticize the recent prosecutions of those suspected of leaking classified materials.

Specifically, he hailed Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, an Army intelligence analyst accused of passing archives of classified documents to WikiLeaks. He called Private Manning a “hero” and “one of the world’s foremost political prisoners.” Private Manning faces a court-martial, and a potential life sentence, for what prosecutors have said was his role in transferring the documents to WikiLeaks, which shared them with several news organizations, including The New York Times.

“As WikiLeaks stands under threat,” Mr. Assange said, “so does the freedom of expression and the health of all our societies.”

He spoke ominously of a “dangerous and oppressive world in which journalists fall silent under the fear of prosecution, and citizens must whisper in the dark.”

President Correa has himself been accused of persecuting journalists who have criticized him.

Marc Santora contributed reporting from New York.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/w...le-blower.html





Photo Reveals UK Police Arrest Plan for Assange

A policeman in London appears to have accidentally revealed an arrest plan for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, in what UK media have branded an embarrassing slip-up by London's Metropolitan Police.

The photo, snapped by the Press Association news agency and published in several newspapers, shows a clipboard held by a uniformed officer Friday outside the Ecuadorian embassy where Assange has been holed up since June.

Clearly legible in a zoomed-in view of the clipboard, on a sheet of paper headed "Restricted," are the words: "EQ Embassy brief - Summary of current position re. Assange. Action required - Assange to be arrested under all circumstances."

It goes on to suggest possible ways in which he could exit the building, such as in a diplomatic bag or vehicle.

The document also appears to warn of the possibilities of "distraction," perhaps by supporters of Assange who have previously rallied outside the central London embassy building.

UK police have previously made clear that they intend to arrest Assange if he leaves the embassy, where he is shielded by its diplomatic protection.

Ecuador says UK would be 'suicidal' to try and enter embassy for Assange

But the carelessness of an officer in apparently exposing details of the force's plan will likely cause red faces.

Asked about the photograph, a spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Police told CNN "the document is not related to the Julian Assange case."

The apparent slip-up is the latest twist in the Assange case, which has brought unlikely drama to the posh Knightsbridge neighborhood since he sought refuge in the embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden to face questioning over sex crime allegations.

This month, Ecuador officially offered Assange asylum in the South American country, but the British say they will not give him safe passage out of the embassy.

The Foreign Office says Britain has a legal obligation to hand him over to Sweden, after Assange's legal efforts to avoid extradition were rejected by British courts up to the Supreme Court.

The dispute gathered heat when the British Foreign Office, in a letter to Ecuadorian officials, cited a little known law that could temporarily suspend the embassy's diplomatic protection and allow authorities to enter and arrest Assange. Ecuador's resident has dismissed any steps in that direction as "suicidal."

Assange's lawyer, Baltasar Garzon, said his client was willing to answer Swedish prosecutors' questions, but only if he was given certain guarantees.

Assange, an Australian, and his supporters claim a U.S. grand jury has been empaneled to consider charges against him.

He says the allegations against him in Sweden are politically motivated, and claims to fear Sweden will transfer him to the United States, where he claims he could face the death penalty for the work of WikiLeaks.

Sweden angrily rejected that allegation last week.
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/25/wo...ice/index.html





Senate Passes 'Lite' Data Retention Laws

Australia gets closer to European treaty.
Darren Pauli

Law enforcement agencies will be able to force internet service providers to store data on subscribers under new legislation approved by the Senate today.

The Cybercrime Legislation Amendment Bill 2011 amends the Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters Act 1987, the Criminal Code Act 1995, the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 and the Telecommunications Act 1997.

The changes allow police to force telcos to retain data on persons of interest for a set period while a warrant is sought.

Such data may have been previously jettisoned by ISPs, which generally retain only enough subscriber information for customer service and billing.

Greens Senator Scott Ludlam described the reforms as a targeted, 'lite' version of the Federal Government's proposed data retention laws, and with more oversight.

Ludlam fiercely opposed the proposed data retention laws, but said he backed this reform to police power.

“It is a narrow and targeted form of data retention that allows law enforcement to target, for instance, persons suspected of serious crime and ask ISPs to retain their data,” Ludlam said.

The changes were couched as necessary for Australia to accede to the 2004 Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime, designed to assist with international cybercrime investigations through sharing of information on persons of interest, among other avenues.

The Federal Government said in May 2010 that it intended to accede to the treaty, which calls for procedures that allow authorities to force service providers to surrender information about subscribers, and intercept and record traffic.

The legal changes have been lauded by law enforcement and intelligence agencies as key to cracking down on international cybercrime.

Should Australia accede, it would join 34 other nations, including the US, that were already party to the convention.

Ludlam said the sharing of data between overseas agencies was troubling due to an increase in the number of requests within Australia for subscriber data by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

“There were a quarter of a million requests to telcos for people’s data and metadata [between 2010 and 2011],” he said.

“This will be shared all over the world and I don’t think the safeguards are there.”

Attorney-General Nicola Roxon said the reforms were necessary to help curb cybercrime.

“Cybercrime is a growing threat that touches all aspects of modern life. It poses complex policy and law enforcement challenges, partly due to the transnational nature of the internet,” Roxon said in a statement.

“The convention promotes a coordinated approach to cybercrime by requiring countries to criminalise these computer related offences.

"The convention also establishes procedures to make investigations more efficient to improve international cooperation.

In May last year, Australia's Joint Standing Committee on Treaties recommended that “binding treaty action be taken” on the accession plans.

The recommendation came despite concerns raised in a separate Senate Inquiry into online privacy and opposition from civil liberties groups.

While that Committee was aware that surveillance raised “fears about the invasion of privacy, with potential threat to human rights and civil liberties”, it expected sufficient safeguards to be in place.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/312771...tion-laws.aspx





Use Ten Connections AT ONCE with Dispatch
jshaab

While I was away in San Francisco, Connectify’s engineers were filming themselves up on our rooftop “eating their own dogfood” — and I’m not talking Kibbles ‘n Bits. Our groundbreaking new application, Connectify Dispatch allows you to connect to multiple networks simultaneously for their combined speed and reliability. And, the Connectify team just couldn’t wait to see how fast Dispatch could go … in the real world.

Connectify Dispatch lets you use any combination of Wi-Fi, 3G/4G mobile broadband, or wired connections, and Dispatch intelligently balances all of your traffic for faster streaming, browsing, and BitTorrent downloads. In fact, the more networks you have, the faster you’ll go. The thing is, it really works!

Since Verizon recently lifted their ban on tethering applications for smartphones, our engineers decided to throw it into the mix, and give it a try. But instead of just using the tethered phone to get on the Internet when Wi-Fi isn’t working, they decided to use it in addition to every other unsecured Wi-Fi network located around our office building!

All in all, they hooked up all of these networking cards:

• 7 USB Wi-Fi Cards
• USB 3G Modem
• 4G Tethered Smartphone
• Ethernet Connection

The results are impressive. Watch as the Connectify team joins TEN Wi-Fi, 3G/4G, and Ethernet connections simultaneously, for one super-fast connection.

We’re breaking down the barrier of networks, and we want you to join us.

To learn more, visit www.backdispatch.com.

Thanks,

Alex Gizis

Connectify Founder + CEO

http://www.connectify.me/use-ten-con...once-dispatch/





Home Wifi Could be Used for Emergency Responders
AFP

Wireless routers for homes and offices could be knitted together to provide a communications system for emergency responders if the mobile phone network fails, German scientists reported on Monday.

In many countries, routers are so commonplace even in medium-sized towns that they could be used by fire services, ambulance and police if cellphone towers and networks are down or overwhelmed by people caught up in an emergency, they say.

WifiKamill Panitzek and colleagues at the Technical University in Darmstadt, western Germany, walked around their city centre to pinpoint the location -- but without invading privacy -- of wireless routers.

In an area of just 0.5 square kilometres (0.19 square miles), using an Android application to locate wireless networks, they found 1,971 routers of which 212 were public routers, meaning they were non-encrypted.

This rich density means that an emergency network could piggyback on nearby routers, giving first responders access to the Internet and contact with their headquarters.

"With a communication range of 30 metres (yards), a mesh network could be easily constructed in urban areas like our hometown," say the team, whose mathematical model is published in the International Journal of Mobile Network Design and Innovation.

The team suggest that routers incorporate an emergency "switch" that responders can activate to set up a backup network, thus giving them a voice and data link through the Internet.

This could be done quite easily without impeding users or intruding on their privacy, the study argues. Many routers already have a "guest" mode, meaning a supplementary channel that allows visitors to use a home's wifi.

"The emergency switch would enable an open guest mode that on the one hand protects people's privacy, and on the other hand makes the existing communications resources available to first responders," says the paper.

The population of Darmstadt is 142,000. The location scanned in the study comprised a rectangle of streets in the city centre, covering 467,500 square metres (558,500 square yards).
https://www.securityweek.com/home-wi...ncy-responders





FCC Report: 19 Million Lack Broadband Internet
Brendan Sasso

About 19 million Americans, many in rural areas, still lack access to broadband Internet, according to a report released Tuesday by the Federal Communications Commission.

For the third year in a row, the FCC concluded that broadband is not being deployed to all Americans in a "reasonable and timely fashion."

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 requires the FCC to issue the annual report and to assess whether "advanced telecommunications" services are being deployed fast enough.

The result was an improvement from last year, when the FCC found that 26 million Americans lacked access to high-speed Internet connections. The 2012 report also noted significant progress in the deployment of high-speed 4G cellular networks.

"The U.S. has now regained global leadership in key areas of the broadband economy, including mobile, where we lead in mobile apps and 4G deployment; but, in this flat, competitive global economy, we need to keep driving toward faster broadband and universal access," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a statement.

Expanding Internet access has been a top priority for the FCC under Genachowski, who argues that broadband is the great infrastructure challenge of the 21st century.

Last year, the commission converted a $4.5 billion fund for rural telephone service into a subsidy for expanding broadband access. But the report noted that implementation of the new Internet subsidy has only just begun.

About 14.5 million of the 19 million people without broadband access live in rural areas, the report found. Additionally, only about 40 percent of Americans who could purchase broadband do so, citing cost, lack of technical skills or the perception that the Internet is not relevant or useful for them.

The commission applauded companies for investing about $1 trillion since 1996 in wireline and wireless broadband, according to industry statistics.

The two Republican commissioners, Ajit Pai and Robert McDowell, dissented from the commission's finding that the pace of deployment is inadequate.

McDowell accused the three Democratic commissioners of using the report as pretext to justify more regulation.

"In reality, the growth of broadband deployment in America, especially regarding the mobile marketplace, has been swift and strong," McDowell said.

Pai argued that the commission should have counted people who are covered by high-speed cellular service as having broadband access. Under that definition, just 5.5 million would lack access to any broadband service, according to Pai.
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-va...dband-internet





The New Rise of a Summer Hit: Tweet It Maybe

Carly Rae Jepsen's video for "Call Me Maybe," which has been watched 212 million times online.
Ben Sisario

For decades, the song of the summer would emerge each year following a pattern as predictable as the beach tides.

Pop radio would get it rolling before school let out, and soon the song — inevitably one with a big, playful beat and an irresistible hook — would blare from car stereos everywhere. Then came prom singalongs as the song finally became ubiquitous around the Fourth of July. In 1987, it was Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” In 2003, Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love.”

But the success of this summer’s hit, Carly Rae Jepsen’s cheerfully flirty “Call Me Maybe,” shows how much the hitmaking machine, as well as the music industry itself, has been upended by social media.

Only a year ago, the charts were dominated by stars who had come out of the old machine of radio and major-label promotion: Katy Perry, Rihanna, Adele, Maroon 5. This year’s biggest hits — “Call Me Maybe,” Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” and Fun.’s “We Are Young” — started in left field and were helped along by YouTube and Twitter before coming to the mainstream media.

For “Call Me Maybe,” which was No. 1 for nine weeks, the longest run of the year, the critical piece was YouTube. After Justin Bieber and friends posted a video of themselves lip-syncing to it in February, hundreds of fan tributes followed. Alongside Ms. Jepsen’s own video, which has been watched 212 million times, versions by Katy Perry, the Cookie Monster (“Share It Maybe”) and the United States Olympic swim team turned it into a yearlong audiovisual meme.

A tribute version even brought the song to the attention of President Obama. In an interview with KOB-FM, a New Mexico radio station, he said: “I have to admit, I’ve never actually heard the original version of the song. I saw this version where they spliced up me from a whole bunch of different speeches that I made. They kind of mashed together an Obama version of it.”

Nearly two-thirds of teenagers listen to music on YouTube, more than any other medium, Nielsen said last week. Ms. Jepsen said in a recent interview that “the viral videos are what’s been the driving force for this. It was insane to see that the music could spread that far because of the Internet. It’s a cool thing. It changes the game completely.”

YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are now record labels’ textbook tools for starting a marketing campaign, and if the numbers there are big enough, they can be used in pitches to radio and television programmers.

To introduce Cher Lloyd, a 19-year-old singer who was on “The X Factor” in Britain, Epic Records set up a “queen” fan to beat the drum on Twitter, and coached Ms. Lloyd on what to mention online — a TV appearance, for example, or the Twitter handles for radio D.J.’s.

“In this day and age, artist development is about how do you turn 10 Facebook likes into 100, into 1,000,” said Scott Seviour, Epic’s senior vice president for marketing.

The song catapulted Ms. Jepsen, apple-cheeked and giggly at 26, from obscurity to worldwide fame. Five years ago she placed third on “Canadian Idol,” and last fall she released “Call Me Maybe” in Canada to preview her second album. By the Christmas holiday it was a minor hit in Canada, when Mr. Bieber heard it.

“It’s supposed to be a fun song,” Ms. Jepsen said. “Not to take yourself too seriously, to put you in a good mood.”

Mr. Bieber’s role in popularizing the song reflects the importance of both social media and old-fashioned celebrity promotion. On Dec. 30, 2011, he told his 15 million Twitter followers that “Call Me Maybe” was “possibly the catchiest song I’ve ever heard lol.” Shortly thereafter, he and Mr. Braun signed Ms. Jepsen to their label in the United States, Schoolboy, which is affiliated with Interscope Records and the Universal Music Group.

To exploit the success of the single, which has sold eight million downloads around the world, Ms. Jepsen delayed the release of her album. Called “Kiss,” it will now be released next month, when she will also hit the road as an opening act for Mr. Bieber.

The song’s trajectory also demonstrates the continuing power of radio, which record executives say is still essential to turn any song — no matter how much online buzz it has — into a genuine smash.

In March and April, when “Call Me Maybe” was getting tens of millions of views on YouTube, it still had relatively low radio play — fewer than 5,000 spins a week on Top 40 stations in the United States, according to Nielsen. It hit No. 1 on iTunes on May 27, but took almost a month to reach No. 1 on Billboard’s singles chart, which counts sales as well as airplay and streaming services. By then it had about 20,000 spins a week on multiple radio formats.

“There’s not a million-seller out there that doesn’t have radio play,” said Jay Frank, chief executive of the label DigSin. “But its first million generally doesn’t come from radio.”

“Call Me Maybe” is a watershed case for the use of social media as a marketing tool, but the song’s success will be difficult to replicate — even for Ms. Jepsen as she prepares to release her album. No matter how hard a record company might push, popularity online depends on the enthusiasm of individual fans.

The marketers behind Ms. Jepsen have worked to organize it to some degree, through tools like a Tumblr blog collecting fan tribute videos. But Jonathan Simkin, her manager, said that trying to control the energy wasn’t the point.

“That’s part of the beauty of how this has grown,” Mr. Simkin said. “This is just people who the song struck. I don’t want to harness it or limit it. I just want to pinch myself and say, ‘Thank God the song affects people this way.’ ”

Ms. Jepsen said she was not worrying about trying to line up another megahit, because that kind of success is never predictable.

“I never know what is a hit and what isn’t a hit,” she said. “I just write what feels natural and good. At end of the day you just release it and hope for the best.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/b...ing-music.html





ToorCamp: Adventures in an American Hacker Camp
Darlene Storm

ToorCamp is an American-flavored hacker camp that was inspired by European versions like CCC Camp [1] in Germany [2] and HAR Camp [3] in the Netherlands. ToorCamp 2009 was the "first ever full-scale" USA hacker camp and was held inside an abandoned Titan-1 Missile silo at Moses Lake, WA. After the Black Hat and Def Con hacking conferences, ToorCamp 2012 [4] was held at the northwestern tip of the U.S. at Hobuck Beach Resort [5] in Neah Bay, WA [6]. Since about 400 people either pitched tents or stayed in cabins, not only does it dispel the notion that all hackers avoid sunshine and the great outdoors, apparently a good time was had by all. So if you were tapped out of mula like me and didn’t attend, here’s a look at some of the unique aspects of this cool camp for “hackers, makers, breakers and shakers.”

As you would expect from a hacker conference, there were workshops [8] like the one for lock picking and a plethora of presentations from [9] “hacking computers to brain hacking, [10] from brewing soda to fighting robots, from civil rights to lightning guns.” Joe 'Kingpin [11]' Grand, previously with Discovery’s Prototype This [12] and the infamous hacker group L0pht, kicked off the keynote [13]. Some of the talks [14] and activities that received the most news coverage [15] included Amal Graafstra [16], who has experimented with human augmentation [17] by having RFID implants [18] in both hands. He found eight other willing souls and implanted them with RFID chips [19]. Dan Kaminsky talked Black Ops [20] and played “with some techniques that are obviously wrong and evil and naïve.” Talking about embedded systems [21], David Bryan presented “I pwned your router. Oops [22].” A few YouTube videos posted include Sai [23] talking about “Make Your Laws [24]” and “Cognitive Psychology for Hackers [25].” Jerry Whiting posted “Occupy your camera: Policing the police through your len(s)” on Vimeo [26].

Aditya Gupta and Subho Halder of Xysec Labs [27] were scheduled to show off their AFE (Android Framework for Exploitation) creation, which allows malware “writers to steal contacts, SC card contents and eavesdrop with ease.” Gupta told SC Magazine [28], “For a basic effort at writing malware, that’s not even really trying hard, you can make $10,000 a month.” GeekWire added [19], “Seattle hacker Parity taught us how to hack a PIN code out of just about any HTC Android phone, and how to apply the approach to other makes and models. Then Kos showed how you could use a special USB OTG cable to connect your Android phone (pre-loaded with tools and scripts) to another Android phone and pwn it in under a minute, gaining access to photos, texts, emails, and even your Google account token.” [29]

While there’s more on the ToorCamp blog [30], some of the other more bizarre activities included Bike Jousting [31], setting up a huge dome which doubled as a dance hall at night, and building a cell network called ShadyTel. Ken Westin explained [29], “We were all given our own SIM card to put into unlocked GSM phones and were able to use the network to not only call each other but also outside the camp, one guy in our camp even called his girlfriend in Australia.” There was also a payphone turned into a community phone.

“Did I mention there were freakin’ laser beams?” Westin wrote at Tripwire State of Security [29]. “Hackerbot Labs built a photonic beam by extracting the laser modules from projectors and merging them into a single beam of light seen for miles.” The laser was so powerful that the group “had to get FAA clearance to deploy” it.

As unique as a hacker camps are, WorldToor [35] is even more bizarre. It’s a 13-day Ice Breaker expedition journey to “the end of the world” for the first ever hacker conference in Antarctica. The event will be held on December 10 – 21, so if the Mayans are correct [36] about the world ending on December 21, 2012, then this will also be the last hacker conference ever. The ToorCon crew [37] “is dedicated to throwing some of the most unique and extreme hacker / computer security conferences in the world.” Although attendees might feel the “pain” of the cold, that may be nothing compared to withdrawals from being cut off from Internet access. The security conference presentations will take the edge off and take place during the cruise to and from Antarctica.

If the world ends, then you won’t need money and can go out in style with this great adventure for hackers and security professionals. While the conference [38] is free, prices range [39] from $4,499 to $9,299 for additional itinerary adventures. It works like this: “Everyone that comes on the expedition is required to give a 20 minute talk. Alternatively you can organize a hacking session where you either teach others about something or propose working on a particular project.” WorldToor was mentioned during a Hak5 interview about ToorCamp [40]. It was suggested that if the end of the world happens on Dec. 21 and everything freezes over, then WorldToor attendees will be safely secured on an icebreaker which is also conveniently a ship in case the opposite occurs and the polar caps melt.

And if the world doesn’t end and you want another adventure for hackers, then you might consider attending the 29th Chaos Communication Congress [41], a four-day hacking conference held December 27 – 30 in Hamburg, Germany organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC).
http://blogs.computerworld.com/secur...an-hacker-camp





A Verdict That Alters an Industry
Brian X. Chen and Lisa Alcalay Klug

The federal court jury’s decision Friday in a smartphone patent lawsuit between Apple and Samsung is expected to alter the dynamics of the highly competitive mobile phone industry.

For Samsung, which lost on almost every count in the closely watched trial in San Jose, Calif., and was ordered to pay more than $1 billion in damages, the implications are more obvious. It will have to be cautious in how it designs products to avoid being accused of imitating Apple.

Other makers may become more cautious, too. Google, which makes the Android software that runs at the core of Samsung phones, will clearly feel an impact through its hardware-making partner. Microsoft, however, which is attempting to enter the market with new software, will feel less of an effect, industry experts said.

Apple has been the smartphone market leader. It defined the category in the way phones look and how users interact with them. Most popular smartphones today are a slab of glass and metal controlled through a touch-screen full of icons arrayed on the screen. Because consumers are familiar with that format, phones from various makers tended to look and behave similarly.

Those similarities might be the first things to change. “Companies in the future are going to have to consider how much they want their product to look and feel like their competitors’ products in terms of shape, size, the way it feels, the way it looks, how the icons are similar, or will the icons be quite dissimilar” said Robert W. Dickerson Jr., a lawyer who is the head of the West Coast intellectual property practice for Dickstein Shapiro, a patent law firm not involved in the Samsung-Apple case.

Microsoft and its main hardware partner Nokia, at the very least, should have an easier time of it. Robert Barr, executive director of the University of California Berkeley’s Center for Law and Technology, said that the user interface — the icons and other features that users see and touch — of the Nokia Windows phones look distinctly different from the iPhone. Nokia, a longtime maker of phones, also has a thick portfolio of patents to protect itself. For Microsoft and Nokia, which are trying to make a comeback in smartphones, this design distinction is a clear advantage in the internecine patent wars sweeping the industry as much as it is a marketing advantage.

Things could get tougher, however, for Google, or any phone maker using its Android software. Android phones are the most common smartphones on the market today. Samsung is the world’s largest maker of smartphones and it has been quickly gaining market share. Collectively, the various Android phones from Samsung and other makers easily outsell Apple’s iPhones.

While Google is not involved in this case, Apple was clearly going after Android all along, said Robert P. Merges, professor of law and technology at University of California Berkeley School of Law. If other handset makers using Android fear that Apple will take them on and win, might they shy away from Android? “There are a lot more players in the Android world who could be involved in the future in litigation,” he said. “And it’s going to raise the cost of everyone in the Android system if the damages stick.”

Shifting to a less popular software system, like Windows or even Research in Motion’s operating system expected to arrive next year, gives Apple an advantage in the marketplace.“It’s not good news for Google,” Mr. Merges said. “Apple’s real target is the Android ecosystem, the Android world, everything having to do with Androids. That’s really what they are targeting here.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/t...-industry.html





Exclusive: Confessions from the Most Corrupt Apple Store in America (Updated)
Sam Biddle

"The saying goes: Don't fuck with the person that serves your food," a former Apple Genius tells me over IM. "Don't fuck with the person who repairs your computer." He—we'll call him Ronald—spent six years as a member of Apple's Genius squad in a busy Southwestern store. It was a model store: shiny as the best of them, teeming, making money. But in back rooms and in plain sight, the employees ran wild: giving away computers, stealing phones, drunkenly destroying customer property. Ronald saw (and did) it all.

You might think twice before your next visit to the bar.

Ronald is a skittish sort of guy, prone to hours of dishing about Apple over the phone and IM with obvious contempt, before vanishing into the thin trenches of the online netherworld. At one point we went almost an entire year without speaking, before he reemerged to link me up with another Genius we'll call Jake: a sturdy nine-to-five type whose aversion to taking part in this story stemmed only with his busy schedule.

Ronald, on the other hand, is terrified of Apple. Terrified of what the white and aluminum demigod would do to him, and what it'd do his friends if the mothership ever found out about what they did. It was bad, and it wasn't just a bunch of young punks working the system; the corruption rained down from above and pooled deep at the bottom.

Jake and Ronald both spoke with smiles and contempt about their former boss-of-bosses, a regional manager from Apple corporate who they allege ran the store like it was her own personal playground. Jake says the rest of the gang wasn't much better. "It bends my brain to know that, statistically speaking, it's harder to get a job at the Apple Store than it is to get into some Ivy League schools," he says. "Yet somehow they're staffed by some of the most inept people this side of mastering the ability to speak."

These were the people at the front lines of Apple's retail empire. Add a hiring boom of young (possibly inept) guns, inject them with the ego-inflaming title of Genius, add liquor, and boom: risky business. But they were a team. And together they perpetrated and put up with some serious retail war crimes—stuff that'd make Tim Cook's fleece jacket unravel.

Trading computers for plastic surgery...

Both Ronald and Jake describe their regional manager as an insufferable tyrant. But everyone has a jerk boss, right? Probably not one who gives away merchandise in exchange for a weight loss operation: With little attempt to cover up her deal from the rest of the staff (who feared imminent termination), Ronald and Jake say the store's Apple corporate regional manager arranged the sale of heavily discounted computers to a local plastic surgeon in exchange for a stomach stapling procedure.
...and plenty of other stuff

"She was notorious for pulling favors for businesses in the community who didn't want to play by Apple's rules," says Jake. "Lending computers out for over a month without any payment by manipulating inventory, issuing customer service exceptions for times when she would damage her products, and offering excessive discounts to receive additional favors outside of the workplace. She made quid pro quo an art."

Stealing bonuses

Sometimes it was quid pro quo, and sometimes it was just eminent domain. The store staff's bonuses were slashed (or eliminated entirely) so that managers could reap big chunks of cash.

6:13:03 PM Ronald: you would not believe the managers bonuses
6:13:06 PM sambiddle: really?
6:13:09 PM Ronald: they took all of ours away
6:13:19 PM Ronald: one day she is driving a shitty saturn
6:13:26 PM Ronald: next it's a brand new BMW
6:13:36 PM Ronald: and they don't do shit
6:13:39 PM Ronald: it's amazing

This didn't last. Jake tells me the Sales Queen's retail despotism turned on her, and she was eventually fired—reportedly for "unfair hiring practices," "playing favorites," and "questionable activities surrounding use of store services." In other words, being crooked.

Unlimited iPhones

But the manager wasn't the only one gaming the system. Ronald admits that he, along with almost everyone else on the Genius staff, wildly and shamelessly exploited the store's lax and easily defrauded return and exchange policies for a virtually unlimited supply of Apple hardware. Want a free phone? Create a fake transaction.

5:59:30 PM Ronald: I think for awhile, none of us had a not up to date anything
5:59:36 PM Ronald: but it was worked through different ways
5:59:48 PM Ronald: no one "walked" out with anything
5:59:56 PM Ronald: we def abused our employee discounts
6:00:41 PM sambiddle: if you broke your phone
6:00:44 PM sambiddle: how did you just get a new one?
6:00:56 PM Ronald: created a case and replaced it
6:01:01 PM Ronald: just like a customer
6:01:25 PM Ronald: we did all the paper work, and replaced it out of service stock
6:01:31 PM Ronald: genius has a service stock
6:01:36 PM sambiddle: and nobody ever became suspicious?
6:01:38 PM Ronald: then there is retail stock
6:01:43 PM Ronald: nope
6:01:51 PM Ronald: we were the gatekeepers kind of
6:02:05 PM sambiddle: is there any kind of corporate oversight of stock?
6:02:08 PM Ronald: apple never had it in place to check up on shit like this
6:02:10 PM Ronald: they do now though
6:02:37 PM Ronald: I think it's more regional about oversight
6:03:03 PM Ronald: like I said. a manager would pull a phone to make someone happy and make the inventory guy "fix' the numbers

Destroying Unlimited iPhones

But the Genius crew wasn't just yanking all these phones so they could make calls with both ears. They took them just so they could break them.

Ronald used this inventory loophole—which he and Jake both say is harder to exploit these days—to go through countless iPhones for the sheer absurdity of it. At parties with other Apple employees, they'd all get tanked, pull out their phones, and spike them to the ground, laughing as the Gorilla Glass and circuits sprayed. Sounds more entertaining than flip cup, at least—and to Jake and the rest, it was a sort of game. How many phones could they squeeze out of oblivious, infinitely-stocked Apple? In the early days of the phone, the only limit seemed to be the audacity of the Geniuses. They even traded gear for free drinks.
Free Computers for Cheap Booze

Of course they were drunk. It was a stressful job. And how else could you get in the mood to ruin tens of thousands of dollars of iPhones for sport if not inebriated? Luckily, the Geniuses had a quick way to score drinks on Apple's dime:

5:32:43 PM Ronald: we had certain bars that hooked us up
5:32:58 PM Ronald: I think the store before ours gave this bar down the street a mac mini to serve music
5:33:08 PM Ronald: we always got super cheap tabs
5:33:19 PM sambiddle: because you'd give them hardware?
5:33:55 PM Jake: among other reasons

Among other reasons.

Forget the bar: a boozy workplace was the norm. "It's not uncommon for the Genius team to be drunk," Jake noted. Liquid impunity. If they didn't like you, they could ruin your computer, blame it on an act of God, and point you to the fine print you signed off on and certainly didn't read. Calling customer support to complain probably wouldn't get much done.

4:29:52 PM Ronald: oh, and the [24 hour] apple call center
4:30:00 PM Ronald: they drink whiskey and do coke all night
4:30:09 PM sambiddle: where's that?
4:30:12 PM Ronald: [Redacted nearby city]

Getting Busted

Scamming Apple wasn't always a straight path to free shots and making it rain iPhones—sometimes, the bad Geniuses were caught in the act. Jake could recount four separate instances of outright employee theft at the store, ranging from manipulating inventory lists to faking transactions to straight-up theft.

• One guy pretended to ring up transactions and then would cancel them out after "swiping" a card. This worked for a long time until someone finally noticed that they never gave their "customers," who were in on the scam, receipts. He swiped iPhones, computers, accessories, iPods, everything, but was eventually caught by management and forced to pay for what he'd taken (more than $20k) to avoid criminal charges.
• Another was stealing cash from the store's safe during nightly counts, which went on for several weeks, but was discovered by a manager who had to open the store the next morning and promptly fired the staffer.
• One Genius had a rather elaborate con going. He was taking service inventory with fake customers. His friends would come in to the store and have their devices replaced with an incorrect product (Say, an original iPhone swapped for a 3G, gratis). The new product was put into the customer's hand and the employee would put the defective product back into available inventory. This went on for more than a year before they were finally caught and canned, but up until then he was actually running an online business based on this scam.
• One idiot was simply giving product to friends for free, ended up getting caught was chased out of the store by a manager. That was the end of him.


The War on Customers

What about the people who actually came to the store to buy things and get help? People like us? Ronald and his pals also enjoyed destruction as a form of payback. Ever been a jerk to an Apple Genius? Bad idea. Ever seen someone approach the bar with a noxious attitude and a litany of dumb questions? They probably got what they deserved. The Geniuses always get theirs. How? By pouring whiskey into a customer's Mac. Or by mocking them enough to erect a shrine in the back room to whiny, dumb customers:

Or this:

6:07:35 PM] Ronald: ive used someone elses hard drive as a skateboard cause he told the store I smelled
6:08:05 PM Ronald: or we just erase people's hard drives that are assholes
6:08:12 PM sambiddle: wouldn't they complain?
6:08:31 PM Ronald: they signed a form that legally made us not responsible for data
6:08:59 PM sambiddle: what happened when they came in and complained?
6:09:06 PM Ronald: show them what they signed
6:09:29 PM Ronald: we tell them multiple times that this could happen

Outed as Gay by Apple Management

Apple employees could be heartless to their customers, sure. But Jake ran into a completely other strand of disrespect at Apple—bastion of progressiveness and tolerance—when his manager gossiped to everyone he worked with that he was gay. Jake is gay. But when he started at the Apple store, he wasn't comfortable sharing this with everyone.

The question, which arrantly violates US labor law, was posed to Jake when he started working: "At one point, one of the managers asked me flat out if I was [gay]," Jake recalls, "but I said no and walked away. A few weeks after, I was asked the same question again. This time I said, 'Yes, is that a problem?'" Jake asked the manager to keep the disclosure between the two of them, but that didn't happen. "Several days go by," Jake remembers, "I'm standing near the Genius Bar, and one of the other concierges walks up to me and says, 'So I heard what [redacted] said about you...' I was bewildered." The entire store knew. The manager had outed Jake to the whole outfit, to anyone "who would spare him 5 minutes of their time."

None of this—the theft, the drinking, the blatant illegal questioning about sexual orientation by an employer—could be sustainable. It wasn't. Soon they all hit quit.

The End

Neither Ronald nor Jake work at the Apple Store anymore. Most of their former coworkers were canned, fled to other jobs, or moved up within Apple. Jake took off, while Ronald had a less glamorous end, fighting his termination as wrongful—to no avail. In his official statemnet to the company, he said "I have been with Apple for almost 6 years total, and would like to continue to do so." But talking to him now, you don't get a sense of much fondness. A little nostagia, now and then: "I took a lot of Apple employees to the strip club, my girlfriend didn't know—actually, the Apple Store employees helped me cheat on my girlfriend a lot," but not much genuine joy. Except when he remembers that stomach-stapling regional manager. "I love that she got fucking fired. That bitch." Ronald remains, to my knowledge, unemployed.

Update: Multiple former and current Geniuses have written in to corroborate the events alleged in this article. More to come!

Update 2: Some of the Geniuses emailing in have asked that I note that the above is the exception to the rule. They say they love their job, treat it with respect, and would never engage in this kind of monkey business. Worth keeping in mind.
http://gizmodo.com/5936324/exclusive...ore-in-america

















Until next week,

- js.



















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