Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 14th, '10

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"With a little bit of work, you could hijack just about any device." – HD Moore


"They were saying that I couldn’t speak to a lawyer. My gut feeling is I’m an American. I always have a right to an attorney. There’s no such thing as you can’t talk to your attorney." – Nicholas Merrill


"It’s amazing how Assange has overplayed his hand. Now, he’s alienating the sort of people who you’d normally think would be his biggest supporters." – U.S Defense Department official


"If someone at Google just stood up and gave a Gordon Gekko-esque speech about their passion for expansion and securing deals it would be easier to stomach. At least it wouldn’t be quite so disingenuous." – MG Siegler



































August 14th, 2010





Another Call To Tackle File-Sharing
John Gammon

The UK record labels didn't miss the chance to use the announcement that they'd upped their secondary revenues by 6.6 percent to £193.5 million ($308.4) as a platform to take another swipe at illegal file-sharing.

"The growth in labels' secondary income in 2009, combined with the strong increases in digital revenue already announced, illustrates the outstanding potential of British recorded music if illegal file-sharing can be tackled," said BPI chief exec Geoff Taylor.

The BPI had thrown its weight behind the Digital Economy Bill, which was passed during the last days of the recently ousted Labour government, but the measures it proposes to take against suspected file-sharers are still the subject of strong opposition from major Internet companies including Google and Facebook and broadband providers such as British Telecom and TalkTalk.

Having another look at the Digital Economy Bill is likely to be something the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government will kick into the long grass while it's preoccupied with sorting out the British economy.

"Music companies continue to face an enormous challenge from illegal downloading, but are responding positively by transforming themselves for the future, identifying new opportunities to generate returns from the massive investments they make - hundreds of millions of pounds per year - in UK talent," Taylor continued.

The main sources of the increased income were artist-related multiple-rights deals - or so-called 360-degree deals - that include concerts, merchandising and sales of music direct from artist and label websites. It was a significant source of revenue in 2009, earning more than £58.6 million ($93.4) - 16.7 percent up on 2008.

Broadcasting and public performance licensing income of £72.1 million ($114.9) from PPL accounted for more than a third of secondary revenues. Synchronization deals from the use of music in film, TV, advertising and games grew by 19.6 percent to £25.2 million. ($40.1)
http://www.pollstar.com/blogs/news/a...09/735245.aspx





Anti-Piracy Failure Takes Down Creative Commons Videos
enigmax

An anti-piracy group has caused a storm of controversy by taking down movies it has no rights to. GVU successfully ordered video hosting site Vimeo to take down several Creative Commons videos created by a freelance journalist and an independent filmmaker. The anti-piracy tracking company hired by GVU claims that its technology failed.

An anti-piracy group working in Germany has stirred controversy by wrongfully taking down videos that neither it nor its clients hold the copyrights to.

GVU served notice and takedown demands on hosting site Vimeo for four works created by freelance journalist Mario Sixtus and another by filmmaker Alexander Lehmann.

The material by Sixtus, who focuses his reporting on Internet issues and network culture, was four episodes of Electric Reporter, all of which were released under a Creative Commons license.

Nominated for the ViralVideoAward in 2009, the video you see below – “You are a Terrorist” by independent filmmaker Alexander Lehmann – was also targeted.

However, while you can enjoy this video now, that wasn’t the case on Monday and Tuesday. Following unfounded copyright complaints by GVU, this video and four others were taken down. So how did this ridiculous situation occur?

In order to identify infringing material on the Internet, GVU hires a company called OpSec Security. The outfit says it uses automated software to identify unauthorized material and then reports violations to hosts in order to have it removed.

The errors with the Creative Commons videos occurred while OpSec Security was scanning the MonsterStream site. While it successfully detected some infringing files, it also erroneously identified non-infringing videos to which its clients do not hold the rights. Wrongful copyright complaints were sent to the host, Vimeo, who took down the videos.

While GVU acknowledged that they and OpSec got it wrong and have officially apologized, this chain of events raises some pretty serious questions.

According to OpSec technical director Petur Agustsson, there was “a bug in the calibration module” which caused the erroneous detection. What’s this? Anti-piracy technology with errors in it? Surely not?

A source familiar with recognition technology told TorrentFreak that the notion that a false positive occurred due to bad automated content recognition simply isn’t a credible explanation. Either the content scanned matches copyright works or it doesn’t. Not scanning content, however, could lead to these type of errors.

Whatever the reason, Mario Sixtus is not happy. Describing the wrongful takedowns as a massacre, Sixtus said the actions of GVU and their hired “mercenaries” amounted to “nothing less than digital vandalism”. He is seeking assurances that these errors won’t happen again.
http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-...-video-100812/





AEG Live Sues Concert Bootleggers Before They Bootleg

Just because the Mile High Music Festival this weekend in Denver hasn't happened yet, and just because the bootleggers haven't yet set up shop, doesn't mean that hundreds of individuals haven't already been sued.

AEG Live has jumped on a growing legal trend in the concert world by filing a trademark infringement claim against hundreds of John Does and Jane Does. According to AEG's new complaint, "only the plaintiff has the right to sell merchandise bearing the Festival Trademarks at and near the Festival."

AEG is asking a federal court in Colorado to order the US Marshal, local and state police, off duty officers, and AEG agents to seize and impound bootlegged merchandise.

The complaint follows a similar lawsuit filed earlier this summer by UMG's merchandising division, Bravado International Group, in anticipation of a series of concerts by Lady Gaga at New York's Madison Square Garden. That action opened some eyes in the concert industry, showing other outfits how to use the once-rare John Doe trademark lawsuit to get law enforcement involved.

Now, AEG is hoping to replicate Bravado's success. No damage has yet been done. And any follow-up legal action after the concert is doubtful. But of course, one would hardly expect anybody to show up this week in a Colorado court to contest AEG's lawsuit. A supporting brief filed in the case says that defendants do have that opportunity, although AEG submits that "experience shows it is doubtful they will do so."

The brief also says the unnamed defendants "are not neophytes, but rather somewhat sophisticated businessmen who operate in stealth to thwart the legitimate rights of Plaintiff."

Some lawyers defend the action as appropriate. One trademark lawyer pointed out to us that on the criminal side, courts empower police officers with the discretion to execute temporary remedies. And that in this instance, bootleggers are too nomadic to be served summons.

We're less than convinced. The threat of bootleggers is real, of course, but it's based purely on speculation, without evidence of the kind of past specific misconduct that might trigger temporary remedies as seen in criminal proceedings. That seems odd, and perhaps a slippery slope. Why can't any company in America file John Doe trademark action and get police to seize goods they believe will be infringing? What stops this beyond the concert venue?
http://thresq.hollywoodreporter.com/...in-denver.html





NAB Radio Board Holds "Productive" Meeting On Performance Royalties
FMQB

The NAB has confirmed that its Radio Board held a meeting in Washington D.C. today for an update on its negotiations with the RIAA and musicFIRST over the controversial performance royalty. There have been rumblings in recent days of new movement on the performance royalty front once again in D.C.

Dennis Wharton, EVP of Communications for the NAB, said in a statement, "The NAB Radio Board had a full and productive exchange of ideas today on the status of discussions with musicFirst representatives. The talks are part of an ongoing dialogue with the Board and NAB membership on possible alternatives to pending legislation that would be devastating to the future of free and local radio. No votes were taken at today's Board meeting. The Board reiterated its strong opposition to the pending bill in Congress, while agreeing that it is appropriate for NAB representatives to continue discussions with musicFirst. Interested parties will be updated quickly if and when new developments emerge."

Wharton and the NAB also released its proposed terms being considered in the performance royalty discussion. The terms have not been agreed upon, but are currently under discussion by the parties involved. They include:

• Tiered rate of one percent or less for all net revenue (roughly $100 million for the industry) which is permanent and can not be adjusted without changing statute or by mutual agreement
• PERMANENT removal of CRB jurisdiction for terrestrial and streaming
• Streaming rate reduction from current rates
• Inclusion of radio chips on all mobile phones
• AFTRA issues resolved (agency commercial replacement on webcasts)

The tiered rate of one percent or less for all net revenue would be as follows:

• Commercial and non-profit stations with revenue less than $50,000 annually would pay the lesser of $100 or 1% of revenue annually
• Commercial and non-profit stations with revenue between $50,000 to $100,000 annually would pay $500 annually
• Non-profit stations with revenue more than $100,000 annually would pay $1,000 annually
• Commercial stations with revenue between $100,000 to $500,000 annually would pay the lesser of $2,500 or 1% of revenue annually
• Commercial stations with revenue between $500,000 to $1,250,000 annually would pay $5,000 annually
• Commercial stations with revenue more than $1,250,000 annually would pay 1% of revenue annually

It is important to note that stations with incidental music use – news, talk and sports radio – would not pay for music. Additionally, religious services – not religious music – would be exempt from music fees.

The above referenced rates would be permanently fixed by statute and can only be changed by act of Congress or joint agreement between both parties.

In related news, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released a report on the performance royalty. Sent to Sen. Arlen Specter by Mark L. Goldstein, Director of Physical Infrastructure Issues, the letter explains many of the issues and the back history surrounding the royalty.

Goldstein and the GAO note that "in a previous rate-setting proceeding for some sound recordings, the standard addressing the disruptive impact on the industries contributed to a lower copyright royalty rate, but the effect of its proposed removal is unclear."

The complete document can be read as a PDF file here.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1905806





Radio Reddit, Earworm of the Hive Mind (They're Still Working on the Metaphor).
Chris

With all of the recent discussions of uptime and new features, we wanted to take the time to shine a spotlight on a reddit community project that deserves your attention: radio reddit.(*)

Radio Reddit is an eclectic independent music streaming radio station whose programming is controlled by redditors’ up and down votes. The music is 100% original, non-RIAA evilness affiliated, broadcast royalty free, and best of all, created by the musicians of reddit. Radio Reddit has a catalog of over 2000 tracks by over 600 Redditors.

Like submissions on reddit, Radio Reddit does not have a program/music director. reddit artists and bands simply upload their music. The site automatically checks that music uploaded is from a redditor, and songs are put into rotation via scripts that compile the play lists based on genre, the schedule, and the songs’ reddit scores. You will never, ever, hear a repeat with an hour of play or within a genre’s block of time (if Metal is scheduled for three hours - those three hours are repeat free). Tracks with high reddit scores are given priority and songs with extremely negative reddit scores are weeded out and excluded from airplay.

While listening from the website you can submit the currently playing track to /r/radioreddit, up/down vote and discuss the track if it has been previously submitted, download the song if approved by the artist, or listen to the song on demand at any point. Each hour of Radio Reddit broadcast is also immediately available as a podcast for download (or for on-demand listening) from the site broken up by show title/genre and also available as RSS feeds.

Radio Reddit also does live broadcasts, where reddit artists and bands are invited to connect to the stream to broadcast their live shows and events.

“What does all of this mean‽”. It means free quality music (as determined by you and your peers) to listen to and a chance for the unheard artists and bands of reddit to get like minded individuals listening to their hard work.

Now in the spirit of reddit, we would also like to mention the Radio Reddit Gold Program....just kidding! But seriously, Radio Reddit is 100% donation based and they need your help to handle the growth. There are currently two options to help fund the Radio Reddit operation. Direct donations can be made via the Donation Page or you can help by buying the awesome Radio Reddit soap made by Soapier, which comes in three delicious flavors. Coming soon will be Radio Reddit swag, including t-shirts. So stay tuned.

If you like Radio Reddit or have a question or comment, don’t blame/thank us, the Radio Reddit admins harrymuffin and octatone are always available to answer your questions. Be sure to join in at /r/radioreddit to get involved.
http://blog.reddit.com/2010/08/radio...hive-mind.html






Jay-Z 'Empire' Spoof Pulled From YouTube
Andre Paine

An Internet spoof version of "Empire State of Mind" that relocates the song to the South Wales city of Newport has been pulled from YouTube.

The video and reworked version of the song, "Newport (Ymerodraeth State of Mind)," has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times since it became a viral hit last month.

The parody of the duet by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys was filmed by M-J Delaney and features rapper Alex Warren and singer Terema Wainwright. The Welsh take on the song got huge media coverage in the U.K.

However, EMI Music Publishing moved to get the song taken down from YouTube. The publisher represents four of the seven writers on the song.

"When a song is created based wholly on any of our writers' works, those writers need to grant their permission," said an EMI Music Publishing statement. "If that permission isn't granted, then we ask the service in question to remove the song."

Some YouTube users have uploaded the track again since the takedown, but it is likely any such uploads will soon be pulled. However, there are live versions of the song as well a reply from the Welsh group Goldie Lookin Chain.
http://www.billboard.com/news/jay-z-...ory?tag=hpfeed





UMG Artists' Videos Taken Off MTV Websites
FMQB

Universal Music Group artists' music videos are temporarily off of MTV's web portals, as negotiations have broken down between MTV and VEVO. Both sides have released statements about the ongoing negotiations, with a spokesperson for UMG saying, "MTVN has been unwilling to negotiate a fair syndication deal with VEVO to carry our artists' videos and consequently our videos will not be shown on their online properties,"

MTV added in a statement, "During our recent discussions with VEVO, we were unable to reach a fair and equitable agreement for rights to stream UMG artists' music video. As a result, UMG has elected to pull their music videos from our Web sites. We are disappointed by this move and sincerely hope that UMG will work with us toward a fair resolution."

CNet notes that since VEVO is supported by UMG, Sony Music and EMI, MTV may have a tough time negotiation with those other two labels. Sources told Bloomberg that VEVO and MTV were negotiating to install the VEVO
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1908574





Netflix to Pay Nearly $1 Billion to Add Films to On-Demand Service
Brian Stelter

At a cost of nearly $1 billion, Netflix said on Tuesday that it would add films from Paramount Pictures, Lions Gate and MGM to its online subscription service.

It was a coup — albeit a costly one — for Netflix, which knows it needs to lock up the digital rights to films as customers stop receiving DVDs by mail and start receiving streams via the Internet. The deal will start Sept. 1.

Ted Sarandos, the chief content officer for Netflix, said he was essentially taking the “huge pile of money” that Netflix paid in postage for DVDs by mail — about $600 million this year — “and starting to pay it to the studios and networks.”

Wall Street analysts estimated that Netflix would pay about $900 million over the course of five years to Epix, a fledgling competitor to HBO that holds the rights to the film output of Paramount, Lions Gate and MGM. Those payments are expected to help the money-losing Epix break even in the next fiscal year.

The Epix deal will add new releases like “Iron Man” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” to Netflix’s catalog, greatly enhancing the streaming service that the company markets to subscribers as part of an $8.99 package that also includes DVD deliveries. It was the second film deal for Netflix this summer, coming a month after a pact with Relativity Media, the firm run by Ryan Kavanaugh.

Netflix’s open checkbook demonstrates that Internet streaming is clearly coming to the forefront in Hollywood, but in a carefully controlled manner. Mr. Sarandos said in an interview Tuesday that the content deals were part of “our continued commitment to making streaming a better and better proposition for our subscribers.”

Netflix’s future depends largely on cutting financial deals that keep those streams in place.

The company first took on the likes of Blockbuster with DVDs by mail. Then, in 2007, it set its sights on online streaming, but existing deals with pay TV operators like HBO made it impossible to stream many of the biggest film releases. These deals preserve what is called the pay television window, which opens up about a year after a film is first released in theaters and gives HBO, Showtime or Starz about 18 months of screening (and, more recently, Web streaming) time.

Pay TV arrangements are important contributors to the bottom lines of Hollywood studios, helping them wring more money out of both blockbusters and flops. These arrangements rely on cable and satellite carriers to collect monthly payments.

Accordingly, the movies that were initially available on the streaming service were mostly ones “you’ve never heard of,” Mr. Sarandos said. But in 2008 the company cut an important deal with Starz that allowed access to widely known films from Sony and the Walt Disney Company. The payments to Epix will add more films.

In doing so, it is essentially creating a new window for movie viewing, one that does not depend on cable or satellite carriers. “If you own content, you want to sell it to as many people as possible without blowing up your existing revenue streams,” said the Morgan Stanley analyst Benjamin Swinburne.

At the same time, having Netflix in the marketplace puts pressure on cable and satellite providers “because you’ve got another bidder out there,” he said.

The two-year-old Epix is invisible to most consumers because some big companies like DirectTV and Comcast don’t carry it. But it is preserving the deals it does have by carving out a three-month TV window for films before they are available to Netflix subscribers.

Jon Feltheimer, the chief executive of Lions Gate, told analysts Tuesday that “by creating this groundbreaking new window for their streaming service, we both protect our traditional M.S.O. customers and create a significant and guaranteed new revenue stream for our service.” M.S.O., or multiple system operator, refers to cable and satellite carriers.

Netflix says it prefers to be a distributor for pay TV — not a competitor to it — and wants to license content from HBO and Showtime. HBO has the rights to Fox, Universal and Warner films for at least the next four years.

Asked about the giant amount of content that Netflix was lacking because of HBO’s deals, Mr. Sarandos seemed to take a long-term view. “Every deal expires,” he said, “and every deal has to be renewed.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/11/bu...11netflix.html





As E-Books Gain, Barnes & Noble Tries to Stay Ahead
Julie Bosman

In the movie “You’ve Got Mail,” Tom Hanks played the aggressive big-box retailer Joe Fox driving the little bookshop owner played by Meg Ryan out of business.

Twelve years later, it may be Joe Fox’s turn to worry. Readers have gone from skipping small bookstores to wondering if they need bookstores at all. More people are ordering books online or plucking them from the best-seller bin at Wal-Mart.

But the threat that has the industry and some readers the most rattled is the growth of e-books. In the first five months of 2009, e-books made up 2.9 percent of trade book sales. In the same period in 2010, sales of e-books, which generally cost less than hardcover books, grew to 8.5 percent, according to the Association of American Publishers, spurred by sales of the Amazon Kindle and the new Apple iPad. For Barnes & Noble, long the largest and most powerful bookstore chain in the country, the new competition has led to declining profits and store traffic. After the company announced last week that it was putting itself up for sale, Leonard Riggio, Barnes & Noble’s chairman and largest shareholder, who has declared his confidence in the company’s future, hinted that he might make a play to buy the company himself and take it private.

For readers, e-books have meant a transformation not just of the reading experience, but of the book-buying tradition of strolling aisles, perusing covers and being able to hold books in their hands.

Many publishers have been astounded by the pace of the e-book popularity and the threat to print book sales that it represents. If the number of brick-and-mortar stores drops, publishers fear that sales will go along with it. Some worry that large bookstores will go the way of the record stores that shut down when the music business went digital.

“The shift from the physical to the digital book can pick up some of the economic slack, but it can’t pick up the loss that is created when you don’t have the customers browsing the displays,” said Laurence J. Kirshbaum, a literary agent. “We need people going into stores and seeing a book they didn’t know existed and buying it.”

Carolyn Reidy, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster, said in an interview that e-books currently made up about 8 percent of the company’s book revenue. She predicted that it could be as high as 40 percent within three to five years.

“E-books are moving faster and faster all of the time, which makes things look harder for bricks-and-mortar stores,” said Mike Shatzkin, founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change.

Iris Reeves, a 53-year-old administrative assistant in East Texas, is one of the bookstore holdouts. Nearly every weekend, she and her husband drive 60 miles to the nearest Barnes & Noble for a long browsing session. She buys several paperbacks (thrillers, science fiction and paranormal romance) and he buys nonfiction (with a few auto magazines thrown in).

She has watched with alarm as dozens of bookstores, both independents and chains like Crown Books, have disappeared. Beyond Barnes & Noble and Borders, the only other retailers nearby that sell new books, she said, are religious bookstores.

“I don’t want to lose the option of actually going into a bookstore and handling a book,” Ms. Reeves said. “I like going up and down the aisles, seeing what’s there. If I had my druthers, it would be paper books all the way.”

Whoever ends up in control of Barnes & Noble’s 720 retail stores will have to grapple with the fundamental changes in the industry — and if the shift to e-books continues, prove that Barnes & Noble can be as successful on the digital side of bookselling as it has been for print.

William Lynch, the chief executive, said in an interview on Friday that the chain was retooling its stores to build up traffic, add products like educational toys and games, and emphasize its own e-reader, the Nook.

“We think we’ve got the right strategy,” Mr. Lynch said. “The growth in our e-books business is about nine months ahead of our plan.”

It is a rare moment of uncertainty for the company. In the 1990s heyday of the superstore, Barnes & Noble reigned supreme, expanding its reach rapidly and dazzling customers with an enormous array of books and steep discounts that smaller, independent stores could not match. Mr. Riggio, a tough and innovative figure, was hailed as the most powerful man in the book business.

“As Barnes & Noble grew, there was a lot that was very good for publishers and authors,” said David Steinberger, the chief executive of the Perseus Books Group. “They were energetic, they were aggressive, they were terrific on author events. They were terrific at broadening the selection available.”

But recently, Barnes & Noble has had to contend with Amazon.com, which has led on e-books and whose vast selection of print books is available online. The release of Apple’s iPad in April only increased interest in e-books.

“This company is going to go through a really fundamental existential struggle,” said Peter Osnos, the founder and editor at large of PublicAffairs, an independent publisher. “What you have is this aggregation of factors — the changes in the way book buying is taking place, the general sluggishness of the economy, the management issues at Barnes & Noble. All of those things together create a set of problems which are really quite striking.”

At the expansive Barnes & Noble store in Manhattan’s Union Square, the changes sweeping the company and the industry are on full display. Shelves have been stripped bare to make room for toys and games, as a sign dangling from the ceiling cheerfully announces.

“I’m in favor of anything that brings traffic in the store,” said Ms. Reidy of Simon & Schuster. “If it’s toys or games that brings a family into the bookstore, then I say fine.”

The company is also taking significant steps to capture the digital market. In September, it will begin building 1,000-square-foot boutiques to showcase the Nook in all of its outlets.

Samantha Robinson, a 24-year-old student, paused outside the Union Square store last week, a newly purchased Nook in her hand.

“I’m going to buy as many books as I can on the e-reader, because they’re less expensive,” Ms. Robinson said.

And if she stopped buying print books altogether? “I wouldn’t miss it,” she said.

In a twist straight out of the movies, some publishers speculated that many of the independents that survived the big chains over the last 15 years might be in an unusually stable position. By the American Booksellers Association’s count, there are more than 2,000 independent bookstores in the United States.

“Being small and privately held allows us to be more nimble,” said Chris Morrow, owner of the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, Vt. “Our competitive advantage has been the curation aspect — knowing our customers and picking the right books.

“We still have that competitive advantage,” he added. “Barnes & Noble doesn’t have that.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/bu...bookstore.html





ISPs Throw Cold Water on Conroy's 'Uncapped' NBN

Fears 'uncapped' could become the new 'unlimited'.
Mahesh Sharma

ISPs rejected a prediction by the Federal Communications Minister that capped data plans will disappear once the $43 billion National Broadband Network is built.

Senator Conroy forecast last week at the AIIA Broadband Agenda event that capped internet plans - under which bandwidth consumption is limited per month - will be eliminated by the increased competition introduced by the national broadband network.

"If you look at what happening in Tasmania... I think ultimately competition will drive caps out of the market," Senator Conroy said last week. "Australia is one of only four countries in the world that has caps.

"The prices you're seeing - I think competition is driving them out of the marketplace."

But ISPs offering services through the NBN fibre rollout in Tasmania contradicted the minister and said there are major obstacles to overcome before Australian customers can enjoy the same uncapped plans available to their global counterparts.

Significant financial and legal hurdles need to be cleared before uncapped plans can be introduced, said Internode's general manager for regulatory and corporate affairs John Lindsay.

"New broadband access networks like the NBN may support uncapped plans, but only if the access prices are set correctly," he said. Specifically, Lindsay said, the Government would need to pass the Telstra split legislation in the Senate.

Exetel CEO John Linton echoed this sentiment and explained that the most prohibitive cost is delivering data nationally, which was almost double the cost of feeding data to Australian shores.

Domestic IP transit costs remain high, despite the cost of international IP falling 60 percent over the past year. International prices arte expected to drop a further 25 percent by the end of the year.

"I can't see 'unlimited' or 'uncapped' data being made available," Linton said.

"[But] with [generous data] allowances these days, I think the relevance of download limits - especially when set at 100GB a month or multiples of that number - are effectively 'unlimited' as far as end users are concerned."

Lindsay warned customers that "uncapped" plans could become the new "unlimited" - a controversial word used to advertise broadband plans which has not gone unnoticed by Australian regulators.

"The cost of servicing an average subscriber is well above the retail price for the cheapest capped plan," Lindsay said.

"This will either lead to the removal of those plans, or to several grades of uncapped service being offered, where service providers torture the language in order to describe various levels of uncapped-ness for their services.

"In short, it will be 'unlimited' all over again, he said, with 'some limits apply' in the fine print.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/223403...apped-nbn.aspx





Critical Flaws Discovered in Widely Used Embedded OS

500 million devices could be affected.
Angela Moscaritolo

Two critical vulnerabilities have been discovered in mission-critical systems used in 500 million devices, including VoIP phones, telecom equipment, military routing devices, automobile controls and spacecraft.

Last week at the Security B-Sides and DEFCON conferences in Las Vegas, HD Moore, chief security officer at Rapid7 and founder and chief architect of Metasploit, disclosed two critical vulnerabilities in VxWorks, which is used to power Apple Airport Extreme access points, Mars rovers and C-130 Hercules aircrafts, in addition to microwaves, switches, sensors, telecom equipment and industrial control monitors.

VxWorks has a service enabled by default that provides read or write access to a device's memory and allows functions to be called, Moore told SCMagazineUS.com. The vulnerable service, called WDB agent, is a “debugger” for the VxWorks operating system that is used to diagnose problems and ensure code is working properly when a product is being developed.

The debugging service, a selectable component in the VxWorks configuration enabled by default, is not secured and represents a security hole in a deployed system, according to an advisory issued by US-CERT.

The exposed WDB agent “allows anyone with network access to the device to take complete control of the device,” Moore told SCMagazineUS.com. “With a little bit of work, you could hijack just about any device.”

To determine how widespread the problem was, Moore wrote a scanner module for the Metasploit open-source penetration testing framework to run a network survey that encompassed more than 3.1 billion IP addresses, he said. More than 250,000 products representing 100 vendors were found with the WDB agent exposed, he said.

Moreover, unknown hackers spent most of 2006 scanning for the service, Moore said.

“There is a pretty good chance that someone already found this vulnerability and exploited it en masse all throughout 2006,” he said. “It was more than likely someone doing something malicious, but we have no clue what that was. There's just a huge variety of what you can do with this vulnerability – if you know how to apply it.”

Meanwhile, a separate vulnerability involving the hashing algorithm that is used in the standard authentication API for VxWorks could allow an attacker to brute force a password, Moore said.

The hashing algorithm is susceptible to collisions, meaning an attacker would be able to brute force a password in a relatively short period of time by guessing a string that produces the same hash as a legitimate password, according to a separate advisory posted by US-CERT.

Moore contacted the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and provided researchers with a list of affected devices, with the goal of notifying as many vendors as possible. VxWorks customers include Northrop Grumman, Motorola, Dell, Apple, HP and Cisco.
VxWorks is produced by Wind River, acquired by Intel in 2009.

Wind River plans to fix the weak password hashing vulnerability in VxWorks 6.9, which has not yet been released, according to Moore. However, the vendor has not made any promises to fix older affected versions of the embedded operating system.

“I expect to see this bug live on almost indefinitely,” Moore said.

However, a Wind River spokesman told SCMagazineUS.com in an email that when contacted by Carnegie Mellon University's CERT Coordination Center, Wind River immediately assessed the alert, issued patches on August 2 and was instructed by CERT to provide a "synchronous public response."

These two bugs are “just the tip of the iceberg,” Moore wrote in a blog post.

The VxWorks platform largely has been ignored for the past 10 years and needs to be more thoroughly tested, he said.
http://www.securecomputing.net.au/Ne...bedded-os.aspx





Logging Off

The Internet Generation Prefers the Real World
Manfred Dworschak

They may have been dubbed the "Internet generation," but young people are more interested in their real-world friends than Facebook. New research shows that the majority of children and teenagers are not the Web-savvy digital natives of legend. In fact, many of them don't even know how to google properly.

Seventeen-year-old Jetlir is online every day, sometimes for many hours at a time and late into the night. The window of his instant messaging program is nearly always open on his computer screen. A jumble of friends and acquaintances chat with each other. Now and again Jetlir adds half a sentence of his own, though this is soon lost in the endless stream of comments, jokes and greetings. He has in any case moved on, and is now clicking through sports videos on YouTube.

Jetlir is a high school student from Cologne. He could easily be a character in one of the many newspaper stories about the "Internet generation" that is allegedly in grave danger of losing itself in the virtual world.

Jetlir grew up with the Internet. It's been around for as long as he can remember. He spends half of his leisure time on Facebook and YouTube, or chatting with friends online.

In spite of this, Jetlir thinks that other things -- especially basketball -- are much more important to him. "My club comes first," Jetlir says. "I'd never miss a training session." His real life also seems to come first in other respects: "If someone wants to meet me, I turn off my computer immediately," he says.

'What's the Point?'

Indeed, Jetlir does not actually expect very much from the Internet. Older generations may consider it a revolutionary medium, enthuse about the splendors of blogging and tweet obsessively on the short-messaging service Twitter. But Jetlir is content if his friends are within reach, and if people keep uploading videos to YouTube. He'd never dream of keeping a blog. Nor does he know anybody else his age who would want to. And he's certainly never tweeted before. "What's the point?" he asks.

The Internet plays a paradoxical role in Jetlir's life. Although he uses it intensively, he isn't that interested in it. It's indispensable, but only if he has nothing else planned. "It isn't everything," he says.

Jetlir's easy-going attitude towards the Internet is typical of German adolescents today, as several recent studies have shown. Odd as it may seem, the first generation that cannot imagine life without the Internet doesn't actually consider the medium particularly important, and indeed shuns some of the latest web technologies. Only 3 percent of young people keep their own blog, and no more than 2 percent regularly contribute to Wikipedia or other comparable open source projects.

Similarly, most young people in Germany ignore social bookmarking websites like Delicious and photo-sharing portals such as Flickr and Picasa. Apparently the netizens of the future couldn't care less about the collaborative delights of Web 2.0 -- that, at least, is the finding of a major study by the Hans Bredow Institute in Germany.

The Net Generation

For years, experts have been talking about a new kind of tech-savvy youth who are mobile, networked, and chronically restless, spoilt by the glut of stimuli on the Internet. These young people were said to live in perpetual symbiosis with their computers and mobile phones, with networking technology practically imprinted in their genes. The media habitually referred to them as "digital natives," "Generation @" or simply "the net generation."

Two of the much cited spokesmen of this movement are the 64-year-old American author Marc Prensky and his 62-year-old Canadian colleague, Don Tapscott. Prensky coined the expression "digital natives" to describe those lucky souls born into the digital era, instinctively acquainted with all that the Internet has to offer in terms of participation and self-promotion, and streets ahead of their elders in terms of web-savviness. Prensky classifies everyone over the age of 25 as "digital immigrants" -- people who gain access to the Internet later in life and betray themselves through their lack of mastery of the local customs, like real-world immigrants who speak their adopted country's language with an accent.

A small group of writers, consultants and therapists thrives on repeating the same old mantra, namely that our youth is shaped through and through by the online medium in which it grew up. They claim that our schools must, therefore, offer young people completely new avenues -- surely traditional education cannot reach this generation any longer, they argue.

Little Evidence

There is little evidence to back such theories up, however. Rather than conducting surveys, these would-be visionaries base their arguments on impressive individual cases of young Internet virtuosos. As other, more serious researchers have since discovered, such exceptions say very little about the generation as a whole, and they are now avidly trying to correct the mistakes of the past.

Numerous studies have since revealed how young people actually use the Internet. The findings show that the image of the "net generation" is almost completely false -- as is the belief in the all-changing power of technology.

A study by the Hans Bredow Institute entitled "Growing Up With the Social Web" was particularly thorough in its approach. In addition to conducting a representative survey, the researchers conducted extensive individual interviews with 28 young people. Once again it became clear that young people primarily use the Internet to interact with friends. They go on social networking sites like Facebook and the popular German website SchülerVZ, which is aimed at school students, to chat, mess around and show off -- just like they do in real life.

There are a few genuine net pioneers who compose music online with friends from Amsterdam and Barcelona, organize spontaneous protests to lobby for cheaper public transport passes for schoolchildren, or use the virtual arena in other imaginative ways. But most of the respondents saw the Internet as merely a useful extension of the old world rather than as a completely new one. Their relationship to the medium is therefore far more pragmatic than initially posited. "We found no evidence whatsoever that the Internet is the dominating influence in the lives of young people," says Ingrid Paus-Hasebrink, the Salzburg-based communication researcher who led the project.

Not Very Skilled

More surprising yet, these supposedly gifted netizens are not even particularly adept at getting the most out of the Internet. "They can play around," says Rolf Schulmeister, an educational researcher from Hamburg who specializes in the use of digital media in the classroom. "They know how to start up programs, and they know where to get music and films. But only a minority is really good at using it."

Schulmeister should know. He recently ploughed through the findings of more than 70 relevant studies from around the globe. He too came to the conclusion that the Internet certainly hasn't taken over the real world. "The media continue to account for only a part of people's leisure activities. And the Internet is only one medium among many," he says. "Young people still prefer to meet friends or take part in sports."

Of course that won't prevent the term "net generation" being bandied about in the media and elsewhere. "It's an obvious, cheap metaphor," Schulmeister says. "So it just keeps cropping up."

In Touch with Friends around the Clock

In purely statistical terms, it appears that ever-greater proportions of young people's days are focused on technology. According to a recent study carried out by the Stuttgart-based media research group MPFS, 98 percent of 12- to 19-year-olds in Germany now have access to the Internet. And by their own estimates, they are online for an average of 134 minutes a day -- just three minutes less than they spend in front of the television.

However, the raw figures say little about what these supposed digital natives actually do online. As it turns out, the kids of today are very similar to previous generations of young people: They are mainly interested in communicating with their peers. Today's young people spend almost half of their time interacting socially online. E-mail, instant messaging and social networking together accounts for the bulk of their Internet time.

For instance Tom, one of Jetlir's classmates, remains in touch with 30 or 40 of his friends almost around the clock. Even so, the channels of communication vary. In the morning Tom will chat briefly on his PC, during lunch recess he'll rattle off a few text messages, after school he'll sit down for his daily Facebook session and make a few calls on his cell phone, and in the evening he'll make one or two longer video calls using the free Internet telephony service Skype.

The Medium Is Not the Message

For Tom, Jetlir, and the others of their age, it doesn't seem to matter whether they interact over the Internet or via another medium. It seems that young people are mainly interested in what the particular medium or communication device can be used for. In the case of the Internet in particular, that can be one of many things: Sometimes it acts as a telephone, sometimes as a kind of souped-up television. Tom spends an hour or two every day watching online videos, mostly on YouTube, but also entire TV programs if they're available somehow. "Everyone knows how to find episodes of the TV series they want to watch," says fellow pupil Pia.

The second most popular use of the Internet is for entertainment. According to a survey conducted by Leipzig University in 2008, more young people now access their music via various online broadcasting services than listen to it on the radio. As a consequence, the video-sharing portal YouTube has become the global jukebox, serving the musical needs of the world's youth -- although its rise to prominence as a resource for music on demand has gone largely unnoticed. Indeed, there are few songs that cannot be dredged up somewhere on the site.

"That's also practical if you're looking for something new," Pia says. Searching for specific content is incredibly simple on YouTube. In general all you need to do is enter half a line of some lyrics you caught at a party, and YouTube supplies the corresponding music video and the song itself.

In this way the Internet is becoming a repository for the content of older media, sometimes even replacing them altogether. And youthful audiences, who are always on the lookout for something to share or entertainment, are now increasingly using the Internet to find this content. But it's not exactly the kind of behavior that would trigger a lifestyle revolution.

Teens Still Enjoy Meeting Friends

What's more, there's still plenty of life beyond the many screens at their disposal. A 2009 study by MPFS found that nine out of every 10 teenagers put meeting friends right at the top of their list of favorite non-media activities. More striking still, 76 percent of young people in Germany take part in sport several times a week, although among girls that figure is only 64 percent.

In January, the authors of the "Generation M2" survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation published the remarkable finding that even the most intense media users in the US exercised just as much as others of their age.

So how can they pack all that into a single day? Simply adding together the amount of time devoted to each activity creates a very false picture. That's because most young people are excellent media multitaskers, simultaneously making phone calls, checking out their friends on Facebook and listening to music. And it appears that they're primarily online at times they would otherwise spend lounging around.

"I go online when I have nothing better to do," Jetlir says. "Unfortunately that's often when I should already be sleeping." Thanks to cell phones and MP3 players, young people can also fill gaps in their busy schedules even when they're away from static media sources like TVs, computers and music systems. Media use can therefore increase steadily while still leaving plenty of time for other activities.

'Time's Too Precious'

What's more, many young people still aren't the least bit interested in all the online buzz. Some 31 percent of them rarely or never visit social networking sites. Anna, who attends the same school as Jetlir, says she would "probably only miss the train timetable" if the Internet ceased to exist, while fellow student Torben thinks "time's too precious" to waste on computers. He plays handball and soccer, and says "10 minutes a day on Facebook" is all he needs.

By contrast, Tom will occasionally get so wrapped up in Facebook and his instant messaging that he'll forget the time altogether. "It's a strange feeling to realize you've spent so much time on something and have nothing to show for it," he admits. But he also knows that others find the temptations of the virtual world much harder to resist. "Everyone knows a few people who are online all day," Pia says, though Jetlir suggests that's only for want of something better to do. "None of them would turn down an offer to go out somewhere instead," he adds.

But even the most inveterate netizens aren't necessarily natural experts in the medium. If you want to make use of the Internet, you first have to understand how the real world works. And that's often the sticking point. The only advantage that young people have over their elders is their lack of inhibitions with regard to computers. "They simply try things out," says René Scheppler, a teacher at a high school in Wiesbaden. "They discover all sorts of things that way. The only thing is they don't understand how it works."

'I Found It on Google'

Occasionally the teacher will ask his students big-picture questions about the medium they take for granted. Questions like: Where did the Internet come from? "I'll get replies like, 'What do you mean? It's just there!'" Scheppler says. "Unless they're prompted to do so, they never address those sorts of questions. For them it's like a car: All that matters is that it works."

And because teenagers are basically inexperienced, they are all the more likely to overestimate their own abilities. "They think they're the real experts," Scheppler says. "But when it comes down to it, they can't even google properly."

When Scheppler scheduled a lesson about Google to teach his pupils how to better search the Web, they thought it was hilarious. "Google?!" they gasped. "We know all about that. We do it all the time. And now Mr Scheppler wants to tell us how to use Google!"

He, therefore, set them a challenge: They were to design a poster on globalization based on the example of Indian subcontractors. Now it was the teacher's turn to laugh. "They just typed a series of individual keywords into Google, and then they went click, click, click: 'Don't want that! Useless! Let's try another one!'" Scheppler recalls. "They're very quick to jettison things, sometimes even relevant information. They think they can tell the wheat from the chaff, but they just stumble about -- very rapidly, very hectically and very superficially. And they stop the moment they get a hit that looks reasonably plausible."

Few have any idea where the information on the Web comes from. And if their teacher asks for references, he often gets the reply, "I found it on Google."

Learning How to Use the Internet Productively

Recent research into the way people conduct Internet searches confirms Scheppler's observations. A major study conducted by the British Library came to the sobering conclusion that the "net generation" hardly knows what to look for, quickly scans over results, and has a hard time assessing relevance. "The information literacy of young people has not improved with the widening access to technology," the authors wrote.

A few schools have now realized that the time has come to act. One of them is Kaiserin Augusta School in Cologne, the high school that Jetlir, Tom, Pia, and Anna attend. "We want our pupils to learn how to use the Internet productively," says music teacher André Spang, "Not just for clicking around in."

Spang uses Web 2.0 tools in the classroom. When teaching them about the music of the 20th century, for example, he got his 12th-graders to produce a blog on the subject. "They didn't even know what that was," he says. Now they're writing articles on aleatoric music and musique concrete, composing simple 12-tone rows and collecting musical examples, videos, and links about it. Everyone can access the project online, see what the others are doing and comment on each other's work. The fact that the material is public also helps to promote healthy competition and ambition among the participants.

Blogs are not technically challenging and are quick to set up. That's why they are also being used to teach other subjects. Piggybacking on the enormous success of Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia produced entirely by volunteer contributors, wikis are also being employed in schools. The 10th-graders in the physics class of Spang's colleague Thomas Vieth are currently putting together a miniature encyclopedia of electromagnetism. "In the past all we could do was give out group assignments, and people would just rattle off their presentations," Vieth says. "Now everyone reads along, partly because all the articles are connected and have to be interlinked."

Not Interested in Fame

One positive side-effect is that the students are also learning how to find reliable information on the Internet. And so that they understand what they find online, there are regular sessions of old-fashioned sessions on learning how to learn, including reading, comprehension and summarizing exercises. So instead of tech-savvy young netizens challenging the school, the school itself is painstakingly teaching them how to benefit from the online medium.

For most of the pupils it was the first time they had contributed their own work to the Internet's pool of data. They're not interested in widespread fame. Self-promoters are rare, and most young people even shun anonymous role-playing such as that found in the online world Second Life. The youth of today, it turns out, is much more obsessed with real relationships. Whatever they do or write is directed at their particular group of friends and acquaintances.

That also applies to video, the medium most tempting for people to try out for themselves. An impressive 15 percent of young people have already uploaded at least one home-made video, mostly shot on a cell phone.

Part of Their Social Life

One student, Sven, has uploaded a video he made to YouTube. It shows him and a few friends in their bathing suits first by a lake, then all running into the clearly icy water. "No, really," Sven says, "people are interested in this. They talk about it!" There are indeed already 37 comments under the video, all from his circle of friends.

"And here," Sven adds, pointing to the screen. "Here on Facebook someone recently posted just a dot. Even so, seven people have clicked on the 'Like' button so far, and 83 commented on the dot."

Older people might consider such activity inane, but for young people it's part of their social life and no less important than a friendly wave or affable clowning around in the offline world. The example of the dot shows how normal the Internet has become, and debunks the idea that it is a special world in which special things happen.

"Media are used by the masses if they have some relevance to everyday life," says Rolf Schulmeister, the educational researcher. "And they are used for aims that people already had anyway."

Turning Point

Young people have now reached this turning point. The Internet is no longer something they are willing to waste time thinking about. It seems that the excitement about cyberspace was a phenomenon peculiar to their predecessors, the technology-obsessed first generation of Web users.

For a brief transition period, the Web seemed to be tremendously new and different, a kind of revolutionary power that could do and reshape everything. Young people don't feel that way. They hardly even use the word "Internet," talking about "Google", "YouTube" and "Facebook" instead. And they certainly no longer understand it when older generations speak of "going online."

"The expression is meaningless," Tom says. Indeed the term is a relic of a time when the Internet was still something special, evoking a separate space distinct from our real life, an independent, secretive world that you entered and then exited again.

Tom and his friends just describe themselves as being "on" or "off," using the English terms. What they mean is: contactable or not.

Translated from the German by Jan Liebelt
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...710139,00.html





Docks for Apple Gadgets Help a Business Thrive
Eric A. Taub

In the 1950s and 1960s, Realtone Electronics made transistor radios, one of the must-have gadgets of the era.

But by the 1970s, that gold mine had played out. For the next two decades, the company survived in the electronics business by making clocks for Timex that sold in drugstores and by creatively combining devices. It made the first cassette tape player-clock radio and the first telephone-clock radio.

It struck gold again in this decade with another combination — speakers with a dock for the iPod music player from Apple. By tapping into the Apple system, the company, now called SDI Technologies, has become the largest supplier of speaker and alarm clock docks. It is also the leading maker of hotel alarm clocks.

Software developers may chafe at Apple’s restrictions and standards for the iPod, iPhone and iPad. But Apple’s set-in-stone design requirements actually help companies making speaker docks and rechargers because they know that the placement of the connector will probably not vary from one Apple model to the next. And they are confident that sales of the Apple products will be strong enough that they will lead to large production runs.

In 2005, SDI was trying to figure out how to recreate the company for the digital age. “I asked one of our designers if he could replace a CD changer from one of our clock radios and let the user wake and sleep from an iPod,” said Ezra S. Ashkenazi, SDI’s president and the son of one of Realtone’s founders. “When I asked that, the karma in the room changed.”

“We recreated the $19.99 drugstore alarm clock radio and turned it into a $100 product,” Mr. Ashkenazi said.

To increase the likelihood of success with its first Apple accessory, the company purposely mimicked the Apple style in its earliest designs. “Our instructions to our designers were ‘Make it look like Apple designed it,’ ” Mr. Ashkenazi said. Its first product, the iH5, was housed in a white plastic case and packaged in a clean box with minimal graphics. “This was the opposite of our Timex boxes,” he said.

“This was a real challenge for us. You get no help from Apple except for specs and requirements. We knew we had something big when stores mistakenly called our products ‘iHome by Apple,’ ” Mr. Ashkenazi said.

It transformed the private company, now run by the children and grandchildren of the men who started the company near the foot of Fifth Avenue in New York. It gets the bulk of its revenue from its 20 types of iPod and iPhone audio accessories.

With 20 percent of the speaker dock market, the company has twice the market share of Sony, its nearest competitor. It also dwarfs Memorex, iLive and Bose.

“IHome has done a good job keeping pace and growing their portfolio,” said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis at the research firm NPD. “They established the clock dock category and created many variations.”

Not that the company has not made mistakes. An under-the-counter kitchen iPod dock failed to attract customers. “It was expensive, and you had to drill under a cabinet to install it,” Mr. Ashkenazi said.

In the hotel market, though, the company has placed more than two million alarm clocks with iPod and iPhone docks in almost 40 percent of the 4.9 million hotel rooms in the United States, according hotelnewsnow.com. It cleverly gave itself an edge by designing an iPod alarm clock that would ring only once and then reset itself, preventing the next guest in the room from being unexpectedly awakened at 5:30 in the morning.

Responding to the current obsession with software applications, or apps, for the iPhone or iPad, the company has created its first app-aware alarm clock. Its free iHome+Sleep app allows an iPhone user to customize the phone with sleep, wake and music instructions.

When a traveler docks the iPhone to the hotel alarm clock, the proper settings are used. That way, a weary traveler never has to figure out how the alarm clock works. The app also handles Twitter messages and aggregates news and weather that is displayed on the iPhone upon awakening.

Its first iPad-compatible product, the $199 iA100, will be sold later this year at its usual outlets, including Best Buy and Apple stores. Like all accessories manufacturers, iHome had to wait until the iPad was in stores before it could learn its dimensions and specs.

It reconfigured an earlier, iPhone-only design to accommodate the iPad. The iA100, equipped with Bluetooth, can stream music from an unconnected iPhone or iPad across a room. The iA100’s clock also syncs to the correct time on an iPhone or iPad.

Given the iPad’s larger battery capacity, Mr. Ashkenazi’s designers were not concerned with having it continuously connected to the docking station to be recharged. To appeal to video game players, iHome increased the unit’s sound quality by incorporating four speakers and enhanced bass response.

Though Apple’s products are selling well, some analysts say SDI Technologies is still taking a risk by relying on one company’s products.

“You’re tied to the core,” said Robert Enderle, president of the Enderle Group research firm. “If the Android smartphone market takes off, you’re in trouble.”

Mr. Ashkenazi is not worried. “The iPad, iPhone and iPod are recession-proof,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/te...y/09ihome.html





Flash / Frash Ported to iPhone 4 !!
Taimur Asad

The title says it all! Yes, you can now get very alpha version of Flash (aka Frash) running right on your iPhone 4. Previously, we showed you how to install Flash (Frash) on iPad. And now folks at Grant Pannell site has managed to compile an iPhone 4 version of Flash. The credit for this of course goes to Comex, the guy behind Spirit and JailbreakMe tools for iOS devices. Without his hard work, this surely wouldn’t have been possible.

Flash on iPhone 4

Simply follow the instructions posted below to get it working on your iPhone 4. According to the source, this version of Flash (Frash) will also work on iPhone 3GS, iPad (on 3.2.1) and iPod touches. I have tested it on iPhone 4, running iOS 4.0.1 only and can confirm that it works. You can see it in the video embedded below.

The installation instructions..

Warning Note: This guide is for testing & educational purposes only. Follow it on your own risk. I’m not responsible for any loss of important data or malfunctioning of your iPhone.

Step 1: First up, you will need to jailbreak your iOS device. Follow the guide posted here to jailbreak your iPhone 4 with JailbreakMe, here to jailbreak your iPod touch 3G and 2G, and here to jailbreak your iPad.

Step 2: Next, you will need to install OpenSSH. To do this, Open Cydia, touch on “Search” tab and then search for “OpenSSH”. Install this app and reboot your iPhone.

OpenSSH

Step 3: Connect your iPhone with your computer. Make sure iTunes is not running.

Step 4: Download and install Cyberduck for Mac or WinSCP for Windows. Enter the following details to login to your iPhone:

Cyberduck

* Server: The IP address of your iPhone/iPad/iPod touch. Settings –> WiFi –> <Your Network Name>
* Username: root
* Password: alpine
* Protocol: SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol)

WinSCP

* Hostname: The IP address of your iPhone/iPad/iPod touch. Setting –> WiFi –> <Your Network Name>
* User name: root
* Password: alpine
* Protocol: SCP

Flash on iPhone 4

Step 5: Download Frash-0.02.deb file from the source link given below.

Step 6: Navigate to /var/root/Media directory and create a folder named “Cydia”. Inside this Cydia folder, create another folder and name it “AutoInstall”.

Flash on iPhone 4

Step 7: Copy over the Frash-0.02.deb file in this “AutoInstall” folder.

Flash on iPhone 4

Step 8: Restart your iPhone and you are done. Now simply browse any Flash based site, click on the “Flash” text to play the Flash content.

Last but not the least, Credits: Comex for the Frash port, Grant Pannell for iPhone 4 compilation. [Thanks to Youtnell for sending this in!]

Make sure you subscribe to our YouTube Channel here for future videos related to iPhone, Android and Windows phones.

You can follow me on twitter or join our facebook fanpage to keep yourself updated on all the latest from Microsoft, Google and Apple.
http://www.redmondpie.com/install-fl...o-video-guide/





Coffee Shops are Taking Wi-Fi off the Menu

To stimulate sales, coffeehouses are pulling the plug on the Net.
Jessica Guynn

Reporting from San Francisco —

Housed in an old San Francisco warehouse, Four Barrel Coffee — with its vintage record player, 53-year-old coffee roasting machine, tables hewn from recycled wood and wall of mounted boar heads — calls one of the world's most wired cities home.

But don't expect to get an Internet connection there.

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Coffee connoisseurs hooked on this roaster's beans won't find a working signal — or even a power outlet. The uninitiated often try to plug into a fake one that owner Jeremy Tooker spray painted on the wall as a gag.

"There are lots of marks on the drywall," Tooker said, laughing.

About 30 miles south in Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley's technology industry, the Coupa Cafe offers some of the fastest Internet service in town. But even this popular hangout for entrepreneurs and venture capitalists bans Wi-Fi on weekends to make room for customers sans laptops.

"We had big parties or family groups who wanted to eat but had no room," said Jean Paul Coupal, who runs the cafe with his mother, Nancy. "They were getting upset about it. They felt the whole place was being taken over by techies."

Coffee shops were the retail pioneers of Wi-Fi, flipping the switch to lure customers. But now some owners are pulling the plug. They're finding that Wi-Fi freeloaders who camp out all day nursing a single cup of coffee are a drain on the bottom line. Others want to preserve a friendly vibe and keep their establishments from turning into "Matrix"-like zombie shacks where people type and don't talk.

That shift could gather steam now that free Wi-Fi is less of a perk after coffee giant Starbucks stopped charging for it last month.

"There is now a market niche for not having Wi-Fi," said Bryant Simon, a Temple University history professor and author of "Everything but the Coffee: Learning About America From Starbucks."

And not just for Luddites. Web designer Mike Kuniavsky, who has spent his career dissecting people's relationship to digital technology, hangs out at Four Barrel Coffee precisely because he can disconnect from the Internet and concentrate on his thoughts. That's where he wrote his upcoming book on consumer electronics design: "Smart Things."

"No Wi-Fi is the reason I was able to write the book," Kuniavsky said.

Dan and Nathalie Drozdenko turned off the Wi-Fi at their Los Angeles cafe when it malfunctioned. The complaints poured in, but so did the compliments: Lots of customers appreciated a wireless cup of joe at the Downbeat Cafe, a popular lunch spot in Echo Park.

"People come here because we don't offer it. They know they can get their work done and not get distracted," Dan Drozdenko said.

This is a 180-degree turn from the always-on culture of San Francisco, where the first Wi-Fi cafe went online in 2000. That's when Cliff Skolnick, a networking engineer who became a champion of piping free Wi-Fi to the world, beamed a wireless connection to the coffee shop near his apartment. The owners of Martha & Bros. Coffee Co. never even knew, Skolnick said.

Soon independent cafes began offering laptop-toting customers free access to the Internet to poach customers from Starbucks. But many discovered that Wi-Fi could eat into their business.

Coffeehouses have always attracted bookish deadbeats who stayed too long and bought too little. But suddenly these shops were teeming with electricity- and table-hogging laptops, leaving trails of tangled power cords and hard feelings. Too many customers spread out at big tables for long stretches over a lukewarm mug, forcing cafes to turn away business. One New York cafe even had a customer who installed himself and his desktop computer at one of its tables each day.

Cafe owners who grumble the loudest are those who serve meals. Customers who linger solo at large tables while working on their laptops can squeeze out the more lucrative lunch or dinner crowds. That got to be a bigger headache during the recession when frugal customers consumed less and stayed even longer, prompting more cafes to impose restrictions to encourage turnover.

Even as the economy rebounds, some eateries are keeping the Wi-Fi off during peak hours. The Literati Cafe in Brentwood unhooks during the lunchtime rush, manager Jon Eiswerth said.

"The Internet is a worm hole to the outside world, and we love that people use our space for that," Eiswerth said. "We are just trying to please as many people as possible and find the middle ground."

The middle ground for Nook in San Francisco's Russian Hill district is banning Wi-Fi in the evenings and on weekends.

"People were sitting all day long on one cup of coffee, blocking tables. Nobody was talking, and there was no table turnover. It was hard to make money," owner Nicola Blair Nook said. "I turn off the Wi-Fi and in 10 minutes all the computers are gone."

Cafe owners have tried a variety of tactics to foil Wi-Fi squatters. They put out signs that ask laptop users to share tables or point them to nearby Wi-Fi hot spots such as public libraries. They hand out wireless passwords that expire in an hour. They cover electrical outlets (less effective now that customers come armed with laptops sporting longer battery lives or with spare batteries). Computer bans extend to iPads and even Kindles and other e-readers, although paper books and other reading materials are still embraced.

Tooker of Four Barrel Coffee says he turned his cafe into a wireless-free zone to encourage his customers to interact with one another rather than their computer screens. He opened his first coffee shop, Ritual Roasters, with his former business partner Eileen Hassi in San Francisco in 2005. They installed Wi-Fi to draw a crowd — a strategy that worked too well. Ritual Roasters had to clamp down after techies with laptops and business plans took over the space. The cafe now covers the electrical outlets with switch plates.

"We just realized it was a mistake. People would just camp out for hours, literally eight hours on one cup of coffee. We only had 75 seats, and those were always full," Tooker said. "It killed the vibe, too."

Tooker is following the example of Victrola Coffee & Art in Seattle, one of the first cafes to disconnect Wi-Fi in 2005 after the owners noticed that friends were no longer talking and strangers were no longer meeting. At the time, it was a daring move. Now cafes are more frequently trying to reboot their culture by giving Wi-Fi the boot.

"People still desire and need actual interaction," Temple University's Simon said. "That dynamism is part of what makes us human. The coffeehouse is a manifestation of our desire for that connection to community and more vibrant life than in our homes."

Coffeehouses have a rich history as community meeting places that can be traced back centuries to the Ottoman empire. They first popped up in Europe in the 17th century, open only to men but to all social classes. Eighteenth-century London saw the rise of the Penny University, where people paid a penny to drink coffee and debate the latest news in local coffeehouses. Italian immigrant communities imported the experience to major cities in the United States. In San Francisco's North Beach district, for example, coffeehouses became the literary home away from home to the Beat Generation's Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Some cafes have retained their character as hangouts to share news and gossip with friends over a cup of coffee or a meal. Others have morphed into 21st-century cubicle farms where young techies set up shop, bang out code, meet with investors, run beta tests and even troubleshoot the Internet connection for cafe owners when it goes on the blink. The trend has seen coffeehouses supplant garages as hatcheries for tech start-ups. This isn't without historical precedent. Examples of business being conducted in coffeehouses traces back to 1688, when insurer Lloyd's of London got its start in one in London. The Tontine Coffee House was the original location for the New York Stock Exchange in 1792.

Many cafes embrace this melding of coffee and commerce. Seattle Coffee Works near Pike Place Market has ramped up the speed and added more electrical outlets (30 outlets for 40 seats) to keep up with demand.

Co-owner Sebastian Simsch said the Internet is far from a buzz kill. It's a business opportunity. Wi-Fi in coffeehouses helps people make connections in the broader world. They may not make friends with someone at the next table, but they check in with friends all over through e-mail or on popular Internet sites such as Facebook.

"It would be ridiculous if we didn't have Wi-Fi," Simsch said.

For holdouts like Tooker, the glut of Wi-Fi has made it tougher to keep people from zoning out on laptops.

Across the street from Four Barrel is a new housing project. Coffee drinkers can access its Wi-Fi if they sit at a counter that stretches along the front window of the shop. And, more and more, cafe nomads bring their own portable hot spots — devices that connect laptops to the Internet from anywhere — so they can plug in whether or not a cafe offers Wi-Fi.

Tooker shrugs his shoulders. On a busy weekday afternoon, his shop is packed with customers, only two of whom are gazing at laptops. His decision to ban Wi-Fi hasn't undercut business: Four Barrel goes through an average of 700 pounds of coffee each week.
"We don't glare at someone with a laptop," he said. "But we don't cater to that person either."
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...612,full.story





Free Wi-Fi Service Coming To City Livery Cabs
NY1 News

Free Wi-Fi service will soon be making its way around the city, by way of livery cabs.

According to LimoRes Car & Limo, the company running the project, the free, advertising-supported service will be installed in 1,000 livery cabs by the fall.

It would provide Wi-Fi to people in the cars, as well as those within about 400 feet of the car.

The company plans to install the service in 20,000 vehicles by 2011.

Of course the moving cabs could create spotty coverage. But LimoRes says adding the service to more cars and improving technology should reduce the problem.

There's no plan at this point to install the service in yellow cabs, given the tougher regulation and approval process.
http://www.ny1.com/content/news_beat...y-livery-cabs/





Google and Verizon Offer Vision on Internet Traffic
Claire Cain Miller and Miguel Helft

Google and Verizon on Monday introduced a proposal for how Internet service should be regulated — and were immediately criticized by groups that favor keeping the network as open as possible.

The proposal includes exceptions for wireless Internet access and for potential new services that broadband providers could offer, including things like “advanced educational services, or new entertainment and gaming options.”

The announcement is the latest move in a high-stakes battle over a principle known as net neutrality. The debate is over whether Internet users should be able to access all types of online information on an equal basis, or whether Internet service providers should be able to charge content companies for faster transmission.

The proposal says that nonwireless Internet providers should not be able to discriminate against or offer paid prioritization to any Internet content providers, and that the Federal Communications Commission should have the authority to stop or fine those who break these rules.

But the proposal excludes wireless access, a fast-growing portion of Internet traffic.

The proposal “sacrifices the future of the mobile wireless Internet as this platform becomes more central to the lives of all Americans,” said Gigi B. Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a consumer group, in a statement.

Ivan Seidenberg, chief executive of Verizon, said the proposal excluded wireless because the companies were “concerned about the imposition of too many rules upfront that would not allow us to optimize this network in a fashion that would supercharge the growth we’ve seen in the past.”

Jen Howard, a spokeswoman for the F.C.C., said the agency would not immediately comment on the proposal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/technology/10net.html





Web Plan Is Dividing Companies
Claire Cain Miller and Brian Stelter

In an emerging battle over regulating Internet access, companies are taking sides.

Facebook, one of the companies that has flourished on the open Internet, indicated Wednesday that it did not support a proposal by Google and Verizon that critics say could let providers of Internet access chip away at that openness.

Meanwhile an executive of AT&T, one of the companies that stands to profit from looser regulations, called the proposal a “reasonable framework.”

Most media companies have stayed mute on the subject, but in an interview this week, the media mogul Barry Diller called the proposal a sham.

And outside of technology circles, most people have not yet figured out what is at stake.

The debate revolves around net neutrality, which in the broadest sense holds that Internet users should have equal access to all types of information online, and that companies offering Internet service should not be able to give priority to some sources or types of content.

In a policy statement on Monday, Google and Verizon proposed that regulators enforce those principles on wired connections but not on the wireless Internet. They also excluded something they called “additional, differentiated online services.”

In other words, on mobile phones or on special access lanes, carriers like Verizon and AT&T could charge content companies a toll for faster access to customers or, some analysts worry, block certain services from reaching customers altogether.

Opponents of the proposal say that the Internet, suddenly, would not be so open anymore.

“All of our life goes through this network, increasingly, and if you can’t reach your boss or get to your remotely stored work, or it’s so slow that you can’t get it done before you give up and you go to bed, that’s a problem,” said Allen S. Hammond IV, director of the Broadband Institute of California at Santa Clara University School of Law. “People need to understand that’s what we’re debating here.”

Decisions about net neutrality rest with the Federal Communications Commission and legislators, and full-throated lobbying campaigns are already under way on all sides. The Google-Verizon proposal was essentially an attempt to frame the debate.

It set off a flood of reaction, much of it negative, from Web companies and consumer advocacy groups. In the most extreme situation that opponents envision, two Internets could emerge — the public one known today, and a private one with faster lanes and expensive tolls.

Google and Verizon defended the exemptions by saying that they were giving carriers the flexibility they need to ensure that the Internet’s infrastructure remains “a platform for innovation.” Carriers say they need to be able to manage their networks as they see fit and generate revenue to expand them.

AT&T said in a statement Wednesday night that “the Verizon-Google agreement demonstrates that it is possible to bridge differences on this issue.”

Much of the debate rests on the idea of paid “fast lanes.” Content companies, the theory goes, would have to pay for favored access to a carrier’s customers, so some Web sites or video services could load faster than others.

That would be a big change from the level playing field that content companies now enjoy, Mr. Diller, who oversees Expedia, Ticketmaster, Match.com and other sites, said last month. Speaking of the telecommunications carriers, he said, “They want the equivalent of having the toaster pay for the ability to plug itself into the electrical grid.”

These fast lanes are fairly easy to understand when it comes to wireless Internet access. But what confused many was the suggestion by Google and Verizon that future online services that are not part of the public Internet should also be exempt from equal-access rules.

These services would be “distinguishable from traditional broadband Internet access services,” the two companies said in a joint blog post. “It is too soon to predict how these new services will develop, but examples might include health care monitoring, the smart grid, advanced educational services or new entertainment and gaming options.”

Some experts were puzzled as to what these services might be and why such an exception might be necessary.

“Broadband that’s not the Internet? I don’t know what they’re talking about,” said David A. Patterson, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. “They seem to have an idea of something other than the public Internet as a way to ship information, but by nature, to have value it has to go to a lot of places, and right now, that’s the packet-switched Internet.”

Josh Silver, chief executive of the nonprofit group Free Press, said the exemptions amounted to “the cable-ization of the Internet,” in that cable subscribers pay extra for premium tiers of service and for certain channels. Mr. Silver’s group is promoting a petition to the F.C.C. titled “Don’t Let Google Be Evil.” Silicon Valley investors have expressed trepidation that the new rules, if adopted, could put a damper on innovation, particularly for mobile start-ups.

The wireless Internet is quickly emerging as the dominant technology platform, said Matt Cohler, a general partner at Benchmark Capital, a prominent venture firm in Silicon Valley that has invested in start-ups like Twitter. “It is as important to have the right protections in place for the newer platform as it is for the older platform.”

Facebook sounded a similar note on Wednesday, saying in a statement that it supported net neutrality principles for both wired and wireless networks.

“Preserving an open Internet that is accessible to innovators — regardless of their size or wealth — will promote a vibrant and competitive marketplace where consumers have ultimate control over the content and services delivered through their Internet connections,” the company said.

Technology companies like Amazon and eBay also expressed concern with Google’s compromise, but have been less vocal.

Some start-ups see possible advantages in tiered access. Danny Stein, the chairman of eMusic, a music download service, said there needed to be Internet service that remained open and neutral, “but that doesn’t mean there can’t be premium options to appeal to some amazing consumer experience outside of the garden of net neutrality.”

The silence of big media companies like Comcast and the News Corporation on the issue has been noticeable. Media companies’ traditional business models have been about controlled pathways to the customer, and they may see benefits in restoring some of that control.

Mr. Diller asserted that the Google-Verizon proposal “doesn’t preserve ‘net neutrality,’ full stop, or anything like it.” Asked if other media executives were staying quiet because they stand to gain from a less open Internet, he said simply, “Yes.”

Miguel Helft, Brooks Barnes and Joseph Plambeck contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/technology/12net.html





Google-Verizon Net Neutrality Pact: 5 Red Flags
Ian Paul

Google and Verizon unveiled a proposal to maintain an open Internet while creating room for a broadband network of premium services. The proposal has no legal standing whatsoever, and is basically a policy paper on network neutrality for consideration by Congress and the Federal Communications Commission. Network neutrality is the principle that broadband providers should not be allowed to discriminate or restrict Web traffic based on its content.

Regardless of the legal standing, this proposal is backed by two major technology corporations involved in the network neutrality debate. That means the proposal could influence discussions about the future of broadband Internet access in the U.S.

So far, reaction to the proposal has been highly critical. Citizen interest group Public Knowledge said the proposal "shouldn't form the basis of legislation in Congress or of rules by the FCC." The headline "Google Goes 'Evil'" lead the Huffington Post's coverage of the proposal.

FCC Commission Michael J. Copps believes the Google-Verizon proposal is a call for the FCC to assert "authority over broadband telecommunications." to protect the interests of users. While Paul Misener, Amazon's vice president for global public policy, told The New York Times the Google-Verizon proposal "appears to condone services that could harm consumer Internet access."

There are many concerns and questions surrounding the Google-Verizon proposal. Here are five things that are top of my mind.

How Would this So-called Private Internet Work?

Verizon, and presumably other broadband providers, want the right to maintain a so-called private Internet to provide new services that don't exist yet. Some examples of what private broadband services could be include health care monitoring, educational services, gaming and other forms of entertainment. This private service would be separate from the regular Internet.

In theory, this sounds like a fair idea since a carrier's private network wouldn't infringe on the existing Internet we have today. But how would this play out in practice?

Would Verizon, for example, be able to tell Blizzard Entertainment--the company behind online games like World of Warcraft--that its services must be on the private network because it takes up too much bandwidth on the regular Internet?

Are there other, less direct ways broadband providers could pressure online companies to move to the private network?

Why is wireless out?

By all accounts, wireless Internet (3G and Edge cellular service) is the fastest-growing means for accessing the Internet. So why does the Google-Verizon proposal leave wireless access out of the network neutrality debate? The proposal says the wireless industry is too "competitive and changing rapidly" to be included in any net neutrality agreement.

But if safeguards aren't put in place now, what happens when wireless access becomes the dominant way to access the Internet? In fact, that future may be here sooner than you think. A recent study by Morgan Stanley predicts more people will be getting online via mobile devices than PCs within 5 years. What happens to network neutrality then?

What Does "Lawful Internet Content" Mean?

The Google-Verizon proposal says broadband providers "would not be able to discriminate against or prioritize lawful Internet content." I have to wonder if by "lawful Internet content" what these two companies really mean is "any content but torrents," also known as peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing.

It's no secret that broadband carriers have a grudge against p2p file sharing and wouldn't mind if it disappeared. Vuze, a company that makes p2p software, has claimed in the past that all U.S. broadband carriers disrupt p2p traffic. Broadband carrier Comcast has battled against file sharing in recent years claiming the file sharing protocol slows down the network for all users.

It's also no secret that many users on p2p networks are trading copyrighted files such as major Hollywood movies, TV shows, video games, music and even digital scans of comic books.

But p2p can be used for legitimate purposes as well. Activist group the Yes Men recently released their documentary "The Yes Men Fix the World" as a publicly available torrent file. Michael Moore did the same thing for "Slacker Uprising" in 2008, and the CBC (Canada's public broadcaster) has also experimented with distributing content via torrents.

For all the criticism and bad press it gets, torrent protocols are an efficient and useful way to distribute content (legal or otherwise). So how would the Google-Verizon proposal effect p2p file sharing? Would access to sites like The Pirate Bay or other torrent databases be restricted based on accusations that most of the content it points to isn't "lawful"? Also, how deeply would broadband carriers be monitoring p2p traffic to watch out for unlawful content on their networks?

What Happens to the Regular Internet?

The Google-Verizon proposal appears to make room for a two-tiered Internet: the public Internet we use today and a private one for premium services. That raises the question about what happens to the regular Internet in the long term? Would broadband providers be compelled to maintain and upgrade their regular Internet services? Could carriers cap regular Internet speeds at a certain level, and then force users over to the proposed private service if they wanted better broadband speeds? How does an open or so-called public Internet survive when corporations have financial incentives, such as private networks, to ignore it?

What Will Be The Costs?

Finally, how much is this going to cost the regular end user? If this proposed framework succeeds and carriers are able to offer private services, what are the costs going to be? Would fees be structured like cable packages, as some reports have suggested, where you buy one plan for entertainment services like gaming and another for services like health care monitoring? Or would services be provided a la carte, where you just pay for the access you want?

The aim of the Verizon-Google plan is to maintain an open Internet and for "continued investment in broadband infrastructure." But is a proposed two-tiered broadband system that ignores the growing popularity of wireless access really a good way to maintain open Internet access for all? I'm not so sure.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/20297...html?tk=fv_rel





Google-Verizon Pact: It Gets Worse
Craig Aaron

So Google and Verizon went public today with their "policy framework" -- better known as the pact to end the Internet as we know it.

News of this deal broke this week, sparking a public outcry that's seen hundreds of thousands of Internet users calling on Google to live up to its "Don't Be Evil" pledge.

But cut through the platitudes the two companies (Googizon, anyone?) offered on today's press call, and you'll find this deal is even worse than advertised.

The proposal is one massive loophole that sets the stage for the corporate takeover of the Internet.

Real Net Neutrality means that Internet service providers can't discriminate between different kinds of online content and applications. It guarantees a level playing field for all Web sites and Internet technologies. It's what makes sure the next Google, out there in a garage somewhere, has just as good a chance as any giant corporate behemoth to find its audience and thrive online.

What Google and Verizon are proposing is fake Net Neutrality. You can read their framework for yourself here or go here to see Google twisting itself in knots about this suddenly "thorny issue." But here are the basics of what the two companies are proposing:

1. Under their proposal, there would be no Net Neutrality on wireless networks -- meaning anything goes, from blocking websites and applications to pay-for-priority treatment.

2. Their proposed standard for "non-discrimination" on wired networks is so weak that actions like Comcast's widely denounced blocking of BitTorrent would be allowed.

3. The deal would let ISPs like Verizon -- instead of Internet users like you -- decide which applications deserve the best quality of service. That's not the way the Internet has ever worked, and it threatens to close the door on tomorrow's innovative applications. (If RealPlayer had been favored a few years ago, would we ever have gotten YouTube?)

4. The deal would allow ISPs to effectively split the Internet into "two pipes" -- one of which would be reserved for "managed services," a pay-for-play platform for content and applications. This is the proverbial toll road on the information superhighway, a fast lane reserved for the select few, while the rest of us are stuck on the cyber-equivalent of a winding dirt road.

5. The pact proposes to turn the Federal Communications Commission into a toothless watchdog, left fruitlessly chasing consumer complaints but unable to make rules of its own. Instead, it would leave it up to unaccountable (and almost surely industry-controlled) third parties to decide what the rules should be.

If there's a silver lining in this whole fiasco it's that, last I checked anyway, it wasn't up to Google and Verizon to write the rules. That's why we have Congress and the FCC.

Certainly by now we should have learned -- from AIG, Massey Energy, BP, you name it -- what happens when we let big companies regulate themselves or hope they'll do the right thing.

We need the FCC -- with the backing of Congress and President Obama -- to step and do the hard work of governing. That means restoring the FCC's authority to protect Internet users and safeguarding real Net Neutrality once and for all.

Such a move might not be popular on Wall Street or even in certain corners of Silicon Valley, but it's the kind of leadership the public needs right now.

If you haven't yet told the FCC why we need Net Neutrality, please do it now.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-..._b_676194.html





A Review of Verizon and Google's Net Neutrality Proposal
EFF Legislative Analysis by Cindy Cohn

Efforts to protect net neutrality that involve government regulation have always faced one fundamental obstacle: the substantial danger that the regulators will cause more harm than good for the Internet. The worst case scenario would be that, in allowing the FCC to regulate the Internet, we open the door for big business, Hollywood and the indecency police to exert even more influence on the Net than they do now.

On Monday, Google and Verizon proposed a new legislative framework for net neutrality. Reaction to the proposal has been swift and, for the most part, highly critical. While we agree with many aspects of that criticism, we are interested in the framework's attempt to grapple with the Trojan Horse problem. The proposed solution: a narrow grant of power to the FCC to enforce neutrality within carefully specified parameters. While this solution is not without its own substantial dangers, we think it deserves to be considered further if Congress decides to legislate.

Unfortunately, the same document that proposed this intriguing idea also included some really terrible ideas. It carves out exemptions from neutrality requirements for so-called "unlawful" content, for wireless services, and for very vaguely-defined "additional online services." The definition of "reasonable network management" is also problematically vague. As many, many, many have already pointed out, these exemptions threaten to completely undermine the stated goal of neutrality.

Here's a more detailed breakdown of our initial thoughts:

Limited FCC Jurisdiction — Good:

Those who have followed EFF’s position on net neutrality will know that, while we strongly support neutrality in practice, we are opposed to open-ended grants of regulatory authority to the FCC. On that score, the Google/Verizon proposal takes a promising new approach. It would limit the FCC to case-by-case enforcement of consumer protection and nondiscrimination requirements and prohibit broad rulemaking. In essence, it tries to limit the FCC to the type of authority that the FTC has — the authority to investigate claims as they are made.

This limitation, if enforced, could help avoid many of the problems we’ve been concerned about, such as the possibility that a future FCC might decide to take on the role of “Internet indecency” police or, as a result of regulatory capture, might become an innovation gatekeeper, blocking new ideas by small innovators in order to protect the interests of big dinosaurs.

The proposal also rightly exempts software applications, content and services from FCC jurisdiction. Suggestions that the content layer should be directly regulated by the FCC were among the most wrong-headed in past debates about this issue.

The provision does suggests the use of “private non-governmental dispute resolution processes,” which is somewhat troubling — we’ve seen how such processes can be gamed by repeat players.

Standard-Setting Bodies — Interesting:

The proposal also has an interesting suggestion for handling concerns about politicization of the FCC processes and the need for a deep technological understanding to make good decisions in this area: standard-setting bodies. It suggests that “reasonable network management” should be “consistent with the technical requirements, standards or best practices adopted by an independent, widely recognized Internet community governance initiative or standard-setting organization.”

This idea is intriguing, but there are some reasons to be wary. Standard-setting bodies can sometimes do a better job of recognizing and resisting bad technological arguments than political or agency bodies. And technical bodies successfully developed many of the standards that make the Internet great. But as we well know at EFF, standards bodies are not immune to bad ideas. We spent years fighting anti-consumer efforts in various standard-setting fora around DRM and trying to correct some bad standards that had been set in the area of evoting. In those instances, we found that allegedly "independent" standards bodies were often closed to the voices of consumers and small innovators, wrapped in secrecy, and lacking basic mechanisms needed to ensure accountability. If standards bodies are to be introduced as part of a network neutrality oversight scheme, that language needs to guarantee that the processes are completely transparent and representative of the interests of user and independent developer communities.

Reasonable Network management, Additional Online Services — Troubling:

The definition of “reasonable network management” needs to be clarified and refined. While we think the way that standard-setting organizations are included in the definition is interesting and potentially constructive, the language on what makes some network management ”reasonable” is extremely unclear. For EFF, the first test for a network neutrality proposal is this: would it have clearly prevented Comcast from interfering with BitTorrent? In the Google/Verizon proposal, because of ambiguous exceptions like the one that allows an ISP “otherwise to manage the daily operation of its network“, we can't be sure that that's true.

The cutout for “additional online services” is also very disturbing. Many have pointed out that it could be the exception that swallows the nondiscrimination rule. After all, much of the innovation we expect to occur in the future will involve services “distinguishable in scope and purpose from broadband Internet access service, but could make use of or access Internet content, applications or services.” If nondiscrimination is allowed for all such things, then there could easily be little left on the “non-neutral” part of the Internet in a few years. There may be some services that need traffic prioritization, such as urgent medical services, but the approach in the proposal creates no real limits on what could be allowed as an “additional online service.” It would be much better if space for these services was addressed through waivers or other processes that put the burden on the company suggesting such services to prove that they are needed. And such processes must be fully transparent — not just consumers but the FCC must be in a position to know how these services work and what impact they are having. They must also be open to real debate and opposition.

“Lawful” Content and Wireless Exclusions — Fail:

The proposal essentially ignores some of the key problems that EFF and others have had with previous network neutrality proposals. These loopholes could undermine the goals of neutrality, or lead to unanticipated and regrettable outcomes.

1. It still limits nondiscrimination to “lawful” content without defining the term or giving any indication of who decides what is “lawful,” opening the door to entertainment industry and law enforcement efforts that could hinder free speech and innovation Last year, the big media companies took advantage of similar language to push for a “copyright loophole” to net neutrality that would have allowed them to pressure ISPs to block, interfere with, or otherwise discriminate against perfectly legal activities in the course of implementing online copyright enforcement measures and a similar loophole existed for law enforcement. So long as your ISP claimed that it was trying to prevent copyright infringement or helping law enforcement, it could be exempted from the net neutrality principles. This was the focus of EFF's comments to the FCC in January, 2010 and our Real Net Neutrality campaign.
2. As many others have noted, the exclusion of wireless from all but the transparency requirements is a dreadful idea. Neutrality should be the rule for all services, and a distinction between wired and wireless not only defies reason, it also abandons the portion of the Internet that is currently most lacking in openness and neutrality. Users are increasingly demanding the ability to do many, if not all, of the same things in a wireless environment as they do in a wired one. Regardless of what regulation may look like or whether there is any regulation at all, there shouldn’t be a distinction between the neutrality available on wired services and that available on wireless services.

We share these initial thoughts in order to surface some details that may be lost in the controversy sparked by this proposal. Others are weighing in with valuable comments as well, and we are paying close attention to their views. We urge policymakers to do the same.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/08...-netneutrality





Google CEO Schmidt: No Anonymity Is The Future Of Web
Ms. Smith

[1]No anonymity is the future of web in the opinion of Google's CEO Eric Schmidt. He said many creepy things about privacy at the Techonomy Conference. [2] The focus of the conference was how technology is changing and can change society. Schmidt's message was that anonymity is a dangerous thing and governments will demand an end to it.

In an video interview [3] with Julia Boorstin, CNBC Correspondent, Schmidt stated (starting at 5:13):

"Privacy is incredibly important," Schmidt stated. "Privacy is not the same thing as anonymity. It's very important that Google and everyone else respects people's privacy. People have a right to privacy; it's natural; it's normal. It's the right way to do things. But if you are trying to commit a terrible, evil crime, it's not obvious that you should be able to do so with complete anonymity. There are no systems in our society which allow you to do that. Judges insist on unmasking who the perpetrator was. So absolute anonymity could lead to some very difficult decisions for our governments and our society as a whole."

Whether it was a Freudian slip or a simple misstatement, Schmidt is correct; it is not obvious that if you are anonymous, you are therefore likely to commit a "terrible, evil crime."

Anonymity equaling a future heinous act seems to be the direction some online security experts are headed. The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace [4] proposes to do away with anonymous multiple identities in favor of one real identity. Part of the reasoning behind one trusted identity is to do away with crime. But isn't this the same logic of anonymity breeding anti-social behavior and criminals?

According to ReadWriteWeb [5], Schmidt said of anti-social behavior, "The only way to manage this is true transparency and no anonymity. In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a [verified] name service for people. Governments will demand it."

Since Google's CEO has proclaimed the future of the web is no anonymity, does that make it a fact? If we keep hearing that privacy is dead and long buried, how long before we accept that anonymity is an anti-social behavior and a crime?

Security expert Bruce Schneier suggests that we protect our privacy if we are thinking about it, but we give up our privacy when we are not thinking about it.

Schneier wrote [6], "Here's the problem: The very companies whose CEOs eulogize privacy make their money by controlling vast amounts of their users' information. Whether through targeted advertising, cross-selling or simply convincing their users to spend more time on their site and sign up their friends, more information shared in more ways, more publicly means more profits. This means these companies are motivated to continually ratchet down the privacy of their services, while at the same time pronouncing privacy erosions as inevitable and giving users the illusion of control."

The loss of anonymity will endanger privacy [7]. It's unsettling to think "governments will demand" an end to anonymous identities. Even if Schmidt is Google's CEO, his message of anonymity as a dangerous thing is highly controversial. Google is in the business of mining and monetizing data, so isn't that a conflict of interest? Look how much Google knows about you [8] now.

Bruce Schneier [9] put it eloquently, "If we believe privacy is a social good, something necessary for democracy, liberty and human dignity, then we can't rely on market forces to maintain it."
http://www.networkworld.com/communit...ity-future-web





The Digital Surveillance State: Vast, Secret, and Dangerous
Glenn Greenwald

It is unsurprising that the 9/11 attack fostered a massive expansion of America’s already sprawling Surveillance State. But what is surprising, or at least far less understandable, is that this growth shows no signs of abating even as we approach almost a full decade of emotional and temporal distance from that event. The spate of knee-jerk legislative expansions in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 trauma — the USA-PATRIOT Act — has actually been exceeded by the expansions of the last several years — first secretly and lawlessly by the Bush administration, and then legislatively and out in the open once Democrats took over control of the Congress in 2006. Simply put, there is no surveillance power too intrusive or unaccountable for our political class provided the word “terrorism” is invoked to “justify” those powers.

The More-Surveillance-Is-Always-Better Mindset

Illustrating this More-Surveillance-is-Always-Better mindset is what happened after The New York Times revealed in December, 2005 that the Bush administration had ordered the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens without the warrants required by law and without any external oversight at all. Despite the fact that the 30-year-old FISA law made every such act of warrantless eavesdropping a felony [1], “punishable by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than five years, or both,” and despite the fact that all three federal judges who ruled on the program’s legality concluded that it was illegal [2], there was no accountability of any kind. The opposite is true: the telecom corporations which enabled and participated in this lawbreaking were immunized by a 2008 law supported by Barack Obama and enacted by the Democratic Congress. And that same Congress twice legalized the bulk of the warrantless eavesdropping powers which The New York Times had exposed: first with the 2007 Protect America Act, and then with the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which, for good measure, even added new warrantless surveillance authorities.

Not even revelations of systematic abuse can retard the growth of the Surveillance State or even bring about some modest accountability. In 2007, the Justice Department’s own Inspector General issued a report documenting continuous abuses by the FBI [3] of a variety of new surveillance powers vested by the Patriot Act, particularly the ability to obtain private, invasive records about Americans without the need for any judicial supervision (via so-called “National Security Letters” (NSLs) [4]. The following year, FBI Director Robert Mueller confirmed ongoing abuses subsequent to the time period covered by the initial IG report [5].

Again, the reaction of the political class in the face of these revelations was not only to resist any accountability but to further expand the very powers being abused. When then-candidate Obama infuriated many of his supporters in mid-2008 by announcing his support for the warrantless–surveillance expanding FISA Amendments Act, he assured everyone that he did so [6] “with the firm intention — once [he’s] sworn in as President — to have [his] Attorney General conduct a comprehensive review of all our surveillance programs, and to make further recommendations on any steps needed to preserve civil liberties and to prevent executive branch abuse in the future.”

Not only has nothing like that occurred, but Congress has twice brushed aside the privacy and abuse concerns about the Patriot Act highlighted by the DOJ’s own report and long raised by Senator Russ Feingold [7]. They did so when voting overwhelmingly to extend the provisions of that law unchanged: first in 2006 by a vote of 89-10 [8], and again this year — with the overt support of the Obama administration — when it once again extended the Patriot Act without even a single added oversight protection [9]. Even after The New York Times in 2009 twice revealed substantial and serious abuses [10] in the very warrantless eavesdropping powers which Obama voted to enact, the administration and the Congress show no interest whatsoever in imposing any added safeguards. The logic of the Surveillance State is that more is always better: not just more powers, but in increasingly unchecked form.

And this is to say nothing of the seemingly more mundane, though still invasive, surveillance powers which receive little attention. When Seung-Hui Cho went on a shooting rampage at Virginia Tech in 2007, this passage appeared buried in an ABC News report [11] on the incident: “Some news accounts have suggested that Cho had a history of antidepressant use, but senior federal officials tell ABC News that they can find no record of such medication in the government’s files.” Such “files” are maintained through a 2005 law [12] which, the Government claims, authorizes it to monitor and record all prescription drug use by all citizens [13] via so-called “Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs.” [14] And there is a slew of other under-discussed surveillance programs whereby the U.S. government stores vast data on our private activities: everything from every domestic telephone call we make [15] to “risk assessment” records based on our travel activities [16]. A bipartisan group of Senators is currently promoting [17] mandated “biometric ID cards” for every American as a purported solution to illegal immigration.

Not only has Obama, in the wake of this massive expansion, blocked any reforms, he has taken multiple steps to further expand unaccountable and unchecked surveillance power. For the last year, the Obama Justice Department has been trying to convince federal courts [18] to extend its warrantless surveillance powers beyond even what the Patriot Act provides to encompass private email and Internet browsing records, a position which would allow the FBI and other federal agencies to acquire email and browsing records of American citizens — including those who are not suspected of any wrongdoing — without any warrants or judicial supervision of any kind. With defeat in the courts appearing likely, it was recently revealed by The Washington Post [19] that the administration is agitating for Congressional action to amend the Patriot Act to include such Internet and browsing data among the records obtainable by NSLs.

Blocking even modest safeguards

Worse still, Obama has all but single-handedly prevented additional oversight mechanisms on the intelligence community by threatening to veto [20] even the modest oversight proposals favored by the House Democratic leadership. That veto threat just resulted in the removal of such mechanisms [21] by the Senate Intelligence Committee from the latest rendition of the Intelligence Authorization Act. As Time’s Massimo Calebresi recently reported [22], these reforms would merely have required the Executive Branch to notify the full House and Senate Intelligence Committees “when they launch any covert action or other controversial program,” as well as vest those Committees with “the power to task the Government Accountability Office (GAO) with auditing any intelligence program” to ensure compliance with the law.

What makes Obama’s vehement opposition even to these mild safeguards so striking is that this lack of oversight was one of the principal weapons used by the Bush administration to engage in illegal intelligence activities. The Bush administration, at best, would confine its briefings to extremely vague information disseminated only to the so-called “Gang of Eight” — comprised of 8 top-ranking members of the House and Senate — who were impeded by law and other constraints from taking any action even if they learned of blatantly criminal acts.

That’s what makes the current oversight regime a sham process: it allows the administration to claim that it “briefed” selected Congressional leaders on illegal surveillance programs, but do so in a way that ensures there could be no meaningful action or oversight, because those individuals are barred from taking notes or even consulting their staff and, worse, because the full Intelligence Committees are kept in the dark and thus could do nothing even in the face of clear abuses. The process even allows the members who were briefed on illegal surveillance activities to claim they were powerless to stop illegal programs — which is exactly the excuse Democratic Senators who were briefed on the illegal NSA program [23] invoked to justify their inaction.

Here’s how Richard Clarke explained the current “oversight” regime in July, 2009, on The Rachel Maddow Show:

MADDOW: Do you think that the current system, the gang of eight briefing system, allows the CIA to be good at spying and to be doing their work legally?

CLARKE: I think briefings of the gang of eight, those very sensitive briefings, as opposed to the broader briefings — the gang of eight briefings are usually often a farce. They catch them alone, one at the time usually. They run some briefing by them.

The congressman can’t keep the briefing. They can’t take notes. They can’t consult their staff. They don’t know what the briefings are about in advance. It’s a box check so that the CIA can say it complied with the law. It’s not oversight. It doesn’t work.

And yet, the more surveillance abuse and even lawbreaking is revealed, the more emphatic is Executive Branch opposition to additional safeguards and oversights, let alone to scaling back some of those powers.

Thus, even when our National Security State gets caught red-handed breaking the law or blatantly abusing its powers, the reaction is to legalize their behavior and thus further increase their domestic spying authority. Apparently, eight years of the Bush assault on basic liberties was insufficient; there are still many remaining rights in need of severe abridgment in the name of terrorism. It never moves in the other direction: toward a reeling in of those post 9/11 surveillance authorities or at least the imposition of greater checks and transparency. The Surveillance State not only grows inexorably, but so does the secrecy and unaccountability behind which it functions.

The results of this mindset are as clear as they are disturbing. Last month’s three-part Washington Post series, entitled “Top Secret America,” provided a detailed picture of what has long been clear: we live under a surveillance system so vast and secretive that nobody — not even those within the system — knows what it does or how it functions. Among the Post’s more illustrative revelations: “Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.” To call that an out-of-control, privacy-destroying Surveillance State is to understate the case.

More Surveillance, Less Safety

What makes this leviathan particularly odious is that it does not even supply the security which is endlessly invoked to justify it. It actually does the opposite. As many surveillance experts have repeatedly argued, including House Intelligence Committee member Rush Holt [24], the more secret surveillance powers we vest in the government, the more unsafe we become. Cato’s Julian Sanchez put it this way [25]: “We’ve gotten so used to the ‘privacy/security tradeoff’ that it’s worth reminding ourselves, every now and again, that surrendering privacy does not automatically make us more secure — that systems of surveillance can themselves be a major source of insecurity.”

That’s because the Surveillance State already collects so much information about us, our activities and our communications — so indiscriminately and on such a vast scale — that it is increasingly difficult for it to detect any actual national security threats. NSA whistle blower Adrienne Kinne, when exposing NSA eavesdropping abuses [26], warned of what ABC News described as “the waste of time spent listening to innocent Americans, instead of looking for the terrorist needle in the haystack.” As Kinne explained:

By casting the net so wide and continuing to collect on Americans and aid organizations, it’s almost like they’re making the haystack bigger and it’s harder to find that piece of information that might actually be useful to somebody. You’re actually hurting our ability to effectively protect our national security.

As the Post put it in its “Top Secret America” series:

The NSA sorts a fraction of those [1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of daily collected communications] into 70 separate databases. The same problem bedevils every other intelligence agency, none of which have enough analysts and translators for all this work.

That article details how ample information regarding alleged Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hassan and attempted Christmas Day bomber Umar Abdulmutallab was collected but simply went unrecognized. Similarly, The Washington Post’s David Ignatius previously reported [27] that Abdulmutallab was not placed on a no-fly list despite ample evidence of his terrorism connections because information overload “clogged” the surveillance system and prevented its being processed. Identically, Newsweek’s Mike Isikoff and Mark Hosenball documented [28] that U.S. intelligence agencies intercept, gather and store so many emails, recorded telephone calls, and other communications that it’s simply impossible to sort through or understand what they have, quite possibly causing them to have missed crucial evidence in their possession about both the Fort Hood and Abdulmutallab plots:

This deluge of Internet traffic — involving e-mailers whose true identity often is not apparent — is one indication of the volume of raw intelligence U.S. spy agencies have had to sort through . . . . The large volume of messages also may help to explain how agencies can become so overwhelmed with data that sometimes it is difficult, if not impossible, to connect potentially important dots.

As a result, our vaunted Surveillance State failed to stop the former attack and it was only an alert airplane passenger who thwarted the latter. So it isn’t that we keep sacrificing our privacy to an always-growing National Security State in exchange for greater security. The opposite is true: we keep sacrificing our privacy to the always-growing National Security State in exchange for less security.

The Privatization of the Surveillance State

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of our mammoth Surveillance State is that the bulk of its actions are carried out not by shadowy government agencies, but by large private corporations which are beyond the reach of democratic accountability. At this point, perhaps it’s more accurate to view the U.S. Government and these huge industry interests as one gigantic, amalgamated, inseparable entity — with a public division and a private one. In every way that matters, the separation between government and corporations is nonexistent, especially (though not only) when it comes to the Surveillance State. Indeed, so extreme is this overlap that when Michael McConnell was nominated to be Bush’s Director of National Intelligence after serving for a decade as Vice President of Booz Allen (prior to which he was head of the NSA under Bush 41 and Clinton), he told The New York Times that [29] his ten years of working “outside the government,” for Booz Allen, would not impede his ability to run the nation’s intelligence functions. That’s because his Booz Allen work was indistinguishable from working for the government, and therefore — as he put it — being at Booz Allen “has allowed me to stay focused on national security and intelligence communities as a strategist and as a consultant. Therefore, in many respects, I never left.”

As the NSA scandal revealed, private telecom giants and other corporations now occupy the central role in carrying out the government’s domestic surveillance and intelligence activities — almost always in the dark, beyond the reach of oversight or the law. As Tim Shorrock explained in his definitive 2007 Salon piece [30] on the relationship between McConnell, Booz Allen, and the intelligence community, in which (to no avail) he urged Senate Democrats to examine these relationships before confirming McConnell as Bush’s DNI: “[Booz Allen's] website states that the Booz Allen team ‘employs more than 10,000 TS/SCI cleared personnel.’ TS/SCI stands for top secret-sensitive compartmentalized intelligence, the highest possible security ratings. This would make Booz Allen one of the largest employers of cleared personnel in the United States.”

As the Post series documented, private contractors in America’s Surveillance State are so numerous and unaccountably embedded in secret government functions that they are literally “countless”:

Making it more difficult to replace contractors with federal employees: The government doesn’t know how many are on the federal payroll. Gates said he wants to reduce the number of defense contractors by about 13 percent, to pre-9/11 levels, but he’s having a hard time even getting a basic head count.

“This is a terrible confession,” he said. “I can’t get a number on how many contractors work for the Office of the Secretary of Defense,” referring to the department’s civilian leadership.

In sum, the picture that emerges from the Post series is that we have a Secret Government of 854,000 people, so vast and so secret that nobody knows what it does or what it is. That there is a virtually complete government/corporate merger when it comes to the National Security and Surveillance State is indisputable: “Private firms have become so thoroughly entwined with the government’s most sensitive activities that without them important military and intelligence missions would have to cease or would be jeopardized.”

As little oversight as Surveillance State officials have, corporate officials engaged in these activities have even less. Relying upon profit-driven industry for the intelligence community’s “core mission” is to ensure that we have Endless War and an always-expanding Surveillance State. After all, the very people providing us with the “intelligence” that we use to make decisions are the ones who are duty-bound to keep this Endless War and Surveillance Machine alive and expanding because, as the Post put it, they are “obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest.” The Surveillance State thus provides its own fuel and own rationale to ensure its endless expansion, all while resisting any efforts to impose transparency or accountability on it.

And as we acquiesce to more and more sacrifices of our privacy to the omnipotent Surveillance State, it builds the wall of secrecy behind which it operates higher and more impenetrable, which means it constantly knows more about the actions of citizens, while citizens constantly know less about it. We chirp endlessly about the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Democrats and Republicans, but this is the Real U.S. Government: a massive Surveillance State functioning in darkness, beyond elections and parties, so secret, vast and powerful that it evades the control or knowledge of any one person or even any organization.
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/08/...and-dangerous/





'Private Browsing' Not So Much
Carrie-Ann Skinner

Security researchers have revealed that 'private browsing' modes on web browsers, which are designed to remove all traces of the sites a user has visited, can leak information.

A study by Dan Boneh from Stanford University which is due to be presented at the Usenix Security Symposium in the U.S. next week claims that many browser add-ons or website security measures stop the 'private browsing' mode from working properly.

Boneh and his team looked at the private browsing functions on Mozilla's Firefox browser along with Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Apple's Safari, and said all four programs were affected.

We discovered that all these browsers retain the generated key pair even after private browsing ends," the study said.

"Again, if the user visits a site that generates an SSL client key pair, the resulting keys will leak the site's identity to the local attacker."

The study also revealed that the function is more likely to be used by those browsing adult websites than those purchasing 'suprise' gifts for family and friends.

Artwork: Chip Taylor"We found that private browsing was more popular at adult web sites than at gift shopping sites and news sites, which shared a roughly equal level of private browsing use," Boneh said in the report.

"This observation suggests that some browser vendors may be mischaracterising the primary use of the feature when they describe it as a tool for buying surprise gifts."

Boneh and his researchers believe they are the first to demonstrate that 'private browsing' can be compromised.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/20283...t_so_much.html





Open Source Tools Turn WikiLeaks Into Illustrated Afghan Meltdown
Noah Shachtman

It’s one thing to read about individual Taliban attacks in WikiLeaks’ trove of war logs. It’s something quite different to see the bombings and the shootings mount, and watch the insurgency metastasize.

NYU political science grad student (and occasional Danger Room contributor) Drew Conway has done just that, using an open source statistical programming language called R and a graphical plotting software tool. The results are unnerving, like stop-motion photography of a freeway wreck. Above is the latest example: a graph showing the spread of combat from 2004 to 2009. It’s exactly what you wouldn’t want to see as a war drags on.

“The sheer volume of observations [in the WikiLeaks database] inhibit the majority of consumers from being able to gain knowledge from it. By providing graphical summaries of the data people can draw inferences quickly, which would have been very difficult to do by serially reading through the files,” Conway e-mails Danger Room. “For instance, in the most recent graph I posted [see above], many people were noticing the increasing number of attacks around Afghanistan’s ‘ring road,’ over time, and seeing that as an indication of the Taliban’s attempt to undermine the Afghanistan government by cutting off villages from one another.”

Conway’s work largely mirrors what the U.S. military’s internal teams of intelligence analysts found. But Conway and Columbia University post-doc Mike Dewar did all this work themselves, relying solely on free tools and the WikiLeaked logs. Applying statistical analysis, they found little evidence of tampering in the reports. Next month, Conway hopes, a group of New York-based R users will be able to tease out more insights from the data.

Obviously, the logs don’t tell the whole story of the war, as Danger Room has noted before. And the stats may be unduly influenced by the spread of NATO forces into different parts of the country. But for now, the most striking point to Conway was how bad things turned in 2006 and 2007. In Afghanistan’s south, for instance, there was only minimal fighting in the start of ‘06. By the end of the next year… well, see for yourself.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010...ghan-meltdown/





WikiLeaks Fighting Worldwide to Rewrite Content Protection Laws
Jeremy A. Kaplan

Whistle-blower website WikiLeaks is rewriting freedom-of-information laws across Europe to make its open-info agenda legal – but its legal status nevertheless remains unclear.

The controversial site had operated out of Iceland, but has since broadened its operations into Sweden, showing its servers to the Associated Press on the grounds that the exact location not be revealed. The secretive website gives few details about its setup, but says its "servers are distributed over multiple international jurisdictions and do not keep logs. Hence these logs cannot be seized."

WikiLeaks frustrated and enraged U.S. government officials by posting more than 76,900 classified military and other documents, mostly raw intelligence reports from Afghanistan, on its website July 25.

And despite angry denunciations from top U.S. officials, who claim the documents put the lives of Afghan informants and U.S. troops at risk, they’re staying up.

"When you look at the legal situation it's hard to see that Swedish authorities can tell us to do anything, legally,” said Mikael Viborg, the owner of Swedish web-hosting company PRQ, to the Associated Press. Viborg said Swedish officials had yet to ask him to remove the content, but had no intention of complying should such a request arrive.

"They can ask us to do it out of goodwill, but I can tell you right now that we won't oblige."

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange revealed Friday his site's connection to Swedish ISP, which also gained notoriety for hosting file-sharing site The Pirate Bay. But Swedish experts disagree about how safe WikiLeaks is in Sweden.

Rules on source protection are written into the Swedish constitution and effectively block individuals and government agencies from attempting to uncover journalists’ sources. But the law applies only to websites or publications that possess a special publishing license granting them constitutional protection, and WikiLeaks has not acquired the requisite paperwork, explained Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan.

"To my mind, it is too simple to claim that all Wikileaks sources are totally protected in Sweden,” deputy Chancellor of Justice Håkan Rustand told the newspaper.

Meanwhile Assange continues to work on freedom of information laws across Europe, helping draft legislation approved Tuesday by Iceland's parliament that provides stronger protection for media sources and whistleblowers, the AFP reported.

The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, or IMMI "aims to create an offshore safe haven for information, to add to transparency," wrote the AFP. Wikileaks made headlines in April by releasing a video of a U.S. Apache helicopter strike in Baghdad that killed two employees of the Reuters news agency and a number of other people.

"At the time, Iceland seemed to be the safest place to prepare for the release of the video and do the necessary fact checks," said Kristinn Hrafnsson, an investigative journalist with public broadcaster RUV, who has co-operated with Wikileaks.

WikiLeaks recently posted a huge encrypted file named "Insurance" to its website, sparking speculation that those behind the organization may be prepared to release more classified information if authorities interfere with them.

Viborg, a goatee-sporting Swede with a law degree and self-taught computer skills, said he didn't know for sure whether that file was hosted on the servers in Solna, though he added that "I assume it is."

He said PRQ had worked with WikiLeaks since 2008, but always through a Swedish middleman instead of direct contacts. PRQ doesn't own the WikiLeaks servers in Solna, but provides the Internet service, electricity and other services, including restarting the servers when needed, he added.

PRQ treats Wikileaks like any other client, Viborg said, but admitted he has personal sympathies for the website.

"The freedom of expression and the transparency that is required in a democratic society, I think they are important," he said.
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/...est=latestnews





U.S. Urges Allies to Crack Down on WikiLeaks
Philip Shenon

The Obama administration is pressing Britain, Germany, Australia, and other allied Western governments to consider opening criminal investigations of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and to severely limit his nomadic travels across international borders, American officials say.

Officials tell The Daily Beast that the U.S. effort reflects a growing belief that WikiLeaks and organizations like it threaten grave damage to American national security, as well as a growing suspicion in Washington that Assange has damaged his own standing with foreign governments and organizations that might otherwise be sympathetic to his anti-censorship cause.

American officials confirmed last month that the Justice Department was weighing a range of criminal charges against Assange and others as a result of the massive leaking of classified U.S. military reports from the war in Afghanistan, including potential violations of the Espionage Act by Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst in Iraq accused of providing the documents to WikiLeaks.

Now, the officials say, they want other foreign governments to consider the same sorts of criminal charges.

“It’s not just our troops that are put in jeopardy by this leaking,” said an American diplomatic official who is involved in responding to the aftermath of the release of more than 70,000 Afghanistan war logs—and WikiLeaks’ threat to reveal 15,000 more of the classified reports.

“It’s U.K. troops, it’s German troops, it’s Australian troops—all of the NATO troops and foreign forces working together in Afghanistan,” he said. Their governments, he said, should follow the lead of the Justice Department and “review whether the actions of WikiLeaks could constitute crimes under their own national-security laws.”

Last month, a prominent pro-military group in Australia suggested that Assange may have violated Australian law through the release of the Afghan war logs, given the threat the leak may have posed to the lives of Australian troops serving in the NATO-led force.

The Obama administration was heartened by the call this week by Amnesty International and four other human-rights groups for WikiLeaks to be far more careful in editing classified material from the war in Afghanistan to be sure that its public release does not endanger innocent Afghans who may be identified in the documents.

“It’s amazing how Assange has overplayed his hand,” a Defense Department official marveled. “Now, he’s alienating the sort of people who you’d normally think would be his biggest supporters.”

The initial document dump by WikiLeaks last month is reported to have disclosed the names of hundreds of Afghan civilians who have cooperated with NATO forces; the Taliban has threatened to hunt down the civilians named in the documents, a threat that human-rights organizations say WikiLeaks should take seriously.

The joint letter by the five groups, first revealed by The Wall Street Journal, was met by a tart response from Assange, who communicates with the outside world largely through the social-networking Internet tool Twitter.

He appeared to suggest that news organizations and human-rights groups, notably Amnesty International, should help him underwrite his cost of the editing and release of more of the Afghan war documents—but that they were instead refusing to provide assistance.

“Pentagon wants to bankrupt us by refusing to assist review,” he tweeted on Monday, referring to the effort by WikiLeaks to convince the Defense Department to join in reviewing the additional 15,000 documents to remove the names of Afghan civilians and others who might be placed in danger by its release. “Media won’t take responsibility. Amnesty won’t. What to do?”

In a separate posting on Twitter, Assange estimated the cost of the “harm minimization review”—a reference, apparently, to the effort to edit the 15,000 documents to remove informants’ names—at $700,000. It was not clear how he arrived at that figure.

The Australian-born Assange travels constantly and is said to have no real home, living instead in the homes of friends and supporters around the world.

He was reported as recently as last week to be in the U.K., although he has spent significant time this year in Australia, Iceland, and the U.S. He has said he is postponing future travel to the U.S. because of fear that he faces legal sanctions here.

Through diplomatic and military channels, the Obama administration is hoping to convince Britain, Germany, and Australia, among other allied governments that Assange should not be welcome on their shores, either, given the danger that his group poses to their troops stationed in Afghanistan, American officials say.

They say severe limitations on Assange’s travels might serve as a useful warning to his followers that their own freedom is now at risk. A prominent American volunteer for WikiLeaks reported last month that he was subjected to hours of questioning and had his laptop and cellphones seized by American border agents on returning to the U.S. from Europe late last month.

An American military official tells The Daily Beast that Washington may also want to closely review its relations with Iceland in the wake of the release of the Afghan war logs.

Assange and his followers have been successful in pressing the government of Iceland, in the wake of the collapse of the country’s banking system, to reinvent itself as a haven for free speech, creating a potential home for WikiLeaks and other organizations that may violate the laws of the U.S. and other nations through the release of classified documents.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-a...n-wikileaks/p/





WikiLeaks Preparing to Release More Afghan Files
Anne Flaherty, Raphael G. Satter

WikiLeaks spokesman Julian Assange said Thursday his organization is preparing to release the rest of the secret Afghan war documents it has on file. The Pentagon warned that would be more damaging to security and risk more lives than the organization's initial release of some 76,000 war documents.

That extraordinary disclosure, which laid bare classified military documents covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010, has angered U.S. officials, energized critics of the NATO-led campaign, and drawn the attention of the Taliban, which has promised to use the material to track down people it considers traitors.

The Pentagon says it believes it has identified the additional 15,000 classified documents, and said Thursday that their exposure would be even more damaging to the military than what has already been published.

Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell described the prospective publication as the "height of irresponsibility."

"It would compound a mistake that has already put far too many lives at risk," he said.

Speaking via videolink to London's Frontline Club, Assange brushed aside the Pentagon's demands that he stop publishing their intelligence. He gave no specific timeframe for the release of the 15,000 remaining files, but said his organization had gone through about half of them.

"We're about 7,000 reports in," he said, describing the process of combing through the files to ensure that no Afghans would be hurt by their disclosure as "very expensive and very painstaking."

Still, he told the audience that he would "absolutely" publish them. He gave no indication whether he would give the documents to media outlets The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel — as he has before — or simply dump them on the Wikileaks website.

The leaks exposed unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings by NATO forces and covert operations against Taliban figures. Assange has said that hundreds of those reports should be investigated by the media for evidence of war crimes.

WikiLeaks' supporters say the blow-by-blow account of the conflict reveal the horror of the campaign's daily grind. Detractors say the site has recklessly endangered the war effort and Afghan informants working to stop the Taliban.

The Pentagon has a task force of about 100 people reading the leaked documents to assess the damage done and working, for instance, to alert Afghans who might be identified by name and now could be in danger.

Taliban spokesmen have said they would use the material to try to hunt down people who've been cooperating with what the Taliban considers a foreign invader. That has aroused the concern of several human rights group operating in Afghanistan — as well as Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, which on Thursday accused Wikileaks of recklessness.

Jean-Francois Julliard, the group's secretary-general, said that WikiLeaks showed "incredible irresponsibility" when posting the documents online.

"WikiLeaks has in the past played a useful role by making information available ... that exposed serious violations of human rights and civil liberties which the Bush administration committed in the name of its war against terror," Julliard said in an open letter to Assange posted to his group's website.

"But revealing the identity of hundreds of people who collaborated with the coalition in Afghanistan is highly dangerous."

WikiLeaks, through its account on micro-blogging website Twitter, dismissed the letter as "some idiot statement, based on a bunch of quotes we never made."

While he acknowledged that some of the critiques leveled at his group were legitimate, he said the Pentagon — as well as human rights groups — had so far refused to help WikiLeaks purge the name of Afghan informants from the files.

At the State Department, spokesman Mark Toner said he was not aware of any effort by department officials to contact WikiLeaks.

Defense Department spokesman Col. David Lapan dismissed WikiLeaks' claims that they were reviewing the documents and removing information that could harm civilians.

"They don't have the expertise to determine what might be too sensitive to publish," he said. As for when the Pentagon expected WikiLeaks to release the documents, Lapan said: "WikiLeaks is about as predictable as North Korea."

A team of more than a hundred analysts from across the U.S. military, lead by the Defense Intelligence Agency, is poring over the WikiLeaks documents, according to defense officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence. Called the Information Review Task Force, the team is working out of the Crystal-City, Virginia-based Counterintelligence Collaboration Center.

The analysts are combing the documents, trying to determine the implications of the WikiLeaks release — everything from whether military or intelligence-gathering tactics and procedures have been revealed and compromised, to whether specific intelligence sources have been endangered. They're also looking for incidents of civilian casualties that might not have previously been reported, anything concerning allies or coalition partners, and even "derogatory comments regarding Afghan culture or Islam."

The officials said the ultimate goal is to ensure the safety of U.S. and coalition members. The team is operating independently of an ongoing Army criminal investigation, and that of other law enforcement agencies, the officials said.

In the meanwhile, the U.S. has also reportedly urged its allies to look into Assange and his international network of activists, although it's not clear how aggressive Washington has been in prodding its foreign friends.

Earlier Thursday the Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith told The Associated Press that Washington had not approached the his government about pursuing possible criminal charges against Assange, an Australian citizen, or about putting restrictions on his travel.

"Quite clearly we're working closely with the United States on these matters," Smith said, citing Australia's Defense Department and the Pentagon as the agencies working together. "These are very serious matters for concern."

Australia, which has some 1,550 troops in Afghanistan, has already launched its own investigation into whether posting classified military documents had compromised the national interest or endangered soldiers.

___

Associated Press Writers Rod McGuirk in Canberra and Pauline Jelinek, Kimberly Dozier and Robert Burns in Washington contributed to this report. Flaherty reported from Washington.
http://www.newstimes.com/default/art...les-613196.php





WikiLeaks Says it Won't be Threatened by Pentagon
Keith Moore

WikiLeaks will publish its remaining 15,000 Afghan war documents within a month, despite warnings from the U.S. government, the organization's founder said Saturday.

The Pentagon has said that secret information will be even more damaging to security and risk more lives than WikiLeaks' initial release of some 76,000 war documents.

"This organization will not be threatened by the Pentagon or any other group," Julian Assange told reporters in Stockholm. "We proceed cautiously and safely with this material."

In an interview with The Associated Press, he said that if U.S. defense officials want to be seen as promoting democracy then they "must protect what the United States' founders considered to be their central value, which is freedom of the press."

"For the Pentagon to be making threatening demands for censorship of a press organization is a cause for concern, not just for the press but for the Pentagon itself," the Australian added.

He said WikiLeaks was about halfway though a "line-by-line review" of the 15,000 documents and that "innocent parties who are under reasonable threat" would be redacted from the material.

"It should be approximately two weeks before that process is complete," Assange told AP. "There will then be a journalistic review, so you're talking two weeks to a month."

Wikileaks would be working with media partners in releasing the remaining documents, he said, but declined to name them.

The first files in WikiLeaks' "Afghan War Diary" laid bare classified military documents covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The release angered U.S. officials, energized critics of the NATO-led campaign, and drew the attention of the Taliban, which has promised to use the material to track down people it considers traitors.

That has aroused the concern of several human rights group operating in Afghanistan and the Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, which has accused WikiLeaks of recklessness. Jean-Francois Julliard, the group's secretary-general, said Thursday that WikiLeaks showed "incredible irresponsibility" when posting the documents online.

WikiLeaks describes itself as a public service organization for whistleblowers, journalists and activists.

"There are no easy choices for our organization," Assange said. "We have a duty to the people most directly affected by this material, the people of Afghanistan and the course of this war which is killing hundreds every week. We have a duty to the broader historical record and its accuracy and its integrity. And we have a duty to our sources to try and protect them where we can."

Assange told the AP that while no country has taken steps to shut down WikiLeaks, some have been gathering intelligence on the organization.

"There has been extensive surveillance in Australia, there has been surveillance in the United Kingdom, there has been the detainment of one of our volunteers who entered the United States a week and a half ago. But he was released after four hours," Assange said. He didn't give details of that incident.

In addition to speaking at a seminar, Assange was in Sweden to investigate claims that the website was not covered by laws protecting anonymous sources in the Scandinavian country.

Assange confirmed that WikiLeaks passes information through Belgium and Sweden to take advantage of press freedom laws there. But some experts say the site doesn't have the publishing certificate needed for full protection in Sweden.

Assange said two Swedish publications had offered their publication certificates to WikiLeaks, "but we will soon be registering our own this week."

He declined to disclose what other countries house WikiLeaks' technical infrastructure.
http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...gon-615659.php





Cyberwar Against Wikileaks? Good Luck With That
Kevin Poulsen

Should the U.S. government declare a cyberwar against WikiLeaks?

On Thursday, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told a gathering in London that the secret-spilling website is moving ahead with plans to publish the remaining 15,000 records from the Afghan war logs, despite a demand from the Pentagon that WikiLeaks “return” its entire cache of published and unpublished classified U.S. documents.

Last month, WikiLeaks released 77,000 documents out of 92,000, temporarily holding back 15,000 records at the urging of newspapers that had been provided an advance copy of the entire database. On Thursday, Assange said his organization has now gone through about half of the remaining records, redacting the names of Afghan informants. That suggests the final release could still be weeks away.

Pundits, though, are clamoring for preemptive action. “The United States has the cyber capabilities to prevent WikiLeaks from disseminating those materials,” wrote Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen on Friday. “Will President Obama order the military to deploy those capabilities? … If Assange remains free and the documents he possesses are released, Obama will have no one to blame but himself.”

But a previous U.S.-based effort to wipe WikiLeaks off the internet did not go well. In 2008, federal judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco ordered the WikiLeaks.org domain name seized as part of a lawsuit filed by Julius Baer Bank and Trust, a Swiss bank that suffered a leak of some of its internal documents. Two weeks later the judge admitted he’d acted hastily, and he had the site restored. “There are serious questions of prior restraint, possible violations of the First Amendment,” he said.

Even while the order was in effect, WikiLeaks lived on: supporters and free speech advocates distributed the internet IP address of the site, so it could be reached directly. Mirrors of the site were unaffected by the court order, and a copy of the entire WikiLeaks archive of leaked documents circulated freely on the Pirate Bay.

The U.S. government has other, less legal, options, of course — the “cyber” capabilities Thiessen alludes to. The Pentagon probably has the ability to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks against WikiLeaks’ public-facing servers. If it doesn’t, the Army could rent a formidable botnet from Russian hackers for less than the cost of a Humvee.

But that wouldn’t do much good either. WikiLeaks wrote its own insurance policy two weeks ago, when it posted a 1.4 GB file called insurance.aes256.

The file’s contents are encrypted, so there’s no way to know what’s in it. But, as we’ve previously reported, it’s more than 19 times the size of the Afghan war log — large enough to contain the entire Afghan database, as well as the other, larger classified databases said to be in WikiLeaks’ possession. Accused Army leaker Bradley Manning claimed to have provided WikiLeaks with a log of events in the Iraq war containing 500,000 entries from 2004 through 2009, as well as a database of 260,000 State Department cables to and from diplomatic posts around the globe.

Whatever the insurance file contains, Assange — appearing via Skype on a panel at the Frontline Club — reminded everyone Thursday that he could make it public at any time. “All we have to do is release the password to that material and it’s instantly available,” he said.

WikiLeaks is encouraging supporters to download the insurance file through the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay. “Keep it safe,” reads a message greeting visitors to the WikiLeaks chat room. After two weeks, the insurance file is doubtless in the hands of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of netizens already.

We dipped into the torrent Friday to get a sense of WikiLeaks’ support in that effort. In a few minutes of downloading, we pulled bits and piece of insurance.aes256 from 61 seeders around the world. We ran the IP addresses through a geolocation service and turned it into a KML file to produce the Google Map at the top of this page. The seeders are everywhere, from the U.S., to Iceland, Australia, Canada and Europe. They had all already grabbed the entire file, and are now just donating bandwidth to help WikiLeaks survive.*

Since the Afghan war logs were posted, it’s emerged the 77,000 records already published contain the names of hundreds of Afghan informants, who now face potentially deadly reprisal from the Taliban. WikiLeaks’ publication of those records has drawn criticism from human rights organizations and the international free press group Reporters Without Borders.

Those organizations are just urging WikiLeaks to be more careful with its releases. But the Pentagon has hinted it actually has some recourse against the site. “If doing the right thing isn’t good enough for them, we will figure out what alternatives we have to compel them to do the right thing,” Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said last week. It’s hard to see what that recourse might be, when Julian Assange, or someone in his inner circle, can spill 1.4 gigabytes of material with a single well-crafted tweet.

(*No, Wired.com has not posted a targeting map for Pentagon cruise missiles. IP geolocation is not precise.)
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...war-wikileaks/





Plaintiff Who Challenged FBI's National Security Letters Reveals Concerns
Ellen Nakashima

For six years, Nicholas Merrill has lived in a surreal world of half-truths, where he could not tell even his fiancee, his closest friends or his mother that he is "John Doe" -- the man who filed the first-ever court challenge to the FBI's ability to obtain personal data on Americans without judicial approval.

Friends would mention the case when it was in the news and the normally outspoken Merrill would change the subject.

He would turn up at the federal courthouse to hear the arguments, and in an out-of-body moment he would realize that no one knew he was the plaintiff challenging the FBI's authority to issue "national security letters," as they are known, and its ability to impose a gag on the recipient.

Now, following the partial lifting of his gag order 11 days ago as a result of an FBI settlement, Merrill can speak openly for the first time about the experience, although he cannot disclose the full scope of the data demanded.

"To be honest, I'm having a hard time adjusting," said the 37-year-old Manhattan native. "I've spent so much time never talking about it. It's a weird feeling."

Civil liberties advocates hope that Merrill's case will inspire others who have received the FBI's letters and have concerns to come forward, and to inform the public debate on the proper scope of the government's ability to demand private data on Americans from Internet and other companies for counterterrorism and intelligence investigations.

"One of the most dangerous and troubling things about the FBI's national security letter powers is how much it has been shrouded in secrecy," said Melissa Goodman, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who helped Merrill sue the government in April 2004 and was one of only a handful of people outside the FBI -- all lawyers -- who knew Merrill had received a letter.

The government has long argued, as it did in this case, that "secrecy is often essential to the successful conduct of counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigations" and that public disclosure of the receipt of a letter "may pose serious risks to the investigation itself and to other national security interests." FBI spokesman Mike Kortan said, "The FBI needs the ability to protect investigations, sources and methods."

The recent request by the Obama administration to amend the law governing the letters has prompted debate in Congress over which types of electronic records should require a judge's permission before the FBI can seek them, and which types should not, as is the case with national security letters. A letter may be issued by a FBI field office supervisor if they think the data will be relevant to a terrorism probe.

The FBI between 2003 and 2006 issued more than 192,500 letters -- an average of almost 50,000 a year. The Justice Department inspector general in 2007 faulted the bureau for failing to adequately justify the issuance of such letters, though progress has been made in cleaning up the process.

On a cold February day in 2004, an FBI agent pulled an envelope out of his trench coat and handed it to Merrill, who ran an Internet startup called Calyx in New York. At the time, like most Americans, he had no idea what a national security letter was.

The letter requested that Merrill provide 16 categories of "electronic communication transactional records," including e-mail address, account number and billing information. Most of the other categories remain redacted by the FBI.

Two things, he said, "just leaped out at me." The first was the letter's prohibition against disclosure. The second was the absence of a judge's signature.

"It seemed to be acting like a search warrant, but it wasn't a search warrant signed by a judge," said Merrill. He said it seemed to him to violate the constitutional ban against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The letter said that the information was sought for an investigation against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities. Merrill said he thought it "outlandish" that any of his clients, many of whom were ad agencies and major companies as well as human-rights and other nonprofit groups, would be investigated for terrorism or espionage.

Although Merrill cannot further discuss the types of data sought, he said, "I wouldn't want the FBI to demand stuff like that about me without a warrant." The information an Internet company maintains on customers "can paint a really vivid picture of many private aspects of their life," he said, including whom they socialize with, what they read or write online and which Web sites they have visited.

Goodman said Merrill's letter "sought the name associated with a particular e-mail address" and other data that, in a criminal case, likely would require a court order.

Merrill confided in his lawyer, who suggested they turn to the ACLU. The civil liberties group decided to file a case, Doe v. Ashcroft, referring to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.

The case yielded two significant rulings. The first was a September 2004 district court decision that the national security letter statute was unconstitutional, which prompted Congress to amend the law to allow a recipient to challenge the demand for records and the gag order. The second was a December 2008 appeals court decision that held that parts of the amended gag provisions violated the First Amendment and that, to avoid this, the FBI must prove to a court that disclosure would harm national security in cases where the recipient resists the gag order. Senior administration officials have said the FBI has adopted that ruling as policy.

The FBI withdrew its letter to Merrill in November 2006.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...080906252.html





‘John Doe’ Who Fought FBI Spying Freed From Gag Order After 6 Years
Kim Zetter

The owner of an internet service provider who mounted a high-profile court challenge to a secret FBI records demand has finally been partially released from a 6-year-old gag order that forced him to keep his role in the case a secret from even his closest friends and family. He can now identify himself and discuss the case, although he still can’t reveal what information the FBI sought.

Nicholas Merrill, 37, was president of New York-based Calyx Internet Access when he received a so-called “national security letter” from the FBI in February 2004 demanding records of one of his customers and filed a lawsuit to challenge it. His company was a combination ISP and security consultancy business that was launched in the mid-90s and had about 200 customers, Merrill said, many of them advertising agencies and non-profit groups.

Despite the fact that the FBI later dropped its demand for the records, Merrill was prohibited from telling his fiancée, friends or family members that he had received the letter or that he was embroiled in a lawsuit challenging its legitimacy. He occasionally showed up for court hearings about the case, but sat silently in the audience with other court observers. In 2007, he was prevented from publicly accepting an award for his courage from the American Civil Liberties Union, because he was not allowed to identify himself as the plaintiff in the case.

U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero in New York finally released Merrill partially from the gag order on July 30, which Merrill revealed publicly only on Monday.

“After six long years of not being able to tell anyone at all what happened to me – not even my family – I’m grateful to finally be able to talk about my experience of being served with a national security letter,” Merrill said in a statement. “Internet users do not give up their privacy rights when they log on, and the FBI should not have the power to secretly demand that ISPs turn over constitutionally protected information about their users without a court order. I hope my successful challenge to the FBI’s NSL gag power will empower others who may have received NSLs to speak out.”

A national security letter is an informal administrative letter the FBI can use to secretly demand customer records from ISPs, financial institutions, libraries, insurance companies, travel agencies, stockbrokers, car dealerships and others. NSLs have been used since the 1980s, but the Patriot Act, passed after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and a subsequent revision in 2003 expanded the kinds of records that could be obtained with an NSL.

With an NSL, the FBI does not need to seek a court order to obtain such records, nor does it need to prove just cause. An FBI field agent simply needs to draft an NSL stating the information being sought is “relevant” to a national security investigation.
The letters come with a life-long gag order, so businesses that receive such letters are prohibited from revealing to anyone, including customers who may be under investigation, that the government has requested records of transactions. Violation of a gag order can be punishable by up to five years in prison.

The gag orders raise the possibility for extensive abuse of NSLs, under the cover of secrecy. Indeed, in 2007, a Justice Department Inspector General audit found that the FBI, which issued almost 200,000 NSLs between 2003 and 2006, had abused its authority and misused NSLs.

In Merrill’s case, although the letter’s gag order “was totally clear that they were saying that I couldn’t speak to a lawyer” about it, he immediately contacted his personal attorney, and together they went to the ACLU in New York, which agreed to represent him.

“My gut feeling is I’m an American,” Merrill said, in an interview with Threat Level on Tuesday. “I always have a right to an attorney. There’s no such thing as you can’t talk to your attorney.

“I kind of felt at the beginning, so few people challenge this thing, I couldn’t just stand by and see, in my opinion, the basic underpinnings of our government undermined,” he continued. “I was taught about how sophisticated our system of checks and balances is . . . and if you really believe in that, then the idea of one branch of government just demanding records without being checked and balanced by the judicial just is so obviously wrong on the surface.”

Merrill and the ACLU filed the lawsuit under the name “John Doe,” challenging the legality of the letter and asserting that customer records were constitutionally protected information. Merrill said the NSL, which listed 16 categories of records, including e-mail and billing records, was “very broad.”

“It was kind of open ended,” he said. “It went through a list of things and then said ‘and anything else.’ The implication was just send us everything and the kitchen sink.”

Merrill wouldn’t say how many records he had that were relevant to the request but said in general, “In the most broad understanding of what is electronic communication transaction records, I probably had like thousands and thousands of records on each client, if you consider that you host things and you’re using software that creates log files. . . . ISPs have a lot of records on every client typically. They may have records of every time you posted something, of every web site you visited.”

Over the years the case progressed, Merrill was careful not to disclose his identity. At one point he attended a packed hearing — filled with law school students and media — but he was careful not to speak with anyone.

Friends began to question whether he was John Doe when he was publicly identified with a second case involving a grand jury subpoena from the Secret Service for customer records related to the news site IndyMedia. In that case, no gag order was imposed. Merrill said he was forced to lie when asked about John Doe or simply refused to answer.

“It put me in a very difficult position,” he said.

In 2007, the ACLU granted “John Doe” a liberty award, along with four Connecticut librarians who also filed a legal challenge over NSLs. Because of the gag order against Merrill, the ACLU had to present his award to an empty chair.

In December 2008, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that some of the NSL gag provisions were unconstitutional, in part because they limited judicial review of the gag orders and forced courts to defer to the government’s assertions about the necessity of a gag order and also thwarted the ability of recipients to challenge a gag order. The case was sent back to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, forcing the government to justify the constitutionality of the gag order imposed on Merrill.

In June 2009, the government introduced secret evidence to the court to justify continuing the gag order, claiming that if information were revealed about the letter it would harm an ongoing investigation. Merrill and his attorneys were prevented from learning the specifics of the evidence in order to refute it. The government was then ordered by the court to produce an unclassified summary of its evidence.

The ACLU worked hard to negotiate a partial gag-lift with the government that allowed Merrill to finally identify himself, while still keeping the details of the letter secret. In return, Merrill and the ACLU agreed to drop their appeal of the case.

Although the case helped expose the secrecy around NSLs and resulted in some First Amendment progress for entities receiving such requests — Congress amended the law to allow recipients to challenge NSLs and gag orders, and the FBI must now also prove in court that disclosure of an NSL would harm a national security case — the fight over NSLs is not over. The Obama administration has been seeking to expand the FBI’s power to demand internet activity records of customers without court approval or suspicion of wrongdoing. If granted, the data sought without a court order could expand to include web browser and search history, and Facebook friend requests.

“Even though this case has resulted in significant improvements to NSL procedures, innocent Americans’ private records remain too vulnerable to secret and warrantless data collection by the FBI,” said Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project in a statement. “At a minimum, the FBI should have to show individual suspicion before it issues an NSL for an individual’s personal information and invades Americans’ right to privacy and free speech on the Internet.”

The FBI’s use of national security letters to get information on Americans without a court order increased from 16,804 in 2007 to 24,744 in 2008. The 2008 requests targeted 7,225 U.S. people.

In the 2007 inspector general’s report, investigators found that the FBI had failed to adequately justify some letters, had evaded limits on (and sometimes illegally issued) NSLs to obtain phone, e-mail and financial information on American citizens, and had under-reported the use of NSLs to Congress.

About 60 percent of a sample of the FBI’s NSLs did not conform to Justice Department rules, and another 22 percent possibly violated the statute because they made improper requests of businesses or involved unauthorized collections of information.

Subsequently, the number of NSLs issued in 2007 dramatically dropped from 49,000 to 16,000, but has rebounded in recent years.

Merrill’s experience with the case has prompted him to launch a non-profit, the Calyx Institute, aimed at educating the technology and telecommunications industry and developing best practices and tools for safeguarding the privacy of customers.

“I feel there’s a lot of work to be done,” he said. “The case has made me realize that just one or two people standing up can have a great effect. I either want to inspire others to follow the example . . . or develop technology that makes it more difficult for people to be snooped on.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...-order-lifted/





FBI Lab Gives Short Shrift to Missing Persons Cases
David Kravets

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving short shrift to processing DNA from missing persons cases, taking as long as two years to handle profiles, according to a Department of Justice Office of Inspector General report.

Overall, about 40 percent of the FBI’s backlog of processing 3,200 DNA profiles stems from missing persons cases, according to Monday’s report.

“The FBI Laboratory’s low prioritization of these cases can have a broader effect because many missing persons are victims of homicide,” the report said. “Therefore, even if a perpetrator is not identified, DNA profiles from crime scenes could be uploaded and potentially linked to each other in CODIS (Combined DNA Index System), thereby aiding homicide investigations and potentially leading to the identification of a suspect.”

What’s more, under the bureau’s current processing rate for all DNA cases, the “backlog would require about 2 years to complete, even without the addition of any new cases,” the report said. Part of the problem is the “absence of a modern laboratory information management system,” according to the report.

“Backlogs can also prevent the timely capture of criminals, prolong the incarceration of innocent people who could be exonerated by DNA evidence, and adversely affect families of missing persons waiting for positive identification of remains,” the report added.

The report comes amid a constitutional showdown in California involving DNA collection. The Golden State, with similar laws in about 21 states, requires the taking of a DNA sample from every adult arrested on felony accusations. The American Civil Liberties Union claims such DNA sampling of arrestees is an unconstitutional search and privacy breach resulting in a California DNA database of 1.5 million people, whose profiles are to be uploaded to CODIS.

The CODIS system enables local, state and national law enforcement crime laboratories to compare DNA profiles electronically. As of April, there were more than 8.5 million profiles in CODIS.

A federal appeals court is weighing the ACLU challenge and could rule any time.

External influences usually determine the order in which DNA cases are analyzed by the FBI laboratory. For example, upcoming trial dates, media attention and FBI Director Robert Mueller’s priorities are the primary influence on case completion, the report said. Mueller’s priorities, the report said, include “counterterrorism, intelligence, cyber-based/high technology crimes, public corruption, civil rights, major white-collar crimes and significant violent crime.”

The report also “determined that the absence of a modern laboratory information management system at the FBI laboratory has hindered its ability to keep pace with the demand for its services.”

Since September 2003, the report notes, the FBI has spent more than $10 million on developing a laboratory information management system, which is still under development.

“The FBI Laboratory is incapable of generating an electronic chain-of-custody document, tracking laboratory-wide evidence work flows, and producing laboratory-wide statistical reports to identify problems and delays,” the report said.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...issingpersons/





FBI Prioritizes Copyright Issues; Not So Concerned About Missing Persons
from the say-what-now? dept

While we've seen that copyright infringement -- which really should be a civil issue dealt with between private parties -- has suddenly become a major priority for the FBI, it appears that the FBI has stopped caring about things that seem a lot more important. Earlier this year, we noted that the FBI had stopped considering identity fraud as a priority. Now, a new report notes that another thing the FBI appears to not care much about are missing persons cases. Specifically, the FBI has consciously decided to give such cases lower priority in the FBI's laboratory, which is used to look at DNA evidence. This has created a massive backlog in missing persons cases. A new report from the Justice Department's Inspector General notes that this has serious consequences:

"Backlogs can also prevent the timely capture of criminals, prolong the incarceration of innocent people who could be exonerated by DNA evidence, and adversely affect families of missing persons waiting for positive identification of remains."

Perhaps I'm missing something, but doesn't it seem like missing persons cases and identity fraud are the sorts of things the FBI should be working on, as they're cases where individuals can be seriously harmed? Copyright cases are really just business model issues, where the only "harm" is caused by copyright holders refusal to adapt to a changing market. Isn't it time the FBI got its priorities straight?
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...62010563.shtml





Toshiba Touts Drives that Wipe Data When Turned Off
Agam Shah

Toshiba on Tuesday introduced a new hard drive feature that can wipe out data after the storage devices are powered down.

The Wipe feature in Toshiba's SED (Self-Encrypting Drives) will allow for deletion of secure data prior to disposing or repurposing hard drives, Toshiba said in a statement. This feature prevents secure data from getting lost or stolen.

The technology revolves around invalidating a hard-drive security key when a system's power supply is turned off.

The first SED drive hard drive was announced in July. The new Wipe capability will go into future versions of the drives, according to the company, which did not provide a timeframe. Drives with the technology will go into hard drives for laptops and desktops. Beyond PCs, Toshiba wants to put this feature on storage devices in copiers and printers, which handle secure documents in digital imaging environments.

The new feature adds a level of convenience to the process of wiping data from hard drives. Today data can be wiped using data-removal software like Eraser, and systems have to keep running as the data is being erased. Depending on the method used and a drive's storage size, erasing data can take hours.

The Wipe feature is based on the Trusted Computing Group "Opal" storage specification, which allows users to protect stored against theft or loss. The hard drives will have hardware modules that enable the Wipe feature.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...hen_turned_off





BSkyB Disputes Skype Trademark as Too Close to Sky
Kate Holton

British pay-TV group BSkyB (BSY.L) has challenged registration of the trademark Skype by the Internet phone service provider on the grounds that the name is confusingly close to its own Sky brand.

A spokesman for the satellite TV group said it was in dispute over the trademark applications but had not yet brought any proceedings for trademark infringement against Skype.

"The key contention in the dispute is that the brands 'Sky' and 'Skype' will be considered confusingly similar by members of the public," the spokesman said. "This was supported by consumer research conducted by Sky."

Internet phone services provider Skype filed on Monday to raise up to $100 million through an IPO, hoping that its wide name recognition and rapid growth would help draw investors. [ID:nSGE6780GY]

In a section on risks in the filing, it said its application to register the trademark Skype had been opposed by third parties, including BSkyB, which is part owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp (NWSA.O).

"These oppositions are based on BSkyB's claimed rights with respect to the mark 'Sky'," it said.

Skype and BSkyB said the EU had recently ruled in BSkyB's favour over a logo, which Skype said it would appeal. It said if it ultimately lost it could be prevented from using the Skype name or logo without a licence, which might not be available or not available on commercially reasonable terms.

Skype was founded in 2003 and was acquired by eBay Inc (EBAY.O) in 2005 for $3.1 billion. Last November eBay sold a majority stake in the firm to an investor group that included Silver Lake, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Andreessen Horowitz for $1.9 billion in cash and a $125 million note. EBay retained 30 percent. (Reporting by Kate Holton; Editing by Will Waterman)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE6790LP20100810





Smartphone Security Put on Test
Mark Ward

BBC News has shown how straightforward it is to create a malicious application for a smartphone.

Over a few weeks, the BBC put together a crude game for a smartphone that also spied on the owner of the handset.

The application was built using standard parts from the software toolkits that developers use to create programs for handsets.

This makes malicious applications hard to spot, say experts, because useful programs will use the same functions.

While the vast majority of malicious programs are designed to attack Windows PCs, there is evidence that some hi-tech criminals are starting to turn their attention to smartphones.

Booby-trapped applications for smartphones have been found online and in recent weeks Apple and Google have removed applications from their online stores over fears that they were malicious.

Chris Wysopal, co-founder and technology head at security firm Veracode, which helped the BBC with its project, said smartphones were now at the point the PC was in 1999.

At that time malicious programs were a nuisance. A decade on and they are big business, he said, with gangs of criminals churning out malware that tries to steal saleable information.

Mobiles, he said, offered a potentially more tempting target to those criminals.

"Mobile phones are really personal devices," said Mr Wysopal. "You might have one computer for a family but every family member has a personal device and it is with them all the time."

Simeon Coney, a spokesman for mobile security firm AdaptiveMobile, said criminals were focused on handsets for one simple reason: money.

"In the PC domain the only way a criminal can generally take money from a user is by having them click on a web link, go to a website, purchase a product and enter their credit card details," said Mr Coney.

"In a mobile network the device is intrinsically linked to a payment plan, to a user's credit," he said. Nothing happens on a mobile network, no call is made or text is sent, without money changing hands.

Criminals have tapped into that revenue stream by getting phone owners to dial or contact premium rate numbers. Now they are turning their attention to applications and the lucrative information they scoop up.

The App Genome project by mobile security firm Lookout was set up to map what applications produced for smartphones do. It tried to find out if they do everything they claim and if they do more than expected.

The project has looked at 300,000 smartphone applications and mapped the internal functions of one-third of them.

It found that about one-third of applications it has studied seek to get at a user's location and about 10% try to get at contact and address lists. The study also found that a significant proportion of applications included code copied and pasted from other programs.

Code creator

To get a better understanding of the barriers to creating malicious programs the BBC downloaded a widely used application development kit, learned the basics of programming in Java and gathered some snippets of code already released on the net.

It was possible in a few weeks to put together a crude game that also, out of sight, gathered contacts, copied text messages, logged the phone's location and sent it to a specially set up e-mail address.

The spyware took up about 250 lines of the 1500 making up the entire program. The code was downloaded to a single handset but was not put on an application store.

All of the information-stealing elements of the spyware program were legitimate functions turned to a nefarious use.

"That's kind of the scary thing," said Mr Wysopal from Veracode.

"The face of the application, be it a game or a simple application that is for fun, can have behaviour that is not visible at the surface."

"There's been cases of spyware being detected on the internet, downloaded even from application stores or from other websites. We've detected it out there," said Mr Wysopal. "On the personal side there are cases of jilted lovers cyber-stalking their ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend through their phone."

The big application stores offering programs to mobile owners do police the software they are offering.

Apple vets applications and rejects those that fail its commercial and coding tests. Google said that applications for Android must declare all the information they will gather when they are downloaded. Blackberry maker RIM and Google use a code-signing system so they can turn off applications that prove to be malicious.

However, it can be difficult to separate malicious programs from legitimate ones because the connectedness of a mobile means many applications need access to contact lists and location data.

For example, gamers might want to brag to their friends about achievements, post high scores to Facebook or play with a friend if they are close by. All of which would need legitimate access to those sensitive details.

Safety steps

Ilya Laurs, founder of independent application site GetJar, said it was "very hard" for application stores to separate programs using personal information legitimately from those with a malicious intent.

Many handset hackers would likely copy existing applications and add-in malicious code, said Mr Laurs.

"It's way less effort to hack into someone else's application, as you do not have to write it yourself," he said.

Many would do that, said Mr Laurs, to ensure they hit plenty of victims.

"What's most important for hackers is how do they get scale," he said. "If they write their own application, such as a game, they may only get 200 downloads."

By contrast, he said, stealing a popular application, packing it with booby-trapped code and offering it for free can reap rewards.

Some application makers have found that 97% of the people using their software are doing so via pirated versions.

Application stores are making efforts to police the programs they offer. So far the number of booby-trapped applications remains low. But many feel the threat is only likely to grow.

Users can take a few simple steps to stay safe.

"Ask which developer an application is coming from, not just the site or carrier because that's only half of the story," said Mr Laurs. "Ask who they are and do you trust them."

Phone owners should also back up data on their handsets to a PC or net-based service to guard against problems.

Nigel Stanley, a security analyst at Bloor Research, said there were telltale signs that revealed if people had been caught out.

"A very obvious tell-tale sign on the phone is all of a sudden your battery life is deteriorating," he said. "You wake up one morning and your battery has been drained then that might indicate that some of the data has been taken off your phone overnight."

Smartphone owners should also keep an eye on their bill.

"Look at your billing information every month and if there are strange numbers appearing on your phone bill that might indicate that there is some software on there that is dialling out to premium-rate lines, billing you for a service that you have not authorised," he said.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10912376





SMS Trojan Steals from Android Owners

A security vendor claims to have identified the first SMS Trojan affecting Android devices.
Stephen Withers

A Trojan posing as a media player for Android smartphones automatically sends text messages to premium rate numbers, according to Kaspersky Lab.

Company officials say the Trojan, dubbed Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.FakePlayer.a, is the first of its kind for the Android platform, even though SMS Trojans are currently the most widespread type of malware on mobile phones.

SMS Trojans provide an immediate way of gaining financially from malware, as it involves the transfer of funds from affected users' phone accounts to the service provider behind the premium number. Presumably the plan is to withdraw the cash received before news of the malware gets out, and then disappear from view, leaving the carriers and/or service platform providers to carry the can.

Kaspersky officials suggest that Android users pay close attention to the services requested by an application at the time of installation, and note that a signature for Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.FakePlayer.a has been added to the company's antivirus databases.

The company plans to release a security product for Android in early 2011.
http://www.itwire.com/your-it-news/m...android-owners





Touchscreens Open to Smudge Attacks
Nicole Kobie

Greasy fingerprints can take the shine off a new touchscreen handset, and the smudges they leave behind could also leave it open to hacking, according to researchers.

When touchscreen devices are held up to the face, they pick up oil from the skin, explained researchers from the University of Pennsylvania at the Usenix security conference. The next time the password is entered, the pattern can be traced – and photographed – in the resulting smudges.

"Touchscreens are touched, so oily residues, or smudges, remain on the screen as a side effect," the report said. "Latent smudges may be usable to infer recently and frequently touched areas of the screen – a form of information leakage."

The researchers tested Android handsets because the Google OS uses a graphical password, with users tracing a pattern on the phone to unlock the device. In ideal lighting conditions, the researchers managed to decipher the phone’s password 92% of the time by taking photos of the screen and bumping up the contrast.

Slipping a phone into a pocket isn’t enough to clean the password trail from the screen, the researchers found, so anyone wary of such an attack should take care to wipe their phone down frequently.

While smudge attacks might sound trivial, the researchers said the threat was genuine because it was so easy to analyse the patterns with just a computer and camera.

Although the experiment focused on Android handsets, the resarchers said smudge attacks could be used against other touchscreen devices, including bank machines, voting devices, and PIN entry systems.

“We believe smudge attacks based on reflective properties of oily residues are but one possible attack vector on touch screens,” the report added. “In future work, we intend to investigate other devices that may be susceptible, and varied smudge attack styles, such as heat trails caused by the heat transfer of a finger touching a screen.

"The practice of entering sensitive information via touchscreens needs careful analysis in light of our results."

The researchers said the Android password pattern needed to be strengthened, but noted that Android 2.2 will also include the option to use an alphanumeric password.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/security...smudge-attacks





Apple Outs Anti-Jailbreak Update

Doesn't fix any real issues
Stewart Meagher

Apple has issued an emergency update for devices running the iOS4 mobile operating system.

iOS4.0.2 plugs the security hole exploited by the iPhone Dev Team to allow pain-free jailbreaking of the iPhone 4 and its manifold siblings as well as... actually, that's about it.

Apple's official statement on the matter says that the update - which is available for iOS 2.0 through 4.0.1 for iPhone 3G and later, iOS 2.1 through 4.0 for iPod touch (second generation) and later - fixes an issue whereby viewing a PDF document with maliciously-crafted embedded fonts could allow arbitrary code execution.

The kind of maliciously-crafted PDF used by the Jailbreakme.com exploit, for example.

Apparently, a stack buffer overflow existed in the way FreeType handled CFF opcodes but the issue has been overcome with better bounds checking.

The update is available through the normal iTunes channel, and automatically updates the firmware to 4.0.2. It doesn't, however, fix either of the major problems which have been plaguing Apple and its latest smart phone. The death grip antenna problem is as bad as ever and this latest update surely puts a final nail in the hope that a software fix was possible. The proximity sensor balls-up, which reportedly can be fixed with a firmware tweak, will have to wait until iOS4.1 is released.

Starting the update process brings up the usual End User blurb, but an unfamiliar notification window pops up before you can continue the update. We might be mistaken but we don't recall anything like this on previous iOS updates.

As expected, Apple's servers were swamped with downloaders when we installed the update this morning, meaning we had to wait an unreasonable 45 minutes or so for the patch to download.

Eventually, everything installs without hitch and the firmware is updated to 4.0.2.

Now if our theory is right, a quick visit to jailbreakme.com is in order. Oh dear. Suspiscion confirmed.

The iPhone Dev Team has bragged that it has already found 'thousands' of similar holes in iOS4 to pick at, so don't be surprised if Comex and his band of pesky cohorts come up with a new jailbreaking methodology in a matter of days, if not hours.

Given that there are so few viable reasons for users to jailbreak the iPhone nowadays (other than the always-irritating 'sticking it to the man' defence), maybe it's time for Apple to just sit back and let them get on with it?
http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/8/12/app...lbreak-update/





The Luddites May Actually be Power Brokers

Not having a cell phone means that the world has to run on your time
Joel Stein

Your boss not knowing how to type, John Madden refusing to get on planes — these are adorable quirks caused by being old, or phobic, or old and phobic. But a cell phone is so simple to use, so harmless, and so integral to how we've agreed to communicate as a society, that refusing to own one isn't just the act of a Luddite. It's a pretty serious power move.

Everyone has a cell phone now. There are more than 280 million mobile subscribers in America, according to the Federal Communications Commission. According to a 2005 international study by Advertising Age, 15 percent of Americans have interrupted sex to answer their phones. Even people who are videotaping themselves having sex, like Paris Hilton, stop to answer a call.

Not having a cell phone is a way of getting the world to run on your time. A lot of powerful people are already on to this. Warren Buffett doesn't use one. Nor does Mikhail Prokhorov, the 45-year-old Russian billionaire who owns the New Jersey Nets. Tavis Smiley doesn't own one, either.

Smiley, 45, the host of a weekly PBS talk show and a national radio show, freaked out two years ago after realizing he couldn't remember phone numbers or appointments without checking his cell. Smiley believes his decision to give up his cell phone has benefited his 75-employee company, The Smiley Group. "At first everybody was complaining that it would be the death of the company," he says. "What's actually happened is that they get more conversation with me than they used to."

Smiley did suffer cell-phone withdrawal symptoms. "The first weekend I was on the road without a phone, I think my hotel phone charges were $1,000," he says. When he travels now, he steals his assistant's phone.

Getting off the mobile grid forces others to wait for you to get in touch with them. Afsheen John Radsan, 47, a professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minn., was assistant general counsel at the CIA and an attorney at the Justice Dept. All sans cell. He even refused to get an answering machine until his parents installed one at his apartment behind his back. Radsan began his habit of not answering phones when he was a young lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell. "If you were called on a Friday, it could only be a partner asking you to work over the weekend," he remembers. "And we had caller ID. So some of the partners would call from an outside phone and say, 'We got you!'"

Working at the CIA, oddly, reinforced his decision, since he couldn't bring any gadgets into the building or take home any of his work. After getting to know the son of an ayatollah, who explained the importance of not responding to everything, Radsan, an avid reader, knew he made the right choice. "I love Russian novels, and (with cell phones) I'm not sure our day-to-day life is any better," he says. His ban on laptops in his classroom has caught on with other professors, he says. The only person his habit seems to annoy is his wife. "She wants to do things on the fly. I'm of the mindset that we can avoid that just by planning. I say, 'Katy, I'll be home at 7 or 7:30,' and she says, 'Let's talk about it later.'"

Hanya Yanagihara, 35, traveled the world as a deputy editor for Condé Nast Traveler without any portable communication device. "In India, even the yak herders and rickshaw drivers have cell phones," she says. Occasionally, when her plans get canceled, she wishes she had one. A few weeks ago her plane schedule got scrambled and she had to tell an associate, so she borrowed a phone from a stranger on her flight. "They give you a sort of pitying look, and assume you're lying or hitting on them," she says of cell-phone lenders. "Then they ask for the number and carefully punch it in. They think you're calling international. They're very suspicious."

Jonathan Reed, 46, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of La Verne, east of Los Angeles, loves traveling without a cell. "I'll talk to strangers. I love going to Italy, where everyone talks to everyone all the time," he says. "A cell phone signals that my whole world is me and it excludes everyone else." He says he has never overheard a cell conversation that wasn't banal. "When I walk around campus, if students are talking to each other in person, you can hear some very interesting conversations." Recently, while in Israel for archeological work, he was struck by how much people use their mobile phones — usually two or three — as status symbols. "I was sitting at a very nice restaurant and two men were sitting there with beautiful women and they were on their phones. Do they have someone better on the other line?"

Reed, like many of his tiny tribe, cites increased efficiency as a reason for not having a cell. "I'm more focused. It forces me to be proactive," he says. It's also a useful management tool. "With 80 to 100 faculty, I wouldn't want to be shackled by a cell phone. In what I do, it's important to pay attention to people when they get a meeting with you. I see people reaching in their pocket when [their phone] vibrates — all of that distracts from your work. At meetings, colleagues of mine miss opportunities to shape the dialogue because they're glancing at their e-mail or going out of the room to make a call."

These non-cell-phone users don't avoid all modern forms of communication. Many are on Facebook and Twitter, and almost all are besotted by e-mail, which gives them time to insidiously shift the conversation to a moment convenient for them. Elena Kostoglodova, a senior instructor in Russian at the University of Colorado at Boulder, whose voice mail says not to leave a message since "my official means of communication is e-mail," responded to my three questions about not using a cell phone with an e-mail twice as long as this article. To summarize: She resents a phone's drain on her time. "I do not want to take calls when I'm playing with my daughter, thereby sending her the message that she is less important than the people who call;" "I don't want to expose my private or professional life talking on a cell phone in public." If students are caught using a cell phone in her class, she promises to reduce their grade by 2 percent. The only time that she was sorry not to have a mobile phone was when a teenager rammed into her car. She had to ask the kid to call the cops.

There are some Luddites among the cell-less class. Not only does Kurt Labberton, a 59-year-old dentist with a staff of six in Yakima, Wash., not have a cell phone, he also avoids e-mail. Instead, he sends his patients handwritten notes. "A quick e-mail is not the same as something with a postage stamp on it," he says. "The one thing you can offer in dentistry is the intimacy of the moment." Labberton sees the impact of cell phones firsthand: He has interrupted root canals and abscesses so his patients can answer calls. Still, he claims, "you can live a 1992 lifestyle and live pretty well." Especially if you have an office full of people communicating with 2010 for you.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38646066..._businessweek/





Google, Just Cut The BS And Give The Gordon Gekko Speech Already
MG Siegler

The past few days I’ve been bookmarking posts about Google, Verizon, and net neutrality to read later. For the past few hours I’ve been doing that — and I’ve barely made a dent. It seems that everyone who has ever written a word on the Internet is up in arms about the situation. And what’s amazing is that nearly all of them are in agreement. There’s no clear consensus as to why Google is selling us out, but the consensus is that they are.

And I have to agree. Further, Google’s response to the backlash today stating the “facts” about their proposal with Verizon sort of pisses me off.

Before I begin, let me just state that are only a handful of companies I adore because I love their products. Google is one of them. Sure, I love the iPhone more than Android phones — but I love Android phones a million times more than the crap that was out before the smartphone revolution started a few years ago. Out of all the things I do during a day, I’m positive I use Google products the most. Gmail, Google Reader, Chrome, Google Search. It’s all solid gold. Google is a great company.

And that’s exactly why what they’re doing with regard to net neutrality is so disappointing.

In light of this week, much has been made about Google’s unofficial motto “don’t be evil”. Google must be evil now, right? No — that’s absurd. There seems to be this tendency to believe that when companies do something unfavorable, they must have malicious intent. I’ve stated it before, but I will again: this is not a James Bond movie where some villain wants to do bad things just because he’s evil.

Instead, Google’s intentions are much more transparent: greed. Greed also tends to have a negative connotation, but I’m of the Gordon Gekko mentality that “greed works.” It’s what drives this country. And as a public company, whether we want to admit it or not, it’s what drives Google.

The problem is that Google themselves are unwilling to admit that greed is what’s at play here. They’re still trying to put on this charade that this is all about what’s best for us. That’s insulting.

What’s best for us is net neutrality, pure and simple.

If someone at Google just stood up and gave a Gordon Gekko-esque speech about their passion for expansion and securing deals it would be easier to stomach. At least it wouldn’t be quite so disingenuous.

Part of the problem may be that those at the top of Google are in disagreement once again. We saw this with the China situation. Word is that Sergey Brin did not want to cave to any of the Chinese demands to operate inside of mainland China, but Eric Schmidt talked him into it. That ended up biting them in the ass. It was a situation of what’s best for the company versus what’s right. This is the same situation.

In private conversations with Googlers and ex-Googlers over the past couple of days, the vast majority of them seem to be disturbed by what Google is doing here as well. Some are buying the company line that Google is doing the only thing they can do in order to get something done. But most seem to agree that this is way too slippery of a slope to be playing on.

I’m assuming, of course, that you’re aware of some of the details about Google and Verizon’s joint proposal for net neutrality. In case you’re not, it basically boils down to the two side reaching an agreement that wired connections for the most part will fall under full net neutrality. Meanwhile, they’re also agreeing that wireless networks for the most part should not — at least not yet.

With both, the key phrase is “for the most part.” With the wired aspect, there’s still a portion that would give providers the ability to circumvent this neutrality with their own services (under proposed government supervision). With wireless, it’s more of a Wild West situation. Things are still shaking out, and there’s plenty of competition, is the argument.

Both arguments are faulty because both are extremely gray. And both set a horrible precedent going forward (if adopted, of course).

For net neutrality to truly work, we need things to be black and white. Or really just white. The Internet needs to flow the same no matter what type of data, what company, or what service it involves. End of story.

That seemed to be Google’s previous stance. But now it’s not.

Obviously, the carriers and service providers don’t want this full net neutrality. They want to be able to charge different amounts of money depending on what is being served. They argue that they need to going forward (particularly with wireless) to ensure the stability of the networks. My guess (given everything I know about the carriers and cable providers) is that this is mainly bullshit — it’s all about trying to make more money.

And in the future, the money is all going to be in wireless, so it’s no surprise that they’re willing to accept a less favorable arrangement on the wired side of things.

In their response today, Google basically keeps restating that a compromise of some sort is needed. They even use the phrase “political realities” — ugh. “We’re not saying this solution is perfect, but we believe that a proposal that locks in key enforceable protections for consumers is preferable to no protection at all,” Google’s Richard Whitt notes.

Again, this is a problem; the solution needs to be perfect or there might as well be no solution at all. Google is suggesting that without a compromised solution, the system could fully swing in favor of tiered packages from carriers and providers. First of all, this sounds like FUD. Secondly, this is a situation where that is a risk worth taking. Google needs to stand their ground here. It needs to be all or nothing.

But again, they don’t want to do that. This compromise ensures that money will keep flowing. Would they prefer not having to deal with Verizon or any other carrier? Of course. But that’s not the reality. The reality is that they need their pipes and their money.

And that’s why Google’s in a hard place. They likely want to do what’s right, but they can’t sacrifice the business to make that happen.

Again, my problem with all of this is the clear misdirection going on. Google’s argument that a compromised solution beats no solution, benefits them a hell of a lot more than it benefits us. And yet, that’s exactly how they’re trying to spin it. They’re doing this for us. Gee. Thanks.

If you really want to do something for us, stand your ground on net neutrality. Don’t let Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, or any of those other jokers bully you into any sort of compromise. Other companies will back you up. But you have to lead.

It may ultimately end in failure. But hey, you celebrate failure. As you should. Big risks, big rewards, and all that.

Or, better yet, extend your brilliant broadband initiative. The real problem behind all of this is that there isn’t nearly enough competition in both the wired and wireless connectivity ecosystems. A huge amount of this country has no choice when it comes to broadband providers. And with wireless carriers, the choice isn’t that much better (no matter what Google and Verizon say). We need more competition in both — with it, the net neutrality debate may give way to natural selection.

There aren’t enough companies out there with the resources to foster this type of competition. But Google is one of them. In fact, they may be the only hope there.

A firm stance on full net neutrality may seem too risky or worse, futile. But it’s the only appropriate stance for Google to take here. We’ve crowned them as the King of the Internet. And now it’s time for them to go to war for us.

Or, if they’re not going to do that, it’s time to at least admit that money is the real motivating factor here. They’re not doing us any favors by compromising on net neutrality. They’re doing themselves one.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/13/google-net-neutrality/


















Until next week,

- js.



















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