News Common PC Mac CUCUG
The next CUCUG meeting will be held on our regular third Thursday of the month: Thursday, March 20th, at 7:00 pm, at the First Baptist Church of Champaign in Savoy. The Linux SIG convenes, of course, 45 minutes earlier, at 6:15 pm. Directions to the FBC-CS are at the end of this newsletter.
The March 20 gathering will be one of our split SIG meetings. The PC SIG will have Richard Rollins showing three programs: Truecryt, SteadyState, and Total Drive Encryption. The Macintosh SIG is open for anything anyone wants to bring in.
ToC
We'd like to thank David Stevens for renewing his membership.
We welcome any kind of input or feedback from members. Run across an interesting item or tidbit on the net? Just send the link to the editor. Have an article or review you'd like to submit? Send it in. Have a comment? Email any officer you like. Involvement is the driving force of any user group. We appreciate you being here.
ToC
Terror Fight Blurs Line Over Domain; Tracking Email
By Siobhan Gorman
The Wall Street Journal
March 10, 2008; Page A1
URL: <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120511973377523845.html>
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans' privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
But the data-sifting effort didn't disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system.
The central role the NSA has come to occupy in domestic intelligence gathering has never been publicly disclosed. But an inquiry reveals that its efforts have evolved to reach more broadly into data about people's communications, travel and finances in the U.S. than the domestic surveillance programs brought to light since the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Message Received:
Examples of data the NSA can look at without a judicial warrant in its search for hints of terrorism:
Email: Recipient and sender address; subject; time sent
Internet: Sites visited and searches conducted
Cellphone: Numbers incoming or outgoing; length of call; location
Phone: Numbers incoming or outgoing; length of call
Financial: Information about bank accounts, wire transfers, credit-card use
Airline: Information about passengers
Congress now is hotly debating domestic spying powers under the main law governing U.S. surveillance aimed at foreign threats. An expansion of those powers expired last month and awaits renewal, which could be voted on in the House of Representatives this week. The biggest point of contention over the law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, is whether telecommunications and other companies should be made immune from liability for assisting government surveillance.
Largely missing from the public discussion is the role of the highly secretive NSA in analyzing that data, collected through little-known arrangements that can blur the lines between domestic and foreign intelligence gathering. Supporters say the NSA is serving as a key bulwark against foreign terrorists and that it would be reckless to constrain the agency's mission. The NSA says it is scrupulously following all applicable laws and that it keeps Congress fully informed of its activities.
According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called "transactional" data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns. Then they spit out leads to be explored by counterterrorism programs across the U.S. government, such as the NSA's own Terrorist Surveillance Program, formed to intercept phone calls and emails between the U.S. and overseas without a judge's approval when a link to al Qaeda is suspected.
The NSA's enterprise involves a cluster of powerful intelligence-gathering programs, all of which sparked civil-liberties complaints when they came to light. They include a Federal Bureau of Investigation program to track telecommunications data once known as Carnivore, now called the Digital Collection System, and a U.S. arrangement with the world's main international banking clearinghouse to track money movements.
The effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called "black programs" whose existence is undisclosed, the current and former officials say. Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach. Among them, current and former intelligence officials say, is a longstanding Treasury Department program to collect individual financial data including wire transfers and credit-card transactions.
It isn't clear how many of the different kinds of data are combined and analyzed together in one database by the NSA. An intelligence official said the agency's work links to about a dozen antiterror programs in all.
A number of NSA employees have expressed concerns that the agency may be overstepping its authority by veering into domestic surveillance. And the constitutional question of whether the government can examine such a large array of information without violating an individual's reasonable expectation of privacy "has never really been resolved," said Suzanne Spaulding, a national-security lawyer who has worked for both parties on Capitol Hill.
NSA officials say the agency's own investigations remain focused only on foreign threats, but it's increasingly difficult to distinguish between domestic and international communications in a digital era, so they need to sweep up more information.
In response to the Sept. 11 attacks, then NSA-chief Gen. Michael Hayden has said he used his authority to expand the NSA's capabilities under a 1981 executive order governing the agency. Another presidential order issued shortly after the attacks, the text of which is classified, opened the door for the NSA to incorporate more domestic data in its searches, one senior intelligence official said.
The NSA "strictly follows laws and regulations designed to preserve every American's privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution," agency spokeswoman Judith Emmel said in a statement, referring to the protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA in conjunction with the Pentagon, added in a statement that intelligence agencies operate "within an extensive legal and policy framework" and inform Congress of their activities "as required by the law." It pointed out that the 9/11 Commission recommended in 2004 that intelligence agencies analyze "all relevant sources of information" and share their databases.
Two former officials familiar with the data-sifting efforts said they work by starting with some sort of lead, like a phone number or Internet address. In partnership with the FBI, the systems then can track all domestic and foreign transactions of people associated with that item -- and then the people who associated with them, and so on, casting a gradually wider net. An intelligence official described more of a rapid-response effect: If a person suspected of terrorist connections is believed to be in a U.S. city -- for instance, Detroit, a community with a high concentration of Muslim Americans -- the government's spy systems may be directed to collect and analyze all electronic communications into and out of the city.
The haul can include records of phone calls, email headers and destinations, data on financial transactions and records of Internet browsing. The system also would collect information about other people, including those in the U.S., who communicated with people in Detroit.
The information doesn't generally include the contents of conversations or emails. But it can give such transactional information as a cellphone's location, whom a person is calling, and what Web sites he or she is visiting. For an email, the data haul can include the identities of the sender and recipient and the subject line, but not the content of the message.
Intelligence agencies have used administrative subpoenas issued by the FBI -- which don't need a judge's signature -- to collect and analyze such data, current and former intelligence officials said. If that data provided "reasonable suspicion" that a person, whether foreign or from the U.S., was linked to al Qaeda, intelligence officers could eavesdrop under the NSA's Terrorist Surveillance Program.
The White House wants to give companies that assist government surveillance immunity from lawsuits alleging an invasion of privacy, but Democrats in Congress have been blocking it. The Terrorist Surveillance Program has spurred 38 lawsuits against companies. Current and former intelligence officials say telecom companies' concern comes chiefly because they are giving the government unlimited access to a copy of the flow of communications, through a network of switches at U.S. telecommunications hubs that duplicate all the data running through it. It isn't clear whether the government or telecom companies control the switches, but companies process some of the data for the NSA, the current and former officials say.
An Intelligence Warehouse
- Domestic agencies, including the departments of Justice, Homeland Security and Treasury, send information obtained under their surveillance programs to the National Security Agency.
- The NSA, whose charter limits it to foreign spy activities, collects and analyzes this information with sophisticated software systems, where it sifts for patterns that could be related to a terror suspect or high risk area.
- The NSA feeds its findings into the effort the administration calls the Terrorist Surveillance Program and shares some of that information with other U.S. security agencies.
On Friday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee released a letter warning colleagues to look more deeply into how telecommunications data are being accessed, citing an allegation by the head of a New York-based computer security firm that a wireless carrier that hired him was giving unfettered access to data to an entity called "Quantico Circuit." Quantico is a Marine base that houses the FBI Academy; senior FBI official Anthony DiClemente said the bureau "does not have 'unfettered access' to any communication provider's network."
The political debate over the telecom information comes as intelligence agencies seek to change traditional definitions of how to balance privacy rights against investigative needs. Donald Kerr, the deputy director of national intelligence, told a conference of intelligence officials in October that the government needs new rules. Since many people routinely post details of their lives on social-networking sites such as MySpace, he said, their identity shouldn't need the same protection as in the past. Instead, only their "essential privacy," or "what they would wish to protect about their lives and affairs," should be veiled, he said, without providing examples.
The NSA uses its own high-powered version of social-network analysis to search for possible new patterns and links to terrorism. The Pentagon's experimental Total Information Awareness program, later renamed Terrorism Information Awareness, was an early research effort on the same concept, designed to bring together and analyze as much and as many varied kinds of data as possible. Congress eliminated funding for the program in 2003 before it began operating. But it permitted some of the research to continue and TIA technology to be used for foreign surveillance.
Some of it was shifted to the NSA -- which also is funded by the Pentagon -- and put in the so-called black budget, where it would receive less scrutiny and bolster other data-sifting efforts, current and former intelligence officials said. "When it got taken apart, it didn't get thrown away," says a former top government official familiar with the TIA program.
Two current officials also said the NSA's current combination of programs now largely mirrors the former TIA project. But the NSA offers less privacy protection. TIA developers researched ways to limit the use of the system for broad searches of individuals' data, such as requiring intelligence officers to get leads from other sources first. The NSA effort lacks those controls, as well as controls that it developed in the 1990s for an earlier data-sweeping attempt.
Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and member of the Senate Intelligence Committee who led the charge to kill TIA, says "the administration is trying to bring as much of the philosophy of operation Total Information Awareness as it can into the programs they're using today." The issue has been overshadowed by the fight over telecoms' immunity, he said. "There's not been as much discussion in the Congress as there ought to be."
But Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri, the ranking Republican on the committee, said by email his committee colleagues have had "ample opportunity for debate" behind closed doors and that each intelligence program has specific legal authorization and oversight. He cautioned against seeing a group of intelligence programs as "a mythical 'big brother' program," adding, "that's not what is happening today."
READ THE RULING
While the Fourth Amendment guarantees "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures," the legality of data-sweeping relies on the government's interpretation of a 1979 Supreme Court ruling allowing records of phone calls -- but not actual conversations -- to be collected without a warrant. Read the ruling.
The legality of data-sweeping relies largely on the government's interpretation of a 1979 Supreme Court ruling allowing records of phone calls -- but not actual conversations -- to be collected without a judge issuing a warrant. Multiple laws require a court order for so-called "transactional'" records of electronic communications, but the 2001 Patriot Act lowered the standard for such an order in some cases, and in others made records accessible using FBI administrative subpoenas called "national security letters."
(Read the ruling. <http://supreme.justia.com/us/442/735/case.html> 2 )
A debate is brewing among legal and technology scholars over whether there should be privacy protections when a wide variety of transactional data are brought together to paint what is essentially a profile of an individual's behavior. "You know everything I'm doing, you know what happened, and you haven't listened to any of the contents" of the communications, said Susan Landau, co-author of a book on electronic privacy and a senior engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. "Transactional information is remarkably revelatory."
Ms. Spaulding, the national-security lawyer, said it's "extremely questionable" to assume Americans don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy for data such as the subject-header of an email or a Web address from an Internet search, because those are more like the content of a communication than a phone number. "These are questions that require discussion and debate," she said. "This is one of the problems with doing it all in secret."
Gen. Hayden, the former NSA chief and now Central Intelligence Agency director, in January 2006 publicly defended the activities of the Terrorist Surveillance Program after it was disclosed by the New York Times. He said it was "not a driftnet over Lackawanna or Fremont or Dearborn, grabbing all communications and then sifting them out." Rather, he said, it was carefully targeted at terrorists. However, some intelligence officials now say the broader NSA effort amounts to a driftnet. A portion of the activity, the NSA's access to domestic phone records, was disclosed by a USA Today article in 2006.
The NSA, which President Truman created in 1952 through a classified presidential order to be America's ears abroad, has for decades been the country's largest and most secretive intelligence agency. The order confined NSA spying to "foreign governments," and during the Cold War the NSA developed a reputation as the world's premier code-breaking operation. But in the 1970s, the NSA and other intelligence agencies were found to be using their spy tools to monitor Americans for political purposes. That led to the original FISA legislation in 1978, which included an explicit ban on the NSA eavesdropping in the U.S. without a warrant.
Big advances in telecommunications and database technology led to unprecedented data-collection efforts in the 1990s. One was the FBI's Carnivore program, which raised fears when it was in disclosed in 2000 that it might collect telecommunications information about law-abiding individuals. But the ground shifted after 9/11. Requests for analysis of any data that might hint at terrorist activity flooded from the White House and other agencies into NSA's Fort Meade, Md., headquarters outside Washington, D.C., one former NSA official recalls. At the time, "We're scrambling, trying to find any piece of data we can to find the answers," the official said.
The 2002 congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks criticized the NSA for holding back information, which NSA officials said they were doing to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens. "NSA did not want to be perceived as targeting individuals in the United States" and considered such surveillance the FBI's job, the inquiry concluded.
The NSA quietly redefined its role. Joint FBI-NSA projects "expanded exponentially," said Jack Cloonan, a longtime FBI veteran who investigated al Qaeda. He pointed to national-security letter requests: They rose from 8,500 in 2000 to 47,000 in 2005, according to a Justice Department inspector general's report last year. It also said the letters permitted the potentially illegal collection of thousands of records of people in the U.S. from 2003-05. Last Wednesday, FBI Director Robert Mueller said the bureau had found additional instances in 2006.
It isn't known how many Americans' data have been swept into the NSA's systems. The Treasury, for instance, built its database "to look at all the world's financial transactions" and gave the NSA access to it about 15 years ago, said a former NSA official. The data include domestic and international money flows between bank accounts and credit-card information, according to current and former intelligence officials.
The NSA receives from Treasury weekly batches of this data and adds it to a database at its headquarters. Prior to 9/11, the database was used to pursue specific leads, but afterward, the effort was expanded to hunt for suspicious patterns.
Through the Treasury, the NSA also can access the database of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or Swift, the Belgium-based clearinghouse for records of international transactions between financial institutions, current and former officials said. The U.S. acknowledged in 2006 that the CIA and Treasury had access to Swift's database, but said the NSA's Terrorism Surveillance Program was separate and that the NSA provided only "technical assistance." A Treasury spokesman said the agency had no comment.
Through the Department of Homeland Security, airline passenger data also are accessed and analyzed for suspicious patterns, such as five unrelated people who repeatedly fly together, current and former intelligence officials said. Homeland Security shares information with other agencies only "on a limited basis," spokesman Russ Knocke said.
NSA gets access to the flow of data from telecommunications switches through the FBI, according to current and former officials. It also has a partnership with FBI's Digital Collection system, providing access to Internet providers and other companies. The existence of a shadow hub to copy information about AT&T Corp. telecommunications in San Francisco is alleged in a lawsuit against AT&T filed by the civil-liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, based on documents provided by a former AT&T official. In that lawsuit, a former technology adviser to the Federal Communications Commission says in a sworn declaration that there could be 15 to 20 such operations around the country. Current and former intelligence officials confirmed a domestic network of hubs, but didn't know the number. "As a matter of policy and law, we can not discuss matters that are classified," said FBI spokesman John Miller.
The budget for the NSA's data-sifting effort is classified, but one official estimated it surpasses $1 billion. The FBI is requesting to nearly double the budget for the Digital Collection System in 2009, compared with last year, requesting $42 million. "Not only do demands for information continue to increase, but also the requirement to facilitate information sharing does," says a budget justification document, noting an "expansion of electronic surveillance activity in frequency, sophistication, and linguistic needs."
*Write to *Siobhan Gorman at <siobhan.gorman@wsj.com> 3
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By Kevin Poulsen
March 06, 2008 | 8:15:00 PM
URL: <http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/03/whistleblower-f.html>
A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier's systems, exposing customers' voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance, according to a computer security consultant who says he worked for the carrier in late 2003.
"What I thought was alarming is how this carrier ended up essentially allowing a third party outside their organization to have unfettered access to their environment," Babak Pasdar, now CEO of New York-based Bat Blue told THREAT LEVEL. "I wanted to put some access controls around it; they vehemently denied it. And when I wanted to put some logging around it, they denied that."
Pasdar won't name the wireless carrier in question, but his claims are nearly identical to unsourced allegations made in a federal lawsuit filed in 2006 against four phone companies and the U.S. government for alleged privacy violations. That suit names Verizon Wireless as the culprit.
Pasdar has executed a seven-page affidavit for the nonprofit Government Accountability Project in Washington, which on Tuesday began circulating the document (.pdf), along with talking points (.doc), to congressional staffers hashing out a Republican proposal to grant retroactive legal immunity to phone companies who cooperated in the warrantless wiretapping of Americans.
<http://www.whistleblower.org/template/index.cfm>
<http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/files/Affidavit-BP-Final.pdf>
<http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/files/Wiretapping-TalkingPoints-bp-r5.doc>
According to his affidavit, Pasdar tumbled to the surveillance superhighway in September 2003, when he led a "Rapid Deployment" team hired to revamp security on the carrier's internal network. He noticed that the carrier's officials got squirrelly when he asked about a mysterious "Quantico Circuit" -- a 45 megabit/second DS-3 line linking its most sensitive network to an unnamed third party.
Quantico, Virginia, is home to a Marine base. But perhaps more relevantly, it's also the center of the FBI's electronic surveillance operations.
"The circuit was tied to the organization's core network," Pasdar writes in his affidavit. "It had access to the billing system, text messaging, fraud detection, web site, and pretty much all the systems in the data center without apparent restrictions."
The 2006 lawsuit (.pdf), which is suspended pending an appeals court ruling, describes a similar arrangement, naming Verizon.
<http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/files/groundbreakerlawsuit.pdf>
Because the data center was a clearing house for all Verizon Wireless calls, the transmission line provided the Quantico recipient direct access to all content and all information concerning the origin and termination of telephone calls placed on the Verizon Wireless network as well as the actual content of calls.
The transmission line was unprotected by any firewall and would have enabled the recipient on the Quantico end to have unfettered access to Verizon Wireless customer records, data and information. Any customer databases, records and information could be downloaded from this center.
That doesn't mean Pasdar's affidavit confirms the claims in the lawsuit. He acknowledges speaking with the attorneys on that lawsuit before it was filed, so he may be the source in that complaint as well. But he insists he did not name Verizon or any other phone company to the lawyers.
"I don't know if I have a smoking gun, but I'm certainly fairly confident in what I saw and I'm convinced it was being leveraged in a less than forthright and upfront manner," Pasdar says.
Verizon spokesman Peter Thonis says he can't confirm or deny a Quantico arrangement, or comment on whether Pasdar did contract work for the company.
"What you're talking about sounds as if it would be classified and involving national security, so I wouldn't be able to find out the facts," Thonis writes in an e-mail.
Postscript: In response to some of the comments here and elsewhere: No, it's not CALEA. CALEA requires phone companies to give the FBI real time access to call content and call detail information on specific targets when presented with a warrant. It does not oblige them to give the FBI or anyone else direct unmonitored access to switches, billing systems or databases.
For more on the FBI's CALEA network, check out Ryan's article on the subject from last year.
<http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2007/08/wiretap?currentPage=all>
Update: Democratic leaders in the House are taking Pasdar's claims seriously. John Dingell, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce committee, wrote a Dear Colleague letter (.pdf) today, addressing the issue.
<http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/files/commerce_letter.pdf>
Mr. Pasdar's allegations are not new to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, but our attempts to verify and investigate them further have been blocked at every turn by the Administration. Moreover, the whistleblower's allegations echo those in an affidavit filed by Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against AT&T. ...
Because legislators should not vote before they have sufficient facts, we continue to insist that all House Members be given access to the necessary information, including the relevant documents underlying this matter, to make an informed decision on their vote. After reviewing the documentation and these latest allegations, Members should be given adequate time to properly evaluate the separate question of retroactive immunity."
Image: FBI.gov
See Also:
Qwest CEO Not Alone in Alleging NSA Started Domestic Phone Record Program 7 Months Before 9/11
Senator Denies AT&T, Verizon Cash Bought Spying Immunity Vote
Verizon and Government Seek Dismissal of Data-Mining Programs on Secrecy and Free Speech Grounds
Legally Questionable FBI Requests for Calling Circle Info More Widespread than Previously Known
FBI Confirms Contracts with AT&T, Verizon and MCI
AT&T, Verizon: We Obeyed FBI "Emergency" Requests - 739 of Them
Verizon: Suing Us For Turning Over Customer Call Records Violates Our Free Speech Rights
Related stories:
Whistleblower: Cellular carrier giving FBI unfettered access
"Providing any third party with unfettered network access to such a broad spectrum of sensitive consumer data would seem to constitute a very clear violation of the Communications Act, which broadly forbids disclosure of such information. The lack of access controls and logging undermines safeguards against abuse by enabling the recipient of the data to operate entirely outside the realm of accountability. This is particularly disturbing if the recipient of the Quantico Circuit is the FBI, because the agency has a long history of intelligence abuses and has been found to have a serious lack of meaningful internal oversight."
Unpaid bills lead phone companies to hang up on FBI wiretaps
ISP blunder exposes entire domain's worth of e-mail to FBI
Data mining at the FBI: digging for terrorists, insurance scammers, and identity thieves
Telecom Donations Rankling the GOP
March 3, 2008 2:42 pm
URL: <http://thinkprogress.org/2008/03/03/communications-trade-group-opposes-retroactive-immunity/>
In a letter to Congress late last week, the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) Ñ which represents groups such as Google and Microsoft - said that it "strongly" opposes retroactive immunity for firms that cooperated with the administrationÕs warrantless wiretapping. CCIA President and CEO Edward Black writes:
ToCCCIA dismisses with contempt the manufactured hysteria that industry will not aid the United States Government when the law is clear. As a representative of industry, I find that suggestion insulting. To imply that our industry would refuse assistance under established law is an affront to the civic integrity of businesses that have consistently cooperated unquestioningly with legal requests for information. This also conflates the separate questions of blanket retroactive immunity for violations of law, and prospective immunity, the latter of which we strongly support.
February 21, 2008 11:59 am
URL: <http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/21/economic-indicators-open/>
On Feb. 13, ThinkProgress reported that facing a faltering U.S. economy, the Bush administration was attempting to hide economic data by shutting down the award-winning website EconomicIndicators.gov.
<http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/13/economic-indicators/>
As Forbes explained when it awarded the site one of its "Best of the Web awards, Economic Indicators is a "necessary" portal because it provides easy access to aggregated economic data across government agencies. More significantly, people can sign up to receive e-mails as soon as new data becomes available.
Yet recently, the Bush administration announced the site would be shut down on March 1 because of "budgetary constraints":
In addition to pressure from the netroots, the Commerce Department heard objections from tech experts and lawmakers. Yesterday, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) wrote a letter to Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez, pressing him to keep Economic Indicators open.
ThinkProgress spoke with a Commerce Department spokesman today who said, "We heard from the users of the website, and they liked being able to receive the e-mails with the news releases." A new announcement on the Economic Indicators notes that the "decision has been made to continue the site and improve its functionality":
Many users also subscribe to the site and have economic indicators and the full releases emailed to them. There are a number of technical challenges with this aspect of the EI site - the service often backs up and fails because of bandwidth issues, releases sometimes take hours to reach subscribers, and some subscribers receive multiple copies of the releases while others get none at all. The cost of maintaining the site is almost entirely attributable to operating this feature.
To address these concerns we will redesign the subscription feature of economicindicators.gov. The new system, which will remain free of charge, will email an abstract and link so that users can access the full release on the source website. We believe the cost of rewriting the system will, in the long-run, be less than continuing to run the existing system. The new subscription service will be operational in the next few months.
Originally when the agency announced the site's closure, it offered users "a free quarterly subscription to STAT-USA¨/Internetª" instead. Once this temporary subscription ran out, however, the public would have been forced to pay a fee.
Glad to see that the Bush administration found a few dollars in its record $3.1 trillion FY 09 budget to keep the site running.
UPDATE: Schumer responds to the Department's announcement:
ToCThe administration took the right step in keeping this important economic indicators website and email alerts free and open to the public. This is no time to pull back on the free flow of critical information about our quick-changing economy, and I'm glad the administration agrees that shutting down this website would be penny wise, but pound foolish.
March 1, 2008 4:50 pm
URL: <http://thinkprogress.org/2008/03/01/judge-reverses-order-disabling-wikileaks/>
Yesterday, [US district judge Jeffrey White] withdrew his Feb. 15 order disabling Wikileaks.org, "a Web site that allows the anonymous posting of documents to discourage unethical behavior in governments and corporations." The judge acknowledged that his earlier ruling "posed serious First Amendment questions and might constitute unjustified prior restraint."
Related link:
Legal aid for whistle-blower site
ToC
World's largest software supplier fined for charging rivals too much to make compatible computer programs.
February 27 2008: 6:03 AM EST
URL: <http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/27/technology/eu_microsoft.ap/index.htm?postversion=2008022706?cnn=yes>
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- The European Union fined Microsoft Corp. a record $1.3 billion on Wednesday for charging rivals too much for software information.
EU regulators said the company charged "unreasonable prices" until last October to software developers who wanted to make products compatible with the Windows desktop operating system.
Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) immediately said that these fines were about past issues that have been resolved and the company was now working under new principles to make its products more open.
The fine is the largest ever for a single company and the first time the EU has penalized a business for failing to obey an antitrust order.
The penalty far outweighs a a March 2004 decision that fined Microsoft $613 million and ordered it to share communications information with rivals within 120 days, taking an appeal to an EU court that it lost last September.
The EU alleged that Microsoft withheld crucial interoperability information for desktop PC software - where it is the world's leading supplier - to squeeze into a new market and damage rivals that make programs for workgroup servers that help office computers connect to each other and to printers and faxes.
The company delayed complying with the EU order for three years, the EU said, only making changes on Oct. 22 to the patent licenses it charges companies that need data to help them make software that works with Microsoft.
Microsoft had initially set a royalty rate of 3.87% of a licensee's product revenues for patents and demanded that companies looking for communication information - which it said was highly secret - pay 2.98% of their products' revenues.
The EU complained last March that these rates were unfair. Under threat of fines, Microsoft two months later reduced the patent rate to 0.7% and the information license to 0.5% - but only in Europe, leaving the worldwide rates unchanged.
The EU's Court of First Instance ruling that upheld regulators' views changed the company's mind again in October when it offered a new license for interoperability information for a flat fee of $14,000 and an optional worldwide patent license for a reduced royalty of 0.4%. To top of page
ToC
Producer - Stevie Converse
Asst. Producer - Candace Clement
Media Minutes, January 25, 2008
Text: <http://www.freepress.net/mediaminutes/transcripts/media_minutes_2-22-08_transcript.doc>
Audio: <http://www.freepress.net/mediaminutes/archive/MM_02_22_08.mp3>
There are vast portions of the public airwaves in between the broadcast channels on your TV dial. Most of this valuable spectrum -- 40 to 80 percent in major metropolitan areas -- remains empty.
These unused frequencies are called "white spaces," and several public interest groups are pressuring the Federal Communications Commission to set them free.
Sascha Meinrath, Research Director of the Wireless Future Program at the New America Foundation, says that this spectrum could be used for Internet access and a variety of new devices that would allow anything from local micro broadcasting to audio and video streaming and voice over Internet phones.
But there are those who want to keep the white spaces closed.
Sascha Meinrath: The main opponents of opening up the public airwaves to the general public are the National Association of Broadcasters and several manufacturers of wireless microphones. And the reason why they're against this is because they want to be able to utilize and sort of capture all of this spectrum for their own uses.
If the FCC were to open the spectrum up to unlicensed devices, however, it could dramatically lower the cost of broadband services while increasing their capabilities. That makes broadcasters nervous.
Meinrath: It creates this two-way flow of information that is antithetical to this notion of "I control the airwaves, you get what I decide to give you."
White space devices are a sign that the end may be near for the broadcast era, says Meinrath.
Meinrath: The broadcast era has served us very well for a very long time. But it's based on notions of technology and capacities that are 70 years old and don't take into account things like computer technology and cognitive radios and smarter digital communications. White space devices are saying we can do far better, make far more efficient use of our public airwaves. But it does mean that we have to rethink these business models and these broadcast models that are incredibly antiquated, given today's technology.
For more information about white spaces, go to <http://www.spectrumpolicy.org> or <http://www.freepress.net/spectrum>.
Related Links:
"White Space Device" Operations on the TV Band and the Myth of Harmful Interference
Congressman Nadler, You've Been Had
How to Give America Wireless Broadband for Christmas 2009
ToC
Producer - Stevie Converse
Asst. Producer - Candace Clement
Media Minutes, January 25, 2008
Text: <http://www.freepress.net/mediaminutes/transcripts/media_minutes_2-22-08_transcript.doc>
Audio: <http://www.freepress.net/mediaminutes/archive/MM_02_22_08.mp3>
Japan has the fastest boadband speeds and the lowest cost per megabit per second of all countries surveyed, according to a recent report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Japan enjoys cost per megabit over four times lower than that of the United States.
Related Link:
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development
ToC
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 26, @06:04PM
from the asleep-in-the-seats dept.
URL: <http://politics.slashdot.org/politics/08/02/26/2158205.shtml>
The Internet Politics
alphadogg notes a story over at portfolio.com claiming, and presenting evidence, that Comcast paid people off the street to take up room at yesterday's FCC hearing in Massachusetts. Comcast acknowledges that it paid people to hold places in line for its employees. But Save The Internet claims that people were bussed in by Comcast and then took up almost all available seats in the meeting room 90 minutes before the meeting opened, blocking scores of interested people from attending. Such tactics are not unheard of in Washington DC, but how appropriate are they in a regional meeting on a college campus?
<http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/top-5/2008/02/26/Comcast-FCC-Hearing-Strategy>
<http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/02/26/0057221.shtml?tid=266>
<http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/2008/02/25/comcast-blocking-first-the-internet-now-the-public/>
Comcast acknowledges that it hired people to take up room at an F.C.C. hearing into its practices.
by Sam Gustin Feb 26 2008
URL: <http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/top-5/2008/02/26/Comcast-FCC-Hearing-Strategy>
How big are the stakes in the so-called network neutrality debate now raging before Congress and federal regulators?
Consider this: One side in the debate actually went to the trouble of hiring people off the street to pack a Federal Communications Commission meeting yesterdayÑand effectively keep some of its opponents out of the room.
<http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/daily-brief/2008/02/25/fcc-warns-comcast-over-web-blocking>
Broadband giant ComcastÑthe subject of the F.C.C. hearing on network neutrality at the Harvard Law School, in Cambridge, Massachusetts - acknowledged that it did exactly that.
Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury said that the company paid some people to arrive early and hold places in the queue for local Comcast employees who wanted to attend the hearing.
Some of those placeholders, however, did more than wait in line: They filled many of the seats at the meeting, according to eyewitnesses. As a result, scores of Comcast critics and other members of the public were denied entry because the room filled up well before the beginning of the hearing.
Khoury said that the company didn't intend to block anyone from attending the hearing. "Comcast informed our local employees about the hearing and invited them to attend," she said. "Some employees did attend, along with many members of the general public."
That was not enough to satisfy Comcast's critics.
Craig Aaron, a spokesman for Free Press, one of the groups that filed the complaint against Comcast, denounced the company's tactics.
"The sad thing about this is that literally hundreds of people who were not paid to stand in line, or paid by their employer to attend, were prevented from even entering the building," Aaron said.
Such tactics are not unheard of at congressional hearings in Washington, D.C., but Comcast's critics said that they were inappropriate for a public hearing on a college campus.
Free Press campaign director Timothy Karr said that he showed up at the hearing 90 minutes early, only to find the room "75 percent full."
"The only reason these people were in the room, it seemed to me, was to keep seats warm and exclude others," Karr said.
Some audience members appeared to sleep through the proceedings, according to photos taken during the hearing. Other applauded enthusiastically when Comcast executive vice president David L. Cohen delivered key points in his presentation.
A number of people in the audience wore yellow highlighter marking pens on their shirts or jackets; Karr said that was to identify them to Comcast employees coordinating the company's appearance at the event. Khoury acknowledged that Comcast coordinated the employees that it brought to the hearing.
The revelation that Comcast paid nonemployees to stand in line at the hearing comes against the backdrop of a bitter public relations war between Comcast and its critics, including the public interest groups Free Press and Public Knowledge.
"For the past week, Free Press has engaged in a much more extensive campaign to lobby people to attend the hearing on its behalf," Khoury said.
The hearing was held to address complaints leveled by Free Press, Public Knowledge, the web-video company Vuze, and others, that Comcast is trying to stifle competition by blocking the delivery of rival video-on-demand services over its cable system.
For weeks, Free Press had been trying to organize supporters to attend the hearing by issuing press releases and circulating flyers advertising the event.
Unlike Comcast, Free Press did not pay anyone to stand in line, Aaron said, nor did it provide transportation to any of its supporters.
<http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/2008/02/25/listen-to-fcc-hearing-on-internets-future/>
ToC
Producer - Stevie Converse
Asst. Producer - Candace Clement
Media Minutes, February 29, 2008
Text: <http://www.freepress.net/mediaminutes/transcripts/mm_02_29_08_script.doc>
Audio: <http://www.freepress.net/mediaminutes/archive/MM_2_29_08.mp3>
All five FCC commissioners ventured outside the beltway to Harvard University Law School on Monday, where they held a hearing to investigate allegations that Comcast has been blocking access to lawful content peer-to-peer file-sharing sites.
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin convened the meeting after a complaint by Free Press that Comcast was interfering with BitTorrent -- a popular application that allows users to quickly upload and download high-quality video and other large files.
Kevin Martin: While networks may have legitimate network management issues and practices, they obviously cannot operate and be prohibited from taking some reasonable steps to manage the traffic on their network. But that does not mean that they can arbitrarily block access to particular applications or services.
Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen claimed Comcast was merely managing traffic on its network.
David Cohen: Comcast does not block any Web site, application or Web protocol, including peer-to-peer services.
But most of the other panelists, which included legal scholars, technology experts, engineers and public interest advocates, strongly disagreed with him. Marvin Ammori of Free Press:
Marvin Ammori: You can believe Comcast, which denied to the press over and over that they were interfering or degrading with BitTorrent. Or you could believe the Associated Press and the EFF, which ran studies showing that Comcast was using reset packets which terminates connections Ð it doesn't just delay them.
And Columbia Law School professor Timothy Wu:
Timothy Wu: Let me translate what he just said: Comcast is blocking BitTorrent, and that's the end of the story.
For more information about the hearing, go to SavetheInternet.com/=boston
ToC
Producer: Stevie Converse
Media Minutes, February 29, 2008
Text: <http://www.freepress.net/mediaminutes/transcripts/mm_02_29_08_script.doc>
Audio: <http://www.freepress.net/mediaminutes/archive/MM_2_29_08.mp3>
Media Minutes traveled to Boston on Monday for the FCC's public hearing on Internet issues. With the room nearly full two hours before the scheduled start, I set up my recorder and microphone and started interviewing the crowd. I expected some strong, opinionated comments on the Net Neutrality issue. But instead of impassioned speeches about Internet freedom or free markets, I was met with blank stares and clearly rehearsed answers.
(Audience Member) - Just, just trying to get more information.
(Audience Member) - I'm here because I'm interested in the topic.
(Audience Member) - I'm here because I'm interested in the topic.
I made my way to the front row. But the comments there were even more puzzling.
(Converse) - I'm wondering why you're here today?
(Audience Member) - Just here to see the hearing.
(Converse) - Do you have any opinions about Net Neutrality?
(same Audience Member) - No comment, thank you...(Audience Member) - I'm with him, we're jus here to just observe today and take it all in...
(Audience Member) - I'm with the same group.
(Converse) - Did you come as a group?
(same Audience Member) - Well not as a group, as individuals. But we're on the same ideas. Just wanna see what's gonna go - happen...(Audience Member) - Umm, I don't have any comments on Net Neutrality. I'm here to find out more about it...
(Converse) - What interests you about it, I mean?
(Audience Member) - Well, the overall ...
(Converse) - What made you come here of all the things you could do today?
(same Audience Member) - I don't know. I had some free time.
(Converse) - How did you hear about it?
(same Audience Member) - Umm, I heard about it through somebody - the person's downstairs...(Converse) - How about Net Neutrality -; do you have any comment on that?
(Audience Member) - No.
(Converse) - What about Comcast blocking Internet access to BitTorrent? Do you have any comment on that?
(Audience Member) - No... I'm here just to learn about Micro, Myro - is that it? what it is?...(Audience Member) - Honestly, I'm just getting paid to hold somebody's seat. I don't even know what's going on.
It turns out, Comcast had paid people to fill up the auditorium - ostensibly to save seats for the company executives. But while the seat-warmers continued to sit through the first panel, others were left out in the cold. Over 100 people were turned away by police guarding the door. I talked to them as well.
[Outside the event]
(Non-Audience Member) - I'm part of the Participatory Culture Foundation. We're a very small non-profit that works on a free and open-source Internet TV application. Comcast right now is filtering BitTorrent, which is a big problem for people who are using our system ...
(Non-Audience Member) - I'm here because I'm real interested to see what the FCC has to say about Network Neutrality, and I'm writing a thesis on it, so it's really interesting to me...
(Non-Audience Member) - I'm a Nieman fellow at Harvard this year. In my other life I work for National Public Radio and I'm interested in actually getting into this hearing to see exactly how the proceedings go and where the discussion goes with regard to the Internet and Net Neutrality...
(Non-Audience Member) - Well, we are here with Project Think Different, which is a media arts organization. We heavily use the Internet. We want to make sure we continue to have that freedom. And after all, the Internet, in communications, fair access to media is the cornerstone to democracy, and a healthy democracy. And I want to make sure that continues.
Comcast had to hire an audience to applaud its executives. But these underhanded tactics kept the public on the outside looking in. Just imagine what they'll do if they get their hands on the Internet.
Related Links:
Allegations Fly in FCC Hearing Aftermath
Comcast Astroturfs the Old-Fashioned Way
Comcast Blocking: First the Internet -- Now the Public
FCC Meeting Announcement
SaveTheInternet.com Event -- Boston Hearing
ToC
Firefox 3.0 Beta 4 is 53% faster than Opera 9.5 beta, twice as fast as Safari and three times faster than IE7 on the SunSpider benchmark, which tests JavaScript performance.
<http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2008/02/firefox-3-ultimate-feature-performance/>
This looks very promising!
[Editor's Note: For further details, see the article "Firefox 3 Beta 4 reveals difference in design philosophy to IE8" in PC Section below.]
ToC
Technique use short pulses of light called attosecond pulses
updated 11:30 a.m. CT, Mon., Feb. 25, 2008
URL: <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23336318/>
Scientists have filmed an electron in motion for the first time, using a new technique that will allow researchers to study the tiny particle's movements directly.
Previously it was impossible to photograph electrons because of their extreme speediness, so scientists had to rely on more indirect methods. These methods could only measure the effect of an electron's movement, whereas the new technique can capture the entire event.
Extremely short flashes of light are necessary to capture an electron in motion. A technology developed within the last few years can generate short pulses of intense laser light, called attosecond pulses, to get the job done.
"It takes about 150 attoseconds for an electron to circle the nucleus of an atom. An attosecond is 10-18 seconds long, or, expressed in another way: an attosecond is related to a second as a second is related to the age of the universe," said Johan Mauritsson of Lund University in Sweden.
Using another laser, scientists can guide the motion of the electron to capture a collision between an electron and an atom on film.
The length of the film Mauritsson and his colleagues made corresponds to a single oscillation of a wave of light. The speed of the event has been slowed down for human eyes. The results are detailed in the latest issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.
Mauritsson says the technique could also be used to study what happens in an atom when an electron leaves its shell.
ToC
February 29, 2008
Text: <http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2008/02/29/03>
Audio: <http://audio.wnyc.org/otm/otm022908c.mp3>
If you still get your TV from over-the-air analog broadcast, you'll receive only static in less than a year - that is, unless you get a new TV or a converter box. The Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro says there's widespread confusion even though it's not that complicated.
[Editor's Note: For more on the story, click on the links provided above.]
Click here to get a coupon for $40 off a digital converter.
<https://www.dtv2009.gov/ApplyCoupon.aspx>
ToC
By Kitty Bennett
March 6, 2008, 3:50 pm
URL: <http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/06/rnc-snaps-up-domain-names/>
Cannotrustclinton.com? clintonisbad.com? At least 25 domain names related to Hillary Rodham Clinton have links to the Republican National Committee: the names were either registered by the R.N.C. last year or showed up on servers the committee uses. Half a dozen seemed to guess at Mrs. Clinton's eventual running mate, like clintonomalley.com, referring to Gov. Martin O'Malley of Maryland.
The day after Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses, the R.N.C. snapped up at least 20 domains related to his candidacy. Some of them may signal the party's future strategy: baracknotready.com and norealexperience.com. The party has also begun preemptively registering domains that could be used to attack John McCain, like mccainamigos.com, voteagainstmccain.com, flipflopmccain.com and hatemccain.com (ihatemccain.com was taken.)
The Democratic Party and the campaigns have shown little of the verve and creativity of the R.N.C. The Obama campaign registered desperatehillaryattacks.com in December. The Clinton campaign registered votingpresent.com two days later, an apparent reference to Mr. Obama's votes as a member of the Illinois legislature. The party has been focused more on the national convention, registering variations of denverdemconvention08.com in February, but so far apparently no domains related to Mr. McCain.
The election has "triggered an avalanche of cybersquatter activity," according to NetNames, a domain name management service. Speculators have registered nearly 2,000 domain names related to presidential candidates as of last week. Names related to Mrs. Clinton's candidacy made up over half of the registrations, followed by Mr. Obama with 635 and Mr. McCain with 269.
Domains registered by the R.N.C . or on servers used by the committee:
2007:
calculatingclinton.com
canttrustclinton.com
clintonbabbit.com
clintoncleland.com
clintoncohen.com
clintonisbad.com
clintoniscorrupt.com
clintoniswrong.com
clintonkerrey.com
clintonlibrarycard.com
clintonlibraryresolution.com
clintonomalley.com
clintonsalazar.com
clintonschweitzer.com
clintontruthwatch.com
hillaryiswrong.com
hillarymythfact.com
hillaryrecords.com
hillaryspendometer.com
hillarytaxplan.com
hillarytruthsquad.com
hopelesshillary.com
outwithhillary.com
thetwohillarys.com
2008:
amateurobama.com
barackisliberal.com
barackiswrong.com
baracknotready.com
barackobamanotready.com
barackobamatheliberal.com
baracktheamateur.com
barackthebeginner.com
fauxbama.org
hesnotready.com
meetbarackobama.com
norealexperience.com
nowecannot.com
nowecannot.net
nowecannot.org
obamaisliberal.com
obamaiswrong.com
obamanotready.com
obamaspendometer.com
obamatheamateur.com
obamathebeginner.com
yeswecandowhat.com
yeswecanwhat.com
By Joel Hruska | Published: March 07, 2008 - 04:36PM CT
URL: <http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080307-us-interferes-with-travel-to-cuba.html>
The United States has often presented itself as the guardian of Internet free speech. China may censor the Internet, and otherwise-civilized nations such as Germany or France may attempt to block what they view as unacceptable material, but the United States of America likes to think of itself as a place that doesn't censor people online... unless you happen to own a foreign travel business that offers trips to Cuba. Under such circumstances, as Steve Marshall discovered, all bets are off.
Steve Marshall is a British citizen living in Spain. For the past decade, he has operated an online travel agency that specializes in selling trips to Cuba to various European nationals. Marshall operated a number of Cuban-specific web sites, including several that focused specifically on the literary and historical aspects of Cuba, and maintained them in English, French, and Spanish. The Internet Archive has some of Marshall's web material on file. The sites themselves don't appear to have been particularly well-designedÑboth Flash and text ads aboundÑbut there's no evidence that Marshall failed to provide the services he advertised.
According to the Department of the Treasury, however, Marshall and his business helped Americans evade the US embargo against Cuba. A 2004 DoT (Department of the Treasury) press release stated: "This travel provider is not only a generator of resources that the Cuban regime uses to oppress its people, but it also facilitates the evasion of U.S. sanction policy." The PR goes on to assert that Tour and Marketing International Ltd. (Marshall's company) advertised itself as the number one agency for American travelers, claimed it could serve any traveler, and insisted that Americans interested in traveling to Cuba use the company's online payment system.
Marshall's domain name registrar, eNom, is based in the US. It apparently didn't learn that his company had been blacklisted for two and a half years. When it did, however, the registrar promptly shut down Marshall's sites without notification and has since refused to release the domain names to him. Marshall has since rebuilt his business using a European registrar and the .net rather than the .com suffix, but his experience raises troubling questions.
As previously noted, Marshall is a British citizen operating a business from Spain, with servers located in the Bahamas. He does not claim that no Americans ever visited Cuba, but he has stated that he was uninterested in marketing his services to the US. In this case, the Department of the Treasury was able to shut down his business without notification or negotiation of any sort. Even if he wanted to appeal the decision, Marshall has no organization to which he can appeal, save his registrar, which can simply claim to have been following government orders.
If the US intends to continue presenting itself as the guardian of Internet rights, situations like this require a bit more delicacy. By effectively shutting down Marshall's business, the United States has committed the censorship it condemns in other nations. Even worse, the Department of Treasury effectively shut down an international business without any type of due process. Both France and Germany followed a court process when investigating Yahoo for alleged improprieties, and the company in question (Yahoo) had the opportunity to respond to the charges in a court of law. Marshall was afforded no such luxury.
While the Internet may be global in nature, foreign companies may very well limit their use of US registrars and hosting services out of concern that activities targeted at other countries could be shut down here.
Further reading:
March 07, 2008
Text: <http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2008/03/07/04>
Audio: <http://audio.wnyc.org/otm/otm030708d.mp3>
Making its way through the New York state legislature is the Libel Terrorism Protection Act. The bill aims to mitigate the impact of libel tourism, which former civil-rights attorney Samuel Abady believes undermines our First Amendment.
BOB GARFIELD: Making its way through the New York State Legislature is a bill known as the Libel Terrorism Protection Act. If passed, the bill would limit what's known as "libel tourism," which, in a nutshell, is when an aggrieved party files suit against a U.S. publisher or author, not here in the States, but, say, in Great Britain, where libel law is much friendlier to the plaintiff.
Through the legal principle of comity, a victory in a foreign court can be enforced here at home. The Libel Terrorism Protection Act seeks to limit such enforcement. That explains the libel part of the bill, but what does it have to do with terrorism? Samuel Abady is a longtime civil rights attorney and outspoken proponent of the bill. He joins me now. Sam, welcome to On the Media.
SAMUEL ABADY: Thank you very kindly.
BOB GARFIELD: Who are Rachel Ehrenfeld and Khalid bin Mahfouz?
SAMUEL ABADY: Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld is an Israeli-American scholar of terrorism and counter-terrorism, who runs the American Center for Democracy, has been a professor at Columbia, New York University, and perhaps most importantly, one of the world's leading authorities on the financial roots and ties of terrorist organizations.
Her latest book is called Funding Evil. In that book, she identifies Khalid bin Mahfouz, who is banker to the Saudi royal family, as a financier of terrorism, and specifically, that through something called Muwafaq, or Charitable Blessed Relief Foundation, that he transferred millions of dollars, all told about 74 million, to various terrorist groups, including Osama bin Laden.
BOB GARFIELD: All right, now, bin Mahfouz sued Ehrenfeld for libel, but not in the States; rather, he filed the complaint in England.
SAMUEL ABADY: Indeed.
BOB GARFIELD: Why did he do it that way?
SAMUEL ABADY: Well, bin Mahfouz lives in Saudi Arabia. Ehrenfeld lives in New York. Her book, which identifies him as a terrorist financier, was published by Basic Books here in the United States, and that book was not marketed in Saudi Arabia, and was not marketed in Great Britain. So common sense, you would think, meant that he would have to sue where the book was published as where he was libeled.
But, in fact, he went to England and sued her there, because 23 copies of the book were purchased over the Internet.
Unlike in American courts, courts in England, Australia, Canada, the Commonwealth courts, will assert jurisdiction in libel cases merely by contacts in cyberspace.
BOB GARFIELD: Now, apart from the question of jurisdiction, what is it about the way libel law is understood in those countries that makes it a friendlier climate for a suit such as bin Mahfouz's?
SAMUEL ABADY: In this country, whenever a plaintiff alleges an injury, typically the plaintiff has the burden of proving the harm.
In England, however, if you sue for libel or slander, the words you claim are offensive are assumed to be false, and the defendant bears the burden of coming forward and proving that they are true.
BOB GARFIELD: Now, Ehrenfeld, knowing the differences between U.S. and English libel law, tried preemptively to get a U.S. court to issue what's called an upfront decision, to prevent any future judgment from England from being enforced here.
SAMUEL ABADY: Correct.
BOB GARFIELD: But the courts turned her down.
SAMUEL ABADY: What Dr. Ehrenfeld did was refuse to recognize the jurisdiction of the British court, simply because 23 copies of her book were ordered from Amazon. And instead, she brought a lawsuit against bin Mahfouz here to declare that his English judgment was not enforceable here as repugnant to the free press provisions of the First Amendment.
And the New York Court dismissed the case, saying that bin Mahfouz had insufficient ties to New York for our courts to assert jurisdiction over him.
BOB GARFIELD: Hmm, that's kind of a Catch-22.
SAMUEL ABADY: In England, they're willing to assert, you know, very tenuous jurisdiction over her, but here, he gets more protection because our courts won't assert jurisdiction over him.
BOB GARFIELD: Now, on the face of it, something called the Libel Terrorism Protection Act, while helping a plaintiff such as Ehrenfeld, could have some other far-reaching and fairly frightening implications if the decisions of foreign courts are not respected here. Am I wrong about that?
SAMUEL ABADY: You're exactly right. We have an interest in comity, but we also have an interest in protecting our own values. And in this case, our interest in protecting the first amendment and the principles of free speech and a free press trump the interest in enforcing foreign judgments that don't meet our first amendment standards.
BOB GARFIELD: It seems to me that the existence of libel-suit-friendly countries like the United Kingdom could actually, you know, apart from doing harm to authors who have published, cause publishers to not publish things that are worthy of print, just for fear of getting whacked with a giant lawsuit from wealthy Arabs or anyone else.
SAMUEL ABADY: This has already happened. After Dr. Ehrenfeld's book, Funding Evil, was published, two scholars published a book called Alms for Jihad, in which bin Mahfouz was also identified as a major terrorist financier. That book was published by Cambridge University Press, the oldest academic press in the world, and on the mere threat of libel litigation by bin Mahfouz, Alms for Jihad was pulped.
All the unsold copies were destroyed and the British public was no longer allowed to have access to that book. So the real threat to our national security by libel tourism is not theoretical, but practical, and has already happened, as in that case.
BOB GARFIELD: Okay, fair enough, although absent the document itself, that is, the book, you know, we can't know whether the chilling effect in that case stymied some important work coming to light in the public, or whether it was actually defamatory and that England's fairly liberal view of libel actually saved someone from defamation or other kinds of harm.
SAMUEL ABADY: I don't think it's just theoretical and I think we do know. We know because Craig Unger's bestseller in this country, House of Bush, House of Saud, was watered down and had to be published under a different name in England, because of fear of libel tourism.
We know that bin Mahfouz keeps a website boasting of his almost 40 litigations, and he's hardly alone, and most importantly, Dr. Ehrenfeld has been told that her newest works will not be published because of the impact of libel tourism.
BOB GARFIELD: Well Sam, thank you very much for joining us.
SAMUEL ABADY: It's been my pleasure.
BOB GARFIELD: Samuel Abady, longtime criminal defense and civil rights lawyer, is now writing and teaching in New York City.
ToC
At CEBIT, F-Secure describes particularly pernicious "Mebroot" pest
By Jeremy KirkMarch 4, 2008 (IDG News Service) -- A rootkit uncovered in the wild in December is proving to be a real headache to detect, according to Finnish security company F-Secure.
Dubbed "Mebroot," the rootkit infects the master boot record (MBR), the first sector of a PC's hard drive that the computer looks to before loading the operating system. Since it loads before anything else, Mebroot is nearly invisible to security software.
"You can't execute any earlier than that," said Mikko Hypponen, F-Secure's chief research officer.
A rootkit is a malicious program that hides deep in a computer's operating system and can be difficult to remove.
Since December, Hypponen said they've seen alpha and beta versions of the Mebroot rootkit but believe it has now been RTMed, the term usually used for a legitimate piece of software that's entered production after testing.
Once a machine is infected, the hacker controlling the rootkit has complete control over the victim's machine, opening up the potential for a variety of other attacks.
For example, the hacker could try and download other malicious software to the machine to log a person's keystrokes and collect financial or personal data.
F-Secure, which specializes in finding rootkits, says its technology is only able to "suspect" if Mebroot is on a PC. Hypponen said he couldn't reveal the techniques the company is using to make even that fuzzy guess.
The problem is that Mebroot isn't just a single file -- it injects itself into other processes running on a machine, masking its nefarious actions, Hypponen said.
Mebroot, however, can be uncovered if F-Secure's security software CD is used to boot up the PC, Hypponen said. "The one who executes first has the upper hand," he said.
Mebroot is the manifestation of what researchers thought was just theoretically possible, although the MBR on older, MS-DOS systems had been infected with rootkits. But in 2005, researchers Derek Soeder and Ryan Permeh of eEye Digital Security showed the idea was possible by producing proof-of-concept code, called "BootRoot."
But Hypponen said it was thought the highly technical engineering needed for a successful attack was beyond the reach of today's malware writers.
They were wrong. Hackers are now creating Web pages that, if visited with certain browsers with security vulnerabilities, will automatically infect a PC with Mebroot -- a technique known as a drive-by download.
Hypponen said it's unknown how widespread Mebroot is. VeriSign's iDefense Intelligence Team has said 5,000 users were infected in separate attacks on Dec. 12 and Dec. 19.
ToC
Opera 9.26 fixes several security and stability issues. See the changelogs linked below for additional details.
Download:
<http://www.opera.com/download/>
Torrent:
<http://www.opera.com/download/torrents/>
Changelogs:
Windows: <http://www.opera.com/docs/changelogs/windows/926/>
Mac: <http://www.opera.com/docs/changelogs/mac/926/>
Linux: <http://www.opera.com/docs/changelogs/linux/926/>
Solaris: <http://www.opera.com/docs/changelogs/solaris/926/>
FreeBSD: <http://www.opera.com/docs/changelogs/freebsd/926/>
by Walter S. Mossberg
Published on March 6, 2008
URL: <http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20080306/apples-time-capsule-gives-you-easy-way-to-back-up-wirelessly/>
Video: <http://allthingsd.com/theme/media/atd_mini.swf?bctid=1444168432&playerid=742148386>
With its new Leopard operating system, Apple tried to solve one of the most nagging problems faced by home-computer users: how to regularly back up their computers completely and painlessly. Leopard includes a feature called Time Machine that automatically and continuously backs up a Macintosh computer's entire hard disk, without requiring the user to do any tedious setup or have any technical knowledge.
Time Machine is a key selling point for Leopard and the Mac. It is more complete, and yet simpler, than the built-in backup feature in Vista Home Premium, the most popular home version of Windows.
But Time Machine has a major drawback: It works much better on desktop Macs than on laptop models. That's because it's primarily designed to operate with backup hard drives you connect directly to the computer. And it's a pain to plug a backup drive into a laptop, which can move around the house. While Time Machine will work with a remote hard disk under certain circumstances, that option requires a second Mac running Leopard, a costly condition.
Now, Apple (AAPL) has attempted to fix the problem with an unusual new companion product called Time Capsule. This is a $299 stand-alone networked gadget that packs both a giant hard disk and a speedy Wi-Fi wireless router into one slender case. It just plugs into your existing home network, and any laptop within wireless range can connect to it. It can back up multiple computers.
Time Capsule is designed to seamlessly work with Leopard's Time Machine. But it can also be used as a wireless Internet connection, and/or a remote hard drive, for manually storing and retrieving files by Windows PCs running either Vista or Windows XP, or by Macs running Apple's older Tiger operating system. And you can also use it with certain other backup programs, such as the ones built into Windows XP or Tiger.
In my tests over the past week, Time Capsule worked well in all of these scenarios. However, Time Capsule isn't meant to do as many different tasks as some other networked drives.
Apple stresses that Time Capsule is a limited, targeted device meant primarily for backup - especially with Time Machine - and as a wireless base station. Unlike some other networked storage devices, like Hewlett-Packard's MediaSmart home server, Time Capsule doesn't allow users to simultaneously stream music or videos to multiple PCs, to easily access its contents via the Web or to stream videos to TV sets.
The $299 Time Capsule model comes with a 500 gigabyte hard disk inside, and there's also a $499 model with hard disk that can hold one terabyte of data, or roughly 1,000 gigabytes. Both models use the same "n" class of Wi-Fi, the fastest version with the longest range. Both also work with computers equipped with the older "g" and "b" versions of Wi-Fi.
You can buy networked hard disks in these sizes for less money and simply use them with your existing Wi-Fi router. However, Time Machine won't work with them, according to Apple. The company says the only standalone networked hard disk Time Machine can use is Time Capsule.
In my tests, Time Capsule performed perfectly with Time Machine. It also was easily recognized by several of my Windows machines running Vista and Windows XP. On all of these machines, I was able to speedily access the Internet via Time Capsule. Time Capsule can be set up to either replace or supplement your existing Wi-Fi router.
All the machines, even the Windows ones, also could recognize the Time Capsule as a remote hard disk, and save files to it and retrieve files from it. For instance, I manually copied a song, a photo and a Word document from a Mac laptop running Leopard onto the Time Capsule. On a Dell running Vista, I then opened the Time Capsule and launched that same Word document in the Windows version of Word, opened the photo in Vista's Photo Gallery program, and played the song in Windows Media Player. This same process worked in reverse.
Apple doesn't guarantee that Time Capsule will work with all backup programs. But it says it will work with the backup software built into Tiger and will likely work with some other backup software.
In my tests, the built-in backup program in Windows XP Pro worked fine with Time Capsule. But the built-in backup program in Vista failed. Microsoft said the problem I encountered was due to a new Vista security feature for backups that foils some remote hard disks, not just Apple's.
Setting up Time Capsule was easy, using a step-by-step utility program that Apple supplies in both Mac and Windows versions. The device has a USB port that can be used to add either an additional hard disk or a networked printer. And it can be connected to a network via a wired connection if you don't want to use its wireless functionality.
If you use Time Machine on a Mac laptop, then Time Capsule's $299 price is money well spent. If you don't, there are cheaper or more versatile solutions to the backup problem.
- Email me at <mossberg@wsj.com>. Find all my columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, <http://walt.allthingsd.com> .
[Editor's Note: My thanks to Jim Berger for submitting this article for the newsletter.]
ToC
By Iljitsch van Beijnum | Published: March 09, 2008 - 06:42PM CT
Get out your list, because you can add another application to the tally of legitimate uses of BitTorrent.
Apparently, software updates are getting so big these days that simply downloading them from a server is becoming prohibitively time consuming, especially when the same updates need to be applied to many different machines. A Dutch university has some 6,500 desktop PCs in ten locations, which on occasion need to download 3.5GB worth of different types of updates. That's a handsome 22.2TB in total. In a traditional client-server world, that's some modest lifting.
In fact, INHOLLAND University's IT department used to have almost two dozen servers distributed over the university's locations to serve up these downloads. The school was able to retire 20 of them after adopting a new way to distribute updates: BitTorrent.
The peer-to-peer protocol allows PCs to download most of the updates from each otherÑthe remaining servers are mostly needed to send out the first few copies and then coordinate the up- and downloading. One of the advantages of the BitTorrent protocol is that it uses bandwidth where it can find it: faster links are automatically used more.
Using this technology, updating all 6,500 PCs can be done in less than four hours. Previously, this took four days. Four days down to four hours for the same needs!
Leo Blom of ITeleo, who came up with the idea of using BitTorrent, told Ars, "Let me put it this way: if INHOLLAND wants to migrate to Windows Vista, they only have to send out an image through BT. All 6,500 desktops can be migrated overnight in two hours' timeÑwith one push of a button. It's a real migration killer. Migration used to mean a lengthy and trying process. At INHOLLAND, we took a different approach."
According to TorrentFreak, the university's management team was reluctant to adopt the peer-to-peer technology, but they quickly changed their minds after seeing a demonstration. Students and staff who think they can use the modified BitTorrent client for other purposes will be disappointed to learn that the system is completely locked down.
ToC
By Andy Kessler
The Wall Street Journal
February 25, 2008; Page A15
URL: <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120390160543089503.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries>
Imagine a town that has all sorts of gasoline pipelines running by it but only one gas pump. Rationing is inevitable. So are price controls.
Everyone gets equal amounts, except of course first responders like police and ambulances, which should get all the gas they want. And, well, so should the mayor. And if you can make a good business case that you work 60 miles away, you can file paperwork and perhaps pull some strings for more gas. How about those kids hot-rodding around town who can't drive 55? They get last dibs, and maybe we can sneak in some gas thinner to slow down their engines and not waste gas.
You can do all that and constantly update the gas neutrality rules -- or you can just open another gas station across the street. Or one on each corner.
This is the essence of the Ed Markey's (D., Mass.) Orwellian-named Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008, which would foist network neutrality on the wild and woolly Internet. The Federal Communications Commission is holding a public hearing today at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass., to build the case for the ill-conceived idea of preventing, as Mr. Markey's bill would, network operators from using technologies that may favor one application over another.
It's a bad idea because the only thing Mr. Markey's bill will preserve is mediocrity via the lack of competition, and full employment for regulators micromanaging a business whose very innovation comes from the lack of rules. With net neutrality, there will be no new competition and no incentives for build outs. Bandwidth speeds will stagnate, and new services will wither from bandwidth starvation.
The idea of network neutrality is that all of our Internet packets are equal, and that the spirit of the Internet and its ability to create wonderful new applications like Google, MySpace and Facebook is predicated on open (albeit limited) access for all. Yet, despite an overabundance of bandwidth pulsing throughout the U.S., we are still stuck with rationing to our homes. Haven't we learned that advancing technology is never served by arbitrary rules to divvy up scarce resources? Look at the dearth of good cell phone applications: Rules make incumbents lazy.
This is all in response to Comcast trying to kill off pirates. Arrgghh. After denying it, Comcast was caught "traffic shaping," sending TCP Reset packets to stop P2P BitTorrent downloads.
In plain English: Comcast is this country's second largest Internet provider and has been plagued by mostly illegal copyrighted video file sharing that is chewing up half or more of its precious bandwidth. More of that than you'd think consists of "Family Guy" episodes. Comcast, whose growth is slowing and whose stock is down 30%, is acting scared of the day when video is delivered one episode at a time instead of via Basic Cable, threatening its bread and butter.
So Comcast took matters into its own hands and applied a sneaky technical fix, a fake message that severely slowed these peer-to-peer video downloads. By the way, this same technique is used by the so-called Great Firewall of China to censor search requests like "Falun" or "Tiananmen." Nice company.
So that's it, isn't it? Comcast's franchise is threatened so it got out the bag of dirty tricks. Google, who you would think has a huge incentive to kill the video star, supports net neutrality. Google has become an incumbent, protecting its no-longer-modern textual ads.
But new layers of regulation just mean long gas lines/slow bandwidth. We have faux competition, cable monopolies versus phone monopolies. Cable modems work by taking away a TV channel or two and using them for data, at $59 per month for 4.5 megabits per second and $69 for 8 meg (while 100 meg in Japan is $30/month).
I have no problem with Comcast cutting back BitTorrent or anything else, as long as I know about it and I have a choice to go elsewhere with my business. But I don't. I might like Comcast service without BitTorrent because my Web pages will come up faster. Others won't. But there is no elsewhere. Antiquated franchise rules mean there's only one cable provider in most towns, and AT&T's DSL service over creaky phone lines is way too slow.
We need policy to help cut a path for more competition, rather than protecting incumbents -- a Bandwidth Competition Act of 2008, not bogus net neutrality. All takers should be allowed access to poles or underground conduits. This is where neutrality should be enforced, instead of being a choke point.
Municipal or privately run wireless data services using Wi-Fi or WiMax should be sprouting like weeds. But they aren't being built because of lack of access to street lights, of all things, to set up access points. Verizon is busy rolling out a fiber optic service, FIOS, that will provide much higher speeds and real competition to Comcast. But it is slow going, as state by state video franchise rules still favor cable over any newcomers.
A stroke of a pen can cure these ills, incumbents be damned. They will adjust. I personally would climb telephone poles on my street to run fiber if I could get 100 megabit Internet service. Any takers? Talk about an economic stimulus; this is the type of infrastructure we need. The stock market will fund it all as well as resolve overbuild problems.
Don't think of Internet access as a static business -- someone put in phone lines 50 years ago or cable lines 20 years ago, and we are stuck with their limitations. Technology changes the game every few years. Even fiber lines put in today will be obsolete within 10 years and need upgrading. Same for wireless systems.
The trick to an open and innovative Internet is not sneaky technical fixes nor more rules and regulations and bureaucracies to enforce them. The Internet will only expand based on competitive principles, not socialist diktat. The more we can do to clear a path, the greater our national wealth will be. Comcast did us a favor by bringing this net neutrality debate out in the open. I hope the FCC doesn't fall for this lousy idea.
Mr. Kessler, a former hedge fund manager, is the author of "How We Got Here" (Collins, 2005).
[Editor's Note: My thanks to Kevin Hisel for submitting this article for the newsletter.]
ToC
February 29, 2008
Text: <http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2008/02/29/04>
Audio: <http://audio.wnyc.org/otm/otm022908d.mp3>
There's a new era of online community and it's challenging our notions of entertainment, activism and audience. Clay Shirky's new book, "Here Comes Everybody," depicts this online world, driven by networks that grow and act in never-before-seen ways.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What happens when time and space disappear and communication is virtually free? Well, when the barriers to media are lower than a croquet wicket, everybody rushes into the breach. And that's more or less the message and title of the new book by author, educator and techno-wiz, Clay Shirky. It's called, Here Comes Everybody, and he says that online there is great strength in numbers than anything, even money. Welcome back to the show, Clay.
CLAY SHIRKY: Thanks so much, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So it's an old notion, isn't it? Wasn't it Ben Franklin who first observed that the Internet builds communities? What's new here?
CLAY SHIRKY: [LAUGHS] Yes. I mean, one of the really interesting things that's going on, actually, is that this was a pattern that was very common in the pre-Web Internet with UseNet and mailing lists and where community was really the normal case.
And then the Web kind of washed it away for five years. Everybody got excited about e-commerce and all of the sort of broadcast and media opportunities and community went by the wayside. But now it's back and it's back with a vengeance.
And one of the interesting changes is, because the Web is now accessible to everybody, this strength in numbers that you're talking about isn't just the province of techies anymore. It's really becoming sort of part of the fabric of society.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you offer a case study of this new world Ð the saga of a cell phone left in the back of a New York City taxi. How fast can you tell this story?
CLAY SHIRKY: Well, let's see.
[LAUGHTER]
In May of 2006, a woman named Ivanna loses her cell phone, which happens a lot, but in this case it's a particular misfortune because she's got her wedding coming up, she's got her wedding list on there, caterers' phone numbers on there and so forth and so on.
So, distraught over the loss of the phone, she goes to a friend, Evan Guttman, and says, look, send an email message to the phone. Tell them there's a reward. I just, I really want this phone.
Nothing happens for three or four days so she finally shells out 300 bucks, gets a new phone, and her phone provider says, hey, do you want us to put all the data from your old phone onto your new phone? [BROOKE LAUGHS] She didn't even know this was possible. She says, yes. She gets all the data, including all of the photos the 16-year-old girl in Queens who now has her phone [BROOKE LAUGHS] has been taking of herself and her friends and uploading to MySpace.
So suddenly, instead of just getting the phone and the old data back, they actually have the email address and access [LAUGHS] to the social network of the person who's now holding this phone.
And so they decide to go after this young woman, named Sasha, and they try to convince her to give the phone back. And Sasha, thinking, you know, you and what army, effectively, says, no way I'm giving this back. It's finder's keepers.
Well, the [LAUGHING] you and what army question actually turned out to be a kind of a problematic one because Evan Guttman went and took all of Sasha's pictures and her [LAUGHING] MySpace account information and her AOL email address, uploaded it to a Web page and then got it listed on the front page of Digg, which is a hugely trafficked social media news site. And what's -
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And people took umbrage. They all jumped into the fray. They were all furious at Sasha and pressure began to be put on the police department that never investigates these cases.
CLAY SHIRKY: Right. And, you know, it's hard to browbeat the New York [LAUGHING] Police Department. But in this case, when a million people tuned in to see whether or not this particular stolen cell phone would be returned -
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Wow.
CLAY SHIRKY: - the story made the front page of The New York Times. And so, people began to contact Evan, including lawyers offering to help, and, critically, an anonymous member of the New York City Police Department who told him what to say down at the police precinct to get the case reassigned from loss to theft.
And eventually the cops were indeed browbeaten into upgrading the matter to theft. They knew exactly where this girl lived, of course. And in the middle of June, they drove out to her house and arrested her for possession of stolen property.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. Now, this sounds like a happy ending. The girl who thought she could keep the ill-gotten phone was obnoxious in her emails, but she came in for some profoundly ugly, sexist, racist abuse. It's the dark side of unmediated communication.
CLAY SHIRKY: Yeah, exactly. The things we're unleashing into society by having this kind of new group capability are not entirely positive. Right? This is not a cyber-utopian story. This is actually a revolution, and it's not a revolution if nobody loses.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, obviously, the cell phone incident isn't going to be repeated, not exactly, but you offer variations on this theme.
CLAY SHIRKY: Right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: One is a study in contrasts involving pedophile priest scandals in Boston ten years apart, essentially pre-Internet and post-Internet.
CLAY SHIRKY: Right. Because in 2002, Father John Gagan, a pedophile priest in Boston, was brought to trial and The Boston Globe covered the story. And during the course of this trial and then the subsequent outrage, this little group formed in a basement in January, called Voice of the Faithful. It was basically outraged Catholics who wanted to do something.
By that summer, they went from 30 people in a church basement to 25,000 members in 21 countries around the world. Now, groups don't grow that fast, or they didn't prior to the Internet.
And one of the really remarkable things that I think demonstrated how quickly the Catholic outrage solidified into this reaction - and Voice of the Faithful was instrumental in both changing Vatican policy but also getting several high-level bishops and archbishops to resign their posts because of the bad handling of the pedophile scandal.
The Catholic Church very much wanted to say, this is a one-off. This is an unusual case. But, in fact, almost exactly 10 years before, in 1992, something almost identical happened. In that case, the priest's name was Porter. But it took place in the same diocese in Massachusetts. Bishop Law was the same person in charge. The Boston Globe was the same newspaper reporting.
But in that case, it just blew over. Part of the difference between '92 and 2002, which is to say, between failure to reform the Church and at least partial success in reforming the Church, is that in '92 The Boston Globe wasn't really global. It was a local paper. There was no way for coverage in the Boston area to suddenly become of global importance.
The other part of the story is that it isn't just about consuming media. It's actually about doing something about it. Everybody who read about Voice of the Faithful in one of these stories could join online, they could make a donation immediately, and that changed from a big gap between thought and action in '92 to a very small gap between thought and action in 2002.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Part of the Internet revolution, you suggest in your book, is that the old order of group activity has been flipped from gather, then share, to share, then gather. A really good example of this is Flickr. Could you explain what that is?
CLAY SHIRKY: This is a pattern I first saw with Brooklyn's Mermaid Parade, right? We have this charming parade around Coney Island where everybody gets all dressed up in funny costumes and walks around the park, and then tens of thousands of people turn out to sort of watch and cheer and take photographs and so forth.
Well, Flickr is an online photo-sharing site. You can take any digital photos you've taken and you can upload it to flickr.com and share it with your friends and comment on other people's photos and so forth and so on.
And in 2005, Flickr added something called tags, which are just freeform labels, ways of reminding yourself who's in a photo or what it's about or whatever. The interesting social side effect of tags is that although people are doing this out of a personal need to keep track of their photos and so forth, the aggregate social effect is that if you go onto Flickr today and you look for all photos tagged "Mermaid Parade," you're going to get tens of thousands of photos taken by hundreds of individual photographers.
What Flickr did is it said if everybody shares, then after the fact we can identify the group that was taking photos of the Mermaid Parade. And so media becomes not something you have to coordinate in advance, but rather a tool for discovering other people who care about what you care about.
And that's a really big change, because it allows people to create groups that would have been hard to form in any other way.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The funny thing is, is this ability to share, then gather is used most frequently for entertainment purposes in the United States. It takes on an entirely different dimension in the developing world.
CLAY SHIRKY: Yeah. This is actually, I think, one of the really important themes. These tools are being pressed into service in very different ways in different parts of the world.
One of the great uses of photosharing was from a young woman named Alisara Chirapongse, who goes by the name Gnarlykitty. And she is a fashion-obsessed student in Bangkok mainly writing about things like the new shoes she just got or a particular phone she's interested in. And then the Thai coup comes along. And then she's -
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is the military coup in Thailand in 2006.
CLAY SHIRKY:Yes. And the official media is shut down. So she's out on the street with her camera phone taking pictures of tanks rolling in front of the Parliament. And she is one of the early documenters of the effects of that coup because, unlike professional media, there's no shutdown of Web logs. There's no shutdown of photosharing.
So one of the patterns we see is that when new forms of communication are deployed in the United States, they're often used for entertainment purposes. But in low-freedom contexts, in places like the Thai coup, where simply getting a photograph out of the country is itself a political act, suddenly these tools take on a real political dimension that we often overlook in a U.S. context but are tremendously important in a global context.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You say that online the audience, even the term "audience", is passing out of use. Are you saying that audiences don't matter on the Net?
CLAY SHIRKY: I'm not saying that they don't matter. What I am saying is that previously distinct categories are now shading into one another. So you have an audience but you can also have groups where everyone's actually talking to one another. And those two people can flip back and forth between those two modes.
Oprah Winfrey discovered this when she defended James Frey's Million Little Pieces book, the memoir that turned out to be not largely drawn from memory but, in fact, parts of it were simply invented. The reason Oprah had to back down wasn't just that her users were mad and it wasn't even that they were talking back to her. The thing that really meant that she had to go back and apologize was when those users were talking to one another on Web logs, on bulletin boards, on mailing lists.
And when each angry user saw how many other people were also angry, they began to behave in ways that aren't characteristic of an audience, which is that they actually had a kind of shared awareness and a shared goal.
So it isn't that audiences are going away. It's just that the phrase "audience" no longer describes a completely discrete sort of behavior that's different from other kinds of group behavior.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Clay, thank you so much.
CLAY SHIRKY: Not at all, nice to talk to you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Clay Shirky writes, consults and teaches, currently at New York University, on the social and economic effects of the Internet. His newest book is called Here Comes Everybody.
ToC
Friday, March 14, 2008
The Associated Press
URL: <http://postgazette.com/pg/08074/865177-100.stm>
PHILADELPHIA -- A man who killed his 17-month-old daughter in a rage over a broken Xbox has been sentenced to more than two decades in prison.
Tyrone Spellman, 27, of Philadelphia, killed Alayiah Turman with at least five blows to the head, prosecutors said. The force of the blows cracked the toddler's skull several times.
"I've been doing this 13 years, and this is one of the few cases that's ever left me at a loss for words," Assistant District Attorney James Berardinelli said. "There's never a good reason for this (murder), but this is just the pettiest of reasons."
A jury convicted Mr. Spellman of third-degree murder and child endangerment in January, and he was sentenced Thursday to the maximum 22 1/2 to 45 years in prison.
Mr. Spellman expressed remorse for the girl's death at the hearing, but defense lawyer Bobby Hoof said afterward they would consider an appeal of the conviction.
Police believe the child's pregnant mother, Mia Turman, was napping when the child was killed. Mr. Spellman spent long hours each day playing video games, they said.
In a police statement the next day, he said he became enraged when the girl pulled down the game console and broke it. Mr. Hoof argued that the statement was coerced and that Mr. Spellman was trying to protect Mia Turman.
Alayiah was one of at least 20 children who died of abuse or neglect between 2003 and 2006 after coming to the attention of the city's Department of Human Services, according to an investigation by The Philadelphia Inquirer.
An autopsy showed that Alayiah had suffered a broken arm about two weeks before she died - an injury that city social workers did not see on two visits to the house.
The city took custody of the couple's second daughter, born after Alayiah's death.
[Editor's Note: My thanks to Kevin Hisel for submitting this article for the newsletter.]
ToC
Paul Thurrott
URL: <http://www.wininformant.com/>
ZD Net's Mary Jo Foley reported this week that Microsoft is working on a product called StartKey that will turn USB memory keys into "Windows companions" that users can cart around with them. These keys would include all of your Windows and Windows Live settings, so when you plugged one into a PC, it would be like you were sitting at your own PC. Obviously, this would require some support tech on the PCs you're accessing, so I'm guessing that part of the product will include a software update for Windows Vista. Still, it's an interesting idea, and not just for the emerging markets that are the obvious target market. Foley says that Microsoft began working on the project after agreeing with SanDisk in 2007 to develop something to replace the reviled U3 Smart Technology stuff that currently ships on so many USB keys.
And that will be great news for the 17 people who buy Windows that way each year. Microsoft announced yesterday that it will be cutting the price of the retail boxed versions of Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate by 20 to 48 percent. (They don't actually specify what the new prices are, however.) The price cuts will take place concurrently with the release of integrated versions of Windows Vista and Service Pack 1 (SP1), Microsoft says, which will happen by the middle of 2008. Here's the thing: This doesn't affect much at all. Retail versions of Windows have always amounted to less than 5 percent of all Windows licenses sold, so it's unclear whether this change will make much of a difference to consumers or Microsoft. And it certainly doesn't affect the prices of the versions of Windows people really do buy, whether they're bundled with new PCs or sold to corporations as licenses.
There's a side story to the retail price cut that I think is, in fact, the real story here: In addition to cutting the price of some retail versions of Vista worldwide, Microsoft is also consolidating and re-pricing various Vista versions that it sells in emerging markets. This is a much bigger deal to the company because of the potential financial upside to these markets, and I feel that the retail price cuts mentioned above are being made simply to put these products more in line with the way Windows is being sold around the world at retail. So what we're getting is Microsoft combining the retail Upgrade and Full versions of Windows Vista Home Basic and Home Premium into full versions of these editions in places like China and India, and then also reducing the prices of these retail products across the board. Microsoft is also lowering the price of Windows Vista Ultimate in emerging markets so that it costs less than an automobile in those countries. (And thanks for that, Tata Nano.)
There are two things I've been complaining about with Vista since, well, forever: The arbitrary demarcation of the unnecessarily huge product lineup, and the silliness of its supposed minimum system requirements. (Actual quote from my Vista review: "Microsoft's official minimum requirements for Windows Vista are so ludicrous I won't even mention them here.") Well, it turns out they were at least partially made so ludicrous in order to meet the needs of its hardware partners. According to an internal email that was unearthed as part of the "Vista Capable" class action lawsuit, Microsoft lowered Vista's minimum hardware requirements to include Intel's 915 chipset, even though the chipset wasn't capable of displaying Vista's Aero graphics mode. An email war or words ensued at Microsoft, with one executive complaining that they were "caving to Intel" and "allowing Intel to drive our consumer experience." Now, Microsoft is in legal hot water over the move, because while Intel 915-based systems meet the "Vista Capable" guidelines, they can't show off the system's best features. This whole thing is silly and should have been avoidable.
And speaking of Vista SP1, Microsoft this week released a tiny list of third party applications that are either blocked or lose some functionality when SP1 is installed on Vista. There are few important applications on this list, which I think is telling, but security applications seem to be the most widely affected. Fortunately, fixes are already available for all the big ones. Did I mention how short this list is? See for yourself... <http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935796>
Less than three weeks after shipping a private version of what is widely regarded as the last pre-release version of Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) to testers, Microsoft has made that release public (<