“And nothing happened?”

Today, April 1, was supposed to be is C Day when the Conficker C worm was supposed to wreak havoc online.

But nothing happened.

Conficker C?

pffffffffft

p2pnet – Conficker C. To fear? Or not to fear?, March 31, 2009

restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.

p2pnet news view

“Officials have invited roughly 70 stakeholder groups to discuss an international intellectual property treaty that the U.S. regards as a national security secret and about which the only public substantive information has come from a series of unofficial leaks.”

ACTA, in other words.

Now, “I thought it be useful to develop an ACTA timeline so that the progression of the still-secret treaty can be more easily understood,” says Geist, going on »»»

This lengthy post builds on a range of articles, blog postings, official documents released under Access to Information, and well-publicized leaks.  While the starting point is October 2007, when there was a coordinated announcement from participating countries, David Harris has an insightful post tracing ACTA lobbying to 2004 and the first Global Congress on Combating Counterfeiting.  Further, I’ve uncovered Canadian documents as early as January 2007 that discuss ACTA.

Assuming October 2007, however, the chronology looks something like this:

October 2007 – The United States, European Union, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Canada announce plans to negotiate ACTA.

November 2007 – April 2008 – Governments conduct initial consultations on ACTA.  Australia consults in November 2007 on whether to participate.  The U.S. consults in February 2008.  Canada consults in April 2008.

The results of the Canadian consultation are not released to the public but an Access to Information request uncovers a report on the results that note that “individual Canadian citizens were generally critical of Canada’s role in the formal negotiation of ACTA.” Individual responses cited the lack of transparency associated with the process, the absence of evidence that a new treaty is needed, the exclusion of developing countries from the negotiations, and the concern that ACTA might undermine Canadian law.

March 2008 – Negotiating countries hold preliminary meeting on ACTA.  The outline of ACTA is confirmed with six main chapters: (1) Initial Provisions and Definitions; (2) Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights; (3) International Cooperation; (4) Enforcement Practices; (5) Institutional Arrangements; and (6) Final Provisions.  The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights chapter has four sections: civil enforcement, border measures, criminal enforcement, and the Internet.

Meanwhile, RIAA submits recommended ACTA provisions to the USTR.

June 2008 – First round of negotiations held in Geneva on June 3rd and 4th.  Canadian speaking notes for the meeting are available here.  Participating countries are Australia, Canada, the EC, European Union Presidency (Slovenia), Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, United Arab Emirates, and the U.S.  The meeting is chaired by the USTR and hosted at the U.S. Mission in Geneva.

Canada submits two “non-papers” on Institutional arrangements (Chapter 4 of ACTA) and procedural matters. The institutional arrangements paper call for the creation of an “ACTA Oversight Council” that would meet each year to discuss implementations, best practices, and assist other governments who are considering joining ACTA.

The U.S. and Japan provide draft language for the Border Measures section.  The proposals call for provisions that would order authorities to suspend the release of infringing goods for at least one year, based only on a prima facie claim by the rights holder.  Customs officers would be able to block shipments on their own initiative, supported by information supplied by rights holders.  Those same officers would have the power to levy penalties if the goods are infringing.  Moreover, the U.S. would like a provision that absolves rights holders of any financial liability for storage or destruction of the infringing goods.  A delegation also raises the prospect of a provision addressing disclosure of information:

With a view to establishing whether an intellectual property right has been infringed under national law and in accordance with national provisions on the protection of personal data, commercial and industrial secrecy and professional and administrative confidentiality, the competent authorities have detained infringing goods, shall inform the right holder of the names and addresses of the consignor, importer, exporter, or consignee, and provide to the right holder a description of the goods, the quantity of the goods, and, if known, the country of origin and name and addresses of producers of the goods.

Many countries suggest amendments including de minimum rules and the removal of certain clauses.  Moreover, the EU has proposed a specific provision to put to rest fears of iPod searching customs officials by excluding personal baggage that contains goods of a non-commercial nature.  It provides:

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

July 2008 – Second round of negotiations held in Washington, DC on July 29 – 31st.  Participating countries are Australia, Canada, the EC, European Union Presidency (France), Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Switzerland, Singapore, and the U.S.  (official press release here). Discussions focus on border measures (second time), civil enforcement (first time), as well as non-papers on institutional issues and international cooperation.

The U.S. and Japan supply draft text of the civil enforcement provisions.  They call for the availability of civil judicial procedures for the enforcement of any intellectual property right, though some countries would like this limited to copyright and trademark.  Parties to the treaty would be required to implement procedures that include the availability of statutory damages for copyright and trademark infringement (some countries would like this to be optional, while the U.S. would like the damages provisions expanded to patent infringement) as well as court costs.  The statutory damages provisions include:

1. Each Party shall provide that in civil judicial proceedings, its judicial authorities on application of the injured party shall have the authority to order the infringer who knowingly or with reasonable grounds to know, engaged in infringing activity of intellectual property rights to pay the right holder damages adequate to compensate for the actual prejudice the right holder has suffered as a result of the infringement, taking into account all appropriate aspects, inter alia, the lost profits, the value of the infringed good or service, measured by the market price, the suggested retail price, unfair profits and elements other than economic factors or other legitimate measure of value submitted by the right holder.

2. As an alternative to paragraph 1, each Party may establish or maintain a system that provides:
(a) pre-established damages, or
(b) presumptions for determining the amount of damages,

sufficient to compensate [Option US: fully] the right holder for the harm caused by the infringement.

Additional required remedies include orders to destroy the infringing goods without compensation.  The proposals also call for significant mandated information disclosure, including ordering alleged infringers to disclose information regarding any person or third parties involved in any aspect of the infringement (some countries want this deleted and others are seeking to preserve privacy protections).  That provision states:

Each Party shall provide that in civil judicial proceedings concerning the enforcement of intellectual property rights, its judicial authorities shall have the authority to order the infringer to provide, for the purpose of collecting evidence, any information [Option J: in the form as prescribed in its applicable laws and regulations] that the infringer possesses or controls, [Option J: ,where appropriate,] to the right holder or to the judicial authorities. Such information may include information regarding any person or persons involved in any aspect of the infringement and regarding the means of production or distribution channel of such goods or services, including the identification of third persons involved in the production and distribution of the infringing goods or services or in their channels of distribution.

October 2008 – Third round of negotiations held in Tokyo, Japan on October 8th and 9th (the meeting was scheduled to last 2 1/2 days but wrapped up early)(official press release here).  Participating countries are Australia, EU, South Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, the U.S., Japan, and Canada.  Countries agree that it is too ambitious to have two more meetings in 2008 and settle for a single, longer meeting later in the year.

Day one focuses on criminal enforcement.  The U.S. and Japan supply draft text of the criminal enforcement provisions.  The proposal would extend criminal enforcement to both (1) cases of a commercial nature; and (2) cases involving significant willful copyright and trademark infringement even where there is no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain.  The treaty would require each country to establish a laundry list of penalties – including imprisonment – sufficient to deter future acts of infringement (specific language is “include sentences of imprisonment as well as monetary fines sufficiently high to provide a deterrent to future acts of infringement, consistent with a policy of removing the monetary incentive of the infringer.”)

Moreover, trafficking in fake packaging for movies or music would become a criminal act as would unauthorized camcording.   The fake packaging provision provides:

Each Party shall provide for criminal procedures and penalties to be applied, even absent willful trademark counterfeiting or copyright or related rights piracy, at least in cases of knowing trafficking in:
(a)    counterfeit labels affixed to, enclosing, or accompanying, or designed to be affixed to, enclose, or accompany the following:
(i)    a phonogram,
(ii)     a copy of a computer program or other literary work,
(iii)    a copy of a motion picture or other audiovisual work,
(iv)    documentation or packaging for such items; and
(b)     counterfeit documentation or packaging for items of the type described in subparagraph (a); and
(c)    illicit labels affixed to, enclosing, or accompanying, or designed to be affixed to, enclose, or accompany items of the type described in subparagraph (a).

The anti-camcording language says:

Each Party shall provide for criminal procedures and penalties to be applied against any person who, without authorization of the holder of copyright or related rights in a motion picture or other audiovisual work, knowingly uses an audiovisual recording device to transmit or make a copy of or transmits to the public the motion picture or other audiovisual work, or any part thereof, from a performance of the motion picture or other audiovisual work in a motion picture exhibition facility open to the public.

Day two focuses on the civil enforcement provisions (for the second time).

November 2008 – Canadian government re-launches ACTA consultation, treating it as ongoing.  Marie-Lucie Morin, then the Deputy Minister of International Trade (and now National Security Advisor to Prime Minister Stephen Harper), warns Minister Stockwell Day that “should there be no consensus among the ACTA partners to make the ACTA text public, the Department will need to develop options to address Canadian stakeholders concerns about the lack of transparency in the ACTA process.”

December 2008 – Fourth round of negotiations held in Paris, France on December 15 – 18th (official press release here). Participating countries are Australia, Canada, the EC, the EU Presidency (France), Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, and the U.S.  Canada supplies the draft text for the Institutional Arrangements chapter, which is the lead issue for discussion on day one.  Later in day one, parties continue negotiation on criminal enforcement (first raised in Tokyo in October).  Day two includes further discussion on criminal enforcement in the morning and institutional cooperation and enforcement practices in the afternoon.

Day three focuses on Internet issues. The U.S. provides a “non-paper” on the Internet issues section with each delegation to answer questions on the state of their domestic law.  The paper discusses Internet copyright provisions, liability for Internet service providers, and legal protection for digital locks and raises questions about damage awards, liability for hosting or storing content, and the extent to which the anti-circumvention provisions mirror the U.S. approach.

February 2009 – U.S. seeks delay in March 2009 negotiation session to allow for transition at the USTR.

March 2009 – The European Parliament passes a resolution calling for the public availability of all ACTA materials. The U.S. government denies requests for access to ACTA documents on national security grounds but promises to review its approach.

To be continued …

Michael Geist – Battle over ACTA Heats Up, March 30, 2009
ACTA – Europe wants greater ACTA transparency, March 12, 2009

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It’s Official Salaried Twitter Tweetist, alternatively known as Ghost Twitterer

Twitter appears to be on the end of its first libel action — singer Courtney Love in the middle of it, says The Independent.

“Ms Love’s angry ‘tweets’ against her former fashion designer, Dawn Simorangkir, have landed her in court,” it says.

According to a libel claim lodged by Simorangkir, Love carried out an,”obsessive and delusional crusade” of “malicious libel against her on Twitter, adding insult on MySpace and other websites,” says the story.

Simorangkir also claims “numerous tweets posted by Love on Twitter accuse her of being a ‘nasty, lying, hosebag thief’,” among many other accusations.

Now Simorangkir is seeking punitive damages, “arguing that the comments have destroyed her reputation and her business,”says the story, adding official documents state, “Whether caused by drug-induced psychosis, a warped understanding of reality, or the belief that money and fame allow her to disregard the law, Love has embarked on what is nothing short of an obsessive and delusional crusade to destroy Simorangkir’s reputation and her livelihood.”

Adds the Independent, “Many celebrities, including President Obama, now use ghost-writers to update tweets.”

Now you know.

The Independent –  Love’s online spat sparks first Twitter libel suit, March 29, 2009

The Big 4 labels, Warner Music, Universal, EMO and Sony BMG, “have all signed up to the service, which will be free to Chinese users, but will not be available elsewhere,” says the story.

The only thing Google fights for is Google, ditto the Big 4, fast going down the tubes as they desperately try to sue their own customers into becoming compliant consumers of corporate ‘product,’ at the same time attempting to recruit ISPs around the world as Big 4 hit squads.

”Google is aiming to take on local search engine competitors such as Baidu, which have the dominant share of search revenue in China,” says the story, continuing:

“Baidu, and other search engines, have grown rapidly on the back of specialised pages that help users to find and download unlicensed music. Kai-Fu Lee, president of Google Greater China, said that music downloads were ‘the key missing piece’ to Google’s service in China, and claimed that a lack of music search was the most common reason that Chinese users gave for preferring other search sites. Google will team up with Top100.cn, a popular Chinese site, to provide the new service.”

First China, and then …

Are you paying attention, RealNetworks and Apple?

Stay tuned.

»»»

Times Online – Google fights for Chinese internet users with free music service, March 30, 2009

It also spent $44 million in advertising with MTVN, said paidContent earlier in the month.

With that in the background RealNetworks, its RealPlayer for years plagued by revelations of one critical security problem after another, said it didn’t think it’d be sued by Hollywood’s MPAA for marketing DVD copying software, says Wired.

“Today was L-for-Launch Day for RealNetworks’ RealDVD, created to allow Windows users rip entire DVDs,” posted p2pnet in September, 2oo8, going on that the EFF’s Fred von Lohmann had pointed out industry DVDs are encrypted with CSS and if you decrypt them without permission, Hollywood lawyers, “may come a-callin”.

He was dead on: the company was accused of deliberately destroying evidence that would’ve been relevant in the   subsequent copyright infringement case.

Real Denied the allegations, but the MPAA demanded a court order for RealNetworks, “to preserve relevant documents from now on,” although the damage had already been done and Real’s actions had “irreparably impaired the integrity of the judicial process,” said Ars Technica, quoting the MPAA.

Now, “We didn’t think litigation was probable,” Wired has Leo Cunningham, a RealNetworks lawyer, telling US District judge Marilyn Hall Patel during a brief hearing.

The assertion was made, “because, under rules of evidence, companies must retain records if they believe they are going to be sued,” says the story,  going on:

“‘The MPAA claims RealNetworks destroyed a host of documents relating to RealDVD’s production — well before the MPAA sued it in September.”

MPAA lawyer Bart Williams told Patel it was obvious the MPAA would sue RealNetworks, says Wired, going on:

“He said RealNetworks should have known as such, even from the time of the product’s initial development two years ago.

” ‘This was not some theoretically possibility,’ Williams said. He also said, ‘They knew there would be a lawsuit’.”

apologised -RealNetworks – ‘give us another shot, February 24, 2009’
paidContent -  RealNetworks Details Promotion Costs For Rhapsody North America, March 2, 2009
Wired – RealNetworks: ‘We Didn’t Think’ MPAA Would Sue Over DVD Copying Software, March 23, 2009
L-for-Launch Day – RealNetworks DVD ripper, September 8, 2008
p2pnet -  MPAA sues RealNetwork, September 30, 2008
pointed out – Want to Back up your DVD? Here’s how …, September 16, 2008
Ars Technica -  MPAA: RealNetworks hamstrings lawsuit by destroying evidence, March 5, 200

But, he says, it’s we, the public, who have to deal with the negative consequences and in some parts of the world, that means waiting for extra weeks, or even months, before a movie premieres.

“Movie theaters nowadays are becoming more secure than some airports,” says the post, going on »»»

Employees are equipped with night-vision goggles and instructed to closely monitor movie goers. Metal detectors are installed, the public has to hand over all recording devices and in some instances even their candy.

Despite all these efforts, desperately poor-quality camcorded films that are hardly worth watching still leak onto the Internet – so more has to be done.

Quite common by now are the watermarking techniques used by the studios to track down the origin of cams. Through these watermarks the theaters where the movies are recorded can be identified, and every now and then an arrest is made. Recent technological advances even make it possible to get a fairly accurate estimation of the location of the camcorder equipment using audio watermarks. These audio watermarks have not been implemented yet since they require a lot of extra paperwork in order to work well.

In a recent blog post John August, the director of hit movie The Nines, discusses some of the anti-piracy tools the movie studios are using to decrease or deter camcording in theaters. August himself has a fairly balanced view on illegal downloading.

In a previous interview with TorrentFreak he said that he wouldn’t think bad of people who downloaded his movie using BitTorrent. In talks with other studio insiders, however, he discovered something that made our jaws drop.

We’ve mentioned many times before that when a movie hits the theater, or a DVD or TV show debuts in one country before it does in another, this is a major incentive for people to turn to BitTorrent. People don’t like waiting for something that other people already have, especially if the solution to that is just a few clicks away.

However, instead of putting time and effort into making their content premiere globally, the studios are purposely delaying movie releases in some countries because a lot of cam releases originate there.

So, instead of working towards solving the problem, the studios are actually encouraging piracy by restricting access to millions of potential customers. Like many others, August himself acknowledges that delayed premiere dates in some locations might actually encourage people to pirate movies and TV-shows.

But, “Instead of adding restrictions and thereby alienating their customers, the movie and TV studios should focus on dropping the release windows for their content,” says TorrentFreak, adding:

“It may have been possible to keep people and countries apart pre-Internet, but not any more.

“People worldwide are closer together today than ever before – and only getting closer.”

TorrentFreak – Fear of Movie Piracy Delays Theater Releases, March 20, 2009

http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/13/projets/pl1240.asp (in French).

Says Philippe Axel  »»»

The French governement wants to disconnect websurfers after three emails warnings and the debates starts at the National Assembly (final  vote). The proposition of law called “Creation et Internet” has the goal  to create a new administration called “Hadopi” with the ability to cut an internet connection for few months.Musical and films industry hopes  that 10 000 warning emails a day will stop P2P sharing. It’s not a  joke.It’s very serious.

The movement “La Quadrature du Net” issues:

A call to all freedom-cherishing citizens to a “black-out” of their sites, blogs, profiles, avatars,… As has been done in New Zealand, the only other country with France where the “graduated response” would have been imposed by law, and was finally pushed back: to protest against  this stupid law and its “white list” of authorized websites, the French  Web must act and dress in black.”

http://www.laquadrature.net/en/french-net-blackout-against-graduated-response

You can see an example on my blog: http://www.philaxel.com. Many french profiles pictures in facebook are now in black.

Thanks to consider that all europe and USA waits for the result of this debate and vote to do simply the same…

In the maintime, la quadrature add this very important information:

“Rapporteurs for the European Parliament on the directives of the  Telecoms Package, have just released their draft reports for the second  reading. Some improvements were made, like the reintroduction of amendments 138 & 166. About “Net discrimination”, the worst was avoided, but there is still a blatant lack for clarification and concrete guarantees that Telecom operators won’t be allowed full control over the m Internet.

http://www.laquadrature.net/en/telecoms-package-a-little-extra-effort-required

Cheers
Philippe Axel
http://www.philaxel.com

[NOTE: I'm afraid I'm feeling too cruddy to do much today so I'm simply going to post headings with notes and links and ask anyone who's interested to perhaps post more data under individual items, if they feel so inclined. Cheers! And thanks - Jon.]

March, 2009

In the white corner are Fredrik Neij (TiAMO), Gottfrid Svartholm (Anakata) Warg, Peter Sunde (Brokep) Carl Lundström who together run The Pirate Bay.

In the black corner are Warner Bros, MGM, EMI, Colombia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Sony BMG and Universal.

TorrentFreak, over in The Netherlands, is running excellent day-by-day coverage with enigmax providing the copy.

Yesterday, all the attention was on Fredrik Neij and today, it’s Peter Sunde’s turn.

Failed Swedish prosecutor Håkan Roswall started off by asking Peter if he ever had dealings with The Pirate Bay’s (TPB) computer systems, says enigmax, reporting Peter said he did, “but in a limited fashion”.

The TorrentFreak post continues »»»

Roswall then inquired about Peter’s involvement in TPB’s advertising deals, in particular one with ad company Random Media which Peter signed up to as a ‘Founder’ of the site. Peter said that this was connected with new website project which would draw funds from TPB’s adverttising revenue.

Roswall then brought up Piratbyran – the Swedish Bureau of Piracy – and asked Peter if this organization is critical of copyright. “Not critical directly,” Peter replied. “There are many differing views.”

Roswall then turned to Peter’s stance toward copyright. “This is a difficult question to answer,” Peter said. “I like things that are not protected by copyright, this is a non-issue.”

Peter was asked if he knew of TPB’s “legal” page. He said he was aware of it. Roswall, presumably trying to speak the same ‘language’ as the somewhat techie defendants, got tied up a little;

“When did you meet [Gottfrid] for the first time IRL?” asked the Prosecutor. “We do not use the expression IRL,” said Peter, we use AFK. “IRL?” questioned the judge. “In Real Life,” the Prosecutor explained to the judge.

“We do not use that expression,” Peter noted. “Everything is in real life. We use AFK – Away From Keyboard.” “Well,” said Roswall. “It seems I am a little bit out of date.”

One of the themes so far is how the Prosecutor is struggling to come to terms with the somewhat chaotic structure of the TPB’s operations. Trying to pin down Peter’s role, he asked about his position as TPB spokesman – Peter said he took the unofficial position since no-one else in the team wanted to do it. A request from a journalist or someone else for a comment on something came in, said Peter, and he simply took it in hand.

Then the attention turned to Peter’s relationship with advertiser Oded Daniel and whether or not Peter has handled money from him. “Have you never wondered why you got these earnings reports? Isn’t this type of thing a little beyond your role of spokesman?” asked Roswall.

“I think it is his [Oded Daniel's] way of trying to motivate people. He sends so much weird email, I don’t read half of it. He could have been using me to get more contact with Fredrik and Gottfrid,” said Peter. The Prosecutor continued to struggle with the apparent lack of a formal decision-making structure at TPB, continually referring to TPB as a “company”.

It was revealed that Peter and Gottfrid met Oded Daniel in 2005/2006. Carl Lundström and Peter Sunde met just a handful of times.

“Is it true you went to Israel to meet Oded in 2006?” said Roswall. “Yes,” responded Peter.

“Why did you go to meet him?” questioned Roswall. “Because he asked me to go there as his guest,” said Peter. “Did you not go there to go to the beach?” “Yes, I did, very often.”

Roswall then questioned Peter on many emails back and forth from Oded Daniel to TPB, many centered on the proposed TPB YouTube-like side-project for streaming video called VideoBay. Referring to development of the search capability on TPB, the Prosecutor appeared to be suggesting that Peter worked on TPB on technical issues in a response to mails from Oded Daniel, but Peter said that others carried out the work.

At one stage Peter said he came up with the idea of selling statistics from TPB, believing people would be interested to read them in newspapers etc. When Roswall asked Peter if he ever expected to receive money from TPB, the answer was “no”.

After the break, it was IFPI’s Peter Danowsky turn to start questioning Peter, beginning with his education. Peter says he dropped out of school but later learned English and computer programming from the Internet. Danowsky then turned his attention to ad-company Random Media, again referring to emails from TPB.

Then, in a repeat of yesterday’s performance, the Prosecution started again to introduce more evidence that had not been cleared pre-trial. Danowsky continued to present new evidence in the form of some newspaper articles to try to contradict what Peter had said.

According to multiple reports, not only was the defense annoyed at the Prosecution’s unacceptable actions, but the judge was too. The judge reprimanded Danowsky and the defense told him to cut out this American-style trial strategy. The Court then adjourned for 10 minutes to discuss the situation.

Upon restart, the judge said the decision is that any new material the Prosecution is planning to bring up needs to be submitted before the questioning has started, as is proper. The Prosecution then claimed to hand over all their surprise material they were holding and the Court took another break so that Peter could read through everything. This was later confirmed to be 9 new documents.

After the break Danowsky’s questioning of Peter resumed. “Did you hold a lecture called “How to dismantle a billion dollar industry?” “Yes I did,” replied Peter.

Danowsky started to quote some of Peter’s comments from his blog at Brokep.com. Peter says that everything he writes on his blog isn’t about TPB even if prosecutors would like it to be the case.

Pressed further on his opinions on copyright, Peter asked Danowsky, “That is a political issue. Is this a political trial or a legal trial?” Danowsky continued, ignoring the question but Peter pulled him back. “I want an answer from the lawyer Danowsky. Is this a political trial? Can I get a reply?”

“How can copyright law be a political issue?” said Danowsky, but had no follow up questions. Peter was surprised, “No follow-ups? Ok, let me elaborate…” and he went on at length about the context of Danowsky’s various questions.

Danowsky asked Peter about a time when he said that rights holders had acted illegally. Peter said this was a reference to Warner Brothers that had attacked file-sharing sites with hacking, aka anti-p2p activity.

Danowsky asked Peter what the purpose of TPB was. “It is to enable users to share their material with others,” said Peter. “Even though it is copyrighted?” questioned Danowsky. “That can sometimes be the sad consequences,” Peter replied.

After a brief appearance by defense lawyer Wadsted, the court stopped for lunch.

On return, Peter Altin questioned his client, Peter Sunde. He asked him if he was responsible for TPB or if he felt responsible due to his comments for the site. On both, the reply was negative.

Altin put it to Peter that he could’ve made lots of money from TPB. “No, I don’t have a million sitting around somewhere. That would be nice, though.”

When Altin asked about the amount of copyright material tracked by TPB, Peter explained that he carried out a survey of a random 1000 torrents from the tracker and 80% of the content linked by the site was not copyrighted, noting that there is much more illegal material on YouTube.

Then Altin’s interview with Carl Lundström began. He told the court how he met Fredrik at an event called Dreamhack in Jönköping, Sweden during 2004. The Court heard that Lundström always believed that TPB operated within the law but they needed resources. This situation led to him signing an agreement with Fredrik that they could have two computers at Rix Telecom in Gothenburg, along with him being a technician there. The deal would allow TPB to develop with a little financial support from Lundström, and then when the site grew and became a success, TPB would stay with Rix and pay their way as a regular customer.

Next it was Roswall’s turn to interview Lundström. Lundström admitted that he knew that there was piracy connected with TPB, and that he understood that TPB is a “file-sharing site, a torrent site”.

Speaking of the advertising he took responsibility for the plan believing it was a way the site could pay for itself in the future. He went on to say that he had no idea of any political motivations of the site and what interested him was the desire of the other defendants to make the biggest BitTorrent site in the world. “And I liked that,” he said.

“I can understand that,” replied Roswall.

Then followed discussion about the equipment given to TPB by Lundström. The cost of the equipment was 18,000 kronor and the bill was paid by Lundström. Lundström made clear that he didn’t want to become a partner, but that he did continue to be interested in the project, and that he gave some advise to the TPB team a few times.

• The Pirate Bay trial, live and online - Day One 
• The Pirate Bay vs Them: Day Two - Distributed Hash Tables 
• The Pirate Bay vs Them: Day Three - ‘Small change’ 
• The Pirate Bay vs Them: Day Four - Neij’s turn 

Stay tuned.

February , 2009

“Richard Dearden acted for the appellant and Ronald Caza acted for the Respondent,” he says, going on »»»

There were several interveners’ counsel.

It involved Dano Cusson, a former OPP constable, who became famous and then infamous right after 9/11 when he went to ground zero with his dog to assist in the search for survivors. The Ottawa Citizen raised questions as to whether Cusson had misrepresented himself as an RCMP officer, whether he and his dog were trained for such K-9 rescue work, and whether he may have actually hampered the rescue effort, etc. Cusson won $100,000 for libel at trial. The Ottawa Citizen lawyer today repeatedly referred to Cusson’s dog as a “pet”.

The Ottawa Citizen lost at trial and on appeal, but scored a huge victory on appeal by getting recognition in principle of the “responsible journalism” defence, albeit with a ruling that it couldn’t be applied in the circumstances and on the record of this case because “the standard of responsible journalism was simply not litigated at this trial.” The Citizen appealed. The issue of whether there is an adequate record for the SCC to decide these weighty issues in this instance is clearly important and contentious.

Big questions coming out of this include how far Canada will go towards the more liberalized standard for journalists now in effect in Australia, New Zealand, UK and – of course – the USA where the NY Times v. Sullivan “absence of malice” standard has ruled for more than 40 years. An important new decision that was the talk of the town today from the House of Lords (Jameel) was rendered after the trial and before the appeal in this instance, although the previous House of Lords decision (Reynolds) on which Jameel was based came before this litigation was commenced. The Reynolds/Jameel defence is known as the “responsible journalism” defence. It doesn’t go quite as far as NY Times v. Sullivan but goes significantly farther than Canadian courts have gone before. It basically gives the “right to be wrong” to a journalist acting responsibly in reporting a matter of public interest.

Of course, NY Times v. Sullivan goes even farther and held that holds that a public official cannot recover damages for defamatory statements relating to his or her official conduct without proof of actual malice, namely, that the statement was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or false. It is often said that without that 1964 decision Woodward and Bernstein would never have been able report their Watergate Story and Nixon would never have had to face the consequences of the cover up. However, for better or worse, NY Times v. Sullivan doesn’t seem likely to be the law in Canada just yet – the Supremes flat out rejected it only fourteen years ago in the Hill v. Scientology case.

“Public interest” on one extreme would include questions such as whether a Member of Parliament had been bribed. At another extreme, counsel seemed to agree the affairs of soccer players’ wives are not matters of public interest.

Can statements on matters of public interest that may turn out to be incorrect be published to the world at large as long as a “responsible” standard was involved? If so, does this defence replace or complement the ancient and honoured but much more limited defence of “qualified privilege”?

And a burning question for lots of bloggers, which repeatedly arose today, is whether the Court should allow any new defence to be available to anyone, and not just a “journalist” (whatever that means any more) working for a traditional media outlet. Interestingly, all of the appellants who represented vested media interests and are urging a significant liberalization of the law of libel the refrained from limiting the potential new defence they seek to traditional “accredited” type journalists.

Another interesting question to watch will be the Supreme’s take on why the law has evolved as it has in the UK, which may have less to do with the evolution of the common law and much more to do with the incorporation the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms into U.K. law. The result so far seems fairly clear. On the one hand, the “responsible” journalism” defence has opened up and liberalized the law of defamation in the UK. But on the other hand, the newly constitutionalized right of privacy under the Convention has enabled a very public figures such as Max Mosley to successful sue for the the publication of very embarrassing but perfectly true private information. It is doubtful that Mosley would succeed in such a claim in Ontario, at least. Freedom of expression for the press is not necessarily that clear in the UK today. Cusson’s counsel emphasized that there was no evidentiary basis to change the common law or to render a Charter based decsion and that European law was not persuasive.

Interestingly, British Columbia now has a Privacy Act that might - note the emphasis – provide some relief to a plaintiff in a Max Mosley situation. It has some interesting cross references to defamation law. Ontario has no such statute. So we could, in principle, see a situation in which the same article would be illegal in the Vancouver Sun but legal in the Toronto Star – with both clearly visible online throughout Canada. Privacy is not a right guaranteed by the Canadian Charter, unlike it is now in Europe.

We may also see situations where different provinces may yield different results in defamation that is published on the internet. Clear and decisive reasoning from the Supremes would go a long way towards resolving such potential conflict of laws problems that could seriously impede communication and freedom of expression in Canada. There still remains of the problem of internatioanl conflicts and a treaty may someday be necessary to solve the libel tourism problem

We will be surely be living in interesting times in respect of defamation and privacy laws in the years ahead. Some principles change slowly if ever. But sometimes the law lurches forward for better or worse. The SCC is now faced with a classic double dilemma of deciding whether the law of defamation needs to be changed in Canada, and if so, whether that change can come from the Courts throught the common law (and what about Quebec where the Civil Code prevails?) or can only come from the legislatures?

From an advocacy standpoint, it was interesting to note the unusual (for a Supreme Court case) reliance on “facts” by the Appellant (the Ottawa Citizen), including the use in reply of a large mounted stand up poster of then Constable Cusson in an RCMP uniform. This had been put in the record just a few days before the hearing.

Here’s a good summary by Kirk Makin, veteran Supremes watcher.

And in a wonderful new development, the Court has begun webcasting. This is a very appropriate case to launch this practice. Congratulations to my old friend Daniel Henry, a great lawyer at the CBC, who appeared today for CBC and who has been fighting the good fight for cameras in the courtroom for about 30 years. Above all, congratulations to the Supremes themselves for making this happen – along with many other innovations and benchmarks for the rest of the judicial system.

Libel law is very complicated. It always was. Now, it is intersecting in interesting ways in Canada with the Charter and the internet. This case is difficult to call. We should know the answer – which may not be unanimous – in about six months, if the Supremes are true to form.

PS:  And in a clearly related development, the Supremes today granted leave to appeal in Grant v Toronto Star, a libel case involving a wealthy businessman and friend of Premiere Mike Harris and contributor to the Ontario Conservative Party. According to the SCC summary:

On the date of a public meeting called by the Minister of Natural Resources with respect to the proposal, the Toronto Star published a front page article regarding the proposed golf course expansion. Inter alia, the article quoted a cottager, who said, “Everyone thinks it’s a done deal because of Grant’s influence – but most of all his Mike Harris ties”. Grant sued the newspaper for libel, claiming that the newspaper suggested that he had used political influence to circumvent the concerns of local citizens and to bypass the normal approval process.

Grant won at trial, lost on appeal and now has been granted leave to appeal by the SCC on an expedited basis,” says Knopf, adding:

“He was an intervener in the Cusson case on Cusson’s side. Clearly, the Court has connected these two cases as sometimes happens and the judgments will likely appear back to back.”

Howard Knopf – Excess Copyright
[Knopf is an Ottawa-based copyright lawyer who's been lead counsel on legal challenges both at the Copyright Board and in the Courts against the excesses of the music industry establishment. He's regularly quoted in the mainstream media and acted against the CRIA in the file sharing litigation, and continues to act against the CPCC, in which the CRIA is still a major stakeholder, on the levy front.]

[Also see Canadian media want old libel laws updated, February 19]

This paper reports the results of a summer 2008 survey designed to address the campus costs of compliance with the new P2P filesharing mandates in reauthorized Higher Education Act (HEA) that was signed into law on August 14, 2008.  The report is based data from 321 colleges and universities and focuses on P2P compliance costs as reflected in expenditures (e.g., content and software licenses)  and also the time that campus personnel spend on P2P filesharing issues.

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Music Social Network Imeem In Play; Hires Bank; Laying Off 25 Percent – paidContent

Online music-focused social network Imeem is on the block, according to our sources, and has hired investment banker Montgomery and Co. to lead the sale. Coincidentally, we have also learned that the company is announcing some layoffs internally today—as much as 25 percent of its around 80-strong workforce. These layoffs are mainly on the technical back end and services side. The company has done its on-demand streaming music deals with all four majors, and has also been working with a slew of indies. As it has built out its platform (it recently relaunched its site/service), and done most of the biz dev deals, the focus now is on growing audience and monetizing the platform…it won’t be needing as much technical expertise going ahead, the sources say, and hence the layoffs. Of course, Imeem is a Sequoia-portfolio company, which means it is all but obligated to heed to the VC firm’s recent call of cost and employee cuts.

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Kevin Cogill, The Guns N Roses Pirate Pleads Not Guilty – PiracyIsACrime

Kevin Cogill, a man who admitted in writing two times to the fbi that he in fact pirated, and distributed the unreleased guns n roses album titled “’Chinese Democracy” has plead not guilty in court earlier today. Cogill was arrested in August at his Los Angeles home and released on bail the same day. He faces three years in federal prison if convicted, and five years if the court finds he posted the songs for commercial gain. Kevin, who has support from many online who are helping pay for his defense fund (ref link removed), is now  able to fight in what most thought would be a quick ending to a ‘open and shut’ case. Originally Kevin was being represented by the federal public defender’s office but now has retained his own attorney, David Kaloyanides.

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Virtual games, real addiction – Globe and Mail

Angelika Crisp would wake in the middle of the night to hear her son, Brandon, speaking into his headset as he feverishly played Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, a popular online video game. She and her husband, Steve, are sure Brandon had become addicted to the game and link its appeal to the 15-year-old’s disappearance from their Barrie, Ont., home on Oct. 13. “He is obsessed with Call of Duty – it has been a constant battle for the last two years,” she told The Globe and Mail this week. Last night, investigators ramped up their national search for the youth and considered the possibility he is trying to survive in the wilderness. The kind of obsessive online behaviour reported by Brandon’s parents is what prompted clinicians at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto to launch Canada’s first holistic clinic specifically designed to treat adolescents addicted to gambling, the Internet and video games. The Adolescent Clinical Education Service, dubbed ACES by clinical head Bruce Ballon, was launched last month and seeks to propel youth addiction treatment into the 21st century by acknowledging that video games and the Internet can be just another escape route for young people battling mental health issues such as social anxiety, depression or low self-esteem.

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‘Shocking’ 61% of all Upstream Internet Traffic is P2P – TorrentFreak

Sandvine, best known for manufacturing the hardware that slowed down BitTorrent users on Comcast, has released an Internet traffic trends report today. The report shows that, on average, P2P traffic is responsible for more than half of the upstream traffic, but mostly the report seems an attempt to sell their traffic shaping products.

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Experts predict botnets will spread to mobile devices in 2009 – Heise Online

Security experts from the renowned Georgia Institute of Technology expect to see botnets spread to mobile devices in 2009. The “Emerging Cyber Threats Report for 2009″ from the annual summit, attended by various research and business specialists and organised by Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC), concludes that bot-driven DDoS attacks on mobile phone networks are likely to occur from next year. In addition, criminals will also take aim at data stored on mobiles and smartphones. In Japan users are already using mobile devices for making payments at vending machines and to pay for public transport.

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[OT] Operating inside a Beating Heart – Technology Review

Fixing the heart is hard. Certain procedures have to be performed on a stationary organ, so the heart is stopped and the patient put on a cardiopulmonary bypass machine. But stopping the heart increases the risk of brain damage. Now researchers at Harvard University and Children’s Hospital Boston are testing a robotic system that could help surgeons perform a common valve repair while the heart beats on. The system uses 3-D ultrasound images to predict and compensate for the motion of the heart so that the surgeon can work on a patient’s mitral valve as it moves.

p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- In our first story on the fact the Cult Scientology owns (or thinks it does) its very own street in Los Angeles, it, “gets the street closed down every weekend,” we said.

“Unphkinghbelieveable. But true.”

A second story wondered what L Ron Hubbard Way actually looks like, and what they get up to and:

“Friday morning from 6am until Saturday night at 11pm for the past two years Samantha Franklin, along with her neighbors, have endured a nightmare of street and sidewalk closures for parties, complete with hostile security guards, stages, bright lighting and loud music, plus vendors crowding her residential street,” said Brandon Walsh’s September 21 San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center story.

It went on:

“Together with Lisa Derrick, Samantha has been trying to get LA City Council to do something about the cult’s regular hostile weekend occupation of what’s supposed to be a public street.

“Construction for the events begins days in advance, starting sometimes before 7 am and going on past 10 pm at night, said Walsh in Residents Oppose Scientology’s Year-Round Weekend Closures of L. Ron Hubbard Way.”

Meanwhile, the amorphous Anonymous continues to plague CoS with no signs of going away.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so what’s this animation, pointed out by a p2pnet reader, worth?

Cheers!

Jon Newton – p2pnet

Los Angeles Times – , September , 2008

Married to singer and broadcaster Murray McLauchlan, Denise Donlon replaces Jennifer McGuire, who stepped down in May, says the CBC.

“Denise is without question one of the broadcasting industry’s most talented and dynamic organizational leaders,” Richard Stursberg, executive vice- president of CBC English Services, said in a statement.

Donlon, 52, was born in Toronto and began working as a host and producer at MuchMusic in 1985 and was president of Sony from 2000 to 2004, says the story.

Sony BMG is a member of the Big 4 corporate music cartel who are using their various so-called trade organisation such as the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association of America)  to try to gain exclusive control how and by whom music is distributed online.

CBC – Denise Donlon named to top job at CBC Radio, September 17, 2008

Canada’s election watchdog is probing whether a vote-swapping group set up on Facebook is illegal or just strategic voting. The online group, titled “Anti-Harper Vote Swap Canada,” is trying to match Canadians who are willing to swap votes to keep the Conservatives from winning a majority in the Oct. 14 federal election. More than 1,200 people had become members of the group by early Friday evening, two days after its creation. Chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand said Friday that Elections Canada is looking into the scheme. In an interview with Canadian Press, Mayrand said it may be nothing more than “organized strategic voting,” but it could also fall afoul of a law prohibiting people from selling votes or accepting bribes for them. “Right now, we have very little information,” Mayrand said about the group.

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Australia issues first license to clone human embryos -  Reuters

[OT] The Australian government has issued its first license allowing scientists to create cloned human embryos to try and obtain embryonic stem cells. The in vitro-fertilization firm Sydney IVF was granted the license and reportedly has access to 7,200 human eggs for its research. If the firm is successful it would be a world first, the Australian government’s National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), which granted the license, said on Wednesday.

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Danish ISPs Reject Anti-Piracy Proposals – TorrentFreak

Danish ISPs have rejected proposals from the IFPI for a ‘3-strikes and you’re out’ policy to deal with illicit file-sharers. In a joint statement, the telecoms companies said that they would not be a part of ‘detection and monitoring’ activities and that the solution to piracy should come from elsewhere. Efforts to reach a voluntary agreement between the IFPI and ISPs in Denmark on the issue of unauthorized file-sharing have failed. The telecoms companies have completely rejected the demands of the music industry.The IFPI wanted to be able to hunt down file-sharers, report them to their ISP and have them implement a so-called ‘3 strikes’ policy. They proposed that the first time someone got caught sharing copyrighted files, they would receive a warning from the ISP, the second time they would have their Internet connection slowed down. After a third warning, or strike, the user would be disconnected from his ISP and banished from the Internet.

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7digital first to sign up big four to unrestricted MP3 – The Guardian

A UK start-up yesterday stole a march on digital music rivals such as Apple’s iTunes and Amazon by becoming the first in Europe to offer the catalogues of all four of the big labels free of rights restrictions.London-based 7digital, which launched in 2004, said the move to offer the majority of its 4m tracks in MP3 was a major step forward for the music industry. It also vowed to boost download sales, which have been growing – but not fast enough to make up for a decline in CD sales – by slashing the price of album downloads. It will offer some new albums at £5 and back-catalogue titles at £2 and £3.

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Canadian changes name to dodge US ‘no-fly’ list – SindhToday.net

Fed up with repeated detentions at American airports for seven years, a Canadian businessman, whose name figures mistakenly on the US ‘no-fly’ list, has changed his name to dodge airport security. Montreal-based Mario Labbe, who wonders how his name landed on the US terror watch list, has added the word Francois to his name to avoid grilling and detention at US airports. He says he wrote to the US Department of Homeland Security to remove his name from the watch list. But the department wrote back saying his name was included in 2004 probably after he became a victim of identity theft.

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DVD sales flat, but still dwarf downloads – CNET News

DVD sales are flat but the drop doesn’t have anything to do with movie downloads, according to the NPD Group. The research group reported Tuesday that, on average, consumers spent 41 percent of the money budgeted for movies and other video content by purchasing DVDs of films. Movie rentals on DVD were the next biggest category with 29 percent. Consumers spent 11 percent purchasing TV shows on DVD. About 18 percent went to theater tickets, according to the report. Here’s the kicker for Internet video: only 0.5 percent was spent on renting or purchasing TV shows or movies off the Web.

The Virginia Supreme Court today struck down a state anti-spam law, saying the statute violated the First Amendment right to free and anonymous speech. The decision also tossed out the conviction of a North Carolina man once described as one of the most prolific spammers.

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U.N. agency eyes curbs on Internet anonymity – CNET News

A United Nations agency is quietly drafting technical standards, proposed by the Chinese government, to define methods of tracing the original source of Internet communications and potentially curbing the ability of users to remain anonymous. The U.S. National Security Agency is also participating in the “IP Traceback” drafting group, named Q6/17, which is meeting next week in Geneva to work on the traceback proposal. Members of Q6/17 have declined to release key documents, and meetings are closed to the public. The potential for eroding Internet users’ right to remain anonymous, which is protected by law in the United States and recognized in international law by groups such as the Council of Europe, has alarmed some technologists and privacy advocates. Also affected may be services such as the Tor anonymizing network. “What’s distressing is that it doesn’t appear that there’s been any real consideration of how this type of capability could be misused,” said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C. “That’s really a human rights concern.”

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Consultation on legislative options to address illicit P2P file-sharing – BERR

Thinking About Truth, Lies, and the Power of Google – Wired Campus

Amy Fry, a San Diego librarian, has a thoughtful little post on ACRLog called “Information Is Power — Even When It’s Wrong.” It’s basically a dissection of the United Airlines stock-value dive that occurred after a reporter from Income Securities Advisors posted erroneous information that he had gotten from a Google search. For the average librarian, the event provides a series of lessons: that “proper metadata is important” or that “sometimes aggregators are misleading.” But a big lesson for Ms. Fry: “Google is more powerful than we even realized.”

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Los Angeles Times – xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, September , 2008

Thailand’s Information and Communications Technology Ministry sought court orders yesterday to shut down about 400 websites and advised internet service providers to block 1,200 sites it considers are disturbing the social order or are a danger to national security. ICT minister Mun Patanotai said the department had advised ISPs to immediately block these websites, which it claimed were detected between March and August this year, and had sought court actions against them under article 20 of Thailand’s Computer Crime Act. The Bangkok Post reported yesterday that the ministry claimed the sites “disturbed the peaceful social order and morality of the people, and/or which were considered detrimental to national security”.

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Europe Weighs Caps on Roaming Fees for Text Messages – New York Times

The European Union’s telecommunications minister will propose price controls that would substantially reduce the roaming fees that individuals are charged to send text messages and limits that could reduce the cost of using the Internet. Details of the proposal, obtained Wednesday by The International Herald Tribune, show that the minister, Viviane Reding, will seek to cap retail roaming fees for short text messages, or S.M.S., within the European Union at 11 euro cents, or 16 American cents, a message.

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Amazon flicks on its streaming-video service – CNET News

Amazon.com on Thursday made available to the general public its video-on-demand service, through which ad-free movies and TV shows can be streamed on Macs, PCs, and Sony Bravia flat-screen TVs. The broader release of the Amazon Video on Demand service comes two months after the online-retailing giant began offering the service to a limited number of its users. Amazon’s service aims to enable users to instantly watch movies or TV shows via a Web browser on their Mac OS or Windows machine. The online retailer is also teaming up with Sony to enable users to purchase or rent movies and TV shows directly through Sony’s Bravia Internet Video Link device on the Bravia TV sets.

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Germany to tighten data protection laws after scandals – Deutsche Welle

At an emergency summit in Berlin, German ministers have agreed to update data protection laws for the digital age in the wake of scandals that showed how easily personal details can be bought on the Internet. Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble called the meeting of political and business leaders Thursday, Sept. 4, to bring Germany’s data-protection regulations up to date for the digital age and to reassure consumers that their details were safe. The conference comes in the wake of a series of privacy scandals. In mid-August, a former call center worker gave authorities a CD containing the bank details of 17,000 people whom he said his employer had procured from a lottery firm.

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Red Hat acquires Qumranet – Heise Online

Red Hat Inc has acquired Qumranet Inc, the makers of SolidIce. The acquisition of Israel-based company adds a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) product to Red Hat’s product portfolio. Red Hat paid $107 million for Qumranet. Qumranet’s SolidICE product provides a kernel based virtual machine based around the open source KVM project which they also sponsor. The KVM project has been incorporated into the mainstream Linux kernel since version 2.6.20.

A recent entrant in Michael Geist’s C-61 in 61 Seconds competition.

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Tunisia: More than just censorship – Global Voices

Three more blogs have been blocked in Tunisia this week. These blogs, Mochagheb (Disturber), Ennaqed (The Critic) and Place Mohamed Ali have all been particularly active in providing news of the struggle of The Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT), and especially about the latest social unrest in the southwestern phosphate mining region of Gafsa, where two people have been killed. One was shot dead by security forces and the other was electrocuted inside a local electric generator.

Woman can sue over YouTube clip de-posting – San Francisco Chronicle

In a victory for small-time music copiers over the entertainment industry, a federal judge ruled Wednesday that copyright holders can’t order one of their songs removed from the Web without first checking to see if the excerpt was so small and innocuous that it was legal. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel of San Jose was the first in the nation to require the owner of the rights to a creative work to consider whether an online copy was a “fair use” – a small or insignificant replication that couldn’t have affected the market for the original – before ordering the Web host to take it down. (Thanks, Kelly)

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Google finds no privacy on private roads – CNET News

Google’s Street View service apparently thinks your “no trespassing” and “private road” signs are just for decoration. The service, which gives Web users a driver’s perspective of hundreds of cities around the world, has raised the ire of residents who say the images are an invasion of their privacy. Now residents in California’s Humboldt County are complaining that the drivers who are hired to collect the images are disregarding private property signs and driving up private roads. In an episode reported recently by the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, a Street View driver cruised past two “no trespassing” signs to collect images of a residence that is 1,200 feet from the public road. “It isn’t just a privacy issue; it is a trespassing issue, with their own photos as evidence,” resident Betty Webb told the newspaper. “They really went off the track to get to our address.”

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Egyptian blogger rearrested after release order – Agence France-Presse

An Egyptian blogger held a month ago and issued with a release order this week has been rearrested, rights groups said on Saturday. Media student Mohammed Refaat “is being held under the hateful emergency law,” the Arabic Network for Human Rights and the Hisham Mubarak Law Centre said in a statement. Refaat, who runs the blog “Matabbat” (Speedbumps), was first detained on July 21 after police raided his home and confiscated his computer, the groups said. “He was accused of offending state institutions, destabilising public security and inciting demonstrations and strikes via the Internet,” the groups said. “State Security decided to release him on August 17 … but an order to arrest him was issued under the state emergency law,” they added.

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DNS poisoners hijack typo domains – Heise Online

Websense, the security services provider, has reported a successful case of cache poisoning on name servers of one of the largest Chinese ISPs. Netcom customers are said to have been steered by criminals to manipulated pages on which exploits for RealPlayer, MS Snapshot Viewer, Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft Data Access Components attempted to inject malicious software into their PCs. The criminals carried out their attacks somewhat subtly: instead of manipulating the addresses of prominent web sites in the cache, they only changed the address of the ISP’s publicity pages. People arrive at these pages when the domain name they request is unavailable, because, for example, they mistyped the URL. ISPs use this redirection method, known as Typosquatting, to advertise free domains or competing products. In the present case, however, clients don’t arrive on the Typosquatter pages, but on pages with a crafted trojan.

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Apple’s iTunes music store has been blocked in China, allegedly due to some athletes listening to protest songs.

It started with Songs for Tibet, a compilation produced by the Art of Peace Foundation, a US-based Tibetan activist group. The Foundation invited Olympic athletes to download the album free of charge. By listening in Beijing, the activist group said, athletes would communicate that “compassion and non-violence can overcome intolerance and oppression – beautiful ideals to be associated with the Olympic spirit”.

More than 40 athletes downloaded the album, according to a press release, which includes songs by Sting, Rush, Damien Rice, Underworld and Alanis Morissette.

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Verizon, Google Close To Mobile Search Deal – Wall Street Journal

Verizon Communications Inc. is nearing an agreement with Google Inc. on a wide-ranging partnership, according to people familiar with the situation, in what could be a much-needed jolt for the anemic mobile search business. It’s the latest sign that telecom companies are finally conceding that their homegrown search services have stalled — and that they need help from the Internet’s big guns. Carriers have been reluctant to team up with established Internet players, not wanting to hand over a potentially lucrative stream of advertising revenue.

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Brazilian charged in U.S. in connection with operating botnet – CNET News

A Brazilian man has been charged in connection with operating a botnet composed of more than 100,000 computers infected with malicious software allegedly designed to send spam, the U.S. Department of Justice said on Thursday. A federal grand jury in New Orleans handed down an indictment charging Leni de Abreu Neto, a 35-year-old from Taubate, Brazil, with one count of conspiracy to cause damage to computers worldwide. If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison and up to three years of supervised release, as well as a fine of $250,000 or more based on the gross amount of monetary loss determined to have been suffered by victims. The indictment alleges that Neto conspired with Nordin Nasiri, a 19-year-old from Sneek, Netherlands, to “use, maintain, lease and sell an illegal botnet.”

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Congress: Terror database upgrade failing – Associated Press

A congressional committee on Thursday asked for an investigation into a counterterrorism database software upgrade that it says is months behind schedule, millions over budget and would actually be less capable than the U.S. government terrorist tracking system it is meant to replace. At issue is Railhead, a software upgrade to the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, which is a vast database of names that feeds the nation’s terrorist watch list. It is meant to help analysts “connect the dots” between known or suspected terrorists and their contacts, potential targets and safe houses. As of January, the database contained 500,000 names. The upgrade was supposed to be completed by the end of this year.

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Actors paid to line up for iPhone launch in Poland – Reuters

When Apple Inc rolled out its iPhone in the United States, some fans paid big money to be among the first to get their hands on the device. In Poland, people are getting paid to line up. “We have these fake queues at front of 20 stores around the country to drum up interest in the iPhone,” a spokesman said. As part of a marketing campaign ahead of the iPhone’s Friday launch in Poland, the country’s largest mobile operator Orange is paying dozens of actors to stand in queues.

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FTC to ban prerecorded sales messages – Associated Press

After a barrage of consumer complaints, the government is banning phone calls of prerecorded sales messages unless consumers agree to receive the calls. The Federal Trade Commission also announced that by December all prerecorded calls must provide an opt-out selection to make it easy for consumers to stop getting those calls. Effective Sept. 1, 2009, sellers and telemarketers may place prerecorded calls only to consumers who have provided signed and written agreements to receive them. The FTC said the rules will not affect informational prerecorded messages, such as messages to notify consumers of appointments and cancellations, because they do not attempt to sell goods or services.

. .Stumble It!

The [US] federal government has been using its system of border checkpoints to greatly expand a database on travelers entering the country by collecting information on all U.S. citizens crossing by land, compiling data that will be stored for 15 years and may be used in criminal and intelligence investigations. Officials say the Border Crossing Information system, disclosed last month by the Department of Homeland Security in a Federal Register notice, is part of a broader effort to guard against terrorist threats. It also reflects the growing number of government systems containing personal information on Americans that can be shared for a broad range of law enforcement and intelligence purposes, some of which are exempt from some Privacy Act protections.

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RBA goes after eBay, PayPal – Australian IT

The [Australian] Reserve Bank has issued a stern warning to online auction giant eBay Australia, urging it to stop forcing PayPal onto its sellers. The RBA will soon have discussions with PayPal on how the latter can accommodate its wishes. “There isn’t a fixed date set yet,” an RBA spokesperson said. “It won’t be just one discussion … there will be several,” the spokesperson said.

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Apple sued over iPhone 3G reception issues – CNET News

An Alabama woman has filed a lawsuit against Apple, claiming the iPhone 3G’s network is slower than advertised. In a 10-page complaint filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for Northern Alabama, Birmingham resident Jessica Alena Smith charged Apple with breach of express and implied warranty and with unjust enrichment. Smith, who refers to the phone she purchased throughout the complaint as “Defective iPhone 3G,” is seeking class action status. The lawsuit claims that Apple’s iPhone 3G advertising campaign is misleading.

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Intel, Yahoo partnering on Internet TV concept – Associated Press

Hoping to plant their flags on the screens of Internet-connected television sets, Intel Corp. and Yahoo Inc. unveiled a new project Wednesday to populate those screens with tiny programs called widgets. Depending on your point of view, the goal is to create a multitasker’s dream or an information-overload nightmare: It would let people to do things like check their stock prices or peruse their photos all while watching TV. The notion that the Internet will be the delivery mechanism for TV has been gaining momentum, and the Intel-Yahoo partnership, called “The Widget Channel,” reflects the potential.

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Sale of bank data alarms Germany – BBC

Data protection officials in Germany have called for privacy laws to be tightened amid a scandal over illegal sales of personal data. The officials say they were able to buy six million items of personal data on the internet, including bank account details and phone numbers. The data cost just 850 euros (£671), the officials said. Call centres and lottery firms are suspected of trading in the data. Prosecutors are now investigating.

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Rumors of iTunes music subscriptions fly again – Industry Standard

Here we go again. A pair of Mac sites, TUAW and MacDailyNews, both received anonymous tips today outlining how an iTunes subscription music store might work — and both are plausible enough to be true. That said, given the rampant speculation and misdirection that exists in the Mac rumor world, this info should be taken with a non-trivial grain of salt. MacDailyNews says the service will be called “iTunes Unlimited” and offer 50% of the songs currently on the traditional U.S. iTunes store through the program at launch. The subscription will be for one year and be available through iTunes or a retail box, similar to how MobileMe/DotMac is sold. iTunes Unlimited would launch, initially, on the U.S. store only. The subscription would cost $129.99 on its own, $179.99 with MobileMe or $99.99 for existing MobileMe subscribers. The site claims a late September announcement with late October rollout, just in time for the holiday season. TUAW received (almost certainly from the same source) a similar report.

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IPhone 3G users have complained about dropped calls and other connection issues. Apple says a software update at least partly fixes the problem. Apple acknowledged Tuesday that a software update for the iPhone partly fixes the connection snags that have caused a global firestorm for the new iPhone 3G. Though mum on details, Apple spokeswoman Jennifer Bowcock said on Tuesday, “The software update improves communication with 3G networks.” In recent days, customers around the globe have complained about dropped calls and other connection issues with the latest iPhone. Such drops apparently occur when calls are handed off from the 3G network to a slower network, such as AT&T’s Edge, when 3G isn’t available.

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Defense: Prosecutors bending law for MySpace hoax – Associated Press

A defense attorney for the Missouri woman charged in a MySpace hoax that allegedly led to a 13-year-old girl’s suicide argued in court papers that prosecutors are bending a cyber crime statute to prosecute his client. At issue is whether the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is relevant to the case against Lori Drew of O’Fallon, Mo. Prosecutors filed voluminous motions last week arguing the statute can be used to prosecute cyber bullying, though it has traditionally been used for crimes such as hacking into computers. The defense filed a thin six-page reply arguing that Drew did not violate the statute. “Cyber bullying is not, under any definition, trespass or theft,” according to the defense motion filed by H. Dean Steward on Monday.

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Professor Creates Video Game About the Lecture Circuit – Wired Campus

When a major video-game company created a new Web site that lets visitors create their own simple games online, it invited Ian S. Bogost, an assistant professor of literature, communication, and culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, to be one of the first to try it out. So Mr. Bogost, who is known for his work creating video games that address social issues, made one about lecturing. The goal of the game, called Honorarium, is to assemble lectures by moving Tetris-like shapes onto a screen at the front of a lecture hall. Successful players win virtual invitations to travel and speak at other institutions.

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Financial Data ‘on Steroids’ – Washington Post

In the realm of quarterly filings, David Blaszkowsky takes the long view. He’s quick to mention that the earliest form of record keeping was on tablets in the ancient Middle Eastern civilization of Sumer. Now, he says, the financial world is about to discover yet a new way. The Securities and Exchange Commission plans in the coming months to require that all publicly traded U.S. companies and mutual funds prepare their financial filings using a new interactive system that allows the information to be viewed and analyzed online as never before. “We’re adding a new dimension,” said Blaszkowsky, the SEC’s director of interactive disclosures.

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Germans urge tougher laws after new privacy scandal – Reuters

German politicians called for tougher privacy laws on Tuesday after officials revealed personal and financial information on millions of Germans was readily available for cash on the Internet. The scandal over the illegal trading of bank account and phone data came just months after snooping cases at some major German corporations raised alarms. “The data scandals unfortunately highlight how urgent this issue is,” said parliamentarian Sebastian Edathy from the Social Democrats (SPD), who share power with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU). “Parliament must … find a quick response to these blatant cases of abuse,” Edathy, who chairs parliament’s internal affairs committee, told Neue Osnabruecker Zeitung.. .Stumble It!

I’m having major hardware problems which mean my connection is going up and down like a yo-yo.

So I’m compiling a largish headline roundup of some of the posts I would’ve filed (or tried to ).

Hopefully, things’ll be back to normal later today (or by tomorrow at the latest) after I replace some faulty gear.

Cheers! And thanks …
Jon »»»

University of Michgan student files followup letter pointing out inconsistencies in MediaSentry’s “defenses” – Recording Industry vs The People

That pesky University of Michigan “John Doe” student, known only as “Case number 162983070″, who filed a complaint against MediaSentry with Michigan’s Department of Labor and Economic Growth, has now filed a followup letter responding to MediaSentry’s March 17th response to the DLEG investigation, pointing out some of its inconsistencies and misstatements. Case number 162983070, August 14, 2008, followup letter.

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IDC Canada: ISP peer-to-peer fears are a Boogie Man – Network World Canada

A Canadian industry analyst says network service providers may be overreacting to the threat of file sharing applications and their impact on bandwidth. Why Verizon may have the right approach. Network service providers are moaning about the toll peer-to-peer file sharing applications are taking on their bandwidth, with Bell Canada and others insisting on the right to slow P2P apps during non-peak hours. But the author of a new study on deep packet inspection, the technology used by many Internet service providers to identify P2P traffic, says the concern is overblown. P2P “is not the boogie man,” says Lawrence Surtees, vice-president and principal communications research analyst at IDC Canada. In fact, he argues that ISPs should embrace the strategy of U.S. carrier Verizon Communications, which is looking for ways to help its users share legal files faster and therefore not slow down traffic.

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Microsoft to push another Windows Update to users … whether you want it or not – ZDNet

Back in September of 2007 Microsoft carried out what I and many others at the time considered to be a pretty big breach of trust and pushed a stealth update for the Windows Update mechanism. What’s wrong with that, you might ask? Well, as it turned out the update disrupted some Windows XP users ability to repair their installation. Not good, and precisely the reason why there are some people who like to know exactly what is being installed on their systems, and control when that happens. Well, according to Microsoft, there’s another update to the Windows Update mechanism ready to be unleashed. The difference between this update and the stealth update from back in 2007 is that Microsoft is being more open about this update and actually talking about it before it hits the download servers and starts getting installed on systems.

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Secrecy claims on copyright treaty – Australian IT

The Bush administration’s plans for a copyright treaty, dubbed “Hollywood’s Christmas list” by privacy advocates, may be disrupted as protests over “secret negotiations” emerge in participating nations, including Australia, Canada and New Zealand. US Trade authorities had been hoping to conclude the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement by the end of the year. But documents posted on Wikileaks have raised global concerns that the treaty goes far beyond tackling counterfeit and fake goods trafficking, and overhauls existing intellectual property and digital copyright laws. Electronic Frontiers Australia chair Dale Clapperton said the proposed multinational treaty had been “developed behind closed doors” in consultation with big music and film industry copyright owners.

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When Professors Create Social Networks for Classes, Some Students See a ‘Creepy Treehouse’ – Wired Campus

A growing number of professors are experimenting with Facebook, Twitter, and other social-networking tools for their courses, but some students greet an invitation to join professors’ personal networks with horror, seeing faculty members as intruders in their private online spaces. Recognizing that, some professors have coined the term “creepy treehouse” to describe technological innovations by faculty members that make students’ skin crawl.

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AT&T Offers $10,000 Reward for Arrests and Convictions in Cable Theft – Press Release

AT&T California announced today the company is offering statewide rewards for information leading to the arrest and conviction of individuals who are cutting and stealing its telephone cable from utility poles throughout California. AT&T is offering to pay up to $10,000 for information that helps identify and prosecute those responsible. Anyone with information can contact AT&T security at: 1-800-807-4205.

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T hacking exposes a deeper clash – Boston Globe

Recent inventions to emerge from the workshop of Zack Anderson include the “Killbot,” a radio-controlled robot with a “1,500,000-candlepower spotlight to blind the victim,” a bullhorn “to terrify victims,” and a spinning drill bit “to bore through obstacles.” Anderson, a 21-year-old electrical engineering major at MIT, has also designed a security system for his workshop that features sirens, flashing lights, and a digitally altered recording of his voice bellowing “Intrusion detected! Initiating auto-lockdown sequence!” and “releasing toxin into atmosphere!” Impressive stuff. But it’s not generating half the attention as his project for Professor Ronald L. Rivest’s Computer and Network Security class last semester. That endeavor, for which he earned an A, has gotten the fresh-faced senior from Beverly Hills, Calif., a visit from an FBI agent, an MBTA sergeant detective, nationwide press attention, and a starring role in a federal lawsuit.

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Santa Cruz firm GraphOn claims Google is using its Web technology – Santa Cruz Sentinel

GraphOn, a small Santa Cruz software company, claims Google Inc. is illegally using patented web technology in its various divisions including YouTube, AdWords and Blogger sites. The company filed suit Thursday in the Eastern District of Texas federal court alleging ongoing violations of four patents. The technology in question involves the way a company maintains automated and network databases. GraphOn seeks a permanent injunction as well as unspecified monetary damages. The suit is the latest in a series of patent infringement suits filed by the company in recent years.

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Hundreds sued for sharing video games – Times Online

As many as 100 people suspected of illegally sharing computer game files over the internet are to be sued for copyright infringement, it emerged today. A London-based law firm said it would launch legal proceedings on behalf of the computer game publisher Topware Interactive after a woman was fined £16,000 for illegally sharing a pinball-themed game over the web. The woman, who has not been named, was forced to pay £6,000 of damages and £10,000 in costs to Topware after she was found to have uploaded the game Dream Pinball 3D to the internet and distributed it using file-sharing networks.

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Student Files Are Exposed on Web Site – New York Times

The Princeton Review, the test-preparatory firm, accidentally published the personal data and standardized test scores of tens of thousands of Florida students on its Web site, where they were available for seven weeks. A flaw in configuring the site allowed anyone to type in a relatively simple Web address and have unfettered access to hundreds of files on the company’s computer network, including educational materials and internal communications.

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